What’s the Deal With the Tails of Connection Substack?!
We get a lot of questions about our new Substack, how to subscribe, and how to use it, so we figured we’d put together this handy guide for you.
If you’re reading this, we want to thank you for being a member of our Tails of Connection Family. We can’t believe we’re writing this, but we launched this online dog training community on Instagram a little over five years ago. In that time, the social media landscape has changed A LOT. We went from being one of the few online dog training accounts pre-Covid, to connecting with so many wonderful trainers and pet parents (like you) in the space when everything went online. Lately there has been a lot of drama in the United States surrounding Instagram’s parent company, Meta, and separately with TikTok. As we look for a home for our content that aligns more with our values, we’ve decided to dig into publishing on Substack this year and hope this guide can help you understand how to get the most out of your TOC substack subscription.
What Is the Tails of Connection Substack About Anyway?
Right now, the TOC Substack is the home of our free weekly newsletter that comes out on Friday mornings. It usually features a training tip of a week from a trainer we admire, our take on a viral dog or animal video, a community corner feature that’s usually a q&a with a human in our community, some quick thoughts from Christie about life with dogs via voice memo, products we love, and our take on dog stories in the news.
As a paid subscriber, you’ll also get one piece of special content from us a week (right now that’s either an article with training advice or an article from Christie that delves more into the human aspect of life with dogs).
Once a month we also hold a live video office hours. Early each month, we start a chat thread where paid subscribers can ask anything they want or request to chat about certain topics (from a challenge with your dog to something you saw online recently that you want to know more about). We’ll pull from this list (and even pick one person to go Live with to chat about their questions if anyone wants to) and then do a Live, which will also be available as an on-demand recording for all paid subscribers after the Live ends. As a note: this is meant to be a fun, engaging opportunity to learn and connect and is not meant to replace hiring a trainer.
As a paid sub, you also get access to our Substack chat where you can start your own thread. You can ask Christie a question (she will do her best to answer and at least point you in a direction to get more help for you and your dog) or crowdsource some information from other subscribers..
Substack is also new for us, so we will keep playing around with new types of content. We’re THRILLED to hear any ideas you have – email hello@tailsofconnection.com any time or drop a note in the chat if you’re a paid subscriber.
How Do I Ask Dog-Related Questions?
While we do our best to answer questions on Instagram, Substack is where you are going to be able to get our attention consistently. We love chatting, so we are excited about this! We are only starting to use the chat feature (so more to come), but for now, you can go to the Tails of Connection Chat and ask us questions anytime you want! You chat, we will respond. You can also use to chat to crowd source info from other subscribers. There will also be monthly office hour threads where you can drop topics or questions you want to talk about with us on a Live (we’re thrilled to chat with one person per month if anyone wants to!).
Why Are You on Substack?
We’ll always love our Instagram community (it’s where we met so many of you), but Substack gives us a shot to make money while sharing info and building community. It also allows us to create stuff that’s valuable enough to charge for without having to spend months creating a formal course. AND we get the chance to chat with people more here (yes, you can literally ask us anything here). We don’t say this to try to push anything on you. Time is precious and money is needed in so many places. We are just being transparent about why you’re seeing some Substack stuff. If you do want to subscribe ($8/month - a cup of fancy coffee these days), we do celebrate each time someone does and promise to work to get you your money’s worth.
Who Is Running This Substack Anyway?
TOC was launched in January 2020 by Jessica Yergin and Christie Catan. We kicked off with a 14-day TOC Challenge where you train your dog in your home for five minutes a day by following our on demand video e-course. Since then, thousands of people have completed the Challenge, along with our three other e-courses.
Christie Catan is the co-founder of Tails of Connection and a certified professional dog trainer, knowledge assessed (CPDT-KA). She is also currently a Lead Trainer at Dog Trained. She is always trying to honor and respect the individual learners in front of her and make her training as conversational as possible. She strives to give learners as much control and bodily autonomy as possible and loves watching the benefits of using positive reinforcement spread to other areas of dogs’ and people’s lives. She is also a TA for Dr. Susan Friedman’s Learning and Living with Animals course, where she supports students in developing a foundation for a comprehensive and coherent understanding of behavior analysis as it relates to facilitating the lives of all learners.
Like many dog trainers, she got into the field while trying to help her own dog, Otis, through some of his challenges. He was reactive to so many things and basically afraid of anything new in his environment, and it was hard for Christie to watch him struggle. In an attempt to do something to make his world a little better, she promised to work with him on something fun for five minutes every day (the inspiration for our challenges). In those five minutes, she watched him transform into a dog you might even label as “confident,” and their time spent training together became something she genuinely looked forward to. It offered a moment for her to slow down, be present, and connect with her dog - something she still relishes to this day.
Christie is a big behavior nerd. Learning about the science of behavior through dog training has fundamentally shifted how she sees and moves through the world. She has witnessed how just a basic foundation can shift how people treat their dogs, themselves, and other people. For her, dog training will always be bigger than “just dog training” because of how the behaviors you learn can spread to other areas of your life and make your part of the world a little better. She will forever be a student of learning and behavior science.
Can you give me some basic tips for using Substack?!
We recommend downloading the Substack app and once you do that you can search for “Tails of Connection” in the search bar at the top. There you will be able to scroll through all of our posts (if you are paid subscriber you will be able to read the paid posts too) and see our notes in our activity feed, join us on chat and start a thread there where (as a paid subscriber) we promise to answer more dog training questions, and read more about our online dog training community on the About page.
There’s a little magnifying glass that allows you to search all of our posts on our main Substack page in the app. We’d imagine that could come in handy if you’re looking for specific dog training content like recall. Admittedly, we haven’t tested the search functionality a ton yet and apologize if it leaves something to be desired. You will also get content sent out via email in your inbox.
How to check and adjust notification settings on Substack:
As a subscriber:
Go to your profile on the Substack website.
Click on "Settings".
Navigate to the "Notifications" section.
Ensure the "Both Email and Push" option is selected so you get our TOC content via email and push alerts when we publish something in the substack app on your phone.
Where Can I Access Help?
Hopefully, most of your questions are answered above.
If you are having technical difficulties with your subscription or have trouble accessing the Substack app, please contact support@substack.com and they will get back to you stat. Substack also has a Help Center.
If you have a question specific to our Tails of Connection substack that is not answered below, please reach out to hello@tailsofconnection.com and we’ll be happy to chat!