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We love women. That’s obvious. We also adore dogs. So to celebrate International Women’s Day 2023 who better to talk to than Leda Taylor and her wife Camille, the terrific twosome behind Follow The Leda.
Follow the Leda dog training and adventure walks are off the leash! Well actually, leashes are optional/most walks are on leash but you get the gist.
Keep reading to learn more about our two favourite dog walkers of Auckland.
Nine years ago, Leda’s love for animals (dogs in particular), led her to start walking dogs for friends she had met in a local park. She made some strong connections and started to spend all her spare time not only walking but learning how to train her four legged friends.
She left her fine arts degree in 2015 to hound down her passion full time, and then in 2017 Leda met Camille and it was love at first sight.
Camille moved her life from France to New Zealand and began to shadow Leda walking and training dogs.
They then built a pack together, taking on a few foster pups themselves, and Follow the Leda evolved from dog walking to pack training.
Follow the Leda has led them overseas where they’ve had the opportunity to meet other handlers and hone their skills. These days, they spend most of their time hiking through the woods with a regular pack of dogs. What could be sweeter.
Six years together, six dogs and four cats later, Leda and Camille have built a business that reflects their shared love for dogs, and each other.
Definitely being out in nature with the dogs! Getting to know them all on such a personal level, watching them come out of their shells in all different manners, teaching them how to interact. There is a lot to love and it's hard to pick a favourite thing! We adore that on we get to connect with our clients daily, they feel like part of the family too.
The beach! Swimming with the pack is a feeling like no other. As long as you stay away from their scratching nails!
Making time for each other has been vital to maintaining a happy balance! We try and have weekends away regularly with the dogs (even if it means taking a dozen dogs on holiday with us!). We try to organise date nights, or sometimes just booking weekends to do nothing but hang out at home with our animals. We are both good at communicating, so this helps too!
Clear communication. We try hard to create a safe platform for open communication, whether it is between us, our staff, the dogs or our clients.
To name a few… Gringas, The Local Vet, Wild Dog, Odorex, and of course Ashley and Co!
Work hard, believe in yourself. Follow what you love and you will get there. It is also so important to remember to take breaks and have some downtime. Running your own business is such a cool job, though it requires you to always be at your best. So take moments and weekends as a way to reboot.
It is very important to support one another in the industry. I will forever be grateful to Gabby, another dog walker and now good friend who introduced me to other handlers who were all passionate about pack walking, and how we consistently bettered ourselves. It is inclusive if you go about it the right way, approaching other more experienced walkers to shadow them and learn from their successes and mistakes. Many people don't realise how much work goes into building what we have today, training and working each and every dog over a length of time.
Leda and I have different opinions about that! I have an insufferable love for the Boxers, they are the silly, goofy, rude at times, clowns of the pack! Leda has a soft spot for Borzois. They are very stubborn, tend to do whatever they want, they make you work very hard to get very little! Jokes aside, they are a very loyal, funny and insightful breed.
Though it is not a breed, we both have a deaf dog we absolutely adore, and we love working with deaf puppies.
Haha! These actually don't take long at all! Our packs are very well-trained and used to having to sit and wait! The hardest part is often getting creative enough with funky sounds to catch everyone’s attention! Memorable portraits are definitely the Christmas portraits we do every year. Because we dress up every single dog in a xmas outfit, these can get quite time consuming, we have to use quite a few treats to keep them awake and excited!
Thank you to Camille & Leda for allowing us a beautiful glimpse into the life you have built with your pack!
And to the talented eye behind the images you see today, thank you Sophia Doak, see more of her work at the link below.
