Meet Christie Catan
Christie Catan is the co-founder of Tails of Connection and a certified professional dog trainer, knowledge assessed (CPDT-KA). She is also currently a Lead Trainer at Dog Trained. She is always trying to honor and respect the individual learners in front of her and make her training as conversational as possible - something you’ll see woven throughout Challenge 2.0. She strives to give learners as much control and bodily autonomy as possible and loves watching the benefits of using positive reinforcement spread to other areas of dogs’ and people’s lives.
How Christie Got Started With Dog Training
Like many dog trainers, she got into the field while trying to help her own dog through some of his challenges. Otis, one of the dogs you’ll see in the course, used to be afraid of basically everything new in his environment and was reactive to a lot of different things. It was in an attempt to help him exist in this scary world, that Christie promised him that they would do fun training for five minutes a day (the inspiration for our challenges). In those five minutes, she watched him transform into a dog you might even label as “confident,” and their time spent training together became something she genuinely looked forward to. It offered a moment for her to slow down, be present, and connect with her dog.
Christie is a big behavior nerd. Learning about the science of behavior through dog training has fundamentally shifted how she sees and moves through the world. She has witnessed how just a basic foundation can shift how people treat their dogs, themselves, and other people. For her, dog training will always be bigger than “just dog training” because of how the behaviors you learn can spread to other areas of your life and make your part of the world a little better. She will forever be a student of behavior science, and is currently a TA in training for Dr. Susan Friedman’s Living and Learning with Animals course.
Where Christie Finds Inspiration As a Trainer
Christie loves to learn and feels incredibly grateful to be in a field with so many people who consistently inspire her. What you see in this course comes with a nod of gratitude to the many people who have helped her learn as well as the many “dog teachers” she’s had in her life. She hopes her teaching of this information resonates but always wants people to know that she is not inventing new things.
Christie loves to spend time out in nature with her two dogs (feel free to talk to her about trees, native plants, and birds!). She loves spending time with her two dogs, Otis and Sully, who you’ll see a lot of in Challenge 2.0. She was seven months pregnant when we filmed this course, and that bundle of joy is now a part of the team of beings in her life who are constantly teaching her. She is excited to share the joy that she’s found and to learn alongside all of you.