I’m doing BH/VT in July. I think some of you can relate to my anxiety about chip readings and greeting the judge. I’m not nervous at all about the rest 😆. This is a stranger to Vega so I’m super proud of our progress. She even sniffed him without getting scared?!? She’s always struggled with people interacting with me. Even if I’m talking to someone across the street. I don’t really understand why so it’s hard to work with.

Start with locking onto food… then it has to be faded 🙊 they are not the same thing and we talk about this in the course Can you successfully trim your dog’s nails currently?

Please do share your current experience with handling your dog. And for those who have purchased the course (thank you!) do please let us know what you find helpful from it and what you might decide to try with your own dogs There was a big mixture of different dogs at our workshop so hopefully something for everyone :) from box feeding to targeting onto toys and stripping things back when your dog gets injured while being able to still get some helpful reps in. Emma and Alba x

Do you have friends you trust and that are calm around dogs to be able to generalise your handling training with? I have 2-4 people I rotate through including one male friend. I do this before I then ask unknown people to Ruse to help me, typically it’ll be a mentorship student. Then I go back to known people again before I ask someone he doesn’t know to handle him. Something to think about when we start to push the training… Who can you ask?

It’s a piece and something we build with our own dogs and demonstrate in the course. But if it was JUST about staring at something, everyone would be doing it easily enough at the vets. We use a motivator as a part of the puzzle but work towards showing the dog how to work through the stressor and then the reward becoming accessible. There are layers to building handling drills with our dogs 🧡