About Us

I'm Marisa Cole, and this site started because of a dog I couldn't take for a walk. Not a metaphor — a literal, six-month stretch where Bruno, my German Shepherd, could not pass another dog on a sidewalk without lunging, barking, and dragging me into someone's rosebushes. I had six years of veterinary practice behind me and a decade of training work ahead of me now, and none of it made those months easier or faster. That's the honest starting point for Raising A Good Dog: a site built by someone who has been on the wrong end of the leash, not just the demonstrating end.

Why This Site Exists

Most dog training content is written for the dog in the video — calm, food-motivated, performing on cue in good lighting. It's rarely written for the dog on a Tuesday evening, in the rain, with a neighbour watching and your patience running thin. Raising A Good Dog exists to close that gap. We cover puppy training, everyday dog training problems, and the practical side of living with a dog — including the dog furniture and DIY builds, like crate bedroom nightstands, that make cohabiting with a dog feel less like a compromise and more like a design choice.

The throughline across every category is the same: force-free methods, management before mechanics, and an honest timeline. If an article tells you a recall problem or a reactivity case resolves in a weekend, that article is selling something. Real behaviour change takes weeks or months, and I'd rather tell you that upfront than have you feel like you're failing on day four.

What You'll Actually Find Here

Three broad lanes, all overlapping in practice:

• Puppy Training — the early groundwork that prevents half the problems people write to me about later: socialization windows, handling, house training, and setting a puppy up before habits calcify.
• Dog Training — recall, leash manners, reactivity, and the games and drills that hold up under real distraction, like the recall work built around beating distractions rather than pretending they don't exist.
• Dog Furniture & DIY — crates, beds, and builds designed around how dogs actually rest and settle, not just how furniture photographs.

Every piece is written to be used, not just read — steps you can run in your backyard or driveway this week, not theory for someday.

The Editorial Approach

I write everything here myself, in first person, because I think readers deserve to know whose judgment they're trusting. That said, judgment needs guardrails, which is why we keep a written Editorial Policy covering how articles get researched, fact-checked, and updated as methods and evidence evolve. Training science moves; an article from three years ago sometimes needs revisiting, and we do that rather than letting outdated advice sit indefinitely.

We're also upfront about how the site is run day to day. Product recommendations and any affiliate relationships are disclosed clearly — see our Disclosure page — and how we handle your data if you contact us or browse the site is laid out in the Privacy Policy. None of this is exciting reading, but it's the kind of transparency I'd want from a site I trusted with my own dog's care.

Behind the Byline

I'm a CPDT-KA certified trainer based in Asheville, North Carolina, twelve years into this work, nine of them professional, and I still see clients three days a week on purpose — the day I stop working with real dogs and real owners, this site turns into theory instead of practice. Before training full-time, I spent six years in veterinary practice, which is where I first got comfortable with the medical side of behaviour: pain, thyroid issues, and anxiety all masquerade as "bad behaviour" more often than people realize.

Bruno, my long-coat Shepherd, is in most of the photos on this site. I adopted him at fourteen months from a family who couldn't manage him, and about five months in, the reactivity started — every dog, every walk, no exceptions. That half-year is where my specialization in reactivity actually comes from, not a textbook. My partner Owen, a physical therapist with strong and mostly correct opinions about how I lift a 75-pound dog off an exam table, keeps me honest about body mechanics. And Pickle, our elderly terrier mix, works as the calm, deeply unimpressed neutral dog in reactivity sessions — a job she considers well beneath her.

How to Reach Us

If you have a training question, a correction on something we've published, a collaboration idea, or you just want to tell me about your dog, email [email protected] or use the form on our Contact page. I read everything that comes in, even the ones I can't answer individually.

Thanks for being here. Whether you're house training a puppy, working through a reactivity case that feels endless, or just want a crate that doesn't look like a crate, I hope this site meets you where you actually are — leash in hand, dog beside you, figuring it out one walk at a time.