I’ve spent a lifetime working alongside humans and animals, focusing on behavioural issues. In addition to dog training, I am also a qualified Nero coach, which may initially sound like an odd skill set for a dog trainer, especially as my career started with me working with autistic deaf children, actually, my second language is British Sign Language.

That may start to sound like a strange introduction to a dog trainer, however, I believe the skills I have learned in sign language and being able to read body language fluently alongside my experiences gained from working with animals, including horses has strengthened my dog training abilities.

Both working with animals and children has heightened my love and passion for working with ‘trust and positive boundaries’. I believe the key to an all around well-trained dog is the ‘trust’ that it has with its handler(s).

Q.What’s Your Favourite Dog?
I don’t have an absolute favourite dog, but as an owner of a Newfoundland they have a very special palace in my heart, but my favourite dog is a happy trusting dog with its owner – so all dogs are my favourite.

Q. What Is The One Single Most Thing You Think Dog Owners Can Do To Reduce Their Carbon Pawprint? 

Totally agree with poo bags as Lisa and Nic have said – people are buying the wrong ones, mislead by the produces. We should all be looking for plant poo bags, they are absolutely brilliant and made from starch so compostable. 

Q.What’s The Most Embarrassing Thing Your Dog Has Done?

The Accidental Water Rescue

Roxy is my Newfounland 13 years ago, she attempted her first water rescue!

Picture the scene. Jack, my son was in is buggy, it was a lovely Easter weekend and we went for a walk with him and an adolescent Roxy.

I live on the top of verge which leads to promenade and beach. Now, if you don’t know about Newfoundlands as a breed they have an inbuilt natural instinct to want to save people from drowning.

As it was Easter, and the weather was good, there were lots of children having a lovely time splashing in the sea and the squeals of their sheer delight of jumping in the waves were drifting up to where we were walking. 

Nest thing I knew, Roxy had taken off, and was now full pelt, heading down the verge across the promenade, down some steps, across the beach hurtling towards the children in the sea who she thought really needed saving!

From the children’s perspective, there’s a great big black bear running towards them – so they are now screaming louder.

Roxy hears the louder screaming and she is thinking it’s an absolute emergency and she must run and get there quicker!

The parents are now panicking, the beach warden is now looking for the dog’s owner, and screaming ‘no dogs on the beach!’ The lifeguards are frantically searching for the owner too… meanwhile, I’m stuck at the top of the steps, because I can’t get the pushchair down the steps.  I’m left with the only option to yell like a fisherman’s wife “Roxy Come”…that was the moment, 13 years ago when I thought, I really should get her trained!

Since that eventful and embarrassing day, Roxy did her training and is now fully qualified as a water rescue dog, so she can go out on command and save people when they really need it, rather than when ‘she’ felt like it!