Halloween Safety Tips for Your Dog

Halloween is quickly approaching and we always experience and increased rate of certain dog related issues pop up during this time of year. Here are some things you will want to be aware of this Halloween season with your dog.

It’s Halloween, of course there will be costumes – for people and dogs!  Please be aware of the following things:

• Children in costumes will most definitely appear different to your dog and can easily scare a dog
• Many dogs will become reactive to children and adults in costume
• Certain dog costumes can be a chewing or choking hazard for them
• If you will be dressing up your dog, make sure that your dog has good peripheral vision to enable them to fully use their senses
• Be aware of how other dogs perceive your dog when he/she is in a dog costume

You are going to have a lot of visitors; be aware of your doorbell when handing out candy.

• Because your door will be opening and closing frequently, make sure your dog knows no to bolt out of the door
• There will be loud and excited children in costumes on the other side of the door, make sure your dog isn’t reactive
• Don’t be afraid to crate your dog away from your door to reduce stress levels and prevent the unexpected

Monitor your dog around chocolate, candy, and other items that are potential hazards.

• Make sure you keep candy out of reach of your dog
• Be sure that your children are not giving the dog candy
• Make sure your dog does not chew or eat candy wrappers

If you think about each aspect of Halloween, it’s almost the most unfair and potentially stressful day for your dog. Follow the steps above and keep your dog out of potentially dangerous situations this Halloween.

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2011 Donkey and Doggie 5K Dash

The Donkey Dash and Doggie Dash are back in Austin for 2011!  The USATF Certified 5k course is a flat user-friendly course will take you on a tour through beautiful Sunset Valley. There will be two aid stations on the course with water for you and the dogs, and the finish line will be a welcome site with plenty of food, drinks, prizes, and entertainment for the family!

Not only are well-behaved dogs welcome to run the course, but VCA Ben White Animal Hospital will be on site to provide any necessary event day veterinary care for the canine participants.  Mark off Saturday, October 22, 20011 on the calendars and get out there with your dog!  Isn’t Austin a great place to own a dog?  Be sure to visit the event website for all sign up information and other details.

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2011 AIDS Walk Austin

If you are looking to raise money for a great cause, get some exercise, and do something new with your dog – we’ve got a great event for you!  This year Unleashed Unlimited is putting together a team and walking in the 2011 Austin AIDS Walk.  The walk, which is going to be held on Sunday, October 16th at 2:00, is a dog-friendly (dogs must be social and remain on-leash) 5k walk that takes place right in Austin’s beautiful downtown area!

If you and your dog, just you, you and a friend, your co-worker, you and your uncle, your cousin’s roommate’s brother, or anyone you know is interested in joining our team, click here and walk with us on October 16th.  If you can’t make it to the event and still want to donate, just click here to join the team and contribute as a “virtual walker.”  The money you help raise goes to AIDS Services of Austin and the fundraising teams of Austin’s other outstanding AIDS service and education providers, so be sure to give anything you can; every penny helps!

If you have any questions about the Austin AIDS Walk, please contact us or visit their website more more details.  We will be communicating more details to our team members as the event gets closer.  Hope to see you out there!!

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More Dog Friendly Companies

We here at Unleashed Unlimited are lucky enough to have been able to build our careers around dogs, and get to take our dogs to work almost everyday!  But did you realize that there are several more traditional companies that are now welcoming pets into their offices?  For regular readers of our blog, you already know that Google is dog friendly but here are some other well-know companies are allow dogs in the work place.

Build-A-Bear – Their love of animals goes beyond the stuffed kind!  Employees at the world headquarters can bring their dogs to work. Build-A-Bear Workshop’s dog-friendly workplace policy is just one reason the company has been named one of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For three years in a row.

Clif Bar -  Employees’ dogs have been featured in the company’s blog from time to time — including a story about Scrubby, who made off with someone’s bagel during a company meeting!  Even with the occassional story like this, their dog-friendly workplace policy helped the company earn a spot on Outside magazine’s Best Places to Work of 2010 list.

Amazon – Internet retail giant Amazon is also a dog-friendly workplace. Any employee interested in bringing a pet to work must first register the animal as a workplace dog, ensure that the dog is up-to-date on vaccinations and once in the workplace, the dog must remain on a leash unless it is behind a baby gate or in an office with a closed door.

Ben and Jerry’s – In addition to 3 free pints of ice cream a day, bringing your dog to work is another perk offered to their employees!  Sean Greenwood, public relations spokesperson for the company, describes what interviewees may see when they visit the company, “If they sit in the lobby for a few minutes, they’re more than likely to see a dog going outside. I’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, we’re a dog-friendly place. It’s part of the tour. This is the design department — Momo is there; Jack is in R&D, Allison’s in retail, Scout is brand new … ‘ They’re just like your co-workers.”

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Continuing Education, Again

In a few weeks I will be heading out of state to attend a continuing education conference in Iowa.  Epalooza is an annual event sponsored by That’s My Dog! that brings together professionals from a variety of different backgrounds in the dog world.  As with every year, the lineup of speakers is excellent and the topics being discussed promise to be extremely beneficial.  Some of the topics of this years conference include first aid for your pet, dealing with canine aggression, current trends in training equipment, and lots more!  Not only am I excited to open myself up to soak  in new information, but I’m excited to reunite with old friends and meet some new ones as well.

Continuing education is important in all professions, just as it’s important to your dog.  Dogs that are constantly being taught new things are able to learn easier, and it keeps them fresh leaves them with a sense of purpose.  If you are looking to teach your dog some new things, check out our Austin Agility Seminar or have a mini training session at home tonight, do some trick training, or enroll your dog into some other type of learning activity.  Remember, mental stimulation is just as important for your dog as physical exercise!  If you’re not sure how to properly exercise your dog’s mind, start by getting them into a great Austin dog training class!

Be sure to keep an eye on our Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account as I will be posting pictures and updates from the conference.

Whats the Big Deal with Hand Signals?

Before title of this post annoys anyone or comes across as arrogant, let me first say I absolutely get that dogs are visual communicators and hand signals can aid in the communication process (check out this video).  I also understand that there are benefits of using hand signals in the hunting industry, agility fields, and other applications, but this article specifically relates to the average pet dog owner, the average pet dog, and the average pet dog problems where hand signals are often used as the benchmark standard of a well-trained dog.  I’m not saying hand signals aren’t cool or shouldn’t be used, I’m just asking, “What’s the big deal?”

When starting off new dogs in our training programs, we use a lot of visual cues to help aid in the learning process.  This may mean adjusting our body language for the sit command, pointing to the ground for ‘down’, and bending down for a recall.  The reason that we do all this is because dogs generally learn easier and faster with visual cues.  But once the dog knows what down means, should you really still have to bend down and point the the ground everything you need them to lay down?  No!  At some point we have to ween them off the help and hold them accountable to a command that they know; we need to stop helping them if it’s not needed.

Also remember that in addition to always needing to add a hand signal to your dog’s commands in order to get a response, remember that in order for your hand signal to be effective - your dog has to already be looking at you!!  So if your dog is in heavy prey drive and is in the act of chasing a squirrel, is making a grandiose hand gesture for ‘come’ really going to help your dog turn around and come back to you?  Or let’s say your dog is leash reactive and is firing up over the sight of another dog, is your raised hand going to help him sit and regain his composure?

Because we don’t always have the luxury of setting up and staging our training, hand signals become less and less effective and more of a burden in real world training applications.

I guess my confusion exists because a hand signal is a form of help in my eyes, not a complex skill that only a few gifted dogs are capable to soaking in.  I guess I’m just more impressed with a dog that is functionally trained and managed with voice commands.  Am I missing something here?

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New Behaviors Arise After Moving

Aah, the joys of moving to a new home; packing, unpacking, meeting the neighbors, finding the nearest grocery store, the fastest shortcut, and now all of a sudden Sparky starts in with new and unwanted behaviors!  If you think about it, it’s pretty easy to understand why our dogs begin to act differently when the family moves – the daily routines is off, the yard is different, the layout of the home is not the same, and dogs need time to adjust to everything that has changed.

In addition to some dogs needing more time to adjust then others, new opportunities often present themselves that may be the source of new problematic behaviors.  Let’s say the old house was at the end of a secluded street, but the new home is on a busy street and has a huge bay window that Sparky has found to be the perfect spot to begin window barking at everything that walks by.  The new house lacks the large yard that Sparky always played in and now he’s being destructive inside because he has no other outlet for all of that energy.  Or let’s say that Sparky has started to fence fight with the dogs on the other side of the fence in the new home, where that was not an issue in the old home.  These are just a few examples of environmental factors that contribute to new behavior issues.

So here are some general tips that can help minimize developing behavior issues.

• Implement proper management skills right away.  In other words, don’t let the dogs have a week of no supervision and chaos while you unpack and adjust to things yourself.  The dogs start taking notes and learning what works and what doesn’t work from the very first second they step foot in the door.

• Take a step back in your training and do some refresher work.  Meaning even if your dog has an off-leash recall, put them on a long line and start with some more foundation work before resuming off-leash privileges.

• Limit opportunities for issues to arise.  Instead of fixing a window barking or fence fighting issue after it begins, go back to crating your dog when you’re not home so you don’t even allow the behavior to develop.

• Tighten up your boundaries and structure.  Don’t just give your dog free reign of the new home from the start, they had to earn it in the last home so make them earn it in the new one too.  Also, do some extended duration stays on a placeboard, just maintaining skills can put the dog in the right state of mind in this new location.

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Indoor Summertime Training Ideas

It has been a scorcher of a summer, especially here in Austin, Texas.  With temps close to 110° and the safety of the dogs really coming into question, traditional dog training in Austin has been difficult and we have canceled our group classes for the week.  So, with no classes this week and limited time outdoors, we thought we would provide a list of some ways to exercise your dog mentally.  Feel free to add your own suggestions by submitting a comment below.

• Play some crate games with your dog.

• Teach your dog some new tricks, check out our trick training dvd for some ideas.

• Play some ‘find it” games using your dog’s favorite toy or treats.

• Break your dog’s current placeboard duration record.

• Teach them to go to their place automatically when they hear the doorbell (a cheap wireless doorbell is a great way for one person to ring the bell without having to go outside)

• Take your dog into the home improvement center (make sure dogs are welcome first) when you go to buy a wireless doorbell.

• Set up some temptations on your counters and finally work your dog through their counter surfing issues.

• Check out our blog archives for more ideas, past articles, and more training advice.

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Verbal vs Visual Cues

Everything from body language and the sit command, the position of your dog’s head, or interruption vs damage control, etc, etc, etc, this is definitely not the first time we have discussed body language here on the blog.  In addition, our local Austin dog training clients are probably sick of hearing us say this over and over again, but we do it for a reason; there is a lot of that can be learned and communicated with visual cues.  Here’s a short video illustrating yet another example of how body language can play a role into our communications.

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