I’ve have seen a lot of chatter lately about the phrase “Pet Health Coach”, but this isn’t just about pet health coaches. It could be about canine nutritionists, dog trainers, herbalists, aromatherapists, wellness practitioners—or almost anyone who has completed a certification and put a few alphabet letters behind their name.
There are several legitimate coaching programs. There are also people calling themselves health coaches with very little formal education. The same thing happens in plenty of other areas of the dog world. But even when someone has completed an excellent program, I don’t think the certificate tells you nearly as much as people sometimes want it to.
A certification tells me where someone studied and that they completed the requirements of that program. It does not tell me how deeply they understood the material, what they did with it afterward, whether they continued studying, whether they question what they read, or what happens when a dog sitting in front of them doesn’t fit neatly into what they were taught.
Someone who earns a canine nutrition certification doesn’t magically wake up the next morning knowing everything there is to know about canine nutrition. I didn’t. My canine nutrition credential is Cert.CN through Companion Animal Sciences Institute, a science-based program requiring roughly 200–250 hours of study and substantial written coursework. It gave me a strong foundation in canine nutrition, but I never looked at finishing the program as finishing my education. Building recipes and translating a lot of that info to raw feeding wasn’t always easy, even after completion.
My aromatherapy education includes a RACE-approved certification. So do some of the conferences I attend. I’ve also studied herbs, homeopathy, iridology, behavior, Reiki, animal communication and other areas that have become part of the way I look at dogs. Much of that education was already in place before I ever took a Pet Health Coaching course, and every new course, resource, practitioner and area of study since has simply added another layer to what I already knew.
I’m proud of my education—but I’ve never viewed completing a course as completing the education.
The Certificate Was the Starting Point
When I say I’m a learning junkie, I don’t mean I like collecting certifications. I mean I don’t know how to leave a subject alone once I become interested in it.
I didn’t study the material in those programs just to pass the test. The material was usually the launching pad for whatever came next. I would learn about something and start digging deeper. One reference led to another, one idea connected to something else I had studied, and before long I was reading papers, comparing information, making notes and building my own library around the subject. Some of those rabbit holes have been going for years.
I’m also the person who sees someone make a claim online and goes looking for the study. I want to read it. I want to know how many dogs were involved, what they actually measured, what the researchers concluded, what they didn’t conclude and whether the person sharing it has stretched the findings considerably farther than the research ever did. Sometimes the post holds up beautifully. Sometimes I learn something new and save it immediately. Sometimes I discover that a very confident social media post bears only a passing resemblance to the actual research. Either way, I keep the notes.
And boy do I keep notes. You should see my OneNote files, spreadsheets, saved PDFs and Word documents. 😂 There are files I started years ago that I still add to, research I saved because I knew I would want it again someday, and notes that lead me back to other notes because apparently one layer of documentation was not enough. It was those notes I took years ago that planted the seeds of nutrition and behavior while I was training that changed everything with one tough case.
That’s what “learning junkie” means when I say it. My nutrition education didn’t stop when I earned my Cert.CN. My aromatherapy education didn’t stop when I passed the exam. Neither did herbs, homeopathy, iridology or behavior. A good course gives me a foundation, introduces me to things I may not have considered and often gives me better questions to ask. Then I go find out more.
Troubleshooting Is How My Brain Works
I think some of that comes from a part of my background that probably doesn’t seem related to dogs at all. I have degrees in computer science and math, and I spent years working at Microsoft. I don’t talk about that very often in my dog work, but I use the thinking behind it constantly.
Computer science teaches you to troubleshoot. Something isn’t working, so you start tracing it. What changed? What happened before the problem appeared? Is the thing you’re looking at actually the problem, or is it the result of something happening farther upstream? What variable are you missing? What assumption have you made that might not be true? If the first solution doesn’t work, you don’t just do the same thing harder and hope the computer finally becomes afraid of you. You keep working the problem.
Dogs are obviously not computer programs—and biology is a hell of a lot messier—but that way of thinking has followed me into everything I do. I want to understand why. I want to know what happened before something changed, what has already been tried, what helped temporarily or not at all, what made things worse and what nobody has looked at yet. I want to know whether two things being treated as completely separate problems may actually be connected.
Sometimes the answer is nutrition. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes something that looks behavioral makes me wonder about what is happening physically. Sometimes something in a dog’s history makes me think differently about the nervous system, digestion, inflammation, environment or stress. Sometimes my education in herbs, homeopathy, essential oils or iridology gives me another place to look.
That’s the value, for me, of having studied across disciplines. It doesn’t mean I think I know everything about all of them. It means I have more places to look, more questions to ask and more ways to recognize that something else may be going on.
Knowing More Also Means Knowing When to Refer
I can already hear the “jack of all trades, master of none” argument, and that isn’t what I’m saying.
There are people who have spent their entire professional lives specializing in one of these areas and know far more about that particular discipline than I do. I refer out. I ask other professionals what they think. I want another nutrition professional’s eyes on something sometimes. I want a veterinarian investigating something when the dog needs veterinary diagnostics. I have practitioners and experts I learn from, collaborate with and bring into the conversation when their depth of knowledge is what the dog needs.
To me, that’s part of being good at this—not evidence that I’m not qualified. I have enough insight into several disciplines to recognize when there may be another avenue worth exploring, and enough sense to know when somebody else should take that piece farther than I can. I don’t need to be the person with every answer.
The team matters.
The goal isn’t for me to prove that I can solve everything myself—the goal is to help the dog, and sometimes the best thing I can bring to the table is knowing who else needs a chair.
I learned that education doesn’t require agreement a long time ago, too. My original dog training and behavior education taught me plenty about training, but it also taught me a lot about the kind of trainer I did not want to become. My instructor was much heavier-handed with the leash and in his training style than I ultimately wanted to be. I learned what he taught, went out and worked with dogs, continued studying and watching and thinking, and eventually figured out what I wanted to keep, what I wanted to change and what I was willing to leave behind. I made it my own.
I’ve done that with everything I’ve studied since. I don’t think taking someone’s course requires me to adopt every belief that person has for the rest of my life. What would be the point of having a brain if that were how education worked? I can learn something valuable from someone and disagree with something else they teach. I can use an approach for years and then change it because I have better information. I can read new research that forces me to reconsider something I was pretty damn sure about before I read it.
That isn’t a threat to my education—it’s the whole reason I keep educating myself.
In fact, I hope I don’t believe exactly the same things five years from now that I believe today. I hope I know more. I hope I’ve changed my mind about a few things because better information became available. I hope somebody who knows more than I do teaches me something that changes the way I work. I hope I keep finding ideas worth investigating and keep enough critical thinking intact not to fall for every exciting thing somebody posts on the internet.
That combination matters to me—curiosity and critical thinking. Curiosity without critical thinking can send you into some pretty ridiculous places. Critical thinking without curiosity can leave you doing something for twenty years simply because that was the way you learned it twenty years ago. I want both. I want to be willing to ask, “What else could be going on here?” and then be willing to do the work to find out whether the idea has any merit.
What I Really Look for in a Practitioner
So when I think about what makes someone qualified, credentials absolutely matter to me. The quality of the education matters. Experience matters. Continuing education matters. But I also want to know how the person thinks and what they’ve done since the certificate arrived.
When they don’t know something, do they go find out? When someone makes an interesting claim, do they repeat it or validate it? Can they troubleshoot instead of reaching for the same answer every time? Can they recognize when something doesn’t fit? Can they change their mind? Can they say, “I don’t know”? And when they reach the edge of what they know, have they built a network of people who can help take the next step?
Those things tell me far more than a title by itself ever could.
When I look at all the things I’ve studied over the years, I don’t see a pile of certifications that somehow prove I know everything. I see more ways to look at a dog, more questions I know to ask, more connections I might recognize and more places to look when the obvious answer isn’t getting us anywhere. I see more tools in my tool box. I see years of notes, research, cases, conversations, mistakes, things that worked, things that didn’t and things I’m still trying to understand better.
And maybe this is where I land after all of it: at the end of the day, the certificate itself is not what we put into practice.
The knowledge matters—however you acquired it, as long as you did the work to actually understand it. Results matter. Determination matters. Critical thinking matters. Creativity matters. The willingness to keep digging when the obvious answer isn’t working matters. And teamwork matters, because nobody knows everything and the dog is better served when good professionals are willing to put their heads together instead of protecting their titles.
A certification can tell you where someone’s formal education started. It can’t tell you how much work they put in afterward, how much they continued learning, how they think through a difficult problem or what they’re willing to do when the first answer doesn’t work.
For me, the certificate has never been the finish line. It usually just gives me a new rabbit hole to go down—and hopefully another tool I can actually use when a dog needs it.
Dana Brigman, Cert.CN :-)