Advice & Adventures 

Have you ever had your arm covered in little bitey teeth marks? I now have. As soon as we got Porter, our first rescue, home he proceeded to tenderize my arm while I had to pretend to be happy about it since I had thrown a fit at the adoption fair about getting him. ("ISN'T HE PRECIOUS!?!?!??! I asked my husband later through clenched teeth while my arms shined beet red.)

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.

Working with this idea that the dogs needed to be in their front brain before leaving for our neighborhood safaris, I started with the front door. Usually we would just hook them all up to their leashes and hope no one got knocked unconscious as we all piled out the front door. Today, on this, the first day or their retraining, I lined them all up and told them to "wait." I use "wait" to mean "don't move forward goddammit" and usually use it when we are hiking down someth

Point of View: Your current dog is reactive and it sucks and it's not fun to take them out anywhere and it's exhausting-emotionally and physically. I feel this way all the time. Whenever our first rescue, Porter, was an especially big turd, I would start scouring Petfinder and daydreaming about the very friendly and very social dog I would own Next Time and all of the training that I would do correctly-Next Time. So when COVID hit, we got another dog and then another dog and

Porter nips one pair of pants too many, so we hire a trainer.