Infinite Pawsibilities

11/03/2025

A morning adventure with

10/03/2025

Dogs on a log 🐶 🪵

03/03/2025

🎉 Welcome Athena to the pack! 🐾 Athena is Reggie the bulldog’s new housemate, and we’re thrilled to have her! Her owners have done an amazing job applying the training techniques learned from Reggie, and now she’s here for some fine-tuning of her off-leash obedience and to work on her habit of jumping on people. Athena is such a fun and sweet dog, and we’re having a blast helping her advance her skills! 💖🐶

02/03/2025

Tethered decompression FTW 🙌 a week ago Harper would lose her mind if I left the room for a moment...

28/02/2025

Welcome Harper to the pack!

Harper is a 5-year-old working line German Shepherd who has assigned herself a few rather intrusive “jobs” that impact her mom’s lifestyle. These include:

- Obsessively chasing lights and reflections
- Breaking through crates and doors to keep tabs on her mom
- Pulling on the leash like a freight train
- Burying her toys inside the couch
- Barking at strange dogs and people

These behaviors have led to a more isolated lifestyle for her owner, as Harper isn’t quite safe to take out in public; she can be a bit of a menace. However, her owner wants to enjoy their time together and take Harper everywhere without the constant frustration.

We’re focused on providing Harper with the fulfillment she needs, along with establishing rules and boundaries. Our goal is to help her walk on a loose leash, recall off-leash, and play without overwhelming her mom with excitement, as well as eliminate the destructive behavior in her home. Harper is actually a highly motivated and amazing dog, so we’re confident that she will train up nicely. We’re excited to share her progress!

26/02/2025

Don’t forget to charge your velociraptor

24/02/2025

Lil hike

22/02/2025

See you in the morning!

18/02/2025

Dogs are way over prescribed behavior medication, and most who have used it would agree that it didn’t help. I am not 100% against medication and I try to stay open minded, but this should NOT be the norm.

For years, fluoxetine (Prozac) has been pushed as the answer to behavioral problems in dogs. Veterinary behaviorists and force-free advocates love to cite “science-backed” studies to justify long-term medication use. But here’s a big problem, most of these studies are flawed, biased, and rely almost entirely on owner-reported data.
Take, for example, the 2009 study on fluoxetine for compulsive disorders in dogs (Irimajiri et al., J Am Vet Med Assoc). It claimed fluoxetine helped, yet the only improvement came from owners’ OPINIONS, not actual behavioral measurements. When researchers looked at objective data the dogs’ actual behavior logs they found NO SIGNIFICANT difference between the medicated and placebo groups. But guess which result gets cited?🤫
How about the 2007 study on fluoxetine for separation anxiety (Simpson et al., Veterinary Therapeutics). The conclusion? Fluoxetine was effective … but only when paired with a structured behavior modification plan. And yet, thousands of dogs are medicated without any meaningful training, as if a pill can replace actual learning.
Sad reality is that Dogs are being drugged, not rehabilitated.
Ask any serious trainer what happens when they get a dog that’s been on fluoxetine for years. They take the dog off the meds, implement a sound training plan, and SHOCKINGLY the dog improves.
Not because fluoxetine “worked,” but because the dog finally got what it needed: clarity and proper training.
Yet, the AVSAB keeps pushing these medications while dismissing legitimate training as “aversive” or “outdated.” They’d rather chemically suppress behavior than actually address it.
The real question isn’t whether fluoxetine has some effect but why so many dogs improve when you REMOVE the drug and train them properly?!!!
Behavioral change comes from learning, not sedation. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise.
I know I am not the only one noticing that dogs on fluoxetine don’t get better - they just get dull.
The dog isn’t learning or adapting, just becoming more passive.
This can actuallY DELAY proper rehabilitation, because the dog’s emotions and responses are chemically suppressed rather than modified through learning.
Thinking about making a solo podcast to talk about the dog I have in training right now, one of the many that end up euthanized after YEARS of being on SSRI’s and the pandemic of prescribing psychotropics like flea medication

12/02/2025

Swipe right

12/02/2025

Frozen beards

11/02/2025

Pack hike with

08/02/2025

🐶 ❤️ ⛰️

24/01/2025

Let’s go one by one.

1/ On leash meetings with other dogs. By now most have seen video clips of owners attempting to create a positive social interaction with their dogs, only to watch it all go terribly wrong. Why? Leashes create restraint and cause unnatural interactions, fraught with tense, friction-filled, possibly guarding, possibly overwhelmed, possibly bullying behavior. It’s the perfect setup for pushy dogs to push softer dogs and for softer dogs to become overwhelmed and defensive… and middle of the road dogs to leave the middle of the road.

2/ Poorly supervised doggy daycare. Once again the hopes are that healthy, comfortable, and “happy” social interactions occur. The reality in many daycares? Just like with on leash meetings, pushy, bratty, dominant dogs apply unwanted and unhealthy pressure to soft, timid, and even fearful dogs. And without proper human supervision, these dynamics play out over and over — and do so in environments which the overwhelmed dog cannot escape, and the pushy dog can push over and over.

3/ Dog parks. I’m sure we’ve also seen and heard countless horror stories of dogs bullied, attacked, and even killed in dog parks. Once again we have the restricted, “I’m stuck with you, you’re stuck with me” environment. And once again the overly aroused, pushy, bullying dogs clash with the soft, timid, fearful dogs — which encourages the bullies and traumatizes the soft ones.

All 3 of these share certain dynamics. 1/ forcing incompatible dogs to interact. 2/ the dogs have no way to escape the pressure. 3/ the pushy, bratty, bullies are encouraged (by allowance and payoff) to become even more problematic, and the timid are repeatedly overwhelmed and freaked out. 4/ this translates to the pushy ones being even more pushy/bratty and thus when on walks they become reactive because it feels good to do so and they’re used to doing what they want — and the timid ones become even more fearful and defensive, and thus reactive on walks because they’re so scared, and are used to not being able to keep themselves safe.

The upshot? These environments encourage the bullies to become bigger bullies, and the fearful to become more fearful. So you create a vicious cycle where one kind of dog learns to enjoy bullying and the other loses their trust in other dogs. And just to be clear, you can have less pushy dogs who will become more so simply by experiencing the thrill of doing so. And you can have dogs who aren’t timid but are more sensitive who become fearful simply because they’ve experienced nasty, traumatic interactions repeatedly.

It doesn’t take a genius to see how if we encourage and allow these negative interactions repeatedly, building bullies and creating defensive softer dogs, that this behavior is inevitably going to surface on walks.

4/ You. You can have a dog who’s never had any on leash meetings, never been to daycare, and never been to a dog park, and absolutely still have serious reactivity issues. How? Through a permissive, unaccountable, leadership-free overall lifestyle and walk. Just by allowing dogs to behave in a fashion which is chaotic, pushy, bratty, disrespectful — or chaotic, nervous, worried, fearful — this leadership gap we create invites all manner of poor choices. Without the proper guidance, many dogs will slide into serious reactivity problems simply because no one has taught them how to properly respond to seeing other dogs. And a proper response, regardless of your dog’s personality (pushy and confident, or soft and insecure) should be a neutral one. But that only comes when owners step up, take the lead, and show their dog’s how to properly respond.

PS, even if you’ve done 1-3 and have unwittingly created reactivity issues, you absolutely can reverse these problems by tackling number 4 properly — by properly leading your dog. We do it all the time. But it’s far easier if you skip 1-3 and just do number 4 correctly.

17/01/2025

Owner update from Charlie! Look at him go 😍

16/01/2025

We live in a beautiful state