“Training Mistakes” Seminar – Orlando, Florida
1/8/12
Train the Trainers! Russell and Cynthia travel to sunny Orlando, Florida for “What Not to Err: Training Mistakes that Create Headaches for Dogs” with Kathy Sdao, M.A., an Associate Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist. 
Course description: There’s no shortage of dog-training advice available to our clients. Websites, books, television, dog advocates and well-intentioned friends offer suggestions for basic training and for solving behavior problems. We’ll review ten errors, both general and technical, common to dog-friendly trainers. Topics include ineffective cues, backward sequences, poisoned reinforcers, misunderstood training transitions and more. Understanding how to avoid or resolve these issues will make training fairer for our dogs and more fun for everyone. Kathy also presents “Plenty in Life is Free: An Alternative to Rank-based Training Models.” Much modern dog training has evolved from older methods laden with physical coercion. Though the dog-training profession has made enormous strides in improving methodology over the past two decades, remnants of that dominance-based paradigm are still common. From the hackneyed advice that owners should be “alpha in their pack,” to the emphasis on leadership, to the ubiquity of “Nothing in Life is Free” (NILIF) protocols, the concept of hierarchy is integral to many trainers. Though this framework can sometimes lead to helpful training procedures, the explanations often go beyond a straight-forward scientific perspective by integrating superfluous concepts such as rank and deprivation. We’ll consider an alternative framework that provides a more equitable approach to effective training.
Kathy Sdao, M.A., ACAAB has spent the past 25 years as a full-time animal trainer, first with marine mammals and now with dogs and their people. As a graduate student at the University of Hawaii in the 1980′s, she was part of a research team that trained dolphins to solve complex cognitive puzzles. She received a master’s degree in experimental psychology and was then hired by the United States Navy (Department of Defense) to train dolphins for applied open-ocean tasks. After that job, Kathy spent five years as a marine-mammal trainer at the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in Tacoma Washington. There she expanded her training skills by working with beluga whales, walruses, porpoises, sea lions, otters and polar bears. After leaving the zoo world, Kathy and a colleague created Tacoma’s first dog-daycare facility, Puget Hound Daycare, where Kathy first began teaching clicker-training classes for pet owners.
Since selling Puget Hound more than a decade ago, Kathy has traveled across the United States, Canada and Europe, and to Japan and Mexico, teaching students about the science of animal training. She enjoys sharing her passion for the incredible power of clicker training, experienced over years of working with many species.
Kathy currently owns Bright Spot Dog Training. Services include consulting with families about their challenging dogs, teaching private lessons to dogs and their owners, and coaching novices and professionals to cross over to positive-reinforcement training. In addition, she has trained animal actors, written for The Clicker Journal and for MSN’s dog-themed website, consulted with Guide Dogs for the Blind and for Susquehanna Service Dogs, served as a subject-matter expert for the Delta Society’s “Service Dog Education System” and taught at the “Instructor Training Course” for Dogs of Course. And, in one of her sillier moments, Kathy appeared as the “Way Cool Scientist” on an episode of the television show Bill Nye the Science Guy. Kathy is proud to be one of the original faculty members for Karen Pryor’s long-running ClickerExpos and has taught at eighteen of these conferences since 2003. FMI, go to Kathy’s website.
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