Meet Your Trainers: Karen Blair

Karen Blair brings over 20 years of competitive dog training to Canine Campus. Karen breeds, trains and shows English Cocker Spaniels (and a lone Keeshond, just to keep thing interesting) in obedience, tracking, rally and conformation. With her dogs, Karen has earned more than a dozen AKC and UKC titles. But, Karen's most rewarding dog activity is to train people to train their dogs. In this capacity, Karen has taught classes since 1988 at Dulles Gateway Obedience Club in Northern VA, Triangle Training Center and the Greater Raleigh Obedience Training Club, Raleigh, NC. She is currently a member of English Cocker Spaniel Club of America.

Using only motivational training methods, Karen's approach to competitive obedience training is to keep all of the activities light, fun, and happy for both dog and handler. After all, this is simply a game we play with our dogs. Karen takes into consideration each individual dog/handler team's strengths, weaknesses, and natural proclivities and helps the owner put together the "training puzzle" piece by piece until the whole ring performance "picture" emerges. The emphasis is never on drilling an exercise or rote routine. Classes are small, so each dog/handler team can receive lots of individual attention.