posted April 27, 2007 10:22 AM         

I recently checked her book out from the library and was blown away. I have immediately seen results with our puppy and can see just what we did wrong with our previous dog.

I really like her message of getting a dog to "obey" you because it wants to do so instead of being forced. What she calls Amichien Bonding certainly is a different way of interacting with dogs but I think the effort is worth it.

posted April 30, 2007 07:22 AM         

Also, her method requires an owner to behave differently than what they're used to, even without dogs. People that are not very confident or overly confident have trouble with her method.

I believe Monty Roberts "The Horse Whisperer" encountered much criticism as well.

Their methods just make sense to me, is all. You can take a dog out of the pack but you can't take the pack out of the dog is not a far fetched concept. I don't see how we can honestly believe dogs understand and respond to the world exactly as humans do. It's almost insulting to the dogs.

Not trying to convince anyone here. Just going off my personal experiences. I recognized a lot of the problem behavior that our previous dog had and she was the first person to address it in a realistic way instead of "oh, he's just being a dog". Now I see we were sending him mixed signals because we were expecting him to communicate with us in a human language from a human perspective. Which is absurd, imo. It's like trying to talk to a person from a foreign culture in a language they don't understand. In the end, your body language, tone of voice, gestures, actions and facial expressions are going to convey much more than verbal gibberish ... and not always the right message, either.