Karen Pryor Academy’s Dog Trainer Foundation course offers dogs and their humans what they really crave: fun together! When you build a solid foundation of positive reinforcement skills, your dog will transform into an excited and enthusiastic learner and you will have created a new level of partnership that will last a lifetime. In this video, Dog Trainer Foundations student Alison Shore and her Boston terrier, Alfie, demonstrate what is possible!
Erin Kidd, KPA CTP, came to positive-reinforcement training with a sigh of relief 15 years ago. Since she bought her first clicker years ago she has enjoyed training her own dogs, working with client dogs through her business Happy Bark Dog Training, and launching the training side of Brook-Falls Veterinary Hospital & Exotic Care Luxury Pet Resort, where she will offer group classes beginning in January 2020 in her role of dog trainer and training program designer.
Think you’re a great dog trainer? Try training a cat, bird, guinea pig, or horse! Training other species is not only fun, but it will ultimately improve your dog-training skills. Working with another species will hone your observations skills and sharpen mechanics such as clicker timing and reward delivery. Working with another species is an important part of the curriculum of Karen Pryor Academy’s Dog Trainer Professional and Dog Trainer Comprehensive courses! In this video, Dog Trainer Professional student Erica Grier, and Rambo the cat, demonstrate just how fun training another species can be!
A recent study out of Portugal led by Ana Catarina Vieira de Castro has been receiving attention, including press from the Bark and Psychology Today, among other sources. The study emphasizes what positive reinforcement trainers know: dogs blossom and thrive when they are trained with kindness and exhibit stress under even mild aversive training conditions.
Puppy training is more than socialization and problem-solving; it’s about setting the foundation for a lifelong partnership between people and their dogs. By building a solid foundation built from trust and respect, there is no limit to what a canine-human pair can do together! Watch this video to see what can be achieved when you have your puppy’s attention and trust.
Is your dog performing a new behavior reliably, but not necessarily when you want him to? Maybe you’re hoping for a sit, and your dog is frantically running through his entire repertoire trying to find a behavior that will earn a reward. When this happens, it means that you haven’t named the behavior yet—you haven’t added the cue.
Teaching your dog to tell the difference between left and right on cue is a fun exercise that is handier than it seems! It’s a terrific skill for many competition venues, including agility, herding, mushing, water dog, and retrieving. This behavior can also be handy walking on trails. Service dog owners could think of a dozen or more applications for “left” and “right.”
Laura Heyer, KPA CTP, an experienced educator of children with behavioral and developmental disabilities, has utilized—and extended—that special skill set in her pet-training career. A trainer at C&C PALS, she offers basic training and puppy classes as well as private, in-home training.
Waltham, MA, October 31, 2019—Karen Pryor Academy (KPA) and Lisa White, DVM, founder of Veterinary Behavior Management Solutions in Cincinnati, Ohio, are pleased to announce and congratulate the winners of the 2019 Zoe Shelter Scholarships to KPA’s Shelter Training & Enrichment course.
The shelter environment is stressful for dogs, and for the people who work there, but the environment is especially stressful for cats. In addition to losing all familiar contacts and past comforts, they are subjected to a constant barrage of alarming stimuli, including noise, strange smells, intrusions from unknown humans, close confinement, and the often-frightening sight and smell of other unfamiliar cats. While you can’t always change the physical environment, you can change the mental environment at a shelter by providing low-cost training and enrichment activities.
