New Year, New Goals? Why My Training Resolutions Don’t Change

Our busy, urban lives may not let us carve out a lot of extra hours to train , but the L.E.G.S.® approach allows training to happen all the time. photo: AdobeStock

It’s time for those New Year resolutions! But as a dog trainer and behavior consultant, I have to admit that my 2025 resolutions look a lot like those from previous years. That’s because they’re pretty much always about the same thing: helping as many dogs as possible and finding new ways to do it.

Speaking of new, I recently earned a brand new certification through the Family Dog Mediation Education Center, which follows an applied ethology model developed by Kim Brophey. Known as L.E.G.S.® - an acronym for Learning, Environment, Genetics, and Self - this model uses all four of these components to create individualized training and behavior modification plans for dogs.

Even before my certification, I had actually been applying this approach to my work with clients’ dogs and my own pups for over two years, after coming to many of its tenets intuitively. It’s helped me craft ways to train humans and their pups in real life and real time. It acknowledges that our busy, urban lives may not let us carve out a lot of extra hours to train a list of single behaviors. Instead, the L.E.G.S. approach allows training to happen all the time, in every situation, while we’re going about all the things we need to do every day anyway.

What Balto Taught Me

For me, it all started with Balto, a five-month-old German Shepherd/Husky mix (a.k.a. Shepsky) who I rescued in 2022. I wanted the challenge of two notoriously independent breeds in one puppy and, boy, did I get it in Balto. Among other things, I was told I wouldn’t be able to train a Shepsky to come when called without the use of a prong or e-collar. But because I’m a science-based, force-free trainer, my resolution that year was to prove that this kind of equipment - or other punitive measures - isn’t needed to train even the most explorative, independent, and fearless of dogs.

At first, everything I knew about training did not work with Balto. I had to reinvent the wheel. But, as I’d hoped, the experience made me a much better trainer. In fact, I actually began using the L.E.G.S. model intuitively, without even knowing it existed.

Balto taught me loads and helped me create many of the training exercises and lifestyle changes I now use with my clients. And just as each dog is a “study of one,” as Dr. Susan Friedman puts it, so is each client. Together, we craft a plan that works best for everyone involved, meeting the needs and wants of both dog and human alike.

Enter Biquette

Just last month, I rescued a four-month-old Malinois puppy, Biquette. This means my 2025 resolution is to apply everything I learned from Balto, plus develop new methods based on all the things Biquette has yet to teach me.

In fact, I’ve begun creating free online video tutorials, journaling our adventures together so that other dog owners can learn and benefit from easy tools that can help with a multitude of behavior needs. These videos show me training Biquette on a daily basis, including tips and tricks about handling training challenges, as well as mistakes and setbacks, which happen to everyone including us pros.

One of the very first foundational behaviors I teach every dog is how to stay busy and to eventually settle while the human is otherwise occupied. Here is Biquette on our third day with me, while I am applying make-up. Food Puzzle = Busy Pup = Free Human! Homemade food puzzles keep her busy, but they also provide an outlet for multiple unwanted behaviors while satisfying all eight steps of the predation sequence to completion (many dogs have excess energy because they do not complete the full cycles of certain behavior strings such as the predation or stress cycle).

Food puzzle games also require olfactory actions - called snuffling - to find the food, which releases calming chemicals to counteract adrenaline and cortisol. In short, the dog stays occupied in an enrichment activity that uses their brain and body, meeting multiple genetically driven behaviors and sequences, all while calming them down. In fact, the dog will often end the game by settling and sleeping because they are tired from all that thinking.

I want to stress that I do not use cues to get the dog to do any of this. Instead, I let the dog choose to do these things on its own. This makes for a much stronger behavior that the dog learns to initiate, enjoy, and repeat on its own, without waiting for my cue or expecting reinforcement from me. Rather, the dog is training itself. I get what I want and/or need by giving them what they want and/or need. And I do this in all of our day-to-day, real-time, real-life situations.

This is the same approach I use with my clients and their dogs: teaching the dog - and human - how to behave and what to do in their daily lives. Properly applied, it works for everything from settling when humans are occupied to leash walking to open space adventures and more.

So who needs a new resolution when the old one still fits? This year, I’ll just keep helping as many dogs as possible and keep finding better ways to do it.