Advice & Adventures 

My first rescue dog, Porter, is 45% Rat Terrier, 5 % this, 5 % that, 35% Elkhound, and 100% spicy. Did I know this when I adopted him? NOPE. Could I tell at the adoption fair that he was going to want to throw down with every dog we walked past once I got him out of there? NOPE! He seemed like a pretty typical hyper 1-year-old dude dog while I were signing the paper work.

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

My first week trying to figure out how to retrain my reactive dog pack ended up turning into an excavation of my soul and a reflection on where I currently am in life. (Follow me for more light and easy dog training tips!!!!) And, currently, in my life, I am in the middle of a scorched-earth, take no prisoners, I-hate-my-job kind of warpath with the school district I teach in.

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

This post is about our trip to Pocahontas State Park with our 4 dogs.

This blog post is about the Delaware State Park campgrounds that we have visited with our reactive dogs.

This blog post is about Porter's reactivity training.

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