DogPACT History
Terry Long grew up in a family who always had dogs, cats, and birds. Family pictures from earlier generations were filled with a variety of pets in all branches of the extended family.
When she was 15, Terry went to work for a local veterinarian so that she could pay off the bill to take care of her gray cat, “Kitty” who was limping after the family Dalmation played too hard with gentle feline. When the vet offered her a part-time job after school, she jumped at the chance. She raced home to ask her mom what a social security card was because she needed one to land that job. She was a junior in high school, and that job was the first of many that offered her the chance to work with animals.
Terry took a detour for many years in Corporate America. Enticed by bigger salaries and benefits, she worked both in the credit insurance and health insurance industries in contracts and project management. Tiring of the commute from Long Beach to the Wilshire District of Los Angeles, Terry eventually extricated herself and started training dogs professionally when a good friend of hers gave her the nudge by giving out her phone number to people who needed help with their dogs.
That was 1996, the same year she threw in the towel on compulsive-style training methods after she attended three seminars at the Pasadena Humane Society in California. Ian Dunbar, PhD, BVetMed MRCVS, Jean Donaldson, and Pam Reid, PhD, CAAB, ignited a passion for the science and outcomes supporting positive reinforcement training.
Those were heady times. She started taking agility classes with Buster, Sandy, and Moka, became the first president of the new Orange County agility club (dash.org), and immersed herself in all things dog attending hundreds of seminars about dog behavior.
Major influences on Terry’s development as a professional trainer and behavior consultant include the teachings and writings of Karen Pryor, Karen Overall, MA VMD PhD DACVB CAAB, Robert E. Bailey, ScD, and Marian Bailey, PhD, and Susan F. Friedman, PhD, to name just a few of the outstanding professionals sharing their expertise.
It was in early 2000 that two most memorable things converged to accelerate Terry’s competence in clicker training: One, she attended Bob and Marian Bailey’s highly regarded “chicken camps” in Hot Springs, AR, and two, she brought home a precocious little imp of a pup named Kiwi. Now, she had a very willing little pup ready to benefit from all she learned from the Baileys. Kiwi became the face of DogPACT as he performed at local public events and at trainer conferences.
Those early years as a professional trainer led Terry to join the Association of Professional Dog Trainers (APDT), and in 2003 she received certification by the Council for the Certification of Professional Dog Trainers (CCPDT). She also became the managing editor of the APDT’s The Chronicle of the Dog. In 2006 her article, “Shape for Confidence,” won a coveted 1st-place Maxwell Award from the Dog Writers Association of America (DWAA) for Best Feature in a Canine Newspaper or Newsletter. It told the story of how clicker training can be used to help dogs overcome fearfulness and build confidence through trick training.
Terry authored Dog World magazine’s “About Agility” column, which was nominated for Best Magazine Column of 2006 by the DWAA, and she wrote a three-part series about training plans for Clean Run, the dog agility magazine. In 2010 Terry completed a 16-part series about dog sports for The Whole Dog Journal. In that series, she introduced the nascent sport of nose work, which has been credited by the co-founders of the National Association of Canine Scent Work (NACSW) as a contributor to the popularity of the, then, new sport as the publication reached trainers and dog handlers across the country.
Terry graduated from the University of Redlands with a BS in business management and received a Certificate in Public Relations from UCLA.
Now semi-retired (do dog trainers ever really retire?), Terry lives in Washington state with her spouse and their two dogs, Sage, a Yellow Labrador retriever, and Cooper, a black and white Border collie, both who love the sport of Nose Work.
Now semi-retired (do dog trainers ever really retire?), Terry lives in Washington state with her spouse and their two dogs, Sage, a Yellow Labrador retriever, and Cooper, a black and white Border collie, both who love the sport of Nose Work.