RESOURCES
Below are links to several in-house & outside resources commonly referred to in PATH training sessions.
Psychiatric Service Dog Partners has created a fantastic sample manners evaluation criteria for a service dog in training or potential candidate. Ash has done this evaluation many times for teams in her program or as a neutral 3rd party for those in another's program.
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Note: There is NO legal certification or testing requirement in the United States for service dogs. ALL registries are scams. This is purely to provide feedback on areas of proficiency and those in need of improvement.
Loose-leash walking has to be one of the most controversial topics in dog training and dog behavior. Social media is flooded with quick fixes that use punitive tools, such as the prong collar and e-collar. Make no mistake, these tools work because pulling is at best uncomfortable and at worst, abusively painful. Otherwise, how do they work?
I take a popular balanced training method of doing 180° turns until the dog stops pulling and turn it on its head by using a back-clip harness to accomplish the same thing. I saw a video on Facebook of a guy who claimed to cure a golden retriever of pulling in 9 minutes using this method with a prong collar. I thought to myself, "I can do that!" Well, I did it in just over 1 minute, and I used a tool many balanced trainers claim encourages or makes dogs pull.
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Is Goku cured? No, because as he further explores his environment, he gets overstimulated and starts pulling again. Same with the golden retriever in the other guy's video, though. No tool cures pulling in all situations in 1 session. No method does, either, because dogs are wonderfully literal learners who need practice in many situations before they can maintain a behavior. Why not be kind and avoid causing them any discomfort while learning?
More Coming Soon!
This site is still under construction. Check back in a few days and there will likely be more.