Purple Pup

04/03/2026

Arousal and thresholds. Perfectly explained! 👌🐾💜

04/03/2026

04/03/2026

The British Veterinary Association is no longer recommending treating dogs with chemical pesticides as a preventative method for fleas and ticks. 🙏

There are lots of risks to regular blanket treatments 'just in case'. To our poor dogs, and to the environment. 😳

You do. Not. Need. to use them. There are better ways to prevent or treat for fleas and ticks. Also worms. 👍

If your vet is still pushing them, here's a link to the BVA Policy Position on Responsible Use of Parasiticides for Cats and Dogs:

https://www.bva.co.uk/take-action/our-policies/responsible-use-of-parasiticides-for-cats-and-dogs/ #:~:text=What's%20the%20issue?,What's%20our%20view?

04/03/2026

03/03/2026

03/03/2026

Reward-based training works because it aligns with how learning evolved.
Because they are animals.

03/03/2026

03/03/2026

I'm so glad the Dog Nutritionist is doing this series on human foods for dogs. So many people think they shouldn't give 'human' food to their dogs at all. There are plenty of things we can share with our dogs that are actually really good for them. 👌🐾💜

03/03/2026

Dogs just got spooky!

While we’ve all been worried about how our phones and devices are listening to us, it turns out our dogs have been doing it all along. I know, right? They’ve been listening even when they aren’t being trained, spoken to or even looked at. Kind of spooky really.

Researchers studied a small group of what they call “Gifted Word Learner” dogs, which is essentially the gifted class. These are dogs who already know loads of toy names. I suspect that there are smarter dogs out there, but they go through life faking it. They didn’t point at the toy or do anything other than talk about it.

Anyway, here’s what the scientists did:

They had the dog guardians talk to another human about a new toy. The dog was present but completely ignored. Just by overhearing, across about eight minutes total of hearing the name over a few days, the dogs later correctly picked the new toy out from a pile. And that is exactly how 18-month-old human toddlers learn words.

So, itt gets worse (or better, depending on how you feel about all of this).
The dogs could still remember the toy names two weeks later. In one test, they even learned the word when the toy wasn’t visible at the moment it was said. Meaning they weren’t just matching sound to object in the moment, they were forming an actual mental link. What, the actual…?
To test this theory, researchers tested “normal” family dogs without big toy vocabularies, and most of them just grabbed whichever new toy looked exciting.

Now, they aren’t claiming that “all dogs understand language like toddlers”, but that it’s that the social skills underneath language such as paying attention to conversations, or tracking who’s focused on what aren’t uniquely human.

Dogs have been living alongside us for thousands of years it’s not surprising they’re very, very good at watching us. For a lot of dogs, they have not much else to do in their lives. And now we have scientific evidence that some are listening very carefully, indeed.