Snowbound Kennels

And not posting from a position of authority meaning, I've done XYZ so everything I say is absolutely right, carved in stone and you must do it.

What I am posting is my honest experience and observations training dogs professionally for over 33 years. Dogs more formally for 38–39 years and being obsessed with fooling with dogs since I was a kid.

I only even started keeping track of individual clients about a decade ago but my best guess is I have probably trained, in a formal long-term format, over 1100 dogs all transition to the electric collar in those 38 years.

Trained:

Contextual reinforcement of multiple commands ranging from 3–9 reinforceable behaviors.

I'm not talking about strapping a collar on a dog and push pushing buttons so generally if the dog actually successfully complies it's probably out of fear or trepidation.

I'm talking about collar conditioning, contextual overlay basically turning the electric collar into an invisible leash that is 1 mile long.

When a biothane strap is new there seems to be a lot of friction and it can be harder to adjust the strap tightness properly.

If you get the strap wet it works much much better when it is new.

So many people....

Probably the best intentions when they get a puppy or rescue a dog but they are incredibly unrealistic about what they are doing.

Then they do nothing, the dog becomes a liability through lack of training or failed training and in a last ditch effort in desperation they decide the dog actually needs to be trained or very frequently contact me about giving the dog away because the dog is such a liability.

It seems like the majority of the time the owners have been told that the dog cannot be successfully trained and getting rid of the dog, drugging the dog or euthanizing the dog are the only options.

Quite frankly I see a lot of people with dogs that should've gotten a tropical fish so when they ignore it dies they can just flush it down the toilet.

Animals and children, the two things many people acquire that have no business acquiring.

A good friend calls you up, tells you their car is snowed in and asks if you would come over and help them dig it out.

You're like, no, I'm in my pajamas drinking hot chocolate I don't want to.

That's a friend who is asking.

Your boss calls you up yelling at you to get over and dig the car out, you're an idiot and you need to do it faster and better because they could clearly do it better than you're doing it.

That's a boss and whoever wants one raise their hand.

Somebody calls you up and says very matter-of-factly, come on over we're digging my car out. They don't ask if you want to and they don't demand, just a matter of fact statement of this is what we're doing.

So you go over and as you start digging the car out you see they are digging harder, faster and deeper than you are and as your leader they will never ask you to do something you can't do or something that is dangerous.

Leader, dogs crave leadership.. Lacking leadership they will become leaders. Welcome to much of America 2026, dogs in charge.

Old school yank and crank training? That's a boss.

Best friend asking if you would like to? That's training where compliance is left optional to the dog.

Learn how to be a great leader for your dog!

There's a new face around Snowbound Kennels these days, sometimes.

I met Leah four years ago when she stopped by for her first visit and I tried to convince her to work for me as an assistant dog trainer that first day.

A few things were very clear. She loved dogs, she loved dog training, she was crazy smart and she was one of those people that just sort of got it when I came to working with dogs.

Unfortunately for me she has a double major and a job in the real world. She came to my rescue last summer when I had rescued that very troubled female Malinois Aurora, first making the initial breakthrough with her and then agreeing to foster her throughout the summer and fall before, sadly for Leah, she ended up in a great forever home.

She was between living situations heading into this summer and my friend Allie had an unused RV down in North Carolina so Leah is happily ensconced with her two dogs in the RV parked down by the horse barn.

She commutes to work five days a week but her schedule gets her back in mid afternoon and of course she's around some weekends when she's not competing with her Malinois Sipa in dock jumping.

She's already been a tremendous help around here helping with some of the endless chores and leanding a hand feeding some nights.

Under my supervision, which honestly isn't really needed, she's worked with some client dogs which is a huge advantage in that they get used to working with a woman and not just me before they head home.

Besides dock jumping she has experience with agility and has a new bite suit on the way because apparently she's crazy enough to want to do some decoy work with protection dogs. Rumor has it she may have a deposit in on a little pointy eared biting a dog herself but of course that's probably just a rumor!

She's also experience in some other dog sport so don't be surprised if I new training group springs up here at some point.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to get her to quit her real job, work for me full-time and enjoy the glamorous lifestyle and countless groupies that come with professional dog training.

The photo is from last summer when she took her first bite ever wearing a Belgian sleeve. Maxx was more than happy to leave her bicep in a condition that required long sleeves at work for a couple weeks.😂

Pressure, physical or mental, some dog training ideologies tell us it must be avoided at all costs and it is unacceptable.

Quick question. Do you have any physical or mental pressure in your life at all?

Work, children, relationships, accident, illness, injury, I think the list of things for us is pretty darn long.

Consider this. Much of the time we voluntarily put ourselves in those positions of physical and mental pressure. We get in relationships, we have children, we take on projects and frequently do what we have to do to get through our lives as decent people.

On top of that we frequently and voluntarily subject ourselves to great physical and mental pressure.

We climb mountains, we skydive, we jump out of airplanes, we run marathons, we run 5K, we work when we don't have to in the heat and the cold. The list of things we do that we actually enjoy that could be physically and mentally challenging is again, pretty endless.

As I see it, the only time physical and mental pressure is difficult is when we don't understand why we're under that pressure, the pressure is over zealously or inappropriately applied or it's never ending.

Dogs live in a world amongst themselves of physical and mental pressure. The mental pressure could be the body posturing, the bared teeth, the growling or the submissive internalizing behavior.

Many times when that doesn't work, what do they do. They send a text, they give the other dog their possession or somehow transmit to them they will give them part of their evening meal!

Oops, my bad, they fight.

Dogs properly trained so they fairly understand boundaries and guardrails on their behavior don't have any more problem with that then we do not going 70 miles an hour through the school zone or yelling fire in the movie theater.

Like many of us, many of them thrive on the mental and physical pressure of play, work or sport.

To think otherwise is based in ideology not reality.

Roscoe wondering why there isn't more human food coming his way.

Someone just sent me a message asking for some examples of things you can do with the dog that is mentally challenging.

As I said, ticking the genetic box with making them think is a great idea.

If you have a retriever that loves to retrieve rather than just throw a tennis ball with your Chuck it in Chili's and exhausted over aroused mess teach him to sit and wait while you throw and he only goes for the retrieve when you release him. Typically we would release a dog on its name.

No coming back and dropping, you could teach the dog to come back and sit before you take delivery so now the dog is doing something that loves, retrieving, but it has to think about doing it correctly.

You can build up to multiple and more complex retrieves on both land and water.

The cool thing about a pointing dog is it sort of like catch and release fishing, you don't even have to shoot the bird. You could do formal bird work training with your dog and even compete and never kill a bird. Checking the genetic box but putting rules around the behavior of how it interacts with the Bird. Teaching it to be staunch, don't creep in after you go on point and if you want to get really fancy, steady to wing so the dog stays in place when the bird flies away to be pointed another day.

If your dog has a favorite toy, and it doesn't matter what it is. It could be a bone, a plush toy, a ball, whatever you can teach them to search for it starting very simply in your living room, expanding to your home and then your yard outside if it's safe to do so.

Even high drive dogs when faced with a protracted search for a favorite toy frequently collapse on their dog beds after they found it because they're mentally fatigued from trying to figure out where the hell you hid it today!

Odor detection. Dogs use their nose like we use our eyes to gather information and it's easy to put a high value reward on a particular odor and then challenge your dog to find it amongst a variety of other objects and odors both inside and out.

Have a terrier that's driving you nuts digging up your garden? If you have or can find the space you can make a simulated barn hunting maze with old inexpensive hay bales that your dog has to navigate to find the odor, usually something as simple as rodent urine on some hay, at the end of the maze and tunnels which change easily.

Think of what your dog was initially bred for countless generations to do and then give some thought to making that more complex or formalize so they have to use their brains.

Of course there are a lot of mental stimulation enrichment games and toys available and honestly I don't have much experience with them. Clients who told me their dogs figure them out very very quickly but I'm sure some people have success with them.

Even something like reward based position changes in your kitchen is fun for you and the dog but also challenges are mentally.

Teacher your Dog to go from sit to down then back to sit. Down to stand, back to sit. Stand and then down.

The combinations are endless and once your Dog has that mastered in close proximity you can gradually increase the distance and get remote position changes.

When you have position changes close or in a remote position you can start adding distractions to their compliance to make it more challenging.

Honestly I think probably five minutes of position change work using a reward bay system a couple times a day would be a great thing.

Working and sporting dogs will routinely be trained to either sit and or lay down or stop and stand despite any distraction hundreds of yards away.

Getting your dog to do that in your kitchen isn't overwhelmingly difficult and it can be a lot of fun.

That's more possibilities but some of these ideas may get you started.

The great thing about the high and tight protocol for a prong collar is the dog is always experiencing prong pressure and can never escape it even when the leash is not activated.

What a great idea!