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! 🙏

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?