I've always been animal mad, with a particular interest in dogs and horses. After leaving school I went onto a YTS scheme (remember those?!)  at a local stables and worked with horses on and off for years afterwards.

 

I’d always had pet dogs and enjoyed training them. My first dog as an adult was a lurcher and I duly took him to puppy classes and then moved on to the more competitive obedience type classes. The training was very much about using food and toys for reward and motivation and my lurcher turned out to be far more clever and trainable than I’d expected!

 

Later on I got a Collie cross puppy and started to learn even more about how dogs think and learn.  Delving into the science of dog behaviour had me fascinated.

I discovered clicker training and that had me hooked!

 

I was lucky enough to find a good local dog training establishment, started off assisting in classes and later on moved on to teaching classes of my own. After

a few years of deliberation I decided it was now or never. If I didn’t at least try branching out on my own I’d aways regret it. So here we are!

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Working as a trainer/instructor for about 6 years now, along with my own  canine  education has continued to convince me that the best way to train any animal is by using rewards. Very often these rewards come in food form, for various reasons - the two main ones being ...

a) Most dogs find food highly desirable and therefore will work to obtain it and

b) during training sessions you can get lots of repetitions of the behaviour you want to teach in a short space of time. A dog trained using rewards is far more likely to happily participate in training than a dog who has been trained using punishment or compulsion. A dog who has learned to “sit” by having his bottom pushed down to the ground will certainly learn to sit. However he will enjoy the learning experience far less than the dog who learns that sitting without having his bottom pushed down gets him a tasty treat.

 

Some dogs aren’t that fussed about food. Some prefer to play with a toy. Or sniff.

Or chase. Every dog has something he loves doing. The key is to teach him that if he does things you want, he gets things he wants. A win for everyone!

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Sometimes of course dogs do things we’d really rather they didn’t. Some of those behaviours can be eliminated by ignoring but most often, it is necessary to teach your dog what you’d rather they did instead. If our dog jumps up, chances are he’s doing it for attention. Simply ignoring the jumping might work but once he learns that jumping doesn’t work, he may try something else - and chances are you won’t like that either! So we teach him what he can offer in order to get the attention he wants, and we make sure that it’s something he can’t do at the same time as jumping up - for instance a “sit”. So his “go to” behaviour when he wants attention switches from jumping up to sitting. He gets the attention - you get a polite dog who doesn’t jump up. Everyone is happy!

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Training is a combination of management (making sure the dog can’t practise the wrong behaviour) and teaching them the right behaviour in a kind, fun way so that the right behaviour becomes more worthwhile than the wrong one.

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I have a diploma in Canine Behaviour and Training.

I am a CTDI (Certified Trick Dog Instructor).

I am a CAP level 1 clicker trainer.

I have several years experience teaching classes and 1-1 sessions of all levels.

My professional education is ongoing - I try to attend seminars/workshops (in person and more recently online) as often as possible.

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Why "FiDoes"?

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It was the first "doggy" sort of name that came to me and immediately it was in my head, the word "Does" stood out as a nice, positive part of the whole! So it seemed to fit nicely with the ethos I wanted to promote.