Dexter’s on the side of the room, lying down.
Freddie’s beside him, sitting regally.
Across the room, Gracie clearly does not know what to make of those two. She a bichon frise. And she’s wearing a pink sweater.
Dexter would have trouble sitting comfortably in the back seat of a car, he’s so big. He’s a 130-pound Great Dane on his way to probably 185 pounds. After all he’s seven months old. His paws are the size of a mayonnaise jar lid.
Freddie is a standard poodle and has the face of an expectant child.
They are at Speedy Paws for obedience training with Sue Conklin, who just won a national award for an essay she wrote about training with kindness.
“She’s better than the dog whisperer,” said Angela Blaugher, Freddie’s owner. “It is happy training, and Fred responds well to that.”
Blaugher says her friend brought an old dog believed to be untrainable to Conklin and six months later it was easy to live with.
With a little liver biscotti or Z-filets chicken, Conklin has these dogs eating out of her hand, literally and figuratively.
She learned it all from horses. She and her husband managed a thoroughbred horse farm in Pennsylvania for nine years. They trained in the way of the horse whisperer, gentle, consistent and positive.
When they left that job she went to a local PetSmart, prepared to be a groomer. Shortly she was the trainer. She’s been in business for herself – the Puppy Nanny – for six years in South Carolina. She’s trained 2,000 dogs – or rather their owners.
But she always had a story she wanted to tell. The story of Pam and Ginger, the subject of the essay judged among the top entries to the Association of Pet Dog Trainers contest. Ginger, a greyhound, lived with Pam, who raised and showed the breed for 20 years. She was no stranger to dog training, obviously.
But Ginger. She was a work all her own. She was afraid of a leash. Not a great trait for a show dog.
“She would run into her crate and hide with her butt facing the door,” Conklin wrote.
Pam was using old-school techniques, choke chains and pops that just backfired with Ginger.
Conklin went to Pam’s home and decided the way to get Ginger to accept the leash was with a clicker and some cheese. Conklin clicked, Ginger responded and earned some cheese.
Conklin put the coiled leash on the table. Clicked. Ginger looked at the leash. Got cheese. Then they spread the leash out, held it, held it close to Ginger, touched her with it. Ginger got some cheese. Finally Ginger put her head in the leash loop. Herself.
“Clicker training had saved her relationship with Ginger,” Conklin wrote.
Ginger was going to be a show dog. She was to be entered in the Greyhound Nationals.
Then one day not long before the contest someone left the door open at Pam’s house.
Ginger ran out, into the street and was hit by a car.
“Pam and I were devastated,” Conklin wrote.
But the good that came was a friendship for Pam and Sue as well as Pam’s conversion to another way of training.
In the years since Pam has trained three puppies that won Best Puppy at the Greyhound Nationals. She’s trained AKC champions, too.
“When she gets advice from handlers who think that she should crack down on her dogs more, she tells them that she has tried that and it didn’t work,” Conklin wrote.
And then she tells them about Ginger.
