Meet Mumbai's dog trainers

A large number of dog owners are constantly complaining of their dogs not obeying them or their dogs' aggressive behaviour or hyper-activity. Many owners can't understand their pets and don't have enough time for them. The solution is pretty simple - to get a dog trainer to...

- not just get your pet to obey basic commands,
- but also to understand their behavioural problems

Who are Mumbai's dog trainers?

Mumbai-based Tanya Patel, an engineer from Nagpur turned to training dogs six months ago.

"It is not very difficult to train dogs. We train owners how to behave with the animal, which is very challenging. All that the dog needs is one word and an action to go with it and through conditioning and positive reinforcement, the dogs pick up the actions very, very quickly.", she says when asked about her experience.

She is currently training 9-10 dogs per month on an average and enjoys working with the small creatures to the fullest.

Tanya Patel with one of her current 'clients'

Tanya training the Shih Tzu, Oreo indoors

Tanya's outdoor training 

Read more about Tanya Patel on her Facebook page.

Another trainer who also left engineering for her love of dogs is 22-year-old Mitali Salvi from Bandra who has actually been in this profession since the past 2years but has grown up with 13dogs one after the other.

Along with basic commands, she also trains dogs to perform tricks like fetching water from the fridge or fetching the newspaper, ringing the doorbell or opening the door.

Mitali with some of her favourites

"In the first month, I teach them the basic commands like sit, stay, roll and how to shake hands," she says.

"Dogs need to be trained with their owners. So I avoid teaching advanced commands to dogs whose owners don't have enough time for them."

Another dog trainer, Chembur-based Srinivas Jakkani says: I have seen many local trainers training dogs with a lot of cruelty. So when I got to know about a course that trained dogs in a friendly manner, I tried it and since then there has been no looking back."

Jakkani is well known for training dogs with behavioral problems like hyper active labradors or golden retrievers, adamant and dominating beagles and even the guard dogs who he trains for agility.

Apart from training and having experiences with many dogs since the past one year, Tanushree Lele and Ganesh Pathrave have their own combined boarding and lodging home for dogs too in Bandra. 

"We keep dogs when their owners go on holidays and they have to be left alone. The peak time is mostly the summers (April-May) and from October to December. It's like a whole jungle of dogs in the apartment," says Tanushree.

"Last month, we had around 15 dogs living with us and it was crazy fun."

When asked if the dogs got along well with each other or if there were any issues, Ganesh stated, "No actually, touch wood, we haven't had any of those problems. All the dogs get along quite well with each other and they love playing and troubling each other."