Abi-K9

The early days with a baby puppy can be a blur. There’s a lot to take in and a lot to do! This is a summary of the most important things to address between 8-12 weeks of age. There are four things that are developmentally dependent: meaning that they’re easily modifiable in a certain age period, but really difficult to do so outside of that. These will be listed and discussed below. Puppies go through multiple critical periods of development in their first year, but none are

How our approach to raising and training puppies has changed throughout the last 150 years. Puppies. Little sponges with teeth. These days, we have a pretty good understanding of how important their first 4 months on this earth are. In fact, it’s one of the only big things that we’d consider as truly ‘settled science’. Although many of the nuances and broad methods of raising puppies differs between trainers, most would agree that, what a puppy experiences in their first 4 mo

Prong Collars. Slip-leads. Check Chains. Martingales. Gentle-Leaders. Front-Attach Harnesses... Making an informed decision. I cleaned out my training room recently, and in doing so I found a whole bunch of gear that I didn't know I had (it's not that weird if you're a crazy dog person). It inspired me to do a blog post about each piece of equipment I found. Now, some of them I knew I had... the pinch collars and (copious amounts of) slip leashes and collars. What surprised m

When we say that a dog has developed odour recognition, we're saying that odour has been classically conditioned; it has gone from being a neutral smell, to a magic smell that predicts the production of all the dog's favourite rewards. I see a lot of questions about the pros and cons of various different methods of creating odour recognition, so decided to give it a shot to summarize the issue. Paired OdourThe target odour is paired with the dog’s reward. When the dog finds h