Harmony - Professional Dog Training

Harmony - Professional Dog Training Clinical Animal Behaviourist support for your dog’s behaviour, as well as puppy and agility training

Clinical Animal Behaviourist member of the APBC and ABTC, agility competitor and guardian of two lovely black labradors, Lawrence and Rory, and a pocket rocket border collie Annie who had a TPLO surgery in 2024

08/09/2026

Rory’s first ever Hoopers competition. 🖤

And actually, she was rather fabulous.

Three tunnels, round the barrel, a brief loss of Labrador 😂 — and then I managed to get myself into completely the wrong position and gave her some fairly questionable information about where we were going next.

She tried incredibly hard to work out what I meant, we found each other again, and off she went.

And the distance she gave me was fantastic. In fact, possibly a little too fantastic — she went so wide at one point that she missed the hoop altogether. 😂

That’s useful information rather than something I’m worried about. The distance is there; the hoops themselves just don’t have quite enough value for her yet. That’s something we can build in training.

I rather like keeping the messy bits in. Dog training isn’t about producing a dog who never gets anything “wrong”. Sometimes the dog is responding perfectly reasonably to the information we’ve given them.

A very Rory first competition: enthusiastic, slightly chaotic, and ultimately rather good. 😂🖤

05/09/2026

Three dogs. One book. No instructions. 📖

I put a book on the floor and gave each dog a short session (around 2 minutes each) to see what we could create together.

We started with capturing — marking and rewarding one tiny thing they naturally offered.

Then came the shaping.

Lawrence offered a paw, so we followed that idea.

Annie and Rory both tried plenty of paws too — but that was after they’d been rewarded for their initial behaviour of sniffing with head down for Annie or for Rory touching it with some part of her head. So I simply ignored those versions and kept marking and rewarding the tiny bits of nose behaviour I wanted to explore.

And gradually, those tiny choices became clearer.

Lawrence ended up approaching the book, placing one paw on it and holding the position.

Annie learned to approach, stop without touching it and indicate the book with her nose and eye gaze.

And Rory ended up touching her chin on it.

None of those behaviours really existed before I put the book down and they hadn’t played with this book before.

There was no cue. No correct answer. And no plan for what a dog is supposed to do with a book.

Just noticing something tiny, saying yes, that bit, and seeing where we could take it together.

That’s capturing and shaping. And you really can start with whatever your dog gives you.

Put something safe and boring on the floor, grab a few treats, and see what your dog thinks the game should be. ❤️

05/09/2026

Is training something you do to your dog?

My favourite training barely feels like training at all.

A clicker, a pot of treats, no particular agenda — and a dog who’s up for a game.

I notice the tiny things they offer, mark and reward something interesting, and see what happens next. A small movement becomes more deliberate. A funny noise gets repeated. Eventually we can give it a cue — and suddenly it looks like a “trained trick”.

But the finished behaviour isn’t really my favourite bit.

It’s that moment when the dog realises “Oh! You noticed THAT?” and starts experimenting to see what else might make the game continue.

There’s skill in capturing and shaping behaviour, of course — but there’s also joy in it. For me, that’s when training feels most like something we’re doing together as a shared activity.

So grab some treats, lose the agenda and go play with your dog. What might they teach you? 🖤

02/09/2026

Yesterday she needed a chin rest.
Today I chose not to use it 👀

A few weeks ago, I couldn’t get an ear swab anywhere near Rory’s ear without her leaning away.

I broke the procedure down — swab, ear handling, opening the ear and head restraint — but progress was still limited. So I went back further and introduced a chin rest.

The chin rest isn’t there to keep Rory’s head still. It’s a clear way for her to participate — and to tell me to stop. If her chin comes up, I stop.

That clarity showed me I was still asking for too much at once. So we practised the individual pieces separately, for just 5–10 minutes most days, before gradually putting them back together.

Yesterday she could comfortably combine chin rest, restraint, open ear and swab. Today we took it to the vets — another increase in difficulty — so I made things easier again.

And when Rory was comfortable simply eating cheese while the nurse handled her ear, we didn’t need the chin rest at all.

The chin rest was scaffolding, not the goal. And cheese doesn’t fix fear — some frightened dogs won’t eat, while others will eat despite being uncomfortable. I was watching Rory’s whole response, not just whether she took food.

Cooperative-care behaviours are tools. The goal is helping the dog in front of us feel safe enough to participate.

02/09/2026

Could your dog sleep while someone they don’t know well moves around your house? 👀 What would success with visitors look like for your dog — wanting to say hello, calmly watching from a distance, or simply being able to ignore them?

Success with visitors doesn’t have to mean wanting to make friends.

With the builders, I used management, distance and reinforcement, and adjusted what I was asking according to what each dog was telling me.

Annie and Rory eventually looked genuinely pleased to have them around. Lawrence could cope, but remained a little uncomfortable. One of the difficult bits was getting people to leave him alone — understandably, when two very sociable dogs are enthusiastically saying hello, it’s easy to assume the third dog hovering nearby wants the same interaction.

The final clip is Lawrence today with another new person in the background who has been brilliant at simply ignoring him and keeping hands off. He doesn’t need to greet her, watch her or check what she’s doing. Eventually, he puts his head down to sleep.

For him, that’s the goal: not learning to love every visitor, but feeling safe enough that someone moving around his home simply isn’t important.

What would success with visitors look like for your dog — saying hello, calmly watching from a distance, or being able to ignore them? 👇

31/08/2026

Mei came to visit… and apparently everyone needed to know who she was 😂

To us, this might look like a spectacularly rude welcome. But sniffing around another dog’s rear end is a completely normal way for dogs to gather social information.

Interestingly, the greeting humans often find more polite — approaching directly and meeting face-to-face — can actually be more socially intense for dogs.

Dog etiquette and human etiquette aren’t always quite the same. 🐾

What does your dog do when they meet someone new?

31/08/2026

Rory knows her chin rest really well — so when it suddenly seems to disappear, I want to know why.

Watch those middle clips again. Alongside not offering the behaviour I’ve asked for, there’s lip licking, panting and interaction with the cotton bud. Dogs may also start interacting with our hands, equipment or other things around them — sometimes offering those slightly “cutesy” behaviours instead of the behaviour we actually cued.

In context, those can be signs of conflict, displacement or anxiety — and for me they’re useful information that the task has become too difficult.

By the final clip, I’m asking much more of Rory: chin rest, her ear held open, head restraint and the ear swab.

So how did we get from “I can’t do chin” to this? What other changes in Rory’s body language do you notice from those middle clips to the final clip? 👀

And the bigger training question: by the final clip I’m asking much more of her — so what do you think I changed to help her get there? 👇

30/08/2026

Mei came to visit… and apparently everyone needed to know who she was 😂

To us, this might look like a spectacularly rude welcome. But sniffing around another dog’s rear end is a completely normal way for dogs to gather social information.

Interestingly, the greeting humans often find more polite — approaching directly and meeting face-to-face — can actually be more socially intense for dogs.

Dog etiquette and human etiquette aren’t always quite the same. 🐾

26/08/2026

I didn’t teach Rory how to shake her head. She gave me the behaviour — I just noticed it.

While we were waiting for my mobility scooter to be repaired, Rory kept making a little movement where she looked back over her shoulder.

So I started saying “shake” and rewarding her when she did it.

Then I waited.

She offered it again.

And again.

And as she started to understand what was earning the reward, I added a ‘cue’ and became a little more selective about the movement I reinforced.

Four repetitions later, we had a pretty convincing head shake. 😂

This is capturing — noticing a behaviour your dog already offers and reinforcing it. Technically, there was a little shaping involved too as I refined the movement.

And while tricks are a fun way to demonstrate it, the principle is much more useful than that.

Your dog chooses to settle quietly?
Notices another dog and disengages?
Checks in with you?
Makes a good choice instead of the one you were expecting?

Notice it. Reward it.

We spend an awful lot of time trying to stop the behaviours we don’t want. Sometimes it’s worth getting really good at spotting the ones we’d like to see again.

And there’s something else Rory repeats every single time she “shakes”… 👀
Can you spot it?

24/08/2026

“He’s mounting other dogs — he needs neutering.”

It’s something I hear surprisingly often.

Except the dog doing the mounting here is Rory. She’s female. 😂

Rory is currently in season, so hormones may well be relevant to this interaction. Mounting absolutely can be sexual behaviour.

But dogs can also mount when they’re excited or playing — and when they’re frustrated, anxious, over-aroused or struggling with a social interaction.

That last one matters.

I sometimes meet anxious dogs who are in social situations with other dogs that they’re finding difficult. They mount, and the mounting is interpreted as sexual behaviour or “dominance”.

The proposed solution becomes neutering.

But if the behaviour is being driven by anxiety, conflict or over-arousal, removing reproductive hormones doesn’t address the reason the dog is struggling in the first place. And that means their behaviour may deteriorate further if they are neutered.

In Rory and Lawrence’s interaction here, the mounting was brief and Lawrence wasn’t particularly concerned, so I didn’t need to make a big issue of it. And Lawrence is not at all interested in her!

Mounting tells us WHAT a dog is doing.
It doesn’t, by itself, tell us WHY.

And that’s the question I’d want answered before deciding what, if anything, needs to change.

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