THE Portland Dog Obedience Club (PDOC) recently brought in a highly respected dog trainer to help the club to be able to help people with challenging dogs.

Thanks to a community grant from the Glenelg Shire council, reactive and aggressive dog specialist Trish Cavarra spent the day on Sunday, November 27, ‘training the trainers’ at PDOC.

“We basically decided that we wanted to be able to help people with slightly more challenging dogs,” said PDOC president Heather Richardson.

“Things like reactivity problems especially on-lead, like frustration around other dogs, barking, pulling on the lead, lunging at other dogs and not being able to focus with other dogs around.”

“The aim is to be able to work with people and potentially run a class specifically for those more high-arousal, frustrated, lead-reactive dogs, and just teach them calm behaviours.

It’s all about it's about changing like the emotional state of the dog rather than just getting them to be obedient and focus on you, it's changing the way they think about seeing the trigger of another dog.”

Ms Cavarra was the choice for them because of her credentials as a training lecturer, as well as her 20 year track record working with dogs.

“She's just got a really good solid history of working particularly with aggression cases, and he's one of the few dog training schools that will actually run a specific, reactive or aggressive dog class.”

The club invited around half a dozen members that they hope will be able to take on one-on one and group classes for dogs with these issues, as well as a few members with dogs that display some of these behaviours.

Among them was Patsy Moore and her 14 month old dog Charlie, who is often reactive around other dogs.

Ms Moore said that PDOC classes have been a great help to her already, but 20 minutes with Ms Cavarra provided her with good strategies and some new ideas.

“All the trainers were looking forward to this and I can see why, Trish obviously has a lot of experience and knowledge.

“[Charlie] responded totally differently, I feel quite confident now and in future, I’ll be using it a lot.”

Ms Richardson says the club are about to take a break over summer but will return in February, and invites anyone interested in dog obedience or agility training to get in touch vie the club’s Facebook page.