This comes from one of our regular contributors, WebVet.com. They are having a photo contest. We would love our K9 Cuisine family to show off your pets and enter this contest!
If you’ve got some great pictures of you and your dog having fun in the sun this past summer, we’d like to invite your to submit your favorite photo.
“The Dog Days of Summer” photo contest runs from October 9, 2009 to November 9, 2009 and the first-place winner and three runners up will be prominently featured on Webvet.com and in Webvet’s blog, The Daily Dish!
So, if you want the world to see some of the special moments you shared with your dog this summer, go here and register now!
Or if you simply LOVE dogs and want to see some great photos and place your vote for who you think should be honored as the “top dog”, go here. Enjoy!
We can’t wait to see your photos!
Hope Schultz, WebVet
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K9 Cuisine is a provider of premium dog food. We’re committed to providing our customers with the knowledge, and the products, to help their faithful friends be the best they can be.
I met Debbie Jacobs on Twitter (her name there is @fearfuldogs and mine is @doggiezen). I followed her because of her thoughtful comments on Twitter, but then I started reading through her blog and was truly impressed. It has such a wealth of information, including some excellent Games and Exercises for fearful dogs. Debbie is also the author of “A Guide to Living & Working with a Fearful Dog” – downloadable here http://fearfuldogs.com/fearfuldogbook.html.
Here is Debbie’s story of how she once thought she was not doing ‘real dog training’ if she used treats instead of force. It gave me goosebumps!
*****
Training Samantha
I found an old picture of me at age thirteen. My spectacled, smiling gaze was aimed downward at my dog, Sam. It is possible to see that I am holding my hand, with dog treats, on the side of my leg I want Sam to leap toward. I had, without any instruction discovered lure training, having initially tossed treats over my leg to get her jump my personal agility element. I was ‘fading’ out the lure by using my hand with the treat to cue her to jump. At the time I had no understanding of ‘how’ I was training my dog. I just knew that it was fun to get her to do ‘tricks’ which I proudly showed off to my family.
Despite their applause I knew that I was not ‘really’ training her. It was just too easy, and I was using treats, surely ‘real’ dog trainers didn’t use food rewards to get dogs to do things. Getting a terrier to jump through a hula hoop or over a leg to reach the treat on the other side seemed like such a no-brainer that I couldn’t feel any real pride in the achievement. There must other ways that trainers got dogs to perform tricks, ways that a kid like me knew nothing about.
At that time indeed there were. Trainers like William Koehler were instructing owners on the variety of different chains and collars to use to control and manage their dogs along with the size and material best suited for use as a truncheon to beat a dog that didn’t follow commands. The methods that he and trainers like him advocated had percolated through our culture and were incorporated into some of the relationships I had with dogs. I once jammed my knee into a dog’s chest so forcefully when it jumped on me that when I re-entered the house and the dog cowered away from me I felt only embarrassment and regret when his owner complimented me for ‘training’ him to stop jumping.
On my sixteenth birthday I was given a puppy and could not have been happier. This eight week old ball of fluff and I were as inseparable as a dog and young teenager could be, and more than we should have been. I would regularly skip classes so I could sneak home and cuddle with her. I named her Treble and she was by anyone’s account a beautiful dog. She looked like a small, reddish-gold Belgian Malinois with feathers on her legs and tail. I told people who asked that she was a ‘golden shepherd’, but she was just pure mongrel.
Though I never thought about training Treble she learned to sit, lie down, and would turn on a dime when I called her name, even if she was in pursuit of a squirrel, an activity which I encouraged during our visits to the Boston Common. Treble rode on the subway and wandered the streets of the city with me. I strolled on the beach while she tormented sea gulls pecking at debris along the tide line. I adored her and her seeming adoration of me. She was a dog, my precious dog, and nothing that she did ever seemed to me to be a punishable offense. Rather it was me that snuck her into rooms, allowed her on beds, and into cars that had been designated off-limits to dogs, the tell tale fur left on bedspreads and upholstery earning me frowns and rebukes from my family.
When asked, as children often are, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I did not know how to respond. The only jobs that I was aware of that would have allowed me to spend time with dogs, which is what I would have preferred, were dog catcher (as they were called back them) or veterinarian. Dog catcher was loaded with too many negative connotations, though today I have high regard for people who choose a career in animal control. I was allergic to cats and not interested in medicine. Dog training was limited to military, police and ‘seeing eye’ dogs and ‘dog trainer’ had not made it into aptitude tests or onto the lists of high school guidance counselors.
In this year’s Canis Film Festival there is a film produced by a seventeen year old trainer by the name of Devi Stewart showing how she taught her dog Chaos* to submerge its nose in a bowl of water and blow bubbles. To accomplish this she used a clicker and treats. I was impressed by and envious of this young trainer. More than thirty years after the thrill of getting a dog to jump over my legs, Devi was getting her dog to perform a ‘trick’ which would inspire professional trainers. I could not have begun to imagine how to teach a dog to do this when I was that age, but by applying the principles of positive reinforcement, i.e., dogs will repeat behaviors they get rewarded for, she made it look easy.
While I was living my life, accompanied by dogs, there had been an evolution in dog training. I envy Devi the years she has ahead of her during which she can hone and perfect her training skills and the pleasure she and her dogs will derive from it. As for me, I’m looking forward to learning a few new tricks myself in the years to come.
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You really should watch that bubble video. Very cool!
K9 Cuisine is a provider of premium dog food. We’re committed to providing our customers with the knowledge, and the products, to help their faithful friends be the best they can be.
We posted a blog post yesterday where we interviewed Hope Schultz with WebVet. They just posted a commercial on YouTube that is pretty funny, and we just wanted to share it.
You can reach Hope and her team at WebVet at www.WebVet.com.
1. You think begging for table scraps is beneath him, so you let your dog eat at the table with you.
2. You take him to the supermarket and let him pick out his own dog food.
3. Your husband comes home from work, looks at the stew on the stove and asks: “Is this people food or dog food?”
4. You bought matching His & Hers place mats for your dog and yourself.
5. At dinner parties you always have to double-check the butter for visible lick marks, before putting it on the table.
6. Your dog gets to vote on where to spend the next family vacation.
7. You don’t care if you or your spouse are comfortable at night, as long as Fido has enough room on the bed.
8. You complain about the rising costs of groceries, but you don’t think twice about spending a fortune on dog treats.
9. Your dog always gets the best spot on the couch and sometimes he even gets to hold the remote.
10. He has his own e-mail address.
There’s an entertaining website that’s been around for a while. It’s for a British comedy called “Gone to the Dogs,” but the best part of the site is the game that tells you what kind of dog you would be. Go to http://www.gone2thedogs.com and click “GAME” on the left side of the screen. After answering each question, click the “Next Question” button on the right. Ten questions later, you’ll know which dog you would be.
I’m a Bearded Collie, a shaggy sheep dog that makes a wonderful family pet and is very reliable with children!
This is a intriguing list of facts for all you dog lovers. I bet you will decipher some pretty interesting things about dogs that you may be unfamiliar with!
1. Dogs have three eyelids. The third eyelid, the haw, lubricates and guards the eye from harm.
2. Kubla Khan owned 5,000 Mastiffs, the highest number of dogs ever owned by an individual.
3. Dalmatians are entirely white at birth.
4. Alexander the Great is said to have discovered and entitled the city, Peritas, in remembrance of his dog.
5. A puppy is inbred deaf and blind.
6. There are approximately 400 million dogs in the world.
7. The highest dog population in the world is in the United States.
8. Dog nose marks can be used to identify them. They are as one-of-a-kind as human finger prints.
9. The top health issue amongst dogs in the world is obesity.
10. Dogs are nearly as smart as a three-year-old child. They can comprehend about 200 words, including indications or signals with similar significations as the words.
Ok, first let’s get all of our items together.
Treats? Check.
Dog? Check.
Ok, let’s begin!
To start, we begin with our dog in a SIT position. Take a treat, and while holding it above your dog’s head, say the phrase you want related to BEG. You can try BEG, SAY PLEASE, or any other phrase you think is cute
Your dog will probably try and reach up for the dog treat with their paws, so as soon as both paws are off the ground, say “Good ________” and give him/her the treat.
Keep in mind that this is a difficult trick for most dogs as it works on their balance skills, so it make take a few tries to get it done. But keep trying, and happy tricks!
Every dog, like every person, has a unique name which they are given. The meaning behind that name and how the owner/parent thought of it is also one of a kind.
So here’s a few questions for you readers.
1. What is your dog(s) name?
2. Why did you name your dog(s) that?
3. How did you get your name?
Our dog’s name is Nanami, which means seven seas in Japanese. My sister actually named her so I don’t know the reason for it. As for my name, my grandmother named me after another relative.
