My name is Jaake. I am a Dog Trainer and have been working for The Dog Trainers since January 2022. Dogs have always been a major part of my life. As a young boy, I used to get dragged to training classes by my father who took part in tracking events and obedience with our Dobermans. Even at a young age, I remember thinking about the way they used to train dogs and found it quite distressing. As a young adult with my first dog, I questioned these methods further after attending a class that used aversive methods. I didn't enjoy the class and neither did my dog. I soon learned the key to a beautiful human-dog relationship lies in the way we treat them. I strongly advocate only using force-free, ethical methods and we should only ever treat our dogs with patience, kindness, and love.

The first time I encountered behavoural issues with my own dogs was when we rescued our Lurcher puppy, Athena, this year. She was found abandoned in a box at 8 weeks old and she came to us with severe separation anxiety. Whilst this has taken a lot of work I am pleased to say we have completely resolved it and she is now happy and relaxed on her own. She has become reactive to some people and other dogs and we have been working hard to help her with this and we have been having great success. She can now relax in the presence of unknown dogs but occasionally we have an incident where she reacts.

Working with dogs professionally has always been a lifelong ambition of mine. Since working with The Dog Trainers I have undertaken a large number of courses and strive to be the best I can be so I can help as many people and dogs as possible.