Train Dog Friendly

12/25/2025

Best wishes for a peaceful and loving holiday season - our sweet dogs show us how to be fully alive in the present moment!

12/23/2025

Dogs deserve as much agency as we can safely provide

12/20/2025

12/01/2025

https://www.instagram.com/p/DRfSLlxDIXi/?igsh=MW43YTdmNmZ3amswaA==

11/30/2025

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRrw5XVkR8r/?igsh=ZmdkbGJ6ZnBlOWVh

11/25/2025

All our walks 💜

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRfO0CKEXqH/?igsh=dXlrcG9zbHgwOTl5

11/25/2025

Good reminder!

11/24/2025

Respect their communication

Just one generation ago, if a dog growled while eating, people said,

“Hey! Don’t bother him while he’s eating.”

And that was it.

We respected the warning.

We understood the dog was simply communicating.

Today?

That same dog gets corrected, labeled, or, even worse…

euthanized.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped allowing dogs to say

“No.” We stopped giving them the space to express fear,

discomfort, or uncertainty.

We expect them to be perfectly happy, perfectly calm, and

perfectly tolerant 100% of the time.

But here’s the truth:

Dogs deserve the right to feel. They deserve the right to

communicate. And a growl is not an act of aggression, it’s a sentence. It’s information.

It’s a dog saying, “I’m not okay right now.”

We’ve lost all nuance. If a dog is anything other than silly, social, and sunshine-on four legs, we slap the label “AGGRESSIVE” on them.

People…please…listen to your dogs.

They are communicating with you in the only way they know how.

Honor that.

Learn from it.

And give them back the right to speak.

11/19/2025

Many years ago, while attempting to demonstrate some no-pulling techniques in a seminar, I was utterly exasperated by a young Labrador.

Clancy had leaped up and head punched me very hard not once but twice, making me see stars and really hurting my nose. Clancy was not malicious or intending harm, he was just an exuberant adolescent who had been taught that leaping around was acceptable. Not being physically sensitive himself, it was doubtful that it dawned on the dog that a head butt was very painful to a human.

I had been patient, kind, vaguely successful but by the second slam to my face, my patience began to shred. I began to think, “One good correction might get through this dog’s thick skull.” I surprised myself by thinking that, but then I further shocked myself (and some of the audience) when I asked the handler explicitly for permission to use a physical correction on her dog.

She agreed, trusting me as a trainer to do right by her dog.

In that moment when she trustingly agreed to let me use force on her dog, I found something in myself that surprised me further: a little voice that challenged me to push myself further, to help this dog without force.

Read more of this article at:
➡ https://suzanneclothier.com/article/i-had-to/