Spots & Brindle

Reactive human trying to learn how to train her reactive dogs.

Welcome

This website was supposed to an upbeat and inspirational jaunt for women who would like to get outside and bring their pain-in-the-ass dogs along, but when I started writing about training my reactive dogs, I realized instead that I am a reactive human. We may use different words for emotionally dysregulated humans, but when I lined up the information I was using to train my dogs with the work I was doing in my personal life, there was no way around it: I have much in common with my crazy dogs.

So for now, this is a blog about a dysregulated human trying to train her four dysregulated dogs...and all of the mess that goes with that. I hope to eventually work through this to get back to my bigger goal of going on Great & Organized & Not Pandemonium Outdoor Adventures with my Furbabies.

In the meantime, please join me for the groundwork...maybe I'll help me, and someone else, and a few dogs along the way.

The Blog

Fail Stupendously... And Then Call For Help

I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to re-train my adult dogs even though were, well, adults. My job is to teach reading to high school students, so I have this annoying belief that anyone can learn at any age and this applies to my dogs, as well. I can learn to train. They can learn to...keep learning. I wanted to take a real stab at training them to be great out in the world--not just kind of manageable if I keep them on short leashes. As you know from my original post

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Early-Early Signs That You & Your Dog Are Going to Lose Your Shit

Part of thwarting reactivity in humans and dogs is to look for the early warning signs that you (or they) are getting riled up.The idea is that it is way easier to shut down reactivity at the very early stages, when there's just low level concern, rather than later once that concern has swelled in to a frothing furor. If you put a few items on your credit card and then pay off that small amount-no big deal. If you put A LOT of big, unaffordable purchases on your credit card,

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How I Managed to Sabotage Every Goal I Set In The Previous Week

Spots & Brindle is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. Ok so here my dogs and I are. We've started our (re) training. I am working on being a less reactive human. My dogs are working on being less psychotic. We've got our books and our YouTube videos. We're feeling hyped about our collective self-improvement even t

ericamargaret5

You Need Threshold Training & So Does Your Dog

So here we are. Me and my crazy dogs trying to get our shit together. Trainer Miriam Pollard says that when dogs are unsure what to do in a situation, their genetics take over. When I am unsure of what to do in a situation, I turn to books. For myself, I picked out some business communication books. For the dogs, since they can't read YET (we are still at the beginning of our retraining), I picked out two trainers to study: Molly Arvin and Mike D'Abruzzo. Mainly, I was just t

ericamargaret5