People talk too much.   As an introvert, spending too much time around an extrovert who just doesn’t know when to stop can be exhausting to me.   I often think that’s why I enjoy working with animals (except parrots). This might come a shock to you, but dogs and humans don’t speak the same language.   (If this wasn’t a shock, congratulations, you were paying attention to my previous post !)   but when we, as humans, have a breakdown in communication, we tend to address that problem as we would with another human.   This is not necessarily a bad thing – it tends to work out pretty well with members of our own species after all – but when miscommunication happens with our dogs and we treat them like humans in little fur coats, then the miscommunication perpetuates.   And humans, even introverts, love to talk!   We talk to each other.   We talk to ourselves.   We talk to our phones.   We talk to our dogs.  ...

Many new clients ask me, “What’s the first thing I should teach my dog?” My answer seems like a cop-out, “It depends!” Do they have a brand-new baby puppy? Potty training is going to be pretty close to the top! Do they instead have a suspicious, reactive adult who might go for my face if I make a wrong move?   Let’s focus on relaxation protocols.   But before we can begin teaching these relatively simple (but not necessarily easy) skills, there is something else that we have to teach.   For the most part, my clients and I share a common culture and language, at least enough so that we can communicate.   We are even the same species.   But we don’t have that same luxury with our dogs.   We must cross that cultural divide using a bridge .   In behavior jargon, a bridging stimulus is a word, click, or whistle signaling to the animal that it has performed the correct behavior and that reward is on the way, bridging the gap between response and ...