Three Ways to Help Clients Do What You Want

We’ve been in our new (at least new to us – it was built in the 1970s!) “snowbird” townhome in Sun City AZ for a little over a month now.  Because the living space and amenities are different from our primary residence in Denver our routines have been modified as well.  Here, we have a…

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Can the Placebo Effect Apply to Training and Behavior Modification?

To be perfectly honest, when we initially had the idea for this article, we weren’t quite sure where we were going with it.  It’s funny how what seemed to be several unrelated events of the last several days suddenly came together to point us in the right direction. The first was a relatively recent article…

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The Importance of Reading Scientific Articles

It should come as no surprise that there is quite a difference between the scientific literature about animal (and dog) behavior and popular literature on dog training.  It’s still fairly difficult for the average dog trainer to access the scientific literature.  On occasion, articles originally published in the scientific literature are made available on the…

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Bust Your Business Barriers in 2013 Survey

Having a successful and profitable behavior and training business – or incorporating behavior services into another type of pet related business – always presents some challenges.   From attracting new clients, working with veterinarians, building an email list, to improving client follow through, we face problems we don’t always know how to solve by ourselves. It’s…

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Who Gets to Label Animal Behavior?

Helping people with their pets’ behavior and training problems requires a variety of skills.  One skill is to know what are normal behaviors and what aren’t.  That can get a little tricky because to call something “not normal” we must have a frame of reference for “normal”.  Normal for all members of the species?  Normal…

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When Dogs Bite Kids

A member of our Behavior Education Network site told us about a case of Great Pyrenees mix that had a great several year history of begin well behaved and getting along with everyone, including the two kids in the family (8 and 10 years old), their friends, other dogs and adults.  His owner did describe…

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Pet Behavior and Training Business Session – on a Cruise!

For the last week or so, we’ve been telling you about our first-ever pet behavior session “Five Crucial Strategies To Expand Your Local Dog Training and Behavior Consulting Business into a Behavior and Training Information Business” that will be part of a business marketing cruise in February 2013.  We’ve attended this business marketing cruise for…

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Cumulative Thresholds for Aggression

We recently posted an article about why pet professionals should do risk assessments of the animals they work with. It served as a reminder that any pet can bite and the safest thing to do is to gather information about the likelihood that the animal may bite in particular situations.  Whether you are a behavior…

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That’s My Job! Really???

What is your job as a dog trainer, behavior consultant, or certified behaviorist?  Is your job to meet an owner’s unreasonable expectations of wanting to have a serious aggression problem resolved in five minutes before the next commercial break? Is your job to push a dog during training or “evaluating” him to the point of…

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What’s the Value of Your Services?

The veterinary profession has suffered financially with the downturn in the economy the last few years.  Many dog trainers and behavior consultants who are our customers say the same thing, that business isn’t as good as it used to be.  Interestingly, statistics indicate that the pet industry as a whole hasn’t been hurt too badly…

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