Field note · Read your dog
The first 90 minutes
People sometimes ask what we do in an initial consult. The short answer is that I spend most of it reading the dog and teaching the owner to start. The longer answer is below.
An initial consult is 90 minutes. It is the first time I meet the dog and the household. By the end of it, I want three things to be true. I want to know what is actually going on with the dog. I want the owner to have started seeing it too. And I want both of us to have a programme that makes sense for the household, not a generic plan I run for everyone.
Here is what the 90 minutes looks like from the inside.
Before I arrive
The owner fills in an intake form when they book. It asks for the dog's history, the behaviours they want to work on, the household setup, who lives there, what the dog eats, where the dog sleeps. I read it before the session. By the time I knock on the door I already have a working hypothesis about which part of the picture is broken.
I am usually wrong about a third of it. The form tells me what the owner thinks is happening. The session tells me what is actually happening. These are rarely the same.
The first ten minutes
I do not greet the dog when I walk in. I let the dog come and read me, or not, on its own time. I am watching the household instead. Where the dog goes when a stranger walks in. Whether the owner's voice changes pitch when they speak to the dog. Whether the dog has a designated space or is moving around looking for one. What the dog does when the owner sits down on the couch. What the dog does when I sit down on the couch.
A lot of the consult is decided in the first ten minutes. I have usually seen most of the recurring patterns by then. The rest of the session is testing the hypothesis.
The walk-through
I get the owner to walk me through a normal day, in order. When the dog wakes. What happens between waking and breakfast. What breakfast looks like. What the dog does mid-morning. When the walk happens, what the walk is like, what happens after. Where the dog rests, whether the dog actually rests, whether the rest is on the dog's terms or on the owner's.
The day is the diagnosis. I am not asking what the dog does at the trigger. I am asking what the dog's life is like in the twenty-three hours of the day that are not the trigger. The waterline is built across those twenty-three hours. The lunge or the bark is what you see at the moment the water spills.
The before-walk
If the dog is reactive on lead, we go on a short walk. I film it on a neck-mounted GoPro so the owner can watch it back. The point is not to fix anything yet. The point is to give us a baseline we can compare against in six weeks. Most owners have never watched themselves walk their dog from the dog's eyeline. Half of what they are doing turns out to be different from what they think they are doing.
The footage stays with me. The owner sees it. Nobody else does.
The assessment
I run a behavioural assessment with every new client. It is a structured walkthrough that scores the dog across the dimensions that matter for the methodology: arousal baseline, recoverability, reactivity profile, household structure, owner regulation, mode balance. I keep the assessment instrument itself internal. What the owner gets out of it is the scores and the picture they make together. By the end of the assessment we both know which lever is the right one to pull first.
The programme
I do not give the owner a list of commands. I give them a programme. It usually starts with cycles. Three or four sequences of the four modes across a day, designed for this dog. We walk through the first one in the session so they have seen it happen. I write the rest up and send it after.
If the dog needs more than the standard four weeks, I say so in the session, not at the end of week four. Most reactive cases run a four-week programme. Some need eight. A few need longer. I would rather scope it honestly at the start than upsell at the end.
After the session
The work continues over WhatsApp. The owner films the homework. I send back feedback. They adjust. The video loop is where most of the real change happens between sessions, because by week two the owner is starting to read the dog themselves, and that is the change the rest of the programme rests on.
By the end of the 90 minutes, the owner usually says one of two things. The first is "I had no idea any of this was happening." The second is "I knew something was wrong, I just didn't have the words for it." Both are the right place to start.