ESTEVAN — For Shayla Hagel, her dog training adventure and later business started with a personal experience about nine years ago.
"When I got my first dog Dobby … we just started having really bad behaviours at home … So, I was like, 'What am I doing wrong?' I had to figure that out, so I started learning and taking it all in, and then I just fell in love with dog psychology. Just learning how they think, how they behave, why they behave that way, all that kind of stuff, I just fell in love with it. So, I just kept going," Hagel recalled.
The industry doesn't have any regulations, and Hagel, who has a degree in social work, kept educating herself about relationships with dogs and learning from other professionals in the industry from all across North America. Robin McFarlane, Jay Jack, Chad Makin, Nelson Hodges and Tyler Muto were among her teachers that have been training dogs for 30-plus years.
She travelled to learn from these and other trainers and then stayed in touch with them to keep advancing her skills and knowledge.
Hagel first started training other people's dogs in 2017, when she opened the Estevan Dog Trainer business. She put in a couple of years of experience locally before she was invited to come to Regina to help a person she knew advance their dog daycare business – an experience that turned indeed negative, and Hagel returned to the Energy City after losing all she'd been working for.
But with expertise and passion for what she does, in the fall of 2022, she opened a new dog training business called Canine Culture with the motto Training the humans for the dogs.
"I'm hoping to bring back what I started back in 2017 because I did have a really good dog community starting to grow here," Hagel said.
Her main program consists of three six-hour days of training a week apart at the dog owner's home.
"It is a full day, and you are learning everything about dogs, not just about your own dog, but all dogs. As a dog owner, you need to know about all other dogs because if you're out with your dog or another dog is coming onto your property, you need to know how to stop that and how to intervene. Being a dog owner, you need to learn how to read dogs," Hagel explained.
The training should start as soon as people get a dog, however, if that didn't happen it's never too late to learn how to connect and work with the canine. She added that whenever owners spend time with their dogs, they should be in training mode, and in her lessons, she explains how to do it.
"If you're out with your dog or if your dog is just loose in your home, well guess what, you're in training. So, if that's how you live, I need to teach you how to live in training mode 24/7, I need to teach you how to live dog 24/7," Hagel noted. "It's a lot of work. Dogs are simple but complex. Once you understand their psychology, you're just like, 'Ah, yes, that makes total sense.' But then it's all about intervening and getting a dog to trust you and understand you.”
She said her course starts with teaching a human to understand their dogs, and then teaching canines to understand their owners.
"Once the dog understands that you're understanding and respecting him, he wants to learn to understand and respect you. He really does, because dogs have that natural instinct to want to form connections with humans," Hagel pointed out. "And it doesn't take long for the dog to learn about the human. It actually takes longer for the human to learn about dogs."
While there are some tools for training that Hagel can teach dog owners to use, she said she prefers to use basic techniques as sometimes tools rather complicate the process.
"Over in the UK, they have a lot of tools that are banned, that we can use here. So I really like learning from those trainers, because you almost have to use nothing to train a dog and I am a believer that you have to learn how to train a dog without any tools before you introduce a tool," Hagel said. "And I actually no longer train with tools other than your basic leash, food and your social pressure."
Hagel said while her main course takes three weeks, the progress also strongly depends on how much dog owners are practising what she's teaching.
"I tell people: 30 consistent days of doing what I'm teaching you and you'll have a different dog – one that you can trust and one that will trust you. It's trust both ways."
She added that while her course takes quite a bit of time and commitment, it indeed gives a lot of knowledge and skills.
"When I started to think about Canine Culture and what it should look like, for me, it's like a university ... You're going to learn so much more than you ever expected. And I've had many clients tell me that they've learned more about themselves through dog training than they ever thought, they learned their dogs were doing things they were doing because of their own human emotions," Hagel said.
"So, in order to fix [dog's behaviours], the human has to take control over their own behaviours and emotions."
While obedience is important, Hagel says the main thing is to learn how to communicate with the animal, which is the main focus of her basic Canine Consultations. She also offers New Dog Owners consults and canine check-ins. And she works with the Estevan shelter and if people are considering adopting one of the shelter dogs, when they're doing their 14-day trial, they get a free three-hour lesson.
For more information about Canine Culture go to @shayla_canine_culture Instagram page or contact Hagel at 306-421-5229.
