Local Trainer Leads the Pack

Sally Zinkhan’s Positively Pals dog training sessions are not just lessons in “sit,” “roll over” and “fetch.” What Zinkhan offers goes beyond obedience and tricks.

Instead, Zinkhan’s training sessions provide both dog and owner with an opportunity to bond, get exercise, and have fun.

“It’s not boring like obedience classes can be,” Zinkhan said. “Usually the hour flies by and the dogs are very tired afterward. It’s great exercise for both the people and the dogs.”

After training dogs as a hobby for 15 years, Zinkhan decided to turn her passion for pups into a profession.  And in two and a half years, she has managed to turn her business into a success, mostly with the help of community word of mouth.

Since she began, Zinkhan has developed a loyal following of 78 clients and their dogs.

A member of the Association of Pet Dog Trainers, Zinkhan offers a seemingly endless number of services for her clients and their pups. She promises to get new puppies started on a path to good behavior, to get old dogs to break bad habits, and everything in between.

In addition to obedience training, Zinkhan trains dogs in flyball, herding and disc dog, and her agility classes are second to none. The classes take place at Branchwater Farms and Border Collies in nearby Reisterstown.

During the agility classes, Zinkhan trains the dogs to complete courses using obstacles like teeter totters, tires and tunnels. Along with the owners, Zinkhan gets the dogs to the point at which they can do sequences of two to five of the obstacles without a leash.

But it’s not all about preparing a dog to compete in a show. In fact, Zinkhan estimates that only 10 percent of her clients are interested in doing so. And the rest?

“It’s more about getting together once a week with your friends or people who have become your friends in the class and building that camaraderie, enjoying your friends and your dogs together,” Zinkhan said. “And it’s really good. It’s turned into a little bit of a social foray, if you will, on several days of the week’s classes.”

And Zinkhan’s pet services don’t stop at training. She welcomes the opportunity to dog sit in her home in Phoenix. While owners are gone, they can be sure that their dogs are being well taken care of in a non-kennel environment. Additionally, they might come back from vacation to find an even better-behaved, newly trained dog.

But for Zinkhan, it always comes down to that one most important thing.

“The bond that increases,” Zinkhan said. “They may have already had a bond when they started, but it definitely gets stronger after being in a class like this because so many people have told me after they started that their dogs act so much differently at home now.”