About Me/Reviews

I’ve always had dogs… Around the beginning of 2009 I realised my passion for training and coaching was far more than a passing interest. I’d had childhood pets when I was a kid, and as soon as I could I got my own dog Maisy, the Border collie cross. I found it incredibly fufilling to train with her, understand her and have her as part of my life. She was an anxious little pup who needed a lot of behavioural work.

After getting Maisy, I spent a lot of time travelling around many training classes trying to understand training and dogs. I got to see many trainers, how they taught and what worked. It wasn’t until later in life that I saw WHY some things worked, and why that wasnt necessarily the best way to train. The first classes were very much about the ‘Alpha’ dog, and I didn’t know any better. But at least I got to see that type of training first hand. 

Our second dog, Rocky, a GSDx came with his own challenges. This time around we used a well known and specialist protection dog trainer in Wales that focused on something called ‘balanced’ training, where I trained him to platinum level using aversive techniques and equipment, because I didnt know any better and thats what I was told... This was especially hard, as Rocky was a rescue and had some behavioural issues around other dogs that we needed to work on, but slowly we managed to get him under control a little, though the balanced training did more harm than good for his mental health.  In later life, I’d coem to understand the implications of this type of training, and steer away from that methodology to work with more science based training. That was over 12 years ago.

From there I moved to Northampton where I tried even more trainers before focusing on a force free, positive trainer that started to explain a little more. I didn’t know it yet, but they taught science, rather than folklore! Mainly I just found an affinity with that training style as it seemed a bit kinder and forgiving, though it still didnt quite work for me. I began learning about dog psychology, associative learning, neuro science and hormonal brain chemistry in dogs. I started to look more and more at the science. It’s something I had been doing for a long time, but I couldn’t join the dots properly or even know what sources to trust. From here I started to create my own principles, theories and proceedures and started to impliment them on just about every dog I could find. Still using the science based training but taking away anything that seemed clunky or unneccisary from a science point of view. I also starting stripping away the fluff to develop training methods that were more concise, effective, easier to learn and teach… And give better results!

During Covid, I got made redundant (twice!) and thought that while I love training dogs, and had been helping countless dogs over the years from rescue dogs to reactive, agressive, fearful and in pet and working lines, I wanted to not only focus on it more, but become accredited so I could give people peace of mind that their trainer was doing the right things, ethicly. This is where it all started, really. I’ve found the science fascinating and used that to slowly build on my own techniques and exercises to deliver an easy to learn version of some very complex ideas. It’s not magic, or super specialist knowledge… Just science, boiled down to easy to understand concepts.

So that’s me!

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