Zen Doggy Den

05/29/2025

It doesn’t have to be overly complicated to train your dog. We give you lots of easy to follow instructions with real life application.

05/21/2025

Wanted Wednesday!

05/15/2025

https://mailchi.mp/4b376287f200/spring-cleaning-for-your-furry-friend-special-de-shedding-offer

05/09/2025

Our website is having an issue. While we figure out how to resolve it, here is the direct link to book online. Thank you for your patience!

05/07/2025

Yippee! We’re starting to heat up and shedding has started! Zen is excited to announce we now have a force dryer! We have new services: blowout, to get all that pesky undercoat out, and bath and blowout, a full service bath and a blow dry at the end to dry off and get the fur out! You can add this to any boarding or daycare stay!

05/05/2025

The first wanted Wednesday!

04/25/2025

The amount of clients I’ve worked with over the years who’ve shared with me that…

1/ Their vets have criticized/shamed/guilt-tripped them over the training/tools they use.

2/ Their vets recommended they only use a positive-only/force-free approach.

3/ Their vets have referred them to a positive-only/force-free trainer, or worse, a veterinary behaviorist.

4/ Their vets have recommended medication for behavior issues as the first response.

5/ Their vets have told them they aren’t allowed to bring their dogs in to the office with certain training tools — because they’re now “fear-free”.

…would make your head spin.

Vets aren’t trainers. Which makes it terribly unethical for them to offer training advice and training critiques. What they are, by and large, are solid medical doctors who are highly skilled in their actual line of work as veterinarians — but who have sadly been completely indoctrinated by the culture that has engulfed the veterinary world.

As for veterinary behaviorists, they are even more deeply indoctrinated. They will happily charge you thousands of dollars, take extensive useless histories, give extensive useless “training” protocols, prescribe extensive useless (but likely harmful) meds, never actually touch your dog, and then recommend euthanasia when it all mysteriously doesn’t work. They are the great charlatans of the dog training world — but the credentials and fancy lingo sure look and sound good… and they happily leverage them to you and your dog’s detriment.

So if we can stand back and actually see that these professionals are deeply indoctrinated (brainwashed), and that their ability to see and work with reality has been, in most cases, completely derailed, then we should be able to clearly see that they’re the last people you should be getting your training advice from.

My suggestion? Do the hard work of searching out training professionals with mountains of evidence of their work actually training dogs, and mountains of testimonials supporting that evidence. And please, stop allowing your local vet to be the arbiter of training wisdom, or to bully, guilt, influence you. Their skills lie in the medical treatment of your dog, not in the training treatment. Even if their hubris gets in the way of that acknowledgement.

04/24/2025

https://mailchi.mp/56fd8b8551bf/last-chance-to-sign-up-for-teeth-cleanings

04/17/2025

https://mailchi.mp/03610c104c6d/anesthesia-free-teeth-cleaning-event

03/29/2025

Worth the read!

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/12G9BJJwR3d/?mibextid=wwXIfr

There is a question I get asked constantly:

“Bart, should I play fetch with my dog every day? He LOVES it!”

And my answer is always the same:
No. Especially not with working breeds like the Malinois, German Shepherd, Dutch Shepherd, or any other high-prey-drive dog, like hunting dogs, Agility dogs, etc.

This answer is often met with surprise, sometimes with resistance. I get it—your dog brings you the ball, eyes bright, body full of energy, practically begging you to throw it. It feels like bonding. It feels like exercise. It feels like the right thing to do.

But from a scientific, behavioral, and neurobiological perspective—it’s not. In fact, it may be one of the most harmful daily habits for your dog’s mental health and nervous system regulation that no one is warning you about.

Let me break it down for you in detail. This will be long, but if you have a working dog, you need to understand this.

Working dogs like the Malinois and German Shepherd were selected over generations for their intensity, persistence, and drive to engage in behaviors tied to the prey sequence: orient, stalk, chase, grab, bite, kill. In their role as police, protection, herding, or military dogs, these genetically encoded motor patterns are partially utilized—but directed toward human-defined tasks.

Fetch is an artificial mimicry of this prey sequence.
• Ball = prey
• Throwing = movement stimulus
• Chase = reinforcement
• Grab and return = closure and Reward - Reinforecment again.

Every time you throw that ball, you’re not just giving your dog “exercise.” You are triggering an evolutionary motor pattern that was designed to result in the death of prey. But here’s the twist:

The "kill bite" never comes.
There’s no closure. No end. No satisfaction, Except when he start chewing on the ball by himself, which lead to even more problems. So the dog is neurologically left in a state of arousal.

When your dog sees that ball, his brain lights up with dopamine. Anticipation, motivation, drive. When you throw it, adrenaline kicks in. It becomes a cocktail of high arousal and primal intensity.

Dopamine is not the reward chemical—it’s the pursuit chemical. It creates the urge to chase, to repeat the behavior. Adrenaline and cortisol, stress hormones, spike during the chase. Even though the dog “gets the ball,” the biological closure never really happens—because the pattern is reset, again and again, with each throw.

Now imagine doing this every single day.
The dog’s brain begins to wire itself for a constant state of high alert, constantly expecting arousal, movement, and stimulation. This is how we create chronic stress.

The autonomic nervous system has two main branches:

• Sympathetic Nervous System – “Fight, flight, chase”

• Parasympathetic Nervous System – “Rest, digest, recover”

Fetch, as a prey-driven game, stimulates the sympathetic system. The problem? Most owners never help the dog come down from that state.
There’s no decompression, no parasympathetic activation, no transition into rest.

Chronic sympathetic dominance leads to:
• Panting, pacing, inability to settle
• Destructive behaviors
• Hypervigilance
• Reactivity to movement
• Obsession with balls, toys, other dogs
• Poor sleep cycles
• Digestive issues
• A weakened immune system over time
• Behavioral burnout

In essence, we’re creating a dog who is neurologically trapped in the primal mind—always hunting, never resting.

Expectation Is a Form of Pressure!!!!!!

When fetch becomes a daily ritual, your dog begins to expect it.This is no longer “fun.” It’s a conditioned need. And when that need is not met?

Stress. Frustration. Obsession.

A dog who expects to chase every day but doesn’t get it may begin redirecting that drive elsewhere—chasing shadows, lights, children, other dogs, cars.
This is how pathological behavior patterns form.

Many people use fetch as a shortcut for physical exercise.

But movement is not the same as regulation.
Throwing a ball 100 times does not tire out a working dog—it wires him tighter.

What these dogs need is:
• Cognitive engagement
• Problem solving
• Relationship-based training
• Impulse control and on/off switches
• Scentwork or tracking to satisfy the nose-brain connection
• Regulated physical outlets like structured walks, swimming, tug with rules, or balanced sport work
• Recovery time in a calm environment

But What About Drive Fulfillment? Don’t They Need an Outlet?

Yes, and here’s the nuance:

Drive should be fulfilled strategically, not passively or impulsively. This is where real training philosophy comes in.

Instead of free-for-all ball throwing, I recommend:
• Tug with rules of out, impulse control, and handler engagement

• Controlled prey play with a flirt pole, used sparingly

• Engagement-based drive work with clear start and stop signals

• Training sessions that integrate drive, control, and reward

• Activities like search games, mantrailing, or protection sport with balance

• Working on “down in drive” — the ability to switch from arousal to rest

This builds a thinking dog, not a reactive one. The Bottom Line: Just Because He Loves It Doesn’t Mean It’s Good for Him

Your Malinois, German Shepherd, Dutchie, or other working dog may love the ball. He may bring it to you with joy. But the question is not what he likes—it’s what he needs.

A child may love candy every day, but a good parent knows better. As a trainer, handler, and caretaker, it’s your responsibility to think long term.
You’re not raising a dog for this moment. You’re developing a life companion, a regulated athlete, a resilient thinker.

So no—I don’t recommend playing ball every day.
Because every throw is a reinforcement of the primal mind.

And the primal mind, unchecked, cannot be reasoned with. It cannot self-regulate. It becomes a slave to its own instincts.

Train your dog to engage with you, not just the object. Teach arousal with control, play with purpose, and rest with confidence.

Your dog deserves better than obsession.He deserves balance. He deserves you—not just the ball.


Bart De Gols

02/21/2025

Something very important has come up regarding you making decisions for your own pets health. Please read this blog post and sign the pet owner petition at the bottom!

How will the new Vaccine Protocol affect Pets and their Owner: PACFA (Pet Animal Care and Facilities Act) is a regulation system for animal facilities to ensure proper care and sanitation of animals for groomers, daycare/boarding, any facility that sells pets, and more. It creates a standard that al...

02/13/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15F3tPrbwA/?mibextid=wwXIfr

For years, fluoxetine (Prozac) has been pushed as the answer to behavioral problems in dogs. Veterinary behaviorists and force-free advocates love to cite “science-backed” studies to justify long-term medication use. But here’s a big problem, most of these studies are flawed, biased, and rely almost entirely on owner-reported data.
Take, for example, the 2009 study on fluoxetine for compulsive disorders in dogs (Irimajiri et al., J Am Vet Med Assoc). It claimed fluoxetine helped, yet the only improvement came from owners’ OPINIONS, not actual behavioral measurements. When researchers looked at objective data the dogs’ actual behavior logs they found NO SIGNIFICANT difference between the medicated and placebo groups. But guess which result gets cited?🤫
How about the 2007 study on fluoxetine for separation anxiety (Simpson et al., Veterinary Therapeutics). The conclusion? Fluoxetine was effective … but only when paired with a structured behavior modification plan. And yet, thousands of dogs are medicated without any meaningful training, as if a pill can replace actual learning.
Sad reality is that Dogs are being drugged, not rehabilitated.
Ask any serious trainer what happens when they get a dog that’s been on fluoxetine for years. They take the dog off the meds, implement a sound training plan, and SHOCKINGLY the dog improves.
Not because fluoxetine “worked,” but because the dog finally got what it needed: clarity and proper training.
Yet, the AVSAB keeps pushing these medications while dismissing legitimate training as “aversive” or “outdated.” They’d rather chemically suppress behavior than actually address it.
The real question isn’t whether fluoxetine has some effect but why so many dogs improve when you REMOVE the drug and train them properly?!!!
Behavioral change comes from learning, not sedation. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise.
I know I am not the only one noticing that dogs on fluoxetine don’t get better - they just get dull.
The dog isn’t learning or adapting, just becoming more passive.
This can actuallY DELAY proper rehabilitation, because the dog’s emotions and responses are chemically suppressed rather than modified through learning.
Thinking about making a solo podcast to talk about the dog I have in training right now, one of the many that end up euthanized after YEARS of being on SSRI’s and the pandemic of prescribing psychotropics like flea medication