Laura Donaldson is a retired Ivy League professor (Emeritus, Cornell University) who has also been a dog trainer and canine behavior specialist for over 15 years. She holds a Ph.D. in the humanities and has done graduate work in applied animal behavior. She is a Certified Dog Behavior Consultant through the IAABC; a Karen Pryor Certified Training Partner; and a Certified Control Unleashed Instructor. She owns Four Paws, Four Directions Dog Training & Behavior Consulting LLC, which is located in the beautiful Fingerlakes region of Ithaca, New York. In her currently full-time behavior consulting practice, she focuses almost exclusively on dogs struggling with dog-dog and dog-human directed aggression issues. She teaches both in-person and online Control Unleashed classes. She is a published writer on dog behavior and her essay, “The Cognitive Revolution and Everyday Dog Training: The Case of Look at That,” won the 2018 Maxwell Medallion Award for best magazine article on dog training and behavior. This article, along with several others, is part of a forthcoming book titled Growing ProSocial and Brain Powered Dogs: Cognitive-Behavioral Interventions for Canine Aggression. Her aim in the book is to bring the emergent research on canine cognition to the everyday practices of dog training.
Sessions
The Cognitive Revolution and Everyday Dog Training: What is Cognitively Modified Counterconditioning