April Frost, she might agree, probably got along better with dogs than her own species. But it was through canines that she believed people could open a new dimension into what it means to be human.

And dogs would live better lives, too.

Frost, who turned away from her mother’s image of a what proper woman should be to become a pioneering “animal communication facilitator” — she eschewed the term “dog trainer” — died Jan. 29 at Woodlawn Care Center in Newport with family.

She was 80.

At a time when the custom among dog owners long had been to act like army drill sergeants inducting raw recruits, Frost advocated meeting dogs on their terms. That meant understanding what they wanted, what their behavior signaled, and how to see the world through the dog’s eyes rather than from arrogant human presumption, her friends and family recalled.

Or, as Frost herself put it in her 1998 book, “Beyond Obedience: Training with Awareness for You and Your Dog,” she had a different approach on how to train dogs.

“I do not do ‘obedience training,’ ” Frost made plain.

Rather, Frost wrote, her method was based on what she called “awareness training,” which she described as “communication training based on love and respect” which “must go both ways,” because traditional regimens did not “take either human or animal psychology into account.”

Although Frost moved away from the Upper Valley in 1997 to live in Walden, Vt., she left behind a legacy of thousands of happy dog owners — and presumably at least an equal number of happy dogs — who benefited from her dog training classes.

Self-trained — she would devour veterinary textbooks and animal research journals — Frost helped to lead a new era in canine education.

“In the 1960s and 1970s the most common way of training dogs was using averse methods,” Laurel McKernan, a cousin of Frost’s who spent her summer vacations at Frost’s kennel and animal menagerie in Norwich.

“You’d have a big, choking mechanism. You were supposed to dominate the dog. April was a leader in a more modified approach with using reward, using encouragement, standard practices today that really weren’t used then. People wanted to bond with their dogs but there wasn’t a lot of understanding about dog behavior until April helped change that,” McKernan said.

Animals were a balm for Frost since youth, she recounted in her book. She struggled with what she called a “lonely” childhood at her home on Bank Street in Lebanon. Frost, an only child, lived in an all-women household comprised of her mother, her aunt and her grandmother.

“She was not allowed to get dirty. She couldn’t go out and play in the dirt like a normal kid. She always had to be pristine,” Lara Judd, her daughter, said.

A “well behaved child” herself, Frost was often tasked with a heavy load of chores while the adults worked outside the home.

Nonetheless, Frost wrote that she had a “strong inner life” and was happiest when scrambling around the woods in jeans rather than “wearing the frilly dresses my mother insisted would turn me into the right kind of woman.”

She suspected her spiritual connection to the natural world might have been passed down from her maternal grandfather, whom she did not know but who was a “full blooded Native American” from a tribe of the Iroquois nation. She later built a “sweat lodge” in a teepee on her property and embraced Native American spirituality.

Frost recounted that her “career with animals” began at the age of about 8, when she befriended two flying squirrels who became her constant companions. They entered her bedroom from the branches outside her window, hitching rides on her shoulders and playing hide-and-seek.

Soon Frost realized she could communicate with the squirrels, talking with them “in the same way I could talk with people.” Their answers “would come as ‘knowingness’ of their thoughts inside my head. And the things they told me about would come true.”

By high school, Frost was already running her own “dog salon” business.

At the same time, pushed by her mother, Frost was competing in the beauty pageant circuit and was crowned Miss Claremont in 1963. The same year she went on to cinch the title of Miss New Hampshire.

But Frost never accepted the state coronation, Judd said, because “she no longer wanted the pageant life. She was 18 and could make that decision.”

”She followed the beat of a different drum,” Frost’s daughter added.

Within a few years of graduating from Lebanon High School, Frost was settled in Norwich, where she opened Hearthside Kennels for training, grooming and breeding dogs.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Frost also gained a reputation as professional dog show handler, garnering ribbons on the East Coast, Canada and Bermuda.

The Norwich home turned into a Noah’s Ark of animals, great and small.

In addition to the kennels in which it would not be uncommon for 15 dogs to be boarding at any time, Frost had her own dogs, half a dozen stabled horses (Arabians and miniatures) — she taught riding lessons as well — geese, cats, guinea pigs, sheep, goats, rabbits, a pond of fish and a “de-scented” skunk named Stinky that snoozed in the linen closet during the day, Judd said.

When it came to her own dogs, Frost would go through a progression of different breeds over the years.

She began with Irish Setters — one had a litter of 15 puppies and when the mother died she organized round-the-clock tube feeding with neighbors and friends — to beagles and, finally her beloved Shetland Sheepdogs, two of which were featured on the cover of American Kennel Club Gazette.

She could get dogs to perform like people.

Frost produced a “precision canine drill team” of 14 Shelties that would do tricks, like jumping over high hurdles, on voice command. Another team of six pulled a wagon, with one Shelty placed on the seat box with leash-like “reins” that harnessed the team as a pack of puppies rode in the wagon.

The drill team hit the road to perform shows at the Lebanon Opera House, the Bonaventure Hotel in Montreal and at retirement homes around New England, among other venues.

Frost liked to joke that her name and initials portended her destiny. Her middle name was Diane, diminutive of Diana, the name of the Roman goddess of wild animals. Before she married her last name was Randall; Frost was the last name of a former husband; her initials “ARF” are oddly similar to the bark of a dog (the initial D for Diane was overlooked for humor’s sake).

“She related much more to animals than people,” Frost’s daughter, Lara Judd, said. “She wasn’t fond with people, to be honest.”

Frost appeared to have a transcendent connection with dogs that defied space and time, said her son-in-law, Jim Judd, which even he — a Ph.D who works at Dartmouth Health — found difficult to dismiss.

He remembers the first time he visited Frost at her home in Walden, Vt., and going to check out the kennel shed where a dozen dogs inside were “all yipping and yapping.”

“April walks in and very calmly, quietly says, ‘that’s enough.’ You could have heard a pin drop,” Judd described, as if he had just witnessed an inexplicable miracle. “Unbelievable.”

Another time a distraught couple in New York state called Frost, hundreds of miles away in Vermont, reaching out to her in a plea for help in locating their missing dog.

“My mom was on the phone with them for two hours. I heard her tell them that their dog was ‘scared and in a culvert,’ ” Lara Judd recalled.

The next day the owners called Frost back in jubilation to report they had found their missing dog “near a culvert” in the woods.

Lara Judd called it “almost sci-fi.”

Ann Waterfall, a Norwich resident, said when her family got their first puppy they would drive to Frost’s kennel, then relocated to Cornish, every week.

“Countless recommendations” persuaded Waterfall to sign up for Frost’s “puppy kindergarten” class, calling Frost’s skills “magic. One look and a quiet word from April and our furry agent of chaos was sitting and heeling like a pro.”

What was Frost’s secret knowledge?

“April assured us it was simple,” Waterfall said. “We just had to use our voice, gesture, and body language together to communicate a clear message to our pups,” which Waterfall noted could be “easier said than done.”

Nonetheless, Waterfall said it was worth the effort because Frost was “a gifted and patient teacher of both dogs and people.”

The calm voice, the patience, the intuitive grasp of what a dog needed and wanted is echoed by Jacqueline Newport, who took her Great Dane, Sonia Bell, to Frost in the 1980s and became a close friend.

Newport, who found other dog trainers “robotic,” called the first class with Frost an “eye opener.”

“I was attempting to get Sonia Bell to sit, with a questioning “sit, please?”

But dogs respond to commands, not requests, no matter how kindly asked.

“April came over and explained with a smile and in her gentle voice that, first, I am a petite woman with an extremely large puppy and second, my voice needed to be assertive and not questioning.”

Frost “calmly took the leash and in her quiet, self-assured voice told Sonia Bell to sit, which she did immediately,” Newport said.

But “it was not just animals that April took in,” Newport shared.

When a “violent event” occurred in Newport’s personal life, Frost opened her home to Newport “when I had nowhere to go.”

Newport said she will be “eternally grateful” for that act of kindness.

“Without her guidance and support, I do not know what would have happened to me,” Newport said.

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.