GM News - October 2022

We're barrelling toward 2023 :-O Do you or your neighbours celebrate Halloween with garden decorations and/or trick or treating? This is the time to prepare your dog for weird objects and costumes. Visiting family with your dog for the Melbourne Cup Long Weekend or Christmas? This is the time to work on your dog's calm settle-on-the-mat. Hosting Christmas this year? This is the time to get to work on polite door manners.
There's always something to do! :-)

Amanda, David, Rodna & Ruth
Gentle Modern School of Dog Training

Hounds Of Heide

The first Heide Market of the season is dog-themed; Hounds of Heide, Sunday 30 October 10.00am-3.00pm. There will be dog-themed stalls, face painting and us! Gentle Modern School of Dog Training will be represented throughout the day. (We'll be offering training advice and teaching simple exercises.) Come by and see us :-)

Congratulations to the Play+Train participants who passed their Ideal Dogs of Australia certification on 2 October!

Canine Body Language - such an important topic, it's going to be a regular feature of GM News. I want a great body language resource to be at your fingertips whenever you have time to spend developing your knowledge of dog body language. This month it's Your Guide to Dog Facial Expressions by Pat Miller.

Your Dog's Diet - A Contentious Issue

Wonder about the healthiness of what your dog eats? You may be interested in The Raw Diet vs Kibble Debate - risks + benefits of raw, home cooked + commercial diets by Dr Alex Avery, a deep dive looking at the claims of advocates of raw diets and of commercial pet food with the aim of a balanced view.

Dogs in the News

Is Your Dog Linguistically Gifted? [Or this could have been titled, Border Collies strike again!]
“We know that dogs can learn commands or cues or sound stimuli or any stimulus for a behaviour, which is basically a process of association,” says Dr. Claudia Fugazza [researcher of dogs' social cognitive abilities, Dept of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary]. “But there was [no existing research] about learning the names of objects. So, we started investigating and we found that irrespective of the age when you start training, most dogs do not learn the name of objects. We trained a group of dogs very intensively for three months—we included a group of puppies around three months old and a group of adult dogs—and none of them could learn any words. . . . There are exceptions, however. As part of their Genius Dog Challenge, the Hungarian researchers spent more than two years searching for dogs that could recognize the names of their different toys, advertising on social media. Ultimately, they located just six dogs, all Border Collies, discovered in Spain, Norway, Hungary, Florida, the Netherlands, and Brazil. . . . the dogs were tasked with learning up to 12 new words in the space of a week, with all six dogs successfully learning between 10 and 12 words."

Dogs can smell when we're stressed out, a new study shows by Linda Carroll
In an experiment, dogs were surprisingly accurate in detecting sweat and breath samples from people who were stressed.

Susan Garrett - The Connected Dog video series - Free

Susan Garrett is a renowned Canadian dog trainer. Susan's podcast, Shaped by Dog, is excellent (it's available in video or audio format and transcripts are available). Susan is launching a new program called DoggyFlix (instructional videos), and to celebrate the launch on 13 October the first DoggyFlix series, The Connected Dog, is free. I've always received helpful information from the various programs of Susan's I've taken part in. If DoggyFlix sounds like something you might be interested in, please check it out.