Encourages children to take nature walks and hikes by relying on the family dog as their naturally skilled, enthusiastic trail guide and to post their outdoor adventures on the book's companion website. Original.

With The Essential Guide to Hiking with Dogs, you and your four-legged friend can be ready for anything the wilderness might throw at you. Set yourselves and others up for the very best hiking experience. Need-to-know topics are covered for the novice hiker or new owner, from trail etiquette to leave no trace ethics, important gear and packing guides to essential commands you should train on the trail. Featuring beautiful and illustrative photography, this must-have guide will inform and inspire any adventure dog and their parents. Inside you’ll find: Tips for minimizing impact on the trail and practicing dog hiking etiquette. Gear and packing lists. Multi-sport information including camping, backpacking, mountain biking, and paddle boarding with your dog. The very best hike to take with your dog in every state.

The Basset Hound has an unmistakable profile. They have the long, square snout, muscular body, and loose skin of their Bloodhound ancestors, but with short legs and a long, sabre-shaped tail. The olfactory ability of this breed is second only to the Bloodhound itself, and they are unrelenting once they have caught a scent. Both the short legs and the long, upwardly curved tail-which is tipped in white-are designed to make these stout hounds easier for hunters to follow on foot. Although they are enthusiastic hunters in the field, they tend to be calmer and more relaxed at home, sometimes to the point of laziness. Bassets are particularly agreeable animals, both with people and with other dogs, and they make excellent family companions as well as exemplary hunting hounds. They are typically gentle with young children, have a very pleasant disposition, and are comfortable in the role of everyone's best friend and confidant. Basset Hounds aren't right for everyone, however, as they can be stubborn, tend to be highly skilled counter-surfers, and frequently howl when left alone for long periods.

A comprehensive guidebook for dog owners that includes seventy-seven great hikes from the Adirondacks through the Catskills. Much more than a guidebook showing readers great places to hike with their canine companions in upstate New York, Doghiker is a dog owner’s operating manual and tool kit. A lifelong dog owner, Alan Via makes a strong case for responsible ownership and offers guidance on selecting a canine hiking companion, training, safety, appropriate gear, canine first aid, and keeping your dog fit and healthy. Covering the Adirondacks through the Catskills, and areas in between, this unique guidebook includes seventy-seven beautiful hikes that are great for dogs. Each hike has a custom topographic map showing parking areas, trails, viewpoints, water sources, and other points of interest. Included are a peak-finder map and chart showing every hike and a summary of rating categories, as well as information on total mileage, elevation gain, ratings for views, difficulty level, dog safety and hazards, hiker traffic, trail conditions, and whether a leash is suggested or required. Detailed driving directions for each outing, including GPS coordinates for key intersections and trailheads, are also provided. By presenting all of this information, drawn from Via’s forty-plus years of hike leadership, readers can easily evaluate which hike fits their needs and get outside and explore the great outdoors with their four-legged friends.

'Britain's top dog whisperer... a canine-human Esther Perel' The Observer Wouldn't you love to know what your dog was thinking? The truth is that your dog is communicating with you all the time but, unless you know the signs, you aren't picking up on what your dog wants you to know. Louise Glazebrook is a dog behaviourist, trainer and television presenter who specialises in teaching people how to understand and connect with their dogs. In The Book Your Dog Wishes You Would Read, Louise tackles everything from bringing the right dog home, understanding body language and breed behaviour, responding to common behavioural issues, to the toys and games that you and your dog will both love. Most dog trainers focus on the dog, but Louise focuses on you, the owner, giving you the skills and confidence to interpret your dog's needs and behaviour and build a better, happier relationship for life.

Help arrives for dog lovers in an indispensable guide to keeping pets happy and healthy, covering everything from vaccinations for puppies to the care needed for senior dogs and including more than one hundred illustrations and helpful diagrams. Original.

What we’re trying to do with this book is help the hunter to have another option, that option is to call in someone nearby with a trained blood tracking dog, YOU. These dogs can find deer that human hunters might walk right by. They are able to scent trail deer, even when there is no blood at all to follow. A trained tracking dog can lead its handler to a deer even several days after it was shot. And that is what this book is all about, getting you started on training a dog that can cut your deer tracking time in half and increase your recovery rate by 80 or 90 percent. Basically, training almost any dog to blood trail is simple. It’s so simple in fact that I can sum it up in just a few paragraphs. You don’t have to own a hound to train your own tracking dog. Any breed with the nose to follow a trail can be trained. I have seen everything from labs to Jack Russell terriers to dachshunds trained to trail deer. I personally have a black lab named “Tilly”, and a heeler/shepherd mix named “Diamond Cut”. In short, you would start out your training by making a game of it. You could use a strip of bacon or a piece of calf liver tied to a string as your first scent marker. To make sure the dog is following the calf liver or bacon scent and not yours tie the string to the end of a long pole to drag it well away from your own scent trail. As your dog become more adept at following the trail, you should start to make it more difficult by hopping the calf liver or bacon strip along the ground and lifting it for several feet between touches. Getting your dog fully trained to blood trail takes a lot of time and patience. But knowing how to get the dog motivated to track and stay with the right line from the beginning really pays off when working with hunters to recover their harvest. The best teacher is time spent with the dog and a lot of it! Time spent in the field tracking through the season and training the rest of the year. This is what it takes to form a bond. And that bond is strengthen and reinforced in life's journey with your blood trail dog! If I gave you no more information than what’s above you would have enough to get your dog started with blood trailing. But in reality, there is a lot more to be learned about tracking with a dog. So let’s get started now to build a complete training course for your new blood trailing student.