Dog Training During The New Normal 2020 COVID-19

You are like a lot of dog owners. You’ve been cooped up at home with your family and your dog for a couple of months, waiting out the coronavirus lockdown. Some of you still have a job and worked through it all. Some had to wait it out, but are just now going back to work. No way your dog is going to be the same after these past couple of months. #dog #dogtraining #therapydog #samthedogtrainer

See: http://samthedogtrainer.com/articles/dog-training-new-normal-2020-covid-19/

Therapy Dog Training & Coaching (Puppies – Adults)

I am a Therapy Dog training specialist. For example, I co-founded a therapy dog program for the Chandler School District in Arizona in 2019 – 2020. Not only do I know how to properly train therapy dogs, I have the expertise to coach therapy dog programs.

DO YOU WANT THERAPY DOG TRAINING? I have trained many therapy dogs. It is one of the great joys I have doing training, and it is a way to give back to the community to help others. A therapy dog is a properly selected and trained dog that is typically used to help someone other than the dog’s owner: to reduce stress, assist in the healing process, and/or provide comfort and company to human patients in hospitals, schools, disaster situations, hospice, and retirement facilities.

DO YOU WANT A THERAPY DOG PROGRAM COACH? With my experience, I can provide business consulting for your therapy dog organization, from start ups to existing operations. I can provide you professional opinions, based upon my experience and viewpoints, on topics such as:

Your Business Plan
Facilitating Focus Groups
Your Relationship With Your Clients
Marketing and PR Strategies
Organizational Operations And Scheduling
Volunteers
Recruiting, Managing And Training Your Therapy Dog Teams
Review Of Forms and Agreements (not the same as legal advice; I’m not an attorney)
Budgeting (not the same as accounting; I’m not an accountant or investment advisor)
Making The Most Of The Work Your Teams Do With The Public

Consulting will mostly be done either with online virtual services (FaceTime, Skype, Zoom) or in person. Dog and handler training can be done online and in-person, as well.

So, if you’d like to find out more about my therapy training or consulting, please contact me.

Happy Eager Dog Training

I think everyone enjoys watching, living with, and training a happy, eager dog...

Dog Training And Sloppy Work

I am not a perfectionist. I think perfection is an unrealistic and burdensome outlook. Not everything can be perfect, and priorities need to be set. However, as a general rule, I think higher priority items need more defined standards of quality and performance...

Change Yourself Or Change Your Dog?

Some human psychology experts say there are 5 Big Aspects of personality: Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism. Each aspect can be measured using personality tests, and they vary in intensity on an individual basis. As a general rule, the more you are like another person, the more likely you’ll get along...

Are Doodles Overpriced Mutts?

A Doodle is a cross-bred dog created by breeding a Poodle with another purebred dog. But, some people don’t like them, calling them overpriced mutts. What’s the truth?

Dog Training Because... Feelings

Is it possible to train dogs and never hurt anyone's feelings? I really don't believe so, if you are being honest with others and yourself.

I try as best as possible to be a good person and treat others well. However, telling the truth always risks hurting someone's feelings. People don't like bad news, don't like changing their ways, don't like losing face in front of others, don't like being told their dog needs changing, and so on. No adult really wants to be told they (or their dogs) need to change.

I know from personal experience, if I want to get the most out of a learning situation, I have to be prepared to be a rookie, to be wrong, to be confronted, to... gasp... change. Yeah, it can rub me the wrong way, but that doesn't mean I quit or blame the teacher. I accept the bad feelings that often come when you have to improve or change.

Not everyone can accept change or being told that things aren't perfect. Feelings will get hurt, even with the best teachers. No teacher wants their students to be upset, but it is going to happen.

What Is Your Dog Handling Demeanor?

What is your dog handling demeanor, and does it matter? Your demeanor is your look, manner, bearing, attitude, expression and presence when managing, directing and leading your dog. It matters because dogs will pick up on your demeanor, and the demeanor of those around you, and that will affect how they will behave…

Therapy Dog Training Working With Children

I have spent a considerable amount of time and brainpower regarding the problem of youth violence, especially the so-called school shooters. What is going on here and what can be done to prevent these incidents? And can therapy dog teams play an important role?

First, many troubled kids can be identified at a very young age, even before 4 years old. These kids have trouble coping with the obstacles of life and are on a path to becoming outcasts. They are growing up faster, and are experiencing earlier adolescence.  Frustration, depression, rage and anti-social behaviors begin to be seen, even at a very early age. These kids are not resilient and develop disturbing emotional responses, to people and animals.

Next, the school shooting phenomenon is relatively new. Twenty years ago, these incidents were barely on our radar. The social dynamics of family, peer groups, society, and schools have changed in ways that many of us still are having a hard time grasping. One of the common factors is a troubled family, and missed clues which would predict that a child is going to violently explode.

Lastly, it looks to me, these children are disconnected from healthy real world stimuli. Without prosocial purpose and motivation, they find an antisocial purpose and motivation. They are often secretively buried in their own electronic media. It is common for these kids to be consuming and ruminating on violent and seriously inappropriate content, without proper supervision or care, especially from their parents. They are also detached from school, given insufficient input and responses to their difficulties, and not identified and treated as having serious difficulties including having issues regarding harassment and bullying. And schools have not applied sufficient multidisciplinary resources to having a system in place to identify and treat these students long before they develop into violent offenders.

What can be done about all of this?

I believe in this mechanized world we are creating, kids are losing touch with the real world. They are lost souls, looking for answers and a purpose. Instead of finding those answers in all the healthy places where they should be found, they immerse themselves in a fantasy world of anger, revenge and perversions, and they find their final mission in life is to eventually violently tear it all down.

I also believe that you have to intercept these children very early on. If we want to address these horrific outcomes, we have to identify and lead these children towards a different future at a very young age.

In the short run, as we have seen, government will try to do this with rules and legislation, buildings and police and metal detectors. We see schools being redesigned and rebuilt and hardened to confine these murderers on the day of the attack. We see politicians pushing for innocent citizens to give up their civil rights and freedoms. But what we are not seeing is much in the way of getting to the children before they go down this destructive path. Buildings and rules, gun bans and metal detectors and speech codes aren’t going to stop future incidents. New technologies will allow future school murderers to circumvent all of these efforts, and they will still find ways to commit mass murder (I won’t mention what things might be done, but anyone with any sense can figure out what is probably going to be the next generation of violent methods to accomplish these evil deeds).

In the long run, however, we need to get to these kids upstream, and I’m saying at kindergarten age on up. I think the real battleground is in the grade schools. We might not be able to fix what is going on in their families, or outside the schools, but we can influence what is happening to these kids in school. We can do a better job of identifying and intercepting these troubled kids. We can implement systems to track kids that are socially failing. And we can interject healthy stimuli in their lives to help them find ways to not escape into the dark underworld.

A properly designed and implemented school therapy dog program could play an essential role. Dogs are real and have positive real world impacts on children; cell phones and computers and such are just not adequate substitutes. We all know 100 years ago, when kids were raised with intact families, good friends, fresh air, nature and animals, these violent incidents didn’t happen.

I was a co-founder of a therapy dog program for the Chandler School District in Arizona. I implemented a scale-able program to assist teachers, counselors and administrators in finding and working with grade school children. Dog teams were used in all aspects of the curriculum, from the very first moments children arrived on campus the first day of the school year, to motivating classroom behavior and academics, to counseling with students thaving difficulties in life, especially in the school environment, using properly managed and trained therapy dog teams. We are currently seeking to pilot such a program with a local school district.

Should you wish therapy dog consulting, please contact me.

Dog Training Mistakes

Dog Training Mistakes: Everyone makes handler errors. From novice to expert, everyone makes mistakes… (MORE)

The Pit Bull Debate Is Over

The pit bull debate is over. The bans have failed. Pit bulls have proven to be good family dogs. Untold numbers of innocent dogs killed. How could we have ever let that happen? How did the dog haters get so much power? It must never happen again.