Behaviour Sessions
Alex is taking behaviour cases from September 2025: please use the contact page to book a session.
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Alex has experienced with a range of common and complex behaviour cases.
If, at any point, Alex feels an individual's needs are beyond her level of expertise, she endeavours to refer you to someone more suitable for help.
Approach:
When you request a behaviour modification session through Friends of Frank, you opt for a holistic approach, where consideration is made for ‘the entire dog’. Together we will take an intersectional look at your dog’s behaviour: evaluating their welfare needs; physical health; genetics and breed disposition; life experiences; emotional state; nutrition; and, individuality.
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A confident, healthy dog will rarely display problematic behaviour, such as reactivity and aggression, providing they feel safe and understand how to behave in their environment. Therefore, the primary aim of many behaviour modification sessions is to improve your dog’s emotional wellbeing, by understanding and changing your dog’s interpretation of their world around them.
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Session Duration:
As part of Cooperative Care, your dog’s emotional wellbeing will dictate the exact duration of each session. Please plan for 45-60 minutes, but be prepared that this may be cut short if your dog is displaying signs of stress.
Each individual plan is reviewed regularly and adjusted if required, to meet your dog’s needs.
Alex recognises that health and behaviour are reciprocal, therefore it may be necessary to have a check-up with your vet. The purpose of this is to rule out any injuries, conditions, or health-related behaviour changes, prior to starting behaviour modification sessions.
Cooperative care:
During behaviour modification sessions, you will learn how to recognise body language and communication signals. ​As you begin learning your dog's language, you will develop the skills to identify changes in your dog’s emotional state.
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Having gained clinical hours with dogs as a General Hospital Assistant (GHA) at Blue Cross, Victoria, Alex recognises that a dog’s emotionality is impacted by their physiological and psychological wellbeing, as well as how much autonomy the dog feels they have.
Alex encourages humans to reflect on the ethics behind ‘controlling a dog’, and demonstrates how to provide a dog autonomy and choice when it comes to their behaviour.
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Using mutual, co-operative care, we will modify behaviour and enhance your dog-human relationship through trust and connection.
Techniques:
A combination of force-free techniques will be employed to address unwanted behaviour. These include: classical, operant and counter conditioning; desensitisation and extinction.
Desensitisation and counterconditioning can be used to neutralise and/or form positive conditioned responses to stimuli and therefore reduce unwanted behaviour.
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In other instances, operant conditioning – involving positive reinforcement and negative punishment – can be used to teach alternative, desirable behaviours, to replace undesirable behaviours!
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Enrichment schedules may be introduced to reduce undesirable behaviours. Enrichment offers an outlet for innate, breed specific traits – behaviour that we, humans, often find problematic!
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Unwanted behaviour, particularly reactivity and aggression, is often exhibited involuntarily as an automatic emotional response. Therefore, it is often necessary to change a dog’s emotional response to a stimulus, to alter this behaviour.
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Who can be a Dog Trainer?
Sadly, in the UK, dog training has no legal protections or regulations whatsoever, meaning that the industry is a free-for-all.
Unfortunately, many dog-parents seeking science-based help fall victim to fraudulent 'professionals' posing as industry experts spouting detrimental 'advice'.
Before booking a behaviour session with any dog trainer or behaviour practitioner, it is vital to ensure the practitioner has a comprehensive understanding of modern, force-free, science-based dog training approaches.
Any professional, proficient in their pedagogy, should be able to prove it!
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