Lakota Creek Kennels

04/16/2025

Congrats to Melinda and K9 Liz on winning first place at the USPCA Regional Detector Dog Trail! Total of 52 police K9s

04/14/2025

Echo earned her first Master pass down in Texas this last week

04/13/2025

FOCUSING ON PUPPIES AND BONE GROWTH:

Puppy growth rates vary greatly by size. It’s important to adapt diet and exercise to your puppies’ specific requirements to ensure ideal skeletal development. Endocondral ossification (the process during which cartilage turns into bone) differs according to the adult size of your puppy, with closed growth plates (complete ossification has occurred) between 3 months in toy breeds and 24 months in large breeds (see photos).
There are many factors affecting growth rate and maturity age. For example, males mature more slowly than females. There are variations in periods of ‘fast growth’ ranging from birth to 11 weeks in small dogs and toys. Large breeds range from birth to 20 weeks (Hawthorne et al 2004). Excessive exercise and inadequate nutrition during these periods can lead to conformation and malformation of bones, which can lead to osteoarthritis development and degenerative joint disease.
Recommended exercise levels for puppies are 1 minute for each week of their life, twice a day. This should be LOW IMPACT at a steady pace. Puppies shouldn’t be fetching at high speeds, or jumping on/off furniture or in/out of vehicles.
If your goal is to train to compete for flyball or agility (for example), it is recommended to AVOID any jump training until full ossification has occurred.
This is why breeders tell new owners to not to rush certain physical activities with your pups. Instead, focus working on other things with them. Work their minds, smell, desensitizing, and socialization, etc.
After going through the development months and developing the corresponding plates, consult your veterinarian to determine if your dog is 100% ready for sport.

SEE THOSE FEET AND TOES. This is a massive reason to keep those toe nails filed back WEEKLY!
Long toe nails cause weird looking feet. You won’t see it at first. But the toes will shift. The dog will end up with arthritis prematurely 🥺😢😭

04/09/2025

When you’re trying to get a good picture and say ‘cheese!’

04/06/2025

The new kennels are installed
Gator Kennels

03/30/2025

We all know the definition of insanity, but when it comes to training our dogs and dealing with behavior issues, I watch owner after owner fall into doing the “insane” thing… continuously repeating the same no-results-delivering stuff and hoping for a better result.

Here’s the thing. If engaging in positive-only training approaches created the desired results owners are desperate for, I wouldn’t be writing this post, and thousands upon thousands of balanced trainers wouldn’t be in thriving businesses

So many of you have allowed your common sense and your personal life experiences and observations of how reality actually works… to be hijacked. You’ve actually allowed yourself to be re-programmed by those who use emotional manipulation; the promises of never having to experience anything emotionally challenging (for you and your dog); and being the kinder more virtuous, more sophisticated, more science-based, more humane owner — even though somewhere, deep down, you know it’s all bu****it.

But you buy it because you want it to be true. Like the “Make a million dollars in a week without any risk or effort.”, “Or get that flat tummy and perfect butt in 7 days, without dieting or exercise!” We all know this stuff is nonsense, (God i hope so!) but we often still get pulled into stuff we know simply isn’t possible, but because it’s so appealing we suspend disbelief.

Owners are told, but they also critically want to believe, that they can just love, praise, and reward their way out of their dog’s issues — and it’ll all be great.

Except, as we all keep seeing over and over — it’s anything but great.

This is your reality wake up call. You know that negative consequences, and the awareness of their possible application, have had a huge impact on your own behavior, as well as all those around you. You know it doesn’t destroy you, it informs, reminds, and corrects you. It often times is the only thing that has saved you from making truly terrible mistakes — or, at least saved you from putting them on repeat.

So if you’re struggling with your dog, and you’ve been trying an all positive approach, before you exclaim to the world how you’ve tried everything, just take a breath and check in with the fact that you’ve done nothing of the sort.

What you’ve done is the “insanity” part — in two ways: 1/ you’ve repeatedly engaged in a training approach which hasn’t delivered the promised results, and you’ve ignored that reality. And 2/ you agreed to invest time, money, and hope into a training approach that you know deep down doesn’t align with the reality of your own personal experience of life.

So when you’re *truly* ready to make something positive happen, it’s time to pull on our big boy and big girls pants and embrace the fact that if we’re going to create a healthy and harmonious life with our dogs, we need to share clearly not only what we want, but critically also what we don’t want. And that second part is only going to be achieved by sharing something — gasp — that is negative. Something that makes engaging in the behavior unpleasant, uncomfortable, unrewarding.

Or not. Totally up to you. We all get to choose whether we prefer a difficult reality and all it has offer, or an easy fantasy and all it has to rob us of.

03/27/2025

A few cool illustrations of what operant and classical conditioning mean

03/22/2025

Echo adding some cool looking ribbons to her collection

03/13/2025

Training is like inflating a balloon: the more reinforcements you put in, the longer it will last. Skimp on the reinforcements, and the behavior might deflate faster than you’d expect.

03/05/2025

Who has ever seen a long haired Frenchie before?!

Billie is a pretty cool little dog!

02/28/2025

💯

Trainers routinely watch dogs play the game of offering their best to those who demand it and offering something very different to those who don’t.

The sheer number of highly trained dogs running around pretending not to know anything is one of the greatest ruses ever pulled on permissive and/or gullible owners.

This is why your trainer can’t (or shouldn’t) make any guarantees about how the dog will behave with you—because if you won’t hold the dog accountable for what it knows and is capable of, your dog’s “memory” will be impressively brief.

Of course your trainer has to train you as much as they do the dog—or more—but once that knowledge is passed along, only one party can make the new reality… reality.

And yes, you can feel free to substitute child for dog if that helps bring more clarity to this dynamic that you’ve almost certainly seen in other contexts.
——
For seminar or shadow program dates/tickets, training courses and books, or hands-on training (Louisiana and PNW areas) please visit: www.thegooddogway.com

02/14/2025

Olives favorite type of chocolate on Valentine’s Day 😍🍫💝🐾

02/12/2025

Josie and Bullet doing some training together today as the snow continues to fall ❄️⛄️

02/09/2025

Olive proofing Rocco’s loose leash walking in public before he goes home 🦮