John Goodwin of HSUS teams up with an unlikely partner in the battle against dogfighting.
Thanks to Trish for pointing the Blog to this article in Yahoo Sports. It concerns a surprising success.
Maybe it was one of the times John Goodwin found a more receptive audience while lobbying politicians
John Goodwin
for stricter sentencing against dogfighting.
Maybe it was one of the times a law enforcement training session was packed with police.
Maybe it was while he was riding along on what is an increasing number of raids on dogfighting operations.
Whenever it was, there was a moment over the past two years that Goodwin, the anti-dog fighting expert at the Humane Society of the United States, realized that of all the unexpected things, a silver lining had formed in the ugly clouds of the Michael Vick scandal.
Read the full article here. More on John Goodwin here.
The story of Luna has some interesting connections.
The person taking the picture in the Post about Tim Woods was Willie Prescott. He just happens to be the grandson of William H. Prescott from whom the town of Prescott is named. Here’s that picture again.
This has been doing the rounds and may be seen on numerous web sites and Blogs. It may be fiction but, nonetheless, it’s a good message.
Strangely, for a Blog called Learning from Dogs, there have been precious few dog stories. Maybe the integrity of a dog is so flippin’ obvious that we don’t need to wrap the species up in all sorts of romantic twaddle. This in no way, however, reduces the power of the message that dogs, along with many other species of warm-blooded animals (e.g. horses) are capable of reminding mankind of the importance of integrity.
This is a YouTube video courtesy of CBS Videos that has obviously caught the imagination of quite a large audience – the number of viewings on YouTube is in excess of 3.2 million! (So, apologies if you have seen this before.)
It’s impossible not to admire, respect and love a dog
An incident last night reminded me of the complexity of the dog’s mind. It has not been the first time this has happened.
Our 6 year-old German Shepherd dog, Pharaoh, was given a bone as a treat during the previous day and, as sometimes happens, it was a bit tough on his stomach. So at around 1.30 am, I was woken up. Nothing so special about that. But reflect on how this happened.
I am your dog and have something I would love to whisper in your ear. I know that you humans lead very busy lives. Some have to work, some have children to raise, some have to do this alone. It always seems like you are running here and there, often too fast, never noticing the truly grand things in life.
Anyone who has owned a dog will know that there is something very special about the relationship between a dog and humans. Dogs have the ability to provide the purest form of unconditional friendship and for us complicated humans this closeness is so precious. I mean who would have thought ……
Much too late to make me realise the inadequacies of my own parenting skills, I learnt an important lesson when training my GSD (who is called Pharaoh, by the way). That is that putting more emphasis into praise and reward for getting it right ‘trains’ the dog much quicker than telling it off. The classic example is scolding a dog for running off when it should be lots of hugs and praise for returning home. The scolding simply teaches the dog that returning home isn’t pleasant whereas praise reinforces that home is the place to be. Like so many things in life, very obvious once understood!
Absolutely certain that it works with youngsters just the same way.
Despite being a very dominant dog, Pharaoh showed his teaching ability when working with other dogs. In the UK there is an amazing woman, Angela Stockdale, who has proved that dogs (and horses) learn most effectively when being taught by other dogs (and horses). Pharaoh was revealed to be a Beta Dog, (i.e. second in status below the Alpha Dog) and, therefore, was able to use his natural pack instinct to teach puppy dogs their social skills and to break up squabbles within a pack.
When you think about it, don’t kids learn much more (often to our chagrin!) from other kids than they do from their parents. Still focusing on giving more praise than punishment seems like a much more effective strategy.
As was read somewhere, Catch them in the act of doing Right!
Learning from Dogs 