“There’s this block of information, and I’m just trying to get the secret out,” he says. He launched a YouTube channel almost immediately with a videographer friend with whom he still works, and even today, at the helm of a runaway smash and a burgeoning business, he still offers free lessons to followers twice a week via his Instagram. Helping others with their dogs was always a part of the plan, even before his Netflix show. However, for the lion’s share of animals, “It can be fixed,” he says, “but it takes the person to adjust to that situation - the dog’s not going to do it on its own.” Some dogs, admittedly, have problems that even the best trainer cannot fix, and his voice grows sad remembering his pit bull Sinbad, which had to be put down with terminal aggression issues. Since 2010, Leverette has been training his and others’ dogs full time, and over that decade he’s seen a wide range of behavioral issues. “A lot of this is what I learned through the high levels of protection training and those high-caliber dogs,” he says. In the same way athletic performance trickles down from the elite to the everyman, so too did Leverette see long-term results on friends’ rescue mutts after honing them on some of the smartest dogs in the world. That’s the common denominator dog people have.”īut the biggest lessons came from the animals themselves. “They start with a passion for dogs and then it turns into more. He learned these lessons through individual research and several well-timed mentors, the latter of whom he credits for his development. All of these, evenly applied, create the separation necessary for a well-behaved canine and, paradoxically, strengthen the bond between alpha and beta. Pack dominance, boundaries, discipline, consistency. “We have to understand it is a predatory animal,” he says. He was a natural, but not in the way we think of a horse whisperer, nuzzling up on dogs. “I fell in love with the process of that.” “As I was incorporating them, I was learning how to train them,” he says. German shepherds, brought in as a means of security for grow sites, were smart and efficient, but they had to be worked as hard as the crop to maintain their efficacy. While he’d grown up with dogs, including his mother’s penchant for cocker spaniels, it was in his cannabis career where he found a new passion for animals. The son of a single mother, he took time to find his footing, first with avionics after high school and then in car customization before landing in the medical cannabis industry in the early 2000s. Leverette, 37, was born in New York, but from the age of 2 he grew up in Oakland, California, where he still lives. “Some people like to jump out of airplanes? That dog coming at you 35 miles per hour, and you have to catch him safe and fluid, it’s the fun part of everything we’re doing, the adrenaline rush of the work.” “It’s like catching a football - a big football,” he tells The Manual. And then, from camera left, an airborne dog latches onto the forearm - a fake forearm, it turns out - in a classic Hollywood jump scare. “Pop!” he says midsentence, seemingly unprompted, before resuming his talk. In his Bay Area lilt, he emphasizes the need to work with one’s dog every day. Jas Leverette, owner of Cali K9 and star of the Netflix show Canine Intervention, is framed in a tight mid-shot, addressing the camera with his forearm parallel to the ground.
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