This happened in Toronto in the Spring, where people were leaving rat poison out to target dogs. I sure hope this is not the case here as it is more than despicable.

Please take a moment to read the article on the Ottawa Citizen’s Website. Teddy, a large brown lab, was nearly killed – our thoughts are with him while he recovers.

Thank you to reader Debbie who sent this in.

A while back we announced the release of the amazing Ottawa Dog Park Finder which is a listing of all of the dog parks in Ottawa derived from a listing from the City.

One downfall of this is that unless the city lists it in its notes, there is no way to search by parks that are fenced in, so I thought I would pose the question to my lovely and awesome readers.

Do you know of any dog parks that are fenced in?
You can just leave the name of the park as we will be able to search for it in the Ottawa Dog Park Finder.

As we compile a list, I will look into how we can use this info for the next version of Parkfinder so we can make it better!

A trainer is interviewing a client who describes her dog as aggressive. It goes something like this:

“I don’t know,” the owner says, “he’s a really great dog, and he comes from a really good breeder. He’s absolutely fine when my husband walks in. He’s absolutely fine off leash at the park. He’s absolutely fine here at home. But, without this single exception. He goes absolutely crazy, lunging, barking, and growling if he sees a black and white dog wearing a green scarf, on our walks.”

The trainer says, “That is very, very strange indeed, please allow me to interview your dog.”

The trainer begins to interview the dog, Jed, and asks “How you feel about your owner?”

Jed then replies, “Oh! She’s absolutely wonderful; she’s very nice here at home. She comes from really good stock. She’s absolutely fine when I’m off leash at the park. But, without this single exception. She goes absolutely crazy when she sees a black and white dog wearing a green scarf while on our walks. She goes crazy pulling on my leash, jerks me hard on the collar, and becomes angry and shouts at me, ‘no, no, don’t bite’. I try my very best to back off and warn the approaching dog about her. I tell him to go back, she can’t be trusted, go back before she becomes even more aggressive you can’t trust her.”

What’s happened here is that there’s a constant tight leash cue which has come to mean to the dog that when a dog approaches the owner will tighten the leash and begin punishment. She jerks the dog and begins yelling ‘no, no, don’t bite you crazy dog’.

This is a case of negative classical conditioning. To fix this problem, we now need to turn to positive classical conditioning in order to change the dog’s attitude which will then influence his emotion from fearful to happy.

Join Corduroy and I at the Wiggle Waggle Walkathon THIS SUNDAY at the Bark & Fitz tent to get your Pup Art photo taken to raise money for the Ottawa Humane Society!

Now I realize this video is about a cat, but I can tell you that my dogs do this to me EVERY morning!! Do any of your dogs do this too?