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Author Archive | Margaret

Don’t be afraid to play

Nose work is a great sport where you can carry your reward right with you into the trialing environment and that allows your training and your trialing to be seamless…………….unless you want to use toys. I have a toyaholic dog, a high drive BC that loves to tug. The struggle in NW comes in when […]

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Stay on the Rails!

When I think of forward motion you can’t get much more forward than a train, not much can stop a train, but a de-railment can.  Most de-railments are minor, a slight disruption of forward motion, while others can be quite serious and lead to a lot of damage.  Nosework careers can be likened to trains […]

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May your weakness be your strength

    A weakness sounds awful, doesn’t it?  Not strong enough, not big enough or something that is less than something else.  Sometimes in our dog training, we can find we have weaknesses.  Maybe we show a few weekends in a row and realize that our heeling isn’t as strong as we thought as our […]

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When Limiting Yourself is a Good Thing

Did you ever think of a limitation as a good thing?  If you are a dog trainer, limiting your self is a great thing, especially when applied to your training sessions and how much you ask of your dog. By limiting yourself to a particular pre-set time, amount of reinforcement or repetitions, you can get […]

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Small Things are Big Things

The devil is in the details, right?  Nothing could be truer then when you shape a behavior.  When you shape a behavior you are rewarding the dog for approximations toward your end behavior.  Now here is the thing, what will those be?  Can you tell I might be teaching a retrieve class 🙂 I am […]

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Why the Drop in Ring Performance?

  Probably one of the most common problems I see trainers face is that their dogs can perform beautifully at home, or their training building, but then when they go to show, they have a different dog.  This happening one time can be due to an unusual circumstance.  Perhaps the dog has not been generalized […]

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Taking the Show on the Road

Spring is right around the corner, and for many of us that means show season is here!  Are you getting ready to show your dog?  How do you decide when your dog is ready?  What shows to enter?  How many shows in a row do you enter?  All of these can greatly affect your performance […]

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