Meet Claire Cario, School For The Dogs’ Private Training Manager. Annie interviews Claire about her journey into the world of dog training, which began with a childhood love of nature shows and eventually led to an array of interesting jobs working with dogs, from training dogs to herd geese in Prospect Park, to working with therapy dog teams at The Good Dog Foundation to evaluating dogs in New York City’s public shelter system and beyond. Claire also talks about the rewards, and occasional challenges, of living in New York with her deaf and partially-blind rescue dog, Otis. 

Book a session with Claire: schoolforthedogs.com/claire

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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

All right. So I am here with Claire Cario, who I am honored to call an employee. Claire, why don’t you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about what you do at School for the Dogs, and then we can move back in time from there.

Claire:

Sure. So I have been with School for the Dogs for the past year, and it’s been quite an interesting year for everyone. And I came on board as a private trainer manager and also as one of the behavior therapy consultant trainers as well. Annie and Kate, both of you guys have been colleagues of mine for years.  We’ve walked in the same kind of pathway for over a decade. And it just really was a great opportunity and I was excited to come on board.

Annie:

Well, yeah, I mean, when we hired you, I felt like we have arrived. Like if we have Claire Cario working for us, we’re doing something right. And well I want to talk actually about the first time you and I met, which was like 10 years ago, but I’m interested in, in sort of knowing how you got into dog training to begin with. Cause you know what, I actually don’t really know.

Claire:

Yeah. Neither do I, Annie. [laughs]

Annie:

You’re like who am I? What am I doing?

Claire:

Who am I, well, you figure that out after the fact, I think, generally.  Yeah, my story is interesting. I used to work in the film industry as a camera assistant for years. So I was a union camera assistant.

Annie:

Is that like a, what does a camera assistant do? Is that different than a best boy? And also, I don’t know what a best boy is.

Claire:

I actually was a best girl on a few jobs as well. That’s working in the electric department, specifically working with anything that’s electrical. But the camera assistant is, I was a first AC primarily.  Worked my way up pretty quickly, and at the age of 23, I was walked into the union.

Basically, like it’s so arbitrary, that job, and the skill set is so weird. But basically I kept things in focus.  That was like my primary goal. And you know, I’m not going to get into, that’s a whole nother podcast about what that means.  But that’s important. Like obviously actors need to be in focus.

Annie:

Did you work on any films that we may have seen, I may have seen?

Claire:

Yeah, I worked in a lot of independent film back in the day when it was still independent. I think probably the most well-known films that I worked on were Boys Don’t Cry and The Believer, that launched Ryan Gosling’s film career.  And Wendigo.

Annie:

Boys Don’t Cry. I remember that one. That was a big deal.

Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast

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