Raising Good Dogs started with a very specific, very humbling walk down a very ordinary street in Portland, Maine. It wasn't a business plan. It was a German Shepherd named Bruno,…
Raising Good Dogs started with a very specific, very humbling walk down a very ordinary street in Portland, Maine. It wasn't a business plan. It was a German Shepherd named Bruno, a leash going tight, and a trainer with fourteen years of professional experience realizing that everything she knew still hadn't prepared her for her own dog. That trainer is me, and this site is what came out of the years that followed.
I'm Marisa Cole, a CPDT-KA certified dog trainer, and I've been doing this work for seventeen years — six of them before that in veterinary practice, which is where I first learned how much of dog behaviour is written in body language nobody's taught to read. I'd been training professionally for five years, with a full client list and a decent reputation, when I adopted Bruno at fourteen months old from a family who couldn't manage him. Within four months, I couldn't walk my own dog past another dog on the sidewalk without a full-blown reaction — lunging, barking, the whole neighbourhood watching.
That was not supposed to happen to me. I knew the theory. I had the certification. And it still took months of slow, unglamorous management-first work to get Bruno to a place where a walk was just a walk again. That experience is the reason this site exists, and it's the reason nothing here promises a quick fix. Bruno is twelve now, arthritic, mostly retired, and still the reason I write the way I do.
Raising Good Dogs is a site for the person on the other end of the leash on a Tuesday, in the rain, with a neighbour watching — not for the demonstration dog in a perfectly lit training video. Most content in this space is written for the best-case dog having a good day. Ours is written for the real one: the rescue with a history nobody fully knows, the adolescent who's suddenly reactive out of nowhere, the senior dog whose patience is wearing thin along with everyone else's.
Everything published here follows a few non-negotiables:
I still see clients three days a week, on purpose, because the day I stop working dogs in real conditions is the day this site turns into theory. Every article is meant to be inspiring without pretending training is easy, and practical without oversimplifying something that's genuinely complicated. If a topic needs nuance — resource guarding, multi-dog households, reactivity around other dogs — we give it the space it needs instead of squeezing it into a five-step list that skips the hard parts.
We're also upfront about how the site is built and funded. You can read exactly how we handle sponsorships, product mentions, and partnerships on our Disclosure page, and how we choose, fact-check, and update what we publish on our Editorial Policy page. Nothing here is written to sell you something first and help your dog second.
It's me, Marisa Cole, working out of a converted mill building in Portland, Maine, though most of my actual sessions happen outdoors — quiet trails, empty school fields at seven in the morning, a harbour-side path where a good chunk of my reactivity work happens. My husband, Owen, is a physical therapist with strong and mostly correct opinions about how I brace my body to hold an eighty-pound dog mid-reaction. Bruno is semi-retired now, and Pickle, our small, deeply unimpressed terrier mix, works as the neutral dog in reactivity sessions and considers the job beneath her.
That household — one recovering reactive dog, one professionally unbothered terrier, and seventeen years of client work between us — is the real testing ground for everything published on this site.
Expect articles on reactivity, adolescence, resource guarding, multi-dog dynamics, and the slow, sometimes frustrating mechanics of behaviour change — written the way I'd explain it to a client standing in a parking lot, not the way it reads in a textbook. We respect your time and your dog's welfare equally, which is why you'll see plenty of caveats, plenty of "this depends," and very few absolute promises.
If you have a question, a correction, or a story about your own dog that sounds a little like mine did, I'd genuinely like to hear it. Reach out through our Contact page or email us directly at [email protected]. We also welcome partnership inquiries through our Collaboration page, and if you're curious about how we handle your data when you browse or reach out, that's all laid out plainly in our Privacy Policy.
Thanks for being here — and for taking your dog's behaviour seriously enough to look past the quick fixes. That's exactly the kind of reader this site was built for.