Behaviour medicine
Behaviour medicine treats how your pet feels, not just what they do. It is a branch of veterinary medicine, which means the work starts with ruling out pain and disease and ends with a written treatment plan you can actually follow.
Initial consults run 90 to 120 minutes from $680. In person across Adelaide and Melbourne, and by video anywhere in Australia.
Every consult produces 4 things
The definition
When a dog lunges at another dog on the footpath, or a cat wees on the bed, that behaviour is the visible end of something internal. Fear, pain, frustration, an underlying illness, or a pattern the animal learned because one of those was true at the time.
Veterinary behaviour medicine is the branch of veterinary science concerned with working out which of those is driving it, and treating that. Not suppressing the sign. Treating what produced it.
This matters practically, not philosophically. A behaviour that has a medical driver will not respond to training, and every week spent training it is a week the animal spends in pain or in fear.
A common question
Not a rivalry. We work with good force-free trainers constantly and refer to them often. But the 2 jobs are genuinely different, and choosing the wrong one costs you months.
| Capability | A good trainer | Veterinary behaviour medicine |
|---|---|---|
| Focus of the work | Teaching skills and changing what the animal does | Diagnosing and treating why the animal feels that way |
| Can examine your pet and assess pain | No | Yes |
| Can order blood tests, urine tests and imaging | No | Yes |
| Can diagnose a medical or behavioural condition | No | Yes |
| Can prescribe and monitor medication | No | Yes |
| Registered and regulated | Dog training is not a regulated occupation in Australia | Registered with the veterinary board, bound by its code of conduct |
| Best used for | Skills, manners, weekly coaching and practice between reviews | Fear, anxiety, aggression, compulsive behaviour and any behaviour change with a possible medical cause |
The short version: if the question is "how do I teach this", a trainer is the right call. If the question is "why has my pet started doing this", or the behaviour involves fear, panic, aggression or a change you cannot explain, it belongs with a vet first.
Why a vet
This is the part of behaviour work that cannot be delegated. Every consult here starts with a medical review, because these are not rare edge cases. They walk in the door most weeks.
Orthopaedic and spinal pain sits underneath a large share of what gets described as sudden aggression. Hip and elbow arthritis, cruciate disease and lumbosacral pain all make being lifted, brushed, hugged or bumped genuinely unpleasant. Train the growl away without treating the pain and you have a painful dog who has learned not to warn you first. That is more dangerous, not less.
Feline idiopathic cystitis, bladder stones, urinary tract infection, kidney disease, diabetes and hyperthyroidism all present to owners as a litter tray problem. So does arthritis, because a sore cat cannot climb into a high-sided tray. Urine and blood testing comes before any conclusion about the litter tray itself, and it changes the answer often enough that skipping it is not defensible.
A dog who becomes clingy, restless at night or newly distressed when left alone at 10 or 11 years old is a different case to the same signs at 2. Canine cognitive dysfunction, failing vision or hearing, high blood pressure and pain that disturbs sleep all change how an older animal copes. Age is a reason to look harder, not a reason to accept it.
Atopic dermatitis, ear disease and gastrointestinal disease all raise arousal, wreck sleep and shorten a pet's fuse, and none of them are obvious across a video call unless someone is looking for them. Chronic discomfort and chronic anxiety feed each other, which is why we treat the physical side properly rather than layering behaviour work on top of it.
Where the history points at a physical cause, we recommend or arrange the work-up before calling anything behavioural: blood and urine testing, a structured pain trial, imaging, or a review with your regular vet. Sometimes the whole answer is medical. More often it is one layer of several, and treating it is what makes the behaviour plan work at all.
What actually happens
Most practices will not tell you this before you pay. Here is the whole sequence, including the parts that are work for you.
You complete a detailed intake questionnaire covering your pet's life from the start, the household, routine, diet, sleep, previous training and what changed and when. It takes most people 30 to 45 minutes and it is worth every one of them. We also ask for short videos of the behaviour as it really happens, filmed safely and from a distance. We never ask you to provoke it.
In person at home across Adelaide and Melbourne, or by video anywhere in Australia. We take a full history, watch your pet be themselves, and where it is safe and we are in the room, examine them. We do not trigger the behaviour to see it. Watching a fearful animal be frightened teaches us nothing we cannot learn from a good history and a video.
After the consult you receive a written report: the diagnosis in plain English, the safety and management changes to make immediately, a step-by-step behaviour modification plan in the order it should be taught, and, where it is indicated, the medication with its dose, expected onset, side effects and monitoring. A copy goes to your regular vet with your permission.
Revisits run 30 to 45 minutes from $330. Most cases need at least 1 or 2 in the first 3 months, and medication cases need scheduled monitoring. Plans get adjusted, because the first plan is a hypothesis and your pet is the one who tells us whether it was right.
Straight talk
The behaviour industry runs on promises, because frightened owners buy them. This is what you get here instead.
Qualifications, plainly
Dr Channy (Dr Chantelle McGowan, she/they) has been a registered veterinarian since 2011 and holds BVSc, MANZCVS (Behaviour), Elite Fear Free Certified Professional & Coach. The behaviour membership was awarded in 2023 after college examination.
Membership of the Australian and New Zealand College of Veterinary Scientists is earned by examination, but it is not a specialist qualification. Australia has only a handful of registered veterinary behaviour specialists. Where a case needs one, we will say so and refer.
We publish this because the pet behaviour industry is not regulated and the titles are a mess. You are entitled to know exactly what the letters after a name mean before you spend $680.
Melbourne behaviour work runs on scheduled in-person visits, so dates are limited. If the timing does not suit, a telehealth consult is the same appointment by video.
Pricing
Published, because you should not have to ring 3 practices to find out. None of our named competitors publish theirs.
In-depth behaviour consultations (Adelaide & Melbourne).
All consults are Fear Free and inclusive of GST. Out-of-hours appointments, travel, prescriptions, medications and pathology testing are quoted separately. We prefer to give you a tailored estimate for your pet's exact circumstances. Travel is charged from $135.
Next
Questions
No. You can book directly. We do ask permission to request your pet's medical history, and we write back to your regular vet afterwards with the diagnosis and the plan, because behaviour and physical health are the same case, not 2 separate ones.
Usually it is alongside one. A behaviour consult works out what is driving the behaviour, treats the medical and emotional side of it, and sets the order in which skills should be taught. A good force-free trainer is often the right person to do the weekly coaching that follows. We are happy to write to your trainer so everyone is working from the same plan.
Management changes, the things you alter in the environment and the routine, often ease the pressure within days. Behaviour modification is measured in weeks to months, because you are changing an emotional response, not a habit. Where medication is part of the plan, most of the daily medications used in behaviour medicine take 4 to 6 weeks to reach their full effect, and we review before drawing conclusions.
Some pets stay on medication long term, many do not. Medication is not a personality change and it is not a substitute for the plan. It lowers the emotional baseline enough that your pet can actually learn, which is impossible for an animal living in near-constant fear. We review at set intervals, and where the picture allows we taper under supervision rather than stopping abruptly.
We will say so. Australia has only a small number of registered veterinary specialists in behaviour, and where a case genuinely needs one, referral is the right call and we will make it. We would rather tell you that at the first consult than take your money for 6 months of appointments that were never going to be enough.
Yes, by telehealth. Behaviour consults run by video anywhere in Australia, and for a lot of cases video is genuinely better, because your pet stays home and we see them in the environment where the problem actually happens.
Describe your pet and what is worrying you. We will tell you honestly whether a behaviour consult is the right next step, what it would involve, and what it would cost, before you commit to anything.
