14/04/2026
Can I tell you about C.? She came to a session with me carrying the lives and histories of three dogs she loves, years of knowledge, and a habit she hadn't yet named.
C. is one of the most knowledgeable, sensitive and sincere women I have ever met. She had done the work. Reflection logs, hours of video, and the full vocabulary. She could fluently name what she was seeing.
Every piece of body-language communication immediately went through a filter: what does this mean, and what should I do next? She was gathering evidence and running it through a translation that wasn't for her three dogs. It was built for dogs in general. And a dog in general, drawn from one narrow, universal understanding of what dogs are, is not the dog standing in front of you.
So even as she watched them, she wasn't quite with them. She was in the interaction she was expecting. With the version of her dogs that lived in her head, assembled from everything she'd learned about what dogs do. And she still felt, constantly, like she was getting it wrong.
When we sat together with the footage, this became clearer for both of us. In one video, she had intervened before any interaction had even occurred. She had moved before the dogs asked her for anything. In another, she used sound signals before any tension came up between the dogs. Running commentary through every unfolding moment, not for the dogs, but for herself.
She named it when I reflected that to her.
"I panic quickly. I sound my inner panic alarm very early on — it's a reaction to the situation."
Her alarm was louder than anything the dogs were actually saying, to each other and to her. When she watched her dogs, she wasn't watching the dogs in front of her. She was watching and responding to the version of them in her head, as well as to her own baggage. Every flick of an ear going through it, every shift in posture filtered through what she was already anticipating.
We also unpacked another of her instincts. Every time the dogs were in the middle of something, she was talking, offering a running commentary on each unfolding moment. When I pointed it out, she didn't hesitate.
"It's a coping mechanism. My inner commentary."
She was narrating for herself. Trying to catch the moment she'd need to step in before she missed it, certain that there would be a moment of rupture, and she would need to intervene.
Then we got to the question beneath it all. What does a successful interaction actually mean to her? What was she measuring against when she watched a video back and thought she'd failed?
She sat with it. Then she said, "In my head, success is looking like 'oh, I love you, and you love me too.' That is a lot of pressure, not just on myself, but also on them."
So we stayed with a different question. What if success is just: are the dogs communicating? Even if that communication is one dog saying I don't like what you're doing and the other one saying, *"Okay."* Even if it lasts ten seconds, and they both walk away.
She said, "The ability to communicate is a success."
And she went quiet.
At the end of the session, I asked her to go back to every video she'd sent me, the ones she'd described as failures, moments she'd messed up, and come back with what she is seeing differently now.
"I will see the worst thing possible from the same footage," she said. "And now I'm going to go back to see it with your perspective."
A few weeks later, she was facilitating a meeting between Z. and N., a foster pup.
Z. went to N. looking to hump him. Every version of C. that existed before that conversation would have split them. Fast. Confidently. Correctly. Believing that this is what N. needs and that Z. will escalate the tension leading to conflict!
She paused instead. And observed them both, listened to them and what they want from her.
N. sat down. Then he lay down. Then got up and walked to the room on his own. She opened the baby gate. He left. Z. settled. Ten seconds, and it was complete without needing her to intervene.
She wrote to me afterwards: "I was able to practise pausing and listening to N. when the interaction was over for him after 10 seconds. I still felt a strong urge to do something. But I was also able to pause."
Both things at once. The urge and the pause. That is someone who has genuinely changed how they show up.
What no certification builds is this. The capacity to stay present. To catch your own alarm going off and ask — Is this theirs, or is this mine? To go back to footage you thought you understood and find a different story in it when you bring a different question.
C. already had all the knowledge. What she was missing was the practice of actually being with the dogs she was watching.
If you're reading this and recognising something — the alarm, the narrating, the urge to intervene and manage, measuring every interaction against a hope rather than what's actually there — that recognition is where The Dog Observation Practice begins.
Comment the word 'OBSERVE,' and I'll send you everything you need to know.
The dogs are already saying something. It is time you listen to them 🐾
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