11/23/2025
ATTENION ALL MY FELLOW DOG OWNERS AND DOG LOVERS OF GREENVILLE SC AND THE UPDATE AREA!!!
Are you and your furry best friend(s) ready for the holiday season. Do you need help with;
• Door Manners: No more charging guests or flying out the front door, we will work on proper threshold training along with teaching calmness and patience when new people come to your home
• Place Training: Enjoy meals without table begging and enjoy being able to relax in your living room watching tv or relax on your front porch as people and cars pass by without your dog parking or whining. True place bed training isn’t just about obedience and enrichment but more importantly about mindset, the mindset to be calm and ignore everything else.
• Guest Greeting: Stop jumping, lunging, and whining to get to people or other dogs, whether it be in your home or when taking your dog(s) to public locations
• Leash walking: Stop pulling all over the place and instead have the dog(s) focus on the handler by teaching 3 structured ways of walking
o Loose leash walking
o Tight leash heels
o Focused Heels
• Problem Behaviors: No more barking, digging, chewing, whining, claiming furniture. Learn how to stop all unwanted behavior by properly fulling the dog(s) breed drives and exercise needs
• Dog Psychology: It’s important to learn how to properly communicate with your dog(s) and to learn how to understand what your dog(s) are trying to communicate to you
• Obedience Everywhere: Would you like to be able to take your dog(s) everywhere and not only have fun with them but also proper control over them. First learn how to properly control your dog at home through engaging training sessions of structured commands that are a perfect balance of fun yet firm with respectful boundaries, that will lead to training in all the desired public locations you want to travel to.
Please visit https://house-stark.squarespace.com/ or call 484-942-5358 for more information as I offer free demonstrations and consultations. Also, there are plenty of training videos to watch on our tik tok or Facebook. Just look up House Stark Dog Academy. Please feel free to read more details below or just call to set up a demonstration or consultation;
At House Stark Dog Academy, we can help with all the above bullet points mentioned through private 1 on 1 in home training lessons that lead to training in public locations. Also, I specialize in working with any type of major dog behavior issues. Whether it be reactivity or aggression towards people or other dogs through insecurities or fear or just frustration to demand attention from other dogs or people. I have 5 plus years of resolving all kinds of dog behavior issues.
Good dog trainers understand and teach that obedience and enrichment activities aren’t enough to have a well-behaved and well-tempered dog, it’s much more important to focus on the dog’s mindset and proper communication. Fulfilling breed drive is great, along with stimulating activities, but even more important is teaching dog owners how to properly communicate with their dogs, how to understand what the dog’s body language is communicating, how to have full control of them in every situation, and most importantly how to teach dogs “the art of doing nothing”, to be calm and learn that being bored and doing nothing is part of normal life.
Yes, I understand its enticing when you see exciting videos of trainers and owners with dogs perched on fire hydrants, tables, rocks, and all kinds of other crazy stunts that look fun but none of that helps you with having a well-tempered and well-mannered dog that is content to do nothing! What is more important is being able to have a dog that can remain calm while waiting on a place bed or underneath a table.
As my favorite colleague in Charlotte NC says, “Your crazy neurotic over stimulated dog does not need more stimulation or more enrichment they need to learn how to be bored and do nothing”!
I achieve all these results through a reward based balanced training method and techniques that I primarily learned from 3 different mentors and have improved and will continue to improve and learn through experiences with a multitude of dogs and working with other like-minded colleagues! The entire premises of balanced training come very easy for logical thinking and realistic mindsets. The idea is to teach through fun rewarding enrichment and breed driven activities while also setting fair, firm, and realistic boundaries and expectations.
Something I say to my clients all the time is good dog training is like alchemy. Alchemy is the process of creating gold from dross through the process of pressure and heat. Too much heat and pressure and the dross melts, too little heat and pressure and then the dross never develops into gold and remains a less valuable mineral. This analogy can be directly related to the other two styles of dog training.
Compulsive alpha theory dog training styles puts too much heat and pressure on the dog and at best have a dog that is very controlled and well-behaved, possibly calm and good at doing nothing, but listens out of fear and submission rather than love, compassion, and respect. At worst a dog trained through these methods develops extreme anxiety and very submissive traits that I have personally had 30 plus dogs I had to had rehabilitated that were used to being pinched on their pressure points or even worse kicked, yanked on by a chock chain or prong collar, or pinned to the ground.
There are just much more humane and safe ways to train dogs by setting safe boundaries that are only meant to cause a slight discomfort. As I always say to my clients we want to make sure a boundary/ secondary reinforcement is respectful, which means not only safe but also firm. Also, most importantly dogs should want to listen to their owners out of respect and love, not fear and submission.
Positive only/ force free and behavior specialist methods are an even bigger issue I have spent most of my career rehabilitating hundreds of dogs trained through these methods who have become extremely stubborn, standoffish, aggressive, territorial, resource guarding, extremely neurotic and constantly over simulated. Fun engaging and enriching activities without any boundaries or consequences creates dogs at best that can do fun tricks and look like they are having fun but don’t understand what it means to be calm, relaxed, and just be bored and truly well-mannered. All dog owners need to understand that excitement is not happiness! An amped up over-stimulated and neurotic dog is not going to make good decisions when they are excited and frantic.
At worst this training style creates dogs that develop the mindset of they can do whatever they want and deserve everything they want, which is not a healthy mindset for a predatory animal that is meant to be a pet living in a human environment. The simpler response I would like to provide is that this style of positive only training is just simply missing half the equation of dog training. Then also even worse sometimes instead of knowing how to teach a dog to be calm and bored and do nothing they always resort to recommending the dog be put on some type of behavioral drug ☹! Drugs are never the answer for dog obedience training and always the last step to resolving any type of behavioral issue. Behavioral drugs at best only give a temporary solution where at worst cause withdrawal symptoms, even worse behavioral issues, and can lead to cancer along with all kinds of other organ failures. I have worked with 30 plus clients, that would be happy to provide a reference, that had a dog on behavioral drugs then after working through balanced methods they don’t use those drugs anymore and have a ten times happier and well-behaved dog.
Also, I could go on for hours talking about the amount of potential clients I have had call me crying because they were told by a positive only trainer or behaviorist that they will never be able to touch their dog in certain ways, hug them, be near them when they are eating, and worst of all that they are better off putting the dog down and getting another one that can be trained through force free methods because “aversive tools are abusive and inhumane to use on dogs” but somehow putting the dog down is less humane?! To be honest, if it’s not already obvious, I don’t have much respect for these trainers as most of them are unqualified, out of their scope, and just truly don’t understand dog psychology. Becoming a good dog trainer takes years of hands-on experience working with hundreds of dogs and several other experienced trainers (not taking tests online, reading about it, or watching some videos)! I understand not everybody is comfortable with seeing their dog showing signs of stress and discomfort and when you already have a dog with no behavioral issues you can be a little more flexible in your choice of dog training style, but what is most important is to match your end goal with what the trainer has to offer.
However, when it comes to training dogs’ logic and rational thought is what must be used and human emotions and being caught up in feelings and being uncomfortable every time you see a stressed dog isn’t what’s best for them. It’s the responsibility of being a good dog owner to show your dog successful reps of stress in safe places that they can be successful in handling so when they get to the outside world they don’t automatically fail and fold. It’s unfortunately a hard concept for a lot of people to understand because not everybody is willing to push themselves or their dogs through moments of stress and things they don’t want to do in order to achieve amazing results. Not everything you do for your dog will be fun but what every person learns every day is that the world is not always fun, and that most of the time we must do things we don’t want to do in order to be successful. Remember at the end of the day we want our dogs to become Gold and not melt or even worse remain as they are as dross, a less valuable mineral that can’t handle everyday life or being in the outside world.
Thank you for reading all the above and again for more information call 484-942-5358 and I look forward to hearing from you and helping with your dog training journey!!!
