From the daily archives: Monday, February 20, 2012

'Don’t Touch my Cookie' photo (c) 2005, Jan Tik - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/In the final post in this series (delayed I know), I’ll offer some thoughts on just one or two of the issues that most concern me about how some trainers and behaviour professionals approach “aggression” cases in dogs. This I’ll contrast with more established and informed methods of B-Mod (behaviour modification), as well as some of the advantages of more recent advances, incorporating an assessment of emotion and mood and its relationship to behaviour. I do this for a simple reason – since I first started working in this field I have been consistently alarmed at just how many ‘trainers’, ‘consultants’ and ‘behaviourists’ continue to ply a very lucrative trade based on claims of knowledge and expertise, or near-miraculous instinctive skills, they appear not to possess.

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