Mom opens dog training business

April 3, 2020

Brenda Scotchie was excited when her child was prescribed a service dog.

“We had a family member that had been prescribed a service dog,” Soctchie said “And so they give you a script when they prescribe that and I though “cool, I love dogs,”

But unlike a medical prescription you can get filled overnight, the wait time for being paired with a service dog was much longer.

“I called everyone that might be affiliated with service dogs and they said 3 to 5 years is the waiting list,” Scotchie said “And I honestly have never been called back,”

So the Scotichie family took on Greta, a Great Dane/Mastiff mix rescue dog.

But when it came to looking for training classes, Scotchie and her family had a hard time finding the right fit.

“We’d been to different trainings and they would incorporate pinch collars and I even had someone incorporate an e-collar or shock collar,” “And I just didn’t feel like the dogs needed that,”

That’s when Scotchie decided to take things into her own hands, becoming a certified trainer with a strictly positive reinforcement plan.

Scotchie recently opened up her own training business “All About Dogs West Virginia” which helps owners right in her hometown of Bridgeport.

Scotchie and her daughter now work as advocates to educate others about the laws and regulations of service and therapy animals.

“I really believe that that’s our way to go is through education and teaching people the expectations of how a dog should look and act when they’re out visiting people, in a hospital or reading to children,” “I think that’s huge.”

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