I can’t wait to begin teaching and helping you in your pursuit of a solid working, social, and personal foundation with your dog. Building strong relationships can be a challenging process but it’s a journey that I have personally found to be extremely rewarding and meaningful.
The wonderful thing about dogs is that they give us honest feedback about how we engage with the world and they often require us to show up in ways that are more authentic. As we become more knowledgeable about what our dogs need from us for clear communication, we also become more self-aware and capable of cultivating great relationships both inside and outside of the home. The thing I love most about this course is that it doesn’t just make your dog better – it has the potential to change your entire life. I look forward to walking alongside you and guiding you in your pursuit of growth because I believe that you can reach your goals and dreams. If you are willing to be brave, try your best, and lean into the vulnerability of being a student, I am honored to be your teacher. I look forward to discovering the things that we can learn from each other and the dogs as we get started!
This course could easily be named "Foundations for life skills"!
For our training program it is training for dog and handler to enjoy the freedoms and joy created by reliable distance skills. There are three elements to "distance" foundation. First, it is creating the trust and confidence in each other to feel the beauty that connect creates when working your dog up close or at a distance. To be able to send your dog away from you and feel so closely connected through a partnership and teamwork.
Second, to be able to have a dog that not only send away, but has an amazing recall back to you, even when they are away from you.
Third, distance reliability is the trust and confidence created when the dog remains and the owner can leave and walk away from the dog and the dog remains in place without threatening commands and harsh body language.
Those are the three most important parts of distance reliability. To send the dog away from you to something specific, to be able to call the dog to you from a distance, and to be able to leave the dog in place while the owner moves away. All are very important parts of distance reliability.
The course is designed as a six month (26 weeks) program. Depending upon the owners schedules for training, some will take much longer than six months to complete and some will progress faster if the dog has more previous training that helps progress with some of the lessons.
The format is 26 modules, sometimes with 3-5 different topics within each module. Each lesson will need to be completed before there is access to the next lesson. Some of the criteria for moving to the next lesson will be either a video submission, a questionnaire, or a series of questions. We want each dog/handler team to fully understand the usefulness of each lesson and enjoy working the tasks for each lesson. Students can go as slowly as needed to ensure that they are enjoying the challenge of each lesson and their dog is loving the training and always wanting to learn more.
At the end of the course, the dog and handler will receive a graduation certificate and will have the skills to earn many other titles.
The only equipment required is 3-6 hoops, an object to be used as a barrel, and items that can be used as marks.
Each lesson will be explained how to teach each task, why the tasks are important, and there will be videos with a variety of different types of dogs to demo the learning process with different personalities, sizes, and temperaments of dogs. We will not use trained dogs to demo how to train a new behavior, so you will see lots of ways to create success. It is not required to watch the variety of training sessions, they are for your use and will all be separate. Then handlers can choose to follow only the types of personalities that match their dog and learn from those sessions, if they choose, or are limited on time.
