Laura is a life-long dog lover, training recreationally since the age of thirteen. As an adult, she dove more deeply into training to address reactive behavior her Australian Shepherd Scout developed, following the path to learning more about behavior, training, and helping other people train their dogs and address behavior problems constructively. Laura also loves dog sports, recreational training, and human-dog enrichment activities of all flavors. Over the years, she has trained in and taught agility, trick dog training, disc dog foundations, canine good citizen, and public manners training. She has dabbled recreationally in canine musical freestyle, nosework, and flyball. Laura and her dog Harper Lee also became a certified therapy dog team through a local non-profit therapy dog group. This coincided with Laura's work with professional counselors to prepare their dogs to pass required behavior testing for integrating their personal dogs into their animal-assisted therapy practices. Laura genuinely loves to help therapists, school counselors, and aspiring therapy dog teams develop solid public manners as well as manners for a professional office setting.

Laura is a Certified Professional Dog Trainer-Knowledge Assessed (CPDT-KA) through the Certification Council for Professional Dog Trainers, an AKC Canine Good Citizen Evaluator and AKC FIT Dog Trainer. Laura's focus is helping Austin-area families enjoy their lives with their dogs to the fullest through fun group training classes, public manners training, reactive dog training, recreational training, private training, and overall behavioral support.

Laura's approach to dog training is to lead with empathy and a science-, evidence-based framework to help people improve their relationships with their dogs. She used an enrichment framework as the big picture and training within the context of that because a dog who has all its needs met is a better-balanced dog--emotionally, mentally, and behaviorally. By extension--their peoples' lives are also enriched. How beautiful is that? Fundamentally, Laura wants to make the world a kinder, happier, funner place through dog training.

Laura shares her life in South Austin, Texas with son Lincoln, husband JP, her three spectacularly sweet dogs--Olive, Harper, and Moxzilla Cthulhu--and her two cat roommates--Astrid and Giles. Laura also still shares her heart with every dog she's ever had: Goldie, Bear, NIkita, Caliban, Angus, Scout, Lola, and Zaphod.