Reading Blogs

I'm new to blogging, I'm doing it in part to force myself to keep a kind of journal to see how we're doing and make it easier to evaluate and spot mistakes. But writing the blog made me curious about other dog training blogs out there, so I started snooping around.

Man, was that depressing! I'm sure I can't be doing it right, I must be missing lots of great blogs... But doing a search on aggressive dogs, positive reinforcement, dog training, or living with a problem dog yields page after page of encouragements to just get tougher with your dog. Followed by information about how unfortunately, in some cases, that's just not enough - if correcting your dog won't work, you may have to face the tough decision to put your dog down. I'm not saying some dogs won't be beyond an owner's - possibly anyone's - ability to fix, but "beat your dog, kill it if that doesn't work" is ridiculous! (Yeah, I'm taking the message to the extreme, but it really is what it boils down to.)

After an hour of surfing around on different blogs this was the only bright spot I found:

Drill Sergeants Part III

There were a few others with actual positive reinforcment as the message, but they were by trainers and/or selling equipment or books for "soft" training. What I was looking for was stories about "civilians" training their dogs without punishment, and that was distressingly hard to find.

I've been thinking that I'm late to the party. That a lot of people have figured out that old school methods are plainly a bad idea for the most part. Not everyone of course, I do know lots of people still stick to it. But I did believe there was a fairly large portion of dog owners who had seen the light, so to speak. They were not visible on the blogs, let me tell you. I did the search wrong, right...?

So, Presenting, The One Blog Showing Some Sense: Puddin's Training Tips!