Good Neighbor Podcast South Charlotte
Bringing Together Local Businesses and Neighbors of South Charlotte.
Good Neighbor Podcast South Charlotte
Ep. # 119 Beyond Basic Commands: How Understanding Dog Psychology Creates Harmony
What makes a well-behaved dog? According to Jason Toy of Canine Scholars Dog Training, it's about finding the right "love language" between dog and owner. Coming from an entrepreneurial background, Jason discovered his passion for dog training after moving to Charlotte and seeing countless young professionals with poorly trained puppies. Since 2012, he's been helping owners develop healthy relationships with dogs of all ages and breeds.
Jason takes a developmental approach that acknowledges different training needs as dogs mature. For puppies, he focuses on positive reinforcement and foundational skills, while adult dogs can handle more structured expectations. His philosophy avoids the common trap of one-size-fits-all training, instead recognizing that each dog-owner relationship requires personalized strategies.
A refreshing perspective Jason offers is challenging the notion that behavioral issues always stem from owner mistakes. In our era of widespread breeding without proper lineage tracking, many problems—particularly aggression—have genetic roots rather than training failures. This insight helps release owners from unnecessary guilt while focusing on practical management strategies.
The most successful training programs combine private lessons with real-world application. Jason explains how teaching obedience commands gives anxious or reactive dogs an alternative mental pathway when triggered, similar to how physical activity can interrupt negative human emotions. His trinity for training success? Schedule, supervision, and structure—particularly for dogs under 18 months old.
Looking to solve your dog's behavioral challenges? Check out Jason's book "Mind Your Paws" or try his innovative potty-training app that predicts when your dog needs to go out. Visit caninescholars.com to discover how understanding your dog's unique personality can transform your relationship from frustrating to fulfilling.
Canine Scholars Dog Training
Jason Toy
1235 East Blvd, Ste E123 Charlotte, NC 28203
(888) 478-2020
charlotte@caninescholars.com
caninescholars.com/charlotte-nc
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Regina League.
Speaker 2:Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast. My favorite thing to do is talk with local business owners here in the Charlotte area, get to know a little bit about them and share what they do. Today I have the owner of Canine Scholars Dog Training, jason Toy. Welcome, jason. Thanks for having me yeah, we all love dogs and I'd love to learn a little bit about you yourself, your journey and what took you to opening this business.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've been an entrepreneur so I've had a couple of different businesses I moved from. I'm originally from Buffalo, new York. I moved down to Charlotte 15, 20 years ago now quite a while. So this is now where I consider home. But the number one thing when you move away from home you're typically a little bit lonely. So you buy yourself a dog and that tended to be what Charlotte was early on. Obviously, the banks recruited a lot of people from universities because they would come down here and live in these apartments and buy a dog. So dogs were plentiful. Dogs were also misbehaving and there weren't a lot of opportunities or options back then to have really well-trained, highly level, obedient dogs. So I first started by buying a dog and wanted to get into some protection work just high level obedience and I used a lot of what I learned in that field as far as the obedience end of it to now train client dogs and just typical home. You know animals.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how long have you been doing this?
Speaker 3:So it's been my company since 2012, and I worked with somebody else about five years prior, leading up to that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when you did so, you had this other experience. What made you spin off and say I want to open K-9 Scholars?
Speaker 3:I kind of took over the company, to be honest, that owner at that time, we kind of built it together and then he ended up having some personal issues moved out of state and I just want to do the right thing for those clients that we had took on and continued to service them. And then I just kind of grew from there.
Speaker 2:So do you have ages that you require in a breed? Tell us a little bit about who you. Well, we should say what dog do you train?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we do. All dogs, all ages. There's not really too much of a difference in the breeds or ages. It's really how you train at different stages. So expectation as a puppy is different than expectation as an adult, which is different as an expectation as a more elderly dog. Also, your goals is a big thing. Some people want really high level obedience. Some people are like, hey, I just don't want my dog to poop in the house. So you kind of have to meet the needs because at the end of the day, the client's hiring us to deliver a goal and so we have to meet those goals. Number one meet those expectations but also be realistic with what those expectations are. Some clients call about aggression as an example, and you're not going to cure aggression. You just need to know the dog that you have in front of you and set that dog up for success.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, okay, I didn't realize that because I have a friend whose little tiny dog thinks it can take on dogs 10 times its little side. So what is your personal training philosophy and the kind of tools and techniques you like to use?
Speaker 3:yeah, from what I said earlier, a lot of it is dependent on the age. So, young from I like to say from 12 weeks to that seven month mark we do a lot of treat, marker training, building foundations, focusing on potty training, getting through those growth stages. No different than a baby, you got to go through the diapers, you got to go through the potty training, you got to go through the talking, the clumsiness, and then, once you get a little older, you got to send them off to college and they got to learn to pay their own cell phone bill. So if you kind of break it down into stages and expectations, and when the dog's ready for certain things is when you can start applying those expectations to the dog.
Speaker 2:So what kind of training sessions do you offer, you know? For example, are they with the dog owner or are they private classes on site somewhere? What are your options?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So all of our we have a variety of training, but all of our initial training is done privately or we have board and trains, so we don't do any like group only training programs. I don't feel those are um as effective. You know the the owner and the dog need to really kind of. Every dog's a little different.
Speaker 3:So what I find in group classes as if you're just going to learn obedience at a group class for the first time you got a crazy puppy, an owner that's got five other dogs that they're trying to pay attention to. No one's getting anything out of it, or the dog does really good there and they go home and they can't apply that behavior. So if we can go to the house and really apply those behaviors where the dog spends 90% of its time, we can then translate that out into the public where you're spending much less of your time and work on those distractions. We also have board and trains where we'll take the dog and bring the dog back. We do combo training at that point. So we still want to do those follow-up lessons together. The best way I describe it is either I can build the car for you and teach you how to drive it, or you can learn how to build the car and teach you how to drive it together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know, when I had a puppy, you know what I learned is there's quite a bit of training that goes into for the dog owner. You know so that we know, so I think that's part of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you have to. No dog's the same. Every dog is a little different. You have to find their love language. So you know the problem is a lot of the owner's love language is different than what the dog's love language is. So if your love language matches, you know you get these very soft, sweet people that buy a golden lab and they're great. You know they have that emotional connection. If you look at the dog the wrong way, the dog is like you hurt my feelings. I will do anything you want me to do to feel better. If you did that to a German shepherd, they wouldn't make great police dogs. So you have a mismatch of love languages and you have to find the right love language for the dog. You're going to have to adjust in order to get the goals that you have out of that relationship.
Speaker 3:What's the oldest dog you've trained? I've trained dogs up to 10, 12 years old. Oh wow. Age is less relevant, to be honest. What I find, just as an economic standpoint, is when is the investment not worth it to most clients? So if your dog's 10 to 12 years old, uh, and you have like pressing needs, those people will go for it. But if you've lived with that dog 10 to 12 years, you're like, ah, it's good enough, it'll. We've adjusted our relationship so that we can coexist. So it's not, you know. So for most people they've. They've found a common ground together.
Speaker 2:So when you contact you and you really have no idea, are the schedules structured after you meet the dog and the parent to see how long it takes? What are you normally looking at?
Speaker 3:Yeah, correct, we do an evaluation so we can come out to the house, meet you and the dog. We want to see the dog in this environment. We can also do a phone interview. A lot of things are just general. Most clients who just get a new puppy, you're running through the standard situations. There's nothing earth-breaking there. But for those more specialized cases or for someone that really is trying to learn what we offer, we come out, meet the dog, meet with you, give you expectations how fast we can expect those results and then make a decision from there.
Speaker 2:How often is the best scenario, how frequent and how long are the sessions?
Speaker 3:Yeah, typically sessions are an hour long If we're doing private lessons as an example for adult training. So dogs seven months and older, we typically do our lessons once a week For puppies. We spread that out. Lessons once a week for puppies we spread that out a little bit. A lot of people are like they get all their gumption right away, they get that dog and they're like we need to do three lessons a week. Listen, your 12 week old puppy isn't going to be much different. At 13 weeks it's still having potty accidents. So you got to spread that out a little bit. You got to let the dog mature, let the body grow, let things develop. So speed is not your friend there. It's quality over quantity.
Speaker 2:Can you describe like a dog, one that just stands out in your mind, a case study that you really just walked away, going. Wow, we've just made a huge difference.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we sometimes. I actually had a dog the other day we were working Um, very nervous, very skittish dog. It was a rescue uh, shuts down in public. Uh, these people live in Belmont, uh, right in proper, where the downtown area is, so a dog is very overstimulated.
Speaker 3:Um, problem is, when you let a dog like that make decisions, it's going to make the wrong decisions and spiral. So it kind of worries about the entire environment and it just is spiraling out of control. You got to shut that mind down and let the dog start trusting in the owner building focus and engagement. So it took about three to four lessons and now the dog is walking around Belmont, the little town down there, and I want to say he's loving doing it. Because that takes time. You got to desensitize and work the dog through that stuff. But step one to doing that is getting control. So what a lot of people want to do is just throw the dog in these environments and be like good luck, here we go, figure it out, you're going to be okay. But first you want to get some control and some tools in your toolbox to put the dog in those positions, to teach them how to work through that, some coping mechanisms, in other words, instead of just being like figure it out.
Speaker 2:Okay, can you explain that a little bit more, how that works with the dog?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So example you have a nervous dog, or even aggressive dog, whatever any of these behavioral issues we'll talk about which are the easiest to explain.
Speaker 3:So you taking your dog over near a dog park that's aggressive is not going to make them naturally figure out how to not act that way, or putting them in a position to just kind of feel that environment constantly is going to make the dog learn how to shut that system off.
Speaker 3:Right, because it's an emotional response. So what you want to do is teach your come, sit, your let's go your place, eye contact, things of that caliber so that when your dog starts making the wrong decision, whether shutting down or overreacting, you can now change them and position them to start turning on their obedience that we just worked them with, so that they can turn off that external environment, which is what their natural response is going to be, and start turning it into work, no different, like I'm a workaholic. So if things are getting crazy in my life, I tend to focus on some drive and work. Or you have other people, like my wife, great example If things are getting chaotic, she's cleaning. So you want to control things the best that you can in your environment. You want to teach the dog how to use their control to shut off the environment around them.
Speaker 2:So kind of like switching their mindset, switching gears a little bit.
Speaker 3:Another easy example is you can't be sad if you run, like have you ever tried to just pout and run? You can't do it. Once you start running, your body releases all sorts of hormonal instincts and you just start smiling and you're like, oh okay, I start feeling better, like you can do a lot of that stuff and play and manipulate yourself to then turn off the other end of the brain, right.
Speaker 2:That's super cool. What are some of the most frequent misconceptions you run across?
Speaker 3:The biggest one is it's the owner's fault. So I get a lot of either second dog trainer on the second dog trainer in or even in the first dog trainer in. So two things are typically not an owner's fault. If you have a puppy or even an older dog that you've had your whole life, it probably isn't aggressive because it's under socialized. It probably is a genetic issue. We see a lot of aggression and weird things going on right now.
Speaker 3:The link or the association nowadays is when everyone wants to take responsibility, like it's my fault that this happened. But the reality is how many people are going back to those breeders and telling them what the result of their dog is? Very few, and so part of even with a protection dogs like you want to buy these great dogs. Part of that is knowing the lineages. So with the popularity of dogs, nobody is going back and controlling those lineages anymore. So we're just pumping out dogs all the time without feedback to the breeders and nobody knows how these dogs are coming out. And then when there's an issue, you're blaming yourself. It could just be bad. A lot of it's just bad breeding and it's not anybody's fault per se. But genetics are genetics. You have 100 people, you're going to have some genetic issues with those, health-wise and so on and so forth issues, with those health-wise, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2:How about you know? I have an example of a lab that has access indoors, outdoors, but gets into everything, choose things, eats them up. How do you, what would you do with something like that?
Speaker 3:Too much freedom. So what happened was early on is the dog had too much freedom. Everything about success for dog training is schedule, supervision and structure. So you treat the inside and the outside the same. If you're not going to leave your dog in the house by itself, you do not leave it outside by itself. And all that is because I need to give feedback in those early stages of what is allowed and what is not allowed. And if the dog is going to figure out what's allowed and what's not allowed without your feedback, it's going to make its own fun. And so the more they create those habits and more they create their own fun, the more they're getting attention out of doing certain behaviors, the more those habits are ingrained. They're getting attention out of doing certain behaviors, the more those habits are ingrained. So you want to early stages.
Speaker 3:I like to stay up to a year and a half as much schedule, structure and supervision as you can give. Don't put yourself in debt. At that year and a half mark you can give freedom. You've already given all the feedback you need to the dog. My shoes are not allowed to be chewed on. My rug is not allowed to be chewed on. My rug is not allowed to be chewed on, my furniture is not allowed to be sat on. Whatever those rules are for your house, irrelevant to what I want, it's your. If you want your dog to sleep in bed with you, that's fine. Um, but show those rules within your household and then, when you give freedom, you're not having to work backwards that's amazing.
Speaker 2:You have such a logical approach. I love this. Yeah, so you admitted you're a workaholic. What do you do for fun when you're not running your business?
Speaker 3:I have a four-year-old and a seven-year-old, so I'm just kind of reliving life through their eyes, which is a lot of fun, which doesn't give me a lot of time to do much of myself, but I stay healthy, go to the gym a couple of times a week. So just trying to have fun as a family unit right now and get through. The days are long but the years are short.
Speaker 2:Good point. Do you have a dog at home?
Speaker 3:I do my Doberman she left us about two years ago. I learned from my client's mistakes. I don't get puppies and potty training at the same time with my children, so I do have a Labradoodle as well. I call that my wife's dog, so we have a small Labradoodle that she's 10. But we'll be looking here, and my daughter is now four she just turned four so we're out of that potty training stage and so I can start looking at puppies.
Speaker 2:At this point we're out of that potty training stage, and so I can start looking at puppies at this point. Well, great story, jason. It's been a pleasure to talk to you about Canine Scholars. How can our listeners find you guys?
Speaker 3:Yeah, caninescholars. com spelled out C-A-N-I-N-E. We also have a book online. You can get it at Barnes, noble and Amazon. It's called Mind your Paws. We're finishing out the website here. Shortly It'll have a video course. The book and the video course go together and we have an app online on the App Store and Google which helps you potty train your dog. It's called the Potty App and so you log your poops and peas and food and water and it kind of predicts when the dog needs to go to the bathroom.
Speaker 2:I love it. Oh goodness, Well, you have covered everything, Jason. It's been a pleasure. I can see why your business is so successful. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me.
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