When people call me, they already believe they have tried everything.

Sam. A documented bite history behind him. This is him after.

Trainers. Multiple board and trains. Well known names online and on TV. Their veterinarian. Sometimes all of it inside the same year.

I fixed them. Those dogs are off leash in public now, absolutely amazing members of society. Time after time.

So before you spend another dollar, read this.

The problem is usually not the tools.

Almost every method an owner brings me has worked for some dog somewhere. That is why it was sold to you. The problem is not the tools or the resources. The problem is how everything comes together.

An aggression case is not a technique. It is a sequence. Get the order wrong and the best technique in the world produces nothing, or makes the dog worse. Most of the failures I take over are not bad tools used badly. They are good tools used in the wrong order, on the wrong problem, by someone who never confirmed what the problem was.

Sounding professional and getting results are two different skills.

Anyone can learn the vocabulary. This industry has no license and no minimum standard. No state in this country requires a single thing of you before you call yourself a dog trainer, and that applies to me exactly as much as it applies to anyone else. So do not judge any of us on how well we talk. Judge us on dogs.

I have rehabilitated dogs that came here after passing through several well known names. I am not going to list them, and the point is not that those people are frauds. The point is that knowledge and articulation are not the same thing as having done this before, with this dog, in this house, with this history.

What you will not see on my social media.

You will not find a dog pushed over his threshold. No thrashing, no snarling, no camera catching the worst two seconds of a dog’s life because that is what gets shared. Those videos cost the dog something every time they are filmed, and they prove nothing except that the dog can be provoked.

What you will see is the same dogs, later. Off leash in public. Walking past strangers. Lying down in a crowd. Doing nothing interesting whatsoever.

That is the entire proof. Anyone can film a dog at his worst. Very few can show you that same dog months later, with a documented bite history behind him, off leash in a place he had no business being. Ivy league educated and safe.

Not my words.

“He takes on all dogs, even those other trainers have written off as incapable of rehab.”

ABC15 ARIZONA, 2012

Watch the segment →

An Iraq veteran’s service dog, Abel. The training was paid for by an 8-year-old girl’s fundraiser. The first trainer failed. Abel came here, and went home working.

FOX 10 PHOENIX, 2015

Watch the segment →

“Former German shepherd trainer for the Israeli army.”

JEWISH NEWS OF GREATER PHOENIX

Read the article →

Education and knowledge sometimes forget the most important thing. Experience.

Before anything else, get the word right.

Aggression is the intent to cause harm. That is all it is. A dog can show that intent in many presentations. A freeze. A hard stare. A lifted lip. A lunge on leash. A bark at the window that everyone laughs off. If the intent was there and nothing materialized, it is still aggression.

When it materializes, when the dog has actually caused harm, that dog is violent.

That distinction is mine, and I use it because right now one word is doing two completely different jobs. A dog who has never touched anybody gets called aggressive. So does a dog who arrives with a folder of vet records and a list of attacks behind him. Those are not the same case, they do not carry the same risk, and they still get handed the same advice.

Most of what comes to me is the second kind. Dogs with documented damage behind them, after everyone else has run out of ideas. Some arrive on a judge’s order. Some arrive under an attorney’s contract. Some come out of the hands of trainers who were afraid of them, and you could see it in their eyes. When the trainer is frightened of the dog, the dog gets sequestered instead of trained, and the owner gets told that containment is the plan. It is not a plan. It is fear with an invoice attached.

That is the work, and it is exactly why the label matters. What we decide to call a dog is what decides whether a family keeps him, manages him, or gives up on him.

The order matters more than the method.

Here is the sequence every case here runs through. If your last trainer skipped a step, that is usually where it came apart.

1. Rule out the body first.

   The biggest mistake I see is starting training before anyone has checked whether the dog is in pain. Across dogs referred for behavior problems, reviews of clinic caseloads find a painful condition in the picture in roughly a third of cases, and in some clinics closer to 80 percent. Orthopedic pain, thyroid and adrenal disease, neurological disease, failing eyes and ears, medication side effects. All of them show up as irritability and aggression.

   A dog who hurts when you touch him is not being defiant. Ask your veterinarian for a workup. Not a behavior opinion. A workup.

   The workup I require is my own. It is a protocol I built over decades on dogs nobody else would attempt to train, and nothing starts here until it comes back.

2. Know who you are asking.

   Your veterinarian went to medical school, not behavior school. Behavior is its own board specialty with a two to three year residency after the veterinary degree, and as of 2020 there were 86 board certified veterinary behaviorists in all of North America. Most clinics have none.

   That is not a knock on your vet. It is how the profession is structured. Use your veterinarian for the medicine, which is exactly what step one needs. Be careful about taking a behavior plan from someone whose training was medical, delivered with total confidence. That is where a lot of owners end up more confused than when they started.

3. Name the motivation, not the label.

   Aggression is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Depending on who is classifying, the veterinary literature uses somewhere between 18 and 22 labels for it. I work with 19. Fear. Pain. Guarding. Territorial. Redirected. Frustration. Predatory. From the outside several of them look identical, and they are treated completely differently. Get this wrong and everything after it is wrong. Dominance is the most commonly misdiagnosed of the whole list, and it is the one owners get handed most often.

   It is also rarely one thing. Fear, pain, genetics and previous learning are usually stacked together. The dog in front of you is the sum of them.

4. Separate what the dog feels from what the dog has learned.

   This is the step almost nobody does. Why a dog bites is one question. How he bites, whether he warns first, how fast he escalates, that part he learned. Dogs repeat what works. When growling makes the frightening thing go away, growling gets stronger and spreads to anything that looks similar.

   It runs the other direction too. In a study of 140 dogs at a referral behavior clinic, hitting or kicking the dog produced an aggressive response 43 percent of the time. Growling at the dog, 41 percent. Forcing an object out of his mouth, 39. Alpha rolls, 31. Staring him down, 30. Punishment also teaches a dog to skip the warning, which is how dogs arrive here described as biting out of nowhere.

   So part of what I am reading is the dog. The other part is the training history that taught him how to express himself.

5. The outcome is not in question. The timeline is.

   Understanding what you are committing to before you begin is the most important conversation we will have, and it is the one most owners never get.

   Here is where I part company with most of the field. If step one came back clean and the problem is strictly behavioral, the dog can be fixed. Not managed forever. Not contained. Fixed. In 35 years I have not met the behavioral case that could not be rehabilitated with the right system and enough time.

   Understand why I will not sell you management as the destination. Management works right up until the day you are tired, or in a hurry, or carrying groceries in from the car, and the door does not get locked. At that moment it stops being a strategy and becomes an incident. A plan that requires a person to be perfect for the next ten years is not a plan. It is a countdown.

   What I will not hand you is a date. Some dogs turn around in weeks. Some take the better part of a year, and the hardest ones ask more of the owner than they do of the dog. The work has to be precise and it has to be consistent and it cannot be rushed, which is exactly why the fast fix you already paid for did not hold.

   Until we get there we manage, and we manage tightly, but with a finish line on it. Temporary containment, run by me, on the way somewhere, is a completely different thing from containment handed to you as the answer for the rest of your dog’s life.

There is no one size fits all, so we do not run one.

Every case here is built around the dog in front of me. Same order of operations, a different plan every time. That is the entire reason this works after other approaches did not. It is not a secret method. It is a sequence, followed honestly, by someone who has been doing it for 35 years.

Private lessons do not fix this.

Almost everyone asks for them first. They cost less, they sound reasonable, and they are far less frightening than handing your dog to someone else. I understand the instinct. It is still the wrong tool for this job.

Start with the arithmetic. A private lesson is one hour. A week is 168. Whatever your dog practices in the other 167 is what he is actually learning.

Then look at where he practices it. Those 167 hours happen in the exact place that built the problem. Same doorway. Same window. Same walk. Same people, making the same mistakes they have always made. You are being asked to undo a pattern inside the environment that is still writing it.

And you are being asked to do it perfectly. Not because you are incapable, but because this demands split second judgment calls at the precise moment they matter, a dozen times a day, for months, in situations that frighten you. That is a specialist skill. Nobody hands it to you in a one hour lesson.

So the weeks go by, the bank account moves, and the dog does not. Go back to step four. The pattern stays alive because it keeps working for the dog every single day, and you do not out-teach a rehearsal schedule that runs all week long in the room where it started.

Your dog needs serious attention now. Wait too long and your dog is the one who pays for it.

How this works if you are not in Arizona.

Most of the dogs I take are not local. Owners drive in or fly in from across the country, the dog stays here with me, and the work happens every day instead of for one hour a week.

That is the part most programs get wrong. An aggression case is not built in a weekly lesson. It is built by controlling what happens between the lessons. In kennel means I have the whole day, every day, which is the only way to move a pattern that took years to set.

How long the stay runs is decided by the dog, not by a package. A recent problem in a stable home can turn in a few weeks. Years of rehearsal, a documented bite history, or a home that has to change alongside the dog take longer. Once I have met your dog I give you an honest estimate, and I tell you the moment it needs to change.

And the dog is only half of it. The stay is not finished when your dog is doing well for me. It is finished when he does it for you. Before he goes home you learn to read him and run the system yourself, because a dog who behaves for the trainer and not for the owner is the same failure you already paid for once.