My first thoughts

Right now I’ve got a bit of extra time on my hands. So I stumbled, as I usually do, into something new. This is how I’ve started every single thing that has ever been important in my live. Thirty years ago I thought it might be fun to check out the Ultimate Frisbee training at my university and spent the next ten years playing tournaments all over Middle Europe and few World Championships elsewhere. I mentioned in passing to my sister that, should her dogs ever have puppies, I would like to have one. A few months later I went from Germany to Sweden to pick up my first dog, who might get his own post on this page soon. It has not been a straight route from that moment to me starting as an agility instructor a few years later, but it seems to have been an inevitable route. I got asked if I wanted to go a class in rally obedience, which fairly soon turned into a bit of a lifestyle, loads of new friends and me being both a teacher, instructor and judge. We happened to go a weekend class in clicker training, started trick training horses, our dogs and the cat and about a year later we set up our first show. Which led to 15 years of creating shows for our own theater company. I don’t seem to have any control over my life, but it sure has been a lot of fun so far.

So I’ve no idea if this will be the start of something new, which I will get really into, or if this will turn out to be a bit of fun every now and then. Mind you, most of the things I’ve stumbled into have turned into some sort of job or other, so I will probably put up both free content and stuff you will need a paid subscription to see. I haven’t really checked out all the possibilities of Substack yet, but I’m hoping that this space will house everything that makes the theory behind dog training interesting to me, i.e. a page for me to publish texts, videos and maybe podcasts, but also a space for you to ask questions and participate in discussions. I will hopefully learn how to do this properly as we go along.

That said, you probably suspect by now that this will not be a straight forward page and I guess you will be right. I’m usually at my happiest when I can mix and connect everything I’m thinking about to get something else. I’m a hard core generalist, although I do have some nerdy corners. My subject at university was Area and Environmental Planning, a happy combination of architecture, biology and law with lots of smaller subjects sprinkled on top. Of course, I never worked in this field as that would be route one and also the Swedish planning authorities don’t like generalists at all. But every now and then, some university class or other comes in handy so it has not been a complete waste of time. And I never would have played Ultimate Frisbee if I hadn’t studied at that exact university. So this page will be a mixture of most things that happen to cross my mind, both new thoughts and things I learn as well as exercises and tips from different dog sports.

I’ve found it extremely useful to cross reference both training methods and exercises from all the sports my dogs have participated in over the years. One of the most complete and most structured dog training books ever written is Training Levels by Canadian dog trainer Sue Ailsby. I think it is her background in almost every dog sport on the planet that makes her approach pretty much all-encompassing and viable for dogs of all breeds, ages and personalities. So I’m going to share my insights from both rally obedience, freestyle, agility, THS, frisbee as well as the stuff I’ve learned from reading ethology and as an obedience instructor and teacher for the Swedish Working Dog Association. As I’m trying to base my training on scientific methods all training tips and exercises will be positive reinforcement only.

So here we go, me a bit nervous about how this will go and if anyone wants to read this, and you hopefully curious enough to try out to subscribe to my Substack.