MORE ABOUT SMARTDOG
Owner and Behavior Consultant | Contact Information
Our Mission
Every year, about 13 million families adopt a dog. Half of those dogs are surrendering within a year. (Dodman, 2008) At SmartDog, our goal we have two goals. First, to educate dog owners before and immediately after they get a new dog to set them up for success and help prevent behavior problems from developing down the road. Second, to provide owners whose dogs have already developed behaviors problems with effective, humane solutions to these problems. By addressing prevention and treatment of behavior problems in dogs, we hope to provide owners with the skills they need to help their dogs become well-behaved members of the family. This will promote life-long homes for dogs, reducing the amount of dogs who are surrendered to shelters for behavior and training problems.
Our Methods
We believe that training methods should be practical and applicable in the real world. We also feel that the most important aspect of working with dogs and owners is giving the owners the skills they need to continue to work with their dog after the professional trainer is gone.
Training methods should be effective and not cause stress, pain, or fear in the dog. Scientific research on dog training and behavior has consistently shown that training with positive reinforcement is very effective. On the other hand, punishment such as yelling, hitting and pinning the dog is often ineffective, causes stress, fear, and sometimes pain in the dog and can often lead to increased aggression (because the dog tries to defend itself). At SmartDog we apply both the science of animal learning and the experience of our behavior consultant to developing an effective and humane training plan for you and your dog.
We also follow the Code of Professional Conduct and Responsibility laid out by the Association of Pet Dog Trainers.
Kristina Gage, the owner and behavior consultant, has a lifetime of experience with dogs. She has been training her own dogs for 22 years. In 1998, she started working at a humane society in Madison, WI where she saw dog after dog brought in for behavior or training problems. This inspired her to get involved with owners and their dogs to help stop problems before they got so severe the owner chose to give up their dog. In 1999, Kristina and another co-worker started a program to teach shelter workers to train shelter dogs to make them more adoptable and give them a head start on training in their new homes. She also started volunteering as an assistant trainer at Dog's Best Friend
owned by Applied Animal Behaviorist Dr. Patricia McConnell. She volunteered with Dog's Best Friend until 2000 when she moved to Minnesota. In Minnesota, she worked as a trainer at AllBreed Obedience.
In 2001 she moved again, this time to upstate New York. Kristina opened SmartDog Dog Training in November 2001 with two classes (puppy and beginner) and has now expanded to offer up to twelve classes a week at various levels of training. She is a member of the Association of Pet Dog Trainers and regularly attends seminars and conferences to continue educating herself about effective methods for training people and their dogs and about dog behavior problems and solutions.
In November 2004, Kristina became a Certified Pet Dog Trainer, the first in the area. To further her understanding of behavior, she will be starting graduate school in biopsychology in the fall of 2008. She will be studying social behavior and cognition in dogs. Kristina shares her home with an adopted Australian Shepherd, a hound mix and a cat.
Contacts
Kristina Gage: (518) 369-9135
Email: training@smartdogschool.com
Mailing Address: 218 Bockes Rd., Porter Corners, NY 12859
Appointments are done at your home or at Paw Lickers in Greenfield Center.
Reference from above: Dodman, Nicholas ed., 2008, Puppy's First Steps: The Whole-Dog Approach to Raising a Happy Healthy, Well-Behaved Puppy. Houghton Mifflin.
