Chill Out Fido!: How to Calm Your Dog

Dogwise Training Manual

By: Nan Kene Arthur

Narrated by: Sherrice Williams

Does your dog go bonkers when the doorbell rings or when you grab the leash to take him for a walk? If you find your dog is often difficult to control, you are not alone!

Getting your dog to calm down and relax is one of the most common challenges pet parents face. This two-part book will help you first identify the factors that cause this kind of behavior in dogs, then it provides you with eleven key training exercises to teach your dog how to calm down, pay attention to you, relax, and respond to every day situations with confidence and composure.

Chill Out will show you how to help your dog become the great dog you always knew he could be.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2009 Dogwise Publishing (P)2025 Dogwise Publishing

Training Bible

This book was worth the time & notes I took from it. I thought it was going to just be about how to calm an anxious, hyper or fearful dog. There is much more to it. Recognizing a canine’s breed, what it was bred to do, giving an outlet for those not so great behaviors is key. The author does this through training.

What I liked about this book was that it is laid out in an organized, step-by-step format that is very easy to follow. At the same time, the author gives interesting examples & stories, which keep the book from seeming like a manual. This is a nice addition to a training library & a very useful book for someone who is committed to having a well~ behaved companion.

Effective training program

This is an incredible dog training book that includes clear training exercises to help your dog learn to be calmer and stay in thinking brain. The training steps are detailed and broken out with what the goal is, what equipment you'll need, about how long it will take to fully train, each step, and troubleshooting. The steps listed are clear and concise with steps for advancing the skill so it works in daily life. There are pictures to go along with the exercises, some of which show one step. I would have liked there to be more pictures of the skill steps and for them to be in color, but this is a minor flaw. These are effective skills to help a dog learn to chill out and while some may be obvious to experienced dog guardians and dog trainers, they are likely new skills for typical dog guardians. It's important to note that exercise one, relax on a mat, is not a place behavior, but training your dog to relax/ settle on a mat which is a crucial life skill I teach in all of my intro dog training classes. A stay in a place skill can be a more active skill as the dog can be fixated on the treats and it's sometimes trained more like an active stay than go to your place and then relax. That difference is crucial and the foundation to all the others. Many of these exercises are ones I already use in my dog training classes, including my focus class and others are ones I'm considering including. I read this book twice because the information is so helpful and well thought out. I immediately made one tweak to how I teach polite greetings.

The reason for the slight ding to the 5 star rating is because of Exercise 10: Keep Calm While Being Handled. First, the title is misleading as it's really teaching a dog to be okay being led around by a collar, which isn't a skill I recommend in the first place, and is sort of an implied leave-it. I don't think it's necessary or helpful for chilling out a dog. The implied leave-it covered in exercise 3: automatic eye contact is sufficient to teach calm behavior with food. My biggest problem with this skill is that it's going to be very frustrating for a food motivated dog and it doesn't teach a dog what you want them to do. Instead, it relies on trial and error and this can be really challenging for over excited dogs. This can hurt your relationship with your dog as well as prevent success in teaching this skill. The better way to teach collar handling is to pair a good treat with touching the collar, moving the collar, and then moving the dog with the collar. It's also simpler. I'm not sure why this skill is included but if it wasn't, it would be a 5 star book. The audiobook was incredibly well done and the narrator did an amazing job of keeping it engaging, which is not always true of nonfiction work. Thank you to Dogwise Publishing for providing me with a review copy of this audiobook. All opinions are my own.