How to Become a Professional Dog Trainer

Dogs are great companions to a lot of people, and if you love working with animals, you might be thinking about a career that sees you dealing with canines on a regular basis. This is a pretty smart choice if you consider yourself to be something of an animal lover, and if you enjoy people as well, there are a lot of careers that can have you working closely with with both people and dogs on a regular basis. As just about any dog owner will tell you, a dog makes a great pet, so long as it’s well-trained. When you wind up with an unruly pup, your life can be made a lot more difficult in some very serious ways. If you’re thinking about a career involving both dogs and people, then working as a trainer might be a very solid option for you. This is a career choice that will see you interacting with a ton of different dogs on a regular basis, while also helping to seriously enrich the lives of dog owners everywhere by showing them how to cultivate a much happier existence with their pets. When dogs are well-trained, they’re about as happy and calm as their owners are, so dog trainers are really doing everyone a favor. If you’re thinking this sounds like a great career choice, we’ll talk about exactly what goes into it. This way, you can have a much easier time deciding whether or not a career as a dog trainer sounds like a good choice for you.

One of the first things you’re going to want to do is make sure that you’re very, very familiar with and comfortable around dogs. Learn as much as you possibly can about all the different types of breeds, the ways in which they behave, and how to handle a dog in a wide variety of circumstances. Your time working as a dog trainer is going to expose you to a lot of different situations, so it’s smart to get used to dogs very early on.

You can take a few seminars on dog training — look up relevant information on a website like DogSeminarsDirector.com to find events near you — and then you’ll be ready to take your certification exam. Get registered, and then start studying. Make sure the exam is officially certified by the Certification Council of Professional Dog Trainers (use their website to find a testing location near you).

When you take the exam, you have the joy of knowing that it’s graded on a pass/fail basis. When you have completed the examination and earned your license, you’re ready to head out and join the legion of Long Island dog trainers making the world a better place. If you love dogs and people in equal measures, working as a dog trainer is a smart choice. You’ll be able to spend time with animals that you love and help people learn how to take better care of them at the very same time.