Pawsitive Works

From The Inside

Karenschu — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:02:30 +0000

There’s no doubt that being in the classroom with youth and dogs is powerful. Powerful for them and our volunteers and trainers.

Here one of our newest trainers relates her first week experiences:

Well, I have survived week one and….. I am so excited for next week! I don’t know who is more excited, me or the students. As you know, I assigned them their dogs on Thursday. The students were having such wonderful successes, they were asking me if I would be at the classroom if they show up early for class. They walked out of the classroom physically taller. It was so sweet!
The greatest dog training success of the day was Ricardo and Bain. The animal control officer referred to Bain as “the crazy one” and Bain was Ricardo’s last choice. But Ricardo hitched up his pants and applied what we taught him with the clicker. We encouraged him to give a high rate of reinforcement for calm behavior. By the end of the session, he had Bain’s full attention. Yesterday, we removed a rug from Bain because he was going to chew it up. Today, Ricardo clicked and treated Bain for looking at the rug and back at him and eventually, for sitting on the rug. Ricardo was in love and sooo proud of himself. As he walked to the door with Bain pulling on the leash, he asked me about teaching Bain to walk nicely on leash and then Ricardo offered: “So do we just click and treat him when he stops pulling?” This kid has great dog training potential!
The greatest turn around was Anthony. Anthony has been 15 minutes late the first two days of class. He showed up ten minutes early Thursday and asked if he could come ten minutes early on Monday. He has a quiet, shy smile. Anthony was hoping for the Kelpie, but he is connecting to the Lab’s need to be in body contact. And the Lab was offering up “sit pretty” (or beg or whatever Anthony will eventually call it), so Anthony became taken with his charge.

Fabian is also quiet and is the most concrete thinker of the class. He struggled a bit with the concepts of capturing a behavior and in being creative in what he was looking for, but Bobble is so smart so Fabian will do fine as training with the dog progresses. Fabian was just all smiles at the end of class.

Welcome

Karenschu — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:16:24 +0000

Thank you for taking time to find out a little more about our program and who we are! Your suggestions, input and questions are very important to us. Feel free to leave a note.

Warmly,

Karen Schumacher – Executive Director

We’ve made progress!

JeffHughArt — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 23:29:33 +0000

We are pleased to continue our efforts to grow and share this program. Our efforts have been rewarded by recent grants and an opportunity to share the program results.
The National Convention for the Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention selected us to share our results in October, 2011 in Maryland. We recently collaborated with The Peabody Research Institute out of Vanderbilt University to examine our curriculum and measurement tools.

Our new curriculum and measurement tools will be implemented Fall of 2012. We are excited to include Caldwell, Idaho as our new site at that time! We will be partnering with the Canyon County Animal Shelter (www.canyoncountyshelter.org/ )and Canyon County Juvenile Probation.

Interested in helping us get these results shown and our program expanded? We could use your help – really!