Welcome to MyHappy.Dog 🖤

MyHappy.Dog is a place for dog owners to find tips, advice and creative ideas to help them understand what it takes to truly make their dog happy and develop a well rounded pet dog. Because when you have a happy house dog, you have a happy household 🐾

Who is MyHappy.Dog?

Hello there fellow dog owner, dog lover, dog enthusiast 👋 Allow me to introduce myself! I’m Karen, a dog trainer, animal lover, pug owner, animal wrangler, wife, crafter and creator of MyHappy.Dog.

Ever since I was a little kid, growing up in a small town in New Zealand’s South Island 🥝, animals have been my life. Whether I was wrangling cats, teaching tricks to dogs, or walking around with a chicken under one arm, it was clear early on that I was destined to do some sort of work with animals when I grew up.

Fast forward to my adulthood, I followed my dreams and went to university to study Computer Science and Mathematics. Wait what?! OK, I’ll be honest with you, I may be an animal lover and also an avid crafter, but I am also a bit of a tech nerd, and proud of it! 🤓

Jumping ahead to today 🦘, I now live in Adelaide, South Australia and spend my days working for a software development company, which I love, and spend my evenings/days off creating content for MyHappy.Dog, training my pugs, volunteering as an obedience instructor at a community run dog club, and running my own business as an Animal Wrangler for movies, TV shows and advertising.

As you can see, I spend a lot of time living and breathing all things dogs, but I haven’t always. This chapter of my life started in 2017 with one seemingly innocent suggestion to my husband, “hey, should we get a Pug?”

Pugs have unique personalities, they love to entertain you, love to cuddle, are very intelligent and don’t need a 10KM walk twice a day! This is just what we wanted in a dog, so we decided to go for it, and we welcomed a tiny Zero into our home. But the problem is I was used to having more “practical” dogs prior to this and to be completely honest I was worried about people’s judgement of us getting this silly, designer dog. This fear just motivated me 💪 I decided if I was going to get a ridiculous dog, I was going to train the crap out if it!

Starting in obedience with Zero, then on to compete in agility and tricks, and in 2019 completing a year long Dog Training certification through NDTF Australia. Thanks to that fear of judgement (which never came by the way), I was realising my dream of working with animals and I was starting to find my niche, teaching dogs complex skills. This is what lead me to book my first TV commercial, my first job as an Animal Wrangler 🤩

Why did I create MyHappy.Dog?

Honestly, I just can’t stop talking about dogs 🙊 OK, you got me, there is a bit more to it than that.

As part of my quest to keep well rounded, confident dogs, I like to do a lot of stuff with my boys. From training them, to enriching them, to snuggling them, to observing and learning from them. Combine this with my experiences as an obedience instructor, an animal wrangler, an obsessed DIYer, and my love for education and you get someone who has a lot of knowledge to share and a drive to share it!

So in 2022 MyHappy.Dog was born as a way for me to share my experiences, warts and all, with other like minded dog owners like yourself. I wanted to create a very real and personal platform to share everything from fun stuff like gift ideas and DIY canine enrichment, to training stuff like how to teach a reliable recall or stop pulling on the lead, to real stuff like managing my dogs anxiety, and even my own. Like I said, warts and all.

I hope you enjoy my blog, and please reach using the contact form if you have any questions, requests or just want to say hello!

Thanks for being a part of the Happy Dog Pack 🐾

Say hi to your dog for me 👋

🖤 Karen