It’s not every day you receive a phone call that starts with, “So, we need to talk about Sauli.”
When you’re a dog owner, you expect the usual gamut of feedback: She’s a fast learner, she plays well with others, she’s a little exuberant. But when you’re the parent of a high-drive Belgian Malinois, the conversations tend to take a sharper, more urgent turn. When I heard those words from the daycare manager, I didn’t immediately panic. I assumed it was about a shredded leash or perhaps a minor disagreement over a ball. I certainly wasn’t prepared for the phrase that followed: “We’ve decided it’s best if Sauli doesn’t return.”
My dog had been fired.
It sounds comical, doesn’t it? Being “fired” implies a level of professional negligence or misconduct that a dog shouldn’t theoretically be capable of. Dogs are supposed to be innocent, happy creatures who exist in a state of perpetual, wagging-tailed benevolence. But as I stood there in the daycare reception area, listening to the manager recount a saga of “excessive herding,” “insistent rule enforcement,” and “daycare-wide chaos,” I realized that Sauli wasn’t just a dog playing in a park. She was an over-caffeinated middle manager with a clipboard, trying to organize an office that had no intention of being organized.
The reality of living with a Belgian Malinois is that you are not just living with a pet; you are living with a force of nature that has been weaponized for work. They are the Navy SEALs of the canine world—brilliant, tireless, and possessing a focus that can be both their greatest asset and their most disruptive trait. Sauli, my rescue Malinois, didn’t view daycare as a place to relax and snooze on a pile of other dogs. She viewed it as a job site. And in her mind, the job was simple: everyone must be moving, everyone must be controlled, and everyone must follow the protocols she had invented on the spot.
The “firing” wasn’t the result of malice; it was a mismatch of professional expectations. Sauli wanted to police the perimeters; the other dogs just wanted to smell each other’s ears in peace. She was a professional athlete trapped in a room of recreational strollers, and she handled the frustration with the only tool she had: relentless, high-octane supervision. If a dog stopped to sniff a tree, Sauli would nudge them forward. If a game of chase slowed down, she would accelerate it. She was the project manager of the playgroup, and unfortunately, nobody had signed up for her coaching sessions.
As I walked out of the facility for the last time, with Sauli trotting beside me, looking entirely unbothered by her professional termination, I felt a strange cocktail of embarrassment and admiration. On one hand, I was the human parent of the “difficult kid,” the one who made the teachers sigh when they saw me coming. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but marvel at the sheer, unfiltered intensity of her spirit. She was unapologetically who she was. She had taken a task—daycare—and she had performed it with such ferocity that she broke the system.
This experience forced me to rethink the entire philosophy of “pawrenting.” We often try to fit our dogs into these standardized molds: they should be calm in the house, playful in the park, and well-behaved in daycare. We want them to be “good” by human metrics. But when you have a dog with Sauli’s specific heritage and drive, you realize that “good” is a relative term. To the daycare, she was “bad” because she was disruptive. To me, she was a dog with an incredible work ethic who simply lacked the proper outlet for it.
Being fired from daycare was, in hindsight, the best thing that could have happened to us. It forced me to stop outsourcing her engagement to a facility and start building a life that actually suited her. We traded the rigid, supervised structure of the playgroup for the open, unpredictable landscape of the world. We found hiking trails where she could satisfy her need to patrol, nose-work games where she could use that brilliant brain to “work,” and one-on-one sessions that respected her intensity rather than trying to stifle it.
I learned that you can’t punish or “train out” the very traits that make a Malinois a Malinois. You have to pivot. You have to become a partner rather than a manager. Sauli didn’t need to be forced into a mold that wasn’t designed for her; she needed to be trusted to do the work she was built for.
So, yes, she was fired. Her professional career in group daycare ended in disgrace. But she gained something much better: a human who finally understood that her chaos wasn’t a defect—it was an invitation to go find a bigger, more meaningful adventure. And frankly, the other dogs at the daycare are probably having a much quieter week without their self-appointed, fuzzy foreman keeping them all on schedule.
Let Your Pawrenting Journey Begin 