Slowly strolling through the backyard of his secluded property just outside Ladysmith, Stanley Dupczak is teaching Riley, a two-year old Jack Russell Terrier, one of the . . .
fundamentals of canine obedience – sitting.
With a blue leash rolled up in his left hand, he pulls up on it as he pushes down on the dog’s backside with his right hand. Initially, the canine keeps his hind up, so Dupczak gives him a hard, little tap on the head, until he finally sits. Dupczak follows up giving him a soft pet of appraisal.
“This is how you teach obedience,” he said. “Through good and bad experiences, that’s the only way they learn – within reason.”
Just about a week into a four to six-week training session, Riley will be expected to obey his owner and do every task that is asked of him.
Long removed from a career of formally training dogs spanning more than two decades, Dupczak is committed to getting back in the game.
With plans of starting his own training business in the Pontiac, Dupczak is hoping to provide a service for local folks wanting to properly train their dogs to obey them. He said he plans on doing lessons similar to the obedience lessons provided by the Canadian Kennel Club.
In the early 1970s, after deciding not to follow through with a career in the military, Dupczak was dead set on getting a dog.
At 24 years-old, living in Oshawa Ont., seeking a certain sense of protection and comfort, he sought out a German Shepherd. As big, intimidating creatures with tremendous working ability, it felt like the ideal breed for what he was looking for.
He visited a well-known training facility around 15 miles outside of Oshawa called the Havelburg Dog Academy. Operated by one of the most well reputed German Shepherd trainers in the world, Wolfram H. Klose, Dupczak was definitely intrigued by what he was walking into.
When Dupczak first showed up to the kennel, he approached Klose as he was picking up dog droppings and expressed his interest in purchasing a well-trained German Shepherd.
Klose was already a legend in Dupczak’s eyes, since he had already seen his work at the Oshawa Shopping Centre.
Having defected from Germany during the Second World War, Klose, a former police officer, specialized in training German Shepherds.
In 1974, he won the Dog World Award of Canine Distinction, becoming a Canadian record holder for completing all obedience courses in just over four months. Many of the dogs he has trained have appeared in a variety of television shows and movies.
But before he could pick out the dog he wanted, sign the papers and go home, Klose advised him that he would need to learn how to properly handle and take care of one.
Plus, since one his helpers had just abruptly resigned from the kennel, Klose offered him a job cleaning the facility to help him get acclimated to German Shepherds.
Dupczak accepted the offer with no hesitation and got his first dog in 1974. His name was Oddie Von Schwanotick. While he’s handled too many dogs to remember, there’s always a special place in Dupczak’s heart when it comes to his first dog. Stuck to the hip for over a decade, until Schwanotick died at 14 years of age, Dupczak recalls the intimate connection the two had.
“That was my first dog and he was so in tune to me,” he said. “After a few years, he’d be off doing something and I’d think I better call him and he’d stop in his tracks and look at me, almost just before I was going to yell. I’d just go like that and he’d come running in. The communication was just so fantastic.”
Starting off as a janitor, Dupczak’s duties included cleaning up messes and putting up signs throughout the facility.
His lucky break came around three years later after Klose returned to the kennel, following a month-long trip to Germany.
During that month, Dupczak was tasked with keeping the place tidy while the three trainers on hand had to ensure that their 100-plus dogs got their daily workout.
Instead the crew did a little too much celebrating.
When Klose came back, he found the dogs were agitated, disobedient and weren’t sufficiently trained, which prompted him to terminate his entire training staff. That’s when Dupczak started his career as a canine trainer.
Training at the academy, Dupczak worked with up to 12 dogs simultaneously, all while crossing paths with a wide variety of interesting individuals throughout his tenure, not to mention a number of famous faces like old time movie stars Michael J. Pollard, Ernest Borgnine and Michael Myers.
With experience training members of the military and police officers on how to work with their dogs, Dupczak also specialized in personal protection dogs by teaching them how to track and sniff things.
But most of all, Dupczak believes he worked best with what he calls “problem dogs” – dogs who are notoriously disruptive or disobedient.
“That’s when people realize they need help,” he said.
After working at the academy for over 25 years, Dupczak was forced to call it quits.
Undergoing a number of personal issues at that time, including drug addiction, Dupczak left Oshawa in the late 1990s to find work and recover from his hardships. Soon, he landed a gig as a janitor for a cleaning company and it didn’t take long before his reputation followed.
“There was a county sheriff who had a shepherd and he looked me up to help him with his shepherd,” he said. “Through word of mouth I got a few good feedbacks.”
Still doing what he loved from time to time, Dupczak knew he still had a long road to recovery, which caused him to head to Quyon. After connecting with John Joly from Maison Luskville, Dupczak was invited to stay there until he eventually recovered.
In Quyon, Dupczak was simply known as “the dog walker” and people occasionally reached out to him for private lessons and pointers.
Shortly before his beloved wife Sally Carty passed away from health complications last July, Dupczak recalls her telling him to start training dogs again on a full-time basis. While he didn’t do it at the time because he already had so much on his plate, now he feels it is the right time to fulfill his wife’s wish.
After creating a number of different signs and business cards for the venture, Dupczak plans on naming his enterprise Salstan Dog Training – a combination of his and his wife’s first names.
Living at his wife’s old home just outside Ladysmith, an ideal setting for training dogs, Dupczak is looking for a relatively young person interested in helping him train them. He’s calling on hopeful candidates to register for obedience trials with the Canadian Kennel Club to obtain their training degrees.
As he looks back on his career, Dupczak is very thankful for his experiences at the Havelburg Dog Academy. From learning how to take dog’s temperatures to how to care for a new-born puppy, everything he knows about dogs was learned during his time there, whether as a janitor or a trainer.
“Those people are the dog people of the universe probably,” he said. “[Klose] is 78 and I think and he’s still doing it. It still exists but it’s a cat sanctuary now. There are lions, tigers and cougars. It’s very big, the biggest sanctuary in Canada.”
Having worked with dogs for as long as he can remember, Dupczak can’t imagine spending his time any other way. Despite having worked with more canines than he could ever count, he never gets tired of meeting even more of them.
“I might be dead tomorrow,” he said. “I can’t see myself stop playing with dogs. Even me, I’m learning. Even though I’ve done so many, there’s always some dog that does something so neat that is out of this world and that dog leaves an impression on you.”
