Calm-submissive energy – In nature, this is the appropriate energy for a “follower” in a dog pack, and thus the ideal energy for a dog to project when living in a household with humans. Signs of calm-submissive energy include a relaxed posture, ears held back, and a nearly instinctual response to the “pack leader’s” commands

Exercise, discipline, and affection… in that order – These are the three ingredients for creating a happy, balanced dog. Most dog owners give only affection, or don’t provide these three necessities in the correct order.

• Exercise – walking a dog at least one hour every day, and in the correct way.

• Discipline – giving a dog rules, boundaries, and limitations in a nonabusive manner.

• Affection – a reward we give to our dogs and to ourselves, but only after the dog has achieved calm submission in our “pack”.

Master the walk – The walk is an extremely important ritual for a dog. It needs to take place a minimum of twice a day, for at least thirty to forty-five minute each time, so that both the dog’s mind and its body are given a workout. This means the dog walks next to the owner or behind him/her – not pulling ahead. If a dog is “walking” a human, the dog perceives itself as pack leader at that moment, and the human is not in control.

Rules, boundaries, and limitations -
- Dogs need to know that their pack leader is clearly setting the rules, boundaries and limitations for their life both inside and outside the house.
- Anger, aggression, or abuse toward the dog will not establish you as pack leader; an angry, aggressive leader is not in control. Calm-assertive energy and daily, consistent leadership behavior will make enforcing the rules easier.

Issues – If a dog doesn’t trust its owner to be a strong, stable pack leader, it becomes unclear about its correct role within the pack. A dog that is confused about who is in charge is actually concerned about the ability of the pack to survive, so it attempts to fill in the missing leadership elements, often erratically. This can cause aggression, anxiety, fear, obsessions, or phobias.

Nose, eyes, ears… in that order! – Dogs see the world differently from the way we do. We communicate using our ears first, then our eyes, and lastly our nose. Dogs begin with the nose, then the eyes, and lastly the ears. Allowing a dog to experience our scent before we engage it in eye contact or speak to it is one way to establish trust early on.

Cesar Millan is a world-renowned dog behavior specialist, known for his uncanny ability to walk large packs of dogs at a time. Not only that but, from poodles to pit bulls, these now well-behaved canines have each been rehabilitated, rescued from a wide range of extreme behavior issues – anything from insecurity to severe ‘red zone’ aggression!

Born and raised in Mexico, his blessed gift – a primal communion with nature – always came naturally to him, but his unique connection to canines became most noticeable around the age of 13. Everywhere Cesar went, there always seemed to be a swirl of dogs surrounding him. The locals gave him a nickname, “El Perrero” – Spanish for “The Dogman”.

Cesar embraced this gift whole-heartedly, and he came to America to pursue his dream of becoming the greatest dog trainer in the world. He soon realized, though, that he was searching for something rather more profound than teaching dogs basic commands.

Heeding his grandfather’s advice to ‘never work against Mother Nature’, Cesar acquired yet another pack of dogs. He passionately studied books on dog psychology, but it was through his own observation, awareness, and first hand experience that Cesar distilled his own formulas that clearly kept dogs balanced, calm, and submissive.

Cesar first captured the national spotlight when his National Geographic Channel series Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan premiered in 2004.

The Approach

In the wild, a dog’s very survival depends on a strong, stable, and organized pack, where every member knows its place and follows the rules established by the pack leader. The pack instinct is perhaps the strongest natural motivator for a dog.

Cesar Millan teaches that, in order to properly fulfill both our dogs and ourselves, we each need to become our canine’s calm-assertive pack leader. A dog that doesn’t trust its human to be a good pack leader becomes unbalanced and often exhibits unwanted or anti-social behaviors.

Cesar does not “train” dogs in the sense of teaching them commands like “sit,” “stay,” “come,” and “heel” – he rehabilitates unbalanced dogs and helps “re-train” their owners to better understand how to see the world through a dog’s eyes.

Cesar counsels people to calmly, assertively, and consistently give their dogs rules, boundaries, and limitations to establish themselves as solid pack leaders and to help correct and control unwanted behavior. He doesn’t believe in “quick fixes.” Though changing some behaviors can appear to happen in a relatively short period of time, none of those changes will “stick” unless the human acts consistently with his or her dog every day to keep unwanted behaviors from returning. In Cesar’s opinion, no one should ever hit or yell at a dog to correct unwanted behavior.

So what is crate training? This involves creating a safe, familiar environment for your puppy where he feels comfortable, safe & slightly protected from the every day hustle and bustle in the house hold. The crate should never be used as a form of punishment or for leaving your puppy locked up for extreme amounts of time.

The crate can be a great tool for toilet training as most will not soil where they sleep, so long as your puppy has been taken outside for the toilet before any reasonable time that is to be spent in the crate. This should always be followed by toilet time outside after immediate release from the crate.

Proper crate training also may prevent separation anxiety when used properly in teaching a puppy that when you leave you always come back. In general, a puppy learns to settle and occupy themselves without constant human intervention, which become increasingly more important as the dog grows and likely become more demanding for attention unless taught to behave otherwise.

Try not to think of it as a prison for a puppy, and certainly don’t use it with this purpose in mind. When used properly, you will find that a puppy chooses to go into their crate without prompting.

If you would like to help us train Cooper then please follow these simple rules when ever you meet him.

No touch, No talk, No eye contact during your initial meeting. Let him approach you as opposed to you approaching him. Only once he is calm and submissive should you then reward him with attention.

How simple could it be!

As preparation for Coopers arrival continues, one thing that is going to be key to making sure we raise the perfect dog is choosing the perfect puppy!!!! So just how are we going to do this!

In the past I have fallen in to the trap of picking the puppy that comes bounding up to me and making a huge fuss, licking etc. Just like most people I thought, awwww he picked me, it must be fate! Only now after reading countless books by Cesar Millan, and watching many many episodes of the Dog Whisperer do I now know that I was actually picking the most dominant, high energy pup in the litter. This is fine if this is the kind of dog you can handle and want, but in most cases for the average dog owner such as myself, it isn’t!

A perfect example of the opposite of this is when I adopted my Rottweiler Yoda from a rescue shelter. I had gone to the shelter with all the intention of bringing home a medium size dog and even though my family had a Rottweiler, I had definitely not intended to bring one home. When I approached the row of concrete pens, immediately all the dogs started "bouncing" up and down, braking, howling, and in some cases growling. That is, all except one. About half way down the block of pens was what I thought an empty pen, but as I got closer, I could see a very proud looking Rotty just sat very calmly, not anxious or scared, at the back of his pen. Once I was right up to the pen door, he trotted up to the gate, sat, gave me his paw and then licked my hand. Wow, I was totally amazed and needless to say, he came home with me a week later once all the necessary checks had been made. Yoda turned out to be a wonderful companion and the only problem I ever had with him turned out to be one of my doing. (only now do I realise this after studying Cesar’s way). After many happy walks, Yoda became very over excited and agitated when we bumped in to other dogs, all this I now know as a result of my own anxiety and tension being passed down the lead at the sight of other dogs. A mistake I will not be making again.

Anyway, back to the question in hand. The key to picking our puppy will be it’s energy. By that I mean we will be looking for the puppy that doesn’t show signs of dominance, signs of anxiety or over excitement. I know, all puppies are excitable little creatures so finding one that is calm can be impossible. This is where food plays a key factor, so watching how they approach the mum for feeding can tell us a lot. Which one pushes the others out the way, dominant, which one is anxious, which one lets the others push it to one side, submissive and which one is pretty laid back and calm in the approach. One thing that Cesar likes to do is split the puppies each in to a different chair or area and see which one can stay there the longest before getting distracted or moving away. One thing we will not be doing is picking one because it is the cutest or the most attracted to us.

I guess all we need to do now is wait for the puppys arrival so that we can go and make our choice!

After making the decision of which breed, we then needed to pick and agree on which training methods we would use and how we wanted to raise our new puppy. For us there was no other way to choose than the Cesar Millan way. For those that are not familiar with Cesar, he is from the USA where is he is known as the Dog Whisperer. He believes that the key to raising the perfect dog is being the Pack Leader. This means being calm and assertive and making sure that you set rules, boundaries and limitations from day one, just as the pups mother would. This also means following the principle of exercise, discipline and affection, in that order. I will go on to explain a little more about Cesar’s way later on.

So why did we think this was the best way for us? Mainly I think because like Cesar, we believe that nature has already done a perfect job and only by humanising have we upset this balance. You only have to watch how a mother raises a pup to see this. Also the idea of having to adopt a calm and assertive manner can only do wonders for your own inner peace!

As we follow Cesar’s way, we will blog about how effective this has been for Cooper and in cases where it has not (which we suspect if at all will be down to the human!) we will blog about how we over come any issues.

Our main aim is to raise a balanced, happy, polite Beagle who can show others just how nature intended it to be! Don’t get me wrong, we in no way believe that this is going to be a walk in the park but we do believe that with lots of patience, time, effort, love and following Cesar’s way we can raise the "Perfect Dog"

Why not check out Cesar’s website to find out more.
http://www.cesarsway.com

Titus the Daddy

Having both been around dogs for most of our lives, my husband Adrian and I had been waiting for the day when we had time in our lives to give a puppy/dog a happy and stable home.

Finally we both agreed that now was as good a time as any, so we set about the task, one which we thought would be easy, of choosing the right breed to fit in to our lives. We both agreed that my most loved breed the Rottweiler was too big for our current home even though the energy was the right one. I would not agree to my husbands favourite, the Boxer. Although I love all dogs, this is a breed that I have just never taken to and find them to have very very high energy levels and we wanted a dog that match that of our own. We decided that we didn’t want to fall in to the trap of little dog, cute dog equals not giving as much discipline as is needed.

The Beagle was a breed that we had mentioned in the past but we were not quite sure what they were like as a breed. So out came all the books, internet search and most valuable of all, asking around and speaking to people with exposure to the breed. I was very lucky to find someone at work that had a Beagle boy with a wonderful temperament and collected all the details about the breeder he was from. After researching the breed and the breeder, I contacted them to ask about litters. It just so happened that one of their bitches was due very soon and the puppies would be ready for the end of April. So on the 13th Feb ’10 we made the journey to South Wales to look at the mum, Fay and the dad, Titus. Both had lovely temperaments, looks and most important of all, they seemed quite balanced dogs. As you can imagine, we left our deposit and are now waiting anxiously for news of Fay having her puppies.

Fay with her last litter