Ruth Hegarty owns Creature Good Dog Training where she combines life coaching and dog training to transform dog and human behavior. Ruth’s extensive background and training in teaching, life coaching and dog training, and commitment to rewards based practices supports clients to create harmonious relationships with their dogs and transform conflict causing behaviors into harmony. She is a strong advocate for adult dog adoption and passionate about fostering understanding and compassion between dogs and people. Ruth has an MS in education and is certified in dog training, life coaching, dog bite safety education and separation anxiety training. She is consistently listed as a top trainer. Ruth began her dog training journey in 2010 after adopting her first dog, Jake, whose behavior was frightening. Jake was a totally unsocialized feral dog with a large number of behavior issues. Ruth took him to a few different trainers who told her she needed to be “more dominant” with him, use an e-collar to control him, become the “alpha,” etc. Not knowing any better at the time, she tried all these things only to discover these practices actually made Jake’s problem behaviors worse! She also felt like a terrible person putting him through this process.

Fortunately, Ruth continued her dog behavior research and finally found positive training. She immediately switched how she worked with Jake and his behavior and their relationship got so much better. Ruth also finally was able to feel good about how she was training Jake. Why did positive training take so long to find? It was shocking more people didn't know about positive training and that Ruth might never have found it herself if she hadn't been so desperate. Ruth kept studying positive training methods, took some classes and then applied to VSA’s full dog training program knowing it would help her help Jake. She also thought it might be a fun side hustle. Fast forward to today, Creature Good Dog Training has grown into a full time occupation and Ruth has been able to help hundreds of dogs and their people learn training methods that are based on science, feel good to implement and get amazing results.  Teaching people that dogs can learn while having fun and without pain and intimidation is a great way to spend your days. Jake left this world at the end of 2022 after a long illness although his love and legacy live on. Ruth currently lives in Cambridge, MA with her dog Shadow Dawn, who she adopted in 2023.