Behavioural Consultations
Behaviour consultations are only undertaken by our behaviourists that have undertaken either formal training or been trained over the year personally by Simon Goodall with their own experience. All behaviourists constantly undertake extra training to keep in touch with what is going on in the behaviour world.
Behaviour consultations are for more serious issues such as aggression towards people, towards other dogs; either strange dogs or other littermates. Behaviour consultations also cover separation anxiety and other abnormal behaviour that can be related to learning or genetics.
We recommend our Dog Behaviour Package or our 1 session behaviour consultation which is $260 for 2 hours.
Your behaviour consultation requires work from you to work on and in the problem. In our sessions we will look over the problem in detail, give you a rundown of the problem and why it is occurring and how best to identify the main issue and ways to fix it.
All behaviour consultations come with our follow up service where you can call or email us at any time to discuss the issues and what to do for the lifetime of your dog. In our behaviour packages we would think the problem is sorted before we leave you.
Behaviour consultations are two hours long. The first 20 minutes usually involves a bit of a chat while we discuss the dogs issues, have a look into the history and current environment of the dog and family. We will also discuss the exercise, diet and other important questions. All questions are set down to an international standard to give a much greater chance of success.
After the questions we get to work and start to see what the problem is. Because all our staff are well experienced in identifying stress, aggression, anxiety or any other signs we need, we can usually tell what the problem is in a few seconds of seeing the issue. All these will be shown and discussed with you.
Following the "show" we then discuss some options to try and work with to determine which one is going to work more effectively. There are usually a few options and we will know which one will work for your dog. This can take some time to trial the options and we often work slowly at first to ensure we don’t stress out the dog any more than required.
For aggression work with other dogs we head out for a walk past any one of our 4 bait dogs. The dogs most often used are my entire male golden retrievers. This allows us to see the problem in a more controlled environment. Our bait dogs are trained to do anything with your dog such as growl, bark, look at you, look away and more so we will be able to get a rise out of your dog if we require.
For separation anxiety we rig up a camera and get you to leave the property for 5 minutes. We then all come back and have a look at the camera work to determine what is happening and whether it is separation anxiety. Separation anxiety can be determined as excessive barking while the owner is gone, destruction, excessive licking, howling or even excessive escaping. With published papers on these issues we can assist you with this problem.
In choosing Dog Guru for your behaviour consultations you are getting one of the top dog behaviour training companies in New Zealand. With thousands of dogs trained we have seen all the problems your dogs may have. Simon is a member of the International Association of Animal Behaviour Consultants meaning that we have access to the top behaviourists and trainers in the world. They are often just a call or email away.