Can anyone help, i want to buy a second book to help me with training tips with my dog. My first book was invaluable (Gwen Bailey, perfect puppy) but i feel like we have outgrown it now after many months of good reading. My dog is a Dogue De Bordeaux, we go to training classes, she knows the basics (even though she ignors us at times) and sometimes has domanance issues. She is 7 months old now. Can anyone recommend a good book. Thanks

Purely Positive Training - Sheila Booth or
The Culture Clash - Jean Donaldson or
why not both? ;)

Dominance issues?? Care to elaborate?

Re books - Everybody can train their own dog - Angela White

Training your dog - Volhard and Fisher

Clicker training for dogs - Karen Pryor

Dogwise - John Fisher

Why does my Dog..? John Fisher ( about training and behaviour, why dogs do what they do eg. bark, growl, chase, etc and what you can do about it ;)

Take a look at www.crosskeysbooks.com, lots to choose from on there.

Lindsay

when i say dominance issues it all began when we got her home at 7 weeks (quite clearly that was too young an age), anyhow she was quite bitey, and was scaring all our guests by attaching herself to their ankles by her needle sharp teeth, being quite moody at times and refusing to conform to our rules. However, we took her to puppy training, (now attenting Bronze level) and she seems to have calmed down after doing the feed after humans, no upstairs, no on furniture and last through doors things.

Generally what happens now days is when she does something that me or my partner are unhappy about, ie paw on the furniture or mouthing us etc we tell her off by saying off or no and she gets quite back chatty with us by barking and growling and mouthing. Her pupils go large and she goes off on one. Its only ever me and my partner that she does this to for some reason. Its not something that happens daily, more weekly if that, but we have ignored her at times (this is the most effective but we dont want her to think she has got away with it) or if very bad we take her outside to the kitchen (which is confined by a dog gate) and give her two minutes to cool down (if she knows this is going to happen and rolls on her back and its quite hard to move a 6 stone dog from that position!!)

All in all, she is a very affectionate dog who just cant get enough of peoples attention, she is very loving and loyal but doesnt like to be told off....... Thats why i think she has dominance issues. Id like a book to teach us how to deal with her at her moody times but also one which will help us further her training. Im grateful for your list of books and your time spent reading this!! any advice is greatly appreciated

How do you deal with the stuff you don't want her to do? Some dogs find a physical approach just too much and we humans inadvertently use what is to the dog overly agressive body language to get our point across - Why does my Dog? will tell you more about that - but in particular things like grabbing a dog, staring at it's eyes, leaning over it are all what might seem to the dog to be overly heavy handed language - as if somebody had walked up to you in the street and asked you to move but every other word was a swear word - some folk would take it and move, others would punch him on the nose, because there has been a communication break down :( Biting at 7 weeks is normal puppy stuff BTW, and in no way indicative of a 'dominant' dog ;-)

I suppose because Dogue de Bordeaux can be dominant we have tried our best to not let her get the upper hand on us, we never use physical methods, but i understand what your saying by tones and actions being threatening to her. We do tend to keep eye contact but mainly because i read somewhere that if they move eye contact first they are backing down... try not to do that in the future in that case.

Thanks for all your advice, ive certainly taken it on board