30/04/2025
At Wonder Puppy, we LOVE when our students share their awesomely inspiring successes with us from lessons learned in our classes! Here is one from a student who really embraced our respect and dialogue-based cooperative care lessons from our Social 2 and Skills 2 courses to help with giving shots to her puppy Vera who has special physical needs ❤️:
“I hate giving Vera shots but it’s been night and day incorporating things we’ve learned in class. We let her consent first - she knows when I’m getting the shot ready and what it means. Now, she will lie down and let me do it!
When I’m getting the shot ready she automatically goes to her mat. I have never asked that from her though. When I sit down beside her sometimes she gets up and readjusts once or twice until she’s ready, always coming back on her own. I give it to her in her neck scruff now. We did a lot of massages to figure out that her neck is most comfortable for her. Initially, I used just my hands to imitate holding the scuff and poking it with my finger [and looked for her to tell us she was ready for being touched]. Next, we progressed to applying the pattern you taught for holding the scruff and giving the injection...then we party afterward! It’s awesome. So much better than having someone hold her or trying to distract her with food… that only worked a couple times.”
Over the years, we have found that cooperative care is often not a big enough part of general dog training classes because it’s such a deep subject. All the same, it’s such a huge part of what is needed to help our puppies and people build trusting bonds. Because of this, it has been our mission (a mission we are still on today!) to help simplify the process and make this more doable, even when just taking a basic group class. It’s stories like this that tells us we can do this! Special shout out and great appreciation to Peggy Hogan, Chirag Patel, Leslie McDevitt, Lion Cao, David Sudar, and Marley the Border Collie for their inspiring teachings that help to guide us on this mission.