Course Details
Can you draw blood from a whale without force? Yes, you can. What about put eye drops into a sea lion's eyes with no fuss? Again, yes you can. But you have to train for it. Captive animals need physical care and can be trained with positive and effective methods to accept all sorts of handling and procedures. At a week-long workshop with Ken Ramirez at Shedd Aquarium, I observed calm and relaxed husbandry training and procedures with many species of animals. This experience inspired me to develop a similar program for dogs.
It seems that we often neglect husbandry work and focus on obedience behaviors and performance skills instead. But we need to rethink that approach. If we are lucky our dogs will be with us 15+ years, and they will need vet care and grooming on a regular basis. It is our responsibility to make these procedures as pleasant and stress free as possible. Our overriding goal is to do what is in the best interest of the dog for a happy and healthy life.
How does your dog react to nail trims? Does he let you brush his teeth without complaint? Can the groomer handle him with ease? Are vet visits comfortable?
This course is intended to guide you through proactive husbandry training for your dog. Husbandry is a term that covers all types of necessary physical care. Grooming and veterinary procedures fall into this category. We often neglect husbandry behaviors and either ignore the possible future need or force the issue when necessary. Our goal in this class will be to teach our dogs to cooperate with us for a variety of required behaviors. We will do a quick review of operant and classical conditioning, and use both in our work.
Our ultimate goal is to have dogs who are relaxed and calm for procedures that will benefit their health and well-being. This class is appropriate for dogs of all ages (our main model is Helo who started this work at 8 weeks old) and at all levels of training. Sometimes very highly trained performance dogs have issues with being handled in certain ways.
Here's a trailer for the class!
Teaching Approach
Lectures and class exercises on a specific cooperative care area or topic will be released once a week. These will consist of information about learning approaches as well as written descriptions of the class exercises. Numerous videos each week demonstrate a variety of steps in the training process.
Due to the nature of this course and the number of possible exercises, students are not expected to be able to address all the material during the course. You should plan to pick and choose those procedures and issues most important to you for your class focus.
Gold students will work at their dog's current level of comfort, and the instructors will give feedback to encourage progress. Progress with teams will vary due to a number of factors related to training history and the execution of class techniques. Every team will be supported at their current level.
This class will have a Teacher's Assistant (TA) available in the Facebook study group to help the Bronze and Silver students! Directions for joining that Facebook group will be in the classroom after you register.
Instructor: Deborah JonesDeborah Jones, Ph.D. (she/her) is a psychologist who specializes in learning theory and social behavior. She taught a variety of psychology courses at Kent State University for the past 20 years. Deb has been training dogs for performance events for the past 25 years and was an early...(Click here for full bio and to view Deb's upcoming courses)
Instructor: Judy KellerJudy Keller (she/her) has owned and trained Shelties for more than 20 years. She has been most successful with Morgan, her once in a lifetime dog. Judy and Morgan represented the United States three times in world agility competition, and were on the gold medal winning mini dog team in 1998. (Click here for full bio and to view Judy's upcoming courses)
