Hey! I'm excited to welcome you to the community! Please leave a comment and tell us where you are from. Thanks, Nick P.S. Don't forget to watch the onboarding so you can make the most of the group.

I realize this is a bit belated because it's been the holidays anyway. How was your Christmas? Any funny stories? What've you been getting up to?

I've been helping a lot of you with your reactive dogs recently and it got me thinking back. When I was 15 I got my first dog. A yellow labrador called Chester. Everything went wrong. I struggled to toilet train him, he ran away on walks, he pulled on the lead, chewed things up... and eventually became reactive to dogs. This is when I first started to learn about dogs, in order to resolve these issues. At the time Cesar Millan was at the height of his fame and I became a devotee. I read all of his books, saw him live, watched every episode, posted on his forum - I even had a t-shirt. I definitely have came a long way since then but to be fair it really gave me a spark. I trained my dog every day. Local people began to recognize this and even would ask me questions about training their own dogs. Quite strange for a teenager. Some people even called me 'The Dog Man' in school. I'm not sure why man, rather than boy but there you go. A lot happened in the following years. I studied Canine Behaviour at University, trained the dogs for Amazon Prime's The Pack & have trained dogs professionally for around the last 12 years or so. I did eventually resolve Chester's reactivity and he spent many years helping me resolve other dog's reactivity as a stooge dog. Sadly he died of cancer in 2020 at 12 years old. Anyway, the point of all of this is to say I have experienced having a reactive dog (and many more issues) first hand. Plus, the thousands of dogs I've worked with since then. I have a lot of empathy for all of you dealing with it and always enjoy helping you speed up your journey by learning from my mistakes! 🙏

A friend suggested that, on New Year’s Eve, we all create a Bingo Card of our goals/plans/predictions for 2026. Since most of my ambitions involve the dogs, I’m considering making one for each dog. So, I was wondering, what would be on your Training Bingo Cards? Here are a few of my initial ideas for Amigo: - Create a proper strength/conditioning plan - Win an obedience show - Train something totally new And Kairo: - Build motivation and drive - Learn to ignore the birds - Train heelwork properly Each of the goals will have different levels of difficulty - some easy, medium and hard. Maybe you can help with gathering ideas!

I met with a friend today to take a walk through the forestry. I knew there would be other dog walkers so I took the opportunity to use this to get some "Aster being normal" footage when there are other dogs about. See for yourself. The classic long dog howl (😂) was the worst she did today (video 1), which was her strongly objecting to two loose collies running about but giving her no notice whatsoever. I actually kept her off lead for the whole thing and most of the remainder of the walk and noticed she got a lot better as time went on. She was with Gills' little pack of glories but we met several other high energy dogs and although she was still up tight she was not nearly as bad. I'd like to repeat this exercise a few more times with her on her own to see if the more "generic pet owner" approach helps. I still have plenty enough control for her not to approach another dog that's not paying her heed or coming towards her, but if she can be loose whilst others are coming she is much happier. Towards the end a curious but polite and very pretty retreiver type thing followed close behind us (video 2) which Aster coped with well.