(upbeat music)
- Hi, I'm Miss Penny from Kid Vision
and I'm thrilled to meet you.
- It's so nice to meet you Miss Penny.
I'm Teoti Anderson from A Dogs Best Friend.
And this is Finian, he is a 13 year old Papillon.
Papillon on is the French word for butterfly
and his ears look like butterflies,
and that's how they got their breed name.
He's very sweet, he's a retired therapy dog.
- [Miss Penny] Oh, he's beautiful.
And you're a dog trainer? - Yes, I am.
- How did you get into dog training?
- When I got started,
I wanted to do pet therapy with my dogs,
and that's when you have a dog that you train
to go into hospitals and nursing homes, and schools,
and make people happy.
And I didn't have a dog that was good at that.
They have to be really, really comfortable with people,
they have to love everybody,
and they have to be really well trained.
And at the time, I wasn't a dog trainer.
I didn't know how to train dogs.
I adopted a three-legged Labrador.
He was in an accident and he lost his leg,
and he ran around just fine, but he loved everybody.
He was wonderful.
So I started training him.
We used to work with people in rehabilitation hospitals,
and those are hospitals where people go
when they've had accidents, or maybe they've hurt their arm,
or maybe they've lost a limb.
And they loved him
because they felt like he was one of them.
- What type of training did you have to go through
to become a dog trainer?
- So when I first started many years ago,
there weren't a lot of schools
on how to become a dog trainer.
I had to read lots of books and watch video tapes,
and study on my own.
But as dogs become more and more members of our family,
and more and more people get dogs,
and as scientists learn more about dogs,
there's become more schools, so that people can go
to school now to become a dog trainer.
- Are there different styles of training?
- Yes, there's lots of different types
of training out there,
there's lots of different ways to get behavior.
We are big fans of positive reinforcement.
We wanna reward dogs for doing good things.
We don't have to bully our dogs to make them do
what we want them to do.
They're our friends and we don't wanna do that.
You wanna be nice to your dog.
So whenever Finian does something right, he gets a treat.
And so he does a lot of things right
because he really likes his treats.
- How do you get started with the dog training?
- It depends, it depends on what exactly the problem is
the person's calling us for.
We'll go into a house,
perhaps the dog is jumping on grandma,
or getting on the couch, or stealing food off the counter,
chasing their children.
And so we start with that, and we work with the dog,
but we also have to work with the people.
Because there are things that people do
that make dogs very naughty.
We're also training the dog owner.
Some of it involves how to teach your dog to sit,
or how to teach them to lie down,
or how to teach them to stop jumping on grandma.
But some of it is on how to be a good pet owner.
For example, Finian has really big ears,
and sometimes we have to check those ears for infections
or seeing if, make sure that his ears are healthy.
We have to teach people how to be good pet owners as well.
It's not just fun and games.
When you first get a puppy, you think I'm gonna teach him
all these tricks and he's gonna roll over,
and he's gonna high five and it's gonna be fun.
And I'll walk him every day.
But puppies are messy.
Puppies get into trouble.
It is a lot of work owning a puppy,
and it is a big responsibility.
- Could you teach us how to be a responsible pet owner?
- Absolutely, I'm happy to show you that.
- Great. (upbeat music)
- Jeff, come!
Good Boy! (upbeat music)
(bell chimes)
(playful music)
- Let's talk about being a responsible pet owner.
- Well, it's not just fun and games.
We do like to teach them tricks
and we like to teach them good manners.
But you also have to learn how to take care of your pet.
This is Rosie, she's seven years old
and she's a Yorkshire Terrier.
And some dogs don't like being touched anywhere.
They don't like it when you touch their paws,
or they don't like it when you look in their ears.
So one of the things that we teach owners,
is to help their dogs learn to be handled.
And Rosie's really good at this,
you can do anything to this little girl.
She's very easy to handle.
You can look at her feet and make sure
that all her toes are okay.
It's hard to find them in all this fur sometimes.
She likes her belly rub,
and this is what we want for every dog.
So what we do, is we might brush them a little bit,
and we'll brush really...
You wanna be careful when you do that,
you don't wanna yank.
Just like our hair, you don't wanna yank your hair,
you wanna make sure that you're doing it really easy.
And then, good girl, she gets a cookie for that.
Good girl.
And then we're gonna brush a little more.
- So you just start a little at a time?
Exactly, if you try to brush this whole dog (chuckles),
first of all it takes a long time with Rosie.
That's not as much fun.
And then everybody gets frustrated and the dog starts crying
and you might start crying.
But she'll do anything for cheese, she's doing really good.
Would you like to try?
- Sure. - Okay.
So here's Rosie. Rosie, this is Miss Penny.
- Hi Rosie. - And here's your brush.
- I'm gonna give you just a little brush.
Oh, you're so pretty!
- And now we have Clover with us.
She's a five month old Golden Doodle puppy.
And I'm gonna show you how to teach dogs to take medication.
Sometimes they get sick and we need to take care of them,
and sometimes they may need pills or liquid medication.
(alarm rings)
- [Miss Penny] Adults should be the only ones
touching medication.
Whether it's for kids or for pets.
Never try to give medication to your pet by yourself.
So what we do is, we might hide it in a piece of cheese,
and then she takes it right down.
Other times, they may need liquid medication.
And so this is not actually medication cause she's not sick,
but this is for purposes, we're gonna use some beef broth
to train her with.
So what we do, is we hold her here,
and we lift her mouth a little bit.
You have to get through all the fluff.
We tuck this in the side, and we just go really slow.
Yeah. - She likes it.
- She does. Was that good?
So she is really good about taking medication,
and luckily Clover's not sick, she's absolutely healthy.
But should she get sick, she's ready to take her meds
like the veterinarian tells her to.
- Oh, that's wonderful!
Cause I know so many people struggle
with giving their animals medication.
It's nice to be prepared
and to have some techniques for them.
- Yes, and you wanna try when they're puppies,
but it's never too late to train a dog.
So if you have an older dog that needs medication,
you can start with the peanut butter and some baby food.
It has to be a treat that they love.
This is Sawyer, he's a ten year old Belgian Tervuren.
And when Sawyer was a puppy
he did not like having his nails done,
it was really hard for him.
A lot of dogs don't like it,
whenever you reach for their paw, they pull it away.
And so I worked really hard to train him
to like having his nails done.
With Sawyer, I like to use a dremel.
And this file's the nail down so you don't have to clip it.
And so sometimes this can be a little extra scary to dogs
because it's noisy, and it also does the nail.
Sawyer, good boy.
So he'll give me a paw,
(dremel hums)
- It's like getting a manicure.
- It's just like getting a manicure, exactly.
- How do you get a dog to get to this point,
where they're comfortable?
- Dogs don't always do what we want them to do,
so we have to have lots of patients with them.
And so what I did at first, was I would just run this
and he would get a treat, and I would run it
and make the noise and give a treat.
And then eventually I just did one nail,
and give him a treat and then we would end for the day.
And by the time I got to all the nails, it was fine.
It was just a while.
So now I can do all of them, and he's much better.
As you can see, he's a lot more relaxed
about having his nails done.
So being a responsible pet owner is really important.
But it's also important to teach your dog manners,
so that they're easier to live with.
- Like teaching children manners?
- Yes, exactly.
- Can you show us how to teach dogs good manners?
- Sure. - Great.
(upbeat music)
(bell chimes)
(playful music)
- So one of the most important things
you can teach your dog, is to sit.
Sit is just good manners.
This is Chewbacca, he is a five month old Cavapoo.
That's half Cavalier, half Poodle.
And we're gonna teach him to sit, so Chewy.
I have a treat in my hand, and I'm gonna slowly go,
yes, good boy, over his head.
(indistinct)
- And how do you teach dogs not to jump on people?
- First thing is, you're gonna teach to sit.
This is where it really comes in handy.
So, what I want you to do is,
I'm gonna let Chewbacca come over to you,
but I only want you to pet him when he sits.
If he gets up, you're gonna stop petting him, okay?
- Chewy (mimics kisses), come over here.
Sit. Good boy, now you can pet him.
- Oh, rolling over counts, that's fine.
He's good with belly rubs. - He's a good boy.
- And see, if he's rolling over for a belly rub,
he's not jumping on you, and that's just good manners.
- It is good manners. You're a good boy.
So sweet, look at you!
What type of behaviors are good for dogs to learn
so that they're good pets?
- Well, we teach them basic manners,
like coming when called, sit, lie down, stay,
don't run out the front door, we do a lot of that.
But some dogs need more advanced behaviors.
If you have a dog that is helping
somebody with disabilities,
they may need to retrieve something.
Like get money for them, or pick up something off the floor.
The other thing we do is we train tricks.
Manners are important, but tricks are fun.
So, sometimes we train just fun tricks for dogs.
How to play dead, how to rollover.
There's a variety of things you can do.
Dogs can learn just about anything.
Sometimes, you meet a dog that's a stray,
that's not attached to a person.
It's really important that you don't go pet that dog,
because there's no one to ask if the dog is safe.
So there's something that you can do to help keep you safe.
What you don't wanna do, is run or yell.
Because that's acting like a squirrel.
If you act like a squirrel the dog's likely to chase you.
So instead, we're gonna be trees.
So what we're gonna do is, trees plant their limbs,
their trunks in the ground, really strong.
So you're gonna lock yourself
into the ground really strong.
You're gonna take your branches, wrap them around your body,
and you look at the sun and pretend you're a tree.
And you're really, really quiet.
And then what's gonna happen is, you're really boring.
And so the dog is gonna sniff you for awhile,
and hopefully, just move onto something else.
But if you run and scream, and flail around,
the dog is likely to chase you, and you might get bitten.
So we wanna be perfectly safe and just be a tree,
and be perfectly still until an adult can come help you.
- Thank you so much Teoti for teaching us
about being a good dog trainer.
- Oh, thank you for having me.
- It was wonderful. - Thanks.
And the dogs too. - Yes, the dogs were perfect.
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