One of the biggest problems owners face, other than house breaking, is chewing. A dog can find things to chew in a empty room, including your couch or shoes if you’re not watching.

Chewing is a normal pattern for dogs. One of the main reasons dogs chew is to relax.  There are other reasons and they can threaten your rapport with your dog!  This is a destructive habit that needs to be altered.

Your dog may chew because he is teething and, just like with a baby it hurts (a lot). Giving him frozen rawhide bones is a wonderful way to begin breaking this habit. Keep a few in the freezer for him.

Because a dogs attention span is all of a foot long, it is a good idea to get 10 or 12 rawhides chews to freeze. Put five down, then in a few days put them back in the freezer and put down the other five. Each one smells a little different and this gives him a variety of things to chew on without endangering your furniture or shoes!

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by Denise Flaim – Aug. 14, 2008 03:18 PM
Newsday

For millennia, cats have cultivated a reputation for self-absorption, superciliousness and outright disregard for anyone’s opinion other than their own.

But that doesn’t mean that cats are too independent to heed a human’s wishes, says Dee Mason of Garden City , N.Y.-based AristoCat Training (aristocattraining.com), whose company name obviously suggests that there is some bid-ability in that bewhiskered head, just waiting to be tapped.

1. COMMUNICATION IS KEY

Mason stresses the importance of simple, short sentences. Many cats, she adds, don’t know their names because their owners do not use them frequently enough.

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Clicker Training is training using positive reinforcement – teaching your dog to learn – using no physical compulsion or corrections whatsoever. Instead of yanking dogs around, shoving them into place, giving some praise, and  hoping the dog will make the connection, dogs are taught using the scientific methods of classical and operant conditioning.

This is the same method used to train the whales and dolphins and other creatures at Sea World. Anyone who’s been there knows that these wondrous creatures perform flawlessly for audience after audience and, at the same time, enjoy doing it.

The enjoyment feature is the key. You love you dogs and you want them to be responsive, but you dislike hurting them! With clicker training you don’t have to. This training works for every dog, from bold to timid, from tiny to giant. It is the same training method used to train animals for movie and TV work.

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