Greater Lafayette Kennel Club an Invaluable resource for dog owners
Greater Lafayette loves its dogs. So, the question begs: Why don’t more people know about the Greater Lafayette Kennel Club?
It’s not like the club is a new venture. The Greater Lafayette Kennel Club is celebrating its 80th anniversary inside a new home at 5139 E 400 S in Lafayette.
“We don’t really know,” says Deb Biesemeier, president of the Greater Lafayette Kennel Club. “It’s not like we keep it a secret. One of our big missions is to provide dog training and education to the community. Every time someone comes to us, they always say ‘Oh my gosh. I had no idea you existed.’
“We don’t do a lot of advertising. It’s just pretty much word of mouth. A great many of our students in our entry-level classes are not members of the club. They just seem to come and take a class and fade back into the community.”
The Greater Lafayette Kennel Club was founded by a group of men who enjoyed hunting sports and conformation, which the American Kennel Club (AKC) describes as how closely a dog conforms to the standard of its particular breed.
“Conformation is not just a beauty contest,” Biesemeier says. “Any reputable pure bred dog breeder will take part in conformation because that’s the stamp of approval by a judge that your dog conforms to that breed standard.”
Those standards include appearance, temperament and instinct.
As the years passed, the club’s emphasis shifted to classes and dog sports.
“It’s really mindboggling all the things you can do
with your dog and all the things people have thought of to do with your dog,” Biesemeier says. “It’s wonderful to have a dog as a pet. It’s a whole different level to have a dog as a teammate. It develops a relationship with a dog that’s hard to duplicate if you’re not in dog sports.”
Every dog is unique
While some dog owners struggle to teach their pets the simplest tricks, Biesemeier takes a different approach. She currently has three standard poodles, two of which she trained for agility sports. The youngest poodle, a 5-year-old, currently is active in agility.
“When I train my dogs, it’s not just a one-way street where I’m saying this is what I want you to do,” she says. “I just need to figure out a way for you to do it. I’m also taking feedback from my dog. Dogs are like children in that they learn in different ways. I recently taught my dog several tricks that she could demonstrate to some Girl Scouts. I’ve been training dogs for a long time, so I had a pretty good idea how I was going to train it. It was a pretty elaborate trick, so I put a blanket on the floor. She laid on the floor, took a corner of the blanket in her mouth and rolled over and rolled herself up in the blanket. So I started calling her my burrito dog.
“It took many, many steps to get there. Those steps were not necessarily what I envisioned they would be when I started. As I trained her I got signals from her that I don’t understand what you want me to do. It would force me to step back and say OK, how can I break this down into something easier or find a different way to teach her?”
A wish come true
The Greater Lafayette Kennel Club is not totally unknown in the community. It occupied a building in Shadeland for nearly 20 years.
“It was an old building. It was perfect for us, just a big old warehouse/garage-type building,” Biesemeier says.
One day, the landlord – a.k.a. the town of Shadeland — decided the building needed to be razed to make room for a community center.
The club moved to Delphi for three years, but that building was half the size of the club’s Shadeland home. Biesemeier and her fellow club members wished for a donor or donors to come along and fund a larger building in Lafayette.
“We had been saying for years we needed a fairy godmother to build us a building because we are a non-profit. We don’t have gobs and gobs of money.”
Their wish came true, thanks to a woman in Indianapolis who loves dogs and loves dog sports. The building’s final cost? Nearly $3 million.
“It’s still to me the most amazing thing to think about,” Biesemeier says.
The club received a certificate of occupancy in mid-September 2025 and slowly began building its classes back up. But for now, events will pay the bills.
One of them is a Fast CAT, which features dogs running one at a time, chasing a lure, to measure speed and agility. The club sponsors four three-day events a year in agility sports. Seminars and workshops also bring in needed funds.
Classes for every dog
The Greater Lafayette Kennel Club offers classes in fundamentals, conformation, competition obedience and therapy dog skills as well as dog sports (agility, rally and scent work). Classes are for eight weeks and cost $120 for members or $160 for non-members. Some classes have prerequisites to enroll.
“We have a lot of entry-level classes,” Biesemeier says. “Puppy training classes. Basic manners classes. What we call our ‘click obedience’ classes. It’s a form of training we like to use.
“Our training methods at the club are 100 percent positive reinforcement training. There’s no punishment, there’s no yanking on the leash when they do something wrong. It’s all letting the dog figure out what it is you want them to do.
“If you have a dog, I can’t stress enough you should take at least one dog training class. Hopefully if you come to the club and you get introduced to what dog
training has to offer that you would become interested in something and take another class.”
Biesemeier teaches the puppy training class and assists in the basic dog manners training class.
A community-centered club
“We are 100 percent volunteers,” she says. “We have some great instructors, but there are not enough hours in the day available for classes, nor do we have enough instructors. Our classes are open to anyone. There are benefits to being a member of the club. One of them is you get discounts on classes. You get the first option to take a class.”
Biesemeier wants the community to know that club members have a passion to teach people how to be good and responsible dog owners.
“People can’t do that if they don’t know how,” Biesemeier says. “We’re not a club that just exists to serve our own needs. It’s really a big mission that we serve the community.
“We are community centered. We want people to know we’re out there. We want them to come to us and let us help them train their dogs.” ★
