Dog Training with Kat Davis
If you’ve been in a classroom with Kat, you’ve likely heard her rave about dogs or some other animal, from lizards to turtles, once or twice. Ever since she was a little girl, Kat attempted to train her family’s dogs. “I didn’t do the best job at training when I was younger, since I didn’t have any disciplined schedule or guidance,” Kat admits, “When I was 12, I really wanted to get a German Shepherd and actually be serious about training her.” Since her family already had a German Shepherd at the time, she knew that she loved the particular dog breed, but he was older and training him for competitions wasn’t a viable option. Eventually, Kat convinced her dad—“if it were up to my mom and I, we would have like twenty dogs”—to bring Maggie into the family.
Unfortunately, the trainer she had been using with Maggie wasn’t quite compatible. Within a year, Maggie started to become aggressive and uncontrollable. “I started to worry if I would even be able to keep her. It taught me that serious issues can arise if you make mistakes when training dogs,” Kat reflects, “I decided to try out a different trainer [...] and thankfully Maggie began to change.” In the past four years with this trainer, Maggie has gone from snarling meltdowns every time she was in public to winning three different competitions and earning her Companion Dog title. During that time, Kat also got Nico, her other German Shepherd, who is currently in protection training.
While lots of families own dogs and have to train them, Kat’s truly an expert. “What you do in dog training really depends on what you are training the dog to do,” Kat explains. There’s obedience training, which comes in all types. Kat usually goes to her dog trainer’s once a week to work on various obedience exercises with Maggie. Now that Maggie’s training for her Companion Dog Excellent title, she gets to learn fun things like jumping and retrieving, as well as heeling on and off leash, staying in a sit or down and coming when called. “Once the dog has the basics down and knows how to do the commands, they go through drills, where they do the command with distractions. [Working through these] distractions makes sure that the dog will be prepared for competitions, where there are many people and other dogs.”
When preparing for a competition, Kat estimates that she spends 150 minutes dog training per week per dog, which translates to around 15 minutes a day of strict training. This number is a fairly fixed one: dogs lose interest if you try to train longer. “In addition, I have to be really careful about what I’m doing with the dog at home, since there is an immense amount of implicit training occurring in everyday life,” Kat says. This is one of the challenges of dog training: usually, people implicitly train habits that they don’t want to see in their competition dogs. As an example, Kat points out that dogs tap our hands and legs to get attention, and we usually pet them in response, leading them to tap whenever they want attention—a habit that can look unprofessional in competitions. “Dog training can seem somewhat simple on the outside. Good dog trainers can make it look easy and people tend to pay more attention to the dog than the handler. However, to get a well trained dog, you have to pay a lot more attention to your posture and movements than you would expect.” Just like any other sport, a good dog trainer needs a good teacher and lots of practice.
Nico at his obedience trials: he won the highest award for obedience trial two days in a row!
Some training definitely requires more practice than others. One of the more complex tricks Kat has taught Maggie is to sit by her side while she throws a dumbbell over a hurdle, jump over the hurdle and retrieve the dumbbell, and jump back over the hurdle to come back. “That trick was super hard to teach,” Kat remembers, “Since dogs naturally want to do the least amount of jumping, I had to be really careful about making sure that she got in the habit of jumping back over the hurtle once she had the dumbbell.” With experiences such as these, it’s no wonder that Kat believes the biggest thing dog training has taught her is that it is possible to communicate complex intentions with animals you don’t share a common language with. “Dogs and humans are obviously very different creatures, but we are still able to communicate with each other. Anyone who has had a dog knows this,” Kat says, “Training my dogs to do complex commands further shows me how much we are able to communicate with them. [...] What I love most about dog training is getting to have such a close bond with the animals that I love.”
Outside of dog training, Kat is an enthusiastic philosopher and biologist, which is clear from her lengthy list of favorite OHS courses: MSB, AP Biology, HSC, Advanced Topics in Biological Research, Study of the Mind, DFRL and Advanced Topics in Philosophy. Yet, her passions don’t stop at the academic. When asked what she does for fun, outside of school commitments and dog training, Kat enthusiastically responds, “Reading and art definitely!” Though she doesn’t do as much art as she would like, she has always loved drawing and listening to music. Further, as the Board Chair of Student Academic Support and Services (SASS), Kat has introduced many new resources to the student body, from study calls to a blog featuring interviews with peer tutors, and continues to develop these established projects by experimenting with different types of articles. “My favorite part about SASS as a student government board is how flexible it is. We don’t have specific responsibilities like organizing clubs or working on announcements, but instead we get to create new academic projects that we think OHSers will find helpful.”
What lies in the future for Kat? “I plan on going to college and double majoring in biology and philosophy, and then going to vet school. I’ve always wanted to be a veterinarian for as long as I can remember. I have sometimes thought about other careers, but I usually stop being interested in those within a few months,” she says. We at the Pixel Journal have no doubt that she will get there.