The main premise upon which Concentric Dog's training philosophy stands is that it is "family oriented." You'll hear me throwing that phrase around a lot and I understand saying something like "family values" has some political charge to it. I guarantee there is no political agenda here. When I say family oriented, I mean the training methods and philosophies revolve around how a family works, the deep ties everyone shares, and of course, the amount of time we all (should) make for our families.
When I present this idea to a client I often get "how do you know how a family works?" My normal response is, "I don't know, how does your family work?" One size does not fit all with a family. Some routines work out well and by extension some dogs will and will not work out well with how a family works. It becomes my challenge to not only discover how a dog fits into a human's life, but how a human fits into a dog's life. This means considering how many people are in the family, what their ages are, what their genders are, how active they are, how much space they have, and more. Only after considering these ideas and getting to know the family can an actual training protocol that works, and better yet sticks, be implemented.
Exposing the ties and emotional relationships people have with their dogs is not hard to do. Most people I've met (my mom included) will show me pictures of their dogs and tell me about their dogs' accomplishments before I hear anything about their children. Now, this of course doesn't mean they don't love their kids, to me it just means they have a lot of enthusiasm about their dogs. It's that enthusiasm that I like to capitalize on when growing ties between the family and the dog. Couple that with what I see as people's undying need to touch their dog and we get things like (calmly) rubbing a dog's shoulders. Here, we get the dog and the human to engage physically, which will also help them bond emotionally.
The last part of the three main pieces of Concentric Dog's philosophy is time. Not everyone is like me and wants to spend 3 or more hours a day training dogs. And most families, adults after work and children after school, will not want to spend an hour training their dog. This is 100% reasonable and a dog can be trained in short sessions of 5 to 15 minutes. Plus, most dogs (and some people) don't have the patience to work longer than that. With this amount of time, training can be done in the time it takes to heat up a lasagna, watch Game of Thrones, or even open (then promptly throw away) junk mail. The quality of the time is more important than the quantity.
It is these three themes that give us the center of Concentric Dog's training philosophy: Turning Friends into Family.
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