Episode Details

Summary:

Laura Waudby works part-time as a service dog trainer who prepares dogs for different types of service dog work and teaching puppy raiser classes -- plus, she's a new mom. You can find her online at TandemDogSports.com.

In her "free time," Laura trains and competes in obedience, rally, agility, and dabbles in disc dog and trick training. She was halfway to her OTCH with her UDX Corgi, Lance, before his early retirement. She has also competed at the Master's level in agility.

Links

• Tandemdogsports.com

Next Episode:

To be released 4/20/2018, featuring Eileen Anderson, author of Remember Me? Loving and Caring for a Dog with Canine Cognitive Dysfunction.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we'll be talking to Laura Waudby.

Laura works part-time as a service dog trainer who prepares dogs for different types of service dog work and teaching puppy raiser classes -- plus, she's a new mom. You can find her online at TandemDogSports.com.

In her "free time," Laura trains and competes in obedience, rally, agility, and dabbles in disc dog and trick training. She was halfway to her OTCH with her UDX Corgi, Lance, before his early retirement. She has also competed at the Master's level in agility.

Due to the special behavior needs of one of her Duck Tolling Retrievers, Laura has developed a strong interest in learning how to create motivation and confidence in dogs that struggle, either through genetics or through less than ideal training, to make it into the competition ring.

At FDSA, Laura offers classes for the Fenzi TEAM titles program and teaches Ring Confidence and several specialty classes including a class on articles and a class on stand for exam.

Hi Laura, welcome to the podcast!

Laura Waudby: Hey. I'm glad to be here.

Melissa Breau: I'm excited to have you. So, do you mind starting us off by reminding listeners a little bit about who the dogs are that you have and what you're working on with them?

Laura Waudby: My first dog is Lance, the Corgi. He is basically retired now due to an injury, but we do some obedience and trick training, and he likes to run around barking quite a bit. Then I have Vito, the Toler, and we mainly compete in agility, where we've worked on a lot of his ring stress issues. We still train in obedience, working on engagement, motivation, being brave. Then I have Zumi the Duck, who is my younger Toler. She's 3 years old right now. We are trialing now in agility, rally, and even obedience. These last few months she's started to awaken, so we're working on a lot of over-arousal issues now in both sports, but it's nice having a completely different set of issues than my other dog Vito. Then I usually have a foster dog or two around the house, service dogs in training.

Melissa Breau: Congrats on getting in the ring with the youngster there. I've seen some of the videos. It looks like good stuff.

Laura Waudby: Yeah, she's a lot of fun.

Melissa Breau: I wanted to start out talking a bit about this idea of ring confidence. I think that most people who have a dog that loves training -- or even those who have worked super-hard to teach a dog to love training -- are often a bit surprised when they go into the ring for the first time and find they have a totally different dog than they're used to. Why is trialing so different from training?

Laura Waudby: Everything about a trial is different than training. One of the biggest things is the atmosphere is really charged. There's nervous handlers and excited handlers both at t