Seminar with Grisha Stewart (english)

Grisha Stewart is one of the top trainers in the USA. She developed Behavior Adjustment Training (BAT) as a way to help dogs gain confidence and social skills. Because of its elegant simplicity and effectiveness in rehabilitating reactivity, this dog-friendly method is quickly spreading throughout the world. Grisha Stewart specializes in dog aggression at her facility in Seattle, Ahimsa Dog Training, which has been voted Best of Western Washington. ”Ahimsa” is a Buddhist doctrine of nonviolence to all living things, which reflects Grisha’s focus on force-free methods to promote the well-being of dogs and their humans.

Grisha has a Master’s in Mathematics from Bryn Mawr College. She is now pursuing a Master’s in Psychology with an emphasis in animal behavior at Antioch University, while still running her 6-trainer business and doing private consults for aggression cases. Her first career as a theoretical mathematician and college instructor serves her well in dog training and behavior consultations, because she relies heavily on the problem solving, critical thinking, and teaching skills she gained in that field. Since founding Ahimsa Dog Training in 2003, she has found her canine and human students to be much more excited about learning than her college students!

Canine behavior fascinates Grisha and she is highly motivated to help improve our techniques for rehabilitating and training dogs. This led her to develop BAT, Behavior Adjustment Training, which uses environmental consequences to reward the dog and eliminate problem behaviors. Her seminars on BAT are entertaining and educational, so they get great reviews from professionals and pet owners alike.

Seminar description:
Fighting is expensive for dogs. Instead of jumping directly into fighting, most dogs give distance-increasing signals, from subtle to overt. But many dogs have also learned to give up on the subtle signals and leap straight to showing big aggressive displays, fighting, or fleeing in panic. When dealing with aggression, fear, or frustration, BAT builds social skills, confidence around the trigger, and trust in the handler. While food or other rewards are used with BAT in some cases, the main focus of BAT is on using environmental rewards that already maintain the problem behavior. This presentation will show many video clips with case studies using various BAT set-ups, as well as videos of how to deal with problems that crop up, a brief history of related methods used in the last few decades, and how to use BAT with other behavior modification techniques. We will discuss the science behind BAT, the reasons and ways that BAT is kept low-stress, how to get volunteers for set-ups, how to use BAT ‘undercover’ in the real world, how to deal with fighting in the home, how to rehabilitate fence-fighting, and more. You’ll also get to see multiple live demos with three or four dogs with reactivity issues and a puppy for socialization. Seeing demos with the same dogs over the two days will allow you to see the progress dogs can make with BAT.

Practicalities:
The seminar will be held in Stockholm during two full days during the weekend 31:th of  march – 1:st of april 2012. The seminar will take place at Tensta Träff, which you can reach quite easy by public transports. The seminar is in english and the price for two full days is 2800 SEK. Lunch is included in the price and will be served at Tensta Träff where the seminar is held. If you register before the 29th of february you’ll get a discount of 500 SEK. Please register by filling out the form further down.

Group discount
If your dog school, club or organization of five or more wants to participate you’ll get a discount if you register together. Please contact us on rplushundskola@gmail.com for more info.

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Examples of Behavior Adjustment Training
Read more about Grisha and BAT here.

Video clips of Peanut who was rehabilitated using BAT. First video is of Grisha and Peanut during training and the second video is the outcome of the work. Peanut used to be scared of people (especially children) and dogs.