October 2013 KPA CTP of the Month
Karen Pryor Academy (KPA) Certified Training Partner (CTP) Irith Bloom will be speaking about choice at the 2014 ClickerExpo conferences. The choice she herself made to attend the KPA Dog Trainer Professional Program has impacted her business and her life in many positive ways.
Irith enrolled in the Dog Trainer Professional Program with the encouragement of another KPA alum, Chris Waggoner. She explains, “Chris is obviously a very good salesperson, because I signed up right after our talk!”
Irith knew that the KPA course would be a quality program, based on Chris Waggoner’s praise and based on her own familiarity with Karen Pryor and her work. According to Irith, “Karen would never put her name on anything that was less than excellent.” Irith, who has trained chickens, rabbits, cats, fish, and horses, was also intrigued by the Dog Trainer Professional Program requirement to work with other species.
As she began the KPA Dog Trainer Professional Program, Irith was excited to improve her skills as a trainer. Having trained dogs since the 1980s, Irith now owns and runs The Sophisticated Dog. Her business offers personalized in-home pet training for clients on the Westside of Los Angeles.
For Irith, one of the most intriguing and enlightening lessons of the KPA course was TAGteaching. She says, “TAGteach has changed my life.” Not only with clients, but in all of her interpersonal interactions, Irith deals with people differently now. Finding and reinforcing desired behavior in human learners, as she learned to do so well under the tutelage of her KPA instructor Nan Arthur, yields major rewards and success for Irith professionally and personally. “My human-human skills were transformed by the KPA program,” Irith emphasizes. Since her graduation from the KPA Dog Trainer Professional Program, Irith has become certified in TAGteach.
Irith sees many other benefits that flow directly from her participation in and certification from the KPA program. Clients specifically interested in clicker training find her through the KPA website’s Find-A-Trainer page. With the confidence of a KPA graduate, Irith has the poise and assurance to go out and sell her services without any hesitation. She knows she is offering an excellent product. The marketing lessons included in the Dog Trainer Program have helped Irith as well.
Irith continues to learn, and looks forward to sharing some of what she has learned at the upcoming ClickerExpo conferences. At ClickerExpo in 2014, Irith will discuss the power of choice. She describes the power of choice this way:
The power of choice is about giving control back to the learner. In some types of animal training, animals are forced to perform regardless of how they feel about it. One of the beauties of clicker training is that the animal always has a choice when we are training with a clicker. The animal can meet criteria and get a click, or fail to meet criteria and then get a chance to try again. Nothing bad happens when an animal fails to meet criteria. In fact, good clicker trainers realize that when an animal fails to meet criteria, it usually means that the trainer has set things up incorrectly.
As a private, in-home trainer, Irith is often asked for her assistance with many kinds of “behavior problems.” She has learned that providing choices to an animal, and encouraging the correct choices through differential reinforcement, is an incredibly powerful tool. This tool is much more powerful than physical manipulation. According to Irith, the best part of training that gives control back to the animal is that the trainer can almost see the animal begin to understand the shift. “The animal is in charge, and being in charge makes life a lot less scary,” Irith says. “Giving an animal the power to choose can yield results that seem magical. What more could you ask for?”