Mel's story

After a childhood spent in several different states throughout the U.S., Melissa Mote, the founder of Canine Gems, continued to travel throughout college, studying abroad in three different countries. Her experiences having lived in so many subcultures of the U.S. as well as overseas have made her unusually skilled in the areas of foreign language and intercultural communication. She believes that the same cross-cultural understanding that makes people kinder to each other, even when they're from different backgrounds, applies between different species as well. The skills she learned in all of her travels have molded her into an empathetic dog-and-person educator whose passion is helping people step across the human-canine divide to communicate with their dog as clearly and ethically as possible.

When she is not training dogs, you will find Mel reading books (probably about dogs), playing chess, studying a foreign language, hiking with the four-legged love of her life, watching crime dramas with the two-legged love of her life, or teaching high school Spanish.