Is your dog your best friend or your biggest headache? If the answer isn’t ‘best friend’ it may be time to call Cati Foss, professional dog trainer.

“Training is often a last ditch effort to keep the dog,” Foss said from her desk at Arnicadia Dog Training in Seaside. The primary reason pet owners seek professional help is because they are experiencing a problem with their dog that makes everyone, including the dog, miserable. The most common issues are impulse control, timidity and anxiety, jumping, barking, mouthing, and reactive dogs.

“A reactive dog is a dog who is hard to manage in public,” Foss said. “The dog is overexcited, or it has mild aggression, or anxiety or fear.” Her first job is calming the dog so it will be receptive to training.

Cati Foss relocated from Des Moines, Washington, to the coast in 2008. Her husband has family in the area. The couple live in Astoria and have two kids and a Sheltie dog. After working as a manager at Safeway, Foss became part of the new management team building the then-new Petco in Warrenton.

“After awhile, I was invited to move from management into dog training,” Foss said. “I quickly learned I had a strong passion for working with dogs who were reactive.” During her time at Petco, the store went from near invisibility within the company to No. 10 in the country for sales in dog training.

But Foss was most drawn to working with dogs Petco ruled had to be turned away.

“I’m really good at reading canine body language,” Foss said. “I was bitten twice as a child and my response was not to be afraid of dogs, but to learn everything I could about their body language.” She also studied canine physiology and canine emotional response. Most dogs have the emotional response and intelligence of the average 2½-year-old human.

“People either view their dogs as their children or animals,” she said. “Dogs give us signals we humans can learn to read.”

Her training method relies on conditioned emotional response, the Tellington TTouch Training, praise, petting, treats, and force free, positive interaction.

“I do corrections,” Foss said. “But not painful corrections.”

After five years at Petco, Foss decided it was time to move on. She maintains a good relationship with the company. For a time, she was a mobile dog trainer, going to people’s homes. In 2016 she was offered the opportunity to buy Arnicadia, founded in 2008 by Erica Curtis.

“I took over the business from Pam Small, who bought it in 2013,” Foss said. “It had no physical location and no group classes; all work had to be done outdoors.”

In search of a space that would accommodate group classes and be large enough to have an agility and obstacle course, Foss said she lucked out when a client offered her a lease in one of his buildings.

Foss offers clients a menu of trainings and activities. There’s training for individual and group classes for behavior modification, starting with basic manners and recall, as well as dog to dog interaction, dog to human interaction, and training to address canine frustration, overexcitement, and mild to moderate aggression. Social protocols, she said, can be taught to dogs of any age.

Then there is professional level training.

“I offer limited service dog training. I do public access,” Foss said. She aims to be a certified therapy dog evaluator and already helps the Search and Rescue team, not as a trainer, but at their trail practices.

“I’m the person who gets lost they have to find,” she laughed.

She also works with dogs on rally, agility training, and tracking, as well as CGC, the acronym for Canine Good Citizenship.

“I help dogs and their owners become a team,” Foss said.

Training, she said, does more than give the dog a physical workout. “It’s a mental workout, too, because the dog has to think. Mental exercise is more tiring than physical exercise.”

Everyone agrees a tired dog is a happy dog and an easy dog to live with.

“I’m also working towards building a true community space,” Foss said. “A place where people can come with their dogs and play.”

“It’s a $5 drop-in fee per dog to come and play,” she said. “Or $40 a month for the first dog and $50 for two dogs.”

Hours are available on request. If you’re in town for only a few days with your pup, this is a safe, fun place to have some fun off leash. 

Arnicadia Dog Training is the first facility on the North Coast to offer indoor agility to the public as well AKC Trick Dog, and the CGCA and CGCU certifications.  

For details about upcoming events, log on to the Facebook page Arnicadia Dog Training or call 503-468-2559; located at 2367 S. Roosevelt, Seaside, right between Ruby’s and Motel 6.