“I made a bet with my husband I could teach a cat to sit and stay,” said Nancy Davis, co-owner of Creature Comforts. She lost the bet, probably her only failure in 24 years of working with animals.

Davis, along with Sherry Hickman, owns and operates Creature Comforts, a boarding, grooming and training kennel located near Lake Junaluska. Davis is a former elementary school teacher, and Hickman worked for several years as a dental assistant. The two met in an art class and soon discovered the other’s love for working with dogs. Hickman has been training canines for 18 years in dog obedience, field, and agility, and both have several competition titles to their credit. They agree that training dogs comes easily to them, and that the real trick is imparting information to owners on how to cultivate a well-mannered pet.

One of the most wonderful attributes of a dog, they say, is that they love authority. Bring home a new puppy, and in just a few days he will pick out the alpha member of your family. It doesn’t matter who feeds him or who plays with him. He will adore the authority figure in his new “pack.” Davis and Hickman know this to be true. Years of working with animals has reinforced what they already knew - if you slip below your dog’s status in the pack hierarchy, he probably will not pay much attention to your wishes.

“Dogs want someone to tell them what to do. If no one does, then they decide what should be done, and that’s when the trouble starts,” Hickman said.

Davis, Hickman, and Cathy Nelson formed a partnership and began searching for a site for Creature Comforts, which opened seven years ago.

“We knew there was a need in the area for this service, but we weren’t at all sure we could do it in the upscale manner we wanted and still afford it. Deciding to go ahead was as scary as jumping off a cliff,” Davis said.

It was Hickman who eventually found the property with a run-down building and the right zoning. The old structure was formerly the Junaluska Baptist Church. It was in such disrepair that the tax office listed it as a utility building.

“We peeked in the windows and planned where we could move walls, add windows and pictured in our minds what it would look like with some paint and landscaping,” Davis remembers. “We agreed that it had possibilities, so we resurrected a church,” she says laughingly. Nelson later moved to another state, and Davis and Hickman are now the proprietors of the facility.

When driving around to dog shows before they opened, the pair visited kennels and asked the owners what they would do differently. They usually received the same answer - kennel owners, especially the married ones, complained about how confining it was to always be on the grounds.

“If you have the flu, dogs still need to be fed and loved,” was what they heard over and over.

“Don’t plan on visiting your family at Christmas,” others said, because holidays are the busiest times for kennels. Hickman and Davis have a schedule that allows them to work alternate weekends and holidays and both agree that this, above anything else, helps them avoid burn out. With the help of three part-time employees, all animals are walked or played with in a large exercise yard at least four times each day. And, less the cats feel slighted, each feline is released into an indoor kitty playland each day.

Creature Comforts will board any dog or cat that is suitable, and this includes all breeds. They will not keep an animal that is tremendously fearful or a dog or cat that is excessively aggressive towards other animals or people. When they first opened, they boarded a feral chow chow (appropriately named Ciao, as in “Ciao, baby.”) The owners were building a home nearby and came by every day to visit and play with the dog.

“That was the only way we could board him,” Davis said. “He was so fearful that we were only able to handle him by not handling him. He would run from whichever door to his kennel we opened. If we opened the door to the run, he ran to his indoor space, if we opened the outside door, he ran into the yard.”

“We count ourselves as successful because we are making a living doing something we really like to do. Working with dogs was our hobby, it became our love, and now it is our livelihood,” Davis states.

Hickman is slight in stature, and it speaks volumes about her self-confidence that when she first attended obedience class as a student it was with Mandy, a Great Dane. Today, she explains that it is not so much that she believes in her ability to command a dog, as in her ability to “read” a dog.

“I pay so much attention to the interaction between pets and handlers in our obedience classes, that I think now I can ‘read’ people, too,” Hickman says. “And, I truly love it when I see the handler ‘get it.’ Then I know I have managed to improve a relationship and that both the pet and owner will be happier together for it.”

Hickman says the most frustrating ordeal is when people don’t listen.

“They tell me that they don’t want to make Shep mad at them or do something he doesn’t want to do (like sit and stay). People with this attitude don’t understand that they are dealing with an animal, not a child. They may love him with all their heart, but they are doing both themselves and the dog disservice by not accepting who he really is - a wonderful, intelligent, loving companion, and a dog.”

Reward and repetition are the basis of training at Creature Comforts. Dogs are food-driven animals who will usually do whatever is necessary for a treat. Hickman and Davis both refer to the reward as a “cookie,” and the very word is often enough to bring about the desired behavior from their dogs.

Hickman said that while the reward method makes perfect sense to most people, when she first became interested in dog obedience the trend was to use a military-style approach. The dogs were told ‘you WILL sit,’ and forced to do so and nary a cookie in sight.

“As you can imagine,”she says, “It did not lend itself to a loving relationship between owner and pet. It was more a domination and submission association.”

Creature Comforts offers several graduated training classes, starting with a Puppy Class and a Beginners Class. During the eight-week course, the commands heel, sit, sit/stay, down, down/stay, come and sit for exam, are taught. The puppy class is structured for a puppy’s shorter attention span and still-growing body and mind. Confidence building and socialization with other dogs, people and new situations is emphasized. Advanced courses leading to obedience competition titles are also available. In addition, agility work and show ring classes are offered. When it is necessary, both Hickman and Davis will each teach private classes. This is usually for dogs that are excessively aggressive or fearful and require individual instruction. Currently, Davis, who uses American Sign Language, is working with a hearing impaired woman and her dog to achieve assistance dog level.

Davis and Hickman have titled several dogs, in both obedience and agility competition. Both are still active and travel the Eastern United States to compete. Everyone who helps them teach the obedience classes at Creature Comforts has titled a dog.

Both Davis and Hickman quickly point out that the purpose behind obedience training is not to create a perfectly behaved animal. It is to make the relationship between owner and animal comfortable, broader, and more balanced.

“After all, you can take a well-behaved dog more places and do more things together,” Davis said. “Ill manners interfere with a relationship - be it with a person or a dog.”

(Godwin is a free-lance writer living in Haywood County.)

 

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