Course Author and Head Tutor Shannon McKay authored the course. She holds an MSc (Zoology) and a cum laude BSc Honours (Zoology) degree both from the University of the Witwatersrand. Shannon is also an internatitonally certified behaviour consultant (canine) with the CCPDT (USA), a senior accredited animal behaviour consultant (canine: 1998) with the Animal Behaviour Consultants of SA©™ and has a certificate in Companion Animal Behaviour from the University of Pretoria. She has spoken at numerous seminars and authored multiple articles appearing in worldwide publications. She has also contributed to veterinary textbooks and is a guest blogger on Ian Dunbar’s website, Dog Star Daily. Shannon established the McKaynine Training Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1999 and due to the rapid growth of the centre Shannon was motivated to offer instructor courses, which she started in 2001 under the Canine Culture banner. While these courses were initially intended purely to develop instructors for McKaynine, the courses gained credibility very quickly and soon other training schools were sending their instructors on this course. Since then McKaynine has grown to multiple branches catering to hundreds of dogs and handlers per week. The Learn Canine courses combine nearly 30 years of involvement in the dog training field with the latest academic research, allowing Shannon to take what we are learning from science and put this knowledge into daily practical use. Shannon has trained numerous animals for television and print commercials and also trained the first dogs in South Africa to be used as a wildlife scat detection dogs (featured on National Geographic, Animal Planet, BBC Channel 5 and Bush Radar). Shannon pioneered a new canine-scenting application for use in scent research and also frequently consults as a canine expert in litigation matters. She also breeds and campaigns harlequin Great Danes and held the top spot in this breed on multiple occasions. Shannon has handled many types of dogs in the breed ring and has also competed occasionally in the working disciplines, mainly agility and dog jumping, gaining qualifications in these disciplines. Shannon's vision for Learn Canine is twofold: • to provide high quality, useful information to enable aspirant professionals to provide exceptional dog training classes to the public • give owners, who want to increase their knowledge of their dog, the insight of a trainer's experience.