Graeme Sims

Graeme Sims has a new website, The Graeme Sims Method - and dog lovers in Italy are in for a treat, as it's a bi-lingual website. Now not only English speakers can discover Graeme's wonderful life story, his love of dogs and his training methods. I've met Graeme many times and he is always delightful company, full of insights into dogs' minds, and never short of an amusing or thought-provoking anecdote. I will never forget watching him work nine sheepdogs simultaneously, it was amazing.

I was invited onto the Radio 5 breakfast show this morning to discuss whether dogs should be sleeping on their owner's bed. This is the second time I've been asked on to talk about this issue, and it's one that rumbles around and erupts into the news every so often. Interestingly, the latest survey in the UK has found that almost double the amount of dog owners in Scotland share their bed with a pet than the rest of us further south, and I think it's possibly because the weather up there is slightly cooler.

I was recently asked what was the best dog related advice I had been given. It was quite an easy question really, because something Graeme Sims said sprang straight into my mind. He said that the secret of good training was to love your dog so much that they can't resist you. I think that applies to life with a dog in general, not just training, but certainly if you apply that to life in general with a dog, I think you get better training results.

We've just got home from a highly enjoyable visit to Graeme and Maureen Sims. Graeme has a book out later this month, and having read it, I can thoroughly recommend it. Give a Dog a Home focuses on how best to settle rescue dogs into their new homes, and how to approach training them. Graeme uses two rescues dogs he has taken in, to illustrate how it can require lateral thinking to come up with a training regime that suits the dog. The interview we recorded today with Graeme will be in a DogCast Radio show later this year.

The book is a great read; Graeme is a brilliant