Meet your trainer Shayde
Before I was a Dog Trainer, I was a stressed out pet owner with a problem dog, desperately searching for answers. I know how it feels to want to help your dog, but everything that you try seems to complicate things further and add to your confusion.
My dog Mia, an American Staffordshire Terrier, had taken over my life. She was aggressive towards other dogs, anxious about everything and difficult to control out in public. Mia would lose her mind and try to chase prey animals like birds, kangaroos, rabbits and lizards. She even tried to pick a fight with the neighbours horses after escaping the house one day. Walking her was a nightmare, she would drag me around barking and lunging at approaching dogs. I did not trust her off leash. And to top it all off I couldn’t leave her alone because she had separation anxiety and would howl and bark the whole time when I left her. It’s exhausting just thinking back to this list of behaviours.
It was a hard time and as much as her behaviour was impacting my life, I just wanted to help her.
I tried working with a trainer and while I thought that we were making a little bit of progress, the advice wasn’t really helping. I knew that there was a lot more that I needed to understand if I truly wanted to resolve the problems that I was having with Mia.
And so I decided to learn as much as I could about Dog Training and Dog Behaviour.
I spent the first 2 years of my Dog Training education learning about Force Free/Positive Only training. This style of training focused on rewarding the dog for good choices, never using any type of consequences or punishment and instead relying on lots of management to help set the dogs up for success. Modern Science based Dog Training methods that could resolve any problem without ever having to use punishment, that was the promise from the Force Free Trainers that I was learning from.
But again, even though I felt like I had made some progress, these methods weren’t actually helping. I realised that all I was doing was managing Mia’s behaviour and the extremes that I had to go to do this were exhausting for me and honestly really unfair on Mia.
And then something happened that forced me to question everything I understood about training at the time. There was an incident where Mia escaped the house and in what seemed to be a moment of her completely losing her mind, she started showing aggression towards people outside trying to pass the house. She sprinted up and down the street in front of cars, barking like a maniac and then cornered a man on a bike refusing to let him move by circling him and charging at him when he tried.
That was not my dog. Mia seemed possessed. After getting through the situation without anyone coming to harm I was left in tears and with some big questions. I remember turning to Mia and saying to her “you are going to break my heart”.
I searched for advice on how to deal with a dog like Mia and I kept finding the same suggestion. Behavioural Euthanasia. That some dogs cannot be helped and are too much of a risk to try and manage.
Oh boy, that was a heavy few days. I thought that this was my only option.
But I consider myself to be a logical person and I asked myself had I truly tried everything that I could to help Mia? Maybe this Positive Based training was the problem? Maybe it wasn’t as effective as people were claiming that it was? What about the other side of the Dog Training spectrum? What about Balanced Training?
And so I pivoted and started to educate myself on Balanced Training methods, the use of consequences, punishment and tools in dog training.
But even the balanced side of the training industry was confusing to navigate. I eventually came across Ivan Balabanov and his Training Without Conflict Dog Training School.
After purchasing a few of Ivan’s videos and seeing an instant shift in not only my dogs, but also clients dogs, I was hooked and signed up for Ivan’s Training Without Conflict Certification course.
This changed everything for me, it changed how I understand dogs and their behaviour, and it changed my life with my dogs. Because after applying what I learned from Training Without Conflict, Mia became a different dog, she has an awesome life, she gets to run free every day, she is the dog that I always knew she could be. Mia even comes to work with me to help rehabilitate other problem dogs.
What did I change that helped get Mia to this stage? I let her be a dog, I let her run and be free, I taught her to play and channel her drives into more appropriate activities, I gave her the room to make choices for herself and I introduced consequences for bad choices. And now Mia is the happiest and most confident she has ever been throughout her 7 years of life.
And now I am a Training Without Conflict Certified Dog Trainer. One of only 4 in Australia. I specialise in difficult behavioural cases, resolving issues like reactivity, aggression and anxiety.
I named my dog training business The Last Round because of my passion for the combat sports like Boxing and MMA. It’s in the last round that the fighters give it their all, empty the gas tank and leave nothing on the table. This is my approach to dog training, I give each case my absolute everything, I’m in this to get the results, to transform lives and that takes the highest level of commitment.
That’s what you can expect from working with me and if you are committed to putting the work in and getting the results than you are my type of client.
Shayde.
