Prairie K9

12/02/2025

The brilliant Jackie Summers is an entrepreneur and an outstanding writer.

Here's the first part of an essay he posted recently, and I thought of how we look to the arts during the Blent -- concerts, dance, vocal music, holiday markets, cooking, decorating --- pulling them up like blankets.

The arts of dog training, too, during this 'vague stretch of days' spent indoors somewhere: subject, light, time, and framing.

Aperture.

_______________

Welcome to the Blent—that vague stretch of days between the fourth week of November and mid-January when time loses all meaning. Emails slow down, emotions run hot, capitalism tosses tinsel on austerity. Jeans grow increasingly skinny, the days slog, and it’s okay to crawl under the covers by 4pm. For the next few weeks, things might feel a bit blurry.

That’s not a design flaw. That’s a feature.

The first rule of good design is: if everything’s important, nothing is. This is true whether you’re drafting a leaflet, a lyric, or a life. Great photography, for example, is just four things in conversation: subject, light, time, and framing. Each matters on its own, yet what truly counts is how those integers interact.

To capture a subject, a photographer controls how much light can enter a lens, and for how long. Narrow aperture plus wide focus equals: the whole scene is visible, but depending on your background noise, your subject may get lost. Wide aperture plus narrow focus equals: your subject snaps into clarity, everything else melts into blur.

Both are valid. Only one accounts for the asymmetry of information.

12/01/2025

A mentor once looked across the table at me with a twinkle in his eye.

He said, "I always charge four times as much to solve a 'behavior problem' without obedience."

Me: ???

Him: "Because you can't solve a behavior problem without training the dog in some way.

I just like to get my money up front."

_____________

Wisdom for a snowy Monday morning.
Be safe out there today!

11/30/2025

When we find ourselves saying:

*"He knows this already"
or
*"He should know this by now"

it might be helpful to archive this post (below) and re-read every so often. ;)

11/27/2025

A day to share with family and friends.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving everyone! 💋

11/26/2025

Brrr, that wind!

Puffer coat szn ❄️

11/25/2025

Reminder: no Puppy classes this week.
Safe travels, and a Happy Thanksgiving.

🦃🥧🌾

We’ll be right back at it again next Tuesday. 🤩

11/16/2025

If you follow this page, you’ve likely followed this amazing team and today we celebrate with them an extraordinary achievement.

Jenna and Ollie, UDX

When Ollie was just four months old, Jenna contacted PK9 after the local “behaviorist” had diagnosed him with “anxiety” and recommended medication or, barring that, euthanasia.

👀💀🙄

But nobody told Ollie he couldn’t have some fun learning new things with his favorite person and seven years later he’s got five obedience titles including the Utility Dog Excellent (UDX).

And Ollie is a well-behaved and much beloved pet, and true companion. Jenna has worked very hard to teach and train him, and to understand the ring routines and scoring process for each new level of competition.

Together, they’re a delightful, dedicated, and dynamic team.

We’re so grateful to have been along for the ride, and to celebrate them today!!

🍾🎉🐾🥂🎈🩷

11/13/2025

Pursuant to yesterday's post about whether or not dogs should be safely handle-able by strangers in a kennel setting and edited for our purposes here:

I do not run a petting zoo, and so [my dogs] are not available for public entertainment. People have a way of approaching very rudely and for their own needs to be met and creating behaviors out of a dog who objects, which they then [want me] to punish.

A horse handleable by all?

I believe all horses, as much as possible, should be safe to handle in an emergency or in our absence. Someone should be able to go in and halter them, lead them out, put them on a trailer, or some simple thing.

I have helped teach horse handling to first responders in classes of large animal rescue (the rescue of large animals in emergencies) and quite often these first responders - the ones who will be leading your horse out of a barn fire or trailer accident - are not horse people. It's imperative that your horse be safe to handle in these situations, and that their training is not so complicated that an unrefined tug forward of a halter cannot be understood. A firefighter is not going to understand or even think about some complicated system of targets and pulleys and buttons -

BUT

Does this mean your horse needs to tolerate, on a regular basis, poor feel or rude handling? No, I do not think so. And in fact, I think this makes them harder to handle.

I am extremely protective of who handles my young stallion and how. I do not run a petting zoo, and so he (and my other horses) are not available for public entertainment. People have a way of approaching very rudely and for their own needs to be met and creating behaviors out of a horse who objects, which they then punish. I can remember a time a woman, who was asked to not pet my one eyed horse, approached him on his right (eyeless) side and poked him right in the mouth. He opened his mouth in alarm, and she immediately said "oh, what a nasty boy, he bites!" --This is why I do not allow the public to smear themselves rudely over my horses. I don't need them to have to defend themselves from rude touch, and I don't need them to learn how to avoid or go after people (even if those people deserve it).

I'm quite confident my young stallion would be easily haltered and loaded by a stranger. In fact, I have proven this by having him transported across the country by someone I had never met, who had never met him, when I was unable to be present. He got nothing but good reports for behavior. This was not created by a million sloppy and rude interactions with strangers - but quite the opposite.

He never learned how to nibble on people, push on people, or use his strength against people because there never was a necessity for it. And so it was not in his vocabulary - Could it be pulled out? Absolutely. But we don't need to do that. It's not fair to him.

I think it's very fair to expect your horse to be handled on a basic level by most. I do not think it's fair to expect your horse to tolerate ALL handling, especially when it is not necessary.

Think about it: there are levels of relationship. A basic handshake (halter and leading), all the way up to marriage. I can ride and produce from my own horses a certain level of feeling we have developed TOGETHER, like a marriage. I do not expect them to be robots for any and all people, just like I would not expect some sort of wife swapping to produce emotional intimacy. They are gentle enough that someone could ride them without being tossed, and get in the general direction they want - but the rest you have to earn. And I think that's more than fair, its their right.

11/11/2025

Some years ago, talented trainer-friend took a part-time position at a boarding kennel in a wealthy suburb in another city. Six months later in an email exchange, I asked her what it looked like from the other side of the boarding experience. This is her reply, entirely unedited.

YMMV
_______________________

I work with pet dogs on a pretty much daily basis. Sometimes hundreds a week. Here are my thoughts on what I see.

Most of the dogs cannot walk nicely on a leash. So they either drag their owners in the door or they have on harnesses, head halters and other strange equipment and they still drag their owners in the door. I have never figured out the rationale for the use of a harness.

The majority are poorly-bred and have very little training of any kind. The people just "have" the dog. They don't do anything with them nor do they understand them and they have no desire to do so. Some owners think of and treat their dogs as if they were children. The dogs have toys, beds, special diets, meds, instructions that go on and on and the dogs are spoiled and often nasty. The owners bring in an entire grocery store of meat/cheese, etc., so we can see if the dog will eat. And these darlings almost always need some medication that they will not take. And they will bite you if you try to get them to take it.

However, the dogs are almost always spayed/neutered. The public gets that message, but not any of the others. ??

The dogs who come from rescue or the shelter come in with a long speech from the owners about how they were "probably" abused before they were saved. Therefore this justifies the dog's behavior problems and we are supposed to overlook them. Yet the owners do nothing to fix any of these issues.

Most owners think that whatever behavior the dogs present is just what dogs do. And you have to live with it. They like to laugh and tell me how the dog is not very well behaved. But they don't want to train it either. The dog just IS what it is. That's how they see it.

Often they bring in two or three dogs and want them kenneled together. But they tell us to separate them when feeding or they will kill each other. We’ll be held responsible for injuries, of course.

I get very depressed about how little education about dogs and real training is actually getting through to the general public.

Oh, and the owners of aggressive dogs call them "loyal" and "protective" instead of what they really are - untrained, and undisciplined.

That's my take on it from the trenches. And yes, though we do get a few exceptions to all of this, I am talking about the majority. It's sad and disheartening.

Dogs need an advocate.

11/10/2025

Dog ownership is decidedly not an isolated phenomenon. It is not just you and your dog. It's you, and your dog, in the concentric circles of home, neighborhood, and community.

An owner once took issue with something I said in class.
"What do you care about how I live with *my* dog?" he growled.

Because we're all in this together, my friend.
Tarred by the same brush, as it were.

Once I posted here about all the "No DOGS Allowed" signs going up all over the city, and suggested that we all have a pretty good idea of what it took to make those signs go up.

But the more meaningful question is, what would it take to make those signs come down?

The answer is below, sketched in perfect detail.

11/06/2025

Dogs, and humans, are animals; all animals know instinctively that to ignore the natural (or built) environment is done so at their/our own peril.

So the bunny who ignores the environment gets picked off by a hawk; the squirrel gets hit by a car; the texting driver causes a wreck.

When I ask my dog to ignore the environment and put her attention solely on me, I am asking her to trust me. Trust is a significant part of our working relationship. I am asking her to trust that I’ll watch where we’re going, and that I’ll take care not to let a person or another dog bother her.

I don’t take that kind of trust lightly, and I endeavor to be worthy of her trust. It’s something worth having and once-built, I guard it like the crown jewels of Europe.

And this is precisely what infuriates me about the loose dog chasing us down -- that dog makes me out as a liar by violating my dog's trust in me. More to the point, the owner of that loose dog fractures a carefully built trust, a contract between my dog and I, a mutual agreement built on good faith.

Entitled much?

Because I don't care how 'friendly' your dog is and it's irrelevant to keep yelling about that. It matters not at all, because that is not the point.

Animal control has been notified. Again.

10/31/2025

Aw, Happy Halloween from Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and PK9!

Boo!