Because of the Dogs

This morning, at the gym, I caught my own reflection and asked myself something I hadn't thought about in years: when was the first time I actually liked the person looking back at me? Not because of how I looked. Because I respected who I'd become.

My mind went straight back to 1988.

I was thirty-four, away on my first formal dog training instructors' course. I'd brought my young Border Collie puppy, Truly Perfect, and my Dobermann, Lisa. Five days residential, a young son at home, my husband holding the fort. It felt like a big deal at the time.

I turned up wanting to be the best instructor I could be. I already knew I wanted training to be different from what I'd seen.

I was born in the 1950s. Children were seen and not heard. You didn't question authority, and if you were a young woman in the 60s and 70s, you especially didn't question a man in a position of power. That wasn't really a choice — it was just how things were.

Dog training could be a brutal profession back then. A lot of instructors ran on loud voices and humiliation, both with the dogs and the owners. I knew people who never came back to a class because they'd been made to feel small. But something else was starting to happen too — more scientific thinking, more understanding that you got further with communication and respect than with fear. That was the world I wanted to be part of.

Halfway through the course, a senior instructor said something that was sexist and unprofessional. I can't even remember the exact words now. I remember exactly how it made me feel.

The whole course ran on hierarchy. Instructors above, us below — we didn't even use the same gate onto the training field. Complaining about one of them wasn't really something you did. But I couldn't let it sit.

Not because I wanted a confrontation. Because staying quiet would have meant accepting that this was fine. And it wasn't fine.

So I complained. Formally.

I was terrified walking into that room — more frightened than I'd been hearing the remark itself. It shook me enough that I dropped out of the final practical sessions and the assessment. Still got my certificate at the closing dinner, with my husband and son there.

But the certificate wasn't really what I brought home. What I brought home was a different sense of myself. I hadn't thought of myself as brave before that. I found out I could stand up to authority when something mattered enough.

It's taken me a long time to work out where that came from.

As a kid, and later as a teenager, things weren't always easy at home. Dogs and horses were where I went. They didn't judge me. They gave me somewhere to put my feelings when I didn't have anywhere else, and without me noticing, they built something in me that wasn't there before. I don't think I understood at the time how much I owed them.

So when I made that complaint, I wasn't standing up for myself, not really. I was standing up for the animals that had got me through. For the owners who deserved better than being humiliated in a training class. For a profession I thought could be better than it was. It wasn't courage. It was gratitude — I could say something because of the strength the dogs had already given me, because they mattered too much not to.

That week changed the direction of my life. It set the standard I've held myself to ever since — how I teach other instructors, how I work with clients, the business I eventually built.

Nearly forty years on, kindness and respect are still at the centre of everything I do.

Standing in the gym this morning, I realised that was the first time I remember liking the person in the mirror. Not because I'd won an argument. Because I'd acted in line with what I believed.

I'd forgotten where that belief came from.

It started with the dogs.