The traveling behaviorist
My name is Liz, and I've been traveling in my motorhome with my five dogs since 2021. I'm an animal behaviorist, specialized in dogs with severe behavioral problems. On the road I help people online and offline with their pets. I also travel from shelter to shelter, to train with more challenging dogs and teach shelter staff how to maintain these trainings after I leave.
It's my mission to stop the euthanasia of dogs, just because they are misunderstood or have faced difficulties in their lives. Dogs and humans are more alike than a lot of people know. It is my goal to demonstrate this to people and to show the world how easily dogs can change their behavior when we change ours.
I also try to educate people as much as possible, especially about street dogs.
Too many people still think dogs on the street is inherently a bad thing, but it's their natural habitat.
While many of the dogs we’ve bred can no longer survive on the street, families of street dogs that have been living there for decades are very well adapted. Taking them off of the street, the environment they are used to, and locking them up in a home, even when you mean well, can be really devastating for them and lead to severe behavior problems!
In the past 5 years I've helped more than 30 shelters all around Europe and I've trained over 15000 dogs from all over the world since founding my own training center and shelter in the Netherlands. From the US to Australia, from Cyprus to Aruba, my work spans the globe.
Beautiful memories are everywhere: helping seven shelters in Croatia in one summer, driving to Portugal to quickly catch a plane, because my help was needed in New York, seeing dogs getting adopted after more than 10 years in the shelter after just a few training sessions and new insights into their behavior, finding and rescuing one of my (now) own dogs who fell into a water reservior and was starving there, and adopting dogs from my own shelter—sometimes even dogs I’ve trained myself. And I'm definitely not done yet! More memories are always on the horizon.
But of course, not all goes well all the time. Three months after I started traveling, a truck hit my motorhome and there was nothing left of it. How my dogs and I all survived remains a miracle, but we did—and since then we try to live life even more to the fullest. My love for animals and my mission keep me going.
Helping animals is what I do best, and traveling is what I love. This combination is the perfect mix for me, plus my dogs love seeing so much of the world as well. As a kid I wanted to become a veterinarian, which I also studied to become, or a truck driver. I think I found the perfect combination of these two professions. And although veterinary medicine will always be my second love, being an animal behaviorist is my true calling.
The connection you make with the animals in this profession, seeing them develop self-esteem, self-awareness and just the ability to handle life better, is the best part of the job.
So if you need help with your pet or you want to know more about me and follow my travels, while getting behavioral advice, feel free to follow along on my socials!
