My Background

My first job was working with dogs. When I was 14, while my friends worked at McDonalds, or at the mall, I got a summer job bathing dogs for a woman who had a small grooming shop in my neighborhood. It was hard work and there were days when I would bathe 10 or 12 dogs in one day. I'd come home at the end of the day soaked and smelling like wet dog, but since I was getting paid $5.00 for every dog I bathed—a lot of money to a 14 year old—I didn't mind that much.

I did that job every summer all through High School and not only learned a lot about different breeds, but also how to read a dog's body language and when to tell if they were comfortable, stressed out, or becoming aggressive.

While I was a senior in High School the Army recruiter began calling and convinced me that the Military would be a good way to raise money for College, so I went to see them. I wasn't sure what career I wanted in the Army but there was a poster in the recruiting office of a Military Policeman with his German shepherd, and that looked good to me. I enlisted as a Military Policeman, only to find out later that in the Army you needed to have a few years of service and obtain a certain rank before you could apply to go to dog handler's school. Even though I didn't immediately this always remained in the back of my mind.

I completed basic training and the Military Police Academy and was sent to Ft. Stewart, GA, which is outside Savannah, and was attached to a unit that supported the Rangers when they were deployed around the world.

There were law enforcement duties as well, when we were back on base, but much of that consisted of being called to the Enlisted Club to break up huge fights that would happen in the parking lot after the club would close. Since Ft. Stewart was also where the 24^th Infantry Division was located, the guys would hit the club after 45-60 days in the field, with a few paychecks in their pocket to let off steam, and they never seemed eager to go home at 2am when the club would close. Often the party would continue outside until we had to break it up. This was not a good situation for an 18-year-old kid, especially since at the time I was about 5'9" and weighed 140lbs-soaking wet. Not the most commanding presence.

The situation was usually pretty out of control when we would pull up and we would immediately get on the radio and call for some more help. Before long, the K-9 unit would arrive. These were our fellow soldiers and we didn't want to arrest them, and just the sight of the dog would always calm the situation down, which I always thought was the coolest thing. I thought about how great it would be to become a dog handler and have a partner like that to "watch my back".

I got to know the dog handlers and one Friday night near the end of a shift, my friends and I invited them to hit the town with us. They told me that they couldn't because they had to go to Georgia Southern University in Statesboro that weekend to do demonstrations with their dogs. I remarked that it seemed like a bummer to have to spend their weekend "working", but they said that they loved it, since the dogs attracted so much attention from the college girls, they would usually leave after a weekend like that with a lot of phone numbers.

Well, that was pretty much all I needed to hear. I had already wanted to go to Dog Trainer's school and if I could become a dog handler, which would keep me safe while on patrol, and help me meet girls…

I started to apply for the Department of Defense dog school, which was located at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas as soon as I got promoted to the appropriate rank. You were permitted to put in one application every 6 months, which I did with no luck. In the meantime; I was transferred to Nuremberg, Germany and soon, the end of my enlistment was in sight. It was at that time that I received orders to be transferred to Ft. Sam Houston, Texas in San Antonio. Ft. Sam Houston was a base where all of the Army's medical personnel go for training, and at the time San Antonio was home to several military bases including the one that hosted the Department of Defense program. I did not have enough time remaining on my enlistment to go there, but I figured that if I'd have a better chance of getting into the school being stationed that close. I decided to extend my enlistment for a year and put in a second application for the dog handler's course.

A few months before my enlistment was up, I received word that after 3 attempts, I was approved for the dog handler's course. The starting date was a month after my current enlistment was up, which meant that I would have to reenlist for another term to be able to go.

I spent several weeks thinking about it, and it boiled down to either going to college, or doing what I had been dreaming of doing for the past 3 years. I figured school could wait a few more years and I reenlisted.

I started the 6-week course in August of 1988. August in San Antonio is hot, and we would typically have to arrive at school at 4:30 in the morning to begin working with the dogs so that they could go back to the shade of their kennels by noon. While the dogs rested, we would eat lunch and have another 4 or 5 hours of classroom training where we learned about everything from health to handling, and lots and lots of learning theory.

During the course, I received a transfer order to a missile base in Fulda, Germany. I wasn't too thrilled about it, since this meant that I would be doing sentry work rather than law enforcement. This disappointment was magnified when I arrived in Germany to find out that the Army had decided that dogs were too expensive to keep at missile sites and had reassigned the dogs to other locations. right before I got there.

Our missile site was located in a remote location and we lived in a barracks on an airfield used by the air Calvary. A local German company provided security on the airfield and my friends and I became friends with a few of the guards who would take us out to some of the local clubs.

Fulda is located just a few Kilometers from the former East German border, and I was fortunate enough to have had a front row seat for exciting and chaotic reunification of the country in 1989. Free travel back and forth between the borders was fine for German citizens, but initially, U.S. Military personnel weren't supposed to go into the East. Our Germany friends however would always go and started talking my friends and I into going with them. We couldn't resist, since it was so different over there, and Americans were such a novelty to the locals on that side.

We would ride with one of our German friends, since their cars had local license plates on them, and we'd stay late, usually until the clubs closed. Early on after reunification, the border was still manned by the East German Army and when we would go home we'd always stop at the border and chat a bit with the guards. It was always late, cold and dark, but near the guard shack there was a kennel and in the kennel were several beautiful German Shepherds that would bark continuously and very aggressively while we were there. One of my German friends, Eddie, was very interested in the dogs, and would try to get close to the kennel to talk to the dogs, trying to make friends with them. When we would go out to eat he would always save part of his meal, saying he was going to give it to the dogs when we were on the way back.

One weekend on the way home, the Guards told us that they were disbanding the military and that they were all going home. Eddie was very concerned about what was going to happen to the dogs and sure enough, a few days later I found out that he talked some of his friends into going to the border and they took 4 of them home.

They had a heck of a time with these dogs. They all lived in apartments, one of them with a wife and child, and the dogs were a handful. They didn't seem to be obedience trained at all and I would see Eddie and his friends on the weekend trying to work with them at the airfield.

Eddie knew that I was an M.P. but didn't know that I was a dog handler, and one day when I saw one of the dogs actually try to go "up the leash" at one of his friends, and try to bite them, I went out to see what they were up to. He told me that the dogs were tearing up their homes, that they had complaints about barking, and that they didn't think they could handle their aggression. They had been working with a trainer that did a type of training called "Schutzhund" training, but they weren't making progress with the dog's house manners. Eddie told me that they were thinking of giving the dogs up and that the dogs would likely be put down.

I hadn't really had any training in how to keep dogs in the house, since military working dogs are kept in kennels at night and brought out to work each day by their handlers, but I applied what I had learned in school a year earlier about a dog's pack mentality, along with teaching them a safe way to handle the dogs. One of the law enforcement handlers had been telling me about crate training, and because of the dog's cramped living conditions, I thought this could be a safe way to keep the dogs in the house, though the concept of crating a dog seemed kind of mean to me. Better than the alternative, I reasoned. I made that suggestion and told Eddie that I would try to teach them some of the handling skills I had learned at school.

An amazing thing happened. While Eddie and his friends really struggled with being able to handle the dogs correctly at first, the dogs seemed to calm down and become much more attentive to them. They kept the dogs with them almost all the time, since their employer allowed it, and when they couldn't, they would crate them. After a while, they became more confident in the things I was teaching them about how to handle the leashes, and how to reinforce commands with the dogs, and when it finally became time for me to leave the military after the first Gulf War was over, all 4 dogs were living happily in the homes of these 4 guys.

I left the Army and returned home to the San Francisco Bay Area with the intent to finish college and go on to law school. Needing to work, and not wanting to go into law enforcement, which is what my military training qualified me for, I got a job as a waiter, which, of course, I wasn't too thrilled with, but it allowed me to go to class and still pay the rent.

While I was in the military a friend of mine had gotten a Rottweiler and asked me for help working with her. They did well and when it was time for him to take her to the veterinarian, the vet noticed a difference in her behavior and asked him who helped him. When my friend told him about me, the vet told my friend that I should consider doing it for a living.

It never occurred to me that I could earn a living training dogs, but I looked into it and found a local trainer who would hire me. When I met this trainer, he told me that he had been training dogs for years and his business card even carried the title, "Certified Master Trainer". He told me that I had a lot to learn, but he would take me on.

The first week I was with him, I was working with clients on my own, and immediately realized that I knew much more than this guy did, despite the lofty title he had printed on his business card.. I didn't know where he had his supposed training (he said it was in New York somewhere, basically as far from California as could be) but mostly what I saw him doing was a very old, punitive style of training that was obsolete, even in the military. His clients began asking to work with me instead of him, which caused conflict between us, yet one thing I did notice was that he was making a pretty nice living, despite his many shortcomings.

There was another trainer working there at the time who, although he was trained by the owner of the place, was impressed with what I could do, and approached me about leaving to start our own company. He would continue to learn from me as we built the business.

I had never thought that I would be self-employed, but he convinced me and we both quit and started our own company. The guy we were working for had a facility in a very nice part of the Bay Area where people would bring their dogs, but since we were starting on a complete shoestring, we decided to do the training at our clients homes to start with and as our business grew, we would also open up a nice place for our customers to come.

This was in 1992 and business was good right away. The veterinarians of our clients would see such a difference in the dogs; they would begin referring their patients to us for training.

Because of my background, having learned to train police dogs, we would get many people asking us to train dogs for personal protection. This was very popular in the early 1990's and the fee for training a dog like this could exceed $3500.00. That's a lot of money for a guy fresh out of the military, especially since I now had a family of my own, so initially I was happy to do it. Inevitably, I decided to pursue dog training as my career rather than go on to law school and I left college.

As we would work with the dogs and their families, however, I began to realize that a regular family was much different than a professional police dog handler, who would work with their dog all day, day after day, and I began to become uncomfortable with doing such a high level of aggressive training. I realized that unless the clients were following through 100% with my instructions, the dog would not be reliable and I was opening myself up for a lawsuit.

At the same time, I enjoyed working with the dogs that had various behavior problems or dogs that just needed good, solid obedience training and I began to develop a process that stressed consistency and boundaries along with obedience, but a process that recognized that most people, while they may love their dogs, have other things going on in their lives as well.

Eventually, I told my partner that I no longer wanted to train protection dogs and wanted to concentrate on pet dogs. I had taught him how to train protection dogs, and he enjoyed doing it and working with the people that would request dogs like this, like professional athletes, and other high profile people. He and I parted ways and I started a new company in Sonoma County called K-9 Advantage. Early on, I realized that while I was an excellent dog trainer, when I would work with a family's dog, most of my efforts were spent teaching them what I knew, leading me to trademark the tagline, "Where Dogs Send Their People for Training".

One of the many things I learned after starting my business was that it was always so much easier and faster to begin training a dog in the dog's home environment. They were far less distracted, stressed and excited when they weren't being loaded into the car and driven someplace else. Working in their own home made it much easier for their people to handle them. After a few training sessions in the home environment, we would progress to a park or other location to test the dog around distractions. By this point the dog was always more focused and the training was successful.

When I started my first training company a few years earlier, my partner and I realized right away that veterinarians were a great source for new clients, since people always trusted their vet's opinion and recommendations. We would visit veterinarian offices all over the Bay Area and leave our business cards and brochures. We would see a few other trainer's things in there as well; most of them very established trainers with years of experience. I was always curious about their methods, (Some offered group lessons, which I never did) but my partner was just the opposite and wanted nothing to do with them.

A funny thing began to happen around 1995. I started getting more and more training clients that had gone to other trainers before working with me. These dogs often had tremendous behavior problems, the most common being aggression and anxiety issues. Sometimes, I would be the 2^nd or even 3^rd trainer that would work with a dog, after the other trainers gave up.

I also decided that I was going to be much more open towards other trainers and read about a new association for dog trainers that had annual conferences where they claimed different training techniques were discussed and taught. (In retrospect, it's ironic that the way I heard about this group was through an article in the San Francisco Chronicle that talked about a conference in San Diego where many of the trainer's dogs caused considerable damage to the hotel they were staying in.)

I sought out this group, in part, because I was interested in learning what it was that I did that was so different than other trainers, and why I was having such success with dogs that others would give up on, sometimes pronouncing the dog "untrainable" and recommending that they go to their vet and finding out about having the dog put down.

I attended my first conference in Houston, TX, and (my eyes were immediately opened to a new style and philosophy of training that I had been hearing about that advocated completely positive reinforcement training as a response to the sometimes tougher methods that had been used up to that point. This completely positive training was creating a huge rift in the dog-training world, and over my years of association with this group, I saw their focus shifting from being an all-inclusive group dedicated to education and fellowship among trainers, to one that advocated one specific training style. While an all-positive approach that sounded great in theory, I would come to realize that it was not completely effective in practice in the "real world".

An upside, was that I met many other trainers at this, and other conferences, some who had decades more experience than I did. I also met many trainers who had very little experience, and not much success in training, but who were able to sustain businesses despite these shortcomings. Some of these trainers would bring their dogs to the conferences and the dogs would be completely out of control, sometimes even aggressive towards the other dogs!

I remained connected to this group because it was the only one of its kind, and I was making amazing contacts with other successful trainers from around the country. I attended seminars by, and developed friendships with some of the most recognized names in the dog training world, many of whom have written books of their own, and while I may not have agreed with everyone's philosophy, I found it valuable to become proficient in other methods, as many of my clients were coming to me after working with trainers who employed some of these techniques.

One of the main differences between what I did and what others did was that I taught my clients a complete process for working with, and living with their dogs that went beyond just training them to respond to commands. Drawing on my very first experiences in Germany helping Eddie and his friends, I realized that my clients weren't professional dog handlers so I did my best to stress the importance of the time that they weren't actually working on their dog's commands and how they needed to remain completely consistent, especially early in the training process.

My success continued, and so did my reputation as the trainer who could help people and dogs who have been failed previously by other trainers. Back then, and really, to this day, there is no universally recognized certification process for dog trainers. Anyone can decide one day that they are fed up with their current occupation, print up some cards, and hang up their shingle. It's much tougher in California to become a hairdresser than it is to become a dog trainer.

The professional organization I belonged to was not helping things in this industry at all. They would accept anyone for membership without checking their background, experience or references, yet to those who didn't understand the process, membership in this group made trainers that didn't deserve it seem credible to clients. And skilled trainers like me, who know the credentials are a sham, don't use them.

As the group grew, so did their leanings towards advocating one type of training and before long, they decided to develop a certification process for dog trainers. This was something I was in complete favor of, and actually joined one of the committees to help promote this. In the end, however the certification consisted of nothing more than a multiple choice written test covering one type of learning theory that anyone with a basic reading comprehension could pass without ever training a dog hands-on.

In addition to this "certification" there are many private schools around the country teaching people to become dog trainers. I learned of several of these schools after looking into the backgrounds of trainers who would work with a client before I would. It seemed that there were many, many people that wanted to become professional dog trainers, and why not? It's a great profession for someone who loves dogs and wants to make a difference in their lives and the lives of their families.

People would occasionally contact me and ask me if I trained dog trainers. My belief was that learning to train dogs, while the most important part of the business, was only valuable if the people also knew how to operate a successful business, so with some help I started the first dog training franchise in the United States and began to teach others how to train dogs using my methods. I trained individuals from all over California and had articles written about me in a few local publications and even a small one in Entrepreneur Magazine. Through this I made many more contacts in the business, and expanded my quest for knowledge outside the U.S. attending seminars at veterinary colleges in Canada and even joining the Canadian version of the group I was associated with in the U.S.

Operating a training franchise was much different than what I had been doing for individual families. While the people I had trained became successful trainers, it was difficult for me to ensure they were adhering to the same standards I use, since they technically owned their own businesses. The process showed me that I could train someone to become a successful dog trainer. My franchise caught the attention of a successful businessperson who had owned several large businesses in the past including a huge national franchise.

This person had an idea to start a business that was not a franchise but had the trainers working as employees of the company, thus allowing me the opportunity to maintain a higher standard, and with his help we started a new company called PAWSitive Solutions. This company grew quickly and offered private training by veterinarian referral in communities all over California from San Diego to Sonoma. At one point we employed 29 trainers.

I trained all of the trainers myself, but found that I was spending all of my time either training people to become trainers, or dealing with other business matters. This meant that I was no longer doing what I loved, which was working with dogs and their families. My partner and I decided to shut that company down, and helped all of my employees who wanted to continue to train dogs start their own businesses. Many of them are the most successful trainers in their communities to this day.

I went back to training dogs and their people in private homes, specializing in working with dogs with behavior problems. I became involved with a new training organization, the International Association of Canine Professionals who, as one of their goals, are striving to create higher standards in the dog training business. Their standards for professional membership are much higher and they have been working to develop a difficult certification process that requires proof of hands-on-skill in addition to book knowledge. I am a charter member and have served on their Board of Directors.

As I write this, I estimate that I have trained well over 3,000 dogs and families, always in one-on-one situations. I have been invited to speak at seminars, have appeared on national radio programs and have written articles on training for several national trade publications as well as some local ones. Except for the Internet, I do not advertise and get the majority of my clients through referral, either from their veterinarian or from other clients, and I can boast a very high rate of success.

Ó2007 by Johan Van Oldenbarneveld