If you have a dog or are thinking of adding a dog to your family this year, you won't want to miss this Local Love post on Om Obedience, a professional dog training service based out of West Bridgewater, MA. Toward the end of last year we started working with Michaela Collins, the owner of Om Obedience and she was truly our savior! Michaela is a Certified Professional Dog Trainer and has been training professionally since 2009. If you aren't familiar with our story, we have 4 kids and last year we added 2 Bernedoodle puppies, Finn and Roxie, to the mix.
We were such ignorant dog owners and had no idea what we were getting into when we got two littermate puppies that quickly grew into two huge dogs. Renee said, "I don’t know what we would have done if we didn’t meet Michaela. When we first called her, we were seriously considering rehoming Finn due to aggression."
Michaela came to our house for the first time, at 9pm, for an emergency intervention. She assessed the pups and our living space and “parenting” style and helped us come up with a personalized intervention plan that relied solely on positive reinforcement.
She helped us revamp the way we were doing things at home and helped create a more secure environment for the pups. Both dogs were enrolled in separate training classes where they worked on socialization, commands, and manners.
In addition to interventions, Om Obedience offers 6-week group training classes and private training in your home or at one of their partner locations. The trainings work on resource guarding, separation anxiety, leash reactivity and more, depending on your dog's needs.
Finn’s reactive puppy class was run by Michaela herself and Roxie’s elementary class was run by Maddi, one of Michaela’s awesome trainers. The classes were well organized, small--so we got a lot of individualized attention, and fun for us and the dogs.
We also signed up for bi-weekly in-home sessions with Michaela where we work on specific behaviors in our home such as waiting before going out to play, staying in place, leash walking, coming inside when called, staying off furniture, waiting to be invited up or down stairs, greeting visitors, etc. And we love when Michaela shows up in her signature Om Obedience purple jeep!
We have learned so much by working with Michaela and Maddi at Om Obedience.
We are now able to recognize triggers and manage behaviors through positive reinforcement. We are a lot more confident as a result and so are the dogs.
We all look forward to our training sessions and can’t wait to see what the dogs will learn next. Learn more about Om Obedience at www.omobedience.com.
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