This much as obvious as soon as you meet Sarah in her training center--she's passionate about a) the well-being of all dogs, b) her human clients and maximizing their communication / relationship with their dogs, and c) the art / skill / career of dog training.
We already had 2 well-adjusted dogs when we adopted our third, a 7-month old puppy with issues our older dogs never had...so we took the new guy for private training in Sarah's "Fundamentals Program". Sarah spent several hours with us during the initial session (in the evening, so both human parents could be there), getting to know our dog, our concerns, teaching us techniques, literally walking us through drills with a slip lead (since leash reactivity was one of our pup's biggest issues), and observing both of us 'parents' and giving us individual pointers. It wound up being literally life-changing for us and the puppers.
Ever watch a YouTube dog training video, or any episode of Cesar Milan, where some out-of-control punk pup is rehabilitated into a responsible canine citizen within the span of a few minutes of screentime, and think 'it'll never work like that with MY dog'? (I have...cuz we were pretty desperate before heading to Naturally Driven K9).
Well it's not instantaneous in real-life...but spend a few hours with a kickass trainer like Sarah, and it CAN be that easy to transform the puppers (or your relationship with your puppers) if you're consistent in applying what you've learned. It's not like we weren't trying before, it's just that our pre-Sarah attempts at training him were ineffective.
One of the open secrets about Sarah's profession must be that 'dog training' is just as much (if not more) about training the humans. Dog 'parents' can run on the defensive side--so the fact that Sarah teaches us humans in a way that's expert, constructive, but comes across as non-threatening, makes her training so easy to be receptive to. She's clearly studied many different philosophies of dog training (and continues to do so), but she's a dog parent just like the rest of us and seems to have adapted the best aspects of other trainers she's learned from, and her own experience, into her own common sense, effective style.
Leash walks used to be dreadful ordeals for us as well as the puppy, and she's given us the tools to make our walks happy and productive instead of loud, stressful, and aggressive. Long way of saying, we love Sarah, and can't thank her enough--the things she's taught us about how to interact with our puppy has improved our communication with the older dogs as well--and by the time we returned for our 1 hour followup session with Sarah only 2 weeks later, it was like we were bringing back a completely different dog. Highly recommend her services. read more