Coaching Canine Companions · North Kingstown, Rhode Island
Canine Sensory Connection.
Before you train the behavior, learn to see the dog.
A live practice in observation, sensory exploration, agency and recovery. Eighty-one sensory encounters, twelve calls, one pack of twelve — and a complete book you can read tonight for nothing at all.
Not sure it is yours? Answer four questions and be told honestly — including, some of the time, that it is not.
Workshop One of Two Live online · guardians, handlers & pet professionals, anywhere
Canine Sensory Connection · taught through the Sensory Connection Method
See Earlier. Understand More. Interfere Less.
You know your dog better than almost anyone. And still, there are moments when you are not quite sure what you are seeing. Canine Sensory Connection does not hand you another quick interpretation. It gives you sustained practice noticing what happened before the behavior you normally remember — so you have more choices about what the moment needs.
Eighty-one sensory encounters, delivered through cards eight at a time and lived one every other day. Twelve calls, twice a month, with eleven other people practicing the same discipline: notice first, describe second, interpret carefully, intervene only when necessary.
Scent becomes the trail. Your dog’s inner state remains the compass. The human can arrange the question. The dog must discover the answer — and sometimes the dog becomes the teacher.
A live room on Zoom. Twelve people, one pack, the first and third Wednesday, six o’clock, ninety minutes.
Eighty-one sensory encounters, eight cards at a time. One every other day, about five and a half months end to end.
Around fifteen minutes a day, most of it sitting down. Your dog stays home and is never asked to perform.
The second costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Twelve seats, filled from that list, and the doors close on the opening call. If you would rather talk it through with me first, the free meet and greet is open today — about half an hour, a conversation rather than a sales call.
Canine Sensory Connection: Teaching Through the Tao of the Dog
Eighty-one lessons at the fire, and the field pages that follow them.
An old dog keeps a fire. Around her sits a litter on their last night together, before they go out in the morning to people they have not met. Everything she says, she says to them — which means you are reading somebody else’s instructions. That turns out to be the useful part. Advice aimed straight at us meets the part of us that defends. Spoken past us, it goes in sideways and stays.
- Eighty-one lessons, complete — nothing held back for a paid second half
- Fifty-one of them turn over into a field page: one small thing to try this week
- The whole 287-page book as a PDF, yours to keep
- The same lens the workshop is built on, before you spend anything
The book introduces the lens: observation before interpretation, agency before insistence, and recovery as information. The paid workshop turns that lens into eighty-one lived encounters. If the book does its job, you will already know whether the workshop is yours.
Tell me where to send the fire.
A name and an email, and the whole 287-page book downloads straight away. It puts you on Lorrie’s list, which is a quiet one, and a single line takes you back off it.
It is yours. The download has started.
Two hundred and eighty-seven pages, all eighty-one lessons. If nothing arrived, use the button below.
Download it again ↓ Read the eighty-one online →If you came here from the fire
The nights taught you where to look. This is where you practice looking.
Eighty-one nights, an old dog keeps a fire for a litter leaving in the morning. Her name is Vela. She talks about fear and recovery, about rest, instinct, the leash, and the stories people tell about dogs — and everything she says, she says to them. You are reading somebody else’s instructions, which turns out to be the useful part. Nothing in it asks you to do anything at all, and that was deliberate. Seeing has to arrive before doing, or the doing lands on the wrong dog.
By the last night the question has changed shape. You came in asking how to stop something. You leave asking what is happening in her before the thing begins — which is the better question, and not one that can be answered by reading. It gets answered by a dog with her nose down on ground she already trusts, and by somebody standing near her, saying nothing, watching.
The fire is where you learned to see. These months are where the two of you go to practice — and, for the first time in a long while, not on your own. Eleven other people are doing exactly the same thing on exactly the same night.
Where each night gets practiced
- The Walk Was Never the BeginningThe first fourteen days ask nothing of her at all. Two cards, and an assignment that is only watching — so you learn the look of her ease long before you study her trouble.
- The Face They Call GuiltyDescribing instead of interpreting. Open, narrowing, closed — and the discipline of saying what she did rather than what it proved about her.
- The Story You InventedOne sentence about her, written before Card One and then sealed. Not what is wrong — her. You do not see it again for five months, and when you do, you will not quite believe you wrote it.
- The Moment You Never SeeRecovery, counted. Minutes from the event to a dog who is genuinely settled — written down from the Baseline Week you begin the day you enroll, and again at the end.
- The Gift of SilenceThe months where you take your hands off and put your eye on — and then Session Seven, where the search comes loose from you altogether and somebody else in the family runs it while you sit down and take no part in it.
- Before I Saw MineThe fourth tell: what your own body did first. It runs underneath the other three and decides whether you are able to see them at all.
- The Doors We ForgotThe distance she can afford — the range where she can notice the difficult thing and still eat the way she eats in your kitchen. Found honestly, held, and shortened only when three conditions are true.
- I Chose It for YouHer ground, and what grows on it. Sleep with a place, a household rule, and somebody you live with who has been told about it.
- The Wisdom of InstinctThe old wolf treated as an engine rather than as weather. Seven first searches, then the whole hunt joined: smell, find it, bring it, give.
- The Quiet You’ve Been MissingLowering the water — decompression, protected sleep, honest management, and one costly thing taken out of her week. The nose is not meant to be busy every hour.
- It Was Never SuddenThe head lift, the lean, and the minutes back. Three tells that let you read a reaction on approach rather than after it has landed.
- Leave Tomorrow WaitingEight finds in ten, and the evening ended while she still wants one more. Stopping is a skill, and it is taught here like any other.
Nothing from the nights is held back from these weeks, and nothing in these weeks assumes you have read them. If you arrived by some other road you have lost nothing — the whole book sits just above, free, and it is the same lens.
Somebody has met your dog
You already know which of these dogs is yours.
- He is a Labrador, a golden, a pointer, a shepherd — an animal assembled across centuries for a particular job, living in a house where nobody has given him one. Fetch is not it, and you both know that.
- She learns a new thing in four repetitions and has begun inventing occupations of her own. You are not fond of her occupations.
- She came home from a rescue eight months ago and is still deciding whether this house is safe. Some evenings you are sure she has decided. Then something falls in the kitchen.
- She will not eat outdoors. Indoors she would sell you her soul for a strip of chicken; on the sidewalk it may as well be gravel.
- She goes quiet and still. Everybody congratulates you on how good she is being.
- The recovery takes the whole evening, and nobody told you recovery was a thing that could be measured.
- He is eleven months old, enormous, tender, and looking for somewhere to put all of it.
Take the one about the food. A dog who will not eat outdoors is neither fussy nor distracted. She is reporting, with some precision, on where her body has gone — and almost everything a handler does next should turn on that single line of evidence, though almost nobody treats it as evidence at all.
We are not going to call her reactive. That word describes ten seconds. It does not describe an animal, and it certainly does not describe a life.
Who these eighty-one sensory encounters are for
Not one kind of dog. One kind of human question.
This is for the person thinking, I want to understand the dog I actually have. Perhaps your dog is fearful, reactive, adolescent, newly adopted, or easily aroused. Perhaps nothing is wrong at all. The common thread is not a diagnosis. It is the wish to notice more accurately, to offer meaningful choice without abandoning guidance, and to know when helping is useful — and when it becomes interference.
- Fearful and startle-proneThe dog who flinches at what has not happened yet, and takes the rest of the evening to put herself back together.
- Leash-reactiveBarking, lunging, or coming apart at distance — noise rather than contact. If there has been contact, the gate below is for you first.
- Anxious and hypervigilantNever quite off duty. Lies down, then gets up again every forty minutes to walk the perimeter.
- Shut down and flatQuiet, still, compliant — the state most often mistaken for a well-behaved dog, and congratulated on.
- Overactive and high-arousalCannot settle, cannot stop, and gets more exercise every week without ever coming down from it.
- Newly adopted or rehomedHome eight months and still deciding whether this house is safe, with a history nobody can hand you.
- Bright and under-employedRetrievers, pointers, shepherds, collies — assembled across centuries for a job, living in a house where nobody has given them one.
- AdolescentsSix to eighteen months, enormous, tender, and looking for somewhere to put all of it.
- PuppiesPeople who would like to begin well, before there is anything to undo.
- Slow to recoverThe ten seconds cost the whole evening, and nobody ever mentioned that recovery is a thing you can count.
- Noise-sensitiveThe doorbell, the delivery van, the visitor, the vacuum, the thing dropped in the kitchen.
- Dogs who will not eat outdoorsIndoors she would sell you her soul for chicken. On the sidewalk it may as well be gravel. That is evidence, not fussiness.
- Seniors, and bodies with limitsThe whole chain can be run by a dog lying down, and every search here can be run by a person sitting.
- Dogs who cannot walk comfortably yetNothing in the first months needs a sidewalk, a yard, or a car. A hallway at an unpopular hour is a legitimate room.
- Dogs with nothing wrong at allNot everybody comes carrying a problem. Some people simply want to know their dog better, and that is a complete reason.
- And the people who work with themGroomers, dog walkers, foster carers, daycare and boarding staff, shelter and rescue volunteers, veterinary teams, and trainers who want a better eye. You will be handed a way of describing an animal that survives a handover note.
One room, all of it at once — which sounds careless and is the opposite. In a pack of twelve, somebody is always two weeks ahead of you in the exact direction you are dreading, and you will hear it described before it is yours.
There are dogs this is the wrong room for, and I would rather say so above the price than below it. Any dog who has bitten, any household where somebody is frightened of the dog, serious resource guarding, or separation distress as the main problem — those need a different first step, and the free conversation is where that gets sorted honestly.
Why scent?
The human can arrange the question. The dog must discover the answer.
Scent gives your dog access to information you cannot fully reproduce, read in advance, or control.
That creates a quiet reversal in the ordinary training relationship. You do not always know first. Your dog investigates, chooses a route, pauses, returns, persists — or declines. You watch. The dog is no longer merely the recipient of human instruction, but a sentient participant with sensory capacities, preferences, strategies, and information unavailable to the person beside them.
This is why Canine Sensory Connection does not simply teach people how to make dogs search. It teaches people how to watch dogs search. Those are profoundly different skills.
Research gives us one useful piece of context: pet dogs given regular nose work shifted toward optimism on a judgment-bias task. The study supports the value of nose work; it does not authorize us to diagnose an autonomic state from a search or promise a neurological reset.
Duranton & Horowitz (2019), Applied Animal Behaviour Science 211, 61–66.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159118304325
Open copy: https://psychology.barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline-files/Let%20me%20sniff.pdf
Scent is the doorway. Relationship is the territory. The question is not merely whether your dog found the food. It is who they were while searching, what changed, what they chose, and what happened next.
Try this tonight · costs nothing
Throw their supper into the grass.
Use ground your dog already trusts. Then stand still. No encouraging, pointing, or praise. Let the search belong to them for two minutes.
Afterward, write three lines: What woke their attention? Which way did they move, and how much? What happened next — and how long did recovery take?
Do not decide what it meant yet. The first practice is to become an accurate witness.
What this actually is
Scent is the trail. Your dog’s inner state is the compass.
Put plainly, nose work is a dog finding food in a box. Anybody can throw supper into the grass, and it will do her good, and I would call that a fine evening. This is not quite that, and the difference is worth being exact about, because from outside the two look identical.
Enrichment may ask whether your dog was occupied. This asks something else: Who was your dog while searching? What changed? What did they choose? Did they continue, pause, return, recover — or decline?
The searching is real work. She learns to hunt, to read moving air, to tell you she has found the thing, to carry it and give it up as a trade rather than a surrender. But the search is the ground the rest of it stands on — the safe place where instinct is finally handed an honest job, and where the two of you can practice, in a hallway on a Tuesday, the things that cannot be practiced on a street corner.
What your dog practices
- Curiosity. Going toward a thing because it is interesting. A braced dog cannot, which is exactly what makes it worth watching.
- Choice. Which way to work the room, which corner to come back to, which one to leave alone.
- Problem-solving. The pause, the recast, the return to ground she had already given up on. That pause is thinking. It looks like failing.
- Agency. Not a reward earned for correct participation, but part of the structure. Your dog may approach, disengage, or decline. Each is information.
- Recovery. The road back from a hard moment, walked often enough that it stops being unfamiliar.
- Completion. A hunt that finishes — found, carried, given, over — and then rest, which is the half most enrichment forgets.
What you practice
- Describing instead of interpreting. What she did, not what it meant about her.
- Seeing earlier. Earlier than the bark, the refusal, the shutdown, the story — and your own impulse to intervene.
- Staying quiet while she is uncertain. This is the hardest thing on the page, and handlers are the ones who say so.
- Reading direction and load. Which way she leaned, and how much.
- Timing recovery. Minutes, written down, rather than a feeling about how the evening went.
- Discernment. Knowing when to continue, create distance, change one dial, wait, simplify, end — or do nothing at all.
Three words, on the kitchen floor
Recovery
A number, not a mood. Minutes from the event to a dog who is genuinely settled — the shake-off is the timestamp. In the first month it might be forty. By the fifth it is often eight, while the reaction itself still looks much the same. That is why recovery, rather than the bark, is what this work is judged on.
Agency
Agency is not something your dog earns by participating correctly. It is built into the encounter. They may investigate, hesitate, disengage, or decline. A refusal is not automatically a failed exercise; it changes the information available to you.
Curiosity
Her going toward something. It is among the first things to leave a frightened dog and among the first to return, which makes it readable long before anything else has visibly changed.
Built for fearful, anxious, reactive and newly adopted dogs — and not only for them. The clever ones with no legitimate work, the retrievers and shepherds living in houses where nobody has given them a job, the puppies whose people would like to begin well: same room, same weeks, same questions.
Which leaves the one question these weeks turn on. Not did she find it — she nearly always finds it. But who was she while she looked, and how did she get herself home?
Every call, in order
Eighty-one cards, twelve calls, and one capability built in three movements.
It is easy to look at eighty-one cards and see a curriculum to complete. Instead, they create eighty-one sensory encounters: repeated opportunities to meet today’s dog without assuming today’s answer will resemble yesterday’s. The twelve calls bring those observations into community so we can become more accurate before we decide what they mean.
Nothing here is a module you unlock. This is the whole curriculum, printed on the page before you have spent anything, so that you can decide with the shape of it in front of you.
The word gets taken away, the dog gets watched without a plan, and the body gets asked about before the behavior does. What comes out the far end is a person who can describe an animal without an adjective in the sentence.
- 01The OpeningThe call before the first card. Twelve people, one sentence each — not the history, not the diagnosis, only what the two of you did together yesterday. Nobody has read anything yet. The pack meets each other before it meets the material, and that order matters far more than it looks.
- 02Session One · Learning to SeeCards One through Eight. Fourteen days in which nothing is asked of her at all — the boxes stay in the closet until Card Three. She gets watched, without a plan for her. It is not a warm-up.
- 03Session Two · The Middle LinkCards Nine through Sixteen. Something can be ended before it ends itself. The give taught as a trade rather than a demand, and the carry built backwards from the last link.
- 04Session Three · The Smell, and the Closing of the ChainCards Seventeen through Twenty-Four. The body gets asked about before the behavior does — the veterinary gate goes up here and stays up. Then the whole hunt joined: smell, find it, bring it, give.
Out of the clean room, into the doorway, past the fence, off the property, and finally out of your own hands. What comes out is a search that runs in an ordinary house on an ordinary evening without anybody standing over it.
- 05Session Four · The Places She Actually LivesCards Twenty-Five through Thirty-Two. One thing moves at a time. The clean room starts coming apart, one element every two weeks, and the bubble learns to travel.
- 06Session Five · Past the Property LineCards Thirty-Three through Forty. What the yard and the sidewalk actually cost her becomes visible — usually for the first time, and usually to somebody who thought they already knew.
- 07Session Six · The Call the Handler Stops Knowing the AnswerCards Forty-One through Forty-Eight. A rebuild can be told apart from a failure. This is the call people name afterward, and not because anything went well in it.
- 08Session Seven · The Search Comes Loose from YouCards Forty-Nine through Fifty-Six. Somebody else in the family takes the chain and the work has to hold without you. If you live alone, the substitution is absence rather than handover: set it, then sit down and take no part in it. The question was never who runs it.
The difficult thing comes near, the length gets held, and then every support is taken out one at a time. What comes out is something small enough to survive the room ending.
- 09Session Eight · The Slow RewriteCards Fifty-Seven through Sixty-Four. A distance gets read rather than set. For seven sessions the difficult thing stayed outside the frame; here it comes in, at a distance she chooses and you write down.
- 10Session Nine · The Length of an HourCards Sixty-Five through Seventy-Two. A length gets held rather than extended. Duration is the last dial and the one nobody means to turn — it has been deliberately unspent for eight sessions so that there is something left here to move.
- 11Session Ten · The Scaffolding Comes DownCards Seventy-Three through Eighty. It gets small enough to keep. Nine of these cards are the ones nobody wants to read, and they are in here on purpose.
- 12The Closing · The Morning After the FireCard Eighty-One, alone, four days beforehand — and then two weeks with nothing in them, which is the same emptiness the last card is about. The final support comes out, and the final support is me.
Ten lines, and not one of them is a promise about a dog. They are things a family becomes able to do — which is the only thing across five months that was ever honestly anybody’s to teach.
Orientation · the shape of the thing
You cannot binge your way into perception.
The day between cards is not empty. It is part of the instrument. Card. Space. Search. Observation. Three Lines. Integration. Next card. The program asks little time — often fifteen minutes — but it asks for attention, and attention cannot be rushed. If you fall behind, you resume the ordinary rhythm. You do not binge.
Below is the whole of it on one page — how the cards arrive, when the room meets, what fifteen minutes actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday, and the short list of what you are asked to bring. It is the opening page of the Student Manual, and it sits out here rather than behind a checkout because the rhythm is not a detail of the method. It is most of the method.
Read the Orientation Map as text
The six movements
How the cards arrive
- 81 cards, two pages each
- Eight at a time, twice a month
- You read one every other day
- About five and a half months end to end
- Read in the evening, near her
- No running out ahead of the room
Twelve calls
- First and third Wednesday
- 6:00 PM
- Ninety minutes each
- Eight cards between one call and the next
- The same six beats every call
The rhythm
- Mon
- You open the next card
- Tue
- Search day
- Wed
- The next card — the one eleven others open tonight
- Thu
- Search day
- Fri
- —
- Sat
- Search day
- Sun
- —
About fifteen minutes a day, mostly sitting down.
What you bring
- Your two lines
- Your number, out of ten
- The one that stayed
- Footage, if it is your week
- Willingness to answer one question
What she did.
One dial at a time
- Distance
- Distraction
- Duration
One moves. The other two stay.
The heart of it
- She may decline. That is an answer.
- Nothing is graded.
- Nothing is collected.
- Nobody compares.
- Say the honest thing.
- Run one search.
- Begin again tomorrow.
Four things printed in the margins
The gate
If something changed in her body, a veterinarian comes before any of this. The cards keep arriving while you wait.
What you need
- Food
- Cardboard boxes
- A quiet corner
You buy nothing. Everything named came with the full program.
The three lines
- What woke it.
- Which way she leaned, and how much.
- What she did — and how long until she came down.
Write after. Never during.
If a Wednesday cannot be given up
- Every call is recorded and goes to the whole cohort.
- Missing one does not put you outside anything.
- Stop the video when a question is asked. Answer before you hear anyone else.
Watched that way, you are standing exactly where the room was standing.
The twelve calls
| Call | Session | Cards read beforehand |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Opening | No cards have been read yet |
| 02 | Session One | Cards 1–8 |
| 03 | Session Two | Cards 9–16 |
| 04 | Session Three | Cards 17–24 |
| 05 | Session Four | Cards 25–32 |
| 06 | Session Five | Cards 33–40 |
| 07 | Session Six | Cards 41–48 |
| 08 | Session Seven | Cards 49–56 |
| 09 | Session Eight | Cards 57–64 |
| 10 | Session Nine | Cards 65–72 |
| 11 | Session Ten | Cards 73–80 |
| 12 | Closing | One last card, on its own |
Printed across the foot of the map: We did not win the walk. We came home to each other.
Nothing is graded. Nothing is collected. Nobody compares. She may decline a search, and that is an answer like any other — written down, and then you begin again tomorrow.
Why this, and why now
Every big reaction is a rehearsal.
A dog who comes apart on Tuesday is not only feeling something. She is practicing it. The response grows more fluent, arrives sooner, needs less provocation to start — all of it quietly, across months, while a household waits to see whether she will grow out of it.
Meanwhile the small things stack. What she managed on Monday tips her on Thursday, not because Thursday was worse, but because Monday is still in her and nobody counted it.
Then the world narrows. First the route. Then the hour. Then the neighborhood, the guests, the holidays. Households do this by degrees, rarely noticing they have done it. By the time somebody says it out loud, an ordinary life has quietly rearranged itself around one animal's worst ten seconds.
And she never has to be in the room. You already know what a group class is like when the dog is yours — the one everybody is kind about, the one that made a room go quiet. That does not happen here, because she is not there. She stays home on her own floor, doing nothing in particular. She is never asked to perform, never assessed by a stranger, never watched live by eleven people. What the pack sees is thirty seconds you filmed on an ordinary evening, and only if you send it. Consent is asked every time and can be withdrawn without a word.
None of that is a moral failure, and I will not discuss it as one. It is simply what happens when a frightened animal is left to rehearse, with nobody in the house able to read what she is rehearsing. It is also, in a great many households, reversible — and the thing that reverses it is not a firmer hand. It is a nose with somewhere to go, and a person who has learned to see.
What actually changes
Not a different dog. The same dog, with a wider window and a faster way back.
Here is the change, with a number on it. A Tuesday in the fifth month. The trash can goes over in the wind at the corner and she comes apart exactly the way she always has — the same bark, just as loud from across the street. Eight minutes later she is asleep on the kitchen floor. In the first month that same trash can cost forty minutes and the rest of the evening. The bark is the part everybody watches. The minutes back are the part that moves first, and almost nobody is counting them, which is why almost everybody believes nothing is changing.
- You get an answer.Something to do in the two seconds after it starts that is neither yanking the leash nor saying her name eleven times. Handlers describe this as the single largest relief — not that the trigger vanished, but that they finally had a move.
- You see earlier.You notice the first small change before the bark, the refusal, the shutdown, the story, or your own urge to intervene — while more choices are still available.
- The evening comes back.A dog who has hunted for ten minutes sleeps differently. So does a household that is not spending the hours after a walk waiting for an animal to come down.
- The route comes back, then the hour.Most people find the map widening before the dog looks obviously different — a street returned, an afternoon returned, the eleven o'clock walk moved back to six.
- She has work, and stops inventing her own.For the clever ones and the built-for-a-job ones, this is the whole story. A dog with nothing to hunt will find something, and you will not choose what.
- You stop apologizing to strangers.You also stop rehearsing the sentence you say about her. That change is the hardest to measure, and people mention it more than any other.
- Her window widens.The range of things she can meet without tipping gets wider. The delivery van at forty feet stops being an event. Not because she has been taught to tolerate it, but because she has more room in her than she had in January.
- She comes down faster.This is the one that can be counted. The reaction that cost you forty minutes in the first month costs eight by the fifth, and the shake-off that closes it arrives sooner every month. Recovery is the measure this whole method is judged on, since it is the one nobody can talk their way around.
- She starts the day lower.A dog who hunts most days carries less baseline load into everything else — the doorbell, the vet, the visitor, the car. It is the difference between a dog who is coping and a dog who is simply living in her house.
- She settles herself, without being managed.The first weeks you help her down. Somewhere in the middle you notice her doing it alone — a shake-off, a sigh, a decision to go and lie down — and that is the moment the work stops being yours to carry.
- You can prove it.A season of change is too slow to feel while it is happening. The two numbers, written down from the day you enroll, are what let you look back in March and see plainly what moved.
- The words you use about her change.This one is not decoration. A guardian who has stopped narrating a dog as a problem handles her differently on a bad Thursday, and the dog reads that before she reads the leash.
What I am not claiming: a cured dog, a dog who never reacts, or a fixed date by which any of this arrives. What is honestly claimable is a dog carrying less, a handler who can see, and a written record showing the difference. That is not everything. It is a great deal, and I would rather state it accurately than promise more.
Tonight, if you enrolled today · before Card One arrives
Five things, and the first one takes longer than it looks
Most programs begin with a stranger’s guess about your dog. This one begins with a sentence written by the person who has watched her longest, and then sealed.
None of it is graded and none of it is collected. It exists so that the fifth month has something honest to look back at — because a season of change is too slow to feel while it is happening, and memory is a poor witness about a dog you see every day.
One sentence about her
Not what is wrong. Her. Sent before you read Card One, and then put away. You will not see it again for five months, and when you do, you will not quite believe you wrote it. In my experience that sentence changes before the behavior does.
The page for everybody else
One sheet, and it is not for you. Physically hand it to the family — the corner nobody enters, the sleep that does not get interrupted, the food left where it lands. Most of that has to be done by somebody who never enrolled in anything, and asking you to translate it and then enforce it is the commonest reason it does not happen.
The Distance Book, starting tonight
Open it to the Baseline Week and begin the day you enroll, not the day the calls start. Seven days. Change nothing. Fix nothing. Three lines a day. A baseline taken while things are calm is worth far more than one taken in a crisis, and it is the one week you cannot get back.
Almost nothing else
Small, soft, strong-smelling food in pieces smaller than you think. Three to five open cardboard boxes. A quiet spot where nothing much happens. That is the entire kit. You buy nothing.
The twelve dates in your calendar
Four minutes, and it is the last time you will have to think about the calendar for five and a half months.
And then the boxes go back in the closet
The first two cards ask nothing of her at all. Fourteen days of watching a dog you have mostly been told about is the whole of the opening assignment. People who skip it spend the following three months describing a dog they have not yet met.
Three windows, and nothing else goes through them: what woke it · which way she leaned, and how much · what she did, and how long until she came down. Write after. Never during — a person filling in a page is a person not watching her dog. Sixty seconds, sitting down, afterward.
The hard part is that there are no adjectives in it. She was anxious is not a line; neither is reactive, stubborn, or fine. Those are conclusions, and they arrived before you finished looking. She stopped at the corner, turned her head away from the parked truck, and would not take chicken for about forty seconds — that is a line. You will find, most times, that the second sentence is better than the first, and nobody will have to tell you so. Somewhere in the first two months people begin putting seconds into their lines without being asked. That is usually the first honest sign that the seeing has changed, and it tends to arrive well before anything changes in the dog.
The part nobody puts on a dog training page
By the time somebody says it out loud, two of you have gone quiet.
It happens by degrees and nobody decides on it. The route moves first. Then the hour — the walk goes to six in the morning, or eleven at night, when the street is empty and there is nobody to explain her to. Then the guests, and the holidays, and the friend who used to ask how she was doing and stopped asking, not unkindly, because the answer was always the same.
Somewhere in there you began rehearsing a sentence about her. You have it ready before you leave the house. She’s friendly, she’s just—
That is not a personality trait and it is not a failure of nerve. It is what happens to a household arranged around one animal’s worst ten seconds. The dog got smaller in the world, and then, without anybody noticing the second part, so did the person holding the leash.
Almost every page written about reactive dogs treats that as a side effect. It is not a side effect. For a great many people it is the heaviest thing they are carrying, and it is the one thing a curriculum, however good, cannot reach.
What twelve people on a Wednesday actually do
There is a moment somewhere around the ninth card when a person becomes fairly certain they are the only one in the room whose dog will not do this. It is a specific, private, entirely convincing feeling.
Every one of the twelve has it. All twelve are wrong. They find that out by hearing somebody else say it first — which is a thing that cannot be arranged, cannot be taught, and cannot happen at all in a room where nobody speaks.
- Somebody says the sentence you could not.I did not run one. Said flat, taken without repair, and then the room breathes out. The person who can say that out loud in month two is generally the person still here in month five — and the reason they can is that they heard somebody else do it in month one.
- You stop being the strange one.Eleven other people are also walking at an unpopular hour, also rehearsing a sentence, also watching a dog nobody else in their life can read. That recognition arrives faster in a pack of twelve than in five years of good intentions.
- Somebody is two weeks ahead of you.The visitor who undid three weeks. The appointment that came back with something. The evening it all came apart on the kitchen floor. You hear it described before it is yours, by somebody ordinary, in ordinary words.
- You learn which dog belongs to which voice.By the fifth month you know eleven dogs you have never met — their corners, their triggers, the particular way each one shakes off. People do not expect this part and mention it more than almost anything else.
- Somebody notices when you go quiet.Two calls a month means a person can disappear for two weeks without anybody feeling it. So the pack is small enough that I do feel it, and small enough that the others do too. Nobody drifts out of this unremarked.
- And the connection you came for turns out to run two ways.You arrived to build something with a dog. What you did not expect was eleven people who understood the thing you had stopped trying to explain.
I want to be accurate about this rather than warm about it. Nobody is required to disclose anything, cameras may stay off, and there is no sharing circle and no processing of feelings. The pack is built around describing dogs. What happens between the people happens sideways, while everybody is looking at something else — which is, in my experience, the only way it ever happens honestly.
We did not win the walk.We came home to each other.Read it again in the fifth month,and notice how many people that sentence has come to include.
The only decision on this page
The mini program, or the full program.
Two ways in, and both of them sit in the same room, on the same two Wednesdays of every month, with the same twelve households. It is not two different rooms and it is not two different Wednesdays. The difference is what you are holding while you sit in it.
I would rather be exact about that here than have you discover it in the fourth month. Nothing said on a call is withheld from anybody, and nobody is told which way you came in. The cards are the whole of the difference, and the smaller one is not the same thing in a shorter form.
The Mini Program
Live on Zoom Twelve calls The first and third Wednesday, six o’clock, ninety minutes — and one question by message on the empty Wednesday between them. Price, start date and the early-bird window go to the list below before they go anywhere else.You sit in the room like anybody else. You are asked questions by name. Your own search is watched by the pack at least once. And you hear eleven other people describe dogs you have never met — which turns out to be where most of the change actually happens, and not only the change in the dog.
What arrives, and when- Twelve calls, twice a month. The same six beats every time, so that after the second one nobody is spending attention on wondering what comes next.
- Your slot. Ten card calls, twelve people: everybody’s own search is watched by the pack at least once, and you will know well in advance which two weeks are yours.
- One question by message, on the empty Wednesday between calls, twice a month. The same question, to everybody, on the same day.
- Every call recorded, and sent to the whole room the same day — so that a Wednesday nobody could give up costs nobody a session.
- Somebody takes your adjective away in front of eleven other people and asks what she actually did, and then waits. It is uncomfortable, and it is most of what changes a person’s eyes.
- Somebody is always two weeks ahead of you in the exact direction you are dreading — the visitor who undid three weeks, the appointment that came back with something. You hear it before it is yours.
- The sentence that is always allowed. I did not run one. Said flat, taken without repair. The person who can say it out loud in month two is generally the person still here in month five.
Choose this if you can already describe the difficulty without reaching for an adjective, and what you need is the hour rather than the pages. Said plainly: what you will not have is a card in your hands on the evening in between, and that is where most of the recognition in this method has always arrived.
The Full Program
Live on Zoom Eighty-one cards Everything in the mini program, and the complete Canine Sensory Connection program with it. Price, start date and the early-bird window go to the list below before they go anywhere else.Eight cards go out on the evening of each call, and you read one every other day. On the night you open Card Thirty-One and find that it describes your Thursday with uncomfortable accuracy, eleven other people are opening Card Thirty-One. That alignment is most of the product.
Everything in the mini program, and- Eighty-one cards, eight at a time, twice a month. Read one every other day. Two pages each: the first is a fire, and an old dog keeping it. The second turns toward your own kitchen — the difficulty, the field lesson, the search for the days ahead, and one honest paragraph for the weeks when it does not go.
- The Distance Book, from the day you enroll rather than the day the calls start — and the Baseline Week is the one week you cannot get back.
- The page for everybody else — one sheet for the family, because a good deal of what the cards ask gets done by people who never enrolled in anything.
- The field pages and every handout the cards ask for, arriving as they are needed rather than all at once. You buy nothing and you print nothing.
- The Canine Resilience Assessment, taken near the beginning, so that the six months have somewhere to stand back from.
- They put a page in the house on the Thursday that went badly. Ninety minutes twice a month cannot be there for that, and that is where most of what people recognize across five months actually arrives.
- The question the room asks you on Wednesday is one you have already been living with for two weeks.
Choose this if your sentences about her are still mostly adjectives — if a word arrived about your dog early on and you have believed it since. That is not fixed by an hour twice a month. The cards are what get underneath the word.
Twelve seats · and this is how they are filled
Take your place at the next fire.
Somewhere ahead of you there is an evening when twelve people open Card One at the same hour, in twelve different kitchens, near twelve sleeping dogs. None of them has met the others yet. By the fifth month they will know which dog belongs to which voice before the name is said. That is the fire, and this is the only list that gets told when it is lit.
Put your name down and you hear it from me first — the start date, the meeting time and time zone, the price, and the early-bird window, before any of it goes anywhere else. The doors close on the opening call and do not open again until the next cohort. Nobody joins at the sixth call, and I am not able to make an exception.
Nothing is owed by putting your name down, and no payment is taken or asked for here. If you would rather ask a question first, the free meet and greet costs nothing and is open today.
Twelve people, and the number is not arbitrary. Below about eight there is not enough range in the pack for anybody to hear their own difficulty described by somebody else’s dog, and I end up teaching, because there is time to. Above about twelve the round eats the call and the same three voices take what is left. Twelve is the size at which everybody speaks every two weeks, and at which, on any given evening, somebody has already had the week you are dreading.
The doors close on the opening call and do not open again until the next cohort. That is not scarcity and I will not sell it as scarcity — it is the only arrangement in which the fifth month works. Card One does something Card Forty-One cannot do afterward, and a room that has been together since January says things in May that a room of strangers will not.
A marketing page would call twelve people who began on the same evening a tribe, and leave it there. What the twelve of them become is closer to a pack — and the word is deliberate, because it is the one thing in this method that is not about the dogs. Nobody in this work is anybody’s alpha. The pack is the people, and what they mean by it is simply that somebody in it already knows what your Tuesday was like.
Would rather talk than type? Book the free meet and greet. It costs nothing, it is where the dates live, and it holds you a place in line just as the list does.
When enrollment opens, fees are paid in full and are not refundable. Places are limited and the four gate questions come before any payment — if this is the wrong room for your dog, you will hear that from me before money changes hands, not after.
What is true in every one of the twenty-four blocks of two weeks
Whichever way you come in, these do not change, and they are worth reading before you decide rather than discovering in month three.
- A card lands every other day. Two pages, about ten minutes, read in the evening near her.
- The day between cards is not a rest day. It is where the search happens, and it is the reason the whole schedule works.
- One dial moves in any two-week block — distance, or distraction, or duration. Never two. The one that turns by accident is duration, and it is never turned by decision.
- She may decline any search, on any evening. The session ends there, without ceremony and without disappointment in your voice.
- Nothing is graded. Nothing is collected. Your dog is not compared to anybody else’s, by anyone, at any point.
- You can fall a week behind, or three, and nobody is counting. Do not read six on a Sunday to catch up — a card read and not tested is a card not yet read.
And if something changed in her body — a behavior that was not there before, a jump onto the bed that became a wait beside it — she sees a veterinarian before she sees a protocol. Nothing here stops while you wait. The cards keep arriving, and the watching costs her nothing at all.
Start date, meeting time, time zone and price go to the notify list first.
Twelve people to a pack, and the doors close on the opening call.
Your Baseline Week begins the day you enroll, not the day the calls start.
What actually arrives, and when
Eighty-one cards, a book to write in, and a page for the people you live with.
You are not handed a library and left to get on with it. One card lands every other day, in the evening, and there is nothing else to wade through and nothing to feel behind on. What sits in front of you on a Tuesday is precisely the thing you are doing that Tuesday.
That is not a delivery mechanism. It is the instrument. A card read on Monday has all of Tuesday to be carried out to a real dog on a real sidewalk before Wednesday’s card lands on top of it. Read one a night and the pages outrun the animal — by the fourth evening you are holding four recognitions and have tested none of them, and the whole thing has quietly become reading.
- ReadEighty-one cardsTwo pages each, about ten minutes. The first is a fire, an old dog keeping it, and a litter on their last night together — and everything she says, she says to them, which is what lets it go in sideways. The second turns toward your own kitchen: the difficulty, the field lesson, the search for the days ahead, your own writing, and one honest paragraph for the weeks when it does not go.
- WriteThe Distance BookWhere the Baseline Week begins and the three lines live. Three lines a day, sixty seconds, sitting down, after — never during. In five months those lines are the only evidence you will have that anything moved, and you will need them.
- Hand overThe page for everybody elseOne sheet, and it is not for you. It goes into the hands of the family — the corner nobody enters, the sleep nobody interrupts, the food left where it lands. Give it to them physically rather than describing it, or it does not happen.
- MeetTwelve calls, ninety minutes eachThe same six beats every time: arrival, the lines, two cards opened, the watching, the next two weekght, the close. Predictability does for a room of worried people exactly what a pattern does for a worried dog.
- BringOne line from every cardThat is the only thing ever asked of you out loud. In the room you say two of them — the one from the earliest card you can still remember, and the one that stayed. It is the one beat where every person in the room speaks.
- KeepAll of it, and it does not expireNothing is graded, nothing is collected, and nothing is taken back at the end. The only person who will ever read your pages is the one who will need them in the fifth month, when she has forgotten what the second week looked like. That person is you.
The connection this builds is not between you and a curriculum. It is between two animals in one house, one of whom has just been watched properly for the first time in a while.
Before the price does any more talking
We do not take every dog.
Saying yes to the wrong household costs that household five months it could not spare. So the honest part of this page sits above the sign-up rather than somewhere below it.
A good fit
- Working and sporting dogs — retrievers, pointers, shepherds — with a job-shaped hole in the day
- Quick, inventive dogs who have run out of legitimate work and started making their own
- Fearful, anxious, or startle-prone dogs who need an occupation that is not merely coping
- Newly adopted dogs still deciding whether this house is safe
- Dogs who bark and lunge at distance but have never made contact
- Puppies and adolescents whose people want to begin well
- Dogs who cannot walk comfortably yet, and need the work to happen at home
- Guardians, foster carers, groomers, dog walkers, daycare and boarding staff, shelter and rescue volunteers, veterinary teams, and trainers building their own eye — it runs on a screen, so where you live is not a factor
A different first step
- Any dog who has bitten, at any severity
- Any household where somebody is frightened of the dog
- Serious resource guarding, or separation distress as the main problem
- A change that arrived carrying no story behind it — a veterinary question first, every time
- Anyone wanting fast suppression rather than a slower, quieter change
These four questions come before any payment.
- Has she bitten a person or another animal, at any severity?
- Has she snapped, lunged and made contact, or backed somebody off in a way that frightened you?
- Are you frightened of her, even slightly, even only sometimes?
- Have you begun arranging your household around what she might do?
A yes to any of these is not the end of the conversation. It is the beginning of a different one, and the first move is to talk to somebody rather than to read another page.
Half an hour, at no cost, with nothing to buy — enrollment is not even open. Tell her what happened and hear honestly what she reads in it, including where she thinks the right help actually sits.
What she will likely tell you is this: a screen full of strangers is the wrong room for that work — not a slightly imperfect room, the wrong one. That is about the format, not about your dog, and it does not mean there is nothing here for you.
Say it anyway. Tell Lorrie what actually happened and she will tell you plainly where she thinks the work should start, and what she can and cannot do from a screen. If the answer is somewhere other than this page, she will say so and help you think it through. Nobody gets quietly turned away.
And whatever else is true: anything that changed in her with no story behind it is a veterinary question before it is a training one. Your own vet is the first call. Pain hides behind more behavior than anyone expects.
Four questions · no name, no email
Where is your dog right now?
This will sometimes send you somewhere other than here. That is what it is for.
Who you would be learning from
Lorrie J. Harris
- U.S. Navy veteran
- Master Dog Trainer, National K-9
- AKC Approved CGC Evaluator
- AKC Fit Dog Certified
- IACP member
- Former IPWDA bomb detection specialist
- K9 Bioenergy Balancing practitioner
- Certified EFT practitioner
- Training dogs since 1990
Navy first. Dogs since 1990 — family dogs, then anxious rescues, then, for a long while now, the ones other programs describe as too much. In 2019 two things arrived together: the Master Dog Training certification, nearly thirty years in, and detection work with the International Police Working Dog Association. Neither made me a trainer. The certification gave me language for what the field had already taught me, and the detection work showed me what a working nose does to a dog who is allowed to use it properly.
For years I believed that mastering enough technique would make me the ultimate trainer.
I studied obsessively. I read the peer-reviewed papers. I drove across state lines to shadow trainers I admired. I worked my way through manuals so dry they could turn a Labrador into a librarian — then took all of it out into the field and used it on hundreds of dogs. The big ones, the small ones, the frightened, the furious, the ones other people had already given up on.
It worked. Until it did not.
What undid me was not a difficult dog in somebody else's house. It was my own. Maui mirrored every tension I carried in my body and handed it straight back to me, and there was no technique in any of those manuals that reached it. So the training stopped. Something else started.
Maui is a live-wired animal — quick, bright, running hot. I was teaching him advanced psychiatric service work at the time, which asks a great deal of a dog's attention, so I gave him tracking alongside it. Serious tracking, then scent work proper.
I expected a hobby. What I got was the most powerful tool I have ever put in front of that nervous system. A dog running a track is not braced. He is absorbed — breathing in another rhythm, slowing down, taking his eyes off every single thing he would otherwise be monitoring — and he comes off the line loose in a way nothing else I tried ever produced. That happened in my own kitchen, on my own dog, years before I taught it to anybody else's.
What changes a dog was never the method. It is the state you bring into the room — your steadiness, your breath, your silence, your willingness to play. The work stopped being about teaching a dog to understand my language. It became about learning to speak hers.
The real change came when I stopped performing like a behavior technician, and started becoming the river my dogs could rest inside.
That is what these weeks are for — taught the way Maui taught me. With a nose, a handful of food, three cardboard boxes.
From people who walked it
Rated 5.0 across 28 Google reviews.
Every one of them written by somebody who worked with me, on Google, where I cannot edit a word of it. Read the whole set rather than the three I chose — that is always the more honest way to judge a trainer.
She has a different approach to training that is all about calming the nervous system and involving play. She has helped me to connect with my rescue pup on a deeper level, which is helping him heal from his past situation.
Google reviewAnxious & rescue dogsWhen we started with Lorrie, we couldn’t walk our dogs on leash — they pulled so much! Now they are a treat to walk. Their recall is better, anxiety is lower, and our bond is stronger.
Google reviewLeash & recallWe have a well socialized, perfectly behaved six-month-old golden retriever puppy, thanks to Lorrie’s expert training techniques. Izzy loved going to school with Lorrie.
Google reviewPuppy foundationWritten by me — not a quotation
Stubborn. Reactive. Fine until suddenly he isn’t. I wish I knew what he was trying to tell me.
What woke his attention? Which way did he move? What happened next? How long did recovery take?
Neither panel is anybody’s actual words, and I will not dress one up as if it were. I wrote both, out of the pattern I hear at the start of a cohort and the pattern I hear by the end of it. The real words on this page are the three Google reviews above, where I cannot edit a syllable. Read the two panels anyway and notice what moved between them — it was not the dog that moved first.
If you are not ready to enroll
Ask first. It costs nothing.
You do not have to arrive with a tidy question. I don't know where to start and she has been like this for two years is a complete sentence. I have answered a hundred of them, and not one of them was a nuisance.
A free meet and greet
A conversation rather than a consultation. Tell me about her, then hear the truth of what I make of it — including, some of the time, that this is the wrong room for her right now, and what I would do first if she were mine. About half an hour, and no sequence of emails afterward.
It is also where you find out when the next cohort opens, and where you can ask to be told first when places go up.
Book a meet and greetOr write, if talking is the hard part
Some people would rather type it than say it out loud, and that is a perfectly ordinary preference. Send whatever you have — a paragraph, a bad week, one question you have been carrying since spring.
Ask for the one-page guide while you are there, if you want it: the fifteen minutes a day, and what to watch for while they pass. I will send it back with my reply.
Lorrie@CoachingCanineCompanions.com
(401) 249-4200
I read every message myself, usually within two days.
The things people actually ask
Before you decide.
Is this just nose work? Or enrichment?
Scent is the vehicle rather than the subject. If all you ever did was throw her supper into the grass most evenings, she would be better for it, and I would call that a good outcome. What the weeks add is everything that happens around the search: you learning to read her while she works, her learning that she can solve something without you, and both of you learning what recovery looks like and how many minutes it actually takes.
Enrichment asks whether she was busy. This asks who she was while she searched, and how she came home.
The mini program, or the full program?
It is the same room, the same two Wednesdays, the same twelve households. The difference is what you are holding while you sit in it.
The mini program is the twelve calls and one question that arrives by message between them. You are asked by name, your own search is watched by the pack at least once, and nothing said on a call is withheld from you. What you do not have is a card in your hands on the evening in between.
The full program is everything in the mini, and the complete Canine Sensory Connection program with it — the eighty-one cards, the Distance Book, the field pages, every handout, and the Canine Resilience Assessment. Take it if your sentences about her are still mostly adjectives, because a word that arrived about your dog in the first month is not undone by an hour twice a month. The cards are what get underneath it.
My dog is too scared to do anything. Is she too scared for this?
Almost certainly not. The first weeks happen at home, in a room she already trusts, with food on the floor and nobody looking at her. Scent work is one of very few things a frightened dog can succeed at on the first day. If she cannot eat in her own house, though, say so in the application — that changes where we begin.
What if I fall behind?
You will, somewhere. A week goes — an illness, a trip, a month at work that took everything — and six cards are sitting there. Do not read six on a Sunday to catch up. A card read and not tested is a card not yet read, and the catching up costs you the only part of this that was ever yours.
Start again at the next one, on the ordinary schedule, and let the six go. Nobody is counting, and there is nothing to be behind. Most people who leave have not actually left — they went quiet, then felt unable to come back. If that is you: run one small search tonight, and do not reread anything.
Will my dog have to be on camera during a session?
Not live, no. A stressed dog cannot consent, and a live reaction witnessed by ten strangers is a rehearsal somebody arranged. What happens instead is that you film thirty seconds during the week, on a propped phone, and we read that footage together in the session. Consent is written, per clip, and you can withdraw it silently at any point. Sending a clip for my eyes only, rather than the room's, is a complete and ordinary answer. Nobody is ever asked why.
Do I get to keep the material?
Yes — all eighty-one cards, the Distance Book, and the household page, none of it expiring and nothing taken back at the end. What you cannot do is run out ahead of the room: eight cards arrive on the evening of each call, read one every other day, and that is deliberate rather than administrative.
A page read on the evening it belongs to does something a page looked up in advance cannot. Most of what people recognize across these five months arrives sideways — on a Thursday that went badly, from the card that happened to be there, which was not the card they would have chosen.
I've done three trainers already. Why is this different?
Honestly, in part it is not — force-free scent work is no secret, and a good local trainer may serve you better than I can from a screen. What differs is where the attention goes. Most of what you practice here is not dog training at all. It is learning to describe instead of interpret, to see direction and load, and to time recovery. Those are the skills that keep the search standing when the world gets loud.
The other difference is arithmetic, and then it stops being about arithmetic at all. Twelve people means your own search is watched and spoken about by name, and that on any given evening somebody there has already had the two weeks you are dreading. In a room of forty, neither is true — and nobody in a room of forty ever learns which dog belongs to which voice.
Is the nervous-system framing actually science?
Partly, and I will tell you which parts. The benefits of sniffing are measured and citeable. So, now, is the co-regulation claim: heart-rate variability in dogs and in the people they live with tracks together at rest, and in one 2024 study the dog’s rhythm predicted the person’s rather than the reverse — twenty-nine dogs, co-operative breeds, correlational, and I state those limits every time I use it (Koskela et al., Scientific Reports). The larger polyvagal framework some trainers build on is still argued over among researchers, so I use it as a working lens and never as settled fact. Where something is tradition rather than evidence, I say that too — it is inherited practice, and it earns its place by being useful rather than by dressing as data.
Do I need a yard, or a car, or equipment?
A hallway is enough for the first months. The entire kit is small soft food, three to five open cardboard boxes, and a quiet corner. You buy nothing.
Later sessions ask for distance and for somebody else in the family to run a search, and not every household has a yard, a second person, a camera or a car. Say so early rather than quietly skipping it. The room changes; the dial never does. A window on an upper floor, a lobby, a stairwell landing, the far end of a lot on foot — the distance does not care where it was taken. Those are the ordinary variants, offered to everybody before anybody has had to ask.
Is this the same as the 90-Day Field Immersion?
No. That program runs ninety days and is documented with the Canine Resilience Assessment. Its Standard Track is self-directed and open to handlers anywhere; the Hybrid and Day Training tracks add in-person work with me in Rhode Island. This is smaller, online, and built around scent. A good many people do this one first. If your dog needs hands-on work, I will say so.
The human end of the encounter
Sometimes the hardest thing to observe is how quickly you want to help.
The fourth thing is not a diagnostic instrument hidden in your body. It is your own contribution to the moment: the interpretation that arrived early, the held breath, the pointing hand, the leash that shortened before your dog had finished gathering information.
Your response matters. But it does not prove what your dog is feeling, and this workshop will not teach you to trust an internal sensation above the dog’s observable behavior. It teaches something more disciplined: notice what happened in you, so it does not quietly become interference.
That is the human half of observation before interpretation. Perhaps your story is right. Perhaps it is incomplete. Perhaps today’s dog is showing you something yesterday’s story cannot explain.
- OneWhat woke attention. The sound, movement, scent, person, distance, or change that came first.
- TwoWhich way, and how much. Approach, retreat, stillness, pace, distance — described rather than explained.
- ThreeWhat happened next. Continue, pause, return, disengage, decline — and the time recovery actually took.
- FourWhat you did. The breath you held, the answer you supplied, the help you offered, or the outcome you tried to manufacture.
Seeing earlier does not mean predicting perfectly or preventing every reaction. It means noticing the first small change while more choices remain: continue, create distance, change one dial, wait, simplify, end, or do nothing at all.
The superpower is not control. It is discernment. Look again before you decide who your dog is.
• • •
We did not win the walk. We came home to each other.
Coaching Canine Companions · North Kingstown, Rhode Island
(401) 249-4200 · Lorrie@CoachingCanineCompanions.com
Force-free, sensory-first training. This workshop is education rather than veterinary or behavioral medicine, and it does not treat aggression. If something changed and arrived carrying no story behind it, call your veterinarian before you call a trainer — pain hides behind more behavior than anybody expects.
One more thing, and then I will leave you to it
Some dogs need a hand on the ground, not a room on a screen.
Everything above happens in your own house, at your own pace, with me on a screen twice a month. For a great many dogs that is exactly right, and a good many handlers never need anything else.
For some, it is not enough. If what your dog needs is field work — somebody beside her on the road, reading her in real weather, and a written record of what actually moved — that is a different program, and it has its own page.
Read about the 90-Day Field Immersion →You do not need both, and I would rather tell you which one is yours than sell you the larger. The free meet and greet is where that gets sorted.