Dee Ganley CPDT, CDBC, CABC
Advisory Board Member
Author of new Book "Changing People Changing Dogs"
http://www.deesdogs.com/
The training and behavioural work I do with the public and shelter community is about how to achieve the two goals: Getting behaviour we want and getting rid of behaviour we don't want, humanely and while having fun! I teach positive reinforcement, and I place a very strong emphasis on managing a dog's environment for safety.
"Loving" our dogs doesn't create trustworthy companions. Commitment by a dog to his people is the result of humane training and diligent management. It happens when we wholly accept the responsibility to lead, but not to dominate. Humane leadership allows the dog's capacity to think and feel to be used for learning rather than defence and avoidance.
Over the years, the dogs and people I have helped have returned the favour 100 fold. They have taught me that learning and teaching is about “calm attentiveness”. Fixing problems starts with paying attention – quietly, openly and always positively. Learning this, I have become much more relaxed, calm and decisive in my interactions with dogs. You get attention when you give attention. Working effectively with dogs means communication starts with the calm, attentive watcher. Wonderfully, this way of listening with your eyes as well as your ears, becomes a way of life and spills over into everything.
For 25+ years I taught training classes and advised individuals on how to create positive partnership with their dogs. In the mid-1990’s I began sharing positive reinforcement training with the deeply committed people working in the shelter world. From 1998-2004, I was the Training and Behaviour Manager for the Upper Valley Humane Society in Enfield, NH. My single most important goal was to create a shelter and training program that teaches the dogs self-control skills and their+ human partners good management skills and how to dance together. I worked with the staff, volunteers and the public, helping them use positive reinforcement to change rude dogs into agreeable family members. Shelter dogs have shown me that self-control skills are the foundation of adoption success. They literally mean the difference between life and death. I created all the kennel protocols and evaluations that I feel are fair to the dogs, remembering that the evaluation process is only a moment in time and most important was to come up with a training plan to help bring these dogs along and to find out just who these dogs are. To find the best suitable homes or jobs for the dogs who came into our shelter.
Today, I am back in private practice, which now includes travelling to many wonderful places helping shelters, rescues, or just folks who want to learn my practical, humane techniques to change our dogs and ourselves into friends and partners for life.
Certainly what I share with you in this book comes from many fine authors and trainers and I’m deeply grateful for their insights. But it is the dogs who have shown me their astonishing capacity to change when we are wise enough to listen and watch and to reinforce them for trying, it is the dogs who helped me write my first published book “Changing People Changing Dogs, positive solutions for difficult dogs”.