Michael Ellis

For established kynologists and dog crazies, Michael Ellis needs pretty much zero introduction….But for new kynologists and maybe people living in a spider hole somewhere, we will go through the form– Michael has more than four decades’ experience in practical working dog training, competitive dog sports, and companion dog training. The list of K9 organizations to which he has provided instruction and consultation range from US Department of Defense Military Working Dog Program and California Highway Patrol K9 Instructors Course, to Canine Companions for Independence and multiple search and rescue groups. He also participated in a wide range of dog sports including Mondioring, French Ring, IGP/Schutzhund, AKC Obedience, Dock Diving, and conformation shows, in the process building three dogs from puppyhood to Mondioring 3– and several dogs to MR 1 and 2– and competing at multiple US national championships. His present competition dog is a big-biting young male named, in Michael’s inimitable style, “Snug.” Humble and quietly charismatic with human students and colleagues, Michael expresses a different kind of mojo when he dons the bite suit– He was one of the first certified Mondioring decoys in the US, worked several national-championship trials in both Mondioring and IGP/Schutzhund, and has been highly sought as a teaching decoy for decades. Michael is also a past president of the American Working Malinois Association, and the proprietor of Loups du Soleil, a methodical and highly successful working Malinois breeding program spanning more than 20 years and seven generations. From 2009 to 2025, Michael and Carol Ellis ran the Michael Ellis School for Dog Trainers (MES) in Santa Rosa, California, and it is through this endeavor, and his 300-plus seminars worldwide and his enormous number of instructional video and interview appearances, that Michael exerted his greatest effect on international kynology. Michael’s impact zone includes the pet dog training industry, where Michael made his bones very early on as a professional trainer, and then much later heavily influenced through the 2,000+ qualified students he graduated from his demanding curriculum at MES. In the quiet moments with a dog, Michael’s personal level of technical achievement and artistry is extraordinary. Like Stewart Hilliard, he began in what one could almost call the Dark Ages of dog training, when force ruled the day and the use of food reward was controversial. Then, over four decades of steady effort and collaboration with other gifted and thoughtful dog trainers, Michael built his masterwork– an elegant and tightly-integrated system of dog training that is both pragmatically effective and good to dogs.  Through his many thousands of in-person students to whom he has taught this system, Michael Ellis is one of the very few people of whom it can be said without  exaggeration– he changed dog training. He is, as far as Stewart Hilliard is concerned, “the most lucid and penetrating speaker on the deep theoretical and practical content of dog training in our time.”