About Us

I've always been drawn to animals, as long as I can remember. And I have always had a soft spot for the challenging dogs. The misunderstood pups. 

That became clear when I adopted a genuinely challenging dog of my own and realized how much I loved the process of turning him into a great family dog. That led me to volunteer at an animal shelter, where I got hooked on fostering the dogs on the euthanasia list for behavior issues — the ones nobody else wanted to take a chance on.

It turned into a business almost by accident. Friends and family started asking for help with their own dogs. I started a dog walking business because it seemed like the easiest way into the industry — I had exactly one client to start. But people kept recognizing what I was actually good at, and it grew into something else entirely: a pack boarding operation on 45 acres of forest in Santa Cruz, running a dozen or more dogs at a time through the woods, letting them teach each other while I guided and observed. That's where I learned more about dog behavior than any class could have taught me.

After a couple years, I took a few months off to explore the world. I then settled in the Bay Area and I took a job inside a dog boarding facility to learn the business side more deliberately — I had general business management experience, but not the specifics of this industry — and spent six months there learning the operational realities of caring for other people's dogs at scale.

I then started Cultured Hounds.

But the real education came from the dogs themselves. Fearful dogs. Reactive dogs. Dogs that had bitten. Dogs that had been returned, removed from daycare, bounced between homes, or gone through several trainers without much changing. Those dogs taught me to pay attention to the whole picture.

I want to know what your dog does, but I also want to know when it happens, what happened before it, what happens afterward, what the household looks like, how much freedom the dog has, what their social history has been, and how the people around them respond.

Sometimes the solution involves obedience. Sometimes it involves changing the environment. Sometimes it's structure, exposure, confidence building, clearer communication, better management, or simply asking less of a dog until they're ready for more. Usually it's a combination.

My approach is practical and individualized. I use reinforcement generously, but I also believe dogs benefit from clear boundaries and fair consequences. I don't use prong collars or electronic collars, and I don't believe every dog should be trained according to one rigid ideology.

I want a dog to understand what I'm asking, and I want the people I work with to understand why we're doing it.

I've fostered more than 60 dogs, volunteered thousands of hours in animal shelters, worked with rescue dogs, helped teach children how to safely interact with dogs, and spent years using my own dogs to help other dogs learn appropriate social behavior.

But experience isn't useful if I can't teach you what I'm seeing. My real job is to help you understand your dog well enough that you don't need a trainer standing next to you forever.

That's success to me.