About Jack
About Jack
Hi! My name is Jack. These days I spend my time sniffing and chewing juicy bones in doggy Heaven, but previously I lived a pawesome life as Ziggy’s companion. My journey with Ziggy made me the inspiration for Ziggy’s TLC and together we helped many K9 parents to understand their K9 buddies. Ziggy’s TLC was born out of Ziggy’s love for me and our experiences together with traditional dog training. This is our story.
I left my birth pack and moved into my forever home with Ziggy when I was just a cute (if I do say so myself) pup of 8 weeks. At first, things were pawsome, but before long Ziggy came to find me to be a rather testy and challenging puppy. The reality was that I was just a dog who knew what I really wanted and my human family had not yet learned how to communicate with me. So off we went to a traditional K9 training school that used check chains (well to me it was a choker chain!) and this was when the real problems began. During training I just became more unwilling and uncooperative, but what did she expect? I was being told to do things I didn’t know how to do and I would get a correction for not obliging! The more corrections Ziggy gave me, the unhappier I became until finally, because she just wasn’t listening to me, I had to resort to aggression. Well that got her attention and then she heard me loud and clear!
You see what Ziggy didn’t know when I first came into her life was that us K9’s have a language of our own. Yes that’s right, just like people from different countries speak different languages, so too do us dogs speak a different language to humans. We communicate through body language as well as with our voices and we are always giving signals about how we are feeling. The problem for us is that often our humans are not aware of (or don’t understand) our K9 language, but often expect that we understand theirs.
To cut a very long story short, by the time I was 2 years of age I had had many a yanking on the good old choker chain, I had been tethered down for 20 minutes with a tent peg in a hole that I had previously dug, and yes can you believe it, I had a static collar used on me. The collar was used to stop me from stealing things I should not have taken. If only Ziggy had known then that a simple “leave it“ would have been much easier and nicer! (By the way Ziggy never actually pressed the button herself because she could not bare to do it).
The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I had a bone which I really wanted and I was not prepared to give it up. Ziggy was told by her traditional dog trainer at the time to put a choker collar on and keep correcting me until I gave it up. Well, she did this but the only result was that I was hanging by the check chain and my back legs were off the ground! The trainer had told Ziggy that this technique would make me give up the bone. Well it didn’t because I really wanted the bone and I didn’t understand what the check chain was meant to be telling me! Thank heavens Ziggy only persisted with this for a few seconds, otherwise I may not have been around to help build Ziggy’s TLC.
After that day, Ziggy threw away the choker chain and cried for three whole days in despair and guilt. We left that training school and Ziggy began to research other methods of dog training. She then enrolled in a course at TAFE where she met her teacher and mentor (and my saviour) Gaille Perry, an animal behaviourist.
The journey to a happy and healthier Ziggy and Jack had begun! Ziggy and I started off on a clean slate and before long she was speaking my language and our bonding began. I learnt to trust her and the communication between us became crystal clear. Ziggy and I soon became inseparable. Ziggy wanted to teach other people how to achieve a happy and healthy relationship between dogs and humans and so Ziggy’s TLC was born. I helped Ziggy nurture the Ziggy’s TLC business, working by her side every day coaching humans and their furry K9’s.
I came to doggy Heaven at the ripe old age of 13, having lived a full and happy life and helping countless humans to understand and communicate with their K9 buddies. I left behind my pack mates Darcy and Dakota who together with Ziggy have continued to represent the loving passion, integrity and understanding that is Ziggy’s TLC.
