Animal behaviour advice

Judita offers animal behaviour advice for more serious problems: the charge for this is £25 per hour. Such problems may include excessive barking, over-enthusiasm when meeting people, house training difficulties, or even mild dog to dog aggression. Judita's dogs can be brought into these one-to-one classes as distractions, or as non-threatening friendly dogs to improve your control over your dog when meeting other dogs. Please note that for some behavioural problems, a behaviourist may recommend a health check by your vet.

An initial behaviour session starts at your home, where Judita observes your dog in his/her usual surroundings. We can then discuss your dog's problem as well as giving Judita the opportunity to observe your dog's behaviour. The remainder of the session is spent with determining the best approach for you to solve the problems discussed. After the session, all methods suggested will be explained in detail and sent to you either by email or letter.

Dog training classes

Judita also offers one-to-one dog training for obedience, agility or simply solving control problems: the charge for this is £15 per hour. You may feel that instructors are not targeting your particular difficulties in class, or that you would like more competition focus than your present classes are offering. This option is also ideal for first time owners of puppies to find out how to encourage your puppy to grow up into a well mannered adult dog.

Any level of obedience or agility can be addressed and again Judita's dogs can be brought in to simulate (controllable) distractions, to improve control over your dog. The emphasis in training with Judita is on keeping your dog motivated, making sure they enjoy the exercises they are doing for you.

The training Judita advises is all reward based as she believes it to be extremely important that everyone has fun in training. Obviously, dog do get things wrong sometimes, but there is usually no need to get cross with them — the photo on the left shows Judita crossing the road with her dogs. Although they always sit at the roadside, when there was a person on the otherside of the road with a camera, they were just not going to perform. There was nothing left to do but laugh!

Qualifications

Judita Preiss is a qualified dog trainer (ADTB) -- while in Britain, she trained dogs at Godmanchester DTC, and at the Cambridge Canine Education Group, in Columbus, Ohio, she has instructed at the Columbus All-Breed Training Club and at the Buckeye Region Agility Group, as well as running seminars. She has attended a number of dog training courses, including an Animal Behaviour course run by the Blue Cross while working at the Cambridge shelter. She competes with her own dogs in obedience (Aragorn was working A and B obedience before we allowed agility to take over), agility (Aragorn went Grade 6 before leaving the UK, Bilbo is in Excellent in the US), conformation (Gala has her AKC Championship and JW in the UK), and herding (Gala and Eowyn both have their PTs).