Wagandwalks

02/09/2026

Some snaps from today 📸 everyone had zoomiessss 🤪 must have been the rain 🤣

01/09/2026

Food for thought, I talk about operant conditioning too much if i am honest, and most of it doesn't matter.

I'll sit there naming quadrants at people who came to me because their dog pulls, and half of it is outdated language for something far simpler. Dog training is bigger than four boxes.

Take a dog lying in front of a fire.

It's cold, so it moves towards the heat. Warmth gets added and the behaviour gets stronger, so call it positive reinforcement. Or say the cold has been taken away and the behaviour got stronger, so call it negative reinforcement. Same dog, same fire, same second in time, two labels.

Now it gets too hot and moves off. Heat was added and lying there decreased, so call it positive punishment. Or heat gets removed by moving away and moving away increases, so call it negative reinforcement again.

Now let the fire burn out. The warmth is gone, and the dog stops lying there. Something good was taken away and the behaviour dropped, so that's negative punishment. Nobody trained anything. The wood ran out.

The only variable that actually moved is the dog's body temperature, and that's the one thing nobody in that room can control in that moment.

The quadrants describe what an observer sees after the fact. They don't tell you what the dog wants, what state it's in, or what it's going to do next. That's the bit that matters, and it's the bit the terminology skips right over

Send a message to learn more

26/08/2026

Your dog doesn’t come back when you call.

So you keep him on the lead. Every walk. Every field. Every day.

You tell yourself he’s happy enough. He isn’t. And neither are you, dragging a frustrated dog past a hundred acres he’ll never get to run on.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you. Recall isn’t a personality trait. Your dog isn’t “just stubborn” or “too high drive” or “a spaniel, what do you expect”. Recall is a skill. Skills get trained.

We’ve spent 7 years doing exactly this with the dogs other trainers gave up on. Reactive ones. Bolters. The ones who hear their name and run harder.

Drop me a message or comment RECALL and I’ll send the details to our off leash freedom package 📦

Wagandwalks!
Trowbridge and surrounding can deliver session across United Kingdom 🇬🇧

26/08/2026

Today’s group walk ❤️
We welcomed Bonnie the lab on her first walk, she’s such a sweet girl 💖

Also had a horse join us 🐴 such a beautiful smile 🤣

26/08/2026

Our Tuesday group ❤️

We had quite a busy Tuesday, everyone enjoyed the sunshine ☀️ and paddling pool 💦

26/08/2026

Mondays with Roo, Max, Momo, Siren, Blizzard and Bing ❤️

19/08/2026

Most owners pick one of two roles without ever deciding to.

Some go boss. Some go parent. I went a different way. I was a technician. Precise, mechanical, Decent at building behaviours. Marker, reward, repeat. Clean sits, recalls, heelwork.

But it was all transactional. Do this, get that. I was programming a system, not developing a dog.

The role I want now is coach.

Think back to any team you were ever part of. Think about how the players spoke about coach. Think about how your parents used him.
"Carry on like that and I'll ring your coach."

That threat worked. It worked better than anything they could threaten you with themselves.

Why? Coach never had to shout to earn it. He wasn't your mate, and he wasn't your dad. He pushed you harder than either of them, and you loved him for it, because everything he asked of you was for you.

And here's the part that should stop you in your tracks. You could leave that team at sixteen. Bump into him in a supermarket at thirty. And you'd stand up straighter. Because you still don't want to disappoint him.

That's not obedience. That's not fear. That's not compliance.

It's a relationship so deeply built that it outlives the whistle by fifteen years.

So ask yourself honestly. If your dog could think back on you in ten years, which one are you?

The boss he obeyed because they had to?

The parent who kept him safe from everything, so they never learned to handle anything?

Or the coach who asked more of him than anyone else, and made him capable of it pushed them to new heights and challenged them!

Your dog isn't a system to be programmed. They are an athlete waiting for someone to develop them

Be the coach.

17/08/2026

This is Poppy. She’s smashing it on her reactivity journey with us.

But this clip isn’t a win. It’s a mess. And that’s exactly why I’m posting it.

Two dogs came at her out of nowhere. I didn’t see it coming. Poppy didn’t see it coming. She launched to defend herself, which is what any living thing would do when something charges at it.

Watch me in that moment. I say no. Then I don’t follow through. Thats me genuinely stuck.

Because here’s the conflict. It worked. The dogs backed off. Which means her reaction just got reinforced, and she is now more likely to do it again. So part of my brain says she shouldn’t have done that.

The other part says hang on, if I was her I’d have done the same thing.

There is no clean answer there. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not thinking about the dog in front of them.

So I stopped looking at the reaction and started looking at the recovery.

How fast does she come back down? Fast. Does she try to escalate or hold a grudge? No, she just carried on with her walk like it never happened.

What I did not do is march over and have a go at the other owner.

You see that all over social media because arguments get attention. It does nothing for the dog. It cranks the tension up and the dog reads every bit of it. So I cracked on, got her off leash straight away, let her dump the stress.

Then my goal from that moment on was find another similar situation.

I went and found a dog barking next to a van and played with her right next to it, so the last thing she felt about a barking dog that day was good. She nailed it and didn’t react or even think about the dog.

If your feed is nothing but flawless before and afters and you’re at home wondering what you’re doing wrong, this is what it actually looks like. Real dogs. Real owners. Real moments where you’re just doing your best with the information you’ve got.

Sometimes the goal isn’t the perfect response. It’s staying calm and turning the event into a non event.

How would you have handled this situation? What should I have done differently?