About

Andrew Ledford
More than thirty-five years at the intersection of two deceptively similar problems: how people change their own behavior, and how they change the behavior of their dogs.

Orange County · Los Angeles · Long Beach · San Gabriel Valley
714-827-4058

How it started

It began when Andrew was around ten years old, his cousin went missing in the Colorado Desert after taking a friend's motorcycle out for a ride. That friend happened to be a dog trainer who owned a kennel in Paramount, CA. After twenty tense hours later, and after helping to manage a rambunctious German Shepherd Dog during the motorcycle recovery, Andrew had made a commitment to a life-defining decision: he would train dogs.

Back then, dog training was not considered a real profession. The few who did it full-time traced their lineage back to early German trainers who had emigrated to the United States, all of them, ultimately, back to Konrad Most, whose research on working dogs remains the foundation of military and law enforcement dog training to this day.

A career built at unexpected intersections

Andrew trained under renowned expert William R. Koehler during high school. At nineteen he was managing a security guard and guard dog company. An interest in Bruce Lee's philosophy led him to Guro Dan Inosanto, one of Lee's students, who introduced him to Len Sana of International Police Dogs. Sana became both friend and mentor, and his influence runs throughout Andrew's approach. A second formative experience came through Alfons Ertel and the American Temperament Test Society, working alongside Sana on police dog evaluations and assisting with ATTS temperament testing shaped his foundational approach in complementary ways.

He has spent decades of exploring, reading, and practicing across fields with no obvious connection to dogs; quality management, strategy, martial arts, and psychology. This is the process of assembling something new from unexpected places. What strategist John Boyd called building a snowmobile.

From that foundation, Andrew went on to train dogs across a wide spectrum: security dogs for Southern California companies, protection dogs for the public, therapy dogs, Psychiatric Service Dogs, and dogs for television and film. He developed and directed the Seal Beach Animal Shelter's first dog training and rehabilitation program, and co-developed pet therapy programs for the Veterans Hospital in the San Fernando Valley, Del Amo Hospital, and Torrance Memorial Hospital. The work within hospitals included training dogs for human post-stroke neuroplasticity research. He has delivered training seminars internationally.

For a number of years Andrew made annual trips to Taiwan, to learn more about the Taiwanese Mountain Dog and where he spent weeks among street, feral, and wild dogs as a pure observer. There was no handling, no intervention, no feeding, and no attempt to shape what he was watching. The discipline was intentional. While watching itself influences behavior the goal was to influence it as little as possible. The more wild dogs required observing from quite a distance, perhaps one to two hundred yards. What interested him was not training but dog behavior in a more natural environment as well as the culture surrounding dogs: how they were regarded, how they moved through human spaces, what the relationship between people and animals revealed about both. Some of what he saw found its way into practical lessons. Observations accumulated over those years shaped how he thinks about behavior, the assumptions trainers make, and what dogs are actually like when left to fend for themselves.

The training philosophy

Andrew's approach falls, as he puts it, "somewhere between science and what people really do." He believes much of a pet dog's behavior is shaped by the human's behavior and that human behavior is rarely as rational as we'd like to think. Changing behavior often means working within what people already believe, while quietly opening new possibilities.

His style is balanced training: the middle way between traditional leash-and-collar methods and positive reinforcement. Because a flexible system with more choices gives any individual a higher chance of success. Every dog's household is different. Every person learns differently. Andrew designs individualized teaching strategies for each person in the household, often two completely different approaches within the same family and tailors the training to the dog's personality as well.

This includes working comfortably with clients navigating physical and cognitive changes that come with age, as well as neurodivergent individuals who benefit from a different pace and structure. These programs are often substantially customized, built around the same core training concepts but delivered differently: more repetition, more patience, and instructions presented in smaller, more deliberately paced steps. The dog training is the same. What changes is how it's taught.

His quest for knowledge is in a constant state of evolution. What he does and teaches in a year, or five years, may be different from what he's doing now. He never stops observing, questioning, and learning.

Influences behind the work

The theoretical framework draws from an unusually broad range of sources. The expected ones are there; European dog training traditions, learning theory, behavior modification, animal psychology, and ethology.

Dog Trainers Who were Influential In his training style

Bob Dawson Dog Trainer	Len Sana International Police Dogs	Bob Smock AKC trainer for C.H.A.O.S. Dog Training Club
Ian Dunbar Sirius Dog Training	William E. Campbell Dog Behaviorist	Captain Haggerty Dog Trainer Author, Actor

But it goes further.
Ideas, theories, and practices from the following sources have influenced and been incorporated into his training system.

B.F. Skinner	Tinbergen	Konrad Lorenz
Edwards Deming	John Boyd	Clausewitz
Sun Tzu	Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching	Claude Shannon
Joseph Campbell	John Stapp	Buddhist meditation
Philosophy of Bruce Lee	Miyamoto Musashi	Tai Chi Chuan/Taijiquan as taught by Harvey Lem

Television

Just the Dawg Gone Facts Original series

Dogs by Andrew Second series

The Dog Adopt Show Current series

Books

Next: Benefits of a Dog Training Plan. This is part of the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle.