Upcoming courses

This course is designed to create the necessary building blocks for effective communication between you and your dog.  It will teach you how to train your dog a repertoire of core behaviours, as well as the skills in how to then effectively apply and progress them.  On completion you will have strong, solid base to progress your training from.

Essential Foundation Behaviours is suitable for dogs of any age, stage and can be an important refresher to assist overcoming any training glitches you may encounter.

We will cover:

• Training Mechanics
• Attention
• Touch
• Mat/Bed/Crate
• Down
• Settle
• Follow me
• Recall
• Drop
• Feed retreat

This course is very sentimental for me. My dog didn’t tug at all. He didn’t like to take things into his mouth but I really wanted to play Frisbee so we started learning how to tug. At that time I knew very little and our journey was full of frustration. That wasn’t a fun experience for any of us.

We were working hard (I’m pretty stubborn so I kept trying) and after a year we managed to bring tugging to the level where I can call that a reinforcement. Was it hard? Definitely… Would it be easier to do if I had known as much as I know now? It would!

So what is “Iron Jaws”? It’s a compendium of knowledge which I hope I have known when I started. I know that I am not the only one who struggled with this behavior. It’s harder than most people think and that’s why I wrote this course.

The goal is to teach you to tug and give you a clear view on what to do BUT “what” is not enough for me. With a little help of science I will show you why does it work. Tugging is not magic. It’s a behavior like a sit or lie down and shares the same principles of learning. It’s also one of the best ways for creating strong and happy relationship with your dog AND it’s so fun to do!

Lessons you can expect can be divided into three major categories:

1. Basics of learning- We will introduce simple concepts like ABC’s, primary and secondary reinforcer, motivation and operationalising behaviors we want to teach. It will be our scientific core for understanding why we teach the way we do.
2. Myths- common knowledge and misunderstandings about tugging. We will dig deep into why things happen and we will question what we know.
3. Tugging- Pure practice and mechanics of the game. How to do it right. Meaning what to do to be safe and have a blast together.

If your dog doesn’t “like” to tug this course is for you!

This course is very sentimental for me. My dog didn’t tug at all. He didn’t like to take things into his mouth but I really wanted to play Frisbee so we started learning how to tug. At that time I knew very little and our journey was full of frustration. That wasn’t a fun experience for any of us.

We were working hard (I’m pretty stubborn so I kept trying) and after a year we managed to bring tugging to the level where I can call that a reinforcement. Was it hard? Definitely… Would it be easier to do if I had known as much as I know now? It would!

So what is “Iron Jaws”? It’s a compendium of knowledge which I hope I have known when I started. I know that I am not the only one who struggled with this behavior. It’s harder than most people think and that’s why I wrote this course.

The goal is to teach you to tug and give you a clear view on what to do BUT “what” is not enough for me. With a little help of science I will show you why does it work. Tugging is not magic. It’s a behavior like a sit or lie down and shares the same principles of learning. It’s also one of the best ways for creating strong and happy relationship with your dog AND it’s so fun to do!

Lessons you can expect can be divided into three major categories:

1. Basics of learning- We will introduce simple concepts like ABC’s, primary and secondary reinforcer, motivation and operationalising behaviors we want to teach. It will be our scientific core for understanding why we teach the way we do.
2. Myths- common knowledge and misunderstandings about tugging. We will dig deep into why things happen and we will question what we know.
3. Tugging- Pure practice and mechanics of the game. How to do it right. Meaning what to do to be safe and have a blast together.

If your dog doesn’t “like” to tug this course is for you!

Preparation for frisbee is a series of four courses  that are meant to turn newbie dog frisbee adept into a team with good foundations that allow them to have fun with flying plastic safely. 

What is a Foundation? 

It’s a group of skills and behaviors. Whenever we think about where to start we should consider where do we want to end up. What our dog will be doing few years from now? 

In most general terms dogfrisbee is a game where dogs chase, jump and catch. So our plan should contain:

1. Physical preparation- conditioning muscles, joints, ligaments and tendons for all those taxing, flashy behaviors.
2. Skills- dog will need to keep track of what it’s body while traveling with high speed. Be able to follow flying discs and adjust it’s behavior accordingly, showcase tremendous coordination of entire body
3. Behaviors- there is simply a lot of stuff that our dog needs to do. We can throw him into deep water and hope that it will be fine… Disclaimer usually it ends with” my dog is bad a frisbee”. Or we can teach what to do instead. Your choice. 

Do we doing part one? 

In short we “teach rewards”. It’s a collection of tug based games that teach a dog all those minor things that we don’t appreciate when they are there but we can get very frustrated when they aren’t. 

Exercises with a dog:

1. Quality tug- how to do is right? How to make a great reinforcer and strength exercise out of it. 
2. Catch the rat- introduction to chasing. Teaches a dog how to execute effective catch on moving target. How to control its body and judging the distance between him/her and a toy. 
3. Drop – if you teach your dog to drop by grabbing its color you are doing it wrong. You will learn four different dropping games. Your dog will think “how can I make this human monkey to ask me to drop”
4. Exchange- swiftly changing from playing with one toy to another. Imagine cool looking freestyle routine. Would it be equally cool if a dog had no idea when to refocus from one frisbee to another. It’s also often used reinforcement procedure.
5. Follow me- base for fetch is a dog that wants to come back and share a toy with you. That’s what we are teaching here.
6. Tossing toys- it’s combined catch a rat with following. 

You will receive one exercise per week. On top of that additional lectures covering more specific aspects and topics. 

In order to to take maximal benefit out of this course you and your dog should be able to tug “happily” for around 30 seconds. If you struggle with it you should check out my course “Iron Jaws” before signing up for preparation for frisbee.

Auditors only edition – Premium Spots available in October!

Training is a skill we need to learn. Teaching animals is not magic, nor common sense. It’s a combination of science and practical skills we need to master. Don’t worry if you don’t know where to start! I have prepared this course for you. It will guide you through the foundations of training. Step by step journey for anyone wishing to learn more!

Too often, we end up in a position of being teacher and learner at the same time, because we hadn’t had a chance to work on our mechanics, clicker skills, delivery patterns before we started working with our learners.

This course is a compendium of knowledge and practice for animal trainers. Focusing on the scientific approach to animal training we will cover ABA (applied behavior analysis) principles and how they resonate with what we do with animals, we will cover the mechanics and techniques of teaching behaviors! It’s a perfect place to start your training journey, but it is also an appropriate course for more advanced students who want to geek in the depths of thoughtful training. Get ready for discussions, practical exercises, and thorough insight into the animal training world.

Throughout six weeks of online learning, we will cover:

• clicker training mechanics
• skills for the trainer
• errorless learning
• chaining
• adding stimulus control to behaviors
• luring
• shaping
• structure of training session
• concept of fluency
• frustration and errors
• raising criteria
• moulding
• concept of loopy training
• planning your training session

Course syllabus:

Week 1
Lesson 1 – Welcome and Introductions
Lesson 2 – Education of choice and science.
Lesson 3 – Basic terms
Lesson 4 – Behavior and its contingencies
Lesson 5 – Consequences
Lesson 6 – Marker cues
Lesson 7 – Behavior profile
Lesson 8 – Luring

Week 2
Lesson 9 – Handler’s technique
Lesson 10 – Strategies
Lesson 11 – Moulding by contact

Week 3
Lesson 12 – Shaping
Lesson 13 – Cue for shaping – explored
Lesson 14 – Outcome versus result. Does it matter?
Lesson 15 – Examples of shaping
Lesson 16 – Frustration

Week 4
Lesson 17 – Handler’s technique – helper
Lesson 18 – Moulding by the environment
Lesson 19 – Schedules of reinforcement
Lesson 20 – Fading out
Lesson 21 – Fluency

Week 5
Lesson 22 – What about emotions?
Lesson 23 – Antecedent Arrangement
Lesson 24 – Cues
Lesson 25 – Error
Lesson 26 – Raising criteria

Week 6
Lesson 27 – Structure of the training session
Lesson 28 – Behavior chains
Lesson 29 – WTF?
Lesson 30 – Poisoned cues

This course is a must-have for anyone interested in diving into depths of scientific dog training. If you want to be the handler your dog deserves – join me for six weeks of great learning.

In this course, you can work with multiple animals within the weekly time frame (twelve minutes of video submission per week).
This course is multispecies friendly! You can join with any animal you wish!

Self-study course! Auditors only! (No premium spots in this course)

Positive reinforcement training is about setting up for success and making sure desired behaviors are followed by reinforcers, which strengthen the behavior in the future. In this course you get to join the Swedish duo Eva and Emelie as they zoom in on the small but important details that make up a training session, from one reward to the next. What happens right after each reward? What happens within your reward procedure? And why does it matter?

In “Seamlessness – from one reward to the next” you will learn learn how to work deliberately with small but significant details, paying attention to all the parts of the training loop and using them to create seamless training sessions. The material in this course will help you develop your own training sessions further.  Your planning will get better, your training will become smoother, and both you and your learner will enjoy the process even more than before!

Course syllabus:

Week 1
Lesson 1 – Introduction to the course
Lesson 2 – The underpinnings
Lesson 3 – From one reward to the next – overview
Week 2
Lesson 4 – Training session fundamentals
Lesson 5 – The reward ends
Week 3
Lesson 6 – Criteria
Lesson 7 – Mark
Week 4
Lesson 8 – The reward appears
Lesson 9 – Take the reward
Lesson 10 – During the reward
Week 5
Lesson 11 – The reward ends (again)
Lesson 12 – Criteria not met
Week 6
Lesson 13 – Putting behavior together
Lesson 14 – Flowcharting your training session
Lesson 15 – Summarizing seamlessness

This is a 6 week self-study course. New lessons will be presented each week  (a total of 15 lessons) and you will have continued access to the material after the course finishes.

We have so much material we wish to share with you on this topic – in this course, we put it together in a comprehensive yet extensive form. Our goal is to provide you with a lot of information and ideas from which you can extrapolate the aspects you currently wish to work with in your own training.

The course is auditors only,  allowing you to digest the material at your own pace and consider how it relates to your own training.  There will be follow-up courses with practical training and feedback from us, we just wish to have everyone on the same page first…   There are so many aspects to consider – it literally takes us six weeks to get from one reward to the next!