How to Be Your Dog's Best Friend: The Classic Training Manual for Dog Owners

382 Pages·2002·5.2 MB·English

by  Monks of New Skete

Contents
Preface to the Second Edition
Acknowledgments
An Introduction to Training
1. Myths, Mutts, and Monks
2. How New Skete Went to the Dogs
3. What Is a Dog?
4. Some Important Terms
5. Selecting a Puppy or Older Dog
6. Researching Canine Roots
7. How to Read a Pedigree
8. Where to Find Training
9. The Concept of Praise in Dog Training
10. Discipline: The Taboo Topic
11. What's Cooking?
12. Grooming Your Dog
13. The Inner Dimension of Training: In the Beginning Is the Relationship
Environments
14. Canine Environments
15. City Life
16. Suburban Life
17. Country Life
18. Outdoor Life
Sensitivity Exercises
19. Your Dog May Be Lonely
20. Where Is Your Dog This Evening?
21. Playing Pavlov
22. Silence and Your Dog
23. Radio Training
24. Massage for Dogs
25. The Round-Robin Recall
26. Keeping Fit for Life
27. Avoid Canine Incarceration!
28. Children and Dogs
Starting Off Right
29. Puppy Training
Standard Obedience Exercises
30. Starting Out
31. Equipment
32. Heeling
33. The Stay
34. The Recall
35. The Down
36. The Down-Stay
37. About Obedience Competition
Problems
38. Understanding Your Dog's Personality: The Problem Explained
39. House Training
40. Chewing, Digging, and Jumping Up
41. Protection Training and Attack Training
42. Alarm Barking
43. Aggressive Behavior, or How to Deal with a Canine Terrorist
44. Behavior In and Out of Cars
45. Social Implications of Training
46. When a Dog Dies: Facing the Death of a Dog
A Parting Word
47. Dogs and the New Consciousness

Select Reading List
Appendix: AKC Titles and Abbreviations
How to Be Your Dog's Best Friend
The Monks of New Skete
How to Be Your Dog's Best Friend
THE CLASSIC TRAINING MANUAL FOR DOG OWNERS
Completely Revised and Updated

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY
Boston New York London
Copyright © 2002 The Monks of New Skete

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Second Edition

ISBN: 978-0-7595-2438-5
To our many clients over
the years, whose love for
their dogs has been a constant
source of inspiration for us
Also by the Monks of New Skete
DOG CARE AND TRAINING
The Art of Raising a Puppy

SPIRITUALITY
In the Spirit of Happiness
Learning the value of silence is learning to listen to, instead of screaming at,
reality: opening your mind enough to find what the end of someone else's
sentence sounds like, or listening to a dog until you discover what is needed
instead of imposing yourself in the name of training.
— THOMAS DOBUSH, Monk of New Skete (October 9, 1941–November 7,
1973), in Gleanings, the Journal of New Skete, Winter 1973

I love inseeing. Can you imagine with me how glorious it is to insee, for
example, a dog as one passes by. Insee (I don't mean inspect, which is only a
kind of human gymnastic, by means of which one immediately comes out again
on the other side of the dog, regarding it merely, so to speak, as a window upon
the humanity lying behind it, not that,) — but to let oneself precisely into the
dog's very center, the point from which it becomes a dog, the place in it where
God, as it were, would have sat down for a moment when the dog was finished,
in order to watch it under the influence of its first embarrassments and
inspirations and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could
not have been better made . . . Laugh though you may, dear confidant, if I am to
tell you where my all-greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was to
be found, I must confess to you: it was to be found time and again, here and
there, in such timeless moments of this divine inseeing.
— RAINER MARIA RILKE, New Poems, Translated by J. B. Leishman

But now ask the beasts and let them teach you,
And the birds of the air and let them tell you,
Or speak to the earth and let it inform you,
And let the fish of the sea recount to you.
Which among these does not know that the hand of God has done this,
In whose palm is the life of every living thing,
And the breath of every human being?
— Job 12:7–10