Leeds dog trainer Kerry Ward, founder of The Fairydogmother and Puptopia in Pudsey, has been named a finalist in the prestigious Animal Star Awards 2024.
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00:00Hi, I'm Kerry. I'm the Fairy Dog Mother. I also do run the Happy Dog Project, which is fearful and anxious dogs and helping them overcome the fears.
00:09We're at Puptopia today, which is a beautiful dog park built to give dogs a space to be happy and build confidence, which is what I love doing.
00:19I've been a dog trainer for, gosh, officially about 13 years, but started doing courses about 22 years ago in my spare time.
00:27People come to dog trainers for different reasons, a lot of them because they've got a problem they want to solve.
00:32But some people come because they want to just build a relationship, which I love, and doing trick training and fun training, and that's massive relationship building.
00:42I love meeting dogs for the first time, but it's knowing dogs, and there's a lot of evidence about dog body language and what means what and lip licks and head turns and paw lifts and things like that.
00:55But it's all down to that individual dog as well, and gut feeling about a dog.
01:01People that succeed are the determined owners that love doing it, that practice all the time and do really well, and the ones that do all the online courses as well that help.
01:14I do monthly drop-in clinics online for people. They get a lot of support, and the ones that take up all that support and practice do amazingly well.
01:26I've met so many wonderful dogs recently. It makes my heart sing when I see them and they're doing so well.
01:34Being nominated for the Animal Style Awards and then finding out I was a finalist, it was like, wow. It was amazing, because I'm sure everybody in the dog training and animal industry knows about the Animal Style Awards.
01:47It's been running since, I think it was 2016.
01:50Our job is to teach people what to watch for, how to escape tricky situations in a really positive way with the dog.