Click to Calm: Healing the Aggressive Dog

Wouldn't it be great if your dog came with a big dial on his or her back that told you exactly how anxious, frightened, or excitable he or she was? Wouldn't it be awesome if you could turn this dial and calm your dog?

Steve Benjamin, CPDT, is a faculty member of Karen Pryor Academy for Animal Training & Behavior, our brand-new institute for clicker trainers. We spoke to Steve recently about his career as a dog trainer, and how his 28 years with the FBI were, surprisingly, an excellent foundation for clicker training.

Debi Davis, service-dog trainer and ClickerExpo presenter (Minneapolis, November 2005), writes training articles for national and international magazines and is an Internet mentor for service-dog teams in training. In 1998, she co-founded OC-Assist-Dogs, a Yahoo Group Internet discussion list for those clicker training service dogs, now the largest service-dog discussion list on the web. In 1999, her papillon, Peek, became the first toy breed and first clicker trained dog to earn the Delta Society's National Service Dog of the Year award. In 2003, Peek was among the Pedigree Paws to Recognize Canine World Hero nominees. Peek and Debi were also profiled on a segment of the international television program Dogs with Jobs. A member of the APDT, IAADP, IABC, and the Delta Society, Debi lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, with her husband and five clicker trained dogs. Recently, we spoke to her about clicker training assistance dogs and her experiences attending ClickerExpo San Diego.

If you are a trainer, a club, or training school we wanted to let you know that you can book a Click to Calm: Healing the Aggressive Dog workshop with Emma Parsons.

In her new book Click to Calm: Healing the Aggressive Dog, Emma Parsons presents several groundbreaking concepts in treating canine aggression through clickertraining. One of her remarkable new ideas recognizes the impact of the handler's body language on a dog's aggressive responses. She describes the moment in which she realized her own signs of stress were cueing her Golden Retriever Ben's aggressive display: