Sorry, Bill, I did misread you. Ignore my previous comments entirely - I'll start over again.
You ask about good tutorials and I would point you to
The DAM Book by Peter Krogh and
Welcome | Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow | dpBestflow . These focus on good practice in metadata and equip you with basic principles which you can then apply to Lightroom. I only really mentioned titles and headlines because I thought file renaming was the issue, so the only things I would add is that:
- copying from KWs to another field is hard to control because a photo can have many keywords and keywords can be a jumble.
- it's easier, technically, to copy to KWs.
- but copying between any fields is irrelevant to most people unless they have some plugin or script.
I see keywording dogs as an extension of the problem of keywording humans. For example, the dog may change ownership, more than once, and a new owner may change their dog's name or their own, while the same person may own more than one dog of the same name. But humans pull similar tricks to test our keywording, so I think the Dog+Human keyword would work, and my only point of difference would be the separator _k9.
This is where I would advise you not to make KW's too complicated, and would follow up by saying it's a mistake to try to bundle too much information into a single keyword. I understand you are following a convention like
DogName _k9 OwnerName where one can read the _k9 as "dog". If that's what you've already done, leave it, and it'll allow you to filter your keyword list to show only dog name keywords (like I filtered the list with - below). I'd probably use a single character like ~ or | and use that same character for horses, cats and other pets. So I wouldn't have
HorseName _hh OwnerName with the _hh acting as a pseudo keyword like your _k9.
DogName | OwnerName would have been my approach. And I certainly wouldn't paste an emoji into the keyword like this!
While I am not a fan of hierarchical keywords, this is an area where pragmatism takes over. So I would not move the K9 (moving those characters will be difficult anyway!) and might go with something like this:
Dog names>
>Charlie _k9 A Beardsworth
>Preston _k9 John Beardsworth
So this lists all the dogs alphabetically, and separates them from other animals, if that is what you want (I'd probably bundle them together under Animal names).
What you want to avoid is overloading a keyword with information that should be recorded in separate keywords. So rather than "a picture with 4 dogs will just have 4 KW's", 4 would be the starting point. While you can certainly make a compound keyword like
Preston | Red Setter | John Brown work for you, it's more effort entering and subsequently when you might want to find every Red Setter or anything associated with John Brown. Think in terms of adding one keyword for each aspect of the picture, as if you're describing the image over the phone to someone who knows nothing about it:
Dog
>Breed
>>Red Setter
>Dog phases
>>Puppy
Animal names>
>Preston _k9 John Beardsworth
People
>John Beardsworth
>Manuela
Dog shows
>Loweswater 2019
So this is a picture of a dog, a Red Setter called Preston Beardsworth when he was a puppy, John Beardsworth and Manuela are also shown in the picture, and it's at a dog show. Another picture of the dog on its own would be keyworded like this:
Dog
>Breed
>>Red Setter
>Dog phases
>>Puppy
Animal names>
>Preston _k9 John Beardsworth
Hope that helps - plenty to chew on!