ACT Companion Dog Club

Don’t know where to turn for reliable information to help raise and train your dog? Here is a list of resources recommended by the Club – whether you are having issues or simply want to learn more about dog behaviour and training to strengthen your bond with your dog.

• For puppy owners (and everyone interested in dog body language and teaching basic manners): invest in a copy of Steve Mann’s Easy Peasy Puppy Squeezy (2019) – available in print, as an e-book and as an audio book (search online for purchase options)
• For raising and training older dogs: see Steve Mann’s Easy Peasy Doggy Squeezy (2020) – available in print, as an e-book and as an audio book (search online for purchase options)
• For socialisation ideas in the age of COVID-19: see this article from Psychology Today
• For owners of adolescent dogs (over 6 months old): see Nancy Tucker’s Six facts to know and Barbara Hodel’s How To Love And Survive Your Teenage Dog (2020). This is an Australian publication. It is available in print and as an e-book (search online for purchase options)
• For tips on teaching your dog to walk nicely on lead: see Nancy Tucker’s Training your dog not to pull
• For tips on teaching your dog a really reliable recall: the video Top 5 must have recall gamechangers from Absolute Dogs is a great place to start.
• Need a long line to help practice your recall safely out in the big wide world? Look for the Long Leads (5 metre) or Tracking Leads (11 metres) available online from Black Dog Wear. We also sell these in the Club shop.
• For training videos on coping with puppy behaviour, teaching basic manners, learning tricks, handling and grooming and so much more: check out the videos on the following recommended Youtube channels:

• Absolute Dogs (Tom Mitchell and Lauren Langman)
• Steve Mann Dog Training
• KikoPup (Emily Larlham)
• Dogs That (Susan Garrett)

• For ideas on physical and mental enrichment for your dog: invest in a copy of Allie Bender and Emily Strong’s Canine Enrichment for the Real World: Making It a Part of Your Dog’s Daily Life (2019) and Christina Sondermann’s Brain Teasers For Dogs (2019) – both available in print and as e-books (search online for purchase options)
• For the latest information about dog cognition, dog emotions and how they influence behaviour: see Professor Paul McGreevy and Dr. Melissa Starling’s Making Dogs Happy: How To Be Your Dog’s Best Friend (2018). This is an Australian publication and should be readily available from your favourite bookshop or library. It is available in print and as an e-book (search online for purchase options)

We also have lots of useful training advice in back issues of the Club’s magazine The Good Companion. Some examples include:

• The 7 habits of highly effective dog owners: see page 21 of the June 2019 issue
• Interpreting dog play: see page 31 of the July-September 2016 issue
• Teaching your dog to settle: see page 23 of the November 2018 issue
• How to train polite greetings at home (for dogs): see page 23 of the November 2016 issue
• Learning to greet dogs properly (for people): see page 13 of the July 2017 issue
• Playing with your dog: see page 27 of the July 2017 issue and page 27 of the September 2020 issue

And don’t forget the other Training Tips articles on our website:

• Exercise and the young dog by Dr Sandra Hassett
• Together apart – Raising two puppies at once by Jess McNamara-Rice
• Ignoring other dogs – It’s the polite thing to do by Juliet Ward
• But he does it perfectly at home – Helping your dog to be practically perfect everywhere by Anne Robertson

Two excellent encyclopaedic online reference sources are the Whole Dog Journal and Karen Pryor’s Clicker Training. You’ll find lots of sound advice on both these sites. Use the search engines on both sites to find articles about topics you are interested in.

And for those of you who are at the more advanced levels of your training and would like to dabble in some online courses or webinars, look at the offerings of the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy and the Karen Pryor Clicker Training YouTube channel – where you can watch (and learn from) training videos featuring alpacas, donkeys, goats, giraffes …. and dogs!

And there are some good programs to binge watch online as well:

• ABC TV’s program ‘Making dogs happy’ part 1 and part 2
• ABC TV’s program ‘A dogs world with Tony Armstrong’
• BBC’s program ‘The wonderful world of puppies’ – search online for episodes
• Channel 4’s program ‘Dogs: Their secret lives’ presented by Dr Mark Evans – search online for episodes

The Club’s guiding ethos is to ‘do no harm’. This means that we do NOT recommend any training approaches or training tools that involve the use of fear, pain, intimidation, physical force or compulsion. All of the reference materials that we recommend advocate humane science-based approaches to raising and training dogs using rewards-based force-free methods.

When we know better, we do better. Spend some time expanding and updating your knowledge and skills by dipping into these resources to become the trainer and guardian your dog wants you to be!

Image: ID: 1752292574, StockSmartStart, Shutterstock ©
Anne Robertson is an Instructor at the Club, a Full Member of the Delta Institute and a Full Member of the Pet Professional Guild Australia (Dog Training Professional).