A Day in the Life of a Canine Actor
Animal trainer Elaine Reiter gives us a behind-the-scenes peek at the world of canine actors
Welcome back, readers, to the blog dedicated to celebrating and exploring the professional and private lives of working dogs of all disciplines!
Today I’ll be sharing a portion of my conversation with Elaine Reiter of Wildside Unlimited. Elaine is an animal trainer and her business services include animal training, nutritional consulting, pet sitting and animal actor agency representation, which is the main topic of our discussion today. Elaine trains animal actors and gives us a peek into the world of canine acting, and what it’s like on the job for this particular subset of the working dog.
As I mentioned, this article only shares part of what Elaine had to say on the subject. You can hear the rest of it on episode 3 of The Hero Beside Me Podcast.
Elaine, welcome to the show! Tell us a little bit about you and your work with animals.
My name is Elaine Reiter. I’m the owner and operator of a company called Wildside Unlimited out of San Diego, California. We’re a company that’s not like your typical animal training company. We started in 1994 as a group of animal trainers that did marine mammal shows throughout south Florida. We worked with killer whales, sea lions, you name it, we worked with big mammals. And we noticed that in the dog training industry that they were using shock collars, choke collars, all these very aggressive collars on dogs, and methods. And we asked the question, if we can work with killer whales without any of these devices, then why can’t people train man’s best friend in a kinder manner? So, that day, actually, Wildside was created, and a group of professional trainers went out into the domestic animal industry and we started sharing our knowledge.
Since then, we’ve grown to then taking these dogs that we trained or have joined our academy — a lot of them are from shelters, a lot of them have been homeless and we work with rescues also — but then we added another aspect of our company, where we started working with the film industry. And so, if our clients do their homework and really take care of their dogs, then those dogs might end up on film sets and have their fifteen minutes of fame, if not more.
How did your career working with animals begin?
When I started it was back in the late ‘80’s. Growing up, I had always wanted to work with Flipper. I watched Flipper growing up. People don’t even know what it is anymore, but my generation does, and I wanted to be Flipper’s friend. I lived in Queens Village/Jamaica, Queens, New York, so my possibility of ever even seeing a dolphin was probably one percent. As fate would have it, when I graduated high school I ended up in south Florida with my dad, and we lived very close to the Miami Seaquarium. Once that happened and I turned 18, I went and applied every three months. I actually think that they eventually hired me out of pity, because they said no so many times, but then eventually, they did take me. And that was the beginning of a beautiful career. I just never left. I got to work with my mentors that I had worked with Marlin Perkins on Mutual of Omaha’s [Wild Kingdom], which, growing up was a big animal show for me. I got to meet Bud and Sandy from Flipper. I got to work with these amazing women that had broke[n] into the industry in the film world when that wasn’t even a goal for anybody. They were working marine mammals for TV and for movies and doing these famous shows. All my training was on the job back then. And then, eventually, when I left there I was the Assistant Director of Training for the park. I had managed to creep my way into working with every animal in the park, do every show, work with every person, and then eventually started teaching the trainers the wisdom that had been passed down to me.
What is your favorite animal to work with?
My favorite animal is actually dogs. I love marine mammals, and I love dolphins, like everybody else does, but I think that the dogs need us. I find that the most beneficial. I think the dogs are the most misunderstood. I believe that if somebody’s working with a marine mammal and they’re not successful, they think it’s funny, they think the animal’s being funny or difficult and they think that it’s humorous and a sign of intelligence. When a dog doesn’t succeed with its owner — I’m not going to call it not listening. I think there’s a disconnect. The dog doesn’t understand, or the owner’s not a trainer so they don’t know how to work with their own dog. The dog [is considered] stubborn or untrainable, and then there’s all these labels on that animal that make it very hard for that person to ever succeed [at] working with that animal if that’s what they truly believe about him.
What brought you to the west coast?
I came to California because there was an opening with the U.S. Navy. I came out here to join, as a contractor, the navy’s U.S. Marine Mammal program and I’ve been working with that since I moved here in 2001. But the whole time that I’ve been working the navy I have had Wildside, and that’s really my passion and where I feel like I contribute the most. So, when people call for animals on the set, I have a partnership with other trainers throughout Southern California, and I’m able to get multiple species. I’ll go and subcontract some jobs out. Then if a producer or director or whomever they have doing their talent, they don’t need to go to this company to get the dogs and this company to get the primates. They can go to one place, and we’ll be able to be their animal coordinators and bring real pros out on the set that we know are well-behaved and well-trained, instead of somebody who doesn’t have experience with that trying to find talent.
What specific characteristics does a canine actor need to have in order to be successful?
The behaviors aren’t really the main part, because if you have a dog that works well around distractions — like where we’re sitting today, we have these planes flying over — a lot of dogs can’t do that. They will lose it. So, when we do our dog classes, when we’re in Liberty Station, we have planes flying over and it’s right where they’re landing, so you can even see the wheels coming out and you’ve got this line of puppies that are just sitting there. They don’t even care. And that’s a big deal, because you go on the sets, we might be doing thunder machines. We might be making it rain. The camera might be right in their face. There’s going to be cameras on wheels rolling around. They have to be secure and not feel like they’re in any threat at all. They have to feel good in their own skin. Once they have that, then you can put on all the behaviors. But you can have a dog that knows 30 behaviors but they get scared if the lights flash on and off. Those behaviors are of no use to us in the industry. So, we just need an animal that’s really confident and really secure.
How does the whole process work?
The way that it works is, we’ll get a call from somebody that’s putting together a film or a commercial or a photoshoot. And generally, they’ll have an idea of what they’re looking for, and they’ll say, “We would like a very large, slobbery dog that can shake.” And that will limit us a little bit because not all of our dogs can shake, not all of our large dogs slobber. From that we say, “Okay, thank you. We’ll get back to you in about 48 hours.” And then we’ll start our search. We’ll go through all of our talent that we have and we don’t just give them exactly what they were looking for. We will give them exactly what they were looking for but we’ll also tack on some other animals that we think are exceptionally photogenic, and we feel can fit the part for them. Things that they might not even have thought of — like we might throw a Dalmation in there that has a big thing of drool coming down, whereas they might be thinking Neopolitan Mastiff. We might throw something that we just think is special into it. We do that a lot with all the requests that we get. We’ll send probably 3 or 4 that are exact and another 3 or 4 that are interesting. And I would say nine times out of ten they actually pick interesting over what they asked for.
Where do you find your canine actors? Do you usually go to the shelters?
We go to the shelters if we’re looking for very young dogs, like puppies. We make sure that they go through the vet’s and they get vetted and that they’re safe and that they’re healthy and then we’ll bring them onto set if they want a mix. As much as we can, we will go into the shelter. But most of our dogs are alumni from our training academy, or they’re people who have heard of us and they send us a picture of their dog and they send us a list of behaviors. And then we go out and evaluate them, and we find out if they’re a good fit. Are they really secure? Are they really workable? The owners also have to be able to release the dogs to us to bring out on the set, and that’s not always what they’re envisioning when they call us. We don’t have stage parents on the set. A lot of times when the owners come, the dogs get distracted anyway. They just keep looking at their owner instead of the trainer. And if the trainer asks them to do something and they don’t do it, the mom (owner) will call from the curtain side, “You know what to do!” So, we don’t bring the moms out on the set, or the stage dads, or the stage kids. And sometimes people are like, “Well, I’m not up for that then.” And we totally get it, we’re totally good with that. Because it is a job. The dog is going to work that day. When they come home, they’re going to be tired. And not because they were like, running on a treadmill, but it’s mental and there’s lotf of sights and lots of smells. They’ll probably work for about 45 minutes out of all the time they’re there — it’s like a “hurry up and wait,” you’re just sitting on the side until it’s your turn. But they’re tired when they get home.
What is your favorite part of the job?
I think the best part of it is when you get to make a difference. When you’re on the set with this dog that was brought to you by their owner because they said to you, “We either train so-and-so, or I’m going to have to rehome them because I can’t take it anymore.” And then they graduate class…then you hire them to go on set because the owner did that well of a job –that to me is success. Not just because we got a job with a dog, but that dog’s life was saved. He didn’t go to a shelter, and now he’s on a set. How amazing is that?
When we think of the term “working dog,” we often think of police, military, or service dogs first. How do you think a canine actor’s job compares to these other canine professions?
I always say that the canine actors have the hardest job of all, out of the canine jobs, because when the nose dogs go to work, they know they’re going to be sniffing. They know their jobs. And when we go on set, things change so much. What they do on set today is not what they’re going to do on set tomorrow. They might even learn to do something on set because everybody changed their mind, and they didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, but it is a big deal to the dog. I think that for the dogs, it’s work, but it’s almost like making puzzles all day. It’s very mental, it’s not very laborious. I think it’s fulfilling for them. They get a lot of attention and they get a lot of love.
Readers, Elaine had a lot more to tell us about canine actors and dogs in general. Make sure you tune into the remainder of the conversation on the podcast!
