Fearful and Feral Dog Workshop

Nose-Centric Dog Training and Rehabilitation

The Nose-Centric Dog Training and Rehabilitation™ system optimizes a dog’s natural behaviors, especially sniffing, to promote healing, recovery from fear, improve behavior, and reduce reactivity. It is a system that can be integrated into other training methodologies to improve results. This method brings the dog’s sense of smell from overlooked to the forefront of training and rehabilitation.

After 16 years of watching, studying, rehabilitating, and training dogs, Julie has learned how using a dog’s sense of smell can improve confidence, attentiveness on handler, and positive behavior while reducing reactivity. We can also form deeper, trusting connections with our dogs by speaking their language and trust building techniques.

Fearful and feral dogs—having survived without human support—serve as powerful teachers, acting as magnifying glasses for our skills, awareness, and emotional regulation. Their responses reveal, with clarity and honesty, what truly builds trust, safety, and connection.

How can utilizing a dog’s exceptional sense of smell help us train and address behavioral issues?

By tapping into a dog’s amazing sense of smell, we can address behavior concerns at their root, rather than merely treating symptoms. Utilizing effective relationship-building methods, tools, and training techniques, alongside Nose-Centric methods, allows for a holistic approach to behavior improvement.

The insights gained in this workshop extend beyond extreme cases and can be directly applied to shelter dogs, rescue dogs, and companion dogs.

What You’ll Learn

• Building trust with fearful and feral dogs
• Reading and responding to canine and human body language
• Effective leash handling with high-stress dogs
• Creating predictability and emotional safety
• Facilitating confident, brave behavior fast instead of enabling fear
• How to rehab fearful and feral dogs effectively in a short amount of time
• Understanding how the human mindset, energy, and expectations affect outcomes
• How to apply Nose-Centric techniques to all dog training scenarios to improve training results.

Participants will learn how to connect with dogs on a deeper level by becoming what dogs need to feel safe, not by “fixing” behavior. A powerful side effect of this work is increased self-awareness—learning to manage your own emotions, presence, and reactions in challenging situations.

Using feral dogs as our teachers to improve our knowledge of dogs and ourselves, this two-day fearful and feral dog rehabilitation workshop gets to the essence and depth of the human-dog relationship with an animal that has developed street smarts and survival techniques without human influence. The lessons feral and fearful dogs teach can be applied to help ALL dogs.

Why Learn from Julie Hart?

Julie has successfully and completely rehabbed fearful and feral dogs for 16 years, achieving a deep connection and trusting relationship with them in a short amount of time. Living in New Mexico with a large number of free-roaming feral dogs, neglect and abuse cases, has provided Julie with unlimited opportunities to hone her skills. Julie’s experience comes from hundreds of foster dogs, involvement in dog rescue, shelter volunteering, and her own training business, Hart to Heart Canine Training. After seeing the shortcomings of common dog training methodologies with fearful and feral dogs, Julie developed a trust-building system that raises the bar on fearful dog rehab. Her best guides to the success of her Nose-Centric Dog Training and Rehabilitation™ system are the dogs who go from shut-down, terrified, distant, and resistant to happy, brave, integrated dog.