Behaviour Antics

02/02/2025

Some lovely cooperative care work with a coyote at Cosley Zoo . Isn't it amazing at what is possible for low stress handling for animals in our care?

15/01/2025

Insights on teaching dogs how to interact with each other. Similarly, we also prefer to have our dogs loose together both when we are and when we aren't at home and have them be capable of making good choices when it comes to interacting with one another

Emily shows a video example of introducing a her friends puppy Roma to her own dogs who have learned default social behaviors. She gives insights on creating...

10/01/2025

Suzie and Pips on a recent "out and about" session. Taking some "Mindful Minutes" to rest in the shade, drink some water and eat snacks after some hard work. We are slowly working on introducing Suzie and Pips in a positive way with the eventual goal of them living together. Suzie has some big excited feelings generally while out and about so working on that while at the same time creating positive associations with Pip and likewise for Pippin, teaching her that this very excited little firecracker means good things for her too ;)

09/01/2025

Absolutely loving our Agility journey with Seidr who is now 2. It's such a fantastic way to keep active, have fun and build that amazing bond together. We recently participated in an Agility seminar by Lynn Madden from OneMind Dogs . OneMind Dogs is a fantastic online resource for all things agility.

05/01/2025

Vale Karen Pryor - a dog training pioneer. I'm very sad to hear that Karen Pryor, has passed away at the age of 92.

She was instrumental in introducing the world to clicker training and modern positive reinforcement dog training as we know it. Her book "Don't Shoot the Dog" is one of the first books that many many animal trainers read at the start of their journey and I highly recommend you give it a read yourself if you come across it (it's written for a general audience not necessarily trainers)

She leaves behind a legacy that transformed how we understand and connect with animals and we owe her so much ❤️

https://karenpryoracademy.com/about/

Vale Karen Pryor! Sad news that Karen has passed away. She was 92. Karen did so much for animals and set the groundwork for many of us to pursue careers in animal training & teaching. What a legacy! ❤️🐾❤️

If you learnt from her, met her, or read her work, spend a moment to remember how Karen changed your life ❤️

And if you haven't read Don't Shoot The Dog, it's a great place to learn about training anyone or anything.

30/12/2024

🎇🎆 Fireworks 🎇🎆 Sadly after years of no council endorsed fireworks on New Year's Eve, they are back in Ballarat. This means there will be these fireworks (Lake Wendouree 9:30pm) alongside all of the other illegal ones that are bound to be around throughout the evening. This is a lot to cope with. More pets go missing on New Year's Eve than any other day. Please take note of these tips and look out for your furry friends on New Year's Eve xx ❤️

FIREWORKS! This New Year's Eve, party hard, but party safe!

Fireworks cause terrible distress for animals! They panic & can hurt themselves trying to escape the noise. Fear is real - it's an emotion, not a behaviour, so don't believe some of the rubbish I'm seeing about not comforting your dog, or getting them to sit or drop! That's outdated nonsense. Get organised now! Read the list!

NOTE: Medications such as Acepromazine should be avoided as they provide sedation without the anti-anxiety effect, and could potentially cause an increase in fear.

Feel free to share & if you have a new puppy, book into our January course NOW! https://pawbehaviour.com.au/group-training/puppy-school/

Happy New Year! Take care, keep safe, hug your dogs! ❤🐾

24/12/2024

Merry Christmas everyone! We hope Santa Paws visited you and left some goodies! We wish you a happy and safe day.
Does anyone else take their pets to visit Santa? Show us your Christmas themed photos!

22/12/2024

There’s just something so fitting about rounding out the last of this year’s consults with a session with Charlie! Look at the images of Charlie from our first session to this session. He almost looks like a completely different dog!
When we started, he was a bundle of high strung nerves and constantly moving energy and now he is so much calmer and focused and happy to engage. While he does have meds on board, they alone didn’t create this and it was all of the hard work and dedication from his humans that now have Charlie on a much calmer and more enriched path to pet dog life! While lots of things are still a work in progress (aren’t they always really!), I’m excited at their progress and can’t wait to hear what 2025 has in store for them xx

09/12/2024

Day 4 of Co-operative Care Camp with Eva Bertilsson
Cooperative care in practice!
Wowee what a final day to wrap up four days of training fun! So amazing to see the teams progress from yesterday with their goals. What an incredible time it has been to learn alongside and catch up with a few familiar faces and many new ones too, I'd love to tag everyone but there were just too many!

08/12/2024

Day 3 of Co-operative Care Camp with Eva Bertilsson
Cooperative care in practice!
Some amazing (and brave) teams with their dogs tackling some cooperative care training today. A fantastic reminder of how much nuance there is for our animals before we even get to the point of trimming a nail or wiping an ear.
Some lovely examples of deliberate and mindful inadvertent handling to build confidence in a low pressure way for the dogs.

07/12/2024

Day 2 of Co-operative Care Camp with Eva Bertilsson
“Chicken Centered” Chicken training!
Narrowed in on our chicken training working in a different area with new chickens. Beyond crating we trained some targeting/recall as well as perch on hand!

06/12/2024

Day 1 of Co-operative Care Camp with Eva Bertilsson
“Chicken Centered” Chicken training!

Absolutely amazing day meeting new people and networking.
Training chickens is super beneficial for building both mechanical skills and creative training solutions.
A huge focus of today was simply acquiring our chickens from their group and crating them. Lots of fabulous problem solving and ideas all with a chicken wellbeing centered focus. Stress can be so detrimental to the learners in our care so where possible we are always working to minimise aversiveness

So great to team up with fabulous animal trainers:
Toni Pup Ruckus
Jess Serenity Scent Work
Jen
Brendon Taronga Zoo

03/11/2024

Picked up these awesome little treat forage puzzles from ALDI Australia ! Has anyone else managed to get them? I'd wanted to just share a photo of the goodies but *someone* was staring at them very intently while doing so, so thought we better give one a go!

30/10/2024

Happy Howl-oween if you're into that! 👻🎃 🦴

Remember to look out for your dogs emotional wellbeing when it comes to spooky or strange things xx

25/10/2024

There’s just something about a terrier! Gorgeous pic of Mr Charlie from our most recent session. We tackled one of his most “sticky” behaviours which was refusing to come in the back door. It was a very poisoned scenario for him, once inside he is fine but there was just something about that doorway! With careful antecedent arrangement and consideration about what Charlie considers a reward in this context and mindful reward placement, Charlie was going in and out of that door in 5 minutes! The challenge now is to be careful with the progression of how we build and use this behaviour because if we aren’t careful it can very quickly revert to a “poisoned cue” for him because he is super smart and picks up our patterns very easily!

24/10/2024

What an interesting little study! I can't say I'm surprised! 😅 What do you think, have you noticed this?

Female dogs tend to judge their humans more than male dogs, according to research.

22/10/2024

🐍 It's getting to that time of year again! This post has lots of fantastic resources on how to tackle the season of the snek, danger noodle, nope ropes or however else you call them.

TRAINING TUESDAY – SNAKE AVOIDANCE

It’s that time of year!

Whether you call them nope ropes, danger noodles or sneks 🐍, snake avoidance CAN be trained using positive reinforcement methods.

This fantastic graphic from Pet Perspective offers some great advice on minimising snake hiding places and looking out for symptoms of snake envenomation. Check out the full post and graphic here https://www.facebook.com/share/p/ZZRdPVEru9z4gRwN/

Also a shout out to UnChase who offer awesome training online and in person for snake avoidance training.

16/10/2024

Snap from Chino’s recent session absolutely living his best life. Confidence, focus and engagement improving and he even achieved multiple Passes at a Trick trial competition recently! They've been working super hard!