Too Broke to Buy Training DVDs? Sign Up for the Netflix for Dog Nerds!

In an ideal world, pet owners would train their dogs in the following order, depending on the pet’s problem, available resources, and geographical availability:

• Find a qualified, dog-friendly training professional to coach you in person
• Find a trainer to work with you via Skype if none are available in your area
• Watch training videos online
• Purchase training books and/or read articles
• Seek advice from anyone you know who has ever had a dog, or watch reality shows about dog training

It’s obviously best to work with a trainer in person, and this should be mandatory if your pup has potentially severe or dangerous behavior problems. But many dedicated pet owners can learn to teach basic manners and even some very advanced tricks by watching training videos or reading books.

This week I want to recommend Tawzer Dog Videos, which is probably the world’s best source for quality training instruction and seminar DVDs. Its site features many of the industry’s well-established trainers alongside up-and-comers like Grisha Stewart and Emily Larlham. I’ve sent many pet owners to the Tawzer site when they’ve asked me about finding resources on teaching new skills, but I admit that purchasing DVDs can quickly get expensive.

Fortunately, Tawzer recently introduced a Netflix-like home delivery subscription service for its training DVDs. This gives you the chance to learn from Grisha, Emily, Steve White, Kathy Sdao, Ken Ramirez, Patricia McConnell, Terry Ryan, and other leaders in the behavior and training field from the comfort of your home. The site lists all the pricing options and policies.

Advantages:

• Variety: You’ll find DVDs on tricks, basic manners, adolescent dog training, training for competition sports, puppy raising, and behavior modification.
• Price: The basic plan (one disc at a time) costs about $10 a month.
• Quality: The folks at Tawzer put a lot of time and effort into finding seminars that promote modern, dog-friendly training techniques.
• CEUs: Pay attention, fellow pet pros! If you don’t have the time or money to attend a variety of seminars, you can now get credit for renewal of professional certifications through viewing Tawzer’s videos.

Disadvantages

• Tawzer doesn’t yet offer a streaming service, but I hope the company is working on that so people like me can watch these DVDs directly without waiting for the mail.

Unlike Netflix, which has multiple shipping stations nationwide, Tawzer is a small, family-owned company based in the Pacific Northwest — so I have some concerns about shipping and delivery times to the East Coast. I admit I haven’t subscribed to the DVD delivery program yet (mostly because I just spent a ton of money on Tawzer videos for my professional library and have yet to watch them all), but hopefully this won’t be an issue. I really want to check out Sandi Pensinger’s new Treibball DVDs and of course, Emily Larlham of Kikopup’s great tricks seminar!

• Patience! Many of the seminars comprise four to eight DVDs, so you may want to upgrade from the one-DVD-a-month plan if you want to watch an entire seminar without waiting.

Have any of you subscribed already? I’m interested in hearing feedback about the service, particularly from East coast subscribers regarding wait time on DVD shipments.

Until next week, happy training!

View the original article here

Uggie Is Psychic: Correctly Predicts “The Artist” Would Win Best Picture

Uggie, in acrylics, on the eternal red carpet. My 15-year-old daughter painted this for me on a 7-by-7 canvas while I was out of town covering the Golden Collar Awards in Los Angeles on Feb 13 and 14. The best Valentine's present! (Painting: Laura Altair Hanson)

The Artist swept five Oscars last night at the 84th Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture. I loved this film, and was happy to see it do so well — especially after meeting Uggie, the movie’s scene-stealing Jack Russell terrier, at the Golden Collar Awards earlier this month.

The semisilent (great music!) French movie  was up against some stiff competition, but I shouldn’t have been surprised that it won: Uggie predicted that The Artist would win. He did so on the Jimmy Kimmel show, with the aid of hot dogs over the movie posters of all the nominees. Uggie is retiring from the big screen, but I see a job for him as a stock market advisor. Or at least a racetrack tipster.

View the original article here

Gnawin’ Forever Treat Toy

February 1, 2012 at 2:30 pm

It’s really hard to keep active dogs occupied for any length of time. But we have to, don’t we? Active dogs of any size can’t just sleep all day. So we give them rawhide and toys designed to keep their attention and prevent boredom-induced vices such as chewing other stuff.

The Gnawin’ Forever treat toy is a new toy from an old company, Ainsworth Pet Nutrition. It’s the first interactive long-lasting dog treat of its kind because the treat that is placed in the toy cannot be crunched up with the back teeth. The dog can lick, spin and nibble with the front teeth, but unless the dog gets the toy apart, she can’t chow down.

The Gnawin’ Forever includes a barbell-shaped toy with round ends and a “spool” through the middle, joining them. A hard cylindrical treat is slipped over the spool and the toy is locked together.

Our test sample included a bacon flavored treat. Although my do did not show any interest in it, a friend of mine tested it on her two energetic mid- to large-sized dogs and told me over and over again that, “they loved it!” Her dogs – especially one of them – are aggressive chewers, and very hard on their toys.  They both wanted to play with it when they first got it, and my friend had to make them take turns. The edible part for her lasted “an hour or two,” and then the dogs chewed the toy. They got the toy apart and were chewing on the middle spool within 24 hours, so my friend threw that part away. But a week later, the dogs are still playing with the red ends. The toy was a total hit with those dogs.

I would recommend this toy for all but the toughest chewers. And even if you have an aggressive chewer, you can still let him use this toy if you supervise, and take it away before the toy part is destroyed. That way, you can get additional treats to put on it and use it over and over again. It doesn’t stain carpets. The refill treats are made from food-grade ingredients (no plastics) and are easy on the digestive system.

The toy comes with a treat, and then you can purchase two-pack treat refills. It appears to come in one size, which is about five inches wide and seven inches long (great for even the biggest dogs). PetFoodDirect, which may be a partner or subsidiary of Ainsworth, has a dedicated page/department for Gnawin’ Forever toys and refill treats. The toy with treat is $26.98 and the refill two-pack is $9.99. Their page says, “A PetFoodDirect Exclusive,” but I see it’s also available at www.petstoreonline.com, www.thepetcenter.com (although they may not actually stock the toy; they may be affiliates of PetFoodDirect).

You can get a $5 off discount at www.gnawinforeverqr.com.

Be the first to like this post.Entry filed under: Miscellany. Tags: active, aggressive, ainsley, ainsworth, big dog, boredom, busy, chewer, destructive, forever, gnawin', indestructible, long lasting, product review, product test.

View the original article here

Want the Smartest Dog on the Block? Check Out This New Book

I’m one of those people whose jobs have nothing to do with science, but who love science from afar. I could read science articles all day, and in my nerdhood, you can often find me glued to anything to do with science on TV.

But when the going gets tough — say, in an intro to physics class at the local community college — I run to series like Physics for Dummies/Idiots/Pathetic Imbeciles Who Thought Physics at a Local Community College Would be a Mickey Mouse Course. Sadly, sometimes the Dummies-type books are also a bit above my head. And that’s why I’m grateful that I can now shop for a book that’s ostensibly for someone with an even lower tolerance for physics pain: My dog.

Physics professor Chad Orzel’s latest book, How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, comes out today. It’s a followup to his similarly titled book on physics for dogs. You don’t have to be embarrassed to buy it in a bookstore, if you can still find a bookstore. It’s for your dog, after all. But of course, our little secret is that it’s really for you, and this is one book that really will help elucidate relatively. You might actually start to understand what Einstein came up with all those years ago. That is, your dog might …

If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe the professor himself. Here’s an excerpt from a Q&A on his website:

Why the dog?

Talking to the dog about physics is worthwhile because it can help me see how to explain physics to my human students. Humans all come at the subject with the same set of preconceptions about how the world works, and what “should” happen, and it can be very hard to shake those off. That’s a big barrier to understanding something like quantum physics.

Dogs look at the world in a very different way. To a dog, the world is a neverending source of wonder and amazement. You can walk your dog past the same rock every morning, and every morning, she’ll sniff that rock like she’s never sniffed it before. Dogs are surprised by things we take for granted, and they take in stride things that would leave us completely baffled.

Can you give an example?

Well, take the dog’s bowl, for example. Every now and then, we put scraps from dinner in the bowl when she’s not looking, and she’s become convinced that her bowl is magic– that tasty food just appears in it out of nowhere. She’ll wander over a couple of times a day, and look just to see if anything good has turned up, even when we haven’t been anywhere near the bowl in hours.

This puts her in a better position to understand quantum electrodynamics than many humans.

It does?

Sure. One of the most surprising features of QED, in Feynman’s formulation, is the idea of “virtual particles.” You have an electron that’s moving along, minding its own business, and every now and then, particle-antiparticle pairs just pop into existence for a very short time. They don’t stick around very long, but they have a real and measurable influence on the way electrons interact with each other, and with other particles.

You’re making this up, right?

No, not at all. One set of these interactions is described by a number called the “g-factor” of the electron, and this has been measured to something like fifteen decimal places, and the experimental measurement agrees perfectly with the theoretical prediction. If there weren’t electrons and positrons popping out of nowhere, there’s no way you could get that sort of agreement.

Emmy, the author's dog, is featured prominently in these books

Well, like I said, the dog is perfectly comfortable with the idea of stuff popping into existence out of nowhere. If a great big steak were to suddenly appear on your dining room table, you’d probably be a little perturbed. The dog, on the other hand, would feel it was nothing more than her due.

So she’s perfectly okay with the idea of virtual particles, unlike most humans, who tend to say things like “You’re making this up, right?” She was already convinced that there were bunnies made of cheese popping in and out of the backyard, and just regards QED as a solid theoretical justification for her beliefs.

And this helps humans, how, exactly?

Physics has a reputation as a difficult and unapproachable subject, especially in fields like quantum mechanics, where the predictions of the theory confound our human preconceptions. If you can put aside a few of your usual notions of how the world works, and think about how things look to a dog, some aspects of physics that seem absolutely impossible to accept become a lot more approachable.

I don’t know about you, but I’m going over to Amazon to buy myself —er, Jake, that is — a copy of this book straight away.

View the original article here

The Dog Days of Daytime are at ABC

February 10, 2012 at 4:44 pm

The dog days are not over, especially if the hosts of ABC’s “The View,” “The Chew” and “The Revolution” have anything to say about it. On FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, it’s “Doggie Day in Daytime” on ABC, as Barbara Walters, Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Sherri Shepherd of “The View,” Chefs Mario Batali, Michael Symon and Carla Hall, Clinton Kelly and Daphne Oz of “The Chew” and Ty Pennington, Tim Gunn, Harley Pasternak, Dr. Jennifer Ashton and Dr. Tiffanie Davis Henry of “The Revolution” celebrate man’s best friend.Joy Behar from “The View”

It’s BARK!: “‘The View’s’ 4th Annual Mutt Show presented by Pedigree” (11:00-12:00 p.m., ET), featuring David Frei of the Westminster Kennel Club judging the “Best Mutt in Show” of five viewers’ mutts and another five adoptable mutts from the North Shore Animal League. One winner is awarded a grand prize trophy and another, the Pedigree Dogs Rule Award.

On “The Chew” (1:00-2:00 p.m., ET) the hosts cook up some fun and easy recipes while celebrating their “All in the Family” show. Special appearances by Michael Symon’s dog, Ozzie, and the Oz family pooch, Rosie, who test out some of the newest and coolest dog toys.

On “The Revolution,” (2:00-3:00 p.m., ET), Dr. Ashton, joined by her two dogs, leads a segment on dog health and conducts a Q&A with the studio audience, many of whom are seated with their dogs. Gunn unveils the do’s and don’ts of dressing up your dog, and Pennington has the perfect household guide to fixing “dog disasters,” including scratched furniture and torn carpets. Animal activist, model and actress Beth Stern joins the co-hosts to talk about the North Shore Animal League and the importance of adopting pets.

Check your local listings for details.

Be the first to like this post.Entry filed under: In the News. Tags: .

View the original article here

People Giving Up Pets Because They Can’t Afford Them

January 5, 2012 at 5:40 pm

I’ve read several articles in the news about people giving up their pets because of the tight economy. More than 80 dogs have been dropped off at a single shelter in West Virginia. Other shelters have seen a sharp increase in people dropping off pets because they can no longer afford them. And, because of the economic scares, fewer people are adopting pets.

It’s hard to understand giving up a family pet because money’s tight. I’d have to be missing some meals before I could give up my fur-kids.  I know there are situations in which the pet truly cannot remain with its owners, and for them I am deeply sorry. Knowing that adult pets are far more difficult to find homes for - and many of them are put down at shelters - I hope that if there’s no money for pet food, there’s also no money for cell phones, cable television, clothes, bottled water, movies and sweets. If there’s money for that stuff, there’s money for your dog.

The decisions we make in the emotional moments after losing a job or filing for bankruptcy are sometimes life-and-death decisions for our pets, who have no say in the decision making process.

Let’s not toss them aside too quickly.

Before you drop your dog off at a shelter, please think about what it really costs to keep your dog. If you already have a leash, collar and crate, what does it really cost? For a healthy dog, it only costs food and heartworm/flea medication. There may be areas in which you can save money that are often overlooked. Do you mow your own lawn? Do you have bottled water delivery? Can you reduce your cable/satellite or Internet service package? How often do you go to Starbucks?

In other words, are the discretionary things you spend your money on worth your dog’s life?

Our dogs give so much, and they don’t ask for much in return. Let’s at least provide a safe home for them with the people they love.

Be the first to like this post.Entry filed under: In the News. Tags: afford, budget, can't, dogs, drop off, economy, expensive, give up, no longer, owners, pets, shelter, surrender, tight.

View the original article here

Have a Bubbly Weekend!

Woot! It’s almost the weekend!

I love this photo. It’s so Jack Russell terrier! And speaking of JRTs, it will be interesting to see whether Uggie, the Jack Russell who stole the show in the enchanting movie The Artist, will appear on stage with Billy Crystal during the Oscars on Sunday. Word was that they’d be sharing the spotlight during the awards show, but a couple of days ago it was announced that Uggie had not even been invited. Seems like a bad PR move if that’s true, but Uggie won’t care. He’ll be just as happy to watch from the comfort of his living room.

Have a bubbly, fun weekend, either way!

(Photo credit: Connie’s Pixdaus photo page)

View the original article here