Thanks to decades of passion, commitment, and hard work from the dog training and professional community, there is a wonderful educational ecosystem out there for owners to learn from, with everything from local puppy and basics classes to introductory books and excellent online videos and courses.

Given that incredible ecosystem, why then, in our mission to improve owner education (”better educated owners, better lives for dogs”), did we spend three years and thousands of hours creating the Good Owners Guide to Dogs?

Despite the abundance of high-quality learning resources out there, there remain significant, damaging, endemic, and persistent gaps in the average owner’s education (cf. Article 1, Article 2, Article 3, Article 4). To better understand the source of these gaps, we interviewed hundreds of owners, breeders, rescue workers, and trainers over the past three years. We found:

1. Most owners never start their learning journey – as many as 95% of companion dog owners never take a single class or work with a trainer.[1]
2. There are two primary reasons for that: (a) most owners don’t know what they don’t know, they don’t realize what healthy dog ownership entails; and (b) people’s lives are busy!

Watching a few 15 minute videos your breeder or rescue sent you home with may not sound like a lot coming from the perspective of a dog professional, but as a pet owner, when it’s late at night after a long day at work, getting the kids fed and corralled, walking the dog, paying the bills, etc. – it can be hard to motivate yourself to sit down and watch videos, or hop in the car and go to a class, especially when you’re not even entirely sure what it is you’ll be learning and why it matters so much.

As a result, we consistently find most owners sincerely want to learn more about how to live and work with their dog, but struggle to get over the hump of starting that learning journey.

To put it in perspective, we found, for example, that the overwhelming majority of dog owners we interviewed:

• Are not aware that a dog’s breed/family history can effect anything other than its looks (i.e. her personality / temperament, behavior, activity needs, etc.)
• Think “training” is purely a recreational hobby of teaching your dog party tricks because it’s amusing (as opposed to an important opportunity to build your dog’s confidence, deepen your relationship, and give them the skills they need to navigate a human world)
• Have never heard of socialization, reactivity, or resource guarding, and have no idea what those concepts are

Remember, as we often remind professional trainers, however much you think the clients you see don’t know enough about how to understand and interact with their dogs, those clients are actually in the top 5% of dog owners in terms of conscientiousness, given that they have self-selected to go see a trainer and start that journey. Tapping into population-wide datasets, looking at Google Search data to better understand how the ‘95%’ of owners think, the chasm between how we think in the enthusiast community and where the overwhelming majority of owners are at becomes clear (cf. article).

So, how can we lower the barrier to owners seriously starting their learning journey? Investigating why owners don’t do more with the ecosystem today, we found that a few key issues intersect with one another:

1. Hard to navigate scattered, single-topic resources: many of the great videos and articles out there are on different platforms (Fear-Free, AKC, Puppy Culture, Kikopup, etc.), and broken into individual topics, making it hard to know where to start or what to prioritize if you don’t feel able to start a full course.
2. Videos and classes are too high-commitment: a 10 minute video on socialization might not sound like a lot, but it requires deliberately sitting down and blocking out time to not just watch but digest – and then put into practice – that information. Note: videos and classes/training sessions are the best ways to ultimately learn, but often too high a barrier to actually get started. We need a lower-commitment ‘bridge’ to draw owners in before asking them to watch videos (more on that below).
3. Hard to know where to start: the majority of owners’ first stop for information today is either a Google search or local dog owner Facebook groups, both of which return an incredible noise of resources and advice that are hard to parse through and identify what is reliable and what isn’t.
4. Timing and simplicity matter: Owners are often sent home with a long list of potential resources from their breeder or rescue, but there are generally (a) too many resources so they get overwhelmed and put it off to later, and/or (b) if the resources are too high a barrier to start (see point 2 above), they put it off to later. Either way, most owners aren’t tapping the resources their breeder or rescue is sending them home with.

The result is that article databases are digestible but fragmented, while ‘end-to-end’ resources like video series or in-person classes have too high a barrier for most owners (although only to start with – before they start to learn and get drawn in).

Alleviating those issues – creating a lower barrier ‘bridge’ to feed more owners into the existing educational ecosystem – was the inspiration and mission for the Good Owners Guide to Dogs. To achieve that, we adopted a few key ‘design principles:’

1. Everything in one place – The Guide is meant to give owners a single, consistent place they can come back to, rather than a long list of articles or videos in different places on different subjects.
2. Digital – accessible all the time, on the owner’s phone (where, for better or worse, many of them live). They can whip it out and explore or remind themselves of a concept when it’s top of mind, without having to go home and grab a book from the shelf or dig up a video.
3. A starting point – no text-based resource can on its own teach a person how to understand and work with their dog; you need to see concepts in action, and practice them with the help of a professional live. Our primary goal with Guide is actually not to teach folks these concepts; rather, our priority is to help them (a) realize the need for (and benefits to) learning about how to care for and communicate with their dog in a healthy, effective way; (b) appreciate what concepts they need to learn, make them aware of them; and (c) understand the consequences of not learning these things – and the enormous benefits of learning them! The objective is, through that greater awareness, to cause a higher percentage of dog owners to start their learning journey, taking classes, reading books, and working with qualified trainers.
4. Text-forward – Videos and in-person classes are by far the better way for most owners to actually learn, but again the barrier to consuming them is just too high to start. Text can be pulled up and perused at one’s own pace, lowering the barrier to initially engaging with the content. To bridge that gap, we design our content to ‘whet their whistle,’ helping owners understand the importance and implications of key concepts and make them curious enough to go on to tap videos, classes, books, and other resources .
5. Shift mentalities! – On the team, we often say: “we don’t care if someone learns a single fact from the Good Owners Guide; the real goal is changing their mentality around how they think about their dog.” If we can get owners to get in the habit of looking at the world from their dog’s perspective, thinking about how their dog experiences things, thinking of their dog as a being with agency, emotions, and mental and physical needs, we believe they will be more likely to start down the right path, finding their way to the right resources and learning as they go. Again, our goal is to give them a little nudge in the right direction, to get a higher percentage of owners to start taking classes, reading books, and tapping learning resources. We achieve this by teaching each concept from the perspective of your dog, of grounding practices in the underlying needs and psychology driving them. In that manner, we hope that readers will start to build the habit of thinking in that way, even if they forget any specific practice or concept we cover.
6. Provide a reference – Even after an owner starts taking classes and watching videos, it can be hard to remember what was covered and go back to try and find it. The Guide is meant to be a reference resource that, after someone learns these concepts from a deeper learning resource (like videos and in-person classes), they can go back to to remind themselves “oh yeah that’s right we talked about how barking can be self-reinforcing;” or “oh that’s right with a new puppy we have to manage what they have access to;” etc. It also provides a ‘map’ of concepts – giving owners a view on to topics they haven’t learned about yet, and making it easy for them to take a quick look and see what it’s all about.

Our aim is, through that design, to:

• Introduce more owners to basic, foundational concepts for the first time
• Change owner mentalities, how they think about their dog
• Steer more owners to start their learning journey, taking classes, reading books, and tapping resources

To that end, our team has spent the past few years creating and revising the Good Owners Guide to Dogs, to the point where, as far as we can tell, it is now the largest, most comprehensive written resource on companion dog ownership ever created! While it will never be perfect – there’s always more to do – our hope is that it will help raise the (very low) bar for new and novice dog owner knowledge, and get a higher percentage of dog owners into the learning ecosystem.

It is also a living document, one that we are constantly updating to improve breadth, accuracy, and understandability. So if you check it out and have any suggestions for any changes or additions, please help by letting us know!

[1] See more context in this article; data reference: Stepita, ME; Bain, MJ; Kass, PH; Journal of the American Animal Hospitalization Association 2013 suggested only 4.7% of dog owners attended a single class; the APPA (American Pet Products Association) National Pet Owners Survey seemed to independently confirm this finding in 2022 (5%) and once again in 2023 (6%).