The Dogs That Changed How I Practice
I did not start out trying to become a canine nutritionist, aromatherapist or holistic pet health coach. I started as a dog trainer, and then the dogs kept giving me problems that training alone could not explain.
Some of those dogs scared me because I could not help them the way I thought I should be able to. Some made me question things I had been taught. Some sent me looking for mentors and books and conferences and certifications I had never imagined I would need.
And over time, something else happened. I stopped seeing these as a handful of unusual dogs and started seeing patterns.
Dogs with allergies, gut problems, anxiety and escalating behavior. Dogs who had once been happy and stable suddenly becoming fearful or aggressive. Former training clients calling to tell me that dogs I remembered as young had developed cancer, seizures or unexplained illnesses — and sometimes that they were gone.
I kept asking why.
The certifications came later.
The certifications followed the questions. I wasn't collecting credentials and then looking for somewhere to use them. I kept meeting dogs that made me realize I needed to know more.
The Dog Who Didn't Bark at Other Dogs. She Screamed.
Anna was a young rescue pit bull who could barely go outside in her own neighborhood. Dogs lived on both sides of her house, people regularly walked dogs past the property, and the mere sight of another dog could send her into an explosion that was nothing like ordinary barking or leash frustration.
Anna screamed.
It is one of those sounds I can still hear in my head. It sounded like genuine terror. Nobody knew Anna's story before rescue, but something in that dog remembered something.
I eventually got her comfortable with my dogs, which was significant. But a new dog could bring the whole reaction roaring back. The frustrating part for me as her trainer was that Anna's obedience was good. There was not another sit, down, heel or place command that needed to be drilled until fear disappeared. She knew what we had taught her.
She simply could not use obedience to make herself feel safe.
So I started researching. Of course Rescue Remedy came up everywhere, particularly among rescue people, but it was not enough. Then I remembered an aromatherapy vendor I had met at a trainer's conference. I called her, and I can still remember sitting in the Costco parking lot that day talking with her about Anna and about this strange new world of aromatherapy.
She sent me a product called Bitch Balm. I remember wondering whether it was supposed to be for Anna or for me.
But something shifted.
Anna did not magically become a social butterfly, and that is not the story I would ever tell. What changed was enough of her arousal that we had more room to work. For the first time I seriously wondered whether emotional support for a behavior case might sometimes need to begin somewhere other than the behavior itself.
Maybe the Bitch Balm Didn't Change Anna. Maybe It Changed Me.
Not all of my training peers were impressed with my new line of thinking. Some thought I was crazy. The explanation I heard was that perhaps the balm had not changed Anna at all. Maybe I simply believed it was helping, so I became calmer, handled the leash differently, changed my expectations and therefore changed the dog.
I understood that argument. I was a behavior professional, and of course I knew the human on the other end of the leash can influence the dog. I considered whether that was what I was seeing.
It just did not explain everything.
I did not decide that meant every oil worked or that every alternative idea deserved automatic acceptance. What it did was make me curious. I started paying closer attention, looking for patterns and asking people who knew more than I did.
Skepticism never bothered me nearly as much as watching a dog continue to struggle because everybody had agreed the only tool worth considering was the one we already knew how to use.
The Attack Was Over. The Family Wasn't Over It.
I already knew this family because they had been through my obedience program. Mom had always been nervous around certain dogs. Vinnie, a 195-pound Great Dane, terrified her. Vika, a black female pit bull, really scared her too. We had worked through those kinds of concerns during training and life went on.
Then, long after their obedience program ended, her husband and their dog were attacked by off-leash dogs.
There was physical recovery, medical care, rabies shots and all the practical fallout that comes after something like that. But the emotional fallout did not end when the injuries healed. Mom called me because after watching what her husband and dog went through, she had become afraid of dogs in general.
I had nothing useful to offer her by way of obedience training. Sit, down, heel and place were not going to address trauma in the people or the dog.
But I have always been the person who says, “There has to be something else to try.”
I remembered the essential oils I had purchased and left sitting in a box in my closet for more than a year. My obvious emotional-support choices were basically Lavender and Stress Away, and I knew we needed more than that. So I made phone calls, asked people who knew more than I did, got suggestions, and that family placed what became my first oil order for clients.
Then I bought an aromatherapy reference book.
I did not buy it so I could flip to “anxiety,” read one paragraph and put it away. I read the whole damn book, cover to cover, more than once. I read the next page even when the next page was not about the thing I originally went looking for.
I made notes. Lots of notes. Those notes eventually became spreadsheets, reference systems and a much deeper education. If you have ever been inside my Remedies Class, you have seen some of what those reference systems eventually became.
Oils also became part of many of my training programs and my kennel environment. There was often something relaxing diffusing while dogs worked, rested and learned.
That family did not turn me overnight into an animal aromatherapist, but they sent me down the road. Their case made me study seriously, seek out mentors and eventually pursue formal and advanced aromatherapy education instead of leaving those oils forgotten in a closet.
Puppy Training. Group Obedience. Private Training. He Still Wasn't Learning.
Bentley went through puppy training, group obedience and one-on-one obedience, and I swear that dog did not seem to learn a thing.
At first I blamed his mom. I told her she was not doing the work, that she needed to practice more and that inconsistency at home was probably why the training was not sticking.
Eventually I told her, “Bring him to me.”
That was another case where actually living with the dog gave me information I could not see during individual sessions. Bentley stayed in my house, I worked with him every day, and after about three weeks I was ready to give up.
I was preparing to call his mom and tell her I thought Bentley might genuinely have some type of learning problem and that it was time to talk with the veterinarian about a neurological evaluation.
As I sat there thinking about that conversation, I got one of those little nudges in the back of my head — maybe those healer ancestors I talk about — telling me to go back and read my notes from Wendy Volhard.
I dug out notes from a conference where Wendy had talked about the energetic nature of food, “hot” proteins and the ways food could influence behavior through a Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine framework.
And here's the funny part: I had not really bought into it at the conference either.
I had written down her checklist for the pattern of a “hot” dog, though, so I pulled it back out.
Bentley checked every box.
Then I asked a ridiculously simple question that I had somehow never made central to his behavior case: What was Bentley eating?
Venison.
Through the TCVM framework I had previously dismissed, we were feeding a very “hot” dog a warming protein. My immediate visual was that we were throwing fuel on the fire. His brain was not literally on fire, obviously, but that was exactly how I pictured the revved-up, unfocused dog sitting in front of me.
I called his mom and basically asked her to humor me because I knew this sounded like voodoo. We sent Bentley to a holistic veterinarian in Charlotte who practiced TCVM, and the veterinarian's assessment supported that same “hot dog” pattern.
We changed Bentley's main protein from venison to white fish. He was still eating kibble at the time because this was before I made my own transition into fresh-food feeding.
Within about three days, the training began to click into place. Bentley was noticeably calmer and more focused. He seemed smarter, not because information had magically appeared in his brain but because he suddenly seemed much more available to use what we had been teaching him.
The obedience had not failed. His mom had not failed. I had not failed to teach him.
We had been teaching him all along.
Bentley made me ask what might affect a dog's ability to use what he already knows.
I Started Seeing Patterns I Couldn't Ignore.
Anna, that traumatized family and Bentley were memorable turning points, but they were not the only reasons my work kept expanding. Over the years I started seeing the same kinds of questions coming at me from completely different directions, and eventually I could not dismiss them as isolated cases.
I was getting calls from former training clients telling me their dogs had died. Of course dogs die, and some of those dogs had lived long, full lives. But too many of the calls that stayed with me involved dogs that felt far too young. Cancer. Seizures. Sudden illness. Unexplained illness. Dogs I remembered as young, energetic training clients were suddenly very sick or gone.
That upset me deeply, and it made me ask why.
At the same time, I was standing in training programs looking at dogs with allergies, recurring ear problems, digestive stress, chronic loose stool, itching, anxiety and other health concerns with what felt like remarkable frequency. I was not yet the person those families were calling for health advice. I was their trainer. But I was standing there watching it happen.
I did not believe all of those problems had one explanation, and I still don't. Cancer is not the same thing as epilepsy. Allergies are not the same thing as inflammatory bowel disease. Anxiety can have multiple drivers.
But I wanted to understand the bigger picture. What roles might food, inflammation, gut health, genetics, environment, medication, exposures, stress, pain and lifestyle be playing? Where were the intersections? What were we missing because we were looking at each symptom in its own little box?
I needed better questions before I could hope to find better answers.
Why Were Some of My Previously Stable Dogs Coming Back?
I was also getting a fair number of calls for behavior tune-ups. Not every dog came back, of course, and sometimes the explanation was straightforward. Life got busy. The family stopped practicing. Rules changed. Structure slipped and an old behavior crept back in.
But it happened often enough that I started questioning whether that explanation covered every case.
Some of these dogs had left training doing beautifully. They were stable, happy dogs with solid obedience and families who understood how to work with them. Then months or years later I would hear that the dog was anxious again, reactive again or simply not acting like the dog everyone remembered.
Even more interesting were the genuinely new behavior problems. A happy-go-lucky dog who had never worried much about anything suddenly developed anxiety. A dog without an aggression history became irritable or reactive. A dog who had always tolerated people, handling or other dogs suddenly did not.
My training brain initially asked the obvious questions. What changed in the household? Did the family stop practicing? Did something happen socially? Had the dog been frightened? Were we accidentally reinforcing something?
Those are still useful questions.
Eventually I added another one:
What changed in the dog?
Was the dog painful now? Had digestion changed? Had a medication been added? Was something inflammatory happening? Was the dog aging? Was there a hormonal change, frightening experience, sleep disruption, food change or neurological concern? Was there something happening in the gut or elsewhere in the body that was changing the dog's capacity to cope?
I could no longer comfortably look at every returning behavior problem and assume someone had simply failed to keep up with obedience.
Training had taught me what the dog knew. These cases made me interested in what might affect the dog's ability to use what they knew.
The Certifications Followed the Questions.
Once I saw enough evidence that food could influence what I was seeing in dogs, I wanted deeper nutrition education. That led into formal canine nutrition education, raw feeding and eventually the fresh-food work that now makes up such a large part of my practice.
The emotional and trauma cases pushed me farther into animal aromatherapy. Chronic health cases sent me toward herbs, homeopathy, bodywork, Reiki, energy work and other supportive modalities. Holistic pet health coaching eventually gave me a broader framework for looking at nutrition, gut health, inflammation, environment, medications, behavior, stress, recovery and the patterns that repeat across a dog's history.
Just as importantly, those cases taught me to value mentors. I learned to call veterinarians, practitioners, teachers and peers when I did not know enough. The answer to getting stuck was not pretending I knew more. It was finding someone who did.
I wasn't collecting credentials and then inventing reasons to use them. The dogs kept showing me holes in what I knew, so I kept learning.
None of that made my training education less valuable. It made my understanding of the dog larger.
A Behavior Change Doesn't Automatically Mean Your Training Failed.
If your previously easygoing dog suddenly becomes anxious, reactive, irritable, aggressive or unable to settle, behavior absolutely belongs in the conversation. So do environment, learning history, stress and whatever may have happened around the time the change began.
But I would also want to know whether anything changed physically. Is the dog painful? Is sleep different? Is digestion different? Has appetite changed? Did a medication start or change? Has the dog gained or lost weight? Is there a new health diagnosis? Has the food changed? Are we seeing aging, mobility changes or another new pattern at the same time?
Sudden or meaningful behavioral changes deserve veterinary evaluation when a medical problem may be involved. Training and behavior work can be incredibly valuable, but neither should be used to talk a dog out of pain or illness.
Sometimes the answer really is training.
Sometimes the training is one piece of a much larger answer.
I Don't Need Every Dog to Prove My Theory. I Need Every Dog to Make Me Curious.
Anna taught me that a dog can know every command I taught her and still be too terrified to use them.
That traumatized family taught me that sometimes what comes after an event is much bigger than the training problem in front of you.
Bentley taught me that food deserved a seat at the behavior table, even though I had resisted the concept myself.
The dogs getting sick too young made me want to understand what we were doing differently as a culture and what I could do better.
And the previously stable dogs coming back with new anxiety, aggression or reactivity taught me not to automatically blame the pet parent or assume the dog simply needed another round of obedience.
All of those dogs made my question bigger.
I still train dogs. I still believe in good behavior work, structure and clear communication. I also believe food, pain, gut health, inflammation, trauma, environment, nervous-system health and the rest of the physical dog deserve to be part of the conversation when the behavior stops making sense.
I do not know everything.
I know a whole lot more than I did when Anna screamed at another dog, and I know enough now to keep asking: What else should we be looking at?
Have One of Those Cases Yourself?
If you are working with a dog who has pushed you to the edge of your own toolbox, I am happy to collaborate. You can refer your client, join their consultation or simply reach out professional-to-professional and tell me what you are seeing.