ABOUT MYSELF
(Click an image)
From
a very early age I have always had a love of dogs. My very own first dog was a
Golden Retriever, called Candy, who started me off on the path of trying to
understand them and to communicate with them.
Like most people I took Candy to dog training classes which worked to a degree but did not stop a lot of the behaviour problems. I soon began to notice that quite a few dogs were quite well behaved in the classroom but as soon as the class was over it seemed to be a case of schools over lets go mad and see who can get out the quickest.
This got me thinking, and so when I got my second dog, a Newfoundland called Heidi, I decided not to take her to classes and to train her in my own way. Although this was not perfect I was getting the same results but without any of the bullying. It was at this point my wife (Angela) and I found out about the working side of the Newfoundland dog, which involves training the dogs to rescue people from the water, to pull boats and various other water related activities along with carting, this involves the dogs pulling a small cart. This is when we learnt about training dogs using the method of 'Reward the positive, ignore the negative' and how important it is to get the reward in at the correct time. It was not long, after travelling around the country visiting other working groups, that we began to notice how the dogs seemed to be trying to interact with us in ways we could not quite understand and so began my journey into what has now become my great interest, the psychology of people and animals. Sadly, after the loss of my two beloved pets, I set out with two young dogs, both Newfoundlands, looking more closely yet again at their behaviour and how to communicate with them in a natural way, so as to be able to alter any unwanted behaviour without the use of traditional methods and gadgets.
As the saying goes 'When the student is ready the teacher will appear' a lady called Jan Fennell 'The Dog Listener' came into our lives, who after seeing how Monty Roberts 'The Horse Whisperer ' is able to communicate with horses, using their own natural body language, set about learning to communicate with dogs in the same way by studying how the members of a wolf pack communicate with each other and how we as humans could use this same language. Then after trying it out on her own dogs, with amazing results, decided to pass on this knowledge knowing that people who decide to use this method will end up with a happy contented dog and be able to enjoy there relationship with them.
This was exactly the next step I was looking for to understanding our canine friends, so my wife and I attended Jan's course on 'Canine Communication' and were introduced to the unique method of 'Amichien Bonding' which made complete sense, and so spent the next few months using this method on our own dogs and began to see results in only a matter of days, with our dogs beginning to relax more and as time has gone on stopped the unwanted behaviour which many of us experience as dog owners. It was now time for us to take the next step in our learning and attend Jan's Advanced Course on Canine Communication and to learn a lot more about why our dogs behave the way they do, again we were amazed at how much we misunderstand what our dogs are trying to tell us and realise there is much more to learn, I am sure.
Having now been using this method for 2 years and seeing the results I now realise how awful we can unknowingly treat our canine friends, by expecting them to understand our language, when it is much easier for us to learn theirs.
So it is now my passion to work with
you the owners to achieve a wonderful relationship with your dogs and to have
the opportunity to work in particular with people at the very early stages of
dog ownership.