How To Train Your Dog With Love + Science - Dog Training with Annie Grossman + Anamarie Johnson PhD (Formerly known as School For The Dogs Podcast)

Annie is joined by School For The Dogs apprentice Leeyah Wiseman to discuss two super important behaviors: Touch and find it. She and Annie discuss the benefits of teaching these two things and talk about why both behaviors are such great starting places for many dogs and their humans. Check out @schoolforthedogs ' Reels on Instagram to see Leeyah demo both!  Annie also engages in some time travel...

Right after getting a pandemic puppy, Tiffany Chen decided to see if she could build some sort of side hustle in order to get her out of the corporate world. She signed up for the Virtual Assistant Internship and learned that it's wise to pick a niche. While she was working on learning about training her own dog (and building his requisite Instagram persona) she started following a lot of positive...

Annie's life has two speeds right now. You'll find her physically trapped underneath her two young daughters using a suite of remote treat dispensers to train her dog, or she's at a local co-working space in a tiny room alone, talking to herself. In this bonus episode, on the one-year anniversary of her beloved dog Amos passing, she is in the latter mode, recording a kind of phone call to her late...

Dog trainer Ilana Alderman, one of Annie's closest friends, has a reputation at School For The Dogs for being a kind of Disney Princess: She looks sort of like Snow White, and seems to titter with birds and befriend fish like Cinderella or Ariel. For nearly a decade, Ilana has focused on training (and enriching the lives of) pretty much every animal she's come across. She has taught fish to play b...

Annie talks about why she is generally against costumes for dogs and suggests some alternatives to dressing up your dog on Halloween. She also discusses some feedback she got about last week’s episode, which featured an interview with the lawyer representing the woman who was mauled by Cesar Millan’s dog. Lastly, she shares two anecdotes: one about how she is using a Buy Nothing group on Facebook...

In the summer of 2017, Lidia Matiss, then a high schooler, went to visit her mom at her workplace and, inside the office, was brutally attacked by an off-leash dog. Her mother worked for Cesar's Way, which belongs to Cesar Millan, aka The Dog Whisperer; the dog was Millan's late pit bull, Junior. Annie interviews LA-based lawyer Brian Adesman, who is representing the victim in a suit against Milla...

This is a recording of a live Q and A done on Instagram, @schoolforthedogs . Annie had no childcare while doing this episode and hoped her infant would stay asleep the whole time, but...she didn't! Annie answer's listener's questions about... -An older Cheweenie who has stopped peeing/pooping in the yard ever since a younger, smaller dog came to live with them. -A dog who will only go in the yard...

If you want to get the best work out of employees, do you send them on a scavenger hunt each week when it's time for them to get paid, or do you put the money directly into their bank account? When it comes to dog training, it's equally important to think about where you're delivering "payment."  Annie suggests where you might want to put a treat, depending on the circumstances, why this is an imp...

One of Annie’s best friends from high school got a puppy and called Annie to get some advice on managing a puppy in a household with four kids (and a husband who isn’t totally in favor of keeping the dog…). Annie gives her friend some helpful tips. Links: Work to Eat toys https://www.schoolforthedogs.com/worktoeat/ How to make a flirt pole https://storeforthedogs.com/blogs/news/dog-flirt-poles-you...

Annie shares two recent anecdotes from her life, both involving humans behaving in extreme ways and young animals she loves (her toddler and her dog Poppy) having meltdowns. These two events made her think about punishment, fear, socialization, behavioral expectations, generalizations, and the way in which people treat animals (dogs or humans) who are emotional, for whatever reason. The episode ta...

Last month, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece about how positive-reinforcement dog training is too much trouble, concluding that punishment-based training is faster and, overall, underrated. Quite a few dog trainers wrote to the Wall Street Journal, angry that such a major publication would run something with such spurious facts and no sources. Annie called up her long time friend Kiki...

This is a rebroadcast of Episode 3 , which originally aired on 3/18/18. Training a dog where to pee and poop is a major priority for most new dog owners. But there is a lot of misinformation on how to do it -- we don't even have a term for it that make sense! Are we training the house? Is it still "house breaking" if you live in an apartment? Annie breaks down how to take on this task in a way tha...

This is the audio of a live presentation Annie gave for New York City's Animal Medical Center's Usdan Institute for Animal Health Education last week.  Annie offers actionable advice for preventing separation anxiety and handling other behavioral issues that may arise as people begin to return to offices after long periods of working from home, with their dogs constantly by their sides. This prese...

Nora Moran is a director at Puppies Behind Bars, a program that employs prisoners to raise and train puppies who will grow up to become service dogs, therapy dogs, and working dogs. She first learned about the program when she herself got the opportunity to raise a puppy while incarcerated at New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Since her release in 2008, she has been working to help mo...

Tamara Meyer is a dog trainer with something of a dream job: She hangs out in the woods with dogs. Her Manhattan-based business, Shape Up Your Pup, brings groups of dogs to trails near the city every day. Annie met her when she was very pregnant and was looking for ways to make sure that her young dog, Poppy, got some good exercise. Annie asks her about the origins of her business, her journey to...

Kate Senisi and Annie Grossman founded School For The Dogs together in 2011. What a decade it's been! Kate, who oversees training and staff at School For The Dogs, is quite busy and can be hard to pin down. But, when trapped in a car with Annie, she agreed to record a casual conversation about the business, the specific challenges faced by city dogs and their owners, and SFTD's unique offerings. S...

To many people, everything they know about dog training has come out of the mouth of one man: Cesar Millan. For nine seasons, on his show, The Dog Whisperer, he told people that they needed to fix their "energy" and become more assertive in order to get their dogs to be "calm submissive." He showed how to get dogs to do what he wanted by using punishment, force and coercion, although he had other...

New York Magazine reports that the Pandemic Puppy boom has left many New Yorkers in a kind of do-gooder competition to see who can qualify to get one of a seemingly dwindling number of rescue dogs. Annie talks about why it’s so hard and how that this fact is probably a good thing for the dogs involved. She offers some tips on how to acquire a shelter dog and things to avoid doing when you're looki...

Annie was pretty psyched to see The New Yorker had two articles in a recent issue that looked like they'd touch on the science of behavior as it relates to both training dogs and raising children. One article is about pandemic pet ownership and rescuing dogs from China; the other is about sleep training infants. Ultimately both underscore what she already knew: The science of behavior and its appl...

Maria Skorobogatov, CTC, is a dog trainer who has spent the last six years traveling the world training animals. She's worked with dogs in Hanoi, cats in Tunisia and Rome, and everything from pangolins to elephants to vervet monkeys in Malawi. Originally from Brooklyn, Maria discovered the joys of animal training when she lucked into a client service's job at The Houston Zoo. When she saw the work...

For two decades, Malena DeMartini has been helping people help dogs who have separation anxiety. She joined Annie to discuss her new book, Treating Separation Anxiety in Dogs: Next Generation Treatment Protocols and Practices. In it,  she reveals some surprising updates to the protocols she suggested in her first book (spoiler: she now wants her clients to do LESS training than before).  She and A...

Some dogs really freak out about loud noises. Unfortunately, too often, new dog owners learn this on a day when scary sounds abound: July 4th. Annie talks to fellow trainer, Cheryl Gfrerer of Giffy Dog in St. Paul, MN, about her personal experiences dealing with a sound-sensitive rescue dog, and together they discuss protocols and practical approaches to helping dogs who are triggered by fireworks...

This is a rebroadcast of Episode 29, which originally aired on 10/15/18.  As much as we want our dogs to be social beings, the sad fact is that city streets are not an ideal place for leashed dogs to socialize. The close confines of the sidewalk can keep dogs from having enough space to greet each other properly, and leashes too often can become uncomfortably taught, leading a dog to think that ev...

Annie has always loved using the Treat & Train , a bare-bones, battery-operated remote-controlled treat dispenser, but she has found it particularly useful for her current situation: Being busy and also largely pregnant in a city apartment with a toddler and a rambunctious adolescent dog. She describes how she has turned the word "Dop" into a tertiary conditioned reinforcer that, with the help...

One of Annie's best friends is Ilana Alderman, an animal trainer who, over the last few years, has been using what she knows about behavior to help create fun games for her son -- games that enrich his brain and games that require her to consider consequences, appropriate rewards, and antecedent arrangements in order to help him engage in necessary behaviors using positive reinforcement rather tha...