Love Is All You Need: The Revolutionary Bond-Based Approach to Educating Your Dog
Jennifer Arnold
There are few people who understand dogs better than Jennifer Arnold. Twenty-five years after she founded Canine Assistants, a nationally recognized nonprofit that raises and provides service dogs for people with disabilities, Arnold had an epiphany. She’d always understood dogs to be uniquely, uncannily attuned to their human companions; in fact she depended on it—she knew that the bond that developed between a person and their service dog was the single greatest predictor of that partnership’s success and, conversely, failure to bond brought about anxiety and distress in dogs. But it wasn’t until recent scientific findings confirmed her hands-on experience with dogs’ intuitive social skills that she was willing to put this bold idea to the test: Dogs who bond with us completely and unconditionally will seek to please us and, with minimal cues, can learn to make remarkably sophisticated decisions about their own behavior.
In this groundbreaking, persuasive, and heartfelt book, Arnold shows us how every dog—no matter their age—can thrive through Bond-Based Choice Teaching. Her proprietary method has been hailed by leading canine behavioral scientists and is being adopted by notable dog trainers, advocates, humane societies, and puppies behind bars programs across the country. For this liberating, revolutionary method to succeed, Arnold says, love really is all you need.
In Episode 126 of the Working Like Dogs show, Jennifer Arnold, stops by to talk with Marcie and Lovey about her groundbreaking new book, Love is All You Need: The Revolutionary Bond-Based Approach to Educating Your Dog. Jennifer discusses her pioneering bond-based approach and talks in detail about her belief that we can teach dogs to figure out the action we want on their own instead of telling them what to do. She advocates this approach as a much more humane and loving way to communicate with our canines, and to prepare them to become more effective assistants to adults and children with disabilities. She also talks about her new creation, the We for Dogs Leash, the world’s first two-way, dog friendly leash. This new leash supports Jennifer’s training philosophy–one handle for you and one for your dog!
