This seminar, presented by Ann Dupuis of Your Dream Dog, will help you prepare your dog to be a perfect patient when visiting your vet.

Date: March 10, 2007
Time: 3:00 - 4:30 pm
Location: Randolph Animal Hospital
400 South Main St
Randolph MA

Cost: $25 (payable to the Dick Bustard Fund for stray animals)

Limited to 6 dogs! Please contact Ann Dupuis for more information or to reserve your spot.

If you would like to attend but your dog is reactive or aggressive towards other dogs or people (barks a lot, or lunges and/or snaps, or otherwise causes a disturbance), please email Ann to discuss auditing the workshop without your dog.

About the Seminar

It’s a common scene: a dog at the vet’s office who would rather be anywhere else! The dog may quake in fear under a chair, or balk at going into the examination room, or even growl or snap at the vet or vet tech.

There’s a reason this is so common: many dogs equate going to the vet with scary and unpleasant things. People they hardly know poke and prod them and do scary (and sometimes painful!) things to them. Why should dogs like going to the vet?

Wouldn’t it be nice to go to the vet’s office with a calm dog who’ll willingly cooperate with the veterinarian and vet techs in getting onto the scale to be weighed, standing still for examination, offering a paw for blood to be drawn, and remaining calm and cooperative when the vaccination needles come out?

Fortunately, there are tried and true techniques for helping dogs overcome anxiety, learn good vet-visit behaviors, and become model patients.

How Will This Seminar Help?

You will learn:

• How to help your dog to actually like going to the vet’s office
• How to teach your dog to remain calm and pay attention to you wherever you are
• Massage techniques for relaxing your dog
• “Tricks” you can teach your dog and how they’ll help you in the vet’s office
• How to teach your dog to cooperate with examinations and medical procedures
• Where to get help if you need it

Learn ways to help your dog become a model patient, from a trainer who’s taught her own fear-reactive dog to remain calm and lie perfectly still for x-rays in a room crowded with noisy equipment and a veterinarian and vet tech in scary-looking protective gear while they operated the x-ray machine � with “Mom” out of the room!

For more information, please email Ann or call 877-K9T-cher.

It seems that everyone has heard of Cesar Millan, host of the popular dog training show “The Dog Whisperer” shown on the National Geographic cable TV channel. When learning that I’m a dog trainer, a new acquaintance will often exclaim that they watch Cesar Millan and just love his show! I cringe inside while I try to calmly and politely explain just why Cesar Millan is bad for the dog training profession and very bad for our dogs.

While Cesar Millan does promote some good ideas concerning our relationships with dogs (I can agree with him that exercise and leadership are paramount!), his methods of fixing problem behavior rely heavily on using punishment and “flooding” — forcing a dog to face its fears until it “submits” (which may result in “learned helplessness,” a state of depression and helplessness in an animal that appears to the untrained observer to be calm compliance). Taken even a little bit too far, some of his methods are downright abusive.

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