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 original members, On Cloud K9, SWDTA, Ginger Mutts and LifeLine Dogs, 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.
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.
How Will It Work?
At present there is no monetary cost and there is presently no intention to change that. Through collaboration we want to educate, both the public and fellow canine professionals that don’t already share our ethos.
We want to raise the profile of canine professionals who share our ethos. We can do this by encouraging each member to commit a relatively small amount of time to the project to help the project grow.
- There’ll be a social group whereby we can get to know each other in order to be confident to both understand and be able to recommend each others services or products. We can also share ideas on how to improve and grow Helping Hounds.
- You’ll have a page that describes your business with a link to your own website – Alliance Members.
- You’ll have a page in which you can introduce yourself – Helping Hounds Team.
- You’ll be able to list your services, with a link back to the page on your website that offers your service, and also a form that will allow people to get in touch with you directly regarding that service – Services.
- We’ll shortly be adding functionality similar to services to allow you to offer products, and also functionality to allow you to include events.
- Note that we do not intend offering payment functionality, simply a method of getting the client or customer to the relevant page on your website or the ability to collect information that will be sent directly to your business.
- New members will be recruited on recommendation from existing members; quality rather than quantity is important to us.
- Helping Hounds website content should be unique and not copied from any other website.
Are you a good fit?
Is the Helping Hounds strategic partnership something that you’d like to be involved with?
If the answer is yes, please outline below the value you feel you’d add to Helping Hounds.
Some examples to get you thinking…
- You could help grow awareness of Helping Hounds though word of mouth.
- You could write blog posts on the Helping Hounds website and share it to the Helping Hounds’ social media.
- You could share Helping Hounds social media posts to both your personal and your business accounts – if all members shared Helping Hounds’ social media all members will reach more people.
- You could share fellow alliance members’ services, products, posts or events.
- You could recommend fellow alliance members and alliance members’ services or products, but only if you feel confident and comfortable in doing so.
- If you have any particular expertise or skills that you feel will be valuable to Helping Hounds or other alliance members you could offer them assistance when you are able.