Renee Rhoades, MSc: Your Dog Behaviorist

Renee Rhoades, MSc: Your Dog Behaviorist Renee Rhoades
🎓 MSc BSc Adv.Dip Fear Free
🐶 Applied Animal Behaviorist
Mental Health • Welfare • Behavioral Therapy
(1)

09/17/2026

Thank you Clarendon Animal Care for your wonderful original post and trying to educate the public!

Nervous system regulation is everywhere in the dog world right now - and I am glad these ideas are being discussed becau...
09/14/2026

Nervous system regulation is everywhere in the dog world right now - and I am glad these ideas are being discussed because they are far closer to the truth than dominance ever was. 👀

BUT they are getting flattened into one message: if your dog is struggling, look at your own state. "YOU NEED TO BE REGULATED SO YOUR DOG CAN BE REGULATED" is everywhere.

The problem is we are already exhausted from monitoring ourselves. And regulation is not a constant state. It's flow. Up and down.

To help, I'm going to separate the terminology out because they are not all the same.

🌀 Regulation is an individual process. It is your nervous system moving out of a heightened state and back toward baseline. It is not the same as feeling nothing. It includes the recovery.

⚖️ Co-regulation is what happens when one nervous system helps another settle. Steady breathing, slow movement, predictable handling, a familiar routine. It is something we offer through what we do, not something we transmit by feeling serene. It isn't one session, it's many.

🧤 Emotional contagion is a short-term catching of another's emotional state. Research suggests dogs DO pick up on human emotional cues, though studies measuring it directly have found it is not as automatic or consistent as the internet implies. Grigg et al (2022) looked for it using simultaneous heart rate measures in dogs and handlers, and did not find consistent support for it with unfamiliar people. Familiarity mattered far more than mood.

🪞 Mirroring, in the way it gets used online, usually means matching of stress levels. Sundman and colleagues (2019) measured hair cortisol in 58 dog and guardian pairs and found their long-term stress levels were significantly correlated. That study measured long-term stress patterns over months. Not moments.

Chronic stress is a real welfare consideration for both of us. But, a single hard moment is not the same thing, and treating it like it is has left a lot of guardians convinced they are responsible for their dog's behavior - and that's just not the case.

Have you felt stressed out by trying to get less stressed?

Follow for evidence-based tips and canine welfare

Comment RGG and I'll send you the guide.You were probably told to take the bowl away while he eats. To show him it's you...
09/04/2026

Comment RGG and I'll send you the guide.

You were probably told to take the bowl away while he eats. To show him it's yours. To make sure he never thinks he's in charge.

Here's what actually happens when you do that.
In a study of 3,589 dogs, taking the food dish away during mealtime was associated with more severe and more frequent guarding. Adding a bit of something good instead was associated with less.

Guarding isn't about possession, and it isn't about rank. It's about prediction.

Your dog has learned what your approach tends to mean, and he's responding to that, every single time.

Which is good news, actually!

Why?

✨ Because predictions can change! ✨

Reversing Resource Guarding walks you through it.

💬 Comment RGG to grab it!


Reference:

Jacobs, J.A., Coe, J.B., Pearl, D.L., Widowski, T.M., & Niel, L. (2017). Factors associated with canine resource guarding behaviour in the presence of people. Preventive Veterinary Medicine, 161, 143-153.

You have probably been told that if you let your dog "get away with it," things will get worse.That they need to know it...
09/02/2026

You have probably been told that if you let your dog "get away with it," things will get worse.

That they need to know it's not acceptable. That you have to interrupt it. That you have to be firm, be consistent, be the one in charge.

And here is the part that gets missed entirely: the barking, the lunging, the growling, none of that is the problem. It is the communication about the problem.

Your dog is telling you they do not feel safe.

Punishment does not touch that feeling. It never has. What it does is teach your dog that showing you how they feel comes at a cost.

When the growl disappears, the warning disappears.

The dog look calmer.

But the fear is still sitting exactly where it was, with one fewer way to reach you.

We see this in the research, and we see it in practice every single week. Confrontational approaches are consistently associated with increased fear and aggressive responses, not fewer.

A dog who has stopped telling you is not a dog who has stopped feeling.

Safety is not something we can enforce. It gets built, slowly, through predictability, through choice, through recovery time, through a guardian who notices what their dog is asking for and answers.

That takes longer than a correction. It also actually works.

And if you have used those methods before, please hear this: you were following advice from people who sounded certain. That is not the same as being wrong-hearted. You are here now, and your dog gets the benefit of that. ✨

📌 Share this with someone who was told they were being too soft.

A new study followed 565 guardians of dogs with behavior challenges. 78% met the threshold for elevated caregiver burden...
09/01/2026

A new study followed 565 guardians of dogs with behavior challenges. 78% met the threshold for elevated caregiver burden. A third screened positive for anxiety. 84% felt that society judges them harshly, and more than half said they feel completely alone in it.

Here is what stayed with me. The severity of the dog's behavior was not what predicted how much the guardian was suffering. Guilt was.

If you have ever come home from a walk and cried in the car, that is not weakness. That is what carrying this alone does to a person.

CCRT was built with your dog's nervous system in mind, and yours. The protocols are designed to be sustainable for a real human with a real life, not a person who has nothing else going on. And you would not be doing it by yourself. There is a community chat full of guardians who understand the walk you just had, because they had one too.

Your dog deserves support. So do you.

Comment CCRT and I will send you the details.

Resource:
Kogan, Currin-McCulloch & Bogie (2026), "Beyond the Behavior," Pets 3(2), 22. Cross-sectional online survey, 565 adults currently living with a dog they identify as having behavior problems.

08/29/2026

Your dog and you are living in parallel, but unique bubbles. 🫧

👃🏼Let's start with smell, because for a dog it isn't simple. They carry somewhere between 800 and 1,100 functional olfactory receptor genes to our 400 or so, plus a working vomeronasal organ we don't have.

Their nasal architecture splits airflow so breathing and smelling happen on separate tracks, and each nostril samples semi-independently. Not like hearing in stereo, but hearing a channel you've never had access to.

👁️ Your dog's vision gets called poor, but it's just different. Dogs are dichromats, so red and green toward the same yellowish gray, which means an orange toy on green grass is low-contrast.

Fine detail at distance is soft, but fast movement is seen better. better in low light, and a wider field of view.

👂🏼 Hearing reaches roughly 45 kHz. The smoke alarm with a dying battery, the ultrasonic pest deterrent, the appliance whine, all of it is happening in a range we can't completely experience.

👋🏼 Touch, we sometimes overlook entirely. The whiskers on her muzzle and jaw are wired for close-range spatial information. And there's work suggesting dogs detect human stress chemosignals, which would mean your internal state is sensed too.

Is a dog "overreacting" in a world built for humans?

Or is the response just proportionate to the feeling?

And it's not just the negatives. Feeling the warmth of the sun. Smelling the wind and all it brings with it. The wet dew on the grass. Birds flying in the sky.

💛 Share this with someone who wants to know more about improving their dog's world.

When behavior change happens, people will readily give you theories about why.He's stubborn.She's testing you.It's adole...
08/28/2026

When behavior change happens, people will readily give you theories about why.

He's stubborn.
She's testing you.
It's adolescence.
They don't respect you.
You're spoiling them.

All of this falls on the dog's failing - without looking further.

There is always a underlying reason for behavior change.

Mills and colleagues (2020) reviewed 100 dog caseloads. A conservative estimate: around a third involved some form of painful condition. In some caseloads, closer to 80%.

Camps and colleagues (2019) put it plainly:

📢 The most common sign of pain in animals is a change in behavior.

Often, by the time you really start to notice limping, yelping etc, they've already been coping for a long time.

So the thing you dismissed as "too small" might be the big thing.

The dog who used to love being brushed and now moves away. The pause at the bottom of the stairs. The shorter fuse on a walk you've done a thousand times. The new sleeping spot.

Always trust your gut when it comes to how you feel about your dog's behavior.

A 'normal' physical exam doesn't mean there is nothing present.

Dogs are stoic rarely showing signs of pain and discomfort, especially in stressful environments like the vet.

Mills and colleagues recommend erring on the side of caution when pain is suspected, and evaluating how the dog responds to a trial of pain relief even when nothing has been found on exam.

Change one thing. Give it real time. Watch what the behavior does.

Yes, your dog isn't giving you a hard time - but they very well might communicate that they are having one.

Follow Renee Rhoades, MSc | Your Dog Behaviorist for evidence-based tips and more on this subject!

Research cited:

Research via PubMed: Mills et al. (2020), Animals
Camps et al. (2019), Animals

Like this? Follow Renee Rhoades, MSc | Your Dog Behaviorist for more evidence-based insights to improve your relationshi...
08/25/2026

Like this? Follow Renee Rhoades, MSc | Your Dog Behaviorist for more evidence-based insights to improve your relationship with your dog!

📑 Research:

Burghardt, G. M. (2007). Critical anthropomorphism, uncritical anthropocentrism, and naïve nominalism. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 2, 136–138.

Hecht, J., et al. (2012). Behavioral assessment and owner perceptions of behaviors associated with guilt in dogs. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 139(1–2), 134–142.

Horowitz, A. (2009). Disambiguating the "guilty look": Salient prompts to a familiar dog behaviour. Behavioural Processes, 81(3), 447–452.

Mota-Rojas, D., et al. (2021). Anthropomorphism and its adverse effects on the distress and welfare of companion animals. Animals, 11(11), 3263.

Voith, V. L., et al. (1992). Is there a relationship between canine behavior problems and spoiling activities, anthropomorphism, and obedience training? Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 34, 263–272.

Vollmer, P. J. (1977). Do mischievous dogs reveal their "guilt"? Veterinary Medicine, Small Animal Clinician, 72, 1002–1005.

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