I’m Ashlie, founder of Canine Brain Games — and until we understand a dog’s world, they can’t really live happily in ours. That’s the whole idea behind everything I make: practical, personalized ways to support your dog’s mind, confidence, and everyday wellbeing, built on real behavior science.
Maybe you’ve been here: a dog who “won’t listen.” A behavior that pops up out of nowhere and won’t go away no matter how consistent you are. Advice that works for every dog on the internet except yours. It’s exhausting to love a dog you can’t quite figure out, and even more exhausting when it starts to feel like something’s wrong with you, or with them.
That was us too.
Canine Brain Games started with Freya — a American Staffordshire Terrier who came into our founder Ashlie’s life after surviving more than any dog should have to. Freya had been purchased for suspected dog fighting, then chained in a backyard with no food, no water and no shelter, left to fend for herself.
By the time Ashlie met her, Freya’s behavior made complete sense, a high prey drive, impulses that felt impossible to control, her reactivity to other dogs. Of course they were there. They were the product of everything she’d survived. The product of her environment and genetics.Â
At first, Ashlie did what most of us are taught to do with dogs: tried to correct it, manage it, make it stop.
Around that same time, Ashlie began her career as a clinical mental health counselor working with kids under 13. Working with children going through hard moments taught her something she wasn’t expecting to bring home: she wasn’t going to punish a child for struggling. She was going to listen, and guide.
If she wouldn’t punish a child through a hard moment, why was she trying to force one out of her dog?
That shift didn’t stay at work. It’s what made her stop and rethink everything she was doing with Freya. If she wouldn’t punish a child through a hard moment, why was she trying to force one out of her dog? Freya wasn’t broken. She was communicating. She needed someone to actually listen to what her history, her genetics, and her behavior were telling her — not fight against them.
Ashlie started fostering behavior dogs in 2020, and the pattern kept repeating. Dog after dog, the “problem behavior” wasn’t the problem. It was the symptom of a need that hadn’t been recognized yet — for mental stimulation, for choice, for a way to just get to be a dog.
That’s the moment Canine Brain Games was really born: not as a training program, but as a way to help every guardian learn to read what their dog is already telling them.
Backed by a Master’s in Applied Behavior Analysis and DN-CET certification, Ashlie built CBG on a simple belief: dogs don’t need to be fixed. They need to be understood — and enrichment is how that understanding turns into everyday life.
We’re honest about our lane: Ashlie isn’t a certified dog trainer, and CBG isn’t a replacement for one. She’s spent years working alongside trainers, and enrichment is designed to support that work — not compete with it.
Every box, every Barkive resource, every lesson we build starts with the same question: what is this dog’s behavior actually communicating, and what choice can we hand back to them? From there, it’s personalized — matched to your dog’s play style, built to grow with them, and grounded in the same behavior science Ashlie’s used throughout her career.
Behavior is communication. Learn what your dog is communicating.
A lot of dog boxes are really just toy subscriptions with a science word stapled on. Canine Brain Games isn’t that.
Every box is matched to your dog’s play style. But the real engine behind everything is the Barkive — our always-on digital library of guided activities, behavior explanations, and new content added regularly, so you’re never just guessing what to do with what’s in the box, or why it matters.
Get real enrichment ideas, the why behind the what, and the occasional good deal — straight from someone who’s lived this with her own dogs, not just studied it.
