Tory's first cooperative health check. She isn't aggressive about being handled, but she definitely doesn't like it. Here we use a sustained chin rest to give her some predictability and add rules to the game that the humans have to follow, so that she's more comfortable with the event.

Video 2 in Chester's 3 part series looking at starting to proof his place behaviour to withstand all manner of distractions etc.

Chester came for a 2 week long board and train to work on his compulsive tail chasing, which occurred whenever the energy in his household went up - whether that be children running around, someone arriving at the door, the blender or vacuum being used etc. This is the first of 3 videos I'll upload condensing his training into stages. We opted to use platform training as our foundation because it's super easy for the dog to understand and grasp, and hits 2 birds with 1 stone

Hannah recorded this little interaction between Eddie and Stella and there was so much that was going on that people might miss I thought it would be a good idea to break down what was happening and why we decided to not let the interaction between these two carry on.

Dog behaviour can be very subtle. Most of us will miss a lot of cues, including us trainers. Here's a breakdown of a session with Marley and myself. I've decided to start teaching Marley an indication on an object and to later start scent work training with him. This was the very first session we did with this. It's simple for us. Put your nose on the toy. But to a lot of dogs, this can be really hard. It's a bit like us trying to read a book with lots of words that we don'

In the first part, I'm creating expectations along with associations toward the car. I don't want it to JUST mean exciting things. So we're doing a few in and out sessions with Gem which doesn't always results to a beach trip or something really fun. We're also focusing on teaching her to lie down and relax when getting in there. She has a habit of barking when in the car. If we can change how she feels first, her behaviour will then naturally change.

This is Gem, a recent foster of ours. Gem was found wandering the streets with a litter of puppies, even though the vets think she's still an adolescent herself. She's a beautiful soul but can be weary of strangers, here's her first week with us.

When we get a little bit down about the progress we're making, here's 6 things that might be the reason as to why things aren't working as quickly as you'd hoped.

As we progress through teaching our own dogs how to play scent work games, we'll film and post those here so you can follow along. We'll try to show you what each stage looks like with multiple dogs so that there's an example that will 'hopefully' be relevant to most dogs.

In this clip I run through why we use the markers and when we use them.

As promised, here is a follow up introduction to teaching a dog to use a scratch board, using Poodle rather than Tory because he learns slower. I’ll put up 2 videos which were his first 2 sessions taken only with about a 20min break in between.

The idea behind the scratch board is to teach dogs to scratch/dig at the sand paper and wear down their own nails, rather than train them through a long and potentially arduous counter-conditioning programme to have them accept nail clipping.

There's not much point in a recall that only works when there are no distractions around...

Here’s a video of how we train our dogs to really understand what each marker means.

Adira is blind and has underdeveloped eyes. She also has entropion where her eyelids are misshaped and the hairs surrounding her eyes rub and irritate them. Long term she may need her eyes removed and sewn closed all together to prevent infection and keep her as comfortable as possible, but for now she just requires regular eye cleaning with a soothing fluid.

Stella has yucky feelings about being handled. It’s not an uncommon problem at all.

Charlie can be reactive to some other dogs and is worried about new people. This is the first in a three-part series for Charlie's board and train stay.

Part 2 of Charlie’s board and train.

This is an hour's session reduced to 23 minutes.

Pixie is a 6 year old American bulldog. She has 4 people she likes (now 5 including Hannah).