Depending on the breed of your dog, you may find grooming to be a daily chore, or something you need to do less often, like trimming their nails once a month. Whether you do this yourself at home or take your dog to a professional groomer, it’s important that you make dog grooming a positive experience for your animal. A professional dog groomer shares some tips with ELLAS Animals INC to help with that. How to Get Your Dog Comfortable with Grooming Tools and Make Dog Grooming a Positive Experience – by Emma Anderson When embarking on the journey of pet care, understanding and utilizing the rig ..read more

Service dog teams often reach out, during or after their formal training is over, because the handler and the dog both crave learning new skills and training together as a team. ELLAS Animals INC recommends many different types of further training like agility, search and rescue, dock diving, detection, and additional task/work training. One of our volunteer trainers has been teaching her dog to use buttons to talk and has shared an update with us. Teaching a Dog to Use Buttons to Talk – by Katie Calahan Last January I made a purchase from Fluent Pet to see if my service dog in training, Daisy ..read more

ELLAS Animals INC offers an online Puppy Basics course that covers topics like puppy socialization, potty training, crate training, and bite inhibition. Our course is designed to set an owner/trainer and their new puppy up for success to train as a service dog team. We recommend that the owner/trainer completes the course before bringing the puppy home so they can hit the ground running. We also follow expert guidelines that a puppy should remain with its mother and littermates until it is at least 8 weeks old. However, puppy socialization begins long before that, with the breeder when the pup ..read more

People with disabilities, whether physical or psychological, are accustomed to work arounds in every aspect of life – adaptations or modifications that empower us to accomplish our goals despite whatever limitations we may experience. ELLAS Animals INC specializes in teaching people with disabilities how to train their own service dogs, and this necessitates a fluid approach, adapting service dog training to a trainer’s disability. Today’s guest blogger, Katie Calahan, shared her experience a few months ago of beginning with a new puppy and how she was learning to modify th ..read more

The temperament of the trainer, rather than the dog The temperament to train a service dog may not lie completely where you expect. We see plenty of statistics about how high a percentage of dogs that begin service dog training are then “washed” from the goal of becoming a service dog. Certainly, there are dogs who won’t succeed – most notably those with health conditions or who are aggressive and therefore dangerous. However, focusing on the people instead of the dogs, we can identify a number of factors on the part of the trainer that are at least as important as the temperament of the dog ..read more

Opportunities for training a service dog at a pool One of the biggest challenges of training a service dog is finding opportunities for exposure to the surroundings or situations that you want to train for. For example, it can be hard to train for fireworks if you only encounter them once or twice a year (hint: play sound clips from YouTube). We find we’re limited in our opportunities to provide consistent and safe exposure to horses and other farm animals, which made this summer’s county fair more challenging. Similarly, we don’t have a regular opportunity for training a service dog at a pool ..read more

We’ve been slowly working our way through the Disney and Universal theme parks in Florida as we do Public Access training with our Service Dogs in Training and we have gone to all of them except Magic Kingdom because we were working our way up to this, what we consider the more challenging park. We went to Magic Kingdom this week to tackle a park with tighter “bottlenecks” that make the crowds feel larger even if the numbers aren’t much different. It’s also an older park with a more dated infrastructure so we anticipated it providing more challenges. As a whole, the day was something of a mixe ..read more

Documenting owner-training of a service dog serves two equally important purposes. First, it may at some point become necessary to prove that your dog meets the legal requirements to be a service dog and, as an owner/trainer, you will have to provide this as you don’t have the protection of a trainer or a program to do this for you. Second, it can be a valuable tool to make your training more effective, efficient, and comprehensive. There is no standard for how to document owner-training of a service dog, but a combination of approaches can help you cover all the bases and be prepared for anyt ..read more

I train dogs but, more importantly, I teach people how to train dogs through ELLAS Animals INC. I specialize in service dogs, but I work with people who are training therapy dogs, ESAs, and pets, too. Part of my job is to figure out what makes people successful training dogs so I can incorporate that knowledge into our online courses. Another part of my job, though, is to figure out why teams (the human trainer and the dog learner) fail to achieve their goals so I can help teams avoid these pitfalls. As such, I spend a lot of time pondering why any particular team gives up and what tools, skil ..read more

Adapting service dog training People with disabilities, whether physical or psychological, are accustomed to work arounds in every aspect of life – adaptations or modifications that empower us to accomplish our goals despite whatever limitations we may experience. ELLAS Animals INC specializes in teaching people with disabilities how to train their own service dogs, and this necessitates a fluid approach, adapting service dog training to a trainer’s disability. Today’s guest blogger, Katie Calahan, shares her experience beginning with a new puppy and how she is learning to modify the training ..read more