Often what our client sees as ‘calm’, I am seeing as extremely inhibited. So what’s the difference and how can we tell?

How to proof a chin rest for use in cooperative care

One of the most important aspects of training any animal is to teach them to cope and tolerate with lots of different husbandry procedures.

This is the very first session of teaching Adira how to hold a sustained lie out for later use in cooperative care. It's messy, as first sessions often are - that's totally ok!

Quick and easy way to teach a chin rest which can be used to cooperative care and veterinary situations later down the track.

Here's Poodle having his first catheter placement. Unfortunately this was a situation that needed to be done and we didn't have time to prepare for this specifically. However, due to his history of cooperative care with his grooming, we managed to use the same principles to makes it a low stress, 'almost' restraint free experience for him.

Meet Mercury, a Persian cat who has medical issues preventing him from grooming himself sufficiently, and who also finds the vet clinic /grooming salon very stressful. We decided to embark on a low stress training programme to teach Mercury to tolerate being groomed at home, and in the process made a fun little video.

A few days before the catheter placement video above, here is Poodle having his first cooperative blood draw. There is lots in here to improve on, you can see he gets a bit uncomfortable and stops offering his leg, but unfortunately, it was a necessity as he fell ill, and the result was a great first step!

Tory's progression towards a cooperative jugular blood draw.

Tory's progression towards a cooperative jugular blood draw.

Tory's first cooperative health check. She isn't aggressive about being handled, but she definitely doesn't like it. Here we use a sustained chin rest to give her some predictability and add rules to the game that the humans have to follow, so that she's more comfortable with the event.

As promised, here is a follow up introduction to teaching a dog to use a scratch board, using Poodle rather than Tory because he learns slower. I’ll put up 2 videos which were his first 2 sessions taken only with about a 20min break in between.

The idea behind the scratch board is to teach dogs to scratch/dig at the sand paper and wear down their own nails, rather than train them through a long and potentially arduous counter-conditioning programme to have them accept nail clipping.

Adira is blind and has underdeveloped eyes. She also has entropion where her eyelids are misshaped and the hairs surrounding her eyes rub and irritate them. Long term she may need her eyes removed and sewn closed all together to prevent infection and keep her as comfortable as possible, but for now she just requires regular eye cleaning with a soothing fluid.

Stella has yucky feelings about being handled. It’s not an uncommon problem at all.

Meet Adira AKA BabyDog! She is our seriously adorable rescue pup who we got mid 2020. Adira is a double merle, which means the person who bred her mixed two dogs containing the merle gene together. Double merles are predisposed to all kinds of medical conditions, and Adira was born both fully deaf and fully blind. Please don't feel sorry for her. She is the most confident, happy, sassy little thing! Here is a collection of some of her training videos. If you have a deaf or bl