THE CANINE INSTRUCTOR ACADEMY

What is The Canine Instructor Academy?

The Canine Instructor Academy runs in person seminars and workshops, and online courses for those who wish to become a dog behavioural trainer, someone skilled in teaching owners to teach dogs, or for those who may not want to be trainers, but have an interest in how dogs (and people) learn. The seminars and workshops cover a wide range of dog-related topics that appeal to both professionals and non-professionals. The Behavioural Course covers both basic pet training and complex behavioural issues.

What’s The Purpose?

Year on year, the behaviour of pet dogs gets worse rather than better. The average age of a dog going into rescue is apparently now only eight months old - they're still practically puppies at the point when their owners give up on them! And yet there has never been more information on how to educate dogs. There have never been more trainers and behaviourists offering their services on how to prevent problems or alleviate existing ones. So what is going wrong?

I set up the Canine Instructor Academy to address what I see as the biggest problem in dog training and behaviour - dog trainers and behaviourists. There are so many courses out there now suggesting that they will make you an effective educator, but they are often set up and run by people who don't themselves train dogs, some of whom have actually never been dog trainers or behaviourists themselves! And eager students may pay thousands of pounds believing the course will teach them how to train owners to train dogs effectively.

Science has taught us so much about dogs, but I see so many courses that are in my opinion far too science-based, teaching students training that may absolutely work in a scientific setting, but when you try to get an owner to follow that technique in a real-life situation, it is so labour-intensive and/or impractical that the owner is unable to follow through with it, and so heart-broken as they are to do so, they finally give up and put the dog in rescue - or worse.

Make no mistake, reward-based training is the most effective way to teach dogs. Rewarding them appropriately will increase the likelihood of a desired behaviour being repeated. But there is currently a concept in dog training that says that although every species on the planet learns consequences to making the wrong choice which help it to make better ones, the one exception to that rule should be this predatory animal that we bring into our home, many of whom are physically capable of killing us. It suggests that dog training should solely focus on positive reinforcement, and that a dog should have no negative consequences to anything that they do, that we should ignore bad behaviour, and reward good behaviour, and all of those bad behaviours will just fade away. Well wouldn't that be lovely? But sadly, this theory is fundamentally flawed because it assumes that the owner will always have a reward greater than one that the dog can get for itself without complying with the owner. As soon as that is the case, the 'training' fails.

Dogs are too clever for that. So, what many of them learn is that it pays to misbehave. If they jump up, they are offered food to get them to sit instead, so they learn that jumping up gets them food. If they refuse to recall, they get offered food, and if they still refuse, the food gets better. So of course they refuse. And on and on it goes. The Canine Instructor Academy ethos focusses primarily on rewarding good behaviour, and paying dogs well for working hard. But for those times when rewards are readily available but the dog rejects them in favour of doing what it wants, the courses will also cover creating non-physical, non-abusive ways to create boundaries for dogs, things that will teach him or her that they really HAVE to do as you have asked. We've stopped teaching our children this, and we can all see how well that's working out.

So the purpose of these courses is to teach people how dogs learn, and how to make it as clear as possible what we want from them, and how best to understand what each party wants and needs from the other, and how to make living together a pleasure for both. Then having done so, how to train and/or retrain them to fit in with our ever-more complicated lives. Training dogs is really very simple, but too many courses make teaching them way too complicated, and focus too much on theory, with little or no consideration about how those theories will work in the real world. Our courses aim to teach you how to teach dogs and owners in as simplistic way as possible, without unnecessary jargon and methods that will take far longer to work than either the dogs or owners have time for, and I know of no other courses quite like them.  

UNDERSTANDING Behaviour course

The course is now entirely online. Each course runs for two months.

This course is intended to teach attendees how to help owners with dogs with unacceptable and/or inappropriate behaviours that they may be struggling with.

Attendees will be shown how to help owners with dogs who are showing aggression, separation anxieties, destructiveness, inappropriate toileting, barking and noise issues, among others.

There will also be videos of Robert conducting behaviour consultations with real clients, where students will get to observe how he trains. Between the videos, handouts, Zoom meetings and Q&A sections at the end of each section, my goal is to teach you effective tried and tested resolutions to be able to resolve training and behavioural issues with owners and dogs.

There will be a number of other speakers on the course who will talk on a variety of subjects including the law, working with owners, setting up and promoting your dog business, using social media to promote and enhance your business, human psychology and it’s importance when working with owners, and how to work with emotional issues with both clients and with yourself. Every week you will be sent a selection of videos covering these subjects and more, that you will be able to watch at a time convenient to you.

We have a private Facebook group accessible only to those who have completed a course, where you can network with like-minded people, exchanging ideas and discussing a myriad of topics. We also have periodical Zoom meetings just for course attendees hosted by me, where we cover anything dog related. People who have completed the course can also have their details shared to the Find A Trainer section of the CIA  website.

Attendees will be awarded with a diploma in canine behavioural training (Dip CBT) after completing the course.