Best Friends Dog Academy

12/03/2025

New puppy? Or planning on it?

Start learning!

12/02/2025

Puppy parents! Your best friend, and your puppy’s too is right here at HyVee!
Puppies need to use their mouth! Let them use it on something appropriate instead of your fingers and toes.
“Life size” toys can be one of the BEST PUPPY HACKS ever! 
These are huge!

12/02/2025

The five domains is a great framework for considering the basic needs of any puppy or dog (or other captive animal for that matter). It applies to “the basics” AND any behavior modification or training work.

Yesterday, we opened up our series with a post about the Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare.

Today, we're going to discuss the Five Domains of Animal Welfare!

From World Animal Protection:

One of the original animal welfare concepts, the “Five Freedoms,” has increasingly been found to be limited in its assumption that the absence of (or “freedom” from) negative states would ensure high welfare. The more modern animal welfare concept of the Five Domains considers nutrition, environment, health, and behavior as governing inputs that result in a range of mental states from negative to positive.

Five Domains

Nutrition — factors that involve the animal’s access to sufficient, balanced, varied, and clean food and water.

Environment — factors that enable comfort through temperature, substrate, space, air, odor, noise, and predictability.

Health — factors that enable good health through the absence of disease, injury, impairment with a good fitness level.

Behavior — factors that provide varied, novel, and engaging environmental challenges through sensory inputs, exploration, foraging, bonding, playing, retreating, and others.

Mental state — the mental state of the animal should benefit from predominantly positive states, such as pleasure, comfort, or vitality while reducing negative states such as fear, frustration, hunger, pain, or boredom.

Credit for below image from ASPCA.

Want to learn more? Enroll in our Shelter Dog Behavior Mentorship: https://www.shelterbehaviorhub.com/courses

12/01/2025

Body language opens up a conversation, sometimes an invitation from one dog can be a request for space from another.

Some tactics work well for avoidance, jumping up stops people leaning over, licking moves children away and showing a belly might mean you can’t do something else, such as putting on a harness.

We aren’t supposed to be experts, but we can gather information, stay informed, open our minds and conversations.

Did you know I have free body language videos on the App? Find the links to Android and IOS in my bio.

11/26/2025

11/24/2025

Oooh, what great information!

With the holidays around the corner, it's time for me to share this wonderful graphic that I made years ago with my friend Miranda from The Mindful Canine. We help to provide translations to dog "meltdowns" over the holidays so that families can be more compassionate.

Meltdowns don't mean...
I'm "crazy"
I have no manners
I don't like your family or friends
I am antisocial
I am being defiant
I am trying to embarrass you
I don't like you anymore
I wanted to destroy the gifts / decorations
I am a bad dog

Meltdowns MAY mean...
I'm very excited
I need more practice
Meeting new people is hard
The kids are too loud
I don't understand what you are asking
I am stressed out
I need a break
I am bored
I need a walk / need to potty
The gifts looked like toys
I need help to resist food temptations

ps. Kids are the same!

11/24/2025

11/21/2025

On location at Canine Social Club CR! Doing some education for their new staff on canine body language.
It’s so great when a business that has a hand in animal welfare emphasizes education and learning! 👏👏👏

11/18/2025

Our friends SPOT & CO are moving! Congrats to them, that’s exciting! Can’t wait to see the new digs, wherever they may be!
Good luck on the search! ❤️❤️👀☺️

Spot and Company dog training, providing positive training and behavior modification for all dogs.

11/18/2025

Scent work gives dogs something they rarely get in human spaces: control. When a dog follows a trail, chooses where to investigate, and solves a scent puzzle, they’re not just “working”—they’re regulating.

Sniffing lowers heart rate, reduces stress, and builds confidence. It’s a gentle way to offer autonomy, navigating new environments, or simply needing a moment to decompress.

So when your dog pauses to sniff, let them.

If you would like to learn more about nose work with your dog, have a look at this mini-ebook course written by fellow behaviourist Ela. https://www.withoutworrycanineeducation.co.uk/ownersguidetonosework

11/16/2025

I never like saying this.🫣
We see it as affection.
Dogs can see it as a restraint.
That's the issue here.

As humans we feel a desire to show our love and affection the exact same way we show it to our family.
We wrap our arms around, pull closer and squeeze tight.
They may wriggle, so we hug tighter.
We might playfully wrestle with them when they move away or try to leave, we often do that to other people we know well.

That doesn't mean it translates well to dogs.

If a dog is trying to leave or is not accepting or receptive to a hug, don't insist.
If we need to use our strength to hold our dogs from leaving, they don't want a hug.
They want space.
Space equals safety to a dog.

Don't take it personally, many dogs don't like hugs.
It goes back to feeling restrained and having their freedom of movement restricted.
Being able to move away from anything they're uncomfortable with builds trust way more than insisting they accept that very close, tight physical contact.

Children often greet family dogs with hugs and that's absolutely fine if that dog is happy to be hugged by that child, but this may form a habit of greeting other dogs by getting low, face to face and restraining/hugging a dog they don't know.

Hugs aren't a right we should insist on.
If a dog accepts them and enjoys them, that's trust built over time and feeling safe.

It's not from restraining and removing options to move.