I have tryed diffrent methods of training and try to stay away from food drive training as it caused a *very* bad habit with my aussi when he was younger... in general i lean towards praise motivation and working for the dogs respect(if posable). i will look through whatever just to get ideas though.
For the time being i'm onely looking for a basic protection dog, also. i may train more if the dog has amazing potential, but only then.

"Of course, there's another way of looking at this - the poor trainer is blameless and the handler is totally nuts and stretching the truth so much that we couldn't really tell what was going on.
If that's so, I'd owe the trainer a big apology also - but we could only go by what the handler told us."

Boy, looks that previous statement turned out to be the true one!





I just received a call from < name Edit at his request > who told me his side of the story, which was *very* different that what the handler at the seminar had told us:

It turns out that ******** had only trained with the handler "two or three times" before the seminar and was in fact training the dog to allow it to interact safely with the public ( not PPD training ) . The dog had received previous training in San Diego by another un-named trainer which may have accounted for it's temperament problems. This was a totally different story than we were told from the handler.
And of course as we all remember the handler in question was decked out in a < fill-in the blank > organization hat, T-shirt, and bumper sticker - the way that she talked we all thought that she was the president of that organization for a bit. <img src="http://www.leerburg.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

********* also told me that he did not charge "thousands of dollars" ( what the handler had told us ) but quoted me his rates, which I found *very* reasonable.

From the details that ******** told me, it seemed like almost nothing that the handler had told us was accurate, and I'm sorry that we believed any of it.

I'd like to personally apologize to ******** for any question that was brought to his name or to his training methods - but I will point out that myself and the other people that had made comments here were only repeating exactly what we were told by someone claiming to be his student ( ********* indicated that he still trains the handler in question and he's going to speak to them about the matter...that would be an interesting conversation ).

********* was a real gentleman during our conversation and I really have to give him big kudo's on his professionalim there.

Ted Hartmann at West Coast K9 has been great. He trains PPDs as well. I have been working with him with my dog doing obedience and getting ready to go for a BH. I have seen him transitioning a sport dog into a PPD dog once when I was early for a lesson, but I am not qualified to comment on his PPD dog training skills. Nonetheless, he has been a great training source.

http://www.westcoastk-9.com/aboutwck9.html