Ty The Dog Guy On The Daily

Tomorrow, I’m going to the dentist for a root canal. I’ve never had one before. I feel lucky that, in my entire life, I’ve only had one cavity. All those years ago, when I was eighteen, I got the cavity filled and then I didn’t think about it for the next fifteen or twenty years. As time has gone on, around that filling in the back of my mouth, the tooth has started to decay. This is perfectly normal. In fact, it’s probably been going on for a long time without my awareness. I go back in my mind, I’ve been wondering when I started to notice the pain. I have brief memories from as long as a year ago of drinking a cold or warm drink, or eating something sugary, and noticing that it hurt. But then it went away, and I didn't think about it. Then one day, out of the blue, I was in enormous pain! I realized I had to act right then because it was hurting like crazy. So of course I went to the dentist, who told me that I needed a root canal. I’m a little terrified at the idea of needles on my gums, so I’m not looki

Today I want to talk about freedom for your dog. This is an idea that often presents me with something of an idealogical conundrum, but I’m going to take the plunge because I think that the way we think about freedom has huge implications on our dog training. Now, I certainly don’t want to get into anything political, but I’m a believer in freedom. I think that I was born a free person. But I think very, very differently when it comes to dogs in domestic situations. Why? Because a domestic dog just doesn't have the ability to process his surroundings in a rational way, unless he’s taught how. Freedom is something that our dogs need to learn. We can’t just give it away to them. The idea of freedom can show itself in many different forms. For instance, most of us want our dogs to have freedom around the house. We want to be able to sit and watch television, eat a meal, clean the bedroom, or read a book without worrying about our dogs. We like the idea of our dogs wandering the house freely, without peeing on

Albert Einstein said a lot of intelligent things, but one of his statements has always particularly stuck out to me. In fact, it’s one of my favorite quotes from anyone, and I think of it frequently in my dog training career. Here it is: “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask. For once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” Now, I think a lot about how this idea can help my clients who are dealing with dog issues. My website gets a lot of traffic, and I get questions from people all over the world. I do my best to answer those questions when I can, but I just get too many to answer every single one of them. There are some questions, however, that I routinely ignore: the ones that don’t even come close to following Einstein’s formula. Now, I’m certainly not saying that you have to be as smart as Einstein in order to ask a question! But I frequent

My dog Chocolate Chip is currently in heat. Go ahead, gasp in horror! I’m used to it, because I take quite a bit criticism for this. There are a lot of people out there who say that you absolutely must have your dogs spayed or neutered, and the earlier the better. Before we dive further into this topic, I’d like to offer a quick disclaimer. I don’t want to definitely come out and label either side of this issue right or wrong. I’m not an expert on dog hormones or surgery. What I do want to do is offer a different perspective for you to think about. Often, many veterinarians tell owners what to do without looking at all the information available. A few studies have come out in recent years which show that neutering and spaying early isn’t actually a good thing. It can allegedly lead to higher rates of cancer, behavioral issues, and other problems. On the surface this seems sensible, and once you dig into the idea a little further it starts to make more and more sense. Here’s why. When you spay a female do

Today I was down at my community lake, which brought to my mind the many times I’ve worked with dogs in the water. I have had lots of clients in the so-called “Sun Belt”—areas such as California, Texas, Arizona, Mexico, and even the south of Spain. Since most of these places are very hot, people who live there either have swimming pools or live on the beach. Naturally, they want their dog to enjoy swimming with them. Here’s the catch: many of these dogs are German Shepherds or Rottweilers or other protection breeds, dogs who aren't necessarily bred for swimming. In generally, these dogs don't naturally enjoy swimming. Nonetheless, their owners want to make sure that their dog can swim—to ensure their safety if they were to accidentally end up in the water—but to also to enjoy swimming. They just want to be able to take their dogs out to the beach or pool to have some fun. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that I can get almost any dog to enjoy swimming. Do they start out loving it? Absolutely not! M

Today, I’ve been hanging out with two of my dogs as well as a few of my clients’ dogs. Watching all of them together got me thinking about multi-dog households. Many of my clients struggle with having moe than one dog in their home. Their dogs get into fights, become destructive, or simply feed off each others’ misbehavior. When someone rings the doorbell, they have two or three dogs barking up the walls rather than just one. That’s enough to drive anyone crazy! Multi-dog households present unique challenges. I frequently see two dogs from the same household begin to fight. This can happen to dogs who’ve been living together for months or even years. They coexist and seem to be getting along, but one day they suddenly get into a fight. A week or so later they fight again, and then in no time they’re at each others’ throats every day. This situation occurs because the dogs were only “getting along” under the banner of a lack of control. Their owners weren’t giving much leadership or structure to the dogs

Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference between simply relaxing and actually shutting down your brain. This topic has been on my mind because of a conversation I had with a client about giving their dog some down time. This was especially necessary in this case because the dog was a service animal who has a very difficult working life and really needs down time. But all dogs can benefit from intentional relaxation. Owners frequently say things like “Of course my dog has a lot of down time—he’s always sleeping in his bed or lying down on the floor to relax!” Of course lots of dogs do those kinds of things, either on their own or on command. Dogs will naturally lie down, take naps, and rest. That’s all well and good, but oftentimes the dog that’s lying down of his own volition isn’t really shutting down. At any given moment he might decide to get up and walk around, or grab a toy, or investigate what’s happening on the other side of the house. So while your dog might look like he’s taking a nap, is h

Today I’d like to talk about something I call “bite-sized chunks.” This is a concept I use tot show clients how to bring about complex behavior changes in their dogs. Now, a complex task for a dog is very different from a complex task for us. If someone were to tell me to go upstairs, grab something out of my bedroom, and bring it back downstairs, I wouldn't think that was a complex task at all. When we’re asked to do something like that, our brain immediately links all the steps together: I need to walk up the staircase, turn at the landing, turn left to enter the bedroom, open the door, pick up an object—and so on. It’s only a few steps. Human brains are good at synthesizing multiple steps of a process, so walking upstairs to grab an object isn’t a complex problem. For dogs, however, that would be a very complex set of actions. If it’s something that they decide to do, and it’s in their minds already, then it isn’t quite as complex. But if we are attempting to prompt that behavior and associate it with a

Right now I’m working a lot with a dog named Barney. Barney came to us, for training in Salt Lake City, all the way from Virginia. It’s a long journey—across the country—but Barney needs serious work with his aggression problem. His owners have tried a lot of different things and been unsuccessful, so I’m trying to work him through this difficult issue. When I’m thinking about how to solve dog aggression, I’m really considering two different time frames. The first is when the dog is actually displaying aggressive behavior, and the second is all of the other times. Between these two times is one hundred percent of the dog’s life. Most of the dogs with aggression that I see have a very lopsided life. Their aggression to nonaggression ratio is probably around 90/10 or 80/20, which means that most of the time the dog isn’t being aggressive at all. But of course, it’s the times when he is being aggressive that are the most troubling and the most difficult to handle. As we can see, those issues often lead to dras

Recently, I’ve been helping a little girl named Luna through our boot camp. As I was working with Luna, I realized that 80% of the dogs we work with are medium or large dogs, and only about twenty percent would be called small dogs. People who are interested in finding a dog trainer here in Salt Lake City often ask if we even train small dogs at all! Of course, we do work with small dogs. Unfortunately, we talk to much fewer people who are interested in training their smaller dogs. I think that there are a few reasons for that trend. For one, it’s easier to overlook misbehavior from a small dog. If a little dog jumps on you, that’s noticeably less of a problem than having a hundred-pound dog jump on you. Likewise, if a little dog poops in your house, that’s obviously not the same as an eighty-pound German Shepherd pooping in your house. That means that a lot of people overlook these problems when it comes to training their small dogs. But I think this attitude does a huge disservice to these small dogs. If

Today I want to talk about teaching your dog to fix mistakes. This idea came to me during a men’s group at church, where we were talking about the difference between acting and being acted upon. In our lives, we essentially have those two options. You probably know yourself as someone who fits one of these two groups: you’re either a person who acts, or a person who’s acted upon. The people who are acted upon are those who are constantly complaining. They say things like: “My boss did this to me,” or “My spouse did that to me,” or “My life isn’t like it should be because this happened to me”—and so on. You probably know the type of person I’m talking about! But there are also people who act. They do what they know needs to be done. They push forward. The same is true of dog training, because we want to train dogs who act. Here’s a principle I’ve found to be true, time and time again: the more proactive the dog is in fixing his mistake, the sooner he will stop making that mistake. This is especially releva

I currently have my arm in a sling. You may not think that has anything to do with dog training, but I can usually get a training lesson out of almost every major life event! Here’s what happened: I was at the gym the other day, trying to get in better shape. I’m not in great shape, but I’m pretty strong, and I enjoy lifting weights. Typically, I lift by myself. When I do a bench press—which, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is when you’re lying down and pushing the weight up—I normally do it on a Smith Machine, which allows you to easily rack your weights. So if you find that you’re in over your head and suddenly have too much weight on the bar, you can flick your wrists and it will rack the weights for you. When you’re lifting by yourself and don’t have any spotters, the Smith Machine can be much safer. The downside to the Smith Machine is that it only has one track for the weights. They move up and down in the same pattern every time. So your muscles don’t need to compensate, and as a result your

Today I’d like to talk to you about a troubling sentiment that I hear quite a lot from new dog owners. It came to mind because of a conversation that I recently had with a client. This individual was explaining to me how they needed to get some training for their dog, who was aggressive toward cats, because they went to an adoption event and their daughter had to bring home a kitten. Those were their exact words: “She just had to have a kitten.” As soon as I heard that, my immediate thought was, “No, she didn’t. She didn’t need to have the kitten.” Instead, this person had allowed their daughter to get a kitten. Furthermore, they had made a bad choice by bringing a cat into their home when they were already aware that their dog had obedience and aggression issues. This person was trying to do the right thing by finding a trainer for their dog. But this incident still shows an all-too-common problem: kids making decision about the family animals. Now, don’t take this the wrong way. I love kids! In fact, I

In this post, I want to talk about breaking the dog training rules. That sounds controversial, but I’m really just referring to the habit of clinging to the first “rule” you hear about a dog training topic. When people want to learn more about dog training, they generally read a book or talk to their trainer to get more information. In most cases, the first information they hear from that first source is what they tend to believe. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, it’s always a good idea to question the information you hear, no matter where it came from. Question the information you get from books about dogs, question anything a trainer tells you about dogs—even question the information I’m giving you right now! It’s quite common for me to hear: “I’ve got this Blue Heeler, and a guy at work told me that all Blue Heelers are like this.” I tell them that yes, their Blue Heeler might be “like that,” but it could also be something completely different. There is no one stereotype that defines a whole

Today I’d like to speak about the impact of taking a puppy away from its mother and litter mates too early. I recently spoke with an owner who had done this, having brought her puppy home at about five weeks. While talking with her, I tried to explain some of the complex issues involved in this kind of situation. In this particular case, the owner had no choice but to bring the puppy home early because its mother had died. Some people do have that choice: they meet a cute puppy who is five or six weeks old, and they’re given the opportunity to take the dog home. Generally, I advise that you not do that. The only way that I would ever recommend that choice is if there is a health issue involved where the puppies can’t be with their mother. In that case, it is what it is: not an ideal scenario, but something you can adapt to. There are a few big potential issues with taking a dog away from its mother too early. I often see problems with mouthiness. Almost every puppy will nip, but dogs who were separated too

In this article, I’d like to talk a bit about context—in other words, how how dogs perceive information. At our company, we do a lot of boot camps. In these camps, both local people from here in Utah or people from out of state bring their dogs to us, and we train the dog and send it home. When I started doing these boot camps, I didn’t understand the concept of context deeply enough to realize that I needed to explain it to everyone. That was a young rookie mistake! So I would train the dog, bring it back to the owners, and tell them: “Here’s how you get it to be obedient. If he isn’t, then make sure you’re doing all these things.” Owners were always surprised by these specifics. They thought that all they would need to do is say “sit” or “come” and their dog would do it automatically. I had to explain that their dog wasn’t a machine. Just because a dog understands a command in training doesn’t mean that he will automatically obey it for his owner without any kind of practice. During one of the first b

Today, I want to talk about how good you need to be at training in order to train your dog. A lot of people call me to ask whether they can actually train their dog. I always tell them that over the years, I’ve found that consistency will trump talent every time. Here’s what that means. Sometimes, I have a client who is talented from the moment they take the leash. They read the dog perfectly and handle the leash well—that’s a natural ability. But some of those people go home, watch Netflix on the couch, and never work their dog. A few weeks later, when they come back to us, their dog hasn’t made progress. So while those owners are naturally talented at the tasks we give them, they don’t have the work ethic to follow through. These people will get results if they implement even a little of what we show them, but they often don’t get the amazing results they could achieve if they put in more effort. On the flip side, we’ve had a lot of clients over the years (no offense if you fall into this category!) who

In the past few posts I’ve been discussing tools, techniques, and consistency, which I believe are the only three things standing between you and the results that you want for your dog. I’ve written about having the right tools and making sure they fit properly. Then I talked about making sure we have the right techniques, and that we’re doing them correctly. These are both very important concepts. But the last thing that stands in the way of most dog owners is consistency, which is dependent to some extent on having the right tools and techniques. I commonly hear owners say things like: “I don't know what to do, I’m being so consistent with my dog and yet he’s still aggressive.” If I look at the techniques that they’re using, however, they’re usually wrong.

I recently took my daughter to equestrian speech therapy. Now, I was initially skeptical about how a horse could help her speak better. But here’s how the half-hour session works: they had her brush the horse, grab the saddle, and walk around the farm. Then they asked her things like, “Look at that horse, he has a stripe—can you say ‘stripe’?” or “That horse is wearing a saddle—can you try to say ‘saddle’?” Essentially, they addressed all of her problem areas in regular, conversational terms.

Since I was about fourteen, I’ve been constantly working. I started working for a dog trainer when I was fourteen. Later, I had plenty of other jobs until I was able to make training my full-time profession, but I was always working a lot.