Dogs might not be the smartest non-human animals out there, but when it comes to ‘trainability’ dogs excel. In fact, they rank near the absolute top for reading human social cues, emotional attunement and cooperative communication. They’re capable of learning a large number of commands, tricks and cues. Take two border collies, Chaser and Rico, for instance; they learned hundreds of words, with Chaser famously able to distinguish more than 1,000 proper nouns, used as names fo

Repetition and predictability are essential to dog training, especially behaviour modification. When you’re trying to change a dog’s emotional response to something – another dog, a person, a cat, cars, whatever – the dog needs to know what to expect. By repeating something many times in a way that’s predictable, the dog can start building new associations without the stress or anxiety of surprise. "Repetition can help transform short-term memories into long-term memories." L

Thresholds. High-value rewards. Positive reinforcement. Jackpotting. Shaping. Pavlov’s dogs. Operant conditioning… The dog behaviour world is filled with jargon and insider terms. To the uninitiated, this can be daunting or, worse, exclusionary. It needn’t be. And, to be honest, to the already overwhelmed reactive dog owner who has probably read a bunch of books and watched every video on YouTube about behaviour modification, there’s only so many more words you can take in. T

That's a good question. Is it a one-to-one walk? Is it behaviour modification? The answer is: it's a bit of both. Generally, dog walkers take several dogs out together for 'pack walks'. For most dogs this is great. They get to play, learn from and interact with other dogs of both sexes of a variety of breeds and ages. For reactive dogs, this simply isn't possible. Reactive dogs, particularly the big and powerful ones, need a walker's full focus and attention. But it's not jus