WELLINGTON COUNTY – Travelling across 12 school boards and 35 classrooms, a Kitchener based dog trainer is working to promote the importance of dog safety to young children.
Dog trainer and founder of Back 2 Basics Dog Training and Your Family Dog Trainer Bill Verbakel has been making his way through classrooms, teaching kids from junior kindergarten to Grade 1, the importance of dog safety.
Verbakel spent the months of May and June providing the free educational program I Speak Doggie to virtual school programs with the goal of preventing kids from getting dog bites.
“Having a four-year-old and seeing how they naturally want to interact with the dog, it becomes clear that if you don’t help them, they’re going to make mistakes that they don’t know are mistakes,” Verbakel explained.
“Because of the way humans are, we interact through touch and hugging and all these things that to dogs, can be quite frightening,” he explained, emphasizing the importance of teaching the kids at that age about how they’re interacting.
Verbakel and his wife have five kids, ranging n age from four to 18, and have had a number of family dogs over the years, some of them more challenging than the others, he noted.
“As I got into the field of dog training, I started to realize that I just really enjoy working with families and a natural evolution for me was how do we stop all the bites that happen to kids and get in front of it instead of just sitting back and waiting for it to happen and then trying to address it with the dog later?”
From there, Verbakel said he offered the program to teachers in his own kids’ classrooms, who welcomed the idea.
He explained the inspiration behind the program stems from wanting to help kids to understand and respect the dogs in a fun way while also learning.
“So instead of teaching them ‘don’t do anything, leave the dogs alone’ all the time, how can we interact safely and in a fun manner?”
Verbakel has been a dog trainer now for two years and recently started his own business at the beginning of 2020.
“It’s a newer venture for us but it’s one that we’re quite passionate about,” he explained.
Of the 12 school boards Verbakel presented the I Speak Doggie program to, two were Upper Grand District Schools. He explained the program has even reached as far as Toronto and Ottawa classrooms, adding the response has been really positive so far.
“I was doing two a day for multiple weeks in a row because the demand was so high, basically; all of May and June were booked solid for two a day.”
Verbakel estimated he reached between 700 and 800 students in during the months of May and June.
He said the lesson runs for about 40 minutes, noting he doesn’t want to rush the kids but wants them to spend time soaking in the information and practicing.
“Really the goal is to prevent bites to children. So, preventing dog bites to children through understanding them as a species and understanding the best ways to interact with them,” he said, adding there’s often misperceived connotations of how people are supposed to act with dogs.
“All of it’s based around a song but has some fun actions that we go through to kind of send the message home to them.”
Verbakel explained he’s currently in the process of being formally vetted to come into classes as an instructor when school starts back up in person in the fall.
“The messaging is helping to protect the dogs as well because when dogs bite kids we know that they get put down. There’s no recovering from that, you don’t get extra chances if you bite a kid. But a lot of the times that it happens, it’s not the dog’s fault.
“So, when we can get in front of that and teach the kids how to interact well, we save the dogs, but we also of course are saving the kids from getting bitten.”
He emphasized the mission is to work with as many families as possible to get the message out, noting his program’s training focuses heavily on working with families with kids and dogs.
“It’s a passion of ours to step into that sort of field and help those people out because I think its missing within the dog training community.”
To access the I Speak Doggie” video or for more information on family training, visit https://www.yourfamilydogtrainer.com/.
