Trish McMillan is Vice President, Behavior & Training for Instinct Dog Behavior & Training. She oversees onboarding training and continuing education programs for Instinct trainers and behavior consultants. She works collaboratively with Instinct’s Veterinary Behavior team to review and develop internal policies and guidelines as well as educational content for the Instinct Online School, and she sits on the Instinct Behavior Leadership Panel.
Trish is a certified professional dog trainer and certified dog behavior consultant who holds a Master’s degree in Animal Behavior from the University of Exeter in England. She is an internationally recognized speaker, sharing her expertise in behavior modification, defensive handling, and animal welfare to trainers, shelter workers, veterinarians & vet techs, and dog daycares across the country and around the world. She specializes in training and behavior modification work with dogs, cats, and horses.
Trish spent 7 years with the ASPCA, where she gained a wide variety of experience in the field of animal behavior. For three years she was the director of the animal behavior department at the ASPCA’s New York City shelter, helping staff, volunteers, and adopters work with animals and make great matches. Trish has also helped assess and rehabilitate animals from cruelty, hoarding, and dogfighting cases, as well as pets rescued from natural disasters. In addition to writing for the ASPCA’s Virtual Pet Behaviorist and other publications, she helped create and present several very popular webinars on dog and cat behavior and handling for the ASPCA Pro website.
When she is not traveling around educating animal professionals, she lives at her farm, Pibble Hill in Asheville, NC, with a host of very cool animals including her (kinda famous) pit bull Theodore, and sees clients through her consulting business, Loehr Animal Behavior.