Blog the Dog: Feeding the Wolf

First off-Happy New Year everyone! I can't believe it's 2012 already. In March I'll have been alive for 2 decades. What a thought! Most people come up with resolutions for the new year, and although that is good, in order to come up with the resolution I think you need to reflect on what has happened in the past year and what you are going to do to change that. This popped up on my news feed on Facebook today. Aside from it looking pretty cool, I realized how much it can relate to how you view life and what you're going to do with the choices you have. You can either feed one wolf or the other, but the choice is entirely up to you.

I also decided to look at this in the aspect of not only life but agility in general and the relationship I have with my dogs. It's unfortunate that a lot of people base their beliefs on dominance theories, alpha and pack leadership, as well as an intimidating relationship. I personally feel that this side of us feeds the evil wolf. It's our choice to blame our dog for our training mistakes as well as expecting them to carry all the baggage of things we wish to accomplish but then go wrong. I always tell people that I try very hard to base my relationship on trust and compromise with my dogs. Though we all can't be purely positive, let's face it, we've all been extremely upset with our dogs, but we can choose to rethink our choice and change our training plan. We can choose to follow the path of clicker training, positive reinforcement, shaping behaviors, and understand how truly incredible our dogs our. I will admit, all of Susan Garrett's webinars and posts have had me thinking about "Do-Land" a lot in the past half year. Even more so since I have Vengeance now but also how I've approached challenges with Shimmer in the past and how we may overcome them now. Sure, there are times when I get really upset and have a hard time living in "Do-Land", but there are many times were I sit back and realize that I've feed the good wolf and my dogs responses to me are much more positive and relaxed than if I were harsh with them. I'm not much of a resolution fan simply because it puts pressure on people and most of them never get followed through, but I've been somewhat working on this resolution for a while now, and I guess I've just realized that I can follow it through. There's so much to learn and the accomplishments can be massive, but you have to realize which wolf you want to feed to get to those accomplishments.

Aside from that Shimmer, Vengeance and I have had an awesome time during our winter break. We've done lots of cool things including plenty of relaxation. So, here are some cute pictures...