Canines Behaving Badly

10/05/2026

Rubbish again this week with the old social media. So here’s a bunch of gorgeous dogs I’ve had the pleasure of working with this week. Starring Breagh, Rodney, Angus, Aegon and Joss. All were revisits or ongoing training and of course smashed it!!

07/05/2026

FOCUS ON ANXIETY IN DOGS!

DID YOU KNOW?

🏃‍♂️ 🐕 It’s good to allow “sniff time” on walks! 🏃‍♀️ 🐕

Dogs have nearly 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, versus only about 6 million for us humans….and…..the part of a dog’s brain dedicated to interpreting
smells is about 40 times larger than ours! Stopping to sniff allows your dog to make sense of the world around him.

Dogs also have the ability to smell separately with each nostril. Just as our eyes compile two slightly different views of the world, and our brain combines them to form a 3-D picture, a dog’s brain uses the different odor profiles from each nostril to determine exactly where smelly objects are located.

Not only that but dogs can detect tiny reductions in the concentrations of odor molecules that occur over short periods of time. This allows tracking dogs to quickly determine which direction a person or animal has gone in by sniffing the ground.

As 30% of a dog’s brain is put aside for processing sniffs, as they age and their eyesight gets worse they will rely on their sense of smell to read their environment more, so take the time to allow your dog some quality “sniff time”!

05/05/2026

I’m always banging on about this!

DOGS IN PAIN STILL RUN AND PLAY

This is Twig, as many of you know she was born with deformed back legs. Twig would play all day- she would run non-stop, play with toys 24/7 if she could. She always wants to go for a walk- she never wants to turn to go home, she would walk all day if you let her.

My only behavioural signs of pain are that she is wakes in the night and takes a while to settle again, she barks a bit more than normal at outside noises and she hesitates about jumping on things. I’ve also seen night-waking with my Dalmatian, Lucky, when he was in pain and my first sign of his back issues was that he would wake up and wander around in the middle of the night.

People often think that a dog who is in pain won’t want to go for a walk but dogs in pain are often still keen to go for a walk and they will want to chase a ball etc and play if you let them.

Signs of pain can be subtle and these are some that I commonly see in dogs I work with -

⏰ They may wake in the night or find it hard to settle in the evening, pacing or moving from bed to bed
🐶 They may vocalise more (whine or bark) and be more attention-seeking (nudging your hand to stroke them all the time or following you from room to room)
🛋️ Hesitating or unable to climb on/off the sofa, go up the stairs or get in and out of the car or needing a bigger run up to get in. Being slower to get up from resting.
🐕 Being unhappy about being handled (groomed/dried etc) or unhappy about people sitting next to them on the sofa or walking past their bed
🐶 Changes in interactions with other dogs on walks- less keen on interacting or less keen on certain types of play etc
🌳 Lying down on walks or walking at a slower place but also conversely running excessively (‘runners high’ endorphins make them feel good temporarily)

You may also notice physical changes (the way your dogs moves or the way their body looks. Please chat to your vet if you see any changes, dogs don’t suddenly change and start or stop doing things for no reason.

Pain is one of the primary causes of behavioral issues in dogs. Dogs also often don’t stop running and playing when they are in pain- signs of pain can be subtle and easy to miss so please seek advice from your vet if you see changes

03/05/2026

Yesterday was a two stooge day. As I’ve said before, if I have to work a (bank holiday) weekend, then I’m bringing my dog (and husband) with me!! Here is Atlas walking past a trigger (Murphy) calmly.

03/05/2026

Oh Gobi, you’re all grown up!! I haven’t seen Gobi since she was maybe 4 or 5 months old and now she is 11 months old. She’s living the dream with a super active owner, but as she’s now an adolescent her recall has regressed. So we were at with the stooge boy as a distraction. She got better over the session, showing that started to realise recall means fun stuff not fun stops.

30/04/2026

Gorgeous Curly (and Molly and next doors dog Becky!!) had a final follow up today. He’s doing really well with his separation related behaviour and he can now safely be left for 2-3 hours, personally I think that’s awesome progress. Well done Curly.

30/04/2026

New girls Daisy and Dotty had a consultation yesterday. Both are reactive to other dogs but for different reasons. Daisy wants to say hello but gets frustrated and Dotty wants to make them go away! So we started with Daisy as she normally starts the barking. Lucky for us, their owners are familiar with other dogs/owners in their village so we had plenty to work with. Well done girls.

30/04/2026

Handsome boy Otto had a follow up yesterday. He’s nailing it, he’s now been in his new home for over 2 months and he’s making himself at home!! Yesterday we weee working on barking at people passing the house and he smashed that too. 💙💙

29/04/2026

Yesterday with Truffle and Ebony I saw the worst and the best of human beings. I worked with Truffle earlier in the year but recently Ebony, a trained assistance dog, has recently joined the family and I was there to help both dogs transition to this. We were working in a big park and another dog (friendly) kept running over and interrupting. The lady clearly had no control and she shouted over ‘this isn’t a training ground’, EVERYWHERE is a training ground for an assistance dog!
Then a lovely lady came over and said how terrible that lady was, she even hugged the young lady whose assistance dog it was. The second lady made us all feel better and diffused a very upsetting (and anger for me) incident. Thank you to that lady!

29/04/2026

Gorgeous Harriet the Hooligan had a training session yesterday. Amongst other things we need to give her an outlet for her digging instincts! When dogs are displaying breed specific instincts we need to give them a positive safe way to fulfill that need not eradicate it!! Harriet is most definitely still a hooligan but she is much more manageable since I first met her. Well done Harriet.