Cooperative care: husbandry at home
with laura monaco torelli
A KPA LIVE!™ Class featuring real-time training and coaching WITH laura
Learn to make your canine care, "care-free."
Join Laura Monaco Torelli and bring cooperative care practices into your home and the stress out of routine care, from nail trims to ear drops and more!.Cooperative Care makes husbandry and veterinary care safe, low-stress, and significantly easier for animals and their caregivers.
Dogs need frequent care, including nail trims, weighing, muzzling, blood draws, injections, ear ointments, eye drops, and more. Yet, administering that care is stressful for everyone involved; animals run from the nail trimmer or hide when the ear drops come out. Each scary experience may even become a withdrawal from the “trust bank” caregivers build with dogs.
Cooperative Care is a better way. In this LIVE class, you will learn how to make ear drops a breeze, eye drops routine, weighing fun, and nail trims voluntary. Cooperative Care practices don’t just take the stress out of these husbandry behaviors, they strengthen the relationship between you and your dog(s). Did we mention Cooperative Care is actually fun?
Teacher and trainer Laura Monaco Torelli specializes in Cooperative Care and has taught those practices to trainers, pet guardians, veterinary staff, and zoological professionals globally. For Laura, success in canine Cooperative Care begins with learning Cooperative Care skills for husbandry at home.
In this four-week, four-unit LIVE virtual class, you will learn and practice the proven training strategies and techniques that Laura uses to transform the care experience and deepen the relationship between caregivers and their animals, right from your home. You will get right to work with your dog building a solid care-behavior base, including stationing, chin rest, and lateral recumbency behaviors, under specific environmental conditions and from specific positions. You will learn how to arrange your home environment to make success easy, how to use props to build approximations, and how to cultivate a variety of reinforcers that make the care behaviors rock-solid.
As the class progresses, you will learn how to build stimulus control under a variety of conditions and environments. Your Cooperative Care procedures can be extended to include assistants and other caregivers and to multiple locations, both inside and outside your home—even on a walk or in a vet office. By the end of the class, you will be amazed at the Cooperative Care skills you and your dog have developed and by the profound changes you have created for the routine care that your dog needs.
Whether you enroll as an Engage or Excel student, you get access to the full curriculum as soon as you enroll. Class begins in the discussion forum on March 6th and live Zoom sessions occur weekly on Wednesdays at 3 PM PT/6 PM ET on March 13, March 20, March 27, and April 3.
Teaching Cooperative Care is Laura’s number-one training passion. She is a skilled trainer and a gifted teacher, communicator, and collaborator. Laura brings all of those gifts and her warm energy to this class specifically created for the KPA LIVE class format.
LEARN, PRACTICE, SHARE
LEARN
Four 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 Laura. You will see other students practice the behaviors, hear Laura’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 Laura’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
- Unit 1 Lessons
- Live Class 1: March 13th at 3PM PT/6PM ET
- Unit 2 Lessons
- Live Class 2: March 20th at 3PM PT/6PM ET
- Unit 3 Lessons
- Live Class 3: March 27th at 3PM PT/6PM ET
- Unit 4 Lessons
- Live Class 4: April 3rd at 3PM PT/6PM ET
LEARN WITH laura monaco torelli
Laura Monaco Torelli is the founder of Animal Behavior Training Concepts in Chicago, Illinois. Her career began in 1991 with Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, where she trained beluga whales, dolphins, sea otters, seals, river otters, and penguins. After nearly a decade at the Shedd, she moved on to the San Diego Zoo and then Brookfield Zoo as a lead supervisory trainer. During her time in the zoo community, Laura worked with a wide variety of species, including primates, large cats, birds of prey, horses, parrots, tree kangaroos, giraffes, red pandas, and dogs. She was also part of the wildlife rescue and rehabilitation team for the Wildlife Discovery Center in Lake Forest, Illinois.
Laura is a Karen Pryor Academy (KPA) faculty member as well as a teaching assistant for Dr. Susan G. Friedman’s Living & Learning With Animals online course. Laura has presented at professional conferences and taught seminars across the United States, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan, and the Caribbean. She was an invited speaker for the American Veterinary Medical Association Convention, Midwest Veterinary Conference, and Penn Vet Working Dog Conference. Laura has appeared on various broadcast media, including FOX 32, WGN, NBC 5 News, WGN Radio, and WCIU’s You & Me This Morning. She contributed training videos for the Fear Free Professional Trainer Certification program and the Karen Pryor Academy Better Vet Visits online class.
Learn more about Laura on her website, on Facebook, on Instagram, on YoutTube, and on TikTok.
Here's What You'll Be Learning UNIT by UNIT
1
Position Variety
You will get right to work building the behavioral base for Cooperative Care. Laura will review and demonstrate how to capture, shape, and target these behaviors using a technique that starts from points of success. You will also discuss how to arrange the environment to provide reinforcement variety while taking advantage of space as a reinforcer.
The unit begins with basic stationing (stand near the handler), chin rest (from a stand, sit, and down), lateral recumbency, sit and down positioning, and gentle restraint—all of which are physically comfortable for the dog-and-handler team. Next comes practicing distraction, duration, and distance criteria, and discussion of their relevance to the exercise goals. Unit 1 material will also cover how to craft questions for the care team that can foster collaboration and consistency outside of your home. Importantly, the unit develops your understanding of how to operationalize the concept of obtaining "consent" from animals—a foundational concept in Cooperative Care practice. Another focus of the unit is setting a baseline so that you can look at your progress over the course of the class.
The first weekly LIVE class meeting on Zoom begins with the Excel students demonstrating their baseline behavior and success with the position-variety goals as Laura coaches them to additional success. Students may demonstrate in real time, use videos that were submitted during the week, or use a combination of the two. Throughout the demonstrations, Laura’s coaching, and the discussion, all students will see how the correct “set-ups” help achieve the target behaviors both efficiently and positively. In preparation for upcoming material, Laura will dive into the next steps for generalizing behaviors to new environments. She will conclude with Q&A from Engage students.
Be sure to keep up with the assignments, as the class builds quickly from here!
2
Prop introduction with Reinforcement Economy
Join Laura in Unit 2, advancing to prop introductions, a critical part of the process that creates comfort with items used in care, such as trimmers. Laura will coach students on how to weave in known behaviors that are fluent and fun (i.e., behaviors with a deep reinforcement history) in order to use those behaviors to build even more fluent care and husbandry behaviors. Prop practice will be included so that handlers gain confidence in the use of the tools while dogs build comfort and confidence around the presence of the tools. This Unit also includes when, where, why, and how to introduce a variety of distractions that can be used to strengthen each goal behavior. Follow along as the class offers multiple approaches to many aspects of care and husbandry, including body handling, paw care, voluntary weight, basket-muzzle introduction, injection prep, and more!
In the weekly LIVE class meeting on Zoom, Excel students will share (in real time or via their videos) their progress with prop training as Laura coaches them on their target-care procedure(s). During the class meeting, Laura will delve into the concepts of reinforcement variety and reinforcement economy, as well as the concept of behavioral momentum. She will coach students to use these concepts to get the most from every reinforcer. Laura will preview next week's material: how students can use their current successes to introduce a second member of the care team. The second LIVE class concludes with Q&A from the Engage students.
3
Build the care team: second person introduction
In Unit 3, Laura will dive into adding a second person to your care team, discussing the steps to involve them (and others) in all of your future husbandry routines. Laura will also help you build the skills that are needed to advance to additional safe and familiar environments by bringing your husbandry-at-home exercises to other rooms of the house, outside locations such as a backyard; condo/high-rise building entryway; or on walks or hiking adventures, or to another familiar home. You will learn how to involve another caregiver your pup trusts using gentle restraint tips and techniques, as demonstrated and guided by Laura.
In the third weekly LIVE class meeting on Zoom, Laura will provide real-time coaching as the Excel students demonstrate their care teams’ progress with the Cooperative Care process. They will share their advances in position variety, with props, in various locations, and/or with a second member of the care team. Laura will take questions from Engage students and discuss how to use record-keeping to track successes and keep moving forward with your care plan.
4
From nose to toes: putting it all together
In Unit 4, Laura will coach students to assess their progress from baseline, determine where to focus continuing efforts, and discuss how to chart incremental approximations using an objective assessment. The focus this week is on how your care and husbandry behaviors have moved along the Cooperative Care spectrum and on your next steps. Laura will examine strategies and propose suggested language for introducing these ideas to your vet or other members of your care team.
In the final LIVE class meeting on Zoom, Excel students will demonstrate their progress with the care behaviors built throughout the course and with their husbandry skills. This will be a chance to share the excitement about the new Cooperative Care skills they have created! Laura will also role-play with Excel students the necessary but sometimes complex discussions with incoming members of the care team. Whether it is with the vet, dog-walker, housemate, or UPS driver, you will learn to be an effective advocate for your dog with all members of the care team. This celebratory final class will also be the last chance for Excel students to get real-time coaching from Laura and share their experiences. All students will be able to ask questions about any topic within the class content.
