dog listener

a friend from back home got us this book as an early wedding gift and it arrived in the mail yesterday. i read the first 6 chapters by the time i went to bed (and probably would have just stayed up all nite if i didn't have to work today). its really good and i'm excited to try these things out with wombat (once zac reads it too so we're both working together with it). basically instead of looking at dog obedience from the point that we are the human and the dog should do what we say and learn our language (which a dog will never fully do), we need to look at how dogs communicate and do it their way to be effective. once we start using the dog's way of communicating we can establish dominance in the our pack and make the dog listen to us without having to use force or yell. the first 4 chapters are pretty much background on how she came to these thoughts and tested them out on her own dogs (and she was fairly skeptical of the whole thing but she tried it time and time again and it worked). i'm hoping that by using her methods we can get wombat to fully realize she is not the alpha of the pack (i think she knows this a lot of the time cuz we do do things like make her eat after us and go thru doors after us but i think on walks she may still belive that she's leading the "hunt"). anyway, we'll try it out and see how it goes. we don't really have anything to lose if it doesn't help (although it is gonna be REALLY hard to ignore her and not make eye contact or talk to her any time we arrive home for a few minutes-- zac already called me cruel tonite cuz i ignored her when i came in).