Half a dozen people, one Zoom link, and an opening line most owners never say out loud: “I admit that life with my dog is not what I imagined.” That is the first of seven acknowledgements participants recite before a Dogs Anonymous meeting begins. The organisation has built one of the internet’s more unusual support networks around a subject the pet industry mostly avoids — people who are worn down by their own dogs.
Dogs Anonymous was launched in 2025 by Louise Crane, its president and cofounder, alongside cofounders Daphne Mendoza-Tervanis and Jerri Scherff. It describes itself as “a non-profit group of dog behavior experts dedicated to keeping dogs out of shelters by helping their humans with advice and emotional support.” Nothing costs money. The group’s site lists three services, all free:
- Free weekly meetings for anyone struggling with their dog
- Free emergency text support
- Free adoption support classes
The architecture is borrowed, deliberately, from Alcoholics Anonymous. Scherff, who is 13 years sober, pushed for AA’s traditions — above all anonymity. What is discussed in the group stays in the group. “We wanted to create something that was repeatable, sustainable, and eventually autonomous, which is the way that recovery groups work,” she says. Sessions run weekly and pull in first-time owners, experienced ones, adopters, foster caregivers and the occasional trainer working an aggression case. Attendees are mostly US residents, though past sessions have drawn dog owners from Singapore, Costa Rica and elsewhere.
The numbers explain why the format found an audience. A survey published in the journal Pets in June 2026, examining guilt, burden and wellbeing among owners of dogs with behaviour problems, found that 53 percent of respondents reported feeling alone and 78 percent reported elevated caregiver burden — the emotional and financial strain of caregiving. Reactivity is the issue owners run into most. A 2026 study by researchers at the University of Lincoln, published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, sorts the behaviours into three components — oral attacks, frustration and posturing — with lunging and barking the most frequently reported.
Cost is the other pressure. Roughly 2 million dogs were adopted from US shelters in 2025, according to the ASPCA, and Mendoza-Tervanis, who has worked in pet care for 15 years, argues that most of those owners lack real support once the dog fails to match expectations. Hourly rates for private dog trainers in Los Angeles can run up to $300 an hour. “A lot of services are becoming financially inaccessible,” she says, “so when someone comes to us the question is not, how much can you pay, but how are you feeling about what happened.”
Social media does not help. Petfluencer accounts such as @_violasnow, a Husky with 5.8 million Instagram followers, and @tikatheiggy, the Italian greyhound Vogue once called “a new fashion it girl,” set a bar most households cannot clear. Even Scherff, with 283,000 followers of her own, says the group was the place she could process the death of her American bulldog in March without being read by an audience.
The value, the founders insist, is not the behavioural advice. It is hearing that somebody else had the same week. Say you hate your dog today, Crane says, and someone will answer: “yeah, that was me last Tuesday.”
