A behaviour is never treated before its cause has been understood.
It is the one rule that is never up for negotiation. Everything else (the steps, the pace, the tools) depends on the dog in front of you.
The symptom is not the cause
A dog who pulls, barks, freezes or lunges is showing a symptom, not a cause. Two dogs behaving in exactly the same way can have opposite causes underneath: fear in one, frustration in the other. Two different mechanisms, so two courses of work that have nothing in common. Applying one dog’s protocol to the other does not merely waste time, it can make things worse.
Silence that symptom without understanding its cause, and another symptom will take its place. It is the equivalent of treating flu with a nasal spray: the problem is moved around, the virus is left alone.
A symptom you silence does not disappear.
It relocates.
A practice grounded in science
My work draws on ethology and on research in animal behaviour. That is not a selling point: it is what makes it possible to tell a hypothesis apart from a hunch, and to recognise when you have got it wrong.
The corollary is that I do not improvise outside my field. When a question belongs to medicine, to nutrition, or to another discipline or speciality, I say so and I hand it over. A professional with an opinion on everything is a professional whose opinions are worth very little.
Fieldwork before theory
I spent more than two and a half years in the field alongside reactivity specialists. You do not learn to read a dog from a book. You learn to spot the signals you could not see the day before, across hundreds of dogs, next to people who have been reading them for far longer than you have.
No aversive tools
No e-collars, no slip or prong collars, no method built on fear. This is not only a matter of ethics, it is a question of what works: on a reactive dog, these tools almost always backfire.
A dog who takes a shock the moment he sees another dog records “other dog = pain”, and his fear grows. A dog punished for growling learns to stop warning, and bites with no warning at all. More dangerous, not less. And without trust, no deeper work holds.
One thing worth saying, because it matters: I do not judge the people who consider these tools. Most of them believe they have run out of options. They have tried everything, they are doing what they were told to do for their dog’s sake, and they are frightened, for him or for other people. That is not brutality, it is a dead end. But there are other ways through.
Working alongside vets
A dog in pain cannot be rehabilitated.
He is treated first. That is a principle I never negotiate, and it is one of the reasons I work regularly with vets.
The collaboration runs both ways. Either the vet comes to me: they are following a reactive dog, sometimes on medication, and they need the behaviour work to move forward alongside the medical side. They handle the treatment, I handle the rehabilitation, and each of us adjusts on what the other observes. That is the setup that produces the best results on heavy cases.
Or, where pain is plausible or I have doubts about a possible medical origin for some of the signs, I am the one who refers. Behaviour problems and pain or illness are easily confused: a dog who growls when touched, who turns irritable, whose “character changes” as he ages very often hurts somewhere. The behaviour is only the message.
How it works
Why online.
Almost everything happens online, in France, across the rest of the French-speaking world and in English. This is not a fallback, it is often the better option.
A dog observed at home, with no stranger in the room, behaves the way he actually behaves, and not the way he behaves in front of a professional. That is even truer of dogs who react to people. In person I am the trigger myself: my mere presence produces the behaviour we are trying to work on, which makes observation impossible and the work counter-productive.
At a distance, you work in his real environment with his everyday behaviour, and the results are often better than anything we would get on site.
The question left is what your dog is actually experiencing.
A fifteen-minute call, free, no commitment. You tell me what is going on, I tell you what I make of it and how I can help, concretely. You will know what the next step would look like before spending a single euro.