A recommendation in a Facebook group for Labrador owners led Jenna to Tom Parker.

Dog trainer for 14 years. Runs his own training program outside Denver. Specializes in leash walking because he got tired of watching clients start over from scratch every single week between sessions.

The first thing he said on the phone was:

“Jenna, if you tell me you’ve already tried everything, I believe you. And I can tell you exactly why none of it worked.”

No trainer had ever said that to her before.

Tom explained that dogs have a biological reflex: when a dog feels pressure — whether at the neck from a collar or across the chest from a harness — it instinctively pushes against it.

The harder you pull back, the harder your dog pulls forward.

Not because your dog is stubborn. Not because your dog is badly trained. But because your dog’s body is literally responding the way it was built to.

This was described in behavioral research over a hundred years ago, but somehow it never really made its way into the dog world.

Then Tom said the sentence Jenna says she’ll never forget:

“Jenna, you’ve been trying to train against a biological reflex for months. That’s like trying to train a dog not to blink. You can be as consistent as you want — their body is still going to do what it does.”

Suddenly, everything made sense.

The training classes. The treats. The stopping.

Jenna hadn’t been training against bad behavior. She’d been training against biology.

And that was NEVER going to work.

But Tom wasn’t done.

He explained why the equipment was making the problem even worse.

With a collar, you trigger that reflex directly. Pressure on the throat makes the dog push against it instinctively. And on top of that, collars can cause lasting injury.