Donna Skinsley - Canine, Equine & Feline Training and Behaviour Consultant

I highly recommend Donna for all kinds of behavioural help. I initially asked for help with backing my rescue cob using kind positive methods. She was very flexible in accommodating what we needed due to his nervousness around people. She has then gone on to support me with other ponies I have, including walking out with me whilst riding and helping with loading.There isn't a problem too big or too small that Donna can't help with and she has given me a huge amount of emotional support when things have been tricky for me, restoring my confidence and giving my little herd a wonderful quality of life x

We have been working with Donna for the past 18 months. We started with 1-2-1 sessions on a weekly basis or every other week. Each session would focus on a command/behaviour with different exercises/scenarios to practice. Donna also provided us with very useful information and ongoing support, including reports after each session. After the 121 training, we started joining group walks/training, which were extremely helpful to continue the practice and socialising with other dogs, and very enjoyable.Donna is very professional and has so much experience and knowledge. She builds a fantastic rapport with all her clients, and she really cares about all the dogs. We have and will continue to recommend her to anyone, whatever the needs.

Meeting Donna has been a brilliant experience for us. We adopted a very anxious rescue dog in 2020 and despite our best efforts, we were struggling to make progress. With Donna’s help, we’ve made some fundamental changes that we wouldn’t have known to try and they’ve really made a difference to the whole household, not just our rescue pup! I really would recommend going down the route of working with a qualified professional if you need help with behavioural issues.

Donna was amazing our dog was very nervous and had quite bad separation anxiety. We were recommended to seek help as our dog had to be sedated to visit the vet. She helped work through his issues both at home and on walks. She is very patient with the humans as well as the dogs. She also provided detailed notes to refer to.

We cannot recommend Donna enough. We were at a bit of a loss without our animals as they seemed unhappy, as were we! We reached out to Donna after multiple sessions with other trainers. We were struggling with multiple issues, however our key concern was our young Romanian rescue dog learning basic commands and his recent behaviour (anxious) barking at other dogs and the relationship between our house cat and rescue dog cohabiting together. After one session, we could immediately see the benefit of Donna’s experience having put it into practise, it definitely made a difference working with a ABTC registered CAB. She is knowledgable, calm and never judged us! Our dog has come a long way with just a few sessions with Donna and our cat is happier as a result. It’s hard to find a trainer to suit as there’s a lot of information out there, but we didn’t want to use slip leads etc so Donna was the right choice for us. I think our dog was able to learn without us fearing for his safety with the wrong lead and scare him further. We have more sessions with Donna in the new year to review his progress and continue on building his confidence around other dogs. Donna cares and we feel so much better once we’ve had a session with her. We really valued the notes alongside the training so that we could refer back to them when we had some time to recap the training we needed to practise. We would recommend Donna to anyone. She is highly skilled with animals and training - and very enjoyable to work with!

We started working with Donna after our 16 month old mixed breed started behaving protectively of family members. Donna has given us the confidence and strategies to deal with this. Her knowledge and experience is second to none. I can recommend her to anyone, not matter what the situation.

Jess and i really enjoyed working with Donna Jess has been suffering from anxiety and not wanting to be left alone. With all the advice and 1t1 training jess has settled down and can now cope with being left for short periods. Donna was supportive and encouraging and her reward based training worked really well i would not hesitate in recommending Donna.

Hank was a nervous dog and we had problems with his behaviour, partly due to his fears and lack of confidence. Training with Donna, she helped us to understand Hank better and his needs. We dealt with his discipline, confidence and communication. Donna trained us, as well as him, to read his behaviour and understand dogs and how they interact. We are delighted with the techniques that she taught us and we still use them today. Furthermore, Donna introduced us into canine cross, which helped Hank to be more social with dogs and less reactive. We had a tearaway dog and with Donna’s help, we now a happy and well behaved boy! Her methods are quick and easy to learn and we saw the effect very quickly. We had bad experiences with other unqualified behaviourists (Will Kay and Marcelle) who made things worse, but we would throughly recommend Donna and her methods.

Soon after adopting our rescue dog Frankie it became clear that we needed professional help with his anxiety and reactivity. Our vet stressed the importance of finding an ABTC accredited behaviourist, which is how we met Donna.Donna is a fantastic behaviourist with a wealth of experience & expertise - we have learnt so many valuable skills from our 1-2-1 sessions together.Frankie has made such wonderful progress since working with Donna -she has given us the tools and education to help Frankie thrive and as a result he is a much happier and more self assured dog who has become the best family dog we could have ever hoped for!We are extremely grateful to have met and worked with Donna and would highly recommend her.Thanks again Donna for all of your help over the last 18 months =)

Donna was recommended to us by a friend who is a vet. We contacted Donna for advice on recall and excitement with visitors for our cockapoo. Donna started by gaining thorough background information about our dog before we set to work on our sessions. Donna has a wealth of knowledge and really explained why we were seeing certain behaviours and how to work on particular training exercises which in turn help in many different situations. We had a number of sessions with Donna all covering different techniques to help our dog improve. Our dog took to the training really well and has come on so much, we continue to use Donna’s training techniques to help him in many different situations.