Merit Dog Project

17/11/2025

The longer I do this work, the more I think “behaviour modification” is a slightly misleading phrase. Most days, the behaviour that needs to change first is ours.

We talk a lot about training plans, protocols, and skills for dogs, and those absolutely matter. Building fluent, flexible skills is a huge part of how dogs can experience real agency and predictability in their lives. But somewhere along the way, we quietly absorbed the idea that dogs should be the ones making most of the compromises and we should be the ones deciding what skills they get to have.

“I want to live my life the way I always have, in the environments I prefer, with the routines I like. My dog will just need to adapt.”

When that is the starting point, the dog’s behaviour becomes the problem to solve rather than a conversation partner to listen to.

For me, this is about two main things: a)expectations and b) bodily autonomy. A dog’s body is not public property and it is not an extension of ours. Access to that body, to their movement, to their space, should not be assumed as a default. When a dog says “no,” that is communication about their boundaries, not a malfunction in need of suppression.

Skill building matters here because it can support autonomy rather than erase it. Teaching dogs reliable behaviours that actually open and close access to touch, procedures, social interactions, and the environment can give them meaningful control over what happens to their body. Consent signals, start-button behaviours, opt-outs that are honoured, and well-rehearsed exits are how we operationalise the idea that the dog’s body belongs to the dog.

The harder part is on the human side. It means questioning our expectations instead of treating our lifestyle, schedule, and social habits as fixed and asking the dog to absorb all the cost. Maybe the way we socialise changes. Maybe certain visitors meet us elsewhere for a while. Maybe our sport ambitions soften, or we choose different environments altogether. If we make the choice to bring a dog into our home, we have to be prepared to do some of the compromising.

It also means learning how to hold a genuine dialogue. Treating so-called “problem behaviour” as feedback about the conditions we have created. Listening when a dog says “this is too loud, too close, too fast, too rough” rather and changing the situation, not just the cue or the reinforcement schedule. Taking seriously that sometimes the ethical answer is not “train more” but “ask for less.”

The way we negotiate all of this with one dog in one household is not separate from the bigger picture. The same story scales up. In our private lives we often expect dogs to fit around human routines. At the societal level, our systems do much the same thing.

We still tend to see dogs in human homes as dependants in our possession, sometimes even as extensions of ourselves/their humans. That framing runs through everything. It underpins laws about “dog control,” shapes who is welcomed in public spaces and on what terms, and colours what “dog-friendly” really means. Often it translates to “dogs may be present as long as they stay quiet, invisible, and tightly managed for human comfort.”

A dog-centred lens would start somewhere else. It would ask, when we write bylaws or design parks, footpaths, and shared spaces: what does this look like from the dog’s side. Where can they move freely, sniff, rest, and step away from pressure. How do we protect their right to be in public without turning their body into public property for strangers to touch.

This is not a call to let dogs run loose in traffic. It is a call to write rules and build infrastructure that assume dogs belong in public life; that they have a right to education and support to navigate it; and that their “no,” their choices, and their bodily boundaries still matter once they leave the house.

For those of us working professionally with dogs and their caregivers, behaviour support and teaching will always be part of what we do. But if we take agency and bodily autonomy seriously, then the central question shifts from “How do I get this dog to stop doing X?” to something more honest and more collective:

👉 What would it look like to change ourselves, and our systems, so dogs don’t have to give up so much of themselves just to be allowed in?

12/11/2025

As we work on finalising the next issue (32) of the IAABC Foundation Journal, I am sharing with you a commentary I wrote for Issue 31:

In the absence of formal regulation, the dog training and behaviour consultancy industry relies heavily on self-defined ethical standards to guide practice. This commentary examines the limitations of ethical...

03/11/2025

We talk a lot about meeting our dogs’ needs. Food, water, rest, vet care, safe spaces, enrichment. Needs keep a body alive. Desires are needs for flourishing; they let a life unfold.

If we want to move from good welfare to good wellbeing, we have to raise the bar. That means taking a dog’s desires seriously. Not as indulgences or extras but as part of what it means to live a life that is more than the absence of harm. Desire is information about what matters to the individual. It speaks to agency, curiosity, preference, and the simple joy of getting to choose.

We often diminish desire because it feels messy or impractical. We focus on behaviours and skills and ability to cope. Yet the difference is profound. A walk that meets needs is a lap around the block. A walk that meets desires lets the dog linger at the hedge that holds the morning news, choose the route, or skip the park when they would rather amble by the river. Needs say “go out.” Desires say “go this way.”

Meeting desires is not the same as saying yes to everything. It is the practice of offering real options, reading the answer, and making room for preference while keeping everyone safe. It is the art of designing days with credible options. It asks us to notice when the dog seeks a different pace, a different game, a different social distance, or a different task entirely.

When we centre desires, behaviour changes in quality. You see softer bodies, longer exhales, steadier recovery, richer engagement. You also see refusals that are easier to hear, because refusal is recognised as communication rather than defiance.

Good welfare prevents suffering. Good wellbeing cultivates a life that feels worth living to the nonhuman animal who is living it. The shift is simple to state and demanding to practice. Ask more often. Offer real choices. Let their answer move you.

31/10/2025

This is Grandma Monday.

In the photo she is eighteen years old. Her mouth is a little grey, the way driftwood is grey. Her body is smaller than it used to be, lighter, almost like her bones have begun to float. People always said she was beautiful and, even then, tired and old and held together by care and routine, she still was.

Monday was one of my Merit Dogs before Merit Dog was even a proper thing. She trained me, really. She shaped what I believe about dogs, about care, about responsibility. She came into every room like the sun through a window. She had opinions. She was certain of herself in a way that felt structural. You did not simply live with Monday. You moved around Monday, you consulted her, you adjusted the world to her comfort and she allowed you to do so because she loved you.

For most of her life she was fearless in that joyful, reckless way that makes you both proud and exhausted. She was the kind of dog who would announce herself to a space, make instant friends, launch into any game, vault over whatever was in her way, and then sleep like she had saved the world. She was bright, fast, busy. She learned everything quickly and expected you to keep up.

And then, slowly, she began to change.

Her first signs of cognitive dysfunction showed up around fourteen. At first it is easy to tell yourself stories. She is just tired today. She is just getting older. She just did not hear me. You do not want to believe you are watching her go somewhere you cannot follow.

It looked small in the beginning. She started losing interest in her favourite games, the ones that had always been ours. The silly chasey games in the hallway where she would pounce and grin and dare me to try to get past her. The tug game she used to insist on, shoving a toy into my hands and growling in that theatrical, delighted way that never once meant danger. One day I realised I had been holding the toy out to her, wiggling it, giving her every cue that used to light her up, and she just looked at it politely, then at me, and then she walked away.

That moment felt louder than it should have. Fun had always been her north star. When she started opting out of fun, I knew something was shifting inside her.

Then came the getting stuck.

Cognitive decline in dogs is often described in clinical language, things like disorientation and spatial confusion, but that is not what it feels like when you are living with it. What it feels like is standing two steps behind your best friend while she stands behind an open door and panics because she cannot work out how to move around it.

She would walk into the kitchen and end up behind the door, the door already open, nothing physically blocking her. She could have just taken one step to the side, curved her body, and come out. She had done that literally thousands of times in her life. But she would freeze. Her body would go small and tense. Her breathing would pick up. She would look at the gap like it was a locked gate. Sometimes she would whine under her breath, almost inaudible, like she did not want to bother anyone but she also did not know what to do.

So I would go to her. I would put my hand on her chest and say her name softly. I would move the door wider, even though it was already wide. I would shift my own body in a way that suggested a path, and then she would suddenly unstick, like a record catching the groove again, and trot out as if nothing had happened. Tail up. Problem solved. Everything fine. And I would smile and tell her she was clever, because in that moment she was. She had done a hard thing.

This is the part people do not always understand. You do not hurry them. You do not tell them they are being silly. You adjust the world so it keeps making sense.

Monday also started to stand and stare into mirrors. For long stretches she would look into a mirror or a dark window as if something there mattered and she was trying to catch it. Sometimes I wondered if she recognised herself and then lost it again, or if she thought there was another dog in the house that she could not quite reach. I used to watch her reflecting back at herself, both of them old and solemn and patient, and it felt like witnessing a conversation I was not allowed to join. But her eyes were vacant.

Her anxiety crept up too. This part broke me more than I expected. Monday had always been so confident. She moved through the world assuming that it should cooperate with her, which is an attitude I admired. To watch that certainty thin out was like watching the tide pull away from a sandbank you know is going to collapse.

She began to shrink into herself. That is the best way I can describe it. Her body posture got smaller. She tucked her head a little lower. She startled more easily at sounds she would have ignored. She paced at night sometimes, walking that slow loop of worry that so many older dogs walk, where you can tell they are tired but their brain will not let them rest. On walks, she would stop mid stride and not know how to get unstuck.

Part of this was cognitive change. Part of it was also her senses. She was losing her vision and her hearing. Sensory loss on its own can be disorienting and frightening. Imagine the world you have always read perfectly suddenly becoming unreliable.

Her hearing went patchy first. I would call and she would not respond or not hear me when I came home. Her brain simply was not processing sound in the same steady way it once had. Her sight softened after that. Her eyes started to cloud and she would miss things slightly to the left. I learned to approach in her field of view, to announce myself with touch before movement, to give her time to smell me and orient. Consent never stops mattering just because someone gets old.

All of these changes together made her unsure in a way she had never been. That confidence that had once felt built in, like part of her spine, was now something I had to lend her.

Caring for her in those final years taught me more about love than any joyful, easy day ever did. Love as maintenance. Love as ritual. Love as I will slow down so you can still recognise your life.

We put rugs on the slippery floors so she would not fall. We kept routines predictable. We turned on more lights at night so the shadows would not startle her. We spoke gently. We shortened outings when she told us she had had enough. We made sure she could still choose, even if the choices were now smaller.

I think people assume the end of life with a dog like Monday is only sad. Parts of it were devastating and scary. Watching the edges of her mind fray was like losing her in tiny pieces long before her body let go. There is a particular kind of helplessness that comes from knowing she is anxious and not being able to explain to her why she feels that way.

But there was also a strange, quiet beauty to it. Monday at eighteen was still Monday. She still had preferences. She still had a sense of humour. She still had that softness in her face when she looked at me, the look that says we have done a lifetime together and I know you. She still leaned her body against my leg in the way that meant stay here. She still relaxed, completely, when she slept. There is an honesty to that level of trust that I do not think language can reach.

And she was loved, fiercely, right until the end. That matters. It matters more than almost anything.

When I look at her photo now I see all of it at once. I see the dog who barrelled through life at full volume and taught me to keep up. I see the elder who needed help getting around an open door. I see the mind that wandered and circled and sometimes got lost behind a mirror. I see the body settling into age the way an old house settles in the wind. I see a soul who stayed gentle, even when the world got confusing.

Grandma Monday was eighteen in that picture. She is very missed.

22/10/2025

This morning on the beach, Juno and I were playing – scoot, pivot, tussle, pause, repeat. She loves to play with me, just not with canine strangers. The sand was firm, the air salty, and Juno’s zoomies carved long commas across the shoreline.

A large pointer spotted us and lit up. He came in bouncy and hopeful, a picture of good intentions. As he closed the distance, Juno flicked me a look that means “pause.” So we did. He stopped too and folded into a clear play bow, chest low, tail soft, weight rocking back. Juno answered with a small lick of her lips, a slight tightening of her mouth, and turned her head away, body loose but still. A polite “no, thank you,” stated in fluent dog.

He read it. He took two slow steps to double check and then stepped off to sniff a clump of seaweed with exaggerated focus. Space offered. Pressure released. After a moment, he glanced back and made a third, lighter invitation without pressure. When she didn’t take it, he trotted on, easy and unbothered. Conversation complete.

And then, the sweetest thing. As soon as he moved off, Juno sprang back to me with a grin, ready to re-engage in our game as if to say, “Where were we?” We scooted and pivoted and tussled again, and the beach felt even kinder than before.

What I loved most was the clarity between them. Juno’s signals were small but precise. His response was thoughtful, patient, and beautifully observant. No chasing, no insisting, no “convincing.” Just two dogs negotiating the terms of play with grace.

This is the kind of beach etiquette I wish every caregiver could see. The clear ask, listen carefully, and let the other individual set the pace. When we honour those quiet messages, dogs don’t have to shout. They can simply live their conversations out loud, in sand-scuffed sentences and soft, readable commas.

That is what "friendly" looks like.

15/10/2025

What a fascinating study. I think a few of you may have participated, too!

New study alert! 🔥
Excited to see a new publication from Jade of Animal Behaviour Matters out today! This study is part of her PhD work, investigating perceptions of dog trainers and scent-based activities for companion dogs.

Link to the open access study in the comments.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159125003351