PPG Advocacy Panel: Making Education More Accessible
By Susan Nilson
The Pet Professional Guild (PPG) Advocacy Panel was launched in August and has already held its first ...
The Bigger Picture
By Morag Heirs
Within my day to day life as a canine professional, I am regularly asked for advice on cases where standard training approaches seem to be failing. In some of these cases, deafness or visual ...
Thinking Outside the Shelter
By Melissa Taylor
Like many shelters, my shelter, Friends For Life Animal Shelter in Houston, Texas, relies heavily ...
Welcoming a New Puppy – Ensuring a Happy and Successful Future Together
Welcoming a new pup into your household should be a time of absolute pure joy - he or she is a new family member after all, but sometimes it just turns into something akin to pure chaos, which is a shame.
In many cases, the reason for this ...
Dog Parks: The Good, the Bad, and the Reality
By Rachel Brix
The Experimental Dog Park at Ohlone Park in Berkley, California, which is generally acknowledged as the first leash-free American dog park, was created in 1979. Since then dogs parks have grown ...
Why Counterconditioning “Doesn’t Work”
By Angelica Steinker
A common criticism of counterconditioning is that it does not work. While there can be many reasons why a behavior modification protocol based on counterconditioning fails, it is, in fact, ...
Examining Bird vs. Human Expectations
By Sheila S. Blanchette
Anthropomorphism is quite a mouthful of a word, defined by Lexico (2021) as “the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object.” Anthropomorphism is commonly ...
The Ever-Changing World of Service Dog Training
By Veronica Sanchez
The service dog industry is ever growing and changing. With the expanding use of service dogs there has, unfortunately, also been abuse of laws pertaining to service animals and emotional support ...