Behaviour consultant. Applied Ethologist. Dog Nerd. Lifelong learner.
Spacemaker. Independent Researcher. Cycle-breaker.
Hi, I'm Sowjanya.I believe there is so much about dogs we don't know — because we are not learning from them.
That belief has put me at odds with almost every mainstream dog space I've walked into. And I've stopped apologising for it.
If you've spent any time in the dog world, you've probably felt it too. The courses that give you more vocabulary but less understanding. The communities where the same conversation loops endlessly in slightly different jargon. The certification that cost you everything and left you further from the dog in front of you. The question you asked had no room in the room.
You're not missing something. You've been missing somewhere.
I found my way here through young Zoey and we were drowning in advice about her. How to manage her, shape her, make her more convenient. Nobody asked what she needed.
Meeting my mentor changed that. She didn't give me a better protocol. She gave me a different question. Why, before how. That was the beginning.
That question led me to the BHARCS Applied Canine Biosociopsychology and Ethology Diploma — where I stopped being trained to fix dogs and started learning to understand them. Where free-living dog observation became the ground on which everything else stands.
Sammy taught me something I've carried with me for years: tolerance is not consent. So much of what we do with dogs, they simply endure — and we read their silence as agreement, their compliance as happiness. Sammy showed me the gap between those things until I couldn't look away. He also showed me that repair matters more than never getting it wrong. That you can hurt someone you love, go back, and the relationship can hold that.
Zoey taught me that standing your ground is not a problem to be fixed. She was the first being who showed me what a cycle-breaker looks like. She became that before I did.
And then there are Laddoo, Lady, Bala — my streeties who taught me what it looks like to build a relationship with foundations of mutual trust, respect and understanding.
For the first 27 years of my life, I walked past street dogs the way most people do. Mutual indifference. They existed. I existed. That was it.
My diploma asked me to learn from free-living dogs — not to train them, not to test them, just to watch them live outside the reach of human management. What I found left me with more questions.
Dogs showing the full, unedited range of a dog. Social intelligence so precise it made standard cognitive tests look like asking a fish to climb a tree. Entire relationships built on communication, negotiation, choice — a whole world of knowing that no course had pointed me toward because nobody had thought to look there. And something I hadn't gone looking for: the way people treat these dogs told me everything about who gets to matter and who doesn't.
I'm a woman of colour in a field shaped almost entirely by Euro-American frameworks, where other ways of knowing are treated as supplementary at best and inconsequential at worst. I've been on the receiving end of that. And I'd already felt, in my own body, that the language used about dogs — behave, comply, fit in, don't be too much — is the same language that has always been used to keep women small. When you've had that applied to you, you stop being willing to apply it to anyone else.
My life's work is grounded in a single, stubborn conviction: that the knowledge dogs carry — especially the free-living dogs the world has persecuted, dismissed, and tried to erase — is exactly the knowledge we need right now. That learning from them, really learning, is an act of decolonising not just how we understand dogs but how we understand our relationships with all living beings.
I am building a movement of dog nerds who are done with the mainstream. People who want to learn from dogs, find each other, and carry that learning into a more honest, more just relationship with the living world — even in small ways, even starting here.
Which brings me to you.
You've been in spaces that promised depth and delivered repetition. The certification that cost you real money and real hope and left you with more terminology but less understanding. The question with actual edges that made the room go flat. The academic work you wanted but didn't know how to enter.
You learn on your own because most spaces don't keep up with you. You want rigour and warmth and have been told you have to choose. You care about dogs in a way that connects to everything else you care about — justice, ethics, the kind of world you want to live in — and you are exhausted by having that met with behaviour charts.
You want peers. People who believe there is no one true way. People somewhere on their own decolonial awakening who want the animal world inside that conversation. People who feel the weight of what's happening in the world and want their work with dogs to connect to something larger.
That is exactly the space I'm building.
How can you be part of this space?
​Specialised Learning Cohorts
Cohort-based learning communities for deeply feeling, critical-thinking dog nerds who want to go further than mainstream content allows. Grounded in free-living dog ethology, critical animal studies, and decolonial frameworks — where intellectual rigour and emotional honesty live in the same room, and your questions drive the learning. Cohorts open periodically. DM me on Instagram to find out when the next one is.
1:1 Behaviour Consultations
Selective, long-term, application-based. For dog parents ready to look at the whole of their relationship with their dog — the ecology, the history, the unspoken things — and do something real with what they find. Not for quick fixes. For people ready for something more honest.
I am still learning and learning with you. Still learning to observe more carefully, own my voice without hedging it, bridge the theoretical and the everyday without losing either. Still in my female rage era — the world keeps providing. And reaching, genuinely, for more joy. More lightness. More of that specific aliveness when a dog shows you something no book could have.
If any of this felt like recognition — you're home.
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Come stray with us.