Leading a dog's life
Dog trainer teaches people how to show their dogs—with a great deal of love—exactly who's boss.
Article reprinted from the Hollywood Independent, Wednesday, May 9, 2001
By Leigh Bailey
Kit Mahoney knew that things weren't right around her house. She laughs about it now, but there was a time when her dog Nikki ruled the roost and she and her partner, Lucienne Ryerson, had to sit on the floor while Nikki and the couple's other dog sprawled across the couch.
"It seems ridiculous," Mahoney says, "but it got to a point where it was less trouble just to let them have the couch than it was to deal with the growling."
Tim Duffy wasn't afraid of his dog Elliott, he says, but neither did he have any control over the animal.
"I used to have to sit in the back yard and just wait for him to calm down before I could even go into my house," Duffy says. "He was just insane, bouncing all over the place."
Elliott did more than bounce. Shortly after Duffy brought the animal home from the shelter, Elliott began "barking, jumping, chewing, biting—just everything you could think of," Duffy says. "Frankly, I didn't know what to do. I thought I probably had made a terrible mistake adopting this dog."
Michael Bell was similarly frustrated. "Sadie, who is a chow mix, had quite a behavioral problem at the time we rescued her from the pound," he recalls. Although she seemed calm and serene when Bell brought her home, shortly after moving in, she began "ripping furniture, peeing in the house and chewing everything."
Although he and his partner had both had dogs as children, neither of them had ever been responsible for training the animals, and neither felt they knew what to do to curb Sadie's destructive behavior, or turn her into an animal they could happily live with.
For Mahoney, though, her dog's behavior was starting to look ominous.
And when Nikki, a shepherd-akita mix that Mahoney and Ryerson rescued, grabbed a neighbor by his pantleg and refused to let him go, Mahoney decided she needed to do something about the animal.
"He was aggressive. He was scary," she says. When Nikki dug his way under a fence that Mahoney had constructed to keep him in, she says she took it as a sign that something had to be done.
Enter Lezle Stein, who, to hear her admirers tell it, ought to be calling herself "the dog whisperer" instead of a dog trainer.
"I called Lezle and told her what was going on," Mahoney says. "She was appalled at how we were having to live."
Stein, who offers dog training classes in parks in Silver Lake, Mount Washington, Griffith Park and, starting on Monday, in Elysian Park, has helped local dog lovers not only keep the animals they take in, but learn to like them, too.
Stein says it isn't so much the dogs she has to train, it's the people.
"What I teach people is how to shape the behavior of their animals," she says. "I teach them how to be the boss, how to control the animal and get the dog to want to do what you want him to do."
And a lot of teaching the humans, she says, is educating them about the kinds of animals they have adopted.
Different breeds, she says, will have different strengths—and different weaknesses, from a human perspective. "One of the first things I ask in my classes is, 'How much do you know about your dog's breed?'" she says. "What is that breed bred to do?"
That alone will shed a lot of light on what an owner might consider to be a behavioral problem, she says. "If you have a terrier, it's going to dig. That's what terriers do—they dig," Stein says. Since this is instinctual behavior, Stein instructs her human students to work with the animal, rather than against it. "It's simple," she says. "Give a terrier some place where it can dig."
According to her clients, Stein's sensitive, common-sense approach to dog training is capable of producing near-miracles.
Duffy says he was considering finding another home for Elliott when he saw Stein's phone number on a flier near his home in Silver Lake. "I called her and she came in to do some in-house tutoring," he says.
Within a week, "the difference was astounding," Duffy says. "Elliott was much calmer. He was sitting. He had stopped jumping when I came in the house," he says. And it was enough to give Duffy the confidence that he could train, and therefore keep, his dog.
But Duffy believes he may have had more to learn from Stein than Elliott did. "Lezle needed to teach me how to treat the dog, how to understand its behavior and how to keep control of the animal, so that it wouldn't control my behavior," he says.
Mahoney says she too required some education. Until Stein came to the house and pointed it out, she and Ryerson hadn't realized that their behavior was contributing to Nikki's aggression. "I think we were very indulgent, amd we didn't know what to expect from her," she says. "Also, we realized that we were getting really nervous when someone would come into the house, which was making Nikki nervous as well."
One of the first things Stein recommended was that Mahoney and Ryerson learn to calm down themselves. "She had us take deep breaths," Mahoney says.
Stein says getting people to understand and take care of their animals has been a passion for a number of years, and she's particularly committed to making sure that people who rescue animals are able to work out a relationship that suits everyone in the household. And there are precious few dogs—or people, she believes—that aren't trainable.
Mostly, she says, it's about manners and confidence—where a dog and a person understand each other and respect each other. And when it works well, it's a beautiful thing.
"It's a great thing to watch the socialization of the dogs," she says. "It's really neat to see as dogs get manners, the dog also calms down, gets more confident that someone is the leader. That makes everybody happy."
Stein offers dog training classes all over the city. For more information or to enroll, call (323) 225-6700. |
Handle With Care was featured in Los Angeles Times Magazine on Sunday, March 3, 2002. 