In this episode I chat with Sue Sternberg, a world renowned dog behavior expert who has devoted her personal and professional life to helping dogs and people live together happily.
We talk about the street dogs we had the pleasure of observing when we were together in Valle De Bravo, Mexico, and the profound difference in behavior with dogs in the United States. I also pick Sue’s brain on her fascinating insight into dog body language and red flags for aggression, and we dive deeper into the reason why we might be seeing an increase in aggression cases overall. Hopefully, this episode will generate some much needed conversation about how we are getting dogs and bringing them into our human lives.
AggressiveDog.com
Aggression in Dogs Conference
Sue's website:
https://www.suesternberg.com
About Sue:
Sue has been working in shelters and as a dog trainer since 1981. Sue was the 2016 recipient of the APDT's Lifetime Achievement Award. She founded the shelter featured in the HBO documentary: Shelter Dogs. Her over 40 years of canine behavior experience includes as a dog control officer, behavior consultant at the ASPCA, shelter owner, successful competitor in a variety of dog sports (with Nose Work being her current wild favorite) and a teacher of dog trainers world-wide. She has published many books and DVDs on all aspects of dog behavior, training and assessments, available through www.Dogwise.com and www.TawzerDog.com.
Her latest book from Dogwise, is Assessing Aggression Thresholds in Dogs —Using the Assess-A-Pet Protocol to Better Understand Aggression. Sue has been developing and refining assessment techniques for decades to help shelter workers and trainers determine the likelihood that a dog will engage in aggressive behaviors. This book includes Sue’s newest protocols based on the theory that sociability is the key predictor of a dog’s potential for aggression.
Sue’s newest DVD project is a giant, lifetime video collection of discrete behaviors serving as a catalog of body language—over three hours of an intensive study guide to dogs, available through Dogwise.
Sue is a hobby paleontologist, and spends as much free time as she can exploring the desert with her dogs looking for fossils and also pretty rocks. She loves all things Star Trek, is an avid tea drinker, and plays the fiddle, too.