A post I didn't want to make

"Since our hair match so well. The dog
started humping my head like a wild
beast." -- Kevin Salem

Some of you may remember that once, long ago, I wrote a blog post about being careful about who you went to training for. This all originally came about because I was looking for places to train in agility and was having a hard time finding someplace that seemed to fit my ideal (positive training, dogs and people having fun). On a lark, I googled the name of someone who had recently been disparaging positive trainers by calling them "cookie trainers" and writing long diatribes about how awful they were.

I really didn't expect to find much. But imagine my surprise when I discovered a world of horror surrounding Kevin Salem! I used him, along with Fred Hassen of Sit Means Sit, as primary examples of what to watch out for. While I don't care for Hassen's business at all, I do have to respect the fact that he made one comment to me (a disparaging, ridiculous one) and left it at that.

Salem, on the other hand, obviously doesn't have the confidence in his own business or training to let it go. Instead of laughing it off, it made him enraged. So enraged that he has been harassing me since October 2009. Many of the first messages he wrote to me were misogynstic in nature, alternately calling me a whore and telling me I need to get laid, insulting my imagined heritage, even my hair color. Here I present to you a few select quotes from the e-mails sent to me, and I apologize ahead of time for the crude content.

Would you sell your pussy at that hell call center for FREE? F*ck no, you wouldn't. Even your red pubic hair got some bills to pay.

Fast forward to three years from now: you are still suckling ... Oops. I misspelled that. my English teacher. c*ck at some call center.

That's what happens when you work ten jobs. No time for getting laid.

How sad. I hope you're not a chick with dick. That would totally ruin it for me and I will go away then for sure. (Shhhhhh. Don't tell nobody. All these dikes are or is it dyke? You would know. They are all jealous of my mullet. Mine is long, soft, shiny and manageable.) What do you use? VO5?

Is that what you wanted to hear? That's what happens when the carpet matches the drapes.

These are just a small smattering of the comments that have come my way since October 2009, when he launched his attacks against me.

Since then, he has threatened lawsuits (come to find out his "lawyer" is really just a barista), gone after my partner, and generally made a nuisance of himself. His latest endeavor is to disparage my dog training business.

What? you ask. What dog training business?

That's right, gentle readers, the dog training business I do not have. As anyone who reads my blog or who knows me in real life knows, I do not have a dog training business. I train my dog and occasionally help out others with their training. I have studied a lot about dog training but only in order to further the training of my own dog. I hope to foster dogs someday and will be able to put all of that study and work to good use, but at the moment there is really only one dog that I regularly train: Dahlia. And since she can't read fake reviews online by someone who claims to have boarded their dog (in an apartment that I do not live in anymore because I couldn't have dogs there), I'm not terribly worried. Hell, if I did board and train dogs in that apartment I would have had a lot more to worry about than some fake reviews by a jerk like Kevin Salem. I would have been fined $1000 and evicted.

But ultimately, I'm not in the business of dog training. It's a hobby for me. It's a hobby that I'm incredibly passionate about, but it's not a business and nor has it ever been.

So Kevin? You're wasting your time. You haven't fazed me one bit. The original post still stands.  Maybe I'll take this one down though if you stop your harassment.