For 27-year-old dog-trainer Indigo Will, a surly bunch of raccoons and a boxer dog named Julie set him down a path that has shaped his life.
He was ten years old, living with his mother, brother, and sister in Norfolk, Virginia, when his mom got a dog for the family. It was Indigo Will’s job to pick up after the new pet, and he did, sort of.
One of his chores was to pick up behind his dog, bag the dog-doo, and dispose it in the trash bin. But he had to deal with aggressive, garbage-loving urban raccoons who kept an eye out for rotting fruit or anything else edible in the dumpster. So Will tossed the poop bags in the dumpster from a distance, and he missed a lot.
“Finally,” he recalls, “the maintenance (crew) found out, and they said, ‘Hey, we have like a bunch of poop bags back here.’ That was my mom’s last straw.”
His mom found a new home for his dog, but Will was troubled over the fact that he lost his pet due to own his irresponsibility.
When he got to junior high he wanted another dog, but his single mother was raising three children in a crowded apartment. “My mom gave my sister a bedroom, and she gave me a bedroom, and mom was literally staying on the couch. And we were coming fresh from … living in a hotel.” Getting a dog “was the last thing we were thinking about.”
Even rescue dogs were beyond the family budget, so he got himself a lawn mower and started working for money to get a dog and to go to basketball camp. He saved enough to pay for basketball camp and had $250 dollars left — the exact cost of a Jack Russell terrier mix he wanted to buy.
He knew a dog was a big ask for his mother, so he did everything he could so she couldn’t say no.
“I said, ‘Hey, Mom, I visited a shelter and the dog is $250, and I’m going to pay for everything and do it all myself this time. … If I can get a dog, I promise you it will be different than last time, and in fact, it’ll be a smaller dog. I’ll make sure this dog is only 40 pounds.”
It worked. Will had a new best friend, and named him Peanut. Will dug into books, started learning how to train a dog. worked with Peanut every day, and the two became inseparable.
That bond kept Will from going down the wrong path in life. His neighborhood was rough, with drugs and gangs — a community where people worried about buying clothes and food, not where to take their next vacation.
“He (Peanut) was definitely my best friend. He was the dog that kept me out of trouble. A lot of kids were gang-banging, and people in my neighborhood looked at me as like a weirdo, like a dog guy. That’s not what kids in our environment do. They care about football, basketball, gangs, and stuff like that. … I’m grateful that I was able to step out of it. A lot of people get stuck in that cycle as an adult.”
Peanut introduced Will to dog training, not the other way around. And once Will had that leash in his hand, he knew what he was meant to do.
“Ever since then, I’ve had a dog leash in my hand and never dropped it. I’ve stayed committed to the dog game. It has affected me as a man and has affected my character, which is a set of certain principles that I’ve never departed from. You know, it’s given me the structure that I required.”
With Peanut by Will’s side, people started to notice how well his pup behaved. It didn’t take long before he was referred to a friend of his brother whose daughter had a Yorkie that needed training, and he was ready to help. He worked with the dog and didn’t ask for anything, but at the end of the training, they paid him $1,000 for his efforts. He was only 13 years old, but he knew that this was what he wanted to do, thanks to his experiences with Peanut and the Yorkie.
He didn’t understand the significance of that moment until a few years later. His family relocated to Sherman Oaks when he was 15 and he finished high school there. In the next few years he moved to Las Vegas, then returned to Virginia and then Washington, trying to make a living. It wasn’t working so at 20 years old he decided that training dogs was the only thing he wanted to do.
So he moved back to Sherman Oaks and opened his small business, K-9 Indigo Holistic Dog Training.
He taught himself to train dogs through trial and error and long days. He learned from his mistakes, developing an approach that uses positive, love-based methods to bring the best out of his students.
“I started to really understand how these animals work, how to live with them, how to be with them, what they need. Okay, they need training, but what else do they need?” Will explains. “If you want a dog to do certain things, you must be a certain way.” Will belives dogs respond to their owners and will react to their human’s behavior. If you want your dog to do things, sit, stay, lay or be calm it is up to the owner to understand that the dog needs them to be an example with their behaviors when they want the dog to listen to them.
He focuses on building a dog’s character and uses positive tools. He wants to coach dogs, not train them.
He doesn’t call his work with dogs “training.” He calls it “coaching.”
“How do we get animals to want to do what we want them to do, even when they don’t want to do it? In my eyes, that is called coachable, not trainable.”
He believes that a dog is a reflection of its human. If you want to have a good dog, you have to be a great human.
“That’s one of the biggest things I try to make sure people understand, and that’s the holistic part of this concept. … So dog training, in reality, is like 80% human, 20% dog.”
Will hopes to give back, especially to minority communities. He believes that proper training will reduce the number of animals returned to shelters and euthanasia. He wants to go to underserved schools and jails to teach at-risk youth and adults about his training methods.
“I didn’t see a lot of black dog trainers growing up,” he said. “It was very hard to get this knowledge. So if I can make this more accessible to black and brown people, I would love that to be the case. I would love for other people that love animals to think they could be more than a vet or groomer.”
Now, his typical work day is 12 hours long, training dogs — and also training humans.
On a recent Wednesday, he was at Van Nuys Sherman Oaks Recreation Center with a handful of four-legged students and Baby, his trusty Belgian Malinois, who is always close to him as he works with furry clients. Using treats and a calm, passive voice, he worked with a petite French Bulldog named Roxy, coaxing her onto a small wooden box.
Roxy gingerly made her way, finally putting all four legs on the box. She was rewarded with a tasty treat and words of praise.
Then the process started again. This time, Roxy stepped right up on the box with her tiny tail moving in anticipation of treats and congratulatory praise. Roxy completed her session, and it was back into Will’s colorfully painted van.
Next was burly pit bull, Sky. Will had a smile on his face and Sky wagged his tail in excitement.
Dogs make things better. They have even been credited with extending people’s lives. The lesson from Indigo Will is that if you want to have a good dog, be a better person.
