What’s it all about at Mountain View?

Mountain View is all about dogs and their interaction with people. We love dogs and what happens when dogs and people learn together. When we train our dogs, we learn not only about our dogs but also more about ourselves and humanity. Our dogs derive huge benefit from this, of course (and so do we). Training dogs using positive reinforcement as the foundation and guiding principle yields huge rewards for everyone involved.

Mountain View Dog Training and Agility was established in the 1990s by Averill & Ken Ring and Cathy Hughes with some very important goals in mind:

• To demonstrate to pet owners how rewarding it is to relate to their dogs in a positive manner
• To involve entire families in the training of their dog; we feel that training dogs is an activity that benefits every family member
• To provide our human students with enough knowledge of dog behavior that long after the class is completed they can continue to teach desired behaviors and thus prevent problems
• To foster responsible pet ownership in our students. We feel this is important in the face of all the restrictive legislation that has been proposed or implemented regarding dog breeding and ownership in many areas of the U.S.
• To provide information to our agility and obedience competition students that will prepare them for the ring, without losing sight of how much fun they can have with their dogs along the way.

We hope that, by training our own dogs, teaching students to train their dogs, by reading and by attending seminars and conferences on the many aspects of dog training and behavior, we can continue to gain the knowledge needed to meet these goals. If we do, perhaps the dogs that pass through our hands will never experience the solitary existence of a chain in a back yard or a kennel in an animal shelter. That goal is closest to our hearts.