Good Owners is a dog owner education organization founded in 2021 by a collaboration of trainers and dog professionals from around the country. Our founding belief is that to systematically improve outcomes for dogs, we need to improve education for owners. Specifically, we need to funnel more 'average' pet dog owners into the incredible ecosystem of trainers, classes, books, and other resources that already exists today. Right now, as many as 95% of dog owners never take a single class or work with a trainer. Even the most famous, popular books, videos, and resources out there will reach tens or hundreds of thousands of people - out of a population of 60-90 million owners in the US.

To that end, our mission is to develop new types of tools for owners, rescues, breeders, trainers, and other dog services that steer more dog owners to start their learning journey. Our current platform includes the Good Owners Guide to Dogs - now the largest, most comprehensive written reference available for pet dog owners - and the RCOC - an interactive educational program for new owners.

For more information on our broader mission and body of work, you can check out these articles:

In 2023, we realized: given that we have one of the largest proprietary dog knowledge datasets in the world; two MIT machine learning engineers; a team with over 200 years combined professional training experience; and a reference platform we can draw from and direct owners to, we should try to develop an LLM-based (Large Language Model) tool to draw from our resources and answer owner questions more directly. Over the following 18 months, we developed dogGPT.

In particular, we designed dogGPT towards two main goals:

The hope is that if we can help owners realize that dog's do things for a reason, that they have complex underlying psychology and emotions, and that they have biological needs for physical, mental, and social stimulation - that a higher percentage of those owners will start down a better learning journey, seeking deeper resources and/or guidance from a professional trainer.