We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tricia Case a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Tricia, appreciate you joining us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

With 17 years of dog behavior experience, we look through the lens of the dog, and believe in creating tools, equipment, and materials that promote animal welfare and positive human + canine relationships.

You’ll notice the simplest, most necessary dog tool on the market, the leash, is weighed down by heavy, cheap hardware, and often overbuilt even for a horse. Dogs have no interest in being on a leash. It’s a foreign concept for a dog, and for some, can lead to fear and frustration, because they loose their ability to fight or flee, so all they have left is to fret or freeze. You see this with dogs who are reactive on leash, only fret most often looks like lunging, barking, and/or jumping. The vast majority have no interest in actually fighting, they just want the stressor to go away, whether that’s a dog, person, cat, etc…

Trailblazing Tails understands and builds multifunctional and lightweight tools to help our dogs feel life, not the tool.

It’s important as an industry that we also take into consideration the concerns dogs have for being touched or handled, and remind ourselves that some dogs simply dislike wearing gear. Our focus as dog parents should be to help our dogs feel more comfortable by making positive associations as well as desensitizing them to it. Hiring a QUALIFIED dog trainer can be extremely beneficial.

Our job as an industry should be to find ways to lighten dog gear and help promote a better relationship with our dogs.

As a society, we need to consider that our dogs are captive creatures and find as many ways as we can to provide them a sense of freedom and autonomy, and meet their core needs as a species. That could start with taking them out on a longer leash and allowing them to sniff and choose the direction of their walk so long as it’s safe. After all, we control their entire world, from when and what they eat, to when they go out to potty. We also choose when, or if, they go on a neighborhood sniffari or a decompression walk in low-distraction area where they can just be a dog.

Through education, we will build a better future for dogs.

Tricia, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Hi, I am Tricia Case, founder of Trailblazing Tails, as well as product innovator and lead educator. As the mother of two young humans and one canine, I am driven to make the world a better and safer place for children and dogs, and build products that consider the dog’s wants, needs, and emotions.

A bachelor’s degree in industrial/organizational psychology and counseling first introduced me to the fascinating world of behavior training, and in 2007 I founded Trailblazing Tails as a dog running service in Los Angeles, CA. I quickly realized how little I knew about the practical application of behavior training and devoted the next 17 years of my life to learning everything I could about dogs and their behavior, and I continue to further my education through
conferences, my professional community, classes, and every dog I meet.

As a product innovator and educator, I dream of a world where people listen and understand how dogs talk, which I believe is the first step in helping solve many of the everyday problems dog parents face. This includes building lighter weight tools to help encourage better communication with our dogs as well as up-to-date educational materials made available for FREE so people don’t have to fall victim to scrolling through pages of misinformation online.

My desire is to create products and materials that educate without alienating. Trailblazing Tails is an all-inclusive community who welcomes those who want to learn more. My goals: 1. Lower the bite statistics in our country, as 77% of dog bites are to children with the family dog or a friend’s. 2. Create and build knowledgable products that find solutions to everyday problems while considering the dog.

I’ve been proudly handcrafting with BioThane for 7 years, which is a waterproof, odor-proof, durable, and strong material manufactured in North Ridgeville, Ohio. We do our best to keep our vendors as local or USA-made as possible. This is important to us as a company and to me as an parent as I teach my children to love and treasure our Mother Earth. We also deeply believe in recycling, reducing, and reusing as much as we can, including, finding creative ways to use our scrap materials for products and enrichment toys, scrap materials to build or modify workshop machines and tools, purchasing used furnishings for our shop and building or stumbling upon them on the side of the road (My favorite place to shop!), finding new purposes for everyday items, etc.

I am most proud of the education and knowledge we bring to our market. Education is a large part of our business and what drives us to create products and materials that promote animal welfare and positive human + canine relationships. Together we can also create an impact!

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Around year 13 of Trailblazing Tails, and after a deep financial dig, it was evident that we could not survive as a service-based company any longer without sacrificing the quality of our service and my personal well-being. As a company who prides itself on quality and knowledge, it would have been impossible to scale with quality training for staff.

Working with dogs is not an easy profession, and for many professions such as dog training, dog walking, and pet sitting, it’s an unregulated industry. Dogs are living, breathing creatures with teeth, and minds no smarter than a two-year-old child. Numerous physical and mental challenges can be arise, especially in unfamiliar environments and with a dog who is not your own. You need to be 10 steps ahead of the dog and paying attention to your environment like a hawk, always having an exit strategy if danger were to arise, like a charging off-leash dog.

Training staff to understand dog body language, behavior, and potential triggers for each individual dog takes time and practice, and as a small, service-based company, we didn’t have that. And because I had been working with BioThane for years, handcrafting tools for my staff and testing those tools, I knew it was time to pivot.

My focus was on building tools to help promote better communication with our dogs.

Best decision I have ever made professionally.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

My social media journey started to take hold when I began creating content of my staff working with our client dogs, as well as creating educational videos showcasing tips and tricks for working with dogs. Trailblazing Tails was routinely reshared by the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants (the IAABC), which I believe propelled our online presence and helped us reach our niched community in science-based dog training.

Though, it was one day that I had had an idea in my head for some time that I decided to create my first in a series of child and dog educational infographics. The next morning I woke up to 25,000 shares on Facebook. The series spread throughout the dog world and beyond, recognized and shared globally by organizations such as The American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior.

The series begs the question, “Which dog is relaxed?” and shows two photos labeled with the body language of each dog interacting with children — one appropriate and one inappropriate, explaining that dogs should have the choice if they want to engage. They include our tagline, “Dogs talk with their bodies. Listen.” and share the message that we should advocate for our dogs.

Building my audience came organically while I did my best to put knowledgeable content into the world. Becoming an online sensation has yet to happen, but I find great pride in reaching even one person and making an impact. My advice to anyone building their online presence is to be authentic and offer good, digestible pieces of knowledge and wisdom.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.trailblazingtails.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/trailblazingtails/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/trailblazingtailsforthewholedog/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/triciaadunn