I am 47 years old, and I have lived with dogs for very nearly all of it. Not as a job and not as a qualification — as a fact of the house. For as long as I can remember there has been a dog on the floor, in the doorway, waiting by the coats, or asleep in the one place it had been told not to sleep. I have never really known a home without one, and I have never wanted to.
Right now that dog is Bell, a Shih Tzu, five years old. He is small, he is opinionated, and he has taught me more in five years than the first thirty taught me put together, because by the time he arrived I had finally started paying attention. There are also dogs that are not mine — dogs I look after for other people, of every size and temperament and set of bad habits.
This site exists because of what all of them cost me to learn. Not money, mostly. Time, and a fair amount of getting it wrong first.
What this is, and what it is not
Let me be straight with you before you read another word. I am not a vet. I am not a qualified trainer, I hold no certificate, and nothing on this site is medical advice. If your dog is unwell, the person to ring is your vet, and there is no article anywhere on the internet — mine included — that replaces someone with their hands on the actual animal.
What I have instead is repetition. Forty-odd years of ordinary days: walks in the dark, walks in heat, teeth that needed doing and did not get done, beds bought in the wrong size, toys destroyed in an afternoon, one dog that pulled and another that would not come back. That is not expertise. It is experience, which is a different and humbler thing, and it is useful in exactly one way — I can tell you where the potholes are, because I have been down most of them.
The dog I live with now
Bell is a small dog carrying a large coat and a short face, and each of those three facts has caught me out.
The coat is a daily job, not a weekly one. Mats do not form where you can see them. They form against the skin, behind the ears, under the legs, in the places a quick brush over the top misses entirely, and by the time you find one it is already pulling at him. Ten minutes a day is easy. A monthly hour is not a substitute for it, it is a fight. If your dog has any real coat at all, that is the single most useful thing on this page.
A short face changes the rules about heat. Flat-faced dogs cool themselves less efficiently than long-nosed ones, and they hit trouble at temperatures another dog would shrug off. I learned to look at the day rather than the calendar, and to move walks to the ends of it. If that is your breed too, the heat guide is the one to read first.
A small dog is desperately easy to overfeed. A biscuit thrown to a Labrador is a snack. The same biscuit to a dog of six or seven kilos is a meaningful part of the day. Nobody sets out to make their dog heavy; it happens one kindness at a time, from four different people in the same house, none of whom are counting.
The dogs that are not mine
Looking after other people’s dogs has taught me more than living with my own, and for one reason: they arrive with habits I did not create. My own dog’s problems are mine, built slowly, and I am too close to see how they were made. Somebody else’s dog shows you the mechanism plainly, because you meet it already finished.
You also learn very fast that “dogs do X” is almost always wrong. One dog is soothed by a crate and another is frightened by it. One will work all day for a piece of cheese and another does not care about food and will do anything for a tennis ball. The same harness that solves the problem for one dog changes nothing for the next. Any advice — mine very much included — is a starting point to test on the animal in front of you, not a rule.
The mistakes I made, so you do not have to
These are honestly mine. I have watched other people make most of them since, which is what finally persuaded me to write any of this down.
- I bought equipment to fix behaviour. A dog that pulls gets you into a shop, and the shop sells you a harness. The harness helps you hold on. It does not teach the dog anything, because pulling is a habit that has been paid off hundreds of times, and hardware does not unpay it. That took me years and several harnesses to accept. Here is what actually changes it.
- I bought for the dog I imagined instead of the dog I had. Beds too small because the big one looked absurd in the room. A ball chosen because it was cute, when the only measurement that mattered was whether it could sit at the back of his throat. Sizing is not a detail on dog gear; on some of it, it is the entire safety question.
- I ignored the mouth completely. Bad breath is not a smell, it is a symptom, and by the time I understood that it was a job for a vet rather than a chew. Nothing I have learned since has changed my mind about which one I should have started twelve months earlier. The teeth guide is here.
- I believed the label. “Orthopaedic” on a bed with no foam density published. “Indestructible” on a toy that lasted one evening. “Waterproof” that meant showerproof. On this site those words get checked, and when they cannot be checked, the listing says so.
- I waited for things to settle down on their own. Barking, pulling, a recall that only worked in the garden. None of it settled. What was actually happening was practice: every day it went unaddressed, the dog got better at it. Starting badly and early beats starting perfectly and late.
- I confused expensive with correct — and then cheap with waste. Both are wrong. Some of the best things I have owned cost almost nothing, and some of the worst cost real money. Price tells you about the seller, not the product.
- I treated the symptom and left the cause. A dog that chews is either teething, bored, or anxious, and those three need opposite answers. Buying a chew toy for an anxious dog is like turning up the radio because the engine is making a noise. The chewing guide splits those apart.
Why none of this costs you anything
Everything I know is on this site for free. There is no course, no membership, no email wall, and there never will be. You can read every guide here, close the tab, buy nothing at all, and I have still done what I set out to do.
So here is the money, in plain sight. When a product on this site is linked to AliExpress and somebody buys through that link, LookDog earns a small commission. It costs you nothing extra. That is the only way anything here is funded — and to be honest about what that means, every product page says what the thing does badly as well as what it does well, including when saying so talks you out of buying it. A recommendation that cannot say “not this one, not for your dog” is not a recommendation, it is an advertisement.
Read the guides and buy from your local shop instead. Genuinely. The writing is the part I care about; the shop is how the writing pays for itself.
How a product gets on this site
I do not test these products in a laboratory and I will never pretend otherwise. What I do is refuse to list things that fail a set of checks anyone can apply, and then say what is wrong with the ones that pass.
- Feedback, with volume behind it. Nothing goes up below 80% positive feedback from the seller’s buyers, and anything added recently has to clear 84%. Volume matters as much as the score: 100% positive across nine orders tells you nothing, while 88% across four thousand tells you a great deal.
- Safety over novelty. No shock collars, nothing flimsy enough to come apart in a determined mouth, and nothing whose listing makes claims it cannot support.
- A real problem, not a clever idea. The catalogue is small on purpose. A category here is a range of genuinely different things rather than the same item eight times under eight names.
- The drawbacks, in writing. Every product page says what the thing does badly as well as what it does well. If a product has no honest downside listed, I have not looked hard enough at it yet.
- No invented ratings and no invented testing. The numbers on a product page are the seller’s own figures with the date they were read, and prices are re-checked through the day because this supplier moves them without warning.
One thing to be clear about
LookDog does not sell anything and does not ship anything. Every product page here points to the retailer, and the purchase, the payment, the delivery and the returns all happen there, under their terms and not mine. If something goes wrong with an order, they are who you deal with — but tell me too, because a seller who lets people down should come off this site.
If we met on a walk, this is what I would tell you
- Time beats gear, nearly every time. Ten minutes a day of brushing, or training, or teeth, will do more than anything you can put in a basket.
- Buy the thing that solves the actual problem. Work out what is going wrong first. That is what this page is for.
- Size it properly, then check it weekly. Toys, collars, beds, harnesses. Dogs change and things wear out, and the failures are rarely gradual.
- Your vet is not optional, and neither is your own judgement. Nobody on the internet knows your dog. You do.
If you are starting out with a puppy, begin here — it is the guide I wish somebody had handed me. If something specific is going wrong today, start with the problem instead. And if you just want to know where all this ends up, this is the short version of the whole site.
Get in touch
Found something I should look at? Think I have got something wrong? I would genuinely rather know. Email motilevi@gmail.com or use the contact page. I read everything, and a correction from a reader is worth more to this site than another product listing.
Thank you for reading. Give your dog something nice from me.