SERVICES

All behavior is functional, serving to affect the surrounding world. This is true for all living organisms.

The goal of a Functional Behavior Intensive is to investigate the purpose of your dog’s behavior – to determine what changes they are behaving to achieve and what environmental factors are contributing to that behavior. That information will then allow us to work at the root cause level to create comprehensive change that is easy to maintain long term.

This process starts by diving deep into:

• Your goals – If we are successful, what will your ideal life with your dog look like?

• Your challenges – How is this different from today? From the past?

• What is going well? Can we build a bridge from here to your desired outcome?

• Your dog's behavior – One or more structured behavior assessments will help determine the best approach and starting point for training.

Once all of this is clear, we can then create an extensive repertoire of options for your dog to get what they want or need in ways that feel good to you. Ideally this allows us to craft a natural solution that can be maintained long-term by the situation itself or by positive interaction between you and your dog. A simple example would be instead of your dog expending energy jumping and mouthing to get human contact, they learn that they can get that desired interaction much more easily and thoroughly by standing, leaning, sitting, or lying down.

But the ultimate goal of a Functional Behavior Program is to turn you into an investigator, so that the next time you have a situation in which you’d like your dog to behave differently – you will have tools to address it on your own!