Healing & Heeling the Dog Within
Asheville, NC is a bastion of alternative practices and ideas. To add to this vibrant alternative community, a local veterinarian and a biologist/dog trainer are joining forces to present Healing & Heeling the Dog Within, a series of educational talks on a favorite topic of many – DOGS!
Healing & Heeling Mission
The mission of Healing & Heeling talks is to share alternative ways to train and care for WNC’s beloved pups. In both the training and veterinary fields, standard approaches are useful, but often limiting. New techniques represent new solutions to old problems that may not only surprise you, but also turn your unhealthy, ill-mannered dog into the dog of your dreams. Both Gubista and Cooke have years of experience and are anxious to share their knowledge with dog lovers everywhere. They think beyond long-established methods and use new techniques to solve old problems with renewed success.
HEALING the Dog Within
Laurin Cooke, DVM, founded Creature Comfort Mobile Laser and Healing in 2016. Her nurturing house call practice sets animals and their owners on the path towards greater well-being and health. She offers consultations in nutrition and gentle holistic medicine, in addition to providing noninvasive laser therapy to arthritic pets.
Dr. Cooke’s therapies build health from within because a healthy animal is less susceptible to injuries, parasites, and chronic diseases. Using a holistic approach to medicine, she seeks to understand and correct the root cause underlying an animal’s illness by examining physical factors along with emotional, environmental, and nutritional imbalances. She encourages high quality foods and exercise that allow dogs to thrive. Along with being a veterinarian, her background includes teaching in zoos and doing research in Africa.
HEELING the Dog Within
The Dog’s Perspective is an alternative dog training approach practiced by Kathryn R. Gubista, PhD (Dr. K) at Lucky Dog Training Asheville. This training philosophy comes from the dog’s point of view. The Dog’s Perspective methodology is a canine version of Positive Discipline, an extremely popular and highly effective approach used by many parents to raise young children with love and guidance.
The Dog’s Perspective thinks outside the constraints of the reward/punishment approach to emphasize dog biology in training, especially natural dog behavior. This approach is both dog-friendly and human-friendly. Training techniques are not only humane, but also “dogmane”. This training approach is successful with dogs of all breeds, ages and temperaments. The combination of being a dog trainer, evolutionary biologist and former zookeeper provides Dr. K with a unique approach to understanding and working with dogs, as well as to teaching others about dogs and dog training.
Talks & Presentations
Gubista and Cooke both look forward to sharing stories and information they have acquired over the years working with all types of animals. They have five fascinating topics of discussion that cover life with dogs from puppyhood through golden years.
If you would like to learn more and schedule a Healing & Heeling talk, please contact either Dr. K or Dr. Cooke (see their contact information below). Their goal is to help as many people possible to heal and heel their dogs so they could ultimately achieve the dog of their dreams.
Kathryn R. Gubista, PhD owns and operates Lucky Dog Training Asheville. She can be reached at TrainingLuckyDogs@gmail.com. Laurin Cooke, DVM, owns and operates Creature Comfort Mobile Laser. She can be reached at CreatureComfortLaser@yahoo.com.
Caption: Kathryn Gubista, PhD on left, Laurin Cooke, DVM right, lucky dogs in center.