VIP K9 offers something to wag about

LE ROY — VIP K9, LLC is closing in on one year of grooming and training dogs at 70-72 Main St.

Owner Cindy Lee is joined by a mix of full-time and part-time employees as the business grooms around 30 dogs a week and trains about 12 weekly. VIP’s first anniversary will be in October.

Lee says holidays are a peak time for people to bring in dogs for training or grooming.

“Training can happen anytime, but our goal is to help a dog be integrated into the family’s life, so they can be well-behaved and go out in the community,” she said. “We can get a dog pretty dialed-in to basic obedience in about six one-hour sessions. It’s a lot of different options and there’s different price points for all of them.”

If people want their dogs to be used to other people and dogs, get used to grooming and being handled, different socialization situations, training is important, Lee said.

“You want your dog to be part of your family. It makes their world bigger. You can go places with them,” she said.

Stacie Dux, dog groomer, said a full grooming session includes full nail trims, bath, brush, blowouts and any haircuts that breed might need or that the owner might want it to have.

“Most people generally just go for the whole, full groom,’ she said. “Sometimes, we do what’s called staged grooming or desensitization grooming, which is for nervous or anxious dogs, or very, very new puppies who are scared of the process. That just breaks our grooming down into shorter sessions over a longer period of time, to get them used to it.”

For the most popular breeds around — doodle breeds — grooming should be done at a minimum of every six to eight weeks.

“That’s fairly standard for all dogs,” she said.

Dux said the length of a grooming session depends on the breed.

“(It’s) anywhere from 45 minutes to three hours per dog,” she said. “I think a lot of people don’t realize that some certain breeds need a lot of at-home maintenance, grooming, brushings in between. If you don’t have time to be able to do that yourself or the desire to do that yourself, that you bring them to somebody who’s going to make sure that they maintain good health and hygiene.”

A lot of it comes down to education, Dux said.

“Some people really don’t realize that their dog needs a lot of brushing, just like your own hair needs brushing and washing,” she said. “If they don’t currently understand that they need to be doing that, then I definitely make sure to give them some advice and they generally do that afterward. I am willing to give anybody advice and tips and demonstrations to show how to properly use tools, etc. It is definitely still important to come to the groomer as well, even if you are doing it at home. We have a lot of different tools and products and things to help ...”

Depending on the dog breed, they need different haircuts, trims in certain places to keep hygienic, she said.

Rae Lombino, a full-time trainer at VIP, said she did horse training for quite a few years and “stumbled” into dog training. She said she had Lee train her own personal dog.

“She offered me a job back in January, but I didn’t start here until around May,” Lombino said. “Dog training is still pretty new to me, but I’ve been around animals my whole life and had different aspects of training before I jumped into it full-force here.”

She now works with a variety of breeds and ages of dogs and dogs with different training needs.

“Some dogs come in that are puppies, that just need some basic obedience. Then, there’s been some that come in that are having more significant struggles that they need help with,” Lombino said. “I think a lot of the time that the thing that’s the trickiest, that most people struggle with, are the higher-energy dogs — the working breeds — all of those dogs that were meant to have a job, not necessarily live a pet lifestyle. Sometimes, it can be a little harder to get their brains organized, in a way and just get them to a point where they are able to work and not really have those anxious tendencies that a lot of these higher-energy dogs can develop.”

The nice thing about training is that it contradicts the saying, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” Lombino says.

“We will take dogs for training of any age,” she said. The length of training depends on the dog and what its needs and the owner’s goals are.

“Most commonly, we do a lot of packages that are six sessions. We say it’s six one-hour sessions, whether that’s over the course of six weeks or somebody wants to do it where they have a couple of lessons per week and they bang out six lessons in three weeks ... We always try to stay flexible for people’s schedules so we can make training accessible for anybody.”

Lombino said there’s never a time in your dog’s life that’s too late for training. Any breed can benefit from training.

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