Meet Brooke
Founder and head trainer of Harmony Canine Behavior Academy.
A Life Shaped by Dogs
Dogs were part of my story long before I ever thought of becoming a dog trainer.
My parents fell in love with Golden Retrievers in the 1970s. When my dad became a general contractor in Las Vegas, he named his company Golden Construction and made a Golden Retriever its logo. In the 1990s, my mom began breeding AKC Golden Retrievers.
I was born into the middle of all of it.
I was six years old when I watched our Golden Retriever, Daisy, give birth to my first litter of puppies. Somewhere there is a photo of little me carrying a Lisa Frank backpack covered in Golden Retriever puppies, which, in retrospect, feels a little prophetic.
I still have pieces of that history around my home today, including one of my mom's old license plates commemorating two of our family Goldens, Taz and Dad's.
Horses may have been my first childhood love, but dogs eventually became the great obsession of my life.
And strangely enough, it wasn't a Golden Retriever who made me a dog trainer.
It was a Siberian Husky who ate my shoes.
The Dog Who Changed Everything
When I was 19, I brought home an all-white Siberian Husky named Blaze.
I had grown up with dogs. I thought I understood dogs.
Blaze disagreed.
He screamed. He howled. He destroyed things. He had more energy than I knew what to do with, and after somewhere around two dozen pairs of shoes had fallen victim to him, I finally admitted that I had absolutely no idea why this dog behaved the way he did.
So I went looking for someone who did.
That search led me to professional dog trainer David Baron of Superdog and Dog Answers Ranch in Roseville, California. When I discovered he didn't have anyone available in Las Vegas, our conversation took an unexpected turn: if I was serious about learning, I could come to California and learn to train dogs myself.
So I said yes.
I left my job, brought Blaze, and spent a month living and learning at the ranch.
My education didn't begin with a leash in my hand.
It began with listening.
For hours each morning, I listened to David speak with dog owners. I learned how to ask questions, how to listen for the problem underneath the problem, and how much of dog training is actually about understanding the person standing at the other end of the leash.
The afternoons were dogs.
I observed lessons, studied behavior, worked with owners and eventually learned how profoundly our own communication, intention, body language and emotional state influence an animal.
David was also an accomplished martial artist, and that influence became part of the way I learned. Long before I had language for some of these ideas elsewhere in my life, I was learning to become aware of my own presence and regulate what I brought into an interaction with a dog.
And Blaze?
Within days, I was walking beside a dog I barely recognized.
I remember thinking:
“What is this? How does this work? I need to learn this.”
I was hooked.
From Dog Trainer to Teacher
I began training professionally in 2010.
My career didn't follow a perfectly straight line. For several years, I stepped into another world entirely and built a career in real estate.
But dogs had an irritating habit of refusing to let me quit them.
People continued finding me. Former clients referred new clients. My phone continued ringing with people who needed help understanding dogs whose behavior they couldn't solve on their own.
And eventually I had to admit something to myself.
I could be good at real estate without loving it.
I loved this.
By 2017 and 2018, dog training was steadily becoming a larger part of my life again. In 2019, I returned to California and reconnected with the mentor who had started it all.
This time, there was an entirely new dimension to learn:
Service dogs.
When Training Becomes Independence
I returned to Dog Answers Ranch to deepen my education in service-dog task training and public-access work, and in 2020 I trained my first service dog.
Service-dog training changed the scale of what this work meant to me.
I've since had the privilege of working with people navigating very different circumstances, including survivors of traumatic experiences, individuals living with disabilities, and people going through extraordinarily difficult periods of their lives.
I've watched dogs help their handlers move through public spaces with greater confidence. I've trained dogs to perform individualized tasks. I've traveled and trained in the environments where these partnerships actually have to function.
Airports and airplanes. Hotels. Restaurants. Casinos. Museums. Historic buildings. Beaches. Boats. Busy city streets.
Because a service dog doesn't ultimately work in a training facility.
They work in someone's life.
Over the years, clients have told me that their dogs gave them independence, confidence, companionship and, in some cases, a reason to keep moving through periods when life felt impossibly heavy.
Eventually, I came to understand that relationship from the other end of the leash, too.
During one of the hardest chapters of my own life, my Golden Retriever Maggie became an extraordinary source of stability and partnership for me.
That experience changed something in my understanding of service-dog work forever.
I knew how to train the dog.
Now I understood more deeply what it meant to need the partnership.
Why Harmony?
In 2021, I left real estate and returned to dog training full time.
By then, I had spent years training dogs, teaching people, building businesses, making mistakes, learning, starting over, and moving through some difficult chapters of my own.
When it was time to decide what I wanted the next chapter of my work to become, I kept returning to one word:
I'm also a singer, so the word had belonged to another part of my life long before it belonged to this business.
Musically, harmony happens when individual sounds remain distinct but learn to exist beautifully together.
I realized that's remarkably close to what I've spent my career trying to create between people and dogs.
Harmony isn't a perfectly silent house.
It isn't a dog without a personality.
It isn't robotic obedience.
And it certainly isn't perfection.
I live with a pack of five dogs. There is dog hair on everything I own. My vacuum and I are in a committed relationship. Life with dogs is alive, occasionally ridiculous, and sometimes chaotic.
But my dogs understand me.
I understand them.
They know how to live together, communicate with me, navigate the human world and still be dogs.
That is harmony.
And after a period of my own life defined by simply getting through things, Harmony also represented something personal: choosing to build the next chapter around peace, purpose, education and the work I knew I was meant to continue doing.
Why “Academy”?
Because I'm not interested in simply training your dog.
I want to teach you.
After all these years, one of my favorite moments still happens when an owner suddenly looks at their dog differently because they finally understand why something is happening.
Behavior makes more sense.
Communication becomes clearer.
The dog isn't simply being “bad.”
The human isn't simply “bad at dogs.”
There are causes, patterns, needs and ways forward.
That's why Harmony is a Behavior Academy.
Whether I'm helping a family raise their first puppy, rebuilding life with a reactive dog, developing reliable obedience, or preparing a service-dog team for the real world, my goal is ultimately the same:
Teach the human. Understand the dog. Build the relationship.
Because I don't want you to need a dog trainer standing beside you forever.
I want to give you the knowledge to understand the animal who will be standing beside you.
More than fifteen years after Blaze demolished his way through my shoe collection, I'm still fascinated by the same question that started everything:
Why does a dog do what they do?
That question has taken me from a California ranch to living rooms, sidewalks, airports, airplanes, museums, casinos, beaches and countless ordinary places where extraordinary relationships between humans and dogs are built.
It's introduced me to people I never would have met otherwise.
It's allowed me to watch frightened dogs gain confidence, overwhelmed owners finally understand their dogs, puppies grow into partners, and service-dog teams accomplish things that once felt out of reach.
And somehow, after all these years, I still get excited when a dog finally gets it.
That's why I'm here.
That's Harmony.