Meet the Owner
Hi! I’m Ani. I am the owner and head trainer of Wanderlust K9. I have always had a passion for animals and always intended to devote my life to them in some way. I’ve volunteered countless hours at shelters handling all types of dogs and interned and worked under multiple trainers to gain knowledge and skills. I am always looking for opportunities for continued education and believe we should never stop learning. I have fostered several dogs and taken on, trained, and rehomed dogs with behavioral problems surrendered to me. I have trained dogs professionally for the last 5 years and have worked with dogs of all sizes with a huge variety of behavioral issues. I also have a passion for raising and training psychiatric and medical response service dogs. I currently have 3 dogs — a 5-year-old golden retriever, Maya, and two 2-year-old malinois, Nyx and Aero.
Maya
Maya is the reason I am a dog trainer. She’s the reason I believe so strongly in balanced training methods. She is an extremely strong-willed and independent dog. She’s not a dog that naturally cares about her handler and could not care less about a verbal correction. She was a genetic disaster of a puppy. I tried all the positive reinforcement approaches to get her to stop biting for 8 months; putting your hand in a fist, redirecting with a toy, ignoring her. The fist did nothing to dissuade her, she cared about biting me more than the toy, and simply ignoring her just made her bite harder and twist to get a reaction. I was completely stumped and so were the multiple positive reinforcement trainers I had found to try and help me. Balanced training truly fixed our relationship and that is why I am such a strong advocate for it. Now she’s the perfect example dog for my business and helps me daily to help build confidence in fearful dogs and neutrality in reactive dogs.
Nyx
I got Nyx as my sport dog for PSA which is a bitesport. She is an amazing dog. She’s naturally handler-oriented, food-motivated, toy motivated, and can be neutral or social with both people and other dogs. She can truly do it all. She has very flashy obedience and is so fun to learn with. She is typically the second dog I bring out for my clients to work their dogs around.
Aero
Aero was not a planned dog. He is actually Nyx’s littermate but I did not get him until he was almost a year old. His first owner attempted to train him as a service dog but he just wasn’t meant for that job so she decided to rehome him. At the time, his breeder was unable to take him back due to major life changes and I offered to take him on in her stead. The original plan was to train him up for around 6 months and then sell him but that didn’t exactly happen because I was having so much fun learning with him and working through his plethora of issues. Aero is the epitome of a malinois. He has high arousal, high toy drive, high possession, high hunt drive, high energy, etc. He has high everything except a high food drive. He is a lot of dog and has taught me a ton. While he is still available, he would take a very specific owner so he’ll stick around until then.
Contact us
Interested in working together? Fill out some info and we will be in touch shortly. We can’t wait to hear from you!