In this webinar, Kristi Benson will delve into the ways the guardians of a multi-dog household can make their living situations more peaceful and joyful, for both the humans and the dogs involved. She’ll review safety factors in having a home with multiple dogs, including how dogs function as social carnivores and how and why other pets and small children may be at risk. She will delve into “management”, or the prevention of problem behaviours before they start, when dealing with multiple animals. She will also cover useful tricks and tools for both management and training, how to maximise training set-ups, how and when to train on-the-fly, and the logistics of comfortable down-time. Kristi will cover how to comfortably bring clients on board with kinder techniques and dismantling client myths about behaviour and dynamics among multi-dog homes. She will also tackle how to have tricky conversations about re-homing and permanent separation of animals in a single home.
Kristi has lived with up to 13 dogs in her home when she was running a sled dog rescue and has tested and streamlined effective and welfare-forward techniques to meet everyone’s needs while keeping the (relative) peace in a busy home.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify safety considerations for multi-dog households, including with cats and children.
- Understand the basics of predatory behaviour and acquired bite inhibition.
- Understand and implement management (response prevention) for multi-dog households to reduce problem behaviours including fighting.
- Identify useful and important training plans, and how to effectively train in a multi-dog household.
- Understand the basics of classical conditioning and how to use it in a solo-counterconditioning protocol on-the-fly.
- Identify and reduce risk/harm in worst-case scenarios.
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