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In the canine world, behavioural challenges are often approached as faults within the dog. Dogs are labelled as difficult, stubborn, dominant, or broken, and the solution offered is to "fix" them. The use of "dominance" as an explanation for individual dogs' behaviour has been extensively criticised: the idea that a dog has a general dominant personality driving their behaviour is not supported by the evidence on how domestic dogs actually relate to people and to each other (

Walking a reactive dog is often looked at as a training challenge … how do you stop the lunging, barking, or pulling? Instead we can flip that perspective and ask a different question first - what does this dog need to feel safe? When we understand reactivity through the lens of welfare and stress biology, walks stop being about behaviour control and start becoming about emotional regulation. Reactive behaviour is a stress response. For many dogs, the outside world is unpre

Stress in dogs is often misunderstood, minimised, or mislabelled as "disobedience" or bad behaviour. Neuroscience, however, gives us a far clearer and more compassionate picture. When we understand what happens inside a dog's brain and nervous system during stress, it becomes evident that stress can substantially alter the behavioural options available to a dog, making flexible decision-making and learning more difficult. Behaviour under stress is, in large part, a biological

Ethical canine behaviour practice begins with a fundamental shift in perspective: behaviour is not something to be controlled, but something to be understood. Dogs are sentient beings with emotional lives, individual histories, and differing capacities to cope with the world around them. When behaviour is viewed purely through the lens of training, we risk overlooking the very real foundational welfare needs that sit beneath it. For decades, dog behaviour advice has prioritis

In the ethical canine community, we are increasingly being asked to reflect on what we really mean by “good behaviour”. For decades, dogs have been judged against rigid human expectations based around the convenience of our lifestyles, rather than true canine needs. An ethical approach invites us to challenge this narrative and replace it with understanding, compassion, and responsibility. At the heart of ethical canine practice is the recognition that dogs are sentient being