If you've ever been through it, you'll know how painful it can be. 

You'll know what it's like the next morning after they've gone. 

The little signs of them missing, like the pitter-patter of their paws across the floor, the sound of their tongue lapping at the water bowl, the warmth of their body as they scoot closer during a Netflix binge.

A recent study from Maynooth University found that losing a pet can sometimes be as intense and as long-lasting as losing a person.

Part of why it affects us so deeply is that our dogs get to see a side of us that no one else ever sees. 

That playful, that gentle, that childlike part of us that only ever comes out around them. They give us purpose. They need us completely. 

So when they go, there's a part of us that goes with them, a part of us that existed only in their presence.

And because dogs don't live that long, loving them means grieving them more than once, sometimes many times across a single lifetime. 

Lisa Waggoner, my guest on the podcast today, has lived exactly that. She's a force-free dog trainer for more than 20 years, the founder of Cold Nose College, faculty at the Victoria Stilwell Academy, author of Rocket Recall, and an ordained animal chaplain.

She's lost 4 young dogs, one of them hit by a car at a year old, and each one changed the course of her life and her work. 

We talk about why losing a dog can hurt as much as it does, why the world is still so quick to say it's only a dog, and what that kind of grief reveals about the way they were loved.

This is Just a Dog Podcast, and I'm your host, Nadine. Let's begin.

A border collie can track a sheep across a field from the smallest flick of movement. Drop that same dog on a busy street, and the skill that makes them brilliant is the one that comes undone.

Ellen Greenwood-Sole, founder of The Urban Herder, has spent more than 10 years working with collies and the people who love them.

She makes a case most of us miss. A collie's intensity is not a personality; it is an extreme we bred on purpose, the behavioural version of a flat face. We just call it clever and leave it at that.

We get into why so much reactivity is really pain, why teaching a dog to switch off matters more than another walk, and why the kindest move is sometimes grieving the dog you pictured so you can meet the one you have.

A growl is one of the clearest things a dog can tell us, and it's often the most misread.

Dog aggression specialist Michael Shikashio has spent 25 years working with dogs that other trainers couldn't help.

His view is that aggression isn't a fault to correct. It's communication. It's a dog showing us that something is wrong.

This conversation looks at where our beliefs about dog behaviour come from, and how often they come from people who were confident rather than informed.

Michael explains why he believes you can't train aggression out of a dog, why pain is one of the most missed reasons behind it, and how the dominance and alpha ideas spread despite the evidence.

Michael is the founder of AggressiveDog.com and a five-term president of the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants.

When a dog reacts on the lead or struggles to settle at home, what we see is often the end of a biological process that started much earlier in the day.

Daniel Shaw is a dog behaviourist with a master's in neuroscience. In this conversation, he explains what is happening in a dog's brain and body during a reaction, including how cortisol rises with each stressor, how the amygdala grows more sensitive under chronic stress, and the physical changes that trauma causes in the brain.

Daniel also works as an expert witness in UK courts in serious dog-aggression cases, where his assessment can determine whether a dog goes home or is put to sleep.

The conversation moves through the stress bucket, why secure fields can sometimes be better than a half-hour walk, why reading body language is a skill that takes time to develop, and the holes in the Dangerous Dogs Act that affect everyday guardians.

Daniel runs a behaviour consultancy in Kent, founded the Brain and Behaviour Academy for dog professionals, hosts an annual UK conference, and gives evidence in courts deciding the fate of dogs across the country.

Connect with Daniel Shaw

⁠Website⁠ | ⁠LinkedIn⁠ | ⁠Instagram⁠ | Spotify

In this episode, we look at why dogs behave in ways that confuse or worry us. Dr. Lisa explains how pain, fear, and the way we treat dogs at home can show up as behaviour we'd otherwise call "bad". It's a conversation that asks you to look again at what your dog might be trying to tell you.

Dr. Lisa Radosta is a board-certified veterinary behaviourist based in Florida. She's one of a small number of specialists worldwide trained both as a vet and as a behaviourist. With over 25 years of clinical experience, she's also the current president of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists.

If you have a dog who's anxious, reactive, or hard to live with, this conversation will give you a different way to look at what's going on. Dr. Radosta also breaks down when to call a trainer versus a behaviourist, and why it matters. And if you just want to understand your dog better, you'll come away with plenty to think about.

Connect with Dr. Lisa Radosta

Website | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

Every spring, a double-coated dog sheds enough undercoat to knit a jumper. Most of it goes in the bin, or worse, on the garden fence for the birds, where flea treatment residue can kill hatchlings. Sebastian Salvat wants a better option.

Sebastian is a fashion marketing student at London College of Fashion and the founder of Chiora, a project turning brushed-out dog undercoat into a cashmere-like yarn.

He's been working in dog rescue since he was sixteen, lives with two rescues from Romania (Chai and Ora, who the brand is named after), and is backed by LCF's startup programme.

The British Dog Wool Association was doing something similar for soldiers in hospitals over a hundred years ago. So the idea isn't new. The question is whether it should exist now.

We get into the ethics of building a luxury material from a living animal, the economics that keep the model honest, and what Sebastian is doing differently this time around.

If you live with a double-coated dog, pause before you throw the brush-outs away. Send your dog's brushed-out undercoat to Chiora [email protected] | chiora.org

Sally Muir is one of the UK’s most prolific painters of dogs. Her books A Dog a Day, Old Dogs, and Rescue Dogs are published by Pavilion. Her work has been selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, including Elderly Dog (2018) and Hound (2019), and she won the Holburne Portrait Prize in 2012.

She co-hosts The Dog Show in Brighton with Joanna Osborne, her business partner of over 40 years. They first met in 1979 through a shared interest in knitting machines, and went on to found Warm & Wonderful. Their black sheep jumper, worn by Princess Diana, was later sold by Sotheby’s in 2023 for $1.1 million, becoming the most valuable sweater on record.

Alongside her studio work, Sally has spent the past decade visiting Galgos del Sol, a galgo and podenco rescue in Murcia founded by Tina Solera. During that time, she has painted murals across the kennels, education building, and puppy block, alongside her commissioned portrait work.

If you love dogs and you love art, this is for you.

The Dog Show is an exhibition of dog art, part of the Brighton Artists Open Houses.

Open House Exhibition on 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 16, 17, 23, 24, and 25 May
from 11 am to 5 pm

Address: 33 Sillwood Road, Brighton, BN1 2LE

Over 200 pieces of dog art from 15 artists, including returning and new exhibitors, across a range of mediums.

Visit the official website for more information.

A dog screaming during a dog training session in a pet store aisle set something in motion that became a 20,000-member global movement.

Niki Tudge went in for supplies and came out in tears, and the Pet Professional Guild exists because of what she heard that day. That moment crystallised something she had already suspected: that the dog training industry was broken, unregulated, and unlikely to fix itself from within.

This conversation covers the culture clash between punishment-based and force-free training, why licensing won't protect dogs but consumer pressure will, and what a landmark $2 million shock collar lawsuit in California signals for an industry at a crossroads.

Niki also shares what the latest research on pet owner behaviour is revealing, and why she believes the industry is closer to a tipping point than people realise.

What makes her optimistic is not legislation or professional consensus but the shift happening at ground level, in the questions pet owners are starting to ask and the choices they are starting to make.

Niki holds a master's degree from Oxford and is the founder of the Pet Professional Guild, DogNostics Career Center, and The DogSmith.

There's a dog asleep on your sofa right now, or there was this morning. And there's a reasonable chance something in your wardrobe is made from dog leather.

Abigail Forsyth is Campaign Manager for PETA Asia, leading investigations and campaigns across the region to expose animal exploitation. In this conversation, she talks through the industries designed to stay invisible: the dog leather trade operating inside Chinese slaughterhouses, puppy mills producing litter after litter while 100,000 dogs sit in UK shelters, the dog meat trade and what South Korea's landmark ban actually means, and thousands of dogs still used in UK laboratories every year.

We also get into why we disconnect what we see from what we know, how quickly public perception can shift when people are given the truth, and why these industries only change when consumers stop funding them.

This episode wasn't made to shame anyone. It was made to close the gap between not knowing and knowing.

If you'd like to learn more about the dog leather trade, please visit https://www.peta.org.uk/news/were-calling-on-the-eu-to-ban-dog-leather/

Most of us try to do right by our dog(s). The problem is that almost everything we've been taught about how to do that was built around human needs, human comfort and human expectations.

My guest for today's episode is Dr. Jessica Pierce, a world-renowned bioethicist and author of 13 books on animal ethics and moral philosophy. She's spent nearly two decades writing about dogs and exploring what life is like for them when we de-center ourselves as humans.

In this episode we cover:

• Why 99% of dogs in a large-scale study showed signs of anxiety, stress or behavioural disturbance, and what that actually tells us
• The sensory world your dog lives in that you've probably never thought to look at, including sound, smell, and a daily experience nothing like your own
• Why barking, pulling, counter surfing and chasing aren't bad behaviours. They're dogs being dogs in a world built entirely for humans
• What burned Jessica out after years in this work, and the unexpected thing she did about it
• Bella, Jessica's 14-and-a-half-year-old dog, and the decision every dog guardian eventually faces, but few talk about openly

Dr. Jessica Pierce | Bioethicist and Author