Canine Scholars Behavioral Training Center

We finally had a few days of sun last week. (The round, bright yellow thing in the sky that hurts your eyes if you look at it, just in case you forgot). But of course, it rained again, and since the ground never dried out we seem to be living in a second “mud season”. Typically, “mud season” was in spring, but given all the rain this summer and fall, we've had it seems that [...]

The author Clive Wynne sums up his book's thesis in its title: Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You. He argues, compellingly, that dogs aren't special because of their intelligence, but because of their social bond to us, which after extensive research, he is happy to call “love”. One might say that this is not quite as unique an argument as he suggests, but there is no better scientific explanation of our astoundingly [...]

With well over half of all US households having one or more pets, it is more important than ever to be a good pet neighbor. We've collaborated with State Farm® in creating a free 35-minute online course that educates both new and experienced pet owners in how to read dog body language and safely interact with dogs in order to reduce pet related injuries and to reinforce what it means to be a [...]

Rain. Rain. Rain. Mud. Rain. Mud. Rain. Mud. You get the idea. It is so wet here in southern Wisconsin that it feels like we are living in a petri dish, designed to grow every plant disease known to man. Granted, it's not like the monsoon rains I remember from coastal Alaska, but then, that area is classified as a rain forest. Its plant and animal life is adapted to it. Not true here. I'll illustrate by [...]

Obedience. Such a loaded word. It makes me cringe when it is used outside of the dog competition world. And quite honestly, I would love to see that word changed in that world as well, to something with a kinder connotation. It's been the status quo word reserved for dog training for so long that it's hard for some dog parents to think of it any other way. There are plenty of modern methods trainers [...]

One of the driving principles of the Victoria Stilwell Academy (where we teach both dog owners and people who want to become professional dog trainers) is that everyone – myself included – in the dog training field is always learning new ways to do things, novel approaches to age-old problems, and how the latest advances in the field of behavioral science can be more effectively applied to our work in the field as pet dog [...]