So you’ve become a clicker trainer! Naturally you are very excited. You want other people around you to stop using punishment-based methods and start clicking. So you introduce

One of my greatest passions is conservation training; I lecture about this topic at every opportunity. I always end my talks with a call to action, inviting more

Challenge: a hearing-impaired dog Do you care for a deaf dog? Have you ever had the opportunity to work with a deaf dog? I had not—until Blanca. In

My letters are usually training-related, but this time I want to share with you a personal story that affected me in a profound way. The details of the

A perplexing tool As I travel around the world lecturing about training, there are certain questions that come up again and again. The end-of-session signal, the keep-going signal, the

The controversial clicker Should we stop using a clicker? Is it really needed? A study by Chiandetti et al. published in November of 2016 in Applied Animal Behavior Science has raised many questions

The quest for greatness One characteristic of a good shaper is flexibility—a willingness to change course based on new information coming in. Good science shares that characteristic. As

Is the end-of-session signal beneficial or harmful? Should trainers use it or not? At a conference, I got into a debate with a group of search-and-rescue trainers about

I’ve always been fascinated by the cognitive abilities of animals. I used to teach a graduate course on animal intelligence. The popularity of the course was indicative of

I’m not over the top—I’m just training my dog My two dogs and I were out for a walk one morning, enjoying the fresh air and the exercise.

Really? That title is a typo, right? A professional dog trainer would never advocate against socialization, would she? Well, maybe! The problem isn’t with socialization itself, but with

Draw the lines yourself Would you like to train your dog to stay in your yard without resorting to electrical shock? There is a way to do it