Part three of the Malta Dog Life Global Expert Series — speaking to leading dog trainers from around the world about what their expertise means for dog owners here on the islands.
Melbourne and Malta seem, at first glance, to have very little in common. One is a sprawling southern hemisphere city of five million people with an international reputation for coffee, sport, and weather that changes four times before lunch. The other is a Mediterranean island of half a million, famous for limestone villages, turquoise water, and a sun that arrives in May and refuses to leave until October.
But ask Tamara Jackman — a nationally qualified dog trainer, award-winning behaviourist, and founder of Underdog Training and Behaviour Consulting, one of Melbourne’s most recognised dog training practices — what the two places share, and her answer is immediate: outdoor culture, heat, and dog owners who have not fully reckoned with what the climate does to their animals.
It is a perspective that has been hard-won. Underdog has been working with Melbourne’s dog-owning population for years, accumulating a track record of results — and recognition — across the full range of presenting problems, from aggression and anxiety to the everyday frustrations of lead-pulling and recall failure. The methodology is evidence-based, nationally accredited, and rooted in a simple observation that the team returns to again and again: environment is not background. Environment is part of the problem.
The Climate Nobody Accounts For
Malta’s dog owners know this intuitively, even if they have not always articulated it. Anyone who has tried to walk a working breed through Msida on a July afternoon knows that the dog that trotted politely through Rabat in February is a different animal entirely. It is more reactive. Its threshold is lower. It tires faster, overheats faster, and makes worse decisions faster. This is not a training failure. It is physiology.
“Heat is a stressor,” says Jackman. “A stressed dog is not a dog that can learn. It is a dog that is in survival mode. And survival mode looks like aggression, reactivity, pulling, barking — all the behaviours that owners bring to us and describe as training problems. But they are not training problems. They are stress responses. And the first thing we have to do is reduce the stress load before we can address the behaviour.”
In Melbourne, this means restructuring training schedules around temperature. Early morning and evening sessions. Shade at every rest point. Water available constantly. A willingness to cut a session short rather than push through when the dog’s body language is signalling overload. In Malta, the same logic applies, but with an even longer hot season — and with the additional complication of stone streets, stone walls, and stone steps that radiate heat long after the sun has moved.
A Maltese dog owner who trains only in summer conditions, or who expects the behaviour achieved at 7am to hold at noon, is setting both themselves and their dog up to fail. The Underdog approach insists on understanding the gap between the dog’s best performance and its worst, and building training strategies that account for the full range — not just the ideal.
Evidence-Based Training and What It Actually Means
Underdog Training’s methodology is grounded in the science of animal behaviour — the same body of research that underpins the work of clinical behaviourists in the United Kingdom and across Europe. It means that training decisions are based on what the evidence says about how dogs learn, not on tradition, personality, or the charisma of a particular trainer.
Practically, this means a heavy emphasis on understanding the ABCs of behaviour: Antecedent (what happens before the behaviour), Behaviour (the behaviour itself), and Consequence (what happens after, which determines whether the behaviour is likely to recur). A dog that barks at other dogs on the lead is not simply “reactive.” It is a dog for which a specific antecedent — the sight of another dog — triggers a specific behaviour — barking — because a specific consequence — the other dog eventually moving away, or the owner moving the dog away — has historically followed. The behaviour is not random. It is logical. And logical behaviour can be changed by changing the consequence.
“Owners come to us wanting to stop the behaviour,” Jackman’s team explains. “We spend a lot of time helping them understand why the behaviour is happening. Once they understand that, the solution becomes much clearer. And the changes they make stick much better, because they understand what they’re doing and why.”
This owner-education emphasis is something that all three experts featured in this Global Expert Series share, regardless of their specific methodology. Tyson and Megan at Midway Dog Academy in Chicago focus on owner energy and consistency. Nose to Trail in Cheshire focus on threshold management and understanding underlying motivation. Underdog in Melbourne focus on the ABCs and the environmental context. The language differs. The core insight is the same: training the owner is as important as training the dog.
What Malta’s Outdoor Culture Gets Right (and What It Gets Wrong)
Malta has one genuine advantage over most European dog-owning cultures when it comes to canine wellbeing: outdoor life. Dogs in Malta are, relative to their counterparts in northern Europe, heavily socialised to people, noise, café culture, and the general business of daily life on a busy Mediterranean island. A Maltese dog that has spent its life being walked through Marsaxlokk’s Sunday fish market, past the ferry terminal in Valletta, and through the Sliema promenade on summer evenings has received a level of environmental exposure that many European dogs never experience.
This is genuinely valuable. Socialisation — proper, positive, ongoing socialisation — is the single greatest predictor of a well-adjusted adult dog. And Malta’s social infrastructure does a lot of this work naturally.
What Malta’s outdoor culture can get wrong is the assumption that exposure equals training. A dog that has been dragged through a busy market every week since puppyhood has been exposed to stimulation, certainly. But if every trip through the market involved pulling on the lead, barking at strangers, and an owner who was too busy managing their shopping to manage their dog, then the dog has learned that a market is a chaotic place where its own behaviour is irrelevant. Exposure without structure does not build confidence. It builds tolerance of chaos — which is a very different thing.
The Underdog approach to socialisation is deliberate and structured. It involves identifying the dog’s current threshold — the point at which stimulation becomes overwhelming — and working consistently just below it, gradually and carefully extending the dog’s comfort zone. In Malta’s terms, this means starting with a quiet side street, not the Sliema promenade. Working up to the promenade over weeks, not days. And understanding that the goal is not a dog that can survive a busy environment, but a dog that genuinely feels safe in one.
Expert Profile: Underdog Training and Behaviour Consulting
Business: Underdog Training and Behaviour Consulting
Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Founder: Tamara Jackman — nationally qualified dog trainer & award-winning behaviourist
Speciality: Evidence-based behaviour consulting, private obedience, group classes, puppy pre-school, aggression and anxiety
Website: underdogtraining.com.au
Google Business Profile: View on Google Maps
This concludes the Malta Dog Life Global Expert Series — three perspectives from three continents on what it means to train a dog well, and what the best in the world have to say to dog owners on these islands. If you found this series useful, share it with a fellow Malta dog owner who might need it.