It’s the canine equivalent of gentle v tough parenting – and there is no sign of a ceasefire. So what is the correct way to get man’s best friend to behave?

Name: Dog training wars.

Age: Puppy to 14 months, and beyond.

‘Les didn’t wear gloves as he needed to be able to feel the bees so he didn’t crush them. “Should I put them on my face?” he said. “Sure!” I replied’

The jumping-off point for my Bare Handed series was a bird becoming trapped in the netting around the raspberry bushes in my backyard. It made me think of the problem humans have interacting with the natural world. How do we navigate obtaining food and the other things we need while still being good stewards of the land? I’d seen work by photographers demonstrating how Big Agriculture was destroying the environment. I wanted to find people who took a respectful approach, tried to work in tandem with it, but who might be in a fearful or dangerous situation.

I approached Les, the man in this picture, after speaking to the director of an exhibition space in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who had hired him to remove a feral beehive from his tree. I’d already tried to photograph another beekeeper who wore a full protective suit, but he might as well have been an astronaut. With Les, I was able to stay nearby and work with him over three days. The first couple involved straightforward documentary pictures of him tending his hives. Then, on the third day, his apprentice Amber showed up to help.

In wet weather, garden snails can seek shelter in letterboxes – and find a feast there waiting for them

We’ve all heard of snail mail – a term popularised since the advent of electronic mail – but who knew that snails eat mail?

We have it on good authority from the ecologist Simon Mustoe – who said snails ate his letter from Sir David Attenborough – a BBC report announcing the closure of a Northumberland Royal Mail postbox because of snails “munching the mail”, and desperate people on the forums of the Australian hardware chain Bunnings claiming snails have “a real appetite for postal letters” and can “eat a whole letter in two days”.