Many of us lead busy lives and in the winter months there’s little choice but to walk our dogs during the hours of darkness.

It goes without saying that one of ours – and our dog’s – major senses, sight, is seriously impaired when it’s dark. This can lead to accidents and, potentially, an unwanted trip to an emergency vet.

Light and bright is the best way forward

Did you know the average dog’s vocabulary can reach upward of 150 distinct words? So, why do we hear so many dog owners using the same words repeatedly with little or no effect on their dogs?
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The most likely reason is that the dog doesn’t understand the verbal request (cue) in the current context, if at all. We find that very often when a dog responds to a cue it probably isn’t responding to the exact word at all – often, it’s responding to the tone of voice and the body language that accompanies that word.

In order of priority for our dogs:

    1 The physical communication (body language & gestures)
    2 The tone of voice we are using
    3 The actual word itself

The M25 is a manically busy motorway, with lots of traffic. This would NOT be a good place to have your first driving lesson!
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You need to learn somewhere quiet to practice changing gear, using the brake and accelerator, before you could put all these behaviours together when your instructor takes you on a main road, let alone a busy motorway.

"Reward the Stroke of Genius!" says Sarah Whitehead. I love this as it celebrates how brilliant dogs truly are.
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Frans de Waal’s new book ‘Are you smart enough to know how smart animals are?’ explores the answer to that question and opens our eyes to their complex and intricate minds. We know more than ever about their cognitive and scent abilities with dogs excelling in medical detection and anti-poaching tasks in places like Africa. Elephants showing how they classify humans by age, gender and language is truly astounding and challenges everything you thought you knew about animal-human intelligence.

So often we fall into the trap of expecting dogs to understand human language, without having ever having taught them what the words mean.

“Ah! Ah!”, “Don’t”, “Leave It”, “No”, “Stop” (and worse)... are all words we hear everyday from clients desperately trying to stop their canine thief pinching food off the table, or in an attempt to stop Fido running off with their latest bounty (typically tea towels, shoes, socks or underpants!). Yet despite your best effort this doesn’t seem to deter the dog at all.
To solve this problem we would teach the dog a number of concepts, one of which would be a “leave it” cue; so when the dog approaches an item they shouldn’t have, the owner can simply say “leave it” in a nice gentle voice and the dog responds accordingly.