Our Training philosophy at Waiiri is that in training we want our animals to have fun too. 

We want our animals to enjoy training as much as we do.  Well behaved is good, but not at the expense of a happy animal.

I started training cattle dogs 25 years ago, using the old methods that were around at the time. The methods worked of course, but my dogs always seemed happier just going for a run at the beach or a play than training. My dogs I have today view training as play, which is how it should be.

Again I was brought to this training method by a challenging dog.  A dog I acquired as an adult with some fear issues that presented as aggression.  I couldn’t use the old methods any more with this dog, they were not helping her problem, and they were making her more worried. I had the good fortune when looking for help with her, to come across the best and kindest and perhaps the most talented positive trainers in the Hunter Valley, at TASK dog training. Neither that dog nor I ever looked back.

That was 10 years ago, it turned my world upside down, but I’m never going back to the old ways. My dogs view training as fun. They are up and happy and keen to do what I wish and they get a kick out of getting it right.

Like the proverbial sponge I soaked up all I could find, read books, attended seminars, took my own dogs training, and got so hooked I started doing the CGC Delta Instructors course (not yet complete).

I also got so hooked and can see so much that is good and right in this method that I now want to convert every dog owner I meet. I’ve yet to see or learn something in positive training that I consider to be wrong!

Another turning point in my training life was a dog seminar where the presenters casually mentioned the methodology used for training horses, something my little brain had not worked out for itself yet, as I’d been happily doing what I had been taught and what had been accepted for hundreds of years. Lightbulb!! There was again a better way. Enter clicker training for horses. Now my horses want to play this training game too!

I already had very obliging horses, but clicker training makes them eager happy participants that want to interact, and that want to learn and want to get things right, and now they want to get it right as it is rewarding for them, not to make the pressure go away.  Another HUGE lightbulb!!

Again I am humbled, again I am a convert, and again I’m also a fanatic who wants to convert every horse owner she knows into becoming an equine clicker trainer too, as the benefits to both horse and owner are without limit.