Course Details
Before marker systems, before training plans, before we ever ask for performance, there is a quieter exchange happening. Our dogs are constantly telling us how they feel, what’s important to them, and what they need from us. The question is whether we are listening.
A bond is not made from successful training sessions, even with clarity from the human side. It’s from mutual understanding and considering a dog’s perspective, establishing alignment in the conversation. When a dog learns that their communication matters and will affect us, we are then on the same page and any potential for conflict is reduced. We can respond to uncertainty by listening to them, agreeing, and then building from there.
In this presentation, we will explore how developing our own social fluency and pragmatic language skills, plus recognizing how we speak (and misspeak!) with our physical movement can have emotional and behavioral impact on our dogs. This gives us the ability to reduce conflict in real time and create the foundation for true partnership. When dogs experience us as socially responsive trust can grow naturally, and then training becomes collaboration. The bond is no longer something we try to build through the activity, it’s what the activity rests on already.
About the Instructor:
Amy Cook, Ph.D. (she/her) has been training dogs for over 30 years, and she has been specializing in the rehabilitation of shy and fearful dogs for over 20 years.
She is a Certified Dog Behavior Consultant through the IAABC (CDBC), a longstanding professional member of the APDT, and was one of the first trainers nationally to become a Certified Professional Dog Trainer (CPDT-KA) through independent evaluation.
Amy returned to school in 2006 to get her PhD in Psychology from UC Berkeley, where she studied attachment theory, child development, stress and the role of social support. Her own research focused on causal inference, olfactory navigation, and the dog-human relationship and its effect on the problem-solving strategies dogs employ.
She is the developer of The Play Way, a play-based therapeutic intervention for behavioral issues in dogs, and is the co-developer of The Social Approach, which emphasizes pragmatics and proxemics to promote conflict reduction and relationship improvement between people and dogs.
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