Are you thinking of becoming a dog trainer but unsure where to begin? This article is going to talk about what exactly you can do in order to become a great professional dog trainer in the confusing world of mixed messages and regulation.
For a very long time, dog training has been a self-regulated profession. This means that you must maintain your own training and knowledge and there is no one able to check up on your qualifications to do the job. In other words there is no law that says dog trainers must be qualified.
This situation is fine if you want to be a dog trainer and are willing to learn the right habits from the right teachers. Yet if you don’t learn the right methods or stop ensuring you keep up to date with the latest dog behaviour findings then it can cause problems.
If you were a psychiatrist that had never studied the human mind you could probably cause a lot of emotional stress in your patients. If you were a surgeon with no idea of anatomy then you could hurt your patients. Dog training is not too dissimilar.
Without regulation, inaccurate training methods prosper in some circles. An example of poor training methods is the dog trainer that thinks dogs are acting like wolves and think their humans are wolves too. This is a misconception yet an opinion that is rife in the world of dog trainers.
Over the last few years professionals have been pushing for regulation within the dog training world. Many governing bodies are offering membership to carefully self-regulated dog trainers. Most will only offer membership to those with an ethos based in science, the proof of the profession.
So what can you do if you want to be a professional dog trainer?
The most important thing to do is learn as much as you possibly can about dogs. The Centre of Excellence Canine Behaviour Training Course is a good start because everything within it is based upon scientific findings. By studying this course you will get a really good grounding on actual dog behaviour as we know it today.
After that it’s vital to keep learning. We have learned more about dogs in the last 20 years than we did in hundreds before that. We are learning more about dogs every day. We know that they have personalities, are individuals and have a wonderfully complex range of canine emotions, which we had no idea about until recently.
As a professional dog trainer you will be learning to interpret the language of dogs for the people that love them. It’s a great job to do if you self-regulate properly and pay close attention to how regulation within the profession is developing as a whole. It’s also a great way to spend your days.
At the time of publishing, entering the code TRAINB49 at checkout will reduce the price of our
Canine Behaviour Training Course to £49.
