By Gaby Dufresne-Cyr, CBT

Many people confuse lure with reinforcement training. The confusion might come from the fact that both techniques use food to train animal behaviours. My goal this week is to shed light and expose the differences between…

By Gaby Dufresne-Cyr, CBT

This week I want to talk about a subject really close to home, dog training methodologies. You would think dog training evolved since my childhood days, but it seems, the more things change, the more they…

By Gaby Dufresne-Cyr, CBT

People often ask me why their dogs bark. I get this question so often, I decided to write about it. Barking is what I call a side effect behaviour. Side effect behaviours occur when dogs exhibit…

By Gaby Dufresne-Cyr, CBT

A few weeks ago, we talked about breeding dogs for fashion, not function. The taboo topic is a very sensitive one because it reflects our direct impact on a species we created to serve our specific…

By Gaby Dufresne-Cyr, CBT

When I was a kid, we had Great Danes. These majestic creatures were big, bold, and never shied away from all our childish shenanigans. We started with one, then we had puppies, so we ended up…

By Gaby Dufresne-Cyr, CBT

When I was in yoga school and attending university, teachers had a saying Observe the Observer. A simple statement which requires years of practice just to understand it's significance. Fortunately for us, dogs live their…

By Gaby Dufresne-Cyr, CBT

Working with animals is extremely rewarding, but it also yields a dirty secret, people in our line of work burn out. We change bad behaviour into good behaviour, we improve the human-animal bond, we teach, we…

By Gaby Dufresne-Cyr, CBT

A while back I wrote a piece called Emotional Projection. The scientifically oriented article focused on possible sources of projection. Unfortunately, the somewhat long description didn't discuss how to actually use projection to change emotions…