How talking about race divided a beloved dog training Facebook group
Reflections on what it means to create a safe digital space
In May 2020, a dog owner made a post in the Facebook group for alumni of Fenzi Academy, a popular online dog training school. “I understand that this will be an uncomfortable topic,” she wrote, but she thought the group was the best place to have an “honest and civil” discussion. The issue in question? Whiteness in the dog training world. It was days after the nationwide protests for George Floyd’s murder, and the question had been on my mind too: Dog ownership was diverse, so why was the dog training world—especially its force-free, positive reinforcement-based sub-community—so overwhelmingly white?
The racial makeup of our 12,000-plus member group was no exception. Its active users were mostly white, and so was the school’s leader, a charismatic woman named Denise Fenzi. The trainer’s post hit a nerve, and as a member of the group, I watched as the thread spiraled out of control. Some members were supportive and eager to discuss it, while others were upset and dismissive—the question seemed confrontational to them, and out of place in a group for dog training. Suddenly, the comments were locked, and soon after, the whole thread was erased.
For many of us, that moment felt like betrayal. I joined the group after I took a few classes for my first reactive rescue dog, and I’d been fawning over Denise Fenzi and the school’s teaching philosophy. To me, the alumni Facebook was a blessing: I’d post about problems I was having with my dog, and get dozens of thoughtful responses, reassurances and solutions. It was a rare, generous community—one that had, until that conversation about racism, felt inclusive.
The Fenzi Incident, as I’d think of it later, changed everything. It split a beloved Facebook community into two, raising complicated questions about what it meant to be BIPOC community members of a mostly white world, the cost of speaking up, and the challenges of creating online spaces that genuinely support its marginalized members.
One of the members who had tried to respond to the thread before it was shut down was Jennifer, a Black woman, who had first joined Fenzi because she admired the trainers who were teaching in her sport, rally obedience. She started taking classes in 2014, and by 2020, she’d become a teacher’s assistant for some Fenzi classes. Until the thread on the lack of diversity got deleted, she’d felt that the group had been welcoming. With the thread gone, she sent a message to Fenzi directly. She told Fenzi that shutting off the comments was hurtful, that it took away her chance to speak up.
But Fenzi argued the thread had to close once people started getting angry. It was becoming an echo chamber, she said, and it would make the divide in the dog world worse, not better.
For Jennifer, Fenzi’s response was crushing. It reminded her of a past experience, when a man from another majority-white dog organization that she had been part of for decades slapped her and called her the “N-word” in public, and then the group dismissed her concerns. Recounting the incident, even years later, still brings her to tears. “It’s heartbreaking because you have a group that you feel almost a familial closeness to. And in one opportunity, one instance, someone can change that very drastically, just by saying, ‘no, we can’t talk about issues that pertain to you,’’ Jennifer said.
In the next few days, Denise Fenzi would post multiple apologies to the Fenzi group about her decisions: apologies about how she hadn’t meant to hurt people, apologies that to some BIPOC members felt more like an attempt to quickly repair things than a genuine attempt at reflection or change. Jennifer began to distance herself from the Fenzi group, and many other BIPOC and allies in the group felt the same.
In one of the first deleted threads, Denise Fenzi had suggested that members create their own space to talk about diversity in the dog world, if they needed to. In the following days, a few Fenzi members did just that, and Fenzi eventually shared the link to the new Facebook group. It was called Inclusivity in Dog Training: a group for dog people to discuss the racism entrenched in the dog world.
Jennifer joined the new IDT group, as did many other BIPOC, and many non-BIPOC allies (Denise Fenzi herself never joined the IDT group, but a few Fenzi instructors did). The group was much smaller than the main Fenzi group, but it grew quickly—from 200 members to over 2,000 in a few months, including some big-name trainers I recognized. The group was very active in its early days. There was a sense of collective anger, frustration, and hurt, and many BIPOC who spoke up about the problems they’d experienced, and others who shared the long, racist history inside the dog world. It was more startling and intense than I could have imagined.
I learned, for instance, that the cute and cuddly American Kennel Club, which made dog breed standards and judged the ever popular AKC show each year, had never once had a non-white Best in Show judge in its 145 year-old history. That out of the hundreds of dog-specific breed clubs in the U.S., only two had non-exclusionary clauses in their membership requirements. That the history of dog breeding is linked to eugenics (for wasn’t dog breeding about preserving lineages, selecting arbitrary ideal traits, over others?). And that modern-day dog breeders often held deeply racist beliefs—some refused to sell puppies to specific minorities, some posted racist memes. At dog sports shows, some dog owners openly disparaged BIPOC, LGBTQ and other marginalized members.
The new volunteer moderators of the group were also figuring out how to set up a trusted, productive space where BIPOC could feel safe and heard, and where everyone else could ask difficult questions or learn. Mods like Oluademi James-Daniel, a dog trainer, had never moderated a big group before. But she found herself spending four to eight hours a day combing through posts in the group, curating, managing, trying to find the right balance of being honest and holding people accountable (if they said something racist, or didn’t know when to step back from a conversation), while still caring about the people behind the screens. She’d sit in front of her laptop with a can of cider, sorting through her alphabetized files of resources: one to explain what privilege looks like, one to explain how the innocuous things people were actually racist, how to be a genuine ally, how to step up.
“Trying to help 2000-plus people to make that journey was a lot of work, but it’s one of the most fulfilling things that I’ve done,” Oludademi told me. Holding true to a lesson she learned from her mom: she decided to trust that there were no stupid people, just blissfully ignorant ones, so part of her work as a moderator became kindly trying to teach them how to understand.
IDT wasn’t only a place to learn and teach about racism. Outside of the IDT group on Facebook, there were no other spaces, in the real world or online, for BIPOC in the dog world—and the group became a vital source of support for them. The group also had ambitions of creating more resources for BIPOC—perhaps someday, even opening a BIPOC-led dog training school, a school by BIPOC, for BIPOC.
The IDT group came with its own challenges, though: its non-BIPOC members still vastly outnumbered BIPOC, which meant white members still easily overtook the discussions. Jennifer continued to feel frustrated when she saw white members who posted repetitive questions, or expected to be rewarded for taking basic steps toward anti-racism.
For the moderators of IDT, it also meant constant unpaid emotional labor, Which they had to juggle with their own dog businesses offline.The work took a toll. They soon realized they had to learn how to step away for their mental health.
They started setting “BIPOC-only posting days”. If a non-BIPOC member posted on those days, moderators would send them a gentle but firm reminder to save their post for later (repeat offenders would get temporary or permanent bans). The days were really designed to be breaks for the mods, but also felt true to the spirit of the group: to promote and prioritize BIPOC voices above all.
From February 2021, more days became BIPOC-only for the IDT group. The group was archived for a weekend, and then a week. The moderators made a new, small private space exclusively for BIPOC (with fewer than 100 members), where they could vent and be heard, even if it would not connect them to the broader dog world. Jennifer felt safe in the BIPOC-only group, but also felt its limits. Many of the BIPOC members in the dog world were struggling—financially, emotionally—the posts were often about their pain, a place to listen. But without non-BIPOC allies and ties to a bigger world, the small group couldn’t push for change, the way that the bigger IDT group did.
Months passed. Some of the BIPOC group members thought about leaving the dog community, like German Shepherd breeder Jackie, a Black woman who especially enjoyed working with young Black dog handlers. But she knew that the cost of leaving the community would mean having even less representation of BIPOC, less guidance for them to enter the dog world. To stay in it, though, meant facing dog friends who wore MAGA hats, and maintaining pleasant interactions with people face-to-face while reading their racist posts online.
The Fenzi Academy Alumni Facebook group continued on, too. Denise Fenzi declined to comment for this story, but at the end of 2020 Fenzi Academy did send an email to its community about actions it had taken to address problems of diversity, which included steps like working on a diverse moderation team for its alumni group, updating its website to reflect inclusive wording, and providing its staff with trainings for inclusive practices.
But many BIPOC members never received the email—they had left for good. That included Jennifer, who stopped her TA work with Fenzi, and completely removed herself from the group six months after the initial incident. And although I stayed in the Facebook group, I never interacted with the group or took another Fenzi class again.
When Denise Fenzi reached out to Jennifer a year after their first conversations to try to talk again, Jennifer did not write back. “I didn’t have anything new to say,” Jennifer said.
Sometimes, Jennifer thinks about how different everything might have been if Denise Fenzi reacted to the very first conversation differently. What if she had acknowledged the problems in the dog training world, and opened up space for a hard conversation? What if, instead of only apologizing for her own behavior, Denise worked on rebuilding trust, and fostering a community that would genuinely feel inclusive? But that wasn’t how things went.
I, too, had to figure out a new relationship to the dog world. I stopped taking classes at Fenzi. Sometimes, I thought about signing up for agility or obedience classes in person, but then I imagined the crowd I might encounter, and what it would be like being the only BIPOC in the group.
Like Jennifer, I also wondered if things could have been different. Was there a way to repair trust, once broken? Was there a way to build better online communities?
Lately, in the BIPOC only IDT group, there’s been conversations about how to restart the main IDT group. “I would like to see it back up because I would like to see diversity and dog training celebrated in a central place,” Jennifer said, “And I’d like to see people that aren’t BIPOC to listen, and think.”
The moderators are trying to figure it out—how to give it the time and resources that it needs to be safe, how to revive a group that once sprang out of betrayal into something new. 🌳
Laura Yan is a writer and teacher in Brooklyn. Her stories have appeared in over 25 print + online publications including Wired, Vogue, GQ, The Cut, Longreads, The Verge and elsewhere. She dreams of moving to a farm.
Illustration by Jasmin Bina.