New handlers and dogs

If you have come to us and have experience of clicker training, or have trained your dog to a reasonably high level we may put you straight into one of these higher level classes. We will give you additional support in class to enable you to teach new tasks you have not trained previously.

What if I have a well-trained dog? Or I’m an experienced handler?

We have plenty of people who start working with us who have owned lots of dogs before, or have a well trained dog that they want to do more with.

Where do we teach?

During the better weather we do as much teaching outside, either in the local park or the village, to work with real life situations to practice and build skills.

What are the classes? What will we learn?

We run an Improvers class and a Top Class which are set around continuing to work on developing your dog’s knowledge and skills.

• In these classes, you continue to work on an individual basis.
• We tend to teach on a topic basis each term for example directionality, self control, quick response etc
• We continue to develop your understanding of how your dog learns, body language and how to use these to teach what you want
• We use agility equipment/Hoopers in these classes – not necessarily to teach agility skills – but because they act as fun ways for you both to learn, and also because they really reinforce self-control and distance control
• We work on target training – to teach distance and direction (to improve off-lead control)
• We develop self-control through extending the level of distractions and difficulty in things such as stopping your dog when he is running, leaving food he has food on the floor and so on. We also teach ‘platform’ training which is a fabulous way of improving your dogs learning even more rapidly.
• We work on aspects of the APDT higher level Good Companion Awards to broaden your skills further Good Companion Awards