Have you ever wondered how various dog trainers got into dog training? I think about this often and ask fellow trainers any time I have the opportunity. It is always cool to learn about how people first dipped their toes into the dog training pool, so I thought I would share how I got started on my dog training journey and hopefully share a useful lesson in the process!

I was never allowed to have dogs growing up. We had multiple cats through my childhood/teenage years, but my parents did not want dogs. So I got my first experiences with dogs through the family and friends in my life that had dogs. I loved them and always wanted to have my own someday. That day came in 2011 when I was 20 years old. I was living with my best friend Sam at the time in a small townhouse and both of us loved dogs; Sam actually grew up with dogs in his home and all of our friends loved his family dog Libby. We had talked multiple times about possibly getting a dog and on July 7th our friend Jerico’s family dog Pinky gave birth to a litter of 11 Staffordshire Terrier pups. We weren’t for sure about getting one but Jerico’s mom told us we could have one if we wanted. When the pups were 11 weeks old she had 2 left that we could choose from and we decided we were going to pull the trigger and take one. 

We went to her house after I was off work and opened the crate for the 2 pups to come out and say hello. A little all white male Staffy walked up to me and I was sold. Sam was sold pretty quickly too since he wanted a male dog and the other pup was a female. We took the pup home that night and named him Tech after our favorite rapper Tech N9ne. I was obsessed with him. 

We went through all the typical first time puppy owner struggles and during that process I was soaking in as much information as I could. I was hooked on watching “The Dog Whisperer” with Cesar Milan and thought he was amazing. I got a couple of his books and read them within days. I started putting his advice to use immediately and felt great about it, at first. Within a couple months I was getting frustrated with Tech on a regular basis because he wasn’t submitting to me as the alpha. Little did I know I was going about everything all wrong.

When Tech was about 6mo old Sam and I were walking him in our neighborhood and he was pulling all over the place and not listening (more on that later) - so I put him in an alpha roll (for those that don’t know this technique, it is when you roll a dog onto their back and pin them down until they give up fighting it). This just frustrated Tech and he was fighting it big time, which was frustrating me. Sam, having watched all of The Dog Whisperer with me, suggested I try holding him and squeezing him as a sort of elevated alpha roll, so I did. After just a few moments of this Tech wiggled his head free and bit me on my arm 5-6 times in a row going up my arm. At that point I put him down and knew this wasn’t working and said something to Sam about needing to find some different suggestions. 

At this point I was even more obsessed because I wanted to figure this out. I wanted to have a well trained dog and didn’t want the conflict we were experiencing at that time. I felt bad about it and wanted to have a better relationship with my dog. So I got a book called “The Dog Whisperer” by Paul Owens. This book took a completely different approach to training and used food/toy/life rewards to teach skills. I was instantly having success with this approach and felt like I had found the holy grail. At that point I started diving into the world of R+ training and bought many different books to start reading.

While I was having success with this new to me method of training, I was still struggling with some things and I couldn’t figure out why. I couldn’t get Tech to consistently respond to his name or verbal cues. One day my mom said “You know, he might be deaf” to which I was in complete denial at first. I thought it was my lack of training chops. No way he was deaf. Eventually I thought my mom could be right and decided to take him to a vet nearly 3 hours away to run a BAER test to see if this was true. Low and behold it was. He had congenital bilateral deafness (deaf in both ears from birth). I had some mixed emotions about this diagnosis at first, but pretty quickly it didn’t bother me at all and allowed me to be so much more patient and understanding with Tech. This had me diving into the dog training world even more.

Eventually I got a book by Jean Donaldson called “The Culture Clash” which is a very well known book in the dog training world. After blasting through the book with a ton of enthusiasm about its content there was an ad in the back for her school “The Academy for Dog Trainers” which I looked into immediately. At that point I knew I had found the career path I wanted to take. Within 6 months I pulled out a loan against my 401k I had built up at my IT Job with Seagate Technologies and enrolled in the online program. It was amazing and I was so stoked to be a part of a community of people from all over the world on the same path.

That’s how my journey into becoming a professional dog trainer began. I graduated from Jean’s program and have since taken many more courses & continued education opportunities to build on the amazing foundation she and the Academy team helped me build. It took me longer than I had hoped to get the business side of things rolling but I eventually made the leap and have been taking clients professionally since 2019, now having helped hundreds of people and their dogs better their training skills and understanding of their canine companions.