USA : Thursday, 6 January 2011 (Local Time)
Sandy Tuck has made a career of training dogs - and training people to understand dogs, so they can take advantage of natural canine behavior and help them be better pets.
"The classic mistake is treating your dog as a person," said Tuck, a Yamhill resident who runs STuck on Obedience classes in McMinnville in Oregon.
"Dogs think differently; they can't rationalize like people. They do better with routine and structure," she said, then added with a laugh, "You know, like small children and some adults."
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Tuck has been training dogs, first as a hobby, then as a business, for about 20 years. Her love of dogs and other animals goes back much further.
"I've always had an affinity for animals," she said.
Lots of animals. While living in Alaska, where she worked as client services director for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, she ran a Rottweiler rescue program. Over the years, she helped about 250 Rottweilers transition from one home to another.
She also worked with Alaska Dog Sports as an instructor for puppies and in obedience and agility classes. And she owned a boarding kennel and obedience school in Anchorage for several years.
When she moved to Oregon in 2001, she drove down with her eight big dogs, sending for the ninth, a rescue dog, a few weeks later. She had her three cats flown down so they wouldn't have to ride with the dogs.
To accommodate the dogs, by the way, Stuck drives a van and a pickup. "Most of my life is pretty geared to my pets," she said.
Her pets even play a role in another of her endeavors, serving as a mentor at Yamhill-Carlton High School.
She offers a scholarship for a graduating YC senior. Applicants must write an essay answering one question: "There's a quotation, 'Lord, help me be the person my dog thinks I am.' What kind of person would your dog or pet say you are?"
Tuck said she's thought about how her own pets would describe her. "They would say I'm firm, fair and consistent, and that I follow through," she said. "And that I make really good snacky-snacks."
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She now has five dogs, all males:
• Blitzen, a Rottweiler who is a certified therapy dog. While his breed often get an undeserved bad rap, she said, "he has changed people's minds about Rottweilers with his calm, nonthreatening behavior."
He also has won titles in Rally-O obedience trials. Her goal is to show him in formal obedience trials, which are more regulated than rally.
Blitzen also is a great demo dog, she said, so she uses him for demonstrations in her obedience classes.
• Brio, a Belgian Malinois, a type of shepherd. He also will be a show dog someday, she said.
• B'Ell, an 8-year-old Rottweiller she adopted through dog control. She changed his name from "Elwood" to the more musical sounding B'Ell.
• Joey, a cardigan Welsh corgi that's also a certified therapy dog. She adopted Joey from another owner. "He came with a lot of attitude," she said, but with her training and Blitzen's patient assistance, he has learned to be a good pet.
• Max, a Rottweiler-Doberman mix that she recently rescued. "He's making good progress," she said.
She also owns several cats, a llama, a sheep, a pygmy goat and about 70 chickens. She loves them all, and learns from them all, as well, she said.
Tuck is a firm believer in research that has found that having a pet reduces blood pressure. "My blood pressure is, like, 5," she laughed.
She said her pets provide companionship, unconditional love and an opportunity to care for something. And "it's a challenge getting something alive, that doesn't speak my language, to behave for me," she said.
Tuck's dog training experience started when she owned Holly, whom she described as a beautiful, smart, pit bull mix.
"I made the classic mistake," she admitted. Treated as a person, Holly soon earned the nickname "Holly Jolly Christmas Sabrina Badger Underwear-Eating, Toothpaste Foam-Catching Dog from Hell."
With training, though, Tuck learned to work with Holly's natural inclinations and use reinforcement and repetition to teach her guidelines. Holly responded to the proper treatment by becoming a wonderful companion, she said.
Dogs can learn to understand a few words, and they inherently understand tone of voice, Tuck said. They don't understand - and don't really care about - whole sentences and explanations that humans consider rational.
Tuck said she eschews the old "yank and spank" method of dog training, which punishes wrong behavior, in favor of positive reinforcement.
"Realistically, dogs need to be corrected sometimes, but I'm 95 percent positive reinforcement with treats, praise and petting," she said. "The old way worked, but treats and training are so much kinder."
Training is important, both for the owner and the animal, Tuck said.
"A dog will choose to behave in the way it sees fit. If you don't teach it, it won't know the rules," she said.
For instance, many dogs will jump up on people, if given the chance. The behavior may be the dog's way of saying hello, getting attention and gathering information about a new person - a good thing, in the dog's eyes, but not so for the person who's being jumped on. Properly trained, the dog won't jump and people will consider it well-mannered.
"My number one premise is safety," said Tuck, who teaches her own dogs the concept of "off" first thing.
Jumping is one of the behaviors that most often lead owners to dog training classes, Tuck said. Leash walking and coming when called are the two other most common behaviors owners want to teach.
"Sometimes there's a miracle dog" that naturally walks on a leash without pulling, she said, but most dogs won't. They need to learn to walk with their owners, rather than dragging them down the street.
The same goes for coming when called. Dogs need to be trained to exercise self-control, letting their owners be in charge. "It's delayed gratification for them," Tuck said.
The dog/owner teams she works with fall into two general categories: dogs that are known quantities, which families have had since they were puppies; and dogs recently adopted from shelters or other families, which may have surprising behaviors that need to be unlearned.
To deal with negative behaviors, such as guarding their food bowls or barking incessantly, Tuck said she works on turning the behavior into something that's done on command. For instance, she will teach a dog to bark for a purpose, such as to alert its owner that a stranger is on the property. Simultaneously, the dog learns to "leave it" and stop the behavior.
Incessant barking often has its roots in boredom and loneliness, Tuck said. A dog that's left outside in a kennel all day, for instance, may bark because it feels cut off from its family.
In that case, she said, the dog would be better off learning to stay in a crate in the house while its owners are away. She suggests putting the crate in the owners' bedroom, so the dog can pick up their scent - that's calming for the animal.
Tuck has been offering dog obedience classes locally for four years, and business has been growing. In 2010, she led nearly 40 seven-week sessions.
Today she holds classes in a large warehouse space in McMinnville's Granary District. Still, she keeps classes fairly small - eight teams in the basic class, about a dozen in other classes - so dogs and owners get the attention they need.
Classes include:
• Basic obedience, which teaches manners and self-control.
• A puppy class, with focuses on name recognition, potty training and acclimation to a crate and other equipment. She encourages owners not to get puppies before they're 8 weeks old, by the way. "It's better for them to stay with their litter until then. Between weeks six and eight, they naturally learn bite inhibition," she said.
• Intermediate obedience, geared toward owners who want to compete with their dogs or take training a step further.
• Rally-O, a more advanced obedience class that teaches teams to compete in a sport that asks dogs to complete different tasks at different stations.
• An advanced obedience, which focuses on off-leash heeling and competition. Many people in this class have a goal of eventually going on to therapy certification.
She plans to add a tricks class this month, which has been designated National Train Your Dog Month by the Association of Pet Dog Trainers.
Story and Foto from : www.newsregister.com (writtened by Starla Pointer)
