Practical Courses

Exclusively for you, our city and country course

The city and country courses alternate, meaning one week is spent in the city, followed by the next week in the country. Our learning method is unique and offers you great advantages, as many satisfied customers repeatedly confirm. Learn to train your dog without stress or pressure.

                                       

Sign up now, you can join at any time.

However, we cannot guarantee you a specific time; it always depends on which group still has available places.

Or attend a 3-day seminar in the Black Forest (see below)

Here you see a short excerpt from a three-day seminar in the Black Forest, which takes place from Friday to Sunday midday. This recording was made on Sunday morning; the video was taken purely by chance by someone observing. The dogs are on average between 9 and 26 months old. There are 23 different people and 17 different dogs present, who naturally had quite different problems. We worked through two lessons each morning and two lessons each afternoon. On Sunday morning, we see a very harmonious and unified picture, regardless of whether we look at each individual handler or each individual dog. You don't see any dogs nervously jumping around because they don't expect a treat after every movement; you don't see any intimidated dogs because they aren't being yelled at or pressured. You also don't see any handler jerking their dog around. Instead, all the teams act as a unit, and you don't see any dog or handler performing better or worse than another.

Let me give you an example of what makes our dog training different: Dog training is what everyone does; the dog is taught commands or hand signals that it then has to execute on command. This is limited to the handler learning how to give these commands and the dog learning how to carry them out. Because a trained dog can only use these commands in situations it has learned them in, it will always remain that way. This means that if you put such a dog in a down position, you always have to apply the necessary pressure to make it stay and then reward it afterward so it has a reason to stay. Simply put, you are forcing it to do what you command. (Everyone has to answer for themselves whether their dog feels happy in such situations.) We never force our dogs; we show them the way to where we want them to go, but this doesn't happen through commands or bribery, etc. We teach the dog a great deal of independence and show it everything in a trust-building way until it does it on its own. For example: I was in Winterthur with a group of dog owners, and I had my Irish Setter, Odin, who was nine months old at the time, with me. I was explaining something to the other dog owners, and my dog understood that it would take a while and lay down on his own. At some point, I stood with my back to Odin and continued giving explanations. Suddenly, everyone started smiling, and I realized something was going on behind me. So I turned around to see what was happening. Odin, who was still lying in the same spot, had been visited by two pigeons, which were walking back and forth about a meter away from him. When Odin noticed me looking, he looked at me too. I took two steps away from him, whereupon he calmly got up and came to me. So Odin decided for himself, before I had even noticed the pigeons, that he would stay lying down and not chase them. When he saw that I was paying attention to him again, he came to me himself. You need to understand that for an Irish Setter, birds represent the ultimate challenge. This means we teach our dogs to do the right thing themselves, which allows us to trust them much more. It also means you have to learn to communicate with the dog mentally. We've developed a training plan that automatically guides you towards this correct communication. You can only learn this method with us. A guide dog trained by us can perform tasks that a conventionally trained guide dog will never be able to. If Odin had been a conventionally trained dog in the same situation, I would have had to stand by him and watch him constantly. If the pigeons had come, I would have had to exert the necessary pressure to make him stay put. This would have created a stressful, trust-breaking situation for Odin, and for me as well (if I have to exert pressure, I can't trust him). With our method, however, everything remained relaxed, even though the difficulty level for Odin was 200% or more.