Our Training Philosophy...

We believe it is important to help owners communicate with their dog through learning to interpret the dog’s body language. This is accomplished by helping owners build confidence through teaching problem-solving strategies via Positive Training methods.

Using a Positive Training approach means we teach you how to use a reward-based system to reinforce your dog when he/she responds correctly. The reward can be in the form of treats, verbal praise and pets and/or a favorite toy. Initially, the rewards are given every time the dog performs the command correctly, as the dog offers the performance of the commands more consistently, we will teach you how to phase out the treats.

The more rewarding a dog finds a particular reinforcement, the more work the dog will do to obtain the reward. We have found that in the process of training dogs, follow through when teaching a command is very important and this can be accomplished through using positive training methods. Also, once a dog has learned how to perform the basic commands consistently, the owners can learn how to use the basic commands and their understanding of the dog’s body language to shape the dog’s behavior.

We have also found that it is very important that as many family members as possible participate in the training sessions because most of the training is actually geared toward the humans!!!

We believe training should be enjoyable for both you and your dog. Our hope is that we can help you enjoy your dog as much as we enjoy our dogs.

Overview of the Initial Consult

• During this initial consult we come out to your home to meet with the family and to observe how your dog interacts with the family members. At that time we also have the opportunity to assess how we could provide individually based training services to help meet your goals of training your dog…and make him/her a better family member.
• There is no obligation to hire us after the initial consult but should you decide to do so, we offer training on an as-needed-basis in your home environment on your schedule.
• We also will send (via e-mail unless otherwise specified) a summary of each session (does not include the initial consult) so the humans do not have to worry about “taking notes” on what we discussed during the session and you will have the summaries to refer to for future reference.