Dog training

how we’ll help:

Obedience (or manners) training isn’t only for those hoping to excel in competitions - it is an ongoing part of helping your dog to be a great companion. Not only that, training is good for mental and physical stimulation. It can be a time to bond with your dog and can also decrease or eliminate behavioural issues.  

Investing in training can help ensure your dog stays safe and learns to behave appropriately. Whether your dog is newly adopted or you want to teach your adult dog some new tricks, putting the time into training is always a good investment.

What we’ll address:

Not coming when called, jumping up to greet, destructive chewing and/or digging, child/dog relations, loose leash walking, demand and watchdog barking.

How we’ll help:

Gone are the days when we made our beloved pets suffer through vet visits. Training specific behaviours and building positive associations with all things veterinary related can make a huge difference in not only our dogs’ experiences, but ours as well. 

Overcoming the fear that can be associated with going to the vet takes a careful approach, and often one that needs to be built over time. By using processes known as desensitisation and counterconditioning, and building behaviours at home that can be later replicated in more challenging circumstances, we can help your dog feel more comfortable with the vet, and with all aspects of veterinary care.

With puppies, we have the opportunity to help them feel comfortable with veterinary care before the fear sets in, and we can make the whole process fun and stress-free. This will allow for a lifetime of care that is co-operative in nature, and becomes something you do with rather than to your dog.

WHAT We’ll address:

Comfort being in the waiting and consultation rooms, stepping onto the scale, being on a table, and all aspects of body handling and familiarisation with instruments to allow examinations of mouth, ears, eyes etc. Temperature taking, stethoscope on the chest, and injections/blood tests.

How we’ll Help:

It is not uncommon for dogs to react on leash by barking, lunging and pulling, even when normal leash manners have been addressed and the dog walks nicely until they encounter something or someone to trigger the reaction. It can be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to know why they are doing this, just by watching them in action - a dog who is excited and desperate to greet another dog can look very similar to one who is acting out in the hope the other dog will go away.

In order to establish the best way to address the issue, we will need to discuss your dog’s behaviour not only on leash but in other contexts such as when playing off leash with other dogs, or when strangers visit your home.

We can teach your dog to choose another behaviour (e.g. sit, watch, leave it) to help them feel more comfortable and less frustrated. This behaviour will be first trained at home before the dog is asked to perform under gradually increasing levels of distraction, step by step. However, if fear is a factor we can also use techniques to help your dog feel better about the trigger, such as pairing every sighting with awesome food, without having to perform any behaviour. These techniques, when implemented correctly under the guidance of a qualified trainer, and used in addition to avoiding triggers or moving quickly away from close encounters until your dog is ready, can make a huge difference to future behaviour.

How we’ll Help:

Resource guarding of food, objects or locations is a natural behaviour for dogs. They have inherited software from their ancestors that doesn’t serve them well in today’s world where food and other resources are rarely in short supply.

If the guarding is mild, and nobody is being hurt or scared, we can choose to ignore it or manage their environment so they don’t feel the need to guard, but if it becomes a problem there are techniques we can use to change the behaviour.

We can help reduce their paranoia by teaching them to love being approached when they are eating, are on their favourite resting place, or to want you to take their stuff away – it always predicts something better.