Just a Dog Podcast
Just a Dog Podcast
Podcast Description
Just a Dog Podcast isn’t about obedience or quick fixes. It’s about reflection. Host Nadine, a long-time volunteer dog walker and soon-to-be fosterer, speaks with psychologists, behaviourists, artists, and everyday dog guardians to explore what our treatment of dogs reveals about us as individuals and as a society. This isn’t a how-to. It’s a mirror. A space for asking better questions, challenging inherited beliefs, and living more intentionally, with dogs, and with ourselves.
Because they’re never just a dog.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast delves into topics related to human-animal relationships, dog psychology, and societal values surrounding pet care, with episodes examining themes like emotional impacts of dog grief and mental health advocacy for animal welfare, showcasing insights from experts like psychologists and behaviorists.
We love our dogs, and we’re doing the best we can with what we know. Where did that knowledge come from? Family, culture, the industries that sell to us?
Just a Dog Podcast questions what we’ve inherited, who benefits from it, and whether any of it serves the dog in front of us. Welfare, training, the stuff we accept as normal without thinking about it. Hosted by Nadine, a regular dog guardian and adopter of Duna, an 8-year-old Spanish galga. Every Monday she pulls at those threads with people who know more than she does. | https://www.instagram.com/justadogpodcast
Most people arrive in animal welfare believing that if they work hard enough they can save everybody.
Jessica Dolce spent 20 years working with dogs, from dog walking in Philadelphia to animal sheltering in Maine, before her own burnout sent her looking for the language to describe what was happening to her.
She now teaches that language for a living, as a Certified Compassion Fatigue and Grief Educator, an instructor in the Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Florida, and the person behind The Compassion in Balance Program.
Her training sits on a Master of Science in Adult and Higher Education alongside certificates in pet loss support, QPR suicide gatekeeper training and mental health first aid, and the organisations she works with range from private rescues to the ASPCA, Animals Asia, Humane World, the National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association and hundreds of animal shelters worldwide.
Our conversation covers why the choice between looking after yourself and looking after the animals is a false one, what compassion fatigue actually is and why almost everyone uses the term slightly wrong, how moral injury builds quietly in shelter work, and what people who spend their days examining evidence of cruelty do to stay well enough to keep going.
At home in the U.S. there are two dogs, Billy and Turtle, two cats, Hazel and Bear, and four naughty ducks.
Links
- https://jessicadolce.com
- The Compassion in Balance Program
- Building Compassionate Badassery Boundaries, self-study
- Compassion Fatigue Strategies, starts 26 October 2026
Also mentioned: Jessica's Dogs in Need of Space project, Patricia McConnell's The Other End of the Leash, and Dr Jamie McNally's paper on moral injury in animal shelter workers.
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