March is Crufts month. A time where we celebrate the polished perfection of the domesticated dog. Dogs with gleaming coats strut the green carpet with royal names.

But while the cameras turn towards the show ring, there are other dogs living very different lives.

Dogs walking across rubble. Dogs surviving deserts, conflict zones and military bases. Dogs who meet soldiers and become lifelines for one another in the middle of chaos.

In this episode of The Future of Dogs, Hannah is joined by Pen Farthing, founder of the NOWZAD charity, to explore the complicated world of war-torn dogs.

We talk about:

• What life is really like for dogs living in conflict zones
• The powerful bond that formed between Pen and stray dog Nowzad in Helmand, Afghanistan.
• The ethics and complexity behind rescuing and relocating animals from war zones
• The valiant continuing efforts of the Nowzad charity supporting dogs abandoned due to Russias invasion of Ukraine.

To keep up with all of the amazing work of the Nowzad charity and support their ongoing projects visit:

https://www.nowzad.com

@nowzadrescue

More about your host:

Hannah is a qualified dog behaviour specialist in the UK with a degree in Animal Behaviour and a specialism in dog body language and pet dog behaviour. She's trained over 10,000 pet dogs in the last 10 years and written an illustrated guide to dog behaviour called ‘Whats my dog thinking: Understand your dog to give them a happy life’. She featured as one of 3 experts on the prime time Channel 4 television series 'Puppy School' and currently teaches body language and handling courses to vets, groomers and pet shops to reduce bite incidents and increase the handling and observation skills of these awesome, but often overlooked, fields of pet care. She currently works as a behavioural expert for Agria Pet Insurance and leads the campaign for responsible dog ownership with the All Party Parliamentary Dog Advisory Welfare Group in Westminster.

Big thanks to our season 2 sponsor Amplified Behaviour

www.amplifiedbehaviour.com

And you can train along with Hannah as a pet owner or a pet professional at www.amplifiedbehaviour.com

@amplifiedbehaviour @thehannahmolloy

We’re stepping into the highly contentious land of Regulating Training this week with the Yoda of dog regulation Sue Evans.” If you’ve ever Googled “dog trainer near me” and felt like you’d opened a lucky dip of credentials, philosophies, price points, and acronyms… you’re not alone.

Dog training in the UK has grown up fast since it started being recognised as a profession in the 90s, but like many young professions, it’s in it’s teenage years. It might be tall, loud, and impressively attention grabbing…but it’s dangerously unsupervised and that lack of oversight is having some disastrous consequences.

We’ve got an industry where almost anyone can call themselves a trainer, where letters after your name often mean absolutely nothing to the wider world where we’ve got a dozen codes of conduct that don’t overlap and where owners are stuck trying to decipher who is safe, skilled, and ethical while their dog is often collateral damage, crying out for credible support.

And then there’s the elephant in the training hall: the tool debate. Not as a valid conversation about welfare and evidence, but as a culture war that fractures the community, and keeps us so busy arguing with each other that we forget the goal is better outcomes for dogs and people.

In this episode, Hannah and Sue help us step back and ask the big questions:

- How did we get here?

- Why has “self-regulation” been unsuccessful as a measure of industry quality for practitioners and the public?

- How we might unite a divided industry without pretending differences don’t exist and what do we do about the tool debate?

- How can we design industry regulation that protects dogs and supports owners, doesn’t turn behaviour advice into a luxury product only available to those who can afford it and allows a broad spectrum of practitioners to have their skills recognised without having to scrabble for higher and higher academic qualifications?

If you’ve ever wondered why two professionals can look at the same dog and give completely different advice, why owners are overwhelmed, or why our industry sometimes feels like it’s building moving trains and laying track at the same time while arguing about who’s driving… this one’s for you.

The future of dog training can’t just be louder opinions and shinier branding. It has to be knowledgeable, trustworthy, respectful, accessible, accountable, and kind enough to keep the door open for owners and learners who are doing their best with the resources they have.
And we’ll need all hands on deck to get there.

To stay in touch with Sue or sign up to the Registration Council for Dog Training and Behaviour Practitioners head to:

https://reg-council-dtbp.uk/

For the latest on what The All Party Parliamentary Dog Advisory Welfare Group (APDAWG) is doing in the regulation space sign up for their newsletter here:

https://apdawg.co.uk/

More about your host:

Hannah is a qualified dog behaviour specialist in the UK with a degree in Animal Behaviour and a specialism in dog body language and pet dog behaviour. She currently works as a behavioural expert for Agria Pet Insurance and leads the campaign for responsible dog ownership with the All Party Parliamentary Dog Advisory Welfare Group in Westminster.

Big thanks to our season 2 sponsor Amplified Behaviour
www.amplifiedbehaviour.com

And you can train along with Hannah as a pet owner or a pet professional at www.amplifiedbehaviour.com
@amplifiedbehaviour @thehannahmolloy

Ep 32: The future of dog ownership Part 1: Dog Walks with David Bavin

Walking your dog is one of life's most beautiful and simple pleasures and there’s nothing quite like the frustration of being faced with a luscious swathe of land you’ve taken the time to travel to, beset with a big sign that says ‘No Dogs’. Some will turn and find another place to walk and others might take a quick look to check for witnesses and wander on anyway ready to claim stupidity if challenged.

In this episode we meet David Bavin, a researcher from Exeter University and the National Trust that has conducted some fascinating research about how we all use Englands green and pleasant lands, the effect of dogs on the natural habitat and most importantly the best strategies land managers can use to help dogs and wildlife coexist so that everyone has a fair share of our beautiful natural world.

We talk about:

• The difficulty dog owners have in meeting their natural behavioural needs while also respecting protected spaces for other species
• How ecologists study different species and measure the weight of evidence on each side to work out the impact dogs really have on nature
• Things dog owners can do to make sure we’re walking our dogs responsibly and sustainably and things we can do that could encourage land owners to have a zero tolerance policy on dogs if we’re not careful!
• The design of a national dog walking highway code that could simplify land access for everyone
  

To learn more about ‘Paws For Thought’ and the work of David and the EXCases team, check out their interactive land use maps and infographics head over to:

https://renewbiodiversity.org.uk/paws-for-thought-excases-mission/

And check out the National Trust’s Open Data portal to see the research displayed in delicious detail:

https://open-data-national-trust.hub.arcgis.com/apps/National-Trust::paws-for-thought/explore

More about your host:

Hannah is a qualified dog behaviour specialist in the UK with a degree in Animal Behaviour and a specialism in dog body language and pet dog behaviour. She's trained over 10,000 pet dogs in the last 10 years and written an illustrated guide to dog behaviour called ‘Whats my dog thinking: Understand your dog to give them a happy life’. She featured as one of 3 experts on the prime time Channel 4 television series 'Puppy School' and currently teaches body language and handling courses to vets, groomers and pet shops to reduce bite incidents and increase the handling and observation skills of these awesome, but often overlooked, fields of pet care. She currently works as a behavioural expert for Agria Pet Insurance and leads the campaign for responsible dog ownership with the All Party Parliamentary Dog Advisory Welfare Group in Westminster.

Big thanks to our season 2 sponsor Amplified Behaviour

www.amplifiedbehaviour.com

And you can train along with Hannah as a pet owner or a pet professional at www.amplifiedbehaviour.com

@amplifiedbehaviour @thehannahmolloy