Parker's Canine Training

05/09/2026

🐾 Puppy Confidence: Lead Training Week

What a brilliant little group this morning!

This week's Puppy Confidence session was all about learning to move together on lead, building connection, orientation and the skills they need to travel comfortably alongside us. Something that doesn't come naturally to our four legged friends, with a different centre of gravity and faster pace then ours. Lead walking was never a skill we designed them to have.

We worked through weave poles, changes of direction and different movement patterns, with a five-second pause on the place boards before moving on again.

But underneath the practical exercises, we were learning something even more important: how training actually works.

As our puppies begin to understand a new behaviour, we can start moving away from rewarding every single repetition and introduce more variable reinforcement.

And I absolutely love having children and families learning together in class. Raising and training a puppy works best as a family effort, with everyone learning how to communicate consistently and get involved appropriately. And, of course, the children learning these skills today are the next generation of dog owners so we need to give them a great understanding of dogs right from the beginning.

Puppy Confidence runs as a rolling programme, so each session has a different practical theme but there's a bigger purpose behind them all.

I don't just want to show you how to teach your puppy a handful of exercises.

I want you to gradually understand how your puppy learns, how reinforcement works, how behaviours develop, when to add cues, how to progress training and how to recognise when something needs changing.

Because the more you understand the why behind what we're doing, the better equipped you are to help your puppy learn long after class has finished. 🐶

And this morning's puppies were absolutely fabulous. Well done, everyone!

01/09/2026

A little learning

Dogs and humans have evolved to understand each other in a rather extraordinary way. 🐕🧠

Wolves evolved cognition suited to navigating wolf social and ecological life.

Dogs evolved within a human-associated niche — and became unusually attuned to us.

One of the most fascinating examples is their ability to understand human communication.

Point towards something.
Look towards something.
Turn your body.
Direct your attention.

And dogs are remarkably good at using that information.

Even very young puppies can respond to human communicative gestures, before they've had years of living with us and learning all our little habits.

And here's the really interesting bit:

Humans and dogs didn't inherit this ability from a recent common ancestor.

We're very distantly related species.

Instead, thousands of years of dogs living alongside humans created selection pressures that produced surprisingly compatible social abilities.

In evolutionary biology, when similar traits arise independently in different lineages, we call it convergent evolution.

And we can think about something similar happening in psychology and cognition.

Dogs have become particularly impressive at human-directed cooperative communication.

That doesn't mean dogs are simply “more intelligent” than wolves, chimpanzees or other animals.

Wolves have extraordinarily sophisticated social cognition for navigating wolf society.

Dogs developed something different:

a mind particularly well prepared for navigating ours.

And you can see the beginnings of that astonishing relationship in puppies.

A young puppy isn't born knowing everything about humans, of course. Learning and experience still matter enormously.

But evolution hasn't handed us a completely blank slate either.

The puppy arriving in our home already belongs to a species whose evolutionary history has prepared them to pay attention to us, interact with us and learn from our social signals.

So when a tiny puppy looks where we point, perhaps we're seeing something much bigger than a simple training response.

We're seeing the legacy of thousands of years of two very different species learning how to live together. 🐾

30/08/2026

🧠🐾 “But he KNOWS it!”
Does he?
Or does he know it here, under these conditions? 👀
I've been nerding out over behavioural momentum this week, and it beautifully explains part of the thinking behind my Proof It Like a Pro course.

Because teaching a behaviour is only the beginning.
What happens when we change the environment?
Add distance?
Movement?
Another dog?
A really good smell?
An EXTREMELY interesting spaniel? 😂

Pop into the comments to learn more..

🐾 Proof It Like a Pro
For dogs who already have some of the foundations and are ready to discover:
Can you still do it when life happens?

26/08/2026

A little learning… 🧠🐾

Why can I feel one thing… and show something completely different?

If someone accidentally hits me with a football and it hurts, my immediate reaction might be irritation.

Ow. That hurt. I'm annoyed.

That emotional response happens before I've sat there and logically thought through the situation.

But then my rather clever human brain can get involved.

It was an accident.

They didn't mean to hurt me.

They're only a child.

And suddenly I have lots of options.

I can inhibit my initial reaction.

I can smile and say, “Don't worry about it!”

I can tell them, “That actually really hurt.”

I can walk away.

I could even be absolutely furious while deliberately pretending I'm completely fine.

That's something I've been thinking about while reading Jaak Panksepp's work on affective neuroscience.

Because underneath all our sophisticated human thinking, we still have ancient emotional systems too.

We haven't evolved away from those more primitive subcortical systems. Our higher cortical processing sits alongside them and gives us an extraordinary ability to interpret, regulate and communicate what we're experiencing.

And that's where I think this becomes really interesting when we look at our dogs.

Dogs can absolutely learn inhibition and emotional regulation. They aren't simply helpless passengers being driven around by their emotions.

But they don't have our human capacity to sit there and think:

"That hurt, but I know Sarah didn't mean to do it, so I'll pretend I'm fine and we'll discuss it later."

They can't verbally tell us:

"I'm actually feeling really uncomfortable today."

"My back hurts."

"That frightened me."

"I normally tolerate this, but today I can't."

So imagine the same football gently clips a dog.

One dog might barely react.

Another might yelp, curve their body away, lower their head, put their ears back, tuck their tail and move away.

We sometimes describe that second dog as “dramatic.”

But what if we stopped judging the behaviour and started treating it as information?

Because that dog is telling us something about how that event affected them.

And this is where behaviour becomes incredibly valuable.

A sudden change in posture.

Avoiding touch.

Moving differently.

Becoming unusually irritable.

Not wanting to interact.

Startling more easily.

Refusing something they normally do.

Moving away.

Growling when approached.

None of those things can tell us exactly what a dog is feeling or why.

But they can tell us:

Something has changed. Pay attention.

And sometimes that something might be pain or physical discomfort.

The fascinating thing about Panksepp's work is that it reminds us that humans and other mammals aren't separated into emotional animals and rational humans.

We share remarkably ancient emotional machinery.

What differs enormously is what our brains allow us to do with those experiences.

So perhaps the next time a dog appears “dramatic”, “grumpy”, “stubborn” or “difficult”, we could ask a slightly different question:

What might their behaviour be trying to tell us?

Because dogs can't sit us down and explain how they feel.

But that doesn't mean they're not communicating it.

26/08/2026

😔

Its National Dog Day today.
I'm sure Dolly would have been sad to miss it.
We love her advocacy for animals. I'm hoping we've a few Dolly namesakes out there.

Dolly Parton spread her love and kindness message especially to children, and supported animal rescues and kindness to animals

25/08/2026

Yeeeeeeeessssss!!!!!!!!
Proper rain!!!! Actually proper rain!!!

23/08/2026

She's home safe. 🥰.

I'll get a little blog done for newly rescued dogs. I'll post it here when its done..