Dogwarts K9 Academy

06/06/2026

Great advice for all you Frenchie parents out there, thank you Red Fox Learning 🙌

🐶 Frenchie owners — this one's for you.

French Bulldogs are one of the UK's most popular breeds, and it's easy to see why. But those gorgeous squishy faces come with some serious health considerations.
Brachycephalic Obstructive Airway Syndrome (BOAS) affects flat-faced breeds and means many Frenchies are working much harder to breathe than you'd ever realise.
Signs to watch for:
❤️Noisy, raspy breathing
❤️Snoring loudly at rest
❤️Struggling in warm weather or after mild exercise
❤️Going blue around the mouth during exertion
❤️Collapsing after activity

In hot weather, flat-faced breeds are at significantly higher risk of heatstroke — and they can deteriorate very quickly.

If your Frenchie is really struggling to breathe, treat it as an emergency. Cool them down, keep them calm, and get to a vet.

Do you have a Frenchie? Drop their name below 👇🐾

06/06/2026

👰‍♀️🤵We have some clients getting married today and this little guy is the ring bearer 💍🐩 We are sure you will do an amazing job Arthur.

Doesn't he look dapper in his shirt collar and tie, very handsome boy 🤩

Wishing Jane & Pete a very long and happy life together, Congratulations to you both, can't wait to celebrate with you 🍾🥂

06/06/2026

One of the most useful things behaviour work has taught me is that behaviour is rarely just about the moment you're looking at.

A dog is always bringing history, physiology, expectation and context into the behaviour you see. That matters because it stops you reading behaviour too narrowly.

The dog barking at the postman isn't just reacting to that one sound. They may be responding to months of rehearsed alarm behaviour.

The dog who panics when you pick up your keys isn't just reacting to the keys. They may be anticipating your absence and losing their sense of safety before you've even left the house.

The dog who guards the sofa may not just love the sofa. They may have learned that resting spaces are high-value, that human approach predicts loss, or that conflict happens there.

The dog who loses control around other dogs may not be dog reactive in some simple, global sense. They may cope perfectly well in some situations and struggle badly in others because lead pressure, movement, available space and social predictability all change the picture.

The behaviour we see is often the final piece of a much bigger story.

That's why I spend far more time trying to understand what sits underneath behaviour than I do focusing on the behaviour itself.

Once you start looking at behaviour through that lens, it becomes much easier to build plans that create lasting change rather than simply trying to stop individual incidents from happening.

What's one behaviour your dog does that you've never quite managed to get to the bottom of?

05/06/2026

This is something I see quite a lot: owners become so worried about upsetting their reactive dog that they stop giving them any structure at all.

The dog is anxious, reactive or overwhelmed, so the owner starts tiptoeing around everything.

No boundaries.
No clear guidance.
No consistency.
No confidence.

So the dog slowly starts feeling like they’re responsible for managing the entire world themselves.

Watching everything.
Controlling everything.
Reacting to everything first.

Now obviously I’m not talking about punishment or harsh handling before somebody in the comments starts twitching 🤣 but I do think some dogs feel safer when life feels predictable and clear.

When somebody calmly says:
“I’ve got this.”
“You don’t need to deal with that.”
“You can stand down now.”

Yes, absolutely reactive dogs need kindness, they need understanding, and they need owners who will champion for them, but they also need clarity, consistency, and someone to take responsibility for what is going on around them so that they don't have to.

Reactive dogs don’t need to feel like they’re carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. Part of our job is helping them realise they don’t have to manage everything alone.

05/06/2026

Complex behaviour cases can feel overwhelming because everything seems connected.

A dog may be reactive on walks, bark at visitors, struggle to settle in the house, guard spaces, wake at every sound and panic when left alone. Owners are often exhausted, embarrassed and desperate for somebody to tell them where to start.

In the early days, cases like this could feel like a huge jigsaw with pieces scattered everywhere. What gave me confidence wasn't learning a new protocol or finding a magic solution. It was learning how to organise the information in front of me.

These days, when I look at a case, I'm less interested in collecting a list of behaviours and more interested in understanding the patterns around them.

What is the dog's baseline state throughout the day? How well do they recover after something exciting, frustrating or worrying? Where does the behaviour happen? Where doesn't it happen?

Is it linked to movement, noise, visitors, pressure, anticipation, conflict, fear, frustration, pain or simply a dog that never really gets the chance to switch off?

Once you stop looking for one explanation and start looking for patterns, things often become much clearer. You can then begin to analyse and work out what is likely driving the greatest number of behaviours.

Confidence in behaviour work didn't come from having all the answers, it came from learning which questions were worth asking first.

The behaviour that worries owners most isn't always the behaviour I start with. Sometimes addressing something completely different creates the biggest shift.

04/06/2026

I think this sentence has probably shaved more years off reactive dog owners' lives than any other, because what usually follows is somebody's dog hurtling towards them.

People massively underestimate the damage uncontrolled off lead dogs can do, and no, I'm not talking about dog fights.

I'm talking about the fallout afterwards:
The confidence knocked out of the on lead dog.
The owner who spent weeks building trust suddenly feeling back at square one.
The rescue dog who was finally starting to feel safe.
The nervous dog who now scans every walk waiting for another dog to charge at them.

Whether your dog is friendly or not is completely irrelevant if they are running up to dogs uninvited.

Not every dog wants interaction. Not every dog feels safe around strange dogs. Not every dog should be forced into social situations because somebody else thinks their dog is harmless.

If your dog does not have reliable recall, work on that before letting them off lead. That's basic responsibility, both for your dog's safety and everyone else's.

Somewhere along the line, we've normalised dogs running over to others while the owner shouts from 200 metres away:

"It's okay, he's friendly!"

Meanwhile, the other owner is trying not to panic, trying to move away, trying to advocate for their dog and trying to hold everything together while their dog is overwhelmed.

Then comes the worst part.

The reactive dog owner is often made to feel like THEY'RE the problem.
Like THEY should stay home.
Like THEY should "train better".
Like THEY'RE overreacting.

When actually, many are doing everything they possibly can to help their dogs succeed safely in the world.

Dogs are often on lead for a reason:
Fear. Recovery. Training. Pain. Age. Reactivity. Medical issues. Confidence building. Trauma.

People should not have to explain or justify that in order for others to control their dogs.

Your dog may be the friendliest dog in the world, but that is not a reason to allow them to invade another dog's space, and it should never be somebody else's responsibility to manage a dog that cannot be recalled away. People with reactive dogs are already trying harder than most people realise.

04/06/2026

🎵Thunderbolts & lightening, very, very, frightening me🎵 Storm here, my dogs are fine with it, how are yours?

04/06/2026

Most reactions don’t actually start with the barking, that's just the point where the humans finally notice. The reaction usually started much earlier.

It started when the dog first spotted something in the distance and couldn’t quite let it go, or when they started scanning and ignoring you, or when their body got tighter and their breathing changed.

A lot of dogs spend quite a long time trying to cope before they finally explode, and this is why I think reactive dog owners often end up feeling blindsided because from their point of view, the dog was “fine” until suddenly they weren’t.

But when you slow video footage down, or really start observing properly, you realise the dog had actually been telling us for quite a while that things weren’t feeling OK.

I think this is one of the reasons behaviour work can feel so emotional for owners because once you learn what to look for, you suddenly realise how much your dog has probably been struggling for longer than you thought.

But you don't know what you don't know and so how can you help them if nobody has ever taught you what stress can actually look like before the barking starts.

Once owners learn how to read the smaller signs earlier, that’s usually when things begin to change.

03/06/2026

Sometimes the win is:

👁️ spotting triggers sooner
➡️ creating more distance
❤️‍🩹 helping the dog recover quicker
🌳 choosing not to push them too far
🏡getting home before everything falls apart

When we choose to help our dogs manage in the real world rather than perform, those quieter wins are often the ones that create the biggest long-term change, because they build new positive associations.

If your dog feels constantly on edge or reactions seem to happen “out of nowhere”, you don’t have to try and figure it all out alone. Feel free to message me if you need support 🥰

03/06/2026

A lot of the dogs people describe as “full on”, “hyper”, “crazy” or “badly behaved” are actually struggling with stress far more than people realise or even recognise.

Barking, lunging, overreacting and constantly being on the go are often the bits humans notice, they focus on the behaviour rather than the reason behind it.

But stress affects far more than behaviour alone.

When dogs are living in a constant state of stress or over arousal, their bodies are pumping out stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline far more than they’re designed to.

That doesn’t just disappear the second the walk ends either.

Over time, that can start affecting all sorts of things:
sleep
digestion
recovery
skin
immune system
ability to focus
ability to learn
ability to cope with everyday life

It’s one of the reasons some dogs seem permanently on edge, because they're not properly coming back down again before the next stressful thing happens.

I think this is why people sometimes feel surprised when I start talking about rest, decompression, calmer routines and reducing pressure instead of jumping straight into lots of training exercises.

The dog needs a chance for their system to recover a bit first and you can often see the difference very quickly, when it starts happening too.

Dogs sleep more deeply.
They start making better choices.
They recover quicker after things bother them.
Their reactions become less intense.

It’s not magic, their brain and body are simply coping better.

Do you think people recognise stress in dogs enough these days or do we still label too much of it as bad behaviour?