Take the Lead Canine Services

GSP day was a success! ✨ We loved celebrating this amazing breed with a bunch of our pointy pals - all of which are regular faces here on the Farm! Can you point out your pointer? 🫵🏼 We’ve already scheduled our next breed day and final one for the year - stay tuned for the breed announcement, it’s sure to be a big one!

Sweet Mya 🩷 Mya recently joined us for a 3-week Stay & Learn to work on her leash skills, socialisation, handler engagement, and her calm mindset outside the home. In the home, Mya is picture perfect; she’s very well behaved, understands her boundaries, and has an array of commands she has learnt and can execute. Outside the home, however, Mya seemed to become overstimulated, leash reactive, and completely uninterested in her handler. Throughout Mya’s time with us, we spent a lot of time building our bond with her and showing that there’s value in us. Building this value and in turn her engagement was no easy task as she would pick and choose when she decided to be motivated by her bbq chicken rewards! While building Mya’s handler engagement, we also conditioned her to a new piece of equipment that enabled clearer communication of our expectations, especially on those days she wasn’t motivated by food reward. Mya also joined us to work on her socialisation as she could be quite fearful around other dogs, but we were able to successfully integrate her into our daily social groups through calm, supervised introductions! Mya made so much progress in 3 short weeks and we can’t wait to watch her continue to build on this progress with her family!

Did you wonder what our office tour looked like behind the scenes? No? Well here’s our BTS anyway 🤭

Our first ever Breed Day was a great success and we had a blast celebrating Golden Retrievers! ☀️ They zoomed, wrestled, ran, rolled, splashed, cuddled, tugged, napped… you name it, our golden crew did it! This video is just a snippet of all the fun they had! We’ve already began planning next month’s breed day! Do you think you know what it might be…? 👀

Check out Comet’s transformation after her 3-week Stay & Learn! ☄️ Comet arrived on the Farm extremely reactive to cars and other fast-moving objects, just like many herding breeds! She would also pull into the leash and struggled to settle down and regulate her over-excitement. Over her time with us, Comet has come along in leaps and bounds! She has been on numerous field trips to proof her skills in real world situations, and just look at her now! This video speaks for itself. From previously flipping out at a single, slow-moving car, to being able to watch many pass her by and look to her handler for guidance. Yes, she’ll need consistent work put in to make sure these habits stick, especially because she has prior associations with her guardians that may cause a slight regression in her training, but we will arm them with all the skills they need to be successful! We’re so proud of how much Comet has achieved in a small amount of time and we can’t wait to see her and her guardians thrive!

ICYMI: Our office has moved! Instead of being stationed in the house, we now have a dedicated space for pick ups and drop offs! Simply follow the signs like Nikki’s doing here, park ya broom/car, and head on inside! 🧙‍♀️🧹 * Out of hours drop offs/pick ups may still be performed in the original office. Please follow the signs as they will point you in the right direction

Join Aimee for a field trip vlog 🚌 Tag along for our sessions with Walter, Mya, Comet, Jack, and Brockie! 🎥

Welcoming Ziggy to his 10-day Puppy Camp! ⚡️ Ziggy is a 5-month-old Golden Retriever who has joined us on the Farm to establish some important training foundations. His guardians have already put in so much work with him but sought our help to find tune his cues and overcome some obstacles they’ve been facing. One of the biggest focuses of Ziggy’s Puppy Camp (and all Puppy Camps for that matter) is exposure. His guardians have been ensuring to do a lot of this with him, taking him on regular outings to the kid’s sports and other public places, but they have found he will display nervousness around cars and other seemingly random stimuli. The goal of exposure for puppies is not to flood them with all the experiences of all the things, but to gradually do so, ensuring that each new thing they experience is a positive one. We want to expose them to enough healthy stress that they can work through, but not to bombard them and in turn create negative associations with the environment. Ziggy’s puppy camp will also look at fine tuning his leash skills, which his guardians have already established great foundations with, crate training, building his impulse control so that he doesn’t jump up at people, and working on his recall. He is such a happy-go-lucky guy that absolutely loves making friends, meaning he can become easily distracted on his walks and will pull into the leash when he sees a new potential bestie. To counteract this, our team will look at building his handler engagement and showing him alternate behaviours as opposed to the jumping and pulling. We’re so excited to be part of Ziggy’s journey and we can’t wait to show off all his new skills at his handover!

Welcoming Comet to her 4-week Stay & Learn! ☄️ Comet is a Kelpie x Border Collie and displays strong herding instincts and drive. These instincts have presented as reactivity towards cars and other fast-moving objects, making walks difficult, stressful, and unsafe. Along with these undesirable behaviours, Comet struggles to calm down and switch off, her mind constantly operating at 💯. Throughout Comet’s time with us, we will be focusing on providing her with healthy outlets for her drive, such as games of flirt pole and freeshaping other behaviours to really get her mind working. We will also be placing a heavy emphasis on her calm behaviours once her physical needs have been met with duration obedience. The combination of meeting her genetic and physical needs, and practicing slowing her mind down, will then translate into the more specific training around cars/fast moving objects. We will also be building the value she holds in her handler so that we are more exciting than her triggers. This will all be a work in progress, but we know Comet and her family have what it takes to achieve long-lasting results after her time with us! We can’t wait to see just how far she’ll progress in these 4 weeks!

Welcome, Jack! Jack is joining us for a 3-week Stay & Learn to work on his leash reactivity, leash skills, impulse control, and overall mindset. At just 9 months old, Jack is HUGE and insanely strong, and he’s only going to get bigger and harder to manage. He is so strong and so reactive, that he has pulled his guardian to their knees on a walk, and, as you can see from this video, he almost achieved the same feat with our experienced trainers! Jack is a big boy with a busy brain and he struggles to regulate his mindset and impulses. At his age, this is often the case with the troublesome ‘teenage’ dogs, but his size and strength really showcase his hectic mindset to the point he is a safety risk. His guardians want nothing more than for Jack to have a good life after he had a rough start, but they want to be able to enjoy his life WITH him. Being unable to take him out of the house, having him being destructive in the house, and struggling to find him outlets for his energy are not conducive to this goal, and that’s where we come in! We’re by no means claiming that he’ll be fixed after his 3-weeks with us; that’s simply not realistic for ANY dog. What we aim to achieve during this time is laying down some solid foundations that his guardians can continue to build upon at home. We aim to have him conditioned to equipment that will enable clearer communication and therefore nicer leash skills. We aim to bring some calmness into his mind through The Art of Doing Nothing. We aim to teach him all about how great crates are. We aim to teach him appropriate social manners through our balanced pack. And we aim to improve his handler engagement, particularly around other dogs. We’re so excited to see Jack progress on the Farm. Stay tuned for updates!

Has your dog had the daycare experience at Take the Lead yet? If not, if not, they're missing out! Our Farm-based facility is unique to other daycares simply due to the sheer SPACE we have. All this space (23 acres to be precise!) enables our dogs to do what they do best: BE DOGS! They can run, they can dig, they can roll, they can wrestle, they can play tug, they can fetch, they can sunbake, they can splash around in pools, they can get cuddles from our team... there is truly something for every dog here on the Farm! From the working breeds like kelpies, border collies, and heelers, to the quieter mastiffs, oodles, and greyhounds. And don't forget the little guys and girls - we also run small dog social yards so they too can safely experience the Farm fun! Each day is different and, under the careful supervision of our trained daycare team, they can run amuck with all their new friends before heading back home for the best sleep of their life 😴 So whether you want your pooch to have fun while you're busy at work, or maybe you just need them out of the house for the day, or perhaps you just want to send them on a play date with their new best friends - daycare is perfect for you! For more information on our daycare service, visit our website or contact our friendly team! 🤎