Beyond Obedience: Training with Awareness for You and Your Dog

One of the most difficult aspects of training your dog is communicating your intentions clearly. Beyond Obedience is the first book that works on the way you communicate with your dog, providing you with the necessary tools to truly understand how your dog's mind works and, therefore, how you can create an effective and mutually satisfying relationship.

Drawing on her extensive experiences as an animal behaviorist, Frost teaches you that training your dog should not be a tedious chore limited to exerting physical and psychological control over an animal's drives, but instead an enriching and spiritually fulfilling experience--gratifying for both human and animal. Frost discusses such essential concepts as mutual respect, unconditional love, mental and emotional discipline, and your expectations and priorities. She shows you how the insights gained from working with your dog can have positive, far-ranging effects on many areas of your life.

Beyond Obedience revolutionizes dog training by addressing the spiritual, physical, and psychological needs of dogs and people, teaching them to communicate effectively through powerful techniques, including visualization and energy work, and offering them valuable insight into the emotional bonds that enrich the lives of animals and their companions.

Guidelines

• Dogs are born knowing how to bark, bite, dig, chew, chase, jump up on one another, eliminate when they need to, and snarl when they feel threatened. It is a challenge to get a dog to suppress or modify his instincts in order to make human existence more pleasant. If the dog reverts, you need to remember that these acts are not malicious; the dog is simply doing the best he can with information he has been given about living with and behaving in a socially acceptable way toward a totally different species.

• Dogs can learn whatever you can find a way to teach them, so long as it is within their physical capability to perform.

• Dogs, like humans, take the path of least resistance; they do only what works well and easily to satisfy their needs and desires. If it is a self-rewarding move, they will repeat and escalate the behavior, whether that behavior is in harmony or conflict with your wishes.

• Every dog has its own point of motivation, a trigger that will evoke a response and awaken its desire to respond to its human.
  
  
  Amazon.com Review
  April Frost philosophizes that the key to successful dog training lies in establishing a spiritual and psychological connection between dog and human. Like the Monks of New Skete, the widely respected authors of The Art of Raising a Puppy and How to Be Your Dog's Best Friend, Frost endorses "love and respect" for a dog and treating each one as a unique individual. Beyond Obedience is not structured with day-to-day accomplishment deadlines or strict training goals in mind. Instead, the emphasis is on the individual dog, who will grow and develop at his own rate. Every chapter aims to enhance the human-canine bond. Topics include the mind and energy connection, how dogs can teach us as human beings, and new ways to improve communication. The book also offers alternatives to traditional veterinary care as more and more pet owners look for less chemically harsh ways to treat animals. Herbal remedies for carsickness, soiling problems, and stress are a taste of these natural substitutes. Beyond Obedience is much more than a dog-training guide--it is a new way of viewing our relationships with our dogs. --Naomi Gesinger