Introducing Your Blogger

So now you have had an opportunity to see the wonderous ability we have to train our dogs with very little effort. With careful observation, a clicker and a cookie, you have been able to get your dog to perform a new behavior with relatively little effort and stress.

I started loving dogs while growing up on my parents hobby farm in the rauceous town of Boring, Oregon. My mother tried her hand at breeding Saint Bernards during which time Heidi became a beloved part of our family. Heidi, however, was neither trained, nor well mannered. Saint Bernards are not easy trainers, but I don't recall anyone making a big effort with her. I do remember fur, mud, and frantically running around the neighborhood trying to catch the boistrous but friendly pet. Heidi taught me that having a dog without manners is not fun, no matter how much you love the dog. Having a BIG dog without manners can be downright treacherous.

The next family pet that made a memorable impression on me was an adorable little American Eskimo named Nomie. American Eskimo's are a notoriously easy-to-train breed and because of this and their striking looks and high energy, are often selected for performing and entertaining by circus' and the like. I decided to take it upon myself to train Nomie, teaching her a variety of functional commands along with some fun behaviors such as roll-over and play dead. Nomie was so fun and easy to train that I was hooked.

I joined 4-H for dog training, but there didn't seem to be a big knowledge base in the area for that, and raising a seeing-eye dog was not in the cards for me, so after graduating from high school and joining the military, dogs were out of my life for the next six years.

When I finally arrived at a point in my life where having dogs was again feasable, I adopted a series of older 'used' dogs. :) They were wonderful pets and family companions, and had for the most part acceptable manners . When I felt I was ready for a challenge I adopted a german shepard and rotweiler mix puppy named Zuess. I had up to this point read my heart out on canine training books, but in the eighties, training methods were still blunt and archaic. I began training Zuess in earnest even teaching him to 'seek back' for rocks I had deliberately dropped on trails.

Zuess was an amazing dog with a huge heart. He was, what I thought at the time, incredible at scent detection. Later in canine search and rescue training, I learned how low my expectations really were. But he had heart and ambition. One game my children and I played with Zuess involved everyone hiding in the back yard and letting Zuess find us one after another. He loved that game. One day, deciding to push the envelope I held Zuess on the front porch while my ex-husband went and hid. He ran to the back yard, jumped into the bed of the pickup truck, onto the roof of the truck, up onto the roof of the carport. When I released Zuess, he went without hesitation straight to the roof. I thought that he went so fast that he could not have possibly scented and I wondered if he listened and interpreted the sounds or sound direction. I don't really know, but he would have been a wonderful police dog. Through a series of unfortunate and tragic circumstances, Zuess left our home much too young.

Many years again passed without a dog in my home or heart, until at last, I decided it was time to bring furry fun to the family again and we adopted a Newfoundland puppy. D'Artagnan was about three months old when Miranda Gaddis went missing from near our Oregon City home, and a month later, Ashley Pond. During the ensuing search for the two missing girls law enforcement officials and search and rescue volunteers searched Singer Creek which ran through my backyard. A few months later a canine search and rescue team inadvertantly parked in my yard while searching Singer Creek during follow-up training. I later found it to be a common practice to re-search areas where people have gone missing in the format of a training mission.

While the teams were re-grouping at their vehicles, I made contact with a wonderful ladie named Tina Parr. Tina gave me her card and invited me to attend the annual recruitment. I was absolutely ecstatic and never new that such opportunities existed, or could even exist for me.

As luck would have it, as I was gearing up for the personnel portion of the search and rescue training, I found the most amazing and competent trainer I had ever met during a PetSmart puppy class. Faye talked the talk of an animal behaviorist. She knew her stuff inside and out, and I was so taken with the possitive reinforcement style of training and her clear and unmistakable knowledge and experience that I took six more classes with her, participating with three different dogs.

So here I am, blogging about my take on training. Seven years after joining search and rescue, having read countless books, and participating in hundreds of hours of canine training, and dozens of hours of classes, workshops and clinics, I think I feel comfortable enough to share my experiences, what has worked and not-worked for me, and share my love of canine training.

So there, gentle reader, you have it. And if I might leave you with one parting observation, that while it is completely true you can train a dog with leash jerks, shock collars, and alpha-rolls, there is another way that will leave you and your pet living a happier more harmonious life.