Brains and Paws Books

Book and Course Categories

I have written over 60 training books. It's easiest to see them in the proper categories. Sometimes they overlap. You can order them in paperback, PDF, eBook, or flipbook. Click the picture to get more information about that category.

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EMPOWERMENT, ENRICHMENT AND CANINE GAME THEORY

Empowerment training is about showing our dogs that the environment is something they can affect and control. Most training is about instilling control onto our dogs instead of showing them how to have self-control and understanding.

With these books you will be establishing a history of reinforcement for choice, understanding, decisions and willingness to operate on the environment and the objects in it.

To empower a dog, you must teach him industriousness, persistence and creativity.

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DETECTION DOGS FOR DISEASE, TOXINS, AGRICULTURAL PESTS AND JUST FINDING LOST PETS !

Our home and work enviornments can be full of things that adversely affect us. Mold, toxic cleaning products, undetected asbestos, mice and rats, termites, formaldehyde, radon, .

In addition to disease we also train our dogs to find those things in our environment that many doctors are starting to realize increase our chances of getting various diseases. Parkinson's, Alzheimers, AutoImmune diseases such as PANS/PANDAS and MCAS are considered environmentally caused auto immune syndromes.

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FITNESS, TRICKS AND SPORTS

Functional training takes us back to the roots of our association with canines and getting back to the basics of movement, body awareness, the flow that should be inherent in moving from space to space and when navigating obstacles, balance, coordination, flexibility and agility.

Function Training starts with Fitness. Fitness helps provide your dog with the strength, stability, power, mobility, endurance and flexibility that s/he needs to thrive as s/he moves through life and sports. Using basic functional movement patterns like pushing, pulling, lunging, squatting, rotating, carrying and gait patterns, Functional Training utilizes exercises that improve movement proficiency, enhance performance and decrease injury.

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OBEDIENCE AND LIFE SKILLS

Foundational skills are the fundamental, portable skills that are essential to conveying and receiving information that is critical to training and real world success. These skills are fundamental in that they serve as a basis—the foundation—for supporting additional behaviors/tasks and learning. They are portable because, rather than being task specific, they can be applied at some level across a wide variety of behaviors.

Dogs who develop these skills have enhanced understanding of and are more responsive to the human world. Navigating the often confusing and inconsistent rules that humans create, knowing how to adapt instinctive and evolutionary behaviors to living with humans compatibly and working as a team with other animals in the home and the humans are all examples of using foundational skills.

Wellness, Husbandry, Healing

Dogs and cats aren't born hating particular people or places. Usually two things need to happen before your pet decides that its groomer and veterinarian are The Evil Empire. The first is unfamiliarity and the second is unpleasant experiences.

Accustoming your pet to handling and the sights, sounds and smells of the grooming salon and vet clinic will greatly reduce your pet's stress when they actually go into these places for an appointment.

Non-conventional, alternative, natural and holistic methods are not only concerned with the physical aspects of your pet, but also its emotions and experiences, which can have a major impact on its physical health.

Medical Alert

Service dogs bring freedom to their partners 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. A person partnered with a service dog has full public access rights as granted by federal law (The Americans With Disabilities Act), which allows them to take their dog into all public facilities. Service dogs are never separated from their human partners! A competent service dog program spends two years preparing each dog for its working life. Service dogs must be physically sound, temperamentally stable, happy working partners.

Medical Detection and Alert Dogs use their incredible noses to sense bio-chemical changes in your body. Every change has an attached smell. If we can isolate that smell, we can train your dog to detect it, alert you to its presence and help you reduce the effects of whatever condition is causing it.

Prey Drive, Boundary Training, and Dangerous Critter Avoidance

I make no secret of the fact that I am not a fan of electric fences or electrical training devices. But many communities and subdivisions do not allow “visible” fences. So while there are many things you can do to protect pet health and safety, like signing them up for pet insurance, what is a dog owner to do if they can’t have a fence?

Training a dog is all about teaching it what to do when. It doesn’t matter whether that when is a word, a signal, a smell (detection and medical alert dogs), an object (agility and fly ball), or a shock (avoid pain). If training a dog what to do when wasn’t possible, guide dogs, bomb sniffing dogs, cadaver dogs would none of them exist. Very few of these dogs were trained with the use of a shock collar and even the small percentage that are is lessoning as everyone embraces the fact that dogs are a lot smarter than we’ve given them credit for in the past.

Service Dogs

Our service dog program has 5 levels. The first 3 levels are basic to advanced obedience. This is necessary for all service, assistance and therapy dogs. This booket covers Levels 1, 2 and 3. Level 4 is covered in Public Access Games and Level 5 is split into separate classes for the types of "tasks" each Service Dog must know for their handler.

Retrieve is used in competitive sports and in daily life. It is useful as well as a fun and interactive game for you and your dog. It is also important for most service dogs to be able to do for their handlers.

The retrieve behavior is part of your dog’s natural instincts as part of the hunt. Bringing food back to the puppies was a necessary part of canid life. I try to include as many of these behaviors as possible, structured to fit in our human world, so that the dog not only loves the activity, but needs it.

train your dog yourself

5 minutes a day is all you need

Wellness, Husbandry, Healing

Medical Alert

Prey Drive, Boundary Training, and Dangerous Critter Avoidance

Service Dogs