Be the Pack Leader Archives

All About Dogs

How To Be The Pack Leader

A dog’s mother begins training puppies from birth. She makes them wait for food; she controls when they play and how far they travel. Adult dogs need these same rules, boundaries, and limitations from you, their pack leader when dog training. Calm and assertive A pack leader doesn’t project emotional or nervous energy, so neither should you. In the wild, the pack leader uses calm-assertive energy to influence how the dog interacts with his surroundings. She enforces these laws in a quiet way, as is the case when a mother picks up a puppy by the scruff of the

September 25, 2020 No Comments

Be the Pack Leader

How To Respect Your Fellow Pack Leaders

As a dog lover, it’s likely that you enjoy meeting new pups — whether they belong to friends, family members, or neighbors. But sometimes the excitement over getting to know a new dog can cause you to inadvertently overstep the boundaries of a fellow Pack Leader. Here are a few guidelines you should always keep in mind to help respect the rules, boundaries, and limitations set by other dog parents. If the Pack Leader asks you not to let their dog jump up on you or sit in your lap, comply — even if you don’t mind You may enjoy

September 16, 2020 No Comments

Be the Pack Leader

Not Quite Sure…

I want you to remember a time when you went into a new situation or a strange place, and then think about how you felt. Maybe it was starting a new school or a new job, or visiting a city you’d never been to before. Maybe it was a first date — or a second date with someone you really liked. Going into New Situations Now think about how you felt going into that situation. Chances are you were anxious, or maybe a little scared. Maybe you even tried to avoid that situation because of the way you felt. But

August 18, 2019 No Comments

Humans can learn a lot from their four legged friends

Be the Pack Leader

How Humans Can Learn From Dogs

For centuries, we’ve been teaching dogs to do things for us. Recently, we’ve come to find that man’s best friend is capable of teaching children and adults in ways people cannot. This is how humans can learn from dogs. Working therapy dogs One group, the Pet Prescription Team (PPT) in La Habra, California, works a special team of therapy dogs at Help for Brain Injured Children, Inc. (HBIC), a non-profit school for children and young adults with moderate to severe multiple disabilities. During their sessions, certain exercises are performed, each with a different goal: Walking the dog develops motor skills;

June 25, 2019 No Comments

Be the Pack Leader

Failing In Order To Succeed

Before your dog can learn to respect you, she has to learn to trust you. To earn a dog’s trust, you have to be a confident Pack Leader and provide protection and direction — sufficient exercise, and consistent rules, all with calm-assertive energy. But before you can provide any of that to your dog there’s one other place where you need to earn trust. First, Trust Yourself That place is in yourself, and it’s true not just for dealing with your dog but dealing with life in general. If you can’t trust yourself, then no one and nothing can trust

August 4, 2017 No Comments

Be the Pack Leader

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

In my new book “Lessons from the Pack,” one of the things I wrote is this: “The building blocks of pack leadership are respect and trust, not fear and domination.” How dogs teach us to respect is the lesson of the first chapter, and I cannot emphasize it enough. If your dog doesn’t trust you, she’ll never respect you. Without those, she won’t follow you because you aren’t leading. People who try to use fear and domination on their dogs may think they have loyal, obedient animals, but they don’t. At the very least, this kind of style will create

March 3, 2017 No Comments

10 Principles for Achieving Balance

10 Signs That You Are Not Yet A Pack Leader

Having a dog is a wonderful experience, but in order to have the best possible relationship with your dog, you need to establish yourself as the Pack Leader. From the moment they’re born, puppies look to their mothers for guidance and training. But once that puppy or adult dog joins your family, the Pack Leader torch gets passed on to you. You need to set rules and boundaries with your dog to ensure both of you lead happy, balanced lives. If you’re new to this and you’re not quite there yet, don’t worry! You can learn the skills necessary to

March 15, 2016 No Comments

10 Principles for Achieving Balance

Principle 9 For Achieving Balance: Be The Pack Leader

Dogs are social pack animals with a leader and followers. In the wild, most dogs are followers, but if they don’t have a leader to follow, a dog ‘ or dogs ‘ will attempt to take control of the situation. The lack of strong leadership leaves the dogs in an unbalanced mental state, and they will do whatever they have to do to fulfill their needs. In nature, this can create chaos in a pack. Unwanted Behaviors The same can happen in a human-and-dog pack where humans don’t fulfill the dog’s instinctual need for a Pack Leader. The dog’s unbalanced

July 3, 2015 No Comments

Be the Pack Leader

A Family Affair

In quite a lot of cases where I’m called in to help a family with their dog’s misbehavior, I quickly find out that the dog is not the problem. In fact, some people have told me that I turned out to be more of a marriage counselor than a dog behaviorist. Humans are Pack Animals, Too AsI often say, humans like to think that we’re not pack animals, but we are. And we need to remember that, when we bring dogs into the household, we are not creating two separate packs. Every member of that household, human or dog, is

June 18, 2015 No Comments

Be the Pack Leader

You Are The Reward

One of the things people often ask me is, “What’s the best training method for my dog?” It can be a confusing subject, because there are two approaches to training, and various techniques. Training comes down to either “do” or “don’t” — encourage a positive behavior or discourage a negative one. This can be based on rewards, like a treat, or ending a bad thing, like stopping in your tracks when the dog pulls and not moving until she relaxes. Techniques are not important. I do use positive reinforcement when I work with dogs, but not in the way that

June 18, 2015 No Comments