Urban Animal strives to help you and your pet via a model of option-based veterinary medicine. This mission drives the innovative services we provide. We’re excited to launch Happy Animal, a focused service dedicated to helping pet owners like you create a happier, healthier relationship with your furry companions. This service is operated by Dr. Micaela Young, a veterinarian and certified professional dog trainer.

What is Happy Animal?
Happy Animal is a comprehensive behavior support program designed to address challenges that can strain relationships with our pets, negatively affect them as individuals, and create safety concerns. With this service, we are broadening the options to help you become satisfied with your pet’s behavior, in or out of the veterinary practice.

How will we approach problems?

Happy Animal operates within a safety-focused, least-intrusive, minimally-aversive framework based on the Humane Hierarchy. This means that every plan we recommend will start with what is the least restrictive and least likely to cause any temporary discomfort or lasting damage, physically or emotionally. Within that framework, however, we will center safety for the pet’s handler, those they live with, and the individual pet.

Research studies often show that teaching methods which focus on building and rewarding desirable behavior lead to better results and fewer side effects than older punishment-based methods. Training which heavily relies on ‘corrections', ‘No!,’ and putting the pet in a position to misbehave so that the behavior can be punished can feed into the underlying emotional distress which is the root cause of many undesirable behaviors. As a result, we will not recommend training your pet with force, pain/discomfort, threat, startle, fear, or intimidation.

We will approach our plans in the following order:

-Ensure we have addressed any underlying medical or nutritional factors

-Change any factors we can control which facilitate the undesirable behavior to happen in the first place

-Make changes that make the undesirable behavior less able or likely to be performed

-Choose specific behaviors that already happen that we can reward to increase their frequency

-Teach new specific behaviors that can replace undesirable behaviors

-Consult with other professionals, if needed, before considering next steps if all of the above has not led to measurable changes

Read more about humane training in the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior’s position statements on:

Humane Dog Training

Positive Vet Visits

Dominance Theory in Behavior Modification