I have some news I’ve been holding close, and I’m finally ready to share it.
I’ve completed Kim Brophey’s Canine Welfare and Behavioral Diversity course and earned the credential of FDM Behavioral Diversity Welfare Analyst (FDM-BDWA).
I want to be honest about what this milestone means to me, because it isn’t quite the story you might expect. This credential didn’t change how I work. It confirmed it.
Everything this course teaches — that dogs are whole, competent beings with deep natural needs; that welfare, not obedience, is the real measure of a good life; that so many “behavior problems” are really unmet needs in disguise — is exactly what Loyal Pawrenting has been built around from day one. What’s new is that a respected applied ethologist and a rigorous, science-backed program have now put their name behind that way of thinking. For me, that’s everything. It’s the difference between “this is what I believe is right” and “this is what the science confirms is right.”
So this post is part celebration, part thank-you, and part invitation to peek behind the curtain at what earning this actually took.
What Is a “Behavioral Diversity Welfare Analyst”?
For a long time, the dog world has organized itself around a negative list; a running tally of things we want dogs to stop doing. Don’t dig. Don’t bark. Don’t counter-surf. Don’t get in the trash. So much of traditional training is, at its heart, a project of suppression.
Behavioral diversity flips that on its head.
Instead of asking “How do I get this dog to stop?”, this framework asks “Is this dog able to be the animal they were built to be?” A Behavioral Diversity Welfare Analyst is trained to recognize, promote, and track the full, rich range of natural behaviors a dog is deeply motivated to perform — things like Exploring, foraging, scent tracking, chewing, and social connection — and to treat that range as a positive indicator of welfare.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same principle I wrote about in The Five Domains of Animal Welfare: we measure success not by the absence of problem behaviors, but by richness (how many natural behaviors your dog gets to express) and evenness (how balanced those behaviors are across the day). Higher behavioral diversity means better welfare. This credential simply gave me deeper training, sharper eyes, and a formal seat at the table where this science is being shaped for pet dogs.
What the Course Actually Involved
This was not a weekend webinar. It was a six-week, live, cohort-based course taught by Kim Brophey, CDBC, CPDT-KA — applied ethologist, founder of Family Dog Mediation®, and author of Meet Your Dog. Just to enroll, I had to have already completed Kim’s L.E.G.S.® Applied Ethology course and her Good Life of a Good Dog Total Welfare seminar.
Here’s what earning the credential looked like:
Foundations. Before we met live, we worked through lessons on the science of behavioral measures of welfare, how ethograms (structured catalogs of a species’ natural behaviors) are built, and my personal favorite: calibrating the human instrument, learning to actually see the behaviors most of us have been trained to overlook.
Weekly live sessions with Kim. Every week, our cohort gathered on Zoom to study a curated set of natural behaviors from the L.E.G.S. Behavioral Diversity Ethogram. We didn’t just name them. We examined what each looks like in the real world, what it’s for evolutionarily, why it matters to welfare, and what conditions in a dog’s environment allow it to happen.
Video homework, every single week. This was the heart of it, and the hardest part. Each week, I had to go out and capture real footage of specific behaviors, then match each clip precisely to its written definition. And I mean precisely. It’s not enough to say “that’s a dog biting a toy.” Is it a grabbing bite, a squeezing bite, a holding bite, or a shaking bite? Each is a distinct behavior with its own evolutionary logic and its own value to the dog. Getting feedback — and often re-filming when I’d misread something — sharpened my observational skills.
A final project. There were no quizzes or exams in this course. Instead, the capstone was to design a real-world affordance — a practical, doable way to make space for one natural behavior in an ordinary dog’s life. I chose Exploring, and my project became a hack I’m genuinely proud of. You’ve actually already seen it:
That post is my final assignment, dressed up and shared with you. Pass/fail, attend, participate, submit your video work, and complete your project — do all of that, and you earn the FDM-BDWA credential. I did.
The Part I Couldn’t Have Done Alone
Here’s the truth about all that video homework: I didn’t gather it by myself. Not even close.
To my friends who volunteer at our local animal shelter, thank you for sharing your videos with me, for pointing me toward the dogs doing a behavior in the ethogram, and for caring so deeply about the animals waiting for homes. So much of what I learned about behavioral diversity, I learned watching shelter dogs light up when given the chance to just be dogs.
To my clients, thank you for the videos, the patience, and the trust. Letting me film your dogs digging, sniffing, shredding, and exploring for a course assignment is a small thing that meant a very big thing to me.
To the foster parents in my community, you open your homes to dogs in transition, and you let me document their natural behaviors along the way. That footage didn’t just help me pass a course; it deepened how I think about supporting dogs in exactly your situation.
And to Coco and Riley, my original research assistants, my patient demo dogs, my whole heart. Half of my homework was just watching the two of you be yourselves. Thank you for being such good sports, and such very good dogs.
This credential has my name on it, but it was a community effort. I’m so grateful.
What This Means for You and Your Dog
Here’s what I most want you to hear: this doesn’t change how I work with you and your dog. It backs it up.
The welfare-first approach you’ve always gotten from Loyal Pawrenting isn’t just my personal philosophy anymore. It’s grounded in the same science a leading applied ethologist teaches and stands behind. It sits right alongside the L.E.G.S.® model and the Five Domains that have always anchored my practice, and it gives me even better tools for something I’ve been doing all along: looking at your dog’s whole behavioral life, not just the one behavior that’s bothering you.
Because dogs aren’t misbehaving. They’re trying to meet unmet needs. Behavior problems are so often welfare problems in disguise. And the most powerful thing we can do usually isn’t teaching a dog to do less — it’s designing their world so they can do more of what they were made to do, on their own terms.
I’ve always believed that. Now I’ve got the credential, and the science, to prove it.
Small shifts. Real impact.
Deep gratitude to Kim Brophey and the Family Dog Mediation Education Center for this work, and for building a framework that truly centers the dog. You can learn more about the L.E.G.S.® model and Family Dog Mediation at familydogmediation.com.
Curious what behavioral diversity could look like for your own dog? Book a discovery call — I’d love to help you build a life your dog can truly thrive in.
