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Get Connected with Your Dog. Emphasizing the Relationship While Training Your Dog | 
 enlarge | Author: Brenda Aloff
Publisher: Dogwise Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $49.95
Buy New: $31.87
You Save: $18.08 (36%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 92260
Media: Perfect Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 395
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 10.8 x 8.3 x 1
ISBN: 1929242530
Dewey Decimal Number: 636
EAN: 9781929242535
ASIN: 1929242530
Publication Date: February 20, 2008
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Product Description
With over 390 pages and the accompanying DVD, the author of Aggression in Dogs; and the Maxwell Award winner, Canine Body Language; brings you new ways to train your dog and to improve your understanding of how your dog perceives the communications you give to him. This is done by providing you with a series of exercises based on Positive Reinforcement training and a new set of protocols based on developing and improving any relationship.
Getting connected with your dog is the key to building a relationship in which learning can flourish and the needs of both the dog and the owner are met. Once you know how to communicate with your dog, that knowledge, combined with positive training techniques, can make you a much more effective trainer.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Path to communication...with your thinking dog June 1, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
While I haven't read the entire book yet, I have read parts of it and have also watched the DVD. I respectfully disagree with reviewer Swissy Mom; her review very nearly prevented me from purchasing the book. I'm glad it did not.
Ms. Aloff is using a method of communication with which dogs are familiar by nature: body language and space. I did not get the impression at all that she was ignoring the dogs' reactions to her movements and behavior. In fact, she understands that, under certain circumstances, dogs are uncomfortable with being handled and unsure (to start with) about what is expected. But this is a part of learning new things. Many dogs react strongly to their first collar or head halter - this is not so different. Some discomfort is to be expected. Movements and handling were performed in a gentle and caring way. All of the dogs in the DVD relax noticeably and seem to begin to enjoy the process as their learning progresses.
I have a smart and wonderful but difficult adolescent dog. As a result, I've done a great deal of reading about various training theories/methods in addition to participating with him in a number of courses. While I understand that space management is important when working with dogs, this is the first comprehensive guide I've found that uses this as a foundation for training, offering individual exercises and a step-by-step approach to each of them, including various key movements/behaviors in your dog that should influence your responses while you help him/her to understand what you want him/her to do. These are called out in the DVD as well. There are also modifiers for dogs who are timid or excitable.
What is most encouraging to me about this approach is what Ms. Aloff describes as getting your dog to use his/her forebrain (thinking about what your communication means and how he should respond) rather than his/her hindbrain (reacting to what you are doing - whether that is offering a treat as a lure or giving an appropriate physical correction). Please note that I am not disparaging other training methods. It is simply useful to have a means of communication with dogs that they already understand on many levels. I'm hopeful this will enable me to teach my dog that he is capable of self-control and help us learn to read and understand each other better. I'll update this review when I have more information.
The only minor negative thing I can say about this is that the DVD I received is a bit grainy. Perhaps that is just my copy, or even my old DVD player. But the content is an extremely helpful complement to the book.
Great ideas, editing could be better May 19, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
Although some readers of the "pure positive/got-a-problem-put-a-cookie-in-it" bent may be offended, ( oh, boo-hoo) this book offers really good thinking and knowledge about dog training in the real world, and some wonderful explanations of why methods work.
My wish was for better organization, as I found the proliferation of different fonts to be distracting and annoying, and the chapter organization lacking. Every paragraph seemed to have its own chapter heading in yet another frilly font. There are nuggets of gold in this book, but it takes some sifting to find them. I would love a second edition that is cleaned up in the editing department. Some really basic errors in spelling and syntax mar the read, and the case histories are too vague and not helpful. I suspect Ms. Aloff is a terrific trainer, and she has put a great deal of thought into why she does what she does and why it works. Its taking me twice as long to read it as I'd like because I have to keep skipping through irrelevant stuff like "How long have you been training dogs? and "What titles have you put on dogs?" in the client intake forms. I don't care. I want to know what problem the dog had and how you fixed it. A simple narrative style would be better, for me.
I also found the photos less than helpful, and they take up a lot of space. One, which takes up most of a page is of a person wearing a cute saying on her tee shirt. I'd rather see a drawing, photo or diagram of how to hold a collar or how to face a dog.
Still, its really good dog-thinking and pretty darn good writing and I will use it and refer to it often.
A comprehensive, detailed, practical, experienced based, and thoroughly 'user friendly' manual from beginning to end April 3, 2008
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
For the past 12,000 years of human history, domesticated dogs have been man's constant companion, helper, and occasional food source. Dogs come in an immensely diverse profusion of breeds, sizes, and dispositions. A professional dog trainer specializing in canine problem behavior, Brenda Aloff has produced "Get Connected With Your Dog: Emphasizing The Relationship While Training Your Dog" a book/dvd combination training manual that will teach dog owners how to use the subtle language of the body to direct (or redirect) their dog's movements; how to be both consistent and coherent in their interactions with their dogs; and how to identify, mark, reinforce those behaviors to be encouraged from those behaviors to be extinguished. The accompanying 90-minute DVD provides exercises and illustrative examples for building skill and confidence as a trainer. Enhanced with 286 black-and-white photos and an extensive \index, "Get Connected With Your Dog" is an ideal, step-by-step training manual for first-time dog owners as well as aspiring and aspiring dog trainers. A comprehensive, detailed, practical, experienced based, and thoroughly 'user friendly' manual from beginning to end, "Get Connected With Your Dog" is an especially recommended addition to personal, professional, veterinary school, and community library reference collections and supplemental reading lists.
Talking with your dog March 28, 2008
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
In her book on Canine Body Language, Brenda Aloff showed handlers how dogs use exquisitely subtle body signals to communicate with one another. In her new book, Aloff offers handlers techniques to make their own body language a means of giving clear, consistent information to their dogs. Clear communication is the basis for developing relationship with your dog, Aloff says: "a communication loop becomes a relationship loop."
Aloff's Get Connected protocols are based on respect for the dog's feelings and talents, and aim to help handlers of all levels of experience and ability earn their dogs' respect. Respect does not mean "dominance" or forced obedience. For Aloff it means that your opinion matters to your dog---that your dog feels comfortable with you (which Aloff says is less common than many handlers might think), and that your dog feels safe and is happy to be with you and to work with you. The protocols are intended to develop internal rather than external motivation in the dog, and to encourage "forebrain" (thinking) responses rather than "hindbrain" (reactive) reponses in both the dog and the handler.
Aloff relies on her dogs to think and to problem-solve. It's not a matter of "believing" that dogs think, she says. She "absolutely" knows that her dogs think and have emotions and opinions. One of the greatest pleasures of the book and the DVD that comes with it is to see Aloff interacting with her own obviously happy and thinking dogs---especially Zasu, a little rocket of a smooth fox terrier with a mind of her own.
Aloff has run into criticism from some trainers for not using "purely" positive methods. She discusses her training theories and her own training history in this book, her preference for clicker training, her refusal to use force-based methods, and the need that she's found in her practice to communicate with clients who need immediate help with their dogs and don't have the skills or the inclination to use clicker training. The book, which is almost 400 pages long, contains both theory and very detailed explanations of the protocols and exercises. The DVD shows the exercises in real time. Some readers have complained about the quality of Aloff's photographs, but to me they look like real life (or at least real life in a dog class) and are very helpful.
Case histories show how the protocols have worked for both experienced and novice handlers and for dogs with varying degrees of reactvity. Wilson, a hound/Great Dane puppy, is seen on the DVD growing (literally and figuratively) before our eyes from a gangly and highly reactive puppy into a much calmer and smoother-working adolescent. What the DVD doesn't say but the case history does is that Wilson as a 12-week-old puppy bit his very experienced handler in the neck and that Aloff and the handler discussed euthanasia at that time. After much work with Aloff, the handler is now considering trying competition obedience training with Wilson. Another case history tells how a horribly reactive rescued border collie found a new, calmer relationship with his handler through long, determined, patient work with Aloff's protocols.
For a handler like me, who has fallen over her own feet in dog class, and for a dog like mine, who from the age of eight weeks has been telling me "I'm so fast and you're so slow," and "I get it. I get it," exercises based on movement (as opposed to sit-stay protocols, which are absolutely and undoubtedly useful but drive me nuts)are a blessing. Aloff says that her intention is to expand the tools available to all handlers, so that the handler can help the dog "be the best he can be" and the dog can help the handler "develop her very best character." Positive training does both those things, and I'm very grateful to Brenda Aloff for her protocols and her teaching.
 Not connected at all March 23, 2008
27 out of 36 found this review helpful
Get Connected with Your Dog. Emphasizing the Relationship While Training Your Dog
I found this book to be a heartbreaking and disturbing read and view of the DVD. Far from connecting, Ms Aloff takes all she knows about dogs, their body language and space - and that's a considerable amount - and uses it against them. Throughout the book and disk she intrudes, hovers, manhandles and applies pressure to collars and necks in an attempt to control how and where a dog moves. Blatantly ignoring every sign given by the dogs, mostly puppies, and sometimes acknowledging but choosing to dismiss the signals the dogs are giving her ("I know he looks a little nervous right now, but he'll get used to it"), Ms. Aloff seems to defy her previous teachings of awareness and sensitivity in favor of a tight leash and a "relationship" based on the the human moving away only when the dog behaves - most healthy relationships would focus, one would think, on the arrival of a human being a positive event, not the opposite. "Petting" is only ceased when the dog stops moving, space is only ceded when the dog "behaves," and proximity to handler is consistently paired with what must surely be experienced as punishment, while reward becomes the lack of close dog/ human interaction. Based on what I've seen and read, Ms. Aloff has surely lost her way, and in the process has lost a fan.
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