Author

Fiona

Hello, I'm Fiona — I spent nineteen years as a vet nurse, and I still ring my own vet.

I'm Fiona Ellis, and I write Happy Dog Tips from a stone cottage outside Callander, in the Trossachs. The Land Rover in most of my photographs isn't a lifestyle choice. It's the only thing that reliably gets up my track in February.

Let me start with the important bit, because it shapes everything here. I'm a Registered Veterinary Nurse and I spent nineteen years in a mixed practice in central Scotland — small animals and farm. But I left clinical practice in 2016, and veterinary medicine has moved on since. So I'll say this at the top of every health post and I'll say it now: I don't diagnose, I don't prescribe, and nothing I write replaces a conversation with your own vet.

What those nineteen years did give me is something I think is genuinely useful, and it's mostly about the telephone. I spent two decades taking calls from worried owners and working out, in about ninety seconds, whether this was a Monday problem, a this-week problem, a ring-us-today problem or a get in the car right now problem. I watched people bring dogs in too late because nobody had told them which was which — and I watched people sit in the waiting room at eleven at night with something that could have waited.

So every health article on this site places symptoms on a clear scale: watch and note / book an appointment this week / ring your vet today / this is an emergency, go now. No health post publishes here without it. You won't find "seven signs your dog is dying" headlines from me — and equally, I won't let you talk yourself out of a lump because it's probably nothing.

The rest of how I got here: I grew up on a hill farm near Comrie with working collies, where dogs were valued and useful and not remotely fussed over. A good deal of what I was taught there about feeding and worming has since been overtaken by better evidence, and I've had to unlearn it. "It's how we always did it" isn't an argument.

After the practice, I ran a small home boarding and grooming service from the cottage for six years — up to four dogs at a time, every coat type you can imagine. That's where grooming became a real skill rather than a chore, and it's why I'll tell you honestly which coats you can manage at home and which ones will end in tears and an emergency clip. Trying to save money on a badly matted double coat costs more, not less.

I stopped taking boarders in 2022, when Skye's arthritis arrived properly. Skye is the collie in all the photographs — she's twelve now, on joint medication, and no longer allowed to jump into the Land Rover on her own. She has a ramp. It took her four months to consent to using it.

Honestly, Skye is why this site exists. When her decline started I went looking for help and found an internet absolutely stuffed with puppy content and almost nothing about the eleventh year, which is the year you actually need it. So senior care is the heart of what I write: mobility, cognitive change, incontinence, medication routines, adapting the house, what it costs — and, when the time comes, the conversations most sites won't go near. I write about that carefully and I don't tell anyone what to decide. That's a conversation for you and your vet.

Also in the house: my husband Rab, retired from forestry and full of opinions about dog beds, and Tam, a five-year-old collie cross from the rescue centre in Stirling who was rehomed twice before he came to us and has an ongoing grievance with the postman. I volunteer at that rescue centre one morning a week, mostly bathing and grooming intake dogs. It's the best morning of my week.

One thing you won't find here: training. No obedience, no lead work, no behaviour problems. That's a proper discipline with proper qualifications behind it, and I'm not qualified in it. If your dog is pulling, barking, reactive or anxious, please find a qualified trainer or behaviourist — you'll get better help than I could give you.

What I do write about is everything else: grooming, feeding, health awareness, kit that survives a Scottish winter, enrichment, exercise, seasonal hazards — ticks, adders, blue-green algae, grass seeds, ice, fireworks — and getting a dog through a long life comfortably.

If you've got a dog going grey around the muzzle, a coat you're not sure how to handle, or a symptom you're trying to decide about at nine on a Sunday night: come in. Kettle's on.