Glen Ellyn's Woof Beach Cove teaches dogs, owners new tricks

GLEN ELLYN – Eric Wilson wants to help dog owners and their pets better communicate with each other.

In May, Wilson, a certified canine behaviorist, opened Woof Beach Cove at 462 N. Park Blvd., Suite 100, in downtown Glen Ellyn. The store provides dog training and grooming.

He owns Woof Beach with his wife, Christina, who is a certified dog groomer.

This is the Elburn couple's fourth location. Other Woof Beach stores are in Batavia, Geneva and South Elgin. Eric Wilson himself has area roots, having grown up in Maple Park.

Wilson said the new location is perfectly located. This is the couple's first store in DuPage County. The three other stores are in Kane County.

"You have a lot of people walking their dogs around," he said. "We're sitting in the middle of where people need us the most... You've got the [Illinois] Prairie Path right here. It's just a really active community out here, and there's a lot of dogs."

Woof Beach has found it is best to first separate the dog from its owner when beginning a training course.

"We have it where the dog goes through training, and then the owner goes through training," Wilson said. "When somebody walks in the door and they are looking for our services for training, neither one of them know anything about what they want. The dog doesn't know how to communicate with the owner properly and is jumping all over him for attention. Maybe they don't know how to sit or heel or any of that stuff. The owner doesn't know how to reinforce that or how to get it out of the dog. Dogs learn and achieve success based on high repetition volume."

He said this type of training allows the dogs to learn what they are supposed to do prior to the owner entering the picture.

"By the time we bring the owner in, the dog already knows what he's doing," Wilson said. "So now you're not trying to fight this dog that has no idea of what you're trying to teach... Our job is to try to make sure that the family is looked at as a leader so that the dog wants to follow them."

The dogs also learn from each other through observation, he said.

"It's a very pack-oriented style of training," Wilson said. "It helps to speed up the repetition volume we need in order for a dog to sustain learning the commands."

And it will take repetition to rid a dog of a bad behavior, such as jumping on people, he said, noting jumping is a natural behavior dogs do with each other all the time.

"But then they do it with us, and everybody's upset with that," Wilson said. "You have to teach them, 'Hey, listen, I know this is something that you like to do, but in this environment with a human, you need to sit instead.' They are not doing it out of spite. Dogs are not spiteful creatures. They're just going with what nature's told them to do. The training is helping condition them and to teach them the alternatives to those behaviors."

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Know more

Information about Woof Beach Cove is available by calling 630-315-0600 or visiting woofbeachcove.com.