Founded by Kay Stephens, BS, DVM, MS (A&M '79, '80, '83), Puppy Love has been serving dogs and their people in the Brazos Valley since 1992.
Kay is a veterinarian who worked full time in private practice until deciding to devote her time to dog behavior and training. She has studied with many of the top behaviorists and trainers in the country. Some of the people she has attended seminars with include Marion Breland Bailey, Jean Donaldson, Terri Ryan, John Rogerson, and Ted Turner of Sea World. Her specialty is the use of operant conditioning and classical conditioning to modify animal behavior.
Kay has worked with hundreds of puppies and dogs of all ages, breeds, and temperaments over the last 14 years. Kay herself is the owner of 8 dogs, border collies and shelties, who compete in agility, obedience, and sheep herding. She is a national level competitor in working border collie trials and writes articles for the Working Border Collie Magazine. Kay has also worked with Texas A&M in the training of their mascot, Reveille VII. In fact, Rev VII lived with Kay for 7 months as a young dog.
Contact Kay at or 979 -694-1998 or 979 229 6300.
Kathrine Mancuso, teaches Basic, Graduate, S.T.A.R. Puppy, and Canine Good Citizen classes for Puppy Love. She is formally educated on behavior with a BA in Psychology and her passion is to help dog owners build a positive and successful relationship with their pups through training, behavior management, and quality time.
Kathrine has been training people & pets for six years, starting out with an apprenticeship and accreditation process through PetSmart.She has experience with a variety of breeds - toys, hounds, bully breeds, and more. Her own dog, Lady, is a Collie who has earned her Novice Agility Certificate.
In the past, she has supervised the training of service dog puppies in the Aggie Guide Dog and Service Dog program.
Currently, she serves on the management team of Impact Animal Foundation as the Behavior and Training Coordinator.
Contact Kathrine at or 979 739 6668.
Aubrey Kotlarich, is the newest member of the Puppy Love Team. Aubrey's love for dog training began when she serviced as a puppy raiser for a future wheelchair assistance dog. His success in obedience and manners allowed him to be formally trained and then placed with a disabled partner.
After three years of involvement with the puppy raising program; Aubrey moved on to more formal training at Petsmart, where she graduated from the certification program and taught over 500 hours of classes in her two year tenure.
Aubrey has continued to challenge herself in the dog training realm by training her dogs for competition in Rally, Obedience, Drafting, Agility and as therapy dogs.
Aubrey's goal for every dog owner is to help them understand the canine mind and methods of communication so that trainer and dog can perform as a fun, cohesive team.
Contact Aubrey at or 409 739 0223.
Puppy Love's Instructors
Are formally educated in sound, positive learning principles and techniques
Love teaching people and dogs!
Are effective communicators
Stress Fun and Safety
Are available to assist with individual training and behavior situations
Puppy Love's Facility
Puppy Love has recently relocated to the America's Country Store on Wellborn Road. We are only 7 miles from the Texas A&M University campus. Visit their website at http://closequartersfeed.com/
Our facility has an indoor, concrete, matted training area.
WHY TRAIN?
Besides helping to manage behavior problems, training can help you and your family build a better relationship with your dog! Our goal is to teach dogs good manners and habits, and to help prevent bad ones before they begin. With improved training you'll enjoy your dog more at home, be able to take your dog more places, and enjoy more activities with your dog.
HOW DO WE TRAIN?
We believe training can and should be positive and fun for people and dogs. We use positive methods based on theories of operant conditioning to make learning fun, fast, and easy. We specialize in "clicker training." The use of a clicker gives us a fast way to communicate desired behaviors to our dogs. No harsh training methods are used.
PUPPY LOVE has always followed the recommendations of the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior in our training methods.
1. AVSAB POSITION ON "DOMINANCE".....if you have worked with a trainer that has told you to dominate your dog, read this :
AVSAB is concerned with the recent re-emergence of dominance theory and forcing dogs and other animals into submission as a means of preventing and correcting behavior problems. For decades, some traditional animal training has relied on dominance theory and has assumed that animals misbehave primarily because they are striving for higher rank. This idea often leads trainers to believe that force or coercion must be used to modify these undesirable behaviors.
In the last several decades, our understanding of dominance theory and of the behavior of domesticated animals and their wild counterparts has grown considerably, leading to updated views. To understand how and whether to apply dominance theory to behavior in animals, it’s imperative that one first has a basic understanding of the principles.
Definition of Dominance
Dominance is defined as a relationship between individual animals that is established by force/aggression and submission, to determine who has priority access to multiple resources such as food, preferred resting spots, and mates (Bernstein 1981; Drews 1993). A dominance-submissive relationship does not exist until one individual consistently submits or defers. In such relationships, priority access exists primarily when the more dominant individual is present to guard the resource. For instance, in a herd comprised of several bulls and many cows, the subordinate males avoid trying to mate when the dominant bull is near or they defer when the dominant bull approaches (Yin 2009). However, they will mate with females when the dominant bull is far away, separated by a barrier, or out of visual sight. By mating in this manner, subordinate bulls are not challenging the dominant bull’s rank; rather, they are using an alternate strategy for gaining access to mates.
In our relationship with our pets, priority access to resources is not the major concern. The majority of behaviors owners want to modify, such as excessive vocalization, unruly greetings, and failure to come when called, are not related to valued resources and may not even involve aggression. Rather, these behaviors occur because they have been inadvertently rewarded and because alternate appropriate behaviors have not been trained instead. Consequently, what owners really want is not to gain dominance, but to obtain the ability to influence their pets to perform behaviors willingly —which is one accepted definition of leadership (Knowles and Saxberg 1970; Yin 2009).
Applying Dominance Theory to Human-Animal Interactions Can Pose Problems
Even in the relatively few cases where aggression is related to rank, applying animal social theory and mimicking how animals would respond can pose a problem. First, it can cause one to use punishment, which may suppress aggression without addressing the underlying cause. Because fear and anxiety are common causes of aggression and other behavior problems, including those that mimic resource guarding, the use of punishment can directly exacerbate the problem by increasing the animal’s fear or anxiety (AVSAB 2007).
Second, it fails to recognize that with wild animals, dominance-submissive relationships are reinforced through warning postures and ritualistic dominance and submissive displays. If the relationship is stable, then the submissive animal defers automatically to the dominant individual. If the relationship is less stable, the dominant individual has a more aggressive personality, or the dominant individual is less confident about its ability to maintain a higher rank, continued aggressive displays occur (Yin 2007, Yin 2009).
Key Points
• Despite the fact that advances in behavior research have modified our understanding of social hierarchies in wolves, many animal trainers continue to base their training methods on outdated perceptions of dominance theory. (Refer to Myths About Dominance and Wolf Behavior as It Relates to Dogs)
• Dominance is defined as a relationship between individual animals that is established by force/aggression and submission, to determine who has priority access to multiple resources such as food, preferred resting spots, and mates (Bernstein 1981; Drews 1993). Most undesirable behaviors in our pets are not related to priority access to resources; rather, they are due to accidental rewarding of the undesirable behavior.
• The AVSAB recommends that veterinarians not refer clients to trainers or behavior consultants who coach and advocate dominance hierarchy theory and the subsequent confrontational training that follows from it.
• Instead, the AVSAB emphasizes that animal training, behavior prevention strategies, and behavior modification programs should follow the scientifically based guidelines of positive reinforcement, operant conditioning, classical conditioning, desensitization, and counter conditioning.
• The AVSAB recommends that veterinarians identify and refer clients only to trainers and behavior consultants who understand the principles of learning theory and who focus on reinforcing desirable behaviors and removing the reinforcement for undesirable behaviors.
About Puppy Love Training