Training seminar tomorrow!

I'm super-excited to be attending this "Tuning Into Your Dog" seminar with Patricia McConnell and Kathy Sdao this weekend. I remember that when I got my first dog of my own (holy crap, that was 20 years ago this coming February--yikes) I went to a few libraries looking for educational/training resources and came up with a couple of books from the Monks of New Skete, Barbara Woodhouse's No Bad Dogs and an old copy of one of the Koehler training books. I read them all, but I remember being a bit surprised by some of the advice they contained. I'll never forget reading Woodhouse's advice to make sure your dog is a bit aloof with strangers by allowing it to have several unpleasant, but not horrifying, orchestrated experiences so he'd learn not to be too eager to greet new people. I also remember taking my poor dog to a class and being taught that I would have to yank her around and not let her have an inch during training or she'd never learn a thing. I dutifully followed the heavy-handed advice I was given and I remember not really enjoying training my dog. It was just something I figured I had to do to ensure that I could control her.



I can't remember how or why, but I finally came across some books by a trainer named Carol Lea Benjamin, whose attitude toward handling dogs was far from the stern and rigid stuff I'd previously been exposed to. I remember feeling this huge sense of relief when I read in one of her books that she sometimes let her dogs pull on the leash, a cardinal sin according to the trainers I'd read and visited. I dug up copies of as many of her books as I could and they completely changed the way I looked at training my dogs -- they weren't clicker training or super-advanced, by any means, but they were lighthearted, she encouraged people to understand their dogs and their motivations and most importantly, she let her readers know it was OK to have fun when training dogs. She's probably the one to blame for the fact that I developed such a serious interest in working with and training my dogs. Lucky for me and even more lucky for my dogs.

Eventually, taking an interest in writing by Benjamin led me to seek out other people who wrote about dogs in an engaging, dog-friendly, insightful way, and that let me to eventually discover (among other people) Patricia McConnell, whose books are ones I always recommend to anyone who asks me for something to read that'll help them understand their dogs. I also recommend her books as alternatives to the doctrines of Cesar Milan. I've admired McConnell's writings and I read her blog and I enjoy her thoughts on human interactions with dogs, so I'm thrilled that I'll finally have a chance to see her in person and learn from someone in the dog world that I have long admired. So I probably won't be online all that much this weekend. Two full days of seminar! Can't believe I'm this excited to sit in a conference room and listen to someone talk!