AbiK9 Training Services

17/06/2024

Fun fact: Smitty’s nose is so long that the cone of shame is useless unless it is so big that even Tato could wear it. Luckily, to keep him from licking a small wound on his back leg, this Kmart onesie has worked wonders 🥰

03/06/2024

The common vet-recommended des*xing age of 6months for all dogs is incredibly outdated. Although s*x hormones and the presence of go**ds increases the risk of some cancers, the premature removal of them increases about a dozen others! Not to mention increasing the risk of ortho and behavioural issues.

Updated information from the University of California study on the effects of spay/neutering.

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/when-should-you-neuter-or-spay-your-dog

02/06/2024

Wednesday Group Drop-in Training - set for the 12th at 4pm (Next Wednesday, not this one!)

Cost - $30
Open to anyone
PM/email [email protected] for info
All dogs must be on leash

Book online: https://www.abik9dogtraining.com.au/book-now

02/06/2024

26/05/2024

AbiK9 is running a self-paced field training day for up to 20 dogs.
These sessions are all ON LEASH and conducted on a very large training field.
This is NOT A CLASS, but an opportunity to work your dog in a controlled setting with other like-minded dog owners. If you're struggling to find opportunities to work your leash-reactive or socially sensitive dog, this is designed for you.
There will be a small agility area that will be added to in the coming weeks.
Bring along a chair and a dog bed to work on your dog's ability to stay calm while other dogs wander about at safe distances. Or go for a walk around the picturesque field and down to the creek.

Location: Alstonvale
Cost: $30
Wednesday 29th @ 4pm (until it gets dark)

Book: https://www.abik9dogtraining.com.au/book-now

26/05/2024

💰

25/05/2024

Wednesday's training is a go!

All dogs are going to be on leash, and it's an open-field training experience. Meaning - if you want to work on leash reactivity, obedience, etc. then you're welcome to in a safe location.

OR, you can also just go for a wander (again - on leash), or bring along some chairs and have your dog practice relaxation while other dogs work around you.

There will be some agility gear - which will be added to in the coming weeks.

Cost is $30. Open field starts at 4pm and runs till it's dark :)

Follow this link to register: https://www.abik9dogtraining.com.au/book-now
It won't ask you to pay. Either bring along cash or direct deposit (pm if confused).

Book online for private lessons, available Mon-Fri

24/05/2024

When dogs bred to use their mouths are discouraged from doing so, they regularly develop into thieves, hoarders and eaters of all the wrong things.

I work with SO MANY retrievers and shepherds, plus some of the herding breeds, whose owners assumed that when their baby puppy picked things up (that they shouldn’t have) they needed to get it from them ASAP. This would quickly turn into a game of who-is-the-quickest!! And, dogs that had no inclination towards swallowing their stolen treasures suddenly start doing so, because they don’t want you to have it.

Even people that attempt to ‘trade’ the item for food can run into trouble. Especially with puppies whose retrieval-based instincts are stronger than their desire for food.

I know it sounds weird to a lot of people, but for the love of god ENCOURAGE your puppies to carry things around. Especially if you have ANY sort of retriever. Even if it’s something you don’t want them to have. They’ve already picked it up, so rousing on them will do nothing but cause problems. Encourage the carry, encourage them to bring it to you and celebrate when they do so. DO NOT take it from their mouth, but DO touch them on the face and body to get them used to the possibility that this might happen one day.

When it’s time to get the thing from them, get out an appropriate toy and YOU start playing with it. Think, ‘wow look at this Kong, isn’t it marvelous, I love it so much’. Quickly, the puppy will wonder about that toy.

Then, you drop that toy, and when the puppy inevitably drops what’s in their mouth to pick it up, praise them for that too. Don’t sn**ch the dropped object. If anything, leave it there and continue to make a fuss of your genius puppy and his wonderful toy.

Even better, start formally training a retrieve from very young. Harness that tendency and put it somewhere productive. This is also how we get a very strong ‘let go’ cue.

Pic of a beautiful shepherd in for training right now. He doesn’t have any of these issues I mentioned, he’s just really cute 🥰

21/05/2024

You know your most annoying dog is growing up when even he’s getting sick of other dogs playing and decides to ask them to stop 😂 He might have a few more brain cells than I thought!

20/05/2024

In 1941, Moose was a 120 pound German shepherd being used as a guard dog by Universal Studios. The studio was filming their newest monster movie, "The Wolf Man", in which lead actor Lon Chaney, Jr. would portray the unlucky Lawrence Talbot who falls victim to a werewolf and inherits its curse. One scene called for a dog to attack Chaney, with the two engaging in a tussle. The studio had rounded up a few dogs, but when they tried to shoot the scene none of these dogs were right for the part. Chaney suggested they give it a try with Moose, the studio guard dog. They rounded up the canine, rolled the cameras...and Moose promptly bit straight through Chaney's protective glove, breaking a few bones in the actor's hand. But they got the footage. And surprisingly, Chaney became so smitten with Moose that he purchased the dog from the watchman owner shortly after filming wrapped. Chaney and Moose were best friends, with the canine becoming a common sight at Chaney's side and even hanging out on set while Chaney filmed scenes for his movies. Eventually, Moose became something of a star in his own right, appearing in several Universal films over a three year period. Moose was paid a cool $25 a day for his work.

19/05/2024

A week of poodles and doodles! There’s also a springer running around somewhere behind me, and a shepherd hoarding her Kong 😁

17/05/2024

Update on Wednesday arvo training - I fully intend to go ahead with this idea*!! However, the unseasonably wet conditions have meant that I need to postpone until the grounds have dried up. The actual field seems to drain well, but up by the house where all the cars will be parked is like a marsh 😓

*Wednesday afternoon open field training.

I hope everyone is enjoying this morning’s sunshine as much as Smitty is 💜

06/05/2024

I need some statues of my dogs, but posed like gargoyles. Smitty especially would make for a terrifying gargoyle.

13/04/2024

*EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST*
The Dog Club

- This is NOT a group class. It is limited to 20 dogs (due to limited parking space).
- You will arrive with your dog and do whatever you want (on leash). Play, train, walk. Work on leash reactivity around other, safe and controlled dogs.
- There will be 'zones'; some small agility gear (which I will be adding to as funds permit), a confidence building section, a rally obedience field, etc. as well as a sitting area.
- All dogs welcome. They must be vaccinated or titre tested and in good health. They all must be on leash.
- Field opens at 4pm and will run until it gets dark (5:30ish).
- Other trainers and their clients are welcome to use field/club too.
- $30/dog. Located in Alstonvale. Preference given to my clients and owners under the guidance of other trainers.

**Comment or message me if you like the sound of the Dog Club! I'm looking to get it running by next month**

07/04/2024

✨✨Feeding your dog✨✨

I get asked all the time what I feed my dogs, and ’what’s best’. So here’s a quick summary:

- I feed my dogs Royal Canin and Prime100 rolls, along with veggies, raw meat (on occasion) and bones.

- They don’t get ‘treats’. During training, they eat their normal food. This helps me manage their weight, my wallet, and keeps their motivation high.

- Most conventional treats are garbage. When they’re not, they tend to be, 1) expensive and 2) calorically dense. As most clients know, I use lots of food! If I were using conventional treats I would be broke and my dogs would have pancreatitis.

- Most kibble is pretty crap. Supermarket brands, brands endorsed by vets, all crap. ***When compared to a quality, balanced raw diet***

- Yes, a raw diet will always be superior to a processed one. That goes for humans too. When people want to get healthy, lose weight, lower their cholesterol or aid their mental health, the most logical and health conscious choice is invariably to “eat a whole food diet”. However, a whole food diet is not something that profits ANYONE, so instead it’s *this diet shake* or *that magic pill* (or, for dogs, *this kibble* or *that one*).

- If you want to do the best thing, feed your dog a raw diet filled with nutritious, novel proteins.

- If you want to do the next best thing, feed kibble and partial raw. A little bit is better than nothing. Short of that, do what you can, when you can.

- Don’t get your meat from coles or woolies. Source it from a butcher or from one of the local pet food suppliers (If you’re local to the Ballina area, Scratch and Sniff on River st. stock a tonne of raw feeding options).

- Diet and physical health ABSOLUTELY impact the behaviour of dogs (and people!!). So diet is very relevant to dog training and behaviour modification. If you’re struggling with hyperactivity, anxiety, reactivity etc. then it might be best to examine what they’re eating and how it might be affecting their gut health.

- There is lots of really conflicting information on feeding raw diets to pet dogs. Take it with a grain of salt and pick up a book, or consult a pet nutritionist, if you’re interested in going that route. 

- Vets have education in nutrition, but it is not extensive. They receive a lot of ongoing in-clinic marketing by science diet and royal Canin, but they do not receive kickbacks (maybe a branded pen or two 🤪). Unless they have extra education in the field of nutrition, I wouldn’t consider them an authority on the subject - in the same way I wouldn’t consider them an expert in behaviour.

25/03/2024

Accurate.

14/03/2024

I love having a dog park for a backyard, and I think everyone else does too!

12/03/2024

Who’s excited for a cooler Autumn!!??

03/03/2024

It ALMOST looks like an angel's halo... If she wasn't so clearly planning to rip the crap out of said halo.

02/03/2024

If you have a dog that has a penchant for committing violence against their bedding, check out my latest blog post:

The best indestructible dog beds (Australia) If you're anything like me, you're never able to just skip past the pet section at Kmart. Yes, you have ALL THE STUFF! But... well, look at that fluffy bed. And the faux fur blanket... I could put it next to the couch, I could put it ON the couch. My dogs...

01/03/2024

👇🏻

26/02/2024

Nooo 😢We've been pretty lucky in the area to avoid parvo thus far. If you've got a new puppy and are worried about how this might effect socialization, please for the love of dog contact a trainer!

🐾😷 PARVO VIRUS ALERT 😷🐾

Numerous clinics in the area are experiencing high numbers of positive parvo cases. We cannot stress enough how serious this disease is!! Please ensure your dogs are up to date with their vaccinations to cover parvo. If your dog develops any symptoms please contact your vet immediately.

Signs and symptoms of parvo include:
- Lethargy
- Vomiting
- Severe often bloody diarrhoea
- Abdominal pain and bloating
- Loss of appetite

25/02/2024

01/02/2024

5 steps to financial success 🤔

31/01/2024

Heya, asking any clients - past or present - of mine to please rate and review my business on Google (link below).

After updating my information on Google, all my old reviews have vanished 😢

Thank you to those that have already done so!

AbiK9 Training Services https://g.co/kgs/DUVyCEQ

28/01/2024

A couple of days ago, researchers at the Royal Veterinary College released their findings following a Battersea-funded, ‘pandemic puppy’ owner survey - (posted further down this page).

The authors of that research stated that those owners who took online puppy training during the pandemic had less requirement for ‘aversive techniques’ .. “Owners were less likely to use aversive training techniques if they had attended online puppy classes with their dog (while they were under 16 weeks) during the pandemic, demonstrating the value of educating owners in humane training techniques at an early stage of ownership.”

As you can see, the authors give a specific nod towards the *value in humane training techniques*

What follows is an article in today’s Sunday Times, with a couple who bought a ‘pandemics puppy’, took a ‘positive’ online course and followed these ‘humane training techniques’.

The Times Sunday 28th January 2024

Crawl on all fours and never say no: has dog training gone soft?
‘Positive-only’ trainers think harsh words hurt our pets — so what should you do when they tear up the sofa?

Matt Rudd

“He was a lockdown puppy,” says Annabel, gesturing at the horse-sized dog looking mournful by the door. Appropriately enough, the half-labrador, half-newfoundland is called Moose. The 55kg beast is good with people, but not so good with other dogs.
Until last year this wasn’t a problem. Annabel, a company director, and her family live on five acres of well-fenced Cambridgeshire fen around which Moose and their two other (normal-sized) dogs are free to roam. But last autumn Moose managed to vault the 5ft gate at the end of the drive to go after a passing poodle. It would have made a nice canapé — Moose eats two kilos of raw meat a day — but Andrew, Annabel’s husband, saw the great escape and managed to stop him. Just.
“It could have been quite awkward,” Annabel says. “He [Moose, not Andrew] obeys most commands but if he’s chasing something, he won’t stop.”
“Annabel’s too soft on him,” Andrew says from the kitchen. “Moose needs to know who’s boss.”
The reason Moose doesn’t know who’s boss, Annabel thinks, is because she got the training wrong. In the pandemic, puppy classes went online and she ended up booking a “positive-only” course because “it sounded good”.
“The trainer’s ethos was that the dog is your best friend and you must never say no to him,” she says. “A correctional tap on the nose was out of the question, as was the phrase ‘bad dog’. Everything Moose did right got him a cocktail sausage. Everything he did wrong was just ignored. It was all about gentle encouragement. I should have trusted my own instincts.”

How you train your dog is now as political as how you raise your children. In the red corner, we have the so-called force-free, positive-only dog trainers who claim their methods are backed by science and that more traditional methods are cruel, confusing and outdated. In the blue corner, the so-called balanced trainers are fighting back. As with all culture wars, the front lines are mainly online, in YouTube spats and hashtagging Twitter mobs.
The force-free trainers insist that any type of negative training is damaging for the dog and doesn’t work — you have to form a bond with your pet. It’s about trust. Other trainers disagree: if it’s all carrot and no stick, the dog won’t understand right from wrong. Or, as Colin Tennant, director of the Cambridge Institute of Dog Behaviour and Training, puts it: “If you treat a dog like a human, it will treat you like a dog.”
As a former police dog handler with decades of experience, Tennant blames positive-only trainers for the rise in poorly controlled dogs. “Where I live in Northamptonshire, I get dogs snarling and snapping and lunging at me more frequently these days,” he says. “Some of it will be down to numbers — there are just more dogs. But it’s more than that. It’s a result of woke dog trainers. They won’t say no to a dog. They won’t check a dog back if it’s leaping at somebody.”
Tennant advocates rewarding good behaviour but a firmer line when necessary: the “no” command backed up with a decent sq**rt from a water pistol, for example, or Mikki training discs, which emit an unpleasant noise. “Consistency is key,” he says. “Do not praise a dog for jumping up and then expect it to stop further jumping up.”
Spend some time down the Instagram rabbit hole that is dog training and you will find a lot of people who vehemently disagree with Tennant. “Don’t label a dog,” says one Canadian trainer. (Canada, unsurprisingly, is a heartland of gentle training.) “Don’t say, ‘This dog bites’, say, ‘This dog has bitten in one or a few specific scenarios where he wasn’t set up for success’.”
Another trainer is annoyed about the expectations we place on our best friends. “We live in a society that expects dogs to behave like robots and to never make any noise,” they argue. “Well, news flash: dogs make a lot of noise. Learn to let go of what other people think of your dog’s behaviour.” Try that the next time your neighbour complains about the barking.
Inevitably, the rise in permissive dog training is spilling over into other vexing aspects of dog ownership. In 2019, The New York Times ran an anguished opinion piece on whether it was wrong to neuter or spay. “We value convenience, and de-s*xing a dog is convenient for us,” wrote the author, an animal behaviourist. “Menses is messy: a female dog may urinate in the house and will spread bloody vaginal discharge where she rests and walks.” In short, if you’re not prepared to have dog urine et al all over your house, if you’re squeamish about dog s*x, don’t get a dog. “We ought to prioritise the complexities of managing thoughtful ownership,” she concluded. “We are the ones who need fixing.”
Since then, long and agonising debates have opened up on the cruelty of neutering. “Why is it OK to spay or neuter your pets but not your children?” asks one distressed owner, neatly summarising quite how anthropomorphic all this is becoming.
At the same time, many positive-only disciples now find the idea of kennelling abhorrent. In the last few years, dog sitters have become the positive choice which may explain the huge rise of dog-sitting apps and reports that some are now charging £100 a night to look after Fido (CVs on request). One north London trainer, upon concluding that her dog had destroyed her new pair of headphones not out of spite but because of separation anxiety, took drastic positive action. “We decided never to leave home again,” she explained. “I am very lucky to have a supportive family who would help me out.”

Matt and Harriet Rudd learnt the perils of positive-only training the hard way.
The trouble is, you do want what’s best for your dog. When we rescued Floss, a three-year-old border collie, from a lonely life on a farm a few years ago, we inadvertently picked a side. Our trainer followed the positive-only mantra.
In an effort to help Floss enjoy getting in the car, the trainer made my wife and I crawl on all fours across the backseats repeatedly in the hope that Floss would follow. For weeks, Floss just watched and shivered. The trainer was unfazed. “Just keep going, slowly, slowly,” he said. We persisted for three months and then gave up. Several years later, she’s still a nervous wreck whenever we go anywhere. Our bad. The second goal was to stop her lunging at other dogs — we’re still working on that one.
Graeme Hall, star of Channel 5’s Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly, has had his run-ins with positive-only trainers — they don’t even like the title of his show. While he says he has no truck with other trainers and other methods, he does find the terminology inflammatory. “What they do is ‘force-free’ and therefore what you do, if you’re not one of them, must be force-full,” he says. “I wouldn’t say saying no to a dog is force, would you? They’ve created a false binary. Anyone with half a brain knows that’s just not true.
“They also say, ‘Look, the science says the only way to do things is purely positive.’ That’s not true either. In 1905, the American psychologist Edward Thorndike wrote what became known as Thorndike’s law of effect: any behaviour that feels rewarding will tend to increase. Any behaviour that feels uncomfortable will tend to decrease.”
This might be more than a century old but it still applies to all species, Hall says. Humans slow down for speed cameras, “not because a policeman is hiding in the bushes waiting to hand non-speeders a bunch of flowers, but because we might get a ticket. Sometimes dogs need an element of consequence too.”
For Hall, it’s not about dominance, but leadership. “The best boss is someone who doesn’t scream and shout,” he says. “They reward you but they’re not gushing and you know exactly where you stand — you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of them.” And so it is with dogs.
Jim Gillies runs a successful positive training school in central Scotland and is one of Hall’s more elegant critics. He describes balanced training as “misleading — it implies a uniform approach which is far from reality”.
“As our world evolves, so do the challenges our dogs face, such as adapting to restrictions like lead laws and essentially living in captivity,” he says. “Recognising and addressing these changes empathetically is crucial. We are asking a lot of our dog population to comply with human rules they don’t understand. Strap a harness and lead, or even a muzzle, on the human population and watch an explosion of ‘behaviour issues’ in not too dissimilar ways.”
Gillies points me towards “the most recent” scientific study which proves him right. It would be snippy to point out that the study is two decades old. Instead, I wonder whether Hall and Gillies might actually agree on more things than not were they to go for a dog walk together. “A scientific, evidence-based approach centred on the most positive, least intrusive methods should be the standard,” Gillies says. “To ensure a clear, consistent and humane strategy for dog training.” Which is pretty much exactly what Hall says as well.
For now, I’m sticking with the occasional “Naughty dog” for Floss, and Andrew is adding another couple of bars to his 5ft gate in Cambridgeshire. We both love our dogs, just not quite as much as our kids.