From corporate conference room to horse barn — you’d be surprised just how one can lead to the other.

Jennifer Garland is well-acquainted with the bustling world of corporate communications and leadership coaching, having 25 years of experience both as a consultant and a full-time team member.

Six years ago, looking out at the empty fields of the farm she and her husband had purchased, she said, “I think I’d like to buy a horse.” And her husband said “Good idea.”

And so, Sunny (who has since earned the name “Sunny with a Chance of Tornado”) came to live with Garland and her family.

“I found when I spent some time in the barn with Sunny, who had a highly developed sense of fear, I went home feeling calmer with a clearer head,” Jennifer says. “He taught me about overcoming fear, being more confident, aware, and focused.”

VIDEO: Welcome to The Mane Intent

To Garland, the path was crystal clear: she became certified in FEEL™ (Facilitated Equine Experiential Learning) and, a year later in 2014, launched The Mane Intent Inc.

Now in 2017, The Mane Intent serves a variety of clients, ranging from individuals and couples, to corporate groups and those healing from trauma.

“The Mane Intent has become my passion,” she says. “This is life-changing work for me.”

The work is also life changing for participants. For people from all walks of life, the business offers individual and team effectiveness coaching, leadership development, and health and wellness workshops working with horses as natural coaches.

“Horses have a natural ability to give us clear, direct, and rapid feedback,” Jennifer explains. “There will be a moment during their session with the horse that is often a surprise for the client. It’s a moment of connection and that’s often the ‘aha’ moment where they see a pattern of behaviour that may not have been clear to them previously.”

The Mane Intent is now partnering with Kawartha Sexual Assault Centre and Trent University to offer a free 12-week program for young women aged 13 to 18 who have witnessed or experienced family conflict, dating violence, or other forms of abuse. The program is designed to promote healthy self-esteem, emotional awareness, coping skills, and personal resilience and is funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada.

“Horses are remarkable animals and they gift us with some pretty amazing insights,” Jennifer says. “This kind of work is a natural for me to do and I am grateful for a wonderful herd of horses who do what they do best for our clients. I am also very grateful for a wonderful life partner who is supporting me every step of the way,”

The Mane Intenet is located at Renegade Ridge Farm (2410 Cameron Line, Indian River). For more information, call 705-295-6618, email jgarland@themaneintent.ca, or visit www.themaneintent.ca. You can also find The Mane Intent on Facebook and on Twitter.

There’s nothing wrong with Brenda Cowan’s hearing. In fact, she’s happy to lend you an ear if your own hearing is failing … and even if it isn’t.

The owner and operator of Peterborough’s The Ear Depot has one goal: to change the conversation around hearing loss.

The Ear Depot’s roots begin in 1982 when Brenda applied for a job as a receptionist at a local hearing aid company. She interviewed well, and the owner asked her if she was interested in becoming a Hearing Instrument Specialist rather than a receptionist. Even though formal education in the field was not required at the time, she decided to attend Sheridan College to obtain it.

After nine years working as a Hearing Instrument Specialist, she opened her first practice in Peterborough in 1991. She moved in 1993 and rebranded as the Peterborough Hearing Aid Dispensary, and purchased an office in Bancroft the following year, expanding to Barry’s Bay in 1997.

Things were going well enough, she says, until the industry began to change. Corporations were moving into the market, and the focus was changing.

“The changes weren’t all for the good,” Brenda says. “I didn’t like was I was seeing and I didn’t like what I was hearing, pardon the pun.”

What Brenda was hearing was that sales of hearing aids were trumping service. It was becoming less about helping the client and more about money.

“It was all about the sale,” she says. “We’re all about the service.”

Brenda had a choice: fold or fight. Since she isn’t a ‘folder’, she leased a vacant building, rebranded her company to be called The Ear Depot, and refocused her business on the client rather than the hardware.

At The Ear Depot’s three locations (Peterborough, Bancroft, and Barry’s Bay), Brenda and her colleagues Matt Paige and Cindy Handke now also consider lifestyle of their clients. What are the signs their hearing might be becoming impaired? What kinds of noise do they regularly expose themselves to? Are they at risk for hearing loss?

“We are about ‘conversation made easy’,” Brenda says, repeating the company’s new motto. “Conversation can mean different things to different people. You have to consider the client’s lifestyle to know their needs.

“If you’re in a nursing home, conversation may mean hearing the nurse. If you’re a CEO of a business, you need to hear every single detail or you could miss a crucial detail that could cost the company.”

That, by the way, actually happened. A simple detail, missed, was a quarter-million-dollar error. That CEO needed precision hearing, and Brenda uses that example to prove the importance of looking beyond a standardized hearing test and the sale of a device.

Beyond serving clients who may or may not need a hearing device when they first visit, Brenda says she is trying to change the public conversation about hearing loss. Recent evidence is showing a link between hearing loss and dementia, cognitive decline, depression, impaired memory — even life span.

The health benefits of hearing-loss prevention are becoming clearer, and Brenda encourages everyone to treat their hearing as they treat their eyesight. To that end, The Ear Depot offers free seminars for the public every second Thursday.

The Ear Depot is located at 236 Parkhill Road East in Peterborough (705-749-0707), 229 Hasting Street North in Bancroft (613-332-3754), and 12 Dunn Street in Barry’s Bay (613-756-9550). For more information, visit www.theeardepot.com or email info@theeardepot.com. You can also email Brenda Cowan at brenda@theeardepot.com and connect with The Ear Depot on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

From the ache of difficult times, comes — often — the blessing of contentment. Paula Kehoe’s story is proof.

After a jetsetting career in journalism that took her from her home in a tiny fishing village in Newfoundland to the Grenadine Islands, from the east coast of Canada to the west, Kehoe settled in Peterborough in 2015 — a bright future on the horizon, a young family in tow.

“Moving to Peterborough was one of the best decisions we ever made,” Paula says. “The people remind me a lot of Newfoundlanders — kind, hospitable, welcoming. It was like being home.”

But Paula and her husband had little time to enjoy that feeling before news came that would change their lives: their eldest son was diagnosed with severe autism.

“That day was extremely difficult for us,” she explains. She had just finished a maternity leave and was ready to re-enter the workforce. Her husband had just taken a new job, and the family had just relocated.

“But, by the end of the night, my husband and I had decided he would leave his job so we could share the family responsibilities equally, and we would both open our own companies.”

So he started his own engineering consulting service and Paula started Red Rock Communications — the name stemming from her childhood in Red Head Cove, Newfoundland. Being in business for themselves gave them the flexibility to share responsibility for the family as well as “stay in the game” career-wise.

In 2015, Paula didn’t know a single soul in Peterborough. So, building on her strength as a people person — and her aptitude for strategically approaching every problem — she bought a membership in the Women’s Business Network of Peterborough (WBN).

“I’ve been networking like crazy ever since,” she says.

And she’s good at it — in just two short years, she’s built her boutique communications business to the point where she sometimes has to turn away work. Among her clients? Peterborough Public Health, kawarthaNOW.com, Sun Life Financial, the WBN, and Active Chiropractic and Wellness Centre.

Red Rock Communications positions itself as a boutique, one-stop communications shop for clients that is rooted in integrity. Services range from social media and brand journalism to media relations and event marketing.

Paula says her goal is to form business relationships based on transparency, honesty, and good old-fashioned hard work. She prefers face-to-face meetings, and aligns her own work with clients whose mission and values match her own.

“It’s that feeling of accomplishment that I’m actually contributing to something that’s worthwhile,” she says.

Nowadays, whether she’s busy with a client, in her role as a board member of the WBN or on the planning committee of International Women’s Day, or with her family, Paula keeps front-and-centre that which inspires her every move: discovering the passion behind what people do.

“Getting to know people, their businesses, their lives — that’s what really carries me through into each new day.”

Red Rock Communications is located in Peterborough. For more information, visit redrockcommunications.ca. You can also connect with Red Rock Communications on Twitter and Instagram.

From small-town Ontario to global communications management, Lorie Gill still has trouble figuring out how she got from there to here.

“You know when you’re a young teenager, you have these crazy ideas about what you want to be?” she says. “Well, mine was a businesswoman. Did I have any idea what that meant? Heck, no!”

Lorie grew up in Bracebridge and attended a tiny school in Utterson. When she graduated from grade 8, there were about 12 other students graduating out of roughly 175 students in the entire school.

“It was very small,” Lorie says, emphasizing the “very.”

She went to business school right out of high school, and even then didn’t have to look far before she met the man with whom she would share both a family and a business.

That was 29 years, three children, and three-decades-of-being-a-businesswoman ago, and Lorie still finds a niche in the family business — whether in client support, inventory management, account management, content management, or social media management.

The Gills opened their first business (retail electronics) in 1989. In 2001, they moved with the industry into the realm of communications, first with the goal of helping mobile customers manage their mobile communications and get better deals while doing it.

Then, in 2006, they expanded into the vigorous domain of digital marketing — with a strong focus on search engine optimization, advertising management, conversion optimization, content management, and social media management — all under the name GILL Solutions Management.

The language Lorie speaks now is one she says she couldn’t imagine speaking 30 years ago.

Back then, typewriters had digital displays, and few people owned computers. Now, few people can say they don’t own a computer.

Along with that came the globalization of communications, paving the road for the Gills’ digital marketing agency which Lorie describes as “local but global.”

“All I need is a computer and internet, and I can work from pretty much anywhere with anyone in the world,” she says. The Gills moved their business into their home in 2011.

Today, while the company outsources some of the specialized work, the Gills are preparing their son (George Gill Jr.) for a role in the family business, which touts the fact that they offer a la carte services as well as strategically designed packages.

“Everybody does it differently,” Lorie says. “We can do search engine optimization, we can do pay-per-click advertising, social media optimization, and conversion optimization individually, but they work so much better when they’re combined into a larger strategy.”

The company also offers online training and live training workshops in Google Analytics, Google Adwords marketing metrics and optimization, email marketing, marketing automation, digital advertsing, content marketing, search engine optimization. and more.

“For me, this is the farthest thing from my world growing up,” she laughs. “And today, the language has changed so much. I can only imagine what technology will be like in another 10 years.”

GILL Solutions has offices in Toronto, Ontario and Tampa, Florida. For more information, call 877-801-4090 or visit www.gillsolutions.com. You can also find GILL Solutions on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

From marketing to fundraising, Kerri Davies is often the public face in the community for the Canadian Mental Health Association Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge (CMHA HKPR). However, as she is quick to point out, there are a lot more people behind the scenes who are working to help people with mental health challenges.

“While I may be the public face, the front-line staff are the heart of the organization, supporting the clients we serve,” Kerri says.

Kerri joined the organization in 2013, the same year CMHA Peterborough amalgamated with CMHA Kawartha Lakes.

Led by CEO Mark Graham, who is celebrating 25 years with CMHA this year, the organization now serves four counties, an area roughly the size of Prince Edward Island at 13,000 square kilometres. It has two locations providing direct service — one in Peterborough and one in Lindsay — and employs more than 200 people.

“My role in the organization is Manager of Development,” Kerri explains. “In that capacity, my primary responsibility is fund development, and that is achieved through community engagement, education, health promotion, marketing, and public relations.”

She rhymes off her various roles quickly, but knows that each helps float the organization to its ultimate goal of creating a community of belonging for people with mental health challenges.

“It’s a huge challenge,” Kerri says. “It’s like many years ago when people wouldn’t talk about cancer, and therefore wouldn’t get help. There’s still a lot of stigma associated with mental illness that prevents people from seeking help.”

Kerri’s role has been instrumental in shifting the conversation. When she was hired as a fundraiser, the organization’s goal was to determine if the community would support a capital campaign for a bigger building.

Consultations quickly determined that the community’s understanding and engagement with CMHA HKPR needed to be boosted.

“We needed to get out in the community and make sure we became relevant to everyone,” Kerri says. “After all, mental illness can touch us all.”

From Bell Let’s Talk Day in 2013 when a local radio personality shared his story of living with mental illness, to today when the public voices of living with mental illness are many and varied, Kerri has shared knowledge about mental illness, hope for recovery, and the importance of those struggling with their mental health experiencing a sense of belonging within the community.

Major fundraisers have drawn names such as Michael Landsberg and Clara Hughes. Community events such as Ride Don’t Hide have boosted fundraising efforts so that, in 2016 — the organization’s biggest year yet — it raised half a million dollars. All of that goes to support local services and public education.

And, on today’s horizon, the possibility that the community turned the corner: CMHA HKPR has received initial endorsement from the Local Health Integration Network for a project that could see a Community Mental Health HUB — one roof for many agencies to help simplify navigation of services.

“It’s the most exciting thing on our horizon,” Kerri says. “Six years ago, we needed to expand but didn’t have an engaged community that would support a capital campaign. Today, we are well positioned to engage the community in this big idea.”

The Canadian Mental Health Association Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge has locations at 466 George Street North in Peterborough (705-748-6711 or toll free at 1-866-990-9956) and 33 Lindsay Street South in Lindsay (705-328-2704 or toll free at 1-888-454-8875). For more information, email info@cmhahkpr.ca or visit cmhahkpr.ca. You can also find the organization on Facebook and Twitter.

Michele Kadwell-Chalmers may not be a wizard, but she has the ability to invoke the kind of enchantment that will help melt away the stresses of the day.

She’s the founder of a boutique fireplace company in Peterborough — a place where fireplace design is the first priority and a place where a customer’s dream is brought to life, with the careful guidance of an experienced hearth designer and a team of expert contractors.

The Original Flame was established in 2007 when Michele followed her own dream of starting a fireplace business that was as much about design, comfort, and aesthetics as it was about heat.

“Starting up was a challenge,” she admits. She built a showroom and secured some of the best lines — and then had to prove herself to others in the industry.

“I knew a lot of people in the industry and a lot of manufacturers, but convincing them that I could pull this off on my own took a couple of years.”

Now in its tenth year, The Original Flame specializes in wood, gas, and propane fireplace and stove sales, as well as certified installations.

What sets her business apart is the personal attention to design. The Original Flame is more than a store that sells fireplaces; it’s a service, Michele explains.

“A lot of people get overwhelmed when they are searching for a fireplace. There are just so many choices. I ask questions: are they trying to cut back on heating bills, are they building a focal point for a room, or are they just wanting to update an older stove? Sometimes people aren’t even sure what fuel they want to burn!”

So your visit to The Original Flame starts with questions and often ends with a few rough sketches to help you envision what is possible in the space you have.

“One lady came in for a fireplace,” Michele recalls. “She said she just wanted a little heat in her living room. We sat down together and talked about what she wanted and how she wanted it to look. I drew some pictures. She bought a nice little fireplace and once it was installed, she loved it.”

“She brought in pictures and we had a nice visit. At the end, she gave me a hug. How many jobs end with a hug?”

In another case, she said she found much satisfaction in helping a family who wanted an update to a fireplace that had been condemned. After the job was done, the customer told Michele that the kids come home from school and the family gathers in front of the fireplace to talk about their day.

“Fire really brings you together to connect,” Michele says. “Even if you’ve just had a rough day, you can just to sit in front of it and let your troubles melt away.

“When you can change the way someone is feeling, that is so satisfying.”

The Original Flame Inc. is located at 982 Highway 7 East, Unit 2, in Peterborough. Showroom hours are 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday to Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday (closed Sunday). For more information, call 705-742-9452 or visit www.theoriginalflame.com. You can also connect with The Original Flame on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

The story of Tracey Ormond’s catering business That’s a Wrap Catering Company is full of unexpected flavours and healthy helpings of Peterborough pride.

She opened her catering business because of the lessons she learned while she was a long-haul truck driver, and she runs the business out of a large modern kitchen — located in a funeral home and reception centre.

The story begins in 2013, when Tracey decided she was ready to go into business for herself. She had some experience in the food industry: she’d worked in a long-term care facility and she’d helped manage Charlotte Anne’s Restaurant in downtown Peterborough.

“I just knew I wanted to be part of the community,” Tracey says, explaining how she was looking for the vitality that comes from being an entrepreneur in Peterborough. “A catering business, to me, was the perfect fit.”

She was ready — like someone parachuting out of a plane for the first time. In other words, she was ready but terrified.

Tracey had just spent six years on the road as a long-haul truck driver. While she’d been back home in Peterborough for about a year, she knew she had a long road in front of her when she embarked the self-employment journey. For one thing, she needed a commercial kitchen.

To ease her nerves, Tracey attended a breakfast hosted by the Peterborough Downtown Business Improvement Area; it was one of the first things she did after making the decision.

She laughs, remembering now.

“I was more out of my element at that meeting than I ever was on the road,” she says. “These were all brilliant people, many in suits and ties, and I thought, ‘what are you doing, you don’t know anybody!'”

As it turns out, it was a connection made at the end of that meeting in late 2013 that led Tracey to the Ashburnham Funeral Home & Reception Centre, which just happened to have a large, brand new kitchen facility — and the need for some in-house catering.

She opened That’s a Wrap from that kitchen in March 2014 and now she runs a robust business that includes classes and workshops, on-site catering with the option of a liquor license, and off-site catering. She does private catering and corporate functions — about a fifty-fifty split between the two.

She does wraps and hot meals, freezer dinners, and sandwiches with salad. And she buys everything she can from local produce suppliers, the market — and, recently, Tiny Greens.

Her goal is to provide healthy catering options for residents and businesses in her home community of Peterborough.

“Doing this allows me to be a part of the community,” says Tracey, who is now the membership director of the Women’s Business Network of Peterborough, as well as a member of the Peterborough Chamber of Commerce and a member of the Peterborough Rotary Club.

About her years on the road, Tracey smiles. She knows how intriguing her story is, and she explains that driving a truck had always been on her bucket list.

When the opportunity arose in the midst of a life crunch, she took it, and is grateful she did. She saw North America, visited every zoo she could (she loves zoos), and witnessed American history-in-the-making when she was in the United States on the night President Barack Obama was elected.

“It was an amazing experience,” Tracey says of her truck-driving years, looking up from the cutting board. “It was scary, but it was also freeing.”

She also learned the value of a wrap. Most of the time Tracey slept in her truck, and almost always ate on the road.

“It had to be something like a hamburger or sandwich or wrap,” she says, “because you had to be able to eat it with one hand.”

Truck driver to caterer may seem an unusual journey to some, but in hindsight it makes perfect sense to Tracey.

“Sometimes you can’t see it at the time, but one thing leads to another.”

That’s a Wrap Catering is located at 840 Armour Road in Peterborough. For more information, call 705-768-7168, email info@thatsawrapcatering.ca, or visit www.thatsawrapcatering.ca. You can also follow That’s a Wrap on Facebook and Twitter, and connect with Tracey on LinkedIn.

Shannon Gray’s sugaring business is experiencing some sweet success.

From its humble and determined start in 2011, Shannon has grown Sugar Me Right! Beauty Studio to serve a client base of 1,960, of which 749 are active monthly customers. In fact, the business has grown so much in the past year that she has just moved to a bigger space in downtown Peterborough.

“Taking the next step is always scary and exciting,” Shannon says.

She’s confident in this latest move because of how the pieces fell into place: an easy-going and extra-helpful landlord offering a “perfect” space, tremendous growth of her business over the past year — almost double — and a stable staff ready to make the move.

“When you’re weighing the pros and cons of a move, and things are falling into place, I just feel you have to take that leap of faith that this is the right way to go. There’s no reward without risk.”

That’s a lesson Shannon learned early in her journey as an entrepreneur, when she faced naysayers who told her “spa-like businesses always fail” and “you won’t get government funding for anything like this, these businesses tend to fold within two years.”

Those were clear messages even from funding agencies, Shannon says. Her choice? Fight or flight. She told them they didn’t know her and how determined she was, and she left the naysayers behind before they could talk her out of following her dream.

The early days were tough. Shannon was committed to sugaring, having experienced the benefits of sugaring as a form of hair removal for years, and then set her mind to making the service available to others.

Yet she was operating out of her home, and her home was in Buckhorn — not as accessible as downtown Peterborough. She had to take her sugaring table and equipment “on the road” to perform services in other people’s homes.

“At one of the last places I arrived with my table and sugars, I looked at the staircase and said ‘That’s it, this is the last time. I need to be stationary.'”

Shannon had started providing sugaring services in January 2011 and, two months later, knew what she had to do. Within a year, she had her own space on Park Street in Peterborough.

When that lease was up, she moved her business to a more central location on Charlotte Street where she grew for three years. Sugar Me Right! Beauty Studio operated from two treatment rooms, with a little extra space.

“The Charlotte Street location was nice but small,” she says.

So, this past June, she upgraded her treatment and office space by moving to 161 Sherbrooke Street in downtown Peterborough. She now has three full treatment rooms, a fully functional kitchen, on-site laundry, and parking.

“And I have an office space for the very first time,” she adds.

Most importantly, she says, there is a “big beautiful waiting room.”

“Our clients are our business,” Shannon says. “We exist because they choose us. So offering them the best experience, and making sure they feel appreciated and welcome, is really important to us.”

While sugaring has been used for hair removal since Egyptian times, its popularity grew exponentially in the 1990s when home products were made available. Today, sugaring is known as a less painful and safer option for hair removal than waxing.

While Sugar Me Right! Beauty Studio doesn’t guarantee permanent hair removal, Shannon says that’s often the outcome.

In addition to professional body sugaring, Sugar Me Right! Beauty Studio also offers Dead Sea salt body glows, ionic foot baths, lash lifts, semi-permanent mascara, and microblading.

Sugar Me Right! Beauty Studio is located at 161 Sherbrooke St., Unit 2 in downtown Peterborough. For more information and to schedule an appointment, call 705-742-6000, email info@sugarmeright.com, or visit www.sugarmeright.com. You can also follow Sugar Me Right on Facebook and Shannon on Twitter.

Imagine not having language to use as a communication tool. Imagine if whatever communication tools you had could be as easily misunderstood as understood. And, imagine if one person, one special being, had an uncanny knack at deciphering what you meant.

That’s the story of Karen Laws and her canine friends.

“I used to watch other people training dogs,” Karen says. “They’d beat the dog to get it to do what they wanted. I remember as a kid thinking there’s got to be a better way.”

She got her first Labrador Retriever when she was 11 and she trained him to walk beside her off-leash, never once with a whip.

“Sometimes, you don’t know what you don’t know until you go away from it and gain perspective,” she says. “I didn’t realize when I was training dogs just how much I understood about dog communications.

“I can think like a dog better than I can think like a person. It was a surprise to me that people didn’t think like I did.”

While Karen enjoyed her career as a field biologist, training dogs has always been her passion. She focussed on training Labrador Retrievers for field competition, and she was good at it. She had that uncanny ability to understand the animals that set her apart from other trainers. She was also a woman in a male-dominated industry.

“There weren’t many women training field dogs for competition in Canada,” Karen says, admitting that some of the men in the industry were surprised at her success using trust and respect rather than physical training methods. “I spent every spare minute working with my dogs.”

Every spare minute for 20 years. Then, after moving back to Peterborough for a promotion with the Ministry of Natural Resources, Karen turned her passion into a business — training dogs on behalf of their owners. The demand was so strong that she often put in an 18-hour day.

When she retired from her day job, it’s hardly any surprise that Karen went full speed into her training business — adding an interesting twist. Instead of just training dogs, she began to train trainers.

VIDEO: Karen Laws – The Ontario Dog Trainer

Then a new revelation: Karen says she would train a client’s dog with ease, but would find the clients also needed some education.

Now, Karen studies dog owners as much, or more, than she studies their dogs. Her unwritten business motto? Fix the people first. Her strategy is to train the trainers to do the same, filling what she calls a “huge gap” in the dog-training industry.

So from 2006, when Karen took her training business to people’s homes, to today, when she owns and operates a boarding school for dogs in Bethany (along with a robust nationally recognized train-the-trainer business with partners in Ottawa and Halifax), Karen has a few words of wisdom for people planning to start their own business.

“First of all, I don’t offer anything for free anymore,” she affirms. “Secondly, I bought a portable classroom and my income tripled in less than one year. It was the best thing I ever did.”

“And think five years out from the beginning,” she adds. “I got some advice to ‘just do it’, and that’s true. Just do it — but while you’re just doing it, think about where you want to be in five years.”

And for dog owners, Karen also has a few tips, including learning to think like the dog thinks. Dogs and humans live together in different worlds, so it’s important to find a way to understand a dog’s world.

“Dogs see with their noses,” Karen explains. “They are not verbal creatures. Sound to a dog has the meaning that we choose to give it.”

Respecting the dog and its personal space is an important part of building a strong bond of trust with your dog, she adds.

“Maintain calm energy and park egos at the door when working with your dog, and be consistent.”

Consistency, calmness, and crystal-clear communication using body language rather than with voice — along with respect for the dog — are the keys, she says.

Oh, and Karen has one more tip that follows from the others: when you are walking your dog, be with the dog … leave your cell phone at home or in your pocket.

Ontario Dog Trainer is located at 814 Lifford Road in Bethany. For more information, call Karen at 705-277-1503 (mobile: 705-761-2159) or visit ontariodogtrainer.com. You can also follow with Ontario Dog Trainer on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and connect with Karen on LinkedIn.