K9 ENERGETICS

Blue Sky Blu LLC dba K9 Energetics offers dog training and behavior coaching, training and support heIping dogs overcome behavior challenges, build confdence and find balance while helping humans better understand what lies at the core of a dog's behavior challenges and how they can help their dog overcome them.

About Steve Barker - K9 Energetics

I have been working with and helping troubled dogs for 15 years in many cases helping them get out or avoid ending up in  the rescue world and in others simply helping them live the best lives they can to their greatest potential.  In the early days I spent a lot of money studying with one of Cesar Milan's 'apprentices' but I soon began to see the floors in a system of training that believed that everything a dog was doing was a case of it trying to 'dominate' you and that at every turn ​you had to show the dog that you were the boss.

In truth the whole 'pack leader' philosophy that lies at the core of this method of training is based on somewhat floored research conducted by observing wolves captured from across the nation kept together and then held in captivity. Not surprisingly under the stress of such an unnatural environment that research observed that significant dominance and violence. Of course this approach would be like like studying human behavior by observing prison gangs.

And when Biologist David Mech, recognized as the one of the leading experts on wolf behavior, studied a pack of wolves living in the wild on Ellesmere Island in Northen Canada he found little in the way of 'dominance' on the part of the pack leaders and in truth the most succesfull wolf pack leaders were those who were supremely confident and charasmatic, those who would lead the others into new territory and who would easily initiate play.

Following my disappointing experience with the Cesar Milan method which I found failed more often than it succeeded especially when it came to under confident, stressed or fearful and nervous dogs I began to seek a different approach. Someone then recommended a new book to me called 'Dog Sense' and so I headed to Amazon noticed that other people who bought it had also bought a book titled 'Your Dog is your mirror' by Kevin Behan and so to save on the shipping I bought both.  Luckily I decided to read 'Your dog is your mirror' first and to this day I  have never actually read 'Dog Sense' which sits waiting on my book shelf.

Kevin Behan, now sadly deceased, offered a whole new way of understanding what drives a dog's behavior and how by way of their connection us and what we are feeling and thinking has an influence on how they feel and as a result how they behave.  Kevin Behan's Natural Dog Training method offers a 'Master and Student' relationship rather than the 'Master and Slave' one offered by the Dominance method.