Presenters at March 17/18 2007 seminar
Ray's Bio
Born in London, England Ray Underwood has been a professional dog trainer for over 30 years. He runs a multi-faceted dog obedience school in Vancouver, Canada that focuses on competitive obedience, musical freestyle and ring sports. He holds national championships in freestyle and ring sports and was a regular participant at the North American Gaines competition.
Ray is one of the originators of freestyle and trained the first Master's level dog in individual, pairs and teams. He also competed at the national level in figure skating and ballroom dancing and in 2006 took first place at the North American Ballet/Stunt Kite Flying Championship. Ray and his wife, Shannon, have 2 children, Tristan and Cailan.
Click HERE for the video ! !
Michele's Bio
Michele Pouliot,
Director of Training
Research and Development
Guide Dogs for the Blind, Inc.
Michele has been a professional guide dog instructor with the largest guide dog school in the USA for 33 years. Before entering the guide dog field, she was a professional in the field of horse training, instructing horsemanship, Dressage and 3-Day-Eventing disciplines. In 1972, Michele became active in competitive obedience trials with her pet Labradors and became fascinated with the comparisons of how dogs and horses learn, stimulating her interest and pursuit in professional dog training.
In 1994 Michele was assigned Director of Training for a new guide dog campus, relocating to Oregon from California to establish training programs for the new campus near Portland. Michele was honored in 2000 to be selected as a guide dog school assessor for the International Guide Dog Federation. She has completed assessments on guide dog schools in Norway, Austria, Czech Republic, France, Japan and Great Britain.
Since 2001, Michele has held the new position of Research and Development for student and dog programs at Guide Dogs for the Blind. Her position focuses on developing and researching new techniques to improve all areas of client instruction, dog-training, and puppy development.
Over her 33 year career with GDB, Michele has presented dozens of lectures both nationally and internationally. She has produced hundreds of hours of videotapes on every aspect of guide dog training and introduced more positive training techniques to the guide dog field. In 2000, she developed the innovative "BEST" training program which is becoming widely adopted internationally in the Guide Dog industry.
In her “hobby world”, Michele has competed in both horse and dog events for 35 years. In competitive obedience, with her personal pets, she has completed 3 OTCHs on Labradors, UDs on English Springer Spaniels. For clients, Michele has attained 3 CDs and 1 CDX on Great Danes (including 2 National High Scoring Danes) and with English Springer Spaniels, attained 1 CD (National High Scoring Springer) and 1 CDX. She has also put numerous agility titles on a variety of breeds, including Springers, Australian Shepherds and a Great Dane.
More recently, Michele has become interested in the newer sport
of musical freestyle, sometimes termed “dog dancing”. She
enjoys its combination of obedience and trick behaviors with the
creative element of music.
Click
HERE
for the video ! !