Kay has been involved in training, breeding and rearing dogs for fifty years. What began as a hobby morphed into a full-time business via college teaching and sheep farming. The constant thread has been a passion for learning about dogs and effective teaching.

The business Learning About Dogs was established in 1996 and provides learning opportunities for people with a passion for dogs and who want to make a change and do better.

Kay leads the way in developing innovative and creative techniques that deliver connection and effective teaching blended with passion, joy and enthusiasm. From teaching communication skills, computing for the terrified to sheepdog training for a range of learners. Masters education specialising in curriculum design, learning styles and designing competency based qualifications.

Frances came to the world of learning about dogs (in lower case) several years ago via a dog who needed more knowledge than she had at her disposal. After feeling her way around in the dog world and learning much about what she didn’t want for her dogs along the way, she was finally led to Learning About Dogs (with caps) by her best friend and co-conspirator, T: a Border Collie who insisted they learn Sheepballs together. A recovering click-and-dumper, Frances has slowly learned of the importance of attentiveness, the root from which her entire approach to living with dogs has grown.

She grew up afraid of dogs after several bites in childhood, and defined herself as a “cat person” until a Border Collie called Jess, adopted into her sister’s family, persuaded her to expand her horizons. Still, “any dog but a Border Collie” was the phrase she repeated when she planned to adopt her first; her urban upbringing had shown her the fallout of pressured living on sheepdogs. However, the mysterious “cross” in her Golden Retriever Cross turned out to be Border Collie, and Frances, recognising that she was possibly mistaken in her assumptions, became a firm convert to the Society of the Smitten by Sheepdogs.

She has written an extended study on the representations of the Border Collie across multiple types of sources, from the shepherding tradition to fiction to peer-reviewed science, to analyse how our (mis)understanding of the Border Collie is constructed.

Frances is passionate about embracing dogs for who they are, and about compromise and negotiation in interspecies living. A keen educator and researcher, data gatherer, detail-explorer, healthy sceptic, and pattern-spotter, she relentlessly questions all received information and the cultural norms that underpin them. Often while surrounded by cats.

This is Tighearnan and his legion of friends.