It started with a simple, stubborn belief: that everyday dog owners deserved real information — not a pamphlet, not a phone call on hold, but something they could navigate themselves, at home, at midnight, with a problem dog and no answers.
In 1995, most Australians had never heard of the World Wide Web. If your dog was destroying the garden, barking all night, or showing signs of aggression, your options were limited. I had been training dogs for years — running obedience classes, working through behaviour problems, absorbing everything I could from every trainer and every dog I encountered — and I kept coming back to the same thought: there had to be a better way.
So I built one. Together with my wife Jenny, whose years of training as a veterinary nurse gave the medical and health sections the credibility they needed, we put together what I called The DogFiles: an interactive, menu-driven programme covering sixty-seven topics, from basic house training to aggression types, feeding, obedience, and pet care. Written in Visual Basic. Designed for Windows. Built on a kitchen table between dog training sessions and vet nursing shifts.
Training sessions from the era — the hands-on experience that underpinned every word written.
The Technology
The programme had dropdown menus, contextual images, scrolling text, sound effects, and a built-in advertising module for local pet businesses. In 1995. Before smartphones. Before Google. Before anyone had yet coined the phrase "online resource."
The code was written with the help of a close friend, the late Zak Madden, whose skill with Visual Basic made the early versions possible. But Zak wasn't always available — life gets in the way — and so I found myself learning to code. Late nights, trial and error, error and more error. Thousands of hours across seven years, teaching myself enough Visual Basic to keep the thing alive.
And that was the other problem. The technology kept moving. Windows 95 became Windows 98. Then Windows XP. Then Windows 2000. Each version brought new system files, new compatibility issues, new reasons to rebuild sections from scratch. Every time I thought The DogFiles was ready, the platform had shifted underneath it.
"I spent all that money and still didn't have a saleable product. That was gut-wrenching. You believe in something completely and then the practical realities just defeat you, time and time again."
— Darren ScahillThe vision was to sell it on CD-ROM through pet shops, vets, and obedience clubs. Distribution networks wanted volume commitments we couldn't meet. Retailers didn't know where to shelf a dog training CD-ROM. The money went in and didn't come back.
In 2002, after seven years, I closed it down.
The Philosophy Behind the Work
The DogFiles was never just a technical project. The content reflected a real training philosophy built over years of working with dogs of every breed, temperament, and problem.
Positive Reinforcement First
The vast majority of the programme is built around reward-based methods. The dog is set up to succeed, praised generously, and never left finishing on a failure. As the programme states throughout: "Always finish on a good behavioural pattern. Never call it quits and go home if the dog has not done well." At the same time, this was 1995, and the work is honest — some techniques reflect the training landscape of that era. The underlying message never wavers: understand your dog, communicate clearly, and if you ignore bad behaviour and praise good behaviour, you are on your way.
Nearly all of the information came from Jenny and my years together learning about dogs — her veterinary nursing background and my work as a dog obedience instructor. The behaviour modification content came purely from experience: methods that worked when I gave advice on problems, that kept bringing more clients back, that told us we were doing something right.
The programme was always intended for the new dog owner. Not the advanced trainer. Not the competition handler. A puppy manual, essentially — written plainly, without jargon, for the person who just brought a dog home and doesn't know what to do next.
The dogs that were always the point of it all.
The Family Behind It
None of this happened in a vacuum. Seven years is a long time to work on something that never quite made it to market. Longer still when the people around you are watching you disappear into it.
From the Original Dedication — 2002
"Thanks to my wife Jenny who has put up with this saga for seven years. I don't know how she has done it. She is a very special person.
Thanks to my boy Adam who was born towards the end of this project, and it breaks my heart not spending all my time with him. Today is the completion of this project, which is his second birthday.
Speaking of time, I can't forget my dogs — Yoshi, Bear, and Copper — who I could have spent my time with instead of writing this programme. I have missed a lot of their life and now they are so old I don't have a lot left to enjoy. There have been some sacrifices, and if it wasn't for them I would never have written this.
Bear has been my inspiration. I have never owned a dog like him. He is smart. His training has been spot on and he will never be replaced.
Yoshi unfortunately died before the completion, and this first CD is dedicated to her."
— Darren Scahill, 2002
Rest in Peace, Yoshi
Gone before the finish line, but not before leaving her mark on every page.
Yoshi, who the first CD was dedicated to. And the bond between a child and a dog — the reason any of this mattered.
Thirty Years Later
The DogFiles closed in 2002. The CD-ROMs were never distributed. The Visual Basic code sat on old hard drives through the rise of broadband, through Web 2.0, through the smartphone era, through everything that made the original vision redundant — and then, eventually, achievable again.
The work was never wasted. The knowledge carried on through the training classes, through the clients who kept coming back, through the book that gathered it all together. The DogFiles was simply ahead of its time — a fully interactive, multimedia dog training encyclopaedia at a moment when the world wasn't quite ready for it.
Now it is finished — properly, this time, but as a book "My Dog, My Way".