We’ve just “celebrated” a full year of lockdown and one of the most important parts of that how we’ve managed to keep Down Dog going, which truly is cause for celebration. Here we share our successes from this last year.
What is there to celebrate nowadays?
Listening to the news yesterday Himself came out with the following comment: “The human race has been a great disappointment to me.”
Once I’d recovered from the inadvertent inhalation of my coffee, I managed, spluttering in between guffaws, to ask him why that should be?
This query produced a tirade of complaints about the unanalytical, unthinking population of this country, our waste-of-space political representatives, vaccine refusers, Brexit supporters, and probably the lack of addressing third world debt – I’d rather stopped listening by then.
But it did get me thinking about events over the past year. We’ve just “celebrated” a full year of lockdown. We’re still well and have had our first vaccine dose, and my parents have stayed safe and had their second vaccination yesterday. And I’ve managed to keep Down Dog going, which truly is cause for celebration.
We think there’s plenty to be proud of here at Down Dog NI!
In fact, I realised we’ve done a huge amount:
– We’ve set up our Online Academy with an increasing range of self-study courses for owners from the various live taught courses we’ve run through the year
– I’ve successfully created my Professional Academy for budding dog trainers, with over eight courses for dog professionals and regular live training
– We moved our signature Perfect Pet live courses online – they’ve got better and better through the year and we now know how to run them best (next course starts 10th April)
– Along with three colleagues we ran two successful conferences – and we hope we can do another this coming year
– We’ve run several Facebook Challenges, getting nearly 1,000 members on our Canine Challenge Facebook page
– I’ve written and published three more books
– Patrycja has joined the team
– We’ve created Nose Nerds, a monthly membership programme to teach you and your dog to be expert searchers, trackers and sniffers
– Each quarter we’ve run at least one other online course, sometimes two. One of the best has been our Reactive Rover course, where we’re seeing some stunning results – the next course starts on 14th April.
All that is definitely cause for celebration – and we’re proud of fighting successfully through this difficult year.
Here’s to an even better 2021
We don’t yet know when we’re going to be allowed to restart in person classes and sessions but I’ll let you know as soon as I know.
Keep training and stay safe,
Carol
