Managing a Multi-Dog Household: The Lazy Dog Trainer Edition. Presented by Kristi Benson

CEUs: PPAB 1, CCPDT 1, IAABC 1, KPA 1

Registered for the live event, get busy and cannot make it!

No worries you will automatically receive a recording!

In this webinar, Kristi Benson will delve into the ways the guardians of a multi-dog household can make their living situations more peaceful and joyful, for both the humans and the dogs involved. She’ll review safety factors in having a home with multiple dogs, including how dogs function as social carnivores and how and why other pets and small children may be at risk. She will delve into “management”, or the prevention of problem behaviours before they start, when dealing with multiple animals. She will also cover useful tricks and tools for both management and training, how to maximise training set-ups, how and when to train on-the-fly, and the logistics of comfortable down-time. Kristi will cover how to comfortably bring clients on board with kinder techniques and dismantling client myths about behaviour and dynamics among multi-dog homes. She will also tackle how to have tricky conversations about re-homing and permanent separation of animals in a single home.

Kristi has lived with up to 13 dogs in her home when she was running a sled dog rescue and has tested and streamlined effective and welfare-forward techniques to meet everyone’s needs while keeping the (relative) peace in a busy home.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify safety considerations for multi-dog households, including with cats and children.
• Understand the basics of predatory behaviour and acquired bite inhibition.
• Understand and implement management (response prevention) for multi-dog households to reduce problem behaviours including fighting.
• Identify useful and important training plans, and how to effectively train in a multi-dog household.
• Understand the basics of classical conditioning and how to use it in a solo-counterconditioning protocol on-the-fly.
• Identify and reduce risk/harm in worst-case scenarios.

About Your Presenter

Kristi Benson

Kristi is an honours graduate of, and now on staff at, the Academy for Dog Trainers. At the Academy, she is a student mentor and coach, and is in charge of the weekly webinars. Kristi is also in charge of special projects, including the Husbandry Project, which is a large co-operative veterinary care research study working with hundreds of dog owners, testing the efficiency and usefulness of a series of training plans. In her private practice, Kristi works with dog guardians through her self-paced online classes. She also loves helping both the dogs and the humans in the equation and brings her trademark combination of humour and compassion to her courses, no matter the topic.

Kristi also enjoys reaching out to dog owners through writing. Besides her own blog, she also regularly writes for the Academy for Dog Trainers’ blog and is a Special Correspondent to Zazie Todd’s Companion Animal Psychology. For ten years, she ran a sled dog micro-rescue with her partner, and fostered, house-trained, obedience-trained, and re-homed racing sled dogs. She lives rurally in northern British Columbia, Canada. She has gained the PCBC-A credential, is Fear Free certified, and is on the Fear Free Speaker’s Bureau.