Fetch Professional Dog Services

Fetch will be attending today. So stop by and see all the adorable babies needing a good home.

Today Little Trick Of the Trade

Stay Clam, when you start to get all worked up that is the moment your baby will act their worst. If you start to frustrated take a few seconds and relax and then start right back where you left off.

Tip of the Day

Dog Behavior and Communication

Use the dog's preprogrammed behavior to tell the dog of your pack status in a way that the dog was genetically created to understand. One way not to convey this message is with a constant barrage of verbal chatter.
Dog communication and Verbal Behavior

Many people feel their dogs can understand English (language) and that they can explain to the dog like it was a young child. I would disagree and encourage people not to use the explain and coax model of pedagogy with their pets.

It is accepted that dogs do not posses the ability of abstract thought that is necessary to understand language.

While studying Chinese I think I may have gotten a glimpse of how a dog might interpret words. In the beginning if I really listened to a conversation, I could understand a very few words. As I became more conditioned, I could pick out more words and understand some even if I was not paying attention. However, I did not really know what was being said. I only knew what some of the sounds represented or stood for. I only knew sounds that I was conditioned (trained) to respond to. I did not know the context of how the words where used.

The first step to good communication with your dog is: don't talk too much. Your canine friends do not spend hours in long verbal conversations with each other.

Tone inflection can influence how a dog responds to its owners. It may appear to us that our pets do not have many different verbal patterns (howling, whining, barking, growling, snorting, crying). However, when we closely listen to many different canine vocalizations, we discover a wide variety of meanings communicated verbally. These meanings are usually indicated by intensity, duration, tempo, and notably, tone inflection.

When communicating with our pets we should use the tone inflection that is appropriate to the message we are trying to convey to the pet.

Avoid excessive verbalization with your dog, otherwise your best friend may think that its humans have a whining problem, or maybe it's a growling problem, and in trying to adapt to their human's problems, your pet may develop some problems of its own. To ignore the dog is better than excessive verbalization.
Dog communication and Body Language