Candor Creek

Among the crates. I use three crates. The first is the black wire drop-pin crate that is a permanent fixture in my home - even if a dog is comfortable loose while I am away. This is treated as a sanctuary, used as a spot to let that den instinct kick in, and my dogs have generally been comfortable going in there to snooze from time to time. It was fully taken apart, scrubbed, and cleaned before Summer came home; while I am sure I didn't get all traces of Storm off of it I wanted to get as much "stressed geriatric" smell off of it as I could. That's important. If you lock your dog in a crate that smells like the built-up panted saliva of a stressed, dementia-suffering geriatric they can smell that and may take cues from it, expecting something terrible to happen to them. The drop-pin construction sucks to put together but it's so much easier to clean fully in this situation. The Workhorse. The second crate is a soft-sided crate with hollow metal tube fr...

Behold: Summer's video premiere. Initially I was going to just post this without explanation on my Facebook and call it a day (I have not been in a writing or, indeed, communicating mood as of late) but I realized that this was an exquisite teaching moment. The video itself is about 15 seconds long, but it packs a lot of lessons into a tiny space. Below I will briefly discuss guarding behavior and the role of this particular exercise and, finally, how the activity can be used to cultivate trust and enhance bond. WARNING: below I will be discussing, but not coaching, an exercise that could be dangerous in certain situations and result in injury to a person if not properly coached or supervised by a behaviorist. What is written below is NOT personalized advice and should not be taken as such. The video above shows me doing an exercise with Summer (my three-year-old rehome, home for nearly two months now) and her favorite plaything. The reason I am making a point of doing it is...