Gill Raddings has been a Hollywood stunt dog trainer for 25 years. In that time, she’s learned just about every trick of the trade. Recently, a 60 Second Doc profiled Raddings as she talked about the ins and outs of being one of cinema’s premier stunt dog trainers.
The Premiere Stunt Dog Trainer
Based out of Oxford, England, Raddings is the director of Stunt Dogs and Animals, her own business that provides complete services for film production seeking trained dogs. Not surprisingly, Raddings’ highly-qualified trainers all love their jobs and are among the best in the business. Among their film credits are blockbusters like The Kingsmen, Beauty and the Beast, The Witcher, and many more.
As such, it makes sense that she is the authority to talk about how to train a proper stunt dog. In the video, Raddings talks about how, with proper guidance and training, dogs actually enjoy being in movies. “Dogs really love acting,” she says. “They love all the attention, and, I mean, you get up to 300 people making a fuss of you.”
Positive Reinforcement Gets the Results
Raddings goes on to talk about how she strictly uses positive reinforcement to train her dogs to perform an outstanding variety of tricks. “All my training is based on a positive food reward system, which is one of the reasons the dogs love it so much.”
For all the aspiring stunt dog trainers out there, Raddings says confidence and positivity are key. “They know when you’re nervous,” she says. “If they were dumb we couldn’t train them to do all the things they do.”
Raddings also expresses how lucky she is to work with dogs, the animal she loves the most. “I couldn’t imagine my life any other way,” she says. Surely, her dogs feel just as blessed to live with someone as caring and thoughtful as Raddings.
