Texas-based trainer Beth Berkobien has a master's degree in animal behavior, specializes in dog aggression, and offers virtual training sessions internationally. She was raised on a farm with field-trial Labradors and grew up around punishment-based dog training using aversives. After being encouraged by a trainer to use an e-collar on her dog that caused him to completely shut down, she moved away from aversives. Many years later, she works primarily with rehabilitating rescue dogs. She joins Annie on this episode to discuss her journey as a dog trainer. Together they also listen to “bonker”-based dog trainer Jeff Gellman’s rant on dog trainers who prefer to use methods that don’t cause their dogs (and potentially others) additional harm. They also discuss an apparent societal tendency to blame people for their failures, and of balanced trainers to blame clients when their training protocols are ineffective. Annie finishes by reading some extreme training methods from a dog tra...
Anamarie Johnson, a former School For The Dogs trainer and current PhD candidate in Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology at Arizona State University, returns to the podcast to discuss her research on language used by dog trainers on their websites. In addition to discussing some of her findings (like what it means when a trainer talks about "nature" and some of the stranger New Age-y language used by aversive and R+ trainers alike), they talk about what's she's learned from working in shelters and more. Sign up for Anamarie's free presentation about her paper, August 8th at 3PM ET: http://schoolforthedogs.com/words Read the paper abstract: Training Dogs with Science or with Nature? An Exploration of Trainers’ Word Use, Gender, and Certification Across Dog-Training Methods https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08927936.2022.2062869 Anamarie's previous visit to the podcast in 2018: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lets-talk-about-pavlov-with-dog-trainer-anama...
Hang out with any Positive Reinforcement dog trainer and they're bound to have a shirt in their wardrobe from the online store Woof Cultr: An apparel company that has a very niche market: Force-free trainers. Woof Cultr is the brainchild of Mandy Boutelle, who originally left a career as a hairstylist to become a certified dog walker in San Francisco. When she started doing off-leash group dog walks, she knew she had to learn more about dog training and behavior in order to manage her rowdy young pack. This led her to decide to become a dog trainer. At the start of the pandemic, however, she and her husband decided to move to Oregon and to spread the gospel of positive reinforcement dog training in a unique way: By printing bold-but-simple statements about training and behavior on t-shirts. Links: https://woofcultr.com/ DigiWoof | Web Design & Digital Marketing for Dog Trainers and Pet Pros --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dogs/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dogs/support
Sara Caron had a leash-reactive dog, and as she started to research a quick fix for the problem, she threw out a wide net and tried lots of things. With guidance from this podcast, she began to see a way of dog training that made sense to her. When felt she had reached a plateau in her own solo study of animal behavior, she enrolled in the School For The Dogs Professional Course last year. She got another puppy shortly before starting the course which allowed her to see some remarkable differences in a dog raised with science-based/reward-based training methods versus one who was not. In this episode, Sara and Annie discuss some of the parts that have made the School For The Dogs Professional Course a life-changing experience for its graduates: The individualized attention, access to the SFTD community of trainers, classes, in-depth material, and the guest speakers. They also discuss the process of finding one’s place in the professional world of dog training. Apply to the Professional Course at: https://www.schoolforthedogs.com/professional-dog-training-course/ Applications for the next cohort are due June 30. Cohort begins Aug. 30. Want to learn more? Book a free consult at: http://schoolforthedogs.com/freeconsult --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dogs/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dogs/support
Leeyah Wiseman is a recent graduate of School For The Dogs Professional Course. If you follow us on TikTok or Instagram, you probably know her from the videos she does for SFTD. While she never thought of herself as a "dog person," she ended up adopting a puppy, George, and falling in love with him. But then she realized she had an issue on her hands: Separation anxiety. Her work figuring out how to deal with this issue in a way that felt right led her to decide to become a dog trainer. Annie and Leeyah discuss how she worked with her dog to improve his anxiety, what she got out of the Professional Course, and popular notions of what it means to "be" positive. Find Leeyah on Instagram @galdogtraining and @schoolforthedogs! Like this podcast? Please rate and review on iTunes! Learn more about the Professional Course at http://schoolforthedogs.com/professionalcourse22 Next cohort starts in late August! ---- Spoil your smart pooch with a Brainy Box! Listen to the episode for a special ...
The term "misfit" originally referred to people who were considered to be not great fit for their surroundings -- an ill fit. I miss fit. At School For The Dogs, we see it as our goal to help dogs -- whenever possible -- exist comfortably in an environment that may not be the best fit for them. New York City certainly isn't the best fit for many individuals of any species, which is perhaps one reason why we have several programs specifically for Misfit dogs. In this episode, Annie talks to two School For The Dogs clients who have been attending a couple of unique types of private sessions: Dog Socialization and Misfits Day School. New York-based dog owners Alyssa and Jen talk about how these sessions have helped them help their "Misfit" dogs. Learn more at http://schoolforthedogs.com/services ***** NEW: Subscribe to Brainy Box, and you'll get a new enrichment toy and new treats every month. Get 15% off for a limited time. Code in episode! Learn more and sign up at http://schoolforth...
Everyone is impressed by a dog whose eyes meets a human's gaze with magnet-like intensity on cue. Teaching a dog to "touch" his or her eyes to your eyes is a great exercise to practice no matter what the pooch's training level is. When teaching this attention-based behavior to a dog-- whether you use a word such as "Look" or the dog's name -- Annie suggests focusing on your training mechanics before jumping to setting criteria for your dog. In this episode, she clearly breaks down how to build a stellar "Look" cue from scratch, in just six quick steps, using only sixty tiny treats. Notes: Treat suggestions - Tricky Trainers (and other brands that make these pencil-eraser sized morsels) can be broken up into at least four pieces, meaning you'll go through only 15 treats in your session: storeforthedogs.com/products/tricky-trainers- Lamb lung breaks up into neat pieces without getting greasy or crumbly: storeforthedogs.com/products/lamb-lung. Dogs and presidents: https://read.bi/2SrAVxu "Look For The Silver Lining" ukulele cover by Renei Yarrow: youtube.com/watch?v=CDIHff9eESQ Partial Transcript: **music** Annie: Hello, everyone. Thank you for listening. Today I’m going to walk you through what I call the Invisible Triangle method of teaching “look.” I think look is a really excellent thing to teach any dog, any age some people call it “watch me” or “attention,” whatever you want to call it, basically you’re teaching your dog to connect their eyes to your eyes on whatever cue you give. And of course that cue, today we’re going to use “look” you could be using their name, you could say “eyes,” you could say “bubblegum babaganoush.,” it doesn't matter but you are to give it some kind of cue. Of course, if you don’t give it a cue and you just teach them that locking eyes with your eyes is always a good thing that certainly not a bad thing to teach either. I generally think that everything we train our dogs to do, pretty much, comes down to targeting- targeting being teaching them to touch one thing to another. Of course, pretty much the first thing I teach every dog I work with is to hand-nose target so to touch their nose to my fingers, to my hand or to touch their nose to an object. And while there are lots of reasons I like to teach this specific exercise, the big reason is that I think of it as a building block exercise that you can use to teach lots of different things because really what you’re teaching is if you touch X to Y then good thing happens and basically everything you’re ever going to train your dog comes down to something that can fit into that equation. Sit is if if you touch butt to ground. Down is if you touch body to the ground. Go to the crate, well, that's if I touch body to crate. And I think that teaching look is really just the same thing except that if I touch my eyes to my human eyes good thing happens . And like I just said, certainly if that becomes just the default behavior, it's never going to be a bad thing since if your dog locks eyes with you, you certainly have your dog's attention and that's a great starting place for getting your dog to do whatever it is you want or need him or her to do... Full Transcript at Schoolforthedogs.com/Podcasts --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dogs/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dogs/support
Elise Mac Adam and Annie first met in 2002 when Annie wrote up Elise's engagement announcement for her column in The New York Observer. Both of them were terrier lovers, writers, and native Manhattanites: They became fast friends. When Annie and Kate first started School For The Dogs in 2011 and running classes out of Annie's Manhattan living room, Elise and her dogs were among their first clients. Elise, her sons, and her husband, have worked with half a dozen of School For The Dogs trainers over the last decade, with three of their dogs. She has, overall, clocked more sessions than any other single client. Eventually, she had to make the difficult decision to rehome one of her terriers. She and Annie discuss how rehoming a dog can feel like both a success and failure at the same time, and the silver lining of this difficult experience: It led her to decide to enroll in the School For The Dogs Professional Course. Apply to the Professional Course at http://schoolforthedogs.com/prof...
Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media at the University of Alabama, is the author of the forthcoming book The Internet Is For Cats: How Animal Images Shape Our Digital Lives. Her research has largely involved looking at how people share and consume photos of animals on the Internet. She and Annie discuss a variety of topics relating to social media pets. Maddox offers an academic take on why people create Instagram accounts for their pets, are drawn to stories about Ukrainian rescue cats, and more. What does Youtube have to say about the practice of tying puppies to train tracks so that someone can post a video of their rescue? Why do some brands prefer to work with pet influencers over human ones? Are we living in a new era of anthropomorphizing our pets in a non-private arena, or is this just a new iteration of an age-old practice? And: Is it possible to breed an NFT cat? Maddox addresses these questions, and more. The secret life of pet Instagram accounts: Joy, ...
Karen Pryor turns ninety on May 14th! Annie is celebrating today and... plotting continued celebrations on this podcast in the coming year. If you're a Karen Pryor fan, join the celebration! If you're not, you'll enjoy learning why she is so worthy of it. In this episode, Annie interviews BF Skinner Foundation president Dr. Julie Vargas, about the importance of this incredible scientist, writer and entrepreneur who, over the last thirty years, has done more than probably anyone else alive to help show people how we can use operant conditioning and secondary reinforcers to train dogs with rewards: aka, clicker training. When her husband bought Sea Life Park in the 1960s, Pryor was tasked with training the dolphins to perform. She got her hands on a paper written by students who were working in BF Skinner's Harvard lab, and it outlined the basics of operant conditioning and how to use a secondary reinforcer, like a whistle, to pinpoint the moment a desired behavior occurred. It furthe...