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Tuning Into Your Dog Seminar January 2012, Orlando, FL

What a great seminar!  I attended the Tuning Into Your Dog seminar a week ago in Orlando, FL and was blown away by renowned speakers Dr. Patricia McConnell and Kathy Sdao.  Both sessions were awesome and were jam-packed with great and useful information.  Patricia McConnell’s presented the first day; her topic: “Dog Talk: Translations Within and Between Species”.  Dr McConnell is a PhD Zoologist and Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist who really knows her stuff.  She focused on different types of canine communication; scent-related communication, acoustic communication, visual communication.  It was fascinating to watch many examples of dogs and humans and other species using various modes of communication.  Bottom line:  Every move and sound you make around your dog matters!

The second day of the seminar was a presentation entitled “What Not to Err: Training Mistakes that Create Headaches for Dogs” by Kathy Sdao.  It was a very enlightening and entertaining second day indeed!  Kathy is an amazing trainer of both dogs and large marine mammals and she is a gifted speaker whose dynamic style kept the audience engaged throughout the day.  Kathy described common training errors and gave detailed information on 10 ways to obtain desired behaviors.  Her detailed information on classical conditioning was fascinating.  She showed how positive reinforcement training +R is used to train animal husbandry in large zoo animals, walruses and elephants for example.  If +R works so well, why don’t more people use it to train their dogs to tolerate and even enjoy simple animal husbandry like nail trimming?  It is so simple, it just takes a little bit of know how and some practice!  More evidence that +R works well, reliably and is extremely rewarding to both humans and animals.