But First, Fun! Cooperative Care Training
live with Sara mcloudrey
A KPA LIVE!™ Class featuring real-time training and coaching WITH sara
A fun way to build skills and behaviors for canine cooperative care!
Join Sara McLoudrey and learn to make cooperative care fun for everyone.Cooperative care makes caring for your dog safer, less stressful, and more consistent. However, teaching dogs the behaviors needed for cooperative care can intimidate even the most well-intended trainers and pet guardians. A major challenge is fluency. Since cooperative care behaviors are required infrequently and set-ups are often time-intensive, it’s easy for dogs and trainers to lose interest. This class will help you clear those hurdles.
Imagine if the behaviors needed for cooperative care were fun to teach, learn, show others, and practice. For Sara, cooperative-care success is achieved with fun skills and “trick-style” behaviors that reinforce the learning process for her clients and their dogs. Cooperative care does not need to be “chore-full.” It should be joyful.
In each of the four class units, Sara will teach you to train fun new skills and tricks from the ground up and connect these behaviors to their cooperative-care uses. Sara makes the training easy using objects you have around your house or can access or create.
Additionally, both Excel and Engage students will learn how Sara coaches learners to experience cooperative care fun so you can incorporate Sara’s methods into your work with clients.
You will learn and practice:
- how to train multiple trick behaviors that are fun to practice outside of the cooperative-care context
- how to utilize these tricks when you are working toward your care goals
- how to recognize when your dog is consenting and ready to proceed
- how to regain momentum in your cooperative-care training
- how to jump-start your clients’ progress toward their care goals with engaging games and teaching techniques
Excel students will learn and practice:
- training multiple trick behaviors that are useful in veterinary and husbandry settings and fun to practice outside of the cooperative-care context
- generalizing cooperative-care tricks so that your dog builds fluency across contexts
- mechanical skills that set up you and your dog for success in trick training and transfer directly into successful cooperative-care practice
- the skills to continue to build your care program long after class has ended
Where and When!
- Content unlocks on September 10.
- Teaching support and the discussion board begin on September 24.
- Zoom classes will be held on Tuesdays: October 1, October 8, October 15, and October 22. Classes will begin at 2:00 PM PT / 5:00 PM ET and are two hours long.
Can’t make the Live classes? No worries! The Zoom classes are recorded and made available shortly after each class concludes. You can access all of the recorded material for an entire year!
LEARN, PRACTICE, SHARE
LEARN
Six weeks of training, a week-by-week curriculum integrated with four LIVE virtual classes with real-time coaching, interactive learning, and Q&A. Super educational, super fun.
PRACTICE
The LIVE week-by-week curriculum integrates with, and prepares you for, the weekly LIVE class. New levels of advancement each week!
SHARE
Ask questions and share insights, pics, and your training videos. Celebrate progress together!A week-by-week curriculum guides your learning every step of the way. Each week, join your classmates for one of four LIVE classes for real-time training and personalized interactive coaching, plus Q&A with your instructor. You will see other students practice the behaviors, hear your instructor’s feedback, make adjustments, and improve their training. Each of these Zoom-based classes is two hours long. All students get access to the full week-by-week curriculum and class forum. In each Zoom class:
- Engage students watch training and your instructor’s coaching and can ask questions through Zoom chat.
- Excel students get personalized real-time coaching and feedback on their training during the Zoom class PLUS on-screen Q&A.
Miss a class? No problem. LIVE classes are also recorded.
Let's Begin This Fabulous Journey, Together
- Discussion Board Opens: September 24th
- Live Class 1: October 1st
- Unit 2 Lessons
- Live Class 2: October 8th
- Unit 3 Lessons
- Live Class 3: October 15th
- Unit 4 Lessons
- Live Class 4: October 22nd
LEARN WITH Sara mcloudrey
Sara McLoudrey is the founder and owner of Decisive Moment Pet Consulting. She specializes in Care with Consent (cooperative care), a variety of behavioral struggles and aggression, helping senior dogs thrive, and living with intact dogs. Sara is a Certified Dog Behavior Consultant (CDBC), CPDT-KSA, Fear Free Certified Professional Level 1 and Certified Trainer - Elite, Low-Stress Handling Certified, Pet End of Life Doula, FitPaws Master Trainer, and TagTeach Level 3.
Since 2001 Sara has been competing with positively trained dogs in retriever field tests, high-level competition and rally obedience (Utility and RAE level), conformation, and elite-level nose work. She founded ROOT Dog Training in 2004 and opened the first positive reinforcement training facility on Chicago’s North Shore in 2012. In 2016 Sara moved to Portland, Oregon, and joined Synergy Veterinary Behavior. There she was instrumental in expanding their Behavior Modification services and mentoring the growing team of trainers.
Over the years, she has seen how our relationships with dogs have changed and even how the “positive/force free/clicker” training world has evolved. For Sara, it is inspiring to help continue and promote this growth mindset for fellow trainers, behavior consultants, and pet guardians.
Even though Sara’s behavior consulting practice focuses on complex and sometimes dangerous behavior struggles, she is known for bringing fun, creative problem-solving, joy, and laughter to her classes and sessions. Sara is an optimist at heart, a perpetual Pollyanna, and loves teaching clients they have the power - they are their dog’s magic wand!
For more information about Sara, check out her Website, Instagram, and Facebook pages.
Here's What You'll Be Learning UNIT by UNIT
1
Foundation For fun!
Jump right into fun foundational tricks and skills. These behaviors are the foundation for other behaviors introduced in the coming weeks.
List of Skills/Behaviors:
- Intro to the shaping game, capture game, luring chair game
- Middle/Peek-a-boo game (sit, stand, duration, and look up - possibly adding duration)
- Pop (moving out of peek-a-boo while moving backward, and staying behind)
- Face in Things (pre-muzzle/pre-cone) - put face in all the things
- 4-Paws On (how to build it and how to add release/change body position/change surfaces)
- Stand on Cue
- Release Cue (primer - refined over class)
- (BONUS BEHAVIOR) Shake-off
2
Heads up!
Heads up! Unit Two is all about tricks involving the head. These skills are a blast to train. They help you and your dog transition more easily to practical behaviors for dental care, ear and eye care, and wearing the recovery cone.
List of Skills/Behaviors:
- Open mouth with or without an object
- Focus: duration staring at treats (hold still)
- Recovery Cone Training (building upon “Face in Things” to using a cone/box/posterboard) and cued back out with “pop” behavior
- Head Target (lift chin/raise neck)
3
fancy feet
Fun and “sole-full!” We are having fun with feet in Unit 3. Learners are taught tricks that involve using their feet in preparation for scale training, paw soaking, cleaning, nail trims, exams, and more.
List of Skills/Behaviors:
- 2-Paws On (variety of surfaces, duration, adding inspection of undercarriage)
- Paw Targeting (to objects - from all positions) - add pressure
- If ya’ fit’ ya’ sit - placing all four feet in objects (different positions and box sizes, and varying duration)
- Cookie Sheet Fun (stay in positions until released; mimic exam tables and scales)
4
Level up!
Take cooperative care trick training to the next level. This Unit introduces a few new skills. It also explains how to level up the skills from earlier Units and bridge them into cooperative-care behaviors that remain fun and engaging for you and your dog.
List of Skills/Behaviors:
- Backward peek-a-boo(ty) - for nails, injections, hind-end inspections)
- Bandage a leg or paw (build from paw targeting an object)
- Clothing - build on head target and cone
- (BONUS BEHAVIOR) Hold Still and Freeze in the position at which the student/dog team excels
