Training Classes

Dog training classes are as much about training the owners as they are the dogs. That’s actually the real reason its important to find a trainer whose philosophy meshes with yours. If you can’t be consistent or follow through, your dog may learn, but they certainly won’t consistently obey.

I have great respect for people who do clicker training, only positive reinforcement. But I can’t wrap my head around it working in every day situations. I understand rewarding my dog for good behavior and that definitely works. I also understand trying to ignore bad behavior, but that doesn’t consistently work, especially since there’s the in between acceptable behavior that is 60+% of what your dog is doing and you’re probably ignoring because your busy and your pet isn’t drawing your attention.

I know ignoring bad behavior feels different to us, because we are pointedly not giving the dog any feedback. But it doesn’t matter how it feels to us, it matters how the dog understands it, and they really don’t know the difference between me pointedly ignoring them when they are barking out the window, or me ignoring them because I’m watching TV while they sleep nearby.

This meant that is searching for a class, we needed to find a trainer that believed in positive reinforcement, but also in limited negative reinforcement, as well.

My other goal for a trainer was someone who would talk to me before I gave them money.

I had some specific concerns I wanted to speak with someone about before bringing Moree in to a multi-dog class. He was on-leash aggressive, which was one of our concerns, something I wanted the trainer to be aware of, and to have some ideas how to handle before we ended up in a situation.

Believe it or not, this was more difficult criteria to meet. Almost every trainer I talked to simply replied with something along the lines of pay for the class and we’ll deal with it.

That’s why I was so thrilled when I got a response from the trainers at PawsAbilities. They replied this was common, told me how their classes were handled to prevent problems from this, offered to have us come watch any class we wanted, and said that if we were still concerned, we could bring Moree by in advance to get some work in.

The classes ended up being wonderful for us and the dogs. Smokey still retains much of what he learned, and we use many of the training techniques we learned with June. (And used them with Moree, too.)

Because of this, I was extra sad to learn recently that the husband of the husband and wife team of trainers at PawsAbilities died a couple of years ago, and his wife is considering shutting down the business. They were wonderful people who taught a great class.