About Dog Brain Lab

What this is

Dog Brain Lab is a notebook about one question: what happens when you give a dog's brain something to do. Puzzle feeders, scent work, shaping games, ten minute enrichment setups built from what is already in the kitchen, and the chewing, barking, digging and pacing that tends to show up when none of that is happening.

Most dog sites cover everything. Nutrition, grooming, breed guides, insurance, the lot. We do not, on purpose. A site that covers everything ends up covering nothing at any depth, and mental stimulation is deep enough on its own to keep us busy for years. So the whole site is three shelves: brain games and enrichment,behavior fixes, and puppy foundations.

How we work

The editorial policy is short enough to hold in your head, which is the point of writing it down.

• We research and we cite. Where a claim leans on something, we link the thing it leans on rather than paraphrasing it into vagueness. You should be able to check whether the source says what we say it says.
• We hedge where the evidence hedges. Canine cognition research is young and a lot of it runs on small samples. When the honest sentence is "studies suggest", we write "studies suggest" instead of dressing it up as settled.
• We say what we have not tested. Every page carries a stamp. "Researched, not yet tested" means we read hard and wrote carefully but did not run it with a dog. "Run with a dog" means we did. The stamp is the first thing we write and the last thing we change.
• We do not invent people or numbers. No trainer persona with credentials nobody can verify, no testimonials that never arrived in an inbox, no rating out of five from a survey that never happened. If we have not earned a number, the page gets a sentence instead.
• We fix things. If we got a fact wrong, we want to know, and the page changes with a note on it. Tell us here.

What we are not

We are not vets, and nothing here is medical advice. Aggression, resource guarding, separation distress and sudden changes in behavior are not boredom problems, and an article is the wrong tool for them. Those want a vet or a qualified behaviorist who can see your actual dog. We say so on the pages where it matters, not just in the footer.

How this is funded

Affiliate links. Some links on this site, most visibly the ones pointing atBrain Training for Dogs, earn us a commission if you buy through them. It costs you nothing extra, and it does not buy a verdict. Our review of that program says out loud who should skip it, which is not a sentence you write when the commission is steering.

We would rather tell you how the lights stay on than pretend a site full of free work funds itself out of goodwill. The long version, including what we will and will not do for money, is on theaffiliate disclosure page.

Who this is for

The dog who has learned to open the bin. The one who finishes a forty minute walk and then starts on the skirting boards. The clever, restless, slightly-too-smart dog whose owner has been told to "just tire them out" and has discovered that physical exercise alone makes a fitter dog with the same problem. Also, quietly, new puppy owners, because ten minutes a day at four months saves a year of undoing at two.

Who "we" is

Dog Brain Lab is operated by Clark Media (Australia), and written as a publication rather than as a character. There is no founder photograph on this page because there is no founder story we could tell that would make the research better. What is here is the work: read the sources, run the games, write down what actually happened, and be straight about which of those three we have done on any given page.

Questions, corrections, or a game that flopped with your dog: get in touch. We read everything.