Our joint partnership with WQAD in the quad cities and the Quad City Animal Welfare Center in Milan, Illinois is officially launched with our first video featuring an adoptable dog from the Quad Cities Animal Welfare Center. The Quad City Animal Welfare Center in Milan, Illinois is a no-kill animal shelter located about an hour and a half south of Dubuque and has many wonderful animals for adoption. We hope this joint effort will bring more awareness to eastern Iowa and western Illinois about positive reinforcement dog training and help animals find forever homes! Read this week's blog post with video: Clicker training Ray - a dog with a visual impairment who sees with his heart

Check out the latest post on WQAD: click here.

_Canine Connection is pleased to announce that we will be partnering with WQAD in the quad cities to post a weekly blog about dog training. We will be working with area shelters to feature dogs and cats for adoption and show how clicker training can help each of these adoptable pets! Read the first blog post here.

Cindy and Opal returned to Loras College on January 18 to provide a presentation to communications students in a class on human/canine communication. Students learned how clicker training facilitates communication between trainer and animal and saw a demonstration of some of Opal's service dog tasks. One student even volunteered to let Opal pull his sock off, a task that Opal loves!

Opal pulls the sock off one of the students in class!

Cindy and Opal teamed up to do a presentation about positive reinforcement training for a group of scout explorers interested in learning more about the veterinary field and dog training.

A letter to the editor of the Dubuque Telegraph Herald submitted by Canine Connection owner and manager,
Cindy Ludwig was published in yesterday's paper. In her letter she explains that breed legislation does not apply to service dogs as clarified by the United States Justice Department in a 2010 ruling by the Department. You can read the letter online by clicking here if you subscribe to the Telegraph Herald.

Cindy Ludwig, owner and manager of Canine Connection LLC has been approved as an instructor of K9to5 National Dog Registry classes. Instructors/evaluators for K9to5 are all certified professional dog trainers.  At present there are only a few instructor/evaluators in the country. Many are Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partners.

See their photo here and Youtube video here.

_Cindy and Opal visited an after-school group of teens interested in learning about how to become a dog trainer. Opal performed a few of her service dog tasks and Cindy demonstrated how Opal had been trained using positive reinforcement.