Mike Dufort

Mike Dufort is a Senior Computer Software Engineer by trade, but his true love is dog training and obedience issues. He loves all animals and tries to avoid animal shelters at any cost (he will want to take them all home). At one time, he had 13 pets in all - from snakes to ferrets to multiple dogs – and somehow managed to teach them all to sit on command. (Author’s note: Well, except for the snakes. And the ferrets. Oh, the chinchillas and hedgehogs didn’t sit either. The dogs! The dogs did sit!) Researching animal behavior and obedience issues has been a passion of his for decades as well as writing his humor column Dungeon of Spew, hence the odd combination of the two in Courteous Canines.

	Works by Mike Dufort

What’s the purpose of Courteous Canines, you ask? I’ve read countless dog books in my lifetime but I still thought there was something missing...something I couldn’t quite put my finger on until a few years ago. The books I’ve read were generally great sources of information, but I found it difficult to get to the meat of my question or problem. “Just tell me how to stop my dog from chewing! I don’t care why they chew, what certain items will do to their gums/teeth, the history of why dogs chew, the ingredients of a chew bone, or how they make rawhide. My dog is chewing now and I need to know how to stop it!” I don’t care, at the moment, how to breed my dog. I don’t care about showing my dog. I don’t care about how to travel with my pet. I’m not interested in preventive dental care right this second. I don’t care about grooming. I just want some answers to the problems I’m having now. Sure, all of these issues are important and I’ve consumed everything there is to learn about them, but right now I want answers. Consider this book as sort of a cheat sheet for dog training if you will; short enough that it can be read in a few days, but rich enough to give practical answers to real problems. It’s really a supplement to the 3000 page books you may already have...not a replacement.

What makes this book different? The content is not just one person’s thoughts and advice; it’s a compilation built from hundreds of sources that have proven effective with dog training. It doesn’t try to tell you that one technique will “fix” any problem - one solution is not universally useful for all dogs. Instead, it presents several practical options to help solve your problems. And, most importantly, it marries actual training material with touches of humor!  Who wants to learn all the fancy Latin names for a type of canine parasite discovered in Timbuktu? Not I! Nor will this book teach such! Instead, let’s enjoy dog training – get a cold one and let’s have some fun with the subject without the monotonous proverbial professor tone perfected by Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (“Bueller? Bueller?”).