Sometimes I feel like an old dog. I’m in my mid-thirties and sometimes life has me feeling much older. I’ve been looking at old photos from my late teens/early twenties as I clear off an old hard drive and it made me even more aware of how much time has past since I was young and insisted that dog training was my only path in life. When I gave it up over a decade ago it was one of the hardest choices in my life and I really just pushed a lot of those feelings down. I told myself I was satisfied with just focusing on my own dog. I tried to ignore those deep, longing feelings whenever anyone talked about their dogs problems or just dogs in general. I bit my tongue. I only offered advice to people I was close with that I thought would actually be thankful for my advice. Otherwise, I just kept it to myself. I was essentially in the closet about being a dog trainer. Since I started training again I’ve had a lot of comments like “oh I’m so glad there’s a dog trainer in town now”. I’ve been here all along.

I’m a bit behind on training theories and techniques. The good news is that dogs are pretty well the same they were 15 years ago, with a few added quirks here and there. I’ve been slowly reading and learning more modern ideas about dog training and I’ve thrown some of my old ways out the window, adopted some new ones, and tweaked a few others. I feel pretty confident in most of my methods.

Something I completely forgot about is how absolutely brutal dog people can be, especially online. From the time I was about 10 until my early 20’s I spent a lot of time on dog forums/message boards. Back when I first started social media wasn’t even a thing. It was just message boards, sometimes independent and sometimes as a part of a larger website, that were aimed at specific topics. The people I chatted with on those forums became long-time friends. Most of them have drifted away but there’s still a couple people I occasionally still talk to or casually follow on Instagram. SitStay was the first message board I frequented. I was obsessed. I loved their website and the forum. It felt amazing to engage in conversation with others about dogs. My family was utterly sick of my dog facts every day and I was asked to stop talking about dogs so much. So finding a group of people online who also loved talking about dogs felt really good for my preteen self. It made me feel accepted and normal. I was talking to total strangers when I was 10 and thinking back on it now it’s a little unsettling. I don’t ever remember coming across anyone weird or anything wrong, but I was probably lucky. Instead, I walked away with real friends. Not from SitStay, though. They ended up turning on me. Reminder; I was 10 years old.

There was a time when my parents thought dogs belonged outside. They only ever let them in the house in the cold weather. It actually took years of my dog obsession to convince them otherwise. At first, they just let the dog in the boot room. Then he was allowed in the basement. Eventually the dog was allowed upstairs and before I knew it my dog was sleeping on my bed. This took several years to happen, however, and at the point in time that I was talking to the Sit Stay group, my dog wasn’t allowed inside. I came across a health problem, I don’t even remember what it was now? Hot spots, or something like that. But they found out my dog was living outside and they jumped on me. I had a couple people defend me and the fact that I was a child living under the rules of my parents, but most of these grown ass adults ran me down on that message board. They said I shouldn’t own dogs at all. They made me feel horrible. I felt so betrayed and ostracized. It took me some time, but eventually I found Dogo. Originally part of Dogomania, a large website that had a dog forum attached to it. This is the group that felt like family. I would chat with them every single day. I made real friends, even though I’d never met them face-to-face (though I did try once; but she never showed up then disappeared from my life and Dogo. To this day I have no idea what happened. Either she wasn’t who I thought she was, which is really creepy to consider, or her parents freaked out about her meeting a stranger). Dogomania was eventually bought by another company and the dog forum fell apart after that. We tried to build our own and it sort of worked for a while, but not everyone followed over and it just was never the same. I don’t really remember what happened. I feel like maybe there was some sort of falling out with these people as well? But mostly, I think it just sort of fizzled out. Became less active, and more and more people left. The core group I “hung out with” online were the younger ones and at this point we were all graduating high school, getting jobs, finding partners, eventually starting families. We just sort of outgrew Dogo, I think. It seems weird to connect so well with people you never meet face-to-face and look back fondly on hours I spent sitting in front of a screen; but it’s true. I spent a lot of time online not just talking to other dog loving people but learning about dogs and dog training. I felt hungry for knowledge about dogs and never could get enough.

I’m really going to date myself here, but there was a time, when Google was new, where I knew what every major dog training page was. I knew every single one. I knew what all the high class breeders were, I spent hours researching about training methods and dog breeds. Oh, I spent SO much time learning about dog breeds. There was a time I would search for “dunker dog breed” and TWO websites would come up about the breed. Go Google it now; it’s endless. In fact, I just did a quick search and they’re not even really called dunkers anymore? It says ‘Norwegien hound”. So, I just learned something new.

As I start branching out into learning new, modern theories I am seeing how cruel people can be. One of my guilty pleasures is reading comments on social media. It is wild. Sometimes it can be so toxic, though. As I start following more and more dog trainers with different ideas I read things in the comments that make me feel so bad about the way I was trained and the ideas I grew up with around dog training. I remember talking about “old school trainers” and “old school methods” when I was in my teens and somehow now I turned into an old school trainer myself? In less than 20 years; that doesn’t seem fair. It makes me feel bad because it implies that I am being cruel to dogs. I used to feel so high and mighty about how I used new aged methods to train and those old school dog trainers were so cruel. I am not cruel. I have a bleeding heart when it comes to animals, especially dogs. So I’ve decided to stay out of the comments and just listen to the trainers and what they have to say. Some information I may really learn something new and some of it I just take with a grain of salt. I can feel my ideas and methods slowly evolving, but I can only learn so much so fast when I also have a home and family to look after.

Meanwhile, I’m also trying to start a new business dog training, I’m rounding out my old art hobby (I’ll continue the hobby but I won’t be pushing sales so much), and, oh right, I’m trying to revamp the entire town and nearby reserves animal control and animal welfare, and educate both communities about responsible dog ownership. I’m a bit swamped these days and my brain is a bit overwhelmed for retaining new info. I’m also not as young as I used to be, which becomes more and more clear each day, and learning doesn’t come as easy as it did back when I was roaming the internet for every scrap of information about dogs that I could find.

When my self-confidence is low I feel like I have no right to be here charging people for what I do. I had a rough puppy session recently, that made me feel this way. I struggled to get this puppy motivated at all. The owner was struggling with the same issue. I observed some red flags (bloated belly, listless attitude etc.) and I advised the owner to get him vet checked just to be sure nothing else is going on. That self-conscious voice in the back of my head whispered that maybe nothing was wrong with the puppy, maybe I’m just not as good of a trainer as I thought I was. I had been feeling pretty confident that I could take on any dog and I felt like I was due for a dog to take me down a peg or two. Perhaps this pup was it. Despite those negative thoughts I told the owner they should maybe get him checked, just to be sure. I vowed to myself a long time ago that I would ALWAYS say something if I suspected that a dogs behavior problems could be medical. I’m not a vet so it’s such a hard call to make. I don’t know medical stuff as well as I know the behavioral stuff. I made that vow in my early twenties after I worked with a pug who hated to sit. He was your typical happy-go-lucky pug who really did try so hard to be good for his owner but he was just a bit slow to learn new things. He was doing really well in all his other lessons but the automatic sit (or really, any sit in general) was not happening. We replaced it with a down and he seemed to do better with that, which made me a little suspicious because most dogs aren’t going to prefer to lay down over a quick sit when you’re in the middle of heel work. The owner also complained of house soiling and all of my recommendations to deal with that just weren’t working. Something I remember Floyd telling us at Canada West Canine Centre was that pugs can end up with spinal problems due to the curly tail. There was no limit on how that tail should curl in the breed standard, it just called for a “corkscrew tail” which caused a lot of spine problems in dogs who were over-bred for that curly tail. That horrible fact set off red flags everywhere for me. I told the owner get him checked out. At the time, I offered 4 weeks of a 1-hour a week session and we ended our sessions and walked away with that. She was happy with the progress he made and said she would get him vetted over the house soiling/not sitting. I saw her some time later and she told me I was right, that was exactly what was wrong with her poor pug and unfortunately it quickly progressed into paralysis and he had to be euthanized. I use that experience as a lesson to always trust my gut and advise the owners to get their dogs checked out if I ever see any red flags. So even though it could be true that the pup I worked with recently was just a lazy personality, or having an off day, it could be true he was just a tough nut to crack or I caught him at a bad time. I honestly hope that’s the case, over something actually being wrong with him, but I hope the owners get him checked out just in case. Better safe than sorry in these situations.

This post ended up so much longer and deeper than I expected it to be, but I think it was something I needed to get off my chest. I think I’ll probably always feel like I’m “still learning” when it comes to dogs. I always want to improve and do better. I want to offer my clients all possible training methods that I feel are safe and effective so that I don’t run into a dog that just stumps me. I want to always keep my options open because while it might not be a method I pull out all the time it might be something that will help reach some dogs.

I dug up a lot of old photos of me and my dogs from my dog obsessed youth. I hope you enjoyed them.