Outdoor Field Trips

Way of Life would want to know about your dog’s health and mobility issues ahead of a field trip to determine if they can participate. For clients with mobility concerns, we can recommend which field trips might be best suited to your needs. The majority of them are very walkable, with occasional challenges in the terrain. If endurance is an issue, you always have the option of turning back sooner than the 3-hour duration. We have clients of all ages and differing levels of fitness who enjoy these outdoor experiences.

To participate in our field trips, you first need to be a student of Way of Life Dog Training. To get to the bottom of your dog’s environmental fear, we need to look at his current way of life and relationship and what could be contributing to his behavior. So to start, we’d require a 2-hour in-person private session with you and your dog to get a better idea of his fear and how you manage it. From there, you would begin to apply the Way of Life Method by joining our membership site, the Way of Life Method Academy, and attending our group classes. Once you advance with the Method, your dog will have the foundations necessary to cope with and build confidence on a field trip.

Things are expensive these days, and most of us just want to say “No!” to any additional spending. With everything costing so much, you might think you should just go it alone because you can’t afford the investment in something like a field trip. But it is, in fact, an investment and not a loss – an investment in your knowledge, your dog and family, and everyone’s long-term happiness and well-being. Going on a group excursion with your dog is not only fun but challenging. It is an opportunity to put learning and training into practice in an outdoor setting that is full of distractions, including dealing with the proximity of the other dogs in the group. We have countless examples of clients whose lives have been healed as a result of investing in field trips and other Way of Life Method training events.

Yes, we keep a close eye on the forecast a few days before our scheduled field trips and postpone them or change the venue if the weather looks bad for both driving and walking.

It depends on the dog and the environment. Dogs who participate in our field trips are already “known” to the instructor because they have attended our group classes. So based on that knowledge, there might be opportunities for some handlers to drop the leash and let their dogs have more autonomy. We’d allow this in environments that are not near busy roadways or populated with a lot of other people and dogs. Some of our field trips, or parts of them, take place indoors (for example, riding the subway or visiting dog-friendly buildings) so in these cases, our dogs would be safely on leash.