I grew up in a house where dogs were not pets. They were family members with strong opinions, sleeping habits that disrupted everyone, and a knack for showing up exactly when you needed them and never when you wanted a moment alone.
I’ve been a dog person for twenty‑some years now. Long enough to know what I don’t know — which, it turns out, is the most useful thing twenty years gives you. I’ve lived with shy dogs, stubborn dogs, dogs who decided on day one that I was theirs and dogs who took eighteen months to look me in the eye. I’ve made every mistake the internet warns you about, and a few it doesn’t.
The M Pack started because I kept reading dog content online and putting my phone down feeling worse than when I picked it up. Either it was too soft to be useful — an endless stream of “your dog is your best friend” reels that don’t help you when your best friend just chewed through a baseboard at three in the morning. Or it was too clinical to be human — a wall of training jargon that made you feel like a bad owner for asking the question in the first place.
I wanted something in between. Honest. Grounded. Written by someone who has actually had to sit on the kitchen floor at midnight with a panicking puppy and figure it out.
The dogs who taught me.
Every dog I’ve lived with taught me something specific, and most of what I write here traces back to one of them. So before I tell you about The M Pack, I should tell you about the pack.
Otto came to me at eight. A retired working‑line shepherd whose previous owner had to relocate, and somewhere in the chain of phone calls my number came up. He was already old. He was already set in his ways. And he taught me, in the first month, that everything I thought I knew about “starting fresh” with a dog was beside the point. He didn’t need a fresh start. He needed someone to read the room.
If you’ve ever met a confident, settled adult dog, you know what I mean. They don’t announce themselves. They just lower the temperature of every space they walk into. That’s what I want my writing to feel like.
The most useful thing twenty years gives you is a sense of what you don’t know — and the patience to admit it on the page.
The hard ones.
Layla was a street dog who had every reason not to trust me. I won’t romanticise it — the first year was hard. There were nights I sat on the floor in the hallway because she wouldn’t come out from behind the sofa. There were trainers who told me to be firmer, and trainers who told me to be softer, and almost none of them were right.
What was right was time. And paying attention. And accepting that her timeline was hers, not mine. By the third year she was sleeping on the bed. By the fifth she was the dog I’d call “the easy one.” She passed in 2022. I still write half of what I write because of her.
There is a category on this site called Loss and Grief. It exists because Layla deserved a category.
What I'm doing now.
I’m on the path to becoming a certified dog trainer. I study companion animal health on the side — nutrition, basic veterinary literacy, the kind of information that should be common knowledge but isn’t. I’m not a vet. I’m not pretending to be. But I read the papers, I ask the right questions, and I write only about what I’ve verified or lived through.
The M Pack is the place where I put the things I wish I had been told earlier. Some of it is practical — how I think about leash work, what I keep in the first‑aid drawer, how I evaluate a breed before recommending it to a friend. Some of it is more personal — what it’s like to lose a dog, what it’s like to not be a “dog person” on a Tuesday and still be one on Wednesday.
Nala is the dog I have right now. She is a four‑year‑old Malinois, which is a polite way of saying she is the most demanding roommate I have ever had. She is also the reason I finally understand the difference between “a tired dog” and “a fulfilled dog.” You can run a Malinois into the ground and still have a Malinois. The work is mental, the work is structural, and the work doesn’t end. She is the silhouette in the logo, in case you were wondering.
What this site is, and isn’t.
This site is not a directory. It is not an affiliate machine. There is no “Top 10 Dog Beds of 2026” here, and there never will be. If I recommend something, it’s because I’ve used it for at least a year and I would buy it again with my own money.
It is also not a training course. I am not your trainer. If you have a serious behavioural issue, you need a professional in the room with your dog. What I can do is give you a way to think more clearly about your dog — and sometimes that’s enough to make the difference between a small problem and a big one.
— A note on the writing
I write slowly. New posts arrive when there’s something worth saying, usually once or twice a month. The archive is small on purpose. I’d rather write fifty pieces I stand behind than five hundred I don’t.