In November 2025, I lost my yellow Lab, Bear, to osteosarcoma.
I had been feeding him a raw diet. Limiting his exposure to things I was concerned about. Doing the research.
Trying so hard to do everything right. And I still lost him.
After the grief came a lot of questions.
What did I miss? What wasn’t I seeing? What didn’t I know?
I don’t think those questions are unusual when we lose a dog we love. We replay decisions. We wonder whether we could have done something differently.
For me, those questions eventually changed the direction of my work.
Losing Bear pushed me to learn more
I had already been researching a holistic pet health coaching certification, but I kept going back and forth about whether to make the investment.
Losing Bear made the decision for me.
I wanted to understand more.
Not because I believed there was some secret thing I could have done that would have guaranteed a different outcome for Bear.
I simply wanted a better understanding of all the pieces that can influence a dog’s health and quality of life.
And the more I learned, the more I realized how often we look at those pieces separately.
We tend to get advice in pieces
Fix the behavior. Address the allergies. Manage the anxiety. Change the food. Work on the training.
But our dogs don’t experience their lives in separate categories.
Stress can affect behavior.
Physical discomfort can change how a dog responds to the world.
Changes in routine, food, sleep, activity, environment, and health can overlap.
That became one of the biggest shifts in how I started looking at my own dogs.
Instead of immediately asking, “How do I fix this symptom?” I started asking more questions about what else might be happening.
Health and behavior can be part of the same story
If a dog suddenly becomes more irritable, anxious, reactive, tired, picky about food, or simply seems different, I don’t want to automatically assume it’s a training problem.
And I don’t want to assume every behavior change means there’s a medical problem either.
I want to look at the bigger picture.
What changed?
What has the dog been experiencing lately?
How are they feeling physically?
Has their environment changed?
What does their veterinarian think?
What patterns are showing up over time?
Sometimes those questions don’t give us an immediate answer.
But they can help us notice things we might otherwise miss.
Bear changed the questions I ask
I wish Bear were still here.
But losing him changed me.
It pushed me to learn more deeply about dog health and made me much more aware of how interconnected our dogs’ lives really are.
I can’t know every answer. None of us can.
What I can do is keep learning, keep observing, work with my dogs’ veterinary team when something isn’t right, and keep asking better questions.
That’s one of the biggest things Bear left with me.
Originally sent to Rescue Dogs 101 subscribers on April 7, 2026. Published online in September 2026.
