Behaviour and training

The weather was very promising when we set off for a clear and sunny day of filming. Our first stop was with Caroline Spencer, Dog Trainer and inventor of the Happy at Heels Harness. The harness was being given its ultimate test. Her client was finding taking her enormous but loveable one year old mastiff, Milo, hard work. In fact, it was more a case of the dog taking their owner for a walk! But Caroline showed that with the right equipment, training technique and patience, the problem could be overcome.

From there we visited another client to see how Caroline dealt with the problem of dogs barking at neighbours in the garden. Unfortunately the neighbours were out and the dogs were smart enough to realise that we weren't them and didn't make a sound! What do they say about not working with animals? So we headed back to Caroline's place to film her dogs, but they were equally well behaved.

Caroline still took the time to show us the techniques she uses for dealing with barking anyway so that we could pass this advice on to you. From there we headed off to see Wag and Tone in action - keep fit exercises for dog and owner together. It's certainly a novel idea and looks a lot of fun.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's superdog!

Never mind about clever dogs, Chris Mancini is an absolute star. It was great fun to be able to film her again and to learn how to add to our dogs' trick repertoire. When Chris shows the finished result with her dog Duffy, you can't imagine where you'd begin with teaching it but once you see it broken down into easy stages, it suddenly looks like a possibility. With the help of enthusiastic but less experienced Shih Tzu/Pug cross Pippin, Chris showed exactly that. Who knows, in time maybe we could all get our dogs taking a bow, skateboarding and even cocking a leg on command.

February 2014

This month sees Naturally Happy Dogs delving more deeply into, or looking at other aspects of, topics we have begun previously.  We feel it's important to cover each area of interest thoroughly.

Some of those topics are to do with activities.  We look at how to teach jumps in flyball, at the "tracking" element of Schutzhund and offer the first of our videos on the level 2 moves in Talking Dogs Rally - "circles".

In medicine, we continue with our series that goes behind the scenes at a veterinary practice to find out what goes on during X-Rays. We find out how homeopathy can help with arthritis, learn about deafness in dogs and gain an overview of the work of the Animal Health Trust.

Finally, we discover how dogs can help children and young people to deal with many of the difficulties and dangers they may face day-to-day in our Dogs in Schools video.  It's just one of the myriad ways dogs can enhance every aspect of life.