With the festivities surrounding St Patrick’s Day (and this being Ireland) we have had a short week this week and another short week next week, with Easter!
Awesome Pets & their People
Monday was a day filled with behaviour consults and we started with Bueno!
This guy spent most of his life confined but has now found a great new family who are doing lots to help him grow in confidence and to learn about the world.
Dogs like Bueno who are shy, reserved and take time to explore their world are most likely this way because they missed out on vital exposure and social experience early in life. Puppies who, in their first 3-5 months don’t have TONS of positive interactions and experiences will probably experience behavioural and emotional issues their entire lives.
People will often presume that they behave this way because they had bad experiences, were abused or neglected, but it doesn’t even require that. Simple lack of experience can be really damaging to a dog, and the effects will be felt for that dog’s entire life.
We got started with lots of foundations and introduced a way to help him learn how to control interactions, feel safe and boost his confidence:
Next up was PingPing who is named after a Panda!! And he has a sister called SingSing – also named after a Panda 🙂
We did lots of work on increasing responsiveness around other dogs and decreasing excitability.
We started with some great foundations and began to teach him that looking at another dog (at such a distance that we wasn’t getting wound up) means yummies and soon, when PingPing sees another dog he looks back to his person (hey! where’s my treat!?). Him playing the game tells us that he is becoming more comfortable too!
Next up for a consult was little Benny, who brought his tennis ball with him – the most important part!
This fella had been wandering as a stray but soon he found his new family and has really landed on his paws! With the help of his love of play and his awesome people this fella will be growing in confidence in no time!
Tuesday meant it was daytraining-with-Molly-time!
We got lots done and made some incremental improvements with her distraction and focus levels. We slowly introduce distractions and work at a level with which she can cope.
Here’s her playlist from session 3:
And our last consult was with this cheeky little chappie, Joey.
He was adopted just before Christmas and is growing in confidence more and more. Now with some great foundations in place along with a little work in some other areas, he will be an even more cracking little dog!
People Training
We have two new and excellent courses coming up soon and there are a couple of spaces left on each.
Teaching Puppies is probably one of our most important courses on offer. Puppy classes offer the most important education for puppies and their new people, helping to get everyone off on the right paw.
What’s most worrying is that anyone can offer puppy classes and they are routinely delivered by those who have no or very little education in training and behaviour! Beginner trainers will often attempt puppy classes as they appear the most straight forward, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Read more about this course here and share the info with people whom you think will benefit!
The Helping Rescue Dogs looks at what happens when the dog-human relationship hasn’t worked out and what we can do to improve that, with dogs’ welfare in mind.
We look at everything from the dogma in rescue to canine behaviour to assessing and improving the welfare of canines in various stages of the rescue process.
To improve the plight of rescue dogs we need educated, skilled and knowledgeable people on the inside, building it up from within. This course is designed to help make that difference.
Read more about this course here and share the info with people whom you think will benefit!
Wohoo! CBTT4
And more great news this weekend for our CBTT4 group who have completed all their work and are now fully-fledged Canine Behaviour & Training Technicians!
They have worked so hard over the last year and have completed over 90 credits worth of work – each credit equals about 10 hours of the learners’ investment…yep, that’s over 900 hours of studying, reading, analysing and practicing, practicing, practicing.
We can’t be more proud of our ever growing CBTT-family!
AniEd Dogs
While the boys got into the celebratory spirit….
Boomer was having none of it:
Have a good one!
AniEd Ireland 