Promote a great relationship with your dog, establish consistent behaviors for easy, reliable handling and lay the foundation for more advanced training with this great DVD. Brenda Aloff is a professional dog trainer, seminar presenter, and author of Aggression In Dogs and Canine Body Language. Whether you’re working with a young puppy or an older dog, this is the perfect tool for the professional trainer or the motivated owner.

What reviewers are saying...

APDT CHRONICLE OF THE DOG
“Brenda Aloff has put together on one DVD many of the behaviors pet owners should know such as Eye Contact, Sit, Down, Leave It, Recalls, Walking Nicely, and several handling exercises including Brenda’s “Down Restraint.” Brenda is a nationally acclaimed dog trainer and author of Positive Reinforcement – Training Dogs in the Real World and Aggression in Dogs – Practical Management, Prevention and Behavior Modification, and also runs her own training facility so she is very well-qualified to teach this material. The DVD is attractively packaged and the menu is clear and easy to navigate—I particularly liked the extra “summary” menu that allows you to select and view a brief recap of each exercise. Each exercise includes several real training sessions and concludes with a bullet-pointed list of the main concepts that you need to take away. The training sessions include a cast of two puppies and three very highly trained adult dogs. Brenda starts each exercise with one of the puppies and shows you how to shape the behavior that she is trying to elicit. I appreciated that this is done in real-time with minimal editing but at the same time the DVD became hard to follow at times because one of the puppies didn’t share Brenda’s “agenda” and kept pulling her off in other directions! I think a real-world scenario such as this does help prevent dog owners from becoming frustrated if they don’t get immediate results, but at the same time it was often confusing as to exactly what was supposed to be happening. Brenda makes some excellent and important points in this DVD including “Training should be done with dogs, not to dogs,” and also “Emotion muddies the water” (i.e. for best results remain cool, calm and patient during training sessions). I do have a few concerns about the content of this DVD. The presentation begins with a section called “What You Need To Know” that attempts to cover the basic principles of operant conditioning, stages of learning, and training methodology in a time-span of about seven minutes total. In my opinion this just isn’t enough time to convey this quantity of information. Brenda also uses many technical terms that the non-professional is probably not familiar with. I had to watch this section several times in order to absorb all of it, so I can imagine that the average pet owner might find it very difficult to follow. After each puppy training session illustrating where to begin with each behavior, Brenda demonstrates the same behavior again with the older well-trained dogs … and here is my second concern. It is clear that the older dogs already know the behaviors backwards and forwards, and little or no skill development is taking place—just maintenance. Since the DVD jacket states that this DVD is also suitable for training older dogs I wish that Brenda had included at least one “unschooled” adolescent or adult dog in the training sessions. I’m not sure what value there is in spending so much time leading proficient dogs through the exercises, except perhaps to show what they should look like at an advanced level. I was also a bit troubled by Brenda’s presenting as fact several things that may be true of particular individuals in very specific situations, but don’t generally apply to typical dogs in typical situations. These include “frightened dogs are biting dogs” and “blinking, lip licking, and yawning are signs that your dog is relaxed.” There is no doubt that Brenda Aloff has good solid knowledge of dog training and is a wonderful teacher. I think the problems I saw in this DVD probably arose from the simple (but oh so common) mistake of trying to include ‘everything.’” Sarah Kalnajs