This is the first course in a three-course dog assessment series. The courses are designed to be taken in order. 

This course focuses on our first time meeting a dog. Participants will identify what valuable information is available in everyday interactions, and learn to acknowledge the role the handler has in interactions being successful or unsuccessful. We practice documenting an interaction with a dog using objective behavior notes and learn to use our observations to set expectations when introducing a dog to a prospective adopter.

Course author: Devan Amundsen, CPDT-KA CBCC-KA, is a certified dog trainer, certified behavior consultant, and founder of the nonprofit Free Dog Trainers. He has over 15 years of experience working with not just dog owners, but dogs in shelters, assistance dogs and other working dogs.

This is the second course in a three-course dog assessment series. The courses are designed to be taken in order. If you have not already done so, please complete course 1. 

Successful evaluations require nuance and specificity. In this course, we seek to answer the question “How does the dog feel about this specific stimulus?” If the dog feels scared, anxious, frustrated, or something else that causes a sudden change in their behavior, we might recognize that stimulus as a trigger. Then we need to ask more questions like “Where is the threshold for this trigger?” and “How can I manage this trigger to avoid the dog becoming overwhelmed?” The answers to these questions will get to the heart of answering the whole purpose of an evaluation in a shelter:

• What does safe handling look like for this dog?
• Do we have the resources to safely handle this dog?
• How do I explain what I'm seeing to make sure we all have the objective information we need to make safe and informed decisions about handling this dog?

Course author: Devan Amundsen, CPDT-KA CBCC-KA, is a certified dog trainer, certified behavior consultant, and founder of the nonprofit Free Dog Trainers. He has over 15 years of experience working with not just dog owners, but dogs in shelters, assistance dogs and other working dogs.

This is the third course in a three-course dog assessment series. The courses are designed to be taken in order. If you have not already done so, please complete course 1 and course 2. 

In the first two courses, we went from identifying what the dog wants (so we can get them out of their kennel) to identifying how the dog feels (so we can get them out into the world). However, the real world is complicated. There's no reasonable way to devise a singular test that can accurately predict future potentially challenging behavior. That's why, in this final course, we identify a framework for evaluating a dog in a way that's safe, reasonable and nuanced. The process of assessment should be to identify what needs to be disclosed to a potential adopter about what we have observed, and to make a plan about how to move forward. Our goal during assessment is to handle the dog to the best of our ability, carefully observe the dog's behavior throughout, respond appropriately to communication from the dog, and report transparently about what we saw. 

Course author: Devan Amundsen, CPDT-KA CBCC-KA, is a certified dog trainer, certified behavior consultant, and founder of the nonprofit Free Dog Trainers. He has over 15 years of experience working with not just dog owners, but dogs in shelters, assistance dogs and other working dogs.