Filter posts by category

Just Dogs

 

Information on living with, training, and loving Dogs

Would you do it to your dog?

/ Dogs in General / By / Leave a Comment

I’ve been following Marc Bekoff’s work on Ethology (the scientific study of animal behavior) for years. He’s written and edited a number of books on the subject, including The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable Accounts of Animal Emotions, a collection of short essays on animal behavior.

One of his recent articles asks the question of animal research scientists, “Would you do it to your dog?”, in an attempt to address the question of animal experimentation in general, while highlighting … Read More

Kiera on Duty

/ Cait and Me, My Dogs and Me, My Favorites / By / Leave a Comment

KieraDuty Kiera sits as sentry, while Cait and I get ready for a little stargazing before shut-eye. No amount of coaxing will get her to join us in the tent. Her self-appointed job is to periodically patrol the perimeters of our property.

Good thing she’s safely fenced in and other critters fenced out, because we live on a little corner of the wild kingdom. Cait and I sleep well knowing that she’s on the job.… Read More

Aha Training Moment with the Help of Visualization

/ Dog Training, My Dogs and Me / By / 1 Comment

When I’m training, I’m always thinking about why Kiera does or doesn’t do what she does. I’m always trying to see if I can understand it from where she is and go from there. For example, once upon a time, I wasn’t having any luck getting Kiera to remain calm when people came over to our house. Whenever someone would arrive, Kiera would go into overdrive to make sure everyone in the house was safe for posterity. I’d tried the … Read More

10 Great Reasons to Have a Dog

/ Dogs in General, On Writing / By / 65 Comments

Yesterday, I had the good fun of speaking with a terrific group of kids who were spending their week at Mahogany Ridge KidsCamp. It’s a camp where kids and their dogs get to play and learn together. Theresa Richmond, the camp director and trainer, (whom some of you may remember from Dogs of Dreamtime) invited me to give a talk on what it’s like to write about dogs.

As with training dogs, writing about dogs is best learned by … Read More

Kiera’s Herding Instinct Test

/ Dog Training, My Dogs and Me / By / Leave a Comment

One morning, as I watched Kiera and Graidy zooming around the backyard together, it struck me how much of Kiera’s play was really herding behavior. Graidy would float around the yard like a piece of newspaper blowing in the wind– fluttering this way and that, skipping and hopping, twisting and twirling. Kiera would conserve her energy as long as Graidy stayed within a certain range. She’d stay in a semi-crouch position with neck stretched out and down, watching. Once he’d … Read More

The other context for “Finding Kiera”

/ My Dogs and Me, The Mail Bag / By / Leave a Comment

From the Mail Bag: M.M. wrote, I experienced your search for Kiera as very single-minded and focused–bordering on obsessive (and definitely annoying to me). It seemed to me that you were too caught up in “looking for something to fill a need (for Kiera) rather than for someone to help.”

Dear M.M.: I can see why you’d view my search for Kiera that way, but let me anthropomorphize for a minute to better illustrate how I experienced it. Let’s say … Read More

Scroll to Top