Upcoming courses

Mat training is one of the most important behaviors that can be taught. It’s very useful in many situations when people and dogs live in the same space.  

Placement and size of the mat, your position, location of the treats, the timing of cues and markers, and other factors can create many variations of mat training. But don’t be scared, I will guide you through this process step by step!  

This mat training course will provide you with ideas on how to incorporate mat training into your daily life in a natural way so that both you and your dog can live stress-free and secure lives.  

Think about these questions:  

• Do you want your dog to stay on the mat while you vacuum?
• Do you want your dog to stay on the mat when you have guests or a delivery guy bring you a package?
• Do you want the dog to stay on the mat while you prepare the dog’s food?
• Do you want the dog to stay on the mat while you eat your dinner at the table?
• Do you want the dog to stay on the mat while you work at your desk?

  If you have said YES! at least once while reading the questions above, you have to register for the course 😀  

I will also share with you the “Most Common Mistakes” people tend to make when mat training, so you can learn in the shortest amount of time possible.  

Here are the skills and concepts that will be taught in the course:  

➡️ Antecedent Arrangements – prevention is better than cure

➡️ 3Ds-Distance, Distraction, and Duration

➡️ Understanding operant conditioning and classical conditioning

➡️ Going to the mat on cue

➡️ Replace it with a context cue

➡️ Stay on the mat until the release cue

➡️ Stay calm and settle on the mat

➡️ Generalize to both – inside and outside the house

➡️ Generalize to crate training – very useful during traveling (safety!) or in the animal hospital  

If your dog knows mat training very well, you can get a peaceful family visit without jumping or have tea with your dog at a cafe!  

I hope you will join this course and enrich your life with your dog through mat training. Register now!

“Dogs are a bit like chips… It’s hard to have just one!”

In some families, cohabitation can go very well, but in others, the management of resources, the organization of training sessions, the walks and the harmony between the dogs, are going to be complicated. In a large family everything will be constantly multiplied: the positive, as well as…

The less positive. In fact, who says more dogs, says more challenge! Fortunately, there are solutions ! This course is designed to give you the tools to make a multi-dog household a peaceful and productive place.

Amélie lives with four dogs on a daily basis and regularly takes in guard dogs for several days. She will guide you step by step to (re)create harmony inside and outside your home.  

In this course you will learn to:

• Read and supervise canine interactions (conduct an introduction well, know how to interrupt an interaction, do consent tests, etc.)
• Teach behaviors that allow you to deal with everyday situations (food time, transport, walk, training, presence of guests, etc.)
• Set up consistent and fair communication (understand everyone’s needs, one-to-one times, use the starts button, resources management, etc.)
• Become pro-active (prevent : why, when and how, anticipate risky situations, use the right tools) – Problem solving and managing “contagious” behaviors
• Take into consideration multiple factors before adding a new dog (crucial skills before you add a dog, assessment of your situation)  

This course is suitable for people with at least two dogs (from permanent cohabitation to occasional care), as well as people wishing to welcome a new dog soon (puppy, or already an adult dog).  

This class is NOT for households where there are dogs that are already aggressive towards each other and must already be managed with gates and doors etc.  

Course syllabus:

• Week 1 : Are you under the water ? Multiple dog household : Why it’s hard ? Learn who are your dogs individually (his needs, his safe space) Is your dog really ok with… ? Household logistic
• Week 2 : Building healthy relationships Different rules for different dogs Routines to maximize enjoyment Work, chill and play with each dog individually When to let dogs train each other and when not to
• Week 3 : Crucial skills inside Games with names (individually and group) Stationning Wait your turn Sharing is caring Love being alone Guest coming !
• Week 4 : Crucial skill outside  Doors manners Transport Walking with multiple dog (leash walking and recall) Free times : calm versus high arousal
• Week 5 : Become pro-active ! Interrupting behaviors in a multi-dog household Manage play time Recognize “risk times” Managing “Contagious” Behavior Common problem solving
• Week 6 : Go forward or go back ? Considerations before adding a new member Assess compatibility Protocol for integration Red flag Rehome is not giving up

• Principles over recipes
• The power of learner-driven teaching
• Performance–Feedback–Revision
• Training in “Three Acts”
• The Brave Learning Rubric for planning and assessment
• How to hone in on meaningful goals for each training session
• What is “errorless learning” really?
• How to find the right starting point (and what to do if you’re wrong)
• How to let antecedents work for you, not against you
• How to avoid “cue pile ups”
• How to identify when prerequisites are missing for something you are trying to teach
• How to capitalize on previously learned repertoires
• How to tell if your marker signals are effective
• How to isolate cues within a context (aka “stimulus control”)
• How to build resilience into your behaviors right from the start
• How to develop reinforcement strategies that suit your learner’s needs in the moment
• Knowing when to follow the rules and when it is okay to break them

A reliable recall is one of the most important safety behaviors we can teach the dogs in our lives, and in emergency situations. When we need our recall to work, we really need it to work!

• Do you wish your dog would come back when you called?
• Does your dog come back most of the time, but not quite all the time, and often not when it really matters?
• Do you wish your dog would stay closer to you and not run off in the first place?
• Does your dog run back to you when you call, but then immediately take off again?

Do you dread walking your dog?  

Is it a constant struggle with pulling and a tight leash?  

Does your dog seem to forget you exist when you’re out on a walk?  

Can you imagine what walks would be like if your dog walked next to you and paid attention to you?  

By taking this course you will learn the skills that will help you and your dog achieve your polite walking dreams!   

Pulling on walks is often a frustrating problem for both you and your dog that can be detrimental to your relationship. It can also be dangerous and can lead to injuries to either of you! It’s not all lost though and this course will get you on the right track! Whether the dog is big or small, loose leash walking skills can be useful for all! With a puppy or newly adopted dog who doesn’t pull yet, the skills you will learn in the course can prevent future walking troubles from developing.  

In this course you will learn:

• How to select the appropriate equipment for walks with your dog
• How to use reinforcement efficiently on the walk
• How to teach your dog to pay attention to you
• How to teach your dog to walk on a loose leash in a variety of locations
• What to do when the leash gets tight
• How to teach your dog to turn away from distraction and walk with you in the other direction
• How to work with distractions 
• Walking games including Leslie McDevitt’s 1-2-3 from Control UnleashedTM

If we haven’t convinced you yet, here is a more in-depth description of what you’ll find in the course:

Week 1

1. Basic skills you and your dog will need
2. Identify your goals
3. Select appropriate equipment for your walks
4. Learn about important concepts and terminology including operant conditioning and marker signals
5. Identify the skills you and your dog will need for loose leash walking
6. Learn to select the correct environment to set you and your dog up for success
7. Know what to do when the leash gets tight

Week 2

1. Teaching u-turns, the 1-2-3 game and directional turns
2. Learn how type of reinforcement, rate of reinforcement, reinforcement placement and other small changes can make a big difference to keep the leash loose
3. Learning what motivates our dogs to pull in the first place
4. The “Three Ds” and loose leash walking

Week 3

1. How to change speed successfully on a walk
2. Learn how to pay attention to the environment and how that impacts our success with polite walking
3. How to build fluency with our polite walking skills in a variety of environments
4. How other important skills like recall can help us on walks

Week 4 – Working with distractions 

1. Diving deeper into motivation and distractions
2. How to identify distractions for the individual dog in front of us
3. Learn to work in more challenging environments
4. Learn when and how to teach our dogs to avoid distractions, and when and how we might use some distractions as reinforcers for loose leash walking

Week 5 

1. Different types of walks including urban walks and more decompression style walks and skill sets needed for both
2. Building duration with polite walking, and with the 1-2-3 game
3. Learning how to decrease distance to distractions

Week 6 

1. Putting it all together – distraction plus duration
2. Remembering to be mindful of the individual we are working with, and the environment where we are working 
3. Learn about common challenges and troubleshooting

  We can’t wait to see you on the course!

Anna&Shelly    

As the caregiver of a mare who used to stand solely on her hind feet for the majority of her shoeing and a pony who came prepared to harm himself and others resisting medical care, I am familiar with how medical or husbandry procedures can become dangerous and generate suffering to all involved.

These horses are not “bad” nor “dominant” or “headstrong” but rather animals facing a stressful situation who are feeling and expressing themselves in the only way they know to defend themselves. It is our responsibility to familiarise and teach them how to behave under these scenarios. But this is also an amazing opportunity to establish kinship, build trust and enrich our shared language. 

Studies have shown that having the power to choose and influence (gain control) is essential to both humans and animals’ health. It has a reinforcing value and it is an inherent part of real cooperation.

Sharing control with horses during medical or husbandry procedures can help transform an aversive stimulus (stressful/unpleasant) like receiving an injection, applying ointment, or lifting a leg for hoof care (or whatever has previously scared our horse off) into a reinforcing stimulus (desirable/pleasant).

Adding control to the horse will eliminate or reduce stress and can be revolutionary for both horses and humans.

It’s much more than just kindness alleviating our horse’s suffering; it also has a very practical aspect: We are all affected by stress on a cellular level. Stress can cause secondary health damage like ulcers, colic, and slow healing process. It will hinder treatment, it can even alter and affect the accuracy of blood tests results (as stress affects cortisol and other hormones), and stress can lead to avoidance or conflictive behaviours that can pose danger to the caregivers and the horse itself. 

This does not mean that the horses are the only ones “controlling” the procedure. It means that both humans and horses have a way to influence in these circumstances and can work in true partnership, which is the actual meaning of ‘co-operative care’.

Learn how to facilitate breathtaking transformation and gain inspiring cooperation with your horse:
Change the way your horse perceives and behaves in husbandry and medical care scenarios. Deepen your shared language, reduce stress and train horses to be active, willing participants while using control (choice and influence) both as a reinforcer and an indicator to influence training and real time procedures. 

Gain deeper understanding of concepts and fluency in applying techniques and tools for training and enable better welfare. Build trust and confidence in both you and your horse and minimise safety risks for all.

Some of the skills and concepts taught in the course:

• Shaping a chin rest and other ‘Start Buttons’ behaviours to use in cooperative care. 

• Defining your goal then letting horses lead, ‘co-creating’ individualised shaping processes.
• Learning to set up inviting environments and use varied feeding techniques as your part of the dialog and your training toolkit.

• Broadening observational skills and adding flexibility.

• Defining and setting up choices – or – how and why to reinforce both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ while maintaining learning. 
• Looking at desensitisation and counter-conditioning with an operant mindset.
• Building duration, adding variety and distraction to the learning.

• Shaping behaviours for eye care, clipping, accepting injections, fly spray, and more.

Pre-requisites: 

Both you and your horse need to be clicker savvy, having some experience with targeting, shaping and adding cues to behaviours.

****
(In Cooperative care with horses Part 2: you will train varied behaviours for hoof care)

Learn a training method that will facilitate and accelerate your training achievements. Meet backchaining!  

You probably don’t even know that you’ve already used backchaining in your training. Or maybe you used it consciously, but you still don’t get it right, or while planning your training, you get stuck somewhere and don’t know how to carry out the training correctly? Or maybe you do not plan your training at all but just grab treats, call the dog and start the sessions?  

Bring peace to your training and start achieving your goals with pleasure and without frustration, yours and your students! 🙂 Sounds great, right?   Backchaining is one of those things that seem very simple. But only when you dive a bit deeper into the subject and start realizing what it actually is that happens and how every single thing we do in the process affects the chain will we get the full advantages of using it.  

You will leave this course with a desire to back-chain everything you can and have gotten very comfortable with splitting everything into behaviors to perfect.  

Some sessions are dedicated to the topic of cues, where we will look deeply at why some cues are like shooting an arrow, and others are more like pushing a car uphill. We will also discuss the topic of off cue behaviors, having fluency, and excellent stimulus control.  

We will:

• go through the pros and cons of backchaining
• Briefly touch base on forward-chaining – but we are not going to spend a lot of time on that
• Have lessons on off cue behaviors, and if that’s a good thing to have
• Go through the process of adding cues to already fluent behaviors
• Make the cue a green light for performing the behavior.
• Dissect the cues, if there is a learning history that gives slower responses
• Find out what is brutally exposed when we’re backchaining.
• Figure what the glue is that makes chains so strong
• Dive into the double effect of each behavior (R+ for previous cue AND green light to the next)
• Exercise backchaining in everything we do
• Discuss the optional response to a mistake in a chain
• Go through the testing phase
• Discuss the complex job, that is, being handler
• Practice without dogs too

This course is most suited for teams that already have good solid fluency behavior and also at least 3 reliable cues that have been learned with positive reinforcement.  

You can participate if you want to work with fun chains that you can use around your house, with tricks or with competition exercises. The most important thing is that you’re willing to spend six weeks of your life learning about backchaining! Will you join me?  

I can’t wait to meet you!  

See you soon at training!  

Get clean, precise, and fluent behaviors – even at a distance. If you are ever in a situation where you need your dog to do certain behaviors at a distance, this course will help you get there.

Even if you are working at longer distances, you can still get your behaviors as perfect as if you were standing right next to your dog. Usually, I focus a lot on the behaviors that are happening close to the handler. In this course, that will be turned a bit around.

In these six weeks, we will discuss the following in the lessons:

• Which basic skills do we need to get started with distance behaviors?
• What equipment do we need – or can have great use of?
• How do we teach the dog an “Off cue” stay?
• How do we define our criteria, and why is this even more important when we are working at a distance?
• How do we get the dog to go to a certain point of distance?
• How do we get the desired pace when the dog is running to a certain point?
• How can we start and perfect stationary behaviors at a distance – like position changes?
• How can we start and perfect speed behaviors at a distance – like picking up the dumbbell?
• How can we teach the dog to have precision in behaviors in motion – like down and stand during recall and send away?
• How do we make a training plan, take some data, and use this information to get progress?
• How do we get fluent behaviors “off cue” when it is at a distance?
• How do we choose the best cues for our distance behaviors?
• And how do you teach those cues in a way that makes them very reliable?
• How can we make the behaviors shine in a back chain?
• And how do we use back chaining?
• What is the best way to reinforce the behaviors when we are working at a distance?

We will cover the different tools we can use, discuss how to get these behaviors started, and we will go into dept with directional targets and platforms and the fading of these tools. There will be video examples of the behaviors – and how to get there and text lessons explaining the process.

We will also have a closed Facebook group for all participants, where we all can discuss these concepts and connect more over this topic. For premium participants, there will be homework with your dog each week, with both set tasks and tasks that you decide on. This course is suitable for all levels. We will work from the level you are at and adjust the criteria so that they are matching you and your dog.

I can´t wait to get to work with this fun and awesome topic that always gets the creativity going.

Catja

Get clean, precise, and fluent behaviors – even at a distance. If you are ever in a situation where you need your dog to do certain behaviors at a distance, this course will help you get there.

Even if you are working at longer distances, you can still get your behaviors as perfect as if you were standing right next to your dog. Usually, I focus a lot on the behaviors that are happening close to the handler. In this course, that will be turned a bit around.

In these six weeks, we will discuss the following in the lessons:

• Which basic skills do we need to get started with distance behaviors?
• What equipment do we need – or can have great use of?
• How do we teach the dog an “Off cue” stay?
• How do we define our criteria, and why is this even more important when we are working at a distance?
• How do we get the dog to go to a certain point of distance?
• How do we get the desired pace when the dog is running to a certain point?
• How can we start and perfect stationary behaviors at a distance – like position changes?
• How can we start and perfect speed behaviors at a distance – like picking up the dumbbell?
• How can we teach the dog to have precision in behaviors in motion – like down and stand during recall and send away?
• How do we make a training plan, take some data, and use this information to get progress?
• How do we get fluent behaviors “off cue” when it is at a distance?
• How do we choose the best cues for our distance behaviors?
• And how do you teach those cues in a way that makes them very reliable?
• How can we make the behaviors shine in a back chain?
• And how do we use back chaining?
• What is the best way to reinforce the behaviors when we are working at a distance?

We will cover the different tools we can use, discuss how to get these behaviors started, and we will go into dept with directional targets and platforms and the fading of these tools. There will be video examples of the behaviors – and how to get there and text lessons explaining the process.

We will also have a closed Facebook group for all participants, where we all can discuss these concepts and connect more over this topic. For premium participants, there will be homework with your dog each week, with both set tasks and tasks that you decide on. This course is suitable for all levels. We will work from the level you are at and adjust the criteria so that they are matching you and your dog.

I can´t wait to get to work with this fun and awesome topic that always gets the creativity going.

Catja

The art of making a cue reliable is not the easiest task we have.  

Often, adding the cue is something we do in a rush, as we just want to get the response as fast as we can. Adding the cue, and making sure we have good stimulus control, is absolutely not the sexy side of dog training, and it does not make good videos to show our fellow trainers. Basically, if we do it right, it is kind of a long process and nothing super exiting happens while we do it.  

Unless.. We actually manage to see it for what it is – an investing in that behavior we have used so much time to teach. An investment, that we can get the interest from, as soon as we have taught he cue really well.  

So let´s bring the excitement back to the boring part, that adding a cue often can look like.   Often the dog will take the cue from the reinforcement history, rather than paying attention to what we say, and that ends up with us saying 1 verbal cue, and the dog doing a completely different behavior.   That is absolute normal and it makes perfect sense, as the behavior that has most recently been reinforced, is the the behavior that is most likely to happen again.  

Try cueing spin, spin, spin, sit, spin. It is very likely that the dog will just spin again when you say sit, if you haven’t proofed your cue in every way possible.  

Many learners respond well to certain cues, in certain context, while they then look completely clueless in others.  

A very reliable “sit” cue can be tested to its breaking point, if we suddenly decide to say the cue in another context than usual. Although the response to “sit” is very reliable in front of handler and on the left side, the dog can seem completely confused, if we cue “sit” when it is on our right side, or 10 meters in front of us. Or even worse, behind us!   In this course, we will go through all the steps. From having the behavior offered off cue, to having a perfectly reliable cue, in all the situations we need it. We will work on proofing the cue, so that the dog will know the cue in every context.  

We will dive deep into the 5 steps of adding a cue and making sure, that the cue, and only that specific cue, is what prompts the behavior.   The goal is to make every cue have the effect off green light. We want our learner to respond, the same way we do, when we get to a green light.  

We will discuss:

• latency,
• how to structure a cue,
• how to chose a good cue
• and most important, when to add the cue!

This course is for you, if you want perfectly reliable cues, and are willing to put in the effort to get it.

Sign up now!