Maybe it’s her 30 years of experience handling dogs. Maybe it’s
the fact that Americans will always see the value in a well-trained
pooch.
Maybe it’s her 30 years of experience handling dogs. Maybe it’s the fact that Americans will always see the value in a well-trained pooch. Maybe it’s the smile that doesn’t leave her face when she’s working with her “clients.” Either way, business is booming for Laurie Frazer.
A Santa Clara County Vector Control inspector by day, Frazer, 49, transforms into a dog trainer extraordinaire by night. She’s been working with animals in one aspect or another since she was a young girl and began her career in a pet shop.
“I’ve always had half a dozen dogs,” she laughed, scratching her black English Labrador Marge behind the ears. Well-trained and mellow, Marge laid obediently at her master’s feet. She’s not a “tragic dog” like many of the canines that walk into the Morgan Hill Petco, where Frazer works. Tragic dogs refer to dogs that are untrained – the kinds that plant two front paws squarely on a visitors chest when their owners answer the doorbell.
At Petco, Frazer trains dog owners to train their dogs. She gently scolded 7-year-old Ashley Davis for rewarding her puppy Midge before Midge performed the task she was supposed to. Davis giggled when her tiny yellow Labrador retriever jumped up and down, begging for a the treat Davis offered.
Frazer used a combination of body pressure and gentle prodding to get Midge to stop bounding around and sit in one spot.
“You don’t use a heavy hand,” Frazer said. Her method of resistance free training allows the animal to “use his mind to solve the dilemma before him,” she said.
She crouched over Midge without touching her, clasping the puppy treat to her chest and repeating the command until the mischievous puppy complied.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” said Davis’ mother, Yvonne, of caring for an 8-week-old puppy. “I have Laurie on speed dial.”
Training puppies and their owners is a breeze for Frazer who has found herself up against a range of menaces, from a snarling rottweiler to the pesky gypsy moth.
When she worked for the Santa Clara County Animal Control, Frazer neutralized a situation that could have been deadly. She was called to a residence where a woman sicked her usually docile rottweiler on her boyfriend. Both were under the influence at the time. The boyfriend had told the woman that, when it came down to it, he would triumph in a battle of man against beast. Not the case. The man barely escaped with his life and the woman was taken away in handcuffs. The police were left to handle a raging dog.
Enter Frazer.
Police sized up the then 32-year-old, petite Frazer, skeptical that she could handle the dog.
But dominance isn’t about stature, it’s about presence, Frazer said.
“I was going to be the biggest, baddest badass,” she said of her attitude when the burst through the gate.
“Get down, get down!” she bellowed, demonstrating the way she approached the dog that had just left a grown man hanging onto his life by a thread. She walked out of the backyard with the dog on a leash.
“That was the training for the big leagues,” she said. “It was like having a shark on the end of a stick.”
Her job hasn’t always been so stressful, however. When she worked for the Humane Society, Frazer bailed German shepherds out of the pound and trained them to be police dogs.
“They could be in a classroom of 5-year-olds that morning and eat the clothes of a burglar later that afternoon,” she said.
In the early 1980s, Frazer worked for the California Department of Agriculture, training dogs to sniff out egg masses for the gypsy moth, a notorious pest. The moths would lay their eggs in some of the most inopportune and difficult to uncover places. Frazer trained her Doberman to sniff out the scent, a fun game for the dog and a significant time saver for Frazer. With 250 million more cells than humans for detecting odor, the task was a cinch for the dog.
Now that she’s established a name for herself, Frazer sees a steady stream of customers enrolling in her classes at Petco. Six weeks of classes go for $100, and customers can attend as many classes as they like, she said. She attributed her success to the man that taught her much of what she knows, most importantly, how to be honest and ethical. Bob McBride, a local horse trainer, taught her from early on that hard work and a gentle hand keep clients coming back. She tells newcomers to the business the same thing McBride told her: “You have to be good with people.”
She accredits Cesar Millan, the ever-popular Dog Whisperer on the National Geographic Channel, for the boom in the market for dog trainers. Pet owners are ever hopeful that their “tragic dog” can become well-trained animals, she said.
“We offer an opportunity for people who are truly in need to dog training,” she said. “These are people who would get frustrated and bring them to the pound otherwise.”
