Photo courtesy of Ralph Long

Author Lorie Long relaxes at her Franklin County home with her border terriers Dash (standing on her lap) and Chase. Long will sign copies of her new book, "A Dog Who's Always Welcome," at Barnes and Noble Booksellers at Tanglewood Mall on Saturday.

Like most dog owners, Lorie Long wants to be able to confidently take her dogs to any pet-friendly public place and know they will behave.

The Franklin County author, who has raised, trained and written about dogs for 25 years, travels frequently with her three dogs as they compete in agility sports.

Long also knows there is no better model for canine social skills than the service dogs that assist disabled people; these are dogs that are so well-mannered they are welcomed anywhere.

Long wanted to know what the trainers who teach assistance dogs knew about creating perfectly polite pooches through the process of socialization. How are these dogs taught to remain quiet, calm and composed in even the most hectic of places?

She spent a year researching the process at various assistance training organizations, including Roanoke's St. Francis Service Dogs, and shares her findings in her second book "A Dog Who's Always Welcome: Assistance and Therapy Dog Trainers Teach You How to Socialize and Train Your Companion Dog," published by Howell Book House.

Long will sign copies and discuss her book at two events this week: First at Barnes and Noble Booksellers in Tanglewood on Saturday at 2 p.m. and then at Westlake Library at 6:30 p.m.

In the meantime, she answers a few questions about her experience.

Q: What inspired you to write this book?

I had been training for quite a long time and I wanted to help dog owners to find a way to round out their dog's behavior and go beyond teaching the typical behaviors like "sit" and "down," and "stay," which are all very useful but only a part of the picture in owning a dog.

There was something missing from what you usually get in a six-week obedience training class of specific behaviors. I went out to find the piece that made dogs a companion in every aspect of a person's life.

I wasn't sure where to find that until I was exposed to an assistance dog and watched the assistance dog work and saw that dog was exhibiting all of the kinds of behaviors and interactions with her human that I was trying to capture for my students.

Q: What is socialization?

[It's] desensitizing the dog to a wide variety of environments through managed and repeated exposure -- sort of building a reference library in his head -- of things not to be concerned about, not to be distracted by, not to be afraid of.

Once he has that huge reference library in his head of things that are of no concern to him at all, then you can take him anywhere, do anything with him, train any behaviors you want, and he's a solid dog.

Q: Do you think most dogs and dog owners can achieve at least some level of a service dog's socialization?

The book will not turn every dog. However, it will make every dog into the best companion dog they can be. ...

The goal of the book is to teach people how to make their dogs the best companion they can be.

Q: What are some things that dog owners can do to begin to properly socialize their dogs?

The first thing to do is evaluate your lifestyle and identify what the dog is going to be doing with you in your life. I would then ... begin to expose them to those kinds of things that they will be asked to handle in their life.

Take a look at what your dog, as your companion, will be asked to handle, incorporate [that] into his social skills, and begin to expose him to those things in a controlled way.

Q: If dog owners decide to improve their dogs' social skills, how much time should they plan to invest?

It's more important to do the social training properly than it is to do it a lot. ... For a new puppy, you've got them at a great time in their lives when the window is wide open for socialization. You can "immunize" them against the pressures of living in human society.

If I had a new puppy I would take them out five or six days a week -- take them to new settings, new environments, new places, make sure they interacted and saw different objects ... and people, all kinds of people.

Q: What's the one message you would like readers to take from this book?

There's a whole separate set of skills for dogs, and those are socialization or emotional skills, and those skills deserve as much time and attention in a dog's training program as behavioral skills. And indeed, if those skills are trained first, the behavioral program becomes much easier.