They are scenarios familiar to anyone who has ever had a dog:
• You cry, “Sit!” to make your dog stop jumping and spinning so you can get the collar on him for a walk. But he doesn’t sit. Instead he jumps and spins and frolics until you have to grab him. You do this four times a day for ten years (4 x 365 x 10 = 14,600 times), and he still doesn’t get it.
• You yell, “Down!” when your dog plants her two front paws on the chest of a visitor to your home, as though asking for a dance. (Or, worse, she shoves her nose in the visitor’s crotch.) But she doesn’t get down. Instead she looks at you and wags her tail as though to say, “Some fun, huh?”
• You come home to find your dog cringing, his tail between his legs and looking as guilty as sin. It’s just as you feared: he’s rooted through the kitchen garbage can and scattered its contents as far as the living room. You rub his nose in it and cry, “Bad dog! No!” He looks contrite and apologetic. The next time you go out, he does it again.
• You’re out doing the right thing, hiking with your dog. You take her off-leash because, what the hell, she loves it, and everybody else is doing it. She sees her friends and runs off. When you call after her, she pretends that she doesn’t know you or—worse—that she’s deaf. This continues to the point where you have to scream at the top of your lungs, “Who wants a cookie?!” so that every dog but yours comes running, and all the other dog owners look at you with disdain and pity because you can’t control your own dog even with cookies.
People and dogs have lived in symbiosis from literally the beginning of civilization, and still, after 200,000 years, we can’t keep the dog from jumping up on the dining room table and eating all the hamburger buns. We coax and scold and bribe and berate and threaten and praise. We’re nice. We’re not-nice. Nothing works. What can we do?
The Rabbis of the Boca Raton Theological Seminary have developed a technique that works, and they’ve (finally!) decided to share it with the world.
From purebreds to hybrids to mutts, from puppies to old-timers, literally any dog—and, just as important, any owner—can benefit from the Rabbis’ program. It doesn’t matter if you’ve tried other dog training plans or if this is your first one. And you don’t have to be Jewish.
How did we meet the Rabbis and come to be involved with this project? That happened thanks to what at the time seemed like nothing more than a routine chain of circumstances: Barbara’s cousin’s roommate’s sister’s boyfriend’s therapist’s mother had a pug named Sam. Sam went through the Rabbis’ training and came out a changed dog. Word naturally filtered back, and we decided to see what this program was all about.
Look familiar? Rabbi Monica feels the frustration and despair of many dog owners today. It is for them that this book was written.
It has been our privilege to work with the small but dedicated group of clergymen-scholar dog trainers who have made the name “Boca” synonymous with canine obedience. We would like to thank Rabbi Paul, Rabbi Alan, Rabbi Monica, Rabbi Mark, and Rabbi Mary-Margaret, as well as all the other faculty and staff of the BRTS for their good humor, their deep dedication, and, above all, their abiding faith that the way to teach a dog to behave properly is to make sure it knows it will never be without you, and then to overwhelm it with love.
— Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman Los Angeles