Holistic Education
We can teach you how to evaluate your dog’s behavior and needs through their learning history, genetics, environment, and individual self. Alongside increasing awareness of how behavior, learning and motivation function together, we can help you develop a framework of understanding through which to experience your dog more fully, collaborate with them in their life, and assist them with safe integration into a world brand new to dogs.
Family Dog Mediation®
Our modern world & the average family home is a strange & difficult place for our dogs. They’re not disobedient & broken. They’re simply out of their element & lost. Being a “pet” is harder than it seems. It’s a whole lot more nuanced that just “dog training”. We’re ready to help your family come together around new interventions, understandings, & agreements in relationship. Welcome to Family Dog Mediation®.
Beyond Training
We can coach you through the application of your newfound understanding of how behavior and learning works. “Training” is a set of mechanical skills married with theoretical understanding in order to teach and modify behavior. Our goal is for you to feel confident setting, evaluating and adjusting your own training goals going forward, with any degree of ongoing support that suits you and your family’s needs.
Example offerings:
L.E.G.S. and CARAT: Ethological assessment approaches to holistic understanding of individual dog behavior and needs.
Dog Breeder Evaluation Education: What makes a “good” breeder? What makes a breeder a “good fit” for me?
Canine Body Language Education: What is your dog communicating?
Behavioral Physiology: The Biology of Behavior (brain and nervous system, hormones, sensory systems)
Emotion and Cognition:
Affective states based in neuroethology. How the dog brain works, how dogs think and how they learn.
Canine Development:
Puppy stages, fear periods, early neurological stimulation and socialization, adolescence, adulthood, and aging.
Animal Welfare and Training Ethics: Prioritizing Quality of Life, Increasing Agency and Resilience for the Animal
Demystifying Enrichment:
Providing an enriched environment and behavioral life for your dog, for stress relief, decompression, and mental & physical stimulation. Behavioral, social, environmental, sensory, cognitive, emotional, physiological, and ingestive/food seeking enrichment. Includes an introduction to contra-freeloading.
Classical Conditioning: The Power of Associative Learning and Conditioned Emotional Responses
Stimulus and Response: Salience, releasing stimuli, fixed action patterns, sensitization, desensitization, habituation, flooding, second order conditioning.
ABC Model of Functional Assessment & Behavior Intervention Design
(A)BC: Antecedent Assessment and Control
A(B)C: Functions of Behavior & Behavioral Diversity
AB(C): Operant Conditioning: The Science of how consequences shape behavior.
Reinforcement: Primary and conditioned reinforcement, Premack principle, and planning strategic reinforcement.
Stages of Learning: Acquisition, Fluency, Generalization, Maintenance
Clear Criteria: “The Three Ds (Distance, Duration, Distraction)” and more, training out of context, strategic escalation and combination of criteria in training plans.
Shaping: Behavior through reinforcement of successive approximation
Capturing: See, Mark and Reward Training
Cues: When to add a cue, change a cue, how to transfer cues, environmental cues
To lure or not to lure?: Prompts, lures, and fading
Chaining Behaviors: Creating a behavior chain – a series of sequential behavior.
Introductory Training Skills:
Before you get a dog, or before you begin working with your dog’s behavior, here’s a comprehensive, accessible introductory kit that will help you with efficacy and efficiency in training! Mechanics of associative learning, operant learning, and how to get behavior – prompting, luring, shaping, capturing, timing behavioral markers, and strategic reinforcement mechanics.
Puppy Proofing:
Clarifying expectations, preventing problematic learning, avoiding accidental reinforcement, management and redirection strategies, positive interruption of behavior, & outsmart your puppy hacks.
Puppy Primer:
Your puppy can start learning now! Set your puppy up for lifelong success with accessible exercises to get a head start on creative reinforcement, building engagement, promoting calm relaxation, recall, on-leash and off-leash skills, appropriate play, default leave-it, drop it, and more.
Relaxation and Separation Training:
Preventing Separation and Isolation Distress
Crate Training:
Crates as safe spaces for ease of management
Real Socialization 1:
Learn to read your dog’s body language and evaluate their emotional states. Build engagement. Environmental attunement and disengagement cues, stimulus and response management.
Real Socialization 2:
Tailoring personalized socialization and reinforcement strategies. Evaluating arousal, responses to stimuli, and installing two-way communication for approach vs. avoidance behaviors with your dog.
Real Socialization 3:
Building real-time collaboration and teamwork with your dog, tracking sensitization and implementing strategic desensitization, clarifying strategy selection and creating behavior and communication patterns you and your dog can rely on.
Collaborative Management:
Building a behavioral repertoire for ease of management: Teaching and generalization of movement cues and stationary behaviors (Stop, Wait, Come, Sit, Out, Go Around, Heel, Switch Sides, Jump Up onto Platform, Place/Settle, Duration targeting behaviors.
Safety First, Boundaries Kit:
Boundary training – Safety and management at door thresholds, fence gates, yards, sidewalks, street crossings, etc.
Safety First, Scavenger Kit:
Default leave it, the balancing act of foraging enrichment with problematic scavenging, food refusal/food avoidance training, preventing problematic ingestion of foreign objects/pica rehabilitation,
Safety First, Resources Kit:
Prevention, management, and treatment of resource guarding. Resource guarding is a normal behavior. Make sharing (toys, rest spots, food, affection) a safer and enjoyable prospect for your dog.
Safety First, Bite Prevention Kit
Soft mouth training, stopping unwanted nipping/mouthing/biting, “drop it”, safe interactive play, & reinforcing functional communication of distress or discomfort.
Leash Skills:
Learning a human walking speed, moving into light pressure, management of slack in leash, cued orientation and proximity to handler.
Off-Leash Skills:
Handler tracking, respondent recall, emergency stops, duration proximity behaviors (stay with handler until released), predation substitute training.
Example behavior challenges:
- Leash & Barrier Reactivity
- Fear of strangers, other dogs, vehicles, etc.
- Generalized fear, rehabilitating “shut down”, rehabilitating generalized behavioral suppression.
- Aggression
- Resource guarding of food, toys, people, etc.
- Leash behaviors: Pulling on leash, leash biting/tugging, planting/refusal to walk.
- Inappropriate elimination in the home – remedial potty training, eliminating marking behavior indoors.
- Destructiveness or “stealing” of inappropriate objects.
- Excessive scavenging behavior, inappropriate item eating.
- Predation replacement training – Managing prey drive
- Excessive barking: boredom barking, demand barking, alert barking
- Containment, isolation or separation distress
Example Mediation areas:
- Holistic, integrated-science approaches to canine education.
- Exploring the canine umvelt.
- Myth-busting: Dominance, Anthropomorphism, Infantilization
- Selecting a new puppy or adopted dog.
- Preventing or managing inter-dog or inter-pet conflict.
- Preparing your dog for the arrival of a new child.
- Preparing your dog for a move, before and/or after.
- Managing safety for all parties: children and dogs.
- Pet dog advocacy – guardian advocate empowerment.
- Re-homing a pet support.
- Navigating local ordinances.
- Evaluating welfare, enrichment and holistic health.
- Husbandry: Cooperative Care at home and at the vet or groomer.
- Fitness: Canine body condition, fitness for sport or support.
- Pet Loss Grief Companioning
(Custom Quote) Consulting offerings:
Dog-friendly Workplace Consult:
Evaluation of “bring your dog to work” policy in your workplace – topical areas of logistics, sanitation, HR package, liability to include local ordinances and ADA compliance, and insurance referrals.
Outsource a-la-carte assessment of suitability of individual dogs for the workplace.
Add a “bring your dog to work” seminar for your dog-owner employees.
Employee discounts on group or individual dog training.
Canine Pet Care Professional Consult:
(suitable for sitters, walkers, groomers, daycare attendants)
– Comprehensive Behavior Education
– Humane Management
– Industry Professional Standards
– Assessment Kits
– Topical research assistance
Dog Training Professional Consult:
– Education and Professional Development Resourcing
– Topical research assistance
– Assessment protocol evaluation (L.E.G.S. and CARAT models)
– A-la-carte eyes on individual behavior case and training plan.
– Procedural hierarchy evaluation
Pet Industry Professional, Human Supports:
– Active Listening Training
– Non-violent Communication Training
– Mental Health First Aid Training
– Dunning-Krueger & Imposter Syndrome Companioning
– Grief and Loss Companioning
– Burnout Coaching
Our training philosophy:
Parts of Us Pet Care Ltd. believes that we as humans can educate and equip ourselves with the most humane, effective, collaborative, and relationally healthy methods of interpreting dog behavior and “training” dogs. Our approach is to concentrate on creating conditions that enable the dog to build a history of success behind productive behaviors.
We address what we can control in the environment and how that effects behavior, we change the behavioral economy by changing the underlying motivations, or we determine what replacement behaviors we can teach. By using graded errorless learning, we have observed across all types of learners: a decrease in frustration and stress, a better overall learning outcome, increased participation from the animal being trained, and a boost in resilience for our companion animals.
This means that we use positive reinforcement almost exclusively (while evaluating other options for contingency based learning). Food is typically the most convenient form of reinforcement that trainers can control – with the added benefit of supporting animals physiologically through the learning process, however it may not be the only choice of reinforcement or even the most likely choice to teach or maintain a particular behavior. Along with food reinforcement, we incorporate environmental and functional reinforcers as well as the “Premack principle” in order to maintain more desired patterns of behavior in the long run.
We know that we can’t train or live life in a bubble, and so we focus on evaluating tailored, minimally intrusive management strategies to escalate through in real time when we need to avoid unsafe situations or accidental learning, or support the physiological state of the learner. Force-free refers to learning plans – sometimes we need to pull our dogs to safety and that’s ok!
When do we refer out?
We require preliminary veterinary assessments, may consult out, or refer out for the following complex behavior cases (external consultation may incur additional fees), as examples and not a complete list:
- Any sudden onset changes in behavior that pose a welfare or safety risk
- Chronic inappetence and other disordered eating
- Noise and other phobias
- Generalized and situational fear, distress, or anxiety
- Barrier & Leash Reactivity
- Human-directed aggression & bites
- Compulsive behaviors and abnormal patterns of behavior (stereotypies)
- Inappropriate elimination/soiling
- Self-injurious behavior
“The Dog’s Truth” L.E.G.S. Course:
Between the myths, there lies the truth
“The Dog’s Truth” is an entertaining documentary film length e-course introducing pet dog owners to applied ethological understanding of domestic dogs, and how this understanding can change your relationship with your dog forever.
- Why your dog’s behavior problems are really happening
- An introduction to the L.E.G.S. model of integrated dog behavior & welfare
- The L.E.G.S. of a Modern Dog – Why their Learning, Environment, Genetics & Self ALL need to be examined and understood
- Specific insights, explanations, & advice for the ten different historic working genetic groups of dog breeds
- Helpful considerations for what type of dog may be best suited to succeed in your environment & family
- An introduction to the revolutionary service model of Family Dog Mediation®
Industry Ethical Standards Statement – LIMA and LIEBI
As trainers and guardians, we have an ethical obligation to provide effective and efficient interventions but also to respect the autonomy, dignity and moral rights of the learner, and make our interventions as minimally intrusive/aversive as possible to achieve our reasonably determined behavioral goals.
As such, Parts of Us Pet Care Ltd. accounts for holistic animal welfare (an animal is in a good state of welfare if it is healthy, comfortable, well-nourished, safe, able to express innate behavior, and if it is not suffering from unpleasant states such as pain, fear, and distress), after which behavior programs operate in accordance with the IAABC L.I.M.A. (Least Intrusive, Minimally Aversive) ethical guidelines, following the Humane Hierarchy of Behavioral Intervention Strategy.
Intervention hierarchies that are both ethical and feasible to implement are “…in the best interests of captive animals, their caregivers and the professionals working with them to solve behavior problems” (Susan Friedman). By choosing the “…least intrusive, effective procedures (i.e. positive reinforcement-based and empowering), we increase the humaneness of our interventions without compromising our learning objectives.”
Furthermore, our behavior programs are informed throughout by the LIEBI model of identifying the least intrusive effective behavior intervention. The LIEBI principle has been prominent in the science of behavior analysis for approximately 40 years in various forms and with various phraseologies (Bailey & Burch, 2005). In the field of companion animal training and behavior consulting, this principle is a more recent development thanks to such trainers as Jean Donaldson, Ian Dunbar and Karen Pryor. The LIEBI model (algorithm and levels of intrusiveness hierarchy) is proposed as a way to offer direction in meeting our professional and ethical obligations to our clients, the subject, the technologist and the profession as a whole. It focuses on a behaviorological approach and emphasizes due professional diligence in finding the Least Intrusive Effective Behavior Intervention possible, while helping guardians train their companion animals, either proactively or reactively, to resolve problem behaviors. (James O’Heare)
+ Procedural Hierarchy Debate Article
Family Dog Mediation®
Nature’s Nutshell – The L.E.G.S. Model
The Applied Ethology L.E.G.S. Model of Integrated Canine Science, endorsed by leading canine scientists and celebrated by dog professionals worldwide, has been called “ the single most important development in the dog behavior industry” and “ the future of dog training”. L.E.G.S. introduces to us to the basic foundational system of orchestral elements that direct the behavior of every single animal on Earth, and explains what this means for our modern canine companions.
Dog training can be super fun and useful for many things, but it’s not the cure-all we’ve been led to believe that it is. We’re just not that powerful, and dogs are part of a natural system much bigger than we are. It’s not all how you raise them. Nature doesn’t work that way. All animal behavior is dictated by the interaction between FOUR primary elements:
We need the whole truth
These elements are designed to work cooperatively for every animal’s benefit and survival, creating the unique individual recipe of L.E.G.S. that each animal is. “Behavior problems” tell us that the L.E.G.S. of an animal are imbalanced. Modifying their behavior through training without a full appreciation for the complete picture of an animal’s L.E.G.S. can not only fail to get to the source of a problem, but can even further harm an animal psychologically, behaviorally and emotionally. Suffice it to say that we need the WHOLE truth about our dogs if we are to understand and help them in any meaningful way, and as such find resolutions for our own frustrations as their housemates, partners and friends.
Dog training, evolved. That’s what family dog mediation is. And it’s about time. The dog behavior and training industry has so far failed to reflect and deliver the complete picture of our dogs’ behavior in both concept and practice, continuing to follow outdated models of “obedience training” built on erroneous ideas about dogs. Though the profession has impressively developed far more effective, efficient, and humane methods of modifying behavior in dogs over the years, the emphasis on training to manipulate the expressions of behavior without a true appreciation for the causes of behavior have left us all just scratching the surface, and our heads, as we continue to struggle with a host of behavior problems in our dogs.