Paws Afoot

Lise is an amazing trainer! I contacted her after seeing other glowing reviews and I was not disappointed. She understands dog behavior really well. She is very patient and trained both Milo and myself. She meticulously passes on all relevant knowledge, instructions and tips to successfully train your puppy and establish a strong lifelong bond with them. She made sure that Milo started off on the right paw!

I participated in the separation anxiety program by Lise and let me establish first that this is a program where the dog parent has to do a lot of the training and requires commitment beyond the program to continue the training after. There are no quick fixes for separation anxiety, and anyone who says there will be is most definitely lying. The only in-person element in this program is the initial consultation to assess the degree of SA your dog's experiencing. That said, after understanding the rationale and doing my own studying, I fully understand the need for the trainer to step away from the process so I'm very glad I was able to have Lise on hand to provide advice and guidance as I worked on the exercises with Luka. In terms of progress, while not major improvements (again, DON'T expect this), he's definitely improved! Before the training, he would usually start whining if I disappeared from his sight behind a door within seconds and, at maximum, lasted only 30 seconds before he started whining. By the end of the program, we got to 2 minutes, and as I'm progressing on my own, I've been able to add to that time slowly every day. Additionally, before when I left him with family, he would whine about 40-50% of the time he's left with them, but now, he only whines about 5% of the time at max, usually at the beginning. My family also didn't have to keep him perpetually distracted the entire time I'm away to prevent him from doing so! (Of course, they still use treats and play with him, but he would even sleep with my mom or sis for as long as an hour without issues!) This may all sound quite little but this is meant to be a long term battle and this slow, steady progress where he's being desensitized to me leaving the house/ his sight is helping to keep him calm even without the help of treats. Your dog will regress at some point, and when Luka did, having Lise's encouragement and advice really helped me develop the knowledge and techniques to move forward in the training without being too discouraged. I'm now very good at reading Luka's body language and assessing when he's under, within, and over threshold, and this has also helped me with his reactivity training. You can find a lot of videos on separation anxiety online and books on it too, but if you need more confidence, encouragement, honest advice and, solid guidance, I definitely recommend you build a strong foundation with Lise's program. I think that starting this improperly on your own can easily worsen things and make your dog develop even more negative associations with you leaving their sight, so it's important to start this right and start off strong! NOTE!!! Personally, if I had to do this all over again, I would work on Luka's reactivity first before starting the SA program so if your dog is reactive at home, work on that first if possible to maximize their progress on the program.