Welcome to Helping Hounds Wales

ABOUT HELPING HOUNDS

Helping Hounds is a strategic alliance intended to put dog owners in touch with a variety of canine professionals that use ethical, scientific and kind practices within their businesses.

Our intention is to help businesses with an ethos similar to ours, to grow. The dog trainers in our alliance are particularly concerned that the general public, in particular dog owners, are not aware of how damaging traditional dog training practices are or even that there’s an alternative, more effective option. As awareness grows, we expect to see people being more demanding of canine professionals and the standard of care we offer dogs to increase.

We intend to be very selective of our members. Prospective members will need to be nominated by a current member, we won’t be accepting applications. We are contacting you as you have been invited to become a member of the Helping Hounds strategic alliance.

The founding members, Emma Badger of On Cloud K9, Bobbi Hayden of LifeLine Dogs, Julie Williams of South Wales Dog Training Academy, Rachel Leather of Animal Behaviour Consultations and Barbara Bottrill of Ginger Mutts, found that collaboration worked really well for them, having complementary services, skills, sharing the same ethos, decided to set up something that was more structured and could benefit more people.

The training courses are designed and developed by On Cloud K9,  LifeLine Dogs,  South Wales Dog Training Academy, and will be delivered by one or more trainers from these organisations.

HELPING HOUNDS’ ETHOS

Our ethos is kindness, to others and especially to our best friends, our dogs. We love working with dog guardians to help them learn and understand, the sometimes, subtle signs of canine body language. We want to empower them with knowledge to treat their dogs with kindness, compassion, gentleness and patience.

We seek to educate everyone about the latest in modern dog training methods that are based on scientific fact, whilst maintaining fear-free, safe, ethical practices which are highly effective and improve the human-dog bond.

Long gone are the days of shouting, frightening or intimidating dogs while yanking their lead or ‘correcting’ them or using equipment that either scares dogs or causes physical harm. These methods have been proven to cause ‘behavioural fallout’, which in a lot of cases, is worse than the original problem.

As dogs are sentient beings with their own feelings, emotions and cognitive abilities, we are very mindful of how emotions drive behaviour and make our observations on how we can best proceed to help our canine friends and their guardians in their training journey.