Meet the Wiggle Butt Team

Rhea Northcut, BS, CSAT, ABCDT, CPDT-KA, FDM

Rhea is a Certified Professional Dog Trainer (CPDT-KA) and a certified Family Dog Mediator through Kim Brophy’s L.E.G.S Applied Ethology course. She graduated from Animal Behavior College as a Certified Dog Trainer. Additionally, she has earned the Certified Separation Anxiety Trainer designation through extensive coursework with the CSAT Program.

Rhea also has a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Texas Tech University. While at Tech, she started her first volunteer work with shelter dogs at The Haven Animal Care Shelter in Lubbock, Texas and also took a course on Human-Animal Interaction. This is what initially sparked her interest in dog training. She started her Masters in Counseling at the University of North Texas with the goal of doing pet therapy. She quickly realized that it was the dogs’ training she was most interested in and was more than willing to give up her spot in the counseling program to fully commit her education efforts to dog training.

Rhea has been a trainer for over a decade, working in many different environments such as animal shelters, dog boarding, in-home lessons, manners and sport training in facilities, as well as virtual training and consults.

Rhea spends her free time with her husband, daughters, and her dog Lizzie, an Icelandic Sheepdog. Her goals in training are enhancing the lives of canine companions and helping their owners better communicate with them.

"The CSAT credential is widely recognized as the most respected and long-standing in the field of separation anxiety – we’re even mentioned by the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior who state in their newsletter that “CSATs are one of the best resources because they are truly experts in this behavior issue.” "

CPDT-KA stands for Certified Professional Dog Trainer - Knowledge Assessed. Those with this certification have at least 300 hours of dog training experience within the previous three years, obtain a reference from another CPDT-KA trainer or veterinarian, and agree to the certification council's Standards of Practice and Code of Ethics and Least-Intrusive Minimally-Aversive (LIMA) Behavior Intervention Philosophy. They have also passed a 180-question exam that tests them on instruction skills, learning theory, ethology, training equipment and animal husbandry. To maintain certification status, trainers must complete continued education credits or re-take the exam every three years.

The Certified Dog Trainer Program focuses on using positive reinforcement The curriculum for the Dog Obedience Instructor Training Program is broken down into 11 stages that cover topics ranging from basic study of canines to business building tips. The program includes a mentorship and shadowing program to prep the trainer for working in the field.

Certified Fear Free Professional (Veterinary) in Progress. Completing the Fear Free Animal Program allows trainers to work in partnership with veterinary teams to prevent and alleviate fear, anxiety, and stress and improve an animal’s emotional wellbeing during veterinary care and home care. This certification program is designed to give qualified animal trainers the knowledge and tools required to begin implementing Fear Free techniques with their clients’ pets at the veterinary hospital, through in-clinic training classes for puppies and kittens, and in day-to-day training of animals in the home.

Certified FDM: Kim Brophey’s L.E.G.S. Model of Integrated Canine Science, endorsed by leading canine scientists and celebrated by dog pros worldwide, has been called “ the single most important development in the dog behavior industry” and “ the future of dog training”. As an applied ethologist, Kim introduces us to the basic foundational system of orchestral elements that direct the behavior of every single animal on Earth and explains what this means for our modern canine companions.