Cooperative Care for Vet Care and Grooming
Teaching your dog to Opt in to Handling
Course Summary
Welcome to Cooperative Care for Veterinary Care and Grooming!
This course is designed to empower pet guardians, groomers, and veterinary professionals with skills to make pet care a more positive, low-stress experience. Cooperative care is an approach that involves training pets to willingly participate in their grooming, medical exams, and other handling needs. By prioritizing comfort, communication, and trust, cooperative care helps reduce anxiety and stress for pets and caregivers alike, making routine grooming and veterinary procedures easier, faster, and more effective.
In this course, we’ll cover the principles of cooperative care, explore techniques for building a strong foundation of trust, and develop specific skills that encourage pets to actively engage in their own care. We’ll also dive into practical handling examples, such as:
- Nail Trims: Teaching pets to allow nail trims, from desensitizing to the clippers or grinder to rewarding them for calm cooperation, which is especially helpful for pets who are fearful or sensitive about paw handling.
- Ear and Eye Exams: Working on calm head handling so pets become more comfortable with their ears and eyes being gently touched and examined. This is essential for preventing infections and monitoring overall health.
- Teeth Brushing: Introducing pets to tooth brushing through step-by-step techniques that encourage them to tolerate or even enjoy dental care.
- Administering Medication: Making oral, topical, or injectable medication administration as easy as possible by reducing pets’ anxiety around these experiences.
- Brushing and Fur Trims: Conditioning pets to tolerate brushing and grooming, with a focus on reducing fear around clippers, scissors, and other grooming tools.
- Examining and Handling Sensitive Areas: Training pets to be comfortable with sensitive areas, such as the belly, tail, and paws, to make it easier to conduct thorough exams and identify any issues.
- Vaccines and blood draws: Training pets to be comfortable with receiving vaccines, standing still and opting in for blood draws, and handling for any injections.
Alongside these specific handling techniques, we’ll discuss how to interpret body language to recognize stress or discomfort, how to use rewards and positive reinforcement to build cooperation, and how to set up the environment to ensure the best outcomes for each handling situation.
By the end of this course, you’ll be equipped with a toolkit of strategies to help animals feel more in control of their care, creating a calmer and more cooperative experience for everyone involved. Join us, and let’s work together to create a more compassionate, cooperative approach to animal care!
Course Curriculum
Casey Buckley
Casey Buckley ( She/Her, They/Them ) is owner, founder of WPCreativepets and has been training dogs of all breeds since 2002 starting with service dogs. She is a CPTD-KA force free fear free trainer. She specializes in reactive and aggressive dogs, those with a lack of socialization, history of trauma, abuse, neglect, or dogs that have been in dog fights and need any form of rehabilitation. Her background is in trauma as a trauma therapist and knowledge of how trauma not only affects the human body/development and the brain has helped in teaching clients how it also impacts social development of dogs, their brains, physiological arousal , animal behavior. Case works with clients on developing new skills/methods to shape changes in behavior as well as creating new neuropathways for sustainable change in a dogs interactions with any environment through positive reinforcement, behavioral modification, and clicker training.
Casey also has an extensive history working with service animals including training medical, psychiatric, & mobility service dogs. Casey has a service dog of her own, Max who is a multipurpose service dog and has worked with a variety of individuals with medical, physical and psychiatric disabilities. She offers a unique perspective on dealing with disability every day and the impact service dogs can have on regaining substantial independence. She offers special rates to veterans in need of service dog training.
Casey has also rescued, fostered and trained shelter dogs, dogs in fostercare, as well as rescuing and fostering some cats. She also works with individuals wishing to work on integrating dogs and cats living together peacefully.
