Absolutely YES! We work with dogs with all kinds of behavioral issues and bad habits even with severe human/dog aggression. When you contact us for a consultation, we want you to be very honest about your dog’s background and behavioral problems in regards to safety of both the trainer and others, so that we can design a specific plan for you and your dog,.
This is a great question! We can tell that you really care about your training. At Disciplined K9,we use balanced training methods, which means both positive training ( reward ) and aversive training ( correction). We use positive reinforcement 95% of the time to reward dogs for making good choices. Meanwhile we apply consequences (5%) for bad choices. Balanced training methods give us the ability to communicate both “yes” and “no” to our dogs. This makes it easy and very clear for them to understand what exact behaviors we encourage and which ones we don’t want. Raising a dog is very similar to raising your child. We need to teach them “yes” and “no” so they know how to tolerate and handle stress in the real world by making the right choices.
We would highly recommend reading our About page to see our philosophy. Another great way to see our work in action is through our social media.You can find other FAQ’s below which will help you understand our views on dog training, and why we train the way we train. Every dog is different, but we always try to be creative with every dog we work with. Please feel free to email us. We can determine which tools and training methods will serve you and your dog best.
Every dog deserves a happy, balanced, healthy life. Your dog counts on you to achieve that. To be your dog’s leader, you must advocate for him at all times. With that being said, we don’t allow strangers, dogs, even children to approach them, especially if you have an anxious or socially insecure dog. In fact, a lot of people don’t know how to approach a dog, sometimes it only takes one bad encounter for your dog to lose trust on you. As humans, and as their pack leaders, we must think from their perspective and be considerate. Your dog can’t talk, that’s why we need to step in to be their voice by advocating for them. We understand, it must sound harsh to tell people “Sorry, my dog is not comfortable, please don’t pet him or her” But that isn’t our concern. In fact, the majority of the general public would put their sense of safety aside to pet cute dogs who might have behavioral problems. You will most likely to be blamed on when an accident happens. On the other hand, we never know if other dogs are vaccinated or not when approaching ours. Diseases and canine flu are very easy to transmit through air and saliva. It’s our responsibility to protect our dog . It’s our responsibility to keep our dog safe. With your help, your dog will be happy, balanced, and healthy.
We want our dogs to know that we love them dearly, so we naturally like to use our high-pitched tone to greet our dogs to get them excited.
As a matter of fact, it’s human unconscious habit to respond to adorable things. Specifically, we all know that women are naturally compassionate, nurturing, and gentle. When these amazing traits apply to dog psychology, dogs will view them as soft, lack of authority figure. Remember, dogs have pack drive. They love to follow a strong leader. If we always project a soft energy and always give them unlimited affection without them performing a task first, they will not only disrespect you, they will also take over your leadership role. This baby voice talk is very important to address. When we try to teach our dog a new behavior, it’s very important to keep our tone neural and clear so that we don’t confuse our dog with emotion distractions either positive or negative. This gives our dogs the best chance to perform at their best when assigning them to a task. However, when your dog obeys a command, it is totally appropriate to raise your tone to mark it. When your dog has been well behaved, there is no harm to praise them a little just don’t over-reward. Likewise, when you mark a bad behavior, you can deepen your tone a bit but you should never yell or shout. We understand that it takes some time to change a habit, but for your dog’s long lasting balanced journey, it is all worth it.
No matter how smart dogs are, and how much we think they understand us. Keep in mind that humans and dogs are two biologically different species. Human psychology and dog psychology are different. When we feel nervous, anxious, upset, we offer physical touch to comfort each other because that’s how humans communicate. Everything becomes a reward in dog training, if a dog wants a piece of chicken in my hand, the chicken becomes a reward. However, when a dog is nervous, anxious or overly excited. If we offer affection or use our soft tone voice saying “it’s ok” to calm your dog down, you’re not only reinforcing the behavior and you’re also unconsciously encouraging them to do it again in the future. When and how to give affection is crucial, pay attention to your dog’s state of mind before comforting them.
We want to see results as much as you do. We always do our best to bring out your dog’s full potential in the most efficient way possible. However, please understand that there’s no short cut in the dog training world. Everything we do takes a lot of patience, consistency and supervision. Every dog’s learning ability varies. Anxious and fearful dogs that have a lot of behavior issues will usually take longer to be rehabilitated. Generally speaking, we need time to correct bad habits and it takes about 28 days to form new habits. We want your dogs to behave just like how they would act with us, that is why we always follow up with dog owners and encourage you to work with your dog daily and consistently to achieve the results you have always desired. If you follow through with our training advice, such as being more assertive, going for a structured walk daily, controlling thresholds, having your dog wait for food, cutting down affection, crating your dog etc. We have no doubts that you will see results a lot faster.
No, this is actually a myth. Everything can be abusive when we don’t use it correctly even a flat collar can hurt a dog. Some competition sport dogs, protection dogs and Police K9s use e-collar to perform tasks along with a great relationship with the handler. Meanwhile, the dogs are still happy and healthy. When we use e-collar properly, we have found that e-collar training is actually very effective to help anxious, nervous dogs. E-collar can also help strengthen your relationship with your dog. Because we use the e-collar as a communication tool to tell your dog “yes” and “no”. Therefore, your dog will follow your direction and leadership. Let’s say, there’s a car approaching, you call your dog to come for their safety. Otherwise, you might end up with a $2000 vet bill and a severely injured dog. That is one of the reasons why we love to use the e-collar. “Shock collars” in the old days did not have current technology to have a very gentle stimulation. With the development of advanced technology, the e-collars we recommend are not what they used to be. This collar has 100 adjustable levels of muscle stimulation, which is based on the same technology used by chiropractors with TENS units. It gives us a better approach to direct our dog. All dogs thrive for humans to provide rules and boundaries with consequences, so that they can trust us and feel protected by us. We DO NOT recommend you use it without our trainer’s instructions, because we want to condition dog to have a positive approach to it.