She has proof.

Premaza said her stepson and his family adopted a border collie from a shelter several years ago that was a terror.

"He was biting the children and resource guarding, growling when anyone came near his food or water bowl," said Premaza, who lives on a horse farm in Winslow. "They said, `Take him on the farm with you or we'll have to take him back to the shelter.' "

Premaza said she thought just taking the dog to the farm, and giving him wide-open spaces, would calm him down.

She was wrong.

"He was really aggressive, and I couldn't handle him," Premaza said.

That experience, in 1999, taught Premaza she needed to know more about dogs. She enrolled in an accredited Internet program to earn a two-year degree as a certified canine-behavioral theorist.

While Premaza was in school, she hired a trainer for Jack, her border collie. He used positive-reinforcement training techniques, including the clicker method. The goal is to teach a positive behavior to a dog by using a device with a clicking noise. The noise signals when to perform the behavior, and then the dog is rewarded with a treat.

Premaza said her training and experience sold her on the power of positive training methods as opposed to, for example, rubbing a dog's nose in its bowel movement. She also thinks hitting is out, even with a rolled up newspaper.

"That's abusive as far as I'm concerned," said Premaza, 59, who now trains up to 300 dogs a year.

Instead, she suggests getting to know a dog - when it needs to relieve itself and other details. She said a puppy can easily be distracted outside. Then, the pet often will come inside where there are fewer distractions and relieve itself.

Premaza said owners should just clean up the mess, focus on recognizing outside distractions and reward the dog lavishly when it behaves correctly.

She said punishing the dog for bad behavior, like jumping on guests or chewing on furniture, also can send the wrong signal. Dogs, she said, associate any attention, even negative attention, with achieving their goal.

"The problem is people try to humanize dogs," she said. "That's a mistake."

Clients of Premaza's sing praises for her methods and results.

"She was kind of training me, too," said Lois Cohen, 57, of Cherry Hill. "I don't know if I would have been able to keep the dog. She really taught him how to behave."

Cohen and her husband, Mitch, own a used-car sales and service business in Berlin Township and their dog, a West Highland terrier named Nigel who is now 2 years old, was chasing away customers when he was 3 months old.

"I was just trying to get the dog to stop barking," Cohen said. "I was begging him. I started off talking like I was talking to a little baby."

Cohen said she saw almost immediate results after Premaza's training. She said she paid about $225 initially for five one-hour sessions. That was followed with doggy-obedience day camp twice a month.

"He's just wonderful now," Cohen said. "My customers love him. They stop in just to see Nigel."

Premaza has also been hired to train dogs for autistic children. The NorthStar Foundation, a Connecticut nonprofit group that places dogs with autistic children around the country, hired Premaza to train two dogs for kids in New Jersey.

The training is nearing completion and Patty Dobbs Gross, executive director of NorthStar, said she's confident in Premaza's method.

"She has an intuition for this type of work," Gross said. "Renee is philosophically aligned to what we are doing. We're on the same page already."

Premaza, who sold her gift shop at the Berlin Farmers Market in 2003 after 28 years, said training dogs for autistic children and for regular pet owners is very rewarding.

"It not just the autistic children, it's the rewards that you get when you make a difference," she said.