Victoria Stillwell
Meet dog training expert Victoria Stilwell, whose expertise has
seen her start training schools in both Britain and the United
States, and helped her become the behaviourist in It's Me Or The
Dog.
The change in behaviour that Stillwell achieves, comes from
altering the environment and communication, as is the case in TV2
hit show,
Supernanny.
"It's exactly the same thing," agrees Stilwell. "But in some
ways it's even more difficult. You can't reason with a dog the way
you can reason with a child.
"If a dog pees on the floor, you can't tell it off. The dog doesn't
understand that you're telling it off because it peed on the floor.
That's why you have to adapt different measures, and understand how
dogs learn. But otherwise, it's very similar to the theories behind
Supernanny."
Which, it turns out, isn't that much of a coincidence...
"I was lying in bed one night after putting my daughter to bed,
and Supernanny came on the television. I loved it, and I realised
that I did exactly the same with dogs. It was very similar,
treating the family as a whole rather than just the dog as its own
entity.
"So I took down the production company details, and the next day I
emailed them saying I've got a great idea. I loved Supernanny, what
about doing the same thing with dogs? They wrote back saying they
were already working on something like that, so I sent them a video
of me training dogs, and they liked it."
Check out Victoria's official website
