Rochester Canine Academy

02/12/2025

02/12/2025

02/11/2025

It's Westminster Week! This week, we are featuring Maud Earl's painting of Duc, the first Poodle to win Best in Show at Westminster, and also the first dog with a woman handler to win Best in Show at Westminster!

Known in his day as "The Duke," this standard poodle kicked off the poodle's rise in popularity in the United States where it remains a top five breed registered to the American Kennel Club to this day. Duc arrived in the United States in 1934 having been purchased from Jane Lane of Nunsoe by Charlotte Hayes Blake Hoyt's mother as a gift to her. She reportedly paid £1,000, or about $75,000 by today's standard. He was already a four-way international champion in Switzerland, France, Germany, and England. Hoyt showed him at the Westminster Kennel Club's dog show in 1935 and he took Best in Show, marking the first win for the breed and the first time a woman handled the Best in Show winner.

In the painting by Maud Earl, he is shown among wind-swept cliffs by the sea, highlighting the breed's status as a water retriever. Duc himself revealed his portrait to happy onlookers by pulling on a rubber rat toy that was tied to the fabric draped over the canvas. He was born in Switzerland in 1929 and died in the United States in 1940.

If you're at the show, come say hi to us at our booth!

02/10/2025

‼️IMPORTANT NOTICE ABOUT MICROCHIPS‼️

Attention clients!

We have recently received news that the company Save This Life Microchips have closed their doors suddenly and are no longer responding to calls or emails. We have been using Save This Life Microchips since summer 2016. Currently any chip registered through them is unlinked and does not hold any information regarding owner contact. We were hopeful that the company would offer a solution to pet owners left in this difficult situation, but so far that’s not the case. Pet owners will need to transfer their pet’s chip number and contact information through new websites. There are many out there and it’s simply which site works best for owners.

To check and see if your pet is still registered, and which company:

https://www.aaha.org/for-veterinary-professionals/microchip-search/

If you find your pet is no longer registered, you can reach out to the following companies to register through them:

https://www.freepetchipregistry

Home Again – 888-466-3242
https://www.homeagain.com/

Pet Link – 877-738-5465
https://www.petlink.net/

24Petwatch – 866-597-2424
https://www.24petwatch.com/

If you have any questions please call 585-349-7387 or email the office [email protected]. We have records of all microchip numbers that were administered by us and are happy to help you with this process. We will keep you updated as any new information is available.

02/08/2025

Here is a hard truth.

Breed matters.

Anyone that tells you otherwise is either: a) not a knowledgable resource or b) has a reason they want to keep the truth from you.

Being 💯 honest with yourself about the time you can devote to training, and exercise is a crucial first step in finding a dog that is right for you.

If you are a in poor health, fairly sedentary, or want a dog to be your "emotional support"...there are a LOT of breeds that are not going to work out for you.

Prioritize the dog's quality of life in your decision making process.

Weigh your choice carefully by making characteristics like activity level, sociability and potential for guardian "watchdog" behaviors more important than how "cool" "cute" or "trainable" the dog is.

01/23/2025

❤️

01/18/2025

Let’s go one by one.

1/ On leash meetings with other dogs. By now most have seen video clips of owners attempting to create a positive social interaction with their dogs, only to watch it all go terribly wrong. Why? Leashes create restraint and cause unnatural interactions, fraught with tense, friction-filled, possibly guarding, possibly overwhelmed, possibly bullying behavior. It’s the perfect setup for pushy dogs to push softer dogs and for softer dogs to become overwhelmed and defensive… and middle of the road dogs to leave the middle of the road.

2/ Poorly supervised doggy daycare. Once again the hopes are that healthy, comfortable, and “happy” social interactions occur. The reality in many daycares? Just like with on leash meetings, pushy, bratty, dominant dogs apply unwanted and unhealthy pressure to soft, timid, and even fearful dogs. And without proper human supervision, these dynamics play out over and over — and do so in environments which the overwhelmed dog cannot escape, and the pushy dog can push over and over.

3/ Dog parks. I’m sure we’ve also seen and heard countless horror stories of dogs bullied, attacked, and even killed in dog parks. Once again we have the restricted, “I’m stuck with you, you’re stuck with me” environment. And once again the overly aroused, pushy, bullying dogs clash with the soft, timid, fearful dogs — which encourages the bullies and traumatizes the soft ones.

All 3 of these share certain dynamics. 1/ forcing incompatible dogs to interact. 2/ the dogs have no way to escape the pressure. 3/ the pushy, bratty, bullies are encouraged (by allowance and payoff) to become even more problematic, and the timid are repeatedly overwhelmed and freaked out. 4/ this translates to the pushy ones being even more pushy/bratty and thus when on walks they become reactive because it feels good to do so and they’re used to doing what they want — and the timid ones become even more fearful and defensive, and thus reactive on walks because they’re so scared, and are used to not being able to keep themselves safe.

The upshot? These environments encourage the bullies to become bigger bullies, and the fearful to become more fearful. So you create a vicious cycle where one kind of dog learns to enjoy bullying and the other loses their trust in other dogs. And just to be clear, you can have less pushy dogs who will become more so simply by experiencing the thrill of doing so. And you can have dogs who aren’t timid but are more sensitive who become fearful simply because they’ve experienced nasty, traumatic interactions repeatedly.

It doesn’t take a genius to see how if we encourage and allow these negative interactions repeatedly, building bullies and creating defensive softer dogs, that this behavior is inevitably going to surface on walks.

4/ You. You can have a dog who’s never had any on leash meetings, never been to daycare, and never been to a dog park, and absolutely still have serious reactivity issues. How? Through a permissive, unaccountable, leadership-free overall lifestyle and walk. Just by allowing dogs to behave in a fashion which is chaotic, pushy, bratty, disrespectful — or chaotic, nervous, worried, fearful — this leadership gap we create invites all manner of poor choices. Without the proper guidance, many dogs will slide into serious reactivity problems simply because no one has taught them how to properly respond to seeing other dogs. And a proper response, regardless of your dog’s personality (pushy and confident, or soft and insecure) should be a neutral one. But that only comes when owners step up, take the lead, and show their dog’s how to properly respond.

PS, even if you’ve done 1-3 and have unwittingly created reactivity issues, you absolutely can reverse these problems by tackling number 4 properly — by properly leading your dog. We do it all the time. But it’s far easier if you skip 1-3 and just do number 4 correctly.

01/18/2025

It’s a lot easier and certainly a lot more fun to build the relationship you want rather than needing to fix the problem you don’t!

One of the best resolutions you can make for your dog, and your family!

01/12/2025

For all those owners who allow their dogs to meet people and other dogs when they’re out and about and don’t know why their dogs go bananas when they see a person or dog, I hope this helps.

Dogs are amazing pattern readers, and easily become conditioned that something occurring predicts another thing occurring if it happens often enough. It’s why picking up your car keys, or walking towards the cupboard where their food is, or picking up their leash, or packing your suitcase, or answering the door after the doorbell goes off — causes an intense reaction.

It could be excitement, it could be anxiety, it could be sadness, it could be anything depending on what the “signal” predicts, and how your dog feels about it.

Same goes for your dog who is allowed to meet random people and dogs — and who takes great pleasure in it. If this sequence occurs often enough, it will begin to condition your dog to view people as a visual signal that predicts a party/arousal/intense emotional escalation.

You end up turning people and dogs into “doorbells”.

This is why you’ll hear almost all experienced trainers not engaging in this activity. (Of course there’s other considerations like creating negative outcomes from these interactions, but that’s a post for another day.) Most trainers, and astute owners are keenly aware that if this meet and greet activity is practiced enough, you’re going to have a dog who is struggling to hold it together when they see people and dogs — because you’ve conditioned your dog that the appearance of people or dogs predicts craziness.

Of course there are exceptions. (There are always exceptions.) There are chilled out, lowkey dogs who enjoy these interactions but who don’t lose it. And there are owners who only do this on rare occasions — and so the reactions are far less intense. But if you do this on the regular, and you have a dog who loses its sh*t when it occurs, you’re almost certainly setting you and your dog up for a lifetime of overly-aroused, reactive nuttiness when people and dogs come into the picture.

And if you don’t enjoy the behavior this creates in your dog, then I’d highly advise you change your approach, or at the very least, minimize it greatly. A doorbell that only predicts someone at the door 5-10% of the time is a far less insanity-inducing doorbell, so perhaps you can adjust your dog’s predictive powers by making things far less predictable. :)

01/04/2025

They all have the best dog

12/30/2024

Send a message to learn more

12/23/2024

Please see below for our holiday hours and other veterinary resources. Wishing everyone happy and healthy holidays!

12/23/2024

Wishing you a safe and happy holiday season!