Dog Walker in Wigan, Leigh and Lowton

Emma Hill who used to help out with our training classes at Elton Dog club and WaggaWuffins has finally set up her own business Dog Walking.

We'd like to wish Emma the best of luck with her business

Emma is very experienced with a Degree in Animal Behaviour, she has great empathy with animals and we highly recommend her services, so if your in Wigan or Leigh and looking for someone to look after your dog while your at work Emma is the person to contact.
To find out more about Emma and her services check out her website

http://muddymutt.co.uk/

Easter Holidays and CAP1

As usual I have been rushed off my feet! Matt was away over Easter on holiday working on a farm in Wales!! Lucky Amy who came to our puppy socialisation classes was back home from Bristol University where she is studying veterinary science and helped the week Matt was away with doggy daycare etc. Amy brought her working cocker Archie who got on great with Xanthe, I think she’ll miss him. We also put Archie through his silver good citizen and he passed. Well done Amy and Archie , I wasn’t surprised after Amy practised her 2 minute stay in the daycare with dogs running around and he did it no problem. Archie and Amy do Gundog Training with Helen Phillips.

Daycare is picking up nicely, we now have 7 dogs who come regularly

All the dogs get on really well, we have a new sofa donated by my brother for the daycare rest room which the dogs like alot.


We have a new staff member Natalie who started this week to help with Daycare. Natalie has lots of academic qualifications and practical experience related to animal care and came highly recommended, she also has the cutest Chinese Crested Powderpuff called Lola.

On Easter Sunday we had our first CAP1 training day. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed it. There was me, Matt, Stewart and Jayne, two handlers from our classes Jackie and Anne-Marie and 2 APDT trainers Cas from Yorkshire where Matt did his gundog tests and Sue from Dogs Can Do in Rossendale. Everyone was really nice and we had a really good day. Helen is a great instructor and we all learnt a lot from her.
I have requested some dates for CAP2 starting in summer and we are looking at K9 Multisports.

I got some new material for the posts so they are now blue and match the rest of the centre!!

Its really busy at the moment, I’m booked up till the end of May for one to one and behaviour but hopefully our new addition to the team will enable me to commit more to this, I now have clients travelling from as far as Preston and Cumbria!!! We have a waiting list for mixed activity classes, puppy class availability is from the end of April and Adult beginners is May!!

I had lots of enquires for Freestyle/HTM classes so we will be starting these in the next few weeks.

Congratulations Matt and Teal

Just a quick update! Matthew and Teal went back to Leaming Bar this weekend to take their grade 2 Gundog Club Hunting Retriever Test. They passed with yet another distinction with a score of 99% dropping just 1 point on heelwork.


They are now preparing for Grade 3!

We have the first session of our clicker Workshop with Helen Phillips in a couple of weeks, cant wait for that! We have 1 space available due to a cancellation if anyone is interested in a space.

We are hoping to hold some more events in Sundays this year with a Canine Freestyle Workshop in the pipeline. I’ve started on a whole new routine and piece of music with Dinky.

Classes are busy as usual and day care is picking up and achieving our projected targets. Trawling through course work amongst everything else at the moment we have 2 new modules started, the last ones I think!! Nutrition and Behaviour and Psychopharmacology!

Daycare and CAP1

Just a quick update! We have been really busy over the last few weeks. Our Day care has opened and we have a few regular dogs having fun each day with us. Because the daycare has now opened we have a job vacancy for a dog walker which needs to be filled in the next few weeks. Matt is currently covering the dog walking and I am in the centre.

Our Mixed activity classes are full so we need to look at setting up another to accommodate the demand for these. We had some fun on our last tricks session and taught the dogs a behaviour and then added a cue which was a card with the behaviour written on instead of a verbal one, so it looked like the dogs can read! It was Games week last week and it was fun to see everyone’s competitive edge come out. This week is scent week, the dogs just love it!!

We have booked Helen Phillips from Wagmore Barn to come and do a Clicker Trainers Assessment Program Workshop at the centre. This is called CAP1. The course runs over 3 months and includes a daily attendance once a month. The dates are Sun 4th April 2010, Sun 2nd May 2010 and Sun 6th June 2010 9am start till 4.30pm. The course is limited to 8 places and there are 4 available as of writing this blog. The course covers foundation clicker training and is really good.

That’s all for now, must get back to playing with dogs!!

Defra, Doggy Dancing and Doggy Daycare

Well this month has been chaotic, it took three weeks for the floor to dry. We are all back to normal how except we still need to get a new office carpet. The reception, training area and day-care are all sorted. The landlord supplied us with lots of fans and dehumidifiers and also some guy came and sprayed the centre with some antibacterial stuff, that kills bacteria and stops mould growth and stuff. He used this machine that looked like Nu Nu off the Tellytubbies

I went to college on the 25th for a block week. It was my birthday on the Tuesday and we all got together for some drinks in the evening which was fab. I even got a chocolate birthday cake.

My freestyle assessment for the advanced dog training was at 9am on the Thursday and the practical coaching assessment for the counselling skills and case histories was at 10am!

On the Wednesday some researchers came from Defra to explain some research they are doing on electric shock collars. They are testing the resistance across the skin of different dogs and also on wet and dry skin. They have this specially altered collar that sends an extremely mild current and records data. They are also doing some research into stress and cortisol levels. They asked if any of the students would let them test on their dogs. They were allowed to feel the current themselves first and also could stop the testing at anytime if they felt they wanted to. Some of the students did and most of the dogs did not even react in any way, but a couple showed a response that they felt something. As they were looking ideally at small dogs I decided not to. I will be interesting to see the outcome.

Wednesday afternoon I took Dinky into the training area and ran through our routine, she did it perfectly, which was a little worrying, would she do the same tommorow??

I didn’t sleep well Wednesday night and was up bright and early. We got to the training area and I had a bit of play with Dinky and did some moves to get her going.
Pauline and Lynda turned up armed with assessment papers and video camera.
I was a bag of nerves and Dinky picked up on it and decided to switch off. The routine started pretty badly and at one point I was considering just stopping! I was determined not to turn it into a training round and get my treats as I would lose 50% straight away for this. So we carried on, we managed a full routine, I got Dinky going again several times and we got through it and I passed!!!!!

I was really disappointed as I had worked so hard at it and it came down to those 3 1/2 minutes, but I guess that’s just dogs for you!!!

My 10am assessment was much less stressful. I went over time a bit and was penalised for it but I passed.

Thursday I was shattered and set off back home. I was back in Work Friday walking dogs and then training later. Matt walked all the dogs for me and Stewart, Jayne and Matt ran the classes while I was away.

We started another puppy class on Saturday due to the others being fully booked up till March!

As the last of the flooring was laid at the weekend we made an appointment on Friday for the council to come and inspect the daycare facility and they have issued us with a boarding license.

So we start offering daycare as from Monday.

Oh and in all my busyness this month I forgot to enter Crufts!!! It will be the first time in 15 years I have not competed!!

It never Rains it Pours!

At 5.45am Monday morning I got a phone call!. It was the landlord, I thought oh no whats happened. He said the electrician was at the mill and had seen water pouring out of the fire exit at the back of the unit. I thought great the pipes must have burst or something.

Panic, clothes on and in the car! I was driving there half asleep trying to convince myself that it’s not that bad the floor is rubber and can be dried and carpet tiles can be dried out. As I arrived and opened the door I could hear gallons of rushing water, it was deafening, my stomach turned I didnt want to go in.

I switched on the lights on. There was water everywhere and I waded to the toilet. All the pipes were fine!!
Then I noticed there was water dripping from the ceiling in the toilet, I stepped back out and then looked up. There was water pouring in all along one side of the unit down the wall and through the ceiling. I quickly left the building and rang the landlord to tell him it was coming from above. He sent the electrician to find the leak. Jon had arrived at this time and we found the electrician on the top floor drenched holding on to a split pipe gushing with water that he could not stop. I said ‘just bend it out of the window’ and so he did. He then found the stop tap and switched the water off.

Jon the electrictian and some of the other mill workers then started to sweep the water from the top floor, then the next one and then got to mine. The water was obviously still coming through but was easing off. It was about 7.50am and I thought my alarm is going to go off in a minute and I’ll wake up in bed and it will have been a bad dream. I was beginning to feel a bit sick at this point, when would the water stop, how long will it take to dry? what’s ruined? how long will we have to close? I have a heelwork to music routine assessment in two weeks, this wasnt in my schedule!!!!

As the water had come in through the ceiling it had soaked the office, kitchen and daycare area and come through those ceilings. We got a pump and started to pump the water out from one side of the unit and then onto the other. The running water had eased off now too, I started to feel a bit better seeing the water level inside the unit go down. The rubber floor is sealed except for the edges so we knew the water would have got under there.
We mopped the excess water off the rubber and then began to lift the floor with the help of Matt who has been out walking all the dogs for me!! The rubber floor weights just over 2 ton! Once we has lifted and rolled all this we dried the DPM and then lifted that. The concrete floor was wet but not too bad. We mopped the excess off and lifted all the carpet tiles and put them all on their sides to dry. The office and kitchen were fine except for the floor and carpets which had to be ripped up and binned. The daycare is all UPVC lined and tiled so most of this is fine but the ceilings have some damp patches that need to dry.

We decided that the show must go on and after some last minute contingency planning we laid out our old rubber mats from the church hall which I still had and ran classes as usual. Stewart did Mondays classes and I went home to bed! We even managed agility but we had to have all the contacts low and on the rubber mats. We decided due to the restriction of equipment we would have to be creative and set up a mixed agility and rally obedience course which the classes thoroughly enjoyed.
The centre is drying nicely now thanks to the help from people at the mill and lots of fans and humidifiers and we should be able to re-lay the floor at weekend and back to business as usuall!!

The carpet tiles and rubber floor are all dry and nice and clean, my books are fine and the water was clean water so its not soo bad! Lucky for us there is actually very little damage at all.

Must get on with that routine!!!

WaggaWuffins Jingle

One of our Customers sent us this Jingle,

Thanks Ann and Brian with Amy :-)

If you want to train your dog instead of doing nothing,
come on down to Bury town and come to Wagga Wuffin’s.

We will help you train your dog to walk and sit and stay,
and you will feel your confidence grow stronger every day.

Your dog will train to do its bronze, its silver and its gold,
and very soon you will find your dog starts doing as it’s told.

And when you finish training there are other things to do,
like agility, and finding treats and jumping thru hoops too.

And if you decide to come along, you will find lots of friendly staff,
who are always there to lend a hand and also have a laugh.