The Good Dog Training And Rehabilitation

10/17/2026

One spot left for TGD’s world renowned shadow experience!

An intimate, highly transparent, small group experience where everyone gets as much one-on-one time as they need.

While I have a foundational curriculum that I always cover, we purposely designed the majority of the program to be attendee-led. Meaning, whatever the individual attendees most want to learn, is what we focus on.

I’ve found this to be the perfect balance. I’ll make sure I share everything I feel is essential for a modern trainer to know in order to be effective and successful, and you supply the specifics that each of you feel you need to improve/tweak/better understand to hit your personal training goals.

As always, it’s a no BS, straight shooting, incredibly transparent look into a highly proven and successful approach for your standard pet dog issues, as well as the most serious of behavior modification.

The program is open to new, intermediate, and highly experienced trainers. It’s also open to rescue, shelter, or foster folks.

We’ve got one spot left for the November program. If you’d like to grab the spot, please email us at [email protected] asap.

PS, IYKYN 🤣

10/16/2026

Mr. Big Stuff, softening up, learning to relax, and giving nothing but safe responses…

Just a handful of days in and Migz, the Akita with the bite history is making awesome strides.

So many prefer to push off addressing dangerous behavior, but I much prefer to address it immediately—breaking the pattern of: “This occurs, I don’t like it, I bite” (regardless of the reason), with “This occurs, I don’t like it, I explore other options.”

This simple training strategy enables us to move much more quickly through the rehab process and get to the fun, light, enjoyable, and safe stuff much faster.

I’ve done it like this for 20 years, with many, many dangerous dogs, and I’ve yet to see a negative downstream effect. All I’ve seen are dogs who happily romp with me and are super connected, in a very short timeframe.

PS, if you’re lacking context on this, Migz had two episodes of attempting to perforate yours truly. We discussed the matter as they occurred, and now he’s in a far better space.

10/16/2026

It only took me 25% of my dog’s life for them be able to enjoy off-leash freedom…

First of all, props to this owner for putting in the work to try to achieve her goals. But seeing as she’s using a force-free approach, there’s a few things to mention.

1/ As I shared in the video, 3 years to create off-leash reliability is approximately 25% of the average dog’s life. Think about that. I watch an endless stream of force-free trainers and advocates proudly sharing, like a banner of goodness, the years of work it took to get their dog to whatever level of training they’ve reached.

And they shout just as loud and proud that there were no tools or aversives involved.

But here’s the thing, I can have almost any dog fully off-leash reliable, and happy as a clam in a week. One week. I can also typically resolve severe reactivity, separation anxiety, resource guarding, and even human aggression in a few weeks to a month at the most.

2/ When trainers and advocates refuse to use the best tools, I know that they will run headfirst into serious limitations. Their “off-leash reliability”, will be will be anything but truly reliable. Their work on reactivity will still involve tons of distance, constant treat distractions, and plenty of blowups when life inevitably happens. And it’s even worse for even more challenging behaviors like the others I listed above.

So once again we have to ask, if the training takes a significant portion of the dog‘s life, and when after all that work the end result is still far from effective or reliable, is the force-free movement actually focused on what’s best for dogs and owners, or is it far more about what best for the trainers, ideologues, and brainwashed advocates?

10/16/2026

Owners, the single greatest insurance you have when searching out and hiring dog training help isn’t determined by the trainers, their supposed skills, or the narrative they spin that is so deeply emotionally appealing.

The single greatest insurance is your own mindset, attitude, beliefs.

Charlatans, liars, manipulators, are everywhere, and they’ll be more than happy to not only steal your cash, they’ll also happily steal you hope… and ultimately you and your dog’s quality of life together.

Which is why YOU have to take responsibility for 1/ educating yourself, 2/ ensuring you’re not being emotionally manipulated, 3/ being unapologetically grounded in reality.

If you’re aware of the above three, and if you do the work necessary to ensure your mindset is as bulletproof as possible, you’ll be an extremely hard target to manipulate and bamboozle.

On the other hand, if you choose not to handle the above three, you can’t complain when you, your dog, and your life together get taken for a most unpleasant, expensive, and ultimately heartbreaking ride.

And it will only be your fault.

Because we all know the fable of the frog and the scorpion. If you choose to believe the scorpion out of the goodness of your heart (or the weakness of your heart), knowing the scorpion is a scorpion who will do scorpion things, there’s only one person to blame.

Hint: It ain’t the scorpion.

PS, Reality is kryptonite to those selling you delusion. If you weild it wisely, and without apology, you’ll be untouchable, and unf**kwithable. And so will your dog.

10/15/2026

This just in: “Dogs are never naughty!”

They’re either scared, overstimulated, or you’re asking too much.

It’s just another version of “They’re not giving you a hard time, they’re having a hard time” victim framing.

Thank god there’s trainers like this to remind you that all you’ve seen of dogs over the course of your life, is simply a figment of your oppressive imagination.

Are there dogs who are genuinely struggling? Genuinely afraid? Of course. But they, just like the opportunistic brats (which are the majority) benefit from the same high standards, the same pushing through difficult things, and the same leadership and accountability that makes all of this work.

Avoidance, coddling, and excuses help none of them. But you know that. ;)

10/15/2026

While I wish it WAS the case that the videos I share of force-free trainers and their wildly dysfunctional beliefs and behavior (and the terrible downstream effects on dogs) were some incredibly rare, super-hard-to-find examples that exist in only the strangest and darkest locations of social media, that’s sadly not the case.

This stuff is indeed everywhere.

If you take a moment and search Instagram and TikTok for “force-free dog training”, you’ll find all you need to finally wake up to what’s happening, and what’s been happening in the training world for a few decades now.

That said, like most radical movements it started off with some *somewhat* reasonable goals, but as time marched on, and as human nature did its thing, it continued to morph into more and more extreme, and eventually non-camouflaged versions of obvious mental illness projected onto, and sadly forcefully applied to dogs.

And as social media has enabled, encouraged, incentivized, and normalized highly dysfunctional, and yes, pathological behavior, the expected result has occurred…

Much of the training world now engages in abject mental illness, and applies it openly without any hint of self-awareness or self-consciousness… to dog training. And because so much of it occurs only their own ecosystem, most folks have no idea just how pervasive it actually is.

And that’s precisely how so much of the world has been engulfed by this toxic mental plague, and adopted it. A small handful of highly motivated, and highly indoctrinated true believers quietly sneak in, and slowly remake the laws and create the new norms for training dogs.

It’s why Europe, the UK, and Australia have had draconian training laws and limitations placed on them. It’s why countries have managed to outlaw crates with doors on them, prong collars, and e-collar.

And if you think they’re not working tirelessly to achieve the same here, you’re missing the plot.

It’s not a war of training methodologies, it’s a war of mental illness against logic, reason, common sense, and observable reality.

10/14/2026

Migz, the human aggressive Akita’s first session…

After 2 days of getting the big guy settled in, working through some rather difficult anti-crate feelings, and setting some clear foundational rules (crate intro/exit, thresholds, not putting pressure on the leash) along with 2 firm convos in regards to wanting to perforate yours truly, we finally had our first “official training” session.

Of course we’ve been training since the moment he arrived, but this is the first “official” session with tools.

I’m using a micro educator and a martingale, and doing my usual e-collar intro, which is simply about creating a vibe where the dog is responding to my cues. Technically, I’m training the beginnings of recall and follow, which I will use down the line, but what I’m really after here is an attitude/mindset shift. Getting Migz to cooperate and work with me rather than simply tuning me out.

Like many of the other small moments we’ve worked on, the goal is to strategically sneak into the dog’s brain (avoiding a full frontal confrontation) and begin to share with him the primary goal of the entire program: that there’s two paths on offer. One is a cooperative, fun, playful, affectionate, socially comfy, pressure free path—the one I want him to choose, and the second is friction filled, not fun, not playful, not affectionate, socially uncomfortable, and has unpleasant pressure involved—the one I don’t want him to choose.

My job is to make the path that I want him to go down irresistible, and the one I don’t want him to go down far from irresistible.

He’s in charge of creating his own reality. A sort of choose your own adventure if you will. My job is to guide him through the process and get him to choose the right adventure.

The muzzle has been off since drop-off, and he’s slowly warming up. Slowly. Good stuff so far.

The Good Dog Way
Gig Harbor, WA
Phoenix, AZ

10/14/2026