Imagine Life with a Well-Behaved Dog: A 3-Step Positive Dog-Training Program

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A comprehensive dog training and puppy training program that offers the added benefit of one-on-one online advice from the author
 
Do you consider your dog part of the family? Most dog guardians do. But just like children, dogs need structure. Structure to show him that he shouldn’t jump on every person who enters your house, or urinate indoors, or drag you down the road when you walk him. In Imagine Life with a Well-Behaved Dog, Julie Bjelland offers all the information you need to make your dog confident, secure and able to understand and follow rules. Drawing on years of experience, Julie has created a thorough guide that teaches basic training, how to communicate with your dog, and how to prevent and solve behavior problems. She discusses how to train your puppy and how to train adult dogs, even special needs dogs, and tells how to choose the right dog for your family and how to integrate him into a home with kids, other dogs, or cats.

Because each dog’s situation is unique, Julie is offering readers exclusive one-on-one guidance via her website, for up to 60 days. Here dog training, often very expensive, is now affordable and accessible to a broad audience.  Julie’s down-to-earth, uncomplicated advice is a welcome solution for a busy dog guardian and aims to change the way people communicate with, and care for, their dogs forever.

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3 Responses

  1. Kim A. Truebenbach
    | Reply

    Excellent book for beginning and experienced dog owners This is a well written easy to follow dog training book. I particularly like how the author spends time in the beginning talking about how to match one’s personality with their dog’s personality. Other dog training books I’ve tried have talked about being an assertive leader for your dog, but haven’t talked about how a passive personality and a dominate dog personality will clash. This author makes it clear that if you are a low energy and passive person you’ll be happier with an older dog and one that is also passive or shy, and your dog will be happier too.She also spends a good amount of time explaining how much exercise is required for a dog and challenging the reader to examine if his/her lifestyle is compatible with having a dog. She also makes several good points about how one’s level of activity should match the dog’s level of activity. Particularly if you are gone all day and don’t have energy for an active dog, you’d do better with an older dog. She makes a great case for adopting older dogs which has really made me rethink the myth that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.The training section is easy to read and the steps are broken down so that they are easy to follow and implement. I particularly like her reminders to remain calm, clear, and consistent. The book has lots of real life cases and how the author has helped people overcome issues with their dogs. I find these extremely helpful in understanding why my dogs behave as they do and how my fears, anxieties and emotions impact their behavior.Particularly helpful in this book is that the author gives lots of examples of how we inadvertently reinforce negative behavior by giving in to our dogs. Many of the dog books I’ve read talked about being the leader, but this author shows how we undermine our leadership in our house and elsewhere and what we can do to get it back. A good example is how when your dog wants something and barks we give it, then we end up having a dog that barks excessively because we’ve always given them attention or the reward when they bark. She gives some very good ways to stop such behavior by redirecting the dog and leaving the room, and making the dogs wait until their calm before giving them food, and attention.All in all I found the book VERY helpful. We have 3 dogs of various ages and I’ve seen a dramatic change in our dog’s behavior when I remember to be calm. The book has made it clear to me how we have confused our dogs by our family members giving in and not being consistent and now that we have started to work together as a family on being consistent with the dogs it has helped a great deal.

  2. M. Kim
    | Reply

    “how to teach an old dog new tricks!” Wow! What a great book! I have a nearly 2-year-old dog, who recently started some annoying behavior, like barking at strange sounds and not stopping (especially at night!). I thought we would have to start another round of expensive dog training courses when I discovered this book. What a gem! It taught us not only how to stop the bad behavior but also how to teach our dog a number of other really useful commands, like how to stop him from chewing my daughter’s toys! We really like the author’s positive-reinforcement approach to training as well as her step-by-step, clearly outlined directions. It’s a very easy to use book! More importantly, it works! It’s also very comprehensive (offering everying from how to choose the “right” dog for your family, to training basic and advanced commmands, as well as recommending a bunch of fun stuff to do with your dog!) We recommend this book to anyone who is thinking of getting a dog and to those who want to teach their old dog some new tricks!

  3. Mrs. Pib
    | Reply

    Not well organized, kind of new-agey, too much talking not enough training I ordered this book as a companion to My Smart Puppy and read that one first. Maybe it’s unfair to compare them but this book really falls short of the two. For one, the other book is very well organized separating each chapter into levels according to how much your dog already knows. They are further separated into sections regarding the types of exercises you do, for example “space” exercises which teach your dog to respect your boundaries whether in regard to your person or the cookies on the kitchen counter.This book is very loosely organized, one minute you could be covering house breaking and the next you could be covering relaxation techniques (for you, not your dog!) You really need to read this cover to cover to get all the pertinent information regarding one topic or stage of your dog’s development, you can’t just refer to a chapter or you’ll miss something. Sections tend to bleed together and there’s quite a bit of redundancy and rambling. For example, the author pushes exercise all throughout the book. Exercise is important, obviously, but it gets mentioned repeatedly in a way that sounds like she has already prejudged you to be a lazy owner who doesn’t exercise their dog enough. Since I don’t even have a dog yet, and this is not Ms. Cleo from the Psychic Hotline, I found this condescending and annoying to read again and again.When it comes to the relaxation techniques for people (not your dog) I think it’s wholly unnecessary to talk about yoga, diet, or what have you. I get that in order to be a good teacher to my dog, I need to be calm and keep anxiety, anger, tension, etc. out of my verbal and physical commands; that’s good advice. I don’t need an entire section to tell me how to relax. Everybody is inevitably going to get frustrated sometimes, but I’m not going to break into the crouching lotus position in the middle of the dog park. The other book gives some practical advice in this respect: take a deep breath and then take a break. Don’t teach angry, always end training sessions upbeat, and keep them short leaving your dog wanting more. This is the practical advice I’m looking for. There is way too much nonsense in this book.The worst thing about this book is the lack of exercises. You don’t start learning commands until halfway in and then it stops again to go over more theory, only to go on to a tricks section. This is not a complete enough training program to cover all or even most the challenges people frequently have with dogs and puppies. The other book covered everything I could think of and more, including alternative solutions on what to do if your dog acted unexpectedly causing you to fail to an exercise. It tells you exactly how to break down the command into even smaller steps that your dog could more easily accomplish if it couldn’t understand it all in one go. I have had some (sweet) dogs who were dumb as bricks so I can anticipate how useful this would be.In short, this is not a very complete book, contains entirely too much theory and not enough practical advice. I would definitely not recommend this to anybody who is raising a puppy for the first time.

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