Jess' Dog Training, Bournemouth (2026)

Raising a young dog is hard: I make it easier 🍬
Kind, ethical methods✨
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23/10/2026

Too much exercise. When their dog develops behaviour problems, lots of people assume they need to tire them out more. Longer walks, more running, more ball throwing. But the opposite is almost always true. They need less physical exercise and more of the right stuff. A physically exhausted dog is not one who’s going to behave better. It’s one who risks injury, and becoming physically exhausted whilst mentally wired. Bad combo.

Not enough rest. Puppies need ~20 hours of sleep, adolescents ~18 hours and adults benefit from 16+ hours. Rest days are vital for physical and emotional recovery and avoiding trigger stacking. Nearly all the dogs I work with are chronically overstimulated, exhausted and totally disregulated due to lack of adequate rest and sleep.

Not enough mental enrichment. If all your dog does is walk, run and chase a ball, they’re missing out on so much. Dogs need opportunities to sniff, lick, chew, shred, dig and solve problems. They need to engage in behaviours that come naturally to. Frustration from a lack of appropriate outlets, due to a sole focus on physical exercise, causes so many issues.

Pain. THE most overlooked contributor. It makes dogs more reactive, less tolerant and more easily overwhelmed. And I hear this all the time: “But my dog loves their walks and they’re still eating, so they can’t be in pain!” Dogs can absolutely continue to eat, play and get excited about walks while experiencing pain. If your dog’s behaviour changes, in any way, PAIN. It’s always pain.

Want to understand where your dog’s behaviour is actually coming from? The answer is almost never: more training. It’s understanding why they’re behaving this way in the first place.

Head to the link in my bio to join my free Communicating With Your Dog webinar, where I’ll help you understand your dog’s behaviour and find strategies that actually work.

Amaya et al. (2020), Hunt et al. (2022), Mills et al. (2020), Camps et al. (2012).

21/10/2026

YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A CAR!!

But apparently, making a dog feel worse for being uncomfortable is perfectly acceptable?

Somewhere along the way, we’ve decided that dogs should be quiet, polite and convenient, regardless of how they’re actually feeling.

And we’ve become so used to seeing barking, growling and other perfectly normal dog behaviours treated as problems to be corrected that we rarely stop to question whether we’re approaching them the right way.

What if the answer isn’t to get better at stopping our dogs from communicating, but to get better at understanding them?

20/10/2026

“Show me you working with an aggressive dog”, well here ya go, lads. Honey is a savage beast 🍯

I like to teach dogs what ‘heel’ actually means before adding movement. Like ‘sit’ means “put your butt on the floor”, ‘heel’ means “come and stand on my right-hand side”. We start off with an obvious lure, then we gradually fade the lure out until only a verbal cue is needed. When a dog can confidently put themselves in the right position & stay there, then we add forward movement, treating after each step.

For me, heel is something fun to work on with dogs. It’s also useful for things like crossing roads, or maintaining your dog’s focus to pass something, but I absolutely do not condone expecting a heel from your dog at all times. It’s no fun for prolonged periods and is very restrictive for them; let them move freely on a long-line and use those amazing noses!

Honey is reactive. She would bark at all dogs, at any distance, and struggled to regulate herself. She wouldn’t take food off me in her first class and couldn’t even offer a sit. This is her four weeks later! 🥹

We didn’t get there with obedience. We got there by looking at her routine, prioritising good rest, enrichment and understanding what she was communicating first. Then I built a relationship with her through making her feel safe, going at her pace, listening to her signals. Now I can teach her fun things like this — in an environment with other dogs in the same room! Her walks her calmer, reactions are few and far between, she’s happier.

This is why you won’t see flashy training on my page. My training isn’t flashy. My work is 95% working with humans, because we should never be looking to teach a new behaviour in the first instance. We should be investigating pain, reducing stress, adding management to set the dog up for success. After we do that, the dog most often doesn’t need any practical training with me and if they do, it’s fun, confidence building stuff.

Real training should start with understanding, not control. If you’d like to better understand what your dog is trying to tell you, head to the link in my bio to book your slot on my free webinar on communicating with your dog.

19/10/2026

Some of the most confidently expressed opinions about force-free training come from people who haven’t got the first clue what it actually means 🧚🏼‍♀️

Let’s start with the tools. Some are inherently aversive because they’re designed to work through positive punishment or negative reinforcement, like a prong, head-collar or e-collar. Others aren’t, like a long-line, flat collar or flexi-lead. And a harness doesn’t cause pulling any more than trainers cause someone to run.

Force-free training doesn’t mean just giving dogs treats and hoping for the best. It means understanding learning theory, the individual dog, the impact of pain and what drives behaviour. To me, it means never intentionally using pain, discomfort or fear to modify behaviour (because who tf do you think you are to decide when discomfort becomes pain for another being, or that it’s okay to impose discomfort on someone else’s body?!).

And yes, all animals respond to positive reinforcement. That’s basic behavioural science. If something doesn’t function as a reinforcer, it isn’t positive reinforcement by definition. It doesn’t mean that R+ “doesn’t work” on that dog, it means the handler is messing up somehow. Knowing how to identify and use effective reinforcers is part of being a skilled trainer.

Your dog doesn’t love their prong collar either. They love what it predicts. In much the same way that my dog doesn’t actually love the cheese grater…

And perhaps the most ironic part is being told to educate ourselves about training tools by people who clearly haven’t taken the time to understand the training philosophy they’re criticising. There’s a reason most of the highly educated professionals in this industry choose force-free methods, and it isn’t because we don’t understand the alternatives.

Ziv (2017); Fernandes et al. (2017); Vieira de Castro et al. (2020); Herron et al. (2009); Blackwell et al. (2008); Hiby et al. (2004); Cooper et al. (2020); Grainger et al. (2021).

14/10/2026

To be absolutely clear, this post is specifically about using tethering as a training strategy, with the aim of ‘teaching a settle’. It is not about tethering for management. Tying your dog to a table at the pub while you eat is an entirely different thing to tethering a dog with the intention of teaching them to settle.

📚 De Winkel, T., van der Steen, S., Enders-Slegers, M.-J., Griffioen, R., Haverbeke, A., Groenewoud, D., & Hediger, K. (2024). Observational behaviors and emotions to assess welfare of dogs: A systematic review. Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 72, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2023.12.007
📚 Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(4), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000033
📚 Vieira de Castro, A. C., Fuchs, D., Morello, G. M., Pastur, S., de Sousa, L., & Olsson, I. A. S. (2020). Does training method matter? Evidence for the negative impact of aversive-based methods on companion dog welfare. PLOS ONE, 15(12), Article e0225023. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225023
📚 Dale, F. C., Burn, C. C., Murray, J., & Casey, R. (2024). Canine separation-related behaviour at six months of age: Dog, owner and early-life risk factors identified using the ‘Generation Pup’ longitudinal study. Animal Welfare, 33, Article e60. https://doi.org/10.1017/awf.2024.56
📚 Nagasawa, M., Mogi, K., & Kikusui, T. (2005). Attachment to humans: A comparative study of hand-reared wolves and differently socialized dog puppies. Animal Behaviour, 70(6), 1367–1375. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2005.03.025
📚 Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. (2018). Code of practice for the welfare of dogs. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/code-of-practice-for-the-welfare-of-dogs

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