My name is Julie Starns and I am owner and managing member of Good Decisions Dog Training, LLC. My
05/05/2025
And they all lived happily ever after…
Or did they?
The reality of dog training and human training is that it’s all a very messy affair. I’ve tried hard to share the messiness of the process — from how the problems often start prior to training, to what I wrote about in my first book “The Messy Middle” (a dog looking anything but perfect mid-training), to the challenges of handing things over to the owners and replicating the success longterm post-training.
And yet, due to the financial incentives and competitive nature of the training industry, not to mention personal status points to be won or lost — the realities of the messiness of the training experience have almost completely been removed and replaced with a pristine sheen of the neat, tidy, perfectly happy endings post-training.
This creates terribly skewed expectations both for owners with truly challenging dogs, as well as for trainers comparing themselves and their inevitably imperfect work and outcomes to the perfect looking work and outcomes they see all around them.
Yesterday we drove from Bellingham to Winlock (3 hours + each way), to do a follow up with Otis. He’d completed our 4 week board and train program and was doing amazing. But one of his major issues slowly came creeping back in. He had struggled with over the top territorial issues when delivery people would drive/walk up. So bad he’d go dangerously ballistic and could redirect on his owner. And now it was back.
We worked for multiple hours on specific problem solving for the specific issue in the specific spot it was occurring. Typically the training and strategies transfer extremely well for owners and dogs back home, but sometimes life is more messy, and it requires more work.
Happy to say Otis’ dad was an amazing student, and by the time we left, he had all the tools and skills needed to overcome this final hurdle, and Otis was accepting deliveries with a far more calm and safe attitude.
It’s messy out there. Don’t let anyone tell or sell you any different.
www.thegooddogway.com
Bellingham, WA & Pacific Northwest
