Fear Free Happy Homes
Reading Time: 3 minutes When you think of summer, what comes to mind? For me, it has always been beachy weekends and holiday gatherings with family and friends. Even hammock-lounging, agenda-less summer days were associated with blissful tranquility, until, that is, I shared those dog days of summer with my best fur pal Bug. For Bug, summer, specifically the […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes Even on a screen, dogs connect with us. A new study found that people who watched videos of dogs were happier and less stressed.
Reading Time: 5 minutes It’s conventional wisdom among dog trainers that a handler’s anxiety “travels down the leash” to influence the dog. To be honest, this had always sounded like some kind of woo-woo mystical nonsense to me. When I got my current extremely reactive Pug, the trainer I was working with – who I respected for being pretty […]
Reading Time: 5 minutes My first dog was thrilled to go anywhere and meet anyone. Crowds, children, traffic: she was calm in the face of it all. So I could not understand what was wrong with other dogs or, more to the point, their owners. You know the ones I mean: their dogs jumped and barked and were out […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes A new study casts doubt on a mainstay of teaching dogs to stay home alone. Here’s what it found. Everyone’s heard the advice: ignore your dog when leaving the house and returning. The claim is that long goodbyes and excited reunions might cause separation anxiety, but if you don’t make a fuss, the dog will […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes If your dog is terrified of riding in the car, it doesn’t have to be that way. With careful planning and patient training, you can teach him to relax and enjoy the ride. Here are my favorite tactics for building canine confidence in the car. Riding in the car. Isn’t that something that all dogs […]
Reading Time: 4 minutes Everyone hopes to find a “natural” way to manage a pet’s fear, anxiety, or stress, but there’s more to consider than you might think. Here are the pros and cons of nutraceuticals and supplements. The word “nutraceutical” was coined as a combination of “nutrition” and “pharmaceutical” quite recently–in 1989–and arguments about its precise definition have […]