“Reach Out to the Community That’s Available to You”: Becoming a Service Dog Trainer with Hallie Wells
Podcast Transcript
[Intro]
Hallie Wells: There was initially pushback, and I think it was just based on fear of not knowing. Whether it was from my volunteers or my staff, we just kind of faced that confrontation and those fears head on. Like yeah, ‘I know this is hard. It’s scary. It’s extremely difficult to change your skillset.’ But once people started noticing that they were able to tell their dog ‘Yes’ and give them information more and do it through a positive manner, they noticed their puppies were learning things faster. They were adapting to unfamiliar stimuli a lot faster. They were also learning a lot more about their dog’s body language and becoming more aware of their dog and their behavior. So, it really became an amazing project for me, and it was extremely fulfilling and reinforcing, but there was definitely a lot of pushback at first. And there was still some pushback, even when I left. But I recognized that some people just weren’t willing to change and those were people that we had to kind of take a hard look and see why they were so resistant to it and understand that it was just because there was something new and change is hard.
[Music]
Elizabeth Silverstein: Hi, welcome back to Telltail Dog the Podcast. I’m your host, certified dog trainer Elizabeth Silverstein, and I have with me today, Hallie Wells, who is a certified dog trainer and owner and head trainer with Lumos Dog Training and Behavior Services. Thanks for making the time to join me, Hallie. How are you?
Hallie: I’m good. How are you?
Elizabeth: Good. Hallie, how long have you been a trainer?
Hallie: I have been a professional trainer in the industry for about eight years now.
Elizabeth: And how did you get started? What was that beginning process?
Hallie: I think it’s pretty similar to most people. I got started with training having a dog that was a little more challenging, and kind of got my wheels turning in my brain about training and behavior. And that’s what got me started, but what really kicked it off for me was puppy raising for a guide dog and service dog school in college.
Elizabeth: What did you go to college for?
Hallie: I went to school for animal science and biology. I was planning on going to vet school until I became interested in dog training and behavior and really just found myself more interested in animal-human connection and impact that all of that gives us in our community.
Elizabeth: And correct me if I’m wrong, because that is an interesting switch. Because when you’re becoming a veterinarian, you don’t get a whole lot of behavior or training. And I talked with Juliana of JW Dog Training about that, and when she did her animal sciences degree, they actually were encouraging alpha roles and dominance theory.
Hallie: Yeah, so that’s actually where I started as well. I actually was more focused on large animals, so a lot of, you know, bullying the animal, making sure that they knew you were in charge. I took breaking and training classes for horses and I studied a lot on nutrition, so the education aspect of behavior was really informal for me other than I knew that I was becoming uncomfortable with what I was seeing with some of the handling at the vet clinic where I was working, and just starting to question what we could do better for our animals.
Elizabeth: So you had a dog that kind of got you on this animal path. Was that as a child? Were you a teenager?
Hallie: So I had my first dog when I was–I got her when I was nine, and she was my birthday present and she was fairly easy. She did have separation anxiety, but it was fairly quickly resolved after we adopted her, and she was one of those dogs that you could just describe as the best. She was just easy going and just go with the flow. Loved life. Very aloof and indifferent to people she didn’t know, but very engaged with my family, especially my sisters and I. So it was fun to teach her and stuff, but she was just one of those dogs that just didn’t require a ton of training and management and so I adopted a dog for her when I moved to college, so she would have a buddy to hang out with, which was, you know, though it’s the best and worst timing to get a dog in college because you do have a little bit more free time, but usually that free time is filled with activities. But I adopted my dog Lola, and she was a Catahoula or assuming bully breed mix. Her mom was a Catahoula that was rescued and then she gave birth to 16 puppies and I adopted Lola. [Laughs] Yeah.
Elizabeth: That’s so many!
Hallie: Her mom has a pretty incredible rescue story, but Lola only knew a life of luxury for the most part. But she developed some leash reactivity after tearing her CCL and requiring a lot of downtime and she was a very, very high energy, high, high mental stimulation dog, and so she started to become leash reactive just out of frustration. But before that, I had really engaged with her on a lot of skills for hiking and being around other animals and stuff like that, but that unfortunately led me to doing e-collar training. Shock collar training.
Elizabeth: So you–it sounds like you’re kind of more in the realm of a crossover dog owner, not a crossover dog trainer, would you say?
Hallie: Yep. Yes.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I would call myself the same. I have never used certain tools in my dog training, and I haven’t used certain tools as a dog owner, but I was definitely with my, he’s like a 20-pound Miniature Schnauzer. Like, I’m in charge. I’m the boss. And it’s really led to some fears he has and some distrust he has of me that we’re still working on almost 10 years into our relationship. And so that’s been really interesting to see, and I want to have those conversations, too, because we make choices often because that’s all we know or we think that’s what’s going to solve the problem, and we don’t always understand, especially as dog owners, what the ramifications are going to be or how that’s going to–that can transition to worse problems or different problems. So what led you to make a switch from e-collar training?
Hallie: I read the book, Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor, and I just kind of took a step back and recognized that my training choices were causing more behavior problems with Lola. It wasn’t making her a more reliable, more trustworthy dog off leash. It was making her scared and it was making her behavior actually more inconsistent because of the fear responses that she was having. So I started to learn more about body language and behavior and just really stopped listening to what everyone was telling me. She wasn’t the easiest dog in the least. One of my friends described her like a fine wine. Like she just got better with age. She was an acquired taste. Maybe like a stinky cheese actually. She was a handful to live with if she didn’t have her needs met. She would find other things to do. She was a rough player. She loved doing neighborhood walkabouts if the door was open. There was an opportunity for adventure. So I just kind of started accepting her as like my wild child and started thinking about how I could really work with that and you know use her personality that I loved so much. That I really found a lot of enjoyment working with and stop trying to suppress it and, you know, magically or not so magically, it was just like a lot of work and fighting through the fallout that we were experiencing and stuff. Things started to get better, and it just really made me hungry for more information and to improve my skill set and that’s kind of where I took off with training.
Elizabeth: And this is all happening while you’re in college?
Hallie: Mmhm. Yep.
Elizabeth: And so you graduate with your Animal Sciences degree, and what happens then?
Hallie: So I graduated and I continued working as a vet assistant, but I was kind of moving through different involvement in the volunteer leadership with the guide dog and service dog school I was volunteering with. So I was on their whelping team because we had several litters a year with one of our field reps, and our puppy rep, and we worked—sorry, girl, sorry. I have a puppy, a shepherd puppy, here who is very clear about when she bites on metal, it hurts but she’s still gonna bite the chair.
Elizabeth: Sounds like a toddler. [Laughs]
Hallie: Yeah, exactly. She has so many toys around her, but she keeps fighting the chair. Okay, sorry for that interruption. [Laughs]
Hallie: But I was working with welping and getting information about socialization and early socialization. I was kind of moving through different puppies that I was raising as well as becoming one of the leaders in our puppy raising program, and at that point it was mostly correction based and that just like really frustrated me at that point. So I had asked if I could really play around with training different ways with our dogs and I was given the go-ahead with that and then I had the amazing opportunity to interview for the puppy program coordinator position up in New York and I got the position and I became the puppy program manager. So I oversaw a team of about anywhere from 10 to 20 team members and then we had about a thousand volunteers up and down the east coast. It was, you know, with our puppy raisers, puppy sitters, transport drivers, all of that stuff. So I made the decision during my interview process that I was going to be transparent and I was going to move the program to positive reinforcement and it was a big chunk of change to bite off, but it was really, really rewarding and it kind of led me where I am today.
Elizabeth: That’s awesome. And how did you–so you’re in college. You’re volunteering. How did you find this whole guide dog program in the first place?
Hallie: Yeah that was actually super easy. The University of Georgia has the biggest puppy raising program for the Guide Dog Foundation and America’s Got Dogs, the program I was volunteering with. And I saw a girl in one of my classes that had a puppy and kind of went from there. It was definitely a challenge because I had my two dogs that were my pets and my first dog was actually a rescue. So it was a lot of experimenting with him. He was very fearful at first. He ended up being someone’s pet and he didn’t make it through the program, but he was a really unique opportunity for me to experiment with my skills and you know transfer things and learn new things before getting a puppy to start puppy raising.
Elizabeth: So now you’re managing the puppy program for the whole foundation, it sounds like, and how long did you do that?
Hallie: I was there for about five years. So through that I was overseeing the puppy program and working with our development program and marketing and social media and all of that stuff and just learning more and observing more from our training teams, and I had the opportunity to learn about service dog training and train service dogs and train guide dogs.
Elizabeth: When you’re transitioning the whole training aspect for these dogs from more punishment based to positive reinforcement, what’s the pushback like? Are people willing to accept it? Do you get a lot of questions?
Hallie: It was definitely a lot of questions and there was a lot of frustration. There were some puppy raisers that had been puppy raising for longer than I had been alive and they saw the program as, it worked. They knew what they were doing. They had more experience than I did, but that experience really hadn’t been updated at all and so I focused on building community and trust with my puppy raisers. I started frequently visiting the different puppy groups and attending classes. Meanwhile, I was rewriting the puppy program manual and just tossing out everything I didn’t like and rewriting everything and during that time I was puppy raising. So I’d usually take a dog for a couple of months, whether it was a puppy or a dog that was struggling through some stage of their puppy raising, or I had a couple dogs that were part of social media marketing projects and so I really had the freedom to experiment with stuff and see what worked, what didn’t work. Would this apply to everyone’s skill set? And there was initially pushback and I think it was just based on fear of not knowing. Whether it was from my volunteers or my staff, we just kind of faced that confrontation and those fears head-on. Like, ‘Yeah, I know this is hard. It’s scary. It’s extremely difficult to change your skill set.’ But once people started noticing that they were able to tell their dog, ‘Yes’ and give them information more and do it through a positive manner, they noticed their puppies were learning things faster. They were adapting to unfamiliar stimuli a lot faster. They were also learning a lot more about their dog’s body language and becoming more aware of their dog and their behavior. So it really became an amazing project for me and it was extremely fulfilling and reinforcing. But there was definitely a lot of push back at first and there was still some pushback even when I left, but I recognized that some people just weren’t willing to change and those were people that we had to kind of take a hard look and see why they were so resistant to it and understand that it was just because there was something new and change is hard.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I have noticed–because that was me when I became a dog trainer. There’s an expectation when you love animals and you’ve been around them and you have your own dog that you know so much–and experience isn’t nothing either. I mean someone raising a puppy for 30 years, you know, being part of that program for 30 years is a huge achievement–but there’s always something to learn and if we kind of open up to that and it’s not–if we kind of get the ego out of the way, then we have such a beautiful chance to grow and improve and make things better for, you know, the puppies coming up.
Hallie: Yeah. And our society as a whole is just based on punishment and so it was a lot of fear of, ‘What do I what if I get this wrong? What if I don’t do it right? What if? What if? What if?’ And I was like, ‘Okay you try again. Like, I still get things wrong sometimes and, you know, I’m in charge of this.’ And so once they recognized and I admitted my mistakes and my flaws and was open about it and gave the anecdotal stories about me, not about anyone else like oh so-and-so puppy raiser. I told them the stories of my embarrassing moments. My mistakes. My failures. And I just–it became more relatable and then people started recognizing these dogs not as like robots and you know militant they have to be perfect, but as puppies that were learning to do a job but still allowed to be puppies and that kind of brought a lot more joy into our program I think and a lot less pressure.
Elizabeth: Yes, and you can just enjoy the relationship more. That’s what I tell clients all the time: like, all right, we made a mistake. Whoops. Let’s, like you said, let’s try again. It’s okay. Instead of using an aversive method where you make a mistake, you could have poisoned something for the rest of that dog’s life.
Hallie: Exactly. Yeah. And you know, the goal is to have these dogs working happily and, you know, being able to teach these dogs with positive reinforcement. And even my less skilled puppy raisers that just, you know, maybe it was harder for them to pick up on observing so many things at once. Stuff like that. But they were even seeing a difference in how quickly they were able to teach their dogs and they were really recognizing how easy it is to do positive reinforcement and how much better they felt about it.
Elizabeth: Absolutely. Okay, so you were there for a while. You did five years. What was the next step? Did Lumos Dog Training and Behavior come out of that? Was there an interim? What was going on there?
Hallie: So Lumos was definitely in my head, but it wasn’t there yet. I was planning to move across the country and start working with another guide dog school in a different position than what I was in at that point. I was ready to learn more. And I received a call from Alex Sessa, who owned Peach on a Leash. And we chatted, and she offered me a job based in Atlanta, which is where I’m originally from. And my family, my sister and her wife had just adopted my niece, and I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to move home and be closer to my family and kind of experience my niece growing up, but then also get to do something new. I was going to be training pet dogs, which I had never done. I’ve taught hundreds of puppies basic obedience and leash walking and stimulus control and some minor leash reactivity and working through fears and stuff but other than like fostering dogs through a rescue, I had very little experience with pet dogs, and I was excited to transfer all of my skills from service and guide over to working with pet dogs, because I loved working with my puppy raisers.
Elizabeth: And Peach on a Leash, it’s a dog training business?
Hallie: It is. So it is a team currently of 11 trainers. I still work with them in the capacity of pet dogs, but Lumos also does service dogs and pet dogs, so there’s a little bit of crossover with what I’m doing with both teams, but I started Lumos with the idea that I was going to be supporting people training their own service dogs, since owner training is a very common way for people to acquire service dogs.
Elizabeth: Yes, and I want to delve into that a little bit more, but I want to continue with your training journey for now. I think we’re going to split it up, if that works for you, ‘cause there’s a there’s a lot of good stuff here.
Hallie: Yeah. [Laughs] It’s a lot.
Elizabeth: So you were up in New York before you moved to Atlanta?
Hallie: I was in New York.
Elizabeth: Perfect. And then when did you move to Atlanta to work at Peach on a Leash?
Hallie: I moved to Atlanta at the end of November in 2018.
Elizabeth: And then how long were you working with pet dogs and Peach on a Leash before Lumos started and when did you start it?
Hallie: I started Lumos a year ago. So I have been working with pet dogs and Peach on a Leash for about two and a half, three years.
Elizabeth: And who would have thought that starting a dog training business in a pandemic would work? [Laughs]
Hallie: Yeah. Oh man. [Laughs] It was a leap of faith for sure. It was very scary, but I just I knew I had to put myself out there and see what would happen.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I officially launched as lockdown happened, and then I was full time like four months later, so I was like, this is kind of crazy. So when you started Lumos, what were some of the things—well, first off, how did you come up with the name?
Hallie: So the name actually might be changing at some point just because of all the JK Rowling stuff that has come out, and how unaccepting she has been towards people that are different than her. So it came out because for me, Lumos is a Harry Potter reference, but it’s something bright. We’re turning on a light. We’re lighting the path towards positive reinforcement and giving people options for training. But due to JK Rowling’s decisions to be transphobic and unaccepting, I might be changing the name so more people feel comfortable with it.
Elizabeth: Have you gotten some feedback that people aren’t comfortable with the name?
Hallie: I haven’t yet, but I think it’s more of a personal decision. I strive to be accepting of everyone, and just being part of the LGBTQ community, I want everyone to feel comfortable.
Elizabeth: I thought it was interesting, and I didn’t make the Harry Potter connection, to be honest, but that makes sense. I totally get that. So with Lumos, were there certain things that you wanted to do, having worked with a non-profit and then with a for-profit business? How did you want to set Lumos up?
Hallie: Yeah, I wanted to make it very affordable and accessible to everyone, obviously. There is a cost with training. I’ve put a lot of time and effort and energy into my education, but I charge the lowest that I can. I have payment plans and I’m helping people become educated on not only training their service dog, but also educating themselves on what dog behavior is and what dog training is, so they have the tools to do mental enrichment with their dog and teach them tricks and pay attention to their dog’s body language if they’re having an off day or problem solve through something like a behavior chain that might be going a little bit awry after some time. Stuff like that. So I do it through virtual training. I do offer board and trains to support clients that are needing some additional support, maybe through training some tasks or they’re traveling or you know they need some downtime from training, because it is hard. But I provide start to finish support or I can jump in and help people as needed. And so we do virtual training so they can do it from their home. They don’t have to travel to me and it keeps the cost fairly low, because I’m not traveling as well. And then it’s really important to me that I’m working with adults, and adult learners usually need visual education as well as written education for reference, so I send videos. I send the recording of our session. I’m giving feedback. And my program is positive reinforcement for the dogs and for the people, because every learner needs that. So my goals were to create something that’s really self-sustainable. I know that I have clients when their dog retires, they might not need me when they’re training their next dog, and that to me is very exciting, because I’m giving them the tools to do it the right way. They might be in contact with me when their dog is ready to retire and be asking about different breeders or rescues and stuff, but I really want to provide the independence that they’re looking for by getting a service dog.
Elizabeth: So you mentioned inclusivity as a big part of what your business is. So you have any other values or morals that guide your business?
Hallie: Yeah, I want to accept everyone, regardless of who they are, and what type of learning that they need. So I’ve done a lot of tag teaching with some of my clients that need some more support breaking things down. I meet with people in person as needed and we just really try to find a way to suit everyone’s needs. I have people that have preferences to use rescue dogs for their service dog. I have people to have specific needs for their dogs. Height requirements or breed type. Stuff like that. So I do try to be aware and accepting of that as well. And so I’m trying to find a balance between making myself stay comfortable and not burning out, but also providing my clients with the education that they need. But yeah, we accept everyone. And everyone that needs my support, even if I’m not the right fit, I’ve pointed many people to different programs that are in the country or in the area if the person has different learning needs that I can’t accommodate. Like they need exclusively in person, then I send them to other trainers that I would trust with my own training.
Elizabeth: That’s awesome. What are some of your goals moving forward for your business?
Hallie: I would love to have more of an online platform for training. I am hoping to kind of produce some different classes on the different tasks that you can train a service dog. Socializing your puppy. Socialization is something that’s really important to me, and that I am very interested in because there’s a lot of ways it can go right and a lot of ways that can go wrong, and since that is really the foundation of service dog training is making sure these dogs are comfortable in public and happy working in public all the time, that is really important to me because that’s in an unrealistic world the dog is going to be comfortable 100 of the time. So what do we do when they aren’t comfortable? How do we support them and what can we do to make it better for them in the future? So I’d love to get some online training classes out, because again that would be a really affordable price point for a lot of different people.
Elizabeth: Absolutely. Well, Hallie, that was all the questions I had about your training journey. Was there anything else you wanted to add?
Hallie: I think that’s it. Thanks for having me on.
Instagram – Lumos Dog Training
Elizabeth: Absolutely. So I’m gonna do the sign off, and I have a question for you at the end.
Elizabeth: This has been Telltail Dog the Podcast with your host, Elizabeth Silverstein, certified dog trainer in central Arkansas, and my guest today, Hallie Wells. Music has been provided by Jim Ciago of Seven Second Chance. Find more of his work on iTunes and Spotify, and stick around for after the music for some final advice from Hallie.
[Music]
Elizabeth: Hallie, before we sign off completely, what advice do you have for someone who would love to work with guide dogs?
Hallie: The best advice I can give is get involved with a non-profit organization. Puppy raising gives you so much education and information. There are many wonderful programs that use positive reinforcement training for their guide dogs and service dogs. As well as, you know, reaching out to the community that’s available to you: service dog users and partners and service dog trainers.
