Tails Trails and Training

Zac was awesome to work with! I reached out to him because I was having a hard time managing behavior with my two dogs and another dog in my neighborhood. Zac uses positive reinforcement to train dogs and it works! When we didn't see this dog out and about in the neighborhood he initiated the approach and bridge for everyone, and handled everything so professionally. Very friendly and he helps explain what dogs are thinking with your body language. Thanks for everything Zac!

100 stars. A million. Give Zac all👏of👏the👏stars👏. All of them. I can’t say enough great things about Zac and the approach he took with training us and our dog. We have a very under-socialized covid puppy named Crash who has some fear-based aggressive behavior. He also happens to have been born fully blind, which adds a little extra challenge to the training because we can’t exactly ask him to “watch” us as a way to guide his attention. I was skeptical before meeting Zac, and sort of felt hopeless in a way, because we had tried for a long time to “just expose Crash to more things”, and to “just be patient”, all without improvement. I felt discouraged from even trying to train Crash, because it felt like I never made any improvement with him. I 100% acknowledge my role in under socializing my dog to begin with. And, it’s also 100% my responsibility to learn how to fix it now so that we can live a normal life (like, have friends over for dinner occasionally maybe, or go for a walk without changing course every single time we encounter literally any other human or dog) and have a good, friendly, social dog for the next 12-14 years. From the moment Zac arrived, he started training us and Crash. He immediately dialed in on a number of things we were doing that were not helping the situation, and as soon as we corrected those, we saw improvement in Crash’s behavior. We all took Crash on a walk together, and Zac actively sought areas of concern (bikers, dogs on walks, dogs in yards, etc) to teach us how to identify and correct them. He was respectful and communicative with the folks and dogs we encountered on our walk, explaining that we were training our dog and asking if it would be ok to safely continue near them/their dog. He even brought his own dogs to our training to help teach us how to introduce Crash, what to watch for, and how to correct fearful or territorial behavior. Remember earlier, when I said I felt kind of hopeless and discouraged about Crash’s training? I cried, literally cried, when Zac brought his dog out of his van and introduced him to Crash without Crash having a negative reaction because for the first time in 2+ years, I could see some hope. It’s going to take work, and it’s not easy, and it’s a long process and I’m sure it will be frustrating at times, but Crash can do it and Zac gets 100% of the credit for showing us how to help get him there.