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Animal Behavior for Pet Pros
By Gary Wilkes © 2013

There are three good reasons for any pet professional to learn about animal behavior; personal safety, better serving their clients and making money.

Safety: There is nothing worse than having an animal injured while in your care. If it’s a matter of a one-of-a-kind, unforeseeable event it’s bad enough. If it’s a matter of poor handling, lack of training or specific policies it is doubly tragic; that it happened at all and that it is likely to happen again. The same is true for your staff. If they are injured because they aren’t good at handling or teaching necessary skills, it comes back to you. Injury is not the only problem caused by a lack of behavioral knowledge. The appearance of hard handling can cause a public outrage because a client sees something they don’t understand or an employee has their own ideas about humane treatment. Some businesses side step this by having “back rooms” or by only handling easy animals. If you do not have the room or luxury to turn away clients with fractious animals, skilled handling is the key. These issues place even more pressure on you to discover better ways to control behavior that are efficient, safe and acceptable. A single botched handling incident can destroy your business.

Serving your client: Your clients love their animals. This leads to two divergent tasks for the animal professional. Half of your clients want to offer exciting and enriching experiences for their animal and the other half want to strangle them. The common problem is a matter of love-gone-horribly-wrong. Over-indulgent owners often let a dog’s worst nature emerge and become paramount. Remember, dogs bite. Left unchecked or uninhibited a typical adolescent dog can easily turn into a dangerous adult. That is as nature intended. Civilization has other priorities. A dog that bites is a dog that will most likely end up dead.

To control behavior problems such as aggression there must be someone in the dog’s life who understands how to stop unacceptable behavior. This requires knowledge of new training methods and products for behavioral control and grounding in how to solve basic behavioral issues. Whether that is you, an employee or a trusted professional doesn’t change the necessity. The problem is sorting out fact from fiction. That is your obligation as a pet professional. 

A Foundational Perspective:

Dog training is about 15,000 years old. Over the millennia dogs have been trained to perform tasks with precision to help and protect humans. Despite the shift from protector and worker to simple companion, one thing is true – the gene pool of dogs is fundamentally the same today as it has always been. That means the collective knowledge of trainers cannot be discounted. Over the last 70 years, scientists have proposed that their discoveries transcend the need to know anything about the tradition of dog training. This is your first necessary decision that will guide your behavioral education. I can sum this up in a single question – if you had to negotiate Manhattan blindfolded, would you want a dog trained by Lukas Franck, head troubleshooter at the Seeing Eye, or a PhD behavior analyst from Harvard? If you said the former you can see the issue. There is evidence that dogs have been helping blind people navigate since the middle ages. Behavioral scientists don’t acknowledge that. They have attempted to invent the wheel without ever looking at wheels throughout the ages. The idea that there is nothing to be gleaned from literally millennia of experience is questionable to mindless. For the pet professional, this is a critical issue when deciding what to believe. You are inundated with people vying to be experts so they can grab market share. But are they really experts? Why does police-dog experience help with a submissively wetting Shi-Tzu. Why does skill with anti-anxiety drugs help stop a Jack Russell from killing neighborhood cats? Is the behavior generated by “anxiety” or instinct? Is an English Pointer crazy because it is obsessive about birds? How does a field trainer control what is obviously obsessive behavior? Can a behavioral scientist produce evidence that their “solution” works compared in blind trials against trainers like George Hickox?

In this sea of claims and assertions, your clients are in a rudderless boat seeking help. They will endure many things well beyond the limits of rational judgment like permanently soiled carpets and perpetual management of aggression. In the absence of solid behavioral advice they often acquiesce to their pet in a downward spiral that most often leads to you losing a client as they give up or kill their pet. 

Making Money:

We are in business to make a profit. While media rhetoric tends to denounce the profit motive, the reality is that profits pay your salary, your staff’s salary, the myriad companies that make products for your business, the local economy and anyone you touch through your service. Enough said. Your cogent behavioral advice is worth a ton. Consider a recent phone call I received from a potential client. He had spent a year and a half working with a trainer to get off-leash control over his dog. He called me to finally get a reliable “recall.” I have no idea what the other trainer was doing other than milking a client. Unfortunately, by the time he decided to go elsewhere, he was tapped out financially. When I quoted my fee, all he saw was additional cost on top of what he had already spent. Illogically, his annoyance was aimed at me. I guess I was supposed to train his dog for free because someone else soaked him for a couple thousand dollars. That is why charging a fee for your behavioral advice can save your clients money – if your advice is solid. Here are the areas where you can improve your bottom line by knowing more than a little about behavior.

• Products that solve problems:
• Providing for-hire training or contracting with a trainer to provide for your clients
• Doing the work, yourself or training staff to provide behavior services.

• These three areas often generate a lot of moans and groans. While it is daunting to have to add an entirely new skill to your current occupation, there is a solid reason why you should enthusiastically become an expert. If you don’t, you client is left to fend for themselves on a critical issue. That could cause the client to lose their animal and you to lose the client. If that sounds like a stretch consider that the number one reason dogs are taken to shelters, sold or given away is problem behavior. If a client’s animal develops a behavior problem and you can’t be the go-to person to help, an unnamed and possibly incompetent person is going to take over the process. That is a missed opportunity to be helpful and thereafter a respected partner in a dog’s life. If you can help an owner solve a problem, they will come to you the next time there is an issue. You can’t talk someone out of getting rid of their dog if you aren’t in the loop.

Products and Services: From simple chew toys to electronic gadgets, any product that can lead to good behavior for a reasonable price is a potential life-saver for your client’s pet. These items can be sorted into two basic categories – daily maintenance and problem solving.

 Daily Maintenance:

• Halters
• Chew toys
• House training aids

• Problem Solving:

• Technological behavior modification products
• Effective training methods
• On-site services
• Referral services

• To be in a business offering any form of pet services our focus must always be on best serving our clients while maintaining high standards of safety, effectiveness and affordability. Cookie-cutter formulas may generate a profitable business but we must also understand that our clients love their animals. Learning to facilitate that love leads to the highest achievement of our various allied professions – compassionate wisdom.

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