Meet the Instructors!!

Jo developed a love of animals as a child, growing up on a farm with horses, cows, a goat, dogs and chickens. After working 25+ years in another industry,  while training her own dogs and devouring all of the training methods she could squeeze in, she hung up that hat and set out to focus on helping others train their dogs!! 

She recognizes and respects that there are all levels of training backgrounds, training knowledge, abilities and situations, all of which create unique parameters for setting up teams for success in training! She firmly believes in working with the dog she has in front of her and helping to establishing communication lines between handlers and their dogs - allowing teams to thrive! There is no one "right way" for all dogs to learn, variations exist and finding the right variation for each team is a skill she is proud to be able to share!

Jo has trained, certified, competed and titled multiple dogs in Tricks, Rally, Obedience, Barn Hunt, Fast Cat, Agility, CGC and Therapy Dog and she is working on learning how to be teammates for herding as well! 

She lives with her five Australian Shepherds, Houdi (13.5), Choo (10.5), Orion (6), Khord (3) and now baby Buc (5 months)!  When she's not helping others train their dogs, you'll find her on her 33 acre farm training her own dogs, working in the garden, building fences, mowing grass, tending to the livestock (chickens, sheep and two steers named Sebastian and Ferdinand) and the livestock guardian dogs, Nadya, Meena and Duke. 

Dawn has owned, loved and trained Labrador Retrievers for almost 40 years.  Through the years she has enjoyed participating in different dog sports/activities such as obedience, conformation, agility, barn hunt, scent work, canine fitness and dog therapy.  Her dogs have titled in obedience, rally, tricks and conformation and several have graced the covers of Labrador calendars.  Raising Labradors is a passion of hers.    

Dawn has been teaching people how to understand, communicate and work with their dogs in classes and private settings for 

20+ years.   Through the years she has enjoyed watching relationships grow and change between a dog owner and their canine companion. In addition to teaching classes, Dawn is a Canine Good Citizen/Trick Dog Evaluator.