Podcast appearances and mentions of Amy Cook

The Complexity of Vaccines | May 8, 2025 | On Call with the Prairie Doc® | Prairie Doc Dr. Debra Johnston, with guests Dr. Amy Cook from Sanford Brookings Clinic, Brookings, SD and Dr. Ashley Sands from Sanford Children's Specialty Clinic, Sioux Falls, SD as they talk about the complexity of vaccines.

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Join me and Dr. Amy Cook for a conversation on where her ideas for The Play Way came from, the science that inspired it, and how it's evolved (and continues to evolve). We also discuss the one letter that Amy thinks every trainer should add to their conversations about reactivity and thresholds. 

In this episode, Chantal and Angelique sit down with Dr. Amy Cook, creator of The Play Way—a therapeutic approach that utilizes social, toy-free play to help shy and fearful dogs build confidence, reduce reactivity, and foster trust.We explore:The Science Behind Social Play: How interactive play can serve as a powerful tool in behavior modification, especially for dogs experiencing fear and anxiety. ​Applicability to Behavior Issues: Identifying which behavioral challenges benefit most from The Play Way and understanding its limitations.​Initiating Play: Techniques to respectfully invite play, ensuring the dog feels safe and in control.​Elements of Therapeutic Play: Breaking down the components that make play a successful intervention.​Tailoring Play to Individual Dogs: Adjusting play styles to suit high-energy breeds versus more reserved dogs, and strategies for engaging dogs unfamiliar with play, such as rescues.​Common Mistakes and Assessing Readiness: Recognizing pitfalls in implementing The Play Way and determining when a dog is prepared to engage, particularly if they're fearful or shut down.​Dr. Cook also shares her perspective on misconceptions in dog behavior and provides information on accessing her Play Way course or other online Fenzi courses for those interested in learning more.

Do you aspire for more money but resent rich people? What stories are you telling yourself about wealth and prosperity? Are you ready to clear a path to an abundant future? On today's episode of Get Your FILL, Financial Independence and Long Life podcast, Amy Cook, Founder and Financial Advisor of the Maven Financial Group, shares her wisdom and experience helping her clients to plan for and execute a successful financial future.

Grab your essential FREE guide - How to clear excess stock without damaging your brand. -- If you have a website but wonder why you aren't ranking on the first page of google search results. Or if you have a local shop, but can't seem to get your customers to find you online? Then the answer might be its time to take a look at your SEO.   In this episode, I'm joined by Amy Cook of Mango&Wild, an SEO and paid ad specialist.   We are discussing the latest trends in search engine optimization (SEO) for 2024. We explore the importance of SEO for both e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar stores, particularly focusing on local SEO strategies to boost sales and visibility.   This episode offers valuable insights for business owners looking to improve their online presence and drive more traffic to their websites.   [00:00] Why its so important for retailers to understand SEO [00:16] Meet Amy from Mango&Wild [02:43] The Importance of SEO in 2024 [08:49] Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid [13:42] Understanding Local SEO [16:32] Practical Tips for Local SEO [19:34] How to Connect with Mango&Wild   -- Learn more about Stock Doctor - https://www.resilientretailclub.com/stockdoctor/ Learn more about the Resilient Retail Club: https://www.resilientretailclub.com/membership/ Learn more about my mastermind for product business owners: https://www.resilientretailclub.com/retail-business-mentoring/

Join us for a fantastic panel discussion with Dr. Amy Cook, Denise Fenzi, Kim Palermo, and Petra Ford on sports dogs, their big feelings, and how to help them thrive. 

A big part of achieving financial freedom is having the right mindset about money. If you don't think about money in a way that aligns with your financial goals, you will find it difficult to succeed. That's why on this episode of the podcast I talk with financial advisor Amy Cook about what she calls your money narrative and how the right one can help you achieve your financial goals and, ultimately, financial freedom. In this episode you will learn: What a money narrative is How it influences your financial decisions The common money narratives that hold people back How early life experiences shape our approach to money How to reshape a negative money narrative

Do you feel like your money narrative is holding you back? In this episode of The Richer Geek Podcast, Amy Cook, financial advisor and founder at Maven Lane Financial Group, shares insights on how your money narrative can impact your financial decisions. She discusses how to build lasting legacies through effective financial planning strategies, overcome your money narrative, find the right financial advisor, and start planning for your future. You'll also learn tips for talking to aging parents about their finances and how to create a plan for your children's education. Whether you're just starting out or looking to elevate your finances, this episode is packed with valuable information. In this episode, we're discussing... Financial planning is a process, not a one-time event. Your money narrative can shape your financial decisions. It's important to find a financial advisor you trust and feel comfortable with. When talking to aging parents about their finances, start by offering to meet with their advisor. Consider creating a master binder with important financial documents and information. There are different levels of financial planning available, depending on your needs. Starting early with college planning can help offset the costs. Financial success is a marathon, not a sprint. Don't get discouraged if you don't make progress overnight.   Resources from Amy LinkedIn | Maven Lane Financial Group | Money Narrative Resources from Mike and Nichole Gateway Private Equity Group |  Nic's guide

Send us a textWhy listen to our interview with Amy R. Cook: She is the founder of Maven Lane Financial Group and worked in financial services for over twenty years, starting in the  mortgage business, where she noticed a consistent reactive approach  to financial decision-making. As a CFP® with a master's in personal financial planning, Amy attributes  her passion for financial planning to her unwavering desire to help others achieve their financial goals and eliminate unnecessary fear and avoidance around money. She emphasizes that financial planning  is dynamic and requires ongoing preparation and maintenance for success. and more see below

Send us a textE135: To start the show, David reviews new legislation before the US Senate that would expand the capital market for startups, HB 2799, The Expanding Access to Capital Act. Then he launches into Revenue Operations (RevOps), the core business function of any successful business and critically important for startups. As a new startup transitions from the CEO salesman/marketing lead to a growing team, a successful RevOps team becomes the key ingredient for growth. By combining Sales Operations and Marketing into a single team for RevOps, management can gain new insights into operations that are traditionally independent and siloed. This can be the lynchpin for successful growth. David interviews Amy Cook, Co-Founder and CMO of FullCast, who is an expert on RevOps. She has 3 successful exits under her belt and just completed a $32M Seed Round for her new startup, FullCast. Text Amy at 949.813.0182 or email at amy@fullcast.com. (recorded 8/30/24)Follow David on LinkedIn or reach out to David on Twitter/X @DGRollingSouth for comments. Follow Paul on LinkedIn or reach out to Paul on Twitter/X @PalmettoAngel We invite your feedback and suggestions at www.ventureinthesouth.com or email david@ventureinthesouth.com. Learn more about RollingSouth at rollingsouth.vc or email david@rollingsouth.vc.

How can we help our dog to avoid stressful situations, and why should we? In part 5 of our series on reactivity we discuss the importance of reducing your dog's overall trigger through the process of trigger mitigation. We'll explain what it is and how it fits into helping you and your pup feel more confident and ready to learn.Join the RYDP Patreon.Subscribe to the RYDT newsletter. Amy Cook's Management ClassSniffspotYou can find Reward Your Dog Training here: Website / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook YouTube

Today, we have an inspiring conversation lined up with Amy Cook, founder and financial advisor at Maven Lane Financial Group. With over 20 years of experience in the financial services industry, Amy transitioned to financial advising in 2009 and quickly became a trusted name in the field.  She's also the author of the Amazon bestseller *Your Money Narrative*, which explores how personal experiences shape financial behaviors and decision-making. In this episode, Amy shares her journey from the mortgage business to financial advising, her approach to creating personalized financial strategies, and how understanding one's money narrative can lead to better financial outcomes.  Whether you're just starting your financial journey or looking to refine your strategy, this episode is packed with valuable insights to help you make smarter financial decisions. So, let's dive in! To reach Amy: mavenlanefinancialgroup.com/wap

"AI will never replace good content, that you will never get the human out of it, and that people are already starting to discern," says Dr. Amy Cook, Co-Founder and CMO at Fullcast.In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Amy Cook, co-founder and CMO of Fullcast, to discuss her journey from academia to the C-suite, the role of content in the buyer's journey, and how AI will never replace the human touch in content creation. She also shares her insights on integrating AI for operational efficiency and the importance of aligning marketing closely with revenue goals.In this episode, you'll learn:The significance of content in influencing 60% to 75% of the buyer's journeyHow AI can be used to enhance content creation without replacing the human elementWhy closely aligning marketing efforts with revenue is crucial for successResources:Connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-gandolf/ Check out The Juice HQ: https://www.thejuicehq.com/ Connect with Dr. Amy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyosmondcook/Check out Fullcast: https://www.fullcast.com/Timestamps:(00:00) Writer turned marketer finds success in tech industry(05:35) The role of AI in content creation(09:25) How Fullcast revolutionizes go-to-market teams(13:33) Why content is king in marketing strategy(15:48) The fulfillment of creating real impact in startups

Do you know how to really PLAY with your dog? The answer is more complicated - and important - than it might seem. True social play between you and your dog can be a powerful tool in building connection and trust, and it can be a much-needed reprieve for a dog living here in our human world. Dr. Amy Cook is the expert on human-canine play, and her "Play Way" approach is our topic for this episode.   LINKS: Video of Dr. Cook demonstrating some elements of "The Play Way" https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=681929543785963    Graphic illustrating highlighting key Play Way concepts https://blog.doggiedrawings.net/post/614077754120519680   Kathy's article on play in Whole Dog Journal      

On today's episode, Good Leadership CEO, Paul Batz discusses healthy accountability with another one of the Accountability Research Steering Team members. Amy Cook, Global Talent Director with Reckitt, shares her valuable insights on the subject. Most people do not recognize the organization Reckitt by its name but know the organization by way of their product lines such as Lysol and Enfamil. In recent years, the world was faced with two different crises that leaned heavily on some of their products – the Covid-19 pandemic, and the infant formula crisis. In the interview, Amy touches on accountability in crisis, as well as what it looks like when you work for leaders who are good at holding their employees accountable in a healthy way, and how she believes her involvement in the Accountability Research Project has influenced her personal leadership.  

What's the big deal about play, anyway? Join us for a conversation on the benefits of play... and how to tap into your inner child, so both you and your dog can enjoy playing together!

Jesse and Verena dish out the goods in the third part of the Reactivity Series. Is reactivity resolvable? And if so, what would that look like? Join them and find out how you can help your dog, both right now and through future training. Join the RYDP Patreon. Subscribe to the RYDT newsletter. Our shoutout goes to Dr. Amy Cook of Play Way Dogs. You can find Reward Your Dog Training here: Website / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook YouTube

In this bonus episode, I chat again with Krystal Hise, a pet portrait artist  and our guest featured in Ep 11, about reactivity in dogs. We talk about what this behaviour looks like in Frank and Freya and share our experiences working through reactive behaviour in our pups. We are honest about the challenges associated with having a reactive dog and discuss the many ways we advocate for them. If you are struggling with reactive behaviour in your dog, I hope you find this conversation helpful. There are a ton of resources available. Also, trazodone. Resources:Victoria Stilwell, positive reinforcement dog trainer: https://positively.com/ Helpful reactivity resources from Krystal's blog: https://krystalhise.com/blog-archive/freyas-recommended-resources Dr. Amy Cook, “The Play Way”: http://playwaydogs.com/classes/ Management for Reactive Dogs class recommended by KrystalGuest InfoInstagram: @krystalhiseportraitsWebsite: https://krystalhise.com/ Contact usPodcast Instagram and TikTok: @animalsoulmatespod Podcast email: animalsoulmatespod@outlook.com CreditsHost & Executive Producer: Dr. Abbie ViscardiProduction Team: Citizens of Sound, https://www.citizensofsound.com/ 

The podcast features Jon Bradshaw and Peter Harris hosting Amy Cook and Ryan Westwood, founders of Fullcast.com, a company specializing in rev ops.They discuss their entrepreneurial journey, including their previous venture, Simplus, which they sold to Infosys for $250 million, and their recent success in closing a $34 million funding round for Fullcast.The conversation covers their background, the importance of focus and differentiation in business, and their approach to building a strong team culture.Ryan shares his personal story of overcoming challenges and developing an underdog spirit, while Amy discusses her entrepreneurial journey, highlighting the significance of resilience and adaptability.They delve into Fullcast's mission to improve sales teams' success rates by optimizing territories and quotas, aiming to become a leading player in the rev ops space.The discussion also touches on their funding strategy, emphasizing the value of building a network of supportive investors and stakeholders.Our GuestsAmy CookRyan WestwoodFullcastFollow the PodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/venturecapitalfm/Twitter: https://twitter.com/vcpodcastfmLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/venturecapitalfm/Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7BQimY8NJ6cr617lqtRr7N?si=ftylo2qHQiCgmT9dfloD_g&nd=1&dlsi=7b868f1b72094351Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/venture-capital/id1575351789Website: https://www.venturecapital.fm/Follow Jon BradshawLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrbradshaw/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrjonbradshaw/Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrjonbradshawFollow Peter HarrisTwitter: https://twitter.com/thevcstudentLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterharris1Instagram: https://instagram.com/shodanpeteYoutube: https://youtu.be/Hy9DsuFzTH4

Amy Cook, PhD is a dog behavior consultant extraordinaire and she sat down to chat with Sarah about the importance of planned, trained, and rehearsed management strategies for navigating the world with reactive dogs. http://playwaydogs.com/ https://www.fenzidogsportsacademy.com/index.php/courses/7467 Sign up for courses and join the membership here: https://cogdogclassroom.mykajabi.com/ Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cogdogradio Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay

Amy Cook, MSPFP, MPAS®, CFP®, is the proud founder of Maven Lane Financial Group in San Mateo, CA. She has over 15 years of experience as a financial advisor and is no stranger to the unique financial challenges that women face. We're so excited to have her in our Purse Strings network and on the show today to share insights from her new book, Your Money Narrative.Here's some of what we discuss in this episode:Forming beliefs and decisions about money based on your previous experiencesHow gender roles and societal expectations impact these money storiesBreaking free from limiting money narratives by talking about your experiences and challenging your ingrained beliefsHow we can use our money stories to inspire and empower the next generation to be financially savvy and independent Amy's new book + choices and personal priorities in budgetingLearn more about AmyEarly in her career, Amy managed a mortgage company branch, witnessing clients reactively approaching financial decisions. Determined to help people avoid mistakes, she became a financial advisor in 2009, driven by a passion for guiding clients to realistic, attainable goals. Now the proud founder of Maven Lane Financial Group in the Bay area, she advocates for proactive personal finance.Amy pursued financial education, earning her CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ certification and a Master's degree in Personal Financial Planning. With clients in various life stages and industries, Amy aims to be part of your financial team, offering guidance in the ever-changing landscape of financial planning.Amy is thrilled about her new book, Your Money Narrative, and is a mother of two grown daughters. In her spare time, she enjoys being home with her cute cats and working on passion projects, including decorating, antiques, and a series of children's books about collections.Get in touch with AmyAmy on Purse Stringshttps://pursestrings.co/professional/financial-advisor/california/san-mateo/amy-cook-mspfp-mpas-cfp/Maven Lane Financial Grouphttps://www.mavenlanefinancialgroup.com/Read an excerpt from Amy's book, Your Money Narrativehttps://www.yourmoneynarrative.com/excerptYour Money Narrative Checklistshttps://www.yourmoneynarrative.com/resourcesAmy on social mediahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-cook-mspfp-mpas%C2%AE-cfp%C2%AE-3239199/https://www.facebook.com/mavenlanefinancialgroupJoin the Purse Strings Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/pursestringsco/ To learn more about money and access additional episodes, visit us online: https://pursestrings.co/

In preparation for the upcoming confident dog conference at FDSA, I invited 4 of the presenters for the conference on the podcast to talk about what confidences looks like in our dogs, how much of it is innate vs. something we can instill, and what the process of building confidence looks like. Join us for this fascinating conversation! 

Medical Myth Busters | On Call with the Prairie Doc® | December 21, 2023 | Prairie Doc® host Dr. Jill Kruse, with guests Dr. Amy Cook from Sanford Health Brookings Clinic and Dr. Stephanie Broderson from Sanford 26th and Sycamore Family Medicine and Sanford Brookings Clinic as they debunk or prove common medical myths.

Welcome to the Evolvepreneur (After Hours) Show I am your Special Host Richard Wray Join me today where we dig deep with our guests and get you the best concepts and strategies to fast-track your business. My very special guest today is Amy Cook ... Amy Cook, founder of Stage Marketing, discusses how her agency helps businesses with full-funnel marketing, digital strategies, and experiential marketing. She emphasizes the importance of understanding customer data and not getting distracted by hype around new technologies. While AI tools can help with efficiency, Amy notes that human creativity and personal touches are still needed to build strong connections with customers. Small businesses are discussed, with advice about carefully managing budgets, researching industry benchmarks, and avoiding too-rapid expansion. Amy also talks about how her agency assists healthcare companies in acquiring new facilities to help them grow while maintaining their mission of improving patient outcomes.

In prepping for the Adolescent Dogs One Day Conference, we brought on a number of the presenters and panelists to chat about what changes we see during adolescence and how we can best handle them. 

What is a threshold? Does it matter? Join Amy and I for a fascinating discussion on how what we know can impact or enable our choices when we're out with our dogs.

Dance school was a cheap hobby for Stephanie Powell-Baxter and her siblings to attend. Now she performs choreography and dances on Strictly Come Dancing, in London West end musicals, and in major movies. We discuss different types of intelligence, the community spirit of dance schools, creativity in schools, and Steph's parental perspective on making sure her children get the right balance. There's also a fantastically grungy road story from the world of dancers after dark. Supported by the brilliant Illustration X, founding sponsor of The Creative Condition podcast. View their global roster of illustrators and animators at https://illustrationx.com Photo by Amy Cook: https://www.amycookphotography.co.uk/ https://www.instagram.com/p/ChkuzrjI4xA/ https://bentallon.com https://bentallonwriter.com

Dr. Cook is an International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants (IAABC) Certified Dog Behavior Consultant, a longstanding professional member of the Association of Professional Dog Trainers (APDT), and was one of the first trainers nationally to become a Certified Professional Dog Trainer through independent evaluation. Dr. Cook received her Ph.D. in Psychology from UC Berkeley, with her research focusing on the dog-human relationship and its effect on the problem solving strategies dogs employ. Dr. Cook is the founder and creator of the Play Way and a popular instructor for the online school, The Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. She has been training dogs for nearly 30 years, and has specialized in the rehabilitation of shy and fearful dogs for over 20 years.  Legal Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational purposes only and does not constitute advice or professional services by either the host nor any of the guests.  Website: http://playwaydogs.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doggeek/  Play Way Course:https://www.fenzidogsportsacademy.com/index.php/courses/84 About the Host If you want to work with me, Susan Light, you can find me at: www.doggydojopodcast.com The music was written by Mac Light, you can find him at: www.maclightsongwriter.com If you like the show, please Subscribe, Rate, Review, and Share to help others find the show! I'll see you in two weeks with a brand new episode of the Doggy Dojo!

Amy joins me for a conversation on managing life with a reactive dog, recognizing the early signs of sound sensitivity... and more!

Understanding Hypertension | On Call with the Prairie Doc® | March 23, 2023 | Prairie Doc® host Dr. Kelly Evans-Hullinger is joined by Dr. Jose Henao from Monument Health Rapid City Clinic and Dr. Amy Cook from Sanford Health Brookings Clinic.

Living with and loving a sensitive dog comes with pros and cons, lessons and blessings. This week Hélène Lawler, Barbara Lloyd, Amy Cook, PhD, and Dresden Graff joined me to talk all about sensitive dogs. 

This was such a fun time! Dr. Amy Cook joined me to talk about fear, anger, food, conditioning, what happens if you get your timing wrong, and a whole lot more! And if you worry about your timing or choices? You definitely want to listen to this one.

This episode was a multi-month labor of love. I couldn't have done it without the dream team - Amy Cook, James Ede, Claire Fernan, Enda Ndungu, and Laura Valenti. Fun fact: the first cut of this episode clocked in at 3 hours and 58 minutes. Somehow we managed to cut it back to what you'll be hearing today. If you love listening to podcasts on 2x so you can listen to MORE podcasts, this episode will be right up your alley. 25 guests in roughly 90 minutes… and GO!Can't-Miss Moments From This Episode:What happens when a “no intro” intro strategy meets a bunch of excited entrepreneurs (hint: sometimes when you set loose guidelines, conversations go off the rails in hilarious ways)... Newsflash: you're not a friggin' imposter just because you don't know what you're doing! We are ALL making it up as we go, and maybe THIS is why instead of being late to the game, you're actually right on time… Spoiler alert: the secret ingredient to a successful business… is YOU! It's your perspective, your story, your inspiration, and your drive that attracts people to you and helps you grow. Here's why you should proudly let your freak flag fly… How serious are you about doing what you're doing? We break down how to figure things out as you go, and the crucial “success mindset” that primes you to take on any stressful situation… and triumph! Who wins, the person with the perfect plan or the person who puts it out there messy? Why ACTION (not planning, and not perfection) is the key to getting unstuck, finding answers, busting through anxiety, and finding your “thing” once and for all. This one is jam-packed full of advice. Don't miss out - listen now!Angie's Bio:Hi, I'm Angie Colee. Nice to virtually meet you! I'm a business coach and communications expert… and your personal hype woman. I help info marketers, thought leaders, creative freelancers, and corporate teams to -Build solid relationships and networks to grow their businesses and influence Create systems and structure that allow you to buy back your time and work ON the business instead of being stuck IN it Unpack (and set fire to) the feelings and struggles that keep us from showing up and communicating as our best selvesAnd so much more! Over the last decade-plus, I've led, coached, and developed creative teams for some brands you would definitely recognize. I've also helped launch thousands of products and marketing campaigns, including two multimillion-dollar launches in the middle of a global pandemic. Combined, my work has generated more than $70 million in direct-to-consumer sales.My passion project is this show, Permission to Kick Ass. It's a podcast (and movement) for freelancers and creative entrepreneurs who want to start (or grow) businesses that are perfect for their personalities and their lifestyles. It's the show I wish I'd had when I was first starting out - maybe then I wouldn't have convinced myself I was screwing everything up and stalled my own progress for years.hen I'm not helping entrepreneurs build their empires, you'll find me on the road. I'm a full-time digital nomad and I host marketing workshops and entrepreneurial playdates business-building events in different locations all around the U.S.You can count on me to locate the really good food, find landmarks and local hotspots, and try all kinds of weird things like llama yoga and digging in the dirt with backhoes.Resources and links mentioned:The Permission to Kick Ass website, where I work 1:1 and in small groups with creative entrepreneurs and teams to leverage their talents, streamline their workloads, and improve communications so they can grow with confidenceFast Passive Media - my new business venture with my partner, Chrys Clay, where we help business owners identify and launch new revenue streams without investing a ton of time, resources, bandwidth, or cashClaire Fernan - jet setter, chief cracker of inappropriate (and hilarious) jokes, and writer of all the fabulous show notes you read every weekAmy Cook - my right-hand woman who keeps the podcast wheels turning week after weekEnda Ndungu - who helped me shape the strategic vision for this episode and pick the best segments and stories PTKA has to offerJames Ede - the editing and production phenom who's been with me for almost 80 episodes, and makes everyone sound like a total rockstarLaura Valenti - the visual/design genius behind the show graphics for the first 100 episodes, as well as the new look and feel from this episode onwardCome kick ass with me:Permission to Kick Ass websiteAngie's Facebook PageAngie on InstaAngie on YouTubeDownload this episode

Today's Topic: When you're dealing with a fearful or anxious dog, it can sometimes feel like you've hit a wall, and the traditional tools that you're using are only getting you so far, resulting in a relationship with your dog that can feel belabored, frustrating, or just plain, UN-FUN.  That's why we invited the founder and creator of "The Play Way", a new therapeutic approach for resolving behavior issues through social interaction and dog empowerment, Dr. Amy Cook, to the pod, to discuss how playing with your dog can help you better assess whether your dog is at or near their threshold, where she sees the "The Play Way" living among the more traditional tools available to treat fearful and anxious dogs, how to start playing with your dog in an appropriate and safe way, the pitfalls of "monologuing", how this methodology fits into what she calls "positive dog training 2.0", and so much more!Guest Bio: Dr. Amy Cook is an Applied Animal Behaviorist, a Certified Dog Behavior Consultant with the IAABC, a longstanding professional member of the Association of Professional Dog Trainers (APDT), and was one of the first trainers nationally to become a Certified Professional Dog Trainer through independent evaluation. Dr. Cook received her Ph.D. in Psychology from UC Berkeley, with her research focusing on the dog-human relationship and the impact that social support can have on stress. Dr. Cook is the founder and creator of the Play Way, a therapeutic approach for resolving behavior issues in dogs through social interaction and dog empowerment, and she is a popular instructor for the online school The Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, where she also teaches a course in active management games for dogs, and in a play-based approach to resolving sound sensitivity.  She has been training dogs for over 30 years, and has specialized in the rehabilitation of shy and fearful dogs for over 20 years. Amy has worked for the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society, the San Francisco Animal Care and Control, has provided behavioral evaluations for shelters and rescues throughout the Bay Area of California, and was a member of the anti-cruelty team for the ASPCA, working in triage sheltering and rehabilitation for large rescue cases. Amy gives seminars all over the country and is a frequent conference presenter. She also competes in sports with her dogs, and has titled in Competition Obedience, Rally, Agility, Barn Hunt, and Nosework.Connect With Dr. Amy Cook:WebsiteInstagramOnline Courses w/ Dr. Amy Cook

Your host, Catherine Cantey talks with Stage Marketing's Founder, Amy Cook.Amy and her husband decided to split their $10,000 tax return, ($5,000 each) and see who could make the most on their investment. Now, 13 years later (and winning the competition), Amy shares her secrets to delegating properly, hiring awesome people, super powers, and so much more.If you'd like to know more about Amy's work, click here.If you'd like to be a guest on The Business Vitality® podcast, click HERE.

Gospel: Luke 13:10-17. Sermon by Amy Cook, Canon for Formation at the Diocese of California.

When we are thinking about positive reinforcement based training, we often envision food as the reinforcer we are using. Or perhaps we might use toys or other reinforcers such as giving attention to a dog when they keep all four paws on the floor instead of jumping up. But what about play? Just straight up play with your dog without toys. In this episode of The Bitey End of the Dog, I have a fun conversation with Dr. Amy Cook on using The Play Way with dogs, and chat about why play can go far beyond “just reinforcement.” For additional resources on helping dogs with aggression, visit:https://aggressivedog.comIf you want to take your knowledge and skills for helping dogs with aggression to the next level, check out the Aggression in Dogs Master Course and get a FREE preview here:https://aggressivedog.thinkific.com/courses/aggression-in-dogsDon't miss out on the third annual Aggression in Dogs Conference  9/30-10/2/22:https://aggressivedog.com/conference/About Amy:Dr. Cook is an International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants (IAABC) Certified Dog Behavior Consultant, a longstanding professional member of the Association of Professional Dog Trainers (APDT), and was one of the first trainers nationally to become a Certified Professional Dog Trainer through independent evaluation. Dr. Cook received her Ph.D. in Psychology from UC Berkeley, with her research focusing on the dog-human relationship and its effect on the problem solving strategies dogs employ. Dr. Cook is the founder and creator of the Play Way, a new way to address behavior problems in dogs, and is a popular instructor for the online school, The Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. She has been training dogs for nearly 30 years, and has specialized in the rehabilitation of stressed and fearful dogs for over 20 years. The Play Way!Support the show

Ever wondered how The Play Way differs from other methods for treating reactivity? Amy and I talk about how she developed the ideas from her work on her PhD in Psychology. 

In Episode 41, Marissa is joined by Dr. Amy Cook as they discuss the best ways to play with our dogs. As many listeners might know, Amy is the creator of the Play Way, a wonderful framework used to help pet parents drop in, connect, and play with their dogs. One might think they don't need help learning how to play with their dog, but trust me, you most likely do! 

In the first episode of our Year of the Black Entrepreneur (YBE) Bonus Spotlight Series, we highlight Amy Cook. Amy Cook is a teacher turned photographer who is following her passion and helping people capture their love and celebrations through her photography business Madalyne Dean Photography.   Learn more about Amy, what drives her and how she creates a unique experience for her clients below. Connect with Amy Website: https://www.mdpnc.com/blog/denise-p-family-session/ Instagram & Facebook: @madalynedeanphotography

In this extra material to episode 2 of Psychology & The Cross scholar Amy Cook explains Kierkegaard and Jung's views on anxiety, despair and neurosis and the potential held in mental suffering. 

My conversation with Amy Cook about Kierkegaard and Jung in the episode of Psychology & The Cross was so rich. I, therefore, decided to share some extra material highlighting specific topics discussed in her book, ‘Jung & Kierkegaard – Researching a kindred spirit in the shadows'. In this short segment, Amy explains both Kierkegaard and Jung's views on 'the therapeutic value of faith'.

Starting out in many different sports, Amy describes how "something woke up in me". She learned to love the amazing world of running. After running in college, she was feeling burned out. A couple years break gave her the desire to get back into doing what she loves. Amy shares awesome advice about getting back into running later in life and starting a family during it all!Amy believes in setting small and attainable goals that help her reach her full potential.Listen to her relatable story now!

Kierkegaard has a lot to say about self-deception. He has a lot to say about how resilient our self-deceptions are. He has an awful lot to say about authenticity… I think what Jungian psychology really needs, is a Kierkegaard.Episode description:For this episode, I had the pleasure to speak to scholar Amy Cook who's written a bold and beautiful book comparing the psychological projects of the Danish philosopher and Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard and Carl Gustav Jung. Amy helps us shed new light on the Jungian psychological project by comparing it to Kierkegaards, who she describes as a shadow figure of Jung. The conversation dives into the relationship between knowledge, religious experience, and belief, Jung's own struggle with his Christian faith, and their respective renderings of individuation and the imitatio Christi.Subscribe on Youtube Music played in this episode is licensed under creativecommons.org:'Ketsa - Hard sell'‘Ketsa - No light without darkness'‘The Psychiatry - Sickness unto death'

On this episode, The Bull Pen discusses the Ag industry, some of the false statements surrounding it and how to spread awareness and truth via inclusiveness and compassion.   Mark & Amanda Hilbrands own and operate Hilbrands Cattle Company in West Central Minnesota. We have two production sales a year, Jewels of the Northland (Dec 7th,2019) and Passion for Perfection Spring Pair Sale. Both South Dakota State graduates, Mark and Amanda calve 160hd of Simmental and SimAngus cows and bred females and enjoy exhibiting at the National Western, North American and various state fairs. Amanda also works for LiveAuctions.TV, enjoys taking livestock photos and videos and is the current Vice President of the Minnesota Simmental Association while Mark serves as a Deacon for Bethany Reform Church. The couple are also dealers for the Code Blue Livestock hair care line and have one daughter (4yrs) that's a big help around the farm!   Facebook: @hilbcattle Instagram: @amandahilbrands Website: www.hilbcattleco.com   Gina Pospichal is a school counselor by day and a fifth-generation cattle producer by night. She and her husband, Barry, live in the Sandhills of Nebraska with their two sons: AJ, age 11, and Bo, age 9. Her family raises Simmental and Sim-Angus cattle, and AJ and Bo have their own herd of Nigerian Dwarf goats. She is also an editor of a show cattle blog: www.silverbarncattle.com. You can follow her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/gpospichal or Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/ginapospichal/.        Amanda Radke is a fifth generation rancher from Mitchell, S.D., who has dedicated her career to serving as a voice for the nation's beef producers. A 2009 graduate of South Dakota State University with a degree in agricultural communications, education and leadership, Radke served internships with USDA's Ag Marketing Service in Washington, D.C. and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association in Denver. Her 2008 summer internship with BEEF magazine led to an ongoing blogger position for the BEEF Daily blog, where she provides timely industry news each week, Monday through Thursday. She's the 2006 National FFA Extemporaneous Speaking champion and the 2006 National Beef Ambassador. In 2012, she was recognized as a Top 10 Beef Industry Leader by the Cattle Business Weekly was included in Media Industry News' 2012 Top 15 People To Watch Under 30 list. When she's not writing or ranching, Radke is traveling the country speaking to agricultural groups about hot industry issues or reading her ranch-inspired children's books at elementary schools. She married her collegiate meats judging teammate, Tyler, in 2010, and together, they have three children, Scarlett, Thorne and Croix. www.beefmagazine.com www.amandaradke.com   Amy Cook, DVM. Dr. Cook grew up on a farm near Gretna, Nebraska.  She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and spent the next 10 years pursing various animal science careers encompassing equine nutrition, feedlot work and race horse management.  In 2013 she received her DVM from Iowa State University, receiving the Large Animal Clinical Excellence Award.  Following graduation she completed a rigorous one-year hospital internship at Kendall Road Equine Hospital in Elgin, Il.   Dr. Cook is a member of the American Association of Equine Practitioners, American Veterinary Medical Association.  She and her husband and son reside near Ashland, Nebraska with their horses and dogs. Dr. Cook used to work with the Vogler family at their bull stud and now works at Nebraska Equine Veterinary Clinic https://nebraskaequine.com/   Angelica Metzger is from Ashland Nebraska, She is a senior in college attending Northwest Missouri State University where she is majoring in Animal Science with a minor in Ag Communication. She has been involved with FFA and 4-H showing pigs and holding leadership positions. She spent last summer as an intern with a pork production company. She has a passion for leadership, animal agriculture, and advocating for our industry.    Susan Vogler is Les Vogler's wife of 20 years. While she has spent a lot of time working primarily in the corporate field, she has a lot of passion for agriculture and the way of life.  voglersemen.com nebraskabullservice.com voglercattle.com https://www.facebook.com/NebraskaBullService/?view_public_for=303025436483192 https://www.facebook.com/VoglerCattle/?view_public_for=1511270259085685 https://www.facebook.com/voglersemen/?view_public_for=643475002464873   A Hurrdat Media Production. Hurrdat Media is a digital media and commercial video production company based in Omaha, NE. Find more podcasts on the Hurrdat Media Network and learn more about our other services today on HurrdatMedia.com. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Summary: Dr. Amy Cook has been training dogs for nearly 25 years and has been specializing in the rehabilitation of shy and fearful dogs for over 15 years. She's the creator of The Play Way, her process for helping dogs learn to cope with the world around them. She's also a certified dog behavior consultant, a long-standing professional member of the Association of Professional Dog Trainers, and has attended all four Chicken Camps in Hot Springs, Arkansas, taught by Bob Bailey. Amy returned to school in 2006 to get her PhD in psychology from UC Berkeley. Her research there focused on the dog/human relationship and its effect on problem-solving strategies dogs employ. Links www.playwaydogs.com Next Episode:  To be released 5/18/2018, featuring Amy Johnson, taking us behind the scenes of a major dog sports competition from a photographer's perspective.  TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Dr. Amy Cook. Amy has been training dogs for nearly 25 years and has been specializing in the rehabilitation of shy and fearful dogs for over 15 years. She's the creator of The Play Way, her process for helping dogs learn to cope with the world around them. She's also a certified dog behavior consultant, a long-standing professional member of the Association of Professional Dog Trainers, and has attended all four Chicken Camps in Hot Springs, Arkansas, taught by Bob Bailey. Amy returned to school in 2006 to get her PhD in psychology from UC Berkeley. Her research there focused on the dog/human relationship and its effect on problem-solving strategies dogs employ. She also recently started a blog at playwaydogs.com, and everyone should definitely go check it out. Hey, Amy, welcome to the podcast. Amy Cook:  Hi Melissa. So glad to be here. Favorite, favorite thing ever. Glad to be back. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to have you, and today I wanted to talk to you about thresholds. Amy Cook: Thresholds [makes “doom music” sounds] … Melissa Breau: Threshold is definitely a word that gets thrown around a lot when it comes to reactivity. Do you mind sharing a little bit about what it typically means? Amy Cook: It's great that we open with that, because of course you want to open with a definition, it makes sense, except that that very thing is a huge can of worms. It takes a lot of time to unpack it all fully, and I'll be doing a webinar on this in June. I think it's just after camp, I think it's June 7 or so, where I'm really going to go into depth about all the stuff you need to know about it. But to get you thinking about it right now, thresholds is one of those things where we say it and we know what we mean by it, but when other people say it, either about our dogs or about their dogs while we're teaching them, we don't know exactly what they mean by it, and we don't have any real assurance that we both mean the same thing, even in the same conversation about thresholds, because if you really think about what thresholds are, it just means that it's a border between two different things, even; the two different states, if you will. So there's a threshold between the way I feel now and the way I'm going to feel next, whatever that feeling is that is coming, and not all thresholds are particularly of interest when we're talking about rehabilitation or dog training. There's only really a few that we care about. I say sometimes in my seminars, “Do you care about the panic threshold for your dog?” And I see some people saying yes, because of course we want to care about panic, but that's not what it says. Do you care about the panic threshold? The answer should be no, because there's plenty of other thresholds that you should have cared about well before we got anywhere near panic. So threshold is that state between one thing and another, and it's no more than that. When someone says, “Hey, your dog's over threshold,” the only thing I think is, Over what threshold? What exactly are you talking about? What state are they in now that they weren't in a bit ago that you want them not to be in or want to help them get out of? Until we have common language — and I'm not even saying that we all, as a training community, need to have one language, because this isn't one of those scenarios. This scenario is the word makes a lot of sense, but what we haven't defined is what states that we're talking about. So over threshold in what way? Can or can't do what kind of thing? It's worth a lot of thought, because if I just say, “Hey, my dog's over threshold now,” if I can be honest with you, I think it's becoming a shorthand for “My dog can't do this right now. I'm just going to call that ‘over threshold.' Oh look, he won't eat. He's over threshold. He's having trouble with latency here. He's going slow. He must be over threshold.” I think it's losing a little bit of meaning because you're not thinking about exactly what threshold you're talking about. It matters, because where you want to put your therapy is dependent on how the dog feels and how stressed he is, so you do really have to know where your thresholds are. So it's something people need to pay more attention to than I think that they are. Melissa Breau: How do you even begin to start to pin down, regardless of which threshold necessarily, how do pin down exactly where a specific dog's threshold may be between any two states? Amy Cook: It sort of depends on what your goal is in the given moment. Is my goal right now just to get past this dog with my dog and nothing happens? I have a different definition, a different threshold in mind for a behavior I don't want, that I'm trying to prevent and keep him under the line of expressing. That's not the same thing as if I want to do some therapy with him. For me, that would be play therapy, and if I want to do play therapy with him, that line of where I say threshold is is going to be much, much, much lower, because the line for me would be between he can play and he can't play. But if we're just talking about getting past a dog, the line might be the line between “he can stay on my food and look at me and keep walking and keep himself together,” and “he can't do that.” So first you have to think … you asked me how can we figure out what the threshold is. Tell me what threshold you want to figure out in the first place. From there we can define what would it be to be under it and what would it be to be over it. Why do you care about this particular threshold? “Because I want to get past the dog and I don't want barking.” OK, so any kind of barking would be over that particular threshold, and anything under where we're managing correctly — or managing successfully, I should say — is keeping him under. But I wouldn't call that under threshold for, say, learning a brand new trick, because he's probably way too busy inside, cognitively and emotionally, to learn something new. So if it's like, I want to keep him under threshold, I'd say, OK, what for, what is your goal? “I want to do shaping with him, and sometimes he gets …” — whatever his problem is. And I don't say I want him under a shaping threshold. I'm not telling the world to start adding new terms for everything. It's not like that. But if you want him clearheaded and able to be in a shaping session, then that's what you're trying to be under. How can you figure out what the threshold is? Well, that's a moving target. You need to tell me what you need to accomplish, and from there we can simply make sort of tests for it. What I do is, I have a really low threshold for The Play Way and I have tests for that. But since everyone's definition or goals might be a little different, I would encourage people to just give it even five minutes of thought of, What are the states I'm trying to define here and get below or get into, and how would I know if I were there? It's a question you almost have to answer for yourself. I have answers for the kind of work that I do, but not everybody's doing that. Thresholds is all over dog training, and so I can't just tell you that threshold is the one I use only and not the ones you use. But I will say if you do think about this and use them, then you should put more thought into definitions and identification of them. Melissa Breau: You talked a little bit in there about how you use them differently in The Play Way, and I did want to get into that a little more. Can you explain a little more how you use them and what you mean by that? Amy Cook: For the Play Way, what that is, if you're not too familiar with my work, it's using social play, so that would be play without the help of toys, like you're playing tug or playing fetch, and without the help of food, although certain exceptions will apply. So social play with your dog to help them relax, to help them feel a lot better about where they are, and to help you read how they're feeling so you can determine whether you are under threshold or not. That would be under my threshold, under the threshold of interest to me, in this case. Really, the whole reason why play is so important, there are two reasons. One is of course it's really fun, it's relaxing, and it's relationship-building. But the other real function of it is directly to help me determine a threshold. The threshold I want is one between the two states of interest for me are the dog is perfectly fine, absolutely nothing wrong as best anybody could tell, just like I can tell in you, you feel perfectly fine, you're not stressed, you're not tired, you're just being you, just being Melissa, and then whatever you are one step away from that. That's not super-specific, but it can't be. It's when the dog or you feels perfect, everything's fine, totally normal, nothing wrong, and then the first step away from that state is happening, and if you keep going on that path, if you keep taking more steps on that line, you're going right to eventually panic, or you're going right to stress, you're going right to upset, you're going right to can't handle, you're going right to trembling or yelling and screaming. A lot of different things can happen along that number line. I call it a one-step threshold as a shorthand for myself so that I can see it as everything was fine, nothing was wrong, and now we've just taken our first step away from that perfect state. And I'd like to know that that's happened for you. If I'm trying to help you stay in that really great state, I'd love to know that you have just left it. And because I have language with you and all other people, I can say, “Hey, let me know when you're starting to leave perfect and you no longer feel that way anymore.” But of course it's very difficult to ask a dog, and what I use play for, or really, more accurately, the disappearance of play. When it disappears for me, I can infer that something has happened. You play in your perfect state, and we of course train that a bunch, and we rehearse it a whole bunch, and then you can't. Something impeded, something got in the way, something interfered with our play. Are you starting on your stress path? Are you starting to leave this great state we're in? When play leaves, and they're just starting to have questions about whether they're OK, that's when I can best apply my rehabilitation techniques, my interventions for them. That's the best place because they haven't gone very far away yet, and I can get them back to feeling OK. Threshold is super-important to me for that reason. It's super-important to everyone for that reason. We're trying to get therapy into a dog who can benefit from the therapy. We don't do that when they're over threshold, but we have a moving target for where threshold is, so for me, I want it really codified. I call anything where the dog can't play like he normally plays at home, and behave like he normally behaves at home, socially with you as over threshold. To me, it's over threshold for therapy. I wouldn't apply therapy there. I might switch to management, which is going to be a different topic that we can talk about, but if you want to apply some kind of therapy to your dog to help them feel better, you want something that indicates that they're crossing the very threshold you care about, and for me, that's play. For me, so much is over threshold. So much more is over threshold for me than your average trainer. But I don't mean to say that therefore everything over threshold is bad. It's just over my therapeutic threshold. I wouldn't do therapy now. We'll do something else. But you can see how it hangs together. You want to know what you're dealing with so you can know what to put at it. I'm not going to throw therapy at a dog who's four steps away from perfect but still many steps underneath flipping out. I still have many things I can do there, which is what management is. Melissa Breau: Most dogs, to some degree, aren't quite as relaxed as maybe would be ideal just in everyday life. Amy Cook: Sure. Are you? Melissa Breau: Exactly. Amy Cook: I'm not. For the record, I'm tightly wound, very tightly wound! Melissa Breau: I just want to ask you, you mentioned management, and I do want to ask, on the flip side of all this, we have this ideal state that you've talked about. But what happens when a trainer inevitably … everybody makes mistakes, and the trainer makes the mistake, they misjudge something, they think their dog can handle something their dog definitely can't, and the dog reacts, whether it's just a couple of steps further away from that ideal state, or whether it's dramatic and lunging and barking and crazy. What do you do? Amy Cook: I don't think there's anybody within the sound of our voices tonight that hasn't done this, and that includes me. I'll just raise my hand. I assume you're going to raise your hand. We've all had a dog that we don't want to have react, react. Or conversely — this isn't really conversely — it doesn't have to be that they even react. It can be that they have been put in a situation that is beyond their skill set right now, and it might be that they tremble, or it might be that they just are now going into sniffing and don't want to do this and leave, and that's a form of being over threshold. You've made a mistake in how much your dog can handle or wants to do, and you're not going to get through a day or week — that may sound like a miscalculation — on the feelings of others who can't talk to you. If anyone out there is like, “Yes, that inevitable mistake,” it's inevitable. You will make it. Because of that, just know that you will, assume you will, try not to in a moment, but don't try to be a person who doesn't do that. You're just going to be your best all the time and accept when you're not. When that happens, though, you need to stay, as best you can, clearheaded about what your next options are, where your next acts need to be. Let's say this is reactivity and your dog has now blown, because it's a very easy example to use. Your dog has just blown up at somebody who showed up where you were training. I have a video of that in my class in fact, of me recording a video for class and someone just shows up and I had to respond. If anyone wants to see me do that, go in my classes in the videos, in the video section. You have to … or I recommend that you immediately drive the bus or pick up the reins — whether you like horses or cars better, pick your metaphor — pick up your reins and drive, pick up your wheel and steer your horse. You have to take over the situation, make immediate decisions, and those immediate decisions should involve getting distance and getting your dog on something else right then and there. You stop your training, you don't negotiate, you don't see if you can get your dog back on you while you're sitting right where you were, or tell the person that showed up “Hey, can you give me some room?” That's not the time to think about restoring what you had a second ago. It's your time to get up and march. I usually tell people “March,” and they're like, “I don't know how to march.” No, no. I mean walk fast. Leave. Get out of Dodge. Go. If you've made a big mistake, your dog went [barking sound], or you didn't notice, you didn't have to make a mistake, you could have been completely unaware or thought, Maybe that's a mistake, I don't know, and something showed up and your dog barked, and too many of us spend too much time frozen right then. You go, “Oh, oh, God, oh, sorry, sorry,” to whoever it was that your dog just now barked at. Or you're holding, “Dog, dog, cookie, cookie, dog, here,” trying to fix it in some fashion, and I don't recommend anyone do that. If you were sitting — I was imagining while you were talking, I was imagining sitting because most of my therapy for dogs is done sitting, so I was going to say, you stand up and you get out. You start walking. You take control. If you can't get out, you immediately get your dog's attention by hook or by crook. Interrupt that behavior. Get them on something else right away. The thing is, that can be difficult. I don't minimize that at all. First of all, you're frozen. Second of all, your dog hasn't seen you do this very much and doesn't have a ton of skills around that. That's why I have a class on this, because I firmly believe that people need to rehearse everything they're going to do in the clinch. If you need to practice getting up and marching out of the way really, really quickly, then you need to practice that when nothing's going on, so that you get fluent in it and so that your dog sees this picture many, many times before you ever need it. That's the one thing we don't do with management is we don't do that. But aside from the practicing issue, if you flip into your mind that first I was being dog empowered, and we were training a little bit, and you were figuring out my shaping puzzle, or I was doing some play practice with you and I'm listening to you and you tell me what you're feeling, dog, and then something happened and your dog goes [gasps] “I can't,” you go, “That's it, let's go. You get up and you just take over. So much of what we're trying to do here at Fenzi and so many of the classes are about giving the dogs a lot of control and a lot of ability to drive a session and to be really active partners, and this is the one time when you go, “All right. We're going. We're not negotiating this. We're getting out of here.” I think people are a little reticent to do it because they're trying to stay in the dog empowerment place or just aren't sure what to do, so I recommend you start driving. You pick up your reins and you drive your car, to mix my metaphors continuously. Melissa Breau: Pick up your reins and drive your car. There you go. Amy Cook: Pick up your reins and drive that car. Melissa Breau: For dogs with reactivity, it's not just about what happens when something goes wrong in the moment or when you've made a mistake. There are some things you just have to deal with. The world can be a really scary place and a really rough place, and there are just normal, everyday things that have to happen, even though they're scary and unpleasant. You have to go outside to poop. We're not going to do that in the house. That's not a negotiable thing. So there are some things that still need to happen in everyday life. How do you handle those things? What do you do? Amy Cook: I think that should be one of those infographics: The world might be a scary place, but you still have to go outside to poop. You still have to do it. I remember being a baby trainer and being really frustrated with the answer of “Don't put your dog over threshold.” I had a dog who was over threshold even by any definition, anyone's definition, outside of a home. Outside of a house, outside of four walls, she was losing her mind, and the answer was you're supposed to keep her under threshold while you're helping her classical condition to whatever, doors and things. And I'd say, “But she has to go outside. I can't keep her under threshold.” I didn't get much of a satisfying answer. It was like, “Well, try not to.” I was like, “That's not helping.” I get it. The world is a rough place, and going about normal, everyday things might be you running a gauntlet, might be you going from challenge to challenge to challenge, and if you're working with me at all, I'm saying, “Hey, let's do a lot of play. Let's keep your dog under threshold as much as possible.” I'm certainly saying those things. So going hand-in-hand with helping your dog be better in any way, whether it's through classical conditioning or whatever it is you're doing, you're training, you need to have an alternate way that you behave, an alternate plan for times that are not those times. Times when we have to go outside and go potty are not times when we're going to be working on how you feel about going outside and going potty. We're going to flip into our management mode. We're going to get our management boots on and we're going to behave as we do in management mode. That means I may have to override you. I will do it certainly as kindly as I possibly can, but we're not going to go that direction. We're going to go this direction, because I know this direction is better, even if you want to go that way. Or you'd like to go up and see that gentleman because you're on the fence about whether you're scared, and I know that when you get there you're going to flip out, so we're not going to. We're going this way. So the first thing you've got to think about is you're in control and you're possibly overriding, although very kindly, your dog. Secondly, your dog needs to know they're part of the management system. The management system might be all the little tricks that you'll do to get your dog past a thing. A certain example might be a magnet walk, a cookie magnet. If I teach you — and you'd think dogs would know this really well, but you'd be surprised how many dogs don't know how to do this because we don't practice it — you take a bunch of cookies, a bunch of them, and you put it right on their nose. Don't just let them sniff it and wish they had it in their mouths, but you're actually feeding in a specific way out of your hands the whole time you're walking. I challenge all of you listening: Can you take ten steps with your dog actively eating the entire time out of a hand, out of your hand — not any hand, your hand — that's right on their nose and eating all the way through. We're going to say these are not 10-inch Chihuahuas, but dogs you can reasonably reach with your hand, because they're the ones you can pick up and we can talk about that later. Can you walk ten whole steps with your dog eating the entire time? No pauses, no time do you take your hand away and put it back, no time for reloading, no time where he's sniffing it and wishing he had it and licking it, but is actually eating the whole way. I think most people can't … maybe not can't do it, most people can get it done if you practice it a bit, but that's the whole point of that. You've got to practice, because your dog is like, “What's going on here?” and you're like, “I don't know. My hands are dropping treats everywhere,” and you're not even the good dog-and-pony show, you're the disastrous dog-and-pony show and you're the pony. That requires that the dog understands that that's what's going to happen, that the magnet should not break. And you're responsible for not letting that magnet break by making that super-interesting and “Let's go, and here's the cookies, eat them, eat them, let's go, come on, eat, eat, eat, go, go, go,” as you're walking past nothing because you're just practicing. If you're just trying to introduce that to your dog in the moment because you needed it right then and there, but they've never seen it before, it's not going to go so well. They need to see their parts. But to the larger thing that you asked, which I'm never going to stay on one question because you pressed the button on my chest and I take off, an everyday walk that is scary will need specific and well-rehearsed management techniques to get through. So if you're going to pass a little too close to something, you flip into magnet walking. If you're going to see something else pass by you and you only have to pause for a couple of seconds, you might do some Find Its, but you're going to have a plan. You're going to go outside and go … in fact, sometimes, when I'm walking my dog, I might say, hey, you know, if that happened right now, like I'm passing a house, if that door just opened and a dog came running out, what would I do right now, right this minute? There's traffic in the street right now, so I'm not going to go walk in the street. I mentally rehearse that, and I try to see if I needed to manage it, if my dog were over-fazed right this minute, what would be my choice? That mental rehearsal is very helpful to getting the reality to be like that. So management is for when you cannot train and you have to get through, and training is for when you can be reasonably under threshold, however it is we're going to define threshold for that particular task, and you don't need to drive the bus. When you can give your dog the reins and the wheel of the horse car, then you're not managing. When you pick up the reins and take the wheel of the horse car, you are now managing, to be tortured with this ridiculous example. Melissa Breau: That was exactly my next question for you. I wanted it to be specifically on what the difference is between treating reactivity and learning management, because I think sometimes it's really easy, I know you draw a really clear distinction between the two, and I think for a lot of people it's a muddy line there. They're like, “But we're working on treating reactivity,” and the situation just changed and now you just need to manage it and get out of there. And sometimes it's hard to understand that those are two sides of the same coin, maybe, where yes, you need to do both. Amy Cook: They are two sides, and I think of them as flipping back and forth a lot. In the way I learned dog training, we talked about flipping from operant conditioning to classical conditioning too. I'm not saying people don't do it now, I'm sure they must, but in the sense of “I'm training you to do a thing. Oh, a scary thing happened. I'm just giving you cookies.” Give and give and give and give, it's a scary thing, and I'm changing right into classical conditioning mode, don't care what you're doing, here's cookies. We flip back and forth on what we can reasonably let a dog do without too much direction and when we have to take over, and I see this as a very similar flip but between two different states, because I do my therapy different now. So in this case it would be training reactivity for me means I let you have your head — back to the horses — you can make some decisions. I want you to tell me what you need to look at. I want you to tell me how you're feeling by the quality of your play. We're having a nice session here where you're looking at something in the distance and gathering some information about it, and then you can dismiss it a bit and come back to me and we play some, and we're doing all this and I'm letting you tell me how you feel. I'm not driving it and telling you to sit and telling you to high-five and giving you things to do. It's very dog-driven. And then, when I see that something has changed, either you've changed or I really see that literally a thing in the environment is now here, I utterly change and flip only into management tasks and I make sure that they happen. I create them all. In play, and even in other kinds of training, if you're not doing specifically rehabilitation, you're doing some heel practicing. The dog is doing the behavior and you're rewarding it. Once management has to be there, I don't ask the dog to do anything. I create it all as best I can. That's what the magnet walk is. It's not a heel, which the dog does and looks up at you and you reinforce. however often you're reinforcing it. It's instead I put a magnet on your nose and I'm drawing you forward and we're walking that direction. And the dog is like, ‘I don't know. I'm just following my nose. I'm not doing anything,” if you think about it that way. I'm taking as much control and I'm doing the behaviors. I'm making sure the behaviors happen. I'm insisting as kindly as possible so that the dog stays contained and stays focused on me and the world can pass by. If the world isn't going to pass by, I'm going to run out of there. And you know what? Running has to be practiced too. If you're going to run away from stuff, you better run the right way. You don't want to run in panic. You don't want your dog to go, “Why are we running? Oh my god!” It's a practiced skill, like any other. You practice running away, yay, from stuff so that it's not surprising for the dog and they don't have to go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what?” There should be no “what.” There's only a lot of “Oh, we're doing this? All right. I can do that.” So the distinction I make between training reactivity or learning management is that in one you are responsible for everything that happens and in the other one you're lightening control. You're letting the dog tell you a lot more stuff. You're responding to the dog instead. In management, the dog's responding to you and you go. Hopefully that's a clarity moment. Melissa Breau: Yeah, yeah, and as you were talking about it earlier I was thinking in one situation it seems like you really want the dog to think, and in the other situation you want to remove any need for the dog to think. Amy Cook: That's a good way to put it. I want you thinking and driving and telling me on your own. You want to look at something, look at something. I don't need to interrupt you. I want you to have your process — and more of that in the Bogeyman class — but a dog showed up, “Oh no, come here, you just need to think about me, and I'm going to take care of all of this.” That's something that doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. We sit there and “Oh God,” and we deliberate, “Should I give a cookie? He barked. I'm so nervous that it's reinforcing the bark, and I can't give the cookie.” In that time, while you're deliberating what you should do, that dog made it all the way to you, or that person got on his phone and started arguing. Everything got worse. You should have left before you started thinking about what you should do for your dog. Leave and then decide. Magnet-walk and go. Take it over. Melissa Breau: One of the biggest takeaways for me when I took the management class, which I loved, was the importance of practicing the skills. You talked about this a little bit: practice and practice and practice until they become a habit, not just for the person but for the dog, something that the dog and you can really fall back on when you need it, because it's so embedded and it's so patterned the fact that it has basically becomes... you don't have to think about this. It's so fluent for both of you. Amy Cook: It's dancing. We're all better if we have instructions. We're all better if we know what we're going to do. We are all better if things are patterned. All of us. Then especially, and if you want a dog to come magnet-walking with you, that dog's got to have seen it dozens and dozens of times, or they're going to go, “Yeah, magnet walk, but I've got stuff to yell at.” They don't have a groove to get into that's been super-practiced, and you know what, you don't either. The class, and the way I teach it to people, we're not using it maybe ever in the class, maybe. But certainly not until the last week, because I want fluency beyond fluency. I'll start throwing in little … here's one thing you can do, anybody listening. If you have a few management skills already, like a find it and a two up, putting two feet on something, maybe some quick sits, something that keeps their attention while all things around are breaking loose. What I want you to challenge yourself to do is you're out on your walk today on a regular suburban block, and you see up ahead a fire hydrant, and you see farther ahead than that the tree that's there, and I want you to manage, flip right into management the second you come to that fire hydrant, and manage the whole way all the way to the tree. Nothing has happened except that you decided you got to the fire hydrant and then you made it all the way to the tree. The dog might at first go, “What? Why are you managing me?” And if that's true and he's looking around, then he's not that practiced at management. He's expecting something to go wrong, he's expecting a big problem, and that's the last thing you want. You want to teach your dog that management is this crazy game I sometimes play for ten seconds for no reason at all. Every once in a while there's also a dog there, but that's not why I did it. I did it because I'm crazy and I just like to do fun things. Get your dog to believe that, and if you can flip in and flip out when nothing around you has happened, and do that any old time … in fact, some people have their partners say a code word, and then they have to manage right then and there and get out of Dodge right now and for no reason. It lets your dog see a little bit of panic in you, it lets your dog see a little bit of “Oh God, oh God, oh God” in you, and you're just freestyling, you're ad-libbing, you're able to take any challenge that comes up. I have people practicing that in the last two weeks of class, where they have to freestyle it, I call it. You've got to go out there and start responding to the tree and the bumper of the car and the fire hydrant, and make me believe that a dog showed up and you got out of Dodge, so that your dog has all of that before he ever needs to have it used. You'd be surprised, I'm often surprised, at how much dogs are a creature of habit. You'd think something like this, I hear people say, “My dog won't eat when we're outside.” They're a creature of habit. You don't start training it outside. You train it inside. You train it in careful places, and dogs really do go with the program. They really do. It's super-helpful, and even if it isn't perfectly helpful at every turn, 80 percent helpful is better than what you had before you started having a management system, so really anything is better than nothing. Melissa Breau: Right. You mentioned a couple of examples of some of the games you include in the management class. You mentioned two paws up, I think, and quick sits. Do you mind sharing some of those examples and describing them a little bit? Amy Cook: I like to separate the skills into the categories of “We are leaving in some fun way. I'm getting you out of this place.” It might be that I'm just pulling up a driveway. It doesn't necessarily mean we're leaving far, but I'm taking you and we're going to a new location. That's one set of skills. The other set of skills is “Well, I'm stuck here.” Oops, my exit is blocked. Or oops, that person showed up, but I see that they're actually just leaving and will get out of here faster than I would ever be able to get out of here, so I might as well stay here for a second and let the trigger leave. Those are super-separate. Getting out of Dodge, leaving quickly, involves connecting a magnet and then deciding which side your dog is going to be on, because perhaps it's better if they were on your left and now they need to be on your right, so you need to execute that really smoothly without breaking your magnet. Perhaps you need to make a U-turn. Can you do it without breaking your magnet? Most people don't. They make a U-turn and then connect the magnet again after they've made the turn. So we fix all those mechanics, how always you can leave a scene, all the directions you could go, all the sides your dog could be on, front crosses and all that stuff. You get one of those a week, and then you get a skill in the “Oops, you're stuck” series. I should call it that. I should just rename it that in the class: “Oops, you're stuck.” This is oops you're stuck, number one. And the next one is find it. I like those to be on cue, although it's really OK if the cue is they saw you drop the food, because that's going to work in a pinch, it's really fine. But I'd like to be able to say, “Dog, find it,” and then they go down and search immediately, even though you haven't put food down there yet while you go and get the food because you weren't ready because it wasn't in your hand because something surprised you. And so you go, “Oh god, find it!” and they immediately start going, “What? Really?” and they're looking down and they don't see anything and in that moment you're like, “Here it is,” and you spill it all over the ground and now they have something to find. That keeps their nose down and on their food. And you should get super-involved: “You missed this one, look at this here,” pat, pat, pat, pat, touch, touch, touch, nudge, nudge. “Look at these, you missed these here, oh my goodness.” Keep them super-engaged in that. What it does is first of all control where their head is, which you totally need, and then if it was a dog that was passing by, or even a person, but if it was a dog that was passing by, that dog is not being enticed by whatever your dog was doing, making it then harder for your dog to resist. Also you look super-busy. If someone was passing by and you're afraid of what your dog was going to do, or really wanted to protect your dog from that greeting, all of a sudden they're in a find it, you're doing training, you're busy, the dog isn't soliciting or looking like they're soliciting attention, which people misinterpret all the time, and is busy. So that's a great one to train. You might think there's no training in that one, but there is, because they want to break from that and you need to really get involved and you need to teach them that on verbal. I like them also to perch on things, so a two up and a four up. Two up is just front paws up, and four up they jumped onto it. I see them really differently from each other. The two up, I want you both facing the same way. It's like we're standing at a fence and both peering over it. We're both facing that way, so if something passed behind us, oh no, we didn't notice because I've got a magnet right in front of your face and “Look at these cookies, honey,” and “Look at that view, sweetheart.” It's not really a view, just imagine it, and then that person or whatever it is, the trigger, can be leaving while you're stuck there. This is your stuck series of skills. The four up I see the other way. I want the dog all four up, but you're going to face me. Tuck your face in close to my chest so I have your head here and you're up at my chest height, say a half-wall or a bench or something like that, and I've got control of your face. I can now look at the trigger passing behind your butt, but you're not, because I'm like, “Look what I've got, honey, look at this,” and if she breaks the magnet to look behind her, you're like, reconnect: “Look right here, cookie, cookie, cookie.” Each scenario might require you to … you want to look at the trigger to make sure that it's going away, so you put them in a four up, or you might neither of you need to look, because if you're looking, you're dog's going to look, and every dog's a little different, so you want to know how that goes. I like those kinds of stationary skills. There's a lot of others, like leave its, which a lot of people have already, but if we practice them in this situation, it helps them resist the urge to want to go look at whatever it is that was scaring them. And we do a thing called a classical recall, so it's not actually about the closing of the distance. I'll let that one remain in the class because it's actually a really long explanation when we do it. It's a special kind of recall. And a bunch of other things. I like dogs to wait at doors, just as impulse control, just don't dart out in front of me for stuff. Stay really connected to me when we're walking. It's not really a loose leash walking class, but I think it ends up being that a little bit too because there's so much magnetization when we're walking. The class also gets a little customization. If your dog in particular needs this one kind of skill, there's room. I built in room in the curriculum for a custom-built trick or a custom-built skill that you can use when you're stuck, your stuck series. So the class is customizable to your situation. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. I will say the find it game has worked, I told you this privately a bunch, but it worked wonders for me with my Shepherd, just having that game as a patterned game where she knows what her job is in such a concrete and understandable way and it's just to find the cookies. Something can pass us by, it can even pass by in the same direction that she's looking as she finds her cookies on the ground, and she knows her job, so she can focus. Amy Cook: I think some of them are self-medicating. It's like, “I wanted not to have to do that anyway, this yelling at dogs thing. I just did. Look, I can do a thing. I can just concentrate on this thing I'm doing.” But if they can't really do that, then you're pointing out every one of them until they're able to concentrate. What I like about the find it is that it can go on as long as you want, because I have an endless stream of pocket cookies. Melissa Breau: Yes. Amy Cook: I'm replete with cookies, so if I want find its to go on for a full minute, it's like, “Look, you missed this one here, and there's a whole trail of them here. Look at what we've got in the grass. Look at all these cookies.” Dogs love to forage, so it's playing to their strengths, and you can get their attention, walk run another fifteen steps to get a little further from something that changed again, and do another find it. You can do find its the whole way while you're walking. It's very customizable. Find its are the unsung hero, I think, of management, because people think, Oh, I put it them the floor but the dog didn't really care, so this doesn't work for me, and it's actually not a simple matter of using it when you've never practiced. Practice is the game changer. Melissa Breau: Right. I want to round things out by asking you if there's anything else that you've got in the works that you care to share — new classes, other goodies people should keep an eye out for, what you're working on. Amy Cook: Goodies. What I'm working on. Well, let's see. Coming up, I mentioned I've got the webinar. I'm going to talk about thresholds solely in that webinar because there's more to say about it for sure than I was able to say here. And then starting in June, I've got two classes. Starting in June, I've got this management class. I alternate it with The Bogeyman and The Play Way class because people need access, I think, to the whole picture of it, so I just try to make sure one runs into the other runs into the other. So next up is management, so if anyone is interested, this is the time to sign up. Concurrently with that, I'm going to run a sound class, which is for dogs who are sound sensitive and who need some classical conditioning essentially, but I use a lot of play and a lot of celebration and a lot less of the dry “I'll give you cookies after the sound happened.” True to form, I use a ton of play in it, but it's not just personal play, so if you have trouble with personal or social play, that's too weak for this class. We do crazy, raucous, amazing play with all the toys of the world that have a sound. That comes up only once or twice a year at most, so if that's your issue, you'll want to pick that up now. In the future, what I'm toying with now, I want to write, I'm in the process of writing a new class about raising puppies or socializing your new dog, if you just got a new dog, in The Play Way style. All this stuff I'm using The Play Way for is usually responding to problems dogs already have, but it would be really great if we could just prevent them in the first place, at least as best we can, and so I'm writing a class that's aimed at “You just got your puppy, or you just got your new dog, you don't know too much about him, and you're in the honeymoon period. What can you do to start off on the right foot?” Really, for me, that means rethinking socialization. Socialization, at least to my mind, is not about being social. It's actually about being civilized and learning to ignore a lot of things, but not through forced connections. So I'm going to write a class for people who want to raise their dog in that dog-empowered way and get started on that right foot. It's in the works, but I take quite a long time to get all the pieces together, so don't expect it soon. Maybe fall, maybe into the next year, I'm not sure. But it's going to be a companion class to The Play Way for people who don't already have a reactivity problem but don't want to have one, they can get into that way. Melissa Breau: That sounds fantastic. I am super-excited about the new class. I'm looking forward to it. And thank you for coming back on. It was fun to chat again, Amy. It always is. Amy Cook: Always a pleasure. You can have me on weekly. I'm available weekly and also daily, if you need more podcast for this. Melissa Breau: If only that were actually true. Amy Cook: If people would interview me every evening, I would be happy. Melissa Breau: In truth, it's a little after midnight here, so … Amy Cook: OK, all right, we'll be done. But it was really great to be here. I'm really happy you asked me back, and it's always a pleasure to talk with you. Melissa Breau: It's always a fun chat. It absolutely is. And I'm glad you could come on. And I'm glad all of our wonderful listeners could tune in to listen to it. We will be back again next week, this time with our other Amy from FDSA — Amy Johnson. We'll be chatting about what it's like behind the scenes to photograph a major competition event, so we'll be talking to her about the recent … I think it was agility nationals she just shot, what that's like, what's involved in that, and all of that good stuff, so it should be fun. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. And if you don't know how to do that, we have directions on our website. If you go to the site, we have buttons right at the top that tell you how you can subscribe if you're on iPhone and how you can subscribe if you are not on an iPhone, if you are using an Android phone. So I hope you'll go and do that. CREDITS: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Summary: Over her 40 years of dog training, Michele Pouliot has presented scores of seminars and has been responsible for bringing science-based clicker training to guide dog training around the world. In her "hobby world," she has actively competed in both horse and dog sports since 1970. In dog sports alone that includes A.K.C. dog obedience, attaining three OTCHes, agility, tracking, and then, starting in 2006, the sport of canine musical freestyle. A short time later, in 2007, Karen Pryor invited Michele to join her faculty for Clicker Expo conferences, where Michele presents on the application of clicker training techniques for a variety of dog sports, general training, and for the training of guide dogs for the blind. Karen Pryor and Michele collaborated for the development of Michele's online freestyle course, which is available from the Karen Pryor Academy. Links www.michelepouliot.com Next Episode:  To be released 5/11/2018, featuring Amy Cook, talking about thresholds and managing reactivity while you work on changing how your dog actually feels. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Michele Pouliot. Over her 40 years of dog training, Michele has presented scores of seminars and has been responsible for bringing science-based clicker training to guide dog training around the world. In her "hobby world," she has actively competed in both horse and dog sports since 1970. In dog sports alone that includes A.K.C. dog obedience, attaining three OTCHes, agility, tracking, and then, starting in 2006, the sport of canine musical freestyle. A short time later, in 2007, Karen Pryor invited Michele to join her faculty for Clicker Expo conferences, where Michele presents on the application of clicker training techniques for a variety of dog sports, general training, and for the training of guide dogs for the blind. Karen Pryor and Michele collaborated for the development of Michele's online freestyle course, which is available from the Karen Pryor Academy. I'm incredibly thrilled to have her here today! Hi Michele! Welcome to the podcast! Michele Pouliot: Hi Melissa, and thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here, and I want to thank Fenzi Dog Sports for having me here. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. So thrilled to talk to you. To get us started out, do you want to just share a little bit about your own dogs and what you're working on? Michele Pouliot: My current dogs are two. One is my English Springer Spaniel Déjà Vu, who is 8-and-a-half years old now, and I have a 4-and-a-half-year-old Australian Shepherd, Saki. They are both continually working on coming up with new ideas for tricks. It's what canine freestyle pushes you to do is always trying to come up with new moves and new behaviors to make your next routine interesting. So other than that, they're having fun just being dogs, running around the property. Melissa Breau: I know that you got started training horses. Do you mind sharing a little bit about how you originally got into training, and what led you then from horses to dogs? Just a little bit on your background? Michele Pouliot: Sure. We're going to go way back now. Straight out of high school, I really wanted to have a career in horses. I'm an Air Force brat, so my father, our family, moved all over the world as I was growing up, and in high school we landed on an Air Force base in Louisiana. My entire life I'd wanted a dog, couldn't have a dog, my mother was not a dog person and used the excuse of us moving so much as to why we couldn't have one. And I also wanted a horse. My father had always promised me that if we ever got to an Air Force base that had a stable, that I could have a horse. Well, we did, when we were stationed in the Philippines when I was in junior high school. I just fell in love with working with my horse, and I thought, This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. My father was very supportive when we came back to the States and ended up in Louisiana. In high school I got another horse, and he went ahead and allowed me to skip college and use the money to go to the Pacific Coast Equestrian Research Farm, which was run by Linda Tellington and her husband at that time, Wentworth Tellington, very well-known equestrian professionals. My whole goal was to be a professional horse trainer and instructor. After spending a year there with Linda and Went, I got my first job, which was running a new equestrian program in Fargo, North Dakota. What happened there was I was giving riding lessons to a woman who was a dog trainer. I got my first dog as soon as I got there, so I had a yellow Labrador. As soon as I got away from home on my own, I got my first dog. So I had this dog, loved it, didn't know what I was doing. But one of the gals I taught riding to was a dog trainer locally, and I look back on that experience realizing how lucky I was that the person I ran into about training dogs was such a good dog trainer. She was a traditional trainer, of course, back in those times, but she was a really good traditional trainer. So she taught me, in exchange for riding lessons, all about how to work with this young Labrador puppy that I had and make it a nice, mannerly pet. I was intrigued with how easy it was to train the dog versus the horses, so it got me interested more in training the dog versus just training it for being a nice pet. That is how I slowly started shifting my focus for my profession towards dogs, yet I always kept horses, so I haven't ever been without a horse since then. I just slowly, when I left North Dakota after my first winter — that was a sign that I never wanted to stay in North Dakota for another winter — but when I came back to the West Coast, I just decided, You know what, I really like this dog thing, so let me start that. And that's how I ended up going into dogs. Melissa Breau: That's really quite interesting, and I know you started to touch on a little bit there the similarities and differences in training the species, that dogs were a little easier. Do you mind sharing a little more about what you learned, compare and contrast a little bit for us? Michele Pouliot: Sure. Of course, when you're thinking that we're talking back in 1970 -'71, there was no positive training that was known of, so everything was traditional. We were training horses in traditional techniques, training dogs in traditional techniques, and when you're training traditionally, the gap between training a dog and a horse was huge, because what you had with this dog was a species that really wants to please in general. So not only are they maybe more domesticated than a horse, but they surely love to work with people. That was what stuck out so much to me. Whereas horses, being traditionally trained, it isn't like they're all excited to go out and work with you. It was good traditional training, they weren't afraid, but they certainly weren't the way horses can be nowadays when they are positively trained. So I think my first realization in that frame of reference, when you think of the times of training at that point in time, was just how much easier the dog was to train because they were so much more like, “What can I do for you?” The horse took so much longer to train because you didn't seem to have that automatic impulse from a horse you're working with to say, “What can I do to please you?” That was the big difference then. There's still a big difference, so even though my horses are clicker trained, as my dogs are, you're dealing with a big animal, so the difference in your safety is a big one. Even though we're not talking about an aggressive horse, it's still a big animal. If you think about dogs that will mug people and get in their bait pouches and jump up and want rewards, well, imagine a 1200-pound horse doing that to you. You have to be much more thoughtful about every step of the training process with a horse to make sure that you're not inadvertently creating an excitement or an energy in your positive training that can actually be dangerous for a human on the ground. Whereas with dogs, we don't really think about it that much as far as something that's going to be dangerous. If I teach a dog to leg kick and he happens to clock my leg, yeah, that's not great, but it's not life-threatening. Melissa Breau: Right. You talked a little bit about the fact that back then everything was traditional training, that approach. What led you to become a positive trainer and to clicker training? Michele Pouliot: When I got into dogs, first I kind of got my foot in the door with that first dog I had. Once I had him trained, I heard something about AKC and obedience, and I entered him in local obedience trials, and for some reason I was winning. People would meet me outside of the ring and say, “Ooh, do you give lessons?” and I felt weird because I didn't think I knew anything yet. But I started giving lessons and I was really enjoying that aspect. I ended up working at a kennel, figuring, You know, Michele, you've really got to learn more about dogs. So I took this entry-level position at a kennel in Long Beach, California. I was cleaning kennels and all that, but in the afternoon I would be giving some training lessons to the public, which was a great experience for me. But I wasn't there very long before I read an article about guide dogs and training dogs for blind people. Remember, there's no Internet back then. This is a magazine, and in the magazine was this article, and in the end were addresses of three guide dog schools in the country. The article was fascinating to me, and all I could think of is, Oh my god, what an amazing combination: the love of training dogs, and I'm also helping people. This is what I want to do. It just hit me like a thunderbolt that I had to do this work. We're in 1973 now, and I write all three schools. One of the schools never responded. Another one, I still have the letter framed on my wall today. The letter reads, “I'm sorry, but women are not emotionally or physically capable of training guide dogs.” Melissa Breau: Oh dear! Michele Pouliot: Understand that in 1973, that was not an affrontive letter. My reaction, as this naïve young woman, was, Oh, I didn't know that, in my head. Whereas ten years later, my hackles would have gone up reading something like that. Anyway, I got a letter from Guide Dogs for the Blind that invited me to fill out an application. I filled out the application, sent it in, and they had me come for an interview. Everything was great, I got the job, I was so excited. I found out later, when I arrived, I was the only woman besides one other woman who had just started working six months prior. It was not an easy place for a woman to step into, because there was a belief system that women can't do this. It's way too rigorous physically, and emotionally it's very difficult. So this woman and myself were like the pioneers of trying to get our feet in the door for proving ourselves that we could do it. When I first got my job at Guide Dogs, which was really my first serious, in my head, dog training assignment, I also was always focused on trying to do so good that I was paving the way for other women to come and do this work. That was the first goal. A part of that —which you're probably wondering, Is she ever going to get to answer my question? — a part of that is that I knew that I could do better what they were doing. I was so surprised when I showed up and realized that I was a darn good dog trainer when I was watching some of the techniques that I saw being used. What I saw was some very harsh traditional training. Very harsh. And I just knew I could do better than that. So, from the day I arrived, I started putting this subtle pressure from demonstrating that you don't really have to do it that way. My focus was always to be the best trainer I could be, the kindest, the gentlest, even though I was totally understanding of traditional training and that's what you do, there was no other option. But because that was my background in the 1970s, when I started hearing in the 1990s about this new, modern training, I was fascinated. Through those twenty years, before I heard about positive training, I had helped the program get better, better, better, and I mean in the early 1990s, our school was doing really good traditional training. I was so happy that the program had come so far that no dogs were being treated really unfairly. Even though it was traditional, it was good traditional training. I always have this flavor in my heart of, How can I be kind and gentle and still get the job done? Even when you're a good traditional trainer, you might be focusing on that, but you also inherited the belief that using a lot of punishment to teach is OK. It's a belief system that you are born into. So as I started opening my mind to looking at this new positive training thing I was seeing, I was so excited that, oh my gosh, there's other possibilities, and that's really what led me to start looking at videos and going to seminars and going to conferences and trying to figure out how this fits into my world, especially how does it fit into guide dog work. Melissa Breau: So, I'd love to hear a little bit more about some of what you did with the guide dog program, if you don't mind. I know that you spent a large chunk of your career focused there. How did that evolve? Can you share a little more? Michele Pouliot: Sure. I retired two years ago with forty-two years, so I've been doing it a long time. When I chose to introduce positive reinforcement training to my school, my guide dog school, my intent at that time was just, can we even make this better, kinder, gentler, and overall more positive for everybody, including the trainer. Because it was a very physical type of training when you're doing traditional training, too, so we had injuries. We had people coming in and being injured. By the way, by this time the staff was majority of women, so over the twenty years a lot changed. The men were in the minority, and I'm not really saying I even know why that is, because it's kind of true in the guide dog industry and in the cane mobility industry — meaning instructors who teach blind people how to travel with canes — it's interesting how through the last several decades the majority are women. I think it has to do with being nurturers and wanting to help is why we have more people in there now that are women versus men. Anyway, back to guide dogs. When I first brought the idea to my supervisor, my supervisor had a lot of faith in me. I had already done a lot for the program and had everyone training so much better than they used to train, so I had a good relationship with my supervisor, but he looked at me like I was crazy. Now, you have to understand that in the guide dog world, guide dogs have been trained since World War I. That's when it started. The techniques used for guide dog training were from World War I, meaning war dogs. How do you train a dog to be a war dog? And you know those dogs were hardy, hardy, tough, courageous dogs. So all the guide dog work that started was with very heavy-duty traditional training, and the thought process was you have to be tough to make the dog reliable. No matter how weird that sounds today in the positive training world, it's a reality for when it started. It was such a unique idea that somebody had in World War I to do this, and they were doing it successfully. So imagine if you say, “Can we train a guide dog to help a blind person get around safely and keep them from being injured?” and it worked, what does that do for your ego? It pushes it up there pretty big. So when you join a guide dog school and you are in awe of what they do, I was in awe of what they did. It's like, oh my god, this is like miracles. Those dogs are saving people's lives. So when somebody tells you that you can't use food when you train guide dogs, and the reason is the handler's blind and there's food all over the environment, everywhere you go, there's food, because of that, you believe it. I believed it. I was totally brainwashed. And I brainwashed so many of my blind clients over the years, like we all did, because we didn't want them hand-feeding their dogs. It was about food only comes in their food pan two times a day when they get fed. So the first thing that we had to tackle, we were the first school in the world that tackled this whole belief system, which was, believe me, very deeply entrenched worldwide that you can't use food in training guide dogs. There are still some outliers now that are holding to that, and their programs probably won't change until there's a few individuals that retire or leave the program, just because they're so entrenched in the belief system, and I understand that because I was there too. Thank God I had an open enough mind to say, “Maybe there's a way.” So the first task at hand was to show that we could teach the dogs, with food, how to not take food in the environment, and how to avoid offered food in the environment. If you picture that you've got this handsome, cute little dog out in harness and you're blind, how many people do you think a day come up and say, “Oh, he's so pretty. Can I give him this cookie? I have a little piece of meat.” You have all sorts of people doing that and not even asking. Guide dogs actually are offered food a lot. And imagine how many restaurants that you would go sit in, and your dog goes under the table, and guess what they find under the table that somebody previously dropped on the floor. There's food all over the place. So we thought — ha ha — we were doing this great job of teaching food avoidance through correction. The dog, of course, if they went for food, would be corrected. The comical part about that is although the response we trained looked really good at the end of guide dog training, because that means the professional was handling the dog, and the professional has sight, so the professional can do what? Time a correction. They can see what the dog's about to do. Well, hand the dog over to a blind client, and guess how long it takes a guide dog who's been trained that way to figure out that the blind person isn't responding at all when they head toward some food. We had ourselves brainwashed that we were doing a good job. The really cool thing about coming up with “How do we teach them with food to leave food?” was incredibly rewarding for us to go, “Oh my gosh, we just blew that belief system out of water.” The dogs are so much better now than they ever were with environmental food. And it's because they're choosing. It's their choice. They're not being threatened. They know that, If I leave this food alone and if I refuse this food from this person offering it, I know at some point in the near future I'm going to get a reward too. That was the huge hurdle to get over because of how entrenched that belief system is in the world. From that point on it was saying, OK, let's look at this clicker training thing, and look at all the skills we teach, and what can we teach with clicker training? I'm really glad my school took it really slow. At the time I felt like I was dragging them forward — “Please, let's do more, let's do more” — but the reality is traditional trainers have to learn these skills, it's totally new skills. So for us to just overnight decide we were going to change would not have been a good idea. We took it really slow. I look back at 2006, when all of our instructors were using clicker training, and it's comical to me to think that we thought we were so advanced, because it's come so far. Things that we transfer over to clicker training, it was clicker training, but now it's been improved to where it's really good clicker training. So it was a very long haul. The good news was that when we made this change, we had a couple schools that had heard through the grapevine that we were doing this who asked if we could help them out. Management made a decision then that really changed the course of the entire industry, because the industry could be very protective over what they did and their information, not necessarily willing to share “secrets.” Our management at that time decided that we're going to share this. We're not going to keep it quiet. And so at that time, around 2007, they started sending me out on the road to any school that wanted help. That is what kind of started the road to changing the industry, because the word started spreading. And then we started presenting at the International Guide Dog Conference, which happens every two years. That was like an international community, and presenting and showing video of all that we're doing, showing them data on success rates that skyrocketed higher than ever historically from the day we started clicker training. There was so much information that our school made available to the guide dog industry besides us actually personally helping. I mean, it's just wonderful. Let me give you an idea. There's about a hundred-plus guide dog schools in the world that belong to this International Guide Dog Federation. In 2006, there were three guide dog schools out of that group that were using positive reinforcement. Now it's over sixty-five. That's a big deal in ten years. It's a really cool thing to see it happening, and it's a really cool thing that I get to still do. I'm a consultant. I just got back from South Africa in February, helping a South African school, and it's just wonderful to see the excitement, because most of the staff are younger people now. There are always still some staff that are more senior, and traditional trainers who are learning new skills, but everyone has gotten to the point where they realize this is really a better way to go. So it's rare for me to run into people now that haven't realized, because we proved it. Basically our school proved it. Melissa Breau: That's fantastic. That's got to be such a good feeling to know that you've had such a huge impact on that field, and to really be able to look at the numbers and see how much change you've really created. Michele Pouliot: It is. It's an extremely satisfying time in my life to go ahead and retire. Melissa Breau:  Fair enough. Michele Pouliot: It was about five or six years ago now I was considering retiring, and I just had a funny feeling that I needed to give it a few more years to make sure that my program that I was leaving was really set to still move forward and not slide back if they didn't have me bugging the heck out of them all the time, for instance. Melissa Breau: Right. It's fantastic you've created this change, but I know there are still some fields that are, for lack of a better word, struggling to make the switch, or fields where traditional methods are still the norm. Do you have any advice for people who are maybe positive trainers in those situations, or positive trainers who are surrounded by others who aren't, when they're trying to maybe create change or inspire change in others? Michele Pouliot:  Over the past ten years — I guess more than that now, actually — I feel like I've done this so many times with so many different people and organizations, at least in the guide dog and service dog industry, I've been involved with so many now that I've learned the hard way what not to do. Even when somebody acts like they're open-minded and ready to listen, you have to be very careful that you respect them and avoid criticizing then, because the tendency in positive reinforcement trainers is to look down on traditional trainers as if they're being mean or even abusive or harsh or whatever. So when they're talking at a traditional trainer, they have that attitude of, “You need to change because da-da-da-da-da.” Well, the reality is traditional trainers love their dogs, too, and if you think they're doing it because they want to be meaner than they need to, that's not so. They inherited that. That's what they learned. I never thought I was being mean or harsh or too rough. I was a good traditional trainer and I used techniques that worked. My dogs were happy, they worked happy, they weren't cowering. But when I look back now, of course I realize, wow, there's so much of a better way to do this, and the animal is so much more joyous in its work. But people approach, if you want to call it the other side of the fence, they approach that with criticism, even if it's not direct criticism. You need to give a person respect for what they've done, what they've accomplished, and not in any way punish them. The comical part, to me, is if you're truly a positive reinforcement trainer, then why are you punishing these people? Are you going to punish them long enough that you think they're going to change? You should know that punishment isn't very effective. It only works with threat, so are you going to threaten them? No. The way you get them to change is reinforce them for their efforts, support them when they're having trouble, and sometimes that means you have to ignore something that's still happening and just go, “That will come in time. Leave it alone.” Right now, give them something you can actually help them with, because that reinforces them. When you solve a problem for someone or some organization with positive reinforcement and it's a problem they continue to have, you are now God. Now it's like, “Wow, we were never able to solve that with traditional training, and they just solved it.” That's all about reinforcement, so it's no different than applying positive reinforcement to animal training. It's how do I get this animal, which happens to be human, I have to want and get them inspired and motivated, don't I? I have to have something they want. So I have to give them the feeling of reinforcement, and usually that comes in the shape of showing them how it works. Don't just tell them. Show them. There are a lot of people in the horse barns, for instance, that are certainly surrounded by traditional horse trainers, and they're the one person in their barn that wants to do clicker training with their horse, so they day in and day out feel like they are one against a hundred. The best thing they can do is just smile and say, “Thank you. That's really cool that you're doing that, but I want to do it this way. I'm really enjoying this. This is really fun.” And then, on the side, you're showing them, from them noticing, that it really works. There's no sense in having a war, because the war never gets you anywhere. I've been at those wars. I've been the positive reinforcement and the traditional trainer wars. It doesn't work. It just makes the traditional trainers dig their trenches deeper because you're making them feel they have to defend themselves. The last thing you want to do is make a traditional trainer feel like they have to defend themselves. You have to get them curious so that they're really interested in how that works. The good news is in the guide dog world it's been proven now. We were on new ground when we did it, and when we did it, we didn't have anything telling us it's going to work, so we were just hoping we'd get the same quality of response at the end of training, and what wowed us was how much better all the responses were. We were just hoping that going to this new positive thing would be kinder-gentler and we'd still get what we had. We never, never imagined we would get better and better responses than historically the school had ever had. Melissa Breau: That's fantastic. I know there are a lot of people out there who are in that exact position, and they're surrounded by so many trainers who are doing things other ways. They feel like they're fighting that battle, so I think that's really useful for folks to hear. What about for those folks that are out there, maybe they're on the edge, or maybe they're in the process of crossing over, I think anyone who has done that knows it's not easy. Do you have any advice for those folks? Michele Pouliot: The best advice I can give for someone who wants to cross over, they're in the process, is realize that learning never goes away. I think in the traditional training world you get to a point — and I say this not just from my experience, but being around so many traditional trainers for so many years in the '70s and '80s — you get to a point where you think you've learned everything. It's a little phenomenon. It's like, I'm there, I've got it, I've done my thing, and now I just keep practicing it. As a positive reinforcement trainer I quickly realized that I didn't know anything about training. It was like, wow, I might be good at actually doing some certain things with animals, but I had never even thought about how the science would affect everything that I'm doing. So realizing that it doesn't end. When I first joined the faculty of Clicker Expo, Karen Pryor's faculty, I was totally intimidated by being on the faculty. It's like, Oh my god, all these people, they are so much better than me. And then I started getting more comfortable after a few years, but every time I went, I realized I still feel like a novice. Every single time I go to an Expo, I'm learning something else from a faculty member, or two or three of them, that I went, wow, I never even looked at it that way. That has not ended, so I realized it's an open book. It's an open end that never stops. And if you do stop and you say, “I've learned enough, this is all I need to know,” that's sad to me because there's so much more available to you, even within your own little world and how you're using it, because it's constantly got the ability to give you more information and make you even better and better at training both the animal and the student, the person. Melissa Breau: Even if you've learned, say, everything that was out up to a year ago, when you really talk to some of the leading trainers out there, there are always new ideas that they're trying and they're testing and they're playing with, and then going out there and sharing. Michele Pouliot: Exactly, exactly. Even through things like this, a podcast. You're listening to a podcast and you go, “Oh, well, that's interesting. I never quite heard that before.” Or you hear it said a different way, and even if all that gives you is ooh, when I teach that next time, I have another way to say that that might make more sense to that individual person who I'm having trouble getting that concept across to. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. I know that that, for me, was a big, big thing when I was teaching pet dog people was that I'd often sit in the class, or listen to somebody talk, and you just come away with, “Oh, well, that was a really great analogy. That was a really good way of phrasing that,” that you can reuse or turn around. Michele Pouliot: For sure, for sure. And to me, I really always look at myself as when I'm working with somebody, an individual and their animal, I'm never really teaching the animal. I'm teaching them. So it's my job to be able to be a hugely successful communicator and adjust on the fly when it's not working, because obviously the way I'm explaining it is not working, so I've got to find another way. Melissa Breau: I know that I mentioned in the intro you've done competitive obedience and agility, and that today you mostly compete in musical freestyle. For those who maybe aren't super-familiar with the sport, can you share a little bit about what it is and how it's judged? Michele Pouliot: Most everybody has at some point in the Winter Olympics watched the ice-skating. If you look at that event, the Olympic ice skating, and the short program, long program — years ago they also had the figures that they don't do anymore because it wasn't very interesting to watch — but it's very similar in that you have a piece of music, and what you're doing is you and your dog are performing certain behaviors and you're interpreting the music. So freestyle, in its own right, is meaning anything you want to do. Anything goes, so it gives you the open ability to choose a lot of interesting things to do. Most organizations that you can compete under, and there's about four or five organizations worldwide, do have some limit in freestyle for safety. In other words, the one limit can be as long as it looks safe for human and dog. Other than that, there really isn't a limit, other than don't do something in really bad taste, for instance. But if you look at the Olympic ice-skating, in that they are judged both technical and artistic, it's the same thing. In most organizations you have two basic element types you're being judged on, which is the technical aspect of the performance, including the precision, including how things flowed, and then you have the artistic, which is the creative part, how unique was this, how emotional was it, was it funny, was it dramatic, was it just really amazingly entertaining. If you look at it with that ice skating analogy, I think you'll realize, yeah, that's an easy to understand sport. It is still a bit of a subjective sport, meaning you could have the exact same performance in front of two different judges and they may judge it a little differently. But that's not really any different than if you get in a high level of competitive obedience. You're looking at who's going to win the classes a half-point ahead of the other, and that could be a subjective judgment between judges, so one judge saw it as a perfect sit and one judge saw it as a half-point-off sit. So no matter what, the subjectivity comes into most sports, agility being one that probably not. The dog either does the … but you still have some judgments about did he make the contact point, did he miss it, so it is a subjective sport. The cool thing about the sport is everyone going in the ring is doing something different, so you're not watching the same routine, like an obedience routine or the agility course. You're not seeing the same thing again and again. Every single person that goes in the ring is doing something different, even if you — by horrors — happen to have the same music as somebody else, which has happened to me. It happened to me. But they're still totally different routines because you have a different person and a different dog interpreting it. So it's very cool that it's your own creation. I have tons of video of my dogs doing competitive obedience at way back Games Nationals, really cool stuff, and agility runs. Do I ever pull that footage out and watch it? Not really. But do I pull out my old freestyle routines and watch those? I do. It's more like you created art yourself, you and your dog together created this thing, and nobody else has done that thing. It's something that you did, and when you are in freestyle long enough that you're losing dogs, obviously they die, I mean, that was the first time that hit me was when I was watching my Springer Spaniel Cabo's performance to Phantom of the Opera at a seminar. Somebody wanted to see it, and I showed it for the first time after he had passed, and I mean I got really emotional because it wasn't just seeing him on the screen as much as all that we put into that routine to make it an entertaining routine. The cool thing to me about freestyle, which is why I got so excited about it when I discovered it, is everything keeps changing. It isn't that you get to this high level and then you're doing the same skills and maintaining those same skills. You're always trying to do something new, inventive, because of the piece of music you've picked. It brings out the creativity and it really pushes you as a dog trainer. So it's been wonderful for me because it keeps pushing me to what is the next thing I'm going to clicker train — not necessarily that I'm going to use it in the next routine, but maybe the routine after that. So it really does help me, personally, get inspired and motivated to train, because my goal is to come up with some sort of performance that is entertaining to the audience. I just love that. Melissa Breau: You obviously bring it to the sport. You're very passionate about it. Is there anything, in your opinion, in particular that has led to your success? Michele Pouliot: I think for anyone's success, you have to say you're obviously doing good training. Again, it's motivating to me to keep pushing myself to become a better and better trainer for that reason, because it's going to come out in the performance. Creativity is something that I think I probably was born with, because I always had a wild imagination, and my brother is a very creative person too. I actually don't know how to teach people creativity, but you can get a lot of great ideas from just watching Broadway plays, movies, shows, you can get some great ideas for what might make a very cool routine. I would have to say that I entered this sport at a point in my career when I'd only been clicker training on my own with my own animals for maybe four or five years when I got into freestyle. But I had already learned the power of it for teaching really great behaviors, entertaining-type behaviors, so that really inspired me to, like, what else can I do? When you envision something in a routine that might seem a little up there — meaning, well, maybe I shouldn't really expect that I can make it look that great by teaching a dog to do something like that — and then you actually do it, that's really rewarding for yourself as a trainer, but rewarding in that you were able to show the audience something. It also is a really good ambassador for clicker training, because when you see a good freestyle performance, the one thing you know is there are behaviors you just watch that you know you couldn't train any other way except with clicker training because it wouldn't work. There's no way you could teach that traditional. It just wouldn't happen. Melissa Breau: I know we're getting close to the end here, and there are three questions I always ask at the end of my first interview with someone. The first one is what's the dog-related accomplishment that you're proudest of — and I feel like you probably have some good ones. Michele Pouliot: I kind of feel like I have two different worlds that I've been in. One is a very serious type of work with the guide dog world and the other is my hobby in the sports. I have to say that being able to look back on my career with the guide dog industry, knowing that I've made a big change, now I am one of the catalysts that's really helped to move that whole industry forward, certainly is something I'm extremely proud of and makes me feel really content that I left that career, officially left the career, when everything was really moving along. That would be the guide dog side. The dog-related side would probably be just individual great performances I've had with my wonderful canine partners. When you said it, I probably had to think of my first Aussie in freestyle, Listo, who passed in 2014. But we've had some incredible performances. I don't know if I can pick one out. But one thing that he did do that no other dog has done is he — I know I should say “he and I together,” but I think of him as such an amazing dog performer. He was like an actor. He was so good at this that I felt like he was carrying me through some of the performances. He not only scored perfect scores from judges once, he did it twenty-four times. It is incredible, and a few of those were at international competitions where there was a judging panel of three judges, and all three judges gave him perfect scores. And I realize gave us perfect scores. But I would have to say that probably is one of the highlights of my hobby career. Just a couple of weekends ago, my young Aussie, we debuted a brand-new routine, and it's a very cool routine. I'm very, very proud of this routine. In fact, we dedicated it to Listo. It's a very cool routine, and he did it so well for his first time. I was totally blown away with how well he did, and he got a perfect score. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Michele Pouliot: For my young boy to get a perfect score was a really cool thing. So there I gave you the serious side of dog training and the fun side. Melissa Breau: Congrats on the new perfect score. That's awesome. Michele Pouliot: Thank you. Melissa Breau: The second question on my list is about training advice, and I wanted to ask what the best piece of training advice you've ever heard is. Michele Pouliot: Oh, so many to choose from. I am going to reach down deep to the first one I ever remember hearing that changed my life, and that was Linda Tellington. In 1970, I was having trouble working with a horse. She stopped me, and she walked over and very quietly said, “Listen to him.” And ever since then, I listen so hard to my learners, and that includes horses, dogs, people that I'm teaching. It's listening, paying attention to what's happening, because they're giving you so much information that so many people ignore. So I think that would be the first one, because it has affected me, it's so much a part of who I am when I train is really noticing what's happening quickly, not waiting until we get five minutes into it to go, “Oh, I guess that's not working.” Then the other one would be Dr. Phil's mantra, “How's that working for you?” Melissa Breau: I like that. Michele Pouliot: I say that at seminars all the time. I say it to myself. It's like somebody comes up with all these questions, “Why is he doing that? Well, I've been doing it this way.” And I go, “Well, how's that working for you?” It's a great mantra, so I find myself going back to that. It actually is usually quite appropriate for most situations to ask yourself that, or to ask someone else, so I'll just stick with those two for now. Melissa Breau: Absolutely, and it relates back to the first one. If you're not listening and you ask yourself, “How's that working for you?” it's going to remind you... My last question here: Who is somebody else in the training world that you look up to? Michele Pouliot: That would probably be Ken Ramirez and Kathy Sdao, both. They have been my lights in the distance when I started this guide dog movement to change to positive reinforcement training. Both of them … without them, I don't know if I could have made it happen, because they again were so supportive of what we were doing, and yet knowing a lot of what we were doing they did not like at that time. They were able to put blinders on and ignore some of what they were looking at, and focus on the stuff we were getting better at, knowing that when more time went, we'd be ready for the next step to improve. And then, on a personal note, when I joined the faculty, just to have them be so wonderfully friendly and open and warm, and so interested in the way I think about training and what I do. They've just always been really dear to me. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Thank you so much for coming on, Michele! This has been great. Michele Pouliot: You're welcome, and I thank you for having me. I enjoyed every bit of it. Melissa Breau: And thanks to our listeners for tuning in! We'll be back next week, this time with Amy Cook to talk about the true meaning of a threshold and how to manage your activity while you work on changing your dog's feelings about the thing. Credits: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Summary: Nancy Tucker is a certified pet dog trainer and behavior consultant in Sherbrooke, Quebec. She regularly teaches seminars, webinars, and workshops on dog training, dog behavior, and the business end of training to dog owners, trainers, and veterinary staff in Canada, the U.S., and in Europe. She specializes in common behavior issues that affect the family dog, including more complex issues like aggression and anxiety. Nancy has written numerous articles on dog behavior and is a regular contributor to the Whole Dog Journal. At FDSA, she's offering a great class on separation anxiety and a new class on desensitization and counterconditioning for the April Session. Links Nancy's Website Next Episode:  To be released 3/30/2018, featuring Nancy Tucker to talk about desensitization and counter conditioning. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Nancy Tucker. Nancy is a certified pet dog trainer and behavior consultant in Sherbrooke, Quebec. She regularly teaches seminars, webinars, and workshops on dog training, dog behavior, and the business end of training to dog owners, trainers, and veterinary staff in Canada, the U.S., and in Europe. She specializes in common behavior issues that affect the family dog, including more complex issues like aggression and anxiety. Nancy has written numerous articles on dog behavior and is a regular contributor to the Whole Dog Journal. At FDSA, she's offering a great class on separation anxiety and a new class on desensitization and counterconditioning for the April Session. Hi Nancy, welcome to the podcast! Nancy Tucker: Hi Melissa, hi everyone, I'm very happy to be here. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to have you here. To get us started out, can you just share a little information about the dog you share your life with and what you're working on with him? Nancy Tucker: Sure. I have a Border Terrier named Bennigan. He's not quite 9 months old yet, but he's creeping up on 9 months, so right now we're working on helping him navigate canine adolescence. That means we're teaching him the basics, with an emphasis on things like impulse control, and good, solid recalls, and trying to remain calm. Melissa Breau: With two classes on the calendar, I want to make sure we get to talk about both of them, but I wanted to start with the shiny new one. You named it “Feelings Change.” What inspired that name? Nancy Tucker: Well, it was catchy, because we're talking about feelings and we're talking about changing feelings. In training, we focus a lot on shaping behavior, and when we're dealing with behavior issues that are rooted in fear, we need to address the emotions that are driving that behavior. Lucky for us, there's a way to zero in on those emotions and help our dogs change how they feel about something, and that's huge. Melissa Breau: I know the core is desensitization and counterconditioning; I mentioned that during the intro. I think anyone who's been in the dog world for a while has probably heard those words thrown about, or at least seen the abbreviations, usually ds/cc, but can you explain what they actually mean? Nancy Tucker: In a nutshell, when we're talking about desensitization, we're describing a process that involves exposing our dog to something they fear, and that's done in a very measured and systematic way. We would start exposing them in a way that is completely non-threatening to them. It doesn't induce any fear at all, and we gradually work our way up from there. That's desensitization. Counterconditioning involves pairing the scary thing with something that elicits a positive emotional response in the dog, so now we're working with building an association. When that's done correctly, we can actually change the dog's emotional response in such a way that he's no longer fearful of the thing that he used to be afraid of. Typically we're aiming for a neutral response, that he's just not afraid of that thing anymore, but if we're lucky, we might even go as far as to create a positive emotional response, which means that he actually now feels good about the trigger that used to scare him. So we're talking about two separate and distinct methods here, desensitization and counterconditioning, but together they complement each other and they're very effective in treating fearful responses. Melissa Breau: Listeners of the podcast have definitely heard us talk before about the idea of creating a positive conditioned emotional response, or a CER. How is that concept, that idea of creating a positive CER, different from what you're talking about with desensitization and counterconditioning? Nancy Tucker: CERs — I'm giggling because now every time I hear the term CER, all I can think about is “ball feelings,” as they're known at Fenzi, thanks to … for those who don't know, that was coined on Hannah Branigan's podcast on CERs. When we're talking about CERs, we're dealing with creating a positive response to something that was previously neutral to the dog. So we're starting from scratch, basically, with a clean slate. When we're talking about desensitization and counterconditioning, we're not starting from scratch. The dog has already formed an association with something, and it's not a good one. To give a visual here, if creating a positive CER is like building a brand new house on a vacant lot, with only brand-new materials, desensitization and counterconditioning is like remodeling an old house. You first need to tear down some things, and you're never quite sure what you're going to find when you start knocking down walls. Anybody who's remodeled a house, I think, can probably relate to that. So maybe you discover you can rebuild a whole new fabulous design on a really solid foundation, or maybe you'll need to make some adjustments and compromises along the way, and build something wonderful but not quite a brand new design. Does that make sense? Melissa Breau: Absolutely. I love that analogy. That's fantastic — the idea of building from scratch versus remodeling. And for listeners who aren't Hannah fans, Hannah's podcast is “Drinking From The Toilet,” and I will try and find the specific episode that Nancy's talking about to include a link to it in the show notes. To get back to our conversation, the general concept sounds simple enough — the idea that we want to build this positive association — but I know a lot of people really struggle to do this stuff well. What are some of the common pitfalls that lead folks to struggle and to be unsuccessful? Nancy Tucker: The reason that I want to teach this course in the first place is because of these common pitfalls. The course focuses on the skills and mechanics that we need to have in order to be successful at desensitization and counterconditioning. There are natural laws at play here that we just can't get around. Things need to happen in a very specific way in order to work. We can't cut corners, and we can't speed up the process, and honestly, that's something that we're all guilty of when we're training our dogs. We can be really impatient, and we try to skip a few steps to reach our goal just a little bit faster. Sometimes we're lucky and our dog figures things out on his own, so hurrying up ends up being very reinforcing for us because it worked, so we do it over and over, again and again. But, when we're treating fears, that's just something we can't do, and understanding the process better and practicing our own mechanical skills is the best thing that we can do to finally be able to help our dogs overcome their fear. And it's actually a very rewarding process. Melissa Breau: Can you share a little more about the class? How you approach teaching this to your human learners to help them go through that process with their canine partners? Nancy Tucker: At the start of the class we'll all be on the same page, so we'll all be practicing the same set of skills, regardless of everyone's individual training experience. And you don't need training experience to do this class. It's quite an eye-opener. Once you start to really break down your own mechanical skills — and naturally this is a Fenzi class, so everything is done in the spirit of positivity and support, and there's no judgment — so there will be nitpicking, for sure, there'll be a lot of analyzing mechanics, but it's not about judgment. It's about helping to perfect these skills. So a lot of nitpicking, but in a very good way. The students' skills will grow from this experience, and they'll be able to transfer these skills to their other training projects as well. So at first we'll be making sure everyone fully understands the process and practices their mechanical skills, and then we'll tackle some actual issues. Students will be able to work on changing their dogs' fearful response to something. Melissa Breau: I know the other class you're teaching in April is on separation anxiety. How is separation anxiety different from what we're talking about here – from general desensitization and counterconditioning – and how does that lead to how you treat it? Nancy Tucker: Treating separation anxiety definitely involves desensitization, and a lot of it, in fact. It's the meat of the program. Desensitization is the meat of any program to treat separation anxiety. We very slowly and very gradually expose the dog to the thing that he fears the most, which is being alone or being separated from a particular family member. We make sure the dog only experiences being alone for however amount of time he can handle without experiencing fear or distress. That can be a very time-consuming process, so again, this is one of those things that we can't rush and we can't cut corners. But along with some environmental management, desensitization is really the most effective way to treat separation anxiety. Melissa Breau: I think a lot of the time when people talk about separation anxiety, they are actually talking about a few different things. It's not necessarily one of those terms that has a hard and fast definition in common use. Do you mind sharing what separation anxiety is — your definition — and what some of the symptoms are of true separation anxiety? Nancy Tucker: We tend to use separation anxiety as an umbrella term for what are essentially a few different issues, so most of the time, we're using it incorrectly. But it's so widespread as a label for a common problem that it's easier to use it. I know that's not correct, it's not scientifically correct, but sometimes when everyone misuses a term the same way, it's just as effective to use the term, if that makes any sense. In truth, what most people are dealing with when they say that their dog has separation anxiety is a dog who fears being alone. That is more common than actual separation anxiety. He fears isolation and he panics when he's left alone. True separation anxiety is when a dog experiences distress if he's apart from a particular person or persons. A dog who suffers from fear of isolation will be fine as long as someone, anyone, is with him. A dog who suffers from separation anxiety will experience distress even if someone else is there with him, if that makes sense. Some of the telltale signs that a dog is experiencing distress during your absence, if you're listening to this and you suspect that your dog may be suffering from this, some of these signs — and what I'm about to mention is in no particular order of importance here, and the dog might display one or several of these behaviors, and at different intensities … and before I go into describing what these symptoms might be, I want to point out, too, that the level of intensity of a symptom does not correlate to the level of severeness of the fear. If a dog overtly displays symptoms, it doesn't mean that he is more fearful than the dog who cowers in the corner and does not move all day. That dog could be equally as in distress. Anyway, some of the signs are vocalization, barking, whining. Actually, that's how quite a few people learn that there is a problem is when their neighbor complains about barking during their absence. That's often the first clue. They don't know until somebody complains about it. So vocalization is one. Excessive drooling is another. You might come home and find a puddle of drool that some people might mistake for pee, but it's actually drool. There can be that much of it on the floor, or the dog's bed is soaking wet. Anorexia is a very common one as well. The dog won't touch his food or a treat toy. Sometimes I discover a problem when a client has called me for another issue. When I'm doing my history intake, I ask them how often the dog eats, or when is he fed, and they say, “We feed him in the morning before we go to work, but he doesn't touch that. He's not hungry in the morning. He doesn't eat until we get home.” And I find out that when they get home, the dog devours his food. That's a sign to me, if the dog hasn't touched his food all day from the moment that they leave, that there may be an issue there, that he might not appreciate being alone and there could be a problem there. So anorexia. Obvious signs that the dog has scratched or chewed an area, especially near an exit, near the door that the owner uses to leave the house. Peeing and defecating, usually a lot of it during their absence, even just a short absence. And self-mutilation, signs of excessive licking or chewing at the paws. If you're not sure what your dog might be doing when you're not home, set up a camera and video him, or watch a live feed. There's lots of apps now that we can use to keep an eye on our dogs. Some dogs might pace while you're getting ready to leave. They're pacing and then they continue for another five minutes after you're gone, but then they settle down quickly and they go to sleep without a problem. Or, on the other hand, some dogs might appear perfectly chill for a few minutes after you leave, and then they begin to panic. So you can't know unless you record it or watch a live feed. Melissa Breau: Right. And technology is our friend, for sure. Nancy Tucker: For sure. Melissa Breau: Do we know what actually causes separation anxiety? It seems like some dogs struggle with it and others are never fazed at all. Is there a reason? Nancy Tucker: That's a really, really good question, and I'll start by talking about what doesn't cause separation anxiety. Owners. Owners' behavior does not cause their dog to develop separation anxiety. If you have a dog who panics when left alone, it is not your fault. It's not because of something that you did. It's amazing how many people feel, or are told, that it's because of something that they did. It is not because you've spoiled him. In fact, if you have a puppy, helping him feel secure by responding to his needs will go farther towards building a confident adult dog than if you try to use tough love by letting him cry it out at night. Don't be afraid to shower your puppy with attention and to provide that sense of security. You do need to teach your young dog that being alone is nothing to be afraid of, but you can do that systematically. Back to causes. For starters, dogs who suffer from this problem, they tend to already be predisposed to having anxiety issues. Just like people, some of us might be more genetically predisposed to experience mental health issues, and this is true for dogs as well. It is worth mentioning that there is correlation between a few things in separation anxiety, but it can't be said for sure that these things actually cause it. For example, dogs who are surrendered to a shelter might display some isolation distress once they're adopted into a new home. Actually, that's pretty common. But it's possible that these dogs had this issue in their previous homes, and maybe that's the reason that some of them were surrendered in the first place. It's not always easy to tell. So it's not always accurate to say that a dog develops a fear of isolation because he was surrendered to a shelter or abandoned somewhere. Another possible correlation is dogs who are sick as very, very young puppies might develop separation anxiety as adults. And again, there's correlation there, but nothing to say that this is a cause. What I see most commonly is after a major change in a dog's life, like a move or a major disruption, a divorce, or a huge disruption in a dog's routine or schedule, that can lead to this type of problem. But again, in most cases we're talking about a dog who is already predisposed to experiencing anxiety. So it's not ultimately because you moved into a new house that you caused your dog to develop this problem. Rather, the move may have triggered an anxiety disorder that was already there but hadn't yet manifested into a behavior issue, if that makes sense. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. It's really interesting. I hadn't realized there were those specific things that were correlated with the issue. That's news to me, so it's interesting. I know you're not a vet, but I know that on the syllabus or in the description you mention that you do touch on meds in the class. I was curious if you'd talk about that a little bit. How do you determine if a student should talk to their vet about their options? Nancy Tucker: I really respect my limitations as a trainer and a behavior consultant, and I avoid talking about meds, except to say that everyone should do their own research and find out what's available to you to help your dog deal with an anxiety issue, and there are quite a few options out there. So if your dog is at risk of hurting himself — self-mutilation, or a dog who is scratching or throwing himself through glass, which I experienced that myself, a dog who is simply overwhelmed with fear or anxiety in general — I strongly urge you to look into medication to help him out. I will say this much: medication can be a huge help. It can create a sense of calm in a dog so that he's able to learn the new behaviors that you want to teach him. It puts him in a better state of mind to learn and for behavior modification to take place. A lot of the antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds out there, they will allow for learning to take place, so in other words, they aren't simply a sedative that can affect short-term memory. So that would be an important thing to discuss with the vet. If you're looking for medication to help your dog deal with anxiety or immense fear, you want to use a medication that will allow him to learn. The whole point of using medication to treat separation anxiety is to be able to work through a desensitization program so that the dog can eventually be comfortable alone at home. Melissa Breau: Right. You mention in the class description that, when done right, Gold videos in this class may be sort of … boring, I think is the word you used. Why is that? Nancy Tucker: This is true. This is very true. There isn't a whole lot of action going on when you're teaching a dog to remain calm. Videos are good, and I can still help guide students by watching what's happening in a video. I can dissect the dog's behavior and body language, and I can make recommendations based on the layout of the home, because we talk a lot about finding that home alone space, and sometimes it's good to have a second set of eyes to look at the layout and see what might work, or even based on the student's own movements. So video is good. I might see something in the environment that the student has missed. Sometimes you're just so familiar with something that even when it's right in front of you, you don't see it. But the bottom line is that we are literally aiming for the dog to look bored and chillaxed. So Gold students don't have to post video, actually, but that's OK, because we tend to do a lot of problem-solving and creative planning and troubleshooting on the forums through discussions. During this class the discussion boards are really important. If you want to follow a case, follow the discussion, because even without a video there is a lot of back and forth and a lot of troubleshooting going on. The Gold-level students are still getting a personal coach as they work through this, and because every single case is completely different, all students get to follow and learn from each individual scenario, which is great. In the last couple of sessions we had a lot of trainers join, so I think they benefitted from seeing the different types of cases. Melissa Breau: There's certainly nothing to sneeze at there about taking a Gold spot just because videos don't play a big role. In an area like this, where there's so often those feelings of, “Oh my god, am I doing it wrong?” or “Oh my god, my dog's panicking,” having somebody to hold your hand and say, “No, actually, it's OK, let's take a step back, let's do it this way,” that can be a huge, huge help. Nancy Tucker: Absolutely. It's great to have a second set of eyes with a problem like this, for sure. Melissa Breau: I wanted to ask about common misconceptions or places where students often go wrong when it comes to working on this kind of thing — separation anxiety, that is. Can you share any tips or suggestions? Nancy Tucker: I think that we tend to circle back to the most common problem of all when treating a behavior issue that's based on an emotion like fear, and I mentioned it earlier: we move too fast. We try to rush things. Sometimes I get the feeling that the students somehow feel bad that they don't have more to show, that they feel they need to push it along in order to look like they're progressing. But that's OK, because I know that behavior change takes time, and I am far more giddy about seeing a student take their time and really progress at the dog's speed, whatever that may be for that dog. When I see that, I know that the student is on the right track and they'll get there eventually. So again, the common problem is just moving too fast. Melissa Breau: If students are trying to decide whether either of these classes is appropriate for their dog, I wanted to ask if you have any advice. How can they decide if their dog is a good candidate? Nancy Tucker: Now might be a good time for me to mention that the desensitization and counterconditioning class is not for those dogs who might display aggression towards the thing that they fear. For example, if a dog might bite a visitor entering his home because he's afraid of strangers, this class is not the place for that kind of issue. That's because I would much rather deal with aggression in person. Other than that, what I'd like to see are students working on minor issues throughout the term, throughout the session. I'll bet almost everyone can name at least one or two things their dog is afraid of. Students might think that their dog doesn't like something because he avoids it, but really their dog might be afraid of that thing, and this class would be a perfect opportunity to work on that. They'll get to practice their training mechanics on a minor issue, like a dog avoiding the vacuum cleaner, for example, or getting brushed, or getting their nails clipped. Then they'll be in a better position to handle a bigger issue later on, like aggressive behaviors that are fear-based, for example. Another important point about the desensitization and counterconditioning class is that whatever trigger the students choose, they need to make sure that they have complete control over their dog's access to that trigger while they work on it. In other words, if you plan to help your dog overcome his fear of the sound of kids playing and screaming on the street, you need to make sure you can control when and how your dog hears that sound. You can see how that can be really, really difficult. We can't control when the kids are going to be out playing, but we can maybe try to control the dog's access to that, to manage the environment or something creatively so that he's not exposed to that. That's just an example. The point that I'm trying to make is that we need to have complete control over that stimulus in order to work through the program, because the only way that desensitization and counterconditioning will work is if we're able to exercise that kind of control over the stimulus. As for the Home Alone class, you don't actually need to have a dog with a separation anxiety issue to take the class. Like I mentioned before, over the last couple of sessions we had lots of trainers take the class who wanted to learn more about helping their clients. It's also a good match for people with puppies who want to teach their dog to be alone in a structured way. In fact, a lot of the lecture videos are of my own dog, Bennigan, when he was just a puppy learning to be home alone. Melissa Breau: I did want to dive in a little deeper there , if you don't mind, and ask if there are any examples that come to mind of students with problems that would be a particularly good fit for the desensitization and counterconditioning class. Are there particular problems that you're hoping to get, or that you think might be particularly well suited for that kind of class? Nancy Tucker: Like I said, the two main criteria are that is not an aggression issue in that there is no danger that the dog will bite, so a dog who is extremely … I don't like to use the term “reactive” because it doesn't really describe what's happening, but a dog who might behave aggressively or lunge and bark at the sight of another dog — this is not a good class for that. I believe that Amy Cook has a good class for that. This is not a good class for that because I personally don't want to be dealing with aggression, except maybe resource guarding. If a dog is displaying object guarding and does not have a bite history, that is something that we might be able to handle, but again, I would rather speak with a student first and have them communicate with me to see exactly what's happening, because that might not be fear-based, and when we're talking about desensitization and counterconditioning, I think that what we're aiming for here is to help a dog overcome a fear. So no outright aggression, and to have control over the stimulus. That is the one thing that is an absolute must. So to answer your question, no, there is no specific thing that's carte blanche, and if students are unsure, they can just communicate with me and we can figure it out together. Melissa Breau: Excellent. I know that your class descriptions mentioned something about CEUs. Do you mind sharing with listeners — and I'm sure there are some ears that just perked up there who may be trainers trying to get those Continuing Education credits — what the deal is there? Nancy Tucker: Both classes are approved for 21 CEUs for training for those who are certified with a CCPDT. I specified “for training,” because with the CCPDT — the Certification Council For Professional Dog Trainers — there are training credits and there are behavior credits. These are 21 training CEUs for each class. Students can register at any level, whether it's Gold, Silver, or Bronze, and throughout the term they'll need to collect some code words that will be peppered throughout the lectures and the Gold discussion forums. So they have to follow and pay close attention to the course as it progresses, the lectures and discussion forums. And hey, 21 CEUs is almost two-thirds of a full recertification, so that's not a bad deal. If you take both classes, you get 42 CEUs right there. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. That's really a fantastic opportunity for those people who are out there trying to get those. Thanks so much for coming back on the podcast, Nancy! It's great to chat. Nancy Tucker: Thanks for having me, Melissa. Always a pleasure. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thank you to all of our wonderful listeners for tuning in! We'll be back next week with Julie Daniels to discuss confidence-building through shaping. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Credits: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.