Podcasts about fdsa

What to listen for:In part two of their discussion with the brilliant Denise Fenzi, our hosts Robin Greubel and Crystal Wing explore the delicate dance between striving for precision and cherishing the quirks of canine behavior!“Your dog has to have a lot of ‘want to.' If they don't have a lot of ‘want to,' they're not the right dog for the job.”Denise explains why picking the right dog for the job from the get-go is foundational to success. When you bring a dog with the right desire to the table, your job as a handler–controlling and shaping that desire–becomes much easier.She also talks about identifying essential behaviors like a reliable whistle recall and advocates for a training philosophy driven by motivation and enthusiasm rather than obligation. She tackles ethical dilemmas faced in high-pressure operations and tells us to always prioritize the well-being of both the dog and the handler.Denise also discusses the controversial use of e-collars and the pursuit of perfect recall. She explores the sensitive topic of rehoming, advocating for it as a positive solution when there is a mismatch between the dog's needs and the owner's expectations.“Leadership is about setting a path. You can't take on a leadership position if you're not willing to say unpopular things.”Denise gives her thoughts on leadership and personal growth through the lens of dog training. Early socialization, adaptability, and setting boundaries are crucial themes in building confidence and respect in dogs.Finally, Denise tells us why she believes dogs are being over-socialized today, and why she's totally against doggie daycare for puppies!Key Topics:Reinforcing Nonnegotiable Behaviors (02:28)Choosing the Right Dog for the Job (10:00)Rehoming Your Dog (22:05)Denise's Thoughts on Negative Online Discourse (22:34)Setting Boundaries and Becoming a Better Leader (32:11)Giving Your Dog Freedom (43:05)Box Feeding (47:33)What's Next for Denise? (55:30)Takeaways (58:22)Resources:Fenzi Dog Sports AcademyWe want to hear from you:Check out the K9 Detection Collaborative FB page and comment on the episode post!K9Sensus Detection Dog Trainer AcademyK9Sensus Foundation can be found on Facebook and Instagram. We have a Trainer's Group on Facebook!Scentsabilities Nosework is also on Facebook. Here is a Facebook group you should join!Crystal Wing K9 Coach can be found here at CB K9 and here at Evolution Working Dog Club. Also, check out her Functional Obedience Class here.You can follow us for notifications of upcoming episodes, find us at k9detectioncollaborative.com to enjoy the freebies, and tell your friends so you can keep the conversations going.Jingle by: www.mavericksings.com

You may have seen her on TikTok or Instagram... this week the dog trainer known for sharing her videos on social media is making an appearance here on the FDSA podcast! If you aren't already following her, you'll want to by the time you finish listening. 

How do you show up on social media? How do you balance your authentic self with the demands of the communities where you participate? Do you have an internal compass to guide you? And…how did FDSA start anyway?  If you struggle to find peace of social media, this live might help.   Follow my training! Instagram The High Drive Dog More online training! Fenzi Dog Sports Academy

Ever wondered what to expect at our annual in-person event? This week we'll hear from several people who have attended multiple events about what they love and why they keep coming back.

In this podcast we discussed the recent XL Bully ban in the UK, the difficulties of owning and training adolescent dogs and Kamal's experience in dog sports. Kamal Fernandez is a world renowned dog trainer and dog sport competitor. He has appeared on several TV shows, most recently Channel 4's The Dog Academy. Kamal has written two books, presented at Clicker Expo, FDSA's Lemonade Conference and much more. Use our code NB10 at N2N Canine Mills: www.n2ncaninemills.com/

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! 

Join Teri Martin, Melissa Breau, Hélène Lawler and Sara Brueske for a conversation about the "other" dog sports offered at FDSA — treibball, herding, and disc! 

Crystal shares the story of how she ended up doing bitey sports and Search and Rescue, and then gives us a sneak-peek at what she plans to cover in her upcoming FDSA-hosted webinar!

This episode is of interest for everyone on the canine nerd level scale: level 1, 2 and 3! Chrissi talks to their friend and FDSA colleague Sue Yanoff, DVM, about whether the ree-roaming dogs of Latin America or the average western-style pet have a better life: what does the data say? How much facts do we have, and when do we need to rely on opinions? What is a dog's natural environment and behavior, and what, in fact, IS a free-roaming dog ... OR a pet ... in the first place? Along with Chrissi, you'll learn about veterinary practice, and along with Sue, you'll learn about Chrissi's and Game's free-roaming friends. LINKS & RESOURCES For pictures and videos of the two injured free-roamers we discuss, see https://chrissisdogtraining.com/one-wild-and-precious-e7-dog-geekery-pet-dogs-or-free-roaming-dogs-whos-got-it-better/ For a weekly glimpse into the life of free-roamers, subscribe to Chrissi's Free Ranging Dogs Youtube channel. Sue Yanoff, DVM: Sue's bio The webinars by Sue Yanoff and Jessica Hekman ("To spay spay or not to spay, that is the question") ran live on September 22, but may still be available for purchase here if you're quick! I (Chrissi) attended both of them live, and highly recommend both parts! Click here for more info on Sue's canine sports medicine class! It will run again in April 2023 at FDSA (registration opens on May 22, 2023). Get in touch with Chrissi: www.chrissisdogtraining.com chrissi.schranz [at] gmail.com https://www.facebook.com/chrissi.schranz/ https://www.instagram.com/adogisabondbetweenstrangers/ Additional resources: Chrissi's Youtube Channel on Free-Ranging dogs Studies alluded to in this conversation (chronological): Silja Griss, Stefanie Riemer, Charlotte Warembourg, Filipe Maximiano Sousa, Ewaldus Wera, Monica Berger-Gonzalez, Danilo Alvarez, Petrus Malo Bulu, Alexis López Hernández, Pablo Roquel, Salome Dürr, "If they could choose: How would dogs spend their days? Activity patterns in four populations of domestic dogs," Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Volume 243 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2021.105449. Beck, Alan M., "The Ecology of Stray Dogs: A Study of Free-Ranging Urban Animals" (1973). Purdue University Press e-books. Book 3. Paul, M., Sen Majumder, S., Sau, S. et al. "High early life mortality in free-ranging dogs is largely influenced by humans." Sci Rep 6, 19641 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep19641

Canine nerd level scale: 1.5 (for interested pet owners as well as enthusiastic dog folks who already know quite a bit) Chrissi, Peter and Amy Miller discuss their perspective on living or working with dogs who don't appreciate being touched by strangers. This episode consists of three distinct stories: Peter's experience as a dog walker, boarder, and vacation-experience provider, Amy's perspective as the owner of the lovely, but opinionated Marley and his protocol for meeting new (and familiar) people, and Chrissi's experience as a trainer working with people who share their lives with dogs who'd rather not be petted. We don't only talk about our personal experiences, but also speculate on where the human desire to use our hands to greet dogs may stem from - and why canines might consider this rude. Most importantly, we dispel the myth that the best way of greeting a new dog is by sticking your hand in their face to sniff. LINKS & RESOURCES Amy: Amy's Bio Amy is one of the masterminds that make sure FDSA runs smoothly. Amy, you are doing A LOT of those things that seem entirely mysterious to me. You're among the ones pulling the strings in the back, making sure the experience for everyone else - instructors as well as students - is smooth and intuitive. You are a helpdesk and tech magician, and I - just as all of our colleagues - deeply love and appreciate the work you do! Resources mentioned in this episode: Jennifer Summerfield, DVM - a great vet, dog trainer, and FDSA guest instructor (as well as Marley's trainer): https://www.drjensdogblog.com/ Friends of Control Unleashed FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/298300721554 Keep an eye out for Julie Daniels' upcoming CU classes at Fenzi Dog Sports Academy: https://www.fenzidogsportsacademy.com/people/786-people/faculty/3636-julie-daniels Get in touch with Peter: peterfrombelfast [at] gmail.com https://www.facebook.com/mcgarrypeterj Get in touch with Chrissi: www.chrissisdogtraining.com chrissi.schranz [at] gmail.com https://www.facebook.com/chrissi.schranz/ https://www.instagram.com/adogisabondbetweenstrangers/

2/3 on the dog geekery scale (for the somewhat knowledgeable dog enthusiast who wants to learn more) Chrissi defines reinforcement, talks about using food in training, how to make kibble more appealing, hacks to increase your dog's food drive, and how to tell whether your dog is pet dog weight, athletic weight or overweight. LINKS & RESOURCES Sue Ailsby's protocol for teaching your dog to eat Get in touch with Chrissi: www.chrissisdogtraining.com chrissi.schranz [at] gmail.com https://www.facebook.com/chrissi.schranz/ https://www.instagram.com/adogisabondbetweenstrangers/ Chrissi's August online class at Fenzi Dog Sports Academy: https://www.fenzidogsportsacademy.com/index.php/courses/12090 More awesome FDSA classes taught by my amazing colleagues (August term): https://www.fenzidogsportsacademy.com/schedule-and-syllabus

What skills do you need as you build from the basis to more advanced levels in nosework? Stacy and I talk about breaking that down and more — PLUS we share an exciting new announcement from FDSA!

Denise & I hung out with our very first guest, Erin Lynes, FDSA instructor and breeder of the most versatile labs around--in our humble opinion, that is... We talk about what temperament adds to versatility and those wrecking ball puppies we just can't resist! Plus, we get an insider look into the world of dock diving and learn about some skills you can train even before hitting the water. Enjoy!

Description: In this episode I catch up with FDSA founder Denise Fenzi and share a bit about what's happening behind the scenes at the school and what folks should keep an eye out for next year.

EP68: Fed Insider Trading, Pompeo vs Julian Assange, Another Health Care Worker Vaccine Deadline, FDSA: Boosters or nah?, NBA vs Vaccine - NFL Week 4 - NBA vs Vaccine - Andrew Wiggins unvaccinated https://sports.yahoo.com/unvaccinated-andrew-wiggins-cant-play-home-games-even-if-he-gets-religious-exemption-from-nba-212836170.html - Next wave of Vaccine mandates in NYS https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/home-care-agencies-project-widespread-staffing-shortages/ - Havana syndrome - FDA: Boosters or nah? https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-advisory-group-rejects-covid-boosters-limits-high-risk-groups-rcna2074 - Fed presidents resign insider trading https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fed-chair-powell-owned-least-15-million-municipal-bonds-ones-fed-bailed-out-2020 - Mike Pompeo vs Julian Assange - information brokers Glenn Greenwald https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/cia-reportedly-considered-kidnapping-assassinating-151233018.html ## About the Sports, Clicks & Politics Podcast SCAPP is a weekly podcast with a Livestream every Monday at 12pm eastern. Join hosts Shawn Hannon and Ben Hussong as they separate the latest news from the noise. The podcast has frequent guest interviews for additional perspectives in the worlds or sports, politics and beyond! Follow the show on social media Website: scappodcast.com Facebook: facebook.com/scappodcast Twitter: @SCAPPodcast Follow Shawn & Ben on social media Facebook: facebook.com/hannon44 Twitter: @hannon44 Facebook: facebook.com/ben.hussong.3 Twitter: @benhussong --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/scapp/support

Description:  With Sue retiring, Heather has stepped in to ensure students can continue to benefit from Sue's awesome Levels program at FDSA — for those not familiar with the program, we chat about how it came to be, and why Heather is excited to teach it!

Description:  Denise has a new project... and that means some changes for FDSA and some exciting plans for the future. We got on a call to talk about it.

Michael is a an internationally sought after keynote speaker and presenter on the topic of aggression at numerous events, conferences, and universities worldwide. He has mentored and presented to thousands of animal professionals in twelve different countries and has been a guest at every major dog training conference in the U.S. and Mexico including the APDT, IAABC, FDSA, Clicker Expo, Victoria Stilwell's DBC, PPG, CICA, Owners of Dog Daycares, and The Aggression in Dogs Conferences.Michael is fully Certified through the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants and is one of fewer than 300 CDBCs worldwide. He is the founder of the Aggression in Dogs Master Course  at aggressivedog.com and currently teaches trainers and behavior consultants in more than 25 countries how to work with aggression cases.Michael also has a great podcast called The Bitey end of the Dog. Interview Questions:Define dog aggression?What are the different types of dog aggression?How do dogs become aggressive?How important is sleep for young puppies?What about fear, anxiety, and stress?What about the owners stress and anxiety?What are dog behavior consultants and dog trainers seeing more of since COVID-19?Have you seen more young puppies with dog aggression?What are the first signs that new puppy owners should look for with their dog being aggressive?How can we help prevent or minimize the possibility of our puppies developing dog aggression. Do male dogs that get neutered become more aggressive?Visit Michaels website at https://aggressivedog.com/ Be sure to visit our website  https://www.puppytalkpodcast.com/Our sponsor is Top Gun Dog Training at https://topgundogtraining.com/Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/puppytalk)

Description:  The last year has been... eventful. Denise and Teri join me to chat about some of the changes at FDSA and some of the exciting things yet to come. 

Description:    On Dec. 8th FDSA will launch a brand new Nosework titling program as part of the TEAM titling options! Today we have Melissa, Julie, and Stacy on to talk about the program and what you can expect!  

Beide sprechen Über ihre ersten Schritte und Erfahrungen im Online Hunde Training, als Teilnehmer an diversen Angeboten und Programmen sowie als Anbieter von Webinaren, Live Chat Trainings uvm. Online Training bietet unsagbar viele Möglichkeiten und Vorteile. Internationale Vernetzung mit Trainern und Teilnehmern auf der ganzen Welt, Zugang zu nahezu jeglicher Art von Training und die flexible Einteilung sind nur Stichwörter dazu. Doch es gibt auch einige Nachteile, die in dieser Folge besprochen werden. Du hast Interesse am Angebot der Beiden? Dann schau dich auf deren Homepages um (siehe Links unten), sie freuen sich über deine Anfrage! Empfehlungen von Eva -> Zoomdogtraining -> Tromplo -> FDSA -> Behavior Works Empfehlungen von Flo -> SWDI Online Training für Spürhunde, Tracking und bald auch Funktioneller Gehorsam mit Flo -> Angebot von HTX workingdogs Live Webinare und Aufzeichnungen von Webinaren mit Flo -> Angebot von HTX workingdogs

Description:  Today we have on the new FDSA Moderators to chat a bit about their backgrounds and get to know them a bit more!

Description: Several of the FDSA Training Assistants join me to share their stories, tips for making it all the way through a class as a bronze or silver student, and more!

Description: After the cancellation of FDSA Training Camp 2020, FDSA and IAABC teamed up to turn the lemons life has dealt us into an extra special lemonade for the dog training community...

Description: The fabulous Leslie McDevitt joins me to talk about her latest book and upcoming FDSA webinar on Pattern Games... games she teaches to help with reactivity and build better focus.

Description: This week I had on Chelsey Protulipac, Ruth Ellis, and Megan Walsh to talk about their experiences at previous FDSA Training Camps now that registration is open for 2020! 

In this episode (38:52) Dr. Amy Cook joins Sarah and Esteban to talk about noise sensitivity in agility dogs. Dr. Cook earned her PhD in Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and has been training dogs and dog trainers for 25 years. Part 2 of 2. You Will Learn Why agility dogs can be very sensitive to noises. Common noises that often cause problems for agility dogs. How to implement the solution to noise issues. What type of conditioning you need to fix the problem. How to “prehab” rather than “rehab” your agility dog. Mentioned/Related Episode 230: Noise Sensitivity in the Agility Dog with Amy Cook – Part 1 Amy Cook’s website: Play Way Dogs Amy Cook’s online courses on FDSA

In this episode (35:32) Dr. Amy Cook joins Sarah and Esteban to talk about noise sensitivity in agility dogs. Dr. Cook earned her PhD in Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and has been training dogs and dog trainers for 25 years. Part 1 of 2. You Will Learn Why agility dogs can be very sensitive to noises. Common noises that often cause problems for agility dogs. How to implement the solution to noise issues. What type of conditioning you need to fix the problem. How to “prehab” rather than “rehab” your agility dog. Mentioned/Related Amy Cook’s website: Play Way Dogs Amy Cook’s online courses on FDSA

A busy Fulhamish Xtra today, as we firstly preview Friday night’s game against Wigan at Craven Cottage as Fulham look to return to winning ways after three consecutive 1-1 draws. We speak to Chris from the Pie At Night podcast to get a view from the opposition.Later on in the podcast we speak to Louie Waldock about the Fulham U23’s after their impressive 5-4 win over Reading in the PL2 at the Cottage last Friday. He gives his thoughts on some players he thinks we should be keeping an eye on this season.Then, George Cooper catches up with Iain from the newly formed Fulham Disabled Supporters Association. If you would like to get in contact with them you can contact them on Twitter @FulhamDSA and on email FulhamDSA@gmail.com. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Description:  Pet Professionals Program and FDSA instructor Nicole Wiebusch joins me to chat about her upcoming PPP Workshop and Rally classes!

We talk about the theme from camp this year and unveil an exciting new program, coming soon to FDSA! Want the full details on the FDSA Pet Professionals Program? Check out the new website, www.fdsapetprofessionals.com!  And we'll be back next week, this time (for real) with Loretta Mueller to talk about improving your agility timing.

Hear about FDSA training camp and upcoming classes.

Summary: Today we have FDSA-founder Denise Fenzi with us to talk about goal setting, the latest happenings at FDSA, and more. Next Episode: 2/22/2019 with Hannah Branigan

Summary: This episode we talked to 3 long-time FDSA students...  Alla Podkopaeva has been taking classes at FDSA since August of 2015, when she took Engagement at bronze for the first time — and last session, Denise asked her to be a Teaching Assistant for that same class! She since has earned her Fenzi Dog Sports Trainer Certificate, and is currently training for all the things… and sharing takeaways from her journey on her new blog, thedognerd.ca. Andrea Woodcock has been taking classes at FDSA since December of 2013, after hearing Denise talk at an APDT conference earlier that year. At that point she had been been training service dogs for about 7 years — and today she continues that work as the training manager at Dogs for Better Lives. Sara Pisani has been taking classes at FDSA since it began offering obedience classes, and has taken a gold class every single session — except for 2 sessions in 2015 when she had both knees replaced. Before finding FDSA, Sara and her first performance dog, Jazz Marie, who she began with in Novice A, knowing nothing about dog sports, went on to earn over 350 OTCH points and a Champion Tracking title. Next Episode: To be released 12/28/2018, with Leslie McDevitt.

Summary: Linda P. Case is a science writer, dog trainer, and canine nutritionist who lectures throughout the world about dog nutrition, training, behavior, and health. Her academic training is as a canine and feline nutritionist and trainer. She earned her B.S. in Animal Science at Cornell University and her M.S. in Canine/Feline Nutrition at the University of Illinois. She was a lecturer of companion animal science at the University of Illinois for 15 years and taught companion animal behavior and training at the College of Veterinary Medicine. Linda currently owns AutumnGold Consulting and Dog Training Center in Mahomet, IL. She is the author of numerous publications and eight books, as well as the popular blog “The Science Dog,” which I’ll make sure we link to in my show notes. Links: The Science Dog Blog Leave FDSA A Voicemail! Next Episode: To be released 11/16/2018, we'll be talking to Barbara Currier about teaching and training weave poles for agility!  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 Linda Case. Linda Case is a science writer, dog trainer, and canine nutritionist who lectures throughout the world about dog nutrition, training, behavior, and health. Her academic training is as a canine and feline nutritionist and trainer. She earned her B.S. in Animal Science at Cornell University and her M.S. in Canine/Feline Nutrition at the University of Illinois. She was a lecturer of companion animal science at the University of Illinois for 15 years and taught companion animal behavior and training at the College of Veterinary Medicine. Linda currently owns AutumnGold Consulting and Dog Training Center in Mahomet, IL. She is the author of numerous publications and eight books, as well as the popular blog “The Science Dog,” which I’ll make sure we link to in my show notes. (http://thesciencedog.wordpress.com/). Hi Linda! Welcome to the podcast. Linda Case: Hi Melissa. Thanks for having me. Melissa Breau: Did I totally butcher the name of where you live? Linda Case: No, you got it exactly. It was great, first shot. Melissa Breau: To start us out a little bit, do you want to tell us a little bit about the dogs that you have, and what you’re working on with them, and a little about you? Linda Case: Sure, sure. Currently my husband and I live with and love two dogs, which is low for us. We had a bad year last year and we lost two dogs in succession. But our two current dogs are Alice, who’s a 3-year-old Golden Retriever, and Cooper, who is a 7-year-old Golden Retriever. What we’re working on with them right now, which I know a lot of folks are excited about, all of the AutumnGold instructors — I have a group of great instructors that work with us at our school — we went to ClickerExpo last spring and we all got excited about concept training with Ken Ramirez, so I’m working on match-to-sample with them. We’re also working on object and identification in concept training with objects — colors and shapes and things like that. That’s not going so well, but match-to-sample is going well. Melissa Breau: That’s pretty cool. Linda Case: It is. It’s really cool. I love it because it brings together what’s the topic of my latest book is animal cognition and higher levels of thinking with behaviorism. I think it meshes those two so beautifully. I no longer show competitively, but I love to train tricks, so I’m doing quite a bit of tricks training with Alice and Cooper. My current goal … Alice is being trained to scoot backwards, like a backwards crawl, under a bunch of … it’s like basically a backwards Army crawl, and she loves that. And Cooper is doing a forwards Army crawl. My goal is to get them to do it together. Again, not going so well, but that’s my ultimate idea. Also I just want to mention that our school — I kind of separate these two — our school primarily works with what I call the highly interested pet owner. We have folks who want to do basic manners training and oftentimes want to do more, but they’re not generally dog sports folks. They’re people who just want to get out and have fun with their dogs. And so our school, we’re kind of challenged a lot of the time to provide things that are fun for them but not too intense, because then they may not want to do the competition stuff. So we recently came up with a concept that we call Life Skills Courses that are a bump up from your basic manners courses and things like good greeting behaviors, or being out in a park or even a dog park behaviors, or behaviors at doggie daycare, or behaviors at the vet. We also do things for CGC. So that’s where our school is, too. We wanted to do concept training with the school, but again that’s probably a little bit higher level than most of our clientele like or are interested in. Melissa Breau: I can see that. It definitely takes some commitment and some playing with things and a pretty solid understanding of training mechanics. Linda Case: Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I think we have a view … we look at it through rose-colored glasses, like, “Oh, everyone will love this!” And people are like, “Yeah, but I really just want my dog to sit when he says hello.” Melissa Breau: Right. I mentioned in your bio that you’re a science writer, dog trainer, and canine nutritionist — so which came first? How did you originally end up “in dogs,” as they say? Linda Case: I came by it very naturally. I actually grew up training, so I guess training came first. My mom was a dog trainer and she showed dogs, primarily in obedience, some tracking, and a little bit of conformation. She was also the leader of our 4-H Club when I was a kid, and that was a dog-training club, which was pretty cool, because back then those things were pretty rare. I started out with a Sheltie, and then, when I graduated from undergrad, that’s when I got into Goldens. My mom and I did a lot of training and showing around the country together, because when I started moving around, she would meet up with me and we’d go to seminars together, we’d go to shows, so that was a lot of fun. It was something really special in my life. So training definitely came first. Melissa Breau: That’s awesome. That sounds like such a unique opportunity to have family-bonding-type stuff but enjoy your dogs, too, especially as you travel around and do stuff with them. Linda Case: I know. I feel lucky to have had that. Melissa Breau: How did you get from that to focusing on nutrition? Linda Case: I would like to be one of those people that would say, “Oh, it’s been a passion of mine all my life,” but that would actually not be the truth. The truth is that I was an animal science major at Cornell, and at that time most animal science majors, if you were interested in companion animals rather than farm animals, you went to vet school. I wasn’t that interested in vet school, because I was training and showing dogs a lot and I knew I really wanted to do something with behavior and training. But this was a while ago, and at that time — I think things have changed amazingly in the years that followed — but at that time there really were no academic graduate programs in canine and feline behavior training. So I went back to my advisor, he was a great mentor at Cornell, and said, “I want to go back to school for something with dogs. What is there?” And at the time he said, “Linda, go into nutrition. You’ll get a job that way.” And he was right, because nutrition … it was in the mid-’80s, and nutrition was taking off as a field of study. Luckily my mentor here at U of I was also a former student at Cornell and a good friend with my advisors. She took me under her wing and was both my mentor as a dog person and in nutrition. So I did that and did find that it did become a passion, even though it wasn’t originally a passion, it was just “I want to do something with dogs.” Melissa Breau: Looking at that, is there a “best” or a “right” choice when it comes to nutrition? I know that’s kind of jumping straight into things, but … Linda Case: There probably is not a single “right” choice, but what I can say with confidence is that there are too many choices today, and that’s what baffles people and frustrates them and makes people finally throw up their hands and say, “How do I choose?” In my view, there are two problems with where we’re at right now with nutrition. One is that owners and consumers are not provided with adequate information about the foods that are available to them in order to choose well, and that’s a drum that I beat very hard in Dog Food Logic, in that book, things such as the food’s digestibility, ingredient quality, even ingredient sourcing. Many of those factors are hidden from pet owners, and they shouldn’t be. We should have full access, we should have full transparency, and we do not have that in the pet food industry. In fact, a lot of regulations are set up to hide many things from, or at least to not make them available to pet owners. So we don’t get the information that we need to choose. And the second is that there are so many choices and there are such small differences. I call it “a distinction without a difference” among these foods that it makes no difference, and people get confused because there are such small and subtle differences among these many choices in the different categories of foods. So that’s the long answer to say there is no clear choice, and even if there was, it would be hard for owners to choose because of the information they’re given today. Melissa Breau: Thinking about that, are there factors they should be considering? What should they be looking at when they’re trying to make a nutrition decision for their own dog? Linda Case: That’s actually the primary focus of my book Dog Food Logic, and the four primary factors that you can break that down into are, first and foremost, the dog, and that’s what I’ll be talking about primarily in the upcoming webinar — your dog’s life stage, their activity level, their health. And then the second would be the owner, and those factors really have a lot more to do with the owner’s values — what they think is important, what they’d like from a food, and also, sadly, economics. Lately I’ve been exploring some different types of foods, just exploring their digestibility and how valuable they are in terms of their nutrient content and their quality. One thing you’ll find is that there’s such a huge range in price point in these foods, so economics can affect a person’s decisions. The third thing, of course, is the food itself — the type it is, the ingredients, the information the owner is provided with and can have access to. And then number four would be the manufacturer — the manufacturer’s size, are they multinational, are they a small, private-owned company, certainly their long-term reputation, how many recalls have they had. Again a big one, this is my drum I keep beating: how transparent they are, how forthcoming they are with information when they’re asked by consumers. Those four factor categories are, I think, are the most important when you’re selecting food. Melissa Breau: It’s almost like you knew I was going to talk more about manufacturing in my next question! I used to actually cover pet food and pet manufacturing for my day job. I used to be a magazine editor at a business-to-business magazine covering that stuff. Of course, every manufacturer out there does their absolute best to make a case for why their food is the best on the market. What research is there that actually tells us what dogs need for a balanced diet? What do we really know, from a scientific perspective, about what we should be looking for? Linda Case: Of the questions that you sent me ahead of time, this was my favorite question, and the reason is that — you present it really well — is that it’s marketing today. Twenty-five years ago, when this field was really first taking off, science did govern the day. There were really great, small, start-up pet food companies that were hiring scientists, hiring nutritionists, they were doing really good research, they were partnering with universities and academic institutions to do this research, and food was about the science. But starting probably about 15 years ago, marketing — just as in the human food industry — became more and more the driving force, and it now pretty much owns pet food companies, so everything is driven by marketing. And so while marketing is very good at its job at selling pet foods to people, it tends to downplay and sometimes even mislead about the science. In fact, that’s one of the reasons “The Science Dog” was born, was trying to bring the science to the people that need it. So there is a real disconnect today between the scientific knowledge and the great research that’s being done, and I would argue this is true in behavior and training as much as it is in nutrition, between the science that’s being done and getting it to the people that need it, the people that are really interested in dogs, that want to do the best by their dogs, both in terms of the nutrition and training. So in terms of what we know, we know a lot. We know all of the nutrient requirements of dogs and cats, we know age differences, how activity affects the dog’s energy and basic nutrient needs, how certain health problems affect a dog’s nutrient needs. That knowledge is solid and it’s backed by good science. The problem is that it often doesn’t get where it needs to go, or it’s again misrepresented because of marketing practices. We also know a lot about many of the ingredients that are used in pet foods. I’m sure you’re aware of the recent grain-free scare and DCM in dogs. One of the problems with that — it’s a great example of ingredients that are relatively new to the pet food market and have not been studied in-depth. Things like chicken and rice and even lamb, all of those, certainly meat, pork, have been studied a great deal in terms of their nutrient availability, what happens to them when they’re extruded, what happens to them if they’re fed raw. We know a lot about those ingredients, but what we don’t know a lot about are the newer ingredients such as legumes and peas. They just haven’t been studied that much. It doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad or they’re necessarily dangerous; they just haven’t been studied. We also know a lot about ingredient digestibility and safety, but again, does it get where it needs to go. It’s in the literature. It needs to just be disseminated in a better way, in my view. Melissa Breau: To dive a little more into that, it does seem like there are a lot of people trying to put out information. Everybody and their dog seem to be blogging about dog behavior, nutrition, all these things, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are all doing their research, or that the research that they’re doing is very good. Do you have any advice for, when you’re out there on the Internet, figuring out what’s reliable and what’s … not? How can folks tell what is based on research and what maybe is just somebody’s opinion dressed up as fact? Linda Case: What you’re really describing is evidence-based decision-making or evidence-based choices, which refers to saying, “If I’m going to make a choice, what evidence is there to support that choice and how reliable is that evidence?” Reliability of course is key. I hate to keep plugging my books, but I have a book called Beware The Straw Man, and the entire purpose of that book was to help interested dog owners and pet owners, and professionals as well, to understand how to sift through evidence that is reliable and evidence-based versus evidence that is just anecdote or opinion. Of course, you can always go back to the original research, but most folks don’t have the time or the interest to do that, so you have to find out where that information came from, what the original source was, how it’s being presented. But again, as far as the average pet owner goes, it can be really challenging. So I think critical thinking skills and being aware of some of the cognitive biases we have when we make decisions can be really helpful. This is why I said earlier this could be a three-hour conversation really easily, so I’m going to refer them to a book instead. Melissa Breau: Fair enough, fair enough. I know in addition to the nutrition stuff, you occasionally debunk training myths. I was curious: What are some of the oddest myths you’ve heard when it comes to training? I was wondering if you could debunk a few for us.   Linda Case: When I looked at this question I thought, Hmm, how do I pick? Because I probably have about twenty that I’ve written about, either on “The Science Dog” or in books. Probably one of my favorites, and I think many listeners will agree with this, but remember there’s a difference between what we intuit and what we believe to be true versus what we have actual evidence to be true, and it’s pretty common for the evidence to not support what we believe or to at least support part of it and hopefully change our beliefs. But this is actually one that most trainers already are onboard with but most pet owners are not, and that has to do with the guilty look. There’s the belief, this prevalent belief, amongst pet owners that when they come home and their dog is showing what they call “the guilty look,” which is usually just fear or submission, that that shows the dog knows he did something wrong or chewed something up or did something they didn’t like him to do, and therefore he’s showing guilt. There was a series of studies by Alexandra Horowitz and Julie Hecht, and Adam Miklosi also was involved in these, that showed once and for all it’s not guilt. It’s fear, and it’s fear of impending punishment. They did this through a series of very unique and creative studies, and I present it in the book Beware The Straw Man. It’s called “Death Throes of the Guilty Look,” and literally walks step-by-step through and say, you can actually fool the dog into thinking he did something, or into thinking that he’s going to be punished, rather, and he will show what’s called the guilty look. My hope is that that information can help trainers then convince their clients who are saying their dog feels guilty and shows guilt to understand that no, your dog has learned to show fear because they’re afraid of an impending punishment. The importance of that is not so much … we don’t really need to debate what the internal emotional state of the dog is, because I would argue it’s probably the same internal emotional state as humans when we supposedly show guilt. It’s basically fear of being caught at something you did wrong. It’s not that. It’s not that we would say, “Oh, they’re not feeling anything internally.” It’s rather that when we label a behavior as guilt, when we label it a certain way, that can then lead to improper and, in my view, cruel treatment of the dog, because if you say he’s feeling guilty, that means you can do something about it, which means punishing that dog, and that’s where we certainly go awry, rather than to understand your dog’s actually fearful, you should manage his environment better so these things don’t happen. That belief in guilt gets in the way of actually changing the behavior and changing how you manage that dog in another way. So that was one of my favorites. If we have time, a second one was an essay that I believe is still on the blog, but it’s also in … I think it’s in Beware The Straw Man and I also talk about it in Dog Smart. This one was called “The Kids Are All Right.” This I just found fascinating because we all know that it’s really important to teach children to be appropriate with dogs, to ask before they come up, and hopefully to learn to read a dog’s body language. I had a personal anecdote very recently with this, in that I was at our veterinarian’s office with Cooper just last week, and Cooper is pretty bombproof. He’s a very steady, easygoing Golden. He loves all people. But he was at the vet’s office, so he was a little nervous. As I was waiting to leave, I was actually talking to our vet about something, a little girl about 8 years old came up with her mom and she came up and said, “Can I pet your dog?” So I was like, “Good girl. You asked first.” And I said, “Sure, yes. He’s friendly.” Well, that’s where it went a little wrong, because she did start interacting with him, but she was very inappropriate in that she started — I’m sorry, that’s a dog drinking behind me, if you can hear that — she was very inappropriate with him. She threw her arms around him, she was leaning over him, she was way, way, way too close. Cooper put his tail down, he backed up, he was showing her every physical sign that he was uncomfortable. I intervened and said, “Hey, honey, you’re a little too close, he’s a little nervous, he’s at the vet’s,” and she was having none of it. This was how she interacted with dogs, and she was going to hug him. And Mom did nothing. Mom just stood there, because I think the mom looked at it as, “My job is done. I taught my child to ask before she went up to greet.” It ended up fine. We told her, “Back off, let him come to you, here’s a treat,” and everything ended up fine. But that story fits right into this essay. It was called “The Kids Are All Right,” and what they did, it was a series of studies from different researchers, which is wonderful because that is a really good way to corroborate information is if different researchers did the studies. They looked at a bunch of different programs that are available for teaching kids to be appropriate with dogs, for teaching kids to not only approach them correctly, but to pet them gently and to show appropriate body language and to read also body language from dogs who are unfriendly. They found that, above a certain age, these programs worked great with the kids. They did a test/retest, so they would test to see how the kids were before they’d had the training, they’d give them these trainings — and there were various types of training; some were online, some were onsite, there were various approaches — and then they’d retest to see did the kids learn something, and sure enough, they did. So this was all good. Then another study looked at the parents’ behavior, and what they found was that oftentimes the kids had learned this behavior, but their parents did exactly what this parent did that I saw. They taught their child to ask first, and then it was kind of like no holds barred, do whatever you want. And even though their child had been given this good information about good interactions with dogs, the parents didn’t follow through. The parents didn’t learn anything. So this essay basically is saying the kids are all right, they’re learning. We need to get to the parents and to teach them to teach their kids to be more gentle, to not encourage their kids. They even had examples in these studies of the kids showing appropriate behavior, just gently petting, and the parents encouraging them to do more, you know, “Throw your arms around the big dog, lean over him.” So what that particular myth busted to me was that it’s not always the kids, that we really need to educate parents as well. Do you want one more, or do we not have time? Melissa Breau: Sure, sure, give us one more! Linda Case: OK, I’ll give you one more very quickly. This has to do with extinction or sometimes negative punishment, which again I’m assuming again probably most of your listeners know what extinction is. It’s removing a reinforcer to decrease a behavior. The most common use of extinction in dog training of course is dogs who jump up or dogs who pester for attention. Owners are said that to extinguish that behavior, you ignore the dog or you step away, you turn your back to the dog. We have not used extinction at my training school for many years. I’m not a fan of it, I never have been. Although I know it is still used a great deal, veterinarians recommend it, a lot of trainers still recommend it, I’ve never been a fan personally because I think it causes frustration. That’s the short end of the story. The interesting thing is that there’s actually some evidence that the end use of negative punishment, removing something the dog wants in order to stop a behavior, do cause frustration in dogs. It’s a very quick experiment. They basically taught dogs to offer eye contact for a positive reinforce, for a treat. The dogs of course learned that very quickly. And then they either would continue to reinforce it or they would use extinction. So now the dog offered the behavior and they stopped reinforcing it and would either turn their back or walk away or just not reinforce the behavior. What they saw — what behaviorist would cause an “extinction burst,” cognitive scientists would call it frustration — that the dogs became very unhappy, they started pawing, they started pestering for more affection, they actually got a little distressed, some of them would whine. And so the conclusion of that study, even though it’s a very small study, was that maybe we need to rethink the use of extinction, especially if it’s not used with training an alternate behavior, which is again the way that a lot of trainers use it. They train an alternate behavior and use extinction. I would argue that just train the alternate behavior and don’t use extinction at all. This essay basically talked about we need to consider the outcome. “Extinction burst” sounds very pure and emotion-free, but actually what we’re seeing in an extinction burst is a dog who’s becoming frustrated and unhappy, and why do that when we don’t need to, when we have alternate approaches. We can just train an alternate behavior rather than the behavior that we don’t want. Melissa Breau: So, I know that we were introduced because you’ve got a webinar coming up at FDSA. It’s titled “Canine Athlete or Couch Potato? - Feeding Dogs to Meet their Exercise Needs,” and I wanted to talk about it just for a minute. Can you share a little bit on what you’ll cover, the type of person who might be interested in the webinar, that kind of thing? Linda Case: Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me to give that webinar. I’m really excited about it and really happy to be part of the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. I’m going to focus on exercise because I know that many of your audience are interested in dog sports and that that’s an important topic for them. We’ll start off with just a small discussion of obesity. That’s again recognizing it, looking at different foods that are on the market that are marketed as light or low calorie, and then we’ll really spend most of the seminar on exercise, looking at the three factors that impact nutrition and exercise, and those are the intensity of the exercise, the duration, and its frequency, and how these three factors influence the energy and nutrient needs of the canine athlete. And then we finish with choosing the best food for a canine athlete, and once again that whole idea that there’s so many choices out there, how do you distinguish among them, and what are the factors that someone who is interested in feeding a canine athlete should pay attention to when they choose a food. Melissa Breau: We’re getting close to the end here, and there are a couple of questions that I usually ask first-time guests, so I’d love to go through those. The first one is, what is the dog-related accomplishment that you’re proudest of? Linda Case: Oh, that’s a nice one. Can I say two? Melissa Breau: Sure, sure. Linda Case: Because I would divide these into an accomplishment that reaches a larger audience versus an accomplishment that reaches a local audience. I guess one of the things I’m proudest of is my writing, because I think science writing that’s brought to interested people, to everybody, rather than just to other scientists is what I’ve really tried to do in my writing, especially in recent years. And then I feel like it reaches many people outside of my local area, and hopefully to many dog trainers and dog professionals who are interested in learning about the recent science. The second would be my AutumnGold dog training school for the local audience, that hopefully we strengthen the loving bond that people have with their dogs, and hopefully increase their understanding of positively based training to our local area, because we only serve of course the local area with that. Melissa Breau: We talked about FDSA is making a ripple and you’ve got to start with your ripple where you are. Linda Case: Yeah, I love that. Melissa Breau: My second question here is, what’s the best piece of training advice that you’ve ever heard? Linda Case: I think the best piece of training advice is also the best piece of life advice I’ve ever received. It started with my dad and it has come from other mentors, and that is just simply “Be kind.” That’s it. Melissa Breau: I like that. Linda Case: It’s short. Be kind. Melissa Breau: Makes it very easy to remember. Linda Case: It is. Melissa Breau: And the last one here, who is somebody else in the dog world that you look up to? Linda Case: Right now I’d say, because I’ve been thinking about a lot and using his methods, is Ken Ramirez is way up there. Certainly of course Karen Pryor. And one of my personal mentors who I mentioned earlier, who was my advisor in graduate school and who now is also an amazing nutritionist and she’s also a KPA certified trainer, so we connected on many levels, and that was my mentor Dr. Gail Czarnecki, who is in the St. Louis area now. She’s no longer here. But I would say she’s definitely one of my most admired personal mentors as well. Melissa Breau: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast Linda! This has been great. Linda Case: It’s been wonderful! Thank you so much, and I’m really excited about the upcoming webinar, and again very grateful and happy that Fenzi Dog Sports Academy has invited me. Melissa Breau: We’re thrilled to have you! And for everybody who’s listening, just so that you know, the details on that, it’s November 15 at 6 p.m. Pacific time. It is up on the site already, so if you want to, you can go over and look. She’s got a full description up there, and we’ve got a link to her bio, and all sorts of good stuff, if anybody wants to go take a look at that. Thank you to everybody for tuning in! We’ll be back next week, this time with Barbara Currier to talk about teaching your dog to love weave poles. In the meantime, I have a special request. For this year’s anniversary episode, we want to do something special. We want to feature you, our listeners. I’d love it if you’d consider leaving us a voicemail that we can include in that episode. To do so, just go to SpeakPipe.com/FDSA_podcast. I’ll have a link to that in this episode’s show notes so you can go there and click on it to be taken to the page. There will be a record button there and you can leave us a message. Have a burning question we haven’t answered? A brag you want to share? Your own best training advice? Well, we want to hear about it. And 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. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Summary: Mike specializes in working with aggressive dogs — we had him on the podcast to share how he defines the term and what tools and analogies he finds useful in working with these dogs and their owners!  Next Episode:  To be released 11/02/2018, our follow up on bringing home an adult dog series with Dr. Jessica Hekman, PhD, DVM 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 Mike Shikashio. Mike is the past president of the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants (IAABC), and provides private consultations working exclusively with dog aggression cases through his business Complete Canines LLC. Michael is fully certified through the IAABC and is a full member of the Association of Professional Dog Trainers (APDT). He also offers mentoring and training to other professionals. Mike is sought after for his expert opinion by numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, New York Post, Baltimore Sun, WebMD, Women’s Health Magazine, Real Simple Magazine, The Chronicle of the Dog, and Steve Dale’s Pet World. He is a featured speaker on the topic of canine aggression at conferences and seminars around the world, and he currently teaches “Aggression Cases: A to Z” through The Dog Trainers Connection and the “Aggression in Dogs Mentorship” through the IAABC. Hi Mike! Welcome to the podcast. Mike Shikashio: Hi Melissa. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. Melissa Breau: I’m excited to chat. To get us started, can you give us a little background about your dogs and what you work on with them? Mike Shikashio: I’m kind of a mixed blended family of dogs right now. My girlfriend just moved up from Chile, and she brought her black Lab/mixed-mutt dog up. But she makes me look good, this dog, because she was already trained because my girlfriend is also a trainer. So I haven’t been doing a whole lot, but I do enjoy some off-leash hikes with her, and she’s got a great recall, and so I’ve got it easy right now with dogs. Melissa Breau: Hey, that’s the best. New dog comes in fully trained? You can’t beat that. Mike Shikashio: Yeah, bonus! Melissa Breau: How did you originally get into dog training and end up in this crazy world? Mike Shikashio: I actually started out in the rescue world. I did a lot of fostering dogs when I was much younger, and as you get good as a foster parent, the rescues will start sending you more and more difficult dogs, so that’s how I caught the training bug and the behavior bug, so to speak. I wanted to learn more about how to work with these foster dogs. At the same time, I always wanted to open my own dog business and dog-related business, so my original aspiration was to have a dog daycare/dog boarding kind of place. But then I got more into this training and behavior side of things, and that led me down the road of doing more research on my own and learning, and going to my first conferences and seminars, and doing things like that, and that’s how it led me to where I am today, really getting focused on training behavior. So those foster dogs, I can give them the credit for making me want to learn more. Melissa Breau: Starting without necessarily a specific background in dogs or what have you, were you always a positive trainer? Is that where you got started, or what led you down that path? Mike Shikashio: I started out as more of a “traditional balanced trainer.” One of my first mentors had a working military dog background, so that’s what I started with, and some of the more traditional tools — pinch collars, e-collars, and things like that. Coincidentally, I was at the APDT conference this week and finally got to meet Jean Donaldson in person, believe it or not. I hadn’t met her in person ever, and she mentioned to me she’s not big into traveling, and so I think that’s one of the reasons I hadn’t met her at any of the previous conferences. But I got a chance to finally thank her, because one of the first books I read about the positive training world was The Culture Clash, and that really had an effect on my training methodology and getting into that side of the training world. So I finally got to say thank you to her. So I didn’t start off as a positive trainer. I started off more on the balanced training side of things to where I moved on to where I am today with my training methodology. Melissa Breau: Would you mind talking a little bit about what your methodology is today? How do you describe it or what have you? Mike Shikashio: My work is exclusively with aggression in dogs, so I only take aggression cases. Most of the work I do, the methodology I use, is through behavior change strategies using desensitization and counter-conditioning, and also differential reinforcement or positive-reinforcement-based strategies to teach the dogs that … the old saying we hear, “What do you want to do instead?” So a lot of it is focused on that, and of course antecedent arrangements. A lot of it isn’t just training and behavior modification. A lot of times I’m working in conjunction with vets in terms of addressing underlying health issues. So most of it is a combination of management and safety, environmental changes, and then working in conjunction with ancillary folks like the veterinary field, and then of course using those differential reinforcement and counter-conditioning strategies in my work with the aggressive dogs. Melissa Breau: Why aggression? You mentioned you do that exclusively now. What led you down that path and what keeps you there? Mike Shikashio: That’s a question I get a lot. First and foremost, if people listen to this and they want to get into aggression, or they’re taking a lot of aggression, I will say that you do have to love working with aggressive cases, or aggression cases, because there’s weeks that can go by where I can work a bunch of cases and not even pet a dog. So you have to be prepared for that. You have to be prepared to have lots of dogs want to bite your face off the first few times you meet them, and see that day after day after day. So that’s part of it is being able to have that, being able to cope with that and be able to come home and pet your own dog and meet a nice puppy every once in a while. But I think one of the most significant factors that got me into this is really helping the people and helping the dogs reestablish that human-animal bond. I think that’s fractured a lot in aggression cases. A lot of clients are on their last leg or really struggling emotionally, and I found that repairing that and focusing on helping that relationship and affording the best outcome for the dog is what really got me into it. I saw I was able to make some significant changes in the future for these dogs by focusing on it. I also think that specializing — we see a lot of this now, and Denise Fenzi’s a good example of that — specializing in certain areas of the dog-training world. Now we have the CSATs that focus on separation anxiety, we have people focusing on certain aspects of dog training, the dog sports world. If people asked me how to teach a dog how to go through weave poles, I would say, “I have no idea,” and I would refer that on to somebody else. I think specializing allows you to get much better at the thing that you’re specializing in much faster than if you were taking a variety of different cases. I also found that was one of the reasons I wanted to get just solely into aggression — because I wanted to be really good at it. So I said, “Let me try just taking aggression cases exclusively,” and it’s worked out really well. I think because you get to see the same things over and over, and so you’re able to troubleshoot much faster. You’re able to see the same things happening and get a general idea of what is happening in a case even before you step into it you’ll start to see the same things over and over. I think that has a lot also, what to do, I want to focus on one area. Rather than being good at a lot of different things, I want to be great at one thing, so that’s what led me down the road of working with just aggression. Melissa Breau: I think that’s really important for professionals to realize that sometimes niching down is a great way to grow a business. It’s not limiting the business. It’s actually a way to become more successful. So I think that’s a great point. Mike Shikashio: Absolutely, absolutely. I just listened to one of your recent podcasts and it was focused on business, and I think that’s such an important point. A lot of folks are worried about, “I do this one thing exclusively, and now all those other clients I could take doing other behavior problems are off the table,” but believe it or not, once people know you specialize in something, the business really takes off because you become that go-to person for that one area. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Just to make sure everybody’s on the same page in terms of terminology and what we’re talking about here, when you say you only take aggression cases, what’s the range of severity there? What does each end of that spectrum look like? Dig into that a little bit for me. Mike Shikashio: That’s a great question, Melissa. I think piggybacking off the last question, I define aggression as basically whatever the client thinks is happening when they call me. I advertise for aggression in dogs, or people having problems with aggression, that keyword right there, because that’s usually what people are searching for online, and that can fall into a wide range. Aggression itself, that’s a construct or a label, so it can have different definitions. Even when you’re talking to experts, or behavior experts, depending on who you’re talking to, that definition is going to differ, so I just classify it or define it as whatever the clients are calling me for in the first place. That can be anything from a dog barking and lunging on leash at people and dogs, but no bite history, and it’s perfectly social when they are close to people or other dogs, and so that might be labeled “reactive,” or may not be labeled aggression, but the client contacted me because they think it’s aggressive, so they will call me for that. The other end we might have true aggression, like aggressive behavior with biting, severe bite injuries, and things like that. So you can get any one of those extremes. You might even get, I get this sometimes, where it’s a client that’s got a puppy that’s new to the home and they’re just mouthing, and the client’s not savvy with dogs, or it might be their first dog, and I’ll get an e-mail: “Help, my dog is being so aggressive and is mauling me.” You get there and it’s just a typical case of a very mouthy puppy and those sharp puppy teeth. In my area you get a lot of retirees, so I’ll get an elderly couple on blood thinners with a young Golden mouthy puppy, and it’s a perfect storm of it looks like a horror show when you get there because the poor folks have all these Band-Aids and marks all over their arms. It’s kind of a mismatch at that point of young puppy with elderly folks, but that’s not of course what we would classify as aggression. Melissa Breau: Sometimes it’s what you show up for, which leads really well into my next question, which is, how do you prepare for that first session? Sometimes owners definitely don’t describe things the way that we would. What kind of information is “need to know,” and how do you figure out what’s really going on? Sometimes, like you said with that puppy situation, they’re going to think the puppy is crazy-aggressive, and you show up and it’s like, “Oh, this is actually pretty normal.” How do you approach that? What do you do to prepare for a new client? Mike Shikashio: In terms of communicating with clients in aggression cases, one of the most important things to focus on in your initial contact with that client is getting information about any kind of bite incidents or the aggressive incidents which are why they’re contacting you about. You want to know about the level of biting that’s occurring, the severity of the biting, and also the context in which it’s happening, so that way you can set things up safely for your arrival. That’s what I focus on during my initial contact. I don’t do a long intake form. I don’t spend a whole lot of time on the phone or e-mailing clients. What I shoot straight for is that context of when the actual aggression incidents happen, so I can get information about how I’m going to set it up safely for my arrival, because even when you can go into very thorough, detailed information with a client on the phone, you still might not get a full picture. So I always err on the side of caution and assume that a bite might happen, if the dog has a bite history, so I’m always setting things up very safely. A good question to ask is, “What do you do with the dog now when people come over?” A lot of the clients will have already set up a system. Most of the time it’s, “Oh, I just put him away,” and that works really well also when I arrive, because then I can get detailed information during the first 15 to 30 minutes or so, where I do the information-gathering step of my consultation. That’s usually, again, going to give you the most information about how to safely set up the dog, or get the dog out. That way, I can then get thorough information in front of the client and see the environment, and then determine the best way to meet the dog after that. I always stress that you always want to be very, very safe during your initial greetings with dogs, and your initial consult, until we have more information. Melissa Breau: I guess the hard question: Do you think that all dogs can be rehabilitated? Mike Shikashio: That term “rehabilitation” is sort of arguable in a sense, because it depends if you look at it from a behavioral standpoint when people talk about rehab, as sort of it leads you toward the dog having a certain illness, because that’s sort of an ugly term in the human world, and if you look at physical rehabilitation, it implies fixing an issue. We know with behavior, once it’s in the animal’s behavior repertoire, it’s technically always there. So I’m very careful about when clients use that term “rehab.” I want to know their definition of it, because if they’re implying that we’re going to fix the problem, or the dog’s never going to do the behavior again, that’s going to skew potentially their goals. So I always explain to clients that the behavior — our goal is to make it less likely to happen. We reduce the likelihood of it to happen and to management and to behavior modification. So to say all dogs are rehab-able, again that’s an arguable term. I think all dogs we can change behavior. In all animals we can change behavior. So that’s what I focus on — making sure the clients understand how behavior works and how we can reduce the frequency of behaviors, and then they can start to understand. And also, of course, looking at the variables that affect behavior, the antecedent arrangements and the antecedents and things that can affect behavior. Once the client starts understanding and grasping those concepts — and using the layman’s terms, not using the behavioral terms with clients — but I think once they start to understand those concepts, then they realize that this is something that is not going to be like a light switch which we turn it on or off. So that’s how I approach it generally with clients. Melissa Breau: You mentioned earlier some of the tools that you use. Can you talk a little more about those? What things do you use most often? Feel free to break it down into layman terms for us. I know we have a wide range of backgrounds in the audience. Mike Shikashio: With aggressive behavior, or aggression, you’re looking at two components. The simple way that I explain to clients is that you have factors that make the behavior more likely to happen, but that doesn’t mean the behavior is going to happen unless you have the antecedent. I use this analogy a lot with clients, where if you have an empty fuel drum or fuel can, and what we can do is add more fuel to it, we can add layers of fuel, which the more fuel you have, the more likely you are to get an explosion, or that progressive behavior we don’t want. And those are what we refer to as distant antecedents in the animal world. So when you have those factors, if you add in more and more layers, you’re going to have at one point a fuel can that’s ready to explode. But again, you need a spark or a match to actually make that explosion happen. Those sparks or those matches are the antecedents, or what sets that behavior in motion, so you need both often to see the aggressive behavior. So I start to teach clients about how to recognize factors that can influence behavior. For instance, a dog that is growling near the food bowl, or biting people when they come near the food bowl, factors that can increase the likelihood of that are a dog that is really hungry, or a dog that is stressed, or a dog that might be on medication, for instance, or underlying medical issues that make it more likely to do that behavior, because those are what we call distant antecedents, or again, factors that are adding layers of fuel. So if you have a dog that just ate a full, huge meal and then you put a food bowl down, you’re less likely to see that behavior if somebody approaches. Now, the person approaching, that’s the match, that’s the antecedent or what can spark that explosion, so one day it might be somebody approaching from 10 feet away and the dog explodes, or the next day it might be the person can literally reach near the food bowl because the dog doesn’t have all those fuels fueling it. Once the client starts to understand that, rather than them assigning personality traits to the dog, or underlying reasons for the behavior, you know, “My dog is dominant,” or “My dog is like, 90 percent of the time he’s good, 10 percent of the time he’s bad, I just don’t know when,” once the client starts to understand how there’s got to be fuel there and then there’s those matches, those matches are not always present, there’s going to be times when those antecedents or those matches come into play, and that’s when you’re going to likely to see the behavior. Once we see that, then we can start modifying those behaviors. So then, again with the food bowl we present the match, or the person approaching from maybe 11 feet away, and we can change the dog’s association with that match approaching. That’s the desensitization and counter-conditioning that I mentioned before. We’re changing the association: somebody approaching the food bowl means something good is about to happen. A lot of times I’m often using food in my work with dogs, so it may be as simple as somebody approaching means they’re about to throw a treat, a higher-value treat than what you have in the food bowl, from 11 feet away. We’re doing it at a safe distance where we’re not causing the explosion, and we’re changing the dog’s association. Then you may also incorporate differential reinforcement of an alternative behavior. That’s just a fancy term for “What do you want the dog to do instead?” when that match approaches, and so lifting the head up out of the food bowl. We can start to catch that, and if we’re doing marker training with our dog, we can say “Good,” or “Yes,” or even click for lifting the head up out of the food bowl, which is an alternative behavior to growling or barking or lunging or biting. So we can start to catch that. So you’re doing two different things at the same time: you’re doing operant conditioning, which is teaching the dog what to do instead, and you’re doing the classical counter-conditioning — you’re changing the association for the dog with the very simple procedure of, “Anytime I approach, if you lift your head up out of the food bowl, something good is about to happen, and when you lift your head up out of the food bowl, I will reinforce that.” That can be incorporated with a number of aggressive behaviors. Think about your typical dog that barks and lunges at other dogs on leash. Set the dog up, set the stage correctly, keep enough distance from the other dog so there’s no explosion. You’re presenting the match of the other dog, so instead of starting from 5 feet away, you might start from 50 feet away, where the dog is not close enough to cause that explosion, and you wait for your dog, the one that has that issue with barking and lunging, to just notice the other dog, and then you would reinforce that. That’s a behavior you like, just notice the other dog, you’re going to mark and reinforce that, and what happens at the same time is the associated learning, so that way the dog knows, “Oh, when I see another dog, the person handling me is going to mark and then feed me.” So again, two things happening at the same time: the dog learns what to do instead, and the association starts to change. As the dog gets better at it, as you’re reducing fuels because you’re reducing the stress of that situation. You might also be addressing the fear or the anxiety, the arousal, all of those other fuels that might come along in that package. You’re reducing the fuel, but you’re also changing the dog’s behavior around that match so you can get that match closer and closer and closer to that fuel without any kind of explosion. That’s exactly how I explain to clients without using the technical terms. I explain that fuel and match analogy, and clients really start to get it, because they’re assigning things like “territorial dog,” or “red zone dog,” or “alpha dog,” which really isn’t helpful, again, because we know those are constructs or labels. So I focus on what we want the dog to do instead and in those contexts. That’s pretty much the tools I use most of the time, most times food, and sometimes it’s play, and sometimes it’s toys, depending on the dog and the context. Melissa Breau: That’s awesome, and I think that analogy works really, really well. It explains all the right pieces and it’s still a concept that people definitely quickly grasp. That’s neat. I hadn’t heard that one before, so I like that. Mike Shikashio: Thanks. Melissa Breau: We were introduced because you’ve got two webinars coming up at FDSA on some of this stuff. For those listening, they’ll be back-to-back, they’re on the same day, and Mike will be talking about intra-household dog-to-dog aggression. So Mike, I was hoping we could talk a little bit about those. First, can you explain the terminology there for anybody who might not know what intra-household dog-to-dog aggression means? And then can you share a little bit about what you’ll be focusing on? Mike Shikashio: Sure, sure. Intra-household dog-to-dog aggression, a.k.a., two or more dogs fighting in the same home when they live together, is the topic that I’ll be focusing on. We’ll be talking about things like common factors in dogfights or why dogs fight in the home. We’ll talk about factors that can influence dogs fighting and having those conflicts. We’ll talk about the overall prognosis in these cases and what the typical outcome can be, depending on a certain number of variables, because each case is going to differ and some cases are going to be more difficult than others, depending on those variables. And we’ll talk about how to start changing the behavior and how to get dogs to live harmoniously again, using a variety of techniques and management tools. And we’ll again focus on the aspects of differential reinforcement and counter-conditioning with most cases as well, because it works on intra-household cases. That’s it in a nutshell. We’ll briefly touch on how to break up a dogfight safely, because I think all clients that have dogs fighting in the home should be able to do that safely as well. Quite a bit to cover and squish down into those two webinars, but I hope to be able to cover it all and we’ll have some fun. Melissa Breau: The first one’s, if I remember correctly, talking through some of this stuff, and the second one is more case studies. Is that right? Am I recalling that correctly? Mike Shikashio: Yes. I’ll be showing a couple of cases that show two dogs that had a history of conflict in the home and how we worked on those cases to resolve it with the clients. And the first webinar will be detailing the reasons why dogs fight, safety and management strategies. The second one feeds off of the first, so it’s good, if you can, to attend both of them so it all makes sense in the second one when we start working with the dogs in those videos. Melissa Breau: Absolutely awesome. I’m trying to pull up the exact date and time, because I should have pulled this up in advance and of course I didn’t. So, for anybody listening, they will be on November 1, that’s an easy date to remember, and the time for the first one is at 3 p.m. Pacific time, the second one is at 6 p.m. Pacific time, and they are currently on the FDSA website if anybody wants to go sign up. Mike Shikashio: That makes them 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern time, if I’m correct. Melissa Breau: You’re absolutely correct. I’m Eastern, and I have to do that time conversion way more times in the day than I care to count. So I have a couple of questions I usually ask at the end of every episode when I have a first-time guest. I’d love to work through those. The first one is, what’s the dog-related accomplishment that you’re proudest of? Mike Shikashio: That’s a good question. I would have to say after this weekend, speaking at APDT and then talking to Jean Donaldson, I would say that I’m just really, really humbled and very happy to be able to share the information that I have now with others. I think that’s how I, of course, learned from many folks that were generous enough to share information about how they work with behavior, and I’m just really happy that I’m able to do that now. If you had asked me seven or eight years ago, when I was attending these conferences, if I would ever imagine myself speaking to an audience, I would say, “No way. I’m just doing my thing, learning training and behavior.” There is no way I would have thought I would be speaking to a crowd at APDT and other conferences and traveling the world giving these workshops. So that’s the thing I feel really good about is being able to share that information. And I think a big part of it is validating for what other trainers are doing. I hear that a lot. Trainers will come up to me and say, “Thank you so much for validating what I’m doing now,” because what I’m doing now isn’t a whole lot different than what a lot of other trainers are doing. It’s just a lonely world sometimes, this dog training world, because some people don’t have a local network, or they don’t really know anybody else taking aggression cases, so they’re not sure if what they’re doing is the latest-greatest or whatever technique, or if they’re doing things correctly. And what I’m doing a lot of times is validating. I’m not showing them much different techniques or strategies. They’re just seeing that, “Oh, OK, Mike’s doing a lot of what I do.” So that’s very validating for them. I feel like that’s something I love about traveling and meeting other trainers and just making the world a little bit smaller for them. Melissa Breau: When you think about it, aggression, it’s one thing if you’re trying to teach a dog to sit with a cookie. It’s a whole other story when you’re talking about, “OK, this dog has serious behavior problems, and do I know what I’m doing, and can I really fix this.” I can see how that would be really validating to say, “Look, here’s somebody who’s doing it, and doing it successfully on a consistent basis.” So that’s awesome. Next question, I’m afraid it’s not much easier: What’s the best piece of training advice that you’ve ever heard? Mike Shikashio: I don’t know if it’s a piece of training advice, but I think, again, because I’m working in training and behavior, they’re kind of two of the same, when I use the term “behavior world,” I’m talking about just general behavior with all animals, and one of the things I started to really hone down on is just this empowerment thing. One of Susan Friedman’s quotes is, “The central component of behavioral health is the power to operate on the environment to behave for an effect.” She’s one that really opened the world of empowerment and allowing animals to act on their own environment, rather than always micromanaging all their behaviors. Giving them the power of choice can have a significant impact, especially in aggression cases. An example I use sometimes is that we focus on getting the dog to watch me, if they’re reactive to other dogs, or we tell them to go to a mat, or we add these behaviors that we ask for, which, don’t get me wrong, they work really well as a great alternative for incompatible behaviors. If the dog’s looking at me, they’re not going to be barking and lunging at other dogs. Or if they go to their mats, they’re not going to be  charging the door. The issue sometimes doing that is it’s not fully allowing the animal to act on their own environment. Follow me for a second here. You ask a dog to go to their mat in the home, and say they have a fear of strangers coming through the door. If I put that mat in a place that’s going to not allow them enough distance, so we’re now introducing strangers past their critical distance, getting into their critical distance, in other words this bubble around them, that we are artificially removing their flight option. So it looks great on paper. “Go to your mat” — that’s better than biting the person that comes through the door. However, if we artificially remove that flight option, what we’re basically asking the dog is to not move away if you’re scared of that person, which doesn’t fully empower them to act on their environment. Now, of course we don’t want them charging and biting the person, because that’s acting on their environment, but we want to preserve that option, that choice of being able to move away. Similarly with dogs that are barking and lunging at other people or dogs on the streets or on a leash, we can say, “Watch me, watch me,” and again, it works really well because the dog’s focused on the handler. Again, however, that doesn’t allow the dog to assess the provocative stimulus or the threat. And what you can run the risk of is that you’re not really changing the association if the dog is watching the handler. So it’s a great alternative behavior, however it puts us at risk of not allowing the dog to act on their own environment and move away if they want to, or just notice the threat and assess that threat and then move away. So a lot of what I focus on now is allowing the dog to act on their own environment. However, I reinforce desirable behaviors without cuing them, so I wind up capturing behaviors I like. Sometimes I will cue, but most of the time I’m just allowing the dog to say, “Hey, there’s a person over there.” I’ll reinforce the heck out of those behaviors, so that way the dog starts to learn that, “OK, I can do this instead, and that will pay off for me,” and then we can increase distance. So there’s a lot of benefits to allowing the dog have that choice and control over their environment. Melissa Breau: That’s a great philosophy for thinking about really what it’s like to be in the dog’s shoes for all of that. Mike Shikashio: Absolutely. Melissa Breau: Last question: Who is somebody in the dog world that you look up to? Mike Shikashio: Oh boy. I have a long list of people I look up to. I would say … I think I have to give that one to Susan Friedman again because … and again, she’s not necessarily in the dog world, she’s in the animal behavior world. Melissa Breau: That works. Mike Shikashio: I’m sure a lot of listeners could agree if they listen to Susan. You could listen to her for hours. She could talk about watching paint dry and you’d be sitting there with your mouth open, like, “Wow.” And she’s got that soothing voice, too. She’s got such a soothing voice. You could put a Susan Friedman podcast on and go to sleep to it every night because she’s got a soothing voice as well. But she’s just amazing the way she understands animal behavior, so I would definitely put her as one of the top on my list for people I look up to in the animal behavior world. Melissa Breau: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Mike. This has been fantastic. Mike Shikashio: I really appreciate you having me. This was fun. Melissa Breau: I look forward to the webinar! Thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week, this time with Jessica Hekman for Part 2 of our series on adopting an adult dog. For that episode we’ll be focusing on what is genetic and what isn’t … that is, what can we likely change! 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. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Summary: Stacy Barnett is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. She is an AKC Judge and contractor, as well as an instructor at FDSA. She hosts the Scentsabilities podcast and blogs regularly on nosework topics at www.scentsabilitiesnw.com. Next Episode:  To be released 10/12/2018, an interview with Nancy Gagliardi Little on agility startlines and obedience. 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 Stacy Barnett. Stacy is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. She is an AKC Judge and contractor, as well as an instructor at FDSA. She hosts the Scentsabilities podcast and blogs regularly on nosework topics at www.scentsabilitiesnw.com — nw is for nosework. I’ll be sure to include a link in the show notes for anybody who is interested. Hi Stacy, welcome back to the podcast. Stacy Barnett: Hi Melissa. How are you? Melissa Breau: Good. I’m excited to chat. It’s morning for us now, so good morning. Stacy Barnett: Oh, I don’t even know what time it is. I flew in from Reno last night, and I was in Sweden right before that, so my body’s very confused. So if you tell me it’s morning, I’ll just believe you. I’ve got a little bit of jetlag going on. Melissa Breau: All different sorts of time zones. Stacy Barnett: Yes. Melissa Breau: To get us started, do you want to just remind listeners a little bit about who the dogs are that you share your life with? Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. I’ve got four hooligans that live in my house and that I love and that I work with. Joey is my senior poodle. He is turning 11, I think this week. He’s at the NW 3 level, which is the third level. Then I have a 7-year-old miniature American Shepherd, or mini Aussie. He’s at the NW 2 level. Then I have two Labradors. They’re my primary nosework competition dogs. I have Judd. Judd is my 9-year-old. He is a Summit title holder, which puts him at the top of his sport. It’s really, really exciting. That happened recently. And an 18-month-old Labrador female named Brava. She’s full of vinegar. Really, really a fun dog, high, high drive, and she’s really teaching me a lot about arousal. Melissa Breau: I want to do a deep dive on nosework today — starting with some of the science-y stuff. What is it about a dog, biologically, that really allows them to excel when it comes to identifying a scent and then tracking it to the source? Stacy Barnett: I love the science behind this. This is probably one of the reasons why I love nosework so much is I’m a little bit of a geek and I have a scientific background. But what I love about this is that there’s a lot of history here. Dogs evolved from wolves. Wolves, if you think about it, have to travel long distances in order to find their prey. They go over miles and miles and miles and miles to find that large prey, and to do that, they have to use their noses, and they have to be able to track, and they have to be able to hunt. Dogs have inherited that ability, and if you look at them from a biological perspective, they all have that ability. Twelve-and-a-half percent of their brain is dedicated to olfaction, so the olfactory lobe is 12-and-a-half percent, it’s one-eighth of their brain. The other part of it is that the nose itself. They have the ability to scent directionally. You and I have the ability to hear directionally, so if I’m standing in front of you, you know I’m standing in front of you, because we have space between our ears, and this space is what allows us to hear in stereo. Dogs can smell in stereo because they have space between their nostrils. It has to do with what they call aerodynamic reach. The difference between the space in the nostrils and aerodynamic reach, it’s kind of technical, but it’s one of the reasons why they can scent directionally. Every breed can do this. Every breed, from a Chihuahua up to a Great Dane, it doesn’t matter how big or small their nose is, they still have that space between their nostrils. So there’s that, and they also have the ability, when they sniff in and they blow out, they have these slits on the side of their nose, so the air blows out of the side of their nose, and it doesn’t disturb the scent that’s being pulled in in the next sniff. It’s fascinating. Melissa Breau: It is pretty neat, especially thinking about the directional piece of it. I imagine it plays such a big role when you’re doing something like scentwork. Stacy Barnett: Oh, totally. Totally. Melissa Breau: Obviously, our noses can’t even come close … so when we’re teaching a dog nosework, once a team is past the basics, what factors influence the difficulty of that search? Stacy Barnett: There’s so many factors. Airflow is a big part of it. From an airflow perspective, airflow is caused by air pressure differentials, which means that there’s differences in air pressure. Air will move from a high-pressure area to a low-pressure area, so that causes air to flow. Air also moves because of temperature differentials. We all know hot air rises and cool air falls, so if you get an area that’s more in the sun, the air is going to rise and it’s going to fall in a shady area. So there’s that. You also have the aspect of how long the hides have been in the area. We call that aging. That is basically, because of the process of diffusion, the longer the hide is aged, the larger the scent cone is going to be. What you’re going to find is that it also depends on how many hides you have and what proximity those hides are to each other, and if you have high hides, if you have low hides, and how the hides interact, because it becomes exponentially more difficult when you have more than one hide out. The other thing is if you have a change in slope, so if you’re scenting and you’re on a slope, that can make a big difference. Standing water, moisture, rain, really the possibilities are endless, and it’s one of the coolest things about this sport, because every time you go to do a search, it’s different. You can never duplicate the same search. It’s always different, it’s always cool, it’s always fresh. It’s always fun. Melissa Breau: I want to talk about some of that terminology for a minute — can you just talk us through that? I know you mentioned airflow and aging and scent cones. Can you define what some of those things are, if people are new to this? Stacy Barnett: Think about a scent cone. We call it a scent cone. People often think in their head, they think of an ice cream cone, but it’s really not that accurate. The scent cone is the plume of odor that we can’t see, but it’s out there because the odor has diffused, or the molecules have left the source, and it becomes like a plume in the air that the dog is following. A scent cone looks like, if you look at a smokestack, and with a smokestack you can kind of see the plume and it goes in the direction that the air is flowing. So if the wind is going from north to south, your plume is going to go from north to south. That’s going to be more what a scent cone actually looks like. If you think about it, when you have less airflow, it’s not quite as windy, your scent cone is going to be a little bit wider, and when you get a windy condition, you get a narrow scent cone, which is more like if you had a water hose and you were to put it on high pressure. So that scent cone is going to go farther and it’s going to be narrower, so where the dog intersects is going to be different. Aging has to do with … we call it aging, and it’s essentially how long the hide has been out and sitting out, because it changes how the dog has to work the hide. Then we have things like pooling odor. Pooling odor is, if you think about a pool of water, that’s exactly what happens. That odor pools in an area and it collects in an area. That’s a lot of fun too. Melissa Breau: Since we can’t “see” scent, and obviously we don’t smell it, how do we really know all this about the way that scents travel? How do we know what we know? Stacy Barnett: We call it scent theory, and we call it scent theory for a reason: because it’s theory. My own background is I have a chemical engineering degree. I pull from my understanding of fluid flow dynamics in order to really understand odor. Air is just another fluid. It’s a gas, but gas is just a fluid in a different state. It all follows fluid flow mechanics. But I think the easiest way to think about it is to think about water. If you think about how water flows, like water in a stream, you can understand turbulence, there’s eddies, all these things happen with air. You get turbulence, you get eddies, because when water hits a rock in a stream, you get the turbulence before and after the rock. The same thing happens with air. So if we can understand how air flows, we know how the odor is carried on that air. Again, it’s theory, but I think we have a pretty good grasp of it. I like to think about that, or think about a smokestack or something like that, to give a visual, because if we can understand a visual, we can start to figure out what it’s actually doing. We can’t smell it the way that the dogs can smell it, but if we can have a visual, I think it helps us. Melissa Breau: Thinking through that for a minute, if there are multiple hides in a room, and you get multiple scent cones, and some of those maybe even overlap … how do you begin to teach the dog this idea that there are multiple hides, and OK, they found one, they need to go find another one. I feel like that’s a complex concept, and maybe they even have to return to where they started in order to trace it to source. Stacy Barnett: That is all about converging odor. That’s what we call it, where you have different scent cones and the scent cones overlap. It’s very complicated for the dog to find it, but they’re absolutely capable of doing this. What I usually do is I start with the hides fairly far apart, and then I start to set a situation up where the scent cones start to overlap. But what’s hard is that the dog has to … oh, and when they go from one hide and to help them move to another, you can actually help move with your body. And I cue them with a word. I say, “Find another.” “Find another” means “That hide is done, it’s finished, let’s go find another hide.” And the body motion helps to move the dog into a new area, because they’re going to follow your body motion. So that really helps. You also have to start realizing dogs are hardwired for “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” So they’re going to be hardwired to ignore another hide for the hide that they’re already at, so you have to start to figure out your reward schedules and whether or not you’re going to re-feed at that hide if they come back to it. What’s easy in the beginning is to work the dog on leash, so that you can use the leash to help them stay, to not return to the original hide. From a re-feeding perspective, I do always re-feed the hide if the dog has confidence or motivation issues or if the dog is very green. Once I know the dog is confident and motivated and the dog is not as green, I start not re-feeding the hide because I want them to know that that hide is finished and they have to find the next one. Melissa Breau: I think it’s an interesting process where you don’t want to erode your confidence, so sometimes you do want to reward them for finding it, but it definitely depends on the dog and the experience level. That makes sense. Stacy Barnett: And sometimes the dog actually has to go back to that hide in order to find the next hide because of the way that the scent cones overlap. They can get information at that hide, and we call it anchoring. So they can go back to that hide and they can say, “Oh wow, there’s another scent cone,” and they can go from that hide to the next hide by getting the information for the second hide at the first hide. Melissa Breau: When there is something pooling odor, or the scent cones intersect, how are you building those things gradually? I know you mentioned usually you start with two hides far apart and you move them closer together. What are some of the other things you do to build those skills gradually and set the dog up for success? Stacy Barnett: It’s all about hide placement, because if you have two hides, and you have two difficult hides, that’s going to be a lot harder than if you have two easy hides. So I like to do things systematically, especially when I teach converging odor. And pooling odor, if you add pooling odor with converging odor, that’s really challenging. So I try to avoid the pooling odor aspect when I’m introducing converging odor, and when I’m doing converging odor I try to be very systematic so that the dog understands how to solve these problems. I want to keep it simple in the beginning and not make it terribly complex, so I make sure that the dog understands and learns how to source different permutations of accessible hides, inaccessible hides, elevated hides, low hides, two hides, three hides. I try to get very systematic about it. Melissa Breau: I know confidence is a really big piece of what you do and what you train for, so I’d love to talk about that in trialing a little bit. When trialing and you have a dog who isn’t super confident, how can you tell when it’s just that they’re working something that’s more complex versus when they are struggling because of stress or because of a lack of confidence? Stacy Barnett: You really need to pay attention to your dog. You have to look for the dog’s enthusiasm level, and you have to really look for the stress signals that they’re giving you. If you look at the enthusiasm level, if the enthusiasm stays up, then they’re not stressed out and they can continue to work. But if you start seeing waning enthusiasm, or the dog is starting to check out, or the dog starts getting distracted, or the dog starts sniffing the ground, or the dog scratches or shakes off, these can be different indications that maybe the dog is a little frustrated or a little confused, and both frustration and confusion can help to lower confidence, which is not what we want. We want to try to work the dog in a state where they’re not confused and they’re not frustrated, so that they can build up their own self-confidence and their own skill set, and ultimately they’ll be more successful and you’ll be able to keep their focus a little bit more. Melissa Breau: If you have a dog that isn’t super confident and you’re in that competition environment, what can you do to make sure you’re supporting them or helping them, and set them up for success even at a trial or in that kind of a situation? Stacy Barnett: I think you also need to know your dog. Nosework really is a confidence-building skill. However, it’s a confidence-building activity. It doesn’t mean that trialing is confidence-building. So in preparation for that trial, you need to get the dog into a situation that you know they’re prepared going into it. It’s just like any other sport. We certainly wouldn’t want to take a dog who has just learned how to heel, and all of a sudden take them into an obedience trial, or take a dog that has never run a course before and take them into an agility trial. Training is really necessary in this sport, and I think sometimes we forget that because the dog has an innate ability to sniff. So generalization is really the key. But if you’re in the moment and your dog is starting to stress a little bit, you have to figure out is it salvageable? Is it a little bit of light stress or is it heavy stress? If it’s just a little bit of light stress and the dog’s got a little distracted, maybe, I give the dog a cookie. I call it a confidence cookie. What that does is it lowers the arousal of the dog, and then that way the dog’s lowered arousal state allows him to relax a little bit, and then they can usually be successful. And you can feed really at any time during your search. The other thing, though, if the stress gets to be too high, call it quits. There’s no point in going for the cue. I’ve been in this situation before with Why, my mini Aussie. He’s a very, very stress-y dog. I had a trial just a couple of months ago where I thought he was too stressed and I said to the judge, “I’m really sorry, but I’m going to excuse myself,” and she completely agreed with my thoughts on that. You want to look at the long-term game. It’s not just a short-term cue. That’s the biggest advice I can give on that. Melissa Breau: You mentioned innate skills in there, and I’m curious: When it comes to something like covering an entire search area and doing it efficiently and quickly, how much of that is innate, how much of that is training, how much is handling? Can you talk us through that piece? Stacy Barnett: It’s probably balanced in-between innate skills, training, and handling. I think all three are really important. If you’re talking a really large search area, there is a degree of talent that comes into play, and that has to do with a dog’s natural hunt drive. If you have a dog with a certain degree of hunt drive, they’re going to want to go out there and find that odor. If you have a dog that doesn’t have that strong of a hunt drive, you have to try to build that a little bit. You can build that through different activities and different motivation games and that sort of thing. So there is definitely an aspect of training. The other thing is training actually helps the dog to become efficient. It really helps them to connect the dots, although I always try to say our dogs do come to us with a Harvard education in olfaction, but with training they become rocket scientists. They learn how to connect those dots. The other thing, I also think about it in terms of you know when you learned how to read and you had to sound out your words? You had to sound them out and it was challenging. Your brain is hardwired to be able to read language, but you still had to learn how to do it. And now when you read, you don’t even actually look at the whole word. The brain doesn’t look at the whole word. The brain may look at the beginning and the end and connects the dots and you know exactly what you’re reading. So it’s kind of the same thing with sniffing. So all these different things really come into play. Handling is a big piece of it because you can help or hinder. You can also help your dog get through a search area. This really becomes super important, especially when your search areas get really big, like at the Elite or Summit level. Handling is huge there. So training, talent, handling — it’s all part of the puzzle. Melissa Breau: The other piece that I wanted to talk about a little bit was startline routines. I know that that’s something that you talk about a lot, but what are some of the different types of routines or some of the options that people have? How can a handler begin to parse those things and decide which routine they need for their dog? Stacy Barnett: The key to this is arousal. Arousal is like the secret sauce of nosework. If you can have a good startline, it’s going to predict how good your search is, and if you have the right arousal state, that will predict how good your startline is. So you need to have the right arousal state coming in, and some dogs tend to be on the low arousal side of it and some dogs tend to be on the high arousal. With Judd, who was slightly to the left of the curve — and we’re talking the Yerkes-Dodson Law — he’s not always in drive. He comes in at a slightly low arousal, or at least he used to, and I conditioned it. But with a slightly low arousal I might use a little opposition reflex on the harness and rev him up a little bit, like “ready, ready, ready, ready.” I might do something like that to help him get into a higher state of arousal. If you have a dog that is a little on the anxious side, or just your high arousal dog, like Brava, she comes into the search area on her hind legs. She really does. It’s kind of funny, she sashays, it’s cute, and she’s still effective, which is amazing. So if you have a high arousal dog, you need to lower that arousal. Things like food actually lower arousal. With dogs like that, if you feed on the startline, if they’re not handler-focused, it can get them right where they need to be. There’s different tips and techniques that you can do, but it all comes down to arousal states, so whatever you can do to modify that arousal state to get the dog in drive, that is going to be the key to the success of your search. Melissa Breau: So I know a lot of this is covered in a lot more detail by some of the nosework classes that are on the schedule at FDSA this term. Do you want to share what you have on the October calendar and what’s covered in which class? Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. I’m teaching three classes. I have NW 120, which is Introduction to Nosework Elements. That is a class … it’s a follow on from our Introduction to Odor. We teach the dogs how to search interiors, exteriors, vehicles, containers, although we start containers and interiors in NW 101. We also introduce buried, which is an AKC element. So we introduce that. Then I’m teaching NW 241, which is Nosework Challenges Series 2. That is actually a whole class, soup to nuts, on converging odor. We take converging odor and we start with the preliminary skills and we systematically help the dog learn how to work through converging odor puzzles so that they get from the very, very beginning of converging odor to the elements that are necessary to them to be able to be really effective at solving converging odor. The last class, which is NW 250, which is NW 3 prep, I’ve actually folded the Path to Elite class, which I was going to teach that in December, I took all that information and I pulled that into NW 250. So NW 250 covers both NW 3 and Elite, and it’s all about how do you prepare for these levels and how to be successful at them. So it’s covering a whole lot this term. I’m really, really excited about it. Melissa Breau: Lots of different levels. Lots of different students. Stacy Barnett: Yeah. Yeah. Melissa Breau: Alright, so my last question — what’s a lesson you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Stacy Barnett: Trust. I wrote a blog on this recently, and I think one of the instructor quotes that came out, my instructor quote was, “Yes, but does your dog trust you?” We always talk about “Trust your dog” in nosework, and I like the term, but in a lot of ways I don’t because it’s so one-sided. It’s so important for the dog to trust the handler. Trust is mutual, and the dog has to be able to trust the handler in order to be able to be self-confident in what they’re doing and in order to have teamwork. Teamwork happens when you have trust between the dog, when it’s not just you trusting the dog, but it’s the dog trusting you. Melissa Breau: I think that’s a great note to round things out on. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast Stacy! Stacy Barnett: Oh, I’m thrilled to be here. This was a lot of fun. This was a lot of fun, and I’m going to try to still figure out what time it is... This was a blast. Thank you so much Melissa. I really enjoyed it. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week, this time with Nancy Gagliardi Little to talk about the other two big topics in the dog sports world: agility and obedience. 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. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Summary: Hannah Branigan, of Wonder Pups Training, is back on the podcast to talk about behavior chains, and a little bit about her new puppy (because he’s adorable).  Hannah is the host of Drinking from the Toilet and blogs at wonderpupstraining.com.  Next Episode:  To be released 9/28/2018, an interview with Shade Whitesel about crucial concepts when training for competition. 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 have Hannah Branigan of Wonder Pups Training back on the podcast to talk about behavior chains, and a little bit about her new puppy because he’s adorable. Welcome back to the podcast Hannah. Hannah Branigan: Thank you for having me. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. To start us out, do you want to remind listeners who you are, share a little about the dogs you have, and a little about the new addition? Hannah Branigan: Sure. I am Hannah Branigan, in case you’ve already forgotten. I have my own podcast, Drinking From The Toilet, as well as teaching for FDSA and playing in a lot of different dog sports. Obedience is my primary focus, that’s where I spend most of my time, but I’m really interested in doing really good training, and diagnosing and breaking things down, and reverse-engineering cool behaviors and high-quality performances, and figuring out how we can systematize that and then how can we teach it. For my own dogs, I currently have five dogs. I have three Belgian Shepherds, one Border Terrier, Rugby, and my new puppy, Figment, is a Border Collie. Melissa Breau: Let’s start by talking about Mr. Figment. With a new puppy, what have you chosen to focus on, and I do assume the goal is to eventually do obedience? Hannah Branigan: Definitely we’ll do some obedience. We’ll probably do a lot of different things. I cross-train with all of my dogs. Again, obedience is my central focus, but we tinker in a lot of sports, so right now I’m not doing anything with him that you would consider sport-specific, nothing that is exclusive to obedience or exclusive to agility or exclusive to anything else. My theme for him right now, my word for him, is really balance. So what I’m trying hard to do is looking at the puppy that I have today and building his skills in how he and I interact together, how he interacts with the world, and trying to develop balance, because he’s definitely got … he has his preferences, I of course have my preferences because I’m old and set in my ways, but there are things that I want to build with him. But while I’m building these new behaviors, I want to make sure that I’m not creating a lot of reinforcement history for a particular picture that will make it harder for me to then get other behaviors to change that picture later on. That was really vague, so let me give you an example. For example, I do want to do sports with him, and so we play a lot of motivational games, drive-building games, where he’s moving and I’m moving and there’s a lot of excitement and a lot of arousal. At the same time as I’m playing those games in a training context, I am juxtaposing them with less exciting, less arousing, more relaxing, more thinking sorts of games. So we might play with his ball for a few minutes and work on some toy skills, and then immediately in the same session we’ll go to some mat, and shape relax on a mat with some food, and then we might go back to working on some toy skills, and go back to relax on a mat. That switching between food and toys, and again being able to balance that, is something that I’m focusing on a lot in terms of his reinforcement, and also just in terms of all the behaviors that we’re working on. Melissa Breau: I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking lately about how much every dog is really unique and their own individuals, and that means that any new dog is going to be totally different than any dog any of us has owned or trained before that one. How do you go about getting to know a new dog or puppy? For that matter, what do you want to know about them? Hannah Branigan: I’m not doing anything particularly formal in that way. We mostly just go through life, and as we come across something like a cat, or an unfamiliar person, or whatever, I’ll pause and I’ll observe his response. Maybe it’s like, “Oh, that’s not a big deal,” and the behaviors I see in this context are totally fine and appropriate, great. I’ll just maintain that. On the other hand, sometimes we’ll see a car moving, and I’ll observe his behavior — and I put observe in air quotes because his behavior is quite obvious in that context — and I’ll say, “Oh, that’s not really what I was looking for, so maybe I need to do some training here to get a behavior that I can live with when we see cars going by.” Really I’m just living my life with my dogs the way that I would normally, and then, as we get to a new situation or some new picture or some new experience, I’ll just keep an eye on him and ask him the question, “How’s this for you?” and just be ready to look for his answer, and then adjust what we do at that time. Melissa Breau: Is there anything about Figment that feels new for you in terms of training? Hannah Branigan: I would say the biggest thing that’s different with Figgy is that he’s the first dog that I’ve ever had personally in my house that is easier to stimulate with toys than food. In fact, his food-eating behavior was not really present when he first came home to me, and it disappears rather easily if we go to a new situation. When we get out of the car at the park or at Panera or something, he may not take food right away. There are situations where I’ve accidentally over-fazed him and he’s not taking food or toys, but there are a lot of situations where we get into a new environment, or there’s people, or there’s other dogs and they’re moving, and he’ll chase a toy but not take food. That’s a new thing for me, because for my other dogs, they would usually take food first, and then the toy play would be the more fragile behavior. With him, he may not take food at all, but he’d be willing to chase a toy. And there’s a little bit of a trap there, because, one, having worked so hard to get Rugby to play with toys with me, it feels nice to have a dog that is so easy to stimulate with toys in that way. So it would be very easy for me to say, “Don’t worry about the food. We’ve got toy play, and that’s sexier anyway, so I’m just going to use the toy.” Having worked through this with students and clients, I know that that wouldn’t benefit my long-term goals, that wouldn’t fit that theme of balance I’m looking for with him, so I know that, “OK, you’re not taking treats; I need to go back a step. Where were you taking treats last? Where can you eat food?” and work from there, rather than blowing past that threshold where he can’t eat food anymore and then just lean on the toys to get through it, because that way is not going to get me what I want in the long run. It’s going to be very limiting and I’ll eventually get stuck. Melissa Breau: I’m guessing at this point he’s probably little enough that he hasn’t been introduced to much in the way of actual behavior chains yet, right? Hannah Branigan: Certainly not formally. Behavior chains are around us all the time, that’s just part of how we naturally function in the environment, but we don’t have really anything on cue. Everything that we’re doing training-wise is just on building fluent reinforcement behaviors, and a few movement skills, and those foundational individual behaviors, and way down the road we’ll work on turning those into more formal, finished behaviors. Once we have those really trained to fluency, then I’ll worry about creating sequences or behavior chains from a performance standpoint. Melissa Breau: Before we get into this stuff too much, can you explain a little bit what a behavior chain is? Hannah Branigan: Sure. A behavior chain … and you will hear words like “behavior chain” and “behavior sequence” can be used, there’s some debate in the behavior world as to what the definition between a chain versus a sequence is. There isn’t a lot of agreement. So some folks have their definition, and other folks have a different definition. I’m going to go ahead and just use behavior chain and behavior sequence pretty much interchangeably and talk about the phenomenon as a whole, and we’ll worry about splitting down the jargon later in another podcast episode. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Hannah Branigan: A behavior chain or a behavior sequence is a sequence of behaviors that are held together with cues. Those cues can come from an outside source, like if we’re talking about a dog, they might come from the trainer, the handler, but they can also come from the environment. If you need to get in your car to drive somewhere, you’ll perform a behavior chain. You’ll walk out of your house, so that’s one behavior. You’ll see your car, and the sight of the car tells you, “Oh …” more specifically, the sight of your car with the door closed is a cue in the environment: If I’m going to drive my car, I need to open the door. So that’s your cue to reach your hand out, take the door handle, pull the door open, which of course is its own little behavior chain. We can really zoom in quite a lot on these and go crazy. Now you’re standing in front of the car with the door open. That’s your cue to get in the seat. Now you’re sitting in the car. That’s your cue to maybe close the door. You’re sitting in the car, it’s not running, that’s your cue: “Oh, I need to put my key in the ignition,” and then turn the ignition. Each behavior that you perform creates some change in the state of the environment and your conditions around you that then signal you to do the next step, and the next step, to eventually reach your goal of backing out of your driveway and driving to the grocery store to get some more Oreos or whatever. So that’s an example of a behavior chain where your actions changing the environment are functioning as your cue to do the next thing. And of course if you didn’t know how to do each of those individual behaviors, you’d be in trouble. If you were faced with — and this has actually happened to me in a rental car before — you get in the car, you close the door, and you cannot find where to put the key because it’s one of those weird cars with the new … Melissa Breau: With the start button. Hannah Branigan: Yeah, and you just sit there for a while and you’re like, “I guess I’m going to have to go ask someone for help.” The chain broke because there was a behavior that was required in the middle there that was not yet fluent. Once you learn how to do that behavior, now you know how to start this new, weird, funky car, and you’re able to complete your behavior chain. Melissa Breau: For anybody wondering, you have to step on the brake and then push the button. Usually. Hannah Branigan: Yeah. I had to go back in and ask for help. Melissa Breau: I had to ask for help too. I could not figure that out. To get back to dogs for a minute, what are some examples of behavior chains that are helpful for competitive obedience? Hannah Branigan: In competition the whole performance is a behavior chain, from the time you get your dog out of the crate to when you put your dog back in the crate, or back in the car, or whatever, after the performance. That whole sequence of events is a behavior chain, really. And it’s one of those combination sequences where some of the cues are coming from the environment and some of the cues are coming from you as a trainer. For example, we’ll look at the retrieve. You throw the dumbbell, the dog is still sitting at your side, and then you’re going to give a verbal cue to send the dog to go get the dumbbell. At that point, though, you’re no longer giving any cues. The cues are all present in the environment. So the dog leaves your side, runs out, the sight of the dumbbell tells the dog what to do with it. “Do I put my feet on it?” Hopefully not, because hopefully you’ve trained your pickup to fluency. So he sees the dumbbell, he scoops it up with his mouth on the bar of the dumbbell, now he’s got the dumbbell in his mouth, that’s his cue to return to you. He sees you standing there with your arms at your sides in that formal soldier kind of posture, that’s his cue to come sit in front. At that point you cue the give and then you cue him to come to heel. So you’ve given two of those cues for those behaviors, and the environment has given the rest of them. So that’s one exercise. But then again, that whole performance is a behavior chain, and we have sequences of behaviors that we have to perform to move from one exercise to the next. So once you’re done with the retrieve on a flat, now you need to cue a series of behaviors to move your dog into the retrieve over the high. Once you do that one, which is another little behavior chain, you have another behavior chain that links the retrieve over the high to moving over to the broad jump. I think we forget that there are still behaviors happening between “Exercise finished” and “Are you ready?” So that’s something that I have made a personal project to figure out. Melissa Breau: I know your upcoming class gets into this, and specifically into the behavior chains, in a big way. Can you share a little bit about that? Hannah Branigan: Yeah. It’s called “Unchain Your Performance,” I think, and it’s kind of a joke because I can’t do anything seriously. But the idea is that in order to unchain yourself from that feeling of having to have food in your pocket, having to have a treat in your hand, and get multiple behaviors, we can build behavior chains, build these sequences of behaviors, that end in the primary reinforcement, the food, the toy, whatever. That’s the little plan, which I thought was hilarious but maybe not everybody gets. But anyway, it is a common problem, in that it is the nature of dog sports that we have to leave all of our sources of primary reinforcement, all the stuff that we’ve been using for months or years to train this dog to do this particular set of behaviors, and we leave them all over here on our chair or in our crate, and we have to go all the way into this other space, which is usually clearly delineated by ring gates or hay bales or ropes or something, but it’s quite clearly a different room in the environment, and there are no food or toys in there. And it does not take many repetitions for your dog to catch on to the idea that “She left all the food over there, but we’re going into this room where there is no food.” That’s not the whole thing that makes performance hard, that makes competing hard, but it is a piece of it, and it is a piece that we want to account for. So one of the things that we can do is we can teach the dog that by being very systematic, I can create this sequence of behaviors that does lead to access to the reinforcement, even when it’s back at your chair. I can communicate that concept through successful approximations, which is shaping in a way, in that we’re gradually building these increments of performance by holding these sequences together in a continuous stream of cues and response and cue-response and cue-response that leads into the ring, we do the performance, and then out of the ring, and bam — that’s when you get access to your reinforcer. All of that is connected instead of having a big gap where we’ve left the food and then nothing happens, and then I come ask you to do this whole bunch of things, and then there’s this gap, and then magically food appears. So it doesn’t work to just feed at the end of the performance. There has to be that connection, and we need to condition the dog, we need to teach them that, “The reinforcement you’re getting right now, here at this chair, is related to the behavior you just performed.” Melissa Breau: You mentioned in there this idea that it does give people freedom from treats and toys, at least on their body, in order to get into the ring. But when you’re talking about clicker training and things, folks often say not to bother loading the clicker anymore because dogs figure it out. If we’re consistent about rewarding when we leave the ring, would a dog just figure it out that after they compete they get good stuff; it’s just in the next little bit of the room? Hannah Branigan: Well, yes and no. If you were consistent with how you performed that whole sequence of events, yes, it would probably totally work. That’s not usually the case in real life. We certainly have examples of dogs being able to catch on to sequences of events as cues that reinforcement is coming. For example, if you feed your dog at 5:30 every night, those behaviors that you’re doing that are leading up to dinnertime, your dog is totally aware of, and when you close your laptop and stand up and start walking toward the kitchen, your dog’s already responding to that. That consistent flow of events that you’re creating with your behavior there effectively becomes the conditioned reinforcer aspect would walk forward in time from scooping the food into the bowl to walking to the kitchen … to closing the laptop and then walking into the kitchen. So yes, that effect is there. However, it does depend on how good of a predictor your behaviors are, which requires consistency. When we’re talking about something in the real world, like a performance, there’s a lot of stuff that happens in between. If we’re talking about a 2-, 5-, maybe 8-minute long obedience run, that’s a lot of stuff to depend on just repetition. There’s a lot left to chance. Could the dog figure that out? Yes, and probably some dogs do. But we can do better than that by breaking it down and being systematic and deliberately building that from the ground up, or from the chair back, or however you want to think about it, so that we know for sure that there’s a connection, instead of just hoping that if I do this a hundred times, eventually it will come out right. Your dog can be learning so many things, and if you’re inconsistent in that space, like sometimes you come out of the ring and you continue straight to your crate and you give them the meatball, but sometimes you come out and somebody says something to you and you look away from your dog, and then you forget where your chair is, or you get there and … stuff happens. The bigger that space is, the more likely that there’s some external variable that’s going to come in and mess up your party. It’s easier, it’s more effective, to be more deliberate about how you build that. Melissa Breau: It feels like, looking at this, that there are two approaches to this whole deal of helping your dog understand that the ring has value. So the idea of building reinforcers you can bring INTO the ring with you, like personal play, which I know is a big topic at FDSA, and then this concept of teaching the dog that the good stuff will come when they’re all done and they get back to their chair or their crate or whatever. Are some dogs better suited for one approach or the other? Hannah Branigan: I don’t think it’s an either/or kind of thing at all. It’s just incorporating … however, again, the whole performance is a sequence of behaviors, so part of that sequence can and should, in my opinion, include a series of, we’ll say, very easy behaviors, preferred behaviors, like play. Ideally, play is a very high-frequency, it’s a very easy behavior, it’s very cheap for your dog because it’s so fun. So there’s some behaviors that are easier as part of your ring performance. Some of the behaviors you’re going to be asking of your dog are a lot harder, like finding the correct scent article under pressure while there’s some strange man staring at him, holding a clipboard, and being very judgy. So it is, I think, very helpful to apply a little bit of the easy-hard-easy pattern that we use in training a lot, where you ask for something a little bit harder and then you ask for something easier and you reinforce it, and then you ask for something a little bit harder and you ask for something easier. We can play that pattern out in the ring by “I’m going to ask you to find the correct scent article, return with that, take it, call to heel, exercise finished, now I’m going to cue an easy behavior, which is playful interaction with me,” whatever that looks like for you and your dog. Those are behaviors that need to be trained and conditioned separately, out of context, and then you can work them into your performance. But they still have to be something you have to condition the dog to expect. We have to build it. It can be systematic, be deliberate about building those easy behaviors into the performance so the dog knows what to expect. That’s part of what makes it easy. Easy things are things we expect. He knows that “Oh, and then we’ll play, and she’ll pet me, and at the end of that play session there’s another call to heel, and we go do another thing, and then there’ll be another play, and she’ll pet me, and then she’ll call me to heel, and do another thing, and then after that we get my leash on, and we go to my chair, and I eat my cookies.” So they can have all of those things, and it’s not one or the other. It’s looking at the whole picture and being thoughtful about how do you want this to happen, what are the actions you’re doing, the cues that you’re giving to your dog that tell the dog what to expect, what’s next, what behavior should he perform, and then being ready to give those cues so that you’re maintaining that continuous interaction that we would call it connection in the ring. There is a common phenomenon that I experienced with my own dogs, I didn’t really know what was going on, and I’ve since seen in a lot of student dogs and go, “This is something we need to train for.” It’s that we are often very good at incorporating play behaviors at the end of some training exercise that we do. We call the dog on a recall, the dog comes to front, finished, exercise finished, “Yay, good boy! You’re amazing and you’re beautiful!” We pet and we play and we do all this beautiful play, and then that’s the end. But we have to have a very clean way to go from “I’m petting and playing with you” to calling to heel. What I noticed with my own dog is when I would stop petting him, and I’d pull my hands back up and I’m ready to move on to the next thing, there was this withdrawal kind of effect where he would stand and just look at me and be a little bit flat. There was a question mark on his face, and I didn’t realize it in real time, but I saw it on the video. So many things are clearer on video after the fact. I was like, let’s try replicating it. Maybe that was just in the ring because he was stressed. So I tried it in my front yard, and damned if he didn’t stand and stare at me in the front yard when I tried to move from play back to call a heel. It was like, oh, this is a chaining problem. I need to be able to time that call. One, I need him to know to expect that this play session will end with another opportunity to work, and hopefully that opportunity to do those behaviors is also positively trained and so isn’t perceived as aversive. That’s part of my job. And then I need to time that cue for while we’re still engaged in the interaction, because if I am petting him and we’re engaged, and then I just stop playing and take a moment to collect myself, he’s just standing there looking at me, and then I say, “Heel,” and he’s like, “What?” There are two things. One, that ending of the play is potentially aversive. You’re taking the toy back. Whether there’s a real toy there or an imaginary toy, there has to be something to fill that space. I realized I was having gaps in my performance, and it was making the setups at the beginning of each exercise harder than they needed to be, because there ended up being a disconnection in-between the exercises. Even when I thought I was doing a good job at maintaining the connection, there was still a little bit of a question mark on his face, and subsequently when I would ask him to come to heel to set up for the next exercise, he would be a little slow, a little bit panty, and then I would fall into some horrible habits of patting my leg and shuffling my feet and repeating cues, which I never do in training, and only add to the weirdness of the ring performance. Melissa Breau: Most people probably wouldn’t think about that. You’re giving your dog a reinforcer, “OK, you did a good job,” now I can get back to work. From the human’s perspective, that makes sense, but from the dog’s perspective, I can certainly see how that might feel a little bit jarring to be in the middle of this interaction and have somebody be like, “OK, time to go.” Hannah Branigan: Especially if they didn’t even say it, if they just stopped, like you’re eating lunch with a friend and you’re having a conversation, and she just gets up and leaves. And you’re like, “What?” But we tend to rush dogs with reinforcement anyway. I think it’s just more obvious when there’s not a physical thing involved. Food is relatively easy because the food is swallowed and then it’s gone, and then that is a very clear signal that that reinforcement is and both of you are aware of that, so there doesn’t have to be an in-between. But we still tend to rush dogs: “Hey, come back, come back, let’s go, let’s go.” Whereas we could let them swallow, let them re-engage, and then give the next cue. With toys, it’s a little bit harder because the toy is still there and you have to take the toy back. We still have a tendency, we get in a hurry as trainers and we want to rush the dog back so we can do the next thing. So “Give me the ball back,” and then we reach toward the ball, and the dog isn’t aware that the reinforcer is over just yet: “I’m still pulling on your toy.” And then, when there’s not a toy there at all, I think it’s even more abstract. So we really have to be thoughtful about how are we signaling that we’re now going to the next thing, and make sure that that transition from this easy behavior to this new next thing, this new harder behavior, is not a surprise, that it’s expected, and that it’s a positive, that the dog has good feelings about that transition. Melissa Breau: To shift gears a little bit, we’ve talked a lot now about behavior chains and the intentional, careful planning, what it takes, think through, “OK, these are the pieces, and this is the order I want them in, and these are the bits in-between, and I want to think about that.” What about unintentional behavior chains? Let’s start with the obvious: Is it possible? Hannah Branigan: Of course it’s possible, and it happens all the time. Behavior chains — that’s how we interact with our environment. There are many, many things we do where we have to do a long sequence of different actions to get whatever outcome it is that we’re after. We can certainly set up what happens to people, but we’ll look at dogs because that’s what we’re interested in right now. It certainly happens in the dog world. Many of us have experienced the undesired behavior chain of the puppy that jumps up at you and then sits. I’m trying to teach you a polite greet, and the greeting that we end up living with or settling for in the short term is the puppy jumps up and then sits. “Did you see me? I sat! Did you miss it? Let me jump up and then sit again.” These sorts of things can happen in lots of places where there’s some behavior occurs on the way to the behavior that you want to reinforce, and then it gets built into that sequence of behaviors. Of course it’s harder to do that if it’s a behavior chain you want to occur. That’s like the Murphy’s Law of dog training, kind of. But if you want the behavior sequence together, it will take months of careful planning and successful approximation to create that structure. But if it’s a behavior that you don’t want because it’s annoying, like vocalizing, like squeaking in your crate, or something like that, or jumping up and then sitting or … Melissa Breau: Or ping-ponging to the end of your leash before returning. Hannah Branigan: Yes, ping-ponging to the end of your leash and then coming back for a treat, and then end of your leash and then coming back for a treat. Those things, of course, you only have to reinforce them, like, one time and you’ve bought it for life. So the trick for those unintended behavior chains, undesired behavior chains, the ones you don’t want, is to reinforce before the undesired behavior happens. So click before the puppy jumps up, which does mean you’re clicking before they sit, but you’re clicking before they jump up, and it interrupts the undesired behavior chain. It’s the universal trick for fixing that in all cases. Melissa Breau: Before the puppy squeaks, or before they hit the end of the leash. Hannah Branigan: Right. Exactly, yes. Click before the thing you don’t want to happen, happens, and it interrupts that chain, and you can get the reinforcement that was going to come at the end of the chain is now coming, you’re short-circuiting, you’re making a little shortcut to that reinforcer. “You don’t have to sit. You don’t have to jump up. Great. Now you’re stopping 2 feet away from me.” Or in the case that you’re hitting the leash, maybe you’re just dipping your head and looking right back, bam, I’ll reinforce that, because that, for me, is a lot better than having my shoulder snapped every three steps. Melissa Breau: Depending on the size of the dog, but yeah. All right, I’ve got one last question for you, Hannah. It’s the new last question I’ve been asking everyone when they come back on: What’s a lesson you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Hannah Branigan: I would say something that Figment has reminded me of frequently right now is the importance of setting up the environment to make the behavior that you want very, very easy to happen, and the behavior you don’t want to see very, very unlikely to happen. So that he’s always rehearsing the things that you like, so that you have opportunities to reinforce them, and rarely — and hopefully never, but probably because we’re all human, rarely — practicing the behaviors that you don’t like. Almost all of the places through the course of the day where I start finding myself feeling frustrated and maybe tempted to fall back on some old training habits that are not tools that I want to use anymore, it’s almost always that I have failed to set the environment up so that he’s set up for success. And it means that I may need to put a leash on him temporarily while we’re walking through the house to go out the back door, if there’s going to be a cat in the kitchen or other predictable features of the environment that I need to change his behavior around. So I would say that’s something that I am having to think about. You don’t think about it as much with your adult dogs, with your old dogs, because they have their habits like we have our routines, and so those types of things are now very much unconscious. But with the new puppy, he doesn’t have those routines yet. He doesn’t have a lot of habits yet. I do have habits, and some of my habits are not setting him up for success. So I need to change my behavior so that he’s always rehearsing the things that I do want. If I catch myself starting to feel frustrated because he’s practicing behavior that I don’t like because it’s annoying or frustrating or dangerous, I need to change my behavior to change his environment so that I have what I want so that I can reinforce it. Melissa Breau: Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast Hannah. This has been great. Hannah Branigan: Awesome! Thanks for having me. Melissa Breau: And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We’ll be back next week with Shade Whitesel. We’ll be talking about crucial concepts for competition. Don’t miss it! 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. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Summary: Sarah Stremming, founder of The Cognitive Canine and host of Cog-Dog Raido and her partner, Dr. Leslie Eide, join me to talk about their latest addition: Watson, a 6-month-old Border Collie puppy. Next Episode:  To be released 9/21/2018. 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 have two guests joining us, for the first time ever: Sarah Stremming, of Cog-Dog Radio and the Cognitive Canine, and Leslie Eide. Longtime listeners are undoubtedly are already familiar with Sarah, but let me share a little about Leslie. Leslie graduated from Colorado State University’s Veterinary School in 2006. She completed a rotating internship in small animal medicine in Albuquerque, N.M., and then became certified in canine rehabilitation with a focus in sports medicine. She is now a resident with the American College of Veterinary Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation. Dr. Eide also helped to create and teaches some of the classes to become a Certified Canine Fitness Trainer (CCFT) through the University of Tennessee's NorthEast Seminars. Like Sarah, Dr. Eide is involved in the agility world. She has trained two dogs to their ADCH Agility Dog Champion title and one to ADCH Bronze, an Agility Trial Champion title and a Master Agility Champion title. Three of her dogs have qualified and competed at USDAA Nationals with multiple Grand Prix Semi-final runs. And today, these two lovely ladies are here to talk to us about puppies, especially one in particular … . But we’ll get to that. Welcome back to the podcast, Sarah — and hi Leslie! Pleasure to “meet” you. Sarah Stremming: Hi Melissa. Leslie Eide: Hi Melissa. Melissa Breau: To start us out, Sarah, can you just remind listeners how many dogs you have now and who they are? Sarah Stremming: I have two Border Collies. Idgie is 9 years old and she’s my main competition dog right now. And Felix is 3 years old, and he’s in training and just keeping me on my toes. Melissa Breau: Leslie, would you mind sharing the same intro for your dogs, including the newest addition? Leslie Eide: My oldest is Brink, a 12-year-old Border Collie, and he right now is champion of holding the couch down. Next would be Stig, my 7-year-old Border Collie, who’s the main competition dog right now and who most of my online training videos have in them. Next is Ghost, my 5-year-old Australian Shepherd, and she is quickly trying to surpass Stig as the main competition dog. And then finally the puppy, Watson, is 6 months old and 1 day, and he is a new Border Collie. Melissa Breau: So, it’s Watson I really wanted to talk about today. Leslie, would you mind sharing a little on how you wound up with him? And why him … even though that meant bringing him over from Japan? Leslie Eide: It just kind of happened. I didn’t go out looking for a Border Collie and saying, “Japan is the place to get him!” I actually met Miki, who is sort of his breeder but not really, a couple of years ago at Cynosport, which is the USDA agility national competition, or international competition, but it’s always held in the U.S. One of her dogs had something happen to him, and I worked on him at the event and he did really well, and we became Facebook friends and stayed in contact. Last year, she won Grand Prix with her dog Soledea. And Soledea, the weird part about it, actually belongs to someone else. She just competes with her. She announced that Soledea was having a litter, and I had been looking for, I don’t know, probably had my feelers out for about a year, looking for a Border Collie puppy. I really liked Soledea, so through Facebook I was like, “Hey, I’m sort of interested,” and she was really excited about it. When the puppies were born, I many times thought it was too much trying to get a puppy from Japan, and everything you have to go through, and blah, blah, blah, blah. I kept saying, “No, no, no, no,” and finally she said, “I’m getting the puppy to L.A. Make sure you’re there to go pick him up.” And I was like, “OK.” So that’s how it ended up getting a puppy from Japan. It all comes back to the world of sports medicine, and that’s how you find puppies. So a little bit of fate in a way of it was just meant to be, despite all the odds. Melissa Breau: Sometimes, when it’s meant to happen, it’s just meant to happen, and it doesn’t matter how many times you say, “Well, that’s pretty complicated.” You end up with the puppy. Leslie Eide: Yeah. Melissa Breau: I know Sarah has talked a bit about him on her podcast and you’ve both blogged about him a little bit. My understanding is that you guys are doing things a little … for lack of a better word … differently than other agility handlers or even dog trainers might with a new puppy. Can you share a little bit about your approach thus far with him? What are you working on, what have you worked on? Leslie Eide: For me, it’s not much different than I would say I’ve raised my other puppies. I’m maybe what you would think of as a lazy trainer. I’m more about building a relationship than necessarily having a list of things I have to accomplish — “He’s this old, he must be able to do these ten things.” I just let everything happen in a more organic manner of he shows me he can do it, and then I say, “OK, I’m going to reinforce that.” An example is I had him at the agility trial this weekend. He hopped on the measuring table and … we’ve never worked on “stay” a day in his life, and because he was willing to stand on the table, I took the opportunity to say, “Hey, I can reinforce this,” and got some really good training in when it was again more organic of him telling me he knew he was ready for it, rather than saying, “He has to know how to stay by a certain age,” or “He has to be able to know how to wrap a wing jump by a certain age,” that kind of thing. Sarah Stremming: For me, more what I do with Watson is teaching him how to be a dog in this house, and how to go out on off-leash walks — as everybody knows I’m pretty into — and providing him with lots of environmental enrichment. I just want to make sure that he maintains this delightfully optimistic personality that he has. I know that you had Julie Daniels, I think just last week, and she talked about optimism. I loved it. I like that word for describing what he is, because it’s not like he doesn’t have any fears, because they all do. That’s not real. That’s not realistic. It’s more that when he encounters something novel, his first guess is that it’s going to be good for him, and I just want that to stay there, because if that stays there, then agility training is a piece of cake. If you’re not trying to overcome fear of other dogs, or fear of strangers, or fear of loud noises or weird substrates or anything like that, agility training is not that hard, especially for a pretty seasoned competitor like Leslie. I think both of us feel pretty confident in training agility skills and also handling. Not that we can’t improve and that we’re always trying to improve, but for me, I want him to maintain that really optimistic outlook on when something new is happening, he’s game to try it. Leslie Eide: I guess I would add, goes along with what Sarah was saying, is I also want him to learn what it’s like to be a dog in my life. So, like she said, being able to live in a household with lots of dogs, but it’s also about getting used to our schedule. I’m a busy person and usually work 12-hour days, and while he may get to come with me to work, he also has to realize there’s going to be some really boring time at work where he just has to sit and chill. And that happens at home too. So that’s really important to me that he doesn’t necessarily get upset or get stir-crazy or all upset when he doesn’t have something to constantly do. Border Collies are definitely busy, smart dogs, and so learning what our life is like, and not necessarily doing things out of the ordinary while he’s a puppy, and then suddenly, when he’s grown up, being like, “OK, now you’re an adult, and you just have to live with how our life is,” but rather teaching him how to handle it when he’s young. Sarah Stremming: You said, “How are you guys doing stuff differently?” I think that is the primary component, because most sport people that I know, especially in the agility world, really, really want their puppy to have tons and tons of drive to work with the handler. I’m not saying that’s bad. We want that too. But they tend to go about it in a way that seems really imbalanced to me, and the dog experiences isolation/boring-ness or super-exciting training time. That’s not how we live. I guess if your dogs all live in kennels and they come out to train multiple times a day, then you could pull that off. But we both want our dogs to be free for 90 percent of their time. We just don’t want them to be crated, kenneled, etc., for large portions of their lives, so they have to learn how to just hang out early on. Melissa Breau: I don’t remember if it was the blog or the podcast, but I feel like I remember something one of you at one point put out about planning to hold off on teaching certain skills until he’s a bit older. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that too. What skills are you holding off on, maybe, and sharing a little bit of the reasoning. I know we’ve talked about it a little bit already. Leslie Eide: I think mostly the blog was relating to agility skills, and that a lot of times we start teaching the foundation movements right away with a puppy, like wrapping a wing, groundwork. You’re not necessarily putting them on equipment or doing anything like that, but everything that you are teaching them in some way relates to eventually an agility skill, including convincing them to tug with you. That’s a big thing of “They have to tug,” and it goes from there. Those things I think will come. I’m not going to push for them too soon. That’s kind of going back to the story of working on a stay on the table this past weekend. If he shows me he’s ready for something, then I’ll take advantage of it, but I’m not going to push him ahead of his comfort level. I’d rather him be comfortable with everything, be happy with playing with me, and know that good things come from me and that we’re going to do fun things, rather than taking it straight to an agility focus. Melissa Breau: I’d assume the two of you have had a pretty big influence on each other, and your approach to dogs and all that good stuff, over the years. From the outside, at least, it seems like you’re essentially taking all Sarah’s developed with her Whole Picture approach and applying it to Watson. Sarah, is that accurate? And for those not as familiar with your approach, can you give us the down and dirty version of what I’m talking about? Sarah Stremming: I would say that’s accurate. The Four Steps to Behavioral Wellness is what we’re talking about. That would be communication, nutrition, exercise, and enrichment. The communication front — that’s just training. That’s just having a positive-reinforcement-based training relationship with the dog, where you give the dog a lot of good positive feedback all the time. Nutrition is kind of self-explanatory, and Leslie’s a vet, so I pretty much defer to her in that regard with him. Exercise — I like free exercise. He certainly goes on leash walks, but the leash walks are more about learning how to walk on a leash than exercise. Again, I defer to Leslie in the exercise department because her field is sports medicine. You definitely don’t want to be overdoing it with a puppy at all, and he would like to be completely wild and run and run and run all day long, so we have to talk about that. The enrichment piece is really big for me. We do lots of things for him to shred. You should see our house. There’s cardboard shreds everywhere. So just giving him things to shred, feeding him his meals out of a slow bowl, we have all kinds of little kibble-dispensing toys around, lots of chew bones, things like that. So just making sure that his brain is exercised, his body is exercised, he is not confused, he is communicated with appropriately, and that he is fed well. That’s what we’re trying to do. Melissa Breau: Leslie, I’d guess your background’s had a pretty big influence on your general approach, right? How has your experience as a vet and a canine rehab specialist influenced your views on this stuff and led you to take this approach? Leslie Eide: It’s maybe changed it a little bit, but not much. I’ve always been a little bit more laid back with my approach with puppies. I’ve always had this belief that puppies should get to be puppies and experience their puppyhood, and not just be thrown into intensive sport training right from Day 1. Maybe that’s a little bit of backlash from my own experience of being thrown into competitive swimming as a 5-year-old and doing that for most of my young life, and everything was about training and being really serious. I also would say, from the vet side of things, I think there’s a lot of injuries that can happen when they’re young, and by pushing things and doing stuff repetitively that causes problems at a young age, or maybe they’re not as visible at a young age, but then they show up a little later in life and can definitely cut their careers short. I want to be successful, but I also want to do it for a long time, and not just a year or two and then have to give it up because they’re hurt for some reason. Melissa Breau: We’ve talked quite a bit about what you’re NOT doing. So I’d love to hear … I know you mentioned a little bit of leash walking. I’d imagine you’re doing some other training with him. What ARE you focusing on as far as training goes with Watson right now? Leslie Eide: Well, Sarah’s trying to teach me how to teach him marker cues. We’ll see how that goes. So we definitely have that going on. He gets the basics of “sit” and “down,” and again, most of it is capturing offered behavior, rather than setting out as a training session of “OK, we’re going to learn this behavior.” We do fitness exercises, so I have my building blocks that I use to make all my canine fitness exercises. So starting to work on ones that are appropriate for him, like learning targeting, front paw targeting, rear paw targeting, being comfortable getting in an object or on an object, like a box or a disc or something like that. And then a lot of new experiences still. Most recently, over the past couple of weeks I’d say, I worked to introduce him to the underwater treadmill so he can start getting some exercise in that, since that’s a really easy way for me to exercise him at work. Melissa Breau: That’s so cool. Leslie Eide: Going places, we went to the beach for the first time, he goes to shops and meets people, he goes to agility trials and hangs out. Like I said, at agility trial learned how to do a stand-stay on the measuring table. So I’m the anti-planner. I don’t set out with “We’re going to learn this.” It’s more see what happens and go from there. Sarah Stremming: For me, the things that I need to teach him are things that make him easier for me to manage in a house with six dogs. We’ve recently started working hard on all the dogs are trained to release out the door by name, and so I want Watson also to know that with everybody else. So we’ve been working on some very early iterations of that. And things like the best stuff for puppies is not on the counter or the kitchen table. The best stuff for puppies is on the ground. And body handling, so handling your feet, and looking in your mouth, and accepting passive restraint, as is so important for all of them to learn. Things like that are more my focus with him. Leslie Eide: I would say something that’s really big is playtime, too. That’s not necessarily something like a skill we’re teaching, but just making sure that playtime happens every day in some form. Melissa Breau: Are there skills that you think get overlooked that you’re making sure to cover right from the start? You mentioned handling, you mentioned play skills. Anything else on that list for you? Sarah Stremming: I do think body handling gets overlooked, but for me, especially within the sport of dog agility, I think a lot of people start out with puppies ringside, watching agility, trying to “teach them” to be cool waiting their turn. And then what happens is at a certain age the puppy notices what’s going on in the ring, and they start to wiggle and scream and not contain themselves. And then, depending on the trainer, the puppy might get a correction, or the puppy might be removed from the arena, or they might try to distract the puppy with food, or I saw a competitor once basically just hit the side of her puppy with a tug toy until the puppy decided to turn around and latch on the tug toy instead of squeal at the dogs in the ring. For me, again, it’s an answer of what are we omitting? But it’s about the teaching him the skill of waiting his turn before we ever ask him to wait his turn. The early, early iterations for that, for me, look like feeding all of the dogs a little bite of something, and I say their name and I feed them, and then I say their name and I feed them. Watson is trying to eat everything that I’m feeding, but he doesn’t get anything until I say his name and then feed him. So he’s bouncing around and being ridiculous, and all the other dogs are sitting and waiting, and eventually they go, “Oh, this isn’t that hard. When she says my name, I get to eat.” Just like what Leslie was talking about, they show you that capability when they have it. It’s kind of like a 3-year-old child only has so much self-control, and I really feel that way about puppies too. They only have so much ability to “wait their turn.” So teaching him the skill of waiting his turn way before we ever ask him to wait his turn is a big one for me that I think people maybe don’t overlook, but go about it in a way that I wouldn’t. Leslie Eide: For me, it’s relationship. He can train, and he knew how to do that from pretty much the moment I got him, but he didn’t necessarily know that I was a special person to him. So, to me, it’s about building a relationship before asking him for a list of skills that he needs to be able to do. Definitely, training can help build that relationship, but I think it’s also just one-on-one time, especially when there’s a large number of dogs in the household. And it’s about snuggles and play and that kind of thing. Melissa Breau: Obviously we all TRY, when we get a new puppy, to do everything right, and there’s definitely nothing more stressful than that feeling. But inevitably something goes wrong. We’re out and about and another dog barks and lunges at the puppy, or kids come flying at the puppy’s face, screaming, and they scare the bejesus out of him. Have either of you had to deal with any of those types of moments yet? And if so, how did you handle it? Is there prep work you’ve done, or things you do in the moment … or even afterwards, stuff you do for damage control that you can talk about a little bit? Sarah Stremming: We honestly haven’t had anything big that I have experienced, but there have been things that he saw and went, “Huh, I’m not sure about that.” Like, we had him in this little beach town after running on the beach and there was a lot of construction going on, and so there was a jackhammer going into the concrete, and he wasn’t sure if that was what should be happening, and I can’t blame him, really. What was important for me, and what I usually tell people to do, is as long as the puppy is still observing the thing, allow them to continue to observe the thing. So he looked at it until he was done looking at it, and then he turned away from it, and then we all retreated away from it together. I think what people try to do instead is they try to distract the puppy away from it with food, or they try to make it a positive event with food, or they try to drag the puppy towards it, maybe, or lure the puppy towards it, and it’s best to just let them experience their environment from a distance that they feel comfortable with. He really hasn’t had any huge startles about anything. I tend not to let him see a lot of people unless I know them, because he is going to jump on them and I don’t want them to be a jerk about that. He did meet one strange dog that I hadn’t planned on him meeting once on a walk. And that dog — I actually posted a video of this on the Cognitive Canine Facebook page — that dog was inviting play before Watson was ready, and he scared Watson a little bit, but not terrible. What was amazing was that Felix walked up and intervened, and then the dog played with Felix. Watson still stayed there, and then he was like, “OK, I can tag along if there’s three of us, but I don’t want to be the center of attention.” If he had run away, let’s say that dog had really scared him and he had tucked his tail and run towards me or something, if the puppy is coming to me looking for shelter from whatever it is, I always give it to them. So I would have absolutely picked him up and just allowed him to look at the dog from a distance. But I tend not to try to involve food in those moments unless the dog is trying to approach. Let’s say, when Felix was a puppy, he saw a fire hydrant, seemingly for the first time, and decided that it was monster. I let him look at it as long as he wanted to the first day he saw it, and then we walked away. And then the next day, he looked at it and he wanted to sniff it and approach it, and I fed him for that. And then the third day, he was like, “Oh, here’s the thing. Feed me.” And I was like, “OK, good. Done. Here’s one cookie, and now I’m never going to feed you for that again because it’s over.” I think people freak out, and if you freak out and they’re freaking out, then we’re all freaking out, and it’s not a good thing. Leslie Eide: Yeah, he really hasn’t had anything, but I completely agree with Sarah. And I’m pretty good about it, again, going along with not planning everything. I’m pretty chill about everything, so when he reacts to something, I’m not going to feed into it by being like, “Oh my god.” It’s about, “Cool, dude. Check it out. I’m not going to force you into anything. We’ll just stand here. If you’re comfortable staying here looking at it, then that’s where we’ll stay.” If food comes into play, it’s for when he turns around and looks at me and says, “OK, let’s go.” It’s more of a reinforcement of choosing to be back with me and go on with me on our whatever we’re doing, not a reinforcement for necessarily … Sarah Stremming: Which we would do if the thing was exciting, too, not just if it’s scary. It’s “Choose me over the stuff in the environment that interests you.” Melissa Breau: I’d love to end on a high note. Can each of you share one piece of advice for anyone out there with their own puppy, hoping to raise a happy, balanced dog? Leslie Eide: My piece of advice would probably be something like, “It’s all going to be OK.” We all can make mistakes, and luckily dogs are very forgiving, so don’t beat yourself up if something bad happens or you make a mistake. There’s lots that you can do to bounce back and still have a perfectly wonderful puppy. Sarah Stremming: I think mine is really similar to yours, in that I would say … Melissa, you had mentioned we’re all paranoid about doing everything right and that’s really stressful. So my piece of advice would be to embrace and accept that you will not do everything right. Embrace and accept that you will screw something up at some point and that you’ll survive, and if you’re paying attention, you’ll learn, and that will in the end be a good thing too. I seriously look back on every puppy and go, “Yeah, could have done that better, could have done that better.” All of us do that, and that’s fine. Embrace it and run with it. Melissa Breau: For folks out there who are interested in following along as Watson grows up, what’s the best way to do that? And where can people who want to stalk — or at least follow — each of you, where can they go to stay up to date? Sarah Stremming: The first question, where can they follow Watson, we are running a subscription to a blog just about Watson. It’s called “Puppy Elementary,” and you can find that by clicking the Puppy Elementary tab on my website, which is thecognitivecanine.com. Again, you can follow me at thecognitivecanine.com. That’s where I blog. I also have a podcast called Cog-Dog Radio, and of course I’m on Facebook with The Cognitive Canine and Cog-Dog Radio, and just me, so that’s where you can find me. You can find Leslie at work — all day, every day! We are teaching our course together … is it next term? October? Jumping Gymnastics, for FDSA, together, so you can find Leslie there too. But your website is thetotalcanine.net?Leslie Eide: Yes. And Facebook. I’m on there. My business-y type page is The Total Canine, which has a Facebook page, and then the website is thetotalcanine.net and it is “canine” spelled out. And my real work is SOUND Veterinary Rehabilitation Center, and it’s on Facebook, and the website is soundvetrehab.com. Melissa Breau: Where are you located again, just in case somebody is in your area and wants to come look you up? Sarah Stremming: About 40 miles north of Seattle, but the SOUND Veterinary Rehab Center is in Shoreline, Washington, which is just north of Seattle. Melissa Breau: One last question for each of you — my new “last interview question” that I’ve been asking everyone: What’s a lesson that you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Sarah, you want to go first? Sarah Stremming: Mine is exceedingly nerdy. When I told Leslie what it was, she was like, “Oh God.” It’s to remember not to stay on lesser approximations for too long. In real words, plain English, basically that means to progress as fast as possible. So don’t wait for perfection before moving on to the next thing that you’re going to be reinforcing. I’m always shooting for low error rates, high rates of reinforcement, I like nice, clean training, and because of that, sometimes I can stay on approximations that are not the final behavior for a little bit too long because I get a little bit too perfectionistic on those, and it bites me every time. I was recently reminded of it in Felix’s contact training. Melissa Breau: I’ve never done that. Sarah Stremming: I know, right? I think it’s the sickness, honestly, of people who are really obsessed with training just get way too fixated on the details. But anyway, that’s mine. Leslie Eide: I think I’m going to pick one specifically to make fun of Sarah. Sarah Stremming: I expect no less. Leslie Eide: In that it’s something that I never do, but she probably really wishes I would, and that’s take data. Sarah Stremming: Leslie never takes data. Leslie Eide: No. Sarah Stremming: I take data on everything. I always say that if we could put us together, we’d be a great trainer, because I’m too detail-oriented and nitpicky, and she’s too freeform. Leslie Eide: Yeah. Sarah Stremming: Which is why together, with Jumping Gymnastics, I think we do a nice job teaching together, because we do come from both of those different sides. Melissa Breau: Thank you so much, ladies, for coming on the podcast! And we managed upon a time when both of you could join me, so that’s awesome. Thank you. Sarah Stremming: Thanks for having us. Leslie Eide: Thank you. Melissa Breau: Thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week talking about details with Hannah Branigan to talk about prepping for competition and more. 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. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Summary: Andrea Harrison is the people trainer on the FDSA team, working with dog sports teams to help handlers train themselves for better performance. She teaches classes on unleashing your personal potential, mental management, planning, goal setting, and more. She’s here today to talk about mental management, self-care, and dealing with failure. Next Episode:  To be released 8/31/2018, featuring Julie Flanery, talking about Heeling. 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 Andrea Harrison. Andrea is the people trainer on the FDSA team, working with dog sports teams to help handlers train themselves for better performance. She teaches classes on unleashing your personal potential, mental management, planning, goal setting, and more. She’s here today to talk about mental management, self-care, and dealing with failure. Hi Andrea! Welcome to the podcast. Andrea Harrison: Hi Melissa. It’s so nice to be here. Melissa Breau: To start us out, can you just remind listeners a little bit about who you are and who the dogs are that you share your life with? Andrea Harrison: Sure. I’m Andrea Harrison, I am Canadian, I live in an island in the middle of Lake Ontario … well, not quite the middle, but close enough on the Canadian side. We live with 32 animals, five of whom are dogs. We’ve got two older dogs, Thea and Sally, who are a Chihuahua and a Border Collie mix. You will have seen both of them in photos of mine, I bet, and they are retired agility dogs, largely. Sally’s done a lot of stuff, actually. She’s been a film star, and she’s been a spokesperson for the SPCA’s spay-neuter program, and all kinds of different things. And then Tom has a farm dog. He has a Golden Retriever, Samson, who is 9 now; we can’t believe it. And then my two young dogs are 6 and 5, and they’re a toy American Eskimo, Yen, also known as the flying squirrel, and Dora, who’s a Cairn Terrier mix, who’s 5. My dogs mostly do farm dog, agility, scent work, and a little bit of playing in whatever kind of sport captures my fancy when I’m working through some concept for one of my students. They’re all really good sports about being flexible. Agility has been my passion for a long time, nosework’s a close second, and I play with some obedience stuff just so I keep my head in the game. So that’s our current crew. I keep expecting one of these days I’ll be telling you about a puppy, but I’m certainly in no rush for that. Melissa Breau: Well, I look forward to it. Puppy pictures are the best. Andrea Harrison: They are. Melissa Breau: I know we have a couple of things we’re hoping to get to today, but to start us out, I want to talk about motivation. If someone listening has a goal they really want to reach, but they’re struggling a little bit to stay motivated to work on it day by day, do you have tips you can offer for continuing to make progress? Andrea Harrison: There are tons of tips, and I think we’ll probably cover lots of the more specific tools, but one of the things I encourage people who have that sense of “I don’t know what to do” is to do a really good self-check. That means thinking about your head, your heart, and your gut, and listening to what those three things tell you. Your head: You’re going to look and make sure that you have a plan in place and that you’re trying to actually honor your plan, that you have some goals set that are both process goals and outcome goals, that you’re meeting both of those needs, and that you’re taking small enough steps to really continue to move forward. We get these big, big goals sometimes, and when we don’t see that we’re progressing towards them, it’s really easy to give up and think, Oh, I’m never going to [fill in the blank] finish this routine, learn this behavior, whatever it is. So if we can make sure that we’re also meeting with small steps — Oh, my dog is getting better as it comes in, or doing a better sit, whatever it is, hitting the contact more often in agility — then we know that our head is in the game and we actually can help ourselves motivate ourselves to do it right and to keep going. But we also need to balance out with making sure we’re challenging ourselves, because if all we’re doing is repetitive things that we already know how to do, we’re going to get bored and we’re going to stop doing it. So the head is a really important piece of trying to find this motivation. And then you want to think about your heart. Are these the right goals for you? Should you be playing the game you’re playing? Is there another game you might enjoy more or be more motivated about? How is your relationship with your dog? Are you feeling that connection and that support, or is that starting to erode a little bit and you need to stop doing some of the competitive training and work on the relationship goals that you have and you want to have with your dog? It’s important that we sometimes look back and see how far we’ve come, and we look forward to see how far we could go. But in those heart-centered moments you want to stop and make sure that you are in the present. What can you be grateful for right now in this moment in time? That’s really hard when we’re frustrated and feeling a lack of motivation, but it can really turn our thinking around to consider where our incentive is to keep getting up every day. We talk sometimes in other things beyond dog training about a reason to get up out of bed. When we’re talking about dog training, we have to think about what’s the reason we’re getting up to train the dog. If our head and our heart can’t find those reasons, talk to your gut and really think about how are you feeling. How can you help yourself and your teammate feel better about it? But that’s sort of a last check on this self-check for when we feel blah, but it’s an important piece of it if we can’t figure it out through looking at our head or our heart. Melissa Breau: Probably one of the key reasons so many people struggle with motivation is simply about time — after a long day at work, they’re totally drained, they get home, and it can be really hard not to say, “I’ll do it tomorrow.” I know I’ve certainly done it, I’m definitely a queen of procrastination some days. What strategies are there for sticking to your guns even when maybe all you really want is to go to bed or sit in front of the TV and veg out? Andrea Harrison: That’s such an important question, and again it depends on the person, because some of us, we think, OK, I’m going to train the dogs after I’ve had dinner and instead of watching TV. But if you’re sitting on the couch, watching TV, and that’s really rewarding for you, why on earth would you leave it to go train? You might do better to train your dogs in the morning before you leave for work. Get up 15 minutes early. Or first thing when you come in the door and they’ve got tons of energy and are going bananas. Or right before dinner, because then dinner can be the reward for doing your training. You have to look at how you work the best and split what you want. Look at your end goal and split it down into tiny, tiny steps, because if 5 minutes of training twice a week will get you where you want to go — because say your goal is six months out, or three months out, which I more often recommend — but if your goal is three months out, you can start with really little steps for right now and get yourself there. If your goal is you’re competing next weekend … I have a number of students who came to me because they wouldn’t train at all. Their goal would be to go to the show and do well in ten days, and they would do nothing for those ten days. And then they would be so frustrated, because of course they hadn’t trained and nothing went right. They’d never actually taught the behavior they expected the dog to show them. So with those guys we sit and we talk about direction, intensity, and persistence. Direction is can you get up off the couch and go and do what you should be doing. Intensity is do you do it long enough and hard enough and with a plan. So the weekend warriors can sometimes forget the intensity piece. Persistence is just are you willing to stick with it for the three or four or five months or weeks or whatever it is. Blocks for our motivation can happen anywhere. So when you are feeling those blocks, and that lack of time management, and that stress, you can actually start to look back at your record-keeping, or start keeping records if you haven’t. Check a video from six months ago. See your progress. You probably aren’t doing as badly as you thought you were in the first place, so sometimes that recognition itself can be a little bit motivating. Melissa Breau: What about those inevitable times when things just don’t go according to plan? Maybe you’re training and something goes wrong or what have you. We’ve all been there. How can folks avoid letting that send them into a rut, or lead to them abandoning their plan entirely and spending a lot of time living in a place of negative self-talk and beating themselves up about it? Andrea Harrison: I can show you a hundred articles that tell us “18 types of negative self-talk,” “32 types of negative self-talk.” If you’re feeling that way, acknowledge it, admit it, but don’t get hung up on it. The more you think about, Oh gosh, what kind of negative self-talk is it and how can I beat it, sometimes it can become a bit of a self-fulfilling thing. So when you feel yourself beating yourself up needlessly, acknowledge it, admit it, and then start thinking again about your motivation, because this is one of the real roots of sometimes negative self-talk. Is your motivation intrinsic? Is it something you’re doing for yourself and your dog? Is it extrinsic or external? Is it something you’re doing for somebody else, like your coach, or your partner who’s giving you all this money for dog sports, or whatever? Or is it affiliative in nature and it’s actually about making relationships? It’s that social aspect of motivation, where we’re doing it for the relationship with our dog club, or the judges group, or for a judge, or whatever it is. So to acknowledge your negative self-talk is fine and an important step, but then focus on the positive. Focus on figuring out why you’re doing what you’re doing, why you’re starting to feel negative, and how you can address it head-on. Again, planning. Sometimes planning a break can be a really good way to beat this negative thinking. You know what? I’m in a really bad headspace, and I’m not going to train for two or three days, or a week. Our dogs won’t roll over and die if we don’t train them for a few days, and most of our dogs actually can benefit from a gap. We certainly can as learners, and there’s some good evidence that they can too. So it’s quite all right, when you’re getting yourself into one of those negative things, look to your outer circle and find some positive things. Again, look back at the video of you doing well. Go and look at your ribbon wall. I talk about setting up an inspiration or confidence corner of some sort so that you have somewhere where you can go and literally touch the things that are good that help you stay grounded and in this game. When you’re finding that that happens, that can be really, really helpful. Melissa Breau: What about in the actual moment — if someone is in the middle of a training session with their dog and something goes … let’s not say “wrong” necessarily, but … definitely not according to the plan? Andrea Harrison: That never happens, does it? I don’t know what you’re talk about. Don’t we wish! I think it happened today actually to me, but that’s a whole separate story! I think you want to make sure that you can see the whole picture. So many of us work from a place where we’re either looking at the big picture more, or the little tiny details more. I can’t predict what kind of view you take, or any individual takes of their training, unless I’m talking to them, but if you are a detail-oriented person and things are going wrong, stop, take a breath, do one of the grounding exercises, breathe in, breathe out, do count breathe-in, 1-2-3 in, 1-2-3-4 out, whatever it takes, just focus, and then think about the big picture. OK, so the tuck sit isn’t perfect right now, the finish isn’t perfect right now. Why am I doing this big picture thing? I’m doing this big picture thing, those little steps, in order to get the big picture of putting together a show or whatever it is. So you need to be really careful that you give yourself credit for what kind of skills you’re best at, and then how you break that down into what you need. If you’ve got the little details at hand, think big picture. If you can see the big picture, you know you want a podium at Nationals in three months, make sure you’re putting the little pieces into play. Often when we struggle with what’s happening in the moment, it’s because we’re getting hung up on either small details or big picture and we’re forgetting that balance. And balance is really what it’s about. We have to have that sense of balance in order for us to be able to move forward. Melissa Breau: Does it matter at all if the mistake was truly a mistake, for example, say the person dropped the leash and their dog decided to go for a very unplanned swim in a nearby lack, or if it’s something maybe where the team just didn’t make as much progress as the person wanted to in that training session and they’re feeling a little disappointed? Andrea Harrison: For some of us it does make a big difference, and that goes back to that whole affiliate of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. If you’re walking with your friends in the park and your dog takes off and runs in the lake without permission, some people will be devastated by that. They’ll be really upset because they’re looking for external validation, or maybe they feel like it’s a great internal failure. But if friends being with them makes it worse, it’s usually because of affiliative or extrinsic values. If it slides off in another direction, that can be a really internal thing. It’s going to depend. So it’s a tough question for me to answer, because the tools that you need to use are not the same tools that I need to use. Recognizing which failure — and you know me, so you know that failure is in big air quotes — what that learning information from the error, what that information gives us, will help us address how to best deal with it and how to move forward. If, for you, a dog going for an unexpected swim in the leash is a terrible ordeal, or for somebody only being able to heel for 6 seconds is a terrible ordeal, whatever the trauma is for you, break it down in terms of how traumatic it is, and then take measures to address it. In the bottom-line world, human, we are all going to make mistakes. I don’t know how to tell anybody that they are going to be perfect, because we are human and we are not perfect. And every trainer — every trainer, I really mean this, I can’t tell you, every single trainer — has a moment where they think, Oh, I wish I’d handled that differently, and that’s OK. It’s all right to be human. We can’t change the fact we’re human, so we want to make sure that we understand where our own stress and distress comes from and that we take steps to address it. Melissa Breau: Obviously, achieving goals is super-important and a part of what you do, but I know another big topic for you is this idea of self-care. So I wanted to ask what some ways are that people can try and make sure they’re working self-care into their regular routine, whether that’s daily or weekly or what have you. Andrea Harrison: Self-care is a really good and big topic. It’s something I talk about all the time, and I think it’s really important to remember that if I tell you that self-help works if you do “this,” and it doesn’t work for you, don’t feel badly, because the same tools are not going to work in the same ways for all people. That’s my self-help rant in a nutshell. But some of the things that people find, and I like to talk about free self-care, because lots of people tell you all kinds of ways to spend money on yourself, and honestly, in my experience, most people feel better if they spend money on themselves, interestingly enough, even if it’s money they don’t have. So I really focus on free self-care and how to make it work for you. One of the biggest things people can do is use the natural world. There’s actually studies done that show if you take your shoes off and touch the earth with bare feet, or if you put your hand up and touch a tree, or any of that kind of thing, that your brain starts to look happier in scanning. I’m not going to get into all the science of it, but it helps calm us and ground us, and our brain looks prettier on scans. The natural world is obviously pretty important to people generally, and especially to dog and horse people I find it’s really important because we already have an affinity for natural beings, other beings beyond being human. So take your time and enjoy the natural world. Maybe consider unplugging from social media or from all electronics for a little while. Even ten minutes of just peace can be a big deal. Exercise, use music, dance if it works for you, or be really still and just listen and be thoughtful. Again, these things vary so much for the individual. But test them all, because you’re not going to know what works for you unless you’ve tested it. For some people, self-help is being creative. Coloring, knitting, crocheting, whatever you do. I’m not saying go and find a new hobby, although if you want to, that’s fine, and that can be effective too. But if you have something you love doing and you found it a good release, do it. Sitting in front of the television on a couch is not good self-care. It’s good escapism, and there’s a place for escapism, for sure, but if you want to take your TV time and get an element of self-care in it, think about doing a Sudoku for your brain, or coloring a picture, or doing a needlepoint. Whatever works for you. But you can take those dead times we have in the day and add a little element of self-care to it. Another example would be listening to inspirational speeches in the car on the way to work instead of listening to the local news. One of the things I’ve been exploring lately for some of my students is scent. If you are sensitive to scent, a little drop of essential oil, or a little rock that’s impregnated with some scent, in a little empty pill bottle. Lavender’s really good for peace and calm and easing anxiety and panic. Lemon is a really good way to concentrate. Rosemary’s really good to help your mind remember things. Cinnamon and peppermint are two other scents that students have found very effective at tying back to things that help them relax and enjoy. I don’t think of scent as a self-care thing for me, but for somebody else it could be really effective. So I would never rule out that tool, if that makes sense. Sleep. I talk about sleep, I think, every time we talk. Sleep is like the heartbeat of how our brain learns new information. We have to sleep to lay down those new neural pathways. So when you want to take good care of yourself, make sure you’re addressing your sleeping needs, whether that means going back to bed for half an hour after your dog gets you up early — oh wait, maybe that’s just me! — or whether that’s going to bed an hour early because you can. Whatever it is for you, make sure that you’re filling those sleep needs. That can be a really, really effective way to start self-care fast. Even if it’s just lying in a quiet, dark room. That’s as effective for everything except your brain does the same effect on your organs as actually being asleep. Sleep is restorative, and resting quietly in the dark is restorative. So take advantage of it. Laughter. We just chuckled. Laughter is such an important self-help tool, and it’s one that’s really easy to forget. We get so busy in our world, training our dogs, and making the money to go to shows, and doing the things, and worrying about the car, and the stress just builds and builds and builds and builds and builds. We can go days without laughing, and days without laughing is not good for any of us. If that’s pulling up a Monty Python clip, going to a comedy, spending time playing with kids, or watching some young animal video on Facebook — it doesn’t matter what it is. If you can find a way to laugh and chuckle, that is going to actually help you with self-care. I can’t talk about self-care without mentioning gratitude practice. Whatever that means for you, gratitude is demonstrably good for us. It’s good for our head, our heart, and our gut. It actually has measurable impacts on all of our wellbeing in every way possible, so if you want to practice self-care, make sure that you’ve got a little bit of time somewhere, whether it’s through formal journaling or just grabbing a moment when you feel blue and thinking, Oh wait, I’m feeling blue. What can I be grateful for? There are tons of different ways to practice gratitude, and I talk about it quite a lot. That’s probably enough for now, but positive self-talk. If you are feeling rotten, if you’re getting hung up on negative self-talk, positive self-talk can be really, really good self-care. Melissa Breau: I was wondering how you define self-care, because I was thinking about it and thinking it’s kind of like reinforcement in dogs, where what’s reinforcing is really dependent on the dog. It seems like we’ve talked about quite a few different forms of self-care. How do you define it, and it’s not all exactly the same for every person, right? Andrea Harrison: It’s not the same thing for everybody, and what self-care means to me for everyone is feeling better after they practice it. So it doesn’t matter what you do. If the result of what you are doing makes you feel better, I’m going to call it self-care. But if that definition doesn’t work for you, I’m OK with that. My self-help rant: The definition has to work for you. So if you think, Well, self-care must be this very measured thing, I’m OK with that. You go ahead and self-care yourself that way, because at the end of the day you’re likely to meet my definition where you feel better about yourself. For example, one of my students, a fabulous student, decided, with my help, that she needed a self-care program. She needed to set aside ten minutes a day that was just for her. Because of where she could do it, which was her workplace, and the tools she had at her disposal, she decided that, for her, watching ten minutes of a TED Talk once a day was going to be her self-care. And it caught on at work. Her boss saw her and said, “What are you doing on your break?” She explained what she was doing, and her boss said, “Great. I’m going to do it too.” So now at this workplace they’ve got a little self-care program running that’s all because of one student who said, “Hey, I need to start taking care of myself.” So for her that worked really, really well. Would I say watching YouTube is necessarily great self-care for everybody? Probably not. But for her and what she needed and where she was, it worked beautifully. So for her, that’s self-care. For other people, TED Talk might be educational. It might be important, but they’re not going to feel better about themselves at the end of it, so therefore it’s simply educational. Whereas going and hugging a tree for 30 seconds is their self-care, and that’s what they need. If it doesn’t work for you, it’s not going to be self-care. I think that’s the really big takeaway for this. If it is working for you, then we can call it self-care. If it isn’t working for you, let’s not call it self-care. Let’s say, “Hey, that was a tool to test. It didn’t work. Let’s find something else.” Melissa Breau: What about … I guess this is a little bit of change of subject … but for somebody who is really goal-oriented, and maybe motivation is not necessarily what they struggle with, but they find instead that they’re so competitive that they’re unintentionally pressuring their dog. What kind of mental management techniques might be useful for somebody like that? Andrea Harrison: People pressure their dogs? Really? Of course people pressure their dogs, because we’re putting pressure on ourselves. That leash is a two-way communication tool, whether it’s an actual leash or a virtual leash, and for sure when we put pressure on ourselves, we’re putting pressure on our dogs. I would say to a whole lot of those people, “Hey, what’s your self-care practice like? Do you have a way to let off steam that doesn’t involve dog training? For them, often getting physical outside of dog sports is a good way to relieve some of that pressure and find a valve to let off of it. One thing I’m always going to say to you, if you say to me, “I put a lot of pressure on myself,” or “my dog,” or “and my dog,” I will say to you, “For every negative thing you identify in a training session or a show, you must tell me two good things.” For some people I’m going to say, “You must tell me three good things,” because what I call that “two-for-one” really makes you focus on the good because … not that it stops you being self-critical, but if you are self-critical, you know … I guess it’s sort of punishment-based … the consequence for that is going to be to come up with two good things. If you find that hard, you’re going to stop being quite so critical of yourself because you don’t want to have to look for those good things. And if you think it’s great and you are picking yourself apart, then it’s just a nice reminder to find something good. It’s funny, we talk about rewarding our dogs all the time, and we forget that we can both reward and punish ourselves as well. And it’s not a terrible punishment to have to come up with something good that you’ve done in a video or a training session or at a show. It shouldn’t be a terrible punishment for anybody, but some people certainly would prefer not to have to do it, so they will settle down being quite so self-critical. And that’s neat to me. It’s an interesting sort of reverse way to use rewards. “You’re going to reward yourself by finding something good.” “I don’t want to.” “Too bad. That’s your homework.” As well, people need to stop and think, they need to recognize that they are putting that pressure on themselves and give themselves a little bit of space to get out of it. One of the breathing exercises that can work well for that is the “I am” breathing, where you breathe in and you think I am, and then you breathe out and you think whatever the word is. So “I am relaxed,” “I am doing well,” “I am calm” — whatever the state is you want to be in. For people who have a lot of pressure on themselves and who are being really negative, I am a good dog trainer works really well, or We are a good team works really well too. I’ve got a student using that now, and she’s finding it really effective to just be a little bit of a pressure valve, because when you’ve got that pressure building up, you need to let off a little bit of that pressure, and that can make a really big, important difference to the way that you’re thinking about the training session or the show that’s happened. Melissa Breau: What about somebody who instead their struggle is ring nerves? Andrea Harrison: We don’t talk about ring nerves ever here at FDSA! I do ring nerves probably more than anything else, and the reason for that is we all put pressure on ourselves, but we don’t all realize it. We all realize we’re nervous, because being nervous makes us feel edgy or unwell. So we have this sense when we’re nervous that we aren’t going to be successful. That’s what nerves are: the ultimate “fight or flight” response. When you are nervous, you go right back to that head, heart, and gut thing. Where do you feel your nerves? And then you can also look at the social, emotional, and physical impact those nerves are having on you. It’s sort of a six-pronged approach to figuring out where the nerves are, because if you just tell me you’re nervous, and you can’t say, “I get so nervous that my palms are sweaty and I can’t think straight and I don’t want to be around my friends,” which hits on all of them … and most people don’t do it quite like that, but if that happens to you and you have all of them, then we have to come up with a tool for every single element of what’s happening instead of just saying, “If you do this breathing exercise at the in-gate, you will be fine.” That’s what takes me right back to my self-help rant, too, because if somebody says, “You will not be nervous if you do this,” and you do whatever it is they say and then you still feel nervous, you feel like you’re some kind of failure. You aren’t a failure. You’re just being a human being, and you’re just expressing your nerves your own way. So if you are nervous, you want to make sure that you acknowledge it, and this is one of the things I really don’t like about what I do some days, because I have to make people feel a little bit uncomfortable.   When we’re nervous, we want to stick our heads in the sand and pretend we’re not nervous, fake it till we make it, re-characterize our nerves as excitement. All of those things can work, and they can all be good tools. But if you really want to break down where those nerves are coming from and what we can do about them long-term, often we need to look at them closely enough that it makes us even more uncomfortable. So we actually have to set ourselves up to feel nervous somewhere so we can think about, Do we get that churning stomach and have to go to the bathroom multiple times a day. Again, totally normal response. People aren’t comfortable talking about it and don’t want to talk about it because they think they’re different or unusual. You’re not. The body’s absolute biological response to fear and stress is to need to go to the bathroom. It’s a given. Biologically, it makes sense. But if you haven’t thought of that and you don’t know that, and you don’t even realize it’s happening, then it can make us more nervous and more anxious and more upset, and it becomes more of a self-fulfilling cycle. So nerves are a tricky one, because your nerves are going to be different than my nerves, and my nerves are going to be different than another instructor’s nerves or another student’s nerves. But similar tools can help with the head, the heart, the gut, the social, the emotional, and the physical reality of the nerves that we’re dealing with. Melissa Breau: So for all the folks who are listening to this and thinking, Hmm, I think I need to do some work on that, or I’d really like to learn more about some of those things, what do you have coming up in the near future? Classes? Webinars? What’s on the schedule? Andrea Harrison: Coming up in October, I’ve got one of my newer classes, called No More Excuses, which is motivation and planning, predominantly. People use it to work through really bad cases of nerves if All In Your Head hasn’t been enough or whatever. But they also use it as a tool to peak performance for a national event, or to figure out a training plan for a new puppy, or to figure out why they are no longer interested in training. It’s a great class. It will be my third time teaching it. I really love it, and we’ve gotten some really exciting work done in it. And then in the following term, so December 1st, I’m pretty sure it’s Handle This that’s on the schedule, which is really my ultimate nerve course coming up, although we look at other stuff too, like why we can’t memorize a course. What we tend to do in that class is look at all the different symptoms of nerves, and then break them down for people. So that’s a pretty cool class too. Then, in the end of October, I think October 25th, it’s on the calendar, I’ve got a webinar called Empower Your Team, and that’s about — again, a little bit funny, all this stuff is on a theme — about how to be the best team you can, working with the team you have to make good choices in training, competing, scheduling, motivating yourself, using your plan, using your record-keeping, all of those kinds of things. How you can be the best team you can in the circumstances. One of the things that came up when I was talking about doing it was a spouse who isn’t too happy about the money that’s being spent on dog sports. They don’t mind the time, but they mind the money. So that’s the kind of thing that I suspect is going to come up, and how to manage all the different stresses of being a dog sport person with grace and dignity. So I’m looking forward to it. And then I also have a really exciting thing I’m not quite ready to talk about, but I’m hoping it will be announced in the next two or three weeks. I’m really excited and really looking forward to sharing that with everybody. Melissa Breau: Well, I’m sure everybody will have to just stay tuned and pay attention, and I look forward to hearing more about it. Andrea Harrison: Oh, you’ll hear all about it! Melissa Breau: My last question for everyone these days — what’s something you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Andrea Harrison: For sure, for me, it’s that every dog is different, every dog is unique. This came to me because my neighbor’s little mini-horse has been escaping their property and coming over here, and our five dogs have all reacted very differently to him. He’s really, really cute. If you see me on Instagram, I’ve got pictures of him all over the place because he’s adorable. But he doesn’t belong here, and my dogs know he doesn’t belong here, and they all insist on telling me, and it’s been so interesting to watch them figure out how to tell me. So I had to go back to some pretty strong recall training. Not strong like aggressive, but consistent reinforced recall training, because they all have fits when this strange horse shows up on my front lawn. They’re all responding to the training a little bit differently, and they’re all reacting now to the mini a little bit differently. Sally, the old Border Collie mix, she makes the biggest racket in the world because she knows I’m going to recall her, and she’s got a fabulous recall, always has. So she’s like, “Hey, this is a great excuse. Bring it on, pony!” The terrier looks at the pony and comes running to me, because she knows there’s going to be reinforcement in there. I can’t even say her name fast enough for her to be at my feet saying, “Ha ha, there’s the mini! Give me the treat!” They’re all reacting so, so differently, and it’s been a really nice reminder for me in the last two weeks: every dog is different and deserves that same respect and to be treated for who they are, as we do. The heart of what I do is that we’re all unique and we all have to build our own toolbox. My self-help rant speaks to that. Same deal with our dogs. Don’t forget the dogs are all individuals, so whatever each dog teaches you will teach you something for the next dog, but that doesn’t change the fact that that individual dog is unique and different and has its own needs. That’s a really neat question. I had to think about that. But yeah, that would be my big, latest epiphany or reminder for sure. Melissa Breau: I like that. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Andrea. This has been great. Andrea Harrison: I always enjoy chatting, Melissa, very much, and I appreciate all you do for the podcast and the students at FDSA. It’s a fabulous place to get to hang out, so I’m grateful, and grateful for you. Melissa Breau: Thank you. And thank you to all our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week, this time with Julie Flannery to talk about heeling like a freestyler. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Summary: Hélène Lawler has been working with animals her whole life — she started by training her cat to use the toilet when she was 12! Since then she’s spent years heavily invested in both training and the rescue world. She’s dabbled in nosework, tracking, and Search and Rescue, and then began training agility in 2004, followed by herding in 2005. It didn’t take long before she was hooked. She won the Ontario novice herding championship in 2008, after just two years of training with her dog Hannah, and together they went on to become an Open level team while simultaneously competing in agility to the Masters level and qualifying for the AAC Canadian Nationals. Today, she runs a working mixed livestock farm, with sheep, goats, horses, and poultry … and she recently agreed to do a webinar for FDSA on herding and how to train it using positive reinforcement techniques! Next Episode:  NOTE: In the podcast I announce Sarah Stremming, who will actually be one week further out; we rescheduled last minute.  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 Helene Lawler. Hélène has been working with animals her whole life — she started by training her cat to use the toilet when she was 12! Since then she’s spent years heavily invested in both training and the rescue world. She’s dabbled in nosework, tracking, and Search and Rescue, and then began training agility in 2004, followed by herding in 2005. It didn’t take long before she was hooked. She won the Ontario novice herding championship in 2008, after just two years of training with her dog Hannah, and together they went on to become an Open level team while simultaneously competing in agility to the Masters level and qualifying for the AAC Canadian Nationals. Today, she runs a working mixed livestock farm, with sheep, goats, horses, and poultry … and she recently agreed to do a webinar for FDSA on herding and how to train it using positive reinforcement techniques! Hi Helene, welcome to the podcast! Helene Lawler: Hi Melissa. Thank you so much for having me here. I’m really excited. Melissa Breau: Did I get the name pronunciation right there? Helene Lawler: Yes, you did. Melissa Breau: Yes! Score! So, to start us out, do you want to share a little bit about each of your dogs and anything you’re working on with them? Helene Lawler: OK, sure. Yes, I can always talk about my dogs. I currently have eleven, so this might take a couple minutes. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Helene Lawler: First of all, I have Hannah, who you mentioned. She’s 12-and-a-half. She’s my main working dog on the farm these days. She’s still going strong. I don’t compete with her anymore, but she’s still quite active being my working partner and running the farm with me. I bred her once and I have two of her pups, Desiree and Clayton. They’re now 5. They both do work on the farm as well, and are advancing their herding skills. Desiree is training to be my next agility dog and fill her mother’s shoes in that respect. We’re hoping to start competing in the fall. I had another fantastic bitch who also helped me run the farm, and I unfortunately had to say goodbye to her last week for health reasons, Kestrel. I’ve actually lost three dogs in the last four months, so it’s been a difficult transition time for us all. But Kessie left me four wonderful pups from two different breedings, so I have Griffon and Raven, the bird puppies, who are two-and-a-half. They both have started their herding training and are showing great promise. I’m really pleased. Griffon is also doing … he’s been very slow to mature, so we’ve been doing Rally. He’s been my introduction to Rally, and I’m really enjoying that a lot. We have a lot of fun with that. And then I have Kestrel’s second litter of pups. I kept two back from that litter as well, Breganz and Jest. They’re 7 months old, so they’re showing lots of interest, but they’re not old enough to start training yet. So right now they’re just being feral puppies on the farm and having a good life. And then I have Aoife, who I imported from Ireland last year. She’s a Border Collie, and I think I mentioned all the others were Border Collies as well. Aoife is 14 months old, and I’ve just started working with her, and I’m really excited about her prospects as a working dog. She’s totally new lines to me, and something completely new and different and really fun and great, so I’m very excited about her. And then I have my Kelpie, Holly, who is the one who has put me on this whole journey of positive reinforcement herding training. She is 8 and still going strong and doing well. We do some stock training around the farm, and she’s really good at nosework, and we’ve been dabbling in barn hunt, and she’s also very athletic and loves to do tricks. And then finally I have my guardian dogs, who are maremmas, Mikey, and Juno. They live full-time outside and patrol the property, and care for the sheep and keep them safe, because we have an awful lot of wolves around here, so I need some good guardians. They’ve actually been a lot of fun. They’re good farm dogs, but they’re just as trainable as the Border Collies, so I have some fun doing foundation stuff with them as well. Melissa Breau: Excellent. You mentioned a lot of wolves. Where are you based? Helene Lawler: I live in eastern Ontario, rural eastern Ontario. We have bush wolves. They’re coyote-wolf hybrids. They’re probably about a 65-pound animal, and they have very little fear of humans and a taste for livestock. I have taken the approach of having a good, hard defense, so I use electric fencing and guard dogs, and that’s been working quite well to convince them to just go and raid other farms. So it’s working quite well. Melissa Breau: How did you wind up in this world? What got you started, and what got you started specifically in herding? Helene Lawler: Well, it’s a long story. I’ll try to make it brief. When I was an undergrad, I had a neighbor who had a dog who … undergrad student didn’t take very good care of his dog, so I used to sneak over and take the dog for walks when he was away at classes. I fell in love with the dog, and then he very wisely rehomed the dog, and I didn’t know that was happening, so I didn’t get a chance to ask for her. So I went out to look for my own dog, and I ended up finding a Border Collie puppy who I named Jake, who ended up being the love of my life and my best friend. Together we went on an incredible journey for 14 years, travelled extensively and … you know how some people get the really challenging dog of their life upfront? He was the perfect dog for me. He was just super-smart and he was this incredible teacher, so I learned so much from him about training. He was like the littlest hobo, the campus dog, he used to come to class with me and sit outside and wait. Back in the day, this was 1989, the laws were not quite as restrictive as they are now with dogs, so he was everywhere with me off leash. We’d go to the pub, we’d go shopping, he’d wait outside stores. I took him everywhere, and he was one of those traditional, old-school Border Collies that fell into place and did everything I needed him to do without me having to know much about training. He was like my live business card — everywhere I went, people would be like, “Wow, your dog’s so well trained. Can you teach me?” So I started getting into teaching other people because of Jake, wasn’t necessarily the most effective way of teaching, but I figured it out. So I did end up teaching other people, and I got into it quite seriously for a while of being a dog walker and trainer, and then went in a different direction after that, after doing that exploration for about a year or two. One day, while I was traveling across the country with Jake — because we traveled extensively all over North America, a girl and her dog — we were at a truck stop, and of course Jake was off leash, as usual. He was sitting on the picnic bench next to me while I was having lunch, and suddenly he just took off — very unusual for him. I raced after him, and what he had taken off after was a big tractor-trailer load of sheep that had pulled into the truck stop. He did an outrun and stopped the tractor-trailer, and I had in that moment the realization that my dog had missed his calling, and I had a pang of regret that I was never able to let him do what he was bred to do. So I promised myself and Jake, in that moment, that my next dog would get to work sheep. At that point, Jake was 8 and we were living in big cities, and it was just not an option for him. But I did hold true, and so fast-forward a few years later, I guess it was about five or six years later. I was living in London, Ontario, at the time, and Jake had passed away, and I was looking for my new Border Collie, and I found Hannah. She was working bred, and her breeder lived about 45 minutes from me and had offered to train me to do stock work with her because she wanted to see her puppies out working sheep. So that’s how I got started. I was actually so excited about it that I took lessons for a year before Hannah was ready to get started. Before she was even conceived I started taking lessons, waiting for the breeding and then waiting for her to grow up. I went and I worked the farm with her breeder and learned how to manage sheep without a dog, which is actually an invaluable skill for anybody who wants to herd. I strongly recommend it. And I never looked back. Melissa Breau: What got you started in positive reinforcement training? Have you always been a positive trainer with that approach, or do you consider yourself a crossover trainer? How did that piece of it come into play? Helene Lawler: Yes, I would say that I’m a crossover trainer. Back in the 1980s, when I first started training, it was all alpha rolls and collar pops, unfortunately. However, I have always used some positive reinforcement in my training. I was one to always use lots of praise and food and things like that. So I guess technically I would be considered a balanced trainer, by today’s definition. I don’t love that term, but I know that’s how it’s used today. But I definitely was not exclusively positive in my training by any stretch back in the day. After Jake died in 2004, I wanted to do something in his memory. I did a bunch of research and I found Glen Highland Farm Border Collie Rescue in New York state, which was close to me where I was living at the time, and I thought I wanted to make a donation in his memory. So I went to check them out and ended up falling in love with the place and staying and doing a bunch of volunteer work. There’s a long story around this that I won’t go into right now, but I ended up adopting one of the dogs, not surprising when I was there, Ross. And Ross was … he passed in April of this year, so we’re still kind of adjusting to that change in my life, but he was a huge, tremendous influence in my life around positive reinforcement. He was a dog that had an unknown background, that showed incredible fear and a lot of rage, a lot of anxiety, and a strong willingness to try and control the world through a lot of bluff, bluster, and aggression. I quickly figured out that he couldn’t tolerate anything other than positive reinforcement in his interactions with me. I had to build trust with this dog. He was just so ready to be defensive about everything. And I just had to figure it out with him. I didn’t even really know what positive reinforcement training was, in any sort of clear definition of the word or even as a philosophy. It was just how I had to relate to him. Looking back, I now see that’s what it was. He really got me to think outside the box of how to work with him, and working with him also got me hooked on rescue. And so I started doing work more locally to me at this point in Ontario with other rescue groups and found a terrific mentor. Her name is Cindy Boht, and she runs Border Collie Rescue Ontario, and she really opened my eyes to a lot of positive reinforcement methods. She is completely — she still is to this day — completely dedicated to this philosophy of working with dogs. She taught me an awful lot, and that’s how I really got launched on the path. Melissa Breau: So today, how would you describe your current philosophy, or your current training approach, I guess? Helene Lawler: Today I try to be 100 percent positive-reinforcement-based in my training. I have to admit that I’m not always there, but that is my intention and my goal and I’m always striving for it. Working on a farm, running a farm, there are always things that happen that are beyond my control, as much as I try and manage things, so I try to have really good fencing, I try to have a very good system. But I have livestock and I have Border Collies and sometimes things go south, so sometimes I’m not always successful in being completely positive in my approach. But whenever I do encounter that, I see that as a failure on my part and then I spend some time thinking about how I can make sure that doesn’t happen again, how I can work through it, how I can train it, how I can better set up my management. So my general philosophy is to be 100 percent in practice. It’s something I’m striving for. Melissa Breau: I know on your website you talk about “force-free herding,” and you have this write-up about it. Can you explain what that phrase means to you and where it came from? Helene Lawler: Sure. Force-free herding is a term that I came up with in discussion with some other people around it. We were trying to find the best way to describe what we’re trying to accomplish here with developing a new method of training dogs to herd stock. I almost think that fear-free might be more apt than force-free, because sometimes we might actually use … depending on how you define force. For example, I will actually use a long line for some of the work that I do, so the dog is not completely at liberty. So it depends how strictly you want to stick to the term. But the general idea is to avoid the use of aversives or punishment when teaching dogs to work stock, so that’s my main goal. That has come about because, when I was training my dogs to work sheep, basically there’s a lot of aversive pressure used on the dogs to get them to do what we want to do. The reason for that is that they get into these fairly high states of arousal, and we need them to be able to think clearly and respond to our cues. And to do that, we need their brains to be in gear and functioning. So a quick and dirty way to do that is to use aversives to keep the dogs a little bit afraid or a lot afraid, depending on the dog, to keep their levels of arousal under wraps and so that they can pay attention and listen. If you don’t want to do that, which I do not want to do that, then how do we get our dogs to keep us in the picture when we’re working? That’s the challenge I’ve been facing with trying to develop a method of teaching my dogs how to work sheep without using pressure or any types of force or aversive or punishment. Melissa Breau: You started to answer this a little bit already, but next I was going to ask you how your approach is different than that traditional approach to training a herding dog. Can you just go into that a little bit more? Helene Lawler: Sure. Traditionally, like I said, people will use an aversive punishment or some level of pressure on the dog to get the dog to keep the handler in the picture. You asked how does what I’m doing differ from how somebody would traditionally train. It really depends on the trainer. I know some excellent trainers. I would say there would be very little difference, because everybody understands that it’s really critical for the dog to be confident and to have a good experience around stock, and I don’t think there’s anybody who would disagree with that. So people are not wanting their dogs to become afraid around sheep. The challenge, like I said before, is that we need to keep their level of arousal in check so that they can focus on what we’re asking them to do, and sometimes, a sharp, well-timed correction can be very clear and give the dog the information that it needs to be able to do the job properly. The really great handlers can do that and not have fallout from using a correction. But for the rest of us, and I certainly count myself in that group, I can’t use corrections and not have fallout, and I have certainly tried and failed many times. I don’t want to take that risk and have that damage to my relationship with my dogs, so what I try to do is find different ways to work with my dogs’ arousal levels. That’s really the key to developing a dog who can work stock without having to use the aversive methods, and that’s what I focus on with my training. So I look at trying to be able to clearly communicate with them and keep myself in the picture through working with their arousal levels around stock, and that can take a lot of work prior to ever going to stock. So I think that’s one of the biggest differences perhaps that you’ll find in how I train from how I trained before, and how I’ve trained with other people, is that I put a lot of foundation work into my dogs before they ever go to sheep, as a way of making sure that we have that clear communication, and they have those skills to be able to keep themselves in a state of arousal that is sufficient to do the work, but not so high that they can’t hear my cues and respond to them. Melissa Breau: I’d imagine, as somebody using positive training in a field where it’s … not yet … hopefully the norm, there have been times when you’ve been facing an uphill battle. What obstacles would you say you’ve had to overcome in the process of learning and now teaching herding using positive reinforcement? Helen Lawler: The biggest obstacles have been, well, first of all, not having a mentor to learn from, so having to figure this out from scratch. That’s been quite a challenge. I do have wonderful mentors in the positive reinforcement world, and so I’ve been studying what they’re doing and then trying to extrapolate from that and then putting into play in the herding setting. So it’s not like I’m working in a complete vacuum. Obviously I’ve got lots of material to work with. It’s translating that to the herding world that’s been the big challenge. A couple of other things that have been challenging for me is that I have yet to find a really systematic approach to follow to try to replicate. Everybody I’ve trained with in herding has their own method, which is similar to dog sports, but I feel like in agility in particular, which I know fairly well now, there really is a systematic way of training your dog, and you can break your training into small pieces, you can split, you can break it out. If you want to teach tight turnings on jumps, you can start that sitting quietly in your bathroom with a cone and have your dog just learn how to go around the cone, and then gradually build up to running in the field at high intensity. But with herding, you can’t really do that, and so I’ve had to figure out how to break down what my dog is doing into pieces that I can then take away from the sheep, take away from the field, and train them away and then bring it back. That’s been very challenging because there’s very little of that going on, and so it’s all things that I’ve had to figure out on my own. So that’s been quite a process. The other thing is trying to really know what I’m looking for when working with the sheep. What is it that it needs to really look like, and what does my dog need to be doing, and what is the picture supposed to be? Even understanding that is quite challenging. It takes years and years and years to be able to see what’s going on and really understand it and know that the dog is doing things correctly. When is the dog correct, when is the dog incorrect? The dog is usually correct a lot more often than the handler is. So as a green handler, I was learning along with my dog. That was tremendously difficult. It’s like a green rider on a green horse. There are just so many things to try and figure out in tandem that your brain short-circuits, so my poor dogs, they’ve had to learn along with me. Now, I said I haven’t had real mentors to follow, but my dogs have been incredible teachers, and I think they have taught me as much or more than anybody else, because they really show clearly when they’re confused, when they’re stressed, when they’re clear and confident, when I’m doing something that’s aversive to them. I’ve had to spend a lot of time studying my dogs and their reaction to what I’m doing to understand if I’m doing something that’s aversive, if I’m not clear, if I’m confusing to them, when they get it. I will do something, and my dog — you can see the light go on, and that tells me, Oh great, I figured out how to communicate this to the dog. What did I just do? And then I have to break that down. So one of the advantages of having, because I have quite a few dogs and I also work with other people’s dogs, is that I have all these fantastic canine teachers. And so really the dogs have led me through this, in particular my Kelpie. She’s really been the one who spearheaded this whole process. Melissa Breau: When you are facing one of those problems where most trainers who teach herding, or who train herding with their dogs, would turn to punishment or fear, how do you start to work on coming up with a positive solution instead? Do you have a method that you use, or a thought process you have in place? I’d love to hear a little bit more about your process. Helene Lawler: Sure. The first thing I do … as I mentioned earlier, sometimes things kind of go south around here, so my very first process when I do that is I go, OK, let’s just hit the brakes here. So I’ll usually end up picking up my dog and carrying it into the house, or whatever, and just stopping the whole scenario and thinking, OK, what just happened here? I then say to myself, OK then, use your big brain. You’re the one with the big human brain, so that’s what you have it for. Figure it out. I say that to myself all the time: Use your big brain. That gets me into a good analytical mode, and I think about it. I think, OK, What is training? I see training as essentially three things. It’s communication, it’s motivation, and it’s ability. My dogs are all very strongly working bred, so motivation is pretty much never an issue with my particular dogs. It can be with other dogs, but I don’t have to struggle too much with motivation. They’re keen. They want to work. So then I have to look at communication and ability. Am I communicating to the dog? Is the dog understanding what it is that I am saying or trying to express to them? If the answer is no, which it would be if they’re not doing what I’m asking them to, then I always assume that they are not doing it most likely because they don’t understand what they’re supposed to do. I don’t ever see my dogs as being willfully disobedient. I just don’t think they are. I think they’re just not clear on what they need to be doing. So then I go, OK, how can I better communicate? So then I really brainstorm. What can I do, and rarely do I ever mean verbally. It’s like, can I set things up better? Can I change the environment to make things more obvious? Can I use different sheep? Can I use some props? Can I use fencing more effectively? How can I better communicate what I want the dog to understand here? That’s a big part of my process is really trying to break it down. The other part of the process is does the dog … as I said, they have communication, motivation, and ability. Does the dog have the ability to do what I’m asking them to do? That can mean things like is my dog fit enough to not be tired while we’re working? Do they have the physical capability? I mentioned I have two 7-month-old puppies. They are crazy keen. They do not have the ability to physically do the work that I want them to do, nor do they have the mental ability to stay present while I’m working with them. So if I put them out on sheep right now, I can put out a group of sheep that will be quieter and move slowly, so that their soft muscles and not fully developed legs can still outrun the sheep. I would keep sessions really short and not ask anything of them, just let them work on instinct and let them drag a short line on a harness, so that when we’re done I can just stand on it and walk them off the field without expecting anything of them other than just working on instinct. I know that they’re not capable of really responding to me until their brains have fully developed, and sometimes that can be until they’re 2 or 3 years old, so I have to be aware of where the dog is at in terms of their physical and mental ability, If I feel like that is not where I need it to be for the type of work we’re doing, I’ll pull them off stock and do things away from stock for a while until we get to that point, be that fitness, be it more mental work. I mentioned my dog Griffon, who I do Rally with. When we go out to stock, there’s nobody home. He is just one big, fluffy, black-and-white ball of instinct, and so I can’t really ask him to do anything. Fortunately, he’s got lots of natural ability, so he doesn’t get into trouble, but I can’t really progress his training at this point, so I’ve just done other things with him. We do lots of hikes, we do Rally, we do lots of fun things while his body and brain develop, and if we don’t get seriously into training until he’s almost 3, so be it. So those are my approaches with my dogs. We look at communication, motivation for some dogs but not mine, and then really looking at their actual ability to do it. Melissa Breau: We were talking a little bit here about how you approach things, and I know you mentioned that you do more foundation work than some other trainers might. Can you share a little bit about how much of your training methods are foundation work — that is, before introducing or using stock, and how much of the training is done on stock? And maybe a little bit about the skills you teach as foundation behaviors? Helene Lawler: Sure. When it comes to my approach to using positive methods for herding, I should be clear: we don’t actually teach dogs to herd. I don’t teach my dogs to herd. I’ll step back for a second. As I said, my dogs are very strongly working bred, so they instinctively know how to herd. They have more herding ability in the tip of their tail than I have in my whole body and will learn in my entire life, so I am not teaching them to herd. Now, some breeds and some dogs actually do need to learn the skills, and those dogs we would train more mechanically. That’s a different ball of wax, not really what I’m talking about here. What I work with are dogs that are just big balls of instinct, that just want to get out there and work, and so I’m shaping that instinct. What I’m actually working on with the dog is how to put their natural instincts on cue. So there’s an awful lot of capturing, basically, and helping them with their arousal level so that they can put two and two together and they can recognize that my cue is asking them to do certain things, because often we’re going to be asking them to go against their instincts. So that’s what we’re really working on. The foundation training that I need them to do is an awful lot around building my relationship with them so that they want to partner with me. I want to look at their ability to manage their arousal levels on stock and keep me in the picture. I keep saying that, but that’s what’s really critical. If they will respond to me, if they can keep their arousal level such that they can hear and respond to my cues, then there’s no need to ever use an aversive. So I do a lot of work around arousals, often at quite a distance from the stock, often without even stock around to start, and you build gradually to that. So that’s a really big part of my foundation work. And then for actual skills, they need a stop, so that can either be a stop on their feet or a lie-down and a recall off stock. Those are the two critical skills that they need before they start doing any formal training. As long as they have that, I can pretty much work with anything else. So I do a lot of work on lie-downs in growing levels of arousal and around distraction and then recalls. And I do a tremendous amount of Premack. Premack goes through everything. All my training, I use Premack as my method for building my skills and my dogs’ because typically they don’t want anything else that I can offer. I can’t give them food or toys when they want to work sheep. They want it that badly. So I use the stock as the reward, and that is an extremely effective way, actually, of building these basic skills. So I have a bunch of exercises that I do, first off stock and then I bring it to stock, but outside the fence so they’re within view, and then we gradually build up to working right directly on the sheep. But the two critical skills are the stop and the recall, and the rest is all arousal training. And then there are little things like shaping a head turn, and a few little odds and ends, but those come in time. But the critical foundation pieces are those three. There’s another critical piece that I should mention, and that is that we need them to have … I like to use the term “dynamic impulse control,” which to me means the ability to control their impulses, have self-control, whatever you want to use, whatever terms you want to use, while the dog is in motion. We do an awful lot in sport training around having a dog who can hold still around distraction. But in herding we really need them to be able to stay, to maintain their impulse control while in motion, and that is also a key piece of the foundation training that I do with my dogs. Melissa Breau: I compete in treibball, so I work a German Shepherd, who is obviously a herding dog, in treibball, and it’s interesting to see the tie-ins to some of that stuff. It’s really interesting. Helene Lawler: I know people who say that that would be a good foundation sport to do. I’ve never done it myself, but I think that that could teach your dog some good skills that would be translatable, from what I know of the sport. Melissa Breau: It’s definitely not the same, but it’s interesting from a … a lot of dogs do have arousal problems around the ball, especially herding breeds, and there’s just lots of interesting pieces there that I could see having some carryover. I’ve never had the chance to test my dog on stock, but I think that would be a lot of fun to take her out because she’s got the treibball training, so it would see how much it holds up. Helene Lawler: Yeah, that would be really interesting to see. I didn’t have sheep for Hannah until we were already competing at the Open level, actually, and so I never told anybody this because I would have been laughed at, but I used to take a basketball out and she would herd the basketball. I used it to lengthen her out runs. I have no idea if that actually translated, but it gave me something to do at home, so I would just send her and she would do an out run on a basketball and lie down and flank back and forth around the basketball. It really brought out the instincts, so I thought, OK, I’m going to work with that. Melissa Breau: That’s so interesting. I know you’re doing a webinar for FDSA on this stuff. It’ll be next week when this airs. Would you mind sharing a little bit about what you plan to cover and give a little insight into the topic? Helene Lawler: Sure. The webinar is going to be diving deeper into what I’ve just been talking about: looking specifically at the intersection of sport training and herding, what crossover there is, how we can apply what we know from sport training to prepare our dogs for stock work, and also where some of the pitfalls might be. Some of the sport foundation training might actually be counterproductive to stock work. And at the same time, how stock work can help with dog sports, which is something that I have found. When I first started doing herding training, I had also recently discovered agility. What ended up happening was I did both sports with Hannah, and I couldn’t tell anybody in the herding world that I was doing agility, because they all thought it would ruin her for herding, and I couldn’t tell anybody in the agility world that I was doing herding, because they would all say that it would ruin her for agility. So I just kept my mouth shut and did both sports completely separately, and what I found was that they were very complementary. Hannah’s confidence in our teamwork just blossomed through agility that translated to working on stock. Her ability to focus on me, her dedication to the job, her start line stays, all these sorts of things were just phenomenal from herding when we took it to agility. So I found that the two sports really complemented each other beautifully, and I think more and more people are discovering that now. However, there are also pitfalls, and there are things that we do in both that can have some fallout. I think that that might be good insight for us around how to change our training across the board, and so that’s what I want to talk more about as well. Melissa Breau: Now obviously during the webinar you won’t be able to cover everything … Helene Lawler: No, I can talk for hours and hours and hours! Melissa Breau: Hey, most of us dog people can, especially about our sports. But I know you have your own site where you talk about some of this stuff. Do you want to share where folks can go for more information? Helen Lawler: My site for my dogs is kynicstockdogs.com. I also have a Facebook page with the same name. And I’m just getting up and running my dog-training site, shapingchaosdogtraining.com, which may be live by the time this airs. I’m hoping. I also have been in discussion and planning about starting a Fenzi herding group on Facebook, so that will hopefully be a great resource for people down the road in the near future. Melissa Breau: Yeah, that would be awesome. So the way I tend to end every episode with a first-time guest — I’ve got my three questions here. The first one is, what’s the dog-related accomplishment that you’re proudest of? Helene Lawler: I had to think long and hard about this, and I have quite a few I’d love to discuss, but in keeping with the discussion around herding, I’m going to focus on that. My proudest moment in herding was competing at Grass Creek Sheep Dog Trials, which is actually ongoing this week. I was there two years ago with Hannah. It was the competition we moved up to Open in, and it is one of the most difficult and prestigious sheep dog trials in North America. There are no novice classes in this trial. It is just purely Open. People come from far and wide, and even overseas, to compete in it, and you’re in there with the best of the best. So it was very, very intimidating, and really I was just proud of myself to be able to find the courage and have a dog who I knew I could count on, and that we were such a strong team that no matter what we faced out there, I knew that we would hold it together and do a good job, do our best. So I went out there with Hannah knowing I could count on her, Miss Cool As A Cucumber in the field. This dog, she just loves to compete when I don’t, so she really helped me with all my trial nerves and so on and so forth. She’s just amazing. She just loved the crowds, and she just loved the attention and the cameras and so on and so forth. So anyway, at this competition you get to run twice. The very first time we went out, it was early in the week. It was on Wednesday, and there weren’t that many people watching, and it was the workweek, so we just went out and we worked our dogs. I said, OK, I’m just going to pretend like I’m at home, and I set myself three goals. The first one was that I wasn’t going to lose my dog. I didn’t want her going out and losing her sheep and running after them, and me having to walk down the field to go get her. I didn’t want to lose my sheep and have them go bolting off into the woods, and I didn’t want to lose my cool. So I sent my dog and she’s so great. She got her sheep, and she didn’t lose her sheep, and she didn’t go running off after them back to the setout. She brought them to me and I was so proud of her. But I have to say, I was pretty stressed, and so by the time she got them to me and I was just so relieved, but I started stressing enough that I started losing my cool. So I thought, OK, I’m just going to call it quits here. I turned to the judge and I said, “Thank you,” and I exhausted the sheep, and I told my dog how great she was, and we left and we celebrated. And I thought, OK, this was great, that was good, but the next run I’m going to add one more thing to my list of things I don’t want to lose, and one of that was I was not going to step off the field until we either ran out of time or the judge asked us to leave. So no bailing, we are going to do the whole course the next time. I showed up, and it was Friday of the competition, and I should say about 10,000 people come to watch this competition over the course of … yeah, it’s a big deal. I wasn’t really prepared for that. I showed up at the competition and there was this huge crowd, and there was an emcee and all sorts of stuff, and I was like, Oh my goodness. I was so overwhelmed. So I thought, OK, let’s do some breathing, and then I thought, OK, here’s my issue. I’m out there with the big hats. I need a bigger hat. So I went and bought myself a big hat. I put on my big hat, I walked to the post, I sent my dog, she got her sheep, she brought them to me, we made it around the course, and we got a score of numbers, not letters, because in herding you either get a score or you get a retire or you get a disqualify DQ, so the goal is to get numbers not letters. We got numbers, not letters, and I was just so thrilled with my dog, I was really pleased with my own ability to overcome my own inner challenges, and it was this very wonderful moment. I was thrilled. So that was a huge accomplishment that I’m quite proud of. Melissa Breau: That’s awesome. My second question here is usually my favorite, but what is the best piece of training advice that you’ve ever heard? Helene Lawler: Again, one I had to think long and hard about, and I know other people have said two, so I’m also going to say two, but they’re nothing new. They are “Train the dog in front of you,” and “It’s all behavior.” Those two, I just tell myself that over and over and over and over and over again. It’s been absolutely critical in everything I’ve been accomplishing. It’s “Train the dog in front of me,” every day it’s different, forget the dog that my dog was yesterday, especially forget the dog that my dog was a few years ago, which I tend to still hang on to, and just work with the dog I have in this moment right now. What does she need, what are we doing, where is she at? That has just been so critical for my own ability to improve my training. “It’s all behavior” is so important for staying calm, cool, and collected, and just being analytical and detached and really taking emotions out of the training, which can be a real challenge in herding, in any kind of dog sport, I’m sure, as you and I’m sure all the listeners know. But in herding it’s really easy to lose your emotional cool, so just saying “It’s all behavior” and understanding that at a deep level has been really, really helpful for me. Melissa Breau: Excellent. The last one: Who is somebody else in the dog world that you look up to? Helene Lawler: Lots and lots of people. Again, I’ll keep this focused on herding. I’m going to say Amanda Milliken. She is one of the giants in the herding world. She is local to me, which I’m very lucky about that. She is the person who has put on the Grass Creek Trials that is running right now, and her dedication, passion, and commitment to the sport and her breed, her commitment well beyond her own performance, has just been amazing. She’s just an incredible woman for all that she has accomplished in herding and with Border Collies in general. I’ve really admired that, and I’ve taken inspiration from how hard she works and how hard she’s trained. I bought my first Border Collie from her in 1989, and she was competing back then. She’d already started Grass Creek. That was 29 years ago, and she’d already run it for two years. So she has been in this for the long game, and I just love to see people be successful and know that persistence pays, and so I’ve learned a lot from that. Melissa Breau: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. Helene Lawler: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been such a pleasure and an honor to be here. Melissa Breau: And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week with Sarah Stremming, to talk about her household’s latest new addition — a Border Collie puppy named Watson. Don’t miss it. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Summary: Dr. Jennifer Summerfield is a veterinarian and Certified Professional Dog Trainer (CPDT-KA), with a focus on treating behavior problems including aggression to humans or other animals, separation anxiety, and compulsive behavior disorders. She also teaches group classes and private lessons in basic obedience for pet dogs, and coaches students getting started in dog sports such as agility and competitive obedience.   Jennifer is proud to be a member of the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior (AVSAB) and the Association of Professional Dog Trainers (APDT). She is a passionate advocate for positive, science-based methods of training and behavior modification, and loves helping pet owners learn to communicate more clearly with their dogs. Links mentioned: Behavior Medication: First-line Therapy or Last Resort? Dr. Jen's Blog Dog Talk with Dr. Jen (Podcast) Train your dog now! by Dr. Jennifer Summerfield (book) Next Episode:  To be released 8/10/2018, featuring Nancy Tucker, talking about how to stop your dog from going crazy at the door. 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. Jennifer Summerfield. Dr. Jen is a veterinarian and Certified Professional Dog Trainer (CPDT-KA), with a focus on treating behavior problems including aggression to humans or other animals, separation anxiety, and compulsive behavior disorders. She also teaches group classes and private lessons in basic obedience for pet dogs, and coaches students getting started in dog sports such as agility and competitive obedience.   Jennifer is proud to be a member of the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior (AVSAB) and the Association of Professional Dog Trainers (APDT). She is a passionate advocate for positive, science-based methods of training and behavior modification, and loves helping pet owners learn to communicate more clearly with their dogs. Hi Jen, welcome to the podcast! Jennifer Summerfield: Hey Melissa. I am excited to be here. Melissa Breau: To start us out, can you share a little bit about your own dogs, who they are, and anything you’re working on with them? Jennifer Summerfield: Definitely. I have three dogs at the moment. They are all Shelties. The oldest one is Remy. He just turned 10 years old this year, so double digits now. He’s my old man. We were really excited this past summer because he just finished his PACH, which so far is our highest pinnacle of achievement in agility, and it only took us ten years to get there, so, you know, better late than never! So that’s been really exciting for him. And I finally just got the courage worked up to enter him in AKC Premier in the next trial that we’re entered in, in August. It’s a bit of a new adventure for us because we’ve never tried that before, but I figure what the heck. My middle dog, Gatsby, is 4-and-a-half years old, he’ll be 5 this November, and he is working on his agility titles as well. He currently is in, I want to say, Master Jumpers and Excellent Standard. His agility career has been a little bit slower than Remy’s. He’s had some stress-related weave pole issues that we’re working through, and he also had some really significant dog-reactivity issues when he was younger, so we spent a lot of time when he was about a year and a half to 2 years old or so just working through that to get him to the point where he could even go to agility trials successfully without having a meltdown. So for him, just the fact that he has any titles at all and can occasionally successfully trial is a pretty great accomplishment. But I have him entered in a couple of trials this fall as well, so hopefully we’ll keep building on that. And then my youngest dog, Clint, he is 4 years old now, and his history was a little bit different. He came to me as an adult, almost a year old, because I really wanted a dog to show in conformation. When I got Gatsby as a puppy, he was supposed to be my conformation dog. That’s what we were hoping for, but … I don’t know how much you know about Shelties and conformation, but the height thing is a killer. It looked like he was going to be in size on the charts and everything, and then when he got to be about 6 months old, he was over. So I got Clint a little bit later at a year old from his breeder, and he was already a finished champion at that point, so he knew what to do, which was perfect because I was a total beginner. So I had a really good time showing him for about a year after I got him. We finished his Grand Championship together, so that was really cool. And now we’re branching out and he’s starting to learn some agility and some other things as well. So that’s my guys in a nutshell. Melissa Breau: I’ve got a bit of a chicken-or-egg question for you here. Did dog training come first, or did becoming a vet come first? How did you get into all this stuff? Jennifer Summerfield: Funnily enough, I’ve been interested in dog training and dog behavior from as early as I can remember, even before we had a dog. When I was a kid, I was really crazy about dogs, and I was fascinated by dog training. I had books and books and books, just shelves of books on training dogs, obedience training, and also a bunch of random stuff, like, I had books on Schutzhund training, and books on herding training, and books on service dog training, and just everything I could get my hands on. One of the really formative experiences of my childhood was that my aunt took me to an obedience trial that was at that time … I don’t remember what the name of the kennel club is, but our local kennel club in Charleston — I live in West Virginia — used to have their show at the Civic Center every year, and they would have an obedience trial as part of that. And so my aunt took me one year. I must have been 8 or 9, something like that, and I just remember being absolutely riveted by watching the dogs in the obedience trial, which I guess is maybe a funny thing in retrospect for an 8- or 9-year-old to be riveted by, but I was. I remember watching that and thinking it was absolutely the most amazing thing I had ever seen, and I wanted to do it more than anything, hence all the books and all of that stuff. I wrote to the AKC when I was a kid to ask for a copy of the obedience regulations, because I had read that that was how you could get them. This was back before everything was online, you know, this would have been the early ’90s. So I wrote to the AKC and I remember being super-excited when they sent the manila envelope back that had the obedience regulations in it. I read them and I was just super-fascinated and I knew that was what I wanted to do. We got my first dog when I was about 16, and he was a Sheltie named Duncan, so I did a lot of training with him. We were never very successful in the obedience ring, which was completely my fault, not his. But I’ve just always been really fascinated by the idea of being able to communicate with another species that way, being able to have that kind of relationship with a dog where they understand what you want them to do and there’s all this back and forth communication going on to do these really complicated, fancy things. So when it came time to start thinking about what I actually wanted to do with my life, around junior high school, high school, getting ready to go to college, I always knew that I wanted to do something related to dog training or dog behavior, and I thought about several different ways of going about that. I considered the idea of just being a professional dog trainer straight out, but I was a little bit nervous about that because I wasn’t quite sure if it was easy to make a living doing that, or how one got established, and I was a little bit concerned. It didn’t feel very stable to me, but who knows, but I wanted something that felt like there was more of an established career path for it, I guess. Of course I thought about veterinary medicine, because that’s one of the most obvious things that everybody thinks about when they want to work with animals. And I did actually give some thought in college to going to graduate school and getting a Ph.D., and then possibly becoming an applied animal behaviorist that way, but there were two reasons I opted not to go that route, and one was that I discovered in college that research is really not my thing, and I knew that unfortunately that was going to be a big part of life getting a Ph.D., so that was kind of a strike against it. So what I ultimately decided to do instead was go to veterinary school, and what I liked about that idea was that I felt like I would always have something to fall back on, regardless. I knew that I could do behavior, hopefully relatively easily, I could get into doing that with a veterinary degree, but I could also just be a general practice veterinarian too, if need be, and actually I really like that aspect of my job right now. So that’s how I ended up in vet school, but it really was always kind of a back door way to get into the world of behavior. Melissa Breau: That’s awesome. It’s fantastic that that appealed to you at such a young age. I think that a lot of people who listen to this podcast can probably relate to that. Jennifer Summerfield: I think this was probably the audience that would relate to it. It’s only in retrospect that I realize what a strange little child I probably was. Melissa Breau: Hey, you’re not alone out there. Dr. Jennifer Summerfield: That’s right! Melissa Breau: So how did you become interested in it from such a young age? Were you always a positive trainer? Is that how you started out, or did you cross over at some point? How did that happen? Jennifer Summerfield: I do consider myself to be a crossover trainer, and I think a lot of that has to do with the kind of information that was out there at the time that I first started getting interested in these things and I was first collecting all my books and reading everything. This was the ’90s, for the most part, so positive training I know was starting to become a thing around that time, but it wasn’t, as I recall, super mainstream, at least not where I was, and in the things that I was reading and the classes that I was going to. Most of the books I had, of course, probably like a lot of people at that time, were pretty correction-based, and they talked about how you needed to be in charge, and you needed to make sure that your dog knew who was boss, and that you had to be really careful about using cookies in training because then your dog gets dependent on them, and of course you don’t want your dog to just be working for cookies, you want them to be working for you, and I thought all that made a lot of sense at the time. When I was first working with Duncan, I had this book that was about competitive obedience training, specifically, and I remember working through this book and just working religiously on doing everything it said. I remember teaching him to heel, and the way that the book said that you taught your dog to heel was you put a choke collar on them and you walked around in circles in the yard, and every time they got in front of your leg, you gave a leash correction and you jerked them back and you just did that until they figured it out. That’s how Duncan learned to heel, and obviously if I had it to go back and do it over again, I would do it differently. But he was a good dog, and he learned, and it worked reasonably well. Like I said, we never got to the point of having any great successes in the obedience ring, for probably a lot of other reasons besides that, but that’s kind of how I got started. As I got older and I started reading more things, one thing that I remember that was a big turning point for me was reading Jean Donaldson’s book The Culture Clash. I know that probably a lot of your listeners are familiar with that book, because I know it’s kind of a classic in the world of behavior, but it’s very much about how most of the things our dogs do that bother us are just dog things. They’re just doing things that dogs do, and those things happen to bother us, and that’s reasonable sometimes and we can teach them not to do those things. But that was such a revolutionary thing for me to think, like, You mean it’s not all about that my dog is trying to be in charge and he needs to know that this stuff’s not allowed. She just made so much sense. At that time I had never heard anybody put it that way before, and I want to say that was really the first time that the idea of positive training was presented to me in a way that made a lot of sense. As I got older, of course, and started to learn more about the scientific side of things — you know I’m a huge science nerd, as probably most people are who go to the trouble of getting a veterinary degree — and so as I learned more about the scientific side of things, then I was sold, because obviously the scientific consensus is unanimous that clearly there’s a way to do things that works a lot better than using correction-based techniques, and that there’s lots of really valid scientific reasons to use positive reinforcement training. So I would say by the time I started vet school, I was pretty solidly in that camp. The other thing that probably cemented it for me was seeing the difference in how quickly Duncan learned things, for one thing, once I switched. He learned to heel the old-fashioned way, but he learned to do his dumbbell retrieve with a clicker, and he loved his dumbbell retrieve. He would find his dumbbell, if I forgot to put it away after a training session, he would find it and bring it to me and sit, and he just had an enthusiasm for it that he never, ever had for the things we learned when I was still teaching the old way. And then, when I got my dog Remy, who was the second dog I had, the first dog after Duncan, who by that point I was pretty solidly in the positive reinforcement camp, and he learned to heel with a clicker. Looking at the difference between the two of them, both in terms of how technically good their heeling was, but also just looking at their attitude differences and how much they wanted to do it, I knew, I think, after I had done a little bit of work with Remy and seen that kind of difference, that I would never train another dog with corrections again. Melissa Breau: Sometimes the proof really is in the pudding. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t go back. Jennifer Summerfield: Yeah, and I guess that’s a pretty common experience, I think. I feel like I hear a variation of that from a lot of crossover trainers, that it’s a combination of understanding the science, but also when you see it, you see the difference in your own dog or in a client’s dog and you say, “Why on Earth did I ever used to do it a different way?” Melissa Breau: Absolutely. I’d imagine that being a vet and a dog trainer, you’ve got a lot of knowledge there. How does one body of knowledge inform the other, and how have they both influenced your career? Jennifer Summerfield: I’m really glad, looking back, that I did make the choice to go to vet school, because I think that’s a good skill set to have. Obviously I like being a vet. I am in general practice. Even though I spend a fair amount of my time seeing behavior cases, I do general practice stuff too, which I really enjoy. But that skill set is definitely useful for seeing behavior cases because there are a lot of behavior issues dogs have, and training issues, that have a physical component to them, and it’s very handy to have that knowledge base to fall back on, so that if somebody comes in and they say, “My dog’s having house training issues all of a sudden again, and he’s always been house trained, but now I don’t know what’s going on,” to be able to say, “Well, you know, your dog might have a urinary tract infection,” or “Your dog might have Cushing’s disease,” or “Your dog might have diabetes.” These are things that sometimes people think they have a training problem or behavior problem when actually they have a medical problem. So it’s definitely useful to have that knowledge base to be able to say, “Well, actually, maybe we should look at this.” Both being a veterinarian and being a dog trainer are fields that I think people feel like they have to do with dogs, or they have to do with animals, I guess, more broadly, being a veterinarian. And that’s true, but what sometimes I think people don’t realize, if you’re not in one of these two professions, is how much they have to do with people, because all of the animals come with a person, and it would be rare, being either a dog trainer or a veterinarian, that you’re dealing much directly with the animal. Your job in both of those fields is to coach the owner on what they need to be doing and figuring out what works for them, and engaging in some problem-solving with them and figuring out what they’re able to do with their lifestyle, whether it’s training their dog not to jump on people or whether it’s managing a chronic disease like diabetes. So I think that in a lot of ways that skill set, the people skills part of things, is something that has gotten to be strengthened and developed by doing both of those things. So I think all in all it worked out for the best. Melissa Breau: The last guest we had on — you’ll be right after Sue — the last guest we had before that was Deb Jones, and we were talking all about that piece of it, just the idea that if you’re a dog trainer, you’re training people, you’re not training dogs. It’s such a big difference. Jennifer Summerfield: Yeah. We do Career Day periodically for a lot of the elementary schools, but also junior highs and high schools in the area, because everybody wants a veterinarian to come for Career Day. And it’s amazing, of course, the common thing that you hear from people sometimes is, “Oh, I want to go into veterinary medicine because I really like animals but I don’t like people.” I say, “Well, then, I don’t know if this is the career for you, because it’s very, very, very, very people-centric. It’s all about people, so you really need to like dealing with people and enjoy that aspect of it too.” Melissa Breau: To shift gears a little bit, I know you’ve got a webinar coming up for FDSA on behavior medications, so I wanted to talk a little bit about that stuff too. At what point should someone start thinking about meds versus training for a behavior problem? Jennifer Summerfield: What I always harp on about this, and I actually have a blog post that I wrote a while back on this topic specifically, is that I really wish we could get more into the habit of thinking about behavior medication as a first-line treatment option for behavior issues. I see so many cases where I think people want to save that as a last resort, like, “Well, we’re going to try everything else first,” and “We’ve been working on this for a year and a half, and nothing’s helped, and maybe it’s time to consider meds.” I totally get where they’re coming from with that. I know that there are a lot of reasons people are nervous about medication. But it makes me sad in a lot of ways because I see so many dogs that I think, My goodness, their quality of life could be so much improved with medication, or The training plan that they’re working on could go so much smoother, and be so much less stressful for both the owner and the dog, if they were willing to consider medication earlier in the process. So for me, when I see behavior cases, certainly not every single one do we go straight to medication, but I would say that, gosh, probably a good 70 or 80 percent of them we talk about medication on that first visit, because usually if there are things that are legitimate behavior issues rather than training problems — which I can touch on here in a second, too, if you want — but if it’s a behavior issue that is enough of a problem that the owner is willing to schedule an appointment for it and pay for the consultation and sit down with me for three hours and talk about it, chances are that it’s something that could benefit from medication of some kind. I see so many dogs that do better on meds, and there’s very few downsides to them, so in general not anything to be scared of, and not anything that you have to feel like you have to avoid until nothing else has helped. I think of it more as it’s just like if your dog had an infection. You wouldn’t say, “Well, I really want to try everything we can possibly do until we put him on antibiotics.” Or if he had diabetes, “I really don’t want to use insulin. I just really, really don’t want to use it.” I think we just think of behavior medication differently, which is too bad in a lot of ways, and I would love to see the mainstream thinking about behavior medication move more towards the same way that we use medication for anything else. Melissa Breau: You said you could touch on the behavior stuff in a second. I’d love to have you elaborate. What did you mean? Jennifer Summerfield: As far as determining whether you have a behavior problem versus a training problem, which I do think can be a little bit of a muddy line sometimes for owners, the way that I usually try to break that down for people is that if you have a training problem, this is usually your dog is normal. Your dog is doing normal dog things that happen to be annoying to you or to other people, which is fine. And that’s legitimate, that’s still definitely something that we want to address, so I’m not saying that as like, “See, this isn’t a problem.” It’s totally a problem if your dog is flattening old ladies when it tries to say hi, or something like that. That’s a problem, but it’s a training problem. If your dog is friendly but otherwise normal, it’s not something that we would treat with medication, because this is just something that we need to teach your dog a different behavior to do in that situation. Whereas things that we think of more as behavior issues are things that have some kind of emotional component to them, so things that have an anxiety component, that’s probably the most common. The vast majority of behavior issues that we see do have an underlying anxiety component. But it’s that, or it’s a compulsive behavior issue, or it’s something that’s not normal, a genuinely abnormal behavior that the dog is doing. That’s when at that point that we think they’re more of a candidate for medication. Melissa Breau: That makes sense. It’s kind of, “Is this a normal behavior or is this …” Jennifer Summerfield: Exactly, exactly. I can’t remember who it was, but I know one year I was at a conference and I was listening to a talk on behavior medication, and I remember the way that the speaker put it, which I really liked, was one of the ways they look at whether it’s a true behavior problem that needs medication or not is, Is it something that’s bothering the dog, or is it just bothering you? Which was a great way to word it. Melissa Breau: Yeah, I like that. I’d love to include a link to the blog post that you mentioned that you wrote a while ago in the show notes. Would you be willing to shoot me over a link to that when you get a chance after we’re done? Dr. Jennifer Summerfield: Absolutely, yeah, I could definitely shoot that over to you. Melissa Breau: Awesome. To get back to the behavior meds thing, what are some signs that medications might really have a positive influence on a behavioral problem? Is there something about a problem that you go, “Oh, that, definitely. We can work on that with medication”? Jennifer Summerfield: Yeah, I would say a little bit of what we touched on a minute ago, in that anything that we think has a significant anxiety component to it, which is a lot of things. That encompasses things like separation anxiety, or thunderstorm phobia, or dogs that are generally anxious and constantly on edge and have trouble settling. Anytime we get the sense that, “Hey, this dog seems to be abnormally fearful or worried about things that are pretty normal in life that a ‘normal’ dog shouldn’t be fearful or worried about,” then that’s a pretty good indicator that medication would probably be helpful. The other big thing that makes me think, We should consider meds here is if the people have already been doing some work as far as training or behavior modification that’s appropriate, something that’s like, “OK, that sounds like a pretty good plan,” and they’re just having a really hard time making any headway, that, to me, is a strong indication that we could probably help that process along quite a bit with medication. The problem with a lot of dogs, especially if we’re working on something like, say, leash reactivity, for example, where we know how important it is from a behavior mod standpoint, how important it is to keep the dog below threshold while we’re working with it, for some dogs that are just so sensitive, that’s incredibly difficult because it doesn’t take anything at all to send them over threshold, and it can be really hard to find that little window of opportunity to even start working on training in a way that’s going to be successful. So in a dog like that, for example, medication can be really helpful to just bring things down enough that the dog is able to think, that you’re able to get that little toehold of space where the dog is able to see the trigger and not react so that you actually have some room to do your training. Melissa Breau: If somebody is considering this, they’re looking at medication or they’re thinking it might be good for their dog, what are some resources that they can use, or that they can turn to, to learn more about some of the options out there and the meds, or even just behavior modification training specifically? Jennifer Summerfield: That is such a great question. I think in terms of learning about behavior modification in general, there is some great stuff out there. There are tons of obviously really knowledgeable people in the field who have blogs and podcasts that are easy that anybody can access for free. You can find some great webinars through, of course, FDSA, but also through organizations like the Pet Professional Guild or the Association of Professional Dog Trainers or the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. There are online courses you can do. I really think that for a lot of dog owners, they might even consider, if they’re into this kind of thing, attending a conference like ClickerExpo or the APDT National Conference, or something like that, if it’s nearby. I find that a lot of dog owners sometimes don’t think about that, or don’t realize that they can go to things like that, but anybody’s totally welcome at those conferences. I know the last couple of years when I’ve been at ClickerExpo, certainly the majority of people there, I would say, are professionals in the field of one kind or another, but there’s always a good smattering of people who are just dog owners who want to learn more about this stuff, and I think that’s really cool. So lots of opportunities to learn more about behavior science and behavior modification. On the behavior meds side of things, I actually wracked my brain trying to come up with some good resources that are available for dog owners for that, and there just really are not a lot, which is one of the reasons that I’m excited to do this webinar, because I do think there’s a lack of good information that is easily accessible for people about behavior meds, other than the very basic stuff, like, “Hey, behavior meds are a thing, you might consider it for your dog.” But beyond that, it is difficult to find much information. Melissa Breau: Now, I know you specialize in behavior. If somebody goes to their average veterinarian, is that person going to have enough of an understanding to start that conversation, or should they really be seeking out somebody who specializes? What’s the guideline there? Jennifer Summerfield: The answer is that it really does depend quite a bit on your veterinarian and whether that’s something that they have an interest in or not. That’s true in general of general practitioners about really anything, so I don’t mean that at all to sound like, “Well, if your vet doesn’t know this stuff, they’re lousy.” Believe me, if you are a general practitioner, you cannot know everything about everything. All of us have areas that we know a lot about and then areas that we know very little about. I know anytime somebody comes to my clinic and they have questions about orthopedic issues, or their dog has a broken leg that it needs pinned or something like that, I send that out the door so fast because I know nothing. That’s not my area and I’ll be the first to say so, and there are some general practitioners who are fantastic at it. So behavior, to me, is a lot like that. There are some GP’s who are going to be great at it and really know their stuff and going to be really well-versed in all the medication options, and then there are others that that’s just not an area that they deal with much, they may not know a lot. But one option that is available that I think a lot of pet owners don’t always realize is an option is that if you don’t have a veterinary behaviorist nearby, or a veterinarian who is good with behavior and sees behavior cases, and your vet says, “I’d really like to help you, I just don’t know that much about this stuff,” many veterinary behaviorists will do a remote consultation with your vet, which can be super-helpful. They can’t do it directly with you, and that has to do with the legalities of the Practice Act and things that we legally cannot make recommendations directly for an animal if we haven’t met them in person. But what they can do is they can talk to your veterinarian, and your veterinarian can give them the whole write-up and details of the case, and they can say, “Oh, OK, I understand. Here is what I would consider as far as a behavior modification plan. Here is what I would consider as far as medication for this dog.” And then your vet can take that information, and they’re the ones who are actually in charge of doing the prescribing and overseeing the case directly, but they can keep in contact with the specialist about the case and make changes as needed and all that kind of stuff. I think that is a really underutilized service that sometimes people don’t realize is out there, but it is. So if your vet’s not super-well-versed in this stuff, but they’d like to help you and you’re willing to do something like that, talk to them about it, because they may not realize it’s an option either. But I think that can be a really good happy medium sometimes if you don’t have somebody in your area who you can work with in person. Melissa Breau: I think that’s an awesome thing to have you mention on something like this, because like you said, maybe people don’t know that it’s an option out there. I certainly wouldn’t know. Jennifer Summerfield: Yeah, definitely. I know I am going to talk a little bit about that in the webinar as well, so I’ll have more details on how that can work and on how people can specifically seek that out, if it’s something they’re interested in. Melissa Breau: Obviously, during the webinar, you’re not going to be able to give dog-specific advice. Like you said, you have to see the dog, hands on the animal in order to do that. But I would love to give people just a little more of an idea on what you plan to cover, especially since I know we’re doing two webinars back-to -back in the same evening. Can you talk a little bit about what you want to cover? Jennifer Summerfield: Yes, I’m super-excited, and I guess this is kind of unprecedented for FDSA to do the double-header. Melissa Breau: It’s our very first one. Jennifer Summerfield: It’s going to be great. It’s going to be a behavior pharmacology extravaganza, and I could not be more excited. The first webinar is going to be an introduction, basically, so meant for people who want some basic information about behavior meds. It’s going to talk about things like how do you know if your dog might benefit from medication, because I know that’s probably a question that a lot of people will have who are watching the webinar. I’m assuming a significant portion of people will be watching because they have a specific dog in mind that has some issues. So we’re definitely going to talk about how to decide that for your own dog, is it something that might be helpful. We’re going to go over all the different classes of drugs that we use for behavior cases, because there are actually quite a few different options now. It just to just be Prozac and Clomicalm, but there’s a lot of other options out now, which is really cool. We’re going to talk about what our goals are when we use behavior meds, so how that works with a training plan and what kinds of things to expect that way. We are going to spend some time also talking about natural supplements and calming aids and things that can help either by themselves or as an adjunct to medication. In the second webinar, that one is going to go into more detail as far as things like how do we actually choose for real specific cases what medication to use, because there are a lot of options. So we’re going to go into factors that we look at to help us decide what medication we think is going to be best for this particular dog. We’re going to talk about combinations, because for a lot of cases we do actually use more than one medication together, so we’re going to talk about how that works and how you decide whether you want to go down that road, and if you do, what things can go together, what things can’t. We’re going to have several case studies to go over, and examples to use for discussion, which I’m really excited about, because I think that’s where sometimes you get the most information is seeing how it applies to some actual cases rather than kind of getting everything in the abstract. And we will be talking in that second webinar, because we know that the FDSA audience obviously is a lot of performance dog people, we are going to talk specifically about considerations for performance dogs, so things like how do behavior meds impact learning and memory, are there any ethical questions that we need to consider when we’re thinking about medicating dogs who are actively showing and competing, that kind of stuff. So I think that will be a really interesting discussion too. Melissa Breau: That sounds so interesting. I’m actually really excited to dig into it. Jennifer Summerfield: Me too. I’m so excited! Melissa Breau: In addition to the webinars and your work as a trainer and a vet — you’re a pretty busy lady — you also blog, and you’ve recently started podcasting. I wanted to point listeners to those resources a little bit. Can you share a little bit on what you write about and talk about, maybe some of the recent topics you’ve covered, and where they can find that stuff? Jennifer Summerfield: Sure, definitely. My blog is Dr. Jen’s Dog Blog, so you can search for that and it will come right up. I’ve been doing it since, gosh, I think July of 2016, maybe, so I’ve got quite a few posts on there. I think the most recent one I did was on accidental behavior chains that sometimes we teach without realizing to our dogs, which was interesting. I know some of the posts I have had in the past on that blog that people have found really helpful have been on things like I have a post on behavior euthanasia, which actually a lot of people have written to me about and said was helpful for them. I have a post on fear periods and single event learning, which I think a lot of people have found pretty interesting. And then I have some posts on specific topics like leash reactivity and odor-directed aggression and things like that. So if anybody’s curious about those topics, a lot of times I do try to include case examples when I write about those too. Melissa Breau: Lots of sticky issues. Jennifer Summerfield: I know, I know. They are sticky issues, but actually those are some of my favorite things to write about because I think that sometimes there’s a lack of honest conversation about some of those things, and I think it’s sometimes useful to just say, “Well, here is something I deal with every day in my job, and here’s some thoughts, here’s my perspective on it.” And I know that I do get a lot of e-mails from people about those sticky topics that they found them helpful, which is really nice to hear. The podcast is pretty recent. I just started that here earlier this year and it’s been super-fun so far. I only have a few episodes of it out so far, but of course I’m actively doing that and the blog, so there will be more coming. The most recent one I did was on teaching reliable recalls to your dog. That’s a topic I get a lot of questions about and a topic that we troubleshoot a lot in our Basic Manners classes. And I’ve had some past episodes, I know I did one on car ride anxiety, and then I’ve got some basic topics like puppy socialization and housetraining and that kind of stuff. I guess I should probably mention here I do have a book out as well, if it’s something that people are interested in. The book is called Train Your Dog Now, and it is basically a reference guide, like a handbook to pretty much anything that might come up, behavior- or training-related, with a dog. So it has sections on teaching basic obedience cues and tricks, but it also talks about how to teach your dog to cooperate for grooming and handling — nail trims and teeth brushing and ear cleaning and that kind of stuff — and then there is a whole section on behavior issues. So it does talk about leash reactivity, it does talk about odor-directed aggression, it talks about aggression to visitors, and there is … it’s a brief section, but there is a section in the book also about behavior medication and supplements. So for people that like to have a hard copy of something they can look at in their home, that might be a good option to consider. Melissa Breau: To round things out, since it’s your first time on, there are three questions I try to ask every guest their first time on the podcast, and I’d love to do those. So first off, what’s the dog-related accomplishment that you’re proudest of? Jennifer Summerfield: I would have to say, and there are so many, that’s always a question that’s hard to narrow down, but honestly, if I had to pick one, I would probably say getting my dog Remy’s CD would be my biggest accomplishment. From the time that I went to that obedience trial when I was a kid, and I watched the dogs and I just wanted to do that so bad, and with Duncan we muddled along and we did a little bit, we dabbled very briefly in competitive obedience and it didn’t go super-well, but I learned a lot from that, obviously. And then with Remy I did things a little differently, and it still took us a long time to get his CD finished, but the day that we finished it was just like … I went back to the crate and I cried. It was such a big deal for us. And I know obviously, for a lot of your listeners, they have much, much higher accomplishments in the obedience ring, but for us, that was huge. Sort of the second part of that, I guess, obviously finishing the title itself was such a big thing for me because it was something that we worked so hard on. But one of the things that kind of was the cherry on top about that trial was I remember when we were packing our stuff up and getting ready to go back to the car, there was a woman that came up to me. I didn’t know her, but I guess she had been standing around, watching the obedience ring, and she came up to me afterwards and she congratulated me on finishing my title. I said, “Thanks,’ and she said, “I just wanted to tell you how much fun I had watching you and your dog because he looked so happy,” and that was huge. I probably still feel the greatest about that of everything that we’ve done in our competition career or anywhere. So that was a great feeling. Melissa Breau: That’s amazing, and I just want to encourage everybody who’s listening, hey, listen, people remember when you say that kind of stuff about them and their dog. It’s worth it. Jennifer Summerfield: I don’t remember very much about that lady now except that that was what she told us, but she made my whole year, my whole decade. So thank you, whoever that lady was, if you’re listening. Melissa Breau: And if you see somebody have a really awesome run and you feel something like that, absolutely step up afterwards and let them know how awesome it was. Jennifer Summerfield: For sure. It makes a big difference. Melissa Breau: It’s such an amazing thing to hear. That’s just awesome. Jennifer Summerfield: Thank you. Melissa Breau: So my second question here is, what’s the best piece of training advice you’ve ever heard? Jennifer Summerfield: What I would have to say — and this is not technically dog training advice, I guess I’ll preface it that way, but I think it can apply to dog training, and I think about it in regards to dog training a lot. It’s actually a quote from Maya Angelou. It gets paraphrased a lot, but the actual quote is, she said, “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” That has always struck me as being such a great way to look at life, a lot of things about life in general, but specifically about dog training, because I think for probably a lot of us who are crossover trainers, I think it’s probably a pretty widespread thing to have some degree of regret or guilt, maybe, about how we did things with our first dog, or how we taught some things that we wish if we could go back and do it differently. I love that quote because it’s so true that there’s no reason to feel guilty or to feel ashamed about doing the best that you knew how to do at the time, and that’s all any of us can do. But when new information comes along and you realize that there’s a different way to do things, that you just adjust your behavior and you do it differently. So I’ve always found that really helpful in terms of thinking about myself and my own choices, but I also think it’s so helpful to keep perspective when I’m thinking about clients and the people that I work with in my job as well, because I think it’s so easy for those of us who do this professionally, and we know all the science and we do this day in and day out, it’s so easy to get a client and to feel like, “Oh, can you believe this person’s been using a shock collar on their aggressive dog,” or “This person’s been alpha-rolling their dog,” and these things that are things that obviously are probably not the ideal way to handle whatever behavior issue they’re having. But I think it’s so helpful to remember that people are just doing the best they can. That’s so powerful, that people are just doing the best they can with what they know, and that’s all any of us can do. We all were there at one point, too, and that thinking about it from that perspective, that our job is to say, “Hey, you know, I totally understand where you’re coming from, and I understand why that seems like it makes sense, but let’s look at some other ways to address this that hopefully are going to be a little bit more effective and don’t have some of the side effects that those methods have.” I think about that frequently, both in terms of my own life and also working with clients, just to try and keep that perspective that it’s important to give people the benefit of the doubt that we’re working with, too, and remember that everybody is just doing the best they can with what they know. Melissa Breau: For our last question, who is somebody else in the dog world that you look up to? Jennifer Summerfield: All three of your questions are very hard because there are so many choices. I have two for this one, if that’s OK. For the first one, as far as being a really well-known public figure in our field that I have always looked up to, I would have to say Dr. Sophia Yin for that. For veterinarians especially, she was such a pioneer of changing the way that we deal with dogs in the clinic, and of course she did a lot of behavior stuff besides the low-stress handling as well. But I think she was such a tremendous role model for all veterinarians in the way that she dealt with animals and the way that she dealt with people, and so I look up to her tremendously, and I think she did great things for the field. The other person that I would have to mention, she’s not overly famous, I don’t think, but she is a great clinical applied animal behaviorist that I worked with when I was in veterinary school, and her name is Traci Shreyer. I worked pretty closely with her through the four years that I was there, because she was very involved in the puppy class program at that school, which I worked with quite a bit, and then she was involved in teaching some of our classes, and things on behavior as well, and working with us, the behavior club setups and some things with her, and so I dealt pretty closely with her the whole four years. What I loved about her and really took away from that experience is she was great with dogs and animals in general, she was fabulous, but she was also so, so great with people, with clients, and she was always reminding us … I think, again, for many of us in this field, being empathetic towards the dogs is easy, that’s kind of what drew us in in the first place, but I think it’s so, so important to remember that we have to have empathy for our human learners too, that what we’re asking them to do is hard, and that they deserve just as much consideration and kindness and respect as our dog patients do. She was probably the single best example of that that I have ever seen. She was fantastic, and that is a lesson that I definitely took away from working with her. So I would say she’s the other person that I still really look up to in the field. Melissa Breau: That’s awesome, and that’s such a great compliment to have given somebody you learned from, to say that they are so empathetic and so good with people. Jennifer Summerfield: Yes, it’s a hard skill, such a hard skill, but it’s so important. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast Jen. Jennifer Summerfield: No problem. I’ve had a great time! Melissa Breau: And thanks to our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week with Nancy Tucker, to talk about getting better door behaviors. Don’t miss it. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Summary: Dr. Deborah Jones — better known around FDSA as Deb Jones — is a psychologist who specializes in learning theory and social behavior. An early innovator in the use of clicker training, she has owned and worked with a variety of breeds and has earned top-level titles in agility, rally, and obedience over the last 25 years. At FDSA, Deb offers a wide range of popular classes, including a number of excellent foundations classes. Her focus is on developing training methods that are enjoyable and effective for both the dog and the trainer. Links mentioned: Deb's Website - www.k9infocus.com Deb's Class on FDSA Next Episode:  To be released 7/27/2018, featuring Sue Ailsby, talking about Rally.  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. Deborah Jones -- better known around FDSA as Deb Jones.   Deb is a psychologist who specializes in learning theory and social behavior. An early innovator in the use of clicker training, she has owned and worked with a variety of breeds and has earned top-level titles in agility, rally, and obedience over the last 25 years. In 2004, Deb worked with agility trainer and World Team member Judy Keller to develop the FOCUS training system. FOCUS stands for Fun, Obedience & Consistency lead to Unbelievable Success. Deb has also worked with Denise Fenzi, co-authoring the “Dog Sports Skills” book series, and authored several other books, with more in the works! At FDSA, Deb offers a wide range of popular classes, including a number of excellent foundations classes. Her focus is on developing training methods that are enjoyable and effective for both the dog and the trainer. Hi Deb! Welcome back to the podcast. Deb Jones: Hi Melissa. Thanks for having me back again. It is always fun to be here and get a chance to chat with you. Melissa Breau: To start us out, can you just reacquaint listeners with the furry friends you currently share your household with? Deb Jones: Of course. I never pass up an opportunity to talk about my pets. First of all, there’s Zen. Zen is my nearly 11-year-old Border Collie, and it’s impossible that he could be nearly 11. I tell him every night that he needs to stop getting old right now, because I’m not going to allow it. Zen is perfect in practically every way. He’s fun, he’s smart, he has done a lot in his life, and he still enjoys a lot of things, like hiking with me. The second dog I have is Star. She’s a 7-year-old black-and-white Border Collie. Star has done quite a bit of demo work in classes, as well as we are starting out on working nosework, doing nosework with her as well. She’s also another hiking buddy of mine. Tigger is the 2-year-old tiny little Sheltie. He really belongs to Judy Keller, but I get to share him. Tigger is fun and he’s funny. He’s very fierce for someone who weighs 7-and-a-half pounds, and he tells you all the time that he’s the biggest dog in the house. And finally, we also have Trick, the kitty. Tricky is now about 8 years old, I think. Trick has been in a lot of videos. He loves to train just as much as the dogs do, and he’s actually a whole lot of fun to train and a challenge. It’s different. It’s not quite the same as training dogs. But every time you get ready to tape a video, Tricky is here, so he usually gets involved in some way or the other. So that’s our household right now. Melissa Breau: I asked you on today to talk about something we haven’t talked about before on the podcast: teaching people. Professional dog trainers are typically training people to train dogs, not actually training the dogs themselves, and even those who aren’t professional trainers often find themselves asked for advice, or maybe they just want to be a positive ripple in their area. Based on your background, you seem like the perfect person to ask, plus I know you have a class coming up on the topic. I think most of our listeners probably realize you teach for FDSA, but some of them may not realize you also taught psychology at Kent State University for 20 years. Did you always want to be a teacher? What got you started on that path? Deb Jones: I’m actually pretty surprised that this topic of teaching has not come up until now. It seems to me it’s pretty central to everything we’re doing here at FDSA, so I’m really excited about starting a program for teachers. Let me go back a little bit and talk about my background in teaching, and give you first of all a personal confession is that I never wanted to be a teacher. That was so far away from anything I ever thought I would do with my life. It was never any kind of consideration for me. There were some, I think, pretty clear reasons why that was the case. I grew up fairly isolated. I was an only child, I lived way out in the country, we didn’t have a lot of people around, but we did have a lot of animals. Especially across the street from us there was a large farm. They always had chickens, pigs, and lot of horses. So I spent lots of time over there with the animals, and I interacted with the animals very easily. With people not so much. So that started out my idea of spending time animal training, because I was simply much more used to them and more comfortable being around them. Also something that I know about myself and I’ve come to learn over the years is I’m a pretty strong natural introvert. I’m relaxed and comfortable alone or with a small number of people around. When you start to get a large group of people, that takes a lot of energy from me in terms of interaction. It’s just not quite so natural for me to interact with large groups, which is pretty funny considering that I teach very large classes sometimes. That was not at all what I would ever have guessed I would have done. It’s something that I learned how to do over the years. It became a role that I could play. But it’s not who I am. There’s a big difference between the role of what we’re doing and our personality, and it’s very clear to me that I’m not a natural teacher, but I could learn how to teach very effectively, and I think it’s something that anybody can learn how to do, if that’s what you want. I never chose to teach when I went college. I didn’t go back to college until I was about 30 years old. I went back as an adult and I had no idea what I was going to do. My plan was to take one college class and see what it’s like, and that one class happened to be Intro Psychology. So I took my psychology class and that was it — I was hooked. That was the thing I was most interested in. All through undergrad I never really thought about what I would do with this degree, except I realized a bachelor’s in psychology doesn’t get you anywhere. You really have to go on to graduate school, and you really need to get a Ph.D. And so I thought, OK, I could do that. I liked a lot of things about research, so I figured I’d be a researcher, and I saw myself working alone in a lab somewhere, spending a lot of time doing my own individual work and then socializing with people every once in a while. I didn’t really see myself interacting with large numbers of people on a daily basis. Since I was older when I went back to college, I got to know my professors a little better maybe than some students of a traditional age might have, and they were really, really influential in my decision on what to do and how to go about approaching my career. There are two in particular, Marion Cohn and Anne Crimmings, who were the psychology professors that I worked with as an undergrad, and they both encouraged me strongly to go on to graduate school. In particular, Marion was a really strong influence on me. She was a behaviorist. She trained under somebody named Ivar Lovaas. Anybody in the ABA world probably recognizes the name Lovaas, who pioneered doing behavioral work with people with autism. So she was very much influential in the fact that I knew I wanted to go into something that had to do with behavior and that everything I found there made a lot of sense to me. So I headed off to graduate school. I had no plans to teach. Again, I thought I would be doing research. But once I got to graduate school, they have an expectation of your work for them. You will work for them 20 hours a week in addition to your class load, and you’re going to be assigned to be either a research or teaching assistant. What I discovered was that research assistantships were harder to get, and usually that happened for the upper-level students. I was pretty much told, “You’re going to be a teaching assistant,” and it was not a happy day for me. That was not what I wanted to hear. It got even worse, though, because I was going to be a teaching assistant for a statistics class, and I don’t like statistics. There is nothing about it that I cared about in any way. I squeaked through it as an undergrad, but I never felt confident in it or felt like I understood it. I just managed to get an A somehow, and it seemed to me like it was luck as much as anything else. Since stats didn’t make sense to me, I didn’t want to do it. I’m going to have to teach something I don’t understand, and the final straw there was that it was going to be an 8 o’clock lab, an 8 a.m. lab, and I’m like, I hate everything about this. There was nothing that sounded like a good plan. I seriously considered dropping out of graduate school. I’m glad I didn’t, but at the time it did not seem like this was going to lead me anywhere down a career path that I wanted to go. Just the opposite. It seemed like it was taking me away from what I wanted to do. But in the end of it, what happened was I learned a really, really important lesson, and that was that in order to teach something, if I had to stand up in front of a group of people and be the expert on something, I really needed to understand it completely. In order for me to understand statistics, of all things, I needed to break it down into tiny little parts and basically split it, is how we talk about it in training now. I needed to split it down, and it needed to make sense to me first before I could use it to make sense to anybody else. I spent a lot of time that first year learning statistics myself. I would take the lesson I learned the night before and present it to my class the next morning. What happened was my students liked it and they did well. They liked the way things were broken down. They liked that things were very clear and understandable to them. As we know, many times you get a professor who really understands the topic, but they can’t make it understandable to the student. With my own struggles I was able to do that right off the bat. I was able to find ways to make it understandable to others. We keep it sort of a secret among teachers that many times we’re barely ahead of our students in the material. We may have been reading that textbook right before we went in the classroom to teach it. So you become, again, play your role. You become good at projecting confidence, even when you may not totally have it. But that’s part of the teaching role that we take on. I finally did get away from teaching statistics in grad school. I got to teach a lot of other classes as well, though my career in teaching altogether I taught statistics every single semester for 20 years. It kept me employed because nobody else wanted to do it. It became very easy for me to do over time, and they were very popular classes, so I always had full classes, which was good. But I taught a lot of other classes in grad school. Once I got my master’s, I taught at a few different area colleges and I started to feel like I was getting control of this, or understanding how to develop material and how to teach it. Of course, when I decided to get a job, then I found out that any job I got was going to be mainly teaching. If there was any research involved, it was going to be minimal. Academic jobs at the time I was looking were very competitive and hard to get, so I was lucky that I had a good friend, Lee [Fox], who is going to be teaching this teaching class with me at FDSA, and I’ll talk about her more in a bit. I was lucky that she had gotten a job at Kent State a few years before me and come up here. So she knew about the opening, she connected me to an opening here, I got the job at Kent State, I decided I’d probably stay for a year or two. Twenty years later, here I am, just retiring from Kent State. So things kind of take on a life of their own. But I’ve been really happy here. I moved from the big Kent campus down to a regional campus called the Stark campus, which is in Canton, Ohio, where my classes were small, I knew most of my students, I had good colleagues, so it’s been a really good career and a really good experience. But I was ready to get away from it. Probably for about the last four or five years I’ve been really done with college teaching. It takes a lot of energy and it does burn you out over time. At the same time I was also starting to teach more and more for FDSA and I saw a couple of things. One of those is that, gee, this thing is going to continue growing. It’s not going to be something that lasts for a year or two. It just keeps expanding, and FDSA has a lot to offer the dog training world. I knew I wanted to get more and more involved here, but I still had a full-time job there, so finally I was in a position, luckily, that I could make the decision to focus my teaching efforts more at FDSA and go ahead and retire from Kent State. That was a long-winded way of telling you where I came from. Melissa Breau: I think that’s all good. You mentioned a bunch of things in there, though. One of the things you talked about were some of the skills that go into being a good teacher, and obviously there’s a difference between being given a job as a teacher and really learning how to teach. Can you identify what some of those skills were? What skills do teachers need that someone might not think about until they are actually in that role? Deb Jones: There’s a lot of on-the-job learning typically involved in teaching, and that’s not always a good thing. In fact, we’d be much better off to have more preparation, but we don’t get that often. We get knowledge of the material. So you come in to teach something, you’re teaching it because you know it, because you understand it, or you do well at it. If we switch from college teaching to talk about dog trainers a little bit — we understand how to train an animal. Once you get that, people are going to encourage you to teach others, which is a good thing. We should share that knowledge. We shouldn’t keep it all to ourselves. But if you’re only good with animals and you don’t know how to teach people, it’s not going to go well for you. People skills, being able to communicate very clearly and effectively with the person, because animals come with people attached. Whether we like it or not, we need to work with the person to change the animal’s situation or to change their behavior. So learning how to communicate with another human, as opposed to communicating with an animal of any species, is much more difficult. People are more complicated, much more complicated. I’ve also come to see that our job is not just to present information. We really are there to motivate and support students, much more than just give them info. That is probably one of the biggest things I’ve learned over my career is that I need to be, and I am now more than I was, a motivator and somebody who’s there for support when the person needs it. As a teacher, being able to take theoretical information, and an understanding of that information, and make it into something that the student can use and apply right away. Some of us are good at book learning. That’s why I’m an academic, because I like that kind of stuff. But if I give all that to my students, I’m going to overwhelm them very, very quickly. So I need to be able to take what I know from theories and pull out the important pieces of information and use those appropriately. I don’t want to overwhelm students. We don’t want to flood students with new information, and that easily happens sometimes, especially with new teachers. You tell them everything, and everything is too much. In college teaching we’re still in the model of lecture. I lecture to you, you listen to me, and then I test you on what you remember from the lecture. That’s the whole mode. It’s not really the best model for learning, probably, but it’s a very strong tradition of that in academics, so that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But in dog training it’s different, because if I lecture my students for very long, they’re bored and they’re finished. I need to be working with them. I need to take information and make it into something that you actually physically do. That can be hard, because I do things without thinking about every little detail and every little step, and when I have to think through that, all of a sudden something that I thought was very simple to teach takes ten times longer because I have forgotten all those details that go in along the way. I think we’re really good at FDSA with this is we approach students differently. It’s not “the instructor has all the power, the student has none” relationship and all the information flows from me to you. It’s much more interactive, it’s much more about the information flow coming from the student as well. I learn as much as I ever teach a lot of people. And it’s much more about how to support our students and help them, as opposed to just give them information. I think those are very different things that we’re doing here with dog training than I do in college teaching. Melissa Breau: How did you learn some of those skills? Where did those abilities come from? Deb Jones: We learn on the job, which is not the best way. Trial and error. When I first started teaching at Kent State, when I got hired at Kent State, one of my first classes was 500 people. It was 500 people, Introductory Psychology class. That’s daunting, and nobody tells you what to do or how to do it. You are basically left on your own: “Here you go, here’s your class, teach Intro Psychology.” And I’m like, OK, I know Intro Psychology, but I’m standing on a stage in an auditorium, which is like my worst nightmare ever, trying to figure out how do I keep these people interested, how do I give them what they need to know, and how do I control this group? Because now I’ve got this large group of people I have to somehow control. So it’s very much sink or swim, trial and error, and I don’t think that’s a good way to do it at all. And so what happens? Some people do well. Some people learn how to teach, they figure it out, they thrive, they have a career out of it. But other people don’t. They hate it, they do poorly, either they quit or they find a way to avoid teaching as much as possible, which is actually true of many college professors. They teach as little as they possibly can. If you have somebody to support you and mentor you, that can be helpful, but that’s not something always that occurs. It’s not a big deal in most colleges. They’re more interested in research than in teaching. Teaching is seen as something we have to do, but that’s not their focus for a lot of people in college. You’d think it would be, because that’s what a university is all about, but oftentimes it’s much more about doing research. So there’s not much effort put into supporting teachers, or showing people how to teach, or giving instruction. So we tend to model, I think, mostly after how we were taught. You probably had a professor that you really liked, and a professor that you felt like you got a lot from their class or classes. And that’s what we tend to do — we model after them. That’s good if you had a great professor, and if that happens to work for your personality and for your topic, but it doesn’t always work out quite that way. That’s one of the reasons, I think this is the main reason, we thought about first offering a class on how to teach. Because it can be a very painful, difficult experience if you don’t know what you’re doing, and hopefully we can save people from some of that. You can learn from our pain. You don’t have to have your own. We can show you and help you along the way, and that’s why we’re doing this. Melissa Breau: I think a lot of dog trainers, when they decide to become professionals, like you’re saying, they jump right into it, so it leads to a bit of flying by the seat of their pants, for lack of a better term. I’d love to hear a little bit about how much of teaching can be, or has to be, that ad hoc, that fly by the seat of your pants, and how much it really requires careful planning and should require that careful planning. What’s the balance like there? Deb Jones: That’s an excellent question, because I think everything requires planning. I’m not a big believer in spontaneity. Part of that is my personality, but part of it is also my experience of teaching for about 25 years now. Very few people … now there are some who can be spontaneous and it goes really well, but they’re not a lot. For most people, when you’re spontaneous, things start to go off the rails pretty quickly. It’s also frightening, it’s pretty scary, to not have a plan, so I’m a total big believer in planning. You may be very good at what you do with animals, but you may need much more work on how do I take that and make it into something that is going to be understandable to humans. Lots of times, students never see the preparation stage of teaching. They have no idea it exists, because it’s invisible. They don’t know how much work we put in behind the scenes before we even get to interacting with them. I know you’ve taught a class or so, and you’re going to be teaching classes, and you know now a little bit about how much work goes on before you ever get there. There’s a lot that needs to be done. We don’t just jump into class on the first day and go, “Ah, I wonder what I’m going to do today.” I know what I’m going to do for the entire session. I have it all planned out, and even if my plan falls apart somewhere along the way, at least I had a plan to start with. I often in my college classes make up a schedule, I always make up a schedule, for every day of the semester for the four months that we would be there. I knew exactly what I was going to do before the class ever started. Whether or not I stuck to that plan is something else. That’s where the spontaneity might come in, where I have to change things because I moved faster or slower than I thought I would, or I needed some more time to talk about a particular topic. So I can change things as I go along, but I need the plan first. That, to me, is just vitally important, and for all the good teachers I know, that is the case. They know what they’re doing. They always know every single day. It’s not, “Huh, I wonder what I feel like teaching this morning.” It’s very much “This is where we go now in the lesson plan.” It helps a lesson plan to be sensible and to be logical and to build one thing on the next. If you’re just jumping around from one topic to another, that feels disjointed and people don’t like that so much. So more planning never hurts. This is what I always say: Plan everything. You can never over-plan. It’s fine. Do as much as you think you need to do. Then, once you have the plan, now you can be flexible. Now you can be a little more spontaneous, if you see the need arise. But don’t just go into it cold, because that’s unlikely for most people to end well. Melissa Breau: That leads directly into what I was going to ask you next, which obviously, no matter how much planning you do, there are going to be times when you have to think on your feet and you have to respond when something unexpected happens, especially if you’re dealing with a dog training class in person, where you have students and you have their dogs and you never know exactly what crazy things could enter somebody’s head, or a dog’s head, in a given moment. How did you learn to handle that aspect of the job — handling the unexpected — and any advice you have, of course. Deb Jones: What do they say, “Expected the unexpected.” Things are going to happen that you could never have planned for or predicted. That’s always very, very true. Things that in your wildest dreams you would not have imagined they’d occur, happen, and I think with new teachers we’re terrified of those possibilities. We’re very worried that something is going to happen, out of my control, I’m not going to know what to do about it. And it will. There’s no question it will. So what do you do? You can panic. You can kind of lose your ability to think and process information. I’ve had that happen now and again. I’m thinking about instructors in early teaching of anything. You’re often worried that you’re going to get questions that you can’t answer. That’s an interesting fear to have, because it is reasonable. There will be questions that I don’t know the answer to because I don’t know everything in the world. I have no idea what the answer might be to certain questions. But I usually can figure out where to find that information. It might not be something I can answer right away, but just that fear that people are going to ask me something I don’t know — I don’t worry about that so much because usually my answer to that is something like, “Well, that a really interesting question and I haven’t really thought about that. So let me think about it a little bit and we can talk about it later, or let me go do some research on it and next time we’ll discuss it.” So you don’t have to answer everything right now. You don’t have to know everything in the world, even about the topic you’re teaching. You can only know your part of it. There’s nothing wrong with that when it happens, and it will happen. The other thing that sometimes happens that’s unexpected is you made your plan for class, you know what you’re going to do, you’ve got it all figured out, and when you get there, that plan is just not right for that group. It may be that my material is too simple, and my group is beyond where I thought they would be. The more likely the problem is my material is too complex, and the group is not ready for this level of material that I was planning to give them and talk about and work on that day. You have to be able to figure out when do I need to go back and go to an easier level, or when do I need to add some challenge that I wasn’t necessarily expecting I was going to have to do here. So my lesson plan is sort of a suggested outline for what is going to happen in a class. That can always be changed. If I have that dog that does something I didn’t expect, either good or bad — either they do much better than I thought they would, or they’re nowhere near ready to do what I had planned for them that day — that’s when I do have to be flexible and be spontaneous. We develop, as we go along with training, ways to deal with that: What am I going to do when I get into that situation? Let’s say you have the dog and the owner that show up to your advanced class and they’re not advanced. They’re barely beginners, and somehow they ended up in your advanced class. This happens all the time. So what you planned for them to do is absolutely not possible for them. Now the question is what do you do at that moment? We want to very quickly drop back down to the level where they can be successful and start them there. That’s all you can do in the moment is to give them something to work on that they can succeed with. Trying to hold them to the same level as everybody else in the class is just never going to work. It’s going to be frustrating for all of you. After the fact, it might be they don’t really belong in that class, but that’s not something to address immediately. You can address that privately at the end of class. Maybe that the class is not right for them, they don’t have the background or the skills that they need, but we can’t derail the whole lesson and say, “OK, because Joe and Fido are having this problem with reactivity and it’s an agility class, we’re all going to stop and I’m going to work with him on this problem.” We can’t do that either. We have to think constantly about the group. What is the group here to be taught? What did I say I was going to teach? I have to do that. Like I say, I can try to alter things as much as I can for somebody who’s not quite fitting, but in the end they may or may not be right for that particular class. We can’t be all things to all people all the time, and we can deal with that after the fact. The other issue, the opposite issue of that, is you get somebody in class who is well advanced of what you’re teaching. This can be disconcerting, especially if you’re a new instructor, because now all of a sudden the student knows more than you do, and you don’t know what you have to offer them. In these cases, with experience, you start to learn to add challenges for those students who are ready for them as part of what you’re doing in the class. Judy used to complain when she had her first agility dog, Morgan, who was Mr. Perfect. Morgan did everything right all the time. Morgan would do an agility sequence perfectly, and they’d be, “That was great, OK, next.” And then the next dog comes up and they’re having trouble, so they get three or four tries at the agility sequence and much more of the instructor’s time. When you get something like this, you’re not real happy if you’re the person who has the perfect dog, because you haven’t been challenged in any way, and you really haven’t gotten the time from the instructor that you should have. So knowing I have to give the same amount to each of my students and I have to meet them or start where they are. Even though I have this general idea of where they ought to be, I’m working with them from where they are right now, which is exactly the same thing we do with dogs. We work from where they are right now. It’s the same with people. Melissa Breau: As somebody who has taught in both a traditional classroom setting and who has taught people to train their dogs, what similarities or differences pop out at you? Deb Jones: This is a really interesting distinction to make between teaching my college classes and teaching my dog training classes because I’ve done both for over 25 years. In terms of preparation, I think they’re pretty much the same. I prepare the same way no matter what the topic is that I’m teaching, whether it’s dog training classes or college classes. Some of the issues you’re going to see that are similar include just dealing with people — interpersonal issues, group dynamics that you have going on. How do I deal with this large group of people effectively? Most of us don’t know naturally how to do that, so that’s something we learn. In dog training, though, it’s interesting because you would think you’re training the dog. That’s what it’s called. It’s called dog training, so our focus is on training the dog. But we all know, who have taught for any time at all, what you’re actually doing is teaching the person to train the dog. So I, as the instructor here, have a double job. I’m teaching a person, also making sure the dog gets trained at the same time. Many dog trainers would say, “The animal is easy, the person is hard,” and that’s probably true. I feel like I could train the dog very quickly, but that’s not the job. The job is to teach the person to train the dog, and that’s not going to be as quick and easy. If you’ve ever learned how to ride a horse — I spent a lot of time when I was younger with horses and riding horses and at stables — oftentimes when you take lessons, what happens, you get a new person who’s never ridden a horse before, and we give them what’s called a school horse. The school horse is usually the one that’s going to be very easy. That horse is experienced. It knows what’s going on. The person knows nothing, but at least the horse knows. And so the horse is pretty easy going, it’s used to beginners, it’s not going to hurt anybody, everything will go along OK. As you get better as a rider, you get the horses that are less trained or more difficult to work with. We don’t do that with dogs. We don’t have school dogs. I think that would be a really good idea, if you had these well-trained dogs that people could practice on before they work with their own. I think that would make things simpler. But we don’t have that. We’re teaching a person and an animal brand new things at the same time, which makes it difficult. We’re also teaching … in dog training, the difference is that’s a physical skill, and it involves a lot of motor skill, and it involves timing, observational skills. These are things I don’t teach in college classes. I teach information. I teach material. I talk about academic stuff out of books, theories and ideas. That’s very different than teaching somebody how to click at the proper moment. That’s a whole different set of skills. Or how to manage a clicker and your treats and your dog and your leash and all those things at one time. This is a lot of mechanical stuff that we work with when we’re teaching animals different behaviors. And again, things I don’t think about. I just do them. So when I have to start to think about how to explain it to somebody, then I have to break it down into tiny little parts. I remember when I first started thinking about teaching FOCUS. I didn’t know how I taught FOCUS. I just did. I just somehow had it with my dogs. There were a lot of things I was doing, but it took me a while to think through all those and to actually be able to verbalize them to other people, because I felt like it’s just what you do, it’s just how you are with your dog, it’s how you live with your puppy. But clearly it’s not, because everybody wasn’t doing those things. Once I started to verbalize it, it just kept growing and growing. It’s like, I do a lot of things I never said or I never even recognized. That’s a lot of what happens in dog training. We have to go, we do this and it works, but how do I tell you to do the same thing? We get students … because we’re working with physical skills, we all end up with students who have difficulty with those skills, who have trouble following direction, or who have some sort of issue with something that I might think is simple. I might say, “Turn to your right,” and to me that would be a simple cue that I would give a person, but that might be very complicated for them. They might struggle with the difference between left and right. So I have to break it down and make it easy enough for that one particular person in my class, and then I have, say, ten of those people, and I have to do that for every single person that I’m working with. Those are challenges, those kinds of things that I didn’t see in college teaching. I just had a group of people sitting in chairs, looking at me. I got to talk to them, which was fine, which was easy, but you didn’t get that intense one-on-one that you do with dog training. Melissa Breau: To kind of flip the switch there, you talked about “The animal is easy, the person is hard.” What are some of the similarities or even the differences, I guess, between teaching your actual dog and teaching those human students? Are there things that stand out? Deb Jones: I think there are a lot of similarities. I mean, the general rules of learning still apply to everybody. I always say they apply to all species, and I don’t say “except humans.” They apply to all species. We all learn in the same way, and we all also need to consider motivation, emotional responses, and reactions to things. I need to consider those in my human students as well as in my animals, and sometimes as teachers we forget about that stuff. We think about it with the animals, but we figure the people must be motivated or they wouldn’t be there, so they must be able to figure it out and they want to do it. But not always. We can have a big effect on their emotional responses and on how much they try and how hard they work. Lots of times, something I see that is challenging with people in animal training, and especially for those of us who are positive-reinforcement-based trainers, is that what I’m teaching you pretty much contradicts your previous learning. It does not agree with what you think you know or what you know about dog training, and what I’m telling you is completely different. So we’re getting into space here where we have to be very, very careful. Even if I’m just implying everything you’ve done up to now is wrong, just listen to me and I’ll tell you what’s right, people don’t like that. They become defensive. They go, “No, wait a minute. I know what I was doing. I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” or “The fact that you’re implying I was doing something wrong is bothersome.” So we have to be very delicate in how we present information that we know is going to disagree with the way that they have always done things. The last thing we want our human students to do is become resistant to learning our ideas. We want them to be open to it, so we need to be very, very careful that I’m not implying to you that everything you’ve done up to now is wrong, thank goodness you found me, because otherwise you’re just messing up left and right. That’s not going to go over well. When you first learn about positive reinforcement training and you’re so excited about it, it’s easy to let that creep in, that this is the right way, everything you’ve been doing is the wrong way. We need to be careful about that as teachers, or we’re not going to convince anybody if we take that approach. Also with humans what I’ve come to see is it’s not my job to convert anybody to believe what I believe about animal training. I feel very strongly about the way I train and teach, and I feel like it’s the right way to go about it. But my job is not to convert the world. My job is to do what I do to the best of my ability. When somebody’s ready to hear what I have to say, they’ll be there. They’ll find me, and then they’ll be ready to make the changes that are necessary. But I’m not going out, pulling people in, trying to make them see how right I am. I think that is something that just turns people away from us, so we need to be careful about that. Melissa Breau: You mentioned that students sometimes are at different places in their learning, and I’m curious how, when professional trainers are dealing with a new class, I think they often struggle with this idea of how you break things down into tiny pieces so the dog can be successful without frustrating their human learners. Do you have any advice or suggestions around that? Deb Jones: Oh, of course I do. I definitely do. This is something I think about a lot. As animal trainers, we’re always talking about the importance of splitting things down into small pieces and making it easy for our animals to learn. We know that lumping things together is going to lead to confusion and frustration. It doesn’t help in the bigger picture. We apply that to animals pretty well, but oftentimes as instructors we have difficulty applying that to our human learners. One of the problems I see here is that our human students come in with unrealistic expectations about how much progress they’re going to make in a class or over the course of a session that you have. They expect a lot more than is realistically possible. I think one of our jobs as instructors is to help them set those expectations more realistically. They want to see some big change right away, and we know that it’s not about big change. It’s about a whole lot of little tiny bits of incremental change that eventually lead to the bigger change. So one of our first jobs, I think, is to convey this information to them, that what you’re seeing here, this is progress. This is what we’re looking at, how do we know it when we see it, and then they can start to look for it a little more as well. The other thing that often happens in classes, and it’s often with new instructors, is that you just feel like you have to give your students everything you know. Give them so much information that it becomes overwhelming to them, and they tend to shut down and stop hearing you pretty quickly. You can only process so much information at a time. We want to tell them everything, we want to give them everything they need to know, but we need to edit that. We need to keep that to a point where it’s enough for now and I can give them more later, so enough to be successful, and then we can build on that in the future. But when we flood people with large amounts of information, it’s not useful to them in any way, and it does make them feel overwhelmed and frustrated, so that’s not helpful as a learner. If you have students in class, as I sort of mentioned this already, lots of different places, some are more advanced than others, finding the level of material and difficulty to give them can indeed be difficult. You’ve got the new pet person in a class along with the experienced dog sport trainer. How am I going to make them both happy? That’s a big challenge, and you’ll probably never feel like you do it perfectly. Perfect and teaching do not go together. Those are not two words that happen. We do our best. We do our best every single time we teach. Later on, you’ll think, Oh, I wish I’d said this, or Oh, I wish I’d done that instead. Next time. Now you know. Next time you can do it that way. But we learn more, we do better. We don’t expect ourselves to be perfect all the time and hit it exactly right for every single class. You’ll have absolutely great classes and then you’ll have absolutely awful ones, and it may or may not have much to do with the material at all. Back to this idea one more time, because I’ll say it again because I think it’s important: More material is not better. It’s flooding. New instructors go into too much theory, too much detail. Narrow things down for your audience. What do they need to know right now? I think that’s the best way to find a balance here. If you have somebody who you really feel like is interested in more and wants to learn more, or is ready to learn more, then you pull out the extra stuff you have for them and give them a little extra instruction in that and give them a little extra challenge. Melissa Breau: I think that so often new instructors are a little bit … I don’t want to say unconfident, but to a certain extent it’s, OK, I’m going to prove you can trust me by telling you all the science that I know to prove that I know the science, so that we can do this thing and it’s going to work. But obviously that’s not, like you said, more information is not better. Deb Jones: Right, and the science is something we can talk about with our colleagues. We’re behavior geeks, a lot of us. That’s why we do this. We love to talk about the science of things. But we have to know our audience. Is my audience one that wants to talk about all this science or not? So save that for the right situation. Melissa Breau: For those who are listening who maybe don’t actually plan to become a teacher, but inevitably, as positive trainers, they find themselves questioned about their training and their techniques, do you have any advice for ways that Joe Schmo or the average positive trainer can maybe bridge that gap and help educate others around them? Deb Jones: Yeah, this is going to come up for you. If you train with positive reinforcement, people are going to be curious, especially if they’ve had more traditional training techniques. That’s all they know, so they’re going to want to know what you do. I’d say a few things that I think can be helpful here. First of all, your first job is to be a good example of positive reinforcement training. Nobody expects you or your dog to be perfect. I know I and my dog are far from perfect in our training. Many positive reinforcement trainers actually have very challenging dogs and that’s why they made this switch to more positive reinforcement, because they found it worked better for them. So you don’t have to be perfect, but do your best to actually train your dog so that they’re a good example of what you can do. If you can get a lot of hands-on experience with more dogs, that’s all the better. There are a lot of people who are very good at the theory and the science, and they understand it cognitively, but they can’t apply it to their own animals or to anybody else’s. I’ve seen that more than once, where somebody talks a very good talk, but when you see them try to train an animal, they haven’t bridged that gap yet. They’re not capable of taking from one to the other. When I first started teaching at Kent State, there was another professor who’s very well known in the world of learning theory. He’s written textbooks on learning, and he came to one of my dog training classes. He was my worst student. He was terrible. He understood the theory better than anybody in the room. That didn’t help him when it came to the hands-on stuff. So I think just because we like the theory and we think all that part of it is interesting, we also need to have a lot of hands-on training of a lot of different animals. So train your own dogs. Train any dog you can get your hands on — your family’s, your friends’, the neighborhood dogs. Train. If you can find a good positive reinforcement trainer to apprentice under, do that. The more animals you can work with, the better. Volunteer at a shelter, do rescue work, lots of dogs. The more dogs, the more you will learn, there’s no doubt about it. You can’t really teach other people until you’ve had a wide variety of experiences. Working with one type of dog does not always translate into helping people with other problems and issues. So getting that variety in. I think one of the best things that ever happened to me was training so many different types of dogs so early in my dog training career. I got a little bit of everything, and I got to see the differences as well as the similarities. Then, once you’ve got that as a positive reinforcement trainer, when people ask you for advice and information, this is kind of a dangerous moment because we want to help so much. When somebody asks me for help, I want to help them. I want them to take my advice, I want my advice to work, I want everybody to be better, I want everybody to be happy. But that’s not always how it ends up working out. People often ask you for advice, and do they take it? No, they do not. Or they apply it very poorly. Or they mix it with something somebody else told them to do and it doesn’t work out. Especially if it’s family, then almost always they’re not doing what you tell them to do, because you’re family, what do you know? So my general rule for other people asking for help and advice and information is I don’t put more effort into solving their problem than they are putting into it. Oftentimes we put so much into it to try to get them fixed. That’s not my job. My job is to give advice. If I choose to — I don’t have to, but if I choose to — my role is to give advice. I’m not responsible for their issues. I like to give enough advice that they can find more help, they can find more hands-on help. And maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but again, I have to let them be responsible for that. I can’t take responsibility for everybody who has a problem and comes and asks for help with it. So don’t get too invested in any one single person. Have an idea of how much time am I willing to spend working with somebody, especially if they’re not paying you. How much time are you willing to spend, because if they’re not paying you, often they think it’s not very valuable, and then they don’t take you very seriously. Melissa Breau: I mentioned earlier, and it’s come up a couple of times, that you have a class coming up on all this, so I wanted to talk about that briefly. What led you to create the class, and maybe if you can share a little on what it will cover, that kind of thing. Deb Jones: Sure, yes, I’m very excited to talk about this. This class, and actually we have a series of two set right now and maybe a third one, enough material for a third one sitting in the works somewhere. About two years ago, my friend Lee and I went to Florida for a vacation. You wouldn’t think we’d be talking about teaching when we’re on vacation, but we are. My friend Lee is also a social psychologist. She’s the person who got me the job here at Kent State. We were roommates when we were in graduate school. We’ve known each other for a long, long time. I’ve probably known her longer than I’ve known any other friend, as far as I can remember, except from high school. Lee and I went on vacation together, and we were talking about the fact that I was looking forward to retirement at some point, hopefully in the not too distant future. Luckily, that worked out really well for me and I was able to retire, but what would I do? She actually asked the same thing. She did not choose to retire, and part of the reason is she doesn’t know what she would do. I said, “There has to be something we can do together that would be interesting to us and that would use our skills.” What do we know how to do? We know how to teach. That’s what we do. Between the two of us we’ve been teaching for something close to 55 or 60 years, if you add it all together. That’s a lot of teaching. We started talking about this, and I had also been talking about the classes at FDSA and how much I enjoy online teaching, and I see that as the big wave of the future. In fact, most colleges now have a lot of online classes as well. Lee and I have both taught online classes at Kent State too. But we saw that, again, nobody tells you how to do it. There’s no sort of teacher training happening. So here’s an area where there’s a need that’s not addressed, and this is something we thought we could do. We started talking about it, and we had, like, an 18-hour drive home from Florida. We started taking notes, whoever wasn’t driving was taking notes, and talking about it helped us pass the time, anyway. But by the time we got back, we had an outline for a class pretty easily. From there, we started to get more specific and spent some time together last summer working on pulling together actual lesson plans and getting much more thoughtful about, OK, we took this vague idea, now what are we really going to do with it? Melissa Breau: Do you want to just share a little bit on what type of material you’ll be covering in the class and who should be a really good fit, if they’re interested? Deb Jones: Yes. As I said, we have two classes planned right now. The first one’s completely done. We’re just finishing up some of the videos on that. The second one’s written. We’ll still have to do the videos that we’re going to do for that one. Possibly a third going on here. Our focus is on how to teach, not on what you teach. Not on the content, but on the process. This could apply to any area of training, whether you’re interested in teaching classes in agility or obedience or nosework or rally. Whatever the dog sport or activity, pet classes as well, whatever the dog sport or activity, it’s going to be how do you approach and teach something. Not exactly what to do — that’s your part of it to bring to the table is the information itself. As always, of course, we’re splitting it down into little parts, as we would do in beginning stages for anybody, teaching being not a natural thing for most people. Now there are a few people who are very extroverted who enjoy talking in front of groups, but most of us do not. Most of us find it somewhat aversive and difficult. But if you’re going to do it, you need some practice at it, and you need to be able to have a safe place to practice and get some supportive feedback. That is what we are planning to offer. Breaking it down into some little pieces, having you work on small assignments that take a minute or so to present and to show, and then letting us give you some feedback on the clarity of it, what might be changed, just as we do with all FDSA classes, how can we make this better, what can you do to improve this thing. Of course, there’s no formula for teaching. Everybody can approach it in different ways and be successful at it. But we are going to give you some structure and some guidelines for what has worked well for us over time. Let’s see … what can I say? Most people … I talked about being stressed, so how can we deal with that? We deal with stress by being prepared. So preparation. The class will give you, hopefully, confidence. If you take this class, you go through the materials, you work through the exercises, we have both written and video exercises to do. Once you work through those you’ll come to get more comfortable teaching something, presenting something. We put you under a little bit of time limitation in terms of how long you have to present certain information, which forces you to narrow it down and to not get too big, and that’s a really important thing. So we’re going to work on those kinds of exercises, thinking about what you’re going to teach, how are you going to convey to your students it’s important, how are you going to start at the level that the student is at. We go through talking about these kinds of questions and how we start our interactions with students, how we basically start to get them to buy into what we want them to do. Practice … something that, as dog trainers, those of us who train and teach have done a lot is I have a demo dog, and I’m demonstrating with my dog while I’m explaining to the class what’s going on. That can be really, really hard to do. That in itself you’re asking somebody to do two things. I’m asking you to pay attention to your dog and use the proper mechanics to get them to do this thing, and at the same time pay attention to an audience who’s watching you do this and tell them exactly what you’re doing as you go through it. Something that sounds easy like that, it’s not so simple in the beginning. If they’re both difficult for you, you’re going to become flustered. If you’re good at one, and typically we’re pretty good at the dog part, then we can concentrate on the other. But putting those kinds of things together in terms of having a demo dog and how useful they can be for certain things, and how to do and talk about what you’re doing at the same time. Something that we’ve added in here that I don’t think a lot of dog trainers think about at all, but I believe it’s really important — we think about it all the time in academics — is where do you get your resource material and where are you getting your information from? In college, of course we have textbooks or journal articles, and so that’s where we get the information that we teach, and then we supplement with many other things. But in dog training, where is our information coming from that’s going to be our class? Lots of stuff in dog training is common knowledge, public knowledge, and you can’t always figure out where this idea or this technique came from. But when we can, when we can know something, when I know where I learned something, or I know somebody who is working with this and has done a certain application of it, we want to give them acknowledgement and say, “OK, I learned this from …” and “Here’s another way you can use it that I saw in a video by …” whoever is doing that. So we talk about giving credit, we talk about finding valid and accurate sources, we talk about avoiding plagiarism, things that we think about much more in academics than the dog training world, but I think it has a place. The other thing that, at least in this first set of classes, we’re going to address is how to take on that role. I mentioned teaching being a role, so how to take on that role of teacher so that it’s still authentic to you, that you’re not being fake about it. It takes part of your personality and also then takes on the necessary demands of the role of being a teacher. How do you combine those things together? Because I say all the time I’m not a natural teacher, but I do it well. How do I do it well? I figured out how to mix these two together. So that’s something we’re going to talk about and have people work on as we go through the course as well. Of course, we’re trying not to overload people in the first course, so in the second one we get more into things like how do you develop a syllabus and lesson plans for a six-week class, how do you deal with challenging students — I won’t say difficult — challenging students to manage, and group dynamics, classroom setups, things like that. Of course I’m going to say, who should take this class, I think everybody. But particularly if you’re instructing anybody, even if you’re instructing one other person, knowing how to do that well, I think, is a really important skill, and if you are ever intending to teach a group, I think it will be really, really helpful. You’re adding the teaching skills set to your training skills set and that can be a very valuable thing to have. Melissa Breau: Absolutely, and it sounds like it’s a very full, chock-full class of lots of different bits and pieces. I’ve got one last question for you here, and it’s my new “last interview question” for everyone who comes on. What’s a lesson you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Deb Jones: Oh, there are so many lessons. The thing I would probably say here right now, the thing that I’ve learned, is that we’re never done learning. There’s absolutely no end to how much we can learn as dog trainers. No matter how much you think you know, there’s always something more out there. These days I define somebody as an expert, and I think somebody who’s an expert in what they do, they’re still learning. They’re a lifelong learner. So if you’re an expert, you should still be learning as much as a beginner does. Melissa Breau: I like that, and it’s very on theme for us today. Deb Jones: Yes, it is, actually. Excellent. Melissa Breau: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast Deb! Deb Jones: Thank you Melissa. I always enjoy it. Melissa Breau: And thanks to our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week, this time with Sue Ailsby to talk about training for Rally. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Summary: Stacy Barnett is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. She is an AKC Judge and contractor, as well as an instructor at FDSA. She hosts the Scentsabilities podcast and blogs regularly on nosework topics at www.scentsabilitiesnw.com. Links mentioned: FDSA Podcast Group Scentsabilities (Stacy's Site) Next Episode:  To be released 7/20/2018, featuring Deb Jones, talking about teaching people to teach dogs.  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 Stacy Barnett. Stacy is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. She is an AKC Judge and contractor, as well as an instructor at FDSA. She hosts the Scentsabilities podcast and blogs regularly on nosework topics at www.scentsabilitiesnw.com — I’ll be sure to include a link in the show notes for anyone who is interested. Hi Stacy, welcome to the podcast. Stacy Barnett: Hi Melissa. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. Melissa Breau: I’m excited to chat. To start us out, can you just remind listeners who the dogs are that you share your life with? Stacy Barnett: I have four crazy hooligans who live in my hut. They are; they’re nuts. I’ll start out with my older dogs. I have an almost 11-year-old Standard Poodle named Joey. He’s a brown Standard Poodle. He’s absolutely wonderful. I absolutely love him. I have a 7-year-old miniature American Shepherd, which is, you know, a mini-Aussie, named Why, and Why is actually his name. He came with it. I always have people ask me, “Why is his name Why?” And I always say, “Why not?” So I have Why, and then I have my two Labradors, who I refer to as my Dream Team. My Labradors, I have Judd, who’s almost 9 years old. He is my heart and soul. He’s actually the one that really got me going in nosework and is the reason why I ended up quitting corporate and pursuing a whole job in nosework. He’s my baby, he’s my Labrador, my 9-year-old Labrador. And then I have my youngest, who is a major hooligan. She is about 15 months old and she is a Labrador, a little shrimpy Lab. Her name is Brava, and I absolutely adore her. She’s the only girl in the house, so she’s like my soul sister. Melissa Breau: I’m sure she gets a little spoiled being the only girl in the house. Stacy Barnett: She does, and the boys love her. They absolutely love her. They fawn over her. We all do. We think she’s wonderful. Melissa Breau: Alright, so I know you’ve been on the podcast a few times now to talk about different aspects of nosework, but today I want to focus our conversation on how handlers can tailor nosework training to their specific dog. Is there a particular type of dog or particular skills or maybe a personality type that really lends itself to helping a dog become a strong nosework competitor? Stacy Barnett: There are, but at the same time I also want to emphasize the fact that every dog can do this sport. Maybe not every dog can compete in this sport, it really depends on the dog, but every dog can do this sport. There are certain aspects of the dog’s personality or what is intrinsic to the dog that will help the dog to become a really strong competitor in terms of being very competitive, or a dog that will really gravitate toward the sport and really, really love the sport. In my experience, all dogs do love the sport, but there are some that just seem to live and breathe for it. And the ones that seem to live and breathe for it, there are a couple of different things that contribute to that. Number one, the dog is a little bit more independent. If the dog is more handler-focused, I say if the dog is really into you and really cares what you think, those dogs tend to not be as gung-ho for the sport. The dogs that are a little bit more independent but have a nice balance between environmental and handler focus seem to do a little bit better. Above all, they have to have a natural love of scenting. Now, most dogs do have this natural love, but there are some dogs that just really, really love it. Those are the dogs I would say make the strongest nosework competitors. Melissa Breau: What other factors may influence how well a dog does when it comes to nosework? Stacy Barnett: One of them has to do with how motivated they are for food and toys. We tend to use food and toys as primary reinforcers for nosework. It’s very easy to reinforce with food, for instance, because it’s very fast. This is a timed sport. You have a certain amount of time to do the search, and typically, at least in the U.S., the fastest dog wins. If you can reward very quickly with food, you’re going to be at an advantage. Toys work really well too. Dogs like toys, they tend to work really hard for toys, you can use toys for a reward, but having a motivation for either food or toys is a real advantage. Another thing is the dog’s ability to think on their own and to problem solve. This goes hand-in-hand with dogs being independent, so if you have a more independent dog that can do some problem solving, you can do really well. I look at Brava, for instance. Brava, and I actually put a video of this on my Facebook page, knows how to open doors. She is a problem solver. The latch doors, the lever doors, she knows how to push down on the door and pull on it and open the door, which is really kind of amusing in some respects but kind of scary in other respects. But having that problem-solving ability can really help in nosework. The third thing that is not a requirement but is definitely helpful is physical fitness. Physical fitness is not a requirement. You know, this is a really great sport for older dogs, for infirm dogs, that sort of thing, but having that physical fitness can give you an edge in competition. There’s different sorts of physical fitness. There’s also fitness related to stamina. Stamina is important from both a physical perspective and a mental perspective. If you can have that mental stamina or that physical stamina, and I’m also thinking nasal stamina, dogs that can sniff for a long period of time, can help in competition. Melissa Breau: To dig a little more into it, you were saying about nosework being good for many different types of dogs. Can you talk to that a little bit more? What are some of the benefits of doing nosework? Stacy Barnett: Oh, there are so many benefits of doing nosework, and in fact I think we could do a whole podcast on this. I think we really could. I’m thinking of three different groups of dogs that really benefit from nosework from a therapeutic perspective. One of them is reactive dogs. For a reactive dog, what it can do is you can develop a positive conditioned emotional response to odor, and then if you have very mild triggers while the dog is experiencing — and I’m talking extremely mild, where the dog is under threshold — and the dog has a positive conditioned emotional response to odor, your dog’s reactivity level can actually go down. With my dog Why, for instance, he used to be extremely dog-reactive, and he was dog-reactive out of fear. So I started to train him in nosework, and he started to really enjoy nosework. At the same time, in doing nosework and having fun in doing nosework, he was also exposed to the smell of other dogs, not necessarily dogs in his surroundings, but the smell of other dogs. The end result was actually lowering of his reactivity level, which was really fantastic. So now he can be within about 8 feet of another dog, which is unbelievable. Older dogs. Older dogs are really super. It can keep their mind active. If they can’t physically do all of the things that they used to be able to do, they still have an active mind. They still want to do things. They may not be able to do agility or heavy-duty obedience or IPO or whatever, dock diving, I don’t know, whatever you’re doing. Even barn hunt. Barn hunt requires a certain amount of physical ability because they have to jump up and down hay bales. These are all dogs that when they get older they still want to work, they still want to do stuff. So if you do nosework, it exercises the mind and it keeps them busy because olfaction, the olfactory lobe, is one-eighth of the dog’s brain, so you’re really, really using the dog’s brain and they can stay engaged. I’ve seen it do incredible things for dogs with cognitive dysfunction who have gotten older. We have seen some amazing, amazing things with the older dogs. Then you have the young dogs. Young dogs, their joints are young, you don’t want to stress out their joints, you don’t want to over-exercise them, but yet you still have these energetic young animals who need an outlet. And it tires them out, which is super, because it does use so much of their brain. In AKC, for instance, you can even trial your dog as young as 6 months old. For a lot of dogs that may be too early, based upon their emotional maturity, but you can do this when they’re young and it’s not going to tax their bodies. So you can protect their bodies but you can still get them tired, which is a really, really great thing, trust me. Melissa Breau: Especially when you’ve got a drivey young dog. Stacy Barnett: I do, I do. She’s about 15 months old right now, and I have to tell you, nosework has been amazing for my sanity and for her sanity. Melissa Breau: I think most people probably start out teaching nosework by following a class or they’re using somebody else’s training plan. But at some point, all these different kinds of dogs, handlers need to tailor that training. How can a beginner handler tailor their training based on their dog’s stage of learning and their temperament? Stacy Barnett: You have to be in tune with your dog’s emotions. So whether or not you’re a beginner or not, you can still read your dog. You can still tell if your dog is confident, if they’re feeling motivation for an activity. You have to be able to read that confidence and that motivation because that’s really the core. Those are sacred. Confidence and motivation are sacred in my book. Once those are in place, you can start to build on skills. But you have to always think about having like a little meter on the back of your dog, like a little meter that says how confident they are, how motivated they are. But based upon that confidence and that motivation, you can tailor what you do with your dog. Maybe you want to build the confidence, or your dog is having some confidence issues — and I don’t just mean confidence in the environment, by the way. There are three different kinds of confidence that I talk about. There’s confidence in skills, which is basically does the dog believe in themselves. There’s confidence in the environment. That’s is the dog comfortable in the environment. Is the dog comfortable in new places. And then there’s confidence in the handler, and this is something that I think a lot of people don’t think about. That’s basically does your dog trust you. Does your dog trust that they’re always going to get their reward for the work that they do. Basically you need to evaluate all of these things and always check for that confidence and that motivation. If you have that, then you can work on the skills, because the skills should be secondary to the confidence and motivation. Melissa Breau: I know you’re a fan of Denise’s book, Train the Dog in Front of You. Can you share a little bit about how that concept applies to nosework? Stacey Barnett: Yes, I love that book. I love, love, love, love, love that book, and I’m not just saying that because she’s my boss. No, I really do, and I tell everybody it’s not a nosework book, but that doesn’t matter. It is such a good dog-training book, and especially chapters 2 and 3 — notice I even know the chapters — chapters 2 and 3 are especially applicable to nosework. Those are the chapters that relate to whether or not the dog is cautious or secure, and whether or not the dog is environmental versus handler focused. Because those are two really core things that affect the dog’s ability to do nosework. If the dog is cautious, for instance, you might want to work in a known environment. If the dog is more secure, maybe you want to work in more novel environments. The same thing goes with environmental versus handler focus. You’ve got to think of these things as spectrums. It’s not an either/or, it’s not whether the dog is handler or environmental focused. It’s on the spectrum. So if the dog is more environmentally focused, you might have a slightly different way of handling the dog, where you might be thinking more about distractions and how you’re going to work with distractions, or if the dog is more handler focused, you might want to be thinking about how to build independence. Actually there’s three different kinds of focus, although this is not in the book, this is more my interpretation. There’s environmental, there’s handler, and there’s search focus. So if you can understand where your dog falls on these spectrums that Denise talks about in terms of environmental and handler focus, you can figure out how do you then reorient your dog onto the search focus. Melissa Breau: Denise opens the book by asking handlers if they are handling their dog in a manner that builds on his strengths while also improving his weaknesses. I was hoping we’d get into that a little bit. Can you share some examples of how a dog’s personality or strengths might influence their nosework training? For example, if a dog is super-confident or less confident, how would that impact training? Stacy Barnett: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I always talk about my pyramid. I have a pyramid of training, and that pyramid of training, there’s confidence on the bottom, then there’s motivation is the next layer, then skills, and then stamina. Basically, if you have a confident and a motivated dog, you can work on harder skills, because confidence and motivation, again, it’s sacred. You can also work on their personality strengths. If your dog is confident and motivated more naturally, maybe you can work on harder skills, or maybe you can work in new environments. The other thing is that it’s also important to really evaluate the dog’s resilience. From a resilience perspective, that will help you to identify whether or not your search is too challenging or not challenging enough. So you need to think about the dog’s natural drive levels, the dog’s resilience, and that can help you to understand how challenging of a search that you can make for your dog in order to keep the dog from … because you don’t want anxiety and you don’t want boredom. You can actually find a sweet spot based upon the dog’s resilience and the dog’s drive levels. But again, the basis, of course, is confidence and motivation. Melissa Breau: Funny enough, I was debating whether or not to announce it here, so I guess I will. We started a new Facebook group specifically for the podcast, and we’re going to encourage people to listen and then ask some questions, so maybe if anybody has a question, I’ll have to tag you.   Stacy Barnett: That sounds great. Melissa Breau: Come dish out a little more. I know you enjoy talking about this stuff. Stacy Barnett: I love this stuff. I love this stuff. I eat, sleep, and breathe this. Melissa Breau: What about natural arousal states? How might a handler tailor training based on those? Stacy Barnett: Arousal is one of those things that … don’t fear arousal. If your dog is high arousal, don’t fear it. Embrace it. Arousal is actually the key to really successful nosework trialing. What’s interesting is that dogs have a natural arousal state, so dogs either have what I call an arousal excess or an arousal gap. If you think about what your dog does when they’re at rest, where that arousal state is compared to their arousal state when they’re in drive, that will tell you whether or not you have an arousal excess or you have an arousal gap. The size of that gap is going to indicate how much work you have to do, because some dogs are a little bit closer to the ideal than other dogs. But what you want to do is when you train them and you’re actually working them, you always want to make sure that your dog is in drive — in drive approaching the start line and in drive while they’re actually searching. You can condition this arousal, because arousal is a habit, and if you can always work your dog in the right arousal state, you’re going to find that your dog is going to come more naturally to the start line and in the right arousal state, and the right arousal state is when the dog is in drive. That’s at the peak arousal. If we think about the Yerkes-Dodson Law, like the curve, it looks like a bell-shaped curve, for dogs who have an arousal gap, we want to increase the arousal to the point that they’re in drive. For dogs who have an arousal excess, we want to decrease the arousal to get the dog into drive, because just because you’re peeling the dog off the ceiling doesn’t mean that they’re in drive. And that’s not what we want. We don’t want the dog that we have to peel off the ceiling. For those dogs, we have to lower the arousal so that they can focus and they can really think. And working in drive really becomes a habit, so you always want to work the dog in drive and always want to work the dog in the right arousal state. Melissa Breau: Of course, if handlers are doing this well, as training progresses their dog will improve; but I think it’s common for trainers in all sports to find they are training the dog they used to have instead of the one that’s in front of them right now. How can handlers evaluate their dogs as they go along and avoid that misstep? Stacy Barnett: That’s really interesting, and I refer to something called typecasting. If you’re familiar with typecasting and you think about the movies, there are a couple movie stars that I can think of off the top of my head that definitely get typecasted. Typecasting is something where you have an actor who might be casted in a very similar role, regardless of the movie that they’re in. Two of the major type-casted actors that I can think of are Christopher Walken and Jim Carrey. Christopher Walken, he’s always kind of that creepy, funny dude. He’s always kind of creepy, he’s always kind of funny, he’s always in those creepy roles, he’s always in just this weird role, and then Jim Carrey is always in the role he’s very kind of a slapstick, silly, funny, not very serious role. And for type-casted actors, it’s very difficult for those actors to break out into another type of role. So it’s very possible that you have type-casted your own dog. If you think about Judd, he used to have a nickname. I used to call him Fragile Little Flower. He was my fragile little flower, and he had a hard time in obedience and rally and agility. He’d be the dog stuck at the top of the A-frame and that kind of thing, just very nervous, very shut down. He is no longer that dog, so I had to divorce that typecast of his. Now he is “I am Judd, hear me roar.” He’s this really great search dog. So I had to break that typecast, because if you have a preconceived notion about your dog, you can train to that preconceived notion and you can actually impose restrictions on your dog. So think about whether or not you can break that typecast. The other thing is have a framework. I suggest my pyramid, and I mentioned my pyramid before, earlier, where you have confidence, motivation, skills, and stamina. So always reevaluate your dog in every search session. Every time you do a search, is your dog confident, is your dog motivated, that sort of thing, especially confidence and motivation, what is the dog’s right arousal state. And sometimes recognize that your dog is going to have an off day. So reevaluate your dog with every search, but also, if you have an off day and all of a sudden your dog doesn’t seem very motivated, there could be something else that’s going on. Maybe say, “All right, today is not our day, and tomorrow’s a different day.” Those are the things I would do to make sure that from a handling perspective you’re always reevaluating your dog and you’re always training the dog in front of you. Melissa Breau: I’m not sure who said it, but somebody at one point mentioned if the dog doesn’t do something you’re pretty sure they’ve been trained to do, let it go. Happened once, don’t worry about it. If it happens two or three times, then it’s time to start thinking about how you can change your training. Stacy Barnett: Absolutely. Absolutely. Whoever said that is a genius. Melissa Breau: Are there any dead giveaways — or even something maybe a little more subtle — that indicate it’s time to go through that process in your own head and reevaluate the dog that you have and maybe your training plan a little bit? Stacy Barnett: Absolutely, absolutely. Things like if your dog is bored, or if your dog is anxious, these are the things where perhaps you’re not evaluating your dog’s resilience level or your dog’s drive level well enough. Because depending upon the dog’s drive level and the dog’s resilience level, you could easily put your dog into an anxious situation. Or if the dog is bored, then you need to reevaluate and say maybe you’re making your searches a little bit too hard, or maybe you’re making them a little bit too easy. Maybe the challenge level isn’t right compared to the dog’s skill level. The other thing is look for changes in the dog’s attitude, and whether or not they’re positive or negative, and then modify your approach based upon that, because you always want the dog to come thinking, This is the most fun part of my day, and if your dog isn’t having fun, you need to reevaluate what you’re doing, and maybe you need to reevaluate what your dog needs, so maybe your dog needs something different from you. Melissa Breau: To round things out, I want to give you a little bit of time to talk about some of the exciting things on the calendar. I know you’ve got a webinar next week on Setting Meaningful Scent Puzzles for Your Dog. Can you share a little bit about it, what the premise is? Stacy Barnett: Oh, absolutely. I can’t wait for that one. The keyword is meaningful. Because it’s not just about setting scent puzzles. We can all set scent puzzles. Scent puzzles are basically our way of creating problems for our dogs to solve so they can learn and build skills, and it’s all about skill building. However, it’s really, really important that we think about the word meaningful, and meaningful really refers to the resilience and the drive of the dog. For instance, I’m not a big fan of … sometimes we see this in seminars and it actually bothers me, where a clinician may set out a really, really hard hide and have green dogs work the hard hide. What you end up with is a dog that might lose their confidence or lose their motivation. So it’s really important that you set the right challenge and right challenge level for your dog, based upon the dog’s resilience and natural drive levels. That’s really what I want to talk about is based upon the dog’s natural drive levels and resilience, how do you know you’re setting a meaningful scent puzzle that’s going to build the skills at the same time as caring for the dog’s confidence and motivation. So it’s not just about building the skills, but rather it’s about how you build the skills so that you can preserve that. Melissa Breau: What about for August, what classes do you have coming up? Anything you want to mention? Stacy Barnett: Oh, I have three classes coming up. I’m teaching 101, so if you want to get into nosework and you haven’t started nosework, join me in NW101, that’s Introduction to Nosework. I’m also teaching NW230, which is polishing skills for NW2 and NW3. And the one that I want to mention today and talk a little bit about is Nosework Challenges. That’s NW240. That’s a series that I haven’t taught in a while, and I’m going to bring that series back. NW240 is Nosework Challenges. It’s a lot of fun. It’s going to be focused on skills, but at the same time what I’m going to do is I’m going to add in elements of this discussion around resilience and drive, so that we can make sure that we’re doing the puzzles in the right way. Melissa Breau: One last question for you. It’s my new ending question for people when they come on. What’s a lesson you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Stacy Barnett: You have to actually train, which sounds kind of funny, but nosework can seem so natural, so it can be like, well, the dog is just scenting, they know how to find the hide, they have value for the odor, so they go out and they find the target odor. Well, that sounds great and all, but you really have to train, because it’s very possible now, with nosework being a lot more popular than it used to be, now with the addition of AKC out there and some other venues, there’s a lot of trialing opportunities and it’s very possible to get into a situation where you’re trialing more than you’re training. If that’s the case, that’s going to have a negative impact on your trialing. You’re going to find that having that competitive mindset instead of the evaluative context is going to be a detriment to your training. So it’s really important to work your dog while you’re evaluative versus competitive, if that makes sense. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. That’s great. I like that a lot. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast Stacy! I really appreciate it. Stacy Barnett: I’ve had so much fun with this. This is a really great topic, a really, really great topic, and I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for having me on. Melissa Breau: Absolutely, and I hope some folks come and join you for the webinars. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week, this time we’ll be back with Deb Jones to talk about becoming a better teacher for the human half of the dog-handler team. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

SUMMARY: Donna has had a lifelong love affair with dogs and is fascinated with dog behavior. She has broad practical experience in the dog world: volunteering and working in kennels and shelters, dog sitting and walking, fostering rescue dogs, teaching behavior modification privately, and teaching reactive dog classes. She also has a background in zoology and teaching. She is active locally as co-founder and professional member of Vancouver Island Animal Training Association (VIATA) and the founder and instructor for the Service Dog Training Institute. Donna has competed in agility, flyball, and rally O and teaches people to train their own service dogs. Next Episode:  To be released 7/13/2018, featuring Stacy Barnett talking about tailoring your nosework training (or really any training) to your dog's unique strengths.  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 Donna Hill. Donna has had a lifelong love affair with dogs and is fascinated with dog behavior. She has broad practical experience in the dog world: volunteering and working in kennels and shelters, dog sitting and walking, fostering rescue dogs, teaching behavior modification privately, and teaching reactive dog classes. She also has a background in zoology and teaching. She stays current in dog behavior and learning by regularly attending seminars by top trainers and researchers. However, she is probably best known for her YouTube videos. I’ll make sure to include a link to her YouTube channels in the show notes so listeners can check her out. She is active locally as co-founder and professional member of Vancouver Island Animal Training Association (VIATA) and the founder and instructor for the Service Dog Training Institute. With her own dogs and other pets, Donna loves to apply learning theory to teach a wide variety of sports, games, tricks, and other activities, such as cycling and service dog tasks. She loves using shaping to get new behaviors. Her teaching skill is keeping the big picture in mind while using creativity to define the small steps to help the learner succeed. That is to say, she is a splitter! Donna has competed in agility, flyball, and rally O and teaches people to train their own service dogs. Hi Donna, welcome to the podcast! Donna Hill: Hi, how are you doing? Melissa Breau: Good, good. I’m excited to chat today. To start us out, can you refresh everyone’s memories by sharing a bit about your dogs and what you’re working on with them? Donna Hill: OK. Jessie is a little, sensitive, German Shepherd dog, possibly Min Pin mix, that’s 11 years old. She’s getting a little bit of gray on her, we used to call her milk chin, now it’s moving up on her little face. We got her from the city pound at 7 months, so we’ve had her quite a while. Lucy, my other dog, is a really drivey, 9-and-a-half-year-old Border Collie mix that we got at almost 2 years of age off of an unfenced acreage, which totally relates to the topic today. Right now we’re experimenting with using a combination of shaping and mimicry for training, and one of my longtime behaviors I’ve been working on — and I haven’t had a whole lot of success, but I’m starting to now with that combination — is working on their rear paw nail file. So think about that. You’ve got the back feet of the dogs, and not only do they have to have back-end awareness, they have to have awareness of their nails, not just their pads, scraping the area. So it’s been a tough one. So for the last couple of nights … well, for the last while, we’ve been bringing out the scratchboard and trying something new, and it’s actually been a fun process, and we’re almost there. Melissa Breau: That’s pretty neat. Donna Hill: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Lucy’s consistently digging with her one back paw, and Jessie’s about halfway there. She’ll do, like, half a scratch. So she’s starting to get there. Melissa Breau: That’s awesome. We didn’t get to chat about it much last time, but you’re very involved in the service dog world. I mentioned in the intro you run the Service Dog Training Institute. Can you share a little about that? Donna Hill: Oh, absolutely. Service Dog Training Institute is an online community for people who are training their own service dogs. We offer self-paced online classes that of course they can check out 24-7, and we have web-based coaching sessions, so they can get on their webcam and chat face-to-face with me, and a few webinars, we haven’t done a whole lot yet, and we also have a new program called Fast Track Training, where people can get either daily help or twice-daily help for the period of a week. Melissa Breau: Wow, that’s kind of awesome. Donna Hill: Yeah. We also offer in-person training, and that’s fairly recent. I’ve actually added another trainer to help with those, and she also helps with the online Fast Track Training too. But the key thing people want to know is there’s tons of free resources on my website. I’ve got over 300 training videos, I’ve got a blog, I’ve got general information like laws and stuff about service dogs, so their best bet is to check out the website and read through, click on every link, and see what’s there, because there’s tons of information there. Melissa Breau: I know you mentioned owner-trained service dogs. Are there advantages and disadvantages to owner-trained service dogs? Would you be able to share your perspective on that whole thing? Donna Hill: Absolutely. There’s both advantages and disadvantages. I feel a person needs to carefully consider if training their own service dog is right for them. It’s a huge time and energy investment, and even though you are doing most of the training, it still costs money. You need to do group classes with other dogs, and every trainer, whether they’re a professional trainer or an owner who’s training, they still need to get some help at some point in time, whether it’s a fear period or they’ve run into a situation that sort of went south, those kinds of things. One of the biggest problems for a lot of people, they do it because they want to save money, but lack of funds are a super-common issue for owner-training teams. The other thing that I find is tough for a lot of people is the lack of focus to take the time to do the job right and not rush the dog through the process. Because of course everyone wants their dog trained yesterday, but it can take up to two years or sometimes longer, depending on the dog that they’ve chosen. The big advantage is that you can train the dog of your choosing, so if there’s a specific breed that you’re interested in that you think would work better for you and your lifestyle, then that’s a choice that you can make. You also get to learn the process of how to train, so when down the road your health changes and you need additional tasks, now you know how to do that, or at least you can figure it out or you know where to get the help to do it. Whereas if you get a program-trained dog, some of the programs actually tell you not to train your dog at all. They just want what the dog is already trained to do. So that can make a big difference. And of course one of the big bonuses of training your own dog is that the bond starts from the day you bring the dog or puppy home, so you don’t have to wait for two or more years for the program-trained dog. Thinking on the disadvantages side, it takes a lot of time and energy and focus to do it, and not everyone’s got that ability. I always say, just like it takes a community to raise a child, so does it take a community to raise a service dog. And it’s so true because there’s all the pieces that need to come in. Your caregivers need to be on board with helping you in the way that you need help, you need to have trainers lined up for assistance, you need people to act as distractions, and you have to go get resources and all those kinds of things, so you have to know how to go out and get those resources. Finding the right dog is another huge barrier for many people. They’ll go out, they’ll find a dog that they immediately fall in love with, and it’s not necessarily the best service dog candidate. So they have to be really careful. For that, I recommend bringing in someone who’s less emotionally related, someone like myself, who can help them assess and look at the weaknesses and strengths of that particular dog before they move forward. The other disadvantage is that, owner-trained or not, sort of an educational component here, is that the handlers in general need to take on an education role at any time, because the public really doesn’t know much about service dogs. Many people want to interact with all dogs they see, including your service dog. Whether it’s in training, whether it’s professional, they don’t care. And of course you’re doing all of this while you’re living with a chronic medical condition that requires the need for the service dog, so that can certainly slow the process. It can throw some glitches into the gears. So it’s a real balancing act, and you have to seriously look at is it a good thing for you, is it a bad thing for you, would a program-trained dog be better. Maybe there’s even other alternatives. Some people jump immediately to the dog aspect when sometimes there’s assistive technology that might be a better choice for them, and they don’t have the responsibility of maintaining the dog or keeping the dog. It’s a big-picture thing, and you have to sit back and look at your lifestyle, look at your family, and see if that would all work out, and if you can in fact wait the approximately two years until the dog would be technically ready for public access and be able to go with you into places. Melissa Breau: Right. You talked a little bit in there about evaluating your dog. What are some of the important traits that people need to objectively evaluate their dog for, if they are considering training it as a service animal? Donna Hill: This applies to whether you already have a dog in your home or whether you’re going to look for a dog. The first and foremost is a known health history of both the dog and his parents, if you can at all possibly get that, and also looking at getting the pups and the parents and also your dog at 2 years of age medically tested for the common diseases that their breed suffers from. Oftentimes they’ll take it to the vet and the vet goes, “Yeah, looks fine.” Well, there’s a whole lot that the vets can’t see unless they take the proper tests and the proper scans. Yeah, the vet says it’s good, but two years down the road, three years down the road, hip dysplasia “appears” out of nowhere. Well, it was probably there, but they just didn’t look for it. Hip dysplasia, epilepsy, cancer, heart conditions — those are common health reasons why a dog is pulled from service after it’s been trained. It’s heartbreaking. You spend two years, or whatever it is, to train this dog, and then you get maybe a year and a half, or if you’re lucky, two or three years, and then suddenly, “Oh, sorry, you can’t use that dog anymore because of health conditions.” So that’s one thing. Another characteristic you look for is a calm temperament. Basically a dog that’s unflappable, meaning nothing fazes them. You really, really want a dog like that, because things like a sheet metal dropped in the next aisle, or a baby screams on the plane in the seat right next to you, your dog should be aware of it but not really worried about it. Both of those things a lot of dogs will react to, and it may take them a while to calm down from. So we want a dog that would notice that, certainly, and be aware that it’s happening, but go, “Oh yeah, no worries. I’ve seen it, done it, been there.” We also know that there’s a number of things that affect temperament, so the more you know about the history of a dog, the better. For example, genetics has an important role to play in both fear and aggression, as well as a solid temperament too. You’ve got a solid-tempered mom, more likely you’re going to have a solid-tempered puppy. The mom’s stress level during carrying the puppies, how good a parent the dog mom is, and also the physical and emotional environment the puppy is raised in, as well as the physical and emotional environment the adolescent dog is raised in. So you’re seeing before the puppies are even born, and then you’re seeing while the puppies are with the litter, and then what happens to the puppies after they’ve left the litter. Those are three key components that can really affect the future of this dog. There’s a couple of other things. People-oriented. We want a dog that has the ability to bond strongly with the handler and yet he’s friendly with strangers, and that can be a tough one if you’re looking at some of the protection breeds. Some of them are very protective by nature and their family is very highly regarded but strangers are not, so that’s a safety issue for emergency personnel and things like that, that are dealing with them in public. You want an animal that’s good with other animals, so dogs, cats, birds, prey species, ideally ignoring them when in public. It makes your life a whole lot easier if you don’t have a dog with a really high prey drive, like Lucy does. Trust me — been there, done that, for a lot of different things, so I have to be on guard, and as a service dog you don’t want to have to be on guard to protect other people or other animals from your dog, and likewise from your dog doing damage to someone else’s animal. That can be a real stressor in itself, so that’s one of the key things you look for as well. The sensitivity level’s a real interesting thing. You want a dog that has a sensitivity level appropriate for the person that they’re helping. We want them to be sensitive enough that they notice changes in their handler, but not so sensitive that the dog mirrors the emotions of the handler, like anxiety. This is a common issue that I find with people with PTSD and anxiety is that they tend to pick dogs that are very sensitive, and then they end up with an emotional mess that they can’t use as a service dog, so that’s a toughie. A dog that’s food-motivated/willing to learn, those come together, it’s much easier to teach complex behaviors, we know, to a dog that’s food-motivated, of course using clicker training, marker-based training, whatever you want to call it. And medium to low need for exercise. That’s assuming this fits the lifestyle of the handler. The vast majority of people out there really don’t want to take the time and energy, or they don’t have the energy, to take a really high-exercise-need dog out for an hour or two a day for exercise, so you really want to make sure that that’s going to meet your needs. Unless you want a dog for competition, and you want an active dog if you’re out and about and your disability doesn’t stop you from hiking two hours a day or whatever it is, then that would be fine, as long as the dog can learn to calm down in public. The last one I’m going to leave you with is a quiet dog. If a dog barks or causes a disturbance in public, a team can be asked to leave. So you want to make sure you’re not choosing a breed that tends to be on the barky side, because then you’re fighting a losing battle because the dog is going to really want to bark, and it’s harder to inhibit something that’s a genetic trait, once it’s brought out. One of the other things that I do want to mention is that the breed of dog can be important because public perception plays a huge role in how some service dogs are accepted. For example, any dog that’s not a typical service dog breed tends to draw more attention to the team. So if you’re out and about in public and somebody keeps approaching you, “Oh, you have such a wonderful,” “Oh, isn’t that unusual,” and you get stopped every five seconds just because you have this stunning Dalmation, or something that causes people to notice more than usual, that can play a role as well. Tiny breeds is another example. They may be commonly dismissed as fakes. Or if you’ve got a protection-breed dog, people are fearful and they’ll give you wider birth. So those kinds of things are important when you’re choosing the breed of the dog as well, or a breed mix. What the dog looks like has an important impact on the public. Melissa Breau: That’s really interesting. I think a lot of people probably don’t think about that piece of it. They think about suitability, maybe, for the tasks and don’t always think that extra step to do they really want to deal with the public’s reaction to that specific dog or that specific breed. So I think that’s a great thing to bring up. Donna Hill: And there is a lot of prejudice as well around certain breeds. There’s a lot of grey lines with service dogs on when you need permission to get to bring your dog to work, for example. If an employer decides that they don’t like the look of your dog, or they feel that your dog is an aggressive dog or aggressive breed, they can do a lot of things to make sure that your dog can’t come to work with you. They can put a lot of barriers in place. It just happens, unfortunately. People are really creative when they don’t want something to happen. I’ve had that happen with kids taking dogs to school, I’ve seen that happen at a government level, where a person was taking a service dog to their government agency and they end up getting isolated just because of the breed of dog, but the minute that they get a more accepted breed, suddenly they’re allowed access everywhere. It can make a huge, huge difference, and so I always recommend to people: think really hard about the breed and the look of your dog. You know your dog is a soft mushy, but people look and they make snap judgments, and those judgments can last for a long time. Melissa Breau: Moving from traits or temperaments and those kinds of things to the core skills: What core skills do service animals need that owner handlers or anybody training a service dog will need to train, in addition to those special behaviors that are medically necessary for whatever their condition may be? Donna Hill: The two most common I tell everybody is loose-leash walking and settle. That’s because service dogs spend most of their time in “hurry up and wait” mode. It is, seriously. So loose-leash walking gets them from Point A to Point B, and it’s a critical skill so the handler doesn’t have to focus on them all the time as they’re loose-leash walking from Point A to Point B. It’s not a formal competition heel, it’s a loose-leash walking. They can walk within 18 inches to 2 feet of the handler, the leash is at a loopy, U-shaped kind of thing, and the dog can be ahead or behind or beside, it doesn’t really matter. A lot of people mistake that and think, Oh, the dog has to have this formal competition heel. Well, we at FDSA know that dogs can only maintain that focused heel for a very short period of time. It takes a lot of concentration to keep that desired precision. So a loose-leash walk is acceptable. We don’t have to ask for 95 percent of precision all the time. It can be 80 percent, which is more reasonable to expect a dog to stay within a zone within the handler. It’s really the distractions that are the tough thing, you know, the dog’s not going to the end of the leash to pull to go see another dog, for example. It’s ignoring that dog and moving on. With loose-leash walking that’s kind of the focus. It’s learning to ignore distractions. Now, the settle or relax, which is the other main skill, it’s not the same as the sphinx-down that’s also used in competition. It is a settle, it’s a relax, let the dog chill out. As long as they’re staying on a single spot, maybe it’s a mat or maybe a defined space under your table, the dog needs to be able to get up and move and turn around, if you’re going to be sitting there for an hour and a half to two hours. It’s not fair to have the dog hold that sphinx-down. We want to give them a bit of latitude that, yeah, it’s OK for you to get up and move around. As long as you’re right here close to me and you’re not getting up and walking away, that’s close enough. The other key thing is that a service dog needs to learn to assess the situation, because we don’t want, as handlers, you don’t want to have to give your dog a cue for every single behavior. The dog starts to learn to recognize, Oh, in this situation I know we’re going to go sit, I’m going to go lay under the table, OK, no biggie. They start using the environment as the cue for what behavior’s expected, so we end up getting a lot of default behaviors. Sits and downs, leave its, and eye contact are the important ones in general. If the dog’s uncertain what to do, what does he do? Look back up at his handler and say, “Hey, what do you want me to do?” They look back and they just might point to the ground. Guess what. That means settle. So it keeps it simple, and the communication’s really clear, and the dog’s always looking to the person for guidance. Melissa Breau: Those are all also skills that even if we only have a pet dog, they would be fantastic skills to have well taught for a good pet dog. They’re not necessarily unusual skills to try and teach, but it’s really important, if you’re training a service dog, that they’re taught to a high fluency. Donna Hill: Absolutely. And it is a fluency difference between a well-trained pet dog and a service dog. Melissa Breau: So the other topic I was hoping to chat about today for a bit is recalls, since you have a class on it coming up. I think recalls are often touted as perhaps the most important behavior we can teach our dogs. First, do you agree? And second, why are they an important skill? Donna Hill: That’s a great question. I’m not sure if I agree or disagree. I think it depends on the living situation the dog is in, and how often she or he finds herself off leash. For example, a recall for a service dog is actually pretty low on the importance scale, since in public the dog is rarely if ever off leash, so why would you need a recall if the dog is not off leash. If they are off leash, usually it’s only to perform a trained task, and when dogs get to that level, they’re so focused on the task that a recall is not important, or the recall may be part of the whole behavior, like in a retrieve. You’ve sent your dog off to get something, he’s got to come back to bring it to you, right? So if it’s trained really well, there’s your recall right there. Or if they’re trained to go get somebody, they go get the person and they bring the person back, so there’s sort of a recall in there as well. For pet or sport dogs, absolutely a recall can be critical, especially if the dog is given a lot of freedom on a regular basis. So you want to know that your dog is going to reliably respond when you call. If she does respond, there’s a potential for so much more freedom for the dog, for one thing, and also if the dog is going to be in environments like agility trials, you don’t want the dog taking off after distractions, or if he happens to, then you know that he’s going to come running back to you when once you realize that he’s taken off, you give the cue and he comes bolting back to you. So you really need that. But the more freedom you give them, the more freedom that they can have as well, so it’s a hand-in-hand kind of thing. There’s also alternative behaviors that can be taught that might be more appropriate in some situations as well than a recall, so something like a sit or a down at a distance. Your dog’s taken off across the street after a rabbit, and when he finally comes back, you want him to sit on the other side of the street because there’s a car coming. You don’t want him to come dashing across in front of the car. So if you can sit or down your dog at a distance, in that situation that would actually be better than a recall. So I guess my answer is, it depends. Which is kind of funny coming from someone who’s training a recall class. Melissa Breau: Hey, it’s honest! I think that obviously at FDSA we see lots of sports dog handlers specifically, so in competition obedience they have a formal recall with a front and all that. For those who compete, how would you handle that in training that recall? Donna Hill: Distance is a real distinction between a competition recall and a real-life recall. For most competitions there is a limited, finite distance within the ring that the dog will be doing the recall, and there is relatively few distractions in that ring. I know some would beg to differ because there’s some nightmaresituations been seen, and I’ve been in the ring and seen that as well. But in real life, when your dog is at even a greater distance that you can … you may or may not be able to control, depending on the dog. Lucy is another classic example. She will happily run 500 yards away and not think twice about it, whereas Jessie stays much closer, so Lucy’s the one that I have to keep an eye on, and I have to make sure I interrupt her running that far away, because at that distance I don’t have as much control as I do if she’s, say, 100 yards away. The distance can make or break a dog’s recall success. If a cyclist rides between you and your dog at a junction, or a rabbit pops up and runs across the trail, that definitely can make a difference. In real life, distractions happen between you and the dog, not necessarily around the outside of between you and the dog, so while a recall is a recall, the dogs do distinguish between different working environments. Because the competition ring tends to be pretty consistent-looking, there’s rings around, or there’s fences around the outside, and there’s certain equipment that are in, the dogs get to know, Oh, OK, I know which kind of recall you want, so they quickly start learning, OK, it’s that form of recall that you want me to run to you, and stop, sit in front of you, and wait for a release to go back to heel, and then the final release at the end of the exercise. So they definitely know the difference between an informal recall that you would do out in the field versus a formal recall that you do in the ring, for sure. And honestly, most people are happy enough, in a real-life recall, just to be able to have their dog close enough to grab the harness and then otherwise tell the dog what to do. So you don’t have that whole longer chain. Melissa Breau: For somebody that is working on their recall, and they work on that real-life situation, would you expect to see some carryover that might strengthen their more formal performance? Donna Hill: For sure. The distraction levels are key in any environment that you’re training. Doesn’t matter what it is that you’re doing, whether it’s a recall, teaching your dog to ignore distractions is the absolutely important thing. Because any chain of behaviors — and of course a recall is a chain of behaviors — can be broken into smaller bits, each part of the chain can be isolated, so that’s the approach that I take in my recall class. If your dog returns to you slowly, you can work on speeding up just that part of the chain. Or maybe the missing piece is the dog doesn’t reorient to you in the face of distraction, You can work on just that too with little games and using controlled distractions. Once you have those improved, then you can add the pieces back together for either the competition recall or the real-life one. But it definitely would benefit both types of recall. Melissa Breau: I know you get pretty into the science of training, and I’ve heard a lot of talk about what they’re calling a “classically conditioned” recall. That’s the phrase that’s recurring all over. Can you explain it for us? Donna Hill: I’ll try. A classically conditioned recall is when the dog reacts to a cue without thinking. Classical conditioning: Think of a cat that comes to the kitchen when he hears the can opener. That’s a classically conditioned behavior. The cat’s not thinking about hearing the can opener. He just hears it and he runs for it because he knows it means food. Or maybe the dog that hears the scrape of the spoon on the bottom of the bowl and he just suddenly appears at your feet, even though he’s not supposed to be begging. That’s a classically conditioned reaction. He hears the sound and it triggers a behavior. He’s not even thinking about it. I remember years ago with a previous dog, and this was long before I knew much about training dogs, certainly not as much as I know today, he was walking ahead of me on the trail, and out of the blue, for some reason, I don’t even remember why, I decided to call out to him and say “sit.” He was probably about 50 feet in front of me, if that. He didn’t go very far and I told him to sit. As soon as I did, his bum plunked down and he looked around like he was startled, going, Hey, who did that? Just bizarre. He had this startled look on his face. That would be an example of a classically conditioned sit. I must have been practicing in that time period so much that it was “sit,” bum go down, “sit,” bum go down. He wasn’t even thinking about it. Just “sit,” bum go down. So even he was surprised. Melissa Breau: That’s awesome. Donna Hill: I was pretty thrilled. And of course when I got these two dogs, I thought, OK, that’s my goal. I have to be able to teach these two dogs. Of course, now I know how to do it much, much better, and much more effectively, and it comes much faster, but I’m still thrilled when it happens, anyway. We want the recall to happen that way ultimately. We want the dog not to think. We just want him to automatically, when he hears the cue or sees the hand signal, because it could be both, it could be a hand signal, it could be a verbal sound that the dog hears. For dogs who are in a really, really high state of arousal and who haven’t had a chance to practice chasing or catching prey, that can be a really hard level of training to get to. The level of adrenalin overrides everything else and they go into that tunnel-vision mode where they literally go deaf and they can’t see anything other than a really narrow vision right in front of them. But if we stick to the training, and we keep doing it and doing it, and vary how we are doing it, and add different distractions, and work the dog around higher and higher-level distractions, we can actually increase the threshold so that while they still are under the effects of adrenalin, they can still function at higher arousal levels, so that tunnel vision will be further open, perhaps like the tunnel that they see will be a bigger tunnel. Maybe they can actually still hear you, rather than not being able to hear you. So that’s a big part of it is just learning to increase that arousal level, but lowering or, I guess, increasing the threshold so that the dog can still function at that higher arousal level, I guess would be a better way of putting it. I’ve got a funny little story about Jessie, my current little dog here. She has a funny combination of an operant and a classical conditioned recall. She actually does both, and one of them is very conscious. She actually sets me up for operant recalls. She’s a dog that will stay quite close. She’s in general … until we got Lucy, she was quite fearful of being out in the bush or out in the woods by herself with us. She’s very much a city dog and very comfortable in the city. She actually learned … I taught her by starting the capturing the eye contact, which is one of the things we do in class. She would run ahead, and she stops and she’s facing away, and you know she’s waiting for something just by her body position and posture. She’s waiting for something. Sure enough, I give the cue, so that’s what she’s waiting for, and as soon as she hears it, she takes off like a rocket towards me. She does this turn on a dime and bolts right back to me. So she’s set me up for a recall. She does this a lot, and I thought, You know, this is good. For a dog that’s so fearful and she couldn’t respond because her level of fear was so high, I’m just thrilled that she would do that and she’s actually setting me up. Finally, in the last I would say year or so, we’ve finally done enough of the operant recalls that it has become classically conditioned. I’ve actually been able to call her off chasing a deer in a classical conditioned response. So I’m pretty happy with that. Melissa Breau: That’s excellent. That’s everybody’s goal, to be able to have their dog in the middle of a chase, and call and have the dog say, “OK, I’d prefer to come back to you.” Donna Hill: It wasn’t even a preference. It was just a reaction. It was just a response. She heard that and she just turned on that dime, and it’s because we’ve practiced and practiced. I kind of stacked my helping, because she likes high-pitched sounds, she’s very much into squeaky toys, she likes movement, so I stack my success by throwing all of those things together, and I guess it was enough that she was not thinking anymore. It was like, “Yay, Mom’s calling me. Woo hoo!” It becomes a classically conditioned response rather than a thinking or operant response. The tough thing, though, is, is it a reliable … could I repeat that? I honestly can’t say, because we don’t have enough situations where we encounter deer on a regular basis to purposely test that out. I do know that I can now call her off mice, I can call her off squirrels, and I can call her off grouse. Those are much more controllable situations, and we do run into those a lot more often on our walks on the logging routes. So far, both dogs have stopped when any of those situations arrive, and, lucky for me, they’ve also stopped when we see bears, and I can cue the recall after they stop. So, so far, cross our fingers, no bear chasing. I don’t know whether they stop and they go, “Oh, that’s a big black animal that I’m not sure whether I want to interact with or not, oh, Mom’s calling, OK, the good distraction.” Melissa Breau: Right, right, definitely don’t want the dogs taking off after the bear. Donna Hill: So I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily classical. I would say it’s probably more operant, and they’re actually thinking about it and going, “OK, this is the better choice.” But I’m still happy with that too. I don’t want them bringing a bear back to us. Melissa Breau: Right, right. Often, people start working a recall, they do it at home, they do it in class, and then they just expect it to work everywhere. Most of our listeners probably get that that’s unrealistic, especially if you’re a sports trainer, you know that there’s a little bit more involved to making any cue become that reliable. I think even pretty sophisticated handlers may struggle to build up distractions in a systematic way when it comes to recalls. How DO you simulate things like motion from prey animals, or those reallllllly good smells that a dog just can’t seem to come away from, when you’re training? Donna Hill: You have to get really creative and you use what you have in your environment. You have to think about what triggers your dog. Is it the scent? Is it the sound? Is it motion? How can you replicate those? Maybe even not to the degree that happens in real life, but certainly at a lower level that you can start building up to that in real life. I start thinking along things like, OK, for scents, I think about how can I get a sample of something similar that my dog might be really interested in, or can I recreate it in a controlled setting with a helper or a decoy animal or a toy that moves. Those are actually the kinds of secrets we’ll be exploring in Part 2 of The Recall, but I’ll give you an example just to get your juices going. Start where your dog is at. If your dog can’t turn away from rabbit poop, for example, and I know both of my dogs, when we started, rabbit poop was pretty high on their interest list because it smells like rabbits, it’s something that they can eat, so it’s self-reinforcing, So what I did was I went and I found some fresh stuff somewhere in the city. I literally went hunting, we collected some, I wore rubber gloves, I scooped it up, I put it in a container, and I used that sample to train a “leave it” at home to the point of a default “leave it.” They smelled the rabbit poop, Oh, look at Mom, what’s going on here. So I had a nice little default behavior, and that’s the starting point to get your dogs. If they learn that they can call off of it, that’s where you need to start from. And of course this is not asking for any distance. This is literally the treat … the treat! … OK, rabbit raisins were in a container on the ground right in front of me and right in front of the dogs, so all the dogs literally had to do was look at it and look back at me. I’m not asking for any distance. It’s just “Look at me after you sniff the rabbit poop.” That’s the kind of small detail where we start, and then we can add motion, maybe we get the dog to have to make the choice to have to turn around back to us, then the dog has to turn around and take two steps to us, and we slowly build it back up until we actually have a recall where the dog might be walking around the yard, and unbeknownst to him, I’ve planted my sample in the yard earlier, and he comes across it, and as soon as he smells it, he does a quick head check-in, and the check-ins as well are another piece, and then I happen to see that and I give my recall and the dog comes flying out. It’s about focusing again on the one piece of the chain at a time and build them up. Yeah, and I have to admit some of us are that dedicated to our dogs to go and search out things like rabbit poop and bring it home. Melissa Breau: That’s funny. I like that you called it rabbit raisins. Donna Hill: That’s more “call-it-able.” So don’t worry, but for those of you listeners, the other ideas in class are not as gross as that. Melissa Breau: It’s just a good example! I was looking over your syllabus for the class for August, and I noticed you had acclimating on your list of skills for a recall, and I guess it caught me by surprise. Can you explain how that fits into the picture of a recall? Donna Hill: Yeah, absolutely. Acclimation is the process a dog goes through to become comfortable with the environment. You give them a chance to go into the environment, and you anchor yourself and they have 6 feet of leash, so technically they can probably move about a 14-foot circle diameter and check out that environment. Sometimes we might want to acclimate them by letting them lead us around a certain space, we usually define that space. But what we find is once they’ve acclimated to that space, then they can focus on what we’re asking them to do. By giving them time to acclimate when they first arrive at a location, we’re giving them a chance to satisfy their natural curiosity that might otherwise distract them from being able to pay attention to us. That’s pretty standard what we do for sport dogs and for service dogs and all that kind of thing. What I find is that the more we allow them to acclimate in each new location, the more they come to realize that the environment is actually less interesting than interactions with us. So by giving them the chance to go check it out, they go, “OK, I checked everything out,” they look back at us and go, “What now, Mom?” They learn that it always pays for them to orient to us, whether or not we ask for it, or whether they just give it as a default behavior. That’s one piece of it. So that orientation is something we work on. We can’t get the orientation until the dog is acclimated. That’s the first step again. As well, giving them time to acclimate allows us to identify what they find interesting, and we can use those interesting things to our collection of reinforcers. So by watching our dog sniff a rabbit trail or look up a tree at a squirrel — those are obvious ones — we can actually go, “Ah, that’s something that I can use as a reinforcer because that’s something that I can control.” So we might send them over to sniff a very interesting mole hole that they saw earlier as part of the recall, or maybe they can go greet the person that’s standing over there, if they’re a really people-oriented dog. We can give them more meaningful reinforcers that they really want, rather than what we think they want, and they start to see us as a gateway to the reinforcers. That’s part of the process of building the bond that’s strong enough to be able to call them away from things like deer. Melissa Breau: You have the class broken into two parts right now, Part 1 and Part 2. You mentioned earlier that some things are in Part 2 that aren’t in Part 1. Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve broken that down? Donna Hill: Part 1 focuses on the basic recall with low to medium distractions in the form of games. So here’s the basic structure of the recall, let’s add some distractions in, and that is a really important piece, because if your dog doesn’t have that fundamental foundation, it certainly isn’t going to be able to do a recall off of higher-level distractions. Part 2 ups the ante to adding a higher-level distraction in controlled settings so that the dog learns, Yes, in fact I can call away from those exciting things. I previously offered it as a single class, but it was too overwhelming for me, and I think for some of the students, because there’s just so much involved in those two levels. So I split them into the two parts to make it easier to really focus on the pieces that are needed. Melissa Breau: I know some of the classes have a lot of material and there’s no way you’re going to get through this in six weeks. It makes it a little bit more real time, for lack of a better phrase, so people can work through the class as you’re releasing stuff. Is that the idea? Donna Hill: Absolutely. The first time I ran it, it just felt too rushed, and while it was fine in that it offered some support for people who were not as far along in the recall, those who already had it were able to zoom ahead. But then it became really confusing to try and watch both ends of the scale, so this just simplifies it that we’ve got to focus, it’s on the basic recall, and then we’re going to add the higher-level distractions in Part 2. Melissa Breau: I wanted to ask if you’d be willing to share a game that listeners might be able to play to work on their recall, to give them a taste of the things you’ll be doing in the class. Donna Hill: OK. One of my favorite ones that has come over time is I have a game that’s a building speed game, because of course we want the dog not only to come to us, we want the dog to come to us really fast. I’ve seen this develop with my girl Lucy, the Border Collie mix, and it’s so awesome to be able to see her just run as hard as she possibly can to come back to me. It’s awesome to see that eagerness and that enthusiasm. There’s literally dust flying up behind her when she comes back to me. I tried to get it on videotape last night, and I’m going to try and get it before the class so I can show a clip of it. I might even use it as part of the promo for the class. It’s just hilarious, because it’s been so dry, and the road, we’re on one of these logging roads, and it’s a really new, dusty road, so she’s running. literally there’s these plumes of dust every time she hits the ground that pop up. It’s heart-rendering, I guess, to see your dog do that. Anyway, so this game we play between two people and we start close up, and once we start adding distance, we can actually start capturing speed because we can select only the fastest responses we’re getting from the dogs. If the dog sort of meanders towards us, OK, not a big deal. We’re not actually recalling, so we don’t have to click and treat, but as we’re playing this back and forth game it sort of turns into intermittent reinforcement so that we can choose the faster responses get the click and the treat, and so what the dog quickly does is starts to offer us faster and faster recalls, so it’s really cool. In combination with where we happen to live, there’s a lot of hiking trails/biking trails. What I like is finding a narrow trail that looks like a roller coaster. They go up and down, they go side to side, and sometimes you can even find ones that zigzag back and forth down the side of a hill. Once the dog’s built up some good speed for recalls, you can have a person at the top and a person at the bottom, and even going up the hill, which by the way is a really good cardio for your dogs, they build up some pretty good speed. You watch them and they do look like a cart from a roller coaster going back and forth, going up and down, and you can just watch their bodies as they’re flying towards you. It’s really cool to watch. That’s my favorite thing. And they’re learning foot placement and they’re weight-shifting to allow them to careen off the trail banks. You can see they’re having fun with it. I’m having fun with it. I’m not sure if it would be considered agility or parkour, but you’re using the skills of both. Melissa Breau: Right, right, and everybody’s having a good time and you’re working on those skills. That’s the important part. Donna Hill: That’s what it’s all about. Melissa Breau: So one last question and it’s on a different topic because I’ve taken to asking it at the end of all my interviews for guests that have already been on once and done the traditional three questions already and that way I don’t have to repeat them. So the new question is, what is a lesson you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Donna Hill: OK. But it’s not about the dogs. It’s about the people. I’ll give you an example. I recently had a client make the realization that her service dog is not a robot. She had come to work with us because her dog was fearful working in public. She had told us, “My dog is fearful about working with the public. She’s scared of people. She’s even scared of strangers coming in our own home.” What we had seen was a dog that had been shut down and was robotically walking through life when working, and this lady didn’t see that. That’s what she had been told that the dog should be working like. She sort of felt something was off, but she wasn’t sure, and she’d never had a service dog before, so she just trusted what she had been told. After working with her for about four weeks, we were so thrilled when she came to us and she said, “Oh my god, she doesn’t have to be a robot.” That’s literally the words that she used. That’s why I used those words. She has changed what she does significantly. We’ve helped her learn to reinforce the dog when the dog is doing what she wants her to do, help build confidence in the dog, and it’s going to be a long haul because this dog has a long history of being like this, but the handler now has joy in interacting with her dog, and the dog now has joy at interacting with her human, and that’s not what we were seeing when we first had her come to the classes. So we were both giving them their life back, basically. Melissa Breau: How awesome is that. That’s got to feel so good. Donna Hill: Yeah. So if we can teach the people that dogs have needs and emotions just like we do, and those needs have to be met for the dog to be comfortable, I think that we go a long way to strengthening the bond and improving the life of both the people and the dogs. Melissa Breau: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Donna! This has been great. Donna Hill: You’re very welcome. You really got me thinking. Melissa Breau: That’s a good thing, I think. Donna Hill: Absolutely. Don’t forget to check out the Build A Bond recall class that’s coming up. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week with Stacy Barnett to talk about tailoring your nosework training to your specific dog’s strengths and weaknesses. Don’t miss it. 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. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

SUMMARY: Sue Yanoff graduated from Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, N.Y, in 1980. After three years in private practice, she joined the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps. While on active duty, she completed a 3-year residency in small-animal surgery at Texas A&M University and became board certified by the American College of Veterinary Surgeons. She retired from the Army in 2004, after almost 21 years on active duty. After working for a year on a horse farm in Idaho, she returned to Ithaca to join the staff at the Colonial Veterinary Hospital as their second surgeon. She then retired from there in December 2009 — her on-call schedule was interfering with those dog show weekends! The following month, she started working for Shelter Outreach Services, a high-quality, high-volume spay-neuter organization. About the same time, Sue joined her colleague, a physical therapist and licensed veterinary technician, to start a canine sports medicine practice at the Animal Performance and Therapy Center, in Genoa, N.Y. The practice is limited to performance dogs. That means that’s basically all she does these days, performance dogs, so she knows her stuff. She also teaches a class on Canine Sports Medicine for Performance Dog Handlers here at FDSA. Next Episode:  To be released 6/29/2018, featuring Julie Symons, talking introducing handler scent discrimination.  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 Sue Yanoff. Sue graduated from Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, N.Y, in 1980. After three years in private practice, she joined the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps. While on active duty, she completed a 3-year residency in small-animal surgery at Texas A&M University and became board certified by the American College of Veterinary Surgeons. She retired from the Army in 2004, after almost 21 years on active duty. After working for a year on a horse farm in Idaho, she returned to Ithaca to join the staff at the Colonial Veterinary Hospital as their second surgeon. She then retired from there in December 2009 — her on-call schedule was interfering with those dog show weekends! The following month, she started working for Shelter Outreach Services, a high-quality, high-volume spay-neuter organization. About the same time, Sue joined her colleague, a physical therapist and licensed veterinary technician, to start a canine sports medicine practice at the Animal Performance and Therapy Center, in Genoa, N.Y. The practice is limited to performance dogs. That means that’s basically all she does these days, performance dogs, so she knows her stuff. She also teaches a class on Canine Sports Medicine for Performance Dog Handlers here at FDSA. Hi Sue, welcome back to the podcast! Sue Yanoff: Hi Melissa, it’s good to be back. Melissa Breau: I’m excited to chat. To start us out and refresh our memories a little bit, can you share a bit about the dogs that you have at home now? Sue Yanoff: Yes. I have two Beagles. The older Beagle is almost 13, and she’s retired from everything except hiking and having fun. She’s a breed champion, she has her UD, her Rally Excellent MX MXJ and TD. My younger Beagle, Ivy, is 6. Most people know her from FDSA classes. She’s also a breed champion. She has her MACH. She recently finished her CDX and we’re working on Utility. She has her Rally Novice and a TD. Melissa Breau: That’s a lot of titles there, lady. Congrats. Sue Yanoff: Thank you. Melissa Breau: So we went back and forth a bit before this call on topics to talk about today, and I want to start out by just talking about some of the basics. What is the difference between a sports specialist and a regular vet? Sue Yanoff: In veterinary medicine, in order to call yourself a specialist, you have to meet certain requirements, and that includes completing a residency in whatever area you’re a specialist in, passing a very long and difficult certifying examination, and being board-certified by the specialty board that oversees your specialty. So if you’re a specialist in internal medicine, it’s the American College of Veterinary and Internal Medicine. If you’re a specialist in surgery, it’s the American College of Veterinary surgeons. So to call yourself a specialist, you have to be certified, board certified, by one of these specialty organizations. Now, a lot of people can be very good at something and not have gone through all the requirements of being able to call themselves a specialist. But a sports specialist basically is somebody that has extra training and experience in that particular area. Regular veterinarians might be very good at sports medicine, but they can’t call themselves a specialist. But, in general, regular veterinarians are general practitioners and they have to be good at everything, so it’s very hard to be good at everything and specialize in any one area. I used to be a general practitioner, I have a lot of respect for general practitioners, I couldn’t do what they do, but that’s the difference between a regular vet, a general practitioner, and a specialist. Melissa Breau: One of the things I’ve heard you talk about a little bit before is this idea of a good sports medicine exam. What’s really involved in that? What does that look like? Sue Yanoff: A good sports medicine exam, like any good exam, starts with a patient’s history. It’s very important to get a good history because a lot of times we don’t have a history that a dog is lame. We have a history that the dog’s performance is deteriorating. Their times are little slower, they might be knocking bars or popping weaves. Sometimes they might be a little reluctant to jump into the car. So it all starts with a good history, which takes time. And then a sports medicine exam involves examining the whole dog and not just one leg. When I was an orthopedic surgeon, I often would just examine the leg that the dog was lame on. We knew which leg was a problem, I’d examine that leg, say, “Here’s the problem, here’s what we need to do,” and that was the extent of the exam. With a sports medicine exam, I examine the whole dog — the neck, the back, all four legs, even if I know which leg the dog is lame in, which oftentimes we don’t know which leg the dog is lame in, so I examine the entire dog. As an orthopedic surgeon, I would mostly concentrate on bones and joints. For a sports medicine exam, it’s really important to look at the muscles and tendons and ligaments, which often are injured. So it’s just a different way of doing the exam. It’s much more complete, it takes more time, and to do a good sports medicine exam I think you need more than a 20-minute office visit, which is often difficult for general practitioners to do. Melissa Breau: A lot of the time, people have a dog that comes up lame or has an ongoing issue and they aren’t really sure what the cause is. We talked a little about regular vets, they might even take their dog to that regular vet, and the vet does what they normally do, they get an “all clear,” but they’re still seeing signs of pain. I guess what stood out to me from your last answer was this idea that maybe it’s a little more subtle when we’re talking about a performance dog. Handlers may notice the more subtle signs of pain. What should they do in that kind of situation? How can they find out what’s actually going on? Sue Yanoff: There’s two ways to handle that. Oftentimes the regular vet doesn’t find anything because, it’s as you say, it’s very subtle, or they’re actually not looking in the right place. And oftentimes dogs will get better with what I call “the standard conservative treatment,” which involves restricted activity, no running, no jumping, no playing with other dogs, no training, leash walks only. When I say “restricted activity,” I usually mean a lot more restriction than most people think. And then put them on some type of pain medicine, anti-inflammatory medicine. I like to use NSAIDs; non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are a good first start. Oftentimes with a minor injury, if you treat them with restricted activity and NSAIDs, they will often get better, so there’s nothing wrong with handling the situation that way. But if they’re still seeing signs of pain after doing that, then they really need to seek out a specialist to find out what’s going on. When I say “a specialist,” I usually mean somebody who is either a board-certified surgeon that does a lot of orthopedics, or a board-certified sports medicine vet — and we’ll talk about what that means later — or somebody that has some advanced certification and training in sports medicine and rehab. We would like to hope that one of those specialists can do a good exam and try to pinpoint what the problem is, because, as you know, you’ve also heard me say, we need a diagnosis. Again, there’s nothing wrong with treating generically for a minor injury, and a lot of dogs will get better if you do that. But if they don’t, we really need to have a better idea of what’s going on, what’s the diagnosis, what are we treating, and are we treating it appropriately. Melissa Breau: What if the dog is given a diagnosis and a treatment plan, and the treatment plan just doesn’t seem to be doing the trick? The dog doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Sue Yanoff: In that case, if the diagnosis is not correct, which happens — it even happens to me, and I could give you an example of a case that I sent for referral a few weeks ago — or the treatment plan is not appropriate … I find what’s more common is the clients that I see, if they have been to another vet, or even another specialist, they have not been given a diagnosis. I often will ask a client, “What did your vet say is wrong?” and they say, “Well, they didn’t really say.” So that’s a problem right there. If they’re given a diagnosis, that’s great. Oftentimes my clients aren’t even given a diagnosis. And if the treatment plan doesn’t seem to be helping, either we’re not treating them appropriately, or — and this happens much more commonly with pet owners — they’re not following instructions. So if I ask you to rest the dog and restrict them, and you’re not really doing that, then the problem might not get better. Melissa Breau: Do most dogs recover from sports-related injuries? What does that kind of “recovery” usually look like? You just talked a little bit about what you mean when you say “rest a dog.” Do you usually recommend rehab of some sort? Can you talk a little bit about how all that works? Sue Yanoff: Sure. That’s a good question, several good questions. In my practice, yes, most dogs recover from sports-related injuries. Now, there are some things, like if it’s a chronic degenerative disease like arthritis or lumbosacral disease, then the dog is not ever going to recover fully. We can only manage the symptoms. But for muscle and tendon injuries, and even for fractures and some things like torn cranial cruciate ligaments, yes, dogs absolutely can recover from sports-related injuries. In our practice there’s three phases of recovery. The first is rest and restricted activity. We need to allow the injury to get better. We need to allow the injury to heal. During this phase of healing, we basically don’t do anything more than have the owners do short leash walks a couple of times a day. So there’s minimum stretching and minimum p.t. and not a lot of strengthening activities. And then we will recheck the dog, and if the owner thinks the dog is doing better, and we don’t find as much pain as we felt on the first exam, then we will go to the second phase of treatment, which is rehab. This is where you put in your stretching and your strengthening exercises and your increased activity to build up the dog’s endurance again, and that progresses as the dog progresses, and that’s tailored to each dog. I should say, during the initial stage of treatment we will do modalities like ultrasound, if necessary, or more commonly laser or massage and mobilization and things like that. So the first phase is treatment, which is basically restricted activity, the second phase is conditioning, where we start to increase the dog’s activity with the goal to get them back to normal activity, and then the third stage is what we call retraining, and this is where we give the owner a program to get the dog back to competition in their sport of choice. That can take anywhere from three to twelve weeks, depending on what the injury is and how long the dog has been restricted and other things like that. Melissa Breau: For that three to twelve weeks, you’re just talking about that last phase, right? Might take three to twelve weeks for training. Sue Yanoff: Yes. The last phase might take three to twelve weeks. So if you have a dog with an injury like medial shoulder syndrome, the post-operative recovery period is twelve weeks, and then probably another eight to ten to twelve weeks of conditioning and rehab to get them back to normal activity, and then another ten to twelve weeks of retraining to get them back to competition. That is one of the injuries that takes a long time to get back to competition, but certainly it’s possible. A lot of the dogs that we treat, when they get back to competition, they’re better than they ever have been because they are in excellent condition, they’re very well trained, the owner knows a lot about warming up and cooling down, and a lot of them go back to very long, successful careers. Melissa Breau: That’s awesome. I want to shift gears a little bit. I know that I’ve heard you say on numerous occasions that pain in general is undertreated in dogs. Why do you think that is? Why does that happen? Sue Yanoff: I think it’s because dogs can’t whine and complain like people can. And a lot of dogs don’t show strong, overt signs of pain. There are ways they can tell us subtly, but a lot of people don’t know what these signs are and don’t really think that they’re causing pain. I’ve had a lot of clients say, when they bring the dog to me, “Well, I don’t think he’s in pain,” and I can tell you right off that if your dog is limping, 99.9 percent of the time it’s because of pain. It interests me that people know that their dog is limping but don’t think they’re in pain, because I can tell you from experience with me, when I bang my knee or stub a toe, I limp because it hurts, and when it doesn’t hurt anymore, then I stop limping. So if the dog’s limping, it’s because of pain. But oftentimes the dogs that I see are not limping, but there are other, more subtle signs, and we often find pain when I examine the dog. I’ll move a joint in a certain way and the dog will react, or I’ll push on a certain place on the spine and the dog will react, and the reaction can be anything from something very subtle, like if they’re panting, they stop panting, or they’ll lick their lips, or they’ll look back at me. Occasionally I’ll have a dog that will yelp or whine or try to bite me, which is great, because then I know for sure that they’re in pain. Melissa Breau: There aren’t many people who would follow “try to bite me” with “which is great.” Sue Yanoff: Yeah, right. Usually, I can get out of the way fast enough, because I haven’t been bitten yet doing a sports medicine exam. I can’t say that for any other type of exam. But we miss signs of pain, and then it’s not treated because, again, people think, Well, she’s not in that much pain, so she’ll be OK. What I was taught in vet school — and I graduated 38 years ago — is, this was common back then, is, “We don’t want to treat the pain, because if we treat the pain, the dog will be too active.” There’s even veterinarians and people that believe that today: Let’s not treat the pain because we don’t want them to be too active. But we know that’s not true. Anybody that has a high-drive sports dog, or even a dog that wants to chase a ball or chase a squirrel, they’re going to do it whether they have pain or not, and then worry about the pain later. That’s why I think that pain is undertreated in dogs. It’s either not recognized, or people don’t think it’s that important. Melissa Breau: What’s your approach? How can you tell if pain is the problem, and then what do you usually do about it? Sue Yanoff: My approach is, if the dog is coming to see me, whether they’re limping or it’s a performance issue, it is very likely due to pain, and it’s likely due to pain because of an injury. As I said, there are a few things that will make a dog limp that’s not due to pain. but that really has nothing to do with sports medicine. So limping is an obvious sign of pain, crying and whining, obviously, or shifting the weight off the leg, or stiff when they’re getting up. Those are pretty obvious things that people can observe in their dog at home. But then there are some less-obvious signs that people might not notice, like if your dog normally stretches a lot when they get up in the morning, and they’re not stretching as much as they used to, that could be a sign of pain. You know how when your dog shakes the water off of them they shake their whole body? Well, some dogs will shake half their body, and that might be a sign that the body part they’re not shaking is painful. They might come out of their crate a little slower, they might be reluctant to go up and down stairs, they might not want to play as much with the other dogs, they might be more grumpy with the other dogs, they might have a slight personality change. In my webinar Chronic Pain, I listed nineteen signs of pain in dogs, and there’s probably more, so I think sometimes handlers need to listen to their dogs. Certainly performance issues can be a sign of pain, and we’ve discussed this before. A lot of people will blame a dog’s reluctance to jump, or going around a jump, or not listening, to being naughty and they try to fix it with training, but it could be that the dog is painful and that’s why they don’t want to do that thing. Melissa Breau: I know if I over-exert myself, I tend to get a little bit sore, and I’ve certainly seen my own dogs, if we do something a little over the top one day, they might be a little less … Sue Yanoff: Active. Melissa Breau: Yes, or sore, the next day. So I’d assume it’s the same for dogs. If a dog is just a bit sore, or seems a bit sore the day after a trial, at what point do you start to worry that it might be something more serious than just that? Sue Yanoff: I think it’s something that has to go on for a while. All of us have had dogs who were out hiking, or after a trial, and they’re favoring a leg, or they’ll step on something and yelp and hold their leg up and then they’re fine, and the next day they’re fine, and that’s OK with me. Or if they’re a little bit stiff and sore the day after trial, especially if they’re a little bit older, especially if it’s a four-day trial, then I would just rest the dog, give them a day off, and if they’re fine after that, then I wouldn’t worry. But if they continue to show problems, if the soreness continues, as we talked about, or if performance deteriorates, or if it comes and goes, so you rest them for a day or two and then they’re fine, and then you go back to normal activity, and then in another week or so, or a month or so, the same thing happens, and then you rest them for a few days and then they’re fine, at that point either they’re not getting better, or if it comes and goes, that’s when you should maybe look further. Melissa Breau: You recently gave a whole webinar where you talked about pain management, and you talked quite a bit about some of the drug options that are out there. What do you wish more handlers knew when it came to pain meds? Could you share one or two things that come to mind? Sue Yanoff: I know a lot of people are reluctant to give their dogs pain meds, and I think those are mostly people that have high pain thresholds and so they don’t take pain meds themselves until it’s really, really bad. I have a very low pain threshold. I’m a wimp, so if I have pain or soreness, I’m taking drugs. And I assume that all dogs are like me, that they’re pain wimps and they need meds. Now there are some dogs that we all know, Labs and Border Collies come to mind, that they can have a lot of pain and still will do their thing because they’re so driven. But just because they will doesn’t mean they should, and just because they seem to tolerate the pain well doesn’t mean they should. So I think what I would like the handlers to know is just because you wouldn’t take pain meds for certain pain doesn’t mean that it’s OK to not give your dog pain meds, because I think we need to address their pain, since they can’t tell us how bad it is. The other thing I want people to know are there are more drugs out there than NSAIDs. NSAIDs, I think, are really good drugs, but some people are scared because they can have serious side effects — not often, but they can. But I want them to know that NSAIDs for most dogs are great, that there are several different NSAIDs available, so if one NSAID doesn’t help your dog, or your dog has an adverse reaction to one NSAID, there are other options. One thing we talked about in the webinar that if people didn’t take it might not know: there’s a new NSAID available for dogs called Galliprant, which has a lot fewer side effects than the NSAIDs that we have been using. Melissa Breau: If somebody has been listening to all this, or they have a dog that’s injured at some point and they think the dog might benefit from seeing a sports specialist, what’s the best way to go about actually finding one and then getting an appointment? Sue Yanoff: There’s three different types of veterinarians that you might want to see, if you need somebody with more training and experience than your general practitioner. The first is a board-certified surgeon. This is a veterinarian that has been certified by the American College of Veterinary Surgeons, who has the training required to meet those certification requirements. Surgeons are trained in orthopedic, neurological, and soft-tissue surgery. Once they finish their residency and go into practice, they might specialize in a particular area like orthopedics or neuro, but we’re trained in all three. So if you want to find a board-certified surgeon who has a special interest in orthopedics or sports medicine, then you can find somebody like that. You can get on the website of the American College of Veterinary Surgeons and find a specialist. I would recommend that you find a specialist who specifically states that they have an interest in sports medicine and has several years experience, because the more we practice, the better we get, because, to tell you the truth, I’ve learned the most from the diagnoses that I’ve missed and referred for a second opinion and go, Oh, I didn’t know that was a problem. Now I know. The second type of specialist is a board-certified sports medicine vet. This is a veterinarian that has been certified by the American College of Veterinary Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation, and again, my recommendation is to look for somebody that has several years experience in the specialty. And for the sports medicine specialty I kind of like it if you find a veterinarian who actually does some sports with their dogs, because I think you get a whole different perspective on sports medicine when you actually do some of these sports. The third type of veterinarian, who can’t really be called a specialist but has some extra training in sports medicine rehab, is a veterinarian who has a certification called CCRT, which stands for Certified Canine Rehabilitation Therapist. This is somebody that has some extra training through online classes, through three weeks of in-person classes, and while the training is not as extensive as a board-certified specialist, at least they have some advanced training. The point I want to make is just because somebody is a specialist doesn’t mean that they’re good at what they do. You would think that they would be pretty good, but not always, and just because somebody is not a specialist doesn’t mean that they’re not good. So if you have no place to start, those are good places to start. I like for you to get recommendations from somebody who has seen the sports medicine vet, whose dog has been treated successfully, and start there. But if you don’t have a recommendation from somebody, then I think looking at the websites of American College of Veterinary Surgeons or American College of Veterinary Sports Medicine and Rehab, or finding a veterinarian with a CCRT certification is a good place to start. Melissa Breau: Excellent. I’ve got one more question here for you, Sue. I’ve replaced the three questions at the end of every interview with a new question for repeat guests, so as a final question I want to get back to dog training. What’s a lesson you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to training? Sue Yanoff: I like this question a lot because I have probably ten answers for that. But having just come back from the FDSA camp, I think the lesson that came to mind first and I think is very important and that is foundation. That’s getting back to the foundations. Whether you’re having trouble with something or whether you just want to have an easy training session with your dog, get back to the foundations. Melissa Breau: Excellent. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Sue! Sue Yanoff: Thanks, Melissa. It was fun, as always. Melissa Breau: And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week with Nancy Tucker to talk about behavior change and why it can be so hard. 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.

SUMMARY: This week we talked to Denise Fenzi about FDSA Training Camp 2018! In previous years, we've shared the audio from Denise's opening talk, but unfortunately the camera this year didn't do a great job picking up her voice, so instead we're just going to talk through all the themes from camp. Next Episode:  To be released 6/22/2018, featuring Sue Yanoff, talking canine sports medicine! 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 Denise Fenzi about FDSA Training Camp 2018! In previous years, we've shared the audio from Denise's opening talk, but unfortunately the camera this year didn't do a great job picking up her voice, so instead we're just going to talk through all the themes from camp. Hi Denise. Welcome back to the podcast! Denise Fenzi: Hi Melissa. It's always nice to be here. Melissa Breau: For anyone who is new to the podcast or to FDSA, can you share a little bit about camp? What is it? Why is it awesome? Denise Fenzi: Well, camp is probably the highlight of my year in relation to FDSA. For starters, we have so much going on at any given time. I think we had 15 or 16 instructors this year, and we run six sessions at a time. So if you come, you have a whole lot of opportunity to see pretty much anything, and we cover a lot of dog sports now, you know, nosework and obedience and behavior, and it goes on and on. Probably the thing that stands out for me is how consistent all of the instructors are with things we really care about, the wellbeing of the dog, and at the same time how different we all are in what we care about and where we choose to put our energy. So it's a pretty amazing experience for me and I think for most of our participants as well. Melissa Breau: I definitely agree. I feel like a lot of seminars and things, as an attendee you go and at the end you feel, OK, I've got some stuff to work on. Whereas I feel like the biggest takeaway for me from camp was the end of it I heard over and over and over again, “I'm so proud of my dog. They did awesome this weekend.” And I really think that can be attributed to the staff and the way the instructors work with the students. I think it just makes them feel good about their relationship with their dog. Denise Fenzi: Yeah. I think the corollary to that is that the instructors spend a lot of time saying, “I'm just so proud of my students.” Because the dogs got that from somewhere. Those dogs didn't just show up being amazing. They're amazing because the people who work with them have spent so much energy making training a wonderful experience. I'm so proud of my instructors because my instructors give so much to their students, and I'm so proud of my students because they give so much to their dogs. So it's an amazing cycle for all of us. Melissa Breau: This was the fourth annual FDSA Training Camp, and each year, camp has a theme. Do you mind sharing what the theme was for this year? Denise Fenzi: This year we did Face Your Fears. So many students, they want to do it right, they care so much, and that's amazing, but sometimes it's also a little paralyzing, and what if? What if my dog pees in the ring? What if … you can fill in any blank you want, people are all over the map. And so I think that is something that is holding us back. So our theme this year was Face Your Fears. What can we do to allow us to succeed? Melissa Breau: Do you mind … can you share the story of the dream that inspired all of that? Denise Fenzi: That was not our original theme. We changed it. What tends to happen each year is something happens during the year that sparks a topic. So, for example, the first year was The Red Dress. That was because one of the students drew a picture of me which is often associated with the school, it's our logo. But she put me in a red dress with heels, and it was kind of cute and fun and a lot of people talked about it, so what the hell, I dressed up in that outfit, which was actually quite hard, but it was fun. The second year, we did a lot of conversation about the idea of ripples and bubbles, so the idea that you want to go out in the world and make change, and at the same time you've really got to have a safe space, so that's a bubble that you hide in, and so I dressed up as a mermaid and represented that theme. The third year, we had talked a lot about advocating for your dog, which is very much a focal point at FDSA, as we just talked about, and so I dressed up as a superhero, Wonder Woman. This year, I'm not going to tell you the original theme because, who knows, we might come back to it. But I had a dream, not an amazing dream, just a regular dream, but it was something of a nightmare. What happened was at first I showed up for camp and there was some fellow teaching a lecture, a lab, and everybody was there, and he was somebody I did not know, and all of the students were riveted by him and he was teaching them about football. I remember being a little bit like, Wow, that's different. I didn't expect somebody I don't know to be here teaching football, but I'll figure it out later. And then I went outside and I saw all of these lions in cages, and I thought, I really have to talk to my instructors about telling me if they're going to do something like that. But I was kind of OK with that too. I'm pretty easygoing. Then I came back in and looked at the clock and I realized I was about to teach, and I looked down and I was wearing a towel. I hadn't gotten dressed yet. Of those events, a stranger teaching at camp football to the students and lions in cages outside, those didn't particularly bother me. But being in a towel bothered me very much. And I did teach, by the way. I think in my dream I went ahead and taught. I don't remember how it went beyond that. But as I brought that up on the alumni list and I talked to the students about that dream and said, “Oh, I must be anxious about camp,” and that led to an amazing discussion where people talked about things that had happened to them for real at dog shows. Funny things, mostly. Well, it depends — funny is from your point of view. It's not funny when your skirt falls off. It is funny when somebody else's falls off. But the thing that came back to me is that people overcame those experiences and did continue to show, because they're on the alumni list. They're still in the community. That led to my thinking about how is it that some people are able to face the fears that have happened, the clothing failures, and how other people are really more worried about what might happen, and how much of that is centered around the issue of being embarrassed. It's not physical harm that most people were worried about. It's emotional harm. So that was the dream that inspired our theme, and that was where we went with our discussion. Melissa Breau: I think it's funny that you say of the three things, the thing that bothered you most is talking in a towel, so you actually made that happen. For anybody that wasn't there, Denise came out in a Pac-Man towel. Denise Fenzi: I did, yeah. I think next year I'm going to go for a lot of clothing. It's a little easier. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. During your opening talk, you had three tips for helping to deal with embarrassment. Can you rehash those for us? Denise Fenzi: Sure. The first one is a little bit of an understanding of biology. When you are anxious, your body releases a variety of hormones that tells you, “Oh my goodness, you're having an emotion.” But what's interesting is those hormonal experiences are the same if you're excited or anxious. It's your brain that tells you, “I'm really excited because this amazing thing is going to happen,” or “I'm really anxious because this horrible thing might happen.” That's actually a fascinating and powerful thing to know, because if you know that, then you actually have a lot of control over the situation. So rather than saying, ‘I'm really anxious about showing my dog. She might pee in the ring,” you have the option of saying, “I'm really excited about showing my dog. I've never done this before. This is going to be new.” And admittedly you have to do a little mental gymnastics, because our natural tendency, I think in particular for women, is to assume anxiety maybe when it really isn't anxiety. Maybe we really are excited. They've done some really interesting research on that topic that you can tell yourself “I'm excited,” and that will help you become excited as opposed to anxious. So that would be one thing I would recommend is an awareness of that, and then just keep telling yourself, “I'm so excited to be at the dog show. This is going to be amazing,” rather than “I'm so scared.” The second thing I talked about was preparation. When you're afraid, instead of hiding it and smushing it down in your head, pull it out. What are you concerned about? And then prepare to make those incidences less likely. So if you are afraid that your dog is going to pee in the ring, teach your dog to go to the bathroom on cue, if that's important to you, if that will give you comfort, so that when you go in the ring that is less likely to happen. Or if you think that you might go in the ring and your dog is going to have a meltdown of whatever type, ask yourself where that is coming from and is it a legitimate concern, because if it is, there are things you can do to prepare your dog and yourself to make that less likely. Don't turn away from the things that concern you. Address them. The final thing I suggested was train yourself and treat yourself with the kindness that we treat our dogs. We talk a lot about criteria with our dogs. Don't put your dogs in circumstances that will over-faze them and make them uncomfortable. Don't put yourself in circumstances that are above your readiness. Your first dog show does not have to be a great big show with six rings and a lot of activity. Maybe start with some video competitions or a smaller local trial or a fun match. Ease into the dog show world or the world of competition. You may never go to a dog show, but I guarantee you will be just as nervous at your first video competition when you turn on that video camera as you will at a show. So treat yourself with some kindness and set yourself up for success, because success really does breed success. That is absolutely well researched. We know this is true for dogs and people, that when people have many successful experiences they build confidence in themselves and they are willing to keep trying and moving forward. Failure, it's wonderful to say “Well, just get back up,” but the fact is failure has a tendency to beat people down and they don't keep getting back up. They stop trying. So those were my three suggestions: a little understanding of biology, prepare yourself well so that you can feel like you've done everything in your power, and set some criteria that will set you up for likelihood of success. Melissa Breau: You also shared some advice on what to do if it DOES all go to hell. How would you recommend people handle that? Denise Fenzi: I'm a pretty big fan of preparing for everything, because I find that if I have a plan for how I'm going to handle it if it doesn't go right, so just in a very straight training sense, I have asked my dog to do something, I have asked my dog to spin, and my dog just looks at me, has never heard that in her life or his life, it's actually important to me to already know exactly what I will do. I asked you to spin, you didn't do it, I am going to move my hand in a way that is going to cause you to spin and make it more likely. When I do that, what I find is two things happen. One, I am more likely to recover quickly because I've already made a decision about what I'm going to do. But the second thing is, in a very subtle way you send off signals to your dog that tell them you have a plan and you are in control. So if I think it is possible that my dog might run amuck in the ring and take off, I've already worked on an emergency recall and I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to kneel down and call my dog to me, because standing and looking paralyzed, not only is that very, very hard on you emotionally, and your dog, it creates long-term issues. Often if I give someone a plan for when things don't go wrong, I've noticed that they have this instant change in their demeanor and then they never have a chance to practice their emergency situation because the dog reads their confidence. So I absolutely believe that you should have some ideas for everything if it's going to go right. You can't pick every possibility, but the ones that are biggest in your head you can pick some strategies in advance. Melissa Breau: Our shirts this year all said, “Game on,” and they had a Pac-Man theme. I'd love to hear how you came up with that, and obviously it connects to the “eating your fears” concept. So I'd love to hear where all the awesome designs come from and where the thought process occurs for that. Denise Fenzi: Well, the school, FDSA, is quite a bit more than me. It's many, many, many people. Teri Martin is sort of, well, she's kind of everything, you know, she's always right there supporting me in many ways. She is the one that came up with the idea of the Pac-Man creature eating up your fears. And then Rebecca Aube is my designer, and she's designed all of the T-shirts for camp. She took Teri's ideas and said, “I can run with that.” There's always a process of back and forth, so we had power-ups. Eating the fruits in the real game of Pac-Man gives you power, so for us, eating up your fear, your anxiety, your worries. So it's a cumulative process and effort of many people on our team to come up with these ideas. Melissa Breau: That was all for the welcome talk or the intro talk, but you also gave a short closing talk, and your focus for that was on the importance of being happy in order to learn. I'd love to have you elaborate a bit more on that, why it's important, and what made you talk about that. Denise Fenzi: Well, I think most of us are aware that when we are embarrassed or afraid, we do not learn well. If something happens in a circumstance and we find ourselves embarrassed, most of us lose the next 15 or 20 minutes of the talk or the event or whatever it is, because we're stewing. I mean, some of us lose days or months or years, even, over embarrassment. And fear is the same. When you are uncomfortable and nervous, really, fear dominates everything and we tend to focus on that. Now, if you think about it, camp can be a very high-pressure situation for both the human and the dog. You're standing in front of maybe a hundred people, you're about to be taught and directed, and that's stressful, so it's so important that we have people as comfortable as we can possibly make them. As a result, everyone — the instructors and the students and the dogs — we all think so much about the importance of maintaining happiness, and I know our students think about it a lot in relation to their dogs because we talk about it so much. That's called a CER: a conditioned emotional response. We want our dogs to be conditioned to loving being with us and training and finding it fun and low stress. But the same is true for the people, and as a result, staff at FDSA and the design of camp is set up to minimize the human stress as much as possible, and to make sure that people are happy and feel loved and warm and excited to be there and understand that if they make an error, there's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's OK. What I found as the years go by this becomes easier for all of us. We all become more comfortable with how this works. You could see the effects in camp. You could see that people were able to learn in real time and they were happy, so then of course their dogs are happy, and then of course the staff is happy, and again you have that circle. I do not choose my closing speech in advance. I just talk about whatever stood out for me at camp. And it really stood out for me, was almost a bit of an epiphany for me, that CER, that conditioned emotional response, the importance of it, the importance of happiness and feeling good is just as important for the handler as it is for the dog and that we all take some responsibility for making that happen. Melissa Breau: Of course the other thing you talk about during the closing talk every single year is the date and location for next year. I want to talk a little more about that, but first, where and when is it next year? Denise Fenzi: All right. It is May 19 through the 21st, it's three days, 2019, in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. The location is the Lebanon Valley Exposition Center. Once again we have lots of space. We go to some trouble to ensure that we have a lot of space so that we have the best possible sound. Once again we'll have a wide variety of instructors. We do have a few changes, I think people will be excited about that, a couple of new people coming in. Melissa Breau: I wanted to get in a little bit more into what goes into choosing the location and the space and stuff like that. I know everybody at camp was pretty excited about where camp would be, but obviously choosing that location is a very involved process, and I know usually Teri is working on it pretty much as soon as one year ends, trying to plan for the next year. So how do you decide where to have camp each year? What goes into that? Denise Fenzi: It's actually, it's really quite complex. Planning camp is actually a two-year cycle, so we are already picking our 2020 facility now because you have to start really far in advance. For 2019, we have a contract signed, but I think maybe more goes into camp than people realize, and it's a very complex thing. Just finding a facility that can host us is hard because we need large, open working spaces. Many conferences don't have working dogs that require large open spaces. It's just the nature of our dog sports. That alone takes a lot of space. The second one is sound. If you're going to run six rings at the same time, you need six distinct spaces. But you don't want six huge spaces, because one, sound does not, it's not as efficient to be in a huge building with a smaller number of people, and the second thing is just expense. You pay for all those large spaces. Just logistically there are only so many places in the United States, and each one that we investigate ends up taking us several hours, once we narrow it down, and then we find something that's just not going to work, so lack of air conditioning or no airport nearby or whatever is part of that. Some of the criteria, we are looking for heavy student population centers because experience has taught us that people generally drive within about an eight-hour radius, although I did notice this year people are coming from further. So we're looking for places where we already know we have a lot of students. In addition, we are trying to rotate it around the country, sort of a north, south, east, west, but it's not that clean because again we're looking for population centers. So this year we're about eight hours east of last year because we feel that we can fill that effectively at this time. We can pull people down from the northeast, it was too far for them, and we can pull people up from the southeast because it was too far for them, and hopefully we'll also pull people in from the middle of the country, and we have an airport within about an hour. Next year we'll probably make a more radical change the year after that and head back to the other side of the country. It's actually very, very difficult for us to pick locations, and we worry and we want everyone to be able to participate, but we recognize the difficulty of that. And we do generally have people come internationally, so hopefully people from Europe and, well, Europe in particular will consider coming over next year, because it's really only about six or seven hours to get to the East Coast, so we're trying to maximize, and Canadians tend to represent very, very well at camp, so we're hoping they're going to come down. They're some lively people, those Canadians. Melissa Breau: I'm sure they'd appreciate that. I know that you were talking about the sound thing, and a lot of the time when those threads pop up on the alumni list, people suggest places where they've had great nationals and things like that. I think there's often a failure to realize what you said that not only do we need the space to have six rings essentially, but they need to be divided into their own rooms, because otherwise you get so much bleed from sounds. I know that's been an issue in past years. And you've worked to remedy food issues from past years and bathroom issues from past years. There's just so many factors. I think it's incredible. Denise Fenzi: We do ask. We do a survey every year and it's incredibly valuable for us. We get feedback about what does or doesn't work. It also comes when I read the survey that I understand that some people just don't understand. For example, we don't choose the caterer. Most of the time the facility tells us what our options are, so we don't say, “We're going to bring in pizza.” They say, “No, you're not.” For example, that is one. They tell us where we can do it. They tell us if we can or cannot have outside alcohol. They tell us what the prices are going to be. We do not make money on those things. So we have to work within the constraints that we have, and I think people are unaware of many of our constraints. However, we always get suggestions every year that we look at and we say, “This we can do.” So if you are really passionate about something and you don't understand why we are ignoring you, it's not necessarily that we think it's not a good idea. It may be outside of our control, or there may be other expenses or other things that people are not aware of that we have to dovetail all of these things together. It's a very complicated and rewarding experience for us. Melissa Breau: I just have one more question on my list, but before we get to that, I wanted to give you an open choice question, for lack of a better term. Is there anything else fun or exciting going on at the academy or favorite moments from camp that you want to share? Denise Fenzi: There's so much. You know, you go home from camp on such a high, and I think a big part for me is this sense of wonder. I'm amazed at what FDSA is and who it is. It is the people. Where did I find a Teri and a Melissa and a Rebecca? Where did I find these amazing people? So, for me, camp is really the people. Where did I find these amazing students? The volunteers — they're fantastic. They work so hard, they're focused, they just do so much. I think the thing I flew home with on my airplane as I came home was that sense of people, how amazing people can be, if you're looking for what's going right. Camp is a great example of what went right, and that will hold me probably for months. I'll stay excited about that. Melissa Breau: So I don't know if you know this, but I've been trying something new at the end of each episode. The three questions at the end of every interview were definitely one of my favorite things early on, but it obviously doesn't make sense to ask them over and over when people come back. So I've come up with a new question for returning guests, and I think you're the second or third person I've had the chance to ask it. What is a lesson you've learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Denise Fenzi: This is one I talk about a lot for other people, but it came home to roost. I would like to talk about videotaping. Has anybody not heard me tell you, “You have to videotape your work if you really want to improve.” Of course you can do it other ways, but my goodness, if you videotape and look at it — this is the second part — look at it from an outside perspective, don't watch yourself training your dog, watch your friend training a dog, and that extra step of removal will show you things. It will allow you to relax your brain and your defensive side that says, “I know I'm doing it right,” because we all have that, and it will allow you to say, “Oh, that's really a quick tweak here, just let's change that little thing.” It did kind of come home. I've been doing some new stuff with Brito, and I was reminded that I need to pay more attention to my basic mechanics. Many of these things are fairly muscle memory for me, but if you don't pay attention, you will start to slide. You'll just get a little bit sloppy. And I realized as I'm trying to teach him some new skills, I am reminded that I need to pay more attention to my mechanical skills. Think about it. You give your cue, you give your hand help if needed, you take your food out of your pocket. That simple sequence has started to blend together over time. So I would say that has been my lesson, my recent lesson that is serving me well. Melissa Breau: Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Denise! This was great. Denise Fenzi: Oh, it's always great to be here. Thank you, Melissa. Melissa Breau: And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! As a last-minute reminder, this comes out on Friday the 15th, which is also the last day to register for this session at FDSA. There are a ton of amazing classes running this term, so if you haven't, you should go check them out. And we'll be back next week, this time with Sue Yanoff to talk about canine sports medicine. 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: Amy Johnson is the owner of Great Dane Photos and teaches the dog photography classes offered through FDSA. She is also the official show photographer for many of the premier agility events in the United States, including the AKC National Agility Championships, AKC Agility Invitational, USDAA Cynosport World Games, and NADAC Championships, as well as numerous local trials, regional events, and breed national specialties. She has photographed a wide variety of dog sports, including agility, obedience, rally, and conformation, and dog events, including FDSA camp.   Her start in professional photography came by taking pictures of her friends' dogs at conformation shows, and quickly grew to outpace her interest in showing her own dog -- and today she's here to talk to us about the reason a great number of people use the internet each day -- dog photos!   Links www.greatdanephotos.com Next Episode:  To be released 5/18/2018, featuring Sara Brueske, the benefits of teaching tricks … and a little bit about disc dog! 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 Amy Johnson. Amy is the owner of Great Dane Photos and teaches the dog photography classes offered through FDSA. She is also the official show photographer for many of the premier agility events in the United States, including the AKC National Agility Championships, AKC Agility Invitational, USDAA Cynosport World Games, and NADAC Championships, as well as numerous local trials, regional events, and breed national specialties. She has photographed a wide variety of dog sports, including agility, obedience, rally, and conformation, and dog events, including FDSA camp.   Her start in professional photography came by taking pictures of her friends' dogs at conformation shows, and quickly grew to outpace her interest in showing her own dog -- and today she's here to talk to us about the reason a great number of people use the internet each day -- dog photos!   Hi Amy, welcome back to the podcast! Amy Johnson: Thank you so much for having me back. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to talk about this stuff today. I know we want to chat about the behind the scenes stuff, but to start us out, can you share a little bit about some of the big events you've covered recently? What kind of events were they and what did they involve, a little bit of background? Amy Johnson: Sure. The most recent one I covered was actually just this past weekend. I was the show photographer for the AKC World Team Tryouts. While that's not one of the biggest events that I do, since it's a relatively small number of competitors, it still is really high profile. AKC sends all of their big guns to the show to be involved. It's not just a local trial. It definitely is a national-level event. I did AKC's National Agility Championships in March, those were held in Reno, Nevada, and I've got several more nationals coming up for later in 2018. Melissa Breau: As somebody who covers those kind of big events, how much traveling are you doing, how much travel is involved? Are you often on the road for this stuff, and how much of a factor is distance in whether or not you take a job? Can you share a little bit? Amy Johnson: I do a lot of traveling. There are times when my family wonders if I'm actually part of the family anymore, I think. Modern technology of texting and that stuff has been very good for that. For the local weekend trials — I say local, but the one that's closest to me is an hour away, but most of them are in the Twin Cities, which is about three-and-a-half hours south of me, the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area — I travel even to just do smaller trials, the normal weekend trials. But those are just in Minnesota. I leave home on the day before, so if it's a three-day trial, if it's a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I head to the cities on Thursday, usually set up on Thursday night at wherever the show is, and then shoot Friday and Saturday and run the booth on Sunday, and then I head home Sunday night and get home usually between 8 and 10 at night. The national events definitely are something that take me out of state and I'm gone a lot longer, but they're also much larger in terms of the number of competitors. The amount of business that I do at those is significantly larger than the amount of business I do at a local trial, so it's worth the extra distance and it's worth the extra staff I bring in. So I will travel out of state. All the nationals that I do other than World Team Tryouts this year were in Minneapolis, so that was a nice, close event. That was easy. AKC Nationals in March was in Reno. I'm going to Arizona, I'm going to Tennessee, I'm going to Orlando, so I get kind of coast to coast over the course of a year or two. Melissa Breau: That's pretty awesome. That's getting to see a lot of awesome places. Amy Johnson: Yeah, I do, and I drive everywhere because I am the person who has all of the gear. I have all the photography gear, but I also have all of the sales booth gear, so that doesn't pack up and ship very well. It certainly doesn't fit on a plane. I have a pickup truck and I fill it from tip to tail with everything I need and drive across the country, so not only do I see the places I'm going to, I also see everywhere in between, which sometimes is not very interesting. My dad's a retired geography teacher, so I think part of my desire to travel came from him instilling a love for the land that we live in, so being able to drive it rather than fly over it has been part of the appeal of the job itself, which is kind of weird, but what it is, it's a good part. Melissa Breau: That's kind of neat. I'm getting ready to do a crazy road trip myself, and there is something to be said for driving a long distance and having that time to explore on your own a little bit. I'd imagine you're working on a lot more of a deadline, so it may be a little more intense. Amy Johnson: Now that my kids are older I can extend my travel time by a little bit. I've never driven through the night. I need my sleep too much. I'll drive all day, but I've started to add an extra day or day-and-a-half so I can stop somewhere and do a little birding, see a local landmark or something. I'm actually starting to get off the Interstate and be able to have some time to explore places along the road, which has been fun. Melissa Breau: I'd imagine that makes it a lot more fun. You mentioned going all over the place, and I'd imagine that that comes with its own challenges. How do you prep for some of these big shows? What do you need to think through, especially if it's a facility maybe you've never been there before? What do you do? Amy Johnson: The national events or the events where I'm going somewhere where I've never been before is a little scary. My biggest concern, and the one that I can't do anything about to prep for, is the light in the place. A lot of the big events are held in state fairgrounds, coliseums, horse arenas, and they're generally fairly well lit, but for the human eye and even for video. But for photography, for still photography, to stop the motion of these dogs that are moving so incredibly fast, you need a lot of light, or you need a camera that can handle the relatively low amount of light that is found in these places. My stomach used to be tied up in knots when I would get to a place before I walked in the door and just go, Please let there be enough light, please let there be enough light. In fact, ten, maybe twelve years ago I walked into a horse barn, a horse arena, where a championships was going to be held and I almost — I had just driven for a day-and-a-half to get there — almost got back in my car and turned around and went home because it was so badly lit. I didn't, I've never done that, but the thought crossed my mind because it was just so incredibly dim. I pushed through and I did it, and the thing that I consoled myself with was, if I'm having this much trouble photographing in here, nobody else is going to be able to do any better. In fact, I'm going to do OK because nobody can photograph anything in here unless they have the kind of gear that I have. So I did OK. People were appreciative of the fact that I was there and stuck it out, and they understood the difficulties that I had getting images and that they just weren't up to my normal standards, but that was as good as anybody could have done in those conditions. The nice thing is, going back to that place after a couple of years, they had swapped out the lights, they had put in new lights, and it was about four times brighter than it was the first time I went in there. So I don't mind going there anymore, but it was terrifying the first time. So that's always my biggest concern. In terms of prepping, I have to arrange housing, I have to make sure I've got my contracts signed with the organization that's putting on the event, I have to line up my staff. These days I have a bunch of photographers that come and work for me, and then I also bring in a sales staff that works at my booth. So it's gone from me, myself, and I, or me and my husband, because in the early days he would come with, and he'd be in the booth and I would be shooting, and now it's evolved into I have some events where I bring in ten to twelve people — four to five other photographers, and then five to six booth staff. There's a lot of logistics involved with that. They come from all over the country. I have photographers coming sometimes from the East Coast and some from the West Coast and everywhere in between. A lot of my sales staff comes from the Minneapolis area because they are customers who have become friends who have become loyal salespeople for me. They know my product, they believe in me and what I do, and that makes them really good at selling the images. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. That sounds like a huge team. That's phenomenal that you've grown to that point where you're bringing in that many people. Amy Johnson: It's fun. It used to be that I would go to these big events and there would be two different photography outfits there, me and somebody else. We'd divide up the rings. I've always worked really well with other photographers. I enjoy talking to them, and the last thing I want to do is be snotty about “Why are you here?” or anything like that. There's enough room for both of us to play in this. But over the years I've been able to bring more and more photographers, and the organizations I work with have liked having only one point of only one photographer or company that is there, and so I've pretty much gone to being the exclusive photographer at all these big events. But part of the deal is if I'm going to do that, then I make sure I bring enough photographers and enough booth staff to fully staff that whole thing. We cover all the rings. I don't bring two other photographers and let two of the rings go without any pictures. If there are five rings, I have five of us. It's complicated, but it's worth it. Melissa Breau: Most of our listeners probably primarily compete rather than work at the events, and I'm sure that working at an event is super-different from being on the competitor side. I'd love to hear a little bit about how you balance things like trying to be in the right spot to capture that perfect image, but at the same time you don't want to be “in the way” or in a spot where you may be distracting for the dogs. How do you manage to blend into the background? How do you manage to set up in a way that allows you to accomplish both ends? Amy Johnson: One of my favorite compliments, it's a weird one, but one of my favorites is when somebody will come up to me and say, “I didn't even know you were here.” It's not that they didn't know that I had a vendor booth, and it's not that they didn't know there was a photographer, but if they don't see me in the ring that they were running in, that means I've really done my job well. It's one of those backhanded, weird compliments, but I always appreciate hearing it because then I know I didn't distract anybody. Making sure that I'm in a place — me and my other shooters, of course — that is always right at the forefront of my mind. I think at most events we're outside of the ring. There have been a few events where the boundaries of the ring are … at World Team Tryouts, it was held at a soccer arena, and so the boards that are the boundaries of the soccer field and there was netting above those — we can't shoot through that. I can't see through walls, and to put a net in front of the lens would be kind of a problem as well. So we do sit inside, but we keep our backs to the wall, just like a bar setter would. We try and make ourselves as small as possible. So we're outside of the ring in general. I'm always looking at the equipment and which direction they're taking the jump, or which end of the tunnel they're coming out of. I'm looking to see where  — and when I'm talking about “they,” the dog — I'm thinking about where the dog's sightline is going to move. If they come over a jump, will they see me as they're turning their head to look at the next obstacle that they're going to, or as they're turning their head from one thing to the thing that they're going to take that's close to me, are they going to look at me and find me to be a distraction? If they're far enough away, it's usually not a problem. They're so engaged in what they're doing, especially at national events, the level of competition is so high, these dogs are so accomplished, they're so prepared, the handlers have done such an amazing job of getting them ready that it's generally not a problem. But I still am really paying attention to the line that the dog will take and making sure that I'm not going to be something that will catch their eye and cause them to misstep, or to miss something, or to not pay attention to their handler. I try not to move very much, so if the dog is taking a jump and it's coming directly over the jump towards me, I've got my shot lined up, all I'm moving is my shutter button, and I wait until that dog has moved past me, or moved through that obstacle and a little bit beyond, before I move to set up my next shot, rather than click and then move while they still might be able to see me, because movement catches our eye. If you think about if you're watching something and there's just a little bit of movement inside of a bigger area of things that aren't moving, you're going to see that movement really fast, so that will grab your attention. So my goal is to not be the one moving thing in the dog's line of sight. Not being a distraction is a really, really high priority for me. Then, of course, the flipside of that is we have to get good shots. So I look at the course. Usually I manage to get hold of a course map so that I know what direction everybody's going and what the order of things is. So we're looking at … I know that I want to get a jump picture, I'm always prioritizing contact obstacles, so the A-frame, the dog walk, the teeter, if it's that type of a course. If it's a jumpers course, those won't be there of course. I want to make sure we get contacts. I want to make sure we get a good variety of jumps, not just straight-on but also maybe coming across at a bit of an angle. I'm looking at where the dog is coming from, the obstacle I want, and then I'm looking at where the dog is going next, because it's not just about, Oh, if I set up right in front of this jump, they're going to come right at me. They may not. If they're coming from the left out of a tunnel and then they're going to move to the right and then take the A-frame — I'm making this all up — if they're moving from left to right, then I have to make sure that I know where that dog is going to be looking, how the dog is going to be positioned over the jump when it takes it, and then set up my shot so that I make sure that the dog is sharp in focus when they are over the jump. Tunnels, it always helps to set up with them coming a little more straight out towards you, because then you can see them coming and take the shot at the right moment. There's all sorts of angles and lines, and even knowing the handler moves. I will watch the walkthroughs because I need to know if maybe a jump that I've picked out is going to give me a beautiful shot, except all the handlers are doing a front cross in front of it, so they literally are putting themselves in between me and the dog coming over the jump because that's the best way to handle the course. So it doesn't help me, I can't take that jump shot if I can't see the dog, so I'll watch the walkthrough and see how the handlers are thinking about handling it. And it might set up a really nice team shot where I can see both the dog and the handler in the shot at the same time, the kind where the dog's going one direction and the handler's already moving on to the next thing, going the other direction, and you get this real interesting dynamic and action shot that people seem to really like. Melissa Breau: Is it really possible to be in one spot and be able to capture multiple obstacles like that? How do you figure that out? Amy Johnson: Going back to the whole distraction thing, we don't move around the ring while we're shooting. The thing that takes so long for us to set up our shots is that — I'm saying “our” because I'm thinking of the big national events where there's five or six of us shooting — and usually it's a whole conversation of, “Did you see this?” and “Did you see that?” and “What about this?” and “Should we try that?” So it is a “we.” It's not just me being royalty here, even though I am kind of the queen! We plant ourselves in one spot for any given course, and once you're there, you're not moving. You're swiveling in your chair back and forth. The camera's on a monopod so you can swivel around it. The monopod's holding the weight of the camera so you're not carrying that the whole time. But we're sitting in a chair and don't move. If I find that the spot is just terrible because there's a judge in the way or a handler in the way — nothing against them, they're just doing their job — but I didn't anticipate something about the way that course was going to run, I may pick up after four dogs and move over or somewhere else that I find that I got better shots. But in general we are planted in one spot and don't move for the duration of that course. These dogs are on course for about 30 seconds, so I would die to have them on course for a minute-and-a-half, although I'm not sure how interesting that would be because that would mean the dog was really not having a good day. So a jumper's course generally is in the neighborhood of 30 seconds. The standard course where you get the contacts sometimes will go to 45, and that's for the big dogs. The littler dogs, you're talking 35 - 40 seconds for the jumpers and maybe 45 - 55 for the standard courses. But it's definitely, for the dogs that are doing what they're supposed to and not messing up, it's under a minute. So the trick is find a spot where you can get at least three solid shots. There are some courses where I can get five or six, and those always make me really happy. I get done shooting those courses and I'm kind of floating because I'm like, “Yeah, that was great!” It's like someone coming off the course saying, “That run, ooh, it just all came together, it really clicked, and it was amazing.” That's how I feel if I get a course where I can get five or six really solid shots. Oh, there's nothing like it. Four shots is a really good number. If we can get — again going back to a standard course — if we can get a jump, a contact, the weave, or maybe two jumps, a contact obstacle, and the weaves, that would be great because then we've got a little variety. Generally we will see the dogs more than once. I may not, I may not see any jump height more than once, but over the course of a weekend, since we are covering all the rings, then that means we'll see the dogs three or four times, maybe five if they get into the finals. So that means we've got plenty of opportunities, hopefully, to get a wide variety of different types of shots. The preparation, the knowing where the dog's going to go, I don't know all the fancy names of all the new moves that people do. I know basically what a front cross is, I know what a blind cross is, I know what a rear cross is when I see it. I couldn't do it, don't ask me to try to do it, but I could probably, if you showed me a video, I could probably name those crosses. I can't name all the other fancy stuff, but I pay attention to it because it helps me know how the dog is going to take an obstacle, if I know how the handler is going to direct the dog to take that obstacle. As a team we're always looking at the course and deciding, “What kind of thing do you think they're going to do?” Because I haven't actually ever run agility, then that means I'm at a slight disadvantage to a few of the other photographers that work for me. Two of them have run dogs, and so they are very valuable to me in terms of being able to say, “For this thing they're going to do this, so we'll want to consider moving to a different spot.” It's a group effort when we're talking about where we go, where we plant ourselves for any course. Melissa Breau: How much do you really need to know about the sport you're photographing to be able to make informed, intelligent decisions? I'd imagine that that's been a learning curve. Amy Johnson: I shot my first agility trial knowing nothing about the sport, so it is possible to do it. I shot a lot of jumps because those are obvious. It makes sense. The dog is going to go over the bar, and you can follow the numbers and you can figure out where they're going to go. In the most basic sense, it is absolutely entirely possible to photograph agility or any other dog sport without knowing anything about it. Now, does that mean that's the best way? Probably not. I know that I can get shots these days that I never could have anticipated 18 years ago when I started in this. I know that my reaction time is faster, my ability to visualize how the shot's going to look before the shot even happens is much better than it was 18 years ago. The more you know about your subject — and this applies to any type of photography; this doesn't just apply to dog agility photography — anything you can know about your subject, if it's something that's alive, if you know more about its behavior, if you know more about its environment, if you know more about its habitat — I'm thinking about birds or wildlife — the more you know about your subject, the more you can predict what might happen, the better you're going to be able to capture that moment that you want. I also do bird photography, as all of my students know. One of the things that I've really worked hard on, especially this past winter, was getting some flight shots of a Great Grey Owl. I've been watching these birds for several years, and I'm starting to pick up on the really subtle signals that they give before they take off to fly. There's the not subtle one of they tend to poop before they fly. That's the one that everybody jokes about, “Oh, the bird just pooped, it's getting ready to fly.” But they don't always do that, so it's not always that obvious. They start to shift around on their perch a little bit, they might fluff their wings out a little bit, they turn their head, or you notice that something catches their attention. All these little body movements are giving you a clue that the bird is about to take off, so make sure that you have your shot lined up for the bird taking off. Same thing with agility. If I know where the dog's coming from, I know where the dog's going to, and I know basically how the handlers are going to be handling the course, I can generally predict exactly how those photos are going to look within a range. There are always outliers, and unfortunately, if a dog does something really unexpected, we might miss that one jump shot if they jumped really high, or they crashed the bar, or if they don't even take the obstacle, or they do something weird to mess up their timing. So the outliers create problems for us, but for the most part, as long as we have a sense of the rhythm and the flow of the course and understand what the dog's going to do, then that greatly increases the likelihood that we're going to get a good shot. Melissa Breau: You mentioned earlier the idea of getting a couple of different obstacles, maybe setting up so that you can get a shot of the dog and the handler. Are there types of pictures that competitors seem more likely to buy? Are there things that they are looking for? Are those what drives you to get those specific shots, or is it more about what shots you can get that are going to be good shots? Amy Johnson: I mentioned I've been doing this for 18 years, and for every trial I've been to, if I had only taken the shots that I thought people would buy, then I would have been wrong for at least one or two people at every single trial I've ever shot. Just like with anything, people have a huge variety of opinions. Some people really like the jump shots where the dog is coming right towards you. Some people really like the jump shots where the dog is kind of slicing the jump and taking it at an angle. Some people hate the pictures on the contact obstacles. Some people love them. It is across the board. Anything I get, I can get a person who loves it and a person who hates it. My goal, because of that, is to try and get the biggest variety possible. So we try and make sure that there's some sort of teamwork shot in the mix. We want to make sure that we hit all the contact obstacles. Now, we aren't always successful, because we're restricted to what sides of each ring we're allowed to be in. For instance, at Nationals in Reno in March, they had three rings running in the main arena, and then one ring was off in another section. Well, those three rings were touching in the middle, so to speak, so we could access the backside of all three rings, we could access the side of Ring 1 and the opposite side of Ring 2 — excuse me, Ring 3 — but all we could access on the middle ring was the backside. If the course isn't set up where I can get a shot of an A-frame from that side of the ring for the whole weekend, like, I never get that shot, then those dogs that ran in that ring, maybe we don't have A-frames for that jump height. The goal is always to get that variety working within the boundaries of the courses and the way they're laid out, and again working with that idea that we don't want to be a distraction. I have passed up shots that would be awesome shots, but I can see that where we're sitting is too close to another obstacle. Even if we're not trying to shoot that obstacle, but it's the end of the weave poles and where I want to be puts me too close to the end of the weave poles, I won't set up there because I know weave poles are a touchy obstacle. Not every dog is as solid on the weaves as they maybe would be on a jump or a tunnel. The last thing I want is for a handler to come off the course and say, “Man, if that photographer hadn't been there.” We're great scapegoats. That is the one thing that I hear that makes me want to cry, but it also drives a lot of what I do. I don't want to be a scapegoat. I don't want to be the reason why someone thinks their run didn't go well. Even if I didn't have anything to do with it, I have to avoid that perception. I've passed up shots because I don't want to even have a hint of being in a place where someone could say, “Well, if that photographer hadn't been there, then we would have qualified.” But going back to the idea of the variety, it's all over the board, and I wish that there was a way to narrow it down to, “Oh, people only like jump shots.” “Well, great then, we'll just take the jump shots.” But you know what? That just is never going to happen. And actually I think I would get a little bored, too, if all I did was the jumps. So yeah, yeah, so it works for everybody. Melissa Breau: We've talked before, I think you actually included it in one of the webinars you did, about the challenges of capturing black dogs in particular. I'm assuming you don't have a ton of time between competitors at some of these events, so how do you work with the variety of the dogs you may see in the ring, both based on color and size and what have you? How do you have to adapt to that? Amy Johnson: The one thing we do at the national events … generally the light in these arenas, especially these days with modern LEDs and the modern fluorescents that don't have the same kind of patchy flicker … older lights are a nightmare to deal with, but the newer lights are quite nice. So we set our exposure for each ring. Like at Nationals, where we had three rings in the main arena, the exposure settings were the same for all three of those rings. We had different exposure settings for the fourth ring that was out in another section, but we set the exposure settings and then leave them alone. I don't try and adjust for a black dog and a white dog, and the biggest reason I don't is because I will screw it up. Like you said, we've got so little time, and if I'm trying to make adjustments because, oh, I see it's a black dog coming up — and I can't always actually see the start line very well from where I am, depending on where I'm shooting — so if I'm trying to adjust that and I say, “Oh, it's a black dog, let me adjust my settings,” great, shoot the black dog, looks wonderful. Then a white dog comes to the line and I forget that I've adjusted for the black dog, then I shoot the white dog at the black dog's settings, and I've screwed them both up, or I've screwed up the white dog. So I prefer to find that middle ground. The way I set the cameras is that we shoot in RAW, which is a file type that is very easily manipulated in Lightroom and Photoshop, so I can brighten the dark dogs and I can darken the light-colored dogs, because it isn't really off by that much. It's much better to pick that middle ground, because I have other things I would much rather put my brain power to, like making sure I get all the shots I want, and making sure I know what dog is in the ring, because we do a lot of data collection, and we can get to that in a bit. I don't worry so much about the color of the dog. What I do worry about — you mentioned the height of the dog and I'll mention the way a dog runs. The heights at a national event are nice because I may only see one jump height for most of the day, or half the day at least, so I might only have the 16-inch dogs. All of those dogs are jumping, they're very similar height, which means if I am visualizing things correctly, then that shot I've got is going to work for all the dogs I'm going to see. Little dogs, we can line things up. We can use a longer lens for a ring that has just little dogs in it, and shoot much tighter, rather than having to worry about using a lens that's going to work for everything from the 4-inch dogs all the way up to the 24-inch dogs. That's one of the things that's very nice about a national event versus a regular local event. When I'm setting up shots for my local events, I have to accommodate all the different jump heights. Sometimes at a walkthrough I'll go grab a different lens, but usually I can do everything with the same lens. The last piece of this, though, with the variety of dogs, goes back to understanding your subject, and that is, I need to understand how different breeds run and how different breeds take obstacles. What I mean is, if you put a Border Collie on the course, they run very efficiently. They run low to the ground, they come in really tight to those weave poles, and they just skim right over the top of the jump bars. They come tight up to the jump standards. They run very small, and I don't know if that makes sense, but they're very efficient, they're very compact in that respect. Then you put a Doberman out on the course. They run very upright, so you've got long legs. If they have cropped ears, you've got to make sure you're incorporating that into the frame. They take up a lot more vertical space in an image than a Border Collie. So even though they may be jumping the same jump height, I have to frame the shot completely differently for a Doberman than I do for a Border Collie. Now, there are exceptions. There's a Doberman in the Minneapolis area that runs like a Border Collie, and when he comes to the line — I am not joking, this dog is phenomenal — when he comes to the line I have to literally tell my brain, This is a Border Collie, this is a Border Collie, this is a Border Collie, because if I shoot him like a Doberman, he's only going to be taking up about the bottom third of the frame because I added extra space to treat him like a Doberman. I can't shoot him like a Doberman. I have to shoot him like a Border Collie. Poodles are another one that run very upright. Great Danes, the few of them that are out there running, run very upright, and I have to make sure I have enough vertical space for them. The little dogs, there's less variety in that way. Of course there's always the Jack Russell Terriers that think they should be jumping 20 inches, even though they only jump 8 or 12. There's an advantage that my local clients have that my national clients don't, because I know my local people. I know how their dogs run. I know the little dogs that run as if they're 20-inch dogs, and so I can be set up for that. I have pictures where all I have are toes in the frame because the top of the dog is cut off at the top because it jumped so high. I have the jump bar in there, and then I have about 8 inches of space, and then I have toes. Sometimes those are really funny shots and the people really like them, but not at a national so much. Understanding the breed, and even if it's a mixed breed, you still can see, you watch the dog go over the first jump and you have a clue about how they're going to run the course. That's another part of knowing your subject. You've got to understand how the different dogs run, and that's just something you learn after observing dog after dog after dog after dog. Melissa Breau: Can you walk me through what a typical day looks like at one of these major events from your perspective? Amy Johnson: One of the things I always want to know is what time does the building open, because I want to be there as early as I possibly can. The reason for that is I want to have as much time as I can to see the course, to look at the different angles, to look at the way it's going to run. If there's a course map, if there are multiple courses in the day, hopefully they put out course maps that are for everything, and so then I can start looking ahead. If we're going to have a course change in the day, I can also start looking ahead for the second half of the day, when you need to switch, consider this, this, and this, so I can prep my team for what they're going to be looking for midday. I get there, and usually a couple of my team of my photographers will be there that early with me, and we look at the courses and start thinking about what shots will work. Once everybody gets there, we make sure everybody's got their chairs, everybody's got the right lens, because if they've got little dogs, they might need a 400mm, if they're shooting things that are all the way across the ring, they might need a 400mm lens, if they're shooting things that are closer, they probably need a 300mm. Everybody keeps track of their own camera body for the week, but we swap the lenses around, depending on what jump height and where the obstacles are physically located in the ring, compared to where you're sitting. There's a lot of … you've got to make sure your cards are formatted. One of the things that is key to the way I do business is that we keep track of what image numbers belong to which dog. The way we do that is we have the running list loaded into a spreadsheet on an iPad, and as you're shooting, you're looking in the back of the camera and recording the image numbers that correspond, the last image number that corresponds to the dog that just ran. We've got data collection that goes on as you're shooting, so we've got to make sure that the iPads are charged, that camera batteries are charged, cards are formatted, cards are loaded in the camera. I have sat down — because I'm trying to get everybody else situated — sat down and realized I don't have any cards in my camera, so then it's a quick scramble. Once the shooting starts, then things settle into a rhythm, and time just becomes weird, and you keep going and you fall in to … your muscle memory takes over. After four or five dogs, you have the pattern, and you don't have to think so hard about I'm going here, oh wait, then I've got to go there. You just settle in. The day … you are always happy to get a break, but they're never very long. We'll shoot from probably 8 o'clock in the morning — earlier on … some nationals start the day even earlier than that — 8 o'clock and sometimes we'll go on until 4 or 5. We've even gone until 6. In fact, World Team Tryouts started shooting on Saturday morning at 7:30 and finished that night at 7. That's a little bit of an extreme, but ten hours of shooting isn't … eight to ten isn't out of the realm of normal. But then the day doesn't end, so we've got to go back to the house and download images, and I have some data stuff, so I suck into my computer the spreadsheets and everybody's images, and through the magic of the scripts that my husband has written for me, we come out on the other side with images that are sorted into directories named with the dog's name. So if I click on Ace Smith, then inside of that folder are all of the pictures that are of Ace Smith — or we hope so, if we've done the data entry correctly. Then we take the time to edit the photos, and editing meaning deciding which ones to keep and which ones to delete, not post-processing in Photoshop or Lightroom. None of that happens. We go through and delete all the bad ones, because there are bad ones. There are lots of bad ones. Keeper rate is probably about 25 to 30 percent of the images are kept. On an eight- to ten-hour day I probably shoot minimum 5000 images, probably closer to 6 or 7. On a day where I've got one of those courses where I've got six shots and they all work really well, I can get up to 8000 images, and then we go through and delete the junk, because there's always junk. I don't want my customers to see the junk. Some stuff does slip through that I would probably prefer not be out there, but for the most part we get rid of a lot of things that just don't need to be seen by anybody. We keep the best of the best, and that's part of what keeps people coming back for more. So the day starts really early. I have trained my booth staff to do editing so we can distribute the images, so I may not have to do all my images. I can split mine between me and someone else. All my photographers, we generally can split so they're only doing half and then one of my booth staff is doing the other half, and that's made a huge difference in how early we can get to bed, because we've divided that work so much. For Nationals I was in bed by 10 or 10:30, but there are times when I've been up until midnight or 1:00 and then had to get up at 4 or 5. You just run on adrenalin at that point, there's not a lot else. And coffee, lots of coffee. I often wish that I could sit ringside and just have a caffeine drip, but nobody's offered to do that for me yet. So adrenalin and coffee. Now, those are the days where all we're doing is shooting, like on the first day of the event. On the Saturday and Sunday of an event, I also have to make sure that the booth gets up and running. Not only am I trying to look at courses and get everybody set, I'm also trying to get the booth. My staff is really good about doing most of it, but there's still some of the computer stuff that is really just me, so I have to make sure that's all working properly. I also have two of my photographers who have become regulars know how to set up the shots the way I want them. I'm getting much better at delegating. It's very hard, but I'm getting better at it, delegate that stuff, getting the shots set up, to them, and then I concentrate on getting the booth up and running, and then hopefully they've even found a spot for me, so I just sit down and start shooting and hope that they did their job well, which they always have. Melissa Breau: That's important. Having good people is an important piece of the process. Having photos available next day for competitors — you mentioned that's not the norm, that's not standard. What led you to make the decision to do that? You talked about being up really, really late the night before, so I'd love to hear what led you down that path. Amy Johnson: There's a lot of things that I do that are not standard. Being willing to stay up late and edit pictures until all hours of the night is the biggest one, I guess. Sorting by dog name is a really big thing to me, and it's not something that most other agility photographers have done. The ones that I've trained are doing it, and it's a very small number, but it's growing. Usually it's sorted by jump height or by group or by arm band number, something. The decision to do that is based on I want my customers to spend their money, not spend their time hunting for their dog. I want them to be able to find their pictures within 30 seconds of walking up to one of my viewing stations. In that 30 seconds they're just typing in their name is all they're doing. And it should — if all their data is correct — it should pull up their dog's pictures as soon as they hit the login button. That makes them feel important, too, because we took the time to know who they are and who their dog is, and to find a way to match those up and to not waste their time with, “Well, here's all 500 20-inch dogs that ran yesterday. Go ahead and look through them and see if you can find your Golden in amongst the 500 other Goldens.” I think that's not respectful of their time as a competitor, and it's certainly not respectful of my sales booth time for my employees to be looking for … to help these people find their pictures, because by the time they find their pictures, then they're exhausted — “Oh, well, here they are. Now I have to decide what to do with them? Really? Oh.” They've made decisions all week or all weekend. They're trying to decide how to handle their dog, they're trying to decide what to do that is best for their dog. I don't want to add to that mental load by making them hunt for their pictures. That's the motivation for me is I think it's a better use of all of our time if they can find that stuff really quick. A lot of agility photographers or dog event photographers will actually find a way to have images up within even on the same day, but the editing piece for me is too important, and so I want the chance to see all the images, or to have a photographer look at all the images, before they go in front of my customers. I sometimes talk about this whole organization is kind of like I'm the chef, and all of the food that comes out of my kitchen has to taste like my food. Even if I'm not the one who actually cooked it, it's still my food. It's still got to taste like my food. So my photos need to look like my photos, whether or not I was the one who actually clicked the button. I'm kind of a control freak. “Kind of” — yeah, right. I'm a total control freak and my students know that. It's the whole premise of how I teach photography is, “You can be a control freak, too, and take better pictures because of it.” Anyway, I don't want to rush through the editing process. I would much rather save it for the evening, and then we get it done and we get it done well, and then my customers are only seeing the best images. Those two pieces: the sorting by dog and then the edit at night and don't have things available until the next day. For day three, if we're shooting on a Sunday, that makes things a little bit complicated, but we've found ways to help people, “Well, I know I want to buy a collage, but I haven't seen all the pictures yet,” we have ways to work around that. Melissa Breau: I'd imagine that at some of these big events, things are pretty high stakes and pretty high pressure. You joked earlier about slipping a memory card in last-minute, but have you ever had something just go totally wrong, and if so, will you share? Amy Johnson: Sure. There's always things. And there are so many moving parts to this that it's amazing in some ways that there aren't more things that go wrong. There are a couple of things that come to mind immediately because they're the most stressful to me. There's a lot of things that could go wrong, but I have learned to just let it roll off me, not a big deal. But the two things that could go wrong are if a camera breaks or if my software in the booth goes a little wonky. I did actually have a camera break. My camera, the one I was using, suddenly quit working in the middle of the last day of Cynosport last year in Tennessee. Literally it just … and found out later, after I sent it in for repair, the whole mirror assembly inside of the camera just came apart. I don't have any explanation for it, but it wouldn't focus, the shutter button couldn't make the camera take a picture anymore. Well, I'm a huge believer in backups, and that applies to both computers and it applies to cameras. So I had a backup camera. I called up to my booth, and one of the guys came down with the backup camera. I probably missed maybe ten or fifteen dogs, I mean it felt like forever, but it wasn't. It just felt like, Oh my god, there's another dog that went, oh my god, there's another dog that went. So I missed dogs and that about killed me, but we made it through. I had a camera up and running again in probably ten or fifteen dogs, finished out the day, no problem. That is the only time it's ever happened. Oh no, I take that back. It did happen with actually a rental camera just was not working right at another show many years ago. So that doesn't happen a lot, but I do have backup gear. I can't come to one of these events and say, “Oh, I'm sorry, we can't shoot that ring because we don't have enough cameras because one broke.” That's just not acceptable. It's not like we have double the number of cameras, but we certainly have, even if everybody's shooting, there's always at least one backup. My software that is running in the booth is actually custom software that my husband wrote because he's brilliant. So we have this point of sale software, and because it's custom, it's also a little bit … it's not finicky, but I'm the only one at the show who knows all of the idiosyncrasies and all the ins and outs. If something happens, if it's not just the wireless network going down or the printer not responding, if it's anything more than that, then it usually involves me having to go up there and fix it. Both at the Nationals both this year and a year ago, I had one of my booth staff come down and hover behind me and say, “Amy, the pictures aren't coming up. What do we do?” Thankfully, this year, one of the other rings was idle, and so the shooter for one of the rings came over and he took over for me, and I was able to go up to the booth and fix it. Those are the two things that stress me out the most: if the software goes wonky or if a camera breaks. There are other little things. Someone's camera wasn't set up with the right file format, and there are ways to work around that. We've never lost images because of it. I don't know. There's always weird things going on, but the major things are if gear goes down or if software goes down.Melissa Breau: What other behind-the-scenes things are there that competitors or novice photographers might not have thought about? Any advice for others who are interested in getting involved in this stuff? Amy Johnson: The first thing I'll say, the behind-the-scenes, it is fun, it's really fun, because I always get there a day early to set up the booth, so I'm kind of in on the setup. I'm watching, whether it's USDAA or AKC or NADAC, I get to see some of their behind-the-scenes stuff as well. The people that I work with in each of these organizations are amazing, and we have a really good working relationship, and it's always, “Oh, it's so good to see you again.” The thing that impresses me is how much they are as concerned about making sure they do what's best for the dogs as the handlers are concerned about doing what's best for the dogs. Not everybody agrees with every decision that an agility organization makes, but the message that I keep seeing over and over and over every time I work with them is that they're in this for the same reasons. I hope that comes through to exhibitors, but I know that that can get lost in the chaos sometimes. My photographers and I live and die on those courses with all the dogs. We sit there and see every single dog that runs. We see everything that happens, and we rejoice in the great runs and we are destroyed a little bit with every run that doesn't go quite as planned. We feel bad, and if we could get the dog through the course ourselves, we could probably just will it to happen, because we are your silent cheering squad, whether you know it or not. If there's a photographer, one of my photographers, at your ring, they are cheering for you silently, because we don't want to distract the dog. We are thrilled when you do well, and we love watching your runs, and we love watching the cool things that happen, the relationships that we see when it all comes together, or you get to the end of your run and it went well or it didn't go well and it doesn't matter and you're having a good time with your dog. You will always have at least a cheering squad of one when we're there. A weird thing that I'll throw out there — this doesn't happen so much at a national, but at my local shows I've had people approach me and say, “Can you just sit there and take pictures and let me get my dog used to the click of the camera?” I would just say that I love that, because rather than being a scapegoat — we talked about that earlier — this is someone being proactive and saying, “I want to help my dog work through this,” and I am thrilled to death to be able to help with that. We're not scary people, even though we have these big, giant pieces of metal and glass in our hands. We're really not scary people, so come and ask us to help, and we're happy to do so. Novice photographers, the biggest thing you can do is learn how your camera works, like, really well. Not just where the shutter button is, and not where the auto mode is, but learn how it works. Learn about exposure, learn about how to capture motion, and learn about the behavior of your subject. Make sure you know your subject. If you're thinking about going into dog events, don't feel like you have to know it all at the very beginning. Yes, you need to know how to take good pictures, but in terms of actually doing the business side of it, make sure you do all the things that you have to do from the legal standpoint of course — register as a business and sales tax and all that good stuff. But you don't have to have a full booth. You don't have to have twenty-five different products. Just start somewhere. Go take pictures, try things out, see what works, see what doesn't, and then the next time you go do a trial, you do a little bit better. And eventually, 18 years later, you find yourself at a national event managing eleven other people and you wonder how it happened. But start with baby steps. Everything I've done in this business has been very incremental. I didn't suddenly go from just me to having a staff of twelve or thirteen. It's been very gradual and very incremental all along the way. Melissa Breau: To round things out, where can people go to learn a little bit more about this stuff? Amy Johnson: Isn't it amazing, but FDSA offers photography classes! Melissa Breau: Imagine that! Amy Johnson: Imagine that! If you don't know anything about photography, I will say Shoot The Dog, which is my beginner intro course, is coming up in June. That's a great place to start. If you know a little bit, just enough to be dangerous, then you might consider doing Chase The Dog, which is my course on how to photograph dogs in motion. If you don't want to take courses through FDSA, that's fine, or if you feel like you're beyond that, that's fine as well. I do offer mentorships on an informal basis, but I have had students come through my classes who are now working for me. The way that happens is they take my classes, they do well — these are Gold students; you can't do this at Bronze because I have to be able to see your work. But if you think you want to do this, frankly, the best way to get on my radar as someone who has the chops to do this is to be a Gold student and to come through that way. I have students who came through all my courses and came to a national event and shot the event but didn't have their images included for sale. It was still just me, or still just my regular staff. But then I got to see the images and we could evaluate. The next time it's now you'll be double-covering a ring and you just are responsible for getting one or two shots, as opposed to the normal four to five shots that a full-fledged photographer would do. It's something that has worked really well for several of my students. I'm on … I think number three is working with me now. So it's a really good way to get into the business. It won't help you develop a clientele locally, but it will let you see an event photography business from the inside, and you can decide if you don't want to edit photos at night in terms of when you do your own business, you can see what pieces of my ideas you would want to retain and what pieces you maybe aren't interested in doing. It doesn't hurt me. You have to build your business the way you want to build your own business. But that is something that I've slowly been offering on a very limited basis to students that have expressed that interest. That's kind of the advanced level of stuff, but definitely if you are interested in photography, start with Shoot The Dog, and then Chase the Dog definitely is the one where we really work seriously on the dogs in motion. And not just for agility. We try and cover all sorts of different types of motion. Melissa Breau: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Amy! Amy Johnson: It was great fun. Thanks for having me. Melissa Breau: It was so interesting to learn a little bit about behind-the-scenes stuff. That was awesome. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in and joining us for that! We'll be back next week with Sara Brueske. We'll be chatting about the benefits of teaching tricks … and a little bit about disc dog! 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.

Summary: Kathy Sdao is an applied animal behaviorist. She has spent 30 years as a full-time animal trainer, first with marine mammals and now with dogs and their people. She currently owns Bright Spot Dog Training where she consults with families about their challenging dogs, teaches private lessons to dogs and their owners, and coaches novices and professionals to cross over to positive-reinforcement training. She's been interviewed pretty much everywhere worth reading — at least as far as dog info is concerned — consulted with organizations including Guide Dogs for the Blind, appeared on Bill Nye the Science Guy, and is one of the original faculty members for Karen Pryor's long-running ClickerExpos. She is also the author of Plenty in Life is Free: Reflections on Dogs, Training, and Finding Grace. Links Plenty in Life is Free: Reflections on Dogs, Training, and Finding Grace (via Dogwise) www.kathysdao.com Next Episode:  To be released 5/4/2018, featuring Michele Pouliot, talking about being a change-maker in the dog world. 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 Kathy Sdao -- Kathy is an applied animal behaviorist. She has spent 30 years as a full-time animal trainer, first with marine mammals and now with dogs and their people. She currently owns Bright Spot Dog Training where she consults with families about their challenging dogs, teaches private lessons to dogs and their owners, and coaches novices and professionals to cross over to positive-reinforcement training. She's been interviewed pretty much everywhere worth reading — at least as far as dog info is concerned — consulted with organizations including Guide Dogs for the Blind, appeared on Bill Nye the Science Guy, and is one of the original faculty members for Karen Pryor's long-running ClickerExpos. She is also the author of Plenty in Life is Free: Reflections on Dogs, Training, and Finding Grace. I'm incredibly thrilled to have her here today! Hi Kathy! Welcome to the podcast. Kathy Sdao: Hi Melissa. Thanks so much for the invitation. This is going to be fun. Melissa Breau: To start us out, do you mind just sharing a little bit about your own dogs and anything you're working on with them? Kathy Sdao: What an embarrassing way to start! I currently have just one dog of my own. His name is Smudge. He's a … who knows what he is. He's a mixed breed. Let's call him a Catahoula mixed breed. He's about 3 years old, and as I'm reminded after my walk in the woods with him this morning that the combination of young man in a hoodie on a skateboard with an off-leash dog running beside this young man — too much for Smudge to deal with on our walk in the woods, so rather than dog sports, I'm still training this young dog that the world is full of interesting adventures and you really don't have to bark at them when they startle you. So we're still doing real-world training just getting him out with me every day in my environment here in Tacoma, Washington, which is beautiful. We spend a lot of time outside. I also am very good friends with the magnificent Michele Pouliot, and she has offered to choreograph a freestyle routine for Smudge and me, and I feel like that would be crazy for me not to take her up on that. So if I ever dip my toe into the water of dog sports, it's likely to be freestyle, because I have an awesome friend offering to help me. Melissa Breau: That's fantastic, and hey, I can't blame him. I think that if a guy showed up suddenly and surprised me wearing a hoodie and a skateboard with a dog running next to him, I might be a little startled too. Kathy Sdao: I was having such a peaceful walk, and then we turned a corner and I'm like, Uh-oh, this isn't going to work. Fortunately, that kid was really nice about it. We all kind of laughed, so it ended up well, but anyway, training goes on, right? Melissa Breau: Absolutely. How did you originally get into training? Can you share a little bit on your background? Kathy Sdao: When I do Career Days at schools. I think kids always think it was planned, like “You had a plan.” I didn't have a plan. I was a premed student in college and took an elective, animal behavior, a psych course, which I thought, That'll be easy. The professor, Dr. Pat Ebert, had a need of someone to help her with some research she was doing and just happened to be at the aquarium where I lived in Niagara Falls, New York. She needed a research assistant, and I went to the aquarium and did some observation work there and fell into the rabbit hole and quit premed and changed my major to psychology. My beloved dad will turn 97 years old next month, and he still has not gotten over the shock that his daughter left premed to do this crazy career he has never once understood. So it was serendipity that got me to that aquarium where I ended up training my first animal, a harbor seal. My professor, Dr. Ebert, passed away very suddenly and at a very young age, 32, from liver cancer, and I don't know, I always felt like there's some way to pass the gauntlet on to me to study the science of animal learning and be brave about it. I applied to graduate school after I got my bachelor's degree in fields that could study animal behavior, and all the schools I was going to study either rats or pigeons, except the University of Hawaii, where I would be studying dolphins. I got accepted to the University of Hawaii to study dolphins, got accepted to Rutgers to study rats, it wasn't much of a choice: Newark to study rats or Honolulu to study dolphins. That was the beginning. The second animal I learned to train was a dolphin at the University of Hawaii, so that started my career in a really different kind of way. Melissa Breau: I certainly understand that decision. I think most people would choose dolphins over rats or pigeons. Kathy Sdao: You know, it's funny, Melissa. Rutgers gave me a big scholarship and I turned it down and they really were mortified. They couldn't believe I was leaving money on the table there. In retrospect, I think I made a good choice. Melissa Breau: It certainly served you well. From dolphins to dogs, it's a pretty big bridge there. What led you to go from marine animals and zoo animals — because you did some of that, too, if you want to talk about that — to dogs? Kathy Sdao: When I was fortunate enough to start my career working with marine mammals, I actually worked in three different, amazing settings. For several years I worked at the University of Hawaii, when I was a graduate student, on the research done there that included, among other cool things, teaching sign language to bottlenose dolphins back in the 1980s. That was just an amazing way to start a training career. I got my masters degree and then was hired as one of the first women to work for the United States Navy's Department of Defense that was training dolphins at the time to do mine detection and detonation work, also a job in Hawaii, working to prepare those dolphins to be turned over to sailors to actually be in the military. Another amazing job and worked there for several years, and then decided that it was time, even though I loved Hawaii, to go to a place that was more reasonable to live, just cost of living-wise. Honolulu's gorgeous but expensive. There were two jobs on the mainland in the United States that year that I decided I was going to transition back to the mainland. One was at Disneyland in Orlando and one was at Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, Washington. I never lived either place, I didn't know anybody in either place, but decided that I much more preferred the Pacific Northwest and so took a job as a staff biologist at Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium, and got to work with beluga whales and porpoises and sea lions and fur seals and walruses and polar bears and sea otters and an amazing collection of marine mammals. Having worked at the zoo for five years, though, realized it was a difficult job. It was tough physically, it can be tough emotionally — I know people are listening; if they've done some zoo work, it's challenging — and so made the decision that it was time to leave the zoo. But I didn't want to leave Tacoma, Washington. I still live here. I love it. So training dogs was my creative solution to earn a living and not have to move, and I can't even recall to you, Melissa, how humbling that switch was, because I was cocky enough to go, “Hey, I've trained really cool, big, exotic animals. Dogs are going to be a piece of cake.” And oh, they weren't. I really didn't know what I was doing at all, and quickly found out that I needed a lot more dog savvy if I was going to do a good job, and opened up the first dog daycare in Tacoma, Washington, back in the mid-1990s. Nobody had ever heard of a dog day care here. I had to get special zoning from the city. They thought we were nuts. But I opened that dog daycare to be able to get my eyeballs on dog behavior more and to be immersed in it. I know you've got listeners that work in dog daycares, own dog daycares, it's a good immersion process for the human to learn about dog behavior. So that was my entry into dog work, and started teaching classes at night in clicker training, and that was really new at the time, a new way to set up dog training classes back in the late 1990s, so haven't looked back since. And though I loved my time with marine mammals and other exotic species, I really don't miss it. I'm just as intrigued working with dogs and their people as I ever was with the exotics. Melissa Breau: You mentioned that there was a little bit of a transition there. Can you share some of the similarities and differences and what they were as you went from training dolphins and zoo animals to dogs? Kathy Sdao: I really look right now, when I'm looking for teachers for myself … it's interesting, Melissa. One of the reasons I asked you if you would be so kind as to delay our appointment for this recording was so that I could spend a couple of hours this morning listening yet again to my colleague and friend Dr. Susan Friedman. She was doing a webinar this morning on a topic I've heard her teach on before, but I'm like, No, I would like to listen to Dr. Friedman again. What I look for in my teachers when I'm making choices is I really love teachers who are transparent and authentic. So your question invites me to be transparent and authentic, because I'm going to say to you that transition, which should have been smooth in terms of training techniques, I really was able to learn to be a trainer in some extraordinary settings that really call out the best skills. People often say, “You know, it's amazing that the dolphins could learn that mine detection and detonation work,” and keep in mind the work I did for the Navy was classified, it is no longer classified, I can tell you about it. The dolphins' lives were not in danger. That sounds really dramatic, like we were risking the dolphins. We were not. The dolphins and the sailors, the military, all the personnel, all the military personnel, dolphins and people, moved away from the setting before anything was detonated. I don't want any listeners to think, oh my gosh, how cavalier I am about that training. It was as safe as possible for everybody. But in saying that, people go, “That's amazing you could teach that to the dolphins,” and I say, “No, no. What was amazing is every one of those dozens and dozens of dolphins that we took out to the open ocean every day had to jump back in our motorboats, our Boston whalers, to go back to their enclosures every evening, every afternoon, good training session, bad training session. They were free, and they had to choose to jump on a boat and come back to the enclosures.” When you have that as your school for learning, you get an ego. So I got an ego to go, “Hey, I trained open ocean dolphins. How hard is it to train dogs?” Not only was it hard, here's the thing I'm sort of dancing around that I'm humbled by. I didn't think dogs could be trained using the same methods as marine mammals. So I really, switching over species, switched training methods and apprenticed with a local balanced trainer. That wasn't a term at the time in the mid-'90s, but used leash corrections and also positive reinforcement, but all mixed together. So I learned how to pop a choke chain, and I trained that way for, I want to say, at least a year, with only the mildest cognitive dissonance in the back of my head going, Why would dogs be different than every other species I've ever worked with? But of course we've got a mythology about why dogs are different. We can tell that story about pack leaders and hierarchies, and we can spin a good tale about why all other animals can be trained using positive reinforcement and a marker signal, but not dogs, they need corrections. Karen Pryor, fortuitously, happened to be talking in Seattle. She was giving a seminar, and I went to the seminar because Karen's a friend, so I just like, Hey, I'll go visit Karen. I don't need to learn anything about training. Now I'm mortified to say that out loud. Karen started the weekend seminar — I still remember it, it was more than twenty years ago — Karen started the weekend seminar to this big room filled with dog trainers, hundreds of dog trainers, and she said, “I'd really be grateful if no one gave a leash correction over the time we're together this weekend. It's upsetting to me, and it's upsetting to the dogs and anybody who has to watch it.” And then she just went on to talk, and like, What? What is she talking about? There's going to be anarchy in here. What does she mean, no leash correction? I had no idea what she was talking about. Oh my gosh, I'm so glad I wandered into that seminar with her, because she started the dominoes falling in my mind to be able to say, Why, possibly, would you not do this with dogs? She was such a good friend and mentor to me, to help me be brave enough to teach classes in my city in a completely different way that dog training colleagues were saying to me, “Absolutely impossible. You're going to fail at this.” So I'm grateful to her and so many people that taught me that it was possible. But my transition was ugly, so if you saw me in that time of me trying to figure out, does all the learning and training I did with marine mammals for over a decade, does it really fit in with dogs? Aren't dogs different? And the answer really is, no, they're not. Good thing I could bring all my other skills into the training. It's a different way to train dogs, but I'd say it's a better way and it's certainly more fun. So that kept me going for a long time, because I don't think we all agree on that yet, so there's work to do. Melissa Breau: That's really interesting. It's a specific pivot point or turning point for you. At what point would you say you actually became, to steal a line from your website, focused on positive, unique solutions, and what has kept you interested in positive training and made you transition to that so completely? Kathy Sdao: I owned that dog daycare for several years, and then at some point felt like I could fledge from that work. It was good work, but it wasn't really feeding me, so I switched at that point to becoming a behavior consultant, becoming a certified applied animal behavior consultant. And so, at that point, to be able to help people create solutions for challenging problems — that brought out a different level of my knowledge than running a daycare. So I'd have to say it was at that point that you have to make decisions about … today we'd look at the Humane Hierarchy and we'd go, “Wow, that algorithm, that sort of model for choosing behavior interventions to be least intrusive for the learner” — I couldn't have given that language back in the late 1990s. That's in reality what I'm doing with the best teachers I can to help me, because I'm now entering people's lives and their families to help them resolve behavior problems with a family member, so that changes things. The idea of that algorithm for interventions, for our training methods with nonhuman learners, comes to us from the work that behavior analysts do with children. And so to make that line fuzzier, to stop saying “humans and animals” like that's a dichotomy, humans or animals, we are animals, and the that learning we do, the teaching we do with animals and people, I want there to be no line dividing those two. So to be able to say, to help a family understand they can help their dog become less aggressive through skilled behavior intervention that's mostly focused on positive reinforcement of alternative behaviors, if I can help a family do that, it changes their lives. It not only changes that dog's life, but if I do my job right, it helps that family become curious about how behavior works. And you know what? We all behave. I love the kids' book Everybody Poops. I want there to be a kids' book called Everybody Behaves. We had the zookeepers read the Everybody Poops kids' book. I'm not a parent of human children, but parents tell me, “Oh yeah, that's a classic book. We read Everybody Poops in our family.” Where's the book Everybody Behaves, so that you can understand if you can change the behavior in one family member, and it happens to be your four-legged dog, and you're successful at that, and you sort of had fun doing it, and you didn't have to be coercive, oh my gosh, then what does that open up for you in terms of all the other behavior change solutions you can come up with? The reason that's interesting to me is I like my species a lot. The colleagues I have that say, “Oh, I work with animals because I don't much like people” are in the wrong business. We should like our species, because I feel like we're doomed if we don't learn some better ways of interacting. So I honestly feel like I'm helping people learn about better ways of interacting. I'm teaching them nonviolence in an around-the-corner, sneaky way to go, “Yeah, we're just training your dog,” but not really. That's never how I'm going into a situation. I'm hoping we can all be learning together to be effective at the same time we're being nonviolent. There's tons of work to do on that. I'm never going to run out of work. It's a tall mountain to climb. Every dog that comes into my consultation office — I mean this sincerely — I'm still fascinated at the learning. I had a new … it's a new breed for me … I always joke when people first contact me and they say, “What do you know about this obscure breed?” Like, in other words, “Are you an expert in …?” My answer to this is “No, but I've trained like fifty different species. Does that count that I don't know?” So a new breed for me this month was a lovely, lovely client with two Berger Picards, Picardy Shepherds. Beautiful dogs, but the breeder talked my elderly client into taking two puppies — “As long as you're going to take one, why don't you take two?” Breeders! Breeders, breeders, breeders! Anyway, lovely woman, retired, her husband just retired, now have two very active herding puppies. As those dogs come into my office, and they've got some behavior issues, but just to watch them learn. Tuesday I was sitting on the floor with them, teaching them just basic behaviors, and to watch their behavior change and their agency kick in that they realized, wow, their behavior is controlling my click, I don't know, it never gets boring for me. I've been doing this for a long time, and I'm still as excited with each dog that comes in as I was in the beginning. Aren't I lucky? Melissa Breau: That's awesome, and it totally comes through in that answer. I do want to back up for a second, because you mentioned two things there that I'm curious. All listeners may not be familiar with what the Humane Hierarchy is, or what it means, and I was hoping you could briefly explain the phrase. Kathy Sdao: I shouldn't presume people know it, but I'm hoping it becomes a common term in our conversations about training, because, Melissa, you've been doing this a long time, too, you know trainers like to have opinions about what's the right way to do things. And unfortunately, at least in the United States, there aren't a lot of laws about what are the right ways to do things, and it's a Wild West out there, at least in my neck of the woods, about what's considered acceptable training practices. I've had two different clients come to me, new clients come to me, in the last couple of months, having gone to another local … we'll call it a trainer. Both of their dogs were in the course of a ten-week package of private lessons. In Week 6, both dogs were hung until they passed out, in Week 6, to make sure that the dogs knew who the leader was. Were hung until they passed out. This is acceptable training. It boggles my mind. So to be able to have an algorithm model to be able to say, “What's OK when you're intervening in another organism's behaviors? Is effectiveness all we care about, that it works?” I first learned of the Humane Hierarchy through Dr. Susan Friedman's teaching, and the easiest way, I think, to find out about it would be on her website, behaviorworks.org. I certainly think if you Googled “Humane Hierarchy in training,” you would see that it's a series of, the last time I looked at it, six levels of intervention. Six choices you would have as a trainer for how you could change your learner's behavior, starting from the least intrusive way, basically looking at the learner's physical environment and health situation, to the most intrusive way, Level 6, which would be positive punishment, and that there would be lots of cautions and prohibitions before you'd ever get to Level 6, and that often, if we're doing our jobs really in a skillful way, we never have to consider using positive punishment, the addition of something painful, pressuring, or annoying, contingent on our learner's behavior. Positive punishment is done so casually and flippantly in dog training, especially in the United States, without a second thought, and this sort of hierarchy of methods we might use really calls out our best practices to say we have a lot of other approaches to go through before we jump right to punishing our learner for behavior we find dangerous or destructive. So I think learning and conversation that continues around the Humane Hierarchy, which comes to us trainers from where? From the rules for behaviorist analysts working with children, human children. They can't just go in and do whatever they want. They have professional restrictions, as should we, as trainers. But that day is not here yet for us. It's coming, I hope. So I find that to be a really helpful model. It's not the only model out there, but it's the one I go to most often when I'm teaching and also when I'm being a consultant. Melissa Breau: Thank you. I appreciate you taking a moment just to break that down and explain it for everybody. And then you mentioned Everybody Poops, and I haven't read that book. So actually I'm curious. Can you give us the gist of what we can imply from the title? Kathy Sdao: You know what? I'm being really serious. I have not read it since I was a zookeeper and was required. I'm not kidding. It's a kids' book, I would think the age group is probably 4-year-olds, to be able to say to your child, “Poop is normal. Poop is good. Don't worry about your poop. We all poop. We've got this thing in common. It's cool.” It's actually a powerful message, like, “Wow, all right, there's nothing weird about that. Everybody poops.” But seriously, in the back of my head I've got this Everybody Behaves book, because if you understood behavior in one organism, seriously … I've got dear clients right now, they're just lovely, they've been my clients for a long time. I'm actually friends with the family now, and one of my clients has a 9-year-old son. As a birthday present he got the fish agility set from R2 Fish School, so 9-year-old boy, he's got his fish agility equipment. What he said to me when I saw him just two days ago, he said to me, “Kathy, I have a science fair coming up. Can you help me teach the fish to do weave poles?” I'm like, This is the best question I've ever been asked. Seriously, I'm so ecstatic I can't even stand it. That a 9-year-old would say, “For my science project I'm going to teach fish to do weave poles”? Aren't we hopeful what that 9-year-old boy is going to grow into, just for the good of the world? Seriously. Melissa Breau: That is so cool. Kathy Sdao: He is going to have the perfect approach to being a parent and a boss and a friend. He's got it at the age of 9, because he's going to teach that fish. And how do you teach the fish? The same way I taught the dolphins and the same way I teach the dogs. It's all the same learning, so that learning principals are general and everybody behaves. Figure it out with one and then it spreads. It's so exciting. So yes, I'm going to help Ryan with his goldfish-training project. We're in the process now of choosing the right fish. It's just making me very happy. Melissa Breau: I seriously hope you video some of that and share it, just because that's so cool. It's such a neat project. It's such a neat science project. Kathy Sdao: One of the most valuable books I've got on my shelf, and I will never sell it, it was vanity-published probably 20 years ago. The title of the book is How to Dolphin Train Your Goldfish, and the thing that made me buy it in the first place is the author, C. Scott Johnson, was a really high and bio-sonar Ph.D. at the Navy, seriously geeky researcher into sonar. He helped us set up some of the training for the dolphins. I'm like, That's such an odd name, C. Scott Johnson. I see it on a book list, I'm like, He wrote a book. It's a 20-page, black-and-white, vanity-published, it is not a high-end book, but it is a perfect description of teaching five tricks to a goldfish and it's brilliant. So now everybody's going to go on Amazon and try to find the book and it's impossible. I wrote to him once and said, “If you've got cases of this book in your garage, I can sell them for you, because it's awesome.” So I've got good resources to help Ryan, and yes, Melissa, it's a great tip. I will videotape. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. I wanted to ask you, as somebody who has been a full-time animal trainer for over 30 years now, and in dogs for quite a while too, how have you seen the field change? What changes are you maybe even seeing today? Kathy Sdao: Oh my gosh, how long do we have? Oh my gosh, the changes. I don't even know where to start. I just taught at my 35th ClickerExpo — 35th. I've gotten the honor and privilege of not only teaching but attending 35 ClickerExpos over 15 years with amazing faculty as my colleagues, oh my gosh. To look back at the first ClickerExpo 15 years ago, what we were teaching and talking about, and now? I wonder when is it that I need to retire, because everything's just moved beyond me. It's so, gosh, I feel like a dinosaur sometimes. So, first off, I already alluded to the idea that whatever species we train is not unique in how they learn. Now, they might be unique in what reinforces them, how we're going to choose our reinforcers, or how we're going to set up the environment, or what behaviors we might teach first, absolutely. But that doesn't mean that the actual laws of learning and that choice of what training methods we will use, maybe with the Humane Hierarchy as a reference for us on how to do that effectively without taking control away from our learner, to be able to say that's general throughout species, to me, that's new. I like that we're moving in that direction and stopping the conversation, or maybe not having so much of the conversation, that says, “Rottweilers learn this way, and they need this kind of training,” and “High-drive dogs, they need this particular kind of training.” I like that the conversation's moving to more general. In fact, even the terminology, my terminology, has changed from saying “the animal learned” to “the learner,” so we are actually using a noun that encompasses nonhuman animals and human animals. And actually even the word training is being replaced by the verb teaching. I'm liking that. It's just a reflection that we teach learners rather than train animals just is taking that it's not just politically correct, it's reflecting the science, which says we can use some of these general principals to our advantage and to the learner's advantage, right? Melissa Breau: Right. Kathy Sdao: Even the idea that we want to empower our learners, you know, when I started with dogs, that was heresy. You would empower the dog? You're supposed to be the leader. You're supposed to be in charge. This is not about empowering. It's about showing them their place. They need to learn deference. They need to learn their place in the hierarchy, and if they get that sorted out, all the good behavior will come along with it. To be able to say that your learner can not only make choices but … I'm so intrigued by this; this is kind of new learning to me and I'm still playing with it. So to be able to say, “Give your learner a way to say “no” to opt out of anything, opt out of a social contact, opt out of a husbandry behavior you've asked the dog to do.” If the dog says, “No, I don't feel like, it,” that we not only accept that no, we reinforce the no — this is like mind-blowing. What does that mean that you say to your learner, “You don't have to. You don't have to”? I'm just intrigued that this doesn't produce complete opting out, the animal doesn't want to do anything, you get no compliance at all. No, instead, you set the animal free to feel so brave and safe in your presence that they're not compelled or pressured to do behaviors. I don't know. I feel like this is a new conversation that I've had with colleagues, again not just about allowing animals to opt out, but reinforcing them for opting. Ken Ramirez talked about training beluga whales, a specific beluga whale, to have a buoy in the tank that she could press with her big old beluga melon, her big head, and say, “No, I don't feel like doing it.” The data he collected with his team at Shedd Aquarium — what did that actually do? What did we get in her behavior? Less cooperation? Or did it provide her safety to be able to work with us in a more fluent way? I don't know. Twenty years ago I can't even imagine we would have had a conversation like that. Melissa Breau: That's so cool. It's such a neat concept. I'll have to go look up the specific stuff that Ken's put out on it, because I don't think I've had the chance to hear him talk about it. So that's cool. Kathy Sdao: You know, it's funny that you say that, Melissa. The timing is really great, because the videos from this year's ClickerExpo — there's two ClickerExpos a year in the U.S., one in January on the West Coast and one in March on the East Coast. The presentations, and there's a lot of them — there are three days, five simultaneous tracks, it's a lot of presentations — but those are recorded, and they're usually not available until the summer, but I know that they're going to be released later this week. So clickertraining.com, you could actually look for Ken Ramirez's presentation on — I think it's called Dr. No — on teaching animals to be able to opt out of procedures. You would actually not only be able to read about it, Ken has written on clickertraining.com about that procedure, you'd actually be able to hear Ken teach on it. So just to know there's a wealth of educational stuff. Gosh, there's lots of good stuff out there, but those ClickerExpo recordings are just one thing you can take advantage of and soon. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. And actually this will be out next Friday, so by the time this comes out, those will be available, so anybody who wants to go check them out can. Kathy Sdao: Thanks Melissa. Melissa Breau: We talked about the change that you've seen. What about where the field is heading, or even just where you'd like for it to go in the next few decades? What do you think is ahead for us? Kathy Sdao: It's a different question between where it is going and where I want it to go. I don't actually know where it's going. What I dream about. I dream about this. We need some guidelines. We need some legal guidelines. We need some way to have a field that has professional standards, and I don't know what that looks like, and I know that's not an easy thing to do, but it's just not OK. Yes, we continue to educate, and we continue to raise the standards, but I want to bring everybody along with us, meaning all my colleagues. That big line we tend to draw — I'm certainly guilty of this — of this “Us, the positive trainers, and them, the other trainers,” and there's this big chasm between us. I want to feel like there's not a big chasm between us. We're all doing the best we can with the knowledge we have, and you're putting more information out there through these amazing podcasts and through all the classes that I'm going to call the Academy, it's not the Academy, I don't know … Melissa Breau: FDSA. Kathy Sdao: The acronym doesn't trip off my tongue. But to be able to go, there's amazing education and I know there is, because I've got colleagues teaching for you, and I've got students who take those courses and rave and are learning so much. That's great. I love the increased educational opportunities, and the bar has really gotten higher. They're better. We're better at teaching this stuff. But I feel there's got to be a way that there's a professional ethic that comes along with. We've all got to be striving and moving toward better practices. It's no longer OK to say, “We've always used these coercive tools with dogs, and we've been able to teach them just fine.” I want that not to be so OK anymore. I'm not sounding very eloquent on this because I don't know exactly how to say … I strive for the day when I'm not losing sleep over what the dog trainer down the street is doing in the name of training. I would like to not lose sleep over what a professional dog trainer with a slick website can do. Melissa Breau: And I totally get you. I want to transition for a minute there. I'd love to talk a little bit about your book. I mentioned it in the intro, the title is Plenty in Life is Free: Reflections on Dogs, Training, and Finding Grace. Can you start off by explaining the name a little bit, and then share a little on what the book is about?   Kathy Sdao: Thanks Melissa. I sort of love my book, so thanks for giving me an opportunity to talk about it. I have to credit my publishers at Dogwise. Larry Woodward — what a lovely, kind man. My original title for that book, and I don't actually remember it because it was so horrible. I didn't see it. I thought it was really clever. I like puns, and so I'd come up with … honestly, I don't remember. That's how much I mentally blocked the bad title I had. Larry so graciously talked me into something else, and Plenty in Life is Free was his idea, and I really love it. The thing that really inspired me to write the book is I was becoming disenchanted with “Nothing in life is free” protocols that not only was I running into that my colleagues would use, but I used all the time in my consultation practice. I would hand out instructions on “For your aggressive dog,” or your anxious dog or whatever behavior problem brought my clients to me. Basic rule of thumb we would start at was your dog would get nothing that the dog would consider a reinforcer without doing a behavior for you first. Often these are implemented as the dog must sit before any food, toy, attention, freedom, there can be other behaviors, but it's sort of like you don't pay unless the dog complies with one of your signals first. Those were at the time, and still in some places, not only ubiquitous, like everywhere, but applied to any problem. So not only were they really common, they're applied to any problem, and the more I used them and really looked at them, I found them wanting in a lot of ways. Not only were they inadequate, but it seemed to me that they were producing really constrained relationships, like not free flowing, spontaneous, joyful relationships between people and their dogs, that everything was all those reinforcers were minutely controlled and titrated. I had clients say to me, “Oh my gosh, I pet my dog for nothing, just because she's cute.” I'm like, When did that become a problem? When is loving your dog the issue? And so the more I took a look at them, I realized I and maybe some of my colleagues were handing those out because we didn't have a way to be able to say, “Yes, we want to reinforce good behavior, but we don't want to be so stringent about it that we don't allow for the free flow of attention and love between family members that we aspire to, to have a joyful life.” Not only did I want to point out the concerns I had for those “Nothing in life is free” or “Say please” protocols — they come by different names — but to give an alternative. So to be able to say, if I looked at my masters degree in animal learning, what would the science say would be the replacement foundation advice we would be giving people. If I'm going to pull the “Nothing in life is free” handout out of my colleagues' hands — and that's what some people who have read the book said: “Wait, that's my Week 1 handout for class. What am I going to do?” “I know, let me give you another handout.” So, for me, it would be the acronym SMART. I don't use a lot of acronyms. I worked for the military, you can get really carried away with acronyms, but SMART — See, Mark, And Reinforce Training — is a really nice package to be able to tell my clients what habits I want to create in them. Because I'm actually changing their behavior. Anytime we teach, we're changing the human's behavior. What is it that science says we want the humans to do more of? Notice the behavior. Become a better observer. See behavior in your learner. Mark the behavior you want to see more of. Use a clicker, use a word, use a thumbs up. We're not going to debate too much about has to be one particular sort of marker signal, but marking is good. It gives information to your learner that's really important. And reinforce. So to be able to say, if I can develop that see, mark, and reinforce habit in my humans, the animal's behavior, the dog's behavior, is going to change, reflecting how much your habit has developed. Just to be able to shift people from that “I'm controlling every reinforcer in your life” strategy to “It's my responsibility to notice behavior I want to see more of, and to put reinforcement contingencies in place for that to make those behaviors more likely” — that's a huge shift. If we can get that going, I hope my little book might start the ball rolling in that direction. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. I know the book came out in 2012, and since then you've done some on-demand videos and you have all sorts of other resources on your site. I'd love to know what aspect of training or methods have you most excited today. What's out there that you want to talk about? Kathy Sdao: It's going to probably be a surprising answer to that. In my talks most recently, my presentations most recently, at ClickerExpo, because I've been on faculty for a long time there, interesting conversations happen about this time of year between the folks who put on ClickerExpo and me and all the other faculty and say, “Hey, what do you want to talk about next year, Kathy?” When that conversation happened last year, maybe even the year before, one of the things that's been really on my mind a lot is burnout, is burnout in my colleagues, and so sort of jokingly in that presentation, call it my Flee Control presentation, meaning I see lots of really skilled colleagues leaving the profession. I see some skilled colleagues leaving more than just the profession, leaving life. It's a really serious problem for trainers, for veterinarians, and where does this sense of burnout come from when we've spent all this time developing our mechanical training chops? We're actually good at the nuts and bolts, the physical skills of training, and we're studying the science, and we're taking courses and we're getting all this education. How is it that so many colleagues quit? It's a hard profession that we've got, those of us that are doing it professionally, and it can be exhausting. And so to be able to take a look at how we can support each other in a really skilled way, meaning taking the skills we have as trainers and applying them to our own longevity and mental health as practitioners. I think we're missing some sort of support mechanisms that are there in other professions. For instance, I have a client who's a psychiatrist and she works with a really difficult population, patients who are suicidal, very frequently suicidal and significantly suicidal, so she has a very challenging human patient load. When we were talking a little while back, she was at a dog-training lesson with her Rottweiler, we were working together, she said, “You know, every Thursday at 1:00 I have to meet with three of my peers. I have to. It's one of my professional demands. I would lose my license if I didn't. We don't look at each other's cases. We don't offer problem solutions. We give each other support. We're there to vent, we're there to listen, we're there to offload some of the grief and heartache that comes from doing our jobs well, and so that's just part of our professional standards.” My jaw sort of dropped open and I'm like, wait, what? I didn't even know that was a thing. Why is that not a thing for us? Why do we not have structures at least to support us being in this for the long haul? Because really, here's the thing. When I started out being a trainer and people said, “You've got to be a really good observer. That's what trainers do. They observe behavior.”  I'm like, cool, I'm going to get that 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell talks about on watching animals behave. That's what the dog daycare did for me, lots and lots of hours watching dogs behave. No one says to you, “Hey, let's warn you that you're not going to be able to unsee.” You can't go back. You can't stop seeing animals in distress and in difficult situations, and it develops a lot of grief in each of us. So I think I'm losing colleagues not just because they've got better job offers. It's because their hearts are breaking. I don't know what the structure looks like to say I want to help prevent burnout in a structured way, but even the title of my book is going to hint the other thing I want to say to you, Melissa, which is intentionally that book title has the word grace in it because I talk about my spirituality in that book, which is kind of weird in a dog-training book, but to me they're all one and the same. Training, to me, is a spiritual practice, completely, and so I don't think we have comfortable formats to be able to have the conversation about the overlap of animal training and spirituality, not in a really saccharine, Pollyanna kind of way, but in a really open our hearts to what's deepest and true for us. I don't know. I want to figure out ways to facilitate that conversation. Because this is the conversation I want to have, so I'm brainstorming projects I'm hoping to take on in the next year or so that will let us have some formats to have that conversation. We're always talking about reinforcement for our learners, and I never want us to forget we have to set up reinforcement for ourselves and the work that we do. I think spirituality talks about how we can develop mindfulness practices that allow us to do good work, but also to stay happy and centered while we're doing it. I'm sure there are resources out there I haven't tripped upon, but I'm intrigued at developing even more. Melissa Breau: It's such an interesting topic, and it's definitely something I don't see enough people talking about or even thinking about, just our own mental health as you are a trainer or as you work towards training. It's an important topic for sure. Kathy Sdao: Exactly. Melissa Breau: We're getting close to the end here, and I want to ask you a slightly different version of the three questions I usually ask at the end of the podcast when I have a new guest. The first one I tweaked a little bit here, but can you share a story of a training breakthrough, either on your side or on the learner's end? Kathy Sdao: Anyone who's heard me teach at all is going to have heard something about my favorite learner of all time. That's E.T., the male Pacific walrus that I got the privilege to work with at Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma. The very short version of an amazing story is when I first got hired at the zoo in 1990, I had worked with seals and sea lions and other pinnipeds, but had never even seen a walrus. So I spent the morning before my interview at the zoo, walking around the zoo and looking at the animals that I would train, and realized that E.T. — he weighed about 3500 pounds at that point — was one of the scariest animals I had ever seen. When I went into the interview I got asked the question, “If you get hired here, you're going to have to work with a new species, a Pacific walrus. What do you think about that?” Of course, anybody who's been in an interview knows that the answer is, “Ooh, I'd be really intrigued to have the opportunity.” Of course, you're saying how cool that would be, yet on the inside I'm positive that he's going to kill me. I mean this sincerely. I had moved into an unfurnished house, I had no furniture, so I have really clear memories of all I have in that house is a sleeping bag, and I'm waking up in cold sweat nightmares, sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor in my empty house in Tacoma right after I got hired, those nightmares are that E.T. is going to kill me. He is completely aggressive, humans cannot get in his exhibit, he's destroying the exhibit because it's inadequate for a walrus. It was designed for sea lions. He came to the zoo as an orphaned pup in Alaska, nobody really expected him to survive, he grew to be an adolescent. The reason that there was a job opening at that department at the zoo is all the trainers had quit. There were no marine mammal trainers at the time I got hired. I don't know why they quit, I didn't ask them, but I suspect it was because E.T. weighed nearly two tons and was an adolescent and he was dangerous, destructive, oh, and he was X-rated — he masturbated in the underwater viewing windows for a couple of hours a day, and you don't need the visuals for that. Trust me when I tell you, if you were an elementary school teacher in Tacoma, Washington, you did not go to the underwater viewing section. It was awful. We didn't know what to do with him. The end of that story that starts with truly I don't want to be anywhere near him, he's terrifying me, he becomes one of the best friends I've ever had, I trust him with my life. By the time I quit the zoo five years later, E.T. knew over 200 behaviors on cue, we got in the exhibit with him, we took naps with him, I trusted him with my life. He lived another 20 years. He passed away only a couple of years ago. He was amazing. His behavior changed so much that I am being honest when I tell you I didn't see the old walrus in the current walrus. There was no more aggression. I don't mean infrequent outbursts of aggression. I mean we didn't see it anymore, based on what? We were brilliant trainers? Based on we were stuck with him and we needed to come up — three new trainers, myself and two gentlemen from Sea World — we needed to come up with a plan to make this livable, and what came out wasn't a tolerable animal. It was genius, and I mean that sincerely. If anyone had had the chance to see E.T. working with his trainers, it wasn't just that he learned really complicated behavior chains and he was really fluent in them. It was we were his friends, and I mean that in the true sense of the word. So my biggest breakthrough is that I can say that E.T. considered me his friend. Oh my gosh, that's it, that's what I'm putting on my resume. I was E.T. the walrus's friend, and he taught me more about training and the possibilities, the potential in each learner, that given enough time and resources, we sometimes can unleash and release those behaviors. That doesn't mean we don't ever give up on animals and say, “Oh my gosh, they're too dangerous, we can't change this behavior in a way that's adequate,” but the fact that we didn't really have that easy choice with E.T., it made us pull out all our best training ideas and to be persistent. Wow, you just couldn't believe what was in there, and without videos and about ten more hours, I can't do him justice, but that we were friends? Yeah, that's my coolest accomplishment. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. My second-to-last question is, what is the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Kathy Sdao: Let me do two. I'm going to cheat. Years ago, this is straightforward training advice, but it's one that I keep in the back of my head, which is, “Train like no one's watching you.” Because even when I don't have an audience … sometimes I have a real audience and I'm onstage trying to train an animal, which is nerve-wracking, but I don't need a human audience in front of me. I have judges in my head, so I always have an audience I always carry around, my critics, and to be able to free myself from those and to instead what happens if I say, “There's no audience in my head judging me”? It frees me up to see what's happening right in front of me. There's a quote I have next to my desk and it's from outside of training context. It's from a Jesuit priest whom I like very much, Father Greg Boyle, and the phrase that's on the Post-It next to my desk says, “Now. Here. This.” To be able to be in the present moment with your learner and say, “What's happening right now? What behavior is right in front of me?” sounds really simple, but it's not. It takes real mindfulness and intention to be in the present moment. When you're paying attention to your audience, real or imagined in your head, you can't be really present. So that would be one: Train like no one's watching you. And here's one that comes from my favorite science book, and every time I have a chance to have anybody listen to me anywhere, I'm going to quote the name of the book so that I can get this book in everybody's hands: Coercion and Its Fallout, by Dr. Murray Sidman. It's an astonishing book. It's not a training book. It's a science book, but it's very readable, most easily purchased at the behavior website, behavior.org, which is the Cambridge behavioral site. It's hard to find on Amazon. You shouldn't pay much more than twenty dollars for Coercion and Its Fallout, by Dr. Murray Sidman. Here's the training advice that Dr. Sidman would give. It's not training advice, it's life advice, but it's my new tagline. Let's see how this works, Melissa, because, you know, you've been doing these podcasts for a while, you're into training deep. It's hard to go “positive training,” that phrase is kind of vague and weird, and clicker training is … so what am I? I'm going to take Dr. Sidman's, one of his lines from Coercion and Its Fallout: “Positive reinforcement works and coercion is dangerous.” That's a seven-word descriptor for what it is I do, and it comes for every learner. Positive reinforcement works, and coercion, Dr. Sidman's definition is all the other three quadrants: positive punishment, negative punishment, and negative reinforcement. So we've got the four operant conditioning quadrants. Dr. Sidman's going to go, “Positive reinforcement works.” It does the job. It's all you need. The other three quadrants, they're there, I know, we use them, but they're dangerous. I love that summary. I'm using that with my clients now. I'm seeing if I can let that really simple summary of the science and our best practices to see if it works. Melissa Breau: That's fantastic. I love that. It's a very simple, easy line to remember. Kathy Sdao: It's Dr. Sidman's genius, so take it and run with it. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Last question for you: Who is somebody else in the training world that you look up to? Kathy Sdao: There's so many. But because he's now my neighbor … Kathy, what's the most exciting thing that's happened to you recently? Ken Ramirez has moved in my back yard. I'm so excited! That genius trainer, the kindest man you'll ever meet, colleague of mine for the last 25 years, truly amazing human being, is now not only living a half-hour from me in Graham, Washington, just outside of Tacoma, he's not only living near me but offering courses. He's teaching a course this week at The Ranch. It's Karen Pryor's training facility here in Graham, Washington. It's an amazing facility, but that Ken, mentor and friend and genius trainer … a client of mine yesterday said, “Wait a minute. Who's that guy that taught the butterflies to fly on cue for the BBC's documentary?” Like, oh my gosh, that's Ken, yes, he taught butterflies, herds of butterflies, what do you call a group of butterflies, swarms of butterflies to fly on cue to the London Symphony for a big fundraising gig. Oh my god. Now is that someone you want to know more about? So I'm going to do a shout out to Ken and say you can find out more about the educational offerings at The Ranch at Karen Pryor's website, clickertraining.com. They've got a drop-down on The Ranch, and I don't live far away from there, so if you want to come beachcombing with me after you've visited Ken and learned stuff, I'll take you beachcombing. I love my beachcombing, so I'm happy to share that. Melissa Breau: That sounds like so much fun. I keep meaning to get out that way at some point and I haven't been yet, so it's definitely on the bucket list. Kathy Sdao: He's going to draw some really cool people to my neighborhood, so I'm going to share. I'm going to share. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Kathy. This has been truly fantastic. Kathy Sdao: Thanks so much, Melissa. You made it fun, and it's just a real treat to be affiliated with … now teach me the name: FDSA. Melissa Breau: Yes. Absolutely. Kathy Sdao: Excellent. So cool to be affiliated with you guys. You do great work, and I'm just honored. Melissa Breau: Thank you. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We'll be back next week, this time with — she was mentioned earlier in this podcast — Michele Pouliot to talk about being a change-maker in the dog world. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice and our next episode will be 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.

Summary: Dr. Jessica Hekman is a postdoctoral associate at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she researches how genetics affect behavior in pet and working dogs. Jessica received her Ph.D. in Animal Studies in 2017 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she studied canid behavioral genetics. Previously, Jessica graduated from the Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in 2012, with a dual DVM/MS degree. Her Master's work was on the behavior and cortisol responses of healthy dogs to being hospitalized overnight. She also completed a shelter medicine veterinary internship at the University of Florida Maddie's Shelter Medicine Program. Links www.dogzombie.com  www.darwinsdogs.org www.muttmix.org www.workingdogproject.org Video: Dopamine Jackpot! (Robert Sapolsky) Video: Sopolsky on Depression (Robert Sapolsky)  Next Episode:  To be released 4/13/2018, featuring Laura Waudby to talk about getting a happy dog in the competition ring. 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. Jessica Hekman. Dr. Jessica Hekman is a postdoctoral associate at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she researches how genetics affect behavior in pet and working dogs. Jessica received her Ph.D. in Animal Studies in 2017 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she studied canid behavioral genetics. Previously, Jessica graduated from the Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in 2012, with a dual DVM/MS degree. Her Master's work was on the behavior and cortisol responses of healthy dogs to being hospitalized overnight. She also completed a shelter medicine veterinary internship at the University of Florida Maddie's Shelter Medicine Program. Finally, she is also the most recent addition to the team of FDSA instructors! Hi Jessica, welcome to the podcast! Jessica Hekman: Thanks. I'm very excited to be here. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to have you, and I was a little nervous reading that bio because I knew there were a lot of things in there that my tongue was not going to wrap around well. Jessica Hekman: You did great. Melissa Breau: I'm pretty happy with that. To start us out, do you want to tell us a little bit about your dogs and what you're working on with them? Jessica Hekman: Yeah, I love that you start with the real easy question, because everyone likes talking about their dogs. Melissa Breau: Of course. Jessica Hekman: I have two dogs. I have Dashiell and Jenny. When I got Dash, I knew that I wanted to do dog sports with him. He's a 19-month-old English Shepherd, and for people who don't know that breed, they're closely related to Aussies and Border Collies, so it's sometimes a little scary how smart he is. He's really docile, sweet, interactive, he's so much fun to work with. We've done treibball, and we've done agility, which is my favorite sport and one I've really wanted to do with him, but he has a chronic shoulder problem right now that we're in the middle of getting under control, so agility's on hold at the moment. We've also done some parkour. I think that's his favorite because he loves to jump on things, and there's still some parkour tricks that he can do, even with his shoulder issues, but a bunch that he can't. So at the moment he's in an in-person rally class with my husband. They both really like the structure of rally, even though it's not really my thing, and then with me he's doing nosework. We did that Intro To Nosework class with Stacy last session and we both really enjoyed it. Dash is the first puppy I've ever raised. I always got rescue or shelter dogs before, but I have wanted to get into studying socialization in dogs, so I wanted to actually go through it with my own dog before doing the research. My older dog is Jenny. She's an 8-year-old mixed breed, and I know just from talking to the shelter that she came from that she definitely has some Lab in her, and we also did an ancestry test, which suggested some Samoyed, and she looks a lot like a tiny, little golden-colored Border Collie, and she sort of acts like a herding breed. She's also super-smart. She did not get enough socialization at a young age. I got her when she was about a year old, and at the time she was terrified of all people and all new places, and she peed every time I touched her. She spent the first week huddled on a dog bed in terror, and when I needed to take her outside to pee, I would crawl backwards toward her without making eye contact, and then, without looking at her, I would have this leash, and she had a little tab permanently on a harness that she wore 24/7 exactly so I wouldn't have to touch her by the collar. So I would reach backwards without looking at her and attach the leash to her tab sort of by feel, and then we would go downstairs and outside. After a week of this, one day I started crawling backwards towards her and she stood up and was like, “I understand the system and I can do it myself.” So I took her downstairs off-leash and she went outside — safely fenced yard, so that was OK — she went outside, she came back in. So that's Jenny. She's really scared of everything, but she's also game to work through it, and she finds her own out-of-the-box solutions to it. Most of the time that she's been with me we've just worked on her confidence levels, but they are really improving now, and since I got Dash she has also let me know that she is really interested in doing sports stuff too, so she also enjoys doing parkour, and we are doing nosework together as well. I don't think she's ever going to be able to go to a nosework trial, but that is fine with me. So those are my two dogs. Melissa Breau: You mentioned that Dash is the first puppy that you've raised, but you knew you wanted to do agility when you got him. How did you get into dog sports? What got you started there? Jessica Hekman: I was looking for something to do with my first dog, who was Jack, he was a Golden Retriever, so I was looking around for stuff and we started doing agility and I loved it. Jack liked it. I think he would have preferred to have done dock diving. I never found a good place to do that competitively, but we'd go to a local pond and he'd do his really impressive belly flops, so that was a good time. We did agility together for two or three years, and we got to the point of going to trials. He cued a few times. I was very impressed with myself with him. But then I started veterinary school, and that was that for any extracurricular activities all through vet school. As you said, I did this dual degree program, so it was extra long as well, and by the time I got out, Jack was elderly to do sports, I had Jenny at that point, and there weren't online classes, online options, and she couldn't do in-person stuff, so I was out of sports then for quite a while, through vet school and through my Ph.D., so that was about ten years, and I missed it horribly. I would watch agility on YouTube and stuff. Jack lived to the very impressive old age of 16, which is great for a Golden Retriever. After I lost him, I got Dash, and I immediately got back into doing sports then. Melissa Breau: What about the positive tilt of things? Have you always been a positive trainer? If not, what got you started on that journey? Jessica Hekman: I had never trained a dog before when I got Jack. I got him in 2003. We went to what I guess you would call a balanced class for basic manners. It was not a terrible class, they didn't have us abusing the dogs or anything, but we did use some leash popping to try to get good leash manners, stuff like that. At the time I thought that was entirely appropriate. When I first learned about clicker training. I remember saying, “Oh, but there should be consequences if a dog doesn't obey you.” That was where I was then. When we started agility together, that was 100 percent positive, of course, and that was when I first learned to use clicker training myself. That was when I started shaping. At the time, though, I was still open to mild positive punishment in basic training, so I think I was gradually converted. I was going to a lot of seminars with positive trainers, I was reading books by people like McConnell and Sdeo, and eventually I started to realize, I can have a better relationship with my dogs than I do. I've realized since then how great the approach is, not just for dogs, but for interacting with people. I use a lot less punishment in my relationships with friends and family than I used to, although I find humans can be hard to reward. You can't pop M&Ms into everyone's mouth, and you can't stop a conversation to have a friendly wrestle, so that's challenging. I'm still trying to figure that one out. Melissa Breau: We should, as a community, decide that it's perfectly appropriate to hand out M&Ms left and right. I think that would make the world a better place. Jessica Hekman: That would make life so much easier. Melissa Breau: Obviously your day job now is heavily research-based. You started off in veterinary school, you started off in dog sports, how did you end up in research specifically? Jessica Hekman: That was the long way around, for sure. I majored in medieval studies in college, and by the end of college I was already starting to feel like, you know, I really liked reading the stuff I was reading, I was reading Arthurian romances, it was great, but I was feeling like I was following paths that other people had taken before. I had this one moment where I had some insight that I thought was fantastic, age 20, I thought I was brilliant, I took this to my advisor and he was like, “That was a great insight. It was exactly the same as this other person said 20 years ago.” Basically he was saying it was so good because it was exactly the same as something someone else did, and I was like, Oh, man, I have to get out of this, and I have to do something new. I have to have some effect on the world. I didn't go into biology then. I got into computer programming. It was the mid-'90s, we were in the middle of the dotcom boom, they were hiring warm bodies off the streets to do computer programming. That was actually a fantastic career. I was in online publishing programming for ten years. I got to the point where I was working four days a week, three of them from home, I was making a lot more money than I'm making now, and that was great. It was great for having a dog. I was at home with my dog all the time. But then I got bored. I started feeling again that I was having no real effect on the world. The dotcom crash happened, there was a lot less money in the industry, and that meant there was a lot less interesting work going on, and right around that time I had gotten Jack, my first dog, and as a result I had also gotten into Retriever rescue. I was working with a local Retriever rescue, and because of that I started getting really interested in dog behavior. I started reading everything I could get my hands on about it, I started going on the seminar circuit, and when I read The Other End Of The Leash, by Patricia McConnell, I was like, Oh, this is it. This is what I want to do. I want to learn all about this stuff. So I started looking into being a behaviorist, and just a quick spoiler alert — I did not actually end up being a behaviorist, but you can become a behaviorist, either with a Ph.D. or with a DVM. At the time, I knew research was the interesting thing to me, so I tried that route. It was 2005 at this point, and there were, at that time, no labs studying dog behavior. I talked to one professor, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and he said to me, “Well, you can study wolf behavior, but Ph.D.'s don't study dogs because they're domesticated, so they're not natural animals. Vets study dogs, but they study them medically, no one studies their behavior. No one studies dog behavior.” So I was like, What do I do? I guess I could go to vet school, and I want to be able to prescribe meds in my theoretical behavior practice. So I went to vet school to become a veterinary behaviorist. At that point I had to do all my basic sciences before I could even apply. As a medievalist turned computer programmer, I had zero sciences under my belt, so I had to do all of that. It changed the way I saw the world. I had been this arty medievalist turned computer nerd, and I was like, Oh, now I'm starting to understand what goes on in bodies and brains. That was real interesting. I got into vet school, I went to Tufts, they had this combined DVM/Master's program, as you said. I decided to do that because I thought it would give me some exposure to research. The way it works is the first two years you do the vet program, you take a year off in the middle to do the Master's, and then you go back and finish the vet program for two years. My second year doing the veterinary program, I shadowed a veterinary behaviorist at Tufts, and that was the first time I got to, week after week, see a behaviorist in action. That was when I realized I totally did not want to do that with my life. I did not want to try to fix broken dogs. I thought it was much more effective to try to figure out why dogs break in the first place and try to stop that from happening. Shortly after that, that was the end of my second year, and then after that I did my research year. So I spent a whole year just doing research. I still remember this one day, walking through the parking lot at Tufts on the way to my car, and thinking, Wow, I love this stuff so much. I am not looking forward to going back to vet school. It was like the skies opened and I thought, I don't have to be a behaviorist! I can go get a Ph.D. after all! It all came together. That was when I was like, I can go do research, and that will help with the prevention of behavior problems. The research world was really changing while I was in vet school. I said that there weren't any labs doing dog stuff when I started, but while I was in vet school, people started to realize that, in fact, dogs are totally fascinating models for research. They are natural animals, and the fact that they've evolved to live inside civilization along with humans — that makes them more interesting, not less interesting. So after I finished vet school, I did do an internship, but then I did a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with Kukekova Lab, and that lab was actually founded just the year before I came there. I was one of her first two grad students. So it's very much been a process of when I'm ready to take my next step, things have appeared just barely in time for me to get there. In that lab we studied tame foxes, not dogs, but the tame foxes are a fantastic model for dogs and for domestication. It was a really great opportunity for me. I learned a lot. But I really wanted to get into studying the genetics of pet dogs, and again, while I was in that program, a few people were starting to do that. No one had quite figured out how to do it at a large scale, so when you're working not with lab animals but with pets, and there's so much variety in their genetics and in how they're raised, you need really, really large numbers of them, and that was really hard for anyone to figure out how to do. But just a couple of years before I was ready to graduate, again, this new lab sprang up, they were doing exactly that, so that's where I am now, Karlsson Lab at the Broad Institute. It's spelled Broad but it's pronounced Brode, just to be super-tricky for people. I like to say of Karlsson Lab that it's, like, thank God they're doing exactly what I thought I would have to do, so I don't have to organize this massive citizen science approach to studying pet dogs, because my new boss, Elinor, has already done that, and I can just focus on the fun parts. So that's my crazy journey. It's probably a longer answer than you were looking for. Melissa Breau: No, it's interesting. You've had a lot of interesting experiences and steps along the way. I'd love to dig a little more into what you're doing now. Do you mind sharing a general overview? Jessica Hekman: Sure. Karlsson Lab, where I am now, takes what we call a citizen science approach to studying pet dogs. What we do is we collect a lot of dog behavior information and DNA directly from dog owners, and we use that to try to find connections between differences in the dog's DNA and their different behavioral traits. The main project that has started out collecting that is called Darwin's Dogs, and you can go to DarwinsDogs.org and participate, and I'm sure that all of you will do that, and you should definitely do that. Right now we're very much in the data collection phase, so at the moment I'm doing a lot of what turns out to be basically project management, making sure that all the stuff is coming together, that we're storing the data in a reasonable way, things like that. But I am already getting to do some data analysis. I actually, really excitingly just last week, I got my hands on about 15 years worth of pedigree and behavioral data from a school that breeds guide dogs. I'm getting to analyze that in order to write a paper about it. As the data is coming in from other projects, the plan is that I'll be one of the ones to analyze that as well. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. I know we've chatted a bit about having your boss on the podcast, too, to talk more about some of this stuff, but I'd love if you want to share just a couple of the projects you guys are working on. You mentioned DarwinsDogs.org, so I'll make sure that there's a link to that in the show notes for folks. Do you want to share any other stuff that listeners might be interested in? Jessica Hekman: For sure. We actually have a brand new project that's about to launch that FDSA folks can participate in, and it's actually, even if you don't have a dog, although I know that pretty much everyone listening to this will have a dog. In my nosework class that I did with FDSA, I was Bronze in the introductory nosework and one person was at Gold with a cat, which was fantastic. Melissa Breau: That's very cool. Jessica Hekman: Yeah, that was neat. This new project is called Muttmix. That's at muttmix.org. The idea is that we will show you photos of a whole bunch of mixed-breed dogs, and you get to guess what is in their breed mix. We will collect guesses from a whole bunch of people, and then we will e-mail you back afterwards and tell you what was in those dogs, based on their genetic analyses that we did. So it should be a lot of fun for you. And then the data that we collect will be used to help us analyze how good people are at looking at a dog and telling exactly what breed is in there, which, just a spoiler alert, it's really hard to do that by looking. It turns out that mutts are really, really interesting, and very few people, if any, have really surveyed them. Most of the papers out there on dogs, particularly genetic papers, are about purebred dogs. So muttmix.org, and it's starting in a few weeks, but if you go right now, you can give your e-mail address and then we can let you know when it goes live. That's Muttmix. And then the main project that I personally am working on is called the Working Dog Project, and that is, we collect behavioral and genetic information from working dogs to find out the genetic influences that make dogs more or less good at their job, or more or less able to succeed in training programs. For example, a guide dog school typically only has about half of the puppies that they train succeed at becoming guide dogs. Why is that? Is there anything we can do to help them do better? And, by the way, if it occurs to you that sports dogs are a lot like working dogs, that has also occurred to me, and I am totally planning to expand this project to include sports dogs, so stay tuned about that. And if and when that happens, I will definitely be letting FDSA folks know. Melissa Breau: Awesome. I look forward to that, and I can't wait to see what some of the outcomes are of the research you're working on. It all sounds so interesting. Jessica Hekman: Us too. It's sad that research is so slow, because we would really like the answers yesterday. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. I know that, talking about research, you did include a bunch of that in the webinar you just did, kind of the other end of things, on the biology of socialization, and you've got another coming up on April 12 on epigenetics. Do you want to explain what epigenetics is, and then share a little bit on what the webinar will focus on? Jessica Hekman: Epigenetics is a way that organisms, including dogs, record the experiences that they've had in their DNA. We used to think that the DNA sequence is something that never changes for a particular individual. It turns out, though, that epigenetics is this mechanism that this cell has. It's like marks that you put on the DNA, so the sequence itself doesn't change, but there's these marks that are added on it, sort of like a bookmark in a book, so that the content of the book doesn't change, but you can put a bookmark in it to save a really important page that you want to come back to again and again. Animals can do this with their DNA to say, “This is a bit that is really useful for the environment that I live in, and I want to use this bit a whole lot.” So this is a new way that we look at what makes up an animal's personality — not just their genetics, but also this way that animals have of recording their experiences in their DNA. In this webinar I'll talk about what we know about epigenetics, and I will specifically relate it to dogs. A lot of the epigenetics resources that are out there for people to read are obviously very human-oriented, and so I will focus very much on “What does this mean for your sports dog?” Melissa Breau: Kind of to take that and ask what is probably a way-too-broad question, what does go into a perfect performance dog from that standpoint? Jessica Hekman: Lots of things. There's very complex effects on a lot of different genes interacting with each other in ways that are really hard to predict, but that's what my job is, is to try to find ways of predicting how that's going to work. And then equally complex there's the effects of the dog's environment, of course. But the environment — we don't always think of it as it actually starts at conception in the uterus, with the hormones that the mom passes on to the puppies in nutrition, and then the environment also includes the time in the nest with their littermates, how the puppy is socialized, how the dog is trained. We can only control a tiny portion of all of this, like some of the socialization and the training, and I knew that theoretically when I got Dash as a puppy, but I have to admit I still figured I'd be able to control a bit more of him than I could in the end. So yeah, perfect performance dog. Melissa Breau: Are there common misconceptions that dog sports people tend to have about this sciencey stuff? If so, what can you do to set the record straight? Jessica Hekman: I think that a lot of people have this hope that science, and particularly genetics, will be able to give us black-and-white answers to questions that we have, that maybe a dog who has behavioral issues, or issues in the ring, has some underlying genetic problem that can't be changed and that perhaps could be identified in a test, that we'll maybe discover one gene for aggression and be able to breed it out. Of course, in real life, biology is incredibly complex and there's no black-and-white, there's really just shades of gray. But of course that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot to learn and understand about how the body and brain work that can be really enlightening when we're thinking about how to interact with our dogs. I hope that answers that question. Melissa Breau: That's actually an interesting way of thinking about it, and I think it's important to note that even science doesn't have all the answers. It's a complex topic, and to a certain extent you do need to wade in waist-deep to get a good understanding of all the bits and pieces. What do you think about for the future? Where do you think the future of some of this stuff will lead us, and what subjects are there out there that you hope that science can find the answers to? Jessica Hekman: Personally, I'm really hoping we're going to find ways of improving how we breed dogs. There are genomic technologies that can be useful to help the process of selecting dogs to breed in order to produce puppies with the traits that we want, and in fact this is done as a matter of course in the cattle industry. The technology is there. It's made a massive difference in the ability of the cattle industry to select for traits like milk production. What we need to make it happen for dogs is just for the community to get together and to pool genetic and behavioral data. The data that Karlsson Lab, where I work now, is collecting could be used for exactly this kind of thing. But the hard part, I think, will be not so much the science, but will be agreeing on what everybody is breeding for. It's the intersection of science and society where stuff gets interesting. How do you work together to breed for things like health and solid personalities instead of things like fancier coat colors and flatter faces? That's really going to be the big struggle, but that's where I hope to see the dog community going. Melissa Breau: I guess part of me peripherally knew that the cattle industry had been breeding for things like increased milk production, but you don't really think about it as a concerted effort, as, like, the industry sat down and looked at it from a scientific perspective. You think, Oh, they did it the same way we do it in dogs, where it's just two that have a line, or have a history, and let's just keep going down that thread. So it's interesting. Jessica Hekman: They're massively well organized, and it's kind of scary if you look at the statistics. The output of milk from an individual cow since 1950, it has more than tripled in individual cows from 1950 to today. One of the things that the cattle industry has going for them is USDA. They have this federal agency that is paid to organize them. We don't have anything like that, and trying to imagine organizing dog breeders to work together is kind of crazy. Melissa Breau: Fair enough, yes. Jessica Hekman: Imagine talking to one person who has their lovingly curated and selected line of dogs, and saying, “OK, for the good of the whole breed, we think you shouldn't breed this particular dog anymore.” Not going to happen. So it's a really interesting difference between the two groups. Melissa Breau: Fascinating. It's such an interesting concept to think through and think about. To shift gears a little bit, in addition to your webinar, you're doing a class on some of this stuff in June. I wanted to ask you to share a little about the class and maybe help folks decide whether or not the class would be a good fit for them. Jessica Hekman: I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be BH510 it's called The Biology of Building a Great Performance Dog. It's going to be basically about the biology underlying dog development, like what makes each dog her own individual self. A lot of what I'll talk about has to do with genetics and very early socialization, so the class will be particularly useful, I think, for people who want to think through how to find their next dog, what to look for in choosing a breed and a breeder, or in choosing a shelter dog or a rescue dog. But we'll also talk about decisions on things like spay/neuter, whether to do it, when to do it, so that could be useful for people with puppies or even people with young adult dogs. And then I also think it should really appeal to anyone who wants to get their science geek on about dogs, like what makes up a dog's personality. So even if you're not thinking about getting another dog, just if you want to learn some genetics and some biology from a dog perspective, and a think through what's going on in their brains, what's going on in their bodies that makes them act the way they do, it ought to be a great class for you. Melissa Breau: Since it's your first time on, I do have three questions I always try to ask each time somebody comes on for the first time. I want to round things out with those. To start us off, what's the dog-related accomplishment that you're proudest of? Jessica Hekman: Oh, Jenny, for sure Jenny. When I got her, as I said, she peed whenever I touched her, and now I can actually bring a stranger into the house. She still gets nervous and shakes, but as soon as the stranger tosses her a treat, she flips over into, like, Oh, a treat game, and she stops shaking, her ears come up, she starts making cute faces at the stranger to get more treats. Very occasionally, if someone really is good with dogs, Jenny will let them pet her, even though she's just met them that day, which I never would have believed a few years back would ever have happened. She can go out in public, she can go walking on leash around the neighborhood, she can go off leash in a safe park. So we've made some amazing progress together. Sometimes I can't believe she's come so far. You asked for my proudest accomplishment, and I feel like she's really been working hard on that too, but the two of us together I think have made some fantastic progress. Melissa Breau: I absolutely think that counts. I don't think she could have done it without you. What's the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Jessica Hekman: It's only in the last couple of years I heard this, I think from Jean Donaldson. She said, “Most people don't use enough treats,” which I love. It's simple, it's concise, it's totally useful. Use more treats. It's easy, and it's so helpful in getting us out of the mindset of thinking, The dog should do this because I asked her to, and into the mindset of, How can I make this more fun for the dog? Melissa Breau: Right, right. That's fantastic, and I think we hear similar things in a lot of different places, but I do like it in that concise, easy to digest. For our last question, who is somebody else in the dog world that you look up to? Jessica Hekman: Can I have more than one? Melissa Breau: Yes, absolutely. Jessica Hekman: OK. The obvious answer, I guess, would be Denise, because in addition to her stellar dog handling skills, she also has stellar human handling skills. She's so great at helping people learn while making them feel good about themselves, and that's really hard to do — not just be good at dogs, but be good at people. I already mentioned Patricia McConnell, whose books are the reason I chose my new career. She had insights into the fact that dog minds are really fascinating in their own right, and I will always be indebted to her for that. And finally, he's not exactly in the dog world, but my science hero is Dr. Robert Sapolsky. He learned some amazing things about how the stress response works. He's a fantastic lecturer, and a lot of his talks are on YouTube and I highly recommend checking them out, if you're interested in how the brain functions and how stress affects behavior. He does not talk about dogs specifically, but his material is totally relevant to them and to training. So Sapolsky. Highly recommended. Melissa Breau: Excellent. I will try to find a YouTube video or two that we can link to in the show notes for everybody. Jessica Hekman: Let me know. I can find you one. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. That would be great. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Jessica. I'm thrilled that we got to chat. This was a lot of fun. Jessica Hekman: Oh, thanks. I had a fantastic time. Melissa Breau: And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We'll be back next week with Laura Waudby to talk about training for a happy dog in the competition ring. 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.

Summary: Julie Daniels has worked with dogs her whole life. In fact, she learned to walk by holding on to a German Shepherd. She is one of the foremost names in the sport of dog agility in the United States. She was one of the early champions of the sport and helped many clubs throughout the country get up and running. She owns and operates both Kool Kids Agility in Deerfield, NH, and White Mountain Agility in North Sandwich, NH. Julie is well known as a premier teacher at all levels of play. She has competed, titled, and won with all sorts of dogs through the years, including two Rottweilers, a Springer Spaniel, a Cairn Terrier, two Corgis, and four Border Collies. She is the only person to make USDAA National Grand Prix finals with a Rottie or a Springer, and she did it two times each. She is also a two-time national champion and a two-time international champion. Links Kool Kids Agility White Mountain Agility Next Episode:  To be released 4/06/2018, featuring Dr. Jessica Hekman to talk about building a performance dog. 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 Julie Daniels. Julie has worked with dogs her whole life. In fact, she learned to walk by holding on to a German Shepherd. She is one of the foremost names in the sport of dog agility in the United States. She was one of the early champions of the sport and helped many clubs throughout the country get up and running. She owns and operates both Kool Kids Agility in Deerfield, NH, and White Mountain Agility in North Sandwich, NH. Julie is well known as a premier teacher at all levels of play. She has competed, titled, and won with all sorts of dogs through the years, including two Rottweilers, a Springer Spaniel, a Cairn Terrier, two Corgis, and four Border Collies. She is the only person to make USDAA National Grand Prix finals with a Rottie or a Springer, and she did it two times each. She is also a two-time national champion and a two-time international champion. Hi Julie! Welcome to the podcast. Julie Daniels: Hi Melissa. Melissa Breau: To jump into things, can you just share a little bit of information about the dogs you currently share your life with and what you're working on with them? Julie Daniels: I have three Border Collies at this time, and my oldest, who is 12-and-a-half — don't tell her that — she recently injured herself. She tore the collateral ligament in her knee. That's a long rehab, and although she's 12, it is very difficult to keep her down. But my best friend is Karen Kay, who is an expert in rehab for both people and for dogs, a fitness expert, so we're diligently bringing Boss back, slowly but surely. But it's tough. Even at 12-and-a-half, if a dog is used to taking a lot of activity and getting a lot of exercise, it's very, very difficult to tone that down and do specific things. But anyway, that's my 12-year-old. My 10-year-old is Sport, and he's a finished product. He likes training as much as anybody. It's just a pleasure to live with and to show he's quite the guy. My youngster, now 2-and-a-half, is Kool-Aid, and I'm having a lot of fun with her. Kool-Aid has been a Fenzi-ite her entire life, so she's one of the stars, even in Baby Genius and also in Adolescent Sport Dogs. She's just a pleasure to work with and train. You'll see a lot of her. Melissa Breau: Awesome. I know here at FDSA one of the things you're perhaps most well known for is your “Genius” series. I know a big part of those classes — and all of your classes, really — is about building confidence. Can you share a little bit about why that's so critical for young dogs and maybe how you go about it? Julie Daniels: Right off the bat in puppyhood, we want our dogs to feel excited about the environment. We want them to do a couple of things. We want to nurture curiosity so that they feel attraction for novelty, which is the natural puppy trait. It is something they were born with — puppies are born curious — so I feel it's up to us to nurture that; yes, to guide it and direct it, but not to lose it. Don't lose that curiosity. Not so different from human children, I think. That's a very important thing. The other thing we want to do is develop a small measure of self-reliance in very young dogs so that they offer interaction with the world. And that gives us a chance to choose — to shape, if you will — what we like best about their behavior choices so that we can guide them along the way to a mutually satisfying life with humans. So yeah, those two things. Melissa Breau: To dig in a little bit into one of the Genius classes, Baby Genius is on the calendar for April. How much of that class is about teaching skills and “learning to learn,” for lack of a better term, and how much is about teaching the dogs a positive attitude toward life and training? Julie Daniels: They're both so important. They're both pretty much flipsides of the same coin. I think it's super, super important that you never get away from how the dog feels about life. So that positive conditioned emotional response that we all talk about, the positive CER, is really for interacting with people, interacting with the environment, as I spoke of before. We want to develop the curiosity and the initiative of the very young dog, and that starts in Baby Genius, big time. So it's not just about skills, no matter what you do. Even if you are training skills, you're always working on how the dog feels about life and how the dog feels about interacting with you, training with you, playing with you, if you will. So I have to say that the class is pretty much half of one and half of the other. It's not so much about skills. Good question, Melissa. I really thought about how to respond to that, and I'm thinking half and half, but it's probably more about life and less about specific skills. Guidance, yes, lots of guidance, and puppy's choice is extremely important in the class. So things are, by design, geared toward helping them choose behaviors that we would like for them to keep, but it's probably more about life, Melissa, and less about skills. So there you go. Melissa Breau: With that said, what are some of the skills you cover? Julie Daniels: Ah! I have to give those away? Let me talk about one that's both, because I could go on all day about that, and you probably have another question or two for me. So why don't I talk about one in specific that I think is maybe a good example of the life version and the skills version, and that would be the recall, because you can't do a baby class without working on recall, and yet I don't really start out working on recall at all. I work on name. I want to create extremely high value for name and attraction, orientation, toward the sound of name. So that's not operant. That's classical conditioning. And I do a whole lot with that just with the little name game. When you're playing name game — with any dog, mind you, not just with a baby; it happens to me a lot that I get adult dogs in for board and train, and they need a refresher on how they feel about hearing their name. It happens to many, many dogs that they've learned not to enjoy hearing their name, so I change it. But with babies it's so easy and fun to just play games, and don't forget: say your dog's name and don't think it's not a recall. Don't think, Oh, the dog needs to be going the other way when I call his name. No, no. It's classical conditioning I'm talking about, so I want that dog to love, love, love the sound of his own name. That's different from the operant games that we play for instilling a recall, which are also important. That's the skills part. But when you ask me whether it's more skills or more enjoyment, you know, life enjoyment, I think it's life enjoyment. I think name game is much, much, much more important in Baby Genius, much more important than the skill of, for example, recall. Melissa Breau: I imagine that the skills you focus on puppies has evolved some over time and that all of this didn't just spring from your brain fully formed. Do you mind sharing just a little bit about how you've decided over the years what it is important to focus on with a puppy versus what you really can wait on until the dog is a little bit older? Julie Daniels: That's fun, isn't it? It's hard to break a brain apart into various classes when you want to teach everything at once. This program started at least twenty years ago with a camp that I did up at White Mountain Agility. I was doing five to eight camps per year, and one of them I decided had to be only for novices. I called it Novice Geniuses, and that camp was a huge success. It was tons of fun, if you can imagine, and it was very, very useful for a lot of people in learning to start their dogs off on the right foot. It certainly was adamant about how the dog feels about it is much more important than whether the dog takes away this particular skill or that particular skill. So it was a great camp like that. And that's what I started out to do for FDSA. I called it Puppy Genius, and it was pretty much the Novice Genius program with a very few elements left out, which were for older dogs. Ultimately it was way too big a territory. It was too large a class in scope, and so I then broke it down into two classes called Baby Genius, for these youngsters, and that's what's coming up in April for the young dogs, and then Adolescent Sport Dog is what I called the former older dog elements of Novice Genius. I tried to break the class into two and then expand upon each of the elements within that smaller scope, and I think that worked out really well. That's what I'll continue to do. So Baby Genius really is for the younger dogs, and as we all know, foundation is everything, and so many dogs can benefit from Baby Genius. Any dog could benefit from the Baby Genius class because it is so elementary, absolutely no prerequisite required, and any dog can play. As I said, I take in many adult dogs for board and train who need, for example, name game, which you could play with a 7- or 8-week-old puppy. Melissa Breau: If people wanted to take one of the more advanced classes, do they need that first class? Is it a prerequisite, or can they just take the one that they need, or what is your recommendation there? Julie Daniels: When I taught Adolescent Sport Dog, I wanted very much for Puppy Genius or Baby Genius to be prerequisite material. It didn't work out that that was all that necessary because I ended up going back to those foundations as we needed to do them. So it worked out as a standalone class, and I don't think I would make it a prerequisite. But it's one of those classes — I feel the same way about my empowerment class — well, everybody ought to take it! But if, for some reason, you don't, I can make it work for you! So I'm not worried about it as a prerequisite, but it sure is good stuff for anyone. Melissa Breau: Excellent. I think some people think, Oh, Baby Genius, my dog's no longer a baby, but like you said, it's still applicable, it's still good stuff, it's still foundation skills that every dog should have. Julie Daniels: That's a good way to describe it. It's foundation. Melissa Breau: I know we talked a little bit about building confidence earlier, and I know in the description for your shiny, new, shaping class you mention that it will focus on using shaping principles to build confidence and teamwork. So I wanted to ask you why it is that shaping is such a good tool for accomplishing those two things. Julie Daniels: It's one good tool, obviously. It's not the only way to do things, we all know that, but it's one good tool for building confidence, specifically because shaping done well inspires the dog of any age — it can be any age dog — to offer a little bit more, to try a little bit more, to use the initiative that I spoke about earlier, to develop the curiosity and then use initiative. What we're working toward when we build upon those things, we're working toward a measure of self-reliance, so we want the dog — and that's where confidence comes in — we're building the dog's ability to make a choice and to enjoy the consequences of this choice. Every once in a while in life it's really important that the consequence teach the dog not to do that again. We let daily life do that. We let other dogs do that. We humans can use artful shaping to almost eliminate the need for a tough consequence to make it hard on the dog. We can become expert at noticing the tiny little elements of curiosity and initiative, and by rewarding those in specific ways, we can create more and more behaviors along that same line that strengthen the dog's ability to behave or perform in the way that we would like to see again. So shaping is artful; yes, it's scientific — and we will go into the science — but really this shaping class is not as scientific as some other shaping class would be, because it is only using the principles of shaping, which are good, clean mechanics and keen observations — very, very important elementary skills for shaping practices, but we are only using those shaping practices in order to get to the good stuff, the bigger picture of curiosity, initiative, self-reliance, you know, eagerness to work, not just for correctness. So that's how this class will run. One of the lectures — I'll just tease you — that will be one of the first lectures in Week 2, for example, is called, “When Did Silent Shaping Become Rigid Shaping?” Do you get what I mean? Melissa Breau: Yes. Julie Daniels: That's what I mean about you can be scientifically spot-on and not really be creating what you want in your dog. Melissa Breau: That's an interesting lecture title, and that will hopefully be a really great thing for people to think about, even before they get a chance to read the lecture. I know in the description you also mention that a lot of your favorite confidence-building games are perfect for practicing shaping. What did you mean by that, and can you talk us through an example of how that works? Julie Daniels: Oh gosh, I'd love to. Some of the games that we play in confidence-building classes, not just empowerment, but that's the big one that is well known in the Fenzi world. Empowerment uses many strange materials, and people will talk about they have a cardboard collection, they have a bubble wrap collection, they have a metal utensil collection. People talk about their bakeware collection. Some people actually cook with this stuff. We certainly don't. I mean that kind of thing, interaction with things that pop underneath you, things that feel squishy and move underneath you, they're unstable, things that make noise, for example, metal noise is very big in obedience training and it's also very, very big in seesaw training. We did a huge amount of work with noise making with metal, and we use noise tolerance, meaning someone else is making the noise and you don't have any say about it. That can be tough for some dogs and easy for others. The other element of that is noise empowerment: what if I'm being invited to make the noise myself. I'm controlling it, I'm in charge of it, I learn what it sounds like, and now it's up to me whether I want to make that happen again and again. So we create the dog's desire to be part of the environment in an active way. We want the dog to be an active participant in the experiences that he's going to have. That's about confidence and empowerment and such. Shaping is the absolute best way to get those things, and you can well imagine that some puppies — or any dog; I'm saying puppy only because I'm teaching Baby Genius, but any dog is invited to play — you can imagine just that taking a closer look at a pile of bubble wrap and plastic on the floor is probably a clickable event for many, many dogs, whereas there would be other dogs who would actually inadvertently scare themselves by jumping in the pile knowing nothing about what is going to happen. That would be handler error. That would be a poor job of establishing operations for the shaping that we want to do. So it's much better for us to learn artful ways to observe what the dog is doing, what the dog is about to do sometimes, and to offer delivery of reinforcement in such a way that the dog is not going to be offended but is going to be curious about doing more and gradually more. So shaping being the practice of building successive approximations toward an end-goal behavior. There are two ways that I make use of that. One is that I'm using end-goal behaviors that are not “world peace.” If your dog jumps into a bin full of bubble wrap, good for you, but you didn't just earn a MACH. So I separate, in other words, the elements that we're working with from the real-world elements of competition, and to a certain extent remove them from daily life, and embrace the dog's ability to enjoy silly things. They're silly things, there's no doubt about it. But it doesn't take a big stretch to see that the dog's confidence with these silly things — if, again, we do a good job of generalizing and creating fluency for these skills — it doesn't take a big stretch to see their usefulness in the dog's daily life as he meets other things in the world. So that's what we're trying to do. We take silly games and we build, through good shaping practices, we build the dog's desire to interact with the novelty in the environment, and we build the dog's enjoyment of the surprises that could happen as a result of that. Does that make sense? Melissa Breau: Absolutely, and I think there's a thread here that you've hinted at a little bit as we've gone through all the questions that's spot-on for everyone to ask you next, which is this idea that people, when they get into dog training, largely think dog training is about the dog, but the more involved they become, most of us realize that it's really at least half, if not three-quarters, about our own skills as a trainer. I wanted to ask how you balance teaching good handler mechanics with canine learning in the class and what aspects of handler skills you plan to talk about. Also, if you'd like to mention why they're so important, that would be awesome, especially when it comes to shaping. Julie Daniels: In the shaping class we'll be talking first and foremost about the handler's job. As I was hinting at, it's our job to set up the scenario so that the dog can be successful. I just call that establishing operations. That's what I was trained to call it back in the 1970s. Establishing operations meaning by the time the dog sees the apparatus or the setup, you have created this little microenvironment — and you have a plan, by the way — so that you are able to build, bing, bing, bing, one success on top of another very quickly so that you're creating this curiosity and this initiative that you wanted to create. For example, it would be a huge mistake to just crowd your dog into a busy place and say, “Hey, I happen to have some bubble wrap. I think I'll do a shaping game of squash the bubble wrap.” But if the environment is absolutely wrong for that new skill, developing that new skill, it will not go well, and that is handler error. It is our job, first and foremost, to set up the operation in such a way to invite success and know what the early steps are going to be, so that we can create, bing, bing, bing, reward, reward, reward, right, right again, bingo, what a genius, ta-da! That's the first order of business as trainers: we're going to be talking about how to establish operations in order to inspire success. And then we'll be talking about how to … obviously the clicking part, but then how to deliver the reinforcement in such a way to invite another success or more behavior or just a repetition of the current behavior. So we'll be talking a whole lot about delivery, as well as about how to establish what we're trying to do. Both those things are important. Melissa Breau: One of the things that I saw on your syllabus that I don't think we've ever really talked about here on the podcast before is this idea of delivery of reinforcement. I know we have a webinar coming up about that in a few weeks with another instructor, but I wanted to ask you about it anyway. How does delivery of reinforcement influence training, and how do you make those decisions? Julie Daniels: I'm glad it is going to be. It's a webinar, it deserves its own webinar, it's really a very big part of the picture and can influence the success of the dog greatly. Part of delivery of reinforcement is geared toward inviting the next rep. The very best example I can think about that is in Chicken Camp. Bob Bailey always says, “Click for behavior, feed for position,” and he's talking about the artful way we move the cup of corn as the chicken is reaching forward and pecking with it. The same thing happens in agility practices with foundation training. We're always moving the reward down the line. We want to be continuing forward toward the behavior that we're trying to create, because necessarily we've only got a tiny little piece of it. That's what shaping's all about. So we're trying to build the next step of the behavior, and using the reward delivery is one very, very effective means of inviting a next correct response. Would you like an example, Melissa? Melissa Breau: Yes, please. Julie Daniels: One good example would be — this isn't necessarily in the Baby Genius class, but it was just in the Canine Fitness class that I was doing with my own instructor, Karen Kay; I'm a student as well as a teacher — so I'm a student in Canine Fitness class, and we were shaping — not just luring, but we were shaping — a complete 360-degree turn on a wobbly surface, so it's very complex, and I was working with Kool-Aid. Well, Kool-Aid already knows an outside turn, and she knows a spin, and she can certainly follow a lure around in a circle. So I could have gotten that done, probably most anybody could get it done, just by luring a circle with a cookie — can you imagine — and then feeding the cookie. Is that shaped? No, not at all. Have you helped create a behavior? Well, maybe. You don't really know. But your dog can indeed follow a cookie around in a circle. There's nothing wrong with that, so I'm not criticizing that. But many of us would choose to do that, and I think it's better to choose to do that, through shaping practices. That would look just a little bit different. Even if you did decide to lure the initial turn of the head, you wouldn't just continue that cookie around in a circle. You would click for that initial head turn before the puppy even gets to the cookie. Then you would deliver that cookie, and as you deliver that cookie — this is the part we're talking about here — you're going to move it a couple or three inches further along the circle. See what I'm picturing? And then you're going to let go. So what's going to happen? Well, you'd better click quickly, because what is going to happen — because you now have removed the lure — what is going to happen is the dog is going to turn around back toward you, and that is not the direction we want to go, is it? We're trying to lure a circle away from us. So what you need to do instead is click before the dog turns back. Can you imagine how quick that is? You perhaps have less than a second in which to get that next click in, and now, Melissa, here's where it comes in again. Reward delivery is buying you the rest of the circle. In perhaps ten little increments around the circle, just as an estimate, you get ten repetitions of creating that puppy's turn around the circle. Instead of one continuous repetition, you get ten repetitions of the puppy learning to turn and move in that circular fashion. That's why shaping, in that one little tiny example, that's why shaping is superior to luring in a simple task like that. Sometimes it's hard to understand that. I'm really glad you brought up this question, and I'm sure it will come up in the webinar as well. It's difficult to help people understand that they actually should do it that way, because if you can picture in my example, it would have taken, oh, I don't know, two seconds perhaps, to lure the entire circle and then give the cookie, and it probably took, I don't know, ten seconds, fifteen seconds, it could possibly even have taken twenty seconds to do it the way I've just described. So I'm hoping, I'm banking on the fact that people will consider the value of shaping as in long-term learning, instead of incidental reps here and there of a behavior, that shaping is more powerful long-term. So that's why I would suggest doing it the way I'm doing it. Shaping is better for long-term learning. It helps the dog offer behavior and learn from the consequences that he can offer more behavior. It just creates a dog who's stronger, more resilient, with a measure of self-reliance, learning to operate in the environment in cooperation with the human. Melissa Breau: Not only that, but in the example you used, he gets maybe ten cookies instead of just one cookie because of the repetition of the behavior. Julie Daniels: For sure. No small matter, that's right! Melissa Breau: In the shaping class, what other skills or concepts are you planning to cover? Julie Daniels: Well, let's see. We'll be doing a whole lot with empowerment-based behaviors. We'll also be doing a little bit with behaviors that will be useful in dog sports. For example, we will be shaping a tuck sit. But I also — this is a disclaimer for Baby Genius class and for shaping class too — we will use props. When we want the babies to learn a specific skill, we're going to use a prop to help them get these things right, because babies don't have the power. In the shaping class, the dog may well have the power, but rather than use just pure shaping techniques to get what we want just in space, we'll use those props to hurry those behaviors along and to help the dog learn to initiate onto equipment. It sounds like it's hard to wean from props, but it's not. If you don't wean from your lures — you know, the primary reinforcer being used as an enticement to behave — that is harder to wean from, if you don't do it early on. We'll be doing that part very early on. But props themselves are not difficult to wean from. Once we have established behaviors that have been created through the props, we'll put them on cue, and then weaning from the props is not difficult. So I'm not worried about that. But we'll be using, in shaping class we'll be using things like platforms and sit targets and maybe some mats, but certainly target sticks. I love to use gear ties and expandable target sticks. We'll do raised targets and low targets, we'll do paw targets and nose targets, and sit targets and stand targets. There's also room in that class — hopefully I've covered everybody's interests now — so we'll also have some room in that class to work on individual projects. I don't think there'll be any individual projects in the first three weeks of class. We'll all be geared toward the foundations, and some people and some dogs will be ahead of others, and that's no problem; I have plenty of material. But I think in the last three weeks of class, this being a first-time class, I'm going to experiment. Can people go off on their own tangents, and I've said yes. Quite a few people have e-mailed me about this. One that has come up many times is that people saw that I was doing the concept of between, beginning in Week 1, and if you think about it, that is the basis for two-by-two weave pole training, so several people have already asked, “Can I use this class to shape weave pole performance?” And I've said, “Absolutely, yes.” This is a great use of shaping, and we are all going to cover the concept of going between two things. There are so many uses for that, not just in agility, but for the people who want to free-shape weave poles, this is a great class. It's a great class. But you'll have to be patient with me, because for the first three weeks we're all going to be working on these foundation skills relating to shaping, and we will be exposed to a lot of different kinds of elements. We're not just going to do between for six weeks, sorry. So once you've gone through the basic empowerment-related and curiosity-related and skills-related behaviors that we'll be shaping — which also, by the way, will build your own expertise with the shaping process and the various ways to build an operation, to establish an operation, to run the operation, and to use reinforcement criteria and timing in effective ways — I figure that's about three solid weeks without doing too much else. And then I'm hoping that Weeks 4, 5, and 6, people who have very specific individual agendas such as weave poles, such as, for example, drop on recalls, such as perfect front tuck sits, such as parallel path, there are so many good things, heeling, I don't really have a problem with that. I think I'm going to experiment with letting people go off on their own individual tangents, and we'll see whether that works out well as a class or whether we actually need six full weeks just to work on the mechanics of shaping. I don't think we will, because this class is geared toward being an overview of good shaping practices and then taking those skills to our activities, whether it be a dog sport in specific or just daily life skills such as getting out in public and the like. I feel like that's my best use of the class is to be able to help people do what they want to do. I'll tell you where I went with this … Melissa Breau: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Julie Daniels: Through all along my good shaping practices, I've been gearing my young dog, Kool-Aid, toward being my seminar dog. So obviously she's going to have to have a myriad of skills. Agility is my sport, but shaping is one of the best and most fun things I do, and I've started another in-person shaping class just last week and I decided, OK, you're 2-and-a-half, little girl, how about you be my dog now? So she is, in this class, my one and only demo dog. She is all by herself for the first time. She did not have her big brother there who's the expert and she's just the tagalong. No, she's now the seminar dog, and so for the first time I had a separate dog bed for her, and I put an x-pen around her because, again, I'm establishing an operation where she can be successful. If I just put her in the middle of the room on her dog bed, I don't even know all of the dogs that are coming into that class yet, that would be a very poor trainer's decision. So I protected her with an x-pen around the dog bed so that she could see everyone and they could see her, she could not get into trouble, and nobody could bother her. But she has the opportunity to learn to raise and lower her arousal state according to whether she is on duty or off duty. That's a really good life challenge that can be built through shaping, which is what I did with this dog. She's an extremely busy dog, and she, her whole life, has wanted all the turns. So for her now to say, OK, I'm back on the dog bed with a bone, and all the other dogs in class are going to be working this, that's tough for her. But you know what? She truly behaved like an old pro. These students, most of them know me, and they know this dog, and they were impressed by what she could do. I think if they didn't know me and I had told them that this is my demo dog and she's been doing this work for a year or so, they would absolutely have believed it. She just did a great job, and it's because she knows how to raise and then lower her arousal state. By the way, we'll start this work in Baby Genius. It's not just all about “Yay, yay, yay, the people are coming.” And I am a person who allows baby dogs to say, “Yay, yay, yay, the people are coming.” I truly allow my baby dogs to be pretty much a happy nuisance around people, because I do err on the side of life happiness and attraction for people and the world in general, like we were talking about earlier. So that means I've got a lot of training to do to get from that as, for example, a 6-month-old to now a 2-and-a-half-year-old who's already my seminar dog. That's a lot of training, but it's all been done through dog's choice training and through good shaping practices. So the end-goal behaviors that I want are broken down very finely into manageable steps for this particular dog, so that now I have a dog who looks fully … she's not fully trained, right? But she looks really good in a crowd when she's working on behaviors that I have built through shaping. So even though she had never been in this crowded an environment all by herself being the only teacher's dog there, she was able to come in and out of demo mode. She was able to raise her arousal state and then lower her arousal state each time she went back in the pen. I know I'm biased, but I don't believe she complained even once. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Julie Daniels: Yeah, she really had it down about how to behave. I think that's part of shaping good behavior rather than coercing good behavior either through commands and corrections or just through pressure, pressure, pressure. This dog wasn't trained with pressure. When I wanted to demonstrate down on a mat, I just let her out of her little pen and I just — with a flourish, because that's the cue — flourished the mat and laid it out for her, and she ran, not walked, and threw herself down. And so then I told the class — this is true, so you'll learn this too, if you take the class — that she's never been commanded to lie down on the mat. Never. She was shaped. And any of the students who've taken, for example, cookie jar games, we build mat work from scratch. In the fall I'll actually be teaching a class specifically dedicated toward all these targets, including mats and platforms and sit targets and the like. But just to be honest, this dog was a hundred percent shaped to lie down on a mat. She was never coerced. And that down could not be more reliable. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Julie Daniels: That's the value of shaping. Melissa Breau: Hopefully, students have their wheels turning a little bit and they're trying to decide whether either of these classes is appropriate for their dog. Do you have any advice for those people trying to make their class selection or decide if they should sign up? What's appropriate, what's not appropriate, how should they make those decisions? Julie Daniels: I think if a person has already taken one of the foundation shaping classes that have already been offered, then I think you probably already have the background that I'll be covering in the first three weeks. I'm sure my spin is a little bit different, but the good practices are the good practices, and so you could pretty much move on to another more skills-based class. Baby Genius, as I said, is good for all dogs, but it's extremely foundation-oriented. There's a good deal of background classical conditioning in there, a good deal of operant conditioning in there, a little bit about shaping just because that's the way I do things, but it's more geared toward all the elements of living with humans as a young dog. One wonderful thing that Fenzi does now is put up the sample lectures. I do think that's a wonderful way to get a feel for how a class will be run and what sorts of things the teacher concentrates on. Obviously it's only one little tiny lecture. Baby Genius, for example, has about sixty lectures in it, and I use forty of them in any class, so I try to make the class different every time through, and the Gold level students, I think in any class, cause the class to develop in a different way, so it's never the same class twice. That is definitely the case in Baby Genius, and all dogs are invited to come look at first-level foundation skills. My shaping class is definitely a fundamental shaping class. There's nothing advanced about it. It's the specifics, the basics, and the groundwork of shaping, and my take on it is to put it to use immediately in real-world elements. Melissa Breau: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Julie! Julie Daniels: Thanks! Melissa Breau: As per usual, it's been awesome … and thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We'll be back next week with Dr. Jessica Hekman to talk about the biology of building a great performance dog, so it should be a good interview. 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.

Note: We've rearranged episodes a bit here to better coordinate with guest schedules, so the names mentioned as next episodes in our last podcast was incorrect. Instead of Debbie Torraca, this week we have Esther Zimmerman -- we'll be back next week with Debbie Torraca.  Summary: Esther Zimmerman is a long-time FDSA student and has been a participant in AKC events for over 40 years. She's been teaching dogs and their people since the early 1980's.   Currently, she is the head competition obedience instructor at MasterPeace Dog Training in Franklin, MA, where she teaches multiple classes at all levels, and coaches many private students. Over the years, Esther has evolved her own special blend of the art and science of dog training, acquired through years of experience, extensive reading, and continuing education at conferences and seminars. She is well known for her patience, compassion, honesty, and humor, along with an unfailingly positive attitude toward both dogs and handlers. She feels it's the trainer's job to have the dogs WANT to play the obedience game, not to make them do it, and that there is no reason to use compulsion for the sake of a ribbon. Her many high-scoring students are proof of this, as they earn advanced titles, many with non-traditional obedience breeds. Esther herself competes with Schipperke, and she has finished the only Champion/Utility Dog Excellent in the history of Schipperke, and three additional Champion/Utility dogs. She also put three UDX legs on Presto, a Golden Retriever, who died of cancer at an early age. Links MasterPeace Dog Training in Franklin, MA Next Episode:  To be released 3/16/2018, featuring Debbie Torraca to talk about exercises, including exercise for puppies! 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 Esther Zimmerman. Esther is a long-time FDSA student and has been a participant in AKC events for over 40 years. She's been teaching dogs and their people since the early 1980's.   Currently, she is the head competition obedience instructor at MasterPeace Dog Training in Franklin, MA, where she teaches multiple classes at all levels, and coaches many private students. Over the years, Esther has evolved her own special blend of the art and science of dog training, acquired through years of experience, extensive reading, and continuing education at conferences and seminars. She is well known for her patience, compassion, honesty, and humor, along with an unfailingly positive attitude toward both dogs and handlers. She feels it's the trainer's job to have the dogs WANT to play the obedience game, not to make them do it, and that there is no reason to use compulsion for the sake of a ribbon. Her many high-scoring students are proof of this, as they earn advanced titles, many with non-traditional obedience breeds. Esther herself competes with Schipperke, and she has finished the only Champion/Utility Dog Excellent in the history of Schipperke, and three additional Champion/Utility dogs. She also put three UDX legs on Presto, a Golden Retriever, who died of cancer at an early age. Hi Esther, welcome to the podcast! Esther Zimmerman: Hi Melissa. I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for asking me to do this. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to chat. To get us started, do you want to briefly just share a little bit about who your dogs are now and what you're working on with them? Esther Zimmerman: I'd love to, but I have to start by talking about Jeeves, my Champion UD Rally X1 NW3 Schipperke, who passed away a few weeks ago at age 14-and-a-half. He was really an amazing ambassador of the breed. He was a perfect gentleman with all people, dogs of all ages and temperaments. He was that priceless known adult dog that we all want our puppies to meet because he's just so good with them. After surviving several serious illnesses as a youngster, he gave me a very profound appreciation of just how much our dogs do for us and with us when playing the games we love. I was grateful every day he was alive and he is really sorely missed. It's very fresh still because it was only a few weeks ago. Melissa Breau: I'm sorry to hear that. Esther Zimmerman: Thank you. Elphaba is my 9-year-old Schipperke. She happens to be Jeeves's niece. She has her CDX, which, when she earned it, included the group out-of-sight stays. Those were a real challenge for her. She doesn't like other dogs looking at her. But we persisted and succeeded. She's almost ready for the utility ring. She's the first and only nosework Elite 2 Schipperke and is a real little hunting machine in that sport. She also has her Fenzi TEAM 1 and TEAM 1 Plus titles. Friday is my 3-year-old Schipperke. His titles at this point are an NW1 and TEAM 1, 1 Plus and 1-H. He just passed his 1-H, which was very exciting. He's teaching me the importance of patience, a trait that I already have an abundance of, but he really requires it in spades. He really does. He can try my patience sometimes, but he keeps me honest as far as that goes. He's got tons of obedience skills under his collar, but there's no way he's ready for AKC competition. I'm hoping maybe by next year. And then I have Taxi, my 17-month-old Golden Retriever. He's had a Gold spot in an Academy class almost every semester since I brought him home as a baby puppy. He's got great potential, like all of our dogs do. I hope that we get to reach the goals I have in mind. He's a typical, happy, fun-loving dog. He's a real joy. And that's the three dogs that I have right now. Melissa Breau: How did you originally get into dog sports? Esther Zimmerman: It's interesting, because back in the beginning I didn't have my own dog. I didn't have my own dog until I was 15, but I've been training dogs since I was 5 years old. I grew up in New York City, and every apartment superintendent had a dog that they were more than willing to let me borrow. I read every dog and dog-training book in the library, much to my mother's dismay, because that's all I read, and with those dogs, I switched what I was doing based on whatever the advice was that the author of that book gave. So I had a real eclectic education as far as training dogs. Not my own dogs, and I did something different all the time. The very first dog show I ever attended was Westminster in 1969. School was closed because we had a snowstorm, but the trains were running. Westminster's on Monday and Tuesday, always has been. So the trains were running and off I went with my tokens, and I went to Westminster. I was in heaven. I had no idea they had 50 percent absenteeism because of the snowstorm, and I thought that the most beautiful dog there was the Basenji. I did not get a Basenji. Melissa Breau: OK. Esther Zimmerman: The very first obedience trial I ever went to was the Bronx County Kennel Club, and there I saw a woman in a wheelchair competing in Open with her Labrador Retriever, which just blew my mind. I couldn't conceive of such a thing, that not only was this dog doing all this amazing stuff, but that his handler was in a wheelchair. She was around for a really, really long time and quite well known on the East Coast and in New England as a competitor. So I got Juno, my first dog, was a German Shepherd. I got him from an ad in the newspaper — the best way to get a dog, right? Melissa Breau: Of course. Esther Zimmerman: She was one of two 10-month-old puppies who were so fearful that they were climbing over each other in their pen, trying to get away from me. So of course I said, “I'll take that one.” That was Juno. I used the same kind of eclectic training with her, doing something different each week based on what book I was reading from the library. It did apparently work, though, because seven years later, after I got married and moved to Massachusetts, I joined the New England Dog Training Club, which is the oldest still-existing dog-training club in the country. That summer we entered our first trial, we earned our first leg, and I got my first high-in-trial on this fearful dog Melissa Breau: Wow. Esther Zimmerman: And that's how somebody gets really hooked on this sport. The first time you go in the ring, you win high-in-trial, you want to do that again. Melissa Breau: Oh yeah. Esther Zimmerman: And coincidentally, my first paying job as a teenager was as kennel help at Captain Haggerty's School For Dogs. He's actually pretty well known. He used to train dogs for movies a lot out in Hollywood. But their training approach was “Break 'em and make 'em.” They would get dogs in there for boarding and training, and they went home trained. They were not happy, but they went home trained. It was absolutely pure compulsion, which as a teenager was really eye-opening and a little bit scary, actually. Melissa Breau: I can imagine. Esther Zimmerman: So that's how I got started in dog sports. Melissa Breau: Wow. You've really been doing it almost your entire life, but in an interesting, different story. Esther Zimmerman: Yes. Yes. Melissa Breau: You mentioned that it's been eclectic, and it's been a little bit here, a little bit there in terms of reading, but what really got you started on your positive training journey? What got you hooked there? Because I certainly know that's where you are now. Esther Zimmerman: I think this is a good time for us to talk about Patty Ruzzo, because she's a big part of that whole journey. In the early 1980s there was a really tight-knit group of us training at Tails-U-Win in Connecticut, and together we had our first exposures to Karen Pryor and Gary Wilkes and John Rogerson and others who totally and completely changed the way we were training and how we even thought about training. We were all attending every seminar we could go to, every clinic we could go to, we were reading dog magazines. I was amassing a huge personal library of dog books. That was all before the Internet, before YouTube, before Facebook. Patty was an interesting person. She was a really quiet force to be reckoned with. She was a great competitor, she had a great rapport with her dogs, anyone who saw her in the ring with her magnificent Terv, Luca, will always remember what that looked like. They had such a presence about them, and it's an image I always aspire to. It's one of those things that if you close your eyes, you can still picture it all these years later. So Patty was my friend, she was my training buddy, she was my coach. We were determined to pursue a force-free, reward-based approach to training. The first thing we eliminated were the leashes and collars. No more leashes, no more collars. We stopped any physical corrections. As our skills and understanding got better, we were able to even avoid applying psychological pressure to the dogs, and that was a big deal. My dog at that time was a Schipperke, Zapper. She was a dog that really pushed us to examine what we had been doing, and to see what we could accomplish with this new — to us — approach. She became my first utility dog. Patty was a really tremendously creative person. She was continually trying and then discarding ideas. It could be dizzying to try and keep up with her, sort of like Denise. Patty passed away twelve years ago. It was a real tragedy for the world of obedience and for me personally. Several of us from that original group have worked to fill the void by becoming instructors and trainers in our own right. We all made that commitment to stay positive, and I think the group of us really has done a good job of that. Melissa Breau: Denise brought up the fact that you knew Patty when she and I were talking about having you on. In case anybody doesn't really know the name, do you mind sharing a just little bit more about the impact she had on the sport in the area, just a little more about her background, or her history, and the role that she played? Esther Zimmerman: She had multiple OTCH dogs, she competed at the games in regionals and did really, really well at those. She had a Sheltie, she had a Border Collie, and then Luca, the incomparable Luca. And then she got a Whippet. It's a dog like that that really tests your mettle and your commitment, and she was totally committed to being positive with this dog. When I tell you that he not able to do a sit-stay of any sort until he was 2-and-a-half, I really mean it, and she just would keep saying, “Don't worry, he'll do it. Don't worry about it, he'll do it,” and that “Don't worry about it” is something that I say all the time to my students. “But my dog's not doing that.” “Don't worry about it. He will. Eventually.” And she was just like that. I'll tell a little anecdote, and this will tell you everything you need to know about Patty and the influence that she had on people. She had two sons. The younger one was about 4 when this happened. They had gone grocery shopping, and they came home and he wanted to help her unload the groceries. So what did he want to carry up the stairs? Take a guess. Melissa Breau: The eggs? Esther Zimmerman: The eggs. The eggs of course. So he goes up the stairs, and of course he trips and falls and drops the eggs. She hollers up the stairs, “Are you OK?” He says, “Yes. Six of the eggs did not break.” So just that switch, six of the eggs broke, six of the eggs did not break — that's how she raised her children to focus on the positive. Melissa Breau: Part of the impressive part is that back then, nobody was doing that. There weren't people achieving those kind of things with positive training, and a lot of people were saying it could not be done. Esther Zimmerman: Right. So the early dogs — it would not be fair to say that she was totally positive with the early dogs. But by the time Luca came along, it was very, very positive, and by the time Flyer, the Whippet, came along, it was totally positive. She didn't get an OTCH on him, things happened, and then she passed away. But there was and she put it out there in the competitive world the way nobody else was at that point in time. Melissa Breau: We've danced around this question a little bit now, but how would you describe your training philosophy now? Esther Zimmerman: That's a good question. My philosophy is fairly simple, actually: Treat the dogs and handlers with kindness and patience. I could probably stop right there, but I won't. But really, kindness and patience. Break things down into manageable pieces for each of them. Use varied approaches to the same exercise because dog training isn't “one size fits all.” The theory, learning theory, applies equally, but not necessarily the specific approach that you use to help them understand. I try to use a lot of humor to diffuse tension in classes, in private lessons. People are a little bit nervous, or a little bit uptight, so I try to make people laugh. If they can laugh, they feel better about themselves, and what just happened isn't nearly as important as they thought it was. I try to be supportive when the dog or person is struggling to learn something. We've all been there, we've all done that, it's not easy. We're trying to teach new mechanical skills to people. They're trying to teach new things to their dogs. That's a hard combination, and I really respect people who make the effort to do that. At the same time I encourage independent thinking and problem-solving for the handler and for the dog. I cannot be there all the time when the handler is working with their dog. No instructor can. Even with the online classes, we can't be there. So if we give the handler the tools to come up with solutions to the problems on their own, now we've really accomplished something. Let them figure out how to solve the problem on their own. That's a big deal to me. I don't want to be spoon-feeding the answer to every little thing that's happened there. So I applaud all their successes, however small. We celebrate everything. My students know that I always advocate for the dog. Whatever the situation is, I'm on the side of the dog, and I urge them to do the same thing when they find themselves in other places, other situations, where perhaps the atmosphere is not quite so positive, or it's stressful for some reason. Advocate for your dog. You're the only one that's looking out for them, and they're counting on us to do that for them. So I really, really urge people to do that. And it's not just about using a clicker and cookies, or any kind of a marker and cookies. It's about having empathy for a creature who is trying to communicate with us while at the same time we are struggling to communicate with them. It's all really very simple, but none of it's very easy. So that's my philosophy. Pretty simple, don't you think? Melissa Breau: Simple but not necessarily easy. Esther Zimmerman: But not easy. But not easy, yeah. Melissa Breau: You mentioned you've been in dog sports in one variety or another for … you said since you were 15, I think. Esther Zimmerman: A long time, a long time. I was 22 years old the first time I set foot in the ring. Melissa Breau: OK. Esther Zimmerman: So now people can do the math so they'll know how old I am. Melissa Breau: As someone who's been in dog sports for that long, what are some of the biggest changes you've seen over the last ten or so years? Esther Zimmerman: Well, for even longer than that, but the sport of AKC obedience has changed dramatically since I started. Classes have been added and deleted, exercises have been added and deleted. The OTCH — the Obedience Trial Championship — was introduced in 1977, and they added the UDX in either 1992 or 1993. I couldn't find the definitive answer for that, and I couldn't remember off the top of my head. The group stays, as of May 1, have been safer in the novice classes and totally eliminated in Open. They've added a new and interesting and challenging exercise to Open. Jump heights have been lowered twice. My little German Shepherd, she jumped 32 inches when we started. Now she would have jumped probably 20 inches. There are tons of exceptions from that, from the … once their jump height now, for the really giant breeds, the heavy-boned breeds, the short-legged breeds, the brachycephalic dogs, they just have to jump three-quarters their height at the shoulder, so that's a big change. Now you've got to remember all of this has been done with the hope of drawing more people into competition. All of it has been done with the accompanying drama, controversy, charges of dumbing-down the sport, nobody's ever happy with whatever the changes are. But we survived all these changes, and as far as what changes do I want to see in the sport, I don't really want to see any more for a little while. I think we need to give things a chance to settle down, I think we need to give people a chance to simmer down, because this was a very controversial thing, getting rid of stays. And then people need time to train the new Open exercise and give that a try. New people coming up will not know that things were different. The command or cue discrimination exercise won't be something that you teach for Open. As opposed to people who are in a little bit of a panic now, if they've got their CDX and they're going on to a UDX, or they've got their UD, they have to go back and teach a new exercise, and not everybody's happy about that. But I think it's all going to shake out in time, as it usually does. People resist change because inertia is really a powerful force, and I think we need to move on. So that's how I see the changes in the sport. I'm very passionate about the sport, or I wouldn't still be doing it, and I try and go with the flow with all these changes that have happened. Melissa Breau: Do you think, or maybe you could talk about, how the addition of other dog sports has changed obedience in particular? I feel like originally it was really conformation and obedience, and now there's nosework and tricks and all sorts of things. Esther Zimmerman: I think that one of the reasons for the decline in obedience entries is the proliferation of alternate sports. When I started, like you said, it was basically confirmation, obedience, tracking, herding, and field. That was pretty much it. Look at what's been added, not only in sports in general, but there are multiple organizations now that offer their own variations on some of these previously existing activities. I'm just going to rattle these off. Besides those we have rally, we have agility with various venues, earthdog, flyball, multiple venues for nosework, lure coursing, barn hunt, dock diving, parkour, freestyle, weight-pulling, Frisbee, carting, sled dog, treibball, tricks, IPO, French ring. That's without even really thinking about it terribly very much I came up with that list. And I'm sure there are ones that I have overlooked. So depending on what part of the country you live in, there are many options to choose from on any weekend. And some of these sports, at the beginner level at least, seem to offer more immediate gratification with a shorter investment of training time than AKC obedience. This can be quite appealing for some competitors. When you get to the upper levels of almost any of these activities, sports, training matters. It really matters. But there's another influence on competition, and I think that's the advent of the private training center. Back in the day, if you wanted to train your dog, you went to a training club. Once you got out of the puppy class you were encouraged to join that club. In order to join that club you had to attend meetings, you had to help out, you set up equipment, you swept the floor, you rolled up mats in the gymnasium, you stewarded the annual trial, and sometimes you became an assistant to a trainer that was already at the club. You became part of something. Now don't get me wrong. Again, training centers like MasterPeace, where I work, offer far more than the clubs ever could. MasterPeace has classes and activities seven days a week, morning, noon, and night. But most of the people come for that class, and turn around and go home, so their exposure to the notion of competition may be more limited than it was when they went to a club. So only AKC clubs can put on an AKC trial. Without the clubs, there are no trials. Several New England clubs no longer exist because of the lack of membership. They had to just fold up and go away. So consider that. Consider … I want people to consider joining their local club. Support them. If you want to be able to compete, there have to be people working to put on the trials. Another thing: I also want to put in a plug for experienced exhibitors to become judges. I don't care what your activity is. I'm an AKC Open provisional judge now. In case anyone has missed the stat, the average age of judges is getting higher and higher. Without new, younger judges in the pipeline, competition will disappear, because sooner or later these judges have to retire. They can't go on forever, and there have to be new people coming up to step up and judge. Competition requires judges. The other thing is that becoming a judge really changes your perspective of your sport. It's so easy to criticize the judge from outside the ring: “He didn't see this,” “He didn't see that, “She missed this,” “She did something wrong.” Yeah, try stepping behind the clipboard and see how hard it really is to keep all the rules and regs in mind, to see everything that's going on, mark it all down. Yeah, it's not that easy, guys. But I encourage everybody to do it, because how else will we go on? The other thing: I can only compete in New England. I go to my national specialty occasionally, not that much anymore, but I have traveled. But in this area there seems to be an improvement in the general competitive environment. Experienced handlers seem to be a little more welcoming of newbies, and more supportive of each other, than maybe five years ago. But those of us in the FDSA world would like to think that training overall is moving in a positive direction. Again, in my area, we have pockets of people devoted to that concept, but we're surrounded by more traditional training. That can feel a bit isolating. But the ripple effect that we talk about is a real thing. We do reach out to support each other, and we have an influence on what other people decide to do when we show how we behave with our dogs when we're in public, when we're at competition. People are watching when you don't think they're watching, and seeing you celebrate with your dog, even if things haven't gone quite well — they don't miss that, and that's an important thing for them to see. So yeah, things have changed a lot. Things have changed a lot. Melissa Breau: Yeah, for sure. Esther Zimmerman: But I'm hopeful for the future, very hopeful for the future. Melissa Breau: You mentioned FDSA in there, and I'm really curious: What led you to the Academy? How did you wind up there? Esther Zimmerman: I first encountered Denise at a seminar, and she's a dynamic presenter. She's got all this energy, talks really fast, is very excited, she's also passionate about what she does, committed to it, and her message just resonated with me in a way that nothing had since Patty. So I started following her blog — there's a lot of information there. Before FDSA, she offered an online course of relationship-building through play through another organization. I thought the idea was intriguing, but was really uncertain of how that could possibly work. So I got a working spot with Elphaba, and as we all know, it works great. It was a fabulous class, and I've been a devotee of the Academy since its inception. So that's how I came to FDSA. Melissa Breau: We talked through and you had a ton of experience before that point, so what is it that keeps you involved in coming back? Esther Zimmerman: This is a really easy one for me. I love dogs. I love dogs, number one. I love training, number two. I personally love how detail-oriented competition obedience is. It's not for everybody, I understand that, but I love that aspect of it. I love every training session, I love every class I teach, I love every lesson that I give, because every single one of them is different. I really love how my classes are a level playing field. Everyone who comes to the sport is a newbie, regardless of their professional and personal fields of expertise. I have doctors, I have veterinarians, I have lawyers, I have chefs, I have people who are really accomplished in their respective fields who are all starting at the same place when they come to dog training. None of that other stuff matters in the least. And I'm dealing with all the different breeds that come to me. That makes me a better instructor and trainer. I think to some degree people like to bring their non-traditional breeds to me since I have Schipperke. I think they think I will have a different sympathy and empathy for the perception of what we can expect from the non-traditional breeds, and to a degree that is correct, because I don't feel, “Oh, it's a terrier, it can't do that.” “It's a sighthound, we can't expect it to be able to do that.” Right? “It's a fill-in-the-blank, and therefore…” Yeah, there are predilections, but we can be successful, if we work at it and if we want it, with most breeds. And with FDSA specifically, I love how we have access to such a wide variety of subjects, world-class instructors from different parts of the world, and we never have to get out of our jammies if we don't want to. Melissa Breau: That makes me think of Sue's competition, her PJ competition, of everybody posting pictures of themselves training in their PJs. Esther Zimmerman: Exactly. And I don't know if you saw it, somebody was talking about FDSA swag that they bought, I think it was a sweatshirt or something, and I said, “How come there are no FDSA pajamas?” Melissa Breau: Yeah, we are looking at that. This is an aside, but I found onesies, pajama onesies, that you can get with your logo on them online somewhere, and I was sharing them with the other instructors, like, “I don't know, I think this should be what we wear to camp.” I think it got vetoed. But I don't know, I still think it's a good idea. Esther Zimmerman: That might be a little small for some of us. Melissa Breau: It's pajamas. Footie pajamas. One-piece footie pajamas. Esther Zimmerman: Hey, why not? You know some people would take you up on that. Melissa Breau: Right. This has been a lot of fun, but since this is your first time here, I want to ask you the three questions that I used to ask on almost every episode, but now that people have been on once or twice, we haven't gone back to them. The first question is simply, What's the dog-related accomplishment that you are proudest of? Esther Zimmerman: I'm not going to limit it to just one. I have a couple of things to say. Melissa Breau: OK. Esther Zimmerman: I'm really proud of the titles that I've earned with my dogs, with the Schipperke. Some of them have been firsts for the breed, which is really a nice thing to be able to say. What I'm most proud of, though, is how much I appreciate the partnership that I develop with my dogs as we go along. I have a bunch of candid photos that people have taken, and almost every one of them shows me looking right into my dog's eyes, and my dog looking right back into my eyes. I cherish those pictures and that feeling that I have. It's so special, and I can conjure that up at a moment's notice. I almost get choked up every time I talk about it, because it's just me and my dog, and everything else just goes away. That is something that I'm proud of, that I have that connection with my dogs. Melissa Breau: That's beautiful. I love that. Esther Zimmerman: Thank you. The second thing is that I love to share in the accomplishments of my students. That brings me so much joy, that they are finding success and happiness in this sport, and I'm just thrilled for all of them, every little thing that they do, and it doesn't always translate to a ribbon. If a person can come out of the ring when they have not qualified, and come to me and say, “Did you see that drop on recall?” or “Did you see how she worked articles?” when maybe that's something they've been struggling with and the dog did it — even if something else went badly, then I've done my job of teaching that person to focus on the positive and not worry about the rest of it, because we can make that better too. Those are the things I'm really proudest. Melissa Breau: I love that. Our second and second-to-last question is, What is the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Esther Zimmerman: I've got a couple of things here too. Melissa Breau: OK. Esther Zimmerman: I do like to talk. Melissa Breau: That makes for a good podcast, so we're good! Esther Zimmerman: Patty said, “When in doubt, put a cookie on it.” That's it. That simple statement can address so many issues. When in doubt, put a cookie on it. Sheila Booth said — I don't know if too many people know who she is, but in Schutzhund circles, IPO circles, I think she's a little better known — but Sheila Booth said, “They can do at 4 what they couldn't do before.” So she's saying what they can do at age 4, they couldn't do before then, which again speaks to patience and not showing prematurely. I firmly believe the dogs will tell you when they're ready to show, and don't rush it. There's no rush. Take your time, put in the work, and you'll be way happier. There are Flyers, there are dogs you can take out at 1 or 2 and accomplish great things, but for the most part, not so much. I have a saying that I say to my students, so much that one of them embroidered it on a vest for me. In class it always comes out when someone says, “How come my dog did that?” I always say, “Too far, too fast, too much, too soon.” Don't go too far too fast. Don't do too much too soon. That's how it got embroidered on my vest. That's my biggest piece of training advice to put out there. Don't go too far too fast. Don't do too much too soon. Melissa Breau: I love that. That's awesome. Esther Zimmerman: Thank you. Melissa Breau: It has a certain sing to it. Too far, too fast, too much, too soon. Last question for you: Who is somebody else in the dog world that you look up to? Esther Zimmerman: This is going to sound like a cliché, but I really admire Denise. In addition to being an outstanding dog trainer and instructor, she's a really smart businessperson. She works harder than any five people I know, she's created something unique with FDSA, and surrounds herself with other smart people who help keep it running smoothly and efficiently, specifically you, Melissa, and Teri Martin. Melissa Breau: Yeah, Teri's fantastic. Esther Zimmerman: And then Denise's generosity to the dog training community always impresses me. There's so much free material and information out there, the blog and these podcasts are free, of course, she joins in the conversations on the various Facebook pages and gives training advice there, she does her live Facebook sessions are free. I think the scholarships for free Bronze-level classes and the contests for free Bronze-level classes are amazing at making education available to everybody, even if you have limited means. It's just a wonderful thing to put out there for people. And then of course the inception of TEAM — that was also just brilliant. It's brought high-quality titling opportunities to anyone, anywhere, anytime. It forces people to pay attention to detail. There's a lot of precision required right through from basic foundation skills through the advanced levels. People who do that are pretty well prepared for success in other types of competition. It was a brilliant concept and brilliant in execution. I don't know what Denise has in store for the future, but I know she's been teasing us about something new coming in April, I don't like being teased like that, but I also can't wait to see what it's going to be, because it's going to be great. I know it is. So I have to say it's Denise. Melissa Breau: I will say that she is by far the most productive person I know. She gets more done in a few hours a day than most people do in a week. Esther Zimmerman: I don't know. It boggles my mind. It just boggles my mind. Melissa Breau: You're not the only one. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Esther! This has been great. I really appreciate it. This has been fun. Esther Zimmerman: I know it took us a little bit of time to be able to connect. I had a cold. I hope I sound OK, because my voice was shattered last week. It was worth the wait. It was a lot of fun, and I'm very honored that you decided to ask me to do this. Melissa Breau: Well, I'm definitely glad that you could. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We'll be back next week, this time with Debbie Torraca, to talk about exercise for puppies. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you guys will consider hopping over to iTunes and leaving us a review. I know I mentioned this in our last couple of episodes, but reviews really help the show! We've gotten a few new ones since I've started including this request, like this one from Schout: “Melissa does a great job interviewing accomplished guests. Filled with useful insights and funny anecdotes.” Thank you Schout, whoever you are! And, while you're there, if you haven't already, I hope you'll subscribe 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.

SHOW NOTES: Summary:   Kamal Fernandez is an internationally renowned dog trainer and seminar instructor, Championship Obedience Judge, Crufts competitor, and the head trainer and owner of East London Dog Training. He has over 25 years of practical dog-training experience, based on a combination of science and hands-on work that have led him to establish a reputation for positive training and to champion reward-based methods all over the world. Kamal has made a study of psychology and began his career as a police officer working with young offenders. This has shaped his training philosophy and helped him craft a style that gets the best from his students — human and canine alike. He's probably most well known for teaching heelwork, his primary focus at FDSA, but he's successfully used rewards-based methods in a wide variety of dog sports, including obedience, agility, protection sports, and canine freestyle. His training specialty revolves around using play and games to create motivation and control. Links kamalfernandez.blog Sports Addict blog post (mentioned during the podcast) Next Episode:  To be released 3/2/2018, featuring Esther Zimmerman, to talk competitive obedience and dog sports in general. 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 Kamal Fernandez. Kamal is an internationally renowned dog trainer and seminar instructor, Championship Obedience Judge, Crufts competitor, and the head trainer and owner of East London Dog Training. He has over 25 years of practical dog-training experience, based on a combination of science and hands-on work that have led him to establish a reputation for positive training and to champion reward-based methods all over the world. Kamal has made a study of psychology and began his career as a police officer working with young offenders. This has shaped his training philosophy and helped him craft a style that gets the best from his students — human and canine alike. He's probably most well known for teaching heelwork, his primary focus at FDSA, but he's successfully used rewards-based methods in a wide variety of dog sports, including obedience, agility, protection sports, and canine freestyle. His training specialty revolves around using play and games to create motivation and control. Hi Kamal, welcome back to the podcast! Kamal Fernandez: Hi Melissa, thank you for having me back. I'm grateful, I should say, to be here. Melissa Breau: I'm excited. To start us out, do you want to refresh our memories a little bit by reminding us who the dogs are that you share your life with and what you do with them? Kamal Fernandez: Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to do so. I own eight dogs — that's a lot of dogs — and several breeds. My oldest dog is a Malinois called Thriller, and she does obedience along with my oldest Border Collie, Scooter, and they're both 10 years old. After them comes a German Spitz called Sonic, and he does agility. He is 7 or 8 years old. I got him when he was a little dog, so I always lose track of their date of birth when I've got them a little bit older. After that is Punch and Fire. Punch is my boxer who I'm currently training to do OPI, hopefully, which is a protection sport, and Fire, my Border Collie, who I do agility with, followed by Super, who is my Border Collie, he's 3 years old. I'm contemplating at the moment doing tracking with him. And then I have Super and Fire's daughter, Mighty, who is my young Border Collie. She is 18 months old, and I'm undecided again about what I'm going to do with her. And then finally my little crossbreed, Sugarpuff, who really is just a very content lap dog. So a lot of dogs. Melissa Breau: I love that at the end of all these working dogs you have a lap dog, which is perfect. Kamal Fernandez: Well, she was meant to be my girlfriend's dog, but she is really just a family pet, she's an absolute little puppet. She's a dog that we got that we rehomed, and she's an absolute joy in every sense. She's just the perfect family pet, so you know what? She can do what she likes, and she gets away with blue murder. Melissa Breau: To dive into things, I did a little bit of reading before putting together the questions. I got caught up on your blog. For those of you who don't know, Kamal writes a blog at kamalfernandez.blog. If you Google his name, it does come up. Anyway, you recently wrote a post about why you choose to compete in dog sports, and you shared that you're under no illusions, that dog sports aren't really about your dogs, they're not sitting around dying for a chance to compete. So can you share some of that here? Why do you compete in dog sports? Kamal Fernandez: Absolutely. I'm happy to do so. As the blog said, I'm under no illusions — competing in dog sports is very much for my ego and my benefit. My dogs love the interaction, they love the training, but to actually put them in my vehicle, drive to Timbuktu, get them out, and ask them to perform at a dog show or a dog trial, or an agility competition is very, very much about my ego. So for me that dictates the reason why I train my dogs, sorry, the manner in which I train my dogs, which is using reinforcement, because, as I say, it's for my ego, the least I can do is sell it to them in a way that's beneficial to them. Now the flipside to that is I have dogs that definitely need a vocation. They're high-drive dogs, they're dogs with a lot of energy, and they're dogs that on paper you would say would have definitely behavioral issues if it wasn't channeled, so I train them because it appeases that part of their personality, but I could just as easily go to my local park, or train at a village hall, or any location, and do exactly what I do with them, and that would appease that need. So the reason for which I compete is because, one, I'm going to be truthful: it's for my ego. I'm a competitive person. I like to push myself as a trainer to see if I can train my dogs to the standard where it's better than my peers. I think that challenge keeps my training fresh, it keeps me innovative, and it also gives me a standard to aspire to. It would be very easy with a certain type of dog that I own, certainly, to manage their behavior and not deal with it if the dog had a dog aggression issue, or was reactive, or was chase motivated — or chase orientated, I should say — it would be very easy to stay in my life and manage their behavior. But going to competition a lot forces me, as the trainer, to have to deal with some of those issues, and as a byproduct of that it actually creates a dog that is able to function in society with great ease. My dogs, I can take anywhere. I can take them to High Street if I'm having a cup of coffee, I could take them to a public place and they would be well-mannered and they would have good social skills. Taking them to competitions forces my hand to have to deal with that stuff. I have to socialize them, I have to teach them self-control, I have to teach them impulse control, I have to teach them to be focused on me and ignore other dogs or fast-moving things. So from a behavioral point of view I actually benefit from having to take them to those environments because I have to deal with the things I could quite easily manage and deal with in other ways. So that's part of the thing. The other thing is that, for me, I train dogs because it's an extension of my relationship, and being amongst other people that have a similar ethos is you accrue — I wrote a blog today about villages — you acquire people who support you in the journey in which you choose to tread. That is not only in the manner in which I train my dogs, but also showing what can be achieved by this methodology and this approach to dog training. So certainly for dog sports, which is largely … the majority of dog sports have, with the exception of, I'd say, agility and heelworks freestyle, those are sports that are relatively new in comparison to, say, bite work and protection work and IPO and obedience, there's less bias toward more traditional and sometimes compulsive methods. I think the way we would change people's perception of how to train dogs is to get out there and show and illustrate to people what can be achieved, not just at a more local level but at the highest level of all sports, so nationally and even world championship level. I've had students that have gone to the world championships with dogs that have been trained positively in a sport that is primarily … for example, it was IPO, which is a sport which largely still has a lot of compulsion within it, so that was a huge thing to illustrate what could be achieved by reinforcement-based methodology, and I think if we are going to change the way in which people perceive how to train dogs, then we need to be out there and be almost ambassadors for that change. Melissa Breau: A lot of people tend to wind up at a competition for the first time before they or their dogs are really ready, often without realizing how unprepared they actually are. If you could talk a little bit about how you officially decide when to begin trialing a dog when they have those skills and you feel they're ready to go to a real competition. Kamal Fernandez: I do a lot of preparation for my dogs, and my actual goal whenever I get a dog is to create a well-adjusted family pet. That's my agenda, because I know by putting in the layers of creating a well-adjusted family pet, I'm going to get a great competition dog. I was in a situation where, with one of my dogs, his career in dog sports was a little bit in jeopardy. He had a major injury, and I wasn't sure if the dog would be able to recover from that injury to be able to ever compete, and I was faced with the prospect of having this dog and he would have to be just a family pet. Well, if I got the dog with the primary intention of competing him, I would have been focused on, say, drive building and bite work when he wouldn't have been a nice dog to own. But because my agenda was to first and foremost make him a great family pet, it was neither here nor there. So the process of creating a dog that's great at competitions is about establishing things like focus, a great recall, getting them to be socially acceptable to work on their temperament. Don't get me wrong — I don't have dogs that are all of that ilk. I have rescue dogs, I have rehomed dogs, I have breeds of dogs that are predisposed to having aggression, chase drive, reactivity issues, and as part of dog training, and as part of preparing them for competition, I have to create a dog that's stable in those environments, so I'm a great believer in training beyond the requirements of competition, so I do a lot of generalizing with my dogs. I take them to weird and wonderful places to get them confident in those environments, I teach them to cope with all the things they're going to encounter in competition, and that is other dogs, other people, motion, distractions, tense, flapping things, things like the head, etcetera. All that stuff's done first and foremost. It would be great to have a dog with a baseline temperament that I could get away with not having to do that work, but the type of dogs I have — and I don't just have one type of breed of dog. I don't have dogs all that are from specific working lines. I have rescue dogs, I have rehomed dogs, I have dogs of unusual breeds, and my first goal is to get that dog comfortable in all environments. That in itself can take time and patience and dedication. And then, from that, I am obviously building behaviors like focus, simple behaviors like sit, down, stand, train them to focus on me, work on their domestic recall. By doing all that I create the basis of a dog that can cope with competition, so that's my primary objective initially. Once I've done that, training the dog to do the specifics needed for competition — actually here's the ironic thing — is actually really, really easy. It's easy  to teach a dog to pick up a dumbbell and come back, if you've done all those preliminaries. So, for example, if I've created lots of focus for me via using the medium of play, I know it's going to be easy to teach my dog to bring a retrieved article back. I know that it's going to teach my dog to be a great agility dog, or have agility skills, if my dog has the ability to ignore distractions. For example, all that would transfer to me walking down the local... the street and the dog ignoring distraction. The whole thing — it's a holistic way in which I engage with my dogs. So it's all about preparation. We used to have a phrase when I was a police officer: “Lack of preparation is preparing to fail, and failure to prepare makes an ass out of you and me.” If you don't put the work into preparing your dogs — and that is not only the dog trainer, that's the you training. That's looking at yourself, that's looking at your mental game, that's looking at your confidence level, that's the whole picture. As a sports dog coach, my agenda, my goal, is to create the team — and I use that word specifically, the team — both the dog and handler that can cope with the rigors and challenges faced within dog sports. Melissa Breau: You said in there you take them to lots of weird and wonderful places. I love that turn of phrase. That just rolls off the tongue really neat. I was hoping that you might be willing to dive a little bit deeper into your process of preparing for that first competition. Can you just share a little bit about how you go about that? Kamal Fernandez: The first thing is I create a lot of focus to me, and that's done … I work a lot on my dog's recall domestically, I take them to lots of environments, and I do the socializing process with other people and dogs, etcetera. But the main thing that I'm aspiring to create with my dog is largely indifferent to things. I don't want my dog to be overly focused with dogs. I don't want it to be overly focused with people. I would like them to be indifferent, like, “Yeah, people, dogs, I'm certainly not stressed by them, I'm certainly not excited by them, I'm largely indifferent.” How I do that is I'm very diligent about how, and aware about how, I socialize my dogs. I ensure that … even socialization, it's a process. It's strategic. I choose the dogs that my dogs will mix with. I choose the people that my dogs will mix with. Obviously, as a professional dog trainer, I'm able to do that, but even my domestic clients who have no interest in doing dog sports specifically, we discuss the need to be vigilant with how you socialize and engage your dogs with the world. So I'll identify if the dog has any issues with his baseline temperament, because not all dogs are predisposed to coping with those things. That's my first thing. I need to see what I've got. And then. if the dog lacks confidence, or is nervous, or apprehensive, or fearful, I first do work to create a dog that's confident and well-adjusted in all environments. Then I work on basic skills. I work on my foundation, and this is something that I would say most people underestimate: the need to teach foundation. It's called foundation because that is where you are laying your basis for which your house, your building, your tower of dog training is going to be placed. If your space isn't solid and secure and well grounded, your house will inevitably fall down. And that is having a dog that has great skills in relation to toys. So I teach distinct skills, that is, my dog to tug a toy, my dog to bring the toy back at speed, my dog to release the toy on cue, my dog to drive to a dead toy on the ground, and my dog to chase a moving toy. I do those in relation to play, and I teach distinct marker words, which I blatantly took from another Fenzi dog instructor, Shade, whose concept of introducing marker words is absolutely fantastic, and I believe other trainers in Europe use a similar principal. So I teach all that first and in relation to toys. Parallel to that, I work skills in relation to food, and I also get my dog shaping behavior and understanding to offer behavior. I lay all that foundation before I teach a specific exercise. The reason I do that is because now I have the mechanical skills, and the dog has the skills, to be able to train the dog effectively and efficiently for that specific behavior. For example, if I need to teach a behavior that requires distance, a great way to reward the dog would be to throw the toy to the dog. If my dog doesn't pursue a moving toy and then bring it back to hand and doesn't release it, I now have to come up with an alternative solution. I would have to either go to the dog or I would have to use food, which might not be appropriate in the environment, or might reduce drive, but I'm having to compromise the A-1 means of reinforcement for that dog. So for me, it's all about laying foundations, and a really good example is my youngest dog, Mighty. Mighty was born and she coincided with the birth of my daughter, and obviously my priorities for dog training was very much about putting that on the backburner, so she largely was left to pasture, so to speak. I worked on social skills, I took her out on her own and I did recalls and stuff, but she had no training for any dog sport specific behavior at all. I didn't teach heeling, I didn't teach retrieves, I didn't teach any of that stuff.  I didn't do a foundation for agility. I did nothing. But what I did do was teach her skills in relation to toys, food, shaping, etcetera. I did five-minute sessions with her whenever I could, and her training was very sporadic. Her siblings were trained and didn't have that issue and they obviously … it was very much a toss, and they raced off and they're doing amazing things by a year old. The irony is that now they're 18 months old, I probably caught up with every single one of her siblings because she had a great foundation, so what they were fastidiously working at, and that's not a criticism of them, it's just that all I did was work from foundation. I worked on her being able to be focused with me, I worked on her understanding to pick up a toy, let it go, bring it back to me, etcetera. Now I can move her through her training relatively quickly, and she's caught up or most certainly is fast catching up with her siblings on what she can do, and that's all about having a great foundation. I think that most people, they desperately want to move on to the sexy stuff, the fun stuff, the stuff that looks like real dog sports, and just working on being able to give your dog a treat without the dog taking your hand off is something that people go, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll do that later on,” and yet they miss the importance of being able to deliver reinforcement effectively, and that's really where I would urge people to place their emphasis and their attention and their training time. Melissa Breau: Because it makes everything else so much easier, right? Kamal Fernandez: Absolutely, yes. Melissa Breau: You mentioned a little bit, you were talking about how you evaluate dogs and their tendencies, and I know that some of your dogs came to you with what people might consider “issues,” for lack of a better term. You mentioned last time you were on the podcast that you actually really enjoy working with behavioral cases, so I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you decide what a particular dog's tendencies are and how those impact what you focus on in your training, or even what sports you might do with that particular dog. Kamal Fernandez: I would get a dog with some idea of what I would like to do with that dog. But if I could, I could pick a dog from a certain line or lineage or temperament that's going to be best suited for a vocation. However, I've had dogs that I literally saw, for example, my Border Collie, Scooter, and my German Spitz. I literally saw them … one was online, I saw a picture of him, I rang up the breeder, and I think I got him with no knowledge of anything about him, his history. I made the decision that I wanted a little small dog, I was Googling, he came up, and that was about as complicated as it got. With my Border Collie, Scooter, I'd lost two dogs very young and I was frantically looking for another dog. At the time there was no puppies for some reason at least that's how it came across, all litters had all gone, the time was wrong, and I saw him in a magazine, looking for a home, and I went and got him with no history. I had intentions of what I'd like to do with that dog. I was going to do tracking, but he had a reoccurring physical injury, which meant that he couldn't do that. So in his situation I was forced to change what I do with him, and the irony is that he was a brilliant, brilliant tracking dog. He just had a natural aptitude toward it, but he couldn't jump because of this particular reoccurring injury. In that instance it wasn't so much his temperament that dictated it, it was physicality, so that was what dictated the way the sport I did with him. But temperament's a massive thing. If the dog has an aptitude for something and the dog gets joy from that, why not investigate that as a chosen career or sport for that dog, because I'm a great believer in doing what your dog loves, and finding what your dog loves, and manipulate it to get what you want from the dog. If my dog has a particular tendency towards, say, for example, chase drive, the obvious sport I'm going to pick for them may be something like agility or something that is motion driven. You have to appease what the dog is naturally. You have to give the dog what its baseline requirements are. If I have a dog that likes to run in some way, shape, or form in its life, I need to almost appease that part of its personality. Same if I have a dog that likes to hunt, I'm going to do something with it that appeases that part of its personality. That doesn't mean I might compete with it, but in its daily life I'm going to do something that satisfies them. I greatly, genuinely believe that creates a dog that is content and happy because they don't have that sort of frustration of not having that part of their temperament or what is hardwired into them genetically not satisfied. Does that make sense? Melissa Breau: Absolutely. I think that's super-important. A lot of people get a dog that was bred for a job and they don't always think about how that should influence, or does influence, what they should do on a daily basis. So I think that's an interesting point. Kamal Fernandez: Absolutely. A lot of the behavioral cases I work with, it's because they get a dog that happens to be from a certain breed that is predisposed to work. They need a task. That doesn't mean that I would say you need to do a dog sport with this dog, but you do need to do something that appeases that part of their characteristics. Like a cocker spaniel — play some search games with it, throw a ball in long grass, teach it to go finding things, do some fun scent work in your living room. Something that just checks the box of hunting in that dog's DNA, as it were. It's the same for … if I had a dog that was predisposed to running, or liked to chase, I would channel that chasing onto me via recall so that my dog didn't then externalize that in a negative way and therefore become reactive, become the dog that chases traffic, becomes the dog that obsesses with shadow, etcetera. Melissa Breau: Did you pull out the cocker spaniel example because you know that I have a 9-month-old English cocker puppy? Kamal Fernandez: Absolutely. Got to love a cocker puppy. Melissa Breau: I know you've been doing some writing lately about the term leadership, and how you've struggled a bit with the term because of how strongly it's associated with dominance theory, so I wanted to ask you a little about that. What got you started thinking about the concept? Kamal Fernandez: I've been dog training for a little while now, and I've seen a real journey from how we used to train dogs and how we viewed dogs, and even from a social setting, to how we see them now, and I would say the pendulum has swung from one extreme to another and that we've gone from the use of compulsion was very much accepted and the norm. Just to give you an example, the first day I went to dog training with my little crossbreed, I was 8 or 9 years old, I was taught how to put a choke chain on her, and we walked around the hall for the whole 45 minutes and we did recalls, we did all these exercises, which now I look back and I shudder of all the things that were wrong with that situation and what is best dog training. Now don't get me wrong — the intentions of the people were genuine and they were heartfelt and they believed — like Maya Angelou says, when we know better, we do better — they believed what they did was correct. But that opinion and viewpoint has largely changed into more positive-reinforcement-based. We've had more studies completed about dogs and dogs' behavior and how behavior is viewed, and how the interpersonal relationship with dogs isn't about them plotting up at night thinking about how, I mean, now Sugar's sitting on my bed. I can't for one minute think that I have to sleep with one eye open in the risk of her taking over the world, so to speak. We've made peace with that. We know that that isn't the case. But we've become almost reluctant to give our dogs leadership, and to give them direction, and to say to them, “It's OK, it's fine, you're going to be OK,” or to say to them, “That's not acceptable behavior. That is acceptable behavior. That's what I'd like for you to do.” I spoke at a conference, talking about the dirty words in dog training and the concept of saying no, not as in I'm literally saying no, but laying boundaries for my dog and having lines drawn in the sand about what is acceptable and what is not acceptable behavior. I believe there's a lot of guilt in dog training. I think that we have a real issue of guilt about how we treat these amazing animals who have forgiven us for poor communication, misunderstanding, and really, really inadequate training, and we're overcompensating in that there's a train of thought about not to put your dog in a collar, that head collars are aversive, which you could argue aversive that they are, that any sort of stress or frustration to your dog is to be avoided at all costs. It's not even a balance. It's not even a balance, because my life is very much in the realm of reinforcement and positive dog training, and I absolutely, absolutely believe in its power and its potency. The way in which I approach dog training isn't just about dog training. It's about the way in which I lead my life. I believe in being positive, positive energy, putting positivity out there. The parallel I use is, as a new parent, my role for my daughter is to give her direction, is to give her leadership, and to give her confidence, and that's the greatest gift I can give her, in my opinion. If I can give her confidence and self-belief, for me, you can give a child no greater gift. That stems from sometimes it's going to be saying to her, “That's not appropriate. You can't speak to people like that. That's amazing. That's fantastic. We're super-proud of you.” I consider myself somebody that leads by example in a professional sense and also a personal sense, and I have no qualms with talking about the concept of leadership. My dogs require leadership. I've had dogs like my Spitz — he was incredibly fearful, incredibly nervous with people and dogs and life. The way in which I built his confidence up was to give him light leadership and teach him, “It's fine, the flappy thing's not going to hurt you. This person's not going to come near you. I will look after you. I will be there. I'll support you.” I never forced him, I never grabbed him and said, “You're going to put up with the thing that scares you most.” I was always the person that gave him confidence, and I fed that through to him with my interactions and my presence and the way I dealt with him. We have become dubious about talking about leadership because I think that it has connotations with dominance-based theories to dog training, in which it was all about being the alpha, and being stronger and bigger, and we know that's been dispelled. I have no negative connotations about leadership, and I have no negative connotations about being a leader to my dogs and giving them confidence. I hope that people realize — and I stress this — that leaders don't oppress. Leaders inspire. They cause you to want to do better. I look at the people that I consider as leaders in the public eye, and I look to them and I think they inspire you to do better. They show you what can be achieved by greatness, or what greatness looks like, and for me, I use that parallel with my dog training. Melissa Breau: There are a couple of things in there, and one it sounds like partially what you're talking about leadership as the idea that positive isn't permissive, that it doesn't mean we have to take whatever our dogs do. It also seems there's this bigger idea of what leadership is in there. How do you define that term, or how are you defining that term? What does that look like? You talked about with your Spitz what you did to feed that confidence. Maybe you can paint that picture just a little bit more, what that looked like and what you were doing. Kamal Fernandez: I deal with a lot of dogs that have reactivity issues and fear issues. I'll give you an example of a dog I had. I posted videos of him on my Facebook page, and that was a Great Dane called Jensen. He was obviously a large adolescent Great Dane, and fortunately I didn't miss my first interaction with him. He was incredibly fearful and he had a history of being reactive. He chased after a child, and there were a couple of other things going on with him. When he came to me, the first time I met him he spook-barked at me, he backed off, etcetera, and his owner was really dubious about it. She was concerned about leaving him. Within, I would say, 24 hours, the dog's behavior changed. It's the same dog, and bear in mind she dropped him off for training with me, I had the dog for ten days, within 24 hours the dog was different, and within 48 hours you would have said I'd done something with that dog, or given him some sort of medication, or he was doped or tranquilized, because his temperament changed. The way in which I dealt with him was I just never made a big deal out of his … when he got worried or apprehensive or scared, it was OK. I just allowed him to figure things out for himself. I allowed him the space and the time to just work out that the world isn't a scary place. I can remember distinctly taking him past a large garden ornament and he absolutely freaked out and he spook-barked at it. He was on a lead, so it was fine. It was quite a long lead, and I just let him go to the end of the lead, and I just stood my ground, and scratched my head, and looked around, and remained really nondescript about the whole thing. I was like, “OK, he's scared of the garden ornament,” and I just allowed him to figure out. He sniffed the ground and went up to it. I didn't feed him or reinforce him for any behavior. I just allowed him to realize, “Oh, it's a garden ornament, that's all it is.” Once he figured it out, the dog was absolutely fine. But because I didn't react, and I didn't panic, and I didn't get stressed, or I didn't hide or I didn't go fearful, the dog picked up from me that, “Oh, OK, this guy doesn't seem to be concerned about it. Why should I?” That was a consistent thing with him. Another scenario — I had him on a training camp with me for a week, as I say. This was a dog that had reactive issues. He would lunge, and he caused quite a bit of damage to his owner's hand by pulling and sort of strained … I think he fractured her finger, her whole hand, by his strength, obviously. So he had major issues with reactivity and lunging. I was training him one day, I was just playing with him and doing stuff with him, and somebody didn't know I was training and they let their dog in the field. It came rushing up to him, straight up to him. It was a Golden Retriever, a really lovely dog, really super-friendly, and Jensen did nothing. He just sniffed it and he relaxed and I gave him a bit of lead and he sniffed it and that was the end of that. Now if that was previous to my dealings with him, that dog would have definitely, definitely reacted. And again, it just stemmed from... I did things with him, like I definitely worked on his recall. I took him out with my other dogs, and my dogs are all very confident, so dogs pick up on that energy and they pick up on that vibe. If you're with a group of people that are gregarious, outgoing, and positive, you tend to pick up on that energy, so it's the same with dogs. The other thing I did with him is I allowed him just to figure stuff out. I let him be a dog, and I think that's a really, really, really key thing. Allow the dog to be a dog. Let him be a little bit freaked out by something and let him just work it out. “Oh, it isn't a big scary scarecrow. It's an inanimate object. It's not an ax murderer that's going to kill me.” Stay a safe distance, and be cautious and be sensible, but don't be fearful in your dealings. I'm very much about letting dogs figure that stuff out and I give them time. Obviously I use reinforcement, if appropriate. I give the dog space, and I'm mindful of who I'm interacting the dog with, so long as there's things that help the dog. But the big thing is I give them leadership. I say to him, “The world isn't a scary place. You're going to be fine. Let's walk past the ornament. Let's just ignore it. It's fine. Let's go. I'm not bothered, so you're not bothered.” I'm a confident person when I deal with dogs, and dogs definitely pick up on that. Practical things that people can do and take away is video your training, video your interactions, and look at triggers that you do. Do you tense up the lead? Do you tense up your shoulders? Does your body posture change? Those are things that you can untrain the dog's association with by doing those in the privacy of your own home and pairing them with reinforcement so you can help your dog understand that those triggers equate to good things happening to them. The other thing is accrue people that are going to help you build your confidence with your dog, if you're not naturally a confident person. I talk about accruing villages, people that have the same ethos, if you have the same approach to dealing with dogs, and therefore are going to help you with dogs that are challenging or that have issues and that you need to be a leader in, so you want supportive people around you. There is information out there. Obviously I teach for the FDSA, and I am going to use her as an example: Denise Fenzi is by definition a leader. She created the FDSA from nothing and she's accrued people, villages, whatever you want to call them, who are on the same ethos. We are all individual, we have our own little things, and I think that's the strength of the school, we're all leaders in our own field, but Denise leads from the front, and she sets the tone and the example of how everybody engages, and how we operate, and how we teach, and how we approach our teaching. From my personal experience that's been a learning curve — how to deal with people online, and how to teach them and be more effective in my teaching and my communication, to be better and to be able to help more people. That's the epitome of what a leader should be. There's no judgment. It's about inspiring people to want to do better, and I would say Denise is a great example of that. There are other people within our industry who I would look to as great leaders. She's definitely somebody that's taken the bull by the horns and set up this amazing school to do so. Melissa Breau: Yes, absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more. To shift gears a little back to the leadership concept, the last time you were on, we talked about this idea that work equals play equals work, and it seems like that idea and this idea of leadership are connected somehow. I'm not sure exactly where to pull those threads together. Do you see those ideas as related, and if so, how or how not? Kamal Fernandez: Absolutely I do. The way in which I explain it is when I was a police officer, we always had a phrase in that you'd say, “You'd go the extra mile for a good governor.” A governor would be a person of rank who would be your manager, and you would go the extra mile for somebody that recognized your value. I think that's very much applicable to dog training. The reason they appreciated you is because you didn't feel like you were going to work. You felt like you were going to be part of a team and having a great time with your mates, and everybody had the same vision, everybody was collective in what they were aiming for. I don't want to say we were playing a game, because it was obviously serious work, but it never felt like work, it never felt like a chore to engage with the team I was specifically thinking about, because the person that led us created that ethos within the group, if that makes sense. I'd say the same applies to dog training, in that if you can inspire your dog to want to play the game with you … Susan Garrett has a great phrase in that she says, “People that do great things, or leaders, they make the mundane tasks a game. They make things that are laborious and hard, they make it a game, and everybody wants to play games.” My role is to make it a game so the dog wants to play the game with me. Being an effective leader, you are inspiring the people that you lead, whether it be two-legged or four-legged, to want to participate. For me, the way in which I do that is via the medium of a game. Melissa Breau: I want to totally change gears on you for a minute here and talk about your Handler's Choice classes. I know Denise often says that the Handler's Choice classes are one of the best values at FDSA, and I know you've taught them, at least the last few sessions. It seems like when I look back it seems pretty consistent. So I wanted to see if there's something special about these classes that's led you to offer them regularly, and if you could just share a little about how you run them and what they're all about. Kamal Fernandez: Handler's Choice is probably one of my favorite courses I've ever done. It's like a smorgasbord of dog training, and anybody that does Gold in the Handler's Choice, you are going to get such amazing value for money, and you're going to learn so much because there's so many things that are covered. I've done Handler's Choice and I had heeling, retrieves, go out, send aways, I had impulse control, I had a behavioral thing in there, all in one course, and you're thinking, like, you sign up as a Bronze, you're getting five or six or seven or eight, depending on how many different goal participants, you're going to get all that information, all that different stuff, and I just think it's such a great thing. The way in which I do it is I allow everybody in Handler's Choice to pick two things that they want to work on, so it might be, for example, heeling and retrieves, or it might be impulse control and tugging, for example, hypothetical, and work through that over the six-week period. I will post videos that are lectures related to your specific needs, and I'll also do ad hoc ones. If I haven't got video that's appropriate I'll go and do one that's literally specific to your needs. Another thing I do, which is really, really cool and I love to do, is I live-stream a session relating to somebody on that course. I have an alumni group for the Fenzi students that have done any of my courses, and I have done live streams talking about everything from heelwork to behavioral issues and adolescents, for example, I think I did a live stream on. It's such a great course. It's like the secret course. People just don't pick up on how amazing it is. You have so many courses that are very specific and the information is amazing, but it's very, very much about a specific task or specific skill. But Handler's Choice is literally a smorgasbord of brilliant training and so many different subjects, so if you're a dog training geek like me, Handler's Choice is definitely the course to do. Melissa Breau: One last question before I let you go. I didn't see anything scheduled with you yet after February when I was checking. It's possible that will have changed by the time this comes out, but are there any other classes coming up that you're going to be offering in the next couple of sessions that listeners should keep an eye out for? Kamal Fernandez: Yeah. I'm the world's worst in getting my calendar in order, and I tend to message Denise going, “Oh, Denise, can I do this in February?” And Denise being Denise goes, “Yes, message Teri to sort it out, whatever.” I probably, knowing me, will do something in February. At this moment I'm not sure what it's going to be. I would have thought it would be Handler's Choice again because that's just a rolling class and I love teaching that, but at the moment I'm doing the FCI Foundation heeling course, which probably the natural thing would be to do the next subsequent course after that to give the people on the Foundation course continuity. That's probably the way in which I'm heading. The whole concept of the school is just fantastic. I love the ethos, I love the message, I love what the other instructors bring to the table. Some of them are very diverse and very different to what I do, and I'm very different to what they do, and I think the beauty is that we're all individual, but we're all on the same song sheet, so to speak. I think for anybody contemplating doing a course, it's amazingly great value for money. It's such a reasonably priced product. To be crass, it doesn't cost the world to do six weeks of dog training with a world-renown international dog trainer in a specific field for $65. I think it's $65. Melissa Breau: The bronze? Yeah. Kamal Fernandez: …where you can get that information. It's ridiculously cost-effective, so hopefully more people will sign up and they'll get on board with what Fenzi has to offer. Melissa Breau: I certainly hope so. Thank you so much, Kamal. I really appreciate you coming back on the podcast. Kamal Fernandez: My pleasure, Melissa. Thank you very much for asking me, and thank you very much for having me, and all the best. Melissa Breau: You too. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week, this time with long-time FDSA student Ester Zimmerman, to talk competitive obedience and dog sports in general. And guys, this week I want to repeat my special request from the last couple of episodes. If you listen to podcasts, I'm sure you've heard other people say this, but reviews in iTunes have a HUGE impact on helping new people find the show and letting iTunes know that our show is actually worth listening to. So if you've enjoyed this episode or any of the previous ones, I'd really appreciate it if you could take a moment, go to iTunes, and leave us a review. We've gotten a few new ones -- like this one, titled Another Way to Learn from Top Dog Trainers from A Very Dead Bird. “I'm excited that the Fenzi Academy has another venue to educate about progressive, effective dog training methods. If you're a fellow behavior geek, especially if you're into dog sports, this podcast is for you.” Thank you a very dead bird, whoever you are! And, while you're there, if you haven't already, subscribe 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.

SUMMARY: Dr. Deborah Jones -- better known around FDSA as Deb Jones -- she is a psychologist who specializes in learning theory and social behavior. An early innovator in the use of clicker training, she has owned and worked with a variety of breeds and has earned top level titles in agility, rally, and obedience over the last 25 years. In 2004 Deb worked with agility trainer and World Team member Judy Keller to develop the FOCUS training system. FOCUS stands for Fun, Obedience & Consistency lead to Unbelievable Success. Deb has also worked with Denise Fenzi, co-authoring the “Dog Sports Skills” book series and authored several other books, with more in the works! At FDSA, Deb offers a wide range of popular classes, including a number of excellent foundations classes. Her focus is on developing training methods that are enjoyable and effective for both the dog and the trainer. Links K9 in Focus (Deb's Site) Next Episode:  To be released 2/9/2018, and I'll be talking to Denise Fenzi about Play, so stay tuned! 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. Deborah Jones -- better known around FDSA as Deb Jones.   Deb is a psychologist who specializes in learning theory and social behavior. An early innovator in the use of clicker training, she has owned and worked with a variety of breeds and has earned top-level titles in agility, rally, and obedience over the last 25 years. In 2004, Deb worked with agility trainer and World Team member Judy Keller to develop the FOCUS training system. FOCUS stands for Fun, Obedience & Consistency Lead to Unbelievable Success. Deb has also worked with Denise Fenzi, co-authoring the “Dog Sports Skills” book series, and authored several other books, with more in the works! At FDSA, Deb offers a wide range of popular classes, including a number of excellent foundations classes. Her focus is on developing training methods that are enjoyable and effective for both the dog and the trainer. Hi Deb! Welcome back to the podcast. Deb Jones: Thanks, Melissa. I'm really happy to be here. Melissa Breau: To start us out, do you want to just reacquaint listeners with the furry friends you share your household with? Deb Jones: At the moment, we have four dogs and one cat. We have a wide variety. Smudge is the oldest dog. He's a Blue Merle Sheltie. He's 14 now, and sadly, he's sort of in the hospice stage of life. He's having more and more issues, so that's always a tough thing to deal with. But we're taking it day to day and seeing how he is. Then I have Zen, my red Border Collie, who's 10 years old. Zen still is his wild and crazy self. I don't think that's ever going to change. Star is my black-and-white Border Collie, and she's going to be 7 this year, which is just stunning to me because it seems like she's still just 2 years old. I can't believe they keep getting older. I tell them to stop, and I tell them 7's a perfect age, just stay 7 forever and I'd be thrilled because it's just the right time. Then we have little Tigger, who is the tiny little Sheltie. He is just going to be turning 2 next week, and he only weighs 7 and a half pounds, so he's very, very small for a Sheltie, but he's full of himself. He's got enough attitude for everybody. And finally we have Tricky the cat. I think Trick's about 8 or so now. He's been around for a while. He was the star of the Cat Class that we put on last year. So that's the group for the moment. Melissa Breau: Last time you were on the podcast, I know we talked quite a bit about focus, since that's a big part of what you teach. For anyone who's listening who wants to go back and listen to that, which I recommend, it's Episode 14. But I did have a question or two that we didn't get to last time, so I wanted to dive into that just a little bit. On your syllabus for the Get Focused class, you have a line that says, “What is focus? How is it different from attention?” So I wanted to ask, what is your definition of focus, and how is it different from attention? Deb Jones: OK, I'm glad to talk about that. That's a common question that we get all the time. The way that I think about focus is that it's the ability to concentrate on a task despite distractions. So whatever it is that we're doing, you can keep doing that without being pulled away or pulled in other directions by things going on around you. In the dog training world, attention is often considered to be either the dog's looking at you or making eye contact with you. Focus is a lot more than that. That's a part of it, but it's actually a small part. With focus, my dog might be working on a task totally independently of me, and I don't want them looking at me or making eye contact. You can imagine, for example, pretty much most of agility, nosework, working in obedience at the upper levels in particular, something like go outs — there are lots of times when the dog needs to focus on what they're doing, and then appropriately switch back to trainer focus when it's necessary. So there's a lot more going on there than just “Look at me,” because if you just look at me all the time, we're not going to get very far in our training. We start out with that, we start out with “Pay attention to the trainer,” because that is really the first step. But it's also, I think, a lot more about persistence at the task, sticking on task once you start doing something, no matter what is going on around you. That's sort of my expanded answer of the difference there. Melissa Breau: A lot of people tend to ask about focus. They're those students that have worked really hard, and they finally managed to achieve good focus from their dogs, and then they're really scared to ruin it. They're working at their desk, or they're watching TV, or who knows, but they're doing something of their own that does not involve the dog, and the dog comes over and offers focus, offers to engage, and wants to work, and they feel like, OK, my choices are ruin my dog's focus and all this work that I put in, or ignore my dog, and they struggle with that a little bit. How do you handle that? What do you recommend in that kind of situation? Deb Jones: That's something that does start to happen, especially if you've done very much focus work. All of a sudden now, too much focus is a problem. But it's really not a problem. We're all happy when we have more focus. We can't say that's a problem. Melissa Breau: It's a good problem. Deb Jones: Yes, it's a very good problem. So if your dog wants to interact with you, I always think that is fabulous. Take it. I always acknowledge it. That doesn't mean I'm going to get up and train you right now, but I am going to respond to you in some way, even if I'm just petting you and saying we're going to do something later. That's still responding to you. I don't jump up every time that you focus on me. In our work, in the system that we have set up and the way we teach focus, we set up expectations for when we want focus and when we don't need it anymore, and we're clear about when those times are. We want focus work for training sessions. When I'm training my dog, I want focus a hundred percent of the time. But when we're lounging around the house, we don't need focus anymore. So we set up the dogs to understand, These are the times, these are the signals I'll give you that focus will be reinforced, and these are the signals that I give you that we are done for now and you can pretty much do whatever you want … well, within reason. You can't get into trouble, but you can pretty much do whatever you want. So we have those on and off cues that we use with them. If I had a dog, though, who was very sensitive, or really hardly ever engaged with me and was very new to this, I would probably leap up from my desk and have a party if they showed me that they wanted to be engaged. So it really very much depends on the dog, as well as the level of training you're at. If I did that now, though, with Zen, I would never do anything else. It would be like a constant 24/7, so with him it's the opposite. It's “We're done for now. We don't need any more focus at the moment.” We do actually in focus training, the second exercise we do, we capture focus when it happens, and we acknowledge it with something that's non-food. So we want to get into the fact that my paying attention to you, my interacting with you, playing, praise, petting, all of those things, we will do. And what surprises people is how often then the dog starts focusing on them around the house. So it shows us that they're willing to do it, as long as we're willing to acknowledge it. The other thing I want to mention here, because this is something that also comes up a lot, is people will talk about doing focus work while they're walking their dog, or hiking, and I tell them, “Don't do that.” To me, that is totally separate from my focus work. When we're out hiking, or out walking, that's my dog's chance to relax, and to sniff, and to do again whatever they want to do within reason. I'll stop when they stop, I'll move when they move, I don't make a big deal about it. It's for them to relax as much as for me, and that's not a time when I want focus. I may have to give you a cue at some point, I may have to call them back to me, or ask them to lie down or something, as necessary, but we don't ever combine focus work with those informal activities. We keep those totally separate, again so it's clear to the dog: I'm expecting focus from you now; I'm not going to be expecting it from you in these other situations. Melissa Breau: Hearing you say this, it almost sounds like you're essentially putting it on stimulus control. Deb Jones: Exactly. I could have said that and not gone through all these explanations. Yes, that is exactly what we're doing is putting it on stimulus control. Maybe I need to stop being so wordy. Melissa Breau: No, no, I think that was good, because I've taken the class and I hadn't thought of it that way until you described it this time around. That's an interesting way of thinking about it. Now, I know in addition to Get Focused this session, you're teaching a new class, and the topic is kind of fascinating. You called it Achieving a Balance Between Motivation and Control, which I think everybody wants that, right? So can you share a little bit about what the class covers? Deb Jones: Well, I can probably share a lot about what the class covers, because it's on my mind. Whenever we develop a new class, we think about it 24/7. It's on my mind a lot, and I've been thinking about this class for a long time and trying to figure out how to put it into the format that I wanted in order to teach it. When I was thinking back, I realized I was writing lectures for this when we went to camp last year, on the plane to camp, so it's been a while. I've been working on pulling this together, and the thought's been in the back of my mind even longer. This is another what we would call a concept class, meaning the class is not about any particular behavior or skill. It's more like it's built around a theme, and everything we do then kind of supports that theme or helps us explore it or find ways to make changes based on that. Concept classes in general are harder because they require more from the trainer. They require more thought and effort. And they're harder for the instructor for the same reason. They just are a little bit different. A skills class is just, “We're going to work on this thing, like a retrieve, and that's all we're going to work on for six weeks,” which is a lot more straightforward. But concept classes tend to be a bit different. I first really started thinking about this idea of balance in dogs back when I was doing a lot of agility. You would see what would happen over time pretty regularly. Somebody would start out, say, with their first agility dog, and often the dog was never gotten with performance in mind. They just stumbled into it. And as they started to do agility, typically what happened was they would say, “Oh, this dog isn't fast enough,” “This dog isn't interested,” or “This dog isn't very driven” — and I'll talk about drive in a second here — and then they would go, “I need a dog that's going to be better suited for this,” which I'm good with that. I think that's a very smart thing to think about: Is the dog I have suited for what I want to do? But then they would get a faster model, oftentimes a model with no brakes, so typically a herding breed. And then they have this little baby puppy herding-breed dog, and they spend about a year building drive in the dog because they're so worried. Since their last dog didn't have a lot of enthusiasm and energy, they're going to get it with this next dog. Of course what happens is this dog already had plenty of motivation, and what you're doing is not building drive in any way at all. What you're doing is building over-arousal. So now you have dogs that are high as kites, and what happens? No control, because the person was afraid to work on control because that was a bad idea with their last dog. We're pretty much always training our last dog, and it's usually very different from what the dog in front of us needs right now. So we end up with these dogs that are highly over-aroused, often around agility, and that's just the first place I saw it. People do it in other sports as well. Let me get back to the term drive, though, because this is one that I very carefully left out of the description of the class. I purposely thought about it and left it out and changed it to motivation. The term motivation, I think, is a better one for what we're talking about. When you're motivated, you want to do something. You have a reason to do it, you have the energy to do it, you have the desire to do it. That's what we think of in dogs when we talk about drive. But scientific terms we never use the term drive. That's just something that's seen as not even a real thing. It doesn't exist. It's a word that can be described better in many other ways, or a quality that can be described better in many other ways. On the other hand, dog trainers use it all the time, so it's not like I can say I will never use that word, because people do understand what you're saying when you talk about drive. Actually, in my first lecture in the class, I talk about … say a little bit about this and why I don't use that term, but I understand that a lot of people do. To me, it's more of a motivation issue than it is a drive issue. That's why I don't use that term a lot. I may lapse into it now and again, if I forget myself. But typically, so let's go back to my example of the totally over-aroused dog. So now what we've got is no control. What that really means is there's no balance. You've got all arousal, no control, or all motivation, no control. That's not a good place to be for the dog or the trainer — trust me, I've been there. You wish greatly for your more careful, thoughtful dog when you have a dog that just “go, go, go” a thousand miles an hour, and you cannot get them to slow down for a second. That's a problem. That's a big problem. I think in general it's hard for us to know who our dogs are, to really, clearly see them, and to see what they actually need. Again, we have this illusion that either we're training the dog we had before, or we have this mythical, idealized version of who the dog is. So we're not actually thinking and really analyzing who's this dog and what do they need to get them more into this balanced place where they can do whatever we want, yet they can still make good choices and decisions and think about what they're doing. This is where we get into nature and nurture a little bit in my thinking about it. Genetics matters. There's no question about that. You can't say they don't, and I sort of believe they matter more than 50 percent. Of course in psychology, for years we've talked about the nature-nurture controversy and what determines how you turn out as an adult. Was it all determined by your genetics, or does your environment and experience have a lot more to do with it? Of course it's not one or the other. It's an interaction of the two. But lately the thinking has been going back to the nature part of it, and that there are some things that were hardwired into us, and it's really hard to change them. You can't override nature. You can modify it a little bit. So we're going to be looking at what has nature given you with this dog. I have sort of a temperament test. It's not really a test. It's you answering questions about your dog from what you know of them, trying to answer them honestly in terms of what is this dog, who is this dog, what do they bring into the world in terms of core characteristics? In humans we talk about something called the “big five personality characteristics,” so I sort of built it off of that, that these are the things that people think are genetic. Where do you fall on introvert/extrovert, where do you fall on resilience when something bad happens and you recover from it — those kinds of things. So we'll look at that, but of course the flipside of that is your environment and experiences. They matter. They may not again override what you normally are going to be, but they certainly matter a lot. So we'll look at those as well and talk a little bit about it. It used to be the early behaviorists like John Watson would say, “Give me a baby and I can make him anything I want him to be.” And I'm, like, Oh, I don't think so. Parents everywhere would tell you that is so very wrong. That's not the case at all that you could possibly … nobody comes into the world a blank slate, or the Tabula Rasa idea that we have from John Locke. That just doesn't happen, really. We're not all interchangeable when we could be whatever we wanted, and that's not true for our dogs, either. We know they're different, and we have to take that into account. So we look at that interaction. I'm going to talk a lot about that the first couple weeks of class, the interaction of nature and nurture, and look at where we're standing with these dogs right now. So, what is my dog, to the best of my knowledge, really like? Then we're going to talk a lot about arousal levels. I've mentioned arousal a few times because you can have too much. Too much, too little, over- and under-arousal. But that's something that we can modify. Classical conditioning, in particular, plays a huge role in this process of arousal. We connect certain stimuli to being over-aroused or under-aroused. So we'll talk about how that works, and look at how we might change some of those fairly automatic responses. They just happen. When you are exposed to stimuli, you have that response. I've had dogs, personally — Smudgie, the old dog, right now is a good example of that. You get within a certain distance to the agility ring, and he had no brain. Absolutely no brain. Screaming, lunging, just … you know, he didn't do it on purpose. It was just his automatic response because the stimuli of agility brought out that response. We had to work very, very hard to change that and to get him at an appropriate level where he could think at least a little bit as he went into the agility ring, because if you go in like that, nothing good ever happens afterwards. It tends to be a train wreck. So we'll talk a little bit about — I've had some train wrecks now and again — we'll talk a little about how arousal levels and classical conditioning work. One of the things that has been fascinating to me lately is to think about what they call “tells.” Tell is a subtle sign that you could easily miss that something is happening or is going to happen. They talk about it in gambling, that if you're good at understanding another player's tells, you can tell what kind of hand they have, even if they're trying to hide that. So learning this about our dogs, what are the precursors to arousal changes? If we can see those early, we can jump in there and make some changes so that they don't go too high or too low. We can get them in that optimal state of arousal where they have plenty of energy and yet they still can think and learn. Tells are really different for every dog and very, very easy to miss. I think here's where video is really helpful, because you didn't see it when you were training, but when you go back and look, you start to see this pattern. I was actually doing some video for this class, for the later parts of this class, talking about tells, and I realized that I was ignoring one from Star. I was getting it regularly that it was definitely one of her tells, and I was ignoring it and not even thinking about it. When I looked back over the videos, I was like, Oh, she does do that regularly when she's too aroused, and then the next thing's going to be a bark. So that led me to go, If I could change when I see this, the very beginnings of it, then everything would go better. So we'll work with people to try to figure out what their dogs' tells are, and to pick up on them earlier in the training process. I think there's a lot here, and it's taken me a long time actually to pull it together in a way that made sense to me. We still go on things like … typical things like the reinforcers we're using, when we're using them, how we're using them. Even the markers and the fact that markers can lead to different levels of arousal. I know I see that in many dogs. There are lots of dogs that the click is a signal for over-arousal, and as soon as they hear a click, they're off. They're just higher than possible. I can't even use a click — I rarely use a click, I should say — with Zen in shaping anymore because I realized I had done that with him. So I switched to a verbal marker, and he doesn't get nearly as high when we do that. The other thing we'll look at here and talk about are energy levels from us and our dogs, and the fact that we want to change their energy level. We want more or less of something, but we have to be very subtle and careful about how we go about doing it. You can't force it. You have to move them very slowly in the direction you want. If we change our energy levels too drastically, it doesn't really help. It only frustrates them or causes them to avoid us. So you have a low-energy dog and you're acting like a clown — clowns are on my mind because I'm doing the webinar on classical conditioning, and scary clowns seems to come up a lot — so you're acting like a clown, and you're actually going to turn your dog off and push them even further away from you, rather than if you just bring up your energy a tiny bit, they'll likely come up to meet that. So we have to experiment with that and see what works for any particular team. A lot of this, in fact all of this, is very, very customized to different teams. The good thing is usually in Gold spots you get enough variety in dogs that you see a little bit of everything. We don't get dogs that are all the same. So we'll be looking at over-arousal, under-arousal, we'll be looking at things I've probably never seen before in terms of arousal, and working with that, which is always the fun part of teaching — when you get something you didn't expect. OK, so that's the long version of what the class is about. Melissa Breau: It sounds even more fascinating now than it did before. I just think it's going to be such an interesting topic. It sounds like the Gold spots are going to be invaluable in that class. Deb Jones: I think it can help people in many ways. I think it really can. As I said, it's going to be challenging for the trainers because they do more work than the dogs. It's the same as trained Focus class. It's more about giving you a lot of information to help you start to see things differently and start to approach your training differently. I think that that's definitely going to be something that comes out of this. Melissa Breau: I know the title includes the word balance, and you talked a little bit in there about looking at different skills and thinking about where your dog is. I've always thought of it as a little bit of a game of tug-of-war, where you work a little bit on precision, then you have to work a little bit more on building drive, and they impact each other. Is it ever really possible to have a dog that's equally motivated and controlled? Deb Jones: I think that there are some dogs who just by nature are pretty equally balanced. It's nothing we do. They just came that way. In fact, Judy Keller's first Sheltie, Morgan, I'd say he was just the perfect dog. In terms of arousal and control, he was ideal. She didn't do anything to cause that. He was her first performance dog. She didn't even know what she had at the time. Looking back now, you know what you had. But it's like, yeah, by nature, some dogs are just like that. They just come prewired that way. But most of us are not that lucky. We're going to get dogs that come at all different levels of this, and yes, we're going to be constantly working on it. It's maintenance. It's always maintenance. You will push your dog too far in one direction and then have to go a little bit back in the other, though most of them we know. For example, I know with Zen, his lifetime is about a little more control, because he's got all the motivation in the world. With another dog, like my Papillon from years ago, Copper, he had so much control just naturally, and he was a little inhibited naturally, so everything for Copper was always about more motivation. That's all we worked on. I never worked on control because he didn't need it. He already had that. And in fact the day in agility when Copper actually was running so fast that he missed his contact on the dog walk, we were stunned, and I'm, like, Good for him. The fact that he was in it so much, and moving so fast that he didn't even hit the contact on the way down, I was proud of myself and him because it's like, that's the motivation I want. And in fact the judge didn't even see it and didn't call it. We didn't realize it until we watched the video later, because he was so fast, and I'm sure the judge never expected that this little dog was going to miss a contact zone. So yes, we're constantly trying to get them in the zone, in the optimal level or state of arousal is how we often refer to it. There's something called the Yerkes-Dodson Law that is well known to quite a few dog trainers. It talks about your level of motivation, and when you get too much or not enough, that's not good. You want that optimal middle state that you're in, where everything is flowing along, and it's perfect, and you have enough of both things. You do everything with lots of energy, yet you can still make thoughtful decisions as you go along. Melissa Breau: Stacy talked a little bit about that when she was on, just looking at that curve and what it means and what it's like. I know she's got her puppy now who's on the opposite end of the curve than what she's used to. Deb Jones: Yes, she does, and that's exactly the thing. It's almost like you have to learn to train all over again when you get a dog that's the opposite, because if you don't, you'll make some pretty big mistakes along the way and have to try to fix them later on down the line. Melissa Breau: Looking at it as a balance, how can people start to get an idea of where their dog is now on that scale or in that balance, if they're too much on the control side or too much on the motivation side? Deb Jones: First thing I always look at is the energy and enthusiasm level. How excited is the dog to do whatever it is you're asking them to do? It really doesn't matter what the task is, but how much energy do they normally bring to it? And is it appropriate for the task? Is it going to be enough? The energy level you need for competition obedience is different than the energy level you need to do well in agility. So are they bringing the right amount of energy? If you take the energy for agility and you put it in a competition obedience ring, it's probably going to be a hot mess because you're just going to have too little control. So we look at are they doing what's appropriate for what we're working on? The other part of that is looking at how, say, clear headed your dog is. Can they think while they're working? Can they seem to make decisions? Can they learn to regulate themselves a little bit and come up or down? That's one of the things we work on, we want to help them with, is this idea of modulating arousal. Can they do that? Can they respond to well-known cues? Do they have enough control for that or not? If they don't respond, it isn't usually a skill problem. It's a problem of arousal, much of the time. Melissa Breau: If you have a dog that you know tends to be more on the control side, or more on the arousal side, how do all those different factors play into that? How many different sides of a dog can there be? Deb Jones: Everything affects it. Everything affects it, and every moment can be different within a given dog. It's a constant process of adjusting to what your dog is giving you right now. It's definitely different from dog to dog, but it's also different in the same dog, I would say, not even day to day but sometimes moment to moment, if you have dogs that can be wildly inconsistent in terms of their ability to work and respond appropriately. So it's this constant fluid process. Arousal isn't a static thing. You don't get the same level of arousal, because it's what is the behavior itself, what are the reinforcers you're using, what is your mood? My little Papillion Copper, for example, who was fairly inhibited, if he thought for one second I wasn't in a good mood for whatever reason, even if it had nothing to do with him, he was done. That was the end of the day. I might as well just not even bother. So it's a constant fluid process. We always have to be thinking about all of those factors and how they're affecting what we're trying to do right now, because people say, “Well, my dog did great in this situation and not in another one,” and I'm, like, “Well, I believe that.” I believe that to be the case, and there are probably a dozen things that went into that difference. So at least being aware of them and knowing that there's going to be a lot of variation. Our job is to read our dogs and to try to help them stay on the path, to try to help them be as consistent as possible with their emotional states and their reactions. That's what we do. Melissa Breau: I wanted to ask you to share a couple of tips. First, looking at the dog who is well-mannered and very much under control, but maybe who they are struggling to get to enthusiastically respond or feel really motivated about training or work. Do you have a tip or two that people can try or do to work on that? Deb Jones: Yeah, kind of a general suggestion. Dogs that are too controlled for whatever reason, either they're inhibited themselves, or they're controlled because the environment makes them a little nervous or uncomfortable, or they're worried about being wrong, there's a million reasons, but they don't have enough energy or confidence to do what we want them to do. For these guys, I think the most important thing you can do is to never, ever, ever let your dog know that he made a mistake, ever. The dog is never wrong. You have to keep up that hugely high rate of reinforcement so that success builds on success, and success also builds confidence. A more confident dog is a sturdy dog. A confident dog can take things that don't go perfectly and roll with it and move on. But a very sensitive dog cannot, and so letting them know they're not right is the biggest mistake I think people make. So I'd say that's the one thing: Don't ever let them know they're wrong. And they learn that, of course, our behavior tells them. They don't know it's wrong unless we tell them it's wrong somehow, so you're going to have to control your own reactions in order to not let them know that there are mistakes, and then make it easier, or make it easy enough, so they can be successful. That's the one thing about those types of dogs. They need to feel free to make mistakes, just to do things, and once they start to feel freer, then you start to get a lot more confidence building. Melissa Breau: What about the opposite? What about those dogs that are driven, they're motivated, but maybe they're a little less under control. Deb Jones: Yeah, a lot of experience with these dogs. A whole lot of personal experience. The dogs that are like, “go, go, go, do, do, do, move, move, move,” any activity is often very addictive to them. Moving feels good. We call them adrenaline junkies, because movement starts to release a lot of these different hormones, adrenalin being a big one, and they're like, Oh, man, this feels so good. It feels so good to do things where there's lots of action. It doesn't feel so good to do things where there's a lot more control. The problem with these guys is if we try to squash that enthusiasm, to overdo control work, to stop them from doing the things that they want to do, that typically leads to frustration, and so we get a lot of frustration behaviors like barking and spinning. At the end of agility runs you'll see dogs that, because they have to stop now, they leap up and start biting their handlers. That's a frustration, because they're now having to inhibit something that felt really, really good to them. So it's a little tricky here because we want to help these dogs see that they can still do everything. They don't need to be high as a kite to do it. I have a little section in the class called Arousal Modulation: learning to change your arousal level without going immediately from zero to a thousand, but coming up a little bit and then going back down, and getting used to these changes or transitions in the amount of energy that you would see from a dog for different exercises or different things that we're training. We start to see these guys like to move. So what happens if you do a moving exercise, and then you go into one that requires more thoughtfulness and control? We work through some experimenting here to see what kind of transitions work best, how can we move from one activity to the other and help them not get too high when we're doing it. So teaching them basically to gear down, but doing it carefully, and not completely squashing their desire to do anything, because that usually ends badly then. Melissa Breau: Everybody wants that dog that's perfectly balanced between motivation and control. But I wanted to ask who you really think is an ideal fit for a Gold spot in this class. What would make a dog a really good candidate? What skills do they need? Can somebody take it with a brand-new puppy? Should they be taking it with a slightly older dog? What kind of dog are you hoping will enroll?   Deb Jones: It's true for almost everybody that you want that perfect balance, so I would think that a lot of people would. Of course we'll see certain people who are having problems right now and they want to work on those. If you're having issues training and showing, and it's not a skills problem, so you see lots of times dogs do great at home, or great in familiar environments where they're comfortable, but then you get them out into other settings, and they get too high or too low and they can't perform, that would be the kind of dog that I think this could help, and the kind of team, I should say — not just the dog; I hope to help the whole team — that this should help. So when you see that inconsistency between different contexts with your dog. Of course what we always say, “My dog did it perfectly in the living room,” and if I had a dollar every time somebody told me that, I'd be rich. And I believe that. I believe that is very true. Your dog did do it perfectly there because their arousal level was at a good level. It wasn't too high, it wasn't too low. So if you see different things in different situations. If you are one of those people who find yourself saying, and I've done it too, “He knows how to do this,” when your dog is clearly not doing it. It's like, “But he knows this.” Again, I don't know that it's a skills issue anymore. I think that is definitely much more an arousal issue, and so that means we have to look at the bigger picture, not just look at, OK, I'll train some more on this behavior. It doesn't ever hurt to strengthen behaviors, but I don't know that that actually addresses the problem that you're having. It only partially does. So anytime you have a lot of inconsistency in the dog's behavior. We don't have any sort of restriction on age or experience for dogs for this class. In thinking about it, a lot of the things that I think about and do, I do this with my puppies, I start very early on, and I work on it basically their whole lives, so young dogs are fine. Older dogs that are having issues are fine as well. The one thing I would hope for is that you have a few behaviors that are on cue. It doesn't have to be much. But for some of our later exercises, we like to move between some trained behaviors and a few behaviors in process that you can use in the exercises. I don't care what the behaviors are. We're not even actually going to be critiquing your behaviors in any way. They're just necessary so we can work on the new things that we're going to try to be instilling in this class, so the exercises are sort of just we're going to ignore those. We're going to ignore the behaviors that you bring in, unless you really want feedback, but that's not the point. The point is can they do them in these different settings and states and in different ways. So the class is pretty open, I think. As always, our job is to adjust for every team that we get. We do the best we can to meet them where they are, and to try to help them from that point. That's why I expect that there'll be a lot of variety in Gold spots. I think we'll have it all over the map, and so that makes it a little challenging for me in terms of I can't just give you any sort of canned answer to something that comes up, but I think that's also what makes it more interesting for people to watch, the people who are in the Silver/Bronze spots, to be able to see that much variety. So we're pretty open, and people can always contact me if they have questions about whether they think their situation would be appropriate for class. I'm very happy to answer any questions they might have about that. Melissa Breau: It really does sound like a fascinating class. I think it's going to be great. The students who get Gold are going to be lucky, lucky people. Deb Jones: Let's hope they think so when class is done. Melissa Breau: I have every confidence that they will. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Deb! It was really good to chat again and to learn a little bit more about the new class. Deb Jones: Oh, thank you, Melissa. I always have fun talking about training. What could possibly be better? So I always enjoy this. Melissa Breau: Thanks again, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in! We'll be back next week, this time with Denise Fenzi to talk about Play. 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. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

SUMMARY: Lori Stevens is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch® Training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health all interact. She uses intimidation-free, scientific, and innovative methods, in an educational environment, to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, WA. She is also the creator of the Balance Harness. Lori's most recent of three DVDs by Tawser Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao and called The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs. It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She teaches the popular FDSA course Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs, and will be introducing a new course this session called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness in Five. Links www.seattlettouch.com Next Episode:  To be released 1/26/2018, and I'll be talking to Chrissi Schranz about building reinforcers and recall training, so stay tuned! 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 Lori Stevens. Lori is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch® Training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health all interact. She uses intimidation-free, scientific, and innovative methods, in an educational environment, to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, WA. She is also the creator of the Balance Harness. Lori's most recent of three DVDs by Tawser Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao and called The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs. It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She teaches the popular FDSA course Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs, and will be introducing a new course this session called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness in Five. Hi Lori, welcome back to the podcast. Lori Stevens: Hello Melissa. Thanks for having me back. Melissa Breau: I am very excited to talk to you again today. To start us out and remind listeners who you are, do you want to recap who the animals are that you share your life with? Lori Stevens: Sure. Since you made that plural, I'll add in my husband because humans are animals. Melissa Breau: Fair enough! Lori Stevens: Anyway, I live with my husband, Lee, and I live with my 12-and-a-half-year-old Aussie girl, Cassie. You know, I used to teach about aging dogs without actually having one, and now I have one. So after several years of teaching basically senior dogs how to have a better life, now I have one and I'm putting it to work. So it's nice to have a 12-and-a-half-year-old who's excited about doing fitness, and going to the park, and the beach, and trail outings, and all sorts of good things. Melissa Breau: You shared pictures. She's clearly in great shape. She looks awesome. Lori Stevens: Yeah, she's doing well. Melissa Breau: Good. I know from last time we talked that you're an advocate for canine fitness — probably not surprising based on what you do. But can you share a little about why it's important, especially for sports dogs? Lori Stevens: I'll start with sports. I have personal experience with seeing athletes go to the next level, and I think it's the cross-training, because they'll come in and basically say something like, “My dog keeps hitting bars. I think we need to improve something.” When we start doing some cross-training, or strengthening the core, or strengthening the legs that are involved in a jump, all those things, we see improvement in performance —surprise, surprise. I think a lot of time in sports the training is going to classes, practicing the sports, but sometimes you need to do one more level of fitness to get that extra little bit. There are so many benefits in canine fitness, things like strengthens muscles is obvious, but it really strengthens and helps the dog know when and how to engage their core muscles. That would happen automatically. It's not like they think, OK, it's time to engage my core muscles, but we do exercises where we start engaging them a lot and then it becomes more natural. You build better joint support through stronger muscles, improving flexibility, improve alignment and posture, balance and stability improve. And with that, what you get is fewer injuries, you get more confidence, you get more body awareness. And so dogs, when they're faced with a quick decision or a quick body move, they're more prepared and more confident to make that move, and stronger in that movement than they might be if they were just doing the regular training as a sport. It improves gait, movement, I just think it's fantastic. But another part of it, which I think we often leave out, is that it's a behavior changer. I have worked with fearful dogs that that was the way that I broke through to them. That confidence they get with suddenly doing things with their body that they've never done before, like hind leg targeting, I think that's a huge, huge exercise for dogs' awareness of where their back end is, their confidence. It seems to be a game changer, really, in terms of behavior, I have found. It's all the stuff you would naturally think of with fitness, but it also does a lot in terms of confidence, body awareness, and building trust even. I mean really being able to build trust, or doing something joyful that doesn't have the pressure of competition in it. Melissa Breau: I think that, for a lot of people, when they talk about fitness, they think about their own experiences. I don't know about you, but for me at least, the gym is not my favorite place to be. How does that compare to how dogs generally feel about fitness and what's the difference there? Lori Stevens: I hate the gym. Can I just say that? Really hate the gym. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Lori Stevens: I have a personal trainer now. I love my trainer. And so maybe that's more like working with your dog. What pops to mind when I think of going to the gym is a sweaty place that doesn't smell great and has a lot of grunting. Canine fitness, what pops to mind when I think about it, is joy, joy, joy. That's what my canine gym is, my canine gym room. Doing fitness together is just a blast. I have to say that every dog I've ever worked with loves it, and that's why it's my sport. It's my sport, I'm calling it my sport because I don't have another sport, but to me, it really is. It's truly a fun activity and it's all about the joy. So they aren't really comparable, those two things. Melissa Breau: Fair enough, and I guess if someone was sitting there feeding us cookies for everything we did at the gym, we might enjoy it a little more too. Lori Stevens: Yeah, true. Melissa Breau: I think the other place that our concepts about our own fitness struggles sometimes hold us back is with the expectations around how much time we have to put into it. Most people probably think about spending an hour — or more, maybe — at the gym each time they go. Based on the upcoming course name, I'm going to guess that canine fitness differs there too. So how much time should people really be spending on canine fitness? Lori Stevens: You know that five is five hours. No, I'm just kidding. It's five minutes. You know, that goes for people too. When you're out walking your dog, and you're out in the woods, or on a trail, or in the park, it's OK if it takes an hour. But when you're in your house with your dog and you want to do some focused exercises, you want to stop and do a little training, so you might as well do a little fitness, five minutes is plenty. I do believe in warming up and cooling down, and the five minutes is the strengthening part, but if you wanted to turn that into two minutes of strengthening and a couple of minutes of warm-up, and a short cool down, that's fine too. I actually think, with people, they don't need to do an hour workout either. If I stop and do five to ten minutes of working out, that's better than if I don't do any at all, so the time thing, I think, often gets in the way. I also think we can over-train our dogs. I have a 12-and-a-half-year-old, and I set a timer. I set it for five minutes of training. If she's cold, like if she's been sleeping for a few hours, then I wake her up, I set my timer for five minutes, and we do five minutes of warm-up. Then I set it again, we do five minutes of strengthening, and then we do a few minutes of cool down, usually another five on the cool down. So I just set my timer. I think I got that idea of five, five, and five from Leslie Eide, a rehabilitation vet in our area. She also teaches fitness work. I think she's done some for Fenzi. I think the thing is that it's important to warm up a bit and cool down a bit, but you really don't have to spend that much time doing it. So all of the workouts that people are going to develop in my class are going to be five-minute workouts. We don't have to overthink this, you know. We can be creative. We just don't want to work the same muscles every day to fatigue. So we just want to be careful on that side of things. Melissa Breau: How much do fitness behaviors — maybe including or maybe not including warm-up and cool down stuff; I'll leave that up to you — but how much do those skills or those behaviors differ from other skills and behaviors that we teach our dog for sport or just for daily life? Lori Stevens: It's all behavior. How does it differ? I think the way it differs is that we need to be safe. So we need to pay attention to alignment, we need to start on the ground, and what I mean by that is we really need to build a foundation, just like with any sport. You're not going to get past the foundation stuff. You don't put your dog directly on a peanut and start doing things. One of my goals in teaching fitness is to really teach people how to be wonderful, incredibly sharp-eyed observers, and teach them what to look for when they're doing fitness, and how to start on the ground and build up. All these exercises that we do as foundation exercises, they're all going to get harder because we're going to be doing them on the ground first, on a stable platform, then an unstable platform, unstable equipment. Training fitness is not training for a competitive sport, so the pressure isn't the same, but you still have to have a good foundation for it. Just like with agility, you don't go in and start running courses. You teach the dog how to get on the equipment, how to exit the equipment, how to use the equipment safely. This is all a good thing, in my view, and that's why I can call it my sport, because there are a bunch of nuances. But it's also a very joyful thing to do. Not to say that sports isn't joyful. Most people do it because it's a blast. But precision is important in fitness training, just like it's important in competitive sports. It's just different in the sense that it's something you can do year-round. You might change your focus based on what you see in your dog, and all of it is about teaching behaviors, so the better you are at training and timing, the better your fitness work will look. Melissa Breau: You mentioned in there the idea of equipment. Do people need special equipment to do canine fitness? Lori Stevens: I think people like an excuse to buy equipment. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Lori Stevens: I really do. I think it's funny, I do think they like that. But let's just say they can't afford it or they don't like it. There's a lot of things you can build. You can use things around the house. Do you have to have fancy cones? No, you can use potted plants. Do you have to have a fancy Cavalletti set with cones with poles through it? No, you can use your mops and brooms and put them on cans and use painter's tape. Do you have to buy fancy platforms or an aerobic platform? No, you can use books and bind them with duct tape and put anti-slip material around them. You can use air mattresses and pillows for unstable equipment. I'm betting most people will want to buy a piece of equipment or two, but you don't have to. Let me just add that the outdoors, when you go for a walk in the park, it is full of exercise equipment. I'm going to give you yesterday's example. We haven't gone for our walk today yet. Yesterday's example was we went to the park and Cassie wanted to jump on every park bench. She sees the bench and she starts targeting for the bench, and she wants to go on every single bench. She can put her front legs up to work her hind legs, or she can push up all the way to do a little jump. Then we do uphill sprints because I'm in Seattle, so there's a lot of hills. We do uphill recalls and she sprints up the hill. We hind leg target curbs on our way to the park, and we were walking across a bridge, and I noticed there was this little shelf, a little curb-like thing that you could step up on. So we did ipsilateral work — I'd better say what that is — we did targeting with same-side legs on the little raised part of the bridge, and we turned around, did the other side, and I took a photo of it. We do that in the class, ipsilateral work. We ended with nosework in the park, followed by walking up a very steep hill. And I did a workout with her that day, too. But this was a really good workout just utilizing, there's often a big rock she likes to jump up on, and there's all sorts of logs that are a little slippery right now because it rains here nonstop for ages. There's exercise equipment everywhere. Maybe I should do a class someday on just outdoor equipment. Melissa Breau: That would certainly be cool. It would be interesting. Lori Stevens: Yeah. Melissa Breau: For those people who are interested in buying a couple of pieces of equipment, are there specific pieces you usually recommend for getting started, or good places to get their feet wet? Lori Stevens: First a caveat: You're talking to someone who has a ridiculous amount of equipment, so maybe I shouldn't really be allowed to answer this question. Older dogs do really well with a balance pad, and you don't have to buy it. You can get a balance pad on Amazon for people and it's not very expensive. You can do a lot of things with a balance pad. I like for people to have a Fitbone or two, or a couple of 14-inch discs. Those pieces of equipment, either one, a Fitbone or a 14-inch disc, or two Fitbones or two 14-inch discs, you can do a lot with those. Platforms are super-useful. Where do you buy a platform, right? A lot of people have been making platforms recently, so there's a lot of how-to's on that. But you asked me about buying. An aerobic step bench is actually a useful platform. Michelle Pouliot has a place that she links to that builds platforms according to her specifications, so I've got a couple of those. And then Paw Pods. They're inexpensive and they're a blast. You just have to make sure you get the ones that are nice and soft, so I get the FitPAWS ones. They're really fun, because then you can target one paw at a time, target all four, do turns, and do side steps onto them and all sorts of things. Back onto them, back onto all four, there's a million things you can do with the Paw Pods. OK, I'll stop. Was that just a couple of pieces? Melissa Breau: No, that's excellent. Paw Pods are fascinating. I've never taught a dog to use them, but just in general I've seen some stuff done with them and they're pretty cool. They require a real awareness of where all four of your feet are. Lori Stevens: Exactly, and it is just fun. It's fun to teach and fun to do them. Melissa Breau: I know you have, and you mentioned this earlier too, this idea of fitness foundation behaviors. I know that's part of what's on your syllabus, so I wanted to ask you what you mean by that, and what are some examples of something that counts as a fitness foundation behavior. Lori Stevens: One isn't even a fitness behavior, but having a good nose-to-hand touch where your dog can … so targeting is a big one, so first a nose-to-hand touch, and that's super-useful for positioning. Having an easy go-to default behavior they can do when you just ask them to do something and they don't do it, you can just say, “Touch.” So when you practice that in all sorts of ways, and moving them into position with your nose-to-hand targeting, then you've got something that you can use during fitness training that gets them to a certain place, gets them on something, gets them off of something. Getting off of equipment sometimes can be challenging for some people. So just to continue with the targeting, being able to target with one paw, target something, your hand, with each of your four paws — not your four paws, your dog's four paws — targeting with one paw, two paws up, four paws up, is a useful foundation skill. Hind leg targeting is, in my opinion, hind leg targeting is a useful skill for all dogs, period. Being able to hind leg target something is really important, but then, of course, it's a foundation behavior when you're just teaching a dog to hind leg target a mat. But it becomes more skillful and more of a fitness behavior when you're targeting something unstable and higher up and asking to hold that position and maybe do shoulder exercises with their hind end up. So these things that start on the ground that don't seem like that big a deal, they build and become more difficult and more challenging fitness exercises or strengthening exercises. Backing up, side stepping — both of those are foundation exercises, but side stepping on unstable equipment is a different thing than side stepping with all four feet on the ground. I call them foundations because you're giving the dog the idea of what is side stepping and what is backing up, or asking them to do it on something difficult. Melissa Breau: What are some of the basic exercises that you teach most often? What do those look like, and what are the benefits of doing some of them? Lori Stevens: Let me just start with the simplest concept, and that is, when you put two front feet up on something, your dog is usually, not always, but you can help them shift their weight to their back legs, so the further they're standing up, the less likely that they'll have the weight on their front legs. The benefit of putting two paws up on something and holding is that the hind legs are being used more. If the hind legs are up, then the weight is more down on the front legs, so you're building front leg muscles. Things like tuck sits and sphinx downs require more core work. There's something that is often said in physical therapy, and that is, you stabilize, you strengthen the proximal, which is the core, which is the trunk, to get better distal mobility from a strengthen position. So it's important to be able to have the strength of that stability in your trunk and in your core, your stabilization muscles, your multifidi, your transverse abdominus muscles. It's important to be able to automatically engage those, your serratus, in order to do some of these other exercises. So the benefits of the core work is to be able to do more difficult things safely. The benefits of some of the other exercises we work on, like, let's just say crawling. Crawling, you're down in a sphinx down position and then you're moving forward on the ground. So you're working the back muscles. You're utilizing all four limbs, and those limbs, especially the back legs, really have to work the rotation of the hip. The benefits of these exercises are pretty amazing. Another example would be with the dog standing on all four legs. If you lift the left front leg, you're going to put more weight on the right back leg, so if you've got a dog that's in a habit of standing to the side because maybe they hurt their right knee two years ago, so they got in a habit of unloading that leg, well, lifting the front left paw loads that leg, and in their body they start getting the muscle memory back of, Oh yeah, I can use that leg like I used it before. It doesn't hurt at all. Let me just add that I still think it's important that everybody who does fitness is checked out by a veterinarian, and if they've had any sort of problems that they're cleared for the exercises first. But there's a lot of benefits that come from doing this work that sometimes people don't even see until they start doing it. It's pretty cool. And then there's the behavior benefits, like I said earlier. The body awareness, the bonding that occurs, the trust and joy. And do you know that some of the agility dogs I work with have never slowed down, and they're like, “Ha ha ha, my dog will never slow down,” and they walk over those Cavaletti poles. But slowing down helps dogs go faster, because in slowing down they really get to know their bodies better, and they get to know where they're not just pushing through. Being the little masters of muscle compensation that they are, when you're moving slowly, it all stands out. You have to know what muscles you're using, you have to know where your feet are in a different sort of way, and so the slow work doesn't slow your dog down on the course. It helps your dog because they're even more confident and more aware, I think. Melissa Breau: I wanted to ask if there are differences in the behaviors you'd recommend for daily fitness versus those you use to warm up and cool down, or whether the behaviors are multifunctional. Maybe you could just talk to all that a little bit. Lori Stevens: The exercises are multifunctional, or at least some of them are. In my warm-up I might do a few tuck sits and a few tuck sits to stand. I might do some short recalls. I might do some targeting, some spins, some bows, some Cavalletti work. But I'm not going to do ten tuck sits to stands, three sets, with feet upon a Fitbone, as my warm-up. So the concept of the exercise is the exercise might be the same, but I'll just do two or three of them in a warm-up versus ten of them, really hard, three sets. I want the dogs, as they're warming up, to go through the different movements. I want them to back up and side step, and all that's on the ground during a warm-up, really. I often just come in from a walk, like, I walk Cassie for however long, usually we walk at least 30 minutes, and we walk in the house and she's pretty warmed up, so we just do a few exercises right after that. But it's spins and turns to get the … or spins in each direction, sorry. It's good lateral flexion for the spine, so it warms up the spine muscles. Cavalletti work is a nice warm-up exercise when you're trotting across them, but I'm not going to raise them real high and have a dog do high steps, or side stepping, or backing up over Cavelletti poles as a warm-up, because that's taking it a little bit further. So they're multifunctional, but they're done in the simplest way during warm-ups and cool downs. I probably made that into something longer than it needed to be. In cool downs I'm even going to go lighter and do less in a cool down than I would in a warm-up. Melissa Breau: You mentioned this earlier, and you talk about it a little bit in your syllabus, this concept of alignment. I wanted to ask what you mean by that, and if you can talk a little bit about why it's important. Lori Stevens: It's super-important, and why it's important has to do with the muscles that are engaging. I'm an alignment geek, I admit. If a dog sits with a leg shooting out to the side, or just a super-sloppy sit to the side, the first thing I want to know is why that's happening and let's change it. If a back is roached up or humped up, I want to know is something wrong. Hunched up, back roached, I don't know how you'd say roaching, but hopefully people know what that is. Sometimes what I see is a dog can stand with their feet under them perfectly fine, but as soon as they step up on a platform, their back feet go really wide, or their front feet go really wide. Have you ever seen people that are standing with their legs really wide? They're not using their core. They're just creating this super-broad base that they don't have to use any muscles. I mean, you have to use muscles to stand, but it's a rather lazy, non-core way of standing. Sorry if you're thinking, I do that all the time! So what I'm looking for is that dogs are using the muscles I expect, they have nice, long spines, neutral necks, their tail is not tucked. If the dog's tail is tucked — some dogs tuck their tails a lot — but if the dog's tail is really tucked and their legs are wide, then I think either, They're not comfortable standing like this. Maybe we're standing on something a little bit too high. Maybe for one reason or another they might or might not be hurting. It's really hard to tell because you can't ask. So I want to see if we can change their position in a way that puts them in better alignment and if they're comfortable doing that. Now if the dog regularly really goes wide in the back, I know how to encourage them to have their legs under them, but if I all of a sudden start doing the exercise with their legs in, they might be using muscles they have never used before. So I have to really be careful with not just bringing their legs in and then doing a million exercises, because the dog needs to get used to using those new muscles. So anyway, alignment is a really, really big deal. It's just safe. It's safer. There's no reason to do things with improper alignment. It's the same thing in human training as well. Melissa Breau: I'll let you talk a little more about the class specifically. I know it's called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness In Five, and it's in February, so lots of f's. What does it entail, what is it going to look like? Do you want to just talk us through a little bit? Lori Stevens: It's going to be fun, it's going to be educational, it will benefit your dog and help him in sports. At the end of, so every week, I think this time I'm going to release everything the first day of the week. You'll have lectures that will tell you a bit about why I want things to go a certain way, or things to keep in mind, or learning about fitness. So I'll have lectures. Then I'll have exercises, and I'll say how to get the behaviors, what they're good for. I'll say the setup, what you need in your environment, the instructions, the number of repetitions and sets, I'll have video of the exercise. So we'll do that. And then, at the end of every week, I'm going to have something called The Five-Minute Workout, it's just called Five-Minute Workout. I'm not going to create the five-minute workout. However, I'm going to give everybody the tools to create their own five-minute workout. So you can imagine what the homework will be. The homework will be showing the exercises, or for sure showing videos of the exercises that you're having trouble teaching. But also I'm going to want to see parts of the five-minute workout. The first week, you're learning how to do a five-minute workout. You're not all of a sudden, “Here's my five-minute workout.” It's going to build across the weeks, and every week your five-minute workout can incorporate, like, let's just say we're in Week 3. Your five-minute workout can include the exercises from Week 3, 2, and 1, so we can get creative and more mixing and matching. Anyway, that's basically how the class is laid out. I'm going to have lectures on things like raising criteria. I'll talk about the benefits, the kinds of movements, the anatomical terminology, like what is cranial and what's caudal, what's lateral and what's medial. I'll talk about exercise frequency, repetitions, durations, and sets. I'll talk about physiological issues, muscle actions. So there's things I'll just talk about, but then there's the exercises, so people will have both. They'll learn about fitness and they will learn the exercises. Melissa Breau: They'll learn both the whys and the hows. Lori Stevens: Yeah. Melissa Breau: I think you hit on the things that people are most likely to have questions about. I feel like anytime people talk about this stuff, it's like, “OK, but how much do I do? How long do I do it?” and all those pieces. Lori Stevens: Yeah, right. Exactly. And it's really different from the Aging Dogs class. In the Aging Dogs class, depending on the age of the dog, for sure, I'm not always this picky about everything. I'm likely to be a little bit more picky about alignment and how we're doing the exercise than I am in the Aging Dogs class. It all depends on the dog, but when you're working with a 16-year-old dog, teaching him fitness exercises, you're going to go really slowly, give that dog the time to learn them, and you're not going to be super-picky about, you're going to be as picky as you can be about alignment, but it's different. Melissa Breau: You hit on something there, and I didn't tell you I was going to ask you this, but you brought it up and I think it makes sense to maybe talk about it for just a quick second. Is there a type of dog that is a good fit for the class, or maybe isn't as good a fit for the class? Lori Stevens: I would say if it's a dog that … OK, first of all, if it's a puppy and the growth plates aren't closed yet, then puppies probably should not take the class, because everything about repetitions and sets aren't going to apply to the puppy. Somebody could take it if they have a puppy. I recommend they audit it. Then, when their dog's growth plates close, then they can start applying it, or they can take it again later. It's a lot of material. You could audit it, then take it later, and still go, “Oh, I don't remember doing this.” If your dog's coming off a pretty serious injury and you've got contraindications, things you really shouldn't be doing, maybe don't take it at Gold. Maybe just audit it. Check with your vet. It's different if you're coming here and you've been released from the rehab vet to come to me to do exercises. But if you are taking this as a fitness class, I'm going to assume your dog is pretty healthy. Other than that, pretty much all dogs can take it. For sure the dogs that are pretty mobile that have been in my Aging Dogs class, they can take it. They may not be able to do everything, but the ones that are pretty mobile, there's some I have in mind that could definitely take it. But if you've got a dog that can hardly move, this will be challenging, is my guess. But there's always something, you know? I have to do some harder exercises for the dogs that are more performance dogs. They're strong and they're used to doing things. And then you can always just stick with the basics and build really, really gradually until you're ready to go up a level. So it really depends. Melissa Breau: If people have questions, they can message you, right? Lori Stevens: Whatever people have, yeah. I think it's going to be a well-attended class, based on the interest I've seen so far, so I hope. It should be really fun. It should be a very positive experience for the dogs and people. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Lori. This is fun to learn a little more about this stuff, and I feel like every time we talk about it, I'm like, Hmm, I really should be doing that. So thank you for coming back on and talking through this with me. And thank you to all of our wonderful listeners out there for tuning in. We'll be back next week, this time with Chrissi Schranz to talk about building reinforcers and recall training. If you haven't already, I hope you'll subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice so our next episode will automatically download 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. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

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. She's also recently started a blog at playwaydogs.com, and everyone should definitely go check it out. Links Amy's Website Next Episode:  To be released 1/12/2018, and I'll be talking to Stacy Barnett about nosework handling, so stay tuned! 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's also recently started a blog at playwaydogs.com, and everyone should definitely go check it out. Hi, Amy. Welcome back to the podcast. Amy Cook: Hi. So good to be here, second time around, love it favorite thing to do, talk with you. Melissa Breau: To start us out, do you want to remind listeners who the dogs are that you share your life with? Amy Cook: My dogs, of course. Can I use the whole 45 minutes? I could do that just on my dogs. Marzipan, first off, my darling Whippet. She's 6 now, which I cannot believe. She's my lovely girl. She's on a break right now from agility. She got majorly injured a year ago, a year and a half ago, and so it was a long recovery that we just very recently got a clean bill of health on, which I'm really excited about. So now it's all about reconditioning her body and getting her brain back in the game. As an aside that isn't really an aside, I don't think I really appreciated the psychological effects of what you have to do to really isolate a dog from using their body correctly, and what that does to their minds. Because I think in a lot of ways she's forgotten how much she can push me into work and forgotten how she can have free agency and try to get things done, because so much time was spent asking her to settle down and not do anything. So rehabilitating her psychologically has been part of this. So that's where she is. And then Caper, my darling Chihuahua something-something, my Ikea assembly dog who seems to have come with no bones. If you follow me on Facebook, you'll see lots of pictures of her being made out of rubber. Both of them do agility, and I'm fooling around on my down time on playing with TEAM stuff. I think if the two of them were one dog we're good on TEAM 1 and 2, but they're two dogs, so that doesn't work, so I'm filling in the holes as I go. They're a blast, so everyone follow them on Facebook. They're so much fun. Melissa Breau: I have to agree with that. I definitely look at their pictures, cute puppy pix. I know that you're probably most known at FDSA for something that I mentioned in the intro, your reactive dog classes that use your play-based approach to treating reactivity. But I want to focus on your Science of Training class today because I know it's coming up. So to start us out, do you want to share a basic summary of what the class covers and what it's all about? Amy Cook: Yeah, sure. I love this class. This one is so fun to teach. It was first conceived of in concert with Denise's The Art of Training class. We wanted to throw in The Science of Training to get people all on the same page about what the fundamentals are, but also how to get these mechanics in your body, how to get these details really solid before you go ahead and deviate from them and experiment and try to do different things that are outside of those experiences. What my class is really focusing on is tightening trainer technique and finding these little areas that I think we don't spend the time on, that we neglect, either because we're not sure if they're important, or we're maybe not so good at them, and we practice the things we're good at a lot. So I want to make sure we get right down to them and really understand them. The class assumes that people have a very basic understanding about operant conditioning. You don't need to be able to do it chapter and verse. I'd assume some experience shaping with a clicker, but that's about it. I found that as I was growing as a clicker trainer, there were all sorts of little holes I'd find, little areas where I thought maybe models conflicted, or didn't really match, or how do I get this done when I've heard of this. I would always keep little notes about that, I think maybe waiting for some future audience when I could finally pass that information along. So that's what this class has become for me. It's my baby in that way. I aim to be practical and so much of the scientific approach to training dogs gets lost and gets intellectual, and I want us to get down to be clear with your body, be clear with your clicker, be really clear with your parameters and what you're doing, because that ultimately serves your learner. And there's no better place to learn that than Chicken Camp and trying to learn how to train chickens. It's really humbling to train a bird, very much. Melissa Breau: That leads us nicely into the second thing I wanted to ask you about, because I happen to know part of the answer. I wanted to talk about the name of the class, and the second half of that name is Think, Plan, Do. I wanted you to maybe share where that came from and a little bit about what it means. Amy Cook: You can Google “Think, Plan, Do,” and you'll see that it's just a phrase that a lot of people use in a lot of different industries and domains. It's an organizational psychology phrase, a motivation phrase, but to us, to dog trainers, that phrase is highly connected to Bob Bailey. That is a Bailey-ism, and it's what I feel, at least for me, what I really took as one of the main takeaways from going to Chicken Camp that is often missing in dog training, we don't spend a whole lot of time thinking. We don't spend a whole lot of time making our plans. We spend our time doing. We pick up the clicker, we get the treats, and we just start training. And with a nod thrown at what we're training this time, of course, but really when you train chickens, you spend a lot of time making a plan and thinking it through before you ever bring that bird out on the table and try to train something. And so, as an homage to the great Bob Bailey, I think the place to start to improve yourself in training is to think something through, to really have a plan — even if it's a plan that doesn't work, you'll find out — make a plan before you do anything. Don't have just a loose goal, because that's not going to be optimal to your learner. Your learner is at your mercy. They're just there to receive all the things you're about to do, and the better you are at doing them, and the more concrete your plan, the better the experience is for your learner, which is ultimately one of our highest goals, and I think it should be. Melissa Breau: To maybe dive a little more into that, what kind of things should people be thinking about before they begin to plan out a specific training session? What kind of factors or what kind of things should they take into consideration and think through? Amy Cook: Well, going in order, first spend time thinking. What specifically are you trying to do in this session? What are you trying to do with your dog in general? But today you're thinking, I have my 10 minutes, I'd like to do something. What specifically? Not I need to improve the retrieve we're working on. What specifically? Really have that in mind. And is it realistic for you today? You can have a long goal, but the small part you're going to work on right now needs an entry point, and that needs to be thought through. Also, as you're picturing that, what don't you want in this picture? Let's say … oh, I know something we all don't want. How about barking? Melissa Breau: Whining, barking. Amy Cook: There's all sorts of things you can write a list about. Think ahead of time about all the stuff you're not going to want, because if you see some of it, you don't want to be thinking, Oh I don't know what to do with that, or Oh, I think I'll ignore that, or I don't know what to do with that; I'll go past it. Maybe going past it is going to be the right thing to do. It really depends on too many factors for this answer. But you shouldn't be caught going, Oh, oh, I don't know what, oh shoot, what is he doing now? You should think ahead: If he barks, this is what I'll do. If I start to get whining, I'm going to stop. Think it out about what this training is going to be like, so that you're not stopping. You can concentrate. You have a plan. Even if the plan isn't going to work, you find out, you'll be more settled. You should also think, at least right then, what is your learner like today. Think about where they are, what they like best from you in terms of your speed, your clarity, how they need you to be, and are you feeling that today? Are you there? Are you in a place to provide that today? Settle down so that you're in that good place. It will be a whole lot less confusing for your learner. If you have to think during the session when you're training, you will slow down, and you'll build in pauses, and pauses build in lapses of attention in your learner as they go, Hello? What happened? You don't want to be thinking a whole lot during it. You don't want to leave them spaces. I think it has an effect on all of us when we do that, even if we do that by default habit, our learners get pauses built in, or get some frustration or confusion built into it, and then we do too, because now we're feeling the clock ticking, we're feeling the dog looking at us like, Oh, ah, what am I doing here? Thinking calms everybody down when we think ahead of time. So that's the first part. Really, once you've thought it through, as best you can, you're going to have to come up with a plan that's at least this one session. Another thing people do is they look for a grand plan: I'm going to be teaching the retrieve. That's not a plan. What you're teaching is literally this next one minute of your time with your dog. You need to think that through in detail. I even suggest people write it down. I make people write that down as homework. Of course, in the class you write it down in the forum. You may decide later that writing it down isn't necessary, but if you don't write it down and find out it is necessary, you'll feel sorry about that, so write everything down. The kinds of things you want to have in your plan are, What am I going to do about, let's say, my environment? Have I picked an environment that is conducive to my goal? Am I going to have a cat strolling through my environment? Is that going to be OK, or is that going to really, really matter? So no, I need to plan, I'm going to train my dog to do this behavior, and I'm going to do it in this room on purpose. You do know what you're going to do. You have a plan for what you're going to do when your dog's nose goes to the floor. But you didn't clean the floor ahead of time. Do you need a clean floor? Maybe you don't need a clean floor because you're going to be working on nose is going to the ground. And you have a plan for what you're going to do when nose goes to the ground. So you don't care about your floor, but maybe you want a really clean floor so think that out -- so thinking and planning, right, they go together. Your environment is really going to matter. Also, how much time are you going to spend, and how do you know when you've spent that time? Do you have a timer? How long is too long to train? How long is too short to train? That's different for everybody, but I say go pretty short, go 30 seconds to a minute. If you don't have an answer to that question immediately in mind, don't go more than a minute. And then find out. You might find out it's longer, but don't start longer and find out you should have gone shorter. So in your plan should be how long you're going to train and how you're going to measure it. Will it be by time or will it be by number of treats? Count out 20 treats, and when your 20 are gone, you will stop and you'll reassess. It really matters that you keep things short because you can get into the weeds really fast. You're clicking for something, you're training for something, your dog offers something else. You're like, hey, that looks great, you follow it along, and soon you're not training not only what you intended to train, but you may be getting behaviors you're really not going to want in your final picture. It's not good to just keep training as long as you like. You need to stop and review what you did, reassess, and stick to it. And your plan should be for what are you going to do with your dog when you stop. I find people rarely put this in their plans, but it flummoxes them when they start to go through the session. Let's say you train for a minute and then you review your video. Well, the dog wasn't done in a minute. The dog was having a good time, hopefully, so what are you going to do to make sure your dog can stop while you review? If you stop it entirely and just put them up, that's kind of no fair, right? So knowing your dog, and what they're like, and what their challenges are, you will have to find a way to stop and keep your dog happy at the fact that that's happening and maybe ready to go again. That might be a skill you want to install way before you start training the actual behavior you were planning. You're going to plan certainly criteria, you're going to plan exactly what is correct, and everything else that is not going completely correct, and you're going to have to set up for that. The correct behavior that you're looking for is what you're going to be getting. It takes a lot of thought and a lot of planning, more than people usually give credit for, and that shows up as soon as you start seeing videos: Oh I didn't realize, I didn't even think about that, oh gosh. All the time spent thinking, all the time spent planning makes the minute or five of you doing much smoother and really successful for your learner, I find. Don't just keep going. Don't dig a hole. Stop and think. And review. Melissa Breau: I think you hit on a lot of the pieces there, and I know, just even from keeping up with the FDSA Facebook page, people tend to really struggle with all of that. They really struggle with planning out their training sessions and figuring out how to break things down, and no wonder, because we start training and the dogs apparently forgot to read the plan. So I wanted to ask you a little bit more about how you balance that concept of having something that's detailed enough but also keeping it flexible enough that if a dog shows you something you weren't expecting, or the dog in front of you that day is a little bit different than the one you usually have, how you can roll with that. Amy Cook: Well, I think making plans and thinking about it is not natural to a lot of us. I was going to say all of us, just because it's not natural to me, and that's not fair; I'm not an example for people. But I think it's really common for us to just go with things as we see them, and I don't think that's a bad trait at all. We should be able to think on the fly. We should be able to roll with changing conditions. But when you have a goal, a specific goal, and you're shaping, there's not a lot of room for improvisation. I don't think you should be … I think the word is flexible, but I want you to be exactly in the training session that you're doing. So you set yourself a minute and it's not working, I don't know, on hold for the dumbbell. Your dog shows you something else. Things didn't go exactly as you planned. Don't keep going. Stop and think about that, because maybe you do want to go with it. Maybe you do think that is a way better idea, that's a better way to explain that stage to my dog, or she's getting something I didn't realize she's getting, and I like this a lot better. Stop for a second and really think about that. Because you just spent time thinking about this plan and it was a good one when you enacted it, and whatever your dog is coming up with may be and may not be, and I don't think you should just run with it. Stop for a second, really think about it, and now start again with your new idea, with the new thing your dog is doing. Because, if nothing else, even if it would have been fine if you'd gone with it, if nothing else, it gives you the discipline, the habit, of not just saying, “Oh, great idea, go, go, go, let's just quit that, let's just go,” which is maybe really natural to you and can get you in the weeds. There is no downside if you just stop and say, “Let me think that through first for a second. Here's something for you to chew on, dog, let me think about this and really decide if that's the way I want to go,” and you might realize there is a downside to that, “Actually that's not the way I want to go. It looked good for a second, but hang on, I want to stick to what I'm doing.” If you have a careful plan, your criterion will be so tight, the little pieces clicking will be so specific, and your rate of reinforcement, which I'm sure we'll get to in a bit, will be so high that the session will be going exactly toward what you're headed for. If you planned it well, and if you're executing it, there isn't going to be a lot of room for experimentation. That might be different from when you're hanging out with your dog and just fooling around, but that's not training toward a goal, and this is how to get from A to B specifically. So I say don't be flexible, which is a weird message, I realize, but if a stroke of brilliance happens, there's nothing wrong with thinking it through before you follow the path. That's my opinion right now. Melissa Breau: I want to talk about the review piece a little bit. I know that most of the FDSA instructors strongly endorse the idea of videoing and reviewing their training, and Denise in particular has come out in strong, strong favor of it. I wanted to ask why it's helpful, and what people should be looking for when they do go back and watch those videos, which of course is everybody's least-favorite activity of all time. Amy Cook: Everybody's least-favorite activity of all time because we can't not look at our messy house, and what we chose to wear, and of course how sloppy we just trained that, right? That's what you're going to find. That's what you're going to find. And the videos are super-helpful, super-helpful. I have always underestimated how helpful they are. I think if every bronze student videoed themselves just like the gold, and watched it back every single time, they'd be shocked at how much they'd get out of a bronze level of instruction. I really believe that. It's amazing what videos can teach you, if you can remember that this is all in support of you. The point of videoing yourself and looking at it is not to give yourself an opportunity to shred yourself and notice how much you suck. That's not what we're hoping you learn from a video review. I think in this specific context, video is helpful in everything I teach and everything we all teach, in this specific class, I think what I'd be looking for is, hey, I made a plan, and I predicted what my dog would be like for this minute, and how tight, how shaved my criterion was, and how good my rate was going to be. You should look at that video and just say, “Did I do that? Did I do that at all? Did I get use these 15 cookies in in 30 seconds? Did I do that? How much am I moving?” We're using marker words, or marker sounds, to train a dog, so we have to really isolate them. Still, did I do that? You can see clear as day whether you moved first or clicked first, because the video doesn't lie, but your memory does. It totally does. Did I follow the plan, and was the plan a good one? Looking at the video, you can honestly go, Oh, absolutely not. That is not where I need to start with her. She's way more confused about that than I thought she was. I thought we were in a good place. And that enriches your next plan. You stop, you revise your plan, and with that new information your next session should be much better. You often don't need anyone to tell you what went wrong, because you can just look and go, That is not what I was planning at all. That's not what I meant. And also I think you should really look at what your dog says, because you don't see it as clearly in real time. You just don't. I think we're always trying to get better at that, to see right then and there that your dog is not feeling great about it, or that your dog is confused -- what does your dog's body say in this video? -- especially at a different angle, you're just looking at them head on and if you get a video from the side, you may be able to see more. It might tell you that you need to slow down, or shift your feeding choice, or the way you're reinforcing, so that you can be more clear. Or they might tell you to speed up, that you give them way too much time in between and that's leading them to whine, or whatever it is. And if you look at it and you still don't know what you're doing, you can see that there's a disjoint to it, but you're just not sure what's wrong, you have something to show somebody. You don't have to train your dog again to show them what's wrong and having your dog experience it. You can say, “Hey guys, what am I doing here? What is this?” So it pays to not only take the video, but to have the ego strength to say, “Hey, I'm not perfect, nobody is, none of you are, can you all help me with this?” I think that's how we all approach it here. It's why the trainers, all of us, show what we do and show when we don't do it well, because we're all in the same boat, trying to improve ourselves more than we are, and video keeps us really, really honest. If you lie to yourself, and again, we all do on some sort of level, we think it went well and it really didn't go well, the one who pays is your learner, they may not know what's going on, and their mind is a valuable thing, their willingness to do this stuff with us is valuable, and when we're clear and we're motivating, they're having a lot of fun. When we're not, those take a hit and your dog will get less out of the game. There's nothing worth that, there's no precision, there's nothing you have to train that's worth their attitude. So keep holding your own feet to the fire. It makes you better, but it's really in service to your dog. Melissa Breau: As you were saying that, I was thinking, gee, not only that, but forcing yourself to watch your videos really helps ensure that you keep them short and your training sessions short because nobody wants to sit there and watch themselves for eight to ten minutes. Amy Cook: No kidding. Oh goodness. I hadn't videoed myself playing with dogs before teaching the play class, and now I'm like, do we do jazz hands with everybody? Is that what I do? Do I do jazz hands? I had no idea. No idea. Yes, keep them short, keep them to the point. Dogs think way faster than we do. Their clock speed's way higher. There's a lot going on for them. This is cross-species modes, so the heavy lifting is for us, not for them, so we have to watch ourselves. Melissa Breau: You've broken up the syllabus for the class into six specific topics. I wanted to dive into those a little bit. You have observing the learner, reinforcement, CERs — conditioned emotional responses, for anyone who doesn't know the abbreviation — mechanics, ABCs, and naming behaviors. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about each of those. Why is observing the learner important, and what kinds of things should people really be looking for when they are doing that? Amy Cook: Observing the learner may be my top biggest maybe best “think, plan, do” takeaway from Chicken Camp, oh my god, because to be able to click when you need to, to be able to mark exactly what you need to, you need to know what your dog looks like when they're doing something well, and right before they're about to do something well, the thing that you want. Because it takes you a second to get that sound out of your mouth, or to get that thumb depressed onto the clicker, and that time is lost. You will be late if you don't know really precisely what your dog looks like right as they've decided, and right as they're contracting the right muscle to do the thing that you want, that you're trying to get them to do. I learned that by clicking my dog. I was trying to teach her to tug open the fridge. I kept clicking when she was tugging, but the click would come just slightly too late, and she had finished tugging when the click sound happened, because the tugs were little short tugs, as you can imagine. It kept being imprecise. I remember I asked Bob, I explained in more detail than you guys need here, I asked, “What am I doing?” He didn't even need to know. He said, “Observe the learner.” I said, “What? I'm watching her. She's tugging. I'm clicking when she's tugging.” He said, “What does she look like before she tugs? What does she look like when she's about to tug?” He was right. What I was missing was contraction of neck muscles, shifting of weight, all the stuff that was right before and as the behavior was commencing. I saw a full tug and clicked right as it ended, because that's how long it took my brain to send my thumb the signal. I learned from that, so many pieces. So let's say you're shaping a down. There's lots of ways a dog can get into a down. There's so many. There's many that we like and some that we don't. You have to think, What position am I looking for first, and how exactly do I want them to get into it? Do you want them to fold back? Let's say you want them to fold back. Fine, you want that one. Well, do you know exactly what it looks like when your dog does that? What any dog looks like when they fold back? Listeners who are listening right now, picture it. What happens? Does it begin with a nose dip? Is that what kind of starts for a fold back? Or does the head stay up? Do you know? Do you know what your dog does? Maybe it starts in the shoulders. You don't want maybe, because you're not going to click when the dog gets all the way down. You have to break this apart if you want that precise behavior. So you need to know what this natural behavior, what this behavior, looks like for your dog, and if you don't spend time observing really specifically, you won't be clicking the very things that are on the path toward the behavior that you want. If you know that your dog always puts her head down a little bit first, then her shoulders fold, and then her hindquarters, you won't be tempted to click when you see hindquarter movement at first, which might result in a sit. So getting to be a really good observer of what your animal looks like before they perform behaviors vastly, I think, increases your accuracy and gets your timing better. That's just one example of the many reasons we want to really observe dogs, because our dogs can't tell us anything, except through what they're doing, and so to be able to talk with them, communicate with them, we have to watch them, I think, really carefully. I think Denise goes through that with her Art class, too, from a totally different perspective of observing your learner in a totally different way. It's really neat to watch that. Melissa Breau: The second piece there was on reinforcement, and when talking to Sarah Stremming a few weeks ago, we got into a little bit about how reinforcement differs from rewarding your dog. They're not exactly the same thing. My guess is that you go a little bit deeper. How does a good understanding of things like timing, rate of reinforcement, and criteria actually impact our training? Amy Cook: I do. I get so geeky in this. For me, it's all about clarity. If you want to get from A to B, you have to be able to explain the path to B, and that's all in your mechanics. You don't get any other way to explain that. That's all you have to work with. Your rate keeps your dog in the game. It keeps you from asking for these big jumps that are too big for your dog to accomplish easily, because if you have to keep your rate up really high, the behaviors your dog are giving you are small and easy to do and they're just little slices, so that keeps your dog in this game. Your rate is really important. That means you have to pick specifically a criterion that allows you to reward at that high of a rate at a sufficiently high rate for your learner. Everybody's rate is different. You don't feed rabbits at the same rate you feed chickens. But if you pick something too hard, your dog will struggle and your rate will fall, so they go hand in hand. How you pick your criterion, your specific one that you're going to work on now, will impact the rate that you get to work at. And your dog tells you what the rate needs to be to keep them in the game, keep the learning fun. So it's not just that, hey, I'm going to work on this one. That is not enough of a slice for your plan. You have to think about how it affects the rate of reinforcement that you have to work with. You want your learner plunging forward. they're confidently doing the thing they think that you are rewarding, just doing something really clear and simple and isn't stuck thinking or worrying or feeling frustrated and starting to whine. You don't want any of that. Again, video is going to be your best friend here. Your video tells you what your rate is, not your intuition in any way. Your rate is the one you want to serve. You pick a criterion that helps you work with that correctly. And then timing. Is there anyone listening at all, anyone within any earshot of anything having to do with dog training, who doesn't know we all have to be better about that? I don't think so. Every one of us is trying to improve our timing, because we're human, and we're slow, and we have neurosystems that take a while to engage. Dogs are plenty forgiving, I think, about our lateness. I've watched perfectly successful training videos where things are pretty obviously late, they happen after the behavior has ended, and the dog is like, “Somehow I get this. I will do the behavior that was just before you clicked, no problem.” That's wonderful. That's great if your dog is like that, and many of them are. They're plenty forgiving. But almost no other animal I know of is, and we shouldn't really rely on dogs to do heavy lifting like that, to figure out what we were trying to click. Timing is our mechanical skill and we need to practice it. In fact, “Timing is a mechanical skill” is a Baily-ism. It's what Bob Bailey says at camp all the time. It's a mechanical skill and you have to keep it sharp. You have to keep practicing it. All of us are late sometimes. I'm late all the time when I'm not concentrating well enough, when I didn't see what I thought I saw, I'm late, I'm a person, and I don't know if when we're thinking about this, if I think, This is a skill I need to keep sharp. I need to practice my timing all of the time to keep it really good. It's not something you can just understand and then do well. You have to practice it like a physical skill, and that's where your clarity comes from. If you can explain what you meant to explain, and click on the thing you wanted, and keep your rate high enough to keep your dog in the game, it will force you to pick your criterion that works. Those things all do more than impact your training. They are your training. That's how you're talking to your dog, so it's really crucial that we get some of these tightened up, I think, for all of us. We can all improve. Melissa Breau: You mentioned in there that it's about clear communication. I think that links back to that conditioned emotional response thing. I know that, I'm pretty sure it was last year, you shared a line that all the instructors have mentioned they love, and it's come up a couple of times since, about how we're always working on our dog's conditioned emotional response to the things that we're teaching, whether we're aware of it or not. So I wanted to ask you to explain a little bit about what a CER is, and what you meant by that line at camp. Amy Cook: Gosh, I think now that's a couple of years ago. Melissa Breau: Was it? Amy Cook: Well, I think it was, well i think it was Purina. Was that last year? No, last year was Portland. I think it was Purina. Time flies. Yeah, every time you're teaching your dog what to do, you're teaching him to feel. CER stands for conditioned emotional response. That's another way to say … conditioning is another way to say learning. It's a learned emotion that they're having. It's another way to say that that's the way they feel right now, what they're feeling from the situation they're in with you and how you're teaching them and what you're trying to have them learn. They're getting emotions, like you are, all of the time, and you're folding it into your picture whether you intend to or not, whether you plan to or not, whether you want to or not, whether you like it or not. We don't get to get away from it, ever. And if you are confusing your dog, by accident, if you're worrying them by a slower rate than you intended, if you're frustrating them by a slower rate than you intended, or late clicks, or rewarding them well, then the emotions that come up there for them, they're getting learned and they're getting folded into the very behavior that you're also trying to teach. You may not see that in an obvious way at first, but you can't escape them being in the picture just tied to everything you're doing. So you may as well take control of this. You may as well take control of things and just use it to your advantage and let it make you better. Training, first, to me, serves an emotional goal, then it serves behavioral, then it serves precision. If you are frustrating your dog while you are having a clicker training session, you need to find out why. Find out why you're frustrating your dog. Find out why you're so confusing. Because we want more than anything for our dogs to be enthusiastic and cheerful learners, motivated to be there, and that's on us to create. It's on us to help them achieve that. Too often we put that on them. Why isn't this dog more into this kind of stuff? Why is she so hard to motivate? Well, I don't know. Maybe those things are true. But that's your first job. Your first job is helping them fall in love with you and training and earning stuff and doing things with you, far beyond any precise behavior you're ever trying to teach. So if you don't have a happy attitude and a great willing learner, it doesn't matter what precision you really have. This is the way I feel. So getting control of that is something you can do on purpose. In this class we have an assignment where I just ask people to create a CER out of whole cloth, just create an emotion — you're not creating, you're not inventing, an emotion … just a brand new emotion, come to my class and we're going to invent new emotions! The assignment is you take a neutral item, an item that you prove to me is neutral — a tchotchke from your shelf does just fine — that your dog thinks nothing about in particular, and for the week you try to make your dog really, really excited about seeing this. You're going to create that emotion and attach it to this neutral object. And sure, it's completely arbitrary. It's not something you're needing for a specific training task. But I like people to see that they can take a previously neutral object and get a dog really excited about seeing it. You know, we do this all the time anyway. Leashes are neutral until they become signals that we're going to go for a walk, and shoes are neutral or delicious, either way, except that they signal that it's a work day instead of a fun day for dogs day. For dogs you're creating this kind of stuff all the time outside of basic training scenarios. But I give people an assignment that helps them literally create a specific emotional response to the specific thing, so that you get familiar with the principals of how that's done. And then we talk about how to provide training sessions so that our dog always feels really good about what we're doing, because that's our goal. That's what we want. We can't keep putting on them that they don't have great attitudes in training. Their attitude is ours to inspire, and we should pick up that mantle. Melissa Breau: The other part that the class covers, and you mentioned this a little bit earlier, is improving your training technique, from mechanics to things like understanding ABCs and when to name a behavior. I want to ask you if there's any one place where people tend to struggle, and if you can offer any tips. It would also be great if you could explain what ABCs are in there somewhere, just because you'll do it better than I will. Amy Cook: Training ABCs in that particular, it doesn't mean the generic term of that, like, training ABCs -- training basics. It's more ABC means antecedent, behavior, and consequence, how to get everything in order. Your antecedent is your cue, the thing that signals to the dog that the behavior, it's time to perform that behavior, and then there's behavior, and then there's the consequence. If you do those all in order. That of course sounds very elementary. Of course it goes in that order. But people get that kind of thing, there's reasonable places in which that's confused, and so I make sure that people have each of those elements identified in every moment of their plans. But it's not the place I think people tend to struggle most. I think … the thing that pops into my head when you ask that is I think people struggle the most with doing less. I think we always want to do more. We want to just have one more rep. We just want to say we want to end on a high note, and we push and push longer to get there. We think things are going great and we want to keep riding high on how great that was, let's do it one more time, that was awesome, let's get more practice in. People suck, all of us kind of suck, at doing less, at stopping ourselves. When the time is up, when the preplanned number of reinforcements have stopped, stop yourself and look at what you're doing. Almost no one does this easily, willingly, naturally — Oh, this is a great time to stop after 30 seconds. It often doesn't feel right, whatever the time, it often doesn't feel great to us because we want to keep going. I think that's where people … I hear — and not just in this class, but in all sorts of classes, or even in our own training — it's like, “Yeah, I know it's gone a little long, but I just wanted to show you.” I was just out training with a friend of mine a few days ago, and we videoed the whole thing and we watched it and went, “Wow, that was a really long training session. What are we doing?” You can just get caught up in doing it. That's why it's like, “These are the rules. There's a timer. The timer will go off. You will stop.” It's not to say that you always have to stop exactly when the timer goes off, but it helps you with the discipline of countering something that I think we all will struggle with. I haven't yet seen a person who's like, “Yeah, it's really easy for me to stop. I don't want to keep going.” Well, of course not. We totally want to keep going. So I do focus on getting people to really think about that and not get off in the weeds again. And don't improvise. Don't just keep going. You deviate, you improvise, you explain things you didn't mean to explain at all, you'll wonder why your dog has no idea of what's going on, then they get frustrated. Definitely not worth it. So get your timer on, get your camera on you, don't show anybody, it's fine. But watch it and keep yourself honest. That's the best tip for tightening yourself up. Watch it and keep it short, for sure. Melissa Breau: Last question. If you could share just one key lesson from the class, what would it be? Amy Cook: Hmm … one key lesson. Well, that's what I built the class around. I'd say spend more time figuring out what you want to do and how you go than you spend training. Don't take 10 or 15 seconds to figure out, Yeah, I've got to do that, that, that, and that. Let's go, dog. Spend more time on the thinking and the planning than you spend on the doing, by a lot. If you're new to anything that you're doing — I don't mean new to dog training, although new to dog training too — but if you're new to this class, or you're not sure how it goes, or new to the sport, or anything, new to the class, mentally rehearse without your dog. Practice physically without your dog. Things that we don't spend time doing — do those things, because if you think things through and plan all your action ahead before you pick up that clicker, then you don't pass on as many mistakes and as many … you don't let the dog do as much of the heavy lifting, and that's what I want people to take away. That and just quit while you're ahead. Just quit pushing. There's always tomorrow. There's always an hour from now. You're fine. Don't rush. Don't push. Your dog is depending on that. That's what I think. Melissa Breau: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Amy. I really appreciate it. Amy Cook: I love it! You should interview me every day. Every day. Melissa Breau: I'm sure there are people out there who would love that. Careful what you agree to here. Amy Cook: Like, subscribe, whatever it is, share. Melissa Breau: I may try to talk you into it. Amy Cook: Oh god! That's a play button on my chest, and you push it and I just start talking. Melissa Breau: I'm sure it would fit so well into all the other things you have going on every day, too. Amy Cook: Yes, I professionally talk for a living. It is a pleasure. I'm so glad you invited me again for a second time. I really enjoyed it. I would do it in a heartbeat anytime. Thank you so much. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you, and I do think it was a great topic for our first thing heading into the new year. The idea that we're talking about plans and planning and setting everybody on the right path heading into 2018 will be good. Amy Cook: Oh yeah, like a resolution of sorts. A little mini-resolution each time you bring your dog out. Melissa Breau: It's almost like I did it on purpose. Amy Cook: No, you couldn't possibly have! You're so clever. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. We will be back next week. This time I'll have Stacy Barnett back and we'll be talking about Nosework Handling. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice and our next episode will automatically download 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

SUMMARY: At FDSA, Andrea Harrison teaches classes for the human half of the competitive team. She's an educator who is passionate about all species including dogs and humans. Having lived with dogs her whole life, Andrea was an early convert to positive training. She has taken this message to the media many times including appearances on many TV shows and news programs as well as in print and on the radio. She has explored the science of brain research and worked with people of all ages on being successful and reducing anxiety and stress using her training and counseling, personality typing, and her own experiences.   When it comes to dog sports her competitive addiction is agility. Andrea and her dogs have many titles between them with placements in regional and national competitions. Andrea has experienced animal wrangling for television and more recently has begun to explore scent work. Links Andrea's Website Andrea's Task Cards Next Episode:  To be released 1/05/2018, and I'll be talking to Amy Cook about the science of dog training, so stay tuned! 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 Andrea Harrison. Andrea is the people trainer on the FDSA team, working with dog sports teams to help handlers train themselves for better performance. She teaches classes on unleashing your personal potential, mental management, planning, goal setting, and more... and with the new year right around the corner, she's here today to talk goal setting and dog-related new year's resolutions. Hi Andrea! Welcome to the podcast. Andrea Harrison: Hey Melissa. Thank you so much for the invitation. Great to talk to you. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to chat today. To get us started, do you want to just remind listeners who you are and tell us a little bit about the dogs you share your life with? Andrea Harrison: Sure. I'm Andrea Harrison. I've been doing the mental management stuff in some capacity in my life professionally for nearly 30 years. I can't believe it. The dogs we're currently living with has changed a bit since the last time I was on the podcast, Melissa. We lost two of our older dogs. Melissa Breau: I'm sorry. Andrea Harrison: Yeah, it's hard. It happens to everybody, but it's never easy. Now we're living with Sally and Thea, our senior dogs, and they're the two dogs that have done the most competitively. Sally was in a feature film. They're the dogs who really push my dog training along. Then we have my husband's Golden Retriever, Samson, who is his dog very much. I try to keep hands off, although it's hard sometimes because he's lovely and really athletic, so I sneak out and do some stuff with him sometimes, but he's Tom's dog, I leave him alone as best as I can. He's the farm dog. We also have two younger dogs, Yen, who is a toy American Eskimo, and Dora, who is a feral little Cairn terrier mix. They're both great and lots of fun, and they basically bum around the farm, keeping me company, and I get my eye on them, which we'll chat about in a bit, I think. Melissa Breau: To jump right in, are there benefits to having set goals for our dog sports? Andrea Harrison: There are so many benefits to goal setting, and I think when we're talking about dog sports, one of the really important things to remember is goals can actually give you power. And I don't mean power in a dictator sense in an all-controlling way. I mean power of ourselves. Power of understanding that we are good enough and strong enough and competent enough. So many of us in dog training land look to someone else and admire them, and wish we were them, and perhaps have a little envy or jealousy. The goal setting that we do can give us the strength to do our own thing, to manage our own expectations, to create training plans, to create competitive goals, all of those kinds of things. So when I talk to people about goal setting, I try to remember to focus on goals, and FOCUS is one of my silly acronyms I like to use. The F stands for facing the present. You never want to dwell on the past, and you never want to just dream of the future. Goals give you the opportunity to focus on and face the present moment, because you look at where you are right now and determine what your goals will be. They let you offer a vision, so you decide, are your goals going to be around structure and plans, or are your goals going to be around skills and those sorts of things. So they give you that vision through offering it to you. C I think of as being for clarity. Goals will bring you clarity around what you want to do. If you want to train your dog to do draft titles and you get yourself sucked into doing obedience fronts, that's not going to be that helpful to you. So if you have good goals, you'll find it's easier to find clarity around what to do and those steps to build. I use the U for understanding the choices and priorities that you make. Say you're looking at what class to take next term at Fenzi, as an example. We all know it's hard to pick. There are so many great choices and we get ourselves spun. If you'd taken the time and done some goal setting, you can actually see which of the classes will help you move forward with your goals and which of the classes that you need. So to be able to understand the choices and set your own priorities can be really important too and really beneficial. And then of course when you achieve your goals, you get both success and satisfaction from them. People laugh at me when I say one of the reasons to goal set is to reach success and satisfaction, but it's so important. So many people don't internalize their own worth, and if goals give you a way to internalize your worth and feel better about yourself, that's a really good thing. So I think goal setting is a really important skill to develop, and I think it can add a lot to us as multi-dimensional positive dog trainers. Melissa Breau: To reiterate that acronym one more time: F is facing the present, O is offering vision, C is clarity, U is understanding, S is success and satisfaction. Andrea Harrison: Exactly. Melissa Breau: Excellent. That's great. I think that's really helpful for people to have that to keep in mind as they go through that process. Andrea Harrison: Exactly, and that's the thing. It gives you a way to break it down to remember it, because you're like, “Oh, goal-setting, it's too much work and you have to think too hard.” You know, you wake up in the morning and drive to work, and you start thinking about a goal, and the phone rings or whatever, and you get distracted. Why would you go back to it? Well, focus. Remember FOCUS and focus on those goals. Melissa Breau: Right, right. I think people probably set goals that require their dogs to learn new skills when it comes to dog training, or to achieve specific things, like in their first OTCH or what have you… but since we're relying on another being, our dogs, what special considerations should we be keeping in mind as we set those goals? Andrea Harrison: Such an important question, and I think the thing I want all of my students, and I hope all of the FDSA students and everybody listening, to remember is that the dogs don't get a say in the goals we set for them. My little Chihuahua, Thea, I wanted her to do agility. She's a Chihuahua, she weighs 6 pounds, agility was not really her thing. She's quick, she's a character, she bombs around the field, but every different teeter I put her on dropped at a different rate of speed, even though they're not supposed to, and she had a couple of quite scary fly-offs. What I did was I started running her in classes that didn't have a teeter. My goal maybe was to do some more advanced agility titles with her, but my goal was to enjoy agility with her, and she did very, very well as long as she wasn't getting on strange teeters. Strange teeters were scary for her, and they were dangerous, and because I didn't let my own personal goals supersede her need to be safe, it allowed us to both enjoy a sport I really love. So you've got to remember the dog didn't get a say in your goal. If you would run if you were sore and achy, but your dog is sore and achy, it might not be a good day to run, because your dog doesn't have the same goals as you. When you look at that, you alluded to it earlier, too, this concept I talk about all the time, the difference between a process goal and an outcome goal. The outcome goal is getting the OTCH, it's getting the ribbon, it's going to Nationals, it's coming first at Nationals for on the podium or whatever, it's those big sort of ribbon goals. That's what I think of when I talk about outcome goals. And process goals are all the little steps that get you there. So a process goal might be training at least three times a week, or teaching my dog to find three different scents, or all of this sort of step-building goals. So when you're thinking about dog training, make sure that you're remembering to build more process goals than outcome goals. I'm not opposed to outcome goals, but the process goals will help you and your dog reach the outcome goal anyhow, and they're a little bit fairer for your dog, given that your dog doesn't have a say in the goal setting. The weekend warriors who say, “I'm going to a trial on Sunday, and I'm going to start training Friday night, and training like mad Friday and Saturday,” they're not doing themselves nor their dogs any favors by that kind of goal setting. A systematic method of goal setting that includes process goals as an actually defined piece of the process are going to get you much, much further than just ping-ponging around from outcome goal to outcome goal and getting frustrated when you and your dog aren't achieving them the way you want. Melissa Breau: You mentioned outcome and process goals, and you got a little bit into my next question, which is how can people be smart about the goals they set for themselves and their dogs? Is there more you want to get into there? Andrea Harrison: Well, yeah, because I think you want to remember that process goals allow you to learn. Through the mistakes that you make, through the opportunities that you get through process, through watching what happens, that lets you learn the most from the goal-setting process. Outcome goals are around performance and they're important too, but outcome goals really are an opportunity to perform and show what you know. So when you're thinking about smart training, it's about picking the model goal setting that's going to work best for you. I'm always happy to share, there are hundreds of different kinds of goal setting models, but a really easy one is the smart goal setting. You hear about it all the time, and that's another acronym that's been around forever. There are some issues with it, but for people who have never goal set before, it can be a good place to start. It looks at having specific goals that are measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely, and those are each of the smart: S-M-A-R-T. And so a specific goal would be: I want Dora to do a dog walk. Measurable: Can she do a dog walk when I'm standing behind, at the side, or recalling her over it to me? Is that achievable for her? Yeah, she's confident on all kinds of shaky surfaces, she's absolutely fine with that. Is it relevant? Well, I like agility, so yeah, for me it is. Is it timely? Yeah, she's a mature little dog, she's still young enough to be fit, all of those kinds of things. So smart goals can give you a nice framework. It can be an intelligent way to look at goal setting. You want to make sure that you're making your goals positive, that you can choose to be positive about your goals and make them changing and affirming, as opposed to negative in things that you're likely to fail at. Some people will set a goal of “I don't want my dog to bark at strangers.” That's a good goal: I don't want my dog to bark at strangers. A better goal for many of the goal setting experts would be to frame it as “I want my dog to walk quietly beside me down the street.” So you can take that negative goal and turn it into a positive goal. That's one thing to keep in mind when you're trying to be intelligent about how you goal set. Also think about making intrinsic goals. When we get into goal setting, we often set our goals for someone else. So we might think, Oh the breeder would love it if I had a versatility title on this dog, or My husband says I'm spending so much money on dog training; I really should bring home some ribbons to show for it, or whatever. We intrinsically tend to set our goals, and that's why I like process goals, too — because they remind us to remember to be internal, set our goals in an intrinsic sense. You need to goal set for yourself. Not wholly — balance is OK — but make sure that you've got that balance, that you're remembering that you matter in this goal-setting regime that you're setting up, too. Melissa Breau: So for those out there, it's SMART: specific measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. Was that it? Andrea Harrison: Correct, yeah. Melissa Breau: All right. I'm taking notes as we go through so I can remember some of the acronyms. Andrea Harrison: You're good! The acronyms — not everybody does them. They may or may not work for you, and that's fine. But I'm finding more and more people the acronyms help them hang on to stuff. That one I did not come up with, but I'm trying to create other ones around some of the work that I do to help people who are figuring that stuff out. Melissa Breau: It helps it stick in your head when you can remember a single word and you go, “Oh wait, I'm missing something, what was the M again, OK.” So, I know that they say something like 80% of New Year's resolutions tend to fail by February – I wanted to address that a little bit. How can people who set a goal for themselves — a good goal for themselves, following the guidelines you laid out — how can they stay motivated past February, hopefully all the way through the year? Andrea Harrison: A few things, and we're lucky with our FDSA community because we've got a natural accountability system, partnership. If you're working on your TEAM titles, you've got the TEAM group. If you're working in a class and working through your bronze, you can post in your local group. There are lots of opportunities for that, and that's a really important thing. People need to remember to do that. But one of the things is to take your time and plan your goal. So here we are sitting on December 26 or whatever, and this will come out at the end of the week with hardly any time before New Year's to do our goal. People will be like, “Oh my god, I didn't goal set yet! I want to goal set!” And they'll jump into it and … don't. Stop, take your time, reflect around what matters to you, talk to an instructor you like or a training buddy already, and figure out what realistic goals are. If we set unrealistic goals, we will fail. We're setting ourselves up to fail when we do that. You're much better to invest the front-end time into making your goals realistic and appropriate for you, and attainable for you in the moment — and we can talk more about that — but make sure that you've got a way to plan those goals that are sensible for you. Then make sure you've got a system to record-keep, so you know if you're meeting those goals or not, or where you've got some holes, the accountability piece. I suggest people take the occasional goals class just to build in a little bit higher degree of accountability. If they haven't tried it yet, it can be a really good thing. An in-person a class, if you're in an area where that's possible. Something to look forward to. For me, I like going to clinics and seminars sometimes just to remind myself. It reminds me to try and make sure I'm ready for it, and I think that can be a helpful thing. Identify and accept your flaws when you're thinking about motivation. Not all of us are equally good at things. If your February's going to be crazy and you get derailed a little bit, that's OK. You don't need to be perfect every day, all the time. If your flaw is that you train in short, intense bursts, make sure your goal reflects that you're better off training intensely six days and then taking four days off, or whatever it is. So know who you are. Spend a little bit of time identifying who you are as well. And then, of course, with motivation you always want to know which of direction, intensity, and persistence are your downfall. Direction is your developing the plan, intensity is how often you'll do it, and persistence is how long you'll stick with it. If you know which of those three things is your biggest issue in motivation, it can help you figure out how to overcome that. Even sometimes knowing just that that's your hole, you can be like, “Ah, I just can't get off the couch tonight. Oh, wait, my direction's failing me and I set those goals on purpose. Let me get up and go to it.” Or “I trained three times last week. I'm not going to train this week at all. Wait a minute. That's persistence. I need to get up and get back to it.” So often, just by understanding ourselves, we set ourselves up to be more successful, in this particular regard, anyways. Melissa Breau: You mentioned setting goals that are attainable for you in the moment. Do you want to go into that just a little bit more, since it came up? Andrea Harrison: Sure. Attainable for you. So what I'm saying is, if you want … you said your OTCH, and that's a huge deal in obedience. I hadn't realized until I started working with somebody who's well on her way to it. She wanted her OTCH, and she and I spent quite a long time figuring out what her realistic timeline was for it, because so much of that is out of your direct control. You can't say you will get that in six shows, because it depends on who else is at your show, or twenty shows or whatever it is from where you start. So you have to make sure you build in a little bit of what I would call a buffer. So you think it would take you twenty trials to get it from where you are right now, I would say to you, “Give yourself thirty shots at it.” If you get there faster than you thought, that's OK. It's good. No problem. You can always adjust a goal. Goals are highly adjustable. They're designed to be adjustable. So if you're reaching it already, that's great. But if you had said to yourself you're going to get your OTCH in fifteen, and you needed every one of those fifteen trials to be completely successful and win the class and all that stuff, then you're going to be really disappointed when you get to trial 14 and you realize you actually still need 13 trials. You're going to feel like a huge failure. So you want to make sure that when you're setting attainable goals, and that's one of the reasons I said talk to your instructors and your friends, because sometimes we get rosy-colored glasses. We're like, “Oh, oh, oh, I can do this! I can do this! This is great!” And then somebody will say, “Mmm, you know, three months isn't a lot of time when you live in a place where …” — well, for me, there's major snow — “ … you might get snowed in and not be able to get to a trial.” “Oh yeah, I hadn't thought of that.” You have to make the whole picture, and the more people you can draw into helping you with that, the easier it's going to be for you in the long run. Melissa Breau: The other thing you mentioned was record keeping, and I know that's a topic that comes up over and over again in the alumni group, that whole tracking your training process, or your training progress, and how to do it, and what are the advantages of it. People share their whiteboards, or their bullet journals, or all sorts of stuff. So I wanted to ask what recommendations do you have for people interested in tracking their progress or coming up with a system? Andrea Harrison: I love this question because it goes right to the heart of me, because my answer is, it depends, and it depends on what works for you. You can set up a really, really simple system that is literally putting a plus, a minus, a plus — it went really well — a minus — it wasn't such a great day — or a big fat zero with a line through it that you didn't train at all that day. You can do that on a calendar on the wall in your kitchen, and that is record keeping. That's legitimate record keeping. You can say to yourself, “I'm going to video every session I do on Friday nights.” And whenever you remember to train on Friday night, you video it. That's record keeping. Those are legitimate forms of record keeping, and they might be what you want to do. That's simple, simple, simple, and it's fine. You might want to do something a little more medium, where you've got a blog going, or you've started a tiny little Facebook group with you and two of your friends and you share your successes, or you write on the backs of agility maps how the run went when you show. I had a book full of maps. I still use them. I still set up training based on my book of maps, and I love them. I remember most of my courses that way. There are so many sorts of medium. You might videotape twice a week, or every time you teach something new, or lots of those sorts of things. And then there are really complex systems, like you mentioned bullet journaling. Bullet journaling's hot, hot, hot. People love it. It's great. It's pretty. Lots of people disappoint themselves because they set up these beautiful bullet journals and then they don't keep them. They're colorful. They're great. If it works for you and you love it, great. If you set it up your own way, set it up your own way. You don't have to do it the way anybody else tells you to. It's for you. It's tracking what you want to track. People get confused, like, “Should I have my grocery lists and my dog training in the same journal?” It's up to you. If you want to have your grocery lists and your dog training in the same journal, go for it. If you want to have every dog having their own separate folder, go for it. If it doesn't work for you, you won't use it. With record keeping, almost more than anything else I teach, it has to work for you. So start simply successfully and build from there. The last chat I saw they weren't sharing them, but people share the most beautiful Excel programs that they've set up with the exercises and the dogs and the colors. We've got some really, really talented people in our group who are happy to share stuff, so I love seeing that conversation come up. I sit back now because people know I've got folders and folders of bookmarks and stuff, but people are all doing all kinds of different things, and if it works for you, great. If it isn't working for you, don't beat yourself up. Stop, think, try something else. There's no failure in not setting up a record-keeping system that works for you the first time you try, or the second time, or the fiftieth time. My record keeping has changed so much over the last 15 years of dog training. I can't even tell you all the different systems I've used, because they're different times in my life. It's busier and less busy, so I work and I do it and it's great, but it has to work for you in that moment. Melissa Breau: You touched on this a little bit in there, but I know for a lot of people, the hardest part of all of that — achieving a goal, tracking it, anything — is when something happens and they miss a day, or life intervenes and maybe they miss a few days… so I wanted to address that too. How can people recover if they do fall off the bandwagon, or if they wake up one morning and realize they have gotten off track and haven't been working on their goal the way they originally envisioned? Andrea Harrison: It's such an important thing. I mean, life happens to us all. No matter how good your goals are, no matter how clear your vision is, life happens. I had a relative diagnosed with cancer, got a call at a trial, left the trial, didn't do competitive agility for four months, that was just my reality. I beat myself up about it — this was a long time ago — I beat myself up about it and was really upset and mad at the money and the training and all of that. At the end of the day, it didn't matter. I went back to agility, loved it, hit my podium finishes, and did just fine. You have to accept that those sort of throwaway days will happen. Sometimes it's a throwaway week or a throwaway month. We do this for fun. The dog sports are about fun, and if we're in a place where it isn't fun, we need to stop and regroup and rethink and plan it out. Imperfect action, though, is better than no action, so if you find that you're stalling out just because you've had a few bad days and you don't know how to get going again, grab a toy and go play, grab a clicker and go teach something, watch a shaping video and try it yourself. Do something. I would rather see someone take imperfect action than just be stalled. If there is a place for that. If there is no place for you mentally, that's OK too, but it's a separate issue right there. There are two reasons life happens to us: one is we can't overcome it, and one is we get so down on ourselves we can't. And when you're that down on yourself, remind yourself of why you're doing it. Put a picture of a ribbon … hang a ribbon on your bathroom door so you'll see the ribbon and be like, “Oh yeah, I want to do that.” Put Denise's book right front and center and think about telling her that what you're actually achieving that day. Jump on the FDSA thing and say, “Hey, I'm feeling down,” and I guarantee you fifty people are going to say, “Hey, it's OK. I've been there too.” We've all been there. Get out there and get training. Have fun with your dog. Use those days to reclaim. I talked a little bit earlier about power, goals giving us power. Those days actually give you a funny sort of backwards opportunity to reclaim that power, because you're busy feeling down about yourself, and if you can get yourself to train for just five minutes … I'm not talking about a great training plan that catches up on all the process goals that you missed last week. I'm saying spend five minutes doing something with your dog. That gives you that little bit of power back, and then you can go on and do a little bit of power again so you can build. Take one tiny, tiny, small, imperfect step forward when it's not working very well, and then you will find that you will be able to make sense of it. If your training is getting derailed, though, and that's why you have stopped, that's OK, and that's important to stop and redress. You want to look at your goals and make sure they are in fact realistic and measurable and achievable for you in that time, and relevant to what you want to do, and you might need to regroup and change your goals a bit. Sometimes when we get stalled out it's because the goals we're working on aren't really the goals we should be working on. So remember that nothing could be a good choice in that situation. So you've gotten really mad at your dog the night before and you've done something you aren't proud of, then you might need to stop and regroup and reassess what your goals are, and that's OK too. Again, you're a human being. We're all human beings. We're not perfect. Melissa Breau: You said something in there that I love, and it's just that idea that we do this to have fun with our dogs, and ultimately if that's not happening, something's wrong, and it's worth taking some time off for rethinking those goals or looking at things again. I just think that's important for people to hear and to recognize. I just like that line. Andrea Harrison: Yeah. It's so important. To me, it's the heart of why I do what I do. My dogs are the good thing in my life, and I know that's true for many of us. So I'm glad it resonated with you. Melissa Breau: Despite our best efforts, sometimes we just don't achieve our goals. It just doesn't happen. Do you have any tips for when that happens, handling it, handling the disappointment and those feelings of having failed, or of failure? Andrea Harrison: Of course I do! This is my bread and butter! This is what I do. And I can hear half my students laughing, going, “Oh, I know what she's going to say.” I've got some new stuff for some of you coming up, I promise. But when that happens to you, I want you to really stop and think, is this goal too much for you right now? And if it is too much for you, that's OK. I often teach people to frame their goals around “at leasts.” Instead of saying, “I'm going to train five times a week,” we'd much rather someone say, “I'm going to train at least four times a week.” You set your goal for what you think it is, and then you backup a step. And then, if you find you're only training three times a week, you say, “I'm going to actually train at least twice a week.” So as soon as you start to feel that sense of disappointment and failure, reword your goal, rework your goal a little bit, and give yourself a bit of a break. I already talked that we are humans. You need to balance that fun in the work piece. You want to make sure that fun and work are in good balance. In my blog you'll see I strike out training and work. Years and years ago I started striking them out and put play, because really that's what I do. I play with my dogs, and we get some training done, and we have lots of fun doing it. That's been a very basic philosophy of mine for a long, long time. So that balance is super-important. Here's a growth mindset. We can have these fixed minds. That's where we think this thing is going to be the way it is forever, and our brains are really very changing, they've got great plasticity, they're very accommodating, so remember that, and remember not yet doesn't mean never. I love that we use “not yet” in the Team stuff, because it's so true in all of life. If you didn't get that cue that you wanted, it doesn't mean you're never going to get that cue. It means you didn't get that cue right then — not yet. So not yet is not never. And mistakes are learning. I say it all the time, and I feel like it's so trite to say it, but it's so true. Look for the learning in the mistake that you make and embrace it. You aren't going to get the opportunity to learn that any other way other than through the mistake you made. If it's an error of enthusiasm, as I like to call them, that's great. Celebrate it. If it's another kind of error, if you over-trained your dog and they're tired at the trial, or you set up beside the wrong dog and your dog snarked at them and you were asked to leave the show — which is terrible, but it happens — then you know, OK, I need to be more careful about where I set up the next time. No matter how big and bad and awful it feels in that moment, Andrea's Rule of Five, kick it in: Is it going to matter in five minutes, five hours, five days, five years? At what point is this thing not going to have such a devastating impact on you? We take things so very, very personally sometimes, and ultimately it really isn't personal. Most of what happens around us is not personal to us. Even our own failures in some way are just circumstances happening to us. Bad things happen to good people, and if it's a bad thing, I'm sorry, and I'll be commiserating, but I'm not going to say to you, “This is the end of the world,” because in all likelihood it probably isn't. Melissa Breau: I think the other piece of goal setting that we haven't touched on is the pressure that sometimes comes with trying to achieve big goals. If someone is feeling stressed out about what they want to achieve, how can they manage that in a way that's healthy and not destructive or beating up on themselves? Andrea Harrison: That's a really good question, and it's so important to access your toolbox Most of my classes talk about a toolbox, and these few things I'm thinking of as we chat are things that try them out, test them, see if they work for you. If they work, put them in the top drawer of your toolbox so you can use them when you feel stressed and pressured. Of course I've talked about breathing before, I think, and there are two easy breathing techniques. I am, where you breath in and you think I am, and as you breathe out, you think the good thought, so I am a good dog trainer, I am confident, I am successful. Whatever any of those things are, that I am breathing is very useful. Count breathing can also calm your nerves because it makes you focus. It's a mindfulness practice. You breathe in for a count of four and breathe out for a count of five, so it goes in, two, three, four, out, six, seven, eight, nine. If you can't breathe for that long, you can do it shorter. Breathe in one count less than you breathe out, so you could breathe in, two, three, out five, six, seven. That can really calm you down quite quickly and give you a thing... Write down what you're worried about. Write it out and then tear it up into tiny little strips of paper, or burn it, gives you great satisfaction sometimes, if it's safe. If you're frustrated or you're angry about something, that can be a very helpful tool. Write it down. Throw a dance party for yourself. You're mad, you're grumpy, you're unhappy, you're sad, whatever. Crank up a tune you love and bop around the house. Your dog will think you're nuts, your spouse might think you're nuts, but get your frustration out. Shake it off. A grounding thing people can try when you're absolutely shaking you're so upset, think about how your feet are touching the ground. Really feel your feet. And in fact you can teach yourself to use that as an anchoring thing when you're standing still and you can't get away. For most of us, movement is a release, just like with our dogs. So if you can move, it's going to help more. You can shake your hands, or push your arms together, or any one of those things. But if you can't do any of that and you have to just stand there, really concentrate on how your toes are touching in your shoes, and your shoes are pressing into the floor, and feel that root to the ground. That can be a really nice tool. I talked briefly about my Rule of Five already. You can strike a pose, very Ann Cuddy, power person. I had lots of fun talking about striking Wonder Woman poses and various poses in mirrors. Go sneak into a bathroom, strike a power pose, and then away you go. That can just root you and reground you a little bit. Another one I like is something I call “traffic light.” When you're getting tense and fried and upset, think about a traffic light. Red: stop. Amber: think about it and make a plan. Green: try your plan. It's a very quick way to just go “traffic light,” and you can actually run through it in, like, 10 seconds sometimes, from red to green, and then reset yourself. It's just a way to reset, and then of course reframe, and whatever's going on can be really helpful, too, when you're feeling really stressed out. I'm stressed, but I'm remembering to do my breathing exercise. I'm stressed, but Andrea would tell me I'm learning from this. Somebody messaged me once, I laughed and said, “Did it work?” And they said, “Yes, it did.” So however you can reframe it. I didn't have a really good show, but I got out of housecleaning today. Whatever it is that will work for you, go ahead and steal it and use it. Reframing can be a very useful tool. But the thing about all of these tools, Melissa, I wouldn't want anyone to forget is they all take practice. You can't just grab one on the fly and go, “Yeah, yeah, I like that ‘feel your feet' thing,” and try to do it only when you're stressed. If it's something that you think might work for you, start trying it now, like any of my tools. I've got hundreds, and I just picked out a few, and I picked out some ones that I hadn't shared in classes very often, if at all, but just to do something a little bit different. But if you don't practice them, they will not work for you in a stressful situation. Melissa Breau: So more to Amy's concept for her management class for managing dogs: you have to practice with the dog so that it becomes second nature before you actually need it in the moment. Same idea. Works on us, too. Andrea Harrison: Exactly, exactly. We're all mammals. Melissa Breau: So I know you touch on a lot of these topics in your “Handle This” class, which is on the calendar for February – and I wanted to ask you to share a little bit about the class and tell students what's in it, tell students what might make them want to take it, that kind of thing. Andrea Harrison: Good question. You know, it's a funny class. When I first developed it, I thought it would be one of the very most popular classes, and it's one of the most intense classes that I teach — and I teach lots of intense classes. People think hard in my classes and I always apologize, “I'm sorry, you're thinking,” and they're always, “No, it's good, it's good.” “But I didn't mean to make you think that hard!” One of the things we get into is creating a master plan, so whatever it is that you've gotten that you want to figure out how to handle. Lots of people come because they're still really nervous in the ring. It was set up to be a follow-up course to All In Your Head, but you don't have to have done All In Your Head anymore to do it. I've figured out how to work through without having to have it. So lots of people who are nervous come into it, or lots of people who are struggling with trial situations, but there are also now lots of people who are just trying to figure out how to get to a show, so they don't even know if they're going to be nervous or not yet because they haven't gone to a show yet. It's become, as well as the nerves piece, it's become setting up a master plan, like, how are you going to get from where you are to where you want to be, applying all of the different things that have come up in Denise's class, and Hannah's class, and all the different classes that you've taken. How are we going to marry them all together into a vision of success for you? There's a lot about change, and being realistic, and adapting to change, and dealing with stressors that come up in your life, but if I was going to give you the one thing, I think it's that ability to create a master plan to bring in lots of different elements. And it's kind of cool because my classes, people come to them from lots of different sports. I have a barn hunt person, a scent work person, an obedience person, an agility person, a drafting person. I usually get lots and lots of variety in the classes, dock diving people have shown up in my classes... so you get to see how all these different sports create these master plans, and sometimes you're able to use ideas from different threads that you can carry over to your sport. So I really like that about my classes. I think it's a quite cool way to do it. The other class I'm running this semester is Unleash Personal Potential, which is the Gold-only class, which is basically whatever people want to do works. The lectures are just around mindfulness, but people do exactly what they want, so we might have somebody trying to peak for performance in March, or somebody who wants to know how to help their boyfriend like their dogs better, or somebody who wants to get a job in a dog-related field. Lots and lots of different things have come up in the class, and it's a lot of fun too. It's Gold only, and you have to have taken some class from me at some level to get into it. Melissa Breau: Alright, I have one final question for you, Andrea… I wanted to ask you if you have any dog-related resolutions or goals that you're planning on trying to achieve in the next year — at least any that you care to share? Andrea Harrison: Great question. I always have goals, and I didn't … I don't think I blogged about it yet this year. If you look at December in my blog, you can see my goals most years. My goal for Sally and Thea is to keep them as healthy and happy as possible. Sally's almost 12 and Thea's 15, and they both have some chronic disease issues that mean they probably shouldn't still be with us. So that's my goal for the old guys. But the cobbler's children, the two young dogs I've got, Dora and Yen, I'm quite determined to get Yen going, and I haven't quite decided whether that means in public doing scent work or agility, or maybe both. She's quite good at both. She's a little flying squirrel, so I've got to figure out how to manage the flying squirrel, but apart from that, that's my goal with her. Dora, I would like very much, because she's feral and quite reactive and quite a character, I'm going to continue working on some of my online stuff. She's working on her trick titles and has been doing quite well at them. I was thinking of adding parkour to it as well. And then personally, because I like agility and she likes agility, we'll do some agility at home, because one of my real goals is to get out and keep doing some personal growth stuff for me, so attending some seminars, attending some workshops. I hope I'm going to be, if I'm invited, driving down to camp for one night, and hanging out for the afternoon and overnight and the morning after. That's my intention, so to get to camp to see everybody. That's actually high on the list of my personal dog goals. And yeah, I think it will be a fun year. I'm looking forward to doing lots of stuff. We're also planning on holding an Iron Dog competition here at the farm. So that will be something new for me. Melissa Breau: Oh, fun! Andrea Harrison: We're going to run one, I think, and a couple of FDSA students have offered to help, and I think it'll be great, so I'm looking forward to setting that up. We have over 200 acres, including a lovely hill that's quite steep, so we're going to have options where you can do the Iron Dog thing or do a training thing. You choose your option, so that people will get different points for doing it, and it'll be a little less of a physical challenge if you choose to do the training options all the way along. A nice walk with some training walks. So there's lots going on in my life I'm looking forward to in a doggy sense for 2018. Melissa Breau: I certainly hope you make it to camp, and do you want to mention where you're located, in case there's anybody listening who's close enough to come out for the dog event? Andrea Harrison: Oh yeah, yeah. I'm in Prince Edward County in Ontario, so in between Ottawa and Toronto, pretty well halfway in between Toronto and Ottawa, so a pretty, pretty part of the world. Lots of wineries and craft breweries and art galleries, and lots of things for spouses to do while you play with your dog in the morning. We're a hotbed of tourism here. Oh, and you know something else I forgot to mention when we were talking about when you're down and out and you can't think of how to get going again, people would be more than welcome to pull one of my task cards out of the deck, so I will make sure I send you a link for how they can get a task card to re-motivate themselves. Melissa Breau: Perfect. And just because I know you mentioned your blog earlier, and I'm assuming that would be the best place to get more info on the Iron Dog stuff, but correct me if I'm wrong, do you want to mention what your website is? Andrea Harrison: It's a blogspot. It's Andrea Agility Addict at blogspot, and you'll find it quickly. It's got really good SEO, despite the fact that I've done no work on it, Melissa, you'd be proud of me. Melissa Breau: Excellent. I will include a link to it in the show notes for anybody who wants to go check that out. Andrea Harrison: Perfect.Melissa Breau: Thank you so much, Andrea. I'm really glad you could come back on, and I honestly couldn't think of a better time to talk goals, so thank you. Andrea Harrison: It's always a pleasure talking to you, Melissa, either on- or offline. I love our conversations, and I always feel like I've learned lots too, so thank you so much. Melissa Breau: And thank you, to all of our listeners for tuning in, both this week and every week this year. We'll be back next week, this time with Amy Cook to talk about the science of dog training. 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 Happy New Years! 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

SUMMARY: For our one year anniversary we're releasing a special edition of the podcast... a compilation of some of the most popular clips from the year in an extra long bonus episode. I hope you enjoy! 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 I'm here with Teri Martin -- for those of you who don't know her, Teri is Denise's right hand woman; she handles setting up the classes for all of you each session, plays tech support, and is the main organizer for camp each year. Teri and I will be doing something a little different this episode… roughly a year ago today, December 23rd, I launched our very first episode, which was an interview with Denise Fenzi. To celebrate our anniversary, today we're going to reshare some of the more memorable moments from the last year. But before we dive into that, Teri is here with me to talk a little about the plans for FDSA Training Camp 2018. Welcome to the podcast Teri! Excited to have you co-hosting this special episode with me.   Teri Martin: Thanks, Melissa. Happy to be here. Melissa Breau: Alright, to start us out, do you want to just remind everyone when and where camp is going to be next year? Teri Martin: Camp is going to be June 1st to 3rd, that's a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and it's going to be at the Roberts Centre/Eukanuba Hall in Wilmington, Ohio. I'm super excited about the venue. It's going to have six different rings running and it's going to be amazing. Melissa Breau: I'm super excited because it's the first year that it's been close enough that I can drive, so I can bring a working dog, and I have a puppy, so can't beat that. Teri Martin: Cool. Melissa Breau: How does registration work? I know it's a little complicated and people tend to ask questions. Teri Martin: Working spot registration is complicated. The regular stuff isn't. Working spot are given priority registration, so there are two phases for those. The first one is Phase 1, and it's going to open on January 8th at 9 a.m. Pacific Time. If you have eight or more courses at any level in FDSA, you will get an invitation to register for that phase. After that, we have Phase 2, which is for people who have four or more courses at any level. That will start January 10th. And then after that we open it to everybody. I should add that auditing is also available and you don't need to register super early for that, but we do suggest you do at least fairly soon, but it's not going to be the same as the demand for the working spots. Melissa Breau: Can they start registering for that on the 8th, did you say? Teri Martin: If you're eight or more, then it will start on the 8th, and if you're four or more it starts on the 2nd. And then general registration opens on the 15th. Melissa Breau: Gotcha. Where do people go for the official schedule and all the additional information that you've got out? Teri Martin: Go to the FDSA website and it's up on there under “More FDSA Education.” You will see a link for the training camp and all the information is there. Melissa Breau: All right, last one -- what is your favorite thing about camp? Teri Martin: Oh, so many things. For so many of us it's getting to see all these people that we feel that we've formed these friendships with, and it's just like you're greeting an old friend that you haven't seen for so long. And those instructors are exactly the same way as they appear when they're giving you advice. They're friendly and warm and funny and fabulous. So it's just the sense of bringing that whole community together in real life and getting all inspired to go home and train your dog. Melissa Breau: Awesome. I'm so looking forward to it. It's been an amazing experience the last few years being able to attend as a volunteer, and so I'm totally looking forward to seeing things from the other side! Teri Martin: We're going to miss having you as a volunteer, though. Melissa Breau: I'll be back next year. Do you want to introduce our first clip, or should I? Teri Martin: (something about the question I asked that led to this -- how Denise's training philosophy has influenced other aspects of her life -- maybe “First up is that first episode, an interview with Denise, from when you asked her…” ). I think it's pretty appropriate that we start with our fearless leader Denise. I think you had a question in the very first episode where you asked her how her training philosophy has influenced other aspects in her life, and for me that just totally sets the ground for how this whole wonderful school and the sense of community that surrounds it has come to be. Melissa Breau: Excellent. Let's play that clip. --- Denise Fenzi: It's been probably the most significant thing that's happened in my entire life. When I changed how I trained dogs, you have to be pretty obtuse not to recognize that we all learn the same way. And if you're a positive trainer with dogs and you really emphasize catching what they do right and ignoring what they do wrong, I mean, you really have to choose not to think about it, to realize that exactly the same thing is true with people. So for example both of my kids have very good manners, and I know how that came about in part. One thing is, I'm simply a respectful person and I encourage that. But I remember our first outings to restaurants when they were smaller, and if they said they would order for themselves, and they would say please and show nice manners, the second that person would walk away from the table I would say to my husband who'd be there, “I am so proud that we have kids who are so respectful and have such good manners. It makes me happy to go places with them.” And you could almost see the difference the next time that opportunity came up again, you could almost see them go just a little bit further with their good manners. And it's not something I comment on any more, because they're older, they're 12 and 16, but they do it by habit. And I know that some part of their brain is always aware of it. So I've never said to them “Say please, say thank you,” I don't tell them what to do, but when it happens I really work to catch those moments and acknowledge them. And I think dog training is a lot easier than child training, that's just my perspective. But I try to work with that, and I try not to think in terms of getting my kids to go to school and do well because I've restricted the rest of their lives, and I try to think in terms of balance and cooperation. Of course with people you can talk things out more. But at the end of the day if you're having any kind of conflict with another person, whether it's a family member or some random person you see on the street, the question I ask myself now is, do I want to feel better or do I want to change behavior? So if I want to feel better I may well behave badly, I may yell. I do yell, by the way. I do yell at my children, I do yell at my dogs. I know some people say, “That's amazing you do, you're not supposed to do that.” Well that's great, I'm glad you're all there. I'm not, so I will yell, “Get off the couch,” or whatever. I'm not really training, I'm expressing my upsetness. So that's, do I want to feel better? Yes, so I'm going to yell. Or somebody irritates me on the street because their dog runs up to mine and is off-leash, and so maybe I'm having a particularly bad day, and I might respond inappropriately. But then the second question is, do I want to change behavior? And I think recognizing that those are different things is really important because never, ever, ever am I yelling if I want to change behavior, and never am I talking to somebody like they're dumb, or ignorant, or anything, because it's all perspective, because they just have a different perspective. So maybe they don't understand that their off-leash dog running up to my old dog is a problem. And the reason it's a problem is, my dog is old and she doesn't like other dogs jumping on her. And I've had much better luck saying, “I know your dog is friendly, but my dog is very old and she has a lot of arthritis. And when your dog comes up like that it really scares her, and it hurts her.” And when I say that, without fail they apologize and they put their dogs on a leash. And I smile, I'm not angry. I might be inside, but I don't show it. The next time I see them we continue with a pleasant set of interactions. And that kind of thinking, do I want to feel better or do I want to change behavior, has been really quite impactful, whether in my family or with people. We often talk about with our dogs, sometimes dog trainers are a lot nicer to their dogs than people. I find that very incongruent, and I don't like to live my life that way. I like my life to make sense. And I think we need to be very aware of not only how we treat our pets but show that same courtesy to each other, and I find that from there I am a happier person. Because when you are kind with people instead of getting your emotions from stewing in your, "oh my God, I can't believe how stupid that person is," that I understand that we take pleasure in those periods of time when we feel superior to other people, because I guess that's where that comes from, I understand that. But it is a short-lived and negative form of emotion, and in the long run it leaves you feeling worse about the world. Whereas when you take the time to think about things from somebody else's point of view, I find that that leads to an understanding, and honestly it makes my life a lot better. It makes me a more pleasant and happy person, so that has a lot of value. --- Melissa Breau: I think that one has really stuck with me. I think it's really influenced what FDSA is and how it works, too. Teri Martin: A little-known fun fact about all of that: As you know, we have a really active Facebook group that's been so much of this community, and that started way back in November 2013, which was maybe two sessions in. There was a group of us that had taken both of these courses and were totally all excited about the FDSA thing and wanted to start a Facebook group. So I pushed Denise about it, and she was like, “Oh, you know, I've had so many bad experiences with groups. People get really nasty and mean, and I just don't want to have that. Well, you guys can go ahead, if that's what you want to do, but I don't want to be part of it.” and then she comes back about a week later and she says, “You know what, I thought it over and I think this is actually a pretty good thing, so let's go for it.” And from there on, the rest is history. Melissa Breau: Yeah, think about how big a part that plays in the community today. It's huge. Teri Martin: Yes. And another fun fact is she has to be really nice to me, because I can actually kick her out of the group because I'm the original founder. Melissa Breau: That's funny. Since you brought up the early days, for our next clip let's use the clip I have from Amy Cook, where she shares how she became one of the first instructors here at FDSA. --- Melissa Breau: So I wanted to ask you too about the early days of FDSA because I believe, I think you actually told me that you were one of the first teachers that Denise brought on at Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. So I was really curious to get some of your impressions on how you think it's changed and kind of what happened when she initially approached you. Amy Cook: Oh, boy. You know, it was standing in the right place at the right time, I swear. You know, she had taught online elsewhere and decided to do this endeavor, and I was just…I'm pretty sure I was just finishing grad school and saying, well, I guess I'm going back to dog training. I wasn't sure what I had in store, I'll just revamp or ramp up my business again, fine. And I can remember, I was standing near a freezer in her garage and I can't exactly remember how it came up but she said, “We have a behavior arm, could you teach what you teach, teach a class in what you do?” Boy, I felt…the answer was both yes and no. The answer is no because I've never done that, but the answer is yes because well, it has to be possible, right? Sure. I'll certainly try it. I really wanted to do something like that. But for a second there I was like, really? Behavior? Behavior, though. I mean, behavior. It's complicated. People are all over the place. Dogs are behaving all over the place. It's a lot to…how will I do this online? But I had faith. She really had vision early on for how this was going to go and we brainstormed, I was really excited about it. She actually came up with the title of the class, Dealing with the Bogeyman, that's hers. She's like, let's call it that. I was like, sure. It was exciting. It was exciting times and I was really just like, well, I'm happy to run a class and see what I can do for people. If it's something I don't feel is resulting in improvements that are reasonable for the dogs I'm helping then it's not right, then online is more suited for skill-based stuff and not so much the concepts or the complicated behaviors. I shouldn't have been afraid because it's been amazing. --- Teri Martin: It's just so cool how all this online stuff works. There was a conversation elsewhere about this with Amy where she said she couldn't believe how much her online students progressed. They get to digest all their information on their own time frame, they get their feedback quickly, they can take the time to set up the scenarios properly so they don't get dogs overwhelmed, and can ask daily questions of the instructor. That's just so more efficient than meeting once every two weeks. So it's really a great way to work behaviour stuff.   Melissa Breau: I think that was on her blog, where she wrote about the impact of online training. Teri Martin: I know it's come up a few times, so it very well could be in her blog. Melissa Breau: Not only is it an awesome way for people to train where they can set up scenarios and whatnot, but because it's online, it lets our students learn from some of the best trainers in the world, no matter where they live, it gives them access to these training concepts that maybe haven't quite become widespread enough for there to be classes on those topics locally. I think a good example of that is Julie Flanery's Imitation and Mimicry class. It's this really interesting concept that I couldn't imagine a local trainer trying to run a class on that. They'd be scrounging up students left and right. So I want to make sure we include a clip of her explaining that concept from her interview back in May. --- Melissa Breau: You kind of mentioned shaping and luring in there, but you wrapped up a class on Imitation and Mimicry and I have to say that's like such a fascinating concept. If you could start by just kind of explaining what that is for the listeners in case they're not aware of it, and just kind of sharing how you got into that, that would be great. Julie Flanery: Yeah. No, I'd love to. Imitation and Mimicry is a form of social learning or learning through observation, and we've long known it to be effective in human learning, but it wasn't until probably the last 10 years or so that we've really seen any studies on its use in dog training. I first heard about it at a ClickerExpo, a talk that Ken Ramirez gave on concept training in dogs, and then further researched Dr. Claudia Fugazza's study that she did, and in 2006 she created a protocol that showed that dogs can learn these new skills and behaviors by mimicking their owners and it's her protocol that we use in class. Also what's fascinating is that Ken Ramirez has developed a protocol for a dog-dog imitation and mimicry, and some of the videos I've seen on that are just truly, truly amazing. So, things that we didn't think were possible now we know are and we're actually able to bring to more people now. The class was really quite inspirational for me because my experience of course had been limited with it in working with it with my own dog and then some of my live classes, my students there in my live classes, we worked through it, and when Denise asked me to do a class on it I was really excited, but I wasn't quite sure what to expect and I have to say my students in that class are just amazing. They have really shown me what this protocol can do and how truly capable our dogs are of learning some of these concepts, so it's been a really exciting class for me. And matter of fact, I'm going to go ahead and put it back on...I think it is already...Teri's added it to the schedule for August, and so I'm really excited about doing it all over again. --- Melissa Breau: I love that our instructors are really well versed in such a wide variety of animal-related training and research. Teri Martin: No kidding! I think there's been tons of podcasts where you've had discussions about all sorts of cool research with dogs including I think even Kamal talked about teaching dogs how to fly a plane. I listened to one with our newest agility instructor just recently, Barbara Currier, who said that she was doing some wonderful things in the field of service dogs. Melissa Breau: Awesome. Let's give that a listen. --- Melissa Breau: So, I have to say, kind of working on your bio, it seems like you've had the opportunity to do lots of different really interesting things, in the world of dogs, from animal wrangling to working on wearable computing, so I wanted to ask a little more about what you do now. Can you tell us just a little bit about the FIDO Program there, at Georgia Tech, and what you're working on with the dogs there? Barbara Currier: Sure. So, FIDO stands for Facilitating Interactions for Dogs with Occupations. My best friend, Dr. Melody Jackson, she's a professor there, at Georgia Tech, and she runs the brain lab and the animal computer interaction lab. She came up with the idea of creating wearable computing for service dogs, military dogs, police, search and rescue, any type of working dog, and she asked me to come on to oversee the dog training aspects of the work. Within the last year, I've been really busy with travel, and so I, actually, haven't been working a lot with them, on the project, and she's actually taking over most of the dog training aspect, the pilot testing, with her dog, but up to this point, a lot of the stuff that they've created, it's kind of funny, when I tell people what I do there, the team that creates all the stuff, it's Melody Jackson and her lab partner Thad Starner, they're brilliant people, and the students that all work there are super brilliant. I am not a techy person. I'm lucky if I can turn my computer on, I just train dogs, so I kind of compare it to like the Big Bang theory, and I'm Penny amongst all of these brilliant people, and they just say stuff and I'm like, that's great, just tell me what you want the dogs to do. That's, kind of, where my expertise is, and I don't have any idea what the technical aspect of it is, but we've, actually, created some really cool things. They've created a vest that a service dog is trained to activate that has a tug sensor on it, and so we had a woman come to us that had a speech problem where she doesn't have, she can't project her voice out very loudly, and she's also wheelchair bound, and she was at the dog park, one day, with her dog, and her wheelchair got stuck in some mud, and she couldn't holler to anybody because her voice just didn't project like that, and she really needed, like, a way that she could send her service dog to get help to come back, and you know, but a dog running up to somebody, at a dog park, barking, nobody is going to think that's anything unusual. So, they created a vest that has a computer on it, and the dog has a tug sensor, on the vest, so she can direct the dog to go to somebody, and the dog can go up and it will pull a tug sensor and the vest will actually say, excuse me, my handler needs assistance, please follow me, and the dog can bring that person back to the handler.   --- Teri Martin: And how cool is that!  FDSA instructors have also been on the forefront of some of the new force free happenings with veterinary medicine. It makes so much sense to extend the positive philosophies when dealing with things that are so often necessary but not necessarily pleasant for the dog.  I think Debbie Gross has some great views on that?    Melissa Breau: Yup, let's roll that clip. --- Melissa Breau: Now, I think that veterinarians and the medical field in general isn't always known as the most positive part of dog sports, so I'd love to get your take on that. How do positive training and rehabilitation overlap, and are there places where they just can't? Debbie Gross: Yeah. And that's a very good question. I belong to an organization, I sit on the board called Fear Free, and their whole goal and mission is to establish fear-free veterinarians' offices, rehab offices, looking at training facilities, boarding facilities, things like that, so it's all aimed at making sure the experience is positive and fear free. And certainly…you know, we laugh in our clinic because we're not the vet, so dogs come in and they know they're getting copious amounts of cookies, and it's going to be a great place, and they love it, and so I think it's very important to, you know, right off the bat we want to make sure the owner and the dog are very comfortable. Certainly, dogs often will become fearful or potentially aggressive if they're in pain, so I always tell the trainers that I work with, assume that it's physical before behavioral. Now, I'll hear so many times from owners, "Oh, my dog didn't want to do the A-frame this morning. It's probably because …" You know, they make something up and then get steak for dinner. They swear they don't think like that. You know, they probably didn't want to do something because they're in pain. Something like the A-frame puts a lot of stress on the dogs back, and the hips, and stuff like that, so understanding if a dog is fearful, or doesn't want to do something, looking at the reason why, you know, so is it pain that is prohibiting them from doing something. And certainly, some dogs are not candidates, like, we've turned dogs away because they're either too fearful, or they just can't do … they don't want to do anything, and rather than forcing them, we won't do that, you know, and that's a little bit different than traditional vet medicine where dogs need to go in. They may need to get an exam, or their vaccinations, or things like that, but this fear free movement is fantastic, and you know, looks at everything from the lighting, their potential pheromones in the air to relax the dogs, and cats also, and other animals, so most the time in rehab dogs love it. They love coming into our office, and it's fun, and it's all positive, and you know, that's the way I want it to be. I mean, I love when the dogs pull their owners into the office, so you know that they're having a great time, so it's great. --- Teri Martin: And of course, using positive training in places where it hasn't historically been used,  carries over into training sports that have been resistant to positive methods too -- like IPO and Gun Dog sports. Melissa Breau: Cassia offers positive gun dog training classes here at FDSA, so I wanted to include this clip from her on the importance of work and play. --- Melissa Breau: I know I mentioned in your bio that you believe dog training should be a form of structured play. It sounds like that's a little bit what you're talking about, but can you explain a little more what that phrase means, or at least what it means to you, and what it looks like in practice, like within a training session? Cassia Turcotte: Sure. I think that…I'm trying to think where I actually first heard that term, and it may have been even Lindsey that said it, but really, it's…you know, I don't want the dog to feel like what we're doing is work. If you feel like you're being dragged to work every day, it's mentally hard, but if they go out and they go, oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing ever, I can't wait to do more of it, then the attitude's up, the motivation's up, and you don't have any trouble with compliance. You know, they're really willing to play the game, and it's fun. It's fun for me and it's fun for them, so you know, it's one of the things…you know, how would it look in a training session? One of the things that we do in field work is called the walk up, and all that is, is a bumper is thrown in the air as you're heeling with the dog, and it's thrown in front of the dog, and the point of it is to challenge the dog to stay heeling and stay steady with you, and the traditional way would be to correct them for not doing that. So in our way, we jackpot with Chuckit! ball or tug or food as a reinforcement for being steady, you know, so they see the bumper go up, and they sit, and we say, “Oh my gosh, that's awesome,” and we throw a Chuckit! ball in the opposite direction, and so it's all a game, and it's about keeping them guessing and mentally challenging them and getting it so that they really understand what they're being asked to do, and they're not just corrected for not understanding. So I think that's pretty much what it would look like in an average day. --- Melissa Breau: We also mentioned IPO, before sharing that clip from Cassia, and the trainer best known for that at FDSA, hands down, is Shade Whitesel. With driven dogs, frustration problems can be a real issue; Shade has spent the last few years looking at how to prevent frustration through clear communication. During her interview back in February, she talked about location specific markers, which are one of the things she's known for here at the school. Teri Martin: I'm taking Shade's class right now with my young, 6-month-old puppy, and I'm absolutely loving this concept. It's really cool to see the clarification in how my dog knows that chase means [26:33] and you get the ball and [26:34] grab it out of my hands and [26:37] you can see the clarity, so I'm happy to see this clip. --- Shade Whitesel: No matter how you train, communicating as clearly as possible is so important, because 99.9 percent of our problems are due to the unclarity of our teaching. And all of our problems with dogs — I mean it's really our problem it's not theirs — go away when you look at the clarity, or more accurately the ‘not clarity' of your teaching. When your communication is clear arousal levels go down, frustration from your learner dog goes down, and you get more confident and fluent behaviors from them. And this holds true over trialing, over living with them, over everything, just to be as clear as possible and predictable, that goes into predictability too. So, no matter what method you do that is just so important I think — obviously, since I talk about it. Melissa Breau: So, I think one really good example of that is the work you've done with location specific markers. Do you mind just briefly kind of explaining what that means and kind of how you use them? Shade Whitesel: You know, markers are such a good thing and people are exploring them, and figuring out that it's really nice to bridge what behavior your dogs doing to get their reward. Tell the dog where to collect their reinforcement, like, technically I want a different marker that means collect it from my hands, whether that's food or a toy and I want a different marker that means collect it away from there, whether it's go pick-up the toy on the ground or whether I'm going to throw the toy, and again it's just that clarity. And I notice with my own dogs if I had a different marker word for, “Strike the tug out of my hand,” versus, “I'm going to throw it,” the dog stopped mugging me, they stopped looking for where the toy was all the time when I was asking for behaviors. Because they knew that I would tell them exactly how to get their reinforcement. And again, it just goes back to the clarity. So, location specific markers is just the dog knows exactly where to go and they don't have to be checking where the toy is or the food — is the food in your pocket? Is it over there in the dish? Because you're going to tell them so they can put 100 percent of their attention to figuring out what behavior you want them to do, because they can trust that you're going to tell them where the reinforcement is. --- Melissa Breau: The other person who really focuses on helping frustrated dogs at FDSA is Sarah Stremming. Sarah has her own podcast, but I've been lucky enough to chat with her twice so far, and wanted to share her take on frustrated dogs vs. dogs who just lack impulse control. Teri Martin: Let's roll that clip. --- Sarah Stremming: I think that for the worked-up types of dogs the most common misconception that I hear about is that these dogs lack impulse control, that a lack of impulse control is the problem. Or that a lack of … if we're going to be very accurate, we would be saying a lack of impulse control training is a problem. Just the phrase “impulse control” makes my eye twitch just a little bit because I think that it implies that there's this intrinsic flaw in these dogs that if they can't control themselves that there's something wrong with them, or that teaching them to control their impulses is something that we can do. I don't think that we can control their impulses one way or another. We can certainly control their behaviors with reinforcement. Whether or not we're controlling their impulses is probably one of those things that we would have to ask them about, kind of like asking them if they were lonely and if that was why they were jumping all over the person coming home. So I like to stay away from stating that lack of impulse control is a problem. I also think that in agility specifically we accept that our dogs will be in extremely high states of arousal and be kind of losing their mind, and we almost want them that way, and any kind of calmness is frowned upon. The dogs that are selected to breed for the sport tend to be the frantic, loud, fast ones, and looking at behaviors, there's just kind of a distaste in agility, I feel — and I'm going to get a million e-mails about this — I love agility, people! I love agility! I'm just going to put that out there! But there is a distaste for calm and methodical behaviors in agility. We push for speed, speed, speed from the beginning, and we forget that sometimes maybe we should shut up and let the dog think through the problem. So I think, to get back to your original question, “What's the misconception?” The misconception is that we need to put them in a highly aroused state to create a good sport dog, and that impulse control is the be-all, end-all of these things. And then, for the hidden-potential dogs, I think the misconception is just that they lack work ethic. They say, “These dogs they lack work ethic, they give you nothing, they don't want to try, they're low drive,” yada yada. I think that's all misconceptions. Everything comes back to reinforcement. When you realize that reinforcement is the solution to everything, you can start to solve your problems and quit slapping labels on the dogs you're working with. --- Teri Martin: I love that. She says, “Shut up and let the dog think,” and also that she says to quit slapping labels on the dogs, because we see so much of that. I love how she's challenging people to think outside the box on all those arousal questions. Melissa Breau: I couldn't agree more. Those are definitely topics that have come up again and again on the podcast, just the idea of not labeling your dog and giving your dog time to process through things. But they definitely aren't the only running themes. I think probably one of the most popular things I've heard, talking to FDSA instructors at least, is how important foundation skills are, and how much of a difference a strong foundation can really make. In fact, Kamal said it was his absolute favorite thing to teach. Teri Martin: Cool. Let's hear. --- Kamal Fernandez: My actual favorite topic is foundations for any dog sport -- that is by far my favorite topic, because that's where all the good stuff happens. That's where you really lay your… well, your foundations, for a successful career in any dog discipline. And I think the irony is that people always want to move on to what I would qualify as the sexy stuff, but the irony is the sexy stuff is actually easy if your foundations are laid solidly and firmly. And I think I've had more  “ah-ha” moments when I teach foundations to people than I have with anything else. I also, i have to say, i like behavioral issues. You can make GREAT impact, and literally change somebody's life and their dog's life, or save somebody's life with behavioral work and giving them a new take on how they deal with their dog at present, but i would say really, really extreme behavioral cases are really, really juicy to get involved in, and dogs that people say they're on the cusp of writing the dog off, and the dog is so phobic or aggressive or dog reactive or whatever the case may be, and you can literally turn that person and that dog's relationship around. That's really rewarding and enjoyable to work with. But I would say as a standard seminar, I would say foundations by far. It's just you've got young, green dogs, you can see the light bulbs going off for the dogs, you can see the pieces being strung together, that are going to ultimately lead to the dog being this amazing competitive dog, and you can see it literally unfold before your eyes. --- Teri Martin: Foundations are one of those things that keep coming up. We see it at camp all the time. People think it's part of an exercise that's wrong, and it's something that's in that exercise, but nine times out of the ten it comes back to how that foundation was taught. Melissa Breau: I definitely want to share one more clip on that because, like you said, it's constantly coming up. This next one's from Deb Jones, who's known for covering all of the awesome foundation skills in her Performance Fundamentals class and her Get Focused class. So I asked her that exact question: Why are foundations so important. --- Melissa Breau: Right, so both the Focused class and your current class, the Performance Fundamentals class, seem to fall into that foundations category, right? So I wanted to ask you what you thought it was so…what is it about building a good foundation that is so critical when it comes to dog sports? Deb Jones: Foundation really is everything. I truly believe that. If you do your foundations well you won't run into problems later on or…I won't say you won't. You won't run into as many problems later on or if you do run into problems you will have a way to fix them because the problem is in the foundation. Ninety-nine percent of the time something wasn't taught to fluency or you left something out somewhere. You've got a gap or a hole, so going back to foundation and making it strong is always the answer. It's never a wrong thing to do. So I really like being able to try to get in that really strong basis for everything else you want. I don't care what sport people are going into or even if they're not going into sport at all. If they just like training and they want to train their dog this…a good foundation prepares you for any direction in the future because oftentimes we change direction. You have a dog you think you're going to be doing obedience with, but if you focus in the beginning too much on obedience behaviors, it may end up that dog just isn't right for that, and so you have kind of these gaps for.. "Oh well, let's see if I want to switch to agility. Now I need to train a new set of behaviors." We don't want that to happen, so we've got the foundation for pretty much everything. --- Teri Martin: So true what Deb says. Having those foundations just sets up the basis for everything we do in a dog's life, including how they have to function in our society today ... which I believe takes us nicely into our next clip, which is Heather Lawson talking about life skills in her Hound About Town classes. Melissa Breau: Excellent. Let's let it roll. --- Melissa Breau: Now, you didn't touch on two of the things that stood out to me when I was looking at the syllabus, which were the Do Nothing training, and Coffee Anyone, so what are those and obviously how do you address them in class? Heather Lawson: Yeah. I always get kind of weird sideways looks when I talk about Do Nothing training, because it's kind of like…people say, ‘What do you mean do nothing training,' and I say, “Well, how often do you just work on having your dog do nothing,” and everybody looks at me, “Well, you don't work on having the dog do nothing,” and I say, “Oh yeah, you do.” That's what we call settle on the mat, chill, learn how to not bug me every time I sit down at the computer to do some work, not bark at me every time I stop to chat with the neighbor, stop pulling me in all different ways, so it's kind of like just do nothing, because if you think about it the first maybe six months of your dog's life it's all about the dog and the puppy. Then when they get to look a little bit more adult all of a sudden they're no longer the center of attention, but because they've been the center of attention for that first eight weeks to six months, and there's been all this excitement whenever they're out and people stop, and you chat or you do anything, it's very hard for the dog all of a sudden now to have this cut off and just not be acknowledged, and this is where you then get the demand barking, or the jumping on the owner, or the jumping on other people to get that attention, whereas if you teach that right in the very beginning, okay, and teach your puppies how to settle, whether it be in an x pen, or in a crate, or even on a mat beside you while you're watching your favorite TV show. If you teach them to settle, and how to turn it off then you're going to not have that much of a problem going forward as they get older. The other thing, too, is that by teaching the dogs all of these different things that we want to teach them, that's great, and that's fabulous, and we should be doing that, but most dogs aren't active 100 percent of the time, they're active maybe 10 percent of the time. The other 90 percent they're chilling out, they're sleeping, they're…while their owners are away working if they're not lucky enough to be taken out for a daily hike, then they've got to learn how to turn it off, and if we can teach them that in the early stages you don't end up with severe behavior problems going forward, and I've done that with all of my puppies, and my favorite place to train the “do nothing” training is actually in the bathroom. What I do with that is my puppies, they get out first thing in the morning, they go their potty, they come back in, we get a chewy or a bully stick, or a Kong filled with food, and puppy goes into the bathroom with me and there's a mat, they get to lay down on the mat and that's when I get to take my shower, and all of my dogs, even to this day, even my 11-year-old, if I'm showering and the door's open they come in and they go right to their mat and they go to sleep, and they wait for me, and that's that “do nothing” training, right, and that actually even follows into loose leash walking. If you take that “do nothing” training how often are you out in your loose leash walking and you stop and chat to the neighbor, or you stop and you are window shopping, or anything else that you when you're out and about. If your dog won't even connect with you at the end of the line, then just…they won't even pay attention to you while you're standing there, or they create a fuss, then the chances of you getting successful loose leash walking going forward is going to be fairly slim, okay.   The other thing that you mentioned was the coffee shop training, and that is nowadays people go and they meet at the coffee shop, or they go for lunch, and more and more people are able to take their dogs to lunch, providing they sit out on a patio, and on the occasion where the dog is allowed to stay close to you we teach the dogs to either go under the table and chill or go and lay beside the chair and chill, and teach them how to lay there, switch off, watch the world go by. Even if the waiter comes up, you just chill out and just relax and that allows the dog, again because they've got good manners, to be welcomed even more places. Melissa Breau: Right. It makes it so that you feel comfortable taking them with you to lunch or out. Heather Lawson: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There's lots of places that dogs can go, providing, and they're welcome, providing they do have those good manners, and if we can keep those good manners going then regardless of whether or not your dog sports or not, it just opens up the avenues for so much more of us to do…more things to do with our dogs. --- Melissa Breau: Of course training and competition aren't entirely about our dogs… we play a big role in their success or failure in the ring. And that can lead to some serious ring nerves on both ends of the leash. Teri Martin: It always comes back to us, doesn't it? But the good news is FDSA has our resident “people trainer,” Andrea Harrison, to help us with this.   --- Melissa Breau: So let's dig into a couple of those specifically just a little bit more, because I know there are a couple that we talked about a little bit before the podcast and whatnot as being particularly important. So I wanted to dig into this idea of kind of ring nerves and people experiencing nerves before a competition, things that really impact their handling. I was hoping you could talk a little more about that, maybe include a tip or two listeners can use when it comes to ring nerves and tackling it themselves. Andrea Harrison: Yes. For sure. One of the things I really encourage people to do is test those tools. So people go off to a trial and they're really, really, really nervous, but they don't know whether those nerves are physical, right, or in their head, or if they're affecting the dog at all, right? Because they've never really thought about it. All they know is that they're really, really, really nervous. They feel sick but they don't know is it in their tummy, is it in their head, is it their respiration, is it sweat glands, is it all of them, right? They haven't thought about it, they know it makes them feel sick so they push it aside, they don't work on it between trials, they go back to a trial and they're like, oh my God, I was nervous again. Well, of course you were nervous again. You didn't try working on anything, right? So like everything else it's almost like a training exercise. You have to think about what is making you nervous, how are you manifesting those nerves, and how can you break them down? It's just the same, right, just the same as positive dog training. Break it down into these tiny little pieces that you can then find a tool to address. So for example, if your mouth gets really, really dry and that distracts you and you start sort of chewing cud, as it were, as a cow, you're like, trying to get the water back in your mouth and it makes you nervous. Well, once you figure that out you take peppermints with you in the car, you suck on a peppermint before you go in the ring, and that's gone away. Right? And that's gone away so you feel more comfortable so you can concentrate on the thing you need to concentrate on, right? You want to always build to those results slowly. When you look at the nerves, I can't say to you, “Here's my magic wand, I'm going to wave it over you and all your nerves will be gone.” But you get that sick, sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, why is that? Are you remembering to eat the day before a trial? Are you eating too much the day before a trial? Are you remembering to go to the bathroom? Because when you're nervous you have to go to the bathroom, so make sure you make time to go to the bathroom because then there's less to cramp in your tummy, right? So step by step by step, you know, you make a plan, you look at the plan. What kind of music should you listen to on the way to the show? Should you listen to a podcast that's inspirational to you? Should you put together an inspirational play tack? Do you know exactly where the show is? If you're anxious and worried and always run late, for Lord's sake, please drive to the trial ahead of time or Google Map it really carefully and build yourself in 15 minutes extra, because being late to that trial is not going to help your nerves. You're going to arrive, you're going to be panicked, you're going to be stressed. So where is that stress coming from? How are those nerves manifesting themselves, right? So the music that you listen to on the way, having the mint if your breath is dry, remembering to go to the bathroom, thinking about what I call Andrea's Rule of Five. So Rule of Five is really simple. Is it going to matter in five minutes? Five hours? Five days? Five years? Right? So if something is stressing you out you can actually stop, ground yourself, which I'll get into in a sec, but ground yourself and think, Rule of Five. And the vast majority of the time, yeah, it might matter in five minutes because your run will just be over and it was not successful and you're embarrassed, maybe, or maybe it was great, and like, super. But very, very few of us are going to remember a run in even five months, let alone five years. I mean, you might remember in general, but your anxiety is not going to still be there, right? I mean, a great run you can remember. I can probably still tell you the details of some of Brody's amazing agility runs or Sally's amazing work, right? Like, I can describe going from the A-frame around to the tunnel and picking him up and staying connected and it was beautiful. I can remember the errors of enthusiasm, right, like when he took an off-course tunnel, and he's never done that in his life, and I was like, oh my God, he took an off-course tunnel. That's amazing. That's so cool, and we celebrated. So I just loved that he was that happy about it. But do I remember those very first, early trials where…do I remember the courses where I stood thinking, I'm never going to get my agility dog to Canada? No. I don't really remember. I remember being sad that he was three seconds over the time and _____ (18:35) [47:44], and that was kind of sucky, but it was okay, right? Like, now with all this perspective it's fine. --- Teri Martin: There's a lot, really, that affects both ends of the leash. After all, we're all learners… it can be easy to forget that sometimes. Melissa Breau: Nancy, for example, shared during her interview how her father influenced her training. He was a football coach, and she's a dog trainer, but that doesn't matter -- because it's all training. Let's listen to that clip. --- Nancy Gagliardi Little: He was a master at analysis, details and creative solutions and i think that's something that I've either inherited or I've learned from him. Melissa Breau: I was going to say, even just listening to you I can hear the parallels to dog sports; just the idea that breaking things down into pieces and foundation skills. Nancy Gagliardi Little: Exactly. This is the other piece that I think is so cool is he expected them to be excellent players, as well as excellent human beings, and he believes in people, and he respects people, loves to learn about people. There's so much about his coaching that parallels the way I train my dogs because I expect and focus on their excellence too. I believe in my dogs -- I always believe in them. I believe they're right and they're telling me things. I listen to them and try to make changes to my training based on what they need. Those are all things that my dad taught me from the way he coached his players. There are so many parallels between coaching and dog training; just his way of coaching, it helped me as a dog trainer. Melissa Breau: I'd really love to hear how you describe your training philosophy now -- what's really important to you? Or what do you see as the big things that you believe in how you believe in training when you work with dogs today? Nancy Gagliardi Little: Well, I guess to sum it up, it's not a really long philosophy. What sums it up for me is I just always look at my dogs as my coaches. So the dogs are my coaches, whether they're my students' dogs, whether they're my dogs, they're the ones who they're helping me develop a plan, and I like to think of it that way because it keeps me always evaluating and looking at things. --- Teri Martin: Dogs as coaches is one of those gifts that sometimes takes us in new directions we never expected. Take Stacy Barnett, nosework instructor, for example. She sort of fell into that sport because of her dog, Judd, just needed to have something, and now it's  turned into this incredible passion for scent sports. I think she talks about that on her podcast and how the sport is so good for dogs that might struggle in some of the more traditional sport venues. Melissa Breau: She did! Let's give that a listen. --- Stacy Barnett: Nose work is not only a confidence builder. It can also help reactive dogs. Nose work itself is very reactive-dog friendly in those venues because the dog doesn't have to work within eyeshot or earshot of another dog. They get to work on their own. However, it really does help from a confidence perspective. The sense of smell is actually pretty amazing. It goes through the limbic system, which means that it goes through the hippocampus and the amygdala. So the amygdala is kind of the fight or flight area, and the hippocampus is responsible for developing those early memories. So what happens is, is that the dog is scenting, and the dog is using about one-eighth of his brain with scenting, and this is all going through this system that's responsible for emotion and responsible for memory. If we can develop this positive feeling toward sensing and toward scent, we can actually help to put the dog into a really good space so that they can work, and also, you know, as long as you're working the dog under threshold, the dog is able to continue to work and will actually become more confident over time and actually less reactive over time. I saw this particularly with my little dog, Why. When he came to me, he could not work at all away from the house. He was also fairly reactive to other dogs. Had about 100-foot visual threshold to seeing other dogs. Now, through nose work, he has developed a lot of confidence. He's now able to search in novel environments with very little acclimation, and he's also quite a bit less reactive. He's got about an eight-foot visual threshold now to other dogs, which I think is absolutely amazing. So the behavioral benefits, especially for a dog like Why, they're off the charts. Absolutely off the charts. --- Melissa Breau: It has been a lot of fun to see the sport of Nosework grow so quickly in the last few years. The AKC has even added it to their list of sports. I caught up with Julie Symons on the new handler scent portion that is part of the new Scent Work competition program with the AKC in Episode 39. --- Melissa Breau: I want to switch a little bit from outcomes to training… what challenges are there when training a dog to search for handler scent, you kind of mentioned that, that may not be present when you're teaching traditional odors? Julie Symons: That's a good question. First, it is just another odor. We can attack it that way and it's true, this is another odor that we teach your dog. But it is different in that it does have its challenges, especially for savvy nosework dogs that have been in oil for a lot of years. We've seen a little bit of it being a little bit more difficult for them in certain situations. For example, there's no aging handler scent, like with the oil odor. So oil hides, the nosework venues we've been at, they're usually placed and they're out there 30 minutes to hours, so the odor is going to disperse more and diffuse into the area. For handler scent you pretty much give it its last scent, you hand it over to the helper, they place it, and then you go in and run. So the scent's going to have less diffuse in the area, handler scents is heavier, that's going to fall down more than, like, a vapor odor oil will disperse in a room, and of course it depends on airflow. Any kind of airflow is going to travel in each scent. It's going to be helpful to your dog that the scent's going to travel into the space. With my dogs and many teams that I've worked in, I find that the dogs have to get a lot closer to where the hide is for handler scents to really hone on that. So in this case I'm not talking about the novice level and boxes; I'll get back to that. But if they hide Q-Tips or cotton balls in a search area, your dog really has to get close to it to find it. So what I'm finding is that I'm actually introducing a little bit more of direction with my handler scent and it's actually helped a lot, and it gets my dog focused and more... not a  patterned search, but just getting them to search. For example, in Advanced Handler Discrimination, it's an interior search, and no hide is higher than 12 inches. So I'm going to plant low. I'm going to be, like, have my dog search low, and they find it really easily. And I found when I have blind hides somebody has set up for me, I feel more liberated to point and direct. Whereas if I know where the hide is, we tend to not want to intervene at all and my dog finds it quicker, because I don't know where it is and I'm just going to have my dog cover the area and then they usually find it. So that's been very helpful in the difference with the handler scent. Also another thing that's interesting if you watch dogs search the traditional oil hides in a box, they just find it really easy. You put your scented glove in a box and the dogs just search differently. They have to go cover the boxes a few times, they just don't hit on it as easily as oil. That oil odor, especially for AKC, is so strong, and your handler scented item is just not going to be as strong in a box, especially it's not aged. So those are some of the differences and why I think the handler scent is a little bit harder to source for a dog, just because of the amount of odor that you have and the fact that it's not aged. --- Melissa Breau: And while we're talking nosework, we have to include a clip from my call with Melissa Chandler. Like Stacy, nosework became her passion after she saw the positive effect it could have on a more sensitive dog, like her dog Edge. Teri Martin: I think there's some really great takeaways for handlers who have softer dogs in that interview. --- Melissa Breau: Now, having worked with a soft dog, do you have tips for others who have soft dogs, kind of to help them let their dog shine or that they should know about setting up training sessions? I mean, what kind of advice would you share? Melissa Chandler: Sure, this is another subject that I did a lot of research and I attended a lot of different seminars to try and get information, mostly to help Edge, and I think, first and foremost, it's so important to keep your dog safe and build their trust because once they trust you, that you will keep them safe, that gives them more confidence, and as I always tell my dogs, I have a cue, it's called “I have your back.” So, if they see something and they get concerned, I'm like, “I got your back.” So, that's our communication of whatever it is, I see it, you're fine, I got you, and it just takes time and by keeping them safe you build that trust that they know that you do have them. I would say never lure or trick your dog into doing something that they don't feel comfortable doing. Sometimes we find that in parkour because someone really thinks their dog should be able to do that behavior and the dog doesn't feel comfortable in that environment, so they tried to take cookies and lure them there. Just back off, work on it somewhere else, and eventually it'll happen. If you lure them, and then they get up there and they're really afraid, they're never going to want to do it again. If you let them do it on their own then they'll be able to do that anywhere in the future. Teach new behaviors in a familiar, comfortable environment, and then when you're ready to take it to another room or on the road, lower your criteria and reward any effort that the dog gives you in trying to do that for you. And one thing, when you're setting up your training sessions, make sure you're not always asking for difficult behaviors or, in nose work, difficult searches. You want your dog to always look forward to and succeed in your training sessions. If your sessions are always difficult and challenging your dog will no longer look forward to them. Have fun sessions that you reward everything, or just play, or do whatever your dog enjoys most. I had mentioned how much Edge loved his dumbbell, there's times we just go in the other room and we play with the dumbbell and he loves that, and just think of the value you're building in your relationship in your training because we just went and did what he loves doing. And then, for nose work, play foundation games. Just have one or two boxes out, do the shell game, play with your game boxes so it's fun, fast, quick, highly rewarding searches. And, I have a thing that I put in most of my classes, it's kind of like your recalls but it's for odor. How much value do you have in your odor bank. And, when you set up these fun, fast, foundation games, you're putting lots of value in your odor bank so, then when you have a more challenging side, you have deposits in that odor bank that they can pull out in order to work harder to find that odor. --- Melissa Breau: Gotta love those tips from Melissa C. So our next two clips, I think, really speak to Denise's sixth sense for bringing on new trainers… she seems to excel at tracking down people who really are incredibly good at what they do, but who also truly imbue the FDSA additude. Teri Martin: I agree. I think our next clip, from Chrissi Schranz, really shows what that attitude is all about. --- Melissa Breau: So I wanted to get into your training philosophy, and lucky me, I got a sneak peek before we started. You sent me over the link for this, but I'd love to have you kind of share your training philosophy and how you describe your approach, and for those of you who are going to want to see this after she talks about it, there will be a link to the comic in the show notes. Chrissi Schranz: Yeah, so I'd say my training philosophy is based on my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. So Calvin has a shovel and he's digging a hole, and then Hobbes comes up and asks him why he's digging a hole, and Calvin says he's looking for buried treasure. Hobbes asks him what he has found, and Calvin starts naming all kinds of things, like dirty rocks and roots and some disgusting grubs, and then Hobbes gets really excited, and he's like, “Wow, on your first try?” And Calvin says, “Yes. There's treasure everywhere,” and that is the kind of experience I want people and their dogs to have with each other. I want them to feel like life is an adventure, and there's so many exciting things to be discovered that they can do together. I want people to learn to look at the world through their dog's eyes a little bit and find this pleasure and just be together, and doing things and discovering things, whether that's digging a hole or playing in dog sports. Yeah, I want them to feel like they're friends and partners in crime and have that Calvin and Hobbes kind of relationship, because I believe if you have that kind of relationship as a foundation, you can do pretty much anything you want, no matter whether you want to have a dog you can take anywhere or whether you want to compete and do well in dog sports. I think if you have that kind of relationship as a basis, everything is possible. --- Melissa Breau: I like that… “Everything is possible.” You certainly can't predict how far a handler and dog can go, if they build a fantastic relationship. Sue Yanoff talked to that a bit too -- she had some great things to say about how our relationship with our dog makes us a great advocate when they need medical care. --- Melissa Breau: Is there anything in particular about veterinary medicine that sports handlers often just don't understand? Sue Yanoff: Yeah. I don't think it's just sports handlers. I think it's a lot of people. Veterinary medicine is a science, and the decisions that we make have to be based on science, and not just what people think, or what they heard, and so when you're making a decision about what the best diagnostics are for a condition, or how best to treat the condition, it has to be based on a series of cases, not just on what somebody thinks, and I go a lot based on what I learn at continuing education conferences, and what I read in the veterinary literature. Because papers that are published in peer reviewed journals are scrutinized to make sure that the science behind the conclusions are valid. So while, you know, it's fine for somebody to say , “Well, I did this with my dog and he did great,” what I want to make my decisions on is what worked well for many dogs, dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of dogs, and not just something that might have worked for your dog where we don't even know if the diagnosis was the same. So I think I want people to know that veterinary medicine is a science, and we have to make our decisions based on science. Melissa Breau: I think that, you know, especially with the internet these days it's very common for people to turn to their favorite local forum, and be like well what should I do, but… Sue Yanoff: I know, like, let me get advice from everybody, and I know it's hard to make decisions when it involves your dog and you're emotionally involved, and that's one of the reasons I want to teach this class, to give people information that they can use to make those hard decisions. Melissa Breau: What about the reverse? Are there things about sports that you think most vets just they don't understand? Sue Yanoff: Oh yes. Yes there's a lot. Unless you're a vet who's involved in this thing, most vets don't understand the time and the effort, and the emotion, and the money that goes into the training, and the trialing that we do. They don't understand the special relationship that we have with our dogs when we put the time and effort into training them. I have had dogs that were wonderful pets, and I loved them, but I never showed them for one reason or another, and there is a different relationship when you accomplish something special with that dog. So I think that's important thing. The other thing that most vets don't understand, and might not agree with, but I have had some clients where we have diagnosed an injury, and said, “Okay, we need to restrict activity, and do the conservative treatment route,” and they say, “I will, but my national specialty is next week, and she's entered in whatever class.” Or they say, “I have a herding finals coming up in two weeks, and I really want to run her in those trials,” and I'm okay with that if the dog has an injury that I don't think is likely to get much worse by doing a little more training, or trialing, then I'll say, “Okay. Well, let's do this in the meantime, and when you're done with your national or with your specialty or whatever, come on back and we'll start treatment.” So I think a lot of vets would not understand that point of view, but I'm okay with it as long as I don't think that it's going to do serious harm to the dog, and as long as the owner understands that there's, you know, a slight chance that things could get worse. --- Teri Martin: One of the great things about all these podcasts is hearing all the instructors' personal stories. For example, you've just gotta love a Sue Ailsby story. Her talk stories are well worth the price of admission in any of her classes. Melissa Breau: She shared a great story about her cross-over dog when we talked. --- Sue Ailsby: The first dog I trained, it wasn't clicker training but it was without corrections, was a Giant Schnauzer and I got her to about eight months and it was glorious. And we were getting ready for an obedience trial and I'm heeling along, and part of my brain is saying, isn't this glorious? She's never had a correction and she's heeling. And the other half of my brain is saying, but she doesn't know she has to. And then the first part, why should she know she has to? She knows she wants to, but she doesn't know she has to. I'm going to put a choke chain on her and I'm just going to tell her that she has to. This is not negotiable. You don't want to put a choke chain on her, you've spent eight mon

SUMMARY: Mariah Hinds' love affair with dogs and fascination with their behavior began young. She's wanted to be a dog trainer since she was eight years old. She's now been training dogs and teaching people for more than 14 years and is a Certified Professional Dog Trainer. Mariah has broad practical experience in the dog world, volunteering and working in kennels, shelters and veterinary hospitals, dog sitting and walking, fostering rescue dogs, and two years of veterinary technician college. She has a passion for finding the best way to communicate with the human half of the dog handler team, because she knows small changes in the handler and practice can yield big results in the long run. Her specialty at FDSA is teaching skills that require self-control from the dog including proofing, impulse control, stays and greetings while using positive training methodologies. Links Mariah's website Next Episode:  To be released 12/22/2017, and it will be a special anniversary edition of the podcast, so stay tuned! 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 Mariah Hinds. Mariah has been training dogs and teaching people for more than 14 years and is a Certified Professional Dog Trainer (CPDT-KA). She also just recently put a UD on her awesome border collie, Clever. And she's here to today to talk about proofing and what it takes to get ready for competition. Hi Mariah! Welcome to the podcast. Mariah Hinds: Hi. Melissa Breau: Can you just remind listeners a little bit about who you are and who the dogs that you share your life with are? Mariah Hinds: Sure. I have Jada, my Doberman, who is 11-and-a-half years old. I got into competition obedience with her and she's my novice A dog. We started training for the ring at age 4, and she earned her novice, open, and utility titles, and some optional titles as well, between the ages of 4 and 8, and she's the one who taught me that positive training methods are much better for her and they're a lot more fun. Clever is my 5-year-old border collie. She got her novice title with 198 from 199. She won first place in Open against 100 other dogs last year with the 199, and she just got all three of her utility legs for her title a few weekends ago. She also knows a ton of tricks, and we train in agility as well. My goal with her for 2018 is to compete in open utility at all the local trials, and hopefully we'll earn some OTCH points along the way, and hopefully we will compete at the Classic next year and place in the top twenty as well. Those are my goals for her for the next year. And I have Talent, who's the baby dog. Her name is Squishy because she likes to lay on top of me. She's 14 months and we're just building the foundations for precision for obedience, and I hope to earn her MACH as well her OTCH and UDX, so we're doing a lot of agility training right now as well. So that's all about my dogs and a little bit about me. Is there anything else you want to know about me? Melissa Breau: Gee, I don't know. Is there anything else good that I should want to know? Mariah Hinds: Not really. I moved from Orlando to Fort Mill, South Carolina, a year ago, and so I'm just having fun getting to know people around here. Melissa Breau: I know that the core of our conversation today, I'm hoping we'll get really deep on proofing and getting “ring ready,” but before we dive into that stuff, I figure it makes sense to get some terminology stuff straight. So I wanted to ask what proofing means to you, and then maybe a little bit about why it's critical for success in competition. Mariah Hinds: Sure. So for me, proofing means that we're adding achievable challenges to a skill. So once a dog can do a behavior reliably on cue — and it can be a verbal cue or a hand signal as a cue — then we ask the dog to do the behavior in different locations, and perhaps we can ask the dog to do the behavior with other dogs around, and perhaps we can ask the dog to do the behavior in different locations in proximity to us, so “Can you sit in front of me? Can you sit at heel? Can you sit on the right side of my body? Can you sit between my feet?” I really think that proofing is critical to success in competition, because there are tons of distractions at a trial, and although you can't actually train for every single distraction, you can practice adding distractions in training. And if we add distractions in a strategic way so the dog is really successful, then we're really building the dog's confidence, and the dog learns to say, “Yes, I know exactly which behavior you want me to do, and no matter what's going on, no matter how far away I am, or where my handler is, or how quickly I'm moving, I know that this is the behavior that gets me closer to earning my reward.” Melissa Breau: You mentioned your dogs' different ages and different stages. At what age or point in your training journey do you really begin to add proofing, and what does that look like? Mariah Hinds: I think everyone proofs their dog, whether they realize it and they work through the behavior strategically or whether they don't. We work on adding distractions to our heeling, we work on adding distance to our position changes for utility, we work on adding out of motions to our downs for open, we work on adding distractions to our stays, we work on practicing in new locations, and once the dog has a basic understanding of these cues with different locations and durations and distance, we can oftentimes add another layer of understanding with even more distractions and more proofing. Typically, I find that those fall into a few different categories. It hasn't been introduced yet, the skill is just being learned, the dog is more than 50 percent reliable with behavior, we're adding new locations, or we're proofing for duration and stimulus control, we're adding distance or distractions, and so on. Those are all the categories that behavior can really fall into. And when the dog's just learning the skills, we setup the environment so that the dog can be really successful, and if we set it up well, then the dog goes up to being successful with behavior 50 percent of the time or better really quickly. Then we can start practicing in new locations, such as in the bedroom instead of the training room, or on the patio, or at the training building after the dog is acclimated, and we can also work on building duration and putting behavior on stimulus control. Then we can add distance and distractions. So I start adding distractions strategically to my dog's behaviors the moment that the behavior is robust and strong enough that the dog will really likely be successful. And if we practice the skill the same way without building more challenges with the behavior, then our training might just go stagnant and we might not make any real progress toward our goal. Melissa Breau: Is there ever a point when you stop proofing? Mariah Hinds: Not really. When I'm first working on sequencing behaviors together, such as for the retrieve over a jump, that's a behavior sequence, and it starts with the dog sitting in heel position. Then they go over the jump on cue, then they automatically retrieve the item, then they return over the jump, automatically do a front. So when I'm teaching that sequence, then I'm definitely going to start sequencing those things together with much fewer distractions than if I'm just working on one piece of that behavior. But before that, I want my dog to be able to do those behaviors separately with distractions. I want the dog to be able to pick up the dumbbell off the ground with distractions around. I want the dog to be able to go over the jump with my jump cue and take the cookie as the reward for that behavior. I want the dog to be able to set up in heel position and stay while I throw a distraction such as a cookie or a dumbbell or a toy. I want the dog to be able to come over the jump from a sit/stay at any angles with the cue to jump. I find that that's a really overlooked part of that behavior sequence and that falls apart really easily. If the pieces are solved separately before we sequence them together, then sequencing the behaviors together happens really quickly, and if a piece of the sequence falls apart, then we can easily fix that piece of the sequence just by revisiting that piece. And once the behavior sequence or the chain is solid, then we want to go back through and add more layers of understanding, and more layers of confidence, by adding distractions and proofing the entire behavior sequence. For example, with Clever, we're working on adding some distractions to our slow heeling. So at the trial, at our third leg, she really was a little forge-y with the slow heel, and so I really wanted to get that a little more reliable. She's consistent with it until we add distractions, so that's what we're working on. The goal, ultimately, for her will be that my training partner can fling a toy and that she'll remain in heel position while we're walking. Right now we're working on food distractions while she heels, because she finds that a lot easier. She's way more toy motivated than she is food motivated, so I'm building confidence with her with that so that she understands, so then I can add more layers of confidence. The other thing that we're working on proofing is doing a finish with the pressure of a judge, without her squeaking from the stress of the pressure. So at home I'm practicing finishing, having her finish on cue with a dog bone as a distraction, or some other distraction, food or toy distraction. And then, when I have my training friends to help me, then I'll do a few repetitions of what she's been successful with at home, and then I'll replace the distraction with a person and see if she can do that successfully. Melissa Breau: I know that precision and maintaining criteria are super-important to you, so I wanted to delve into that a little bit and ask you what the relationship between proofing and getting really precise, consistent behaviors is, and if you could just talk about that for a minute. Mariah Hinds: Sure. First, we need to add the behavior. We need the behavior to be precise with our desired criteria. So that means that has to happen first, and that needs to happen before we add layers of proofing. And we can certainly use different reinforcement strategies to help maintain the desired criteria without losing attitude, and that's really important to do. I do that a lot with my puppy when I'm building reliability, so she'll get one reward for trying, and she'll get multiple rewards for doing it accurately. We can also think about where we place the reward so that we're getting the most effect for our desired behavior. This is talked about a lot in the Precision Heeling class that Denise does. If a dog is lagging, we want to build more reliability for being in heel position, and then we really want the reward to happen ahead of heel position, and if the dog is heeling too wide, then we want the reward to happen with the dog really close to us, with the rear in as well, because otherwise we'll create crabbing, and if the dog is heeling and they tend to crab out and forge ahead, then we can have the dog spin away from us, which encourages their butt to get in, and then we can reward them from behind heel position, or even from our right hand. The dogs tend to anticipate when a reward will happen, and they will gravitate more to that area. And we do talk a lot about reinforcement strategies in my class, and it really can help a lot with building reliability. Melissa Breau: Do you work precision and consistency separately? It sounds a little bit like they're very closely related. Can you talk about that for a minute? Mariah Hinds: I do think they're closely related. I mean, I think that precision has to happen first, and consistency is really just generalizing the behavior. So first I work on precision. Let's say that I'm working on fronts. The first thing I do is I'm going to help the dog be correct, so I can use a platform to help the dog find front precisely. I can also do step back fronts where I lure the dog into position while I take a step back, and once the dog is precise at finding front from two or three feet away, with the platform or with luring, then I can start fading my lure, so I can ask the dog to find front with my hands pointing at my face instead of luring the dog with my hand. Another reason why I like to do that stuff is because when I'm teaching a dog where I want them to focus when they're finding front, I don't want them to accidentally find front on a stranger or the judge. I do want them to look up at my face, and then I can go to teaching them to find the precise position with my hands at my side. Once the dog can find the position precisely from two to three feet away, then I can start adding different angles to come to front, I can toss a treat from the left or to the right and have the dog find front that way. Again, this is from a very short distance away, and that's quite a challenging thing to do precisely. So once they're precise with that, then I can start adding more speed by tossing the reset cookie further away, I can start weaning off of the platform and going back to an earlier step to help guide them, to help guide the dog to where they should go. I like to do a little bit of pointing to my face as I'm weaning off of the platform, and then I can add in my distractions such as the judge and the pressures of the ring gating and so on. So the dog needs to understand exactly where the position is precisely first before we get consistency with that precision with a lot of variables. Melissa Breau: I think all novice competitors have been at that place where they thought their dog knew something, they show up to compete, and then their dog's carefully trained behaviors fall apart totally in the ring. Where do people go wrong when that happens? And what kind of things can they do to prevent it? Mariah Hinds: I think that's a really common thing that happens, and I think that we all fall into the habit of training at one or two places because it's convenient, and then we expect that is enough to get reliability in a new place, with new dogs, and new people, and a stranger in the room with you. I think that's a lot to ask of our dogs. I find that training at different places is really important, and going to show and gos is a great way to see where your dog is in terms of readiness. If you can't find a show and go, then I think another great option is to go to places where there are other dogs behind a fence or on leash. One option would be going to a big, grassy area outside of a dog park and practicing there, or you can go to a parking lot near the dog beach entrance, or you can go to a parking lot at a really busy veterinary clinic. For me and my dogs, that always tends to give me a really accurate gauge as to where they are with reliability with distractions. For me, I like to combine that with distraction work at home. It just isn't practical for me to go train at a new place more than once a week, but at home I can add challenging distractions that help my dog understand that the way to earn the reward for the cued behavior is really to ignore the distraction. Melissa Breau: I think the other place that a lot of people really struggle is when it comes to cleaning up their own body language as part of proofing. We get all this reinforcement built in from our dog doing the right thing when we include those extra movements! When we lean forward slightly on the down cue, or when we use our hands a little more than we should. I wanted to see if you could talk a little bit about why it's important to get rid of that movement, and then share any tips you have, because I think it's something that you do really well. Mariah Hinds: Well, thanks. I do find that it's really important. I find that especially when we're preparing to go into the novice ring, that we've done a lot of helping the dog set up in heel position by doing certain things with our body, or we help the dog halt when we're heeling by turning our shoulders toward the dog and looking at their rear, or we help the dog find front by always practicing with our hands near the center of our body during practice. And then we go in the ring and we can't help the dog, so we've removed the cues that the dog was familiar with and the dog doesn't know what you want anymore because we removed the cue and there are distractions everywhere. So it really can be challenging for the dog to go in the ring when they really just aren't ready yet. Whereas if we actually prepare the dog, and we show them that the cue for the behavior is in all of this extra body movement, then they're going to be a lot better prepared. As for tips, I think the first thing that's really important is discovering what your body is doing while you say the verbal cue. So the more that you actually video yourself, and then watch those videos back, the more you're going to realize what you're doing with your body while you're saying your cues. So once we realize what the body language cue is that we're doing, then we can start working on fading them. I also think that one of the longstanding myths of dog training, especially in obedience, is that you should be saying the verbal cue while you help the dog do the behavior with your body language. And what we really want to be doing is we want the behavior to be reliable without body language, and start saying the verbal cue without moving, and then following that verbal cue with your old cue, which will be the body language help or the hand signal gesture that you've been using. Melissa Breau: I know, for example, some instructors use the prompt “always return your hands to neutral,” or “always return your hands to the same spot.” Is that helpful? Is that kind of a strategy useful? Mariah Hinds: Yes. We want to practice looking formal, if that's what we're going to do in the ring. So yes. If, for example, you're using pocket hand, or putting your left hand to your side to help the dog actually sit when you stop, then that's fine. But we want to return to formalness when we can to help the dog see that picture as well. Melissa Breau: Beyond simply proofing, what other skills are there that somebody needs to know to get “ring ready?” And I know that you're teaching some classes on this, so I thought it might be a good topic to talk about a little bit. Mariah Hinds: I'm teaching a class on putting the novice exercises together, called Putting It Together, and I'm teaching Proof Positive: Building Reliability. The first thing we cover in Proof Positive: Building Reliability is discussing our reinforcement strategies for the behavior that the student has chosen to work on in the class. We have some people working on fronts, or position changes, or go outs, some heeling, some drop on recalls, some setting up in heel position, some weaves, some running contacts, some freestyle behaviors, and lots and lots of obedience. I really love that variety. It really keeps the class fun and it's fun to follow along with. So the next thing in that class is that we talk about fading our extra body language cues, and we work on actually putting it on a verbal cue, and we work on getting the behavior solid under one set of circumstances, and we work on waiting, and we work on teaching stimulus controls, so helping the dog learn to wait for the cue before doing the behavior, and then we start playing games. This week we're going to work on teaching the dog to ignore our body language and listen to the verbal cue, and we're going to work on doing the behavior in various locations, and in the upcoming weeks we work on adding sound distractions and spatial pressure, which is the amount of things around the dog, like ring gates and judges, although we're not actually going to be working on people, so a trash can can provide spatial pressure, a wall can provide spatial pressure. We're also going to be adding various angles, adding some duration and distance, different locations, adding some out of motion to the behaviors, and we're going to work on building reliability with food, and scent distractions in a few different scenarios. So overall we're playing fun games to build the dog's understandings and reliability with behaviors. In the Putting It Together class we're working on making sure that our behaviors for the novice ring are really solid separately. So we're working on stays, and fronts, and moving in heel position, and setting up in heel position, and stand stays, and our circles for our figure eights, and our complete figure eight exercise, and our turns and change of pace in heeling, taking off the leash, entering the ring, exiting the ring. So first we're doing some problem solving, helping the dogs understand the desired behaviors, then when those pieces are solid, then we're working on sequencing those behaviors together, building confidence by adding realistic ring distractions, weaning off of rewards, and practicing our entire ring performance. So we're looking at all of these pieces in this class, and putting those pieces together when the pieces are ready to come together. So in both classes we're talking about reinforcement strategies, and there are lectures on building reliable, precise fronts. The Putting It Together class covers a lot of topics regarding the novice ring, and polishing those behaviors before sequencing them together and putting them into a ring performance practice. The Building Reliability class covers adding distractions, different locations, spatial pressures, sound distractions, handler body language distractions, and adding those things to our simple behaviors like sit and down. Then we can take those games and practice with our complex behaviors, and we can add duration and out of motion and food distraction to those behaviors as well. Both classes are a lot of fun, and if you do obedience, then both classes can fit your needs. It just depends on where your dog's behaviors are and their understanding of the behaviors. So if you're just starting out, and you're just working on pivots, then Building Reliability would probably be a better fit, versus if your dog is solid with that, and you're really ready to move on and start sequencing a little bit of find heel positions stationary with actually moving in heel position, then the Putting It Together class is a good fit. Melissa Breau: They sound very complementary. Mariah Hinds: They do. Melissa Breau: They sound like they work well together. Mariah Hinds: Yes, definitely. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Mariah. I appreciate it. I know things are crazy, but I'm glad you could make some time for me. Mariah Hinds: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Melissa Breau: Awesome. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We'll be back next week, this time with a special anniversary edition of the podcast… also, just a last-minute reminder that if you want to take a class for the December term, today -- Dec. 15th, the day this episode comes out -- is the absolute last day for registration. So, if you're a procrastinator, it's time…. And, 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

SUMMARY: Nancy Gagliardi Little comes back on the podcast — Nancy has been training dogs since the early 1980's when she put an OTCH on her Novice A dog, a Labrador Retriever. Since then she has put many advanced obedience titles on her dogs, including 4 AKC OTCH titles, 6 UD titles, 3 UDX titles, and multiple championships in herding and agility. Today, she joins me to talk startline stays in agility. Links Nancy Gigliardi Little's Website Next Episode:  To be released 12/15/2017, featuring Mariah Hinds. We'll be chatting about proofing and building reliably, ring-ready behaviors! 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 have Nancy Gagliardi Little back on the podcast — Nancy has been training dogs since the early 1980's when she put an OTCH on her Novice A dog, a Labrador Retriever. Since then she has put many advanced obedience titles on her dogs, including 4 AKC OTCH titles, 6 UD titles, 3 UDX titles, and multiple championships in herding and agility. Welcome back to the podcast, Nancy! Nancy Gagliardi Little: Thanks, Melissa. Thanks for having me. Melissa Breau: The last time we talked a little bit about obedience. Today we're talking a little bit about agility. To start us out, do you want to just remind listeners who you are and share a little about the dogs you share your life with? Nancy Gagliardi Little: Sure. Who I am … I guess I'm still discovering that, but I live in Minnesota, about 45 minutes north of the Twin Cities, and I compete mostly in agility, AKC mostly, but also USDAA and UKI. I still train my dogs in obedience, I just don't compete in obedience anymore. I have aspirations of doing that again, but we'll see. I teach agility and obedience online classes with FDSA, and I teach agility and obedience lessons and classes at a local center here in Minnesota. I did judge obedience, AKC obedience, for about twenty years, and I judged around the country in all classes and also in some national events. So that's about me. And then my dogs. I've had border collies since the mid-'80s, and I love everything about the breed, including their quirkiness and their sensitivity. My dogs are Score, a border collie, 13. He's retired, obviously. He did agility and herding. And Schema is 9 years old. She's currently my competition dog doing agility. She is competing at AKC Nationals this year in 2018, and I think that's the fifth time she's qualified. She's also competed at Cynosport. And then I have Lever. He's 4, and he is competing in agility. I train him and Schema too, both in obedience. He's kind of the up-and-coming guy, I guess. And then my husband has a toller and his name is Rugby. He's 2, and he trains in agility and obedience. Melissa Breau: That's your crew, and we were talking a little bit before I hit “record” that hopefully there'll be one more joining the family early next year, right? Nancy Gagliardi Little: Correct. I think they're supposed to be born in early December. It's one of Lever's puppies. Melissa Breau: I look forward to lots of puppy pictures. Nancy Gagliardi Little: Yeah. That will be exciting. Melissa Breau: I mentioned in the intro that last time you were on we really talked obedience, but today we're going to talk agility, so specifically we're diving into start line stays. So, I wanted to start with how they're different from a stay in any other sport, something like obedience, for example. Nancy Gagliardi Little: They are quite a bit different in the agility environment. Agility is very high-energy, and the environment itself is fairly unpredictable, and that makes for difficult conditions for dogs that are trying to perform these skills that they learned at home and in class, especially the start lines. That's kind of the transitional exercise into the course. And then of course most dogs love agility, and it's pretty reinforcing for them to go. In obedience the stays are very predictable, well, in actually all the exercises are fairly predictable. They're patterns. Dogs learn those patterns, and that gives them pretty clear information when exercises start and end. Even in obedience, dogs can make mistakes. They might read a pattern and anticipate the finish of an exercise, especially the stay, and it's probably just when the judge says, “Exercise finished,” so they're pretty much done anyway. So it's just much more predictable. Melissa Breau: Why is it so important that people actually have a good start line stay in agility? What benefits does it offer if they put in the work and they get there? Nancy Gagliardi Little: Well, agility is pretty much all about speed, and most people have dogs that are much faster than they can run. I know I do, and most of the people do, and if they don't, they want that. Being able to lead out gives you an advantage, especially with a fast dog, and actually on many courses it can be difficult to start without a lead out with a super-fast dog. Going into the sequence, you just can't get where you need to be to cue something. So yes, it's quite an advantage having that. It gets you ahead. It might even keep you ahead throughout the course. And without that, you're going to be behind, which isn't all that bad if you want to do rear crosses throughout the course. Some people are very good at that. I have some students without start lines just because they came to me after their dog was a little bit older and we just decided we weren't going to teach the dogs the stay. And there are definitely some sequences that they just can't … or courses with starts that they just can't do, or they just have issues with it, so it does put them at a disadvantage. Melissa Breau: You mentioned that you decided just not to bother with it. Why do people struggle with it? Why is it something that's hard to teach? I think a lot of people think a stay is a stay is a stay, right? Nancy Gagliardi Little: Right, right. Well, there's just so many variations, but it could be that there's holes in training or holes in generalization. There's a lot of that that happens. And lots of times handlers try to control the dog's behavior instead of training, so that would be like a hole in training. It could also be the training sessions are handled differently than the handling at the trials, and there's a lot of that that's due to handling. Another thing I see contributing to the start line is — this is interesting — but the handler's own increased arousal level. And this happens in obedience, you see that too, but in agility it's pretty much, it's a big contributing factor where the handlers are too hurried, they're un-confident and disconnected when they enter the ring, and then, at the beginning of the run, they're thinking more about the course and they just don't stay connected and focused on the dog. The dogs sense that, and that can cause — in the dogs we're talking about, probably the dogs that have increased arousal level — that causes stress and also increased arousal, and that's never good at the start line. Especially the dogs start reading a disconnected handler, and they start losing the ability to think, and then you have a break. A lot of times there are small issues that crop up along the way and they aren't noticed by the trainer until it becomes a big problem. And that happens a lot. There's little things, you know, little things that they just aren't seeing, or they aren't aware of, and then they don't know how they got there. Melissa Breau: Do you mean on the day of the trial or do you mean … Nancy Gagliardi Little: I just mean in general kind of building up to that, but it will happen at the trials usually because that's where the ultimate differences are between the training and the trials. Melissa Breau: Little stuff like creeping, or what do you mean? Nancy Gagliardi Little: Well, it would be mostly handling. Some of it would be handling. The dogs start getting a little more and more aroused because they maybe can't predict when the handler's going to release them. That causes … and it depends on the dog. It could be that this dog, this particular dog, responds to arousal and stress by creeping forward, or they stand up, or even just a glazed look in their eyes. It just keeps changing until there's actually just an outright break. And that's when the handler notices that there's an issue, but it's actually happened long before that. Melissa Breau: I know we talked about this a little bit just now, but I think a lot of people attribute start line problems to poor impulse control. The person just didn't work it enough, or didn't do it right, or something. Nancy Gagliardi Little: Right. Melissa Breau: Can you talk a little bit about the role that impulse control actually does play in a good start line stay? Nancy Gagliardi Little: I hear that a lot. People think their dogs are pushy or have impulse control issues. But I've seen more over-arousal issues or frustration issues than impulse control issues. And frustration and over-arousal, they can be caused by lack of clarity, unpredictable cues, and then, like I said before, handlers that aren't connected with their dogs. The dogs really want that. And impulse control skills, they're just a part of the foundation of training a start line, and it should be fun for the dog. Some of the issues with start lines might be due to poor impulse control training, but there's a lot more at play here than that. And actually I've seen plenty of dogs that really have great impulse control, but they can't hold a stay at the start line, and a lot of that is due to just their arousal state. They can't think. People just call that “impulse control issue,” and really it's something quite different. Melissa Breau: That's really interesting. You commented that you've seen a lot of dogs with great impulse control who really struggle with this particular skill. I think that's something a lot of people don't think about. Nancy Gagliardi Little: Yeah, exactly. Melissa Breau: I'd imagine … I don't do agility, but I'd imagine that part of what often goes wrong with a start line is simply that the dog breaks their stay in a trial situation and people just start the run. And they do that over and over again, and the dog figures out, “Well, we're just going to go.” Nancy Gagliardi Little: They're so smart! Melissa Breau: Is there a better way to handle that? Nancy Gagliardi Little: That's a really good question and it's a complicated one, too. I think it's one of those things that's hard to answer, but it's part of what goes wrong. Usually there's an issue, like I said before, that's starting to manifest long before the dog even breaks the start line, and the handler isn't recognizing it until the dog finally leaves before that release cue, and it's actually usually in a really important run for them, so they're like, “Oh my god.” And a lot of times this has been happening for a while. The dog's been breaking it, but the handler doesn't really notice it because they might be just turning back and releasing, and this time they turn back and they don't release and the dog goes. Something like that. And like you say, the more a dog breaks the start line in a trial, the more it becomes a pattern or a habit, and actually it's very, very reinforcing to the dog because they love — most of them love — agility and they want to go. So in terms of a way to handle it once they go, I'm not a big fan of removing the dog for breaking the start line. If you watch some handlers, a lot of times they remove the dog, and the dog's already taken a few obstacles by the time he realizes that he's being taken off course, so he's probably not even going to associate breaking the start line with that removal. And that not understanding why he's being removed is going to cause more stress and frustration for the dog, and that makes the start line area even more frustrating, and then that causes more mistakes, so how do you handle it? Again, it's very complicated, and it also depends on the dog and the handler. Lots of times when we decide this with students, I come up with a plan, depending on the dog, the sensitivity of the dog, the experience of the dog, making sure the handler's being clear, all those things come into play for that. It's mainly just making sure that the handling is clear. I'll give you some examples. Melissa Breau: That would be great. Nancy Gagliardi Little: And I'll just use my own dogs because their start lines are very good, but Schema, both of them, have broken their start lines. Schema, so she's been running about seven-and-a-half years. When she was maybe 4 or 5 years old, it was in a two-ring soccer arena with lots of activity behind and around, and as I'm leading out, I was watching her and she left before I gave her the release cue. But I was watching her, I saw her expression, and she looked the same as she always does. There was no twitching or any odd behavior. I just let her run. I just went on because that's just the way I feel. It's like, I'll look at this later, we'll deal with this later, and one mistake is not going to affect anything. I looked at the video and I obsessed on it, and then I went to the practice jump between runs, and I tested her with some games, and she was solid, like I figured she would be, and she never broke the rest of the weekend or any time after that run. So I suspect she just heard someone else at the practice jump behind her give the same release cue and truly thought I had released her. So if I would have removed her for that, or done anything but just run her, that would have been very confusing to her, so she never really knew. An example I have with Lever is he's got some arousal issues, increased arousal issues, I've been working on a lot over the years. He has some great skills but has issues where he's really gotten, he's really improved, but his start lines were a little … I guess there's lots of arousal there, and they've gotten better. What I do at the start line is I ask him how aroused he is. I know that sounds funny, but I basically just pause briefly before I leave him, and if he can look at me before I lead out — I step lateral and then wait for him to look at me. It just takes a brief moment. If he looks at me, his arousal level is under control. There was a time when he couldn't even look at me, and that told me that his arousal level is high. That didn't mean I was going to do anything different. I just needed to know that. I just would stay super-connected with him as I led out and just be a little bit more focused on him. So about six months ago I waited a little bit too long to see if he could look at me, and that was me trying to control him, a little bit of control. It was too long, and once I decided to leave, he broke. I realized what I was doing at that time and I just went on. I just kept going. And he actually knew right away he made a mistake, and that was not my intention to make him think he made a mistake, because I knew in his case it was arousal. But he did have a really nice run after that. So if I would have pulled him off for that, or handled it in any different way, it would have affected him, and I want him to be very confident in himself at the start line. His start lines have improved dramatically just by me being super-connected to him and just knowing that they're a work in progress. So those are a couple of examples. There's so many different ones, and it really just depends on the team, and the experience of the dog, and what kind of things they're training for start lines, but they are all very different how you would handle it. The main thing is just ensuring that it's handled the same in practice as it would be in trials. Melissa Breau: I was going to say that it sounds like you don't necessarily have to worry about it a ton until it happens that first time, and then after that first time you want a plan in place in case it happens again. Nancy Gagliardi Little: Right, you really do, because the first time it happens, you want to go back and make sure that it's not handling. People don't realize how much in agility people work hard on handling, but there's a lot of handling that goes into start lines and the whole routine with start lines. There's a lot of handling, and if you don't, if your handling's not clear to the dog, there's going to be issues. Melissa Breau: Now that we've talked a little about problem solving, I want to take a little of a step back and talk about how you actually teach a start line stay. Is there anything special you do during the foundation stages? Nancy Gagliardi Little: I probably teach it the same way most people do, but I do a lot of Zen games, I think some people call it “It's your choice.” I do lots of that, and on the flat, and my young dogs wanted to stay by, they make a choice not to go, and then that decision brings reinforcement. I do lots and lots of games away from equipment, starting without handler motion and then adding more and more motion. It's the motion that can really, or even the anticipation of handler motion, that can actually cause issues with the dogs, so adding that is important in agility. And then lots of behaviors to train in the start line routine: entering the ring, moving to the start line area or the area you're going to set them up, the position of the dog, what position are they going to be in, a sit, a down, a stand, whatever, between your legs, setups, or how they're going to line up, and I guess that has more to do with going between your legs, or if they're going to go to the left side, or the right side, or some handlers stand in front of the dog and position them kind of like a front, and the stay, there's an actual stay, which isn't really a big deal, the release is the big deal, there's a lead out, and then there's handling and training involved in all those areas. So all of them are worked on separately, and then we gradually put them together as each area is mastered. So it's like a lot of flat work and fun stuff so dogs don't even know that we're working towards a start line. Melissa Breau: I think that a lot of people probably just think about the stay itself, and they leave out all those other pieces you just mentioned about entering the ring and setting up. Nancy Gagliardi Little: Right. And what happens is then they try to control the behavior instead of asking the dog to do the behavior, and then that creates more stress and more issues there, and the dogs don't want to stay at the start line because they're never right, they're always being controlled. So that contributes to it too. Melissa Breau: So once you've gotten the stay that you want, and the entrance that you want, and you're trialing, what do you do to maintain that stay? How often do you train it, how do you approach it, what do you do to make sure that it doesn't erode or doesn't disappear over time? Nancy Gagliardi Little: I don't think about it that much, but I guess when I think about it, I do it all the time without even thinking. I'm always looking at videos of my runs, or of training, and I'm always checking to see if the dog … how's the start line. It's just maintaining it. It happens by keeping the handling clear and the cues clean. When I talk about the cues clean, I'm talking about making sure that it's not being any of the cues being paired with any extra motion or movement, because that's a big deal in agility. Well, it's a big deal in any sport. And it's also ensuring that my dogs are going to be able to predict when the release is coming. That's what people don't pay attention to, and then the dogs are sitting back there watching the handlers lead out and just arousal level's going up, like, “When are they going to release me?” They don't know, they can't predict, and so I try to create a predictor that is easy for the dog to read. So I'm watching videos of my runs, and I evaluate my dog's start lines just as much as the rest of the run. I'm always looking to see did the dog release on my cue, or was there any twitching, or whatever. It's just really important to know what to look for, and that's I think what people are missing. They don't know what to look for. They're just looking to see if the dog stayed and not looking at a lot of other things, which is a lot of handling. So my start lines are really important to me because my dogs are very fast. But I find them very easy to maintain if my dogs understand the routine. And whenever I lead out, I'm just always checking to see that my dog has made the choice to stay, and if I'm always doing that, then my dog has always made that choice to stay because the release cue is very reinforcing to my dogs. They get to go, and so they learn to choose to stay because that's what leads them to go. They love that. Melissa Breau: For people out there who are listening to this and going, “All right, that's awesome,” but they are in that position where they taught their dog a stay initially and it disappeared after they started running more regularly. How would you handle that? Would you just look at it as a poisoned cue and start over with a new cue? Would you retrain it with their existing cue? How would you approach it? Nancy Gagliardi Little: That's a really good question too. I think the first thing that I'd recommend to people in that situation is to make sure that they're videotaping their training, the dog in training. And also making sure that they're in that videotape as well, and also in the trial, and then really look at those two sessions and see if the handling is identical. It really needs to be. It's important for the dogs. Dogs need to see the same thing. It needs to be clear to the dog. Cues need to be clear and clean. And then also the connection to the dog is super-important to the dog in agility, very, very important, and that's at the start line, not just during the run. So the questions to ask are, does the dog understand all of the little parts of his job at the start line, or is the handler trying to control the dog, like leading out and telling them to stay constantly. That's going to be the beginning of a break because it's going to stress the dog up, and there's many reasons why that's going to cause a break. So any type of controlling rather than training is going to make that experience stressful for the dog, so it's better to take the time to teach those behaviors for the start line routine. So if that's the case, we look at that. You really take a look at that picture of the start line. Are all those behaviors trained, and is the dog confident in all those little areas? That's going to make that whole experience very, very easy for the dog. And then, in terms of whether a new cue or a new setup routine needs to be trained, that just really depends on the dog and the situation. If it's been going on for a long time, it might be wise to change the position. If the dog was doing a sit and he's breaking, maybe you just start him in a down. I don't really think the cue is usually the issue, because probably most likely the dogs are not even reading that cue. They're probably reading some type of incidental cue or signal or motion from the handler that's being paired with that. So it's not even probably an issue, but yet it can make the handler feel better changing the cue, and it might still be the case that we'd want to change it. But it's just one of those, again, creative processes you have to go through with each individual team. It just depends. Melissa Breau: I know that, to mention FDSA, again here at the end, but I know you have a class on this subject running – and it's supposed to start literally the day this airs, but registration is still open! — can you share a little bit about what the class does or doesn't cover, and the kind of dog-handler team that might benefit most from taking it? Nancy Gagliardi Little: Sure. Like I said before, I'm pretty excited about this class. At one time I had another class that was pretty popular that covered agility, start lines, stopped contacts on the table, and that was just filled with a lot of information, probably too much. So I felt it was important to make the subject of start lines into its own class. So this class is perfect for young dogs starting to train or even getting ready to trial. I think that's a perfect area for these type of dogs. But it's also a good class for dogs that are already trialing. I just ask, if they're going to take the class, to make sure that they stop trialing during this retraining period because that's really important for the dogs, because we do really want to make the trial and the training the same, otherwise they just become different. What it's not going to cover is how to address over-arousal issues, or environmental issues at the start line, and that subject's covered in other FDSA classes. So in this class we're going to work extensively on creating handling and training skills that will help predict the release. That's the main thing I want people to be aware of is how much your dogs depend on predictability for start lines. It's amazing, once you clear that up, it just creates a whole different world for the dogs. So with these consistent predictors the dogs are going to get more confident and adapt much easier in different environments, and that's hugely important in agility. Melissa Breau: Awesome. Well, thank you so much Nancy -- it sounds like a great class. Nancy Gagliardi Little: Yeah, I'm really excited. Melissa Breau: I can see why. And thank you again for coming back on the podcast! I'm glad that you did and I'm glad we got a chance to talk about some of this stuff. Nancy Gagliardi Little: It was great. Thanks for having me. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Mariah Hinds to talk about proofing and building reliable, ring-ready behaviors. Don't miss it! It 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.

SUMMARY: Sarah Stremming is a dog trainer, a dog agility and obedience competitor, and a dog behavior consultant.  Her credentials include a bachelors of science degree in psychology from Colorado State University, and more than a decade in the field of dog training and behavior.  Her special interest area is problem solving for performance dogs. Links The Cognitive Canine Effective Behavior Change Part 1: Replacement Behaviors Effective Behavior Change Part 2: Antecedent Arrangements Effective Behavior Change Part 3: Reinforcement Strategies Next Episode:  To be released 11/24/2017, featuring Hannah Branigan getting geeky about tuck sits. 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 have Sarah Stremming, of Cog-Dog radio and the Cognitive Canine back on the podcast to talk about… dog behavior. Welcome back to the podcast, Sarah! Sarah Stremming: Thanks, Melissa. Melissa Breau: To start us out, I know it's been a little while since you were on the show, can you just remind listeners how many dogs you have now and who they are? Sarah Stremming: Sure. Between my partner and I, we have five. I'll tell you about my two. I have Idgie, who's an 8-year-old border collie, and Felix, who's a 2-year-old border collie, and my primary sport's agility, so that's what they're both working on. Idgie doesn't really train much in agility anymore, she just competes, and Felix is mostly training with hardly any competing. And then I also play around in obedience, so they're both working on some of that stuff as well. Melissa Breau: So, I know that last time we talked, we just touched on the 4 steps to behavioral wellness briefly, covering what they are… but since I definitely want to dive a little deeper this time, do you mind just briefly sharing what those 4 steps are again and giving folks a little bit of background so that they're not totally confused when we start talking about it? Sarah Stremming: Sure, of course. The four steps to behavioral wellness are something that I came up with a long time ago when I was primarily working with pet dog behavior cases, and they are exercise, enrichment, nutrition, and communication. And basically they're the four areas that I find are often lacking in our basic dog care, and that includes sport people. What I found is that when trying to modify behavior, if one or more of these areas was lacking so the dog's basic needs were not being met, we would always hit a point where we couldn't progress with the behavior modification. So that's where they came from. Melissa Breau: Now I believe — though I could be wrong — that most of your students today come to you because of a problem training for a specific sport, but listening to your case studies in the podcast and talking to you a bit, it seems like the solution is often a lifestyle change. So I wanted to ask why it is that a dog's lifestyle can have such a huge impact on their performance in their sport? Sarah Stremming: That is true. Most of my clientele now, really all of my clientele now, is sports dog people who are having some kind of behavioral issue, usually a behavior problem that is preventing their dog from being able to compete or being able to compete well. And we definitely do work on specific behavior change protocols, so we definitely do go through behavior modification. But I've just come to find out that, over the years I've seen that if a dog's basic needs are not being met, you will not get where you want to get with the behavior modifications. So when we go through a lifestyle change, it is typically about meeting dogs' basic needs. I think a lot of people look at what I'm doing and they think I'm trying to give every single dog an exceptional life. Now, yes, I would like every dog and every person to have an exceptional life, but that's not necessarily the goal. The goal first is to meet basic needs, and I think that, unfortunately, that few people understand what some of those basic needs are. And so I think that's what shines through a lot of the time when I'm talking about my cases is I always want to look through those four steps of behavioral wellness as I want to look at what adjustments were made there, and then after that's done, we can then get into the nitty-gritty of the behavior modification work. Melissa Breau: Can you tell me just a little bit more about that? What are some of the common problems that you run into where those 4 steps can help? Sarah Stremming: Some of the most common things that I deal with are things that people label as “over-arousal issues,” and they're usually in agility, though I've definitely worked with a few obedience clients and a couple other clients from other sports on these issues. The behaviors that we label as over-arousal behaviors tend to be biting the handler during agility, oftentimes at the end of the run but a lot of times during the run, inability to hold front line or contact in competition, and then things that I just call spinning, barking, madness. The dog might spin, might bark, might also bite, just basically explosive behaviors that occur on course or during work. Those are some of the biggest issues that I deal with. Some of the ways that the four steps can help those issues are that when I see these dogs that have these … what we call over-arousal issues, especially in agility, often this is because agility is the most fulfilling thing the dog experiences in their life. So if their agility time is the only time that they actually feel satisfied mentally and physically, they become what I think looks like desperate to do the sport. Anybody that has ever felt desperate for something understands that that's a yucky way to feel, and I think that I observe dogs feeling desperate to do agility when I'm at trials. I've certainly seen it in my own dogs as well. And I think that some of the ways we train them encourage that, but the ways that we can help them feel less desperate are through exercise and enrichment, so those two steps out of the four. With adequate exercise, the dog's going to feel more like its body has been worked adequately, so that agility isn't the only time that the dog's body actually feels physically satisfied. And then enrichment needs to be part of  … environmental enrichment needs to be a part of every dog's daily life, because they do have brains and they do get to use them and they are not a couch ornament for us. If that sounds a little harsh, I don't mean to say that most people think that way. I do think, unfortunately, it's very common in the agility world to feel like agility class is enough. If we're going to agility class tonight, I don't have to do anything else today. Or if we had a trial all weekend, I don't have to do anything else this week to fulfill my dog physically or mentally, and that's just not true and that can definitely create problems. A couple of the others, just hitting on a few other steps to behavioral wellness, anything I deal with that has to do with generalized anxiety, so things like separation issues or fear responses that keep dogs out of the ring, anything that has to do with overall anxiety, my anecdotal experience is that diet can have an enormous effect on that. So when you feed the gut appropriately — and there is actually some cool research coming out about, cool research that exists and then also more and more research coming out about the relationship between mental health and gut health — but what I have observed anecdotally is that when a dog has a healthy GI, its overall anxiety is reduced, and so diet is a place that we look at. There's some nutrition being the one of four steps that I emphasize on the anxiety front, and then there just isn't any behavior problem that isn't going to be helped with better communication. Communication helps everything. No matter what we're talking about, that definitely helps everything. Melissa Breau: To go back a little about the couch potato bit, even if someone doesn't necessarily think that way, it can be hard if you've worked all day for eight hours and then come home and you have agility class. It can be hard to fit something else in. So even if it's not intentional, sometimes it can be totally easy to de-prioritize those things. Sarah Stremming: It is. It's easy for us to go, “OK, the dog box is checked because I have agility class tonight.” Where I want to encourage people to at least provide environmental enrichment for the dogs during the day when you're gone. So feeding them out of puzzle toys or Kongs as opposed to out of a bowl is a really simple, easy way to do that. And then just basically enrich their environment. Take a page out of the zookeeper's book and provide them with things in their environment that they have to forage through or rip apart or something. Even if they're crated during the day, give them stuff in the crate so that they literally aren't just left to lay around with a bowl of water and maybe a Nylabone that they've had for five years. Melissa Breau: I know that you recently published a series of podcasts on behavior change, talking about things like replacement behaviors… How can someone decide if what they need is just to teach a dog not to jump all over them or if they have a stress problem? And when is it time to look at things like nutrition and exercise — you got into this a little bit, but — versus going back to foundations to prevent frustration and stress through clearer communication in that sport? Sarah Stremming: The answer is yes. The answer is you should always be doing all of the above. Trying to look at behavior as one thing, or trying to look at a problem behavior as one thing, meaning a behavior is always serving a function for the animal, so it doesn't exist if there isn't reinforcement present for it. It doesn't exist if it doesn't serve a function. So you always want to look at it like that first, and you always want to make a plan to change it that way first. But you have to understand that if the dog's needs are not being adequately met that you may not be able to get anywhere with that plan. And then, as far as deciding between “Do I just need a training program, or do I also need a lifestyle change,” I think when most people get down to it and examine their dog's lifestyle, they will see the answer. I have certainly had clients who showed up and they were pretty much doing everything right. They just needed to tweak some training stuff. That is rare, but that has happened. So I think, to try to make it a simpler answer, I think we should always, always assess the functionality of the behavior you'd like to change. So if it's jumping all over you, try to look at what the dog is getting out of that, and try to help them to get that a different way, and make a plan to do that. And then also be sure that the dog's needs are being adequately met, because if you make a plan to solve this problem behavior, so let's say it is jumping all over you, what do they need? Is it that they are missing you all day long and feeling lonely? A little bit of assigning some human emotions here, but is it that? I mean, I do think that my dogs can feel lonely, but who knows? We can't ask them. Melissa Breau: It's a dog podcast. You can absolutely do that. Sarah Stremming: Right! So if it is that they're missing out on that human connection, can we address that as well as making this behavior change plan? And not just saying, “I want to change this behavior, therefore I will,” but also respecting that that behavior has a function, and that behavior came from a need that this dog has, and it's up to us to fulfill it always. Melissa Breau: Most of our listeners are probably pretty familiar with the idea of stressing up versus stressing down… that is, having a dog that's easily over-aroused versus one that completely shuts down. I know you have classes for both ends of the spectrum. So I wanted to ask a little bit about, now that we've talked about these four steps and a little bit about behavior change, how are the solutions to the problems different, depending on which end of the spectrum the dog falls on? Can you talk about that a bit? Sarah Stremming: Sure. And the two classes are Worked Up, which are the dogs that are worked up, just as it sounds, and then I call the other class Hidden Potential, which is about more of the stressed-down types of dogs. And I get this question probably every time I teach a seminar on one or the other. So if I'm teaching a seminar on worked-up types of dogs, the hidden-potential dogs come up and vice versa. And the reason that that's OK, and the reason that that should be expected, is because the solutions are similar. Both dogs are dealing with states of arousal that are not optimal. So if we've got a dog that is in a hyper-aroused state, he's not able to do his job because his adrenalin is off the charts. And if we have a dog in a kind of suboptimal arousal state, he can't do his job either, because he would rather go back into his crate and sleep and just may be bored. If we are talking about anxiety or stress, then that's where things start to change. So if we're talking about almost a temperament difference, we've all seen dogs that movement for them is cheap. They move a lot and they move quickly, versus dogs that … if you're training a border collie versus a bassett hound, you've got the border collie, movement is cheap for them. They will jump a bunch of times, they can heel a bunch of times, and that's cheap for them. They have a lot of energy. Versus maybe your basset hound has less energy than that and movement is more expensive for him. So then we're just dealing with differences in arousal states, and what we would do is play games to either bring the arousal up or bring the arousal back down. When we're dealing with anxiety or stress, that's where I might deal with it … that's where I see most of the dogs that fall into the hidden-potential category are. It's usually more of an anxiety-based or a stress-based or maybe a fear-based issue, and that's where I would address it in a different way. So if we can identify what the stressor is, I would actually want to tackle that head-on with a specific treatment protocol for whatever the stressor is. A lot of those dogs are worried about other dogs, and then we go to a dog show where there are tons of them. And then a lot of them are worried about people, and we go to a dog show and there's tons of them. The good news is they can be helped with those things. Certainly some of the worked-up dogs are experiencing environmental arousal or environmental anxiety, and if they are, then we want to go down that path as well and again address it the same way. So a lot of the times the same solution exists. It's just that we're looking at a different picture in the beginning and still trying to get to the same picture in the end. Melissa Breau: What are some of maybe the misconceptions people have about those kind of issues, or what do people commonly think about that maybe isn't 100 percent accurate when it comes to stressing up or stressing down and managing that? Can you set the record straight? Sarah Stremming: I think that for the worked-up types of dogs the most common misconception that I hear about is that these dogs lack impulse control, that a lack of impulse control is the problem. Or that a lack of … if we're going to be very accurate, we would be saying a lack of impulse control training is a problem. Just the phrase “impulse control” makes my eye twitch just a little bit because I think that it implies that there's this intrinsic flaw in these dogs that if they can't control themselves that there's something wrong with them, or that teaching them to control their impulses is something that we can do. I don't think that we can control their impulses one way or another. We can certainly control their behaviors with reinforcement. Whether or not we're controlling their impulses is probably one of those things that we would have to ask them about, kind of like asking them if they were lonely and if that was why they were jumping all over the person coming home. So I like to stay away from stating that lack of impulse control is a problem. I also think that in agility specifically we accept that our dogs will be in extremely high states of arousal and be kind of losing their mind, and we almost want them that way, and any kind of calmness is frowned upon. The dogs that are selected to breed for the sport tend to be the frantic, loud, fast ones, and looking at behaviors, there's just kind of a distaste in agility, I feel — and I'm going to get a million e-mails about this — I love agility, people! I love agility! I'm just going to put that out there! But there is a distaste for calm and methodical behaviors in agility. We push for speed, speed, speed from the beginning, and we forget that sometimes maybe we should shut up and let the dog think through the problem. So I think, to get back to your original question, “What's the misconception?” The misconception is that we need to put them in a highly aroused state to create a good sport dog, and that impulse control is the be-all, end-all of these things. And then, for the hidden-potential dogs, I think the misconception is just that they lack work ethic. They say, “These dogs they lack work ethic, they give you nothing, they don't want to try, they're low drive,” yada yada. I think that's all misconceptions. Everything comes back to reinforcement. When you realize that reinforcement is the solution to everything, you can start to solve your problems and quit slapping labels on the dogs you're working with. Melissa Breau: To be clear, it's not that people who have a dog that's shutting down in the ring aren't rewarding their dog enough. It's that there is a kind of misstructure there somewhere, right? Sarah Stremming: Yes. Thank you, Melissa. And actually I'm really glad that you said the word “reward” instead of reinforce, because they probably are rewarding their dogs plenty, but they're not reinforcing their dogs enough. And the difference is that a reward is just a nice thing that doesn't necessarily affect behavior. Reinforcement, by definition, affects behavior. So if behavior is not increasing, improving, etc., reinforcement is not present, though rewards well may be present. So if you get a Christmas bonus at work, that's nice, but that's not why you showed up the rest of the year. Melissa Breau: Well, maybe! But … Sarah Stremming: I'm going to argue it's not. I'm going to argue the paycheck that you got every other week is why you showed up the rest of the year, and then the reward might have affected your feelings about the job. It might have made you feel nicer about it. It might have made you feel nicer about your boss. Or it could have the total opposite effect, and be a $20 Starbucks card and you're, like, thanks a lot. But my point being there's so many lovely, kind people who are rewarding frequently who don't have enough understanding of the reinforcement procedures that they could be utilizing to actually increase the dog's behavior or change the dog's behavior. I don't mean to imply that those people are not training well or training nicely and training kindly and being generous. I think they probably are. In fact, they're probably a lot more generous. But a lot of the people I see training those super-high dogs, I see a lot of super-high dogs that do not get a high enough rate of reinforcement in training, which that's just amping them up, whereas the other end of the spectrum is that the other dogs are shutting down. So thank you for bringing that up, and I think, yeah, it's about the fact that understanding that if reinforcement is present, then the behavior will be present as well. Melissa Breau: I am glad that we went into that a little bit more. That was good information that people maybe don't hear often enough. Sarah Stremming: Good question, thank you. Melissa Breau: Thanks for answering it. Before I let you go, I mentioned earlier that you have a series that you've been publishing on effective behavior change, and I wanted to ask a little bit about that. First, what led you to explore that topic? Sarah Stremming: I'm just excited about the topic constantly, but to be honest with you, I decided to explore the topic based on dog trainers on the Internet. I saw a dog trainer on social media talking about behavior change as a kind of mystical thing, when I'm very passionate about training as an applied science and understanding training as an applied science. That certainly does not mean that I discount the art side of training, because there certainly is an artistic side to it, and before I ever knew anything about the science, the artistic side to it is what kept me in it. And so I think that's very, very important. But I do think that our industry would be better if all trainers recognized training as an applied science, and when I say “better,” I mean just serving the people and the dogs better. I think that all dog trainers, no matter what kind of training they do or what kind of training background they have, are in this because that's what they want to do. They want to serve the people and the dogs. They love dogs, and they hopefully like the people who own them, and they want to help people to have better connections with their dogs. I think all dog trainers are after that, no matter what kind of dog training they do. But I do see a general lack of recognition of dog training as an applied science, and specifically I think that a lot of positive-reinforcement-based trainers, especially on the Internet, can be very unkind to each other. I know this seems like, “How did you come up with this podcast series based on that? This has nothing to do with it.” Where I came to it, and where I wanted to talk about it, was because we really all should be generally training, generally the same way, or we all should understand some general basic principles, and I just don't see that as being reality. We should all be able to talk to each other about the effects of reinforcement and punishment and what makes for effective behavior change instead of … I think what we talk about instead on the Internet is how that person over there is doing it wrong and “This is how I would do it, and that's the right way to do it,” when in reality the right way to do it is treating it like an applied science. And then there are certainly variations within that, but I'm basically talking about it because we need to be talking about it as an applied science, and I think we do that over at FDSA, and Hannah Branigan does that on her podcast really beautifully. And the more I think we talk about it as an applied science, I think the further we can get and the more undivided we can become, and then the more dogs we can help. Melissa Breau: Not to ask you to take these three episodes and condense them into one tiny, short, little blurb, but to do exactly that I wanted to talk a little bit about what you cover in them. I definitely fully recommend people go listen to all three, if they haven't already. The first two have been out and I've listened to them and they're absolutely excellent, and by the time this comes out I know that you're planning on a third one and hopefully that will be available. But I did want to ask you to share just a couple of the key points or major takeaways that you really want people to walk away from after they listen to those episodes. Sarah Stremming: Definitely. Thanks for the plug there! Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Sarah Stremming: I'm glad that you liked them and all three should be available; two of them are as we record this, and I just recorded the other one today, so it should be out soon. The first one I did just talked about replacement behaviors. So if we are trying to modify a problem behavior, we want to use a replacement behavior to come in instead of that behavior. What that means is that instead of squashing a behavior, getting rid of a behavior, we just want to swap it out with something else. And so we generally think about incompatible behaviors, so an incompatible behavior, an example of that would be the dog is dashing out the front door. That's the problem behavior we want to solve, and we can train the dog to go lie on a mat when the door opens instead, and that would be an incompatible behavior because the two behaviors cannot happen at once. I also talked about the concept of alternative behaviors, which are not necessarily incompatible. I think that's a really interesting concept, that you can actually train the dog to sit, let's say at the front window, let's say the dog is barking at passers-by, you can train the dog to sit instead. Now that's an alternative behavior. My dog Idgie can tell you, she can bark while sitting just fine. She doesn't need to be standing to be barking. So it's alternative because both the behaviors can still happen at once, but what's really nice about it is that if you're reinforcing an alternative behavior, the problematic behavior still does decrease. So in the first episode we talk about what are some good qualities of incompatible or alternative behaviors, so basically what makes a good replacement behavior, and to really sum it up in short, what makes a good replacement behavior is that (a) it's incompatible or alternative and (b) it's already fluent, so it's something the dog already knows how to do. There's a little bit more to it than that, but you'll have to go listen to it. In the next one I talked about antecedent arrangements, or basically just the principal of manipulating the environment in which the behavior occurs, as opposed to attempting to manipulate the behavior itself. I think a lot of times, as dog trainers, we really focus on trying to manipulate behaviors when we should be thinking more about manipulating environments. The third one, that I recorded today, is kind of the other end of the spectrum of the second one. So you can manipulate the environment, and then you can manipulate the reinforcement. You can manipulate the consequences to the behavior. So the third episode is about reinforcement, and specifically, building what I call reinforcement strategies, so that you have a huge toolbox of reinforcement from which to draw from. So the more ways that you can reinforce an animal's behavior, the more effective you're likely to be in attempting to change its behavior. So those are the three that I've got. Melissa Breau: I'm curious now and looking forward to hearing that third one and rounding out the series. I really am glad that you tackled it and it's been a great series so far, so cool. Sarah Stremming: Thank you. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Sarah! I know that you're in the middle of a long drive, so I will let you get back to that. But thank you. Sarah Stremming: Thank you. Thanks so much. Melissa Breau: And thank you to all our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Hannah Branigan, who Sarah mentioned. Hannah and I will be talking about detail oriented training -- things like getting that miraculous tuck sit or the perfect fold back down. Don't miss it! If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice and 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.  

SUMMARY: The Fenzi TEAM program is a progression-oriented titling program that emphasizes excellence in training. Each TEAM level adds complexity for the dog-handler team in four areas:  the difficulty of the skills being assessed, the potential challenges in the form of food and toy distractions, the challenge of the actual testing location, and finally the quantity of reinforcement allowed during the test. We invited Denise Fenzi, one of the founders of the program, onto the podcast to talk about creating it and how it all works. Links Recent Team Newsletter Self Study: Precision Heeling Fenziteamtitles.com Fenzi TEAM Players Facebook Group thedogathlete.com Next Episode:  To be released 11/03/2017, featuring Shade Whitesel to talk about toys and common issues, including talking about introducing work to play. 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 have Denise Fenzi with us again, this time to talk through the Fenzi TEAM titling program and then share a little bit about her upcoming book. For those who may not have heard the earlier episodes where I chatted with Denise, she is the founder of the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy and, more recently, the Fenzi Team Titles. Melissa Breau: Welcome back, Denise! Denise Fenzi:Thank you. How are you? Melissa Breau: I'm good. I'm excited to talk about TEAM today. Denise Fenzi: I'm excited about TEAM. Melissa Breau: So to start us out, do you want to tell us what TEAM stands for? Denise Fenzi: Training Excellence Assessment Modules. Melissa Breau: And why did you pick that name? Denise Fenzi: Well, actually, it was crowdsourced, so I just explained the program on a Facebook list and asked people to contribute their ideas. My experience with Facebook and crowdsourcing is I can come up with a really good answer in a lot less time than I could on my own. So, within an hour or two, somebody came up with that, and I thought it very much described what I was interested in, which is a team event between a dog and a handler. And I wanted to emphasize the training aspect of a competition in this case, and so it fit very well. Training, excellence, assessment, and modules works well because they do build on each other. Each level is a module to the next. Melissa Breau: So where did the idea for TEAM come from? What led you to create the program? Denise Fenzi: Well, most people probably know that my interest is competitive obedience, and traditionally I have competed in AKC. And the numbers have fallen off badly over a period of time. So I've been competing since I was a kid, so a long time, and back then we would have so many dogs that they would split Open B into two classes, so you would have 60-odd dogs in one class, so that gives you a sense of the numbers. And a lot of things have happened in the meantime. A lot of new dog sports have come in, and time has gone by, and people have different interests and such. But I hate to see something I love go away, and I think and think about, What was it about the sport that was … why were we suffering so much when other dog sports seem to be doing OK? And as I looked at novice obedience and thought about it, the AKC program was set up a long time ago, when training was done differently, and it was really very logical to start with heeling because of how it was taught. So back then you walked in a circle in a class, or in lines, kind of very military style, up, down, back, forth, run in a circle, and the dog was simply corrected if it went out of position. It was not refined, it was not pretty, it wasn't meant to be. The word obedience had meaning. It meant to be obedient. And the dog did what they were told. And so at the novice level, you really did showcase the dog's ability to walk on a leash, basically what we now call loose-leash walking, except slightly more stylized, right? In heel position. And then eventually you took the leash off, and we had all sorts of ways to do that. And then throw in a recall, because you need a good recall, right? That's obedience. A stand for exam would have imitated either a stranger touching the dog or a veterinary exam. It wasn't meant to be beautiful. It was meant to be practical, and the heeling was not beautiful. So the performances we have now look nothing like the performances of thirty years ago. And as I thought more about it, I think a big part of the problem is we don't train that way anymore, and really beautiful heeling, the kind of heeling that competitive people want to see in the ring today, takes a couple of years to master. It takes a long time to get a dog to work comfortably for a couple of minutes with extreme precision, head up, and we're talking 1 inch, in, out, up, down. It's very minor scoreable issues. Done well, it's beautiful, and in my opinion, I really enjoy teaching heeling. I like teaching all those tiny bits and pieces. But you don't just teach it all at once in one fell swoop. You teach it over time. And neither dogs nor handlers really want to spend 10 minutes at a time — and that would be short; some people train for a lot longer than that — working on this one skill. Yet entry-level people who come in from the outside, they're not thinking utility. They're thinking, Well, I'll try the first level, and if it goes well, I'll try the second level, and if it goes well, I'll try the third level. Competitive people don't train that way. They actually train all the skills usually from the start, and by the time they get into the novice ring, they do have two years of heeling, and they have a lot of other skills that they taught. So if you think about a barrier to entry, when your entry level emphasizes your most difficult skill, you're going to really struggle to bring in new people because there's no motivation. And if you do bring them in, what happens is they bring dogs in the ring that aren't properly prepared. So they may heel, they may get through it, but it's silent for 45 seconds at a stretch, very, very stressful for the dogs. If you compare that to the higher levels opening utility, the exercises generally don't go on that long. There's more going on, there are more cues being given, there's more movement, there's more freedom. I mean, on a recall, at least the dog is running and moving. Heeling is hard. And I thought, Well, if I were going to design a program that was designed to reflect the way we train today, what would that look like? And that was the goal of TEAM was to test the same way that we train, and we do train in small pieces, and it was also designed to teach dogs things like distraction training right from the start. So in our first level we have a stay where there's a cookie present, but it's only 2 seconds, so it's not horrible. But then it's 15 seconds, and then the dog is working and asked to retrieve within 2 feet of a cookie. But that's as you go up through the levels, so as one piece gets a little harder, another piece gets a little easier. The other thing we did is incorporated every skill we could think of in the first level. So you have scent discrimination in the first level. You have pivots in the first level. That's the basis of heeling. You have sit and down in the first level because they matter. And then, as you work your way up, skills are combined, so now you have a sit and a down, but maybe the distance is greater, or maybe there's a distraction, or maybe you're doing it away from home. And it's kind in the sense that expectations rise over time, so if you are training to the test, you can actually end up with a very well trained dog. That is not true in traditional competitive obedience. If you train for the test, you're going to become miserable because you can only do so much heeling and recalls and fronts. And so that's what we were trying to design was a program that reflected excellent training. So do you generalize your behaviors? Take them new places? Can you engage your dog without a cookie? That's important to me. Can you engage your dog without a toy? That's important. Can you end one exercise and go to another one without some kind of external reinforcer besides your voice? Because when I looked around the world at all of the obedience programs, and I looked at a lot of them, what I realized is there's really a fairly small number of core behaviors that they all use and they combine them in different ways. And if you worked your way through all those levels, including things like fluency, can your dog do it, oh, I don't know, can your dog sit on cue 20 feet away when you're laying down on the ground? Well, do you need that? No. But if you can do that, your dog has shown the ability to understand the cue under an unusual circumstance. Well, a dog show is simply one more unusual circumstance. So the goal of TEAM is that if a person trains the TEAM program and trains for the test, that's fine, and gets up through several levels, they should be able to go anywhere in the world, take those pieces, look at the organization they are interested in, put those little building blocks together in new ways, and compete successfully. Melissa Breau: So to dig in a little bit more in the skills specifically, what skills do dogs need in order to compete in the program? Denise Fenzi:Well, let's see. You need to retrieve, you need to be able to do scent work, you need excellent rear end awareness, because heeling is very much about moving your rear end and pivoting. We teach skills that include the mouth, the nose, the feet, the eyes. So can you look at the handler? Good. Can you look straight ahead? Good. You need both of those. Can you go out and come back? So we send the dog around a cone. Can the handler teach the dog using props? So you have to be able to show that your dog can effectively pivot on a disc, for example, or find front, which is a precision behavior using a platform. The first level's actually quite heavy on precision skills, but each one can be done in a matter of seconds, but I need to know that you can teach really high-level precision skills. But I let you keep your cookies, at least at the beginning levels. That gets thinner as you go, but that's appropriate as the challenge goes up, as you become more skilled. Let me think. Scent work, heeling, you need a stay, you'll need a sit or a down/stay. At the second level you need a sit/stay with a cookie behind the dog with your back to the dog at 15 or 20 feet. You need to be able to jump. The dog has to jump. The dog has to be able to retrieve, but at the first level the retrieve is just hold an object in the mouth for 1 second. It's not until you get to the top levels that you actually have movement. Eventually the dog needs to be able to work out of motion. So, for example, the stand out of motion is an AKC utility exercise. We do have that exercise. We do have signals at a distance. We do have go away, so go out to a spot and stay there. We have hold the position for 5 seconds without doing anything, which is shockingly hard for a lot of dogs. They can sit, but if they think you're going to say something else, they get very agitated when they have to just wait, and that is the expectation of the exercise. The dog has to be able to back up because … and that's a first level skill. In my experience, dogs that can back up between cues have many fewer problems with creeping forward on a lot of exercises, so I want to see that you've taught that. And the dog needs to show a front. Now I will say the first three levels were designed to be foundation for all sports, because as I talked to my agility friends and people in other fields, their dogs can do most of those things. We actually … many sports start with the same foundation skills. Many of us do touching an object, retrieving, many of us do pivoting on a disc, many of us do platform work, so those things don't actually change. The really obedient-specific things is probably scent discrimination, and I wanted that in Level 1 because people make it so much harder than it needs to be by waiting. So I think that roughly, I'm sure I left one or two out, but that kind of roughly covers the skills that you work on in TEAM, at progressively more difficult levels as you work your way up. Oh, and behavior chains don't actually come in until the third level. So up till then, everything is a discreet exercise, go out around a cone and come back. At the third level there would be exercises like go out 10 feet and get on a platform, and then the handler will direct you to go on. So it's a go back and field, go on over a jump that's 10 feet beyond, and then go on to a cone, which is 10 more feet. So now the dog demonstrates that it can work at 30 feet and then come back. That would be a behavior chain. So those don't start until the third level. Melissa Breau: At the very least that gives people a pretty good idea of kind of what they're looking at if they're interested in the program. Can you share a little bit more about kind of the logistics of how TEAM works? What is the process for somebody interested in titling their dog through TEAM? What do they do? Denise Fenzi: Well, it is a video submission, so it's pretty convenient. Now in the first three levels you can tape it anywhere you want. If you have room, you can tape it in your house. A lot of people do the very first level in the house. It's hard after that because of space. You do have to have a space large enough that the dog and the handler can be clearly seen and heard throughout the test. You videotape your test, you have to do it in order, you submit it through the TEAM website, and then you timestamp where each exercise is in order so that the judge … basically we do that because people forget exercises, so when they're submitting their video they realize they're missing one and then they don't submit, because we really tell people, “Don't submit a video that's not going to pass.” You have all the rules, you can use a very, very active Facebook discussion group to be sure you've done them correctly, but we don't want you to submit a not passing video, so we try to make sure you actually did do all of the exercises. You have to pass all of them except for one. It is “pass not yet.” It's not fail. It's not yet. You'll make it next time. We do not score it, but it's pretty tight expectations for passing an exercise, so when we say the dog needs to find front, we really do mean front. It needs to be within 30 degrees of front position. Now admittedly we let you have cookies, right, in those first levels, or we let you have a platform, but not always. So you submit your video and then a judge reviews it. The judge will give you comments on it, so it's actually a lot of fun to get your results back, because you'll get all kinds of helpful tips and suggestions. So the judge might say, “You know, you did a really nice job on this. Consider …” and give you a little advice to progress it forward. So people always say they really like getting the feedback from the judge, rather than a score sheet. I know there are more and more people getting together in groups. I know of a seminar in Ohio, for example, that filled very quickly when they offered it. I know there are training groups in the San Francisco Bay Area and also in Portland. Again, they offered a class and filled it that day. It's very popular with students because it's fun. People who are just engaged … people love the idea of coming in and Day 1 their dog is doing cool stuff, not just heeling in a circle. So they love watching their dog do scent discrimination the first week, or get on a disc, or on a platform, and move and do these things. People love that. Plus, playing with your dog is actually a requirement of TEAM, so people think that's very entertaining. I love … I love to see that, that people are doing it in groups. You can test alone. I did a test recently with Lyra. She did her TEAM 3. I just set up a video camera, I marked off my area so I wouldn't walk in and out. You want to think carefully about how you lay it out, because a judge has to be able to judge it, so if they can't see if your sit is correct in front, or whatever you've done, then you won't … you won't be able to pass that exercise. People appreciate it who for whatever reason cannot get to trials, will not get to trials, have test anxiety, whatever the deal might be. It is suitable for more reactive dogs. I will say that all of the levels are off leash, so that is a consideration. You need to be comfortable training your dog off leash, and at some point you have to be able to take your dog to new locations, so that means you either need to feel good enough about your training that your dog is safe off leash in new locations, or that you're able to find a fair number of new locations to perform. And I know for some people that is a challenge, but I would suggest that that is the nature of competition, that you will go to new places and you must prepare your dog for that. So we do expect that. Melissa Breau: I think the only thing that maybe you didn't mention that would be worth bringing up is the idea about questionable exercise. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Denise Fenzi: Yeah, we try to give super-clear criteria for what it takes to pass, but the reality is when you're looking at somebody's position and you just watched them do a 360-degree pivot, and it's supposed to be smooth and continuous, and the dog should be parallel every step of the way, and we allow a 30-degree out of position, you know, at some point. Well, for a judge to decide if it was 30 degrees or 45 when it took place at one moment, or if the handler did something funny with their shoulder but we can't decide, or, you know, little things like that, we do have the option of giving it a questionable, so that's kind of halfway in between. A questionable is a half point off, so if you think about ten exercises being 10 points, you're allowed one “not yet,” so you need a 9. A questionable is half off, so you can have two questionables and everything else perfect and you will pass. If you have one “not yet” and one questionable, you won't quite make it. But that, actually, it helps the judges. It makes us more comfortable, because it's very hard to not pass somebody who you really thought was, really had the essence of the exercise, but you also felt that you could not say they truly did it correctly. So it very much puts the handler on notice, because everything you do at the first level is going to come back. Nothing goes away. So it just builds on it. So if you got a questionable on your down at the first level, be aware that your down at the second level is at a greater distance and for a longer period of time, so you probably need to go back and look at it. So it helps the trainer do a better job. Melissa Breau: I think you're pretty well known as an advocate for positive training, and I wanted to ask a little bit about how that ties in or doesn't tie in to TEAM. So does someone have to be a positive trainer to compete in TEAM? And is there anything about TEAM that kind of inherently tests the trainer's training philosophy? Denise Fenzi: No and no. We certainly don't ask, and to be kind of brutally honest, I don't even care. You simply have to pass the test. In my opinion, it is easier to pass the test if you are a positive trainer, because it is designed to test clean training that is broken into small pieces, and since it's tested off leash from the first level, I think most people who are interested in TEAM are pretty comfortable training off leash anyway. But we do not, certainly don't ask about it. You do not need to be a student of mine, you don't need to share my philosophy at all. I personally believe that a good trainer of any method can teach most anything, one way or the other, you know, being a good trainer just matters because you communicate well. But no, we don't test it, no, we don't check for your philosophy, and to be honest, we're just pretty welcoming people, so if a person joins the Fenzi TEAM Players List on Facebook and is a balanced trainer, or mixed methods, or whatever, the topic is probably not going to come up. I mean, I don't think it ever has, and I really would be surprised if somebody asked outright about that. Melissa Breau: So if I wanted to put a Level 1 title on my dog, what would that video look like? What skills are at that first level? Denise Fenzi: Well, they do go in order, and now I have to tell you my poor little head is not remembering the exact order. I do know engagement for 15 seconds. That means playing with your dog. Now playing can be as nice as a belly rub. It just needs to show something where the dog is interacting with you and not trying to figure out how they can just get away. That's what I need to see — that your dog will stay with you and follow you, and if you interact or clap or smile, that the dog shows some kind of a connection to you. So we start there. Then the dog goes into using a pivot disc in heel position. So we want to see that the dog can find heel position, and it really needs to be correct heel position, and then show me a 180-degree pivot to the left. Then I want to see your dog show me a front. Most people use a platform in front from several angles, so you throw a cookie off to the left, you throw a cookie straightforward, you give one cue, get the cookie, and then we expect the dog to come back and use that platform to find front. We do the same thing in heel position. You can use a disc or a platform. The dog needs to show the ability to find its way to heel position, even when the cookies are thrown off center. We want to see your dog go over a jump, but you're welcome to go with the jump with the dog, and the jump is very low. We want to see your dog back up 2 feet continuously. We want to see your dog do scent articles. Now how does that look? Well, three scent articles, and you can put food in or on one of them. So talk about stacking the deck, right? We're going to make this work for you. It's going to get harder down the road, but I just need you to start thinking about scent discrimination. Your dog needs to clearly indicate the correct article, does not need to pick it up. As long as the judge can say, “Yes, the dog has clearly indicated,” it might nose touch and it might hold that, it might pick it up, it might lay down, I don't care what the dog does. Just I should be able to tell which one is yours. There is a retrieve — I'm trying to remember, maybe that's second level — where the dog holds an object. The dog has to stay in the presence of a cookie in a bowl for 2 seconds and has to release when said “OK.” So I want to know that your dog knows how to stay, and we want to know that your dog knows how to go. Your dog needs a sit and a down at 5 feet, so that's not so horrible. Your dog needs to go out around a cone and come back, because we want to start that process of showing us that you can get your dog to go away and come back. Am I leaving anything out? I'm sure I'm leaving something out. I believe there are ten exercises in the first level. And in some ways, in my opinion, the first level is the hardest because there are so many things for a new person to look at, and then, over time, it's really a matter of building up skills, so … oh, by the way, that scent discrimination — the handler is sitting next to the article. So they throw a cookie to get the dog moving away, they place their article, and then the dog comes back in. So the dog isn't working by itself at a distance. There's no retrieve, there's no front, there's no formal anything. Those things will come later, but it does get you started on the path. Melissa Breau: I don't think you left anything out. I was checking my little cheat sheet here as you went along, so ... Denise Fenzi: Oh, good for me! Melissa Breau: So now you've kind of walked through the list of skills, so how did you come up with those things, and how did you kind of decide which pieces to include? What was the process like to put all those pieces kind of together into a program? Denise Fenzi: Well, I worked with Deb Jones and Teri Martin to create this one, and I will say it is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I'm not kidding, actually, and I've done a lot of stuff. The reason it was so difficult, we really did look around the world at what are all of the obedience skills. They are jumping, they are heeling, they are position changes, they are retrieving, there's just a set of things and they come, doesn't matter where you go, they are done, those skills are done. So we had all of those, we broke them all down and said, “What do those all look like?” So that was one side of a spreadsheet. And then we said, “What are all of the elements of great training?” Well, fluency. Can your dog do those behaviors under adversity? OK, we want to test fluency. Formality. Can your dog do those behaviors when you're quiet and still and only one cue? We're kind of particular about that. We don't allow a lot of handler help. You really need to be formal. Can your dog do these behaviors in an unfamiliar environment? I call that generalization. Can your dog generalize the exercise? Can your dog do it under distraction? So if there are toys or food in the area, can your dog still perform correctly? So we had a spreadsheet, which kind of created a matrix, which said, “How can we test all of these things without pounding a person at each level?” Because we don't test everything at every level. We sort of, at one level you'll notice it's more skill based, so the first level is very heavy on skills, and then also can you create behavior chains? We don't even introduce the behavior chains until the third level. I mentioned that. Distraction training does start very, very light in the first level, but it gets harder and harder as you go on, second level, third level. Scent work, we decided first and second level, but you don't even have it at the third level. You have it harder at the fourth level. So we went through, and we had checkmarks here and there, and we tried to figure out by the time the person has done all six levels did I feel confident that they had the skills to go anywhere in the world and compete. Now I'm not saying they wouldn't have to rearrange the exercises, because they would, but that's kind of irrelevant. A person who finishes all six levels, who has also taken me seriously when I said, “Show me these exercises” in whatever, seven new environments or whatever it is, if they did that and they did it within the spirit of the program, i.e., they really did go to new places, they didn't just keep going to their friend's back yard, if they did that and they really did try to show their dog the types of environments that would be involved in competition, then they should be successful, and their dog should be comfortable because they are well trained. So that's how we got there. Where it got quite painful breaking it up into fair chunks, so you want challenge, but you don't want people to give up, because it's kind of hard. Finding the balance between accuracy, which is what we emphasize in the first three levels, and movement, flow, behavior chains, which is what we emphasize in the second three levels. Making decisions about things like a sit at heel. We actually don't require it. You just have to tell us. Your dog either sits at heel or stands at heel. Same as front. I don't care if your dog sits or stands, because again, around the world that varies. So you can pick what is most comfortable for you, or you can pick, like, if you have an older dog, maybe they don't want to sit anymore, so fine, don't have them sit, that's not a problem. But it can't be haphazard. You have to say, “My dog sits in heel,” or “They stand in heel.” So we judge that. That took a lot of thinking, trying to figure out around the world how could we design a program that didn't create active conflict. So I think we did all right, but it did take some thought. The next thing was setting criteria. What is a front? What is a finish? What is a down? It sounds simple until you look at a dog on a down who is one inch from the ground, the elbows aren't down. Now all of a sudden you say, “What is a down anyway? And you realize these things are not simple. So laying out criteria was very challenging. We do have video examples of all the exercises, so you can just look. If you're a reader, you can read through our very detailed descriptions of what we want to see, what it takes to pass, how it should be set up, and then you can look at the video and you'll see an example, “Oh, OK, that's what it should be.” We do say what will cause you not to quite make it, but we don't list everything. It's impossible. There's just too many possibilities. We do list the most common elements. There is a website called fenziteamtitles.com. It's well laid out, so you can just pick a level and look at it. Most of the levels have video runs where you can see a start to a finish. Not the higher levels, because I think we so far only have one or two dogs that have made it to Level 5, so there's just no videos to be had at the higher levels, but they're working on it. The program's only slightly over a year old, and we did change our rules about two months ago at Level 1. We just made it flow a little bit better, so it's possible we don't have up a full Level 1 run with the new rules. We should have one soon. So what a person will want to do is start with the website, start looking at the levels, they may find they already have several of the skills. Watch the videos so they see how it works. Join the Fenzi TEAM Players List, which has become quite active, and get to know your team players, the other people, who are very supportive. Register your dog. I think it's $20 to register your dog. That will put you in the database. The database is searchable. Some people choose to be searchable to the public and some people choose not to. If you are a trainer and if it matters to you, you might want to make sure you're public, because then people can see what titles you accomplish. Your TEAM titles will be listed there for each of your dogs. And a video run costs $29, so remember, you should only have to submit it once and you only have to pass once, so don't submit a video that's not passing, which makes it a very inexpensive titling program if you submit only passing videos. We do have a Plus level. Plus just means the 1 Level you showed in a new location, the 2 Level you showed in a new location. When you get to 3 Plus, then you can go on to the fourth level. The fourth, fifth, and sixth are all new locations. So that's probably how I would start if I was intrigued. I would join the Fenzi TEAM Players, and I would also from there get on the newsletter, you know, because I put out newsletters with tips and videos to kind of help you on your way. Melissa Breau: So you talked a little bit about this. I wanted to see if you'd talk about it a little bit more, kind of the … that the levels build on each other. I know you added a little bit at the end about the Plus titles, but is there anything you kind of want to add to that? Denise Fenzi: So when we designed it, so, like, for example at the first level, where you make your pivot on the pivot disc when the dog stays in heel position, you do have a disc. That would be first level. Second level you also have to show us pivots, but there's no disc this time, so instead of doing 180 degrees to the left, now you're going to do 360 degrees, and you're also going to do it to the right, so that's a little bit harder. When you get to the third level, now I need to see pivot left, pivot right, pull sideways 2 feet and go forward 2 feet. Now that's the first true heeling. But if you can do that, if you can pivot left from Level 1, pivot left and right without a disc from Level 2, and do what I just described at Level 3, then when you get to Level 4 and you're doing true heeling, your dog knows how to heel. There's just no question about it. Or in Level 1 you have to show that your dog can find heel position with a platform, and your dog needs to be able to find front. In Level 2 you need to show me a formal recall without a platform. So did you have the skill to get rid of that platform? And your dog needs to show me a correct finish. That means straight without a disc. So the skills in Level 1 directly influence Level 2. So Level 1 can use props. Level 2 can you get rid of props and maintain precision? So that's what I mean by the levels build on each other. And then once something we feel is mastered, then we let it slide. So Level 4 we no longer judge the quality of your straightness. We figure you've already shown us that you know how to teach straight fronts and finishes. It's totally up to you if you care to maintain them. We don't care anymore. Now we're going to do stuff where your dog runs out 40 feet, goes left around a cone, or maybe over a jump, or maybe gets scent articles, or whatever. Now we're going to look for other things. But the first three levels are precision. After that it's just kind of free fun, interesting ways of combining exercises that people wouldn't have thought of. Melissa Breau: So I wanted to ask a little bit about the tools that are out there if someone is struggling to teach their dog those skills. I know you mentioned the Facebook group, and I will include a link to that in the show notes, for anyone who's interested. Denise Fenzi: We also have at the Academy, Fenzi Dog Sports Academy does teach classes that teach TEAM skills. There's a couple ways you can get it. One is just take a class called TEAM. TEAM 1 is running right now. Now unfortunately, registration is closed, so you cannot join now. TEAM 2 is running in December. So if you look over the skills and you say, “You know what, I have most of TEAM 1,” then feel free to pop into TEAM 2 in December. It's not like you have to have the title to take the class. And since TEAM 2 is building on Level 1, you will be improving your Level 1 skills, so you have that option. You also have the option of when Hannah Branigan teaches her obedience skills series, she teaches obedience very much the way we structure the TEAM program. It's bits and pieces. So while it's not a perfect fit because it wasn't meant to be, many of the skills you would want in TEAM happen to be covered in her Obedience Skillbuilding series. So you can take classes at any given time. There will probably be webinars on the topic. I would guess we will teach webinars on it. There are support groups out there that you can find through the TEAM players list, if you want to hook up with people more locally and see if there's somebody you can work with. Melissa Breau: So far, which skills do people seem to struggle with the most? And then I'd love it if you'd share some tips for problem-solving those skills. Denise Fenzi: Well, the scent discrimination, this is really interesting, almost everybody passes it, but boy do they howl about having to teach it. So if I can get them to believe in themselves, they don't seem to struggle that much. They do teach it, but getting them to start teaching it is very hard because they can't get it out of their heads “This is a hard thing, this is an advanced skill.” No, it's not. It's no harder than anything else. It's just that you make it hard by thinking about it like that. So it's actually almost always, almost always, people pass the scent discrimination, but the getting them to teach it is just misery. I would say where people struggle the most is on the pivots. Staying in heel position accurately is very hard for people. Their dogs have developed all sorts of habits, you know, maybe they start to pivot and the dog jumps around into position, or the dog waits until they've moved 90 degrees before the dog catches up. We score that down, so you cannot pass if your dog does that. And while people gnash their teeth a bit and get very frustrated, the reality is if you ask them again in two weeks if they worked on it, they say, “Thank you for holding your criteria, because, you know what, after I worked on this for two weeks, not only did I do it, but I learned how to do it and my dog got better, but miraculously my dog's heeling has improved dramatically because he no longer bumps me on left turns.” And that's kind of the whole point of TEAM. Like what I tell people if they're struggling with their precision and obedience, I say, “Well, try this. I don't care if you're working on your OTCH. Stop all your obedience for one month and only do TEAM 1. Only TEAM 1 level for one month. Now go back to your obedience and tell me what happened.” And it just never fails. Because they went back and focused on the foundation precision skills, when they go back into their obedience, their dog is that much better. It's a bit of an eye-opener for people. So I would say pivoting on a disc gives people a fair amount of … they stress about it, they worry about it, the pass rate is not as high, I would say, on that exercise than most of the other exercises. Melissa Breau: Any tips for working on it? Denise Fenzi: I just did the last Fenzi TEAM newsletter. It shows a video, I'm working with Lyra on how to keep her in heel position when I do sit, down, stand in position when I'm moving my feet, and if you want to use that, it will also teach your dog how to — it's the same skill, actually — how to keep their rear end in position. So feel free to look at that, and that should help you out. And if you search my blog, I do so much on my blog of obedience. And it has a pretty good search function, so you can put in something like “heeling” or “pivots” or “a disc,” any of those. Or if you want you can buy my self-study program, called Precision Heeling, through FDSA. That is available at any time, not just during terms, so you can buy it today. Tons and tons and tons of video and discussion about pivoting and heel positions, very heavy on that, so you would, in theory, be quite good at it by the time you were done with that course. Melissa Breau: Excellent. And I think that I can share a link to the last TEAM newsletter in the show notes. So if I can do that, I will. Denise Fenzi: Oh, that's awesome. Melissa Breau: You mentioned a little bit earlier that there are places starting to offer some classes. Is there anything that people have to do if they want to offer classes? Is there anything special they have to do to get started? Or kind of how does that work? Denise Fenzi: No, I am not at all proprietary about it. You can use the name of the program in your advertising, you do not have to credit me in any way, shape, or form, you can do what you want, you can teach it how you want. So it's simply there, it's simply available. The Fenzi TEAM Titles is not associated with FDSA, it's not associated with the school. They are two separate things. I have no restrictions whatsoever on how you teach it or anything, really. You can use our logo if you're teaching. Not the FDSA one, but you can use the Fenzi TEAM Titles logo if you're offering classes on Fenzi TEAM Titles. Go to town, have a good time. I think this is good for dogs, I think it's good for dog training, and I think many trainers are finding it to be quite an eye-opener when they realize how effective training this way is. And since it happens to be one of my personal strong goals, anything I can do to make that work makes me happy, and I actually think if people take to this program that it will also improve the status and the wellbeing of obedience as a sport, regardless of what organization you decide you want to compete in or not. It's not really that important. What I do care about is that people do things with their dogs in a kind and friendly manner, and so we have set up a program that allows you to do that. So go to town if it serves you well. I mean, I would personally, if it was me, if I was training dogs for AKC obedience competition, I would from Day 1, after those dogs are done with their pet manners class, if they show any interest in competition, I would start them in TEAM, and then, after getting up through a few levels, they could say, “You know what? And you're ready for your CD,” because they would be, with just a bit of polishing, and the odds that you kept them, and you kept them intrigued and happy. When I talk to people who teach TEAM classes, they say retention is very high because people have a good time, they love coming back, they love seeing, “Look, my dog can find a scent article,” “Look, my dog can retrieve,” “Look, my dog can jump.” After six weeks your dog will, if it's well trained, should be able to go around a cone, get on a platform, pivot in heel position with a disc, hold an object in its mouth. That's cool, that's interesting. Pet people do have the attention span for that for six weeks. They do not have the attention span for heel position walking in a circle. I mean, I don't have the attention span for that. So whether you even want to teach TEAM, I would really suggest that some of these clubs, these AKC clubs that are struggling and that can't find new members, something like this, where people start to play and laugh and engage, because engagement is part of it, and be silly with it, and teach cool things that everybody, “Oh, it's a trick,” OK, well, call it what you want, it's getting to where we need to go, I think that would do wonders for the culture of our sports. So use it as it works for you. Melissa Breau: So I know that TEAM right now seems pretty focused on obedience, and I wanted to ask if you've considered doing TEAM programs for any of the other sports out there. Denise Fenzi: The first three levels of TEAM was never designed to be obedience. I'll just put that out there. It was actually really designed to be a foundation for any performance sport, because it teaches skills that the body awareness, the handler cues, the distraction training, the proofing, all of those things were really meant to cross all sports. So the first three levels is for that. I will say that we have at least considered, contemplated, adding stuff. What we're going to add, I don't know. Like I said, it was hard. It was a hard thing to do, and I don't like to do things that aren't well done, so if we're going to do another level, it has to be done well. But I would say that, like, nose work might be a possibility, so yeah, you know, you never know. You never know. So it's something to keep an eye on. Melissa Breau: Alright, and before we wrap up, I want to ask you about that book. So a new book? Want to share the details? Denise Fenzi: Can you believe that? I know, I just keep writing them. I wrote a book called Beyond The Back Yard: Train Your Dog Anytime, Anywhere, and I wrote it to the pet market. It's a distraction-training book, and it was quite popular. I sold more copies of that book than any other book I've done. And it did not sell to the pet market. It actually sold to the competition market just as heavily, which is great, but I'm sort of intrigued by that market, by the sort of in-between pet trainer, a little bit of competition dog trainer, engaged, I'm going to call it an engaged pet person, I'm very interested in that group because those are the future dog people. I like those people. So this book is called Beyond The Basics: Unlock Your Dog's Behavior, and it is not an obedience book. Actually it's a hard book to explain. It's very, very heavy on understanding the emotional reasons that dogs do things. So, for example, if you have a barking problem, you can have a barking problem because you have a stressed dog, a bored dog, an anxious dog, an under-exercised dog. I mean, there's so many possibilities, and it's actually important to understand that, because the solutions are often diametrically opposed to each other. So the way you handle a bored dog and an anxious dog, you cannot use the same solution. If you do, you will make your problem worse. So the book is very much about understanding the reasons, the underlying reasons, for dog behavior, analyzing your dog from that point of view, and once you understand why your dog is doing the things it's doing, then you can set in place a behavior plan to fix it. And then I give a bunch of case studies using recalls, I think there's seven dogs that all have recall problems, and they all have problems for different reasons. And it discusses the reasons, and then it discusses potential solutions for each of those dogs. So you can pretty quickly see why each dog solution needs to be for that dog and not the next dog. And then barking is also handled, dogs that bark excessively. So maybe seven dogs, and again, many different reasons. So we go through and we look at things like temperament of the dog. We do talk about breed, we talk about health, we talk about general emotional state, we talk about training. It's not a book on training, but in relatively few pages I sort of packed in everything you could ever possibly want to know about what makes good dog training, how to do it, it's all in there. It's just exceptionally condensed. If I was going to say who would get the most bang for the buck out of this book, I would say a dog trainer who specializes in behavior. If they could get their clients that have problem behavior dogs to read this book, they would save themselves an enormous amount of explaining, cajoling, coercing their clients, because the clients would get it. They would get it from the dog's point of view, and I think they would be endlessly more cooperative with the program when they were able to understand why their dogs, because all behavior serves a purpose, and when people take the time to figure out what is the purpose that this problem behavior is solving, now you can address it. So that's what this book is about, and then it also talks about if it doesn't work, what do you do now? If your solution didn't work, how do you go back and evaluate and analyze it? So that book will be available in Europe, because they get published in different places, probably in a day or two, so by the time the podcast comes out, it should certainly be out. In the United States I expect it out November 6, and that would be through my own website, thedogathlete.com. In Canada I would expect it maybe the middle of November. Australia/New Zealand probably closer to the end of November. So the Europeans are they're the lucky ones because it should be out in a day or two. Melissa Breau: Want to repeat the name one more time for folks so they can Google it? Denise Fenzi: Yeah. It's called Beyond The Basics: Unlock Your Dog's Behavior. Melissa Breau: Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Denise, for coming back on the podcast. Denise Fenzi: Thank you for having me, Melissa. Melissa Breau: Absolutely, and thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Shade Whitesel to talk about toys and common issues, including talking about introducing work to play. Don't miss it! 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.

SUMMARY: Laura began training professionally in 1999, and is author of the best-selling book Fired Up, Frantic, and Freaked Out: Training Crazy Dogs from Over-the-top to Under Control and her newest book, released earlier this year, Social, Civil and Savvy: Training and Socializing puppies to become the best possible dogs. She owns Canines In Action, Inc. in Indianapolis, speaks at workshops and seminars, and is also a Karen Pryor Academy faculty member. Links Fired Up, Frantic, and Freaked Out: Training Crazy Dogs from Over-the-top to Under Control Social, Civil and Savvy: Training and Socializing puppies to become the best possible dogs Canines in Action, Inc. Next Episode:  To be released 10/27/2017, featuring Denise Fenzi to talk about the Fenzi TEAM Titling program and her upcoming book. 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 will be talking to Laura VanArendonk Baugh. If that name isn't familiar to you, no worries. Laura is actually our first non FDSP instructor to be on the show. Laura began training professionally in 1999 and is author of the best-selling book Fired Up, Frantic, and Freaked Out, training crazy dogs from over-the-top to under control. And her newest book, released earlier this year, Social, Civil, and Savvy: Training and socializing puppies to become the best possible dogs. She owns Canines in Action Inc. in Indianapolis and speaks at workshops and seminars. She is also a Karen Pryor Academy faculty member. Hi, Laura, welcome to the podcast. Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Hi, Melissa. I am thrilled to be here. Melissa Breau: Good. I'm looking forward to chatting with you. To get us started out, do you want to just tell us a little bit about your dogs and what you're working on with them? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: I have two dogs at this time. Penny is a Labrador who was raised as part of a Clicker training research project with guide dogs for the blind, and she actually ended up coming back to me. As a trainer, it's important for me to say her training was great. She did not come back to me for a training reason, which would've been fine too, but that's always like, my little, “No, I'm a trainer. She was good.” So anyway, so she now has very important tasks at home. She has to hold my couch down, she has to check my ponds daily to see if it's wet, so that's Penny's life right now. Melissa Breau: Critical. Laura: VanArendonk Baugh: Yeah, Yeah. Those are important tasks. I also have Undómiel, who is my young Doberman, and she's Danish, so she has ears and a tail and all the extra bits, and she's pretty high-energy, and pretty fun, and I actually have some guilt because you ask what I'm doing with them right now. Right now, they both are just dogs, which is a little weird for me because they spent so long in the dog sport world. And I took some time off mostly with Undómiel because she loves to work, but she wasn't loving mondioring, which is what we were doing with her as a puppy, and I think that was in part physical. I needed…she had some fairly loose joints and I think it just wasn't comfortable for her, so we could go back and do it now, but she's matured a little bit, but I've scheduled my life poorly so that's why we're in a holding pattern still, so yeah. Melissa Breau: Far enough. So I know I kind of mentioned you've been in personal training since 1999, but I wanted to ask a little bit about how you got into it. So how did you originally get into training professionally? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: I didn't want to do what I went to school for is the short answer to that question, so I graduated with a couple of degrees in, you know, mass communications, and a foreign language, and all these things that, you know, I'm like oh, okay, those are nice, but I don't want to do that. I ended up getting into…I'd done some obedience training and such previously. I ended up getting a job doing that actually at a big box store, so that kind of thing. I worked up there, became a regional manager for the training program, and it was actually while I was there that I went… I'm a crossover trainer and I was originally trained in more the Koehler approach and kind of encountered clicker training and was like oh, this makes sense, oh, this works really well, and then so I had my crossover experience, and yeah, just kind of never looked back after that, which is funny because for so many years I was like oh, food and toys are stupid, we don't bribe dogs, and that's totally not where I am now, so. Well, I'm still in the we don't bribe dogs, but toys and food are not necessarily bribing, so. Melissa Breau: Right. So is there anything in particular that got you started on that journey? What was kind of the switch or was there a particular experience, or anything kind of that you can point to? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: There were several things. I mean, I kept seeing people doing interesting things with Clicker training. That was nice.They were doing cute tricks and stuff. And then the kind of the clincher for me was one of my dogs at that time, her name was Chaucer, she was a brilliant little dog, and she was mildly reactive, and the longer we worked the more and more reactive she became, and nothing that I knew how to do was working, and in fact, everything was getting worse, so clearly the dog was stupid. It couldn't possibly be me. And so I ended up talking with someone about Clicker training and the nugget that I got from that was to click for the behavior that you want the dog to do, and I thought okay, I want her to be around other dogs without barking and launching, so I will wait until she looks at another dog and then I will click before she barks. So this actually makes great sense and we do it all the time now, and Leslie McDevitt called it the “look at that” game, so it sounds hilarious to say that I invested the look at that game as my first Clicked behavior, which in no way am I taking credit for that because I had no freaking clue what I was doing. It was one of those things that was very logical and I accidentally got it right, but was amazing about that is it worked, like, within seconds, and I guess that she was a brilliant dog, she made this work for me despite my absolute ignorance. And so I clicked her, she turned around and got her treat, and I clicked her again and she turned around, and I was like, oh, wow. Like, we're 10 seconds in and this is working, and you know, the effect of prompt reinforcement, it changed my behavior, and so that's where I started doing more research and saying oh, this is really cool. Melissa Breau: Yeah. I mean, especially since you've been trying other things for so long and probably got really frustrated, at that point, with the lack of results. Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Oh, there was a lot of frustration. Yeah. I was so ready for something to work and I think if you look at the dogs…a lot of the dogs that we work with, a lot of the reactive dogs, you know, they're very frustrated, they're ready for something to work, and just having that really powerful instance of positive reinforcement for a different behavior, it can be massively effective because, you know, I lived that, I'm not just making that up because that's the way the theory goes, that was my experience is I was so frustrated, I got something that worked so well, and I was like okay, tell me more. Like, I'm in now. Melissa Breau: Right. So I want to talk a little bit about your first book, and maybe…you just kind of share a little bit about this. What led you to write Fired up Frantic and Freaked out? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: I was... with Canines in Action. I do a lot of in-home sessions. I work with a lot of dogs that aren't equipped, for whatever reason, to come into a group class and I realized that about 70 percent of my cases were anxiety or reactivity, and I just kept saying the same thing over, and over, and over. I'm like oh my gosh, I should just write this down, save time, so I did so. So that's honestly kind of where that came out of was I was seeing so much of it, and doing so much of it. It was made partly as a reference guide for clients if they wanted a homework sheet, you know, here's a book to follow along with, and partly so that I would maybe not have to say it quite as so often in the future, which would be fantastic. Melissa Breau: So for those not familiar with the book, can you explain a little bit kind of about the main focus and what you talk about? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: The focus there is really on teaching dogs to think and to kind of be cognitive in the moment. One of the things I talk about is if you have a fear reaction or just a pure joyous, excitement reaction, those can frequently result in the same behavior patterns and problems because what you have is a dog who is just way too excited to think, you know, whether he sees eustress or distress, he's still stressed and aroused and not processing. So it's about teaching the dog to think in the moment, it's about reducing threshold, and it's especially about teaching the human end of the leash to develop a good splitting technique and utilize that to make it much easier for the dog to focus in a new situation. Melissa Breau: I definitely read your first book and one of the things that really stood out to me was the nice balance you managed to strike between the what and kind of the why, so it covers both the approach to training and kind of the science behind what's going on in the dog's brain, and I think you managed to do that in a pretty accessible way. You know, when I picked up the book I definitely did not have the background that I do now, and it really kind of helped build a base understanding for me. Can you talk a little bit about how you approach training for a dog that tends to overreact, like the approach that you use in the book? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Well, first, I'm just so happy to hear you say that because I'm such a science nerd and I wanted to make that science very user-friendly, so thank you, that's awesome. So the mat is…and definitely, I am not the only person to use a mat in this way. I want to be up front. I don't want to claim credit where it's not due. There's a lot of really great matwork protocols out there, but what they all have in common is it's a really handy visual crutch for the dog and it certainly doesn't have to be a mat. There's a lot of just kind of physical or mental touchstones that could be used, but a mat is just so convenient and so easy for the human to use in that way... but what you're doing is you're building a fluency, you're building some patterns of behavior that a stressed animal can fall back on, but you're also building some patterns that they can work through, I guess on a more cognitive level. “Oh, when my mat is presented I should think about going to my mat, I should think about doing these behaviors on it.” And you can use it both as an emotional crutch. “Oh, I'm on my mat, nothing bad can happen to me,” or as a actual behavior prompt, you go through these physical actions and you can earn reinforcement for it. And then the big thing that the mat does so well, and this is why think it so useful, is it's so easy to split behaviors in a situation using that mat, so I can take it, obviously, from looking at the mat, touching the mat, going to the mat, down on the mat, chin down on the mat. But then I also have a nearly infinite number of positions that, that mat can be in, in or around a trigger, or whatever. So it's a very flexible tool, I can fade it, or not fade it based on necessity, it's just a really easy way for people to do that, and for me as an instructor. So I'm working with clients who aren't coming in with a huge skill set and a lot of background. It's easy for me to manipulate the mat and they can focus on the dog or their patterns, and it just takes some of the load off them. There's a lot of flexibility to it. I like it. Melissa Breau: It makes the criteria clear for the person as well as the dog. It's kind of neat looking at it. Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Absolutely, Yeah. Melissa Breau: Yeah. So I knew you mentioned you like to nerd out a little bit on that stuff and I'm going to give you full approval to go ahead and do that. So I wanted to have you share a little bit about kind of why it works and what's going on in the dog's brain, kind of what you're teaching when you introduce the mat work and begin to introduce triggers and all of that. Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Awesome. There's a lot going on in the brain, but what I'm specifically…what I think is great about these kinds of approaches is if I have a stressed dog and an anxious dog, and let's be honest, that's where almost all of aggression or reactivity comes from, and so I've got a dog who is not in a happy place in his head, and every time I click with a Clicker-conditioned dog there's a tiny little shot of dopamine that's going on, so if I'm bringing a dog into what could potentially be a trigger situation, and we start with low criteria and we're building up at a rate that he can be successful at, with a high rate of reinforcement, you know, constant reinforcement going on, and this dog is getting dozens or hundreds of little dopamine shots... It's free drugs. Legal. That you don't have to wrestle down his throat in a pill form. It's great. And so I think that's a really key thing that…you know, it's just built into the system. There's no way to mess that up if we've set up our Clicker and our training situation right that's going to work for us a hundred percent of the time, so I think that's great. And so yeah, a lot of it's just taking the dog…the visual I use, and I always tell my clients, you know, if this works for you, great. If this doesn't work for you, flush it. There will not be a quiz at the end of the day. But the visual I use is there's a continuum and the dog is limbic and reactive at one end, and he's very cognitive and rational, and analytical at the other, and he can't be both at once, so we're asking the dog to move away from reactive and toward proactive, and we do that by making him…that's why I love Clicker training, specifically shaping and capturing as opposed to luring, which there's nothing…you know, it's not a moral problem to lure, but it's less useful in this particular context because I want that dog being analytical, and kind of really just crunching down on what behaviors should I try next, and he can't do that while he's being reactive, so if I'm reinforcing being analytical it's going to change not only what he's doing, but it's going to change the chemistry in his brain. I've had this happen a number of times, but I'm thinking of one particular incident. I was working with a client and their dog for the first time. We're in their living room, we're in the front room and we've just been introducing the mat. The dogs not even fully down on the mat yet. He's experimenting with a number of things, but he really hasn't grokked yet that down is what we're after, and while we were working a FedEx delivery guy showed up at the front door, which is the dogs worse trigger, from what I've been told, and they're knocking at the door, he's leaning in, and he's 10 feet away from this dog and the dogs looks up from the mat and he just gets like…his forehead is creased, his little eyebrows are pushed together, and you could almost just see him be like, “dude, I'm busy,” and he looks back at the mat, and I am just clicking and treating, like shot gunning rapid fire because the dog's staying on the mat. And you could see he was just really tempted to… “there's a pattern that I'm supposed to go to, but I'm really concentrating on this right now,” and it's a physically different mode that they had to get into and just like it's hard for them to get out of that…you know, if you've ever tried to talk to dog out of that reactive burst when they're lunging and barking, and they can't snap back into rational thought. It's just as hard to go the other way. So we just put them in the rational thought and then it's harder for them to fall into limbic. Melissa Breau: Interesting. I love that example just because it really kind of illustrates what the purpose and kind of the effect. I have a change in brain space. Laura VanArendonk Baugh: I loved it because it was their first session and I was like, man, if I could have set this up any better to get client buy in, you know? This was great. Melissa Breau: I bet they followed through. Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Yeah. Melissa Breau: So I want to switch gears and talk a little bit about your new book. It's a fairly different topic, so what led you to write Social Civil and Savvy? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: I think it's really interesting that you say it's a different topic because I'm looking at it as these are the same things. For me, socialization is kind of the prequel, it's getting your dog to think proactively in a novel situation, potentially triggered situation, before we develop a problem, which of course is my idea. I think most trainers would love to put themselves out of business. You can always go and train, fun stuff, but you know, if we're working with reactivity and aggression and all of that we would love to put ourselves out of business there. But yeah, socialization is all about teaching young brains to look at a situation and go, “this is interesting, what can I do here to get what results,” so. Melissa Breau: So how do you actually define socialization, either for yourself, or you know, kind of in the book? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: That's a much wigglier concept than you would think. There should be a six-word definition that would be easy to apply, but you know, even when you get into psychology texts and stuff it's not that simple even in our own species. The way…I'm going to do this as a truly practical application, I want socialization to mean I am aware of my environment, I am making proactive decisions about my environment, and I'm still thinking about the environment, so even if something is new I can compare to things I've seen before, I can say, “huh, this is interesting, what happens if I try this.” You know, I want an animal whose thinking proactively is my ultimate goal there. Melissa Breau: Is there one place where people often kind of go wrong, or you know, kind of a misconception you think people have when it comes to socializing puppies that maybe sometimes causes more harm than good? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Yeah, I think there's actually two. I think…and it's two ends of a spectrum where you have, you know, the I don't socialize at all, and a lot of times you hear trainers talk about…depending on what part of the country, but you'll hear trainers talk about winter puppy syndrome. The puppies come home in November or December, and the weather is horrible and nobody takes them out to do anything until spring, and by then you have dogs who are like no, no, the world looks like my living room, and then anything outside of that is scary. And in the other extreme is doing too much in the name of socialization and just really overwhelming a dog in teaching them that they don't necessarily have control of their environment and the world is a scary place, and I've seen a few articles circulating lately on the dangers of socialization, and you shouldn't socialize because it's bad for your dog, and on the one hand I was like hey, guys, you know. Several years ago I wrote an article called Don't Socialize the Dog, this isn't new, but the point is not that we don't socialize, the point is not to socialize badly, and I think if I take a dog to a situation that's overwhelming and I don't give him agency, choice and a way to affect his environment, yeah, I'm going to get myself in trouble. I'm teaching the dog that reactivity is his only choice, but that's not a fault of socialization. That's a fault of bad socialization. Melissa Breau: So I've kind of heard it expressed as, you know, it's not just that you want them exposed to things it's that you actually want to them to have positive experiences with things. Is that kind of… Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Absolutely. Melissa Breau: Okay. Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Yeah. I want every socialization experience, if I have perfect control of things, which we rarely do, but this is my goal. I want every socialization experience to end with “I win! What's next?” and that's…even if the dog starts off with a little bit of worry about something, or whatever, like, work through it, let the dog know that everything was a puzzle and he solved it, he's awesome. And you know, I want positive experiences and I specifically want positive experience where the dog felt like he had some control in that environment. So one of the big things…and this is why I think the socialization book and the fired up and frantic book are the same topic. Predictability and a sense of control are the two things that I tell my clients that we crave in order to feel safe, and you know, I want to know what's coming, and I want to have some say in what happens to me, and that is what socialization is. It's teaching the dog hey, this is how the world works, this is what you can expect to see, and this is what you do to manipulate your environment and get what you want. And manipulate is not a dirty word, it's just agency, so if you want people to pet you this is what you do, if you want people to leave you alone this is what you do, and giving them that sense of control, now there's nothing to fear. Hooray. We're done. It's awesome. Melissa Breau: So if people were to pick up the book, read through it, and only walk away with kind of one thing, or one message. What kind of key piece of information would you want them to learn? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Give your dog a happy sense of control. I think. Is that a good…I don't know. That kind of condemns everything I just said. I want a happy puppy feeling he has choice, and yeah. Melissa Breau: I normally and every episode with kind of the same three questions, so I wanted to give you a chance to answer the same questions, and I'm actually really excited to post under somebody who isn't just an FDSA person, so this will be fun. So to start out, what is the dog related accomplishment that you are proudest of? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: I might have to say that's actually the first book just because I've gotten so many emails and stories about how that was really helpful not just to people and their dogs, which was the goal, but I've had people tell me that they used the techniques for themselves in their own personal human lives, and that's really awesome, so yeah. I mean, I feel some guilt because that doesn't even involve my own personal dog, but there's…you know, my dogs probably don't need that specific achievement to feel happy. They're having awesome lives hanging out with me. So let's just pretend that they didn't hear that question. Yeah. I'm going to say finding out that it was really helpful to people, so yeah, that's it. Melissa Breau: Okay. And then what is the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Oh, there's no way I can pick a single one. There are …can I choose two? Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Go for it. Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Bob Bailey once said…and I'm sure he said it to many people, but he did say to me also, you know, “Timing, criteria, rate of reinforcement. Those are your three things. If anything is going wrong it's in one of those three,” and I have never found that not to be true. So anytime I'm looking at a problem it's going to be in my timing, it's going I've set the wrong criteria, or my rate of reinforcement is wrong. Melissa Breau: Want to repeat those one more time for people just so that they can really get them down if they're listening? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Sure. Sure. Because trust me, this is tattooed on the inside of my skull for easy reference. Timing, criteria, rate of reinforcement. Any problem you have it's going to be one of those, or maybe two, but it's something in there; don't go looking for weird esoteric stuff. It's going to be timing, criteria, rate of reinforcement. And then the other one…and I have to credit Steve White for this one because I'm one of those people who can get…let's say “focused.” Focused sounds like a nice way to put this, or you can get really intense on solving a particular problem or working a particular session, and Steve said, “The one to quit is the one before you say just one more,” and I was like oh, that's me. Melissa Breau: I don't think you're alone there. I think that's a common problem. Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Yeah. We should have membership cards, yeah. Melissa Breau: So my last question for you is who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: There's a lot and I'm really hesitant to pick one because that's like picking favorite dogs, but probably Hannah Branigan. I would like to be Hannah when I grow up. That sounds like a good plan. Melissa Breau: Wouldn't we all? Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Yeah, yeah. She's got a lot of good stuff going on and she's got a lot of fantastic techniques, so I'm going to say Hannah, yeah. Melissa Breau: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Laura. It was great to talk to you. Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Melissa Breau: And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Denise Fenzi to talk about the TEAM program and her new book, which will be out later this month. Don't miss it. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.

Summary:   Loretta Mueller returns to talk about her upcoming class, Managing Multi-Dog Mayhem and we talk about the skills it takes to manage a multi-dog household, choosing your next dog, training several dogs at once and how she does it with 6 sports dogs. Links Managing Multi-Dog Mayhem: Description & Registration Next Episode:  To be released 10/13/2017, featuring Loretta Mueller to talk about managing a multi-dog household. 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 Loretta Mueller. For those of you who've been listening to the podcast since the beginning, you'll known this is Loretta's second time on the podcast. She first joined us back in February, for episode five, and today we've brought her back to talk about her upcoming class, Managing Multi-Dog Mayhem, on managing a multi-dog household, because the struggle is real, guys. All right, well welcome back, Loretta. Loretta Mueller: Thank you, very much, Melissa. I'm glad to be here again. Melissa Breau: So, to start us out, can you just remind everybody how many dogs you have now and kind of who they are? Loretta Mueller: Yeah, no problem. So, I have, currently, Klink, who is a 12-year-old, Gator, who's 11, Lynn, who's 8, Even, who is also 8, Gig, who's 3. They are all Border Collies, and then I have Crackers, who is a 9-year-old Jack Russell Terrier, all very high-drive, very motivated dogs. Melissa Breau: So, what led you to create a class specifically on this? Loretta Mueller: Well, I will, on occasion, post a video or two of the dogs waiting to work or going on walks as a group, and people would ask me how do you do that, how does that happen, as if it was some magical formula, and at first I kind of was thinking to myself, well, what, what do you mean how does it happen? It's very simple. And then I realized that the more I talked to people, they're struggling. People are really having a hard time managing extra dogs. One dog is easy, for the most part, right? We make mistakes with that first dog, but then we're like, hey, I've got this figured out, let me add a second dog, let me add a third dog, let me get addicted, and the next thing you know, you've got a lot of dogs and you have a lot of problems, and I started realizing that the way I train my dogs is very different because I specifically train them so that they are going to be a part of a multi-dog household, and for many people they don't do that. And so Denise and I were talking, and she said, you know, I think there's a place for this at the academy. And I said, well, you know what, after some thought, why not? Let's do it. And so, from there, it kind of became a thing. You know you put it on the forum and…or not the forum but the group, and people were very, very excited about it, and it was very funny because I asked for some videos of dogs that were doing this or that, and the number of videos that came in was a little overwhelming, and so what I really liked about this class is I'm going to be helping a lot of people, not just with agility, which is normally what I do, but with just life skills and people enjoying their dogs, and what I've found is there are a lot of people that have a lot of issues and are really struggling, and they just need a lot of advice and help on where to proceed, and I think with the more dogs you have, the more overwhelming it is, and so for me the goal is just to break this down into bits and pieces so that people can attack it with education, as opposed to just be frustrated with their dogs. Melissa Breau: So, you mentioned you kind of handle training so that the dog will feel like it's part of or know that it's part of a multi-dog household. So, how do you handle training multiple dogs and making sure everyone gets what they need, and you still manage to fit in training, and I mean how do you do it all when there's still only 24 hours in a day? Loretta Mueller: Well, to me, I'll be the first to admit, and people ask me, usually at every seminar that I teach, how soon do you train your dogs, and normally it's kind of an embarrassment because my dogs do not get long training sessions. Quality is important, not quantity, and people say that over and over again. The nice thing about those of us with multi-dog households is we don't have time to over-train because we're busy training too many dogs. So, that is one really big plus about having a lot of dogs is you're never going to over train anybody. You might under train someone, but you're never going to over train anyone. So, my dogs do not get long training sessions, 5, 10 minutes, usually every day, but I travel a lot, so some days they won't get anything. They do get walks, daily, as a group, and I think for me, being efficient is a really important part of it because I incorporate training into each of those walks, so, for example, recalls out of the group, impulse control when throwing toys for fetching, things like that. So, they are still getting some training, in a group, even if the days they have that pass that they don't get the individual stuff, but I really, really do try to focus for 5 to 10 minutes, every single day. You know training the dogs, it's a priority. You have to make sure it's a priority. Being that that's what I do for a living, the tendency is just to be, you know, exhausted at the end of the day. You're training other people's dogs. Those dogs become the focus, but I make sure that I do something every day with each dog, if I can, regardless of how old they are. I have a 12-year-old. She's doing nose work. You know you just want to make sure that these dogs have a really wonderful life and are happy and still working their brains as much as possible. Another thing that really helps me be super-efficient is I work really hard on my dogs being able to stay while other dogs work with me. So, my dogs are on mats or their own bed and they just stay there, kind of like, actually, a circus, if you ever go to the circus and you have the lions, you know, on the little stands, and they come off. They train, do the tricks, go back on the stands, things like that, definitely more positive, but my dogs are kind of like that. They just sit on their little mats or their beds, and I call them off individually, we train for a little bit, they go back to their bed, call the next dog off, and they all know the rules. They all know that they should stay there and wait quietly and things like that, and that's a big priority for me when I'm bringing these dogs up is I know that's going to be an issue, I assume it's going to be an issue, and there's so many people that say I can't train multiple dogs because my other dog screams or my other dog won't stay, and so, from the get-go, these dogs know nothing but that when they come into my house, and so I'm very, very clear with that, and if you can do that and you can train dogs out fairly efficiently, things go really smoothly and you can get dogs worked very quickly. Melissa Breau: For a lot of people, when they get a second dog, they think it'll actually be easier than it was with the first dog because they'll entertain each other, so I wanted to ask if that's true, and if so, why or why not? Loretta Mueller: That's a tricky one. I actually say yes and no. So, yes it's nice having another dog because, you know, dogs do well in groups. They're social animals and so I think having another dog around does fill part of that need for them as an animal, as a creature. Plus, you know, you've already made a lot of mistakes with your first dog, and you're like, okay, I got this, I can correct it, not a problem. However, if you're looking at it from the performance side, which most of the dogs at FDSA are looking to perform some sort of dog sport, task, it gets a little trickier. So, dogs can become very dog-focused, you know, I'll use the term doggy, which means they're so excited about other dogs that they kind of forget the human side of the equation. I mean, let's face it, dogs are awesome friends for other dogs, right? They speak the same language, there's no questions, for the most part, as long as everyone's temperamentally sound, there's a lot of wonderful communication that goes on between two dogs, and it's really hard for us to mimic that type of interaction, and so competing with that can be tough, as a handler. So, you have to be very careful with that and limiting, sometimes, the actual exposure or maybe I should say keeping the ratio correct. So, the dog should spend enough time with me versus the other dogs. So, it gets a little complicated that way, you know, and the other thing I find is they can get themselves worked up very easily, just bouncing off of, you know, each other, as far as energy goes, and things can get very out of hand, very quickly, and then a lot of times people just don't know what to do, and that's a big issue. So, you have to make sure the dogs have alone time with you. It's really, really important. It just requires more time, and sometimes it requires separation in the beginning. So, for example, if I bring a puppy home, do I just let it run amuck and you know run around with all my adult dogs in the group? No, I don't. There's definitely separation as far as, you know, just to protect the puppy from doing anything inappropriate, also protecting the older dogs in the group, you know? Some of them don't like being pestered by little, little puppies, and so it requires that, and I have raised littermates. As I said in the beginning of the podcast, I have Even and Lynn, both 8, both from the same litter. I will never do it again. It was horrible. I'll be honest with you. It was a very difficult situation because being that I had two puppies, in two crates, they both have to go to the bathroom, right, and first thing in the morning, you let them out of their kennels, you can't let them out together. Why? They'll play. They won't go to the bathroom. You let one out, it goes to the bathroom. By the time you come back in to get the other one, guess one? The other one's already peed. So, you have that whole dynamic that you have to think about. So, I always tell people it's wonderful as long as you can manage it and as long as you understand that in the beginning it's going to take some extra time on your part to set what you want so that the dogs view you as having a lot more value as the other dog, if that makes sense. Melissa Breau: So you touched on, a little bit, in there, kind of making sure that the dogs get time with you and talking about, you know, training for just a couple minutes with each of the dogs. So, is it important for each dog to really get one-on-one time? You know I guess if it's important, how important? Kind of what are your thoughts on that? Loretta Mueller: I think it's really important. We spend a lot of time building value in us as trainers, and these dogs learn to depend on us. They learn to trust us. They want to be with us, whether they just have a natural propensity, due to their breed or their temperament, or we've created it with training and things like that, and I think that, you know, the more dogs you get, the more difficult it is to get that one on one time, but I do think that you do have to make time for it, and it doesn't have to be a lot of time. Remember, dogs are social creatures. They like being in groups, so they do get a lot of, I think, enrichment from the other dogs in the house, but they do still want that time with you, and the thing that I find with a lot of my students is most of my students only make time for training, which is great, okay, because dogs, dogs love to train, if we do it right, hopefully, and if we've trained them to have value in the work, and we're rewarding heavily, and we're not confusing them, which is great, but what I've found is even the highest-drive dogs, those dogs that, you know, will work forever, if they only interaction you have with them is when you're training them, that's the only time, I've seen a lot of fallback from that. And the reason is, is because no matter how much you enjoy a specific hobby, if the only time you ever see someone, you have to do that hobby, and it happens every day, and there's pressures put onto it, right, expectations of competition or whatever, eventually you're going to need a little bit of a balance there, and so what I always tell my students is it doesn't have to be training, that one on one time. It can be just relaxing on the couch. It can be taking a nap with you. It can be just whatever. Be with your dog, and I think that's something that a lot of people, especially those that really, really love to train, they lose sight of that sometimes, and I, myself, have done it as well, and so it's just these dogs are so much fun to train, and you're having a great time, but then you also need to realize that every once in a while, you've got to throw in some of that actual just, I don't mean to sound kind of weird, but just kind of the act of being with your dog, being in the same space, touch, things like that, and so I do think it's very, very important. You know training counts, but it isn't the be all to end all with the one-on-one time. Melissa Breau: So, you kind of mentioned in there people who really like to train, and I think a lot of sports people, especially, have kind of a type when it comes to dogs. You know some like the really pushy, demanding dogs. Others prefer thinkers. You know once a household kind of goes beyond one dog, how much should people be weighing what they like in a training partner kind of against the other personalities they already have with their current dogs? Loretta Mueller: That's a really good question. I see that a lot. As someone who appreciates both the pushy, demanding dogs and the thinkers, it's not something that I really think about, I guess, as far as my own dogs, because I will assess a puppy and say is this puppy a thinker, is this puppy not? However, I'm always, in the back of my mind, thinking in terms of, again, multi-dog household. So, I could say, oh, well this is the type I want, but in reality, if I look at my subconscious, it's back there. It's always there. It's always thinking in terms of that. So, yes, absolutely positively people need to always take into consideration what dogs they have when adding another dog. It's very, very important to do that because what you're looking for is just a nice, peaceful group. You're not looking for turmoil, you're not looking for chaos, and if you start from the foundation of just is this dog temperamentally sound, is this dog super type-A, is it going to mess with the other dogs? If you start with that foundation set, everything becomes a lot easier, obviously. A house full of pushy, demanding dogs with type-A personalities? My goodness. It's going to be tough, and it's going to require a lot more training and possibly more management just because it's like putting a bunch of, you know, high-powered CEOs in a really small apartment and giving them limited resources and expecting them to, you know, passively work it out. It's probably not going to happen because they have that intense drive, that intense need to be first and top, and when you add that many dogs in a situation like that, you're going to have problems. It's just, it's part of it. Do I have several dogs in my group like that? Of course I do, but again, when you bring them in, you teach them, from the get-go, that there is part of the group that you have to take turns, and there is, in a way, kind of situations with sharing, and you have to only deal with your own resources and not worry about anybody else's, and things like that. So, yeah, it's extremely important to look at all the personalities you have as a whole. I have...a good example would be my first Border Collie Zip, who's no longer with me. She was a very type-A, dominant dog, extremely. She just wanted to do all the things and rules were silly, and that was just her personality, and so the next dog I got, after her, which I knew was going to be having to live with that, we always joked that if she was a human, she would have very few friends because she just was like all the things are mine, and this is mine, and everything's mine, and mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, and that was just her mentality, and so the dog I got after her, who's Klink, my 12-year-old, she doesn't care about much of anything. She's like super chill, so, in the house she doesn't do much of anything. She doesn't actually care about playing with toys when we're working. She's on and she wants to go, but as a puppy she was just that chill type of dog, and so that was of interest to me because I had the exact opposite, and it worked out really, really well because those two got along great. Zip cared about all the things. Klink cared about none of the things. Both of them were really, really wonderful working dogs, but it was just a really good choice on my part to get something that was not quite as intense all the time, and I think that that's kind of how I approach things is I look at…normally what I'll look at is my most, I guess, difficult dog in the group, the one that's, you know, wouldn't have friends type of thing, and if I have one of those, I'm going to base a lot of my choices of young dogs or a puppy off of that type of situation. So, which dog's going to get along with the one that's the most, I guess, apt to cause mayhem? So, yeah, it's really important, and a lot of times, you know, I, you always want to pick your own puppy, right? You always want to be the one to pick the puppy, but if you look at…if you're getting a puppy from a breeder or you're getting a puppy from a rescue group that has seen a litter grow up and things like that, I really do defer a lot to those people because they've watched these dogs grow up. If you're looking at getting a rescue dog, you know, do several meetings, if you can. Obviously do it appropriately where both dogs have space and stuff like that. There are going to be situations where dogs may or may not get along, and that's one of the nice things about the multi-dog class is that I show you how to assess that, and do we need to go into a management situation or can a lot of training be worked on to make things a lot more, I guess, easy on both dogs that are possibly having some conflict. Conflict is normal. There's going to be conflict in a group of dogs, and people, I think, have a tendency to get in a very utopic thought process about it and say, oh, my dogs are going to get along amazing, and everybody's going to great, and there's never going to be any discussions about things, and in reality that's not…that's just not the case. Anyone who read the sample lecture on the Fenzi site for my class, it says that, that there's going to be some occasional lip raises, there's going to be an occasional grumble, there's going to be things like that, and that's a normal thing. It's no different than me saying, you know, hey, Melissa, don't touch my breakfast, it's mine. Melissa Breau: Right. Loretta Mueller: And you know and so I would be considered a resource guarder because I really love food, a lot, and so I would be more apt to be like, you know, the fork on the table type of thing, whereas then you can teach the dog, you know, hey, you can't actually get quite that much, but you can protect your space, as far as food bowls and things like that, but you do it by using games and by using positive rewards and things like that because, you know, in negative situations what happens is that builds an emotional connection to the situation. So, if a negative thing happens every time the dogs are fed, for example, if you yell at the dogs, things like that, it creates that negative emotion, and then you're actually, in many cases, making it worse. So, my goal is to make these dogs feel safe, comfortable, happy, when they're having to share their space or resource with other dogs, and it just is so much simpler. It really is, so. Melissa Breau: So, we talked a whole bunch kind of about the importance of personalities. Are there other things that people should take into consideration when they're looking at adding another dog? Loretta Mueller: Yeah, actually, the age of the other dogs. So, I see this a lot, do you have an older dog, you know, does that dog need to have the last part of its golden years being bothered by a puppy? That's something that a lot of people don't always think about when they're looking at getting a puppy or another dog. Time constraints for you and your family, so, do you guys have time for another dog? And a big one, does everyone want the dog, you know, because if you've got some members of the household and some of them want the dog, some of them don't, that can cause a lot of issues. Some may train the dogs. Some may not. Space, do you really have enough space for the number of dogs that you're looking at getting and the size of dogs and the drive of dogs. So, a lot of times, for example, dogs with more of that, as I'll say in some of my lectures, introverted personality, do you have space for these dogs to go away from the main pack, or are they going to be all in a very, very small, contained area? And that's something, for a dog that needs to go away and get away from the group, that's something that you have to think in terms of is if I can't give that dog a basic need that they have to have, is that going to cause turmoil? And yeah, it is, for sure, and so you need to think in terms of do you have enough space to allow dogs to do what they would naturally do to get away from other dogs in their group. What if they don't get along? So, normally, with an older dog or a rescue dog, they're a little bit older, you kind of have an idea of what their temperament is, but if you're getting puppies, anyone who's raised a puppy knows that they go through all sorts of changes in temperament, and what if this puppy grows up and the two don't like each other? Can you…do you have the ability to separate and manage, do you want to manage? Is that something that you're willing to do? Some people don't want to do it, and so it's just, it's an understanding of exactly what these dogs need over what you need. You know I think that if you want another dog, getting a dog that isn't necessarily your type, as we talked about before, can actually be a really good thing. I've had several, and they've made me a better trainer and given me a much greater understanding of dogs as a whole. So, when people always ask me do you want a doer, you know, the pushy demander, or do you want a thinking dog, which one's your favorite? I've got both, and I adjust to both, so it's not a big deal for me. So, a lot of times if you have a real demanding dog, maybe getting a lower key dog would be a better bet, so you still get the addition of another dog, but you get a dog that's going to create less turmoil and less mayhem in the long run. So, that's what I usually tell people. Melissa Breau: So, if I was to restrict you to kind of one core piece of advice for people as they kind of make the move or when they make the move to becoming a multi-dog household, so going from that first dog to adding a second one, what piece of advice would that be? Loretta Mueller: Two dogs is a change. So, for most people, adding another dog is managed and it's easy, for the most part, with a bit of training. As you add that third dog in, something changes. So, you're dealing with a whole different set of dynamics, and things can get out of hand much quicker. It's best to start training as soon as your new dog or puppy comes home and by themselves, then add each dog in if things progress in a positive way, and never be upset or refuse to back up a step or two. That's one of the things that I try to tell people, when they see my six dogs all loose-leash walking on a flat buckle collar at a local park is this didn't happen in a week, right? This was systematically…Klink learned how to walk on leash, then Gator learned how to walk on leash, then the two are combined, and then you slowly add dogs in, and so it's not something that you're like, okay, well, everybody knows how to stay now, so we're all going to do group stays. Group stays are not part of the…they don't generalize, so staying on a mat, in the living room, is not the same as staying on a mat, in the living room, with five other dogs there, and so people have to definitely understand that is that you have to always tell yourself that I've got to get the behaviors down with one dog first and each dog individually and then you add the other dogs in, and then that will get you that group control, that group that's going to listen and behave because they know what's expected of them when there are multiple dogs around. So, that's the one piece of advice I think many people have a tendency…they want to just jump over that, and that's where people get themselves in trouble. Melissa Breau: So, talking about trouble, what are some of the kind of the common challenges that crop up when you have several dogs, especially several sports dogs, presumably all with drive and active interest in training? What happens? Loretta Mueller: Oh my goodness, demanding, pushy behavior for all of the resources, right, any and all resources, so you, food, toys, couches, spaces in the house. These dogs have been bred and trained to want to work for all the things, and so then all of a sudden they're like well that's mine and that's mine and that's mine, and they're very adamant and they're very intense about it. So, that's a big one, big, big, big one. You know big personalities can have big discussions about things, and most of the time those discussions are all, you know, mouth, but you have to understand that that could occasionally happen, and we're going to go over how to deal with that in a multi-dog class, how to effectively deal with it. We teach them to love the game, we teach them to love being with us, and so what we actually create by doing that, if we're not careful, is we create dogs that absolutely, positively do not want to share their training time with other dogs. They only want us. So, when we get another dog, it's very difficult for them to understand, well, why is this dog now at the lesson? Well, why is this dog getting my five minutes? And we created it. We did it ourselves, and so then we get upset because these dogs, who we've told to love the game and love us and love all the things that we reward them with, they're barking their heads off and we get frustrated. So, it's a balance that we have to create with our training that gives us a high-drive dog, on command for drive, ideally, that can patiently wait their turn, and I've had questions, before the class started, was do you do alpha deferment, so, that's something that did come up, and what that means is do I let the alpha dog in the group determine, like, for example, would I feed the alpha dog first, would I train the alpha dog first, would I, you know, anything first? And my answer is no. I train everything very randomly, so none of my dogs know when they're going to get picked to get trained. They just know they're on their mat, and as long as they stay, they'll get to work. So, it's just a matter of them understanding, all the dogs as a whole, that they have to share that time and that you have that balance between, you know, intense love of the game and also the understanding that there must be some semblance of impulse control in order to get, to play the game, and they have to share that with the other dogs in the group. So, that's a big thing that I find that comes up with people, and that's the most common thing I've heard from people that were interested in the class and just people in general that I teach at seminars was that they just don't know how to get their other dogs to be quiet or to sit still while they're training the other dog, and that's a big challenge, and it requires a lot of effort, requires a lot of training, but again, as soon as the dog comes into the household, if you start it immediately, it becomes they only thing they've ever known, and so they're like, yeah, well, we always share time, that's what we do, as opposed to, a lot of people, they're going to be starting from behind the ball, right? The dog's already been, for two years, going, no, this is all mine, mine, all those things are mine, you're mine, get that other dog out of here. Then it requires a little bit more energy on your part, but once the dogs figure it out, they actually really do roll with it pretty easily, because it makes sense to them, as opposed to the chaos of, oh my gosh, this is horrible, I can't believe she's training another dog. So, it does help, kind of. You know what I mean. They just get really upset. I mean some of these dogs get extremely upset and emotionally just, they become a mess because they don't know what to do, and if you show them what to do, when presented with that problem, all of a sudden they go, oh, okay, I can do this. All right, I can do this, this is good. And so then they have a plan, and that's really what the goal with this class is, to provide people with a plan so that they can start with the group of dogs they have now that may have 1 or 2 or 10 problems and then have a plan and a roadmap to work to a calm, peaceful multi-dog household. Melissa Breau: I mean if you went from having one significant other and suddenly started dating around, your significant other would probably have a problem with that too, so. Loretta Mueller: You think? Like, yes… Melissa Breau: I mean you can't really blame a dog that's thought you were going steady for getting too upset about that. Loretta Mueller: Yeah, we were exclusive. We were exclusive. What the heck? Yes, exactly. That is exactly what's going on, totally, and then we go I don't understand why you're not getting this, and the dogs are like really? Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. So, yeah, that's exactly what's happening, and so, again, you know, it's, to me it's very obvious that these dogs are doing that because of the fact that we've created such a wonderful relationship with them that we have to then show them, you know, there is going to be times where you're going to have to share me a little bit, and again, once they figure out the process, it actually goes pretty easily, so. Melissa Breau: So, we've talked a lot, I think, about kind of the idea of running a smooth household and management and training. I wanted to ask a little bit about how you balance the two, both in real life and kind of in the class. Loretta Mueller: I get this a lot, and sadly I can't give you a definite answer, and the reason I can't is because the dogs kind of decide what needs to happen, as far as management versus training. It is all about the dog. So, you know, with dogs that are temperamentally sound, with no major issues, and what I mean by no major issues is, you know, no severe resource guarding, no severe reactivity, things like that, so just a normal, you know, normal-tempered dog, after they understand the situation with the training and the taking turns and learning how they are supposed to behave when another dog is out and things like that, there's usually very little management after training, and I say management…some people have different terms of management. So, I'll go onto that in a second, but many dogs do have their quirks. I mean I have a houseful of Border Collies, so, they're their own little weirdos, you know, to begin with. I love the breed. I love them, but they definitely all have their quirks. Anyone that has a Border Collie will go, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, even I have dogs that are a bit on the odd side, and the key, I guess, with that, is to identify it early and see if training can fix it. You apply the training, does it get better, does it progress positively, yay. If it does not, are there other options? So, I will always defer to training first, if I can. You know, so, for example, this is a good example of something that I do with my dogs, and they only know this. They know no other way, training. My dogs are taught that the house is not a place to be in drive unless they're given a trigger word. So, for my dogs it's the word ready, which I'm really happy that I just said that and none of them are getting up off the couch, because they're all five of them currently are just sacked out in my living room with me. So, if I don't say that word, the assumption, to all of my dogs, is the house is a calm place. So, there's not dogs running around, throwing toys, there's not dogs running around, playing and going crazy in the house. It's just a place that they should be calm and out of drive unless asked into drive and the only place I will actually ask them to go into drive is in my training room, which is in my house, but it's a spare bedroom. So, if they go into the training room, that's when they will go into drive because the training room itself is a trigger. So, I will say are you ready to work or…I can't even say it because they're going to all get excited. So, that word means get going and let's get to business. Outside, when we go outside, as long as they behave themselves and go through doors correctly and you know are good with their impulse control, that's where they can be dogs and run around. So, they can go on off-leash walks, things like that, and if I do want them to go into a working drive, I would give them the same word, ready, and they would come to me and we'd work, if needed, and so it's very important because this rule creates a house that doesn't have dogs throwing toys me all hours of the day and night. There's no craziness. The house, to the dogs, is just like a crate, so a place to be calm, and it's something I just, I guess, took for granted because I was like I don't really want six dogs running around amuck in my house, just chaotic, but a lot of people don't do that. They, the house is a place to play and go crazy and get zoomies, and all these amazing things happen in the house, which is fine, but always be cognizant of what you're actually working, right, because something that might be cute in the beginning, when you add 4 or 5 dogs into the mix, it becomes a major, major issue, and that's the situation that I find with people is that they don't think in terms of the future. They think in terms of, oh, these two dogs are having fun in the living room. And so for me, if, for example, I had a dog that was wanting to play with my puppy in the house, I would most likely, if I could, take them outside and let them have fun outside, and then once puppy was tired, bring them back in the house. So, I'm just setting an example for calm, controlled behavior in my home, and then, when we go outside, they can be, you know, dogs, within reason, do dog things, run around, bark, things like that. So, I think it's something that people have to always think in terms of, and a lot of people don't because when you have one dog, it's not that big of a deal, but when you have five dogs, it becomes a major thing. So, and that's an example of training. So, for me, management can come in situations with just daily life. So, a good example of management that I do, myself, is not all of my dogs are loose in the house when I'm gone. It's an earned thing because some of my dogs are great in the house, and then I have some, a couple of them, that are a bit more naughty, and the naughty ones are crated, and it's just some people would call that, I guess, true management. I just call that putting dogs that are naughty in crates, and so that's, they can't be naughty when I'm not around. So, you know, that would be fine. That's just a standard that I have for my dogs. Do I have a dog or two that doesn't necessarily like the other dog? Yeah, I do, and so do those dogs, are they left out when I'm not around? No, they're crated, you know, and so if you have those kind of personality things, you say, okay, there's a personality issue here between two of my dogs. Therefore, I'm not going to create a situation where they have the ability to have any discussions. I'm going to remove that from the table so that the only time they have the ability to have a discussion is when I'm going to be around and I can distract them from it or whatever, if need be. But the dogs, to me, will really determine how much management's required. Many dogs, when I actually work through all the exercises in my class, don't have as much of an issue of space or reactivity, or they're greatly lessened just due to understanding, but you know, however, if you have dogs that are attacking other dogs, you know, you have to understand that there is a time for management, and sometimes it's just managing, like, situations we'll deal with in the multi-dog class, pinch points, so areas of conflict as far usually that's like space, so hallways, door entryways, things like that. If you acknowledge it and you manage little pieces, then you don't end up having to manage the entire situation all the time and keeping dogs completely separate. So, it's identifying those trigger or those pinch points that will tell you, hey, this is an area of conflict, I can do this, this, or this, and that will take care of it and get rid of the conflict. You get rid of the conflict, you get rid of the emotion, the dogs then relax and things become much better, and so it's about just observation and seeing exactly what's happening with your group, and that's going to be very, very important when you can decide whether you need to train something or it is a true management situation. Melissa Breau: Now, you kind of mentioned the loose-leash walking thing earlier, but I want to kind of circle back around to that. I know one of the most common requests, when it comes to having several dogs, is definitely loose-leash walking because there's definitely nothing crazier than having several dogs all pulling you in different directions when you're outside. Ask me how I know. So, I know that, you know, you've shared some pictures on the Facebook group and things of you with your crew, all leashes, nice and loose. Are you covering that in the class? Loretta Mueller: Yes, I am, definitely, absolutely. I will be going over it, and I'm going to be starting it on week two. I've just released lectures for week one. So, week two we're going to already start on some loose-leash walking, and again, the key is one dog at a time. When you add more dogs, it's not going to get better. It's going to get worse, and so I think as the people are like well, you know, they'll probably be okay, get the leash walking done well with one dog, and then we're kind of adding other dogs, and again, like I said before, people have a tendency to rush it, and then you end up with four dogs dragging you down the road, and that's not fun, and you also have dogs that, you know, they might be somewhat okay as a group on leash, but then a squirrel runs cross your path, and then you are now officially skiing, which we don't want that. We want you to not be ran into trees and not be drug through forests. I actually just got back from a camping trip, and I saw that in full force, a woman with four Goldens, not a cool situation. So, luckily my dogs are only about 35 pounds, but I do work with a lot of people that have dogs much bigger, and the bottom line is it takes patience, but the rewards are amazing, and I think that's the hardest part, for most people, when they're dealing with loose-leash walking is they want to just get it done and then add all 3, 4 dogs, and that's not how it works, and so again, laying those roadmaps on here's where you start and then there's how you slowly add in more layers, and a layer being distractions, and a layer being a dog, things like that, and that's one of the things we do in week one of this class, actually, is self-assessment of each dog, and I have a couple of the golds say do you really want me to write out everything for each of the dogs in my house? Yes, I do. I sure do, and the reason is, is because you can use dogs' personalities to benefit another dog's training. So, for example, if you have a really exuberant young dog that's learning loose-leash walking and has it, and has got it, and they're doing really well by themselves, and then you have the option of adding a 4-year-old, who is kind of high strung, your 12-year-old dog, who is not high strung, or a18-month-old young dog that doesn't know how to loose-leash walk. Which one do you add in? You're going to go with the older dog, right? So, you can use those personality characteristics to help you, but you have to understand what those characteristics are because we just have a tendency to look at the group as a whole and not these individual dogs, and you can use them so easily, and I do that a lot in my classes, where I'll deal with certain dogs who get overstimulated by a specific type of dog. I can use that dog for my group to work them through that, and it's the same thing that you'd be doing when you're dealing with multi-dogs. You can use the dog that best fits the situation that's going to put that positive progress into play, and that's going to be a really, really important thing when you're dealing with loose-leash walking. Again, I think people get on the verge of getting it and then they just lose patience, and I know nothing worse for me, personally, than dealing with a dog dragging me. That's just one of my things. Like, it makes a lot of stuff not fun, and so, for me, it's something that I really work on, and I think it's kind of fun to see a lot of these golds that are in the class, currently, are really excited about doing that. So, I see some really, really motivated people that are hopefully going to get some really good leash walking out of their dogs, and then again, once they get it on one dog, keep working on all the rest, and then we add them all in, as a group, slowly, and the rewards are awesome because you can just walk your dogs and not have to worry about being pulled or drug, and it's a really awesome thing. I mean I know it's not nearly as cool as doing weep holes or you know dumbbell retrieves, but the bottom line is you're probably going to spend a lot more time walking your dog on-leash than you are, you know, doing other stuff. So, that's going to be a really, really important thing. I'm excited about that, super excited, so. Melissa Breau: I think most of people taking the class are probably pretty excited about that, too. Loretta Mueller: Yeah, they are. Melissa Breau: So, I wanted to just kind of generally ask you a little more about what you will and won't cover in the class. What are some of the other topics? Loretta Mueller: So I'm going to cover just group mentality, assessing your dogs as far as their temperaments, common areas that cause issues with groups, games to help dogs learn to share and accept other dogs, share and accept resources, understanding what each of the dogs in your group needs to be happy and content, because that's a really, really important one. They're just like people. Some of them are extroverts. Some of them are introverts. It really depends on the dog, and just noticing those characteristics and giving them what they need so that they're more comfortable, and a big one is when you should look into a true management scenario. I think that's a hard one for a lot of people. I find a lot of people go into management before they've actually looked into training first, and I think that a lot of stuff can be accomplished with training, as, again, as long as you're dealing with a dog that's just maybe over threshold or things like that. Things I'm not going to cover, I'm not going to cover severe aggression issues between pack members, severe resource guarding issues, so dogs that are lunging while being fed, things that should be left to a certified behaviorist. To me, those things can't really be worked through via a lot of video because you're still going to be still missing out on some things or just discussion. I think that in those cases, with severe issues, you need one on one, in person time with a professional in that specific field, and so I think it's just really important that people understand that this is to fix tendencies or slight issues that don't involve severe massive aggression or severe resource guarding or also just, you know, if you're bringing a new puppy into the pack and you want to know how to raise this puppy in a way that it's only going to know that it's…that's how it lives, it's in a group, then the class is for you, but like I said, in severe issue…cases with aggression and resource guarding, I'm going to leave that to someone that is, you know, a professional in the field, and that's where I would send people to go, so. Melissa Breau: Kind of my last question here, is there, just generally, I guess, anything you'd add and either about the class or in general or maybe something you've learned over time or that hasn't worked, just kind of anything you'd add to anything we talked about? Loretta Mueller: Yeah. You know I think having a houseful of dogs can be really a fun experience. I love my group. I wouldn't trade them for the world, I'll be honest with you. One of the things I've learned, over time, and I think we've all kind of done it, probably out of frustration more than anything, is yelling or screaming or you know getting upset when the dogs are being silly in a group, it doesn't work. It just doesn't work. I mean it might make us feel a little bit better at the time, that we're trying to, you know, maybe fix something, but the bottom line, it really doesn't work. It's, the goal that you have to think in terms of, and this has taken me, you know, I've been dealing with multi-dogs for many years now, is just think in terms of divide and conquer. So, if your group is unmanageable, you need to work each dog on their own, get them the skills, and then, like I said, slowly add in dogs if things progress in a positive direction. If you bring dogs in, just assume it's going to be a multi-dog household, and all your training should be around that. If you only ever want one dog, it's a little different, but I think, to me, you know, every dog that comes in is going to understand that they will be in a group situation and they will have to have these specific skills and games that they have learned that will help them deal with that type of life, because it's different. I mean it's very different, especially going from one dog to multiple dogs, the dogs have to be accepting of personal space, possibly being invaded, things like that, and you have to work with them to develop that understanding and the tolerance to accept, you know, dogs in their space and things like that, and then, on the flip side, you also, as the trainer, have to understand how to make things less evasive and how to give dogs outs and options and things like that, and I think that something I've learned, a lot, just through the years is that incompatible behaviors, so, if you have a behavior you don't like, go the exact opposite and teach that. So, it's really hard for, example, a dog to run ahead of everyone else, and you'll see this common in a lot of the herding breeds, they'll nip. So, for example, if you let your dogs in the house, one dog in particular, normally, will run ahead of everybody because they're busting through the door, of course, and they will wheel around and nip those dogs coming through the hallway or through a door. So, you just think in terms of incompatible behavior, so, if the dog is waiting at the door to be released, is that compatible with running through the door and biting the other dogs? No. They can't do both, and so you want to think in terms of I want to find a behavior that they can't do simultaneously, and then you work on that as a trained behavior and you'll get that situation. So, one of the things that people will get used to, throughout this session, is in a group, my dogs are released to commands or to food or through doors by their names. So in agility, I say okay. That's their release word. In a group situation, because I would never do agility with my dogs in a group…that just sounds dangerous. It really does. I'm like I've got a little anxiety over that one, actually, but you, I would release them with an okay in agility, but in a group, and for example if I wanted them to come to the door, if I say okay, is that fair? Melissa Breau: Right. Loretta Mueller: It's, well, it is, technically, if I want them to all bust through the door at once, which is definitely not what I want, because they'll kill each other, but you know people are like okay, and then all five dogs jump up and bust through the door. Well, that's not what I want. So, in the situation of a group thing, I would be saying, Klink, and Klink means you are released to come to the door. If I want to tug with multiple dogs, for example, I would say Klink, get it, or Lynn, get it. So, it gives the dog's name and then something, and that way I can be very specific about what I want which dog to do, and that was something I didn't think about, actually. One of my students was just feeding her dogs cookies, you know, just cookies, and one of the dogs was getting a little guard-y, and what I realized through that was that I tell my dogs their names before I give them a cookie, if I have five dogs waiting at my feet, and none of them try to get the other dog's cookie, and I do have a couple dogs that are a little resource-guard-y, but unless they hear their name, they know not to get the cookie, and so it's just little things like that that if you're not training with multiple dogs, you don't think about, and then, all of a sudden, you add in that second dog, and you're like, oh wow, everything has changed now because my first dog doesn't want the other dog to get cookies, etcetera, etcetera. So, it's stuff like that that I've just naturally developed through the years of having multiple dogs that we will go through, and you know you don't have to say your dog's name. You can…one of my students has uno, dos, tres, one, two, three in Spanish. That's how she calls her dogs, as far as group stuff. So, her dogs are uno, dos, tres in a group, and then her dogs, you know, when they're individually training, have their names and things like that, and so, so my dogs' conceptual… Melissa Breau: I was going to say I'm assuming that's because she uses their names to mean something else in training. Loretta Mueller: Yes, exactly, yeah. Melissa Breau: Yeah. Loretta Mueller: And you know dogs, dogs are very good at figuring out scenarios. They're phenomenal at figuring them out. I mean my dogs know that if they come out of the house and we turn left, we're going to go into the agility field, but I never work five dogs in agility. So, they don't do agility. If I come out with one dog, and I turn left, and I go to the agility field, they know they're working. So, it's all about context. So, I teach my dogs that in context there's group context and then there's individual context, and they are very, very good at figuring that out, and so we'll be going through that, as well, in the class, but that's a big one is teaching them what they should expect in a group, and so a lot of these people, we're working on a lot of that stuff this, the next six weeks. So, I'm pretty excited about the class. Melissa Breau: It sounds awesome. Loretta Mueller: Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited about it. I'm looking forward to seeing the videos and seeing the starting points. I just released a lecture where it says I need to see the ugly, and so I'm kind of excited to go look at the forums and see some ugly, and then we can work on some stuff. So, yeah, it's going to be a fun class. Melissa Breau: For folks listening, we're actually recording this on the first day of class, on October 1. So, they won't hear this for a week or two, but for you, it's, today's the very first day of class. Loretta Mueller: Yes, it is. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you, so much, for coming back on the podcast, Loretta. This is great. Loretta Mueller: Yeah. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Melissa Breau: And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll actually be back next week with our first non-FDSA interview. I'll be back with Laura VanArendonk Baugh. I pronounced that right, I'm pretty sure, and she's the author of Fired Up, Frantic, and Freaked Out, Training Crazy Dogs From Over-The-Top to Under Control, and Social, Civil, and Savvy, Training and Socializing Puppies to Become the Best Possible Dogs. Don't miss it. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.

Summary: In 2004 Barbara Currier and her husband Michael were relocated to Richmond, VA, where she began teaching agility at All Dog Adventures. It was there that Barbara was introduced to Susan Garrett and her amazing foundation-based training, centered around impulse control and relationship building with your dog.   She continues to train with some of the best handlers in the world and has implemented what she has learned from each of them into her training program. She became heavily involved in the OneMind Dogs handling method in 2014. She has successfully competed in agility with over 10 different breeds of dogs. Along the way, she started her own in home training and behavioral rehabilitation business. She was the trainer for Richmond Boxer Rescue and also assisted Southeastern Virginia Golden Retriever Rescue in assessing some of their dogs. Over the years, Barbara has worked extensively with many rescue organizations in numerous states. Barbara has also worked as an animal wrangler for Marvel's Ant-Man, 90 Minutes in Heaven, the TV series Satisfaction and various commercials. Today Barbara is the head dog trainer for the F.I.D.O Program run at Georgia Tech which creates wearable computing for military, SAR and service dogs. Links Party of 2 (PO2) - Barbara's Website F.I.D.O at Georgia Tech Next Episode:  To be released 10/13/2017, featuring Loretta Mueller to talk about managing a multi-dog household. 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 I'll be talking to Barbara Currier. In 2004, Barbara and her husband, Michael, were relocated to Richmond, VA, where she began teaching agility at All Dog Adventures. It was there that Barbara was introduced to Susan Garrett and her amazing foundation based training centered around impulse control and relationship building with your dog. She continues to train with some of the best handlers in the world and has implemented what she has learned, from each of them, into her training program. She became heavily involved in the OneMind Dogs handling method, in 2014. She successfully competed in agility with over ten different breeds of dogs. Along the way, she started her own in-home training and behavioral rehabilitation business. She was the trainer for Richmond Boxer Rescue, and also assisted Southeastern Virginia Golden Retriever Rescue and assessing some of their dogs. Over the years, Barbara has worked extensively with many rescue organizations in numerous states. Barbara has also worked as an animal wrangler for Marvel's Ant-Man, 90 Minutes in Heaven, the TV series, Satisfaction, and various commercials. Today Barbara is the head dog trainer for the FIDO Program, run at Georgia Tech, which creates wearable computing for military search and rescue service dogs. Hi, Barbara. Welcome to the podcast. Barbara Currier: Thanks for having me, Melissa. I'm really happy to be here. Melissa Breau: As a new FDSA instructor, I'm looking forward to getting to know you a little bit. Barbara Currier: Thank you. Melissa Breau: To start us out, do you want to just tell us a little bit about the dogs that you have now and what you're working on with them? Barbara Currier: Sure. I have four dogs, currently, two Border Collies, a Parson Russell Terrier, and a Miniature Poodle. My oldest is Piper. She is the Parson Russell Terrier. She's 8 years old. I got her when she was 2 years old. She belonged to a friend of mine, who passed away unexpectedly. We tried agility with her, but she didn't love it. She loved it when there was cheese around, but the moment the treats went away, it was more of, okay, I'll do it, but the love clearly wasn't there. She's also built like a typical terrier, so she's very front-end heavy. She's really straight in the shoulder, and I really struggled with keeping her sound. I specifically thought, when we would work weave poles and when we would do A-frame stuff, she was constantly coming up lame, and so I decided since she didn't particularly love it, and I, you know, didn't want to keep injuring her, that I would just find something else that she would like better, so one of the things that she's always loved is swimming, so I decided to try dock diving with her, and that is, truly, her love. We don't need to have cheese, or any type of treat, within a 50-mile radius and she will happily do her dock diving all day long, so that's been really fun. I have a Border Collie, Brazen. I have two Border Collies. Brazen is the oldest of the two, by a few months. She's 8 years old. I got her from a breeder, in Virginia, when she was 8 weeks old. Unfortunately, she has a lot of health problems, so she has not really been able to do any type of sport. She has some minor brain damage. The best way to describe her is, basically, she's like autistic. She doesn't deal well with any types of changes in her environment. She tends to be a self-mutilator, so when anything changes, like my neighbor parks his truck in a different part of his driveway, she'll rip the hair out of her body, so we've gotten that under control. It was really bad, when she was a puppy, but we've gotten it under control, but she doesn't handle any types of changes well, so she's happiest when she can just be at home, on the property, so we let her just do that. She also has a very severe case of Border Collie collapse, so she passes out whenever she has any type of hard exercise, even just playing frisbee, so we have to, kind of, keep that managed too, so unfortunately, she never really got to do any type of performance, but she's happy being at home and chilling and getting out and playing. We have five acres, completely fenced, so she gets plenty of room to run around, so that's, kind of, what she does. Blitz is my other Border Collie. He is also 8. I adopted him from Bimmer's Border Collie Rescue, in Virginia, when he was 10 months old. He just recently retired from agility due to, at 7, he tore his psoas and we rehabbed that for a year, and then, when he came back, he was sound for about two months, and then he injured his flexor tendon, and I felt like we were having progressive injuries, and that was not the way I wanted him to be in his later years. I wanted him to be able to enjoy life and do all of the things that he loves to do without constant rehabbing, so I made the decision to retire him from agility, about three months ago. It just seemed like that was the thing that kept injuring him, but everything else, in life, wasn't, so it just seemed like it was the right choice, and he's loving retirement. He's doing dock diving now. He's also my service dog. I am hypoglycemic, and he actually detects it about 30 minutes before I know anything is going to happen, and if I eat, then I don't have any episodes, so he is, kind of, my other half. He's just amazing.   Then my youngest is Miso. She is a Miniature Poodle. She is 3 years old, and I got her from a breeder in Florida, when she was 8 weeks, and actually waited for 10 years to get a puppy from her line, and she was worth every year I waited because she has been perfect since the moment she came home. She's been competing for about a year and a half now, in agility, and in her first year, of competing, she actually qualified for AKC Nationals, and she's, actually, the seventh ranking dog in the 12-inch division, in the country, and she's already been to two world team tryouts, and won round one of the FCI World Team tryout. She's already qualified for her second AKC Nationals. She's qualified for USDAA Cynosport, and she is one double q away from her MACH, and at this point she's only been trialing a year and a half, and I actually only trial about once a month because I am so busy, so she is pretty remarkable. Melissa Breau: Wow. That's impressive. Barbara Currier: Yeah. Yes. She is a super impressive little girl, so she's been really, really fun and we have a new puppy coming, in the fall, hopefully. Melissa Breau: Fingers crossed. Barbara Currier: Yeah. Yeah. It's all good. Melissa Breau: Yeah. So, how did you originally get started in all of this, in dog training and agility. I mentioned a little bit, kind of in the bio, I think 2004, right, so what kind of kicked things off? Barbara Currier: Well, in the late ‘90s, I adopted a 9 month old Chihuahua, named Cabal, from Chihuahua Rescue, and he was my first dog, as an adult, you know, we had dogs growing up, but he was my very first dog, and at the time I was technician at a veterinarian hospital and one of the technicians that I worked with, there, she bred and trained Belgian Tervurens and competed them in obedience and tracking, and so she started working with me on training dogs, and training for obedience and tracking, and I started, kind of, assisting with her and learning, kind of, the trade, and during our training we discovered that Cabal had a chemical imbalance, which made him, sort of, a challenge to train, so I'm kind of obsessive in anything I do, and I have to learn everything I can and be the best at everything I can, and so I became obsessive on learning about behavior training and how everything I could do to make him have the happiest, most well rounded, stable life, which we were quite successful at. He went on to compete in agility, and he did obedience and carting and climbed mountains all over the White Mountains, in New Hampshire, and taught me so much about dog training, and he really is what opened up the whole world of dog sports for me. Melissa Breau: So, what got you started, kind of, training positively? Was it that way from the beginning? What got you started on that part of your journey? Barbara Currier: Well, again, it kind of stemmed back to Cabal. When I started training him, it was, kind of, the old school method of the collar corrections, and there was always this nagging, in the back of my head of, you know, I'm collar correcting a six-pound Chihuahua. There's got to be a better way, and my background is in equestrian show jumping, and I trained horses for many years, and I was never a harsh physical trainer with my horses either, and I feel like training dogs and training horses is not entirely different, and agility and show jumping are not a lot different, in the way things need to be trained except agility is far less dangerous than show jumping, so that's always fun. So, I've always, kind of, wanted to have a bond with my animals and train my animals through trust and mutual respect. I don't want a relationship built out of fear and pain, so that's when I started looking into, you know, there's got to be more positive ways that I can train this dog without having to collar correct and do those types of physical corrections. Melissa Breau: How would you describe your training philosophy these days? Barbara Currier: I really like for my dogs to think of training as lots of games. So, again, I want my relationship to be, with them, a partnership that's based completely on trust, and so I want them to understand that, you know, if they get something wrong, not to shut down. You know, a mistake is just that didn't work, try something else, and so, to them, it's just a big puzzle that they're trying to figure out, so they never have a fear of, I'm going to be angry, or you know, they're going to get hurt in any way. It's just a big game, and it's a puzzle they're trying to figure out with lots of rewards throughout it. You know, every time I bring them out for any type of training, they're just all thinking that it's the most wonderful thing in the world, and that's how, I think, it should be, with any animal that you're training.    Melissa Breau: So, I have to say, kind of working on your bio, it seems like you've had the opportunity to do lots of different really interesting things, in the world of dogs, from animal wrangling to working on wearable computing, so I wanted to ask a little more about what you do now. Can you tell us just a little bit about the FIDO Program there, at Georgia Tech, and what you're working on with the dogs there? Barbara Currier: Sure. So, FIDO stands for Facilitating Interactions for Dogs with Occupations. My best friend, Dr. Melody Jackson, she's a professor there, at Georgia Tech, and she runs the brain lab and the animal computer interaction lab. She came up with the idea of creating wearable computing for service dogs, military dogs, police, search and rescue, any type of working dog, and she asked me to come on to oversee the dog training aspects of the work. Within the last year, I've been really busy with travel, and so I, actually, haven't been working a lot with them, on the project, and she's actually taking over most of the dog training aspect, the pilot testing, with her dog, but up to this point, a lot of the stuff that they've created, it's kind of funny, when I tell people what I do there, the team that creates all the stuff, it's Melody Jackson and her lab partner Thad Starner, they're brilliant people, and the students that all work there are super brilliant. I am not a techy person. I'm lucky if I can turn my computer on, I just train dogs, so I kind of compare it to like the big bang theory, and I'm Penny amongst all of these brilliant people, and they just say stuff and I'm like, that's great, just tell me what you want the dogs to do. That's, kind of, where my expertise is, and I don't have any idea what the technical aspect of it is, but we've, actually, created some really cool things. They've created a vest that a service dog is trained to activate that has a tug sensor on it, and so we had a woman come to us that had a speech problem where she doesn't have, she can't project her voice out very loudly, and she's also wheelchair bound, and she was at the dog park, one day, with her dog, and her wheelchair got stuck in some mud, and she couldn't holler to anybody because her voice just didn't project like that, and she really needed, like, a way that she could send her service dog to get help to come back, and you know, but a dog running up to somebody, at a dog park, barking, nobody is going to think that's anything unusual. So, they created a vest that has a computer on it, and the dog has a tug sensor, on the vest, so she can direct the dog to go to somebody, and the dog can go up and it will pull a tug sensor and the vest will actually say, excuse me, my handler needs assistance, please follow me, and the dog can bring that person back to the handler.   Melissa Breau: That's pretty cool. Barbara Currier: Yeah. It's super cool. So, my dog, Blitz, my Border Collie, Blitz, and Melody's Border Collie, Sky, are the two main test subjects for all of the stuff that we create. We have a few other dogs that we use consistently, but most of these things, like, we just bring in random people, and their dogs, to train everything, but Sky and Blitz, kind of, go through everything first, and we work all the bugs out on them. They've created a haptic bodysuit that allows handlers to communicate with SAR dogs from a distance, so, for instance, if a SAR dog is looking for a child with down syndrome, or autism, where they may be afraid of dogs, so a lot of times the SAR dogs will work at a very far distance from the handler, and they don't want the dogs to scare the person into running more. So, the SAR dogs can have like a camera on their vest, so when they find, whatever they're looking for, we have a computer that's on their vest that they can activate their GPS, so it sends out exactly where their location is, but then the owner can give the dog commands through this haptic vest that has vibrating sensors, in different parts of the dog's bodies, and each sensor vibrating, on a certain part of the body, means something, so, like, when the sensor vibrates on the back, that means lie down, so the handler can then vibrate the back sensor that tells the dog to lie down and stay, but the handler can be, you know, 20, 30, 40 feet away, so that's been really fun to work with that. We've taught dogs how to use large touchscreens, so for like hearing dogs, in the house, a lot of times, they don't wear vests, and so when a hearing dog hears something, they just go to their handler and they need to take them to the source of the sound, but sometimes we don't want them to take them to the source of the sound, like a tornado siren or a fire alarm, so we've created a large touchscreen that the dogs can differentiate the sounds, and they can actually go to the touch screen and detect fire alarm, and hit that, and like if the handler is wearing something that's called Google Glass, it will show up in the Google Glass that the fire alarm is going off, or if the doorbell is ringing, maybe the handler just doesn't want to get up and answer it, so the dog can actually differentiate the sounds and tell them, by using, it's like a giant iPad, exactly what sensor is going off. Melissa Breau: Interesting. Barbara Currier: Yeah. It's been really fun to watch the dogs be able to do all of these amazing things, and it's been really fun to watch the students say, do you think a dog can do this? I'm like, sure they can, and they do. I mean, it's just amazing what dogs can do. Melissa Breau: So, what about your experience animal wrangling? Do you want to share a little bit about that work? Barbara Currier: Yeah. I don't do it anymore. It's, honestly, not as glamourous as it sounds. Some of it's fun, some of it, not so much. It depends on, you know, the set you're working on, like the TV series, Satisfaction was super fun to work on, the people were really great. That was with my friend's dog. The producers were really great, but like the movies aren't always so fun to work on because the days are really, really long, and a lot of these people have no idea what it means to train animals, and so they, kind of, think that they're little computers and you can just program in whatever you want, and just change it, on the fly, and the dogs should just automatically know how to do it. It just can be a little frustrating sometimes, and so I did it for about two years and got burned out pretty quickly. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Now I know that, I kind of mentioned, in the bio, a little bit about Susan Garrett, and I know that you have been able to work with a lot of different excellent handlers, in the agility world, so I wanted to ask a little bit about how working with those professionals has experienced and shaped your training. Barbara Currier: Well I have been lucky to work with some of the most amazing dog trainers, in the world, and I have to say, I've learned something from every trainer I've ever worked with. I'm a firm believer that there's always somebody out there that can teach us something, and the day that we feel that people don't know more than we do, then our education stops, and so I, for one, always want to keep learning and evolving, in my dog training, so even if I go and I take away one thing, from a weekend seminar, well that's one thing that I didn't have going into it, so, to me, it's just worth it. Melissa Breau: For those not familiar with OneMind Dog handling, specifically, do you mind just briefly, kind of, explaining what it is? Barbara Currier: Sure. The OneMind Dog handling, it's a handling method that's based on how dogs naturally respond to our physical cues, and what works best, from the dog's perspective, so it basically teaches us to speak the dog language instead of trying to force dogs to understand us, so a lot of the handling comes very, very natural to the dogs and takes little to no training. It's mostly just training the humans to learn how to speak to the dog, but the dog's, right from the beginning, really understand it quite well. I love when I'm working with a student, and I tell them to do something, and they're like, I don't think my dog's going to do that, and I say, if you do this, they will, and then the dogs do, and they're like, wow. I didn't know my dog could do that. Melissa Breau: So, the real question is, who's harder to train, the students or the dogs? Barbara Currier: Always the students. The dogs are easy. Melissa Breau: What was it that, kind of, originally attracted you to OMD? Barbara Currier: Well Blitz was 4 years old, when I got introduced to OneMind, and I was really struggling with Blitz, and I was having a very hard time. Our cue rate was extremely low. He was a very, very fast dog. He was very obstacle focused, and I just was really, really struggling with him, and I had never had a dog that I struggled that hard with. I've always been a very successful agility handler, and I was just really starting to doubt myself, and then I was introduced, I went to a seminar, I was introduced into the OneMind system, and immediately it was like Blitz was saying, oh, thank you. Finally, somebody is going to help her. It kind of just like came into place, and after one seminar, I went to a trial, that weekend, wear we hadn't cued in months, I think we came home with four cues, in one weekend, which was unheard of, for us, and that was after one seminar, so then I was really hooked, and then Jaakko and Janita, who are the founders, of OneMind, they did a tour, in the United States, a few years back, and they asked to come to my school, and so we hosted them, and they ended up staying with us. We hosted them for a weekend, and then they had like three weeks off between our place and where they were going next, and so we said, why don't you just stay here, and we'll show you around Georgia, and take you hiking, so they stayed and insisted on working with us every day to thank us for our hospitality, and so having three weeks of pure immersion into the OneMind system, I was completely hooked, and the difference that it made, in Blitz, was just out of control, and Miso is the first dog I've ever had that was trained, from day one, with the OneMind handling system, and the difference in her skill level, going out to start competing and the difference in any dog that I've ever had, has been night and day, and so I just was hook, line, and sinker sucked in. Melissa Breau: So, I want to talk a little bit about the class you have coming up, that kind of include some of those handling methods, so it's called Making It Easy, 12 Commonly Used OneMind Dog Inspired Techniques. Can you just share a little bit about what you will cover in that class? Barbara Currier: Sure. So, the OneMind handling system has 30 different handling techniques, and for the average person, who does AKC, USDAA, you're not going to use all 30 handling techniques. You'll use a lot more as you start getting into the international type handling, but this course will cover the 12 most commonly used techniques that people are going to use weekend to weekend, at their local trials. Melissa Breau: So, what are some of the, I guess, the common sticking points, for handlers, looking to teach those skills. How do you problem solve for some of those issues? Barbara Currier: Basically, one of the things that I see handlers struggle with the most is maintaining connection with their dogs while looking where they need to be going. So, dogs seek out connection with our face, when we're running, and if they can't find that connection, with our face, depending on the dog, they can have different reactions. Some dogs will just stop running through the obstacles and just try to drive around and curl in front of you, to search for your face, some will start dropping bars, some will just find a line and take it, so if we're not connected with our dogs, we also can't see whether they're committing to the correct obstacles and when we need to execute their turn signals, but our body wants us to, through self-preservation, look where we're going, so the hardest thing, for students, is to learn how to run forward, with your head looking back, and be connected with your dog, and see where you're going out of your peripheral vision, so I teach my students to basically go out and get used to running a course while looking behind you, and using your peripheral vision, because everybody has it, but again, it's kind of a brain training thing that the more you use it, the stronger it gets. When I first started doing it, I kind of saw blurry objects, in my peripheral, but I was never comfortable to run a whole course that way, where the more I went out and just practiced running a course, without my dog, and the stronger my peripheral vision got, so I can run full courses now and not worry about running into things, while staying strongly connected to my dogs, so that's probably the thing that I see most people struggle with, and my little games that I've created to help that seems to really help them with that. Melissa Breau: Do you want to talk just, maybe, a little more about which of the OneMind Dog handling techniques are, kind of, included in your class? I know you said the 12 most commonly used ones, but what are some of those? Barbara Currier: So, in the first week, we're going to start off with the most common handling technique that everybody knows, but a lot of people, actually, execute incorrectly, which is the front cross, so everybody probably knows that, but it's also one of the most commonly misused and done incorrectly, so we're tackling that right off the bat, and then we'll move into the forced front cross. Then, into week two, we address the Jaakko Turn and the reverse spin. Melissa Breau: So, for somebody not agility, like, savvy, what is that, the Jaakko turn? Barbara Currier: The Jaakko turn kind of takes the place of the traditional Post Turn, so in the traditional Post Turn as we're rotating around. Our chest laser is opened up to tall of these obstacles that we don't want our dog to take, so as we're rotating our dog, saying, is it that obstacle, is it that obstacle, is it that obstacle, and it's not until we actually get to where we want to go that we say, no, no, it's this one. Where the Jaakko Turn, we get the collection, at the jump, but the dog actually goes around behind our back, so our chest never opens up to all the obstacles we don't want, it's only going to be driving straight to the one obstacle we do want, so it's a really good technique for dogs that are super obstacle focused and really like to scope out lines on their own.   Then the next technique we'll tackle, in week two, is the Reverse Spin, which is, basically, it, sort of, looks like a Jaakko, but it doesn't get you as tight collection as a Jaakko. Your exit line is different, but it's a really good handling move to use if you, say your dog is on a pinwheel, and you want the first and the third jump but not the second jump, out on the pinwheel. By doing a reverse spin, you're going to change the dog's exit line and it's going to create collection for the dog, so you will not get that jump out on their natural path because you created a turn with more collection. It's kind of hard to explain without looking at a map, but. Melissa Breau: Yeah, but still. Barbara Currier: Then, in week three, we're going to look at the Reverse Wrap, which is a tight turn off of the backside of a jump, and Rear Cross, which is another one most everybody is familiar with but often done incorrectly. Week four we will look at a Lap Turn, which is a U-shaped turn that the dog turn happens on the flat, and I use Lap Turns so often, in pulling my dog to, if we're on a course, and the course is sending the dog to the tunnel, but the judge has nicely picked the offside tunnel, for the opening, Lap Turns work so great for that. I also, often, Lap Turn my dog into weave poles, on AKC courses, so that's a great one, and then we're going to move into the Double Lap, which is a Lap Turn to a Front Cross, and create the very tight O-shape turn, on a wing, for a dog. Week five we'll look at the Whisky Turn, which is a very shallow Rear Cross, and we are going to work on the Blind Cross, which I think is one of the most fantastic moves ever, for so many people, especially people that have knee issues because you don't have to deal with rotation, and it keeps you going forward on the line, but there are appropriate places to put Blind Crosses and places where a Front Cross would be a better choice, but not a lot of people understand. Then, week six, we'll work on the German Turn, which is a backside, it's a little hard to explain, it's a backside, almost like to a Serpentine into a Blind Cross, and that's a really fun one to do, and I actually use that one quite a bit, in premiere courses, and kind of the tournament classes in the USDAA classes. Then the Tandem Turn, which is a turn away from the handler, for the dog, on the flat, and that's a really good turn to have if you are on a straightway and you're having trouble getting down, in front of your dog, to do a turn, a Tandem Turn is a really, really handy move to have, especially when it's a straight line to a back side and you just know you're not beating your dog down that line. Melissa Breau: So, it sounds like you're definitely going to cover, kind of, the how to do all of these things. Are you also talking a little bit about when to use each of them, in the course? Barbara Currier: Yes. So, the course will be broken down to, step by step, how to train, on one jump, and then I'm giving them short sequences of three to eight obstacles, where they're going to see where this could fit into a course. Melissa Breau: Is there anything else you think the students, who are kind of trying to decide their classes, because this will go out during October registration, so anything else that students should, maybe, know if they're considering the class? Barbara Currier: Well I think it's important that, you know, and I put in there the pre-requisite for Loretta's class, because this isn't going to be the class where you are going to learn how to sequence one or two obstacles. The dogs, coming in, should know how to do, you know, at least eight obstacles in a row, just meaning jumps and a tunnel, so as long as they have a firm understanding of that, and I would assume that, coming in, they know what a Front Cross is and they know what a Rear Cross is. Beyond that, the other ones are all, you know, not ones that I would expect them to know coming in. Some people may know them, the other stuff, but I would, kind of, hope that everybody knows what a Front Cross and a Rear Cross is because those are the basics and everything, kind of, builds off of those. Melissa Breau: Okay. Excellent. We're getting close to, kind of, the end here, so I want to ask you the three questions that I always as, at the end of an interview. The first one, and I think some of my guests would say this is, probably, the hardest question, but what is the dog related accomplishment that you are proudest of? Barbara Currier: You know, I'm probably proudest of my school, Party of 2. I have a really large student base, here in Georgia, and I am so lucky to have the best students. They are just the greatest group of people, and they always want to push themselves to be better. I throw the craziest stuff at them. If I find a comfort level, I'm always looking how to push people out of it, and they are always willing to rise to the challenge, and they are so supportive of each other. We're like a big, giant family, and everybody is always willing to help anyone out, and I just love it. I'm just super proud of all of my students, at my school. Melissa Breau: Excellent. What is the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Barbara Currier: Oh, that's easy. Comparison is the thief of joy, is the best training advice I have ever had, and I remind myself that often. So, basically, not compare yourself to other dog trainers, your dog to other dogs, your dog to your dog's litter mates, or your friend's dog, or your trainer's dogs because, then, it overshadows any progress or triumphs that you made because you're always comparing it to somebody else, and it never feels like enough. Melissa Breau: Then, our last one, here, is who is someone else, in the dog world, that you look up to? Barbara Currier: That's a tough one. I'm not sure I can only pick one. I've have the longest training relationship with my mentor and coach, Tracy Sklenar. She's been my coach for over 10 years, but since I've become involved with OneMind, Jen Pinder and Mary Ellen Barry have been instrumental in my progression and mastering the OneMind handling system, so I would have to say it would be those three amazing, talented ladies that are at the top of my list. Melissa Breau:  Fair enough. Well thank you, so much, for coming on the podcast, Barbara. This has been great. Barbara Currier: Thank you, so much, for having me. I really enjoyed myself. Melissa Breau: Good. Thank you, so much, to our listeners, for tuning in. We'll be back next week, with Loretta Mueller to talk about managing a multi-dog household. As someone who just brought home dog number two, I'm looking forward to talking about skills we can learn and teach our dogs to make life go a little smoother. Don't miss it. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.

Summary: Donna Hill has had a lifelong love affair with dogs and is fascinated with dog behavior. She has broad practical experience in the dog world, volunteering in working in kennels and shelters, dog sitting and walking, fostering rescue dogs, teaching behavior modification privately, and teaching reactive dog classes. She also has a background in zoology and teaching. She stays current in dog behavior in learning by regularly attending seminars by top trainers and researchers, however she is probably best known for her YouTube videos. She's active locally as co-founder and professional member of Vancouver Island Animal Training Association and the founder and instructor for the Service Dog Training Institute. With her own dogs and other pets Donna loves to apply learning theory to teach a wide variety of sports, games, tricks and other activities such as cycling and service dog tasks. She loves using shaping to get new behaviors. Her teaching skill is keeping the big picture in mind while using creativity to define the small steps to help the learner succeed. That is to say she is a splitter. Donna has competed in agility, flyball, and Rally-O and teaches people to train their own service dogs. Links Donna's Youtube channel - Supernatural BC 2008 Donna's Youtube channel - Supernatural BC 2009 20 Crate Rest Activities (Video) Service Dog Training Institute Website Next Episode:  To be released 10/5/2017, featuring Barbara Currier to talk about agility training and handling and I'll ask her about her work with Georgia Tech which is creating wearable computing devices for military search and rescue and service dogs. 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 Donna Hill. Donna has had a lifelong love affair with dogs and is fascinated with dog behavior. She has broad practical experience in the dog world, volunteering in working in kennels and shelters, dog sitting and walking, fostering rescue dogs, teaching behavior modification privately, and teaching reactive dog classes. She also has a background in zoology and teaching. She stays current in dog behavior in learning by regularly attending seminars by top trainers and researchers, however she is probably best known for her YouTube videos. I'll include a link to her YouTube channels in the shadows so listeners can check her out. She's active locally as co-founder and professional member of Vancouver Island Animal Training Association and the founder and instructor for the Service Dog Training Institute. With her own dogs and other pets Donna loves to apply learning theory to teach a wide variety of sports, games, tricks and other activities such as cycling and service dog tasks. She loves using shaping to get new behaviors. Her teaching skill is keeping the big picture in mind while using creativity to define the small steps to help the learner succeed. That is to say she is a splitter. Donna has competed in agility, flyball, and rally O and teaches people to train their own service dogs. Hi Donna welcome to the podcast. Donna Hill: Thanks for having me! Melissa Breau: I am looking forward to it. So to get us started out, do you want to just tell us a little bit about your dogs and what you're working on with them now? Donna Hill: Okay. Let's start with Jessie. She's my little German shepherd mix possibly min pin believe it or not. She's 10 1/2 right now and we got her at seven months old from the local city pound. She is doing a public presentation with me next week, so I'm actually currently acclimating her to the new location and we're practicing the known behaviors in the new environment. It's really important that I do this in particular with her, more so than just doing with any dog, because she has a really fearful nature and she needs a lot more support than say your typical dog, whatever that might be. So we tend to spend a lot more time in acclimating with her. My border collie/vizsla mix, Lucy, is actually nine years old today! “Happy Birthday Lucy!” Melissa Breau: Happy birthday! Donna Hill: Yeah! We're working on discriminating cues for sound alerts. Yesterday we were up at a campsite at a lake (that's not very far from our house) and we were working on discriminating a sound alert, which is a nudge behavior. She nudges her nose to my knee. Then the cue for it is actually a knock. I can knock on anything and that becomes the cue for her to run over to me and push her nose against my knee. So one of the discriminations that we have to do is to find my car! The car has a similar behavior in that I tell her “Go find car.” and she takes me to find the car and nose nudges or nose tap targets near the handle of the door.  Because they're so similar behaviors and especially if I'm standing close, she needs to learn what's the difference. Which one is she having to target depending on the cue? That was what we were doing in the distraction level of the campsite environment.  Actually, the other thing we're working on with her too, was working on a “Forward” cue which is using a mobility harness.  You teach the dog to actually put some pressure forward to help people with say knee issues or just balance issues. That forward momentum really helps people as they're moving forward, so we were also working on generalizing that as well. We like doing stuff from all over the map! (laughing) Melissa Breau: So I know you mentioned in your bio that you've kind of been involved, you've lived with dogs all your life, but how did you specifically get into training and dog sports a little bit, like how did that part start? Donna Hill: Okay. Well training started way back. I remember when I had a basset hound as a kid. I taught her to pull me on the toboggan and also run beside me on the bicycle. Now for a basset hound, that's not…neither one are very typical behaviors, (laughing) and they're not known to be particularly trainable, but I don't remember how I did it but I managed to do it. Especially sitting behind the dog and getting the dog to pull forward. I actually don't even remember how I did it. But she was doing it and it was great fun for me! (laughing) I was about ten I think when that happened.  I remember ticking my brother off when I was teaching his little lab cross to retrieve, and he was hoping to have her as a hunting dog (and I mean she was all of about 30 pounds, this little lab mix,) and instead of teaching her to come back and retrieve and sit on my side, I would actually sit cross-legged on the ground and she would come and sit in my lap. (laughing). So my brother was not very happy with me. And so for the more formal sport stuff, it sort of came later. I had a number of generations of dogs that we went through. My dachshund which I'll tell you about a little bit later, and then along came this amazing dog. He was a Dalmatian/springer mix and honest to goodness I think he was half-human! He was just an amazing dog and we had an instant bond! He was definitely MY dog and he was just so smart! You know, I would try things two and three times and by the third time he'd kind of look at me like “Really? I'm not stupid Mom! I got it.”  He was really, really quick. He'd pick behaviors up so fast! He was, you know, one of those dogs that makes you look really good as a trainer, so of course I thought I was a great trainer. (Laugh) Of course, looking back I go “Yeah! No! It was all Ollie. It wasn't me!” Well I guess some of it was me, but you know mostly it was him. He loved doing all kinds of stuff so we started with fly ball because that was one of the first dog sports that mixed breeds could actually participate in. The interesting thing was he didn't like retrieving! In my interpretation, he thought retrieving was for dumb dogs! So he was “No. We're not doing that!” but because we took it and he had to do it in order to be competitive (he was incredibly competitive), and he HAD to win against other dogs! So we used the competitive nature of the sport to teach him to retrieve and he was awesome! He was in the top levels, I forget the numbers whether it was one or five, but they had five different class levels according to speed and he was in the fastest category and he was really good. And if he sensed that another dog might potentially be beating him, he would just turn on the speed as much as he possibly could to make sure that he won! He was just that kind of dog. I've never had seen a dog like him. He was a lot of fun! He also had a really stylized high jump too, where he would like do this exaggerated jump about three feet high over an eighteen-inch jump. It's totally hilarious to watch him! So I started from there. That's kind of where we went. We put our golden at the time as well into flyball. She did really well, although she was slow. She was at the other end of the category she was the slowest category, but she was very consistent. Then from there, I just started dabbling in rally obedience because that popped up at the time. As more and more sports kind of came, that's where I started getting more involved. Not at a really high level… I like the training aspect more than I like the competing part and so for me the competition was more of a goal. You know, “Can we enter this?” or “Maybe I might think about doing that one day. Let's train towards that?” If we never actually compete, I don't care. It's all fun because I just like the training part of it. So that's kind of where that all came from. (laughing) Melissa Breau: At what point did you really start looking at positive training specifically? What got you started focusing on positive training? Donna Hill: Well I wasn't really aware that there were different kinds of training or different approaches to training. At home, we just sort of did our own thing. I actually never took any formal training classes until I was about fifteen and I had my little daxie mix. She was six months old. At the time you had to wait until the dog was six months old to take it to classes. And of course once we did, then we realized why. Because the classes were so punitive, the dog had to be six months of age or you'd actually break the spirit. So we dutifully took her. There'd been a change in our life. I had moved from the Midwest area of Canada to the West coast with my mom and dad, leaving three siblings behind in the city. So we also left the dog I told you about, my brother's dog, with him because he was old enough that he could stay there as well. Anyway, so Dad decided we were getting a new dog and he marched me off to this litter of dachshund puppies (unbeknownst to my mom). That was my classic dad who was constantly bringing dogs home without letting Mum know. (laughing) So with five kids, we always usually had at least two dogs around. Anyway, we got this little dog and marched her off to training class. We'd never ever taken any of our dogs to training class before, but we thought “Well, you know this is a new dog and the classes are new!” and okay. So we took her to this this class and let's just say that force- based behaviors and training didn't work with her independent nature. (laughing) She's got a really good oppositional reflex. (laughing) So after the end of class she graduated ninth out of twelve dogs for her, shall we say, lack of obedience! (laughing) She never did learn how to do a recall because I never figured out how to do it positively. So the ironic thing that I kind of looked at later though was at home I was able to teach her more than 35 tricks! and she did them enthusiastically and eagerly! and I was like “Okay this is really interesting! Hmmm. ” So that was her. You know, I just kind of dabbled and played and as I said I was a teen and I went off to university and we'd never had any problems with any of our other dogs, so I was like “Okay, what gives here?” So that started the ball rolling to kind of down the positive way. Then of course once I got my Ollie dog I told you about, my dog of a lifetime. He was a very sensitive boy and I realized that I could not use some harsh methods. We enrolled him in classes too. Some of the methods they were using were again, not so positive. (Sighing) One of the things I remember distinctly with him was a recall.  The teacher had us put him on a long line and if we called him and he didn't come, we were to back up and pop really hard twice on the long line and then just keep backing up until he came towards you and got to the point where you could grab his collar. And I did this all of twice. The second time, I looked at him and he was so much in a hurry to get to me the second time, that he crammed himself at me as soon as he knew that pop was coming, he ran as fast as he could and he crammed himself right against my legs (almost knocking me over in his effort to get to me). But I could see it was in fear. It wasn't that he wanted to come to me. It was that he was scared he was getting popped.  I thought “You know what? I can't do this to you!”His nature was that I just couldn't do that! and then I went, “You know what? We're not using that.” So we continued going to classes. I just chose not to use the methods that the instructor told us. I found other ways to go and then down the road we found a second level class which actually started using food. “Oh my God! They actually used food in training classes!” and from there I had him…He was a dyed-in-the-wool puller on leash, and to him, the leash was a cue to pull. That's exactly the way he saw it. So when we trained him using the food, heeling beside me without a leash, he was awesome because the leash was no longer the cue.  He was like, “Oh you want me to stay right beside you. No problem! This is cool!” And it used his brain, which is what he liked doing. So, it was just the whole shift at that point. I started going “Okay, let's use some more positive methods. I don't need to use punitive methods to communicate with my dogs and I never liked using it anyway.”  It just felt bad to me. But of course, you know you're young, you're impressionable and you're following the instructors because they supposedly know what they're talking about. I discovered on my own that you don't need to use that stuff. You can you can use lots of positive stuff and communicate with your dog. Tell them what you want to do before they're going to do it and they are happy to comply. They just want to do and be with you and do stuff with you! Melissa Breau: What about now? How would you describe your training philosophy today? Donna Hill: It's always evolving. I'm really eclectic and I take things from different disciplines. I'm really interested in the more cognitive aspects of training. I see dogs as being very thinking animals. I really like that part of them. To me that's how I develop the relationship so I look at how they problem solve and how they try and communicate. I really like the to “Do as I Do” philosophy or approach. Mimicry is something that I've always kind of played with, even with my current dogs that I have now. I notice that Lucy is really good about mimicking Jessie and I've actually used that to train her some behaviors. I really like the idea that dogs are able to use modifiers. So things like left and right, they can recognize colors by name, shapes. They can count. They can do so many more things than we ever dreamt of when I was a kid, that we never even thought of thinking! Do they do this? Can they do that? So that really is what intrigued me, so the more of the cognitive kind of stuff comes out and the neurological kind of stuff comes out, I just yum that right up and that's what I'm incorporating more and more into what I do. But basically, I see that they learn in the same way that humans do. In humans we learn in many, many different ways, so depending on the dog their predominant way of learning might be one way, and another dog might have a different way of learning. So I try and learn what those are and then cater to that the dog's needs using those. Melissa Breau: So I wanted to ask you a little more about the service dog work, that piece of what you do. How did you get started down that road? Donna Hill: Okay that's a great question! That actually started with Jessie my current dog when she was young and I still had my senior golden. Ollie had just passed away, but I was doing rally obedience with my golden and I decided that I was going to be using positive methods if I could at all with Jessie, and so I started with the clicker with her and she took to it really well. My golden took to it really well and I just started playing with it.  I had thought that my golden was actually ready to trial in rally obedience until I found Sue Ailsby's original “Training Levels Program”, and I worked right from scratch through that. It was actually exactly what I was looking for! I was looking for a structured program to help me learn how to clicker train and how to work with my dogs and learn all of the concepts behind it and it was perfect!So I just worked my senior dog through until she passed away and Jessie, of course I worked her right almost to the end of the level seven. We were about halfway through level seven.  Because of Jesse's level of fears we weren't able to actually get some of the generalized stuff out there, but we were able to get a lot of them done and so I started to doing that. Then once I started playing around with teaching her just tasks, just for fun, I mean that's how it started, it was like “Oh! Let's train her to shut the door and open the door and you know do this kind of stuff.” Once I realized how easy it was and how ANYBODY could do it because the click is really the communication. You didn't need to have a force. You didn't need to have strength. You didn't have to use your lowered voice that we were always taught in class. Anybody could use it, right? I thought “Well! Wow this is really cool! This could be applied towards training service dogs.” and that's actually when I started my YouTube channel.  I thought “I got to get this out there so that other people can see how easy it is and they can train their own service dog.” Service dog training to me was always a mystery and it was really fascinating! I'd grown up around people that had guide dogs and a lot of people with disabilities and I really didn't know how to train them or how that I could help other people with disabilities, so when everything… all the dots fell in line, I went, “Oh cool! I can do this and I can get out there and I can help other people. This is so awesome!” (laughing) So that's my mantra. I really like helping people and that's my “AHA” moment when someone gets something because I was able to explain it to them, that's my reinforcer. That's what keeps me going every day. I see someone going “Yes, I got it!” and I'm thinking “Yes. That's me. Woohoo! I helped someone do that.” I also love my feedback. Yeah. (laughing) Melissa Breau: That's awesome. So you do a lot of different types of training right, so I imagine the stuff like behavior modification of the service dog stuff is very different from the reactive dog classes you offer, and I wanted to see how having experience at those different ends of the spectrum has really influenced your training overall. Donna Hill: -I am a big picture kind of person. I like seeing the big picture at the end -what is the final goal that I'm going to do? I like to see where the animal is starting and then the puzzle for me is figuring out how to get there. You know, what is the little roadmap, the little steps and whether it's ten steps or a hundred steps is going to get me from the beginning to the end. Sometimes, of course, along the way you're thrown in a fear period in the service dog, or you know just a regular pet dog as well. Sometimes there's aggression issues come up because some trauma happened to the dog. So those kinds of things definitely throw a wrench in it, but again it's all part of that big picture. So if I have those little pieces that I can pull together and realize this is where the dog is at this particular point, instead of going along my nice little line of a map or my plan. Of course, as you know dog training is never a linear progression. It always goes all over the place. It's like the piece of string that somebody drops on the floor. When we hit one of those parts or one of those events then I know, “Ah, okay! Time for lateral training!” or “Time for stepping right out of the training altogether, going back and doing some really basic stuff where there's desensitization or counter conditioning or operant training to help the dog overcome whatever that thing is” before we can continue on with my linear training that I have planned out on paper or in my head depending on what it is that we're working on. I think in that way, it really gives me flexibility to be able to jump wherever I need to jump because it's the dog that's sitting right in front of me and that's where they're at and that's what we need to deal with. Melissa Breau: I want to talk a little bit about the YouTube videos. I know one of the ones that I see come up all the time and get shared all the time in different Facebook groups, I've even posted, I saw a couple of times is the video you have on tricks you can teach a dog that's on crate rest. Do you mind just talking a little bit about that, and for those listening I will share a link directly to that video in the show notes if you don't want to go searching for it. But yeah, if you could talk about that Donna. Donna Hill: Okay when making my YouTube videos, I tend to look for trends so I look at what is already out there and I look at what's missing and that was one of the pieces that I found missing. I was noticing that there seemed to be a lot of people out there whose dogs were having cruciate ligament issues or just issues that really confine them to a crate for long periods of time, and that can be really hard to deal with for a lot of people. So I thought oh, well there's a hole. You know there's no one has ever shown what kinds of things you can do with a dog that's on crate rest because most of the stuff that's out there is very active- oriented right? So that's just kind of where that came from was, you know there's a need and I try and fill it. Again it's me trying to help people learn what they can do with their dogs. Melissa Breau: So I know one of the big things that you know your classes seem to have in common, is an emphasis on observation skills and I know even in your bio on the actual FDSA site you kind of mentioned that, so I wanted to ask why being able to watch your dog and accurately read their body language is so important, and to ask you to talk a little bit about the role that doing that plays in training. Donna Hill: Okay. Well I think observation skills has been a hugely underplayed skill in training dogs until fairly recently. It's absolutely key to be able to SEE the behaviors, because if you can't see them then you have no idea how to interpret what the dog is doing. So if you're not seeing some subtle stuff and you just see your dog going along, you may think “Oh well, the dog's doing fine!” when in fact actually there are some really subtle behaviors that are telling the dog is not so fine. There's some you know, there's subtle stuff going on and of course subtle stuff usually escalates if it's not dealt with. So by learning the really subtle stuff you can get in there early on and the dog doesn't have to get to the level of stress where it's really obvious so that you can deal with it and then that helps them in actually learning. One of the other reasons that I do have such a heavy emphasis on that is because my previous career, I was a nature interpreter, or a “naturalist” most people call it, and what a naturalist does is teaches people how to observe nature. So I had a long history of teaching people about how to observe, mostly it was nature so animals, plants, things like that, you know watching the birds, that kind of stuff. But it's just a natural translation to watching dogs because dogs are part of nature in my view. You know they're animals.  They have behaviors and I've always been fascinated with their behaviors so it just seemed a natural extension to me to say “Okay. Let's start teaching people about observation skills!” “Let's look at the dog, what behaviors are we seeing, you know and how does that relate to training and how does that impact training? What information can they give us? So are they relaxed and able to learn? Are they excited about what we're doing with them? Are they frustrated? Are they making mistakes or are they stressed about something in the environment?”  By observing them and in context, and that's a big piece of it is what's happening in the context around the dog, that combination allows us to interpret what's happening for the dog. So knowing that helps us to adjust the pace of training, how far we need to break down what we're doing to help them to succeed. Or maybe the dog's just zooming right through and we can make the steps bigger to add more of a challenge for that particular dog. So yeah, so it really affects training in a big way and I am so thrilled that we're seeing now more and more, particularly on Facebook, people incorporating videotapes of dogs and saying, “Oh you know, have a look! What behaviors do you see?” That's such a critical skill which is separate from the interpretation part of it, where then we kind of try and make our best guess about what is going on for the dog. But without those observation skills we wouldn't even be able to see or make good interpretations anyway. So it's a really important part of it. Melissa Breau: So I want to dive a little bit further into your classes at FDSA. So I know that for those listening this will air I think during registration for October. I think it opens the 22nd, so I think this will be after that I hope I'm not lying. Anyway, so I know that you have two classes coming up in October. One is The Body Awareness For Competition Precision Behaviors, and the other is The Elusive Hand-Delivered Retrieve. I want to start with the body awareness class. Why is body awareness an important skill for a competition dogs? Donna Hill: Well knowing where their body is in space and how to move it is what makes the difference between a performance that's amazing to watch and one that's sloppy. Most dogs don't have much clue that they even have a back end. Their front end walks along and they might have some sort of awareness, you know their nose, their muzzle certainly, their front paws, they're really useful for digging at things and touching things. But the vast majority of dogs have no clue that they have a back end and it just sort of follows along, you know the front left foot comes forward and then the back right foot comes forward and they just kind of do this opposition as they walk. But they're not really that aware. But once we start teaching them that yes, not only do they have a front end, they also have a back end and they also have hips and they also have shoulders and they have chest, and they can move each piece of that body separately, that really starts putting it together for them. So you get, you get a gawky kid right? They know they're a gawky kid. They're not that coordinated. Once they start to isolate each one of their body parts, so they work on their hands, and they work on their head, and they work on their feet, and they work on their body core and how to move that, once they have individual knowledge of all of those, then the whole package comes together and they move much better as a whole package, and they become much more graceful. And so just like dogs, they become more graceful athletes who perform with speed, precision and confidence. So that's kind of the fundamental idea behind the body awareness classes. Melissa Breau: And for people listening I did double check while Donna was answering that. Registration is currently open when you hear this. So, it opened last week so you can go to the site and register if you are so inclined. So Donna how do you approach teaching body awareness in the class itself? Donna Hill: Okay, well I just break it down into the separate parts of the body. So we're looking at some specific behaviors. One is a chin rest which also translates to a whole bunch of other behaviors like a chin rest can be turned into teaching a hold for a retrieve. It can be taught for a placement of the retrieve where the dog comes back and delivers it to you, and most of the behaviors do translate into other into specific behaviors for competition, but which is why I've chosen them. Muzzle pokes are another thing so the dog is very aware of where they're putting their muzzle so they can poke it through your fingers, they can poke it through a hoop, they can poke it into a yogurt container- those kinds of things and are comfortable doing so, which also gives them more confidence. Like Jessie for example did not like putting her head into anything, so one of the easiest ways I found was actually to use the yogurt containers, and just put some yogurt in the bottom and she would stick her head happily in at the bottom to lick it up. That really built up confidence of facial awareness and you know that kind of stuff. So that's the kind of stuff we're going to be doing in class. Shoulder, hip, and chest targets, and the other thing we're also going to look at is how to fine tune balance. So if we can get them on like a balance beam and actually teach them how to how to place their feet so that they're not falling off or they're not having to use one foot on the ground and three feet on the balance beam, so that they gain confidence in actually balancing. And that was the one thing with both of my dogs that I really found helped was to build that confidence on narrow surfaces. That in turn of course, once they can do it on a narrow surface while walking on a regular surface and actually moving with precision is much, much easier. In the class, we use the success of approximation and shaping to get the behaviors. Melissa Breau: Very nice. Well I want to also talk about the retrieve class a little bit. I know that's something a lot of people struggle with. Why do you think so many people have a hard time teaching retrieves? Donna Hill: I think most people have an expectation that the dog would just do it, because there's a lot of breeds like the retriever breeds, goldens, labs, flat coats, that have a natural retrieve and look so easy. They make it look so easy because it's bred into them. But what they don't realize is that most dogs that does not come naturally. There's a series, a chain of events, that they do called motor patterns, and the retrieve doesn't really fit in there because most dogs end the motor pattern with either a bite or a consume. Well most dogs don't consume, but some will certainly do a grab bite at the very end. That does not involve picking it up and carrying it anywhere or bringing it back to a person. So what the mistake they make is they toss the ball out, and the dog of course will happily chase it because chasing is part of the prey drive, and then the dog often will lose interest because once the ball stops moving, it's like “Oh yeah. Okay. Whatever.” and they can't do anything with it. So they either drop it and walk away from it or maybe they'll carry it away and play with it, but they certainly won't bring it back. The most common error I found is that people don't break it down into the smaller skills the retrieve chain is made up of. It's actually at least six individual skills that are involved in teaching a behavior chain of the retrieve. If people go back and teach the dog each one of those little pieces, then they put the pieces together in a behavior chain, then they can get it right. The other element as I also will back chain it. That means that we start at the very end of the chain so that the dog is always working towards something that they know, i.e. putting the object in your hand or delivering the object to your lap or wherever it is that you want it at your feet. We start at that point, and then we back up so that eventually the dog is always understanding, “Uh! I have to deliver it at that location, and that's where it has to be. That finishes the chain. That gets me the reinforce.” and it becomes much easier for them to succeed. So the key thing is breaking them down into the small pieces and then back chaining it. For example, if you need teach a dog to pick up a dime off a smooth floor, you have to train it right? A dog can't just automatically do it. There's a lot of even finer things that go into that. They need to learn how to use their heads and their mouth, to tilt their head and use their mouth and their tongues to pick up the object, and also to place it precisely. Both of my dogs can take a quarter and place it into a narrow slot, like a piggy bank. That takes a lot of skill to learn. They have to really refine the skills down step by step by step in order to get to that level of accuracy. It's really interesting to watch the process and to teach them and some of them do it better than others. Jesse is really, really into the fine-tuning behaviors. That's her specialty. She loves really fine behaviors, whereas for Lucy it's “Let's just get it done mom and throw that behavior together!” so for her it was much more of a challenge for me to get her down to that point of taking the quarter and putting in that slot because she really had to get patient and be very careful and be very calm while she does it. She also is very food motivated, so she gets excited about food really easily. So my big challenge with her was learning to keep her calm, which is always another piece of the element for retrieve as well. But each dog does it in their own way. Melissa Breau: So it sounds like the class would be good for people who are both interested in like a play retrieve with a toy, and more formal retrieve, right? Donna Hill: Yeah absolutely. A retrieve is a retrieve no matter what kind of sport or environment that you're doing it in. It could be for a sport dog. It could be for a competition dog. It could be for a service dog or it could be for a play dog. So the class really covers the gamut and it was originally designed for…Denise suggested that I design it as a problem solving class. So whatever your problems are, I'm hoping that it covers the main problems. So you know if your dog rolls a dumbbell, or whether it drops it, or whether it's over excited, I try and cover all of the super common problem areas and then if the goals in particular have additional problems, that's what they're at gold for so that we can actually fine tune it and say, okay you know the dog does well until this point. Let's deal with that point and how do we fix that piece, or maybe we need to go back and retrain something prior to that piece so that when we get to that piece, it just becomes part of the chain and it just flows through and it's no longer an issue. Melissa Breau: You talked a little bit in there kind of about your approach to teaching it, but is there more you want to say about that, about kind of how you approach the class? Donna Hill: Basically it's a combination of shaping each part of the chain and then back chaining the parts together. That in a nutshell, that's kind of a summary. The dog always works towards something that's more familiar because we've already practiced that end piece lots and lots of times, and the more repetitions we do, the more practice so the stronger they get in coming towards it. So I don't know how many people have been asked to memorize poems, but when I was a kid we had to memorize poems for school, and one of the techniques we were taught was actually back chaining even though they didn't call it that. What we would do is say we had ten verses in the poem or even songs. What we would do is actually start with the last verse or the last piece of it, and we would memorize that. And then we would go to the second last one, and the last one, and then the third last one, the second last one, and then the last one. And what that allowed us to do, was as we would progress through the recitation, we actually got more confident because we've had more practice with the end one. What often happens is when we forward chain, we start at the beginning. We got a really solid start and then we sort of peter out near the end because we don't have as much practice near the end. Freestyle is another place that we can actually apply that as well but it works really well for a retrieve. Melissa Breau: Now I know you've got one more class on the schedule, this time for December, and I wanted to talk about that too. So it's called Creativity With Cue Concepts. So talk me through that. What do you cover in that class? Donna Hill: We break the various parts of cues into smaller components. That allows us to look at how we use the cues and what our dogs need from us to succeed in using them to do the behaviors that we want them to do. So the kinds of things we're looking at are the cues themselves. What are they? The kinds of cues. There's verbal. There's physical. There's environmental. Then we look at the delivery or the response to cues for something called latency which is the time between when the cue is given and when the dog starts responding to it. The speed of the response, so how fast is the dog walking towards you? Is it running towards you once you give the cue? Things like what is a concept and how do we generalize cues as a concept so that the dog understands that this specific sound means to do this behavior in any environment no matter where you are. That is a concept. Discrimination between cues, so I was telling you what I was doing with Lucy was we were discriminating between competing cues because she had the car that she nose targeted and she had my knee and we had two different cues that were used.  One was a sound and one was a verbal cue. So she had to discriminate between those. How do you start teaching that because that's really confusing for a lot of dogs, especially dogs that like to just throw behaviors at you, the ones that like being shaped. I really like this class because the students get to choose the behaviors that they want to apply the concept to. So there isn't any prescribed behaviors that they have to work on. They can pick whatever sport that they're working on. “I'm in agility and I want the dog to understand the cue for this and this obstacle. It just makes it easier when I'm sending them out.” So let's work on that and we apply the concept for the cues in the class to that particular sport, and you can do that with any sport. You can do it with service dogs. It doesn't matter what it is you're training. I really like it because I get to see a wide variety of behaviors from different sports and from different activities with the dogs. It's a really fun class to watch as well as a bronze, but it's even more fun as a gold student because you just get to go wherever you want to go with it. If you want to spend the entire class on one concept, you can do that too. It's entirely up to you. I'm flexible. Melissa Breau: That's really interesting it's kind of a very different class than a lot of the other classes on the schedule and… Donna Hill: It is! and you know it for me, it just came together so quickly when I originally developed it! I was just astounded! I thought “This is what we're doing. We're da da da da.” I explained it and then thought “Oh my goodness! This is so much easier than the rest of the classes where I've had to go through step by step by step.”  Whereas this class, it's more conceptual. Once you get the concept, then you can go to the detail. But you want to get that concept first and then get into the detail that's, hence the class name. Melissa Breau: So I want to get into those last three questions that I ask everyone at the end of the interview and the first one is what is the dog related accomplishment that you're proudest of? Donna Hill: I would have to say, it's probably two if I'm allowed two. One is developing a great training relationship with each of my dogs. Because I'm a process-oriented person rather than results, I feel that the results come if the process is good. They and I could train all day and I mean I love it! I really love it! When I had Jessie by herself for a couple of years, I consulted a certified Karen Pryor trainer that was the only one on the island at the time where I live, and she said to me, she goes, “Donna you have to get a second dog.” (laughing)  She said “You are loving training too much.” Seriously, I was overtraining Jessie. I was really careful to try not to, and she's a really sensitive dog, but I just love training so much I just couldn't help myself. I wanted to do so many things! We always had plans for a second dog anyway, so we went out and we got our second dog. It was a bit of a process. We finally found Lucy and I she is so amazing. She is a driven dog and she would work with me all day, honest to goodness. She loves working. She's a really fun dog to train. She throws behaviors at me. She loves shaping. She's a fantastic dog! So as a second dog she's a fantastic dog, because it really took the pressure off Jessie who is a really sensitive dog, and they are a really good combination because you know if I need more training I just take Lucy out and away we go. So that's the first is developing a great relationship with them. The second part that I'm really proud of is the You Tube channels. So many people can learn so much on the You Tube channels. It's a really great way or venue to put the information out there and reach a lot of people. It was a bonus for me because one of the main reasons I actually started it as well, or I guess the second main reason, was because I was terrified of being videotaped and I wanted to get over that fear and I thought well if I put these videos together, I have control over the process, so if I videotape myself and I hate what I see, I don't have to include it. And it's really has given me a lot of confidence now. Seriously, when I was at my wedding, I actually banned videotapes and video cameras because I did not want the added stress of being videotaped. (laughing) So yeah, so now I've mostly overcome it. I'm still nervous, but nowhere near the level of nervousness. It's funny because Denise just recently suggested that videotaping yourself really adds that sort of a fake environment of adding extra pressure to yourself, like practicing for a competition, right? Videotaping yourself is a good start to it, because it adds that little bit of pressure. You know someone's watching and she's absolutely right! That's what I would totally feel and I still feel that that to this day. When I go out and about in public, I still feel like people are watching me. I still feel that pressure of people around watching which in public actually is interesting. I am more nervous in general public just working my dog one on one doing my own thing, than I am in front of a group simply because I think I have more control in the group. Because usually when I'm working with the group, I'm the one leading the group. I'm the speaker. So then I control the rest of it and I'm a real control freak when it comes to that. So if I'm in control, that changes everything. But when I'm not in control, then that makes me really nervous. So a teaching role is a really good role for me because I feel like I'm in control and yet I can still let the students do their thing, but it takes the pressure off me. So those are the those are two things I am proud of, developing a great training relationship and my two YouTube channels. Melissa Breau: So this is normally my favorite question of the entire interview and that is what is the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Donna Hill: Not specifically training related although it totally is relevant. Many years ago, I think I was about twelve or thirteen, my older brother who's quite a bit older than I am. I'm the youngest of five kids and there's a bit of a gap between me and the previous four and I'm also the youngest of three girls and back then it was the old hope chest. I don't if you'd remember what those, were but they were kind of the hope for the future when you get married. There's things you started collecting in preparation for that. Kind of an old-fashioned concept I know, but whatever, that's my family. Anyway, so many years ago when I was about twelve or thirteen, he gave me this little trivet, which is like basically a hot plate that you can put a pot on the stove and stuff on the counter. It's just this little metal thing and it had a picture of a little yellow tacky caterpillar on it. But it had a little quote on it, and the quote said, “Yard by yard, life is hard. Inch by inch, it's a cinch!” For some reason it really struck me and I have really taken that to heart and I've applied that to almost everything I do in life. When I'm faced with something hard, I know it's not this big thing. I can break it down into smaller pieces and we can get through it step by step by step, and ultimately get the final goal that I want. And of course dog training is EXACTLY that. It's all about these teeny tiny little pieces that get you to that final goal. That final behavior, the competition, whatever it is that's at the end. So I take that and apply it in many different ways in my life, and training certainly. Melissa Breau: And that's great I like that so much. It's such a great kind of line to kind of remember, you know. Donna Hill: It's an easy one. Yeah, it's everywhere and I've told so many people, that my husband actually this morning when I was talking about that, I thought, oh I bet she's going to ask this question. And he said you know, I remember when you told me that. He said we were back in university and I was helping him with his writing projects, and he said “I remember you telling me that. Break everything down. It was the yard by yard, life is hard, inch by inch it's a cinch.” So and that was probably about thirty years ago he remembers that from. Melissa Breau: (Laughs) It's clearly a memorable line. Donna Hill: Yeah. (Laughs) Melissa Breau: So my last question for you today. Who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Donna Hill: I can't say one person! I have to say there's lots of them. I'm a real eclectic learner, and so again back to that real variety of learning styles, so everybody from Karen Pryor, Bob Bailey, Suzanne Clothier, Turid Rugaas, Denise Fenzi of course, Leslie McDevitt, Susan Friedman, Raymond Coppinger, and Jean Donaldson, Sue Ailsby. I take a little piece of something from a lot of the better trainers that are out there. Just things that really appeal to me and I incorporate them, and I try them. It's all over the map and I think that comes back from my zoology background and just the general interest in animal behavior, because I do see it. It's not just one way or the other way of doing it. There's a whole variety. Some of the new researchers that are coming out are really affecting me too. A lot of the cognitive instructors, half of them I can't pronounce their names. I take the information that they've got and they're just fantastic. So there's tons and tons of not only trainers, but also researchers out there that I really appreciate their contributions so that I can take what I need and put it all together to create something that works for me and for the students that I work with. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Well thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Donna. Donna Hill: Well thank you for having me! This has been a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it! Melissa Breau: That's excellent and thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Barbara Currier to talk about agility training and handling and I'll ask her about her work with Georgia Tech which is creating wearable computing devices for military search and rescue and service dogs. Don't miss it. If you haven't already subscribed 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.

Summary: Cassia Turcotte has been involved with the dog training world for nearly two decades and has been training professionally since 1999. She has a background in private behavior modification, and has worked as a kennel manager, volunteer shelter staff, veterinary technician, Search And Rescue  training officer, and taught classes for both reactive and fearful dogs. She completed her first professional certification in 2003. Midway through her career, Cassia decided to combine her passion for positive dog training with her  love of the outdoors, and a background in waterfowl and upland game hunting. She channeled her training efforts into developing a program for versatile real world hunting companions, building hunt test teams using positive training techniques. Her students have titled dogs for both retrieving and pointing breeds. During the hunting season, you will most likely find Cassia and her dogs in a duck blind or kayak doing what they love most. Cassia has titled her own dogs in numerous dog sports including hunt tests, obedience and rally, agility, conformation, and Nosework. Additionally, she has been involved with both wilderness and urban Search And Rescue teams, including the evaluation of operational readiness. Cassia believes in finding joy in the process of training rather than adopting an outcome oriented mindset and she believes strongly that dog training should be a form of structured play. She is an advocate for positive training methods for field dogs. Next Episode:  To be released 9/29/2017, featuring Donna Hill to talk about training service dogs, perfecting the retrieve, and cue concepts. 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 progressive training methods. Today, I'll be talking to Cassia Turcotte. Cassia's been involved in the dog-training world for nearly two decades and has been training professionally since 1999. She has a background in private behavior modification and has worked as a kennel manager, volunteer shelter staff, veterinary technician, search and rescue training officer, and taught classes both for reactive and fearful dogs. She completed her first professional certification in 2003. Midway through her career, Cassia decided to combine her passion for positive dog training with her love of the outdoors and a background in waterfowl and upland game hunting. She channeled her training efforts into developing a program for versatile, real-world hunting companions, building hunt test teams using positive training techniques. Her students have titled dogs through both retrieving and pointing breeds. During the hunting season, you'll most likely find Cassia and her dogs in a duck blind or kayak, doing what they love most. Cassia's handled her own dogs in numerous dog sports including hunt tests, obedience and rally, agility, confirmation, and nose work. Additionally, she has been involved in both wilderness and urban search and rescue teams, including the evaluation of operational readiness. Cassia believes in finding joy in the process of training rather than adopting an outcome oriented mindset, and she believes strongly that dog training should be a form of structured play. She is an advocate for positive training methods for field dogs. Hi, Cassia. Welcome to the podcast. Cassia Turcotte: Hi. Thanks for having me. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. To start us out, can you tell us a little about your dogs and what you're working on with them? Cassia Turcotte: Oh, sure. I have six Chesapeake Bay Retrievers and they're currently all in different levels of retriever hunt test training. Some of them are versatile hunting companions, so they do both retriever work and real-world hunting and upland hunting. I have one who just started nose work training, literally like day one, and she's the one we refer to as the soccer mom. She's never done any performance sport before, and I didn't get her until she was five, so she's just learning how to learn, but everybody else is various stages of training, and we do the breed ring, so we do a little bit of tracking and a little bit of nose work. Melissa Breau: Awesome. How did you get started in dog sports and training? Cassia Turcotte: Oh, gosh. Originally, let's see, I was involved with helping a sheriff's department with laying tracks, and I think I was about 16, and they were kind enough to let me tag along on their training because I think I annoyed my parents to death training our cocker spaniel, and so they let me volunteer, and eventually, I did some decoy training with them, and I got really involved in search and rescue and ended up getting my own dog, and the dog I got at the time was a problem dog, so he had quite a few issues in terms of…he was, you know, nervous with people. So we did the search rescue training just as kind of a fun thing to do with him, and he ended up becoming certified later down the road, which was kind of a pretty cool thing. So it sparked my interest in both behavior modification and how that works as well as, you know, performance sports and working dogs. Melissa Breau: I don't think there are many people who can say they got their start working with police dogs, so that's a pretty neat start. Cassia Turcotte: It was a small town. Melissa Breau: So what got you started…I mean, maybe it was right from the start, but what got you started on positive training specifically? Cassia Turcotte: Well, it was a little bit right from the start. I think I was fortunate to be part of a program that, while they certainly weren't purely positive, they were really exploring newer methods, so I would say it was more a balanced program that I started out in, but the first dog that I started with, I had the grandeur that he was going to be a great retrieving dog, and I still remember taking the ball out and throwing the ball, and he took off after it, and it was going to be this great moment, and then he just sniffed the ball and kept on running, and he had zero retrieve desire whatsoever. And so I ended up having to look for alternative methods to teach his retrieve, and that ended up being with Karen, how…you know, Karen Pryor's Don't Shoot The Dog, and we learned how to shape or retrieve, and it was all downhill from there. Melissa Breau: So if you were to describe your philosophy now and kind of how you train, how would you describe that for people? Cassia Turcotte: I think it's really about living with and playing with dogs. You know, I love teaching. I like breaking things down, and I like for them to have a purpose, but I'm okay if they pick their purpose, you know? I have Chesapeakes, so generally, retrieving is something that they enjoy, but you know, my philosophy is really about let's find what the dog's good at and expand on it and teach them games and things that they really seem to naturally want to do, and you know, every dog has strengths and weaknesses, and it's about finding balance and making them enjoy the things that are their weakness and how that works, so really just living and playing with dogs. Melissa Breau: I know I mentioned in your bio that you believe dog training should be a form of structured play. It sounds like that's a little bit what you're talking about, but can you explain a little more what that phrase means, or at least what it means to you, and what it looks like in practice, like within a training session? Cassia Turcotte: Sure. I think that…I'm trying to think where I actually first heard that term, and it may have been even Lindsey that said it, but really, it's…you know, I don't want the dog to feel like what we're doing is work. If you feel like you're being dragged to work every day, it's mentally hard, but if they go out and they go, oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing ever, I can't wait to do more of it, then the attitude's up, the motivation's up, and you don't have any trouble with compliance. You know, they're really willing to play the game, and it's fun. It's fun for me and it's fun for them, so you know, it's one of the things…you know, how would it look in a training session? One of the things that we do in field work is called the walk up, and all that is, is a bumper is thrown in the air as you're heeling with the dog, and it's thrown in front of the dog, and the point of it is to challenge the dog to stay heeling and stay steady with you, and the traditional way would be to correct them for not doing that. So in our way, we jackpot with Chuckit! ball or tug or food as a reinforcement for being steady, you know, so they see the bumper go up, and they sit, and we say, oh my gosh, that's awesome, and we throw a Chuckit! ball in the opposite direction, and so it's all a game, and it's about keeping them guessing and mentally challenging them and getting it so that they really understand what they're being asked to do, and they're not just corrected for not understanding. So I think that's pretty much what it would look lie in an average day. Melissa Breau: So I know that you've got a new class in the schedule for October called Instinct Games - Leadership In Drive, so I was really…I wanted to dig into that a little bit and find out what that means, and then kind of what you'll cover in the class. Cassia Turcotte: Well, instinct games, the way I initially thought of it was all different types of dogs have different natural instincts, whether it's sighthounds who see things or scent hounds who smell things or retrievers who, you know, as in my breed, they tend to pick things up. They don't necessarily want to give it back, but they tend to want to carry things in their mouth, so there's a lot of different natural instincts that are governed by the dog's senses, and I think that's the piece that as trainers, we frequently miss. We miss that moment where the dog is…there's a change in arousal or a change in stimulation based on the initial sensory response, so all of a sudden your dog's toddling through the woods, and oh, their body language changes because they smelled something. You know, certainly search and rescue handlers notice those really minor alerts that a dog, when they first start getting with the something, but they haven't gotten fully into a scent cone. You know, I notice with my dogs, the second they're watching a bird or a bumper fly through the air, they're visually watching it, there's a change in the body language and there's a change in their stimulation, and I think that in general, in dog training, if you miss those initial moments, it's really hard to stay ahead of the dog and to be the leader in the relationship and to kind of drive where you want to the train to go. If you miss that first moment, you're always reacting, and you're behind the eight ball, and I think a lot of people struggle with that, so what I started doing with all of my puppies is just developing games that were meant to not only work on self control and impulse control and all of those things that we need for a functional adult dog, but they also work on developing the handler's awareness of, oh, there's that moment that I need to respond to, and how do you get that moment, an increased arousal levels? So, you know, when you're dealing with a high-drive dog, your reaction time has to be really fast, and to be able to really stop them out of motion, you have to be able to read them, and so it's all about developing the team based on little games that mean nothing to any sport, but they can be applied to pretty much any sport you do with your dogs. Melissa Breau: I kind of mentioned that you've done a number of different dog sports, but I'd imagine that something like hunt skills are very different than something like agility, so how does teaching those different skills kind of involve a different process for you, or how is it…maybe it's very similar and just you kind of figured out the secret. I don't know. Cassia Turcotte: Well, I think there's a lot of vast similarities, and then there's differences. I think the biggest difference between, say, agility and obedience with a breed ring for us would be that you're generally within a confined space, whereas in fieldwork, the distance and the environment is such a big factor. So you know, even when I do other sports, going to a big venue where there's big loudspeakers, that's something I have to generalize, but we're still generally in a similar looking ring. When we do field work, you know, especially when we travel around the country, there are so many…there's different plants, there's different smells, there's different animals, and there's so many factors, and I think that's the big thing. The generalization factor itself is the biggest difference, so it's really just about people have to get out there and do it, and they have to do it in a number of different environments until their dog feels really confident doing it anywhere, and I think that's one of the challenging aspects, but I think that the underlying teaching…you know, I teach my dogs to go over the hay bale the same way I would teach them to go over a agility jump, and in fact, I use a lot of the skills that I learned from agility instructors years ago to teach that stuff. You know, look for the obstacle to jump over, so it's a lot of that foundation stuff is going to be the same. I teach my obedient jumps the same way, so the underlying methodology is the same. I think it's the generalization, that it really is different. Melissa Breau: Now, kind of to pull those two questions together, I guess, is it possible to take the dog's natural instincts and their drives, things like those things from herding or that nose work, kind of those things that are in them instinctually, and channel them for all sports, or is it kind of more specific to the sports…you know, some sports are a better fit than others, for those types of skills? Is it possible to kind of harness those things for everything? I mean, it sounded like a little bit from your class description, it can be, if it's done well. Cassia Turcotte: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the way to look at it is every dog's an individual, and you know, they need to have a great class on actually train the dog in front of you, and I can't emphasize how important that is to me, too. You know, it's the...it really is about each dog is an individual, and yes, they have these natural instincts. First of all, you know, knowing your dog, and what are their natural instincts? You know, I talked about the dog that has no natural birdiness, and she also has very little desire to just hunt for things. Is she better suited to be a retriever or be a hunting dog? Maybe. Maybe not, you know, but she's doing fantastic right now, and what we did was we developed those things that she doesn't have naturally. We developed those, and then the things that she does have naturally, we tried to put a stimulus control on them so she doesn't just do it all by herself. Understanding how your dog, you know, how they sense those things…first of all, how they sense those things that are natural to them and how they react to them, and then being able to harness them and use them as part of your training system, regardless of what sports you're doing, so you know, if you've got a dog who's really interested in scent, sometimes, you know, obedience trials can be painful because they want to sniff the whole 100 yards of the floor, and I have my…one of my older males is very interested in dog smells, so to get his head up and to get him connected in new environments was really challenging. We have used his natural desire to sniff as part of his reinforcement program for obedience work, so it's just…it absolutely works for every sport, it's just how you learn your relationship with your dog. How you learn your dog and how you utilize those things that are naturally reinforcing to them to begin with. Melissa Breau: So I don't have the syllabus out in front of me fro the class, but it sounds like it will be part observation skills, part games, part kind of figuring out training plan? Is that accurate? I mean… Cassia Turcotte: Yeah. I think what it does is the first six weeks is really about learning to observe your dog, learning to develop some basic game skills, and then within those games, we can take those games…you know, for a team that's more advanced and has done a lot of work, we can apply that game to their sport, or if somebody's just starting out, you can learn how to put just the basic…how to teach the game step by step, and maybe you only get through the first part of the game, but it will give you that foundation of teaching whatever you need to teach in your sport. So mostly, it's about learning to read your dog, learning how to teach the games and what the games are, different games to play. We'll do a couple different games each week, and then how those games can apply to your sport. How can you use this thing that you've learned to apply it to your sport or to real life, or whatever you need from your dog? How does this actually carry over? Melissa Breau: So it sounds like all ages are okay, all skill levels are okay, it's a good fit for anybody who's looking to just really understand that piece of it a little bit more, right? Cassia Turcotte: Absolutely. Yes. Melissa Breau: Cool. So I wanted to…we talked kind of about general training a bunch, and I want to dig a little bit more into some of the hunt stuff specifically, because I think that while most people in our audience, and probably, at this point, even the general public, are pretty familiar with agility and maybe even obedience, hunt tests are a little less publicized on TV and in the media, just a little bit. Cassia Turcotte: Understandably. Melissa Breau: So can you share a little bit about what a hunt test actually involves and what skills they demand of the dogs? Cassia Turcotte: I think originally, hunt tests were developed to really identify quality breeding stock, and over the years, we've gotten away from that a little bit, and particularly with the retrievers…pointing breeds and spaniel breeds, I think, are a little bit more true to what they started out as. In the retriever world, we've gone into a completely different game nowadays, but ideally, it's about retrieving game, regardless of what type of hunting dog you have. It's when you're a hunter you don't want to…you're also concerned about preservation, so you don't want a bird that has been shot to get away, and that's what the dogs are for. You don't want to injure things unnecessarily, and that's the dog's job, is to make sure that the game is retrieved, so your upland breeds also do…they help you locate the game. So if there's a field, there's birds, you don't know where they are. You can walk through the field, but if it's 500 yards by 500 yards, one person walking through that field's going to take a really long time to find some birds potentially, so the dogs are obviously much more efficient at that by smelling them out. So in the hunt test, it's really your upland breed, it's about how they hunt the field, how they look for birds, and as they go up in the levels, it's about steadiness under gun fire. So there's a lot of arousal that goes into the sport in terms of…you know, you get multiple dogs out in the field, you get people yelling, you get gun shots, you get live gain birds, and then at the uppermost levels, there's usually an honor, which means that somebody else's dog runs right in front of your dog with all this arousal going on, and your dog has to sit and watch them get to retrieve, and that's a pretty challenging aspect. So there's a lot of development of natural abilities and independent work on the dog, but then, they have to come under immediate control and be able to respond to whistle signals and be, we call it, handling, which is basically hand signals that control where they go in the field, and then first and foremost, they can't hurt the game, so they've got to bring it back intact. Melissa Breau: So some people definitely say that doing all of that while training positively, it just isn't possible, but you're kind of proving that it is. So why is that so hard for some people to believe? Like, why are so many people saying that it isn't, and how do you kind of overcome those obstacles, those skills that most people really struggle to teach positively, how are you kind of approaching those things? Cassia Turcotte: I think part of it stems from our mentality as a society in general. You know, you break the speed limit, you get a speeding ticket. You break the law, you go to jail. There's a consequence-based mentality, and I think we really fail at teaching in general, and it's not that I've never said no to my dogs. I'm human. I've certainly done it, but I focus a lot more on just teaching them the job and finding what's reinforcing to them, and basically, if you do it my way, you can have what you want. If you want your Chuckit! ball, you can go get this bird in this beautiful straight line and come back and give it to me, and then you can have your Chuckit! ball, you know, and a lot of my dogs…I think the thing that's fortunate about field work is a lot of the dogs find the bird work, and going back to those natural reinforces, you know, natural senses, a lot of them find, you know, hunting for birds naturally reinforcing, in itself reinforcing, so once you teach them the rules of the game and then they get out there, and they're like, oh, you mean I get to do this with things that I really like doing it with? Then the game itself, there's pieces of the game that are naturally reinforcing. So, you know, I think the pieces that people say you can't train are partially the pieces that we've put into the game, it's…particularly for retriever work, but if you can't teach a retrieve without force, and going back decades and decades, we bred dogs to retrieve game, and they did it naturally, and now you read, every gun dog magazine that say, oh, you can't train a reliable retrieve without forceful…I think we're failing in our breeding programs. You know, there's a problem there. If a dog doesn't want to retrieve things naturally and then be…in terms of a retriever, I'm going to be concerned. I don't expect my pointing breeds necessarily to retrieve naturally, but the force breaking came about as ways to train difficult dogs, and then because it was systematic, it gained so much popularity because it was a system. It was a teaching system that the dogs could follow. It was effective, and so people were having quick results, and so it gained popularity because of that. The dogs were reliable because they'd been taught, and yes, they were harsh methods, but at least it was systematic, and no one really just came behind and said, hey, we can do systematic without all the force. And I do think, to the credit of the trainers today, there are a lot of trainers, professional now, who are really dialing back on the amount of force that they do use in their teaching processes, but really, I just think that nobody has just done the teaching and reinforced the dogs otherwise. So if everybody says you can't do it, then who's going to argue with them, saying oh, it can't be done that way, but then somebody comes along and says, well, let me just try. You know, I'm okay with failing. I can fail big, but we're having quite a bit of success and proving that it can be done, over and over again, so I think that's really the key, is people just seeing that it can be done and that we're having fun doing it, you know? Melissa Breau: Right. Right. Well, congratulations on the success that you've been having and for doing well in that sphere. So I want to kind of round things out with the three questions that I always ask at the end of the interview. So the first one is what is the dog-related accomplishment that you're proudest of? Cassia Turcotte: The one of all time that did it has been the dog that I adopted with all the behavior issues, and you know, I started doing search and rescue work with them as a way to boost his confidence, and then he went on to be a certified dog, and he taught me so many things, and then his confidence just bloomed, and I think that, that was a big thing for me, not so much the fact that he got certified, but the fact that we were able to change so much in his life, and he really ended up having a purpose, whereas before, he wasn't adoptable. He was scheduled to be euthanized. They didn't feel safe putting him out with just anybody, you know? So that, to me, is a big accomplishment, and then, probably my second biggest is having people ask for our dogs now. So the retrievers that we're working with now that, you know, none of our dogs are force fed fetched, none of them use electronic collars, and we're getting to travel all over the country because our dogs are being requested. People want to hunt with them. You know, they like what they're seeing. They like the dogs, and that's all just word of mouth and people actually seeing the dogs work, and as much as I like the ribbons and I like the accomplishments, I like the fact that people who've been hunting for a long time are seeing that these dogs are reliable and they're consistent and they're talented, and that, to me, is a pretty big accomplishment. Melissa Breau: That's excellent. So my second stumper question is what is the best piece of training advice that you have ever heard? Cassia Turcotte: Relax. Honestly though, it really is. For me, it's easy to get serious about training and to want to go faster and do more and be better, and really, what I need to do is relax and play with my dog and teach and have fun, and when I relax and breathe, everything goes much better. You know, the dogs learn faster, they do better. They do all those things that they want to do when I'm not pushing, so that…honestly, my husband says it to me all the time, which doesn't actually help me relax, ironically, but it is good advice. He just has poor timing so… Melissa Breau: So my last one here for you is who is somebody else in the dog world that you look up to? Cassia Turcotte: I look up to the people that are brave enough to just try stuff. You know, try new methods that they think are fair to the dog, and even if somebody tells you not to try it. Denise has obviously given us all a chance to come together and do that through FDSA. You know, I think Ken Ramirez, back when I as first getting started, I loved listening to his lectures and teaching on environmental enrichment. You know, it changed how I do things, not only for my dogs, for my farm animals, who are spoiled rotten thanks to him, and I'm sure they send a big shout out, and you know, in the field world, Robert Milner was a longtime traditional trainer, longtime back when the electronic parts were much more barbaric than they are now, and he came out and was brave enough to say, hey, we screwed up, you know? We shouldn't do this. He wrote an article on it, and he's gone the other way now, and I think in terms of fieldwork, that's one of the people that I really look up to, as well. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Cassia. Cassia Turcotte: Well, thank you for having me. Melissa Breau: And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Donna Hill to talk about training service dogs, perfecting the retrieve, and cue concepts. Don't miss it. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.

Summary: Sue Yanoff graduated from Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, New York in 1980. After three years in private practice she joined the US Army Veterinary Corps. While on active duty she completed a three-year residency in small animal surgery at Texas A&M University, and became board certified by the American College of Veterinary Surgeons. She retired from the Army in 2004, after almost 21 years on active duty. After working for a year on a horse farm in Idaho, she returned to Ithaca to join the staff at Cornell Veterinary Hospital as their second surgeon. Sue retired from Cornell in December of 2009. After all her on call schedule was interfering with those dog show weekends. The following month she started working for shelter outreach services. A high quality, high volume spay neuter organization. About the same time Sue joined her colleague, a physical therapist and licensed veterinary technician to start a canine sports medicine practice at the Animal Performance and Therapy Center in Genoa, New York. The practice is limited to performance dogs, and now she's joined the team here at FDSA to teach a class on canine sports medicine for performance dog handlers. Next Episode:  To be released 9/22/2017, featuring Cassia Turcotte — we'll talk about positive gun dog training, and her upcoming class on channeling dog's natural instincts for high level behaviors while they are in drive. 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 Sue Yanoff. Sue graduated from Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, New York in 1980. After three years in private practice she joined the US Army Veterinary Corps. While on active duty she completed a three-year residency in small animal surgery at Texas A&M University, and became board certified by the American College of Veterinary Surgeons. She retired from the Army in 2004, after almost 21 years on active duty. After working for a year on a horse farm in Idaho, she returned to Ithaca to join the staff at Cornell Veterinary Hospital as their second surgeon. Sue retired from Cornell in December of 2009. After all her on call schedule was interfering with those dog show weekends. The following month she started working for shelter outreach services. A high quality, high volume spay neuter organization. About the same time Sue joined her colleague, a physical therapist and licensed veterinary technician to start a canine sports medicine practice at the Animal Performance and Therapy Center in Genoa, New York. The practice is limited to performance dogs, and now she's joined the team here at FDSA to teach a class on canine sports medicine for performance dog handlers. Hi Sue. Welcome to the podcast. Sue Yanoff: Hi Melissa. Thanks. Melissa Breau: I'm looking forward to chatting. I think that most of the students who have been with FDSA for any period of time have probably seen your dogs in one class or another. But for those that haven't, do you want to just tell us a little bit about the dogs you have now, and what you're working on with them? Sue Yanoff: Sure. My older beagle is Charm. She's 12 years old. She's a breed champion. She has her UD, her rally excellent, MX, MXJ, and TD. She's pretty much retired from performance right now, but I am still doing tracking with her, and would like to get a TDX on her. And then my younger beagle, Ivy, who has been in a lot of Fenzi classes is six years old. She's also breed champion. She finished her mock last year. She has her rally novice title, and a TD, and she has two legs towards her CDX. Melissa Breau: Well congrats. Those are some seriously impressive stats, especially with beagles. Sue Yanoff: Thanks. Melissa Breau: So how did you get your start in dog sports? What got you started there? Sue Yanoff: A beagle. Between my sophomore and junior year as an undergraduate here at Cornell, I went home to visit my parents, and I also went to visit the vet I used to work for when I was in high school, and there was a little beagle puppy with a cast on his hind leg coming out of anesthesia, and I picked him up, and I cuddled him. I said oh I want to take this puppy home, and they said well you can because his owners had him for just a couple of days and then their little boy broke his leg, and they were going to pick him up from the vet that afternoon, and take him to the animal shelter. So some phone calls were made, and I got the puppy and took him back to college with me, and I didn't know anything about dog training. I had never heard of crate training, so I would just leave him in my apartment, that I shared with two roommates, while I went to class, and of course he destroyed things, and did all the naughty things that puppies do. So I thought I need to do something, and I enrolled him in the kindergarten puppy class at the local dog-training club. That's how it got started, and I ended up getting a CDX on that dog while I was in Vet school, and that got me started in dog sports. Melissa Breau: Wow. So to go from, you know, never having done anything dog training wise before, to a CDX. That's pretty impressive Sue. Now I'd imagine being both the sports dog handler and the vet has led to some pretty unique insights into each field. How has being involved in both influenced your views in each of those? Sue Yanoff: Yeah, that's an interesting question. As a dog trainer all my dogs have, at one point in their careers, been injured, and I know what it's like to have to restrict your dog's activity. You can't train them. You can't show them. It's very frustrating, and so as a vet when I have to tell a client okay you can't train, you can't show, you have to restrict your dog for weeks, or months sometimes, I know how frustrating that can be, and how hard it can be, but I also understand where they are coming from so I think I can see it from both sides. Melissa Breau: Is there anything in particular about veterinary medicine that sports handlers often just don't understand? Sue Yanoff: Yeah. I don't think it's just sports handlers. I think it's a lot of people. Veterinary medicine is a science, and the decisions that we make have to be based on science, and not just what people think, or what they heard, and so when you're making a decision about what the best diagnostics are for a condition, or how best to treat the condition, it has to be based on a series of cases, not just on what somebody thinks, and I go a lot based on what I learn at continuing education conferences, and what I read in the veterinary literature. Because papers that are published in peer reviewed journals are scrutinized to make sure that the science behind the conclusions are valid. So while, you know, it's fine for somebody to say well I did this with my dog and he did great. What I want to make my decisions on is what worked well for many dogs, dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of dogs, and not just something that might have worked for your dog where we don't' even know if the diagnosis was the same. So I think I want people to know that veterinary medicine is a science, and we have to make our decisions based on science. Melissa Breau: I think that, you know, especially with the internet these days it's very common for people to turn to their favorite local forum, and be like well what should I do, but… Sue Yanoff: I know like let me get advice from everybody, and I know it's hard to make decisions when it involves your dog and you're emotionally involved, and that's one of the reasons I want to teach this class, to give people information that they can use to make those hard decisions. Melissa Breau: What about the reverse? Are there things about sports that you think most vets just they don't understand? Sue Yanoff: Oh yes. Yes there's a lot. Unless you're a vet who's involved in this thing, most vets don't understand the time and the effort, and the emotion, and the money that goes into the training, and the trialing that we do. They don't understand the special relationship that we have with our dogs when we put the time and effort into training them. I have had dogs that were wonderful pets, and I loved them but I never showed them for one reason or another, and there is a different relationship when you accomplish something special with that dog. So I think that's important thing. The other thing that most vets don't understand, and might not agree with, but I have had some clients where we have diagnosed an injury, and said okay we need to restrict activity, and do the conservative treatment route, and they say I will but my national specialty is next week, and she's entered in whatever class. Or they say I have a herding finals coming up in two weeks, and I really want to run her in those trials, and I'm okay with that if the dog has an injury that I don't think is likely to get much worse by doing a little more training, or trialing, then I'll say okay. Well let's do this in the meantime, and when you're done with your national or with your specialty or whatever, come on back and we'll start treatment. So I think a lot of vets would not understand that point of view, but I'm okay with it as long as I don't think that it's going to do serious harm to the dog, and as long as the owner understands that there's, you know, a slight chance that things could get worse. Melissa Breau: I think it's really kind of interesting that you focused a little bit on performance dogs. So I wanted to ask about what led you to that, I guess, to focus on that. Was it your own interest just in the being involved with sports when you joined the practice in New York? Sue Yanoff: Yeah. No. It's my own interests. I'm mostly retired. I've retired from three different jobs now, so I don't have to do this sports medicine stuff to make a living, and to pay my mortgage. So I became interested in it when I joined the practice at Colonial Veterinary Hospital about the same time my colleague Lynn joined it. She's a physical therapist. She was a physical therapist for people for 20 plus years before she decided she wanted to work on animals, so she went to vet tech school to become a vet tech, and get some animal education. And I remember when I first met her she said to me well what do you think about physical therapy for dogs, and I thought I don't know anything about it. So the more I learned about it, the more I realized how important it is, and I did a lot of reading, and I went to continuing education about sports medicine, and about the same time, like a few years later, the American College of Veterinary Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation was getting going so the whole topic of canine sports medicine was getting more popular and people were learning more about it. So the more I learned about it, the more I liked it and of course since I did dog sports, I understood what's involved in dog sports. So when Lynn and I started this little practice, we did see pets for the first year or two, but then we said you know what, we don't want to deal with people. Performance dog people, in general, their dogs are better trained. They're better behaved, which make it easier to examine them. Not all of them but most of them. They're definitely more committed to doing what needs to be done to get their dog better. So they are more willing to put the time into it, and the work for treating, and rehabbing the dog, and the money that it costs to get their dogs better if the need surgery, or other treatments. So, you know, when Lynn and I started seeing more and more animals we said okay, we're not doing pets any more. We're just going to work on performance dogs. Melissa Breau: Now I want to talk a little bit about your upcoming class. So in some ways it's the first of it's kind here at FDSA. Do you mind sharing a little bit about what students can expect to learn? Sue Yanoff: Well basically the goal of the class is to, in the words of a friend of mine that I was discussing this with, is to make people better consumers of healthcare, for their animals. I want to give them information about the various injuries that the dogs can get, and how they are diagnosed, and what the treatment options are, and what's the best chance to get them back to competition. I want them to understand the importance of a good sports medicine exam. When I was a surgeon when I saw an animal for an injury, or a lameness, I would examine the leg that was lame. Most of the time, we knew which leg was lame and I would examine that leg and tell them what surgery I think the dog needs, and that was that. With a sports medicine exam, I examine the whole dog. At times I don't even know which leg is lame, because the owner doesn't know which leg is lame. We come with a history of knocking bars, or popping weaves, or not being as active, and they think there might be something wrong, but they're not sure. So it's a totally different type of exam from when I just did surgery to now doing sports medicine. So I want people to understand that, and I just want them to be able to make informed decisions if and when they have to deal with an injury. Melissa Breau: I'd imagine it was probably pretty hard to decide what things to fit into the class and what things were kind of beyond the scope of what you could cover in those six weeks. So what are some of the common types of injuries that you'll be discussing in those six weeks? Sue Yanoff: Yeah. It was really tough. When I started writing lectures, I had no idea how much material I was eventually going to cover. So people can go to the website to look at the course summary to see what we cover from week to week. But three of the common injuries that we see in sports medicine are injuries to the muscles and tendons of the shoulder, the biceps and supraspinatus specifically. Injuries to the iliopsoas muscle which ten or so years ago I never heard of, and now it's a very commonly diagnosed injury. And then, also talking about cranial cruciate ligament injuries because just based on a recent thread on the Fenzi Alumni Facebook page, there's a lot of information out there about cranial cruciate ligament injuries, and some misinformation. We have a whole lecture just on cranial cruciate ligament injuries to give people, you know just the basic facts of what's based on science. What's not based on science. What the options are, because there's always options. There's no one best way to treat almost anything. So those are probably the three most common things that people know about that they'll learn. But there's a ton of other stuff in the class. Melissa Breau: Now I know that the syllabus mentions prevention a little bit, and I wanted to know if you could talk for a minute about the role that prevention plays when it comes to these types of injuries. You know, how much should sports handlers focus on preventing problems? If you can, even beyond that, are there skills that they should teach that would make dealing with these kinds of problems, should they occur, easier before there's ever actually a problem for them to be worried about. Sue Yanoff: Yes. Well prevention is always best, and as far as preventing injuries in dogs the bottom line is that we don't know what we can do to prevent injuries. Everything that we know is based on the human literature, and some horse literature, but there are no studies in veterinary medicine for dogs as to anything that's proven to prevent injuries. So we have to just extrapolate from the human literature, but there certainly are lots of things. In fact my sample lecture is my lecture on preventing injuries, and that's a freebie for anybody to go read. But one of the most important things to keep your dog thin and fit, and there's some really good Fenzi classes on canine conditioning. So I think that's important. The other thing that is important that I notice that a lot of handlers don't do because I compete with my clients, I compete with all the people and I can see that they don't' spend enough time warming their dogs up before the competition, and cooling the dog down after the competition. Now for an obedience trial, the warm up is probably not as important as something like field trials, or agility trials, and certainly lure coursing. But I think those three things, conditioning, warm up, and cool down will go a long way to helping to prevent injuries. And then, as far as what they can teach their dog that will help, there's two things. On is to teach your dog to allow a hands on examination, including lying on their side while I examine them. Most of the dogs that I see are pretty good about it. Some of them will, you know, will fuss a little at first, but they pretty much relax into it. But I've had a few dogs where there's no way we can lay them on their side to examine them, and I can barely get in a good standing exam. So it'd be really nice to be able to have your dog do that, and I know that Deb's Cooperative Canine Care class, I'm sure, can help with that. Then the other thing that's important is best gait to diagnose a lameness is a trot, and a lot of my patients either won't trot nicely on a leash. They want to bounce around, or pull, or run. Or they won't trot on a leash next to the owner without looking up at the owner, and that kind of throws the gait off a little. So to teach your dog to have nice straight trot, on leash without looking up at you would be another thing that would make my life a little bit easier. Melissa Breau: I mean I definitely wouldn't have thought of that second one. The first one definitely made sense, having the dog lay on its side and being able to be calm while its examined, but it never would have occurred to me that it would be important to have a forward motion where the dog wasn't looking at you for diagnostic purposes. Sue Yanoff: Right. That's why it's really nice when we get show dogs, confirmation dogs that know this skill. I mean we get the job done, but there are certain things that can make it easier for the dog, the owner, and me. Melissa Breau: Obviously there's a limited amount you can do remotely when it comes to canine medicine, so how are you doing the different levels in the class and what will and won't be covered in class. Sue Yanoff: Right. Well the first thing I want to say is I will not make any diagnoses over the phone or online, and the reason for that is that, you know, in order to give advice on diagnosis and treatment, you have to establish a veterinary client patient relationship, and in most states, at least in New York state, that means you have to see the client, and the dog in person. So while I can answer people's questions, and look at video, and say well you know it could be this, and it might be this, and you might want to get these diagnostic tests, and if it's this then this treatment works, and if it's that, this treatment works. I don't want people to sign up for the class expecting me to diagnose their dog online. So with that said, there's going to be two levels. Bronze which is the typical bronze level, and then silver, and with this new working silver level that Fenzi has, I think that all of the silver spots will be working silver spots because there'll be no gold spots. So it's mainly a discussion class, but I want the silver students to be able to at least post photographs. They can even post radiographs, or x-rays if they want to. If we mutually agree that a video would be helpful they can post a video of their dog, and they can ask any question they want. They can ask general questions about the material. They can ask specific questions about their dog. They don't have to pick one dog. They can ask specific questions about any dog they want to. I want there to be a lot of discussion because I think everybody, me, the silver students, and the bronze students will learn a lot from the discussions, you know as much if not more so than from the lectures. So I'm hoping to have some really active silver students. Melissa Breau: Hopefully, you know, having said that you will now get even more of them, than you would have otherwise. I think that, that will be a real appeal for students to know that you really want an active silver group. Sue Yanoff: Right, and then the other things that they should understand is there's so much material that we could cover, but this class is basically covering injuries, and not specifically hereditary or developmental disorders like hip dysplasia or elbow dysplasia, or OCD. I mean those are common in sports dogs, but that could be a whole class in itself. So I really had to limit some things so we're going to be talking about injuries that they can acquire. Melissa Breau: So maybe in the future if this class does well, huh? Sue Yanoff: Maybe, and when I want to spend another huge amount of time writing these lectures, so. Melissa Breau: You mentioned earlier treatment decisions for dogs can be super hard, you know whether their a performance dog, or just a pet. So I'd imagine that one of the major benefits to this class would be that students will feel significantly more informed when they have those kinds of decisions to make in the future. First of all, would you agree with that? It sounds like from what you said earlier, you would, and then do you have any advice for students who may be facing those kinds of decisions now? Sue Yanoff: Yes. So yes the class will provide a lot of information for the students to help them make better decisions about their dogs medical care, but what they need to know for now, are two things that I think are important. One is to get a diagnosis. It's really hard to make a treatment plan without at least having an idea of what's going on, and general practitioners are great. I have a lot of respect for general practitioners because I was one for five years, but they're not specialists in any one subject. So unless the cause of the lameness is very obvious, you might have to see an expert, and there are two experts that can be used for sports dogs. One is the board certified surgeon, which is what I am, and more, and more board certified surgeons are realizing that sporting dogs, performance dogs, are a little bit different from pets, and so they're dealing with them a little bit better, although there's still some that do what I used to do, just look at the leg. Look at the injury, and not look at anything else. But then this new specialty of sports medicine and rehabilitation, there's more and more vets being trained, and being board certified in that specialty. So that would be another specialist to go see if your general practitioner, you know, is not sure about what might be going on. The other thing is that I'm a big fan of all the therapists that are out there. Massage therapists, and the physical therapists, and the people that do acupuncture, and chiropractic, but if they're not also veterinarians, then they may not be able to make the diagnosis. They could look at things that might be causing the dog pain or discomfort that might be secondary to the diagnosis. But sometimes treating the symptoms is all you need to do, but sometimes treating the symptoms won't cut it. You need to know what the diagnosis is so you know specifically what you have to treat, and we'll discuss all that in the class. Melissa Breau: What I was going to say is that I know this was in the questions I sent over, kind of in advance of our call, but I'm curious…you kind of mentioned some specific certifications. Is there anything out there, or do you have any recommendations if students are trying to find a good specialist or kind of get advice on where to look? Is there any, I guess, any way for them to kind of vet on their own, okay this is a person who really, probably is going to be good for a sports dog versus this is somebody who maybe doesn't have as much of a background in that. Sue Yanoff: Yes. Well I mean both these specialties have websites. American College of Veterinary Surgeons, and American College of Veterinary Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation, and on the websites you can look up to see who in your state is board certified, and you can also look up to see what their special interest is. So, I mean, for the sports medicine and rehab vet's then obviously their specialty is sports medicine and rehab. But for the board certified surgeons some of them are more geared towards, you know, sports medicine versus just plain old surgery. The other thing is, you want to, if you're going to see a board certified surgeon, you want to see somebody that deals with a lot of performance dogs, if possible, and you also want to deal with somebody who understands, and agrees with the importance of physical therapy postoperatively, because there are still some veterinary surgeons out there that don't think dogs need physical therapy post op. They just, you know, restrict the activity until the surgery is healed, and then say okay well gradually get him back to normal, and it's like what does that mean, or what do you do. So I truly believe that the surgery is only half of the story, and that physical therapy, post operative physical therapy, guided by a knowledgeable person, and there are certifications in physical therapy for both veterinarians and technicians, where they can get some, you now, advanced training outside of vet school and tech school, on physical therapy. There's a lot of human physical therapists that are now doing veterinary physical therapy, and you know, while I don't know how good they are, you know the Fenzi alumni Facebook page is a great resource if you say okay I need a physical therapist in this area. Can you recommend somebody, or I need a good sports medicine vet or surgeon in this area, can you recommend somebody. The Fenzi Alumni Facebook page is a great resource, and also just talking to friends, and you know it won't hurt to ask your veterinarian what's your experience with this condition, how many have you done, and what's your success rate? People are a little reluctant to do that, but no good veterinarian is going to be insulted if you ask them that, and they should be able to answer. Melissa Breau: I think that's a great piece of advice, just being comfortable asking that kind of question of your vet, or your veterinary surgeon. I mean if you don't ask, you can't know, right. Sue Yanoff: That's true. Melissa Breau: So I wanted to end with the same few questions that I ask everybody that comes on, at the end of the interview. So the first one is, what is the dog-related accomplishment that you're proudest of? Sue Yanoff: Yeah, I thought about it, and it'd have to be the UD on my older beagle now, Charm because Charm is a dog that switched me from you know traditional training to positive reinforcement training, and I had shown her nine times in utility, and nine times she NQ'ed, and people just kept telling me well she's just not putting in any effort. You need to correct her harder, or you need to make her do it. And so the more times she  NQ'ed, the harder I was on her until the final time in utility, I gave her the hell signal and she just sat there, and she basically said nope. I'm done, not doing it. So I thought to myself, there's got to be a better way, and that led to positive reinforcement training, which led to the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, and after a few weeks off from training, I retrained Charm pretty much all the utility exercises using positive reinforcement, and about nine months later I showed her in utility again, and she got the UD in four shows. So I am really proud of Charm. I feel bad for all the stuff I did to her before I crossed over, but now that I train with positive reinforcement, there's just no comparison. So I'm very proud of Charm for getting her UD. Melissa Breau: Congrats. Sue Yanoff: Thanks. Melissa Breau: So the second questions that I usually ask is, what is the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Sue Yanoff: Yeah. Now this is a hard one, because I've been taking classes at FDSA since pretty much Denise started, and there's so much good information, and great advice. But if I had to pick one I'd say it's acclimation, and that is because I've had people tell me don't ever let your dog sniff. Wherever you go new, don't let them sniff. They have to be paying attention to you, like all the time, and it's like you know what. I've tried that with Ivy for a few weeks, and it almost drove both of us crazy. So when I learned about acclimation I thought, yep. This is it. This is the best piece of advice I've gotten. Melissa Breau: And especially I'd imagine with Beagles, that nose, you know. It's a real thing so. The last question is, who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Sue Yanoff: Yeah, well it's not anybody that's known in the dog world, because she doesn't teach classes, and she doesn't have a blog, and she, you know, doesn't do anything online. But she's a friend of mine who I've known since college. We met through dogs. When I was getting a CDX on my first beagle, she was getting a CDX on her first keeshond and since then she has been put multiple notches in herding titles, and some agility titles on her border collies, but she's also put multiple OTCHs on her Keeshonds, and all of her OTCHd kees are also breed champions, some of them bred by her. So there's a lot of, you know, trainers out there who have trained another dog other than a border collie, or a golden, or a sheltie whatever to an OTCH, and they do it once, and they never do it again. But Marian has, I think had, at least four or five, if not six champion OTCH keeshonds, and she's got a young keeshond coming up now that just finished her CD with six scores or 199 or above, and one score of 200. So I'm sure that's a future OTCH. So you know, I don't agree with everything she does in her training, but her dogs are really good, and they are happy in the ring, and they love her, and she gets OTCHs on keeshond's over, and over, and over again. So I admire her. Melissa Breau: That is quite the accomplishment. Well thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Sue. Sue Yanoff: It was fun. Thanks Melissa. Melissa Breau: It was fun, and thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with somebody that I've gotten lots of requests for. Cassia Turcotte will be here to talk about positive gun dog training, and her upcoming class on channeling dog's natural instincts for high level behaviors while they are in drive. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.

Summary: Chrissi Schranz is based in Vienna and lower Austria. She has been fond of dogs of all sizes, shapes, and personalities for as long as she's been able to think, especially the so-called difficult ones. After training the dachshund of her early teenage years in traditional ways at her local obedience club, she learned about clicker training and got hooked on force-free motivational methods. Her workdays are spent doing the things she loves most, thinking about languages, writing, and teaching pet dog manners and life skills to her clients and their dogs. Her German language puppy book was released in April, and a recall book will be released next spring. Chrissi loves working with people and dogs and training, playing, and hiking with her own three dogs, who we'll learn a little more about in a second. Links Mentioned: Training Website - www.clickforjoy.org  Blog - www.clickforjoy.wordpress.com. Calvin & Hobbes Comic Next Episode:  To be released 9/15/2017, featuring Sue Yanoff to talk about canine sports medicine for sports dog handlers. 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 most progressive training methods. Today, I'll be talking to Chrissi Schranz, a dog trainer, translator, and chocolate addict. Chrissi is based in Vienna and lower Austria. She has been fond of dogs of all sizes, shapes, and personalities for as long as she's been able to think, especially the so-called difficult ones. After training the dachshund of her early teenage years in traditional ways at her local obedience club, she learned about clicker training and got hooked on force-free motivational methods. Her workdays are spent doing the things she loves most, thinking about languages, writing, and teaching pet dog manners and life skills to her clients and their dogs. Her German language puppy book was released in April, and a recall book will be released next spring. Chrissi loves working with people and dogs and training, playing, and hiking with her own three dogs, who we'll learn a little more about in a second. Hi, Chrissi. Welcome to the podcast. Chrissi Schranz: Hi. I am excited to be here. Melissa Breau: I'm looking forward to chatting. To kind of get us started and to dive right in, do you want to tell us about your own crew and what you're working on with them? Chrissi Schranz: Yeah. So I have three dogs right now. The oldest one is Fanta, my greyhound. I got him from Ireland as a retired racing greyhound, and by now, his main job is to be a couch potato and get lots of belly rubs. He basically does everything he wants, but he's also my assistant when I'm working with reactive dogs. He's really good for this because he's very calm and communicates very well, so he's a very good decoy. Then there's Phoebe, my standard poodle. You might have seen her in pictures or videos. She is very crazy. She has an endless supply of energy, is very extroverted and outgoing. Everyone loves her, but she can be very exhausting to live with sometimes. If I didn't force her to, I think she would never sleep, never stop. So I've tried lots of different things with her. She was the dog I tried pretty much everything I could think of with her to see what I like. She likes everything, so she's up for anything. Now, I'm mainly focusing on nose work with her. That would be her sport of choice and my sport of choice for her because it's one thing that she loves but she doesn't get overexcited about, so she doesn't lose her mind. She can focus and enjoy it. That's her biggest issue, that she gets excited so easily that her brain freezes, and she's just like, oh my god, oh my god, life is so good. Yeah, and we do lots of hiking together and just play. Melissa Breau: And then you've got one more, right? Chrissi Schranz: Yes, my youngest one. That's Grit, my mal. She'll be a year in September. We are working on obedience foundations and some tracking. It's been really fun to work with Shade here at the FDSA. I think the way she teaches is a perfect fit for her. She's probably my favorite, but please don't tell my other dogs. We'll hopefully be doing a little obedience in the future and tracking, and maybe we'll get into protection as well. We'll see. Yeah. My dogs usually get a say in what they want to do as well, so… Melissa Breau: It sounds like three very different breeds and three very different dogs. Chrissi Schranz: Yes, they actually really are. Melissa Breau: So what led you from teaching your own crew to becoming a dog trainer? Chrissi Schranz: So I grew up with my dad's dogs, and then when I was 12 or 13, I had my very first own dog. That was the dachshund. He was really difficult. When I had him, I started reading a lot and going to seminars and workshops, and I wanted to learn as much as I could about training. I didn't plan on becoming a dog trainer yet, but I got more and more fascinated by it, and I started dog-sitting for other people and fostering for a rescue organization, so I got to play with all kinds of different dogs with all kinds of different issues. I started working as a teacher for German as a foreign language, which was really fun, too, because I've always liked teaching. It doesn't matter what that species is, and then I got Phoebe, and I took her to school with me every day, so she could come to work, and I also started a dog trainer course, which is supposedly teaching you to be a professional dog trainer, but well, I won't go into that because it was not a very good class, but I still just thought I'd want to learn as much as possible to be a good trainer for my own dogs. But then the building that our school was located in, the German school, implemented a new policy that there were no dogs allowed anymore in the building, so I couldn't bring Phoebe anymore, and that kind of annoyed me, so I finished up that term of teaching, and then I quit and opened a business focused on translating and dog training full-time, and yeah, I think it's the best decision I've ever made. Melissa Breau: So I'd imagine that having previous teaching experience was pretty useful when you started teaching people how to train dogs. There's got to be some crossover there, right? Chrissi Schranz: Yeah, actually, a lot because even when you're working with dogs, you're really working with people because it's the people who are living with the dogs every day, and you're teaching them a foreign language, which is dog, basically, or a foreign language which is German, so there are many similarities, actually. Melissa Breau: That's such an interesting way of looking at it, as both just being, you know, kind of different languages that you need to help people understand. Chrissi Schranz: Yeah. I feel like it kind of is. Melissa Breau: So I wanted to get into your training philosophy, and lucky me, I got a sneak peek before we started. You sent me over the link for this, but I'd love to have you kind of share your training philosophy and how you describe your approach, and for those of you who are going to want to see this after she talks about it, there will be a link to the comic in the show notes. Chrissi Schranz: Yeah, so I'd say my training philosophy is based on my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. So Calvin has a shovel and he's digging a hole, and then Hobbes comes up and asks him why he's digging a hole, and Calvin says he's looking for buried treasure. Hobbes asks him what he has found, and Calvin starts naming all kinds of things, like dirty rocks and roots and some disgusting grubs, and then Hobbes gets really excited, and he's like, wow, on your first try? And Calvin says, yes. There's treasure everywhere, and that is the kind of experience I want people and their dogs to have with each other. I want them to feel like life is an adventure, and there's so many exciting things to be discovered that they can do together. I want people to learn to look at the world through their dog's eyes a little bit and find this pleasure and just be together, and doing things and discovering things, whether that's digging a hole or playing in dog sports. Yeah, I want them to feel like they're friends and partners in crime and have that Calvin and Hobbes kind of relationship, because I believe if you have that kind of relationship as a foundation, you can do pretty much anything you want, no matter whether you want to have a dog you can take anywhere or whether you want to compete and do well in dog sports. I think if you have that kind of relationship as a basis, everything is possible. Melissa Breau: I love that, just on so many levels, that comic works for what you're talking about, right? From the almost literal sense of, okay, they're digging a hole and they find buried treasure that's rocks and grubs and things our dogs would actually find pretty fascinating, to that metaphorical level of, like, just wanting to kind of explore and find joy in the everyday with our dogs. I mean, this is just a great illustration, I guess, of kind of a philosophy in a comic. It's really quite neat. So I want to dive into a little bit the classes that you teach at FDSA. So I know that your first class at FDSA, I think it was your first class, right? Calling All Dogs? Chrissi Schranz: Yeah. Melissa Breau: Okay. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that, and start off with I guess what may be a little bit of a controversial question. Is there such a thing as a 100 percent reliable recall, and kind of how do we balance the idea of giving our dogs freedom with the realities and dangers of life? Chrissi Schranz: I don't think there's 100 percent reliable recall. I don't think you can get 100 perfect reliability on any real life behavior, really, simply because you can't control your environment, so you can prove your recall against lots of distractions, but there's no way you can prove it against all of them because there's always unexpected things that will happen and things that will show up that you didn't even know existed. I mean, it's different with competition behaviors because those, you only need in very specific environment, so you can prepare for the ring easier than for the real world in some ways. So you know there won't be kids on bikes in the ring, and there won't be loose dogs, and…hopefully not. There won't be any squirrels, but you don't know these things about the real world, so I don't think there's an objective answer to how we should balance freedom and safety for our dogs. It's more like a personal decision. So we take risks that we think are worth it because they increase our dogs quality of life, and we don't take those risks that scare us too much, and I think everyone draws this line differently, and that's okay. I think dogs can be perfectly happy even if they never get to be off leash in an unfenced area. So off leash freedom is one of many ways to enrich their lives and share things with them, but it's not the only way, and yeah, I think there's just no right answer. Everyone has to answer this question for themselves. Melissa Breau: Right. It kind of goes back to almost to the comic idea again, like that the Calvin Hobbes comic, just the idea that finding the pleasure in the everyday and what those pleasures are going to be are going to vary. So saying that you can't get a 100 percent reliable recall, obviously the point of the class is still to teach a really strong, reliable recall, so how do you approach that? How do you teach a recall that's as strong as you can get it? Chrissi Schranz: That also goes back to that comic, in a way. I think my approach to recall training is different to many other people's approaches. For example, so the first one or two weeks of class, there's no…we don't even really talk about the recall, but we focus on the relationship. So most people want a recall that they can use when they're hiking or when they're…yeah, distractions around or maybe when they're in a dog park and there are other dogs and so much exciting stuff going on. So the first weeks are about getting to know your dog in new ways, to observe them, to learn new things about them. I have students offer their dogs various reinforcers and let the dog choose their favorite one, and often, they'll find out interesting things that they didn't think were their favorite ones. Melissa Breau: Do you have an example? Chrissi Schranz: Well, for example, with my own dogs, when I make the videos for this class, and I haven't…like, I sometimes do these experiments, but I hadn't done it in a while, and I was convinced that Phoebe's and Fanta's favorite treat was this salmon pâté, but when I offered them various different kinds of treats…and that's the last thing they ate, so that is not true anymore. Sometimes we just believe that hot dogs is our dog's favorite treats because that's what we assume is a dog's favorite treat, or we ask them when they were puppies and then never again. Their tastes may have changed in the meantime. Yeah, and there's lots of games that I ask people to play out on walks and at home in their yard to just make their walks more interactive and to experiment with what kind of games their dogs want and enjoy, so with toys, with food, with food trails, with using their nose, with running, so by the time I actually start conditioning a recall cue, the student's should have learned something new about their dogs, and they should have started building this kind of invisible connection that they can take with them out into the real world to all the places where they actually want a strong recall. Yeah, and then it's pretty straightforward. Classical conditioning of a recall cue, I ask everyone to choose a new one because I'm assuming if you're taking a recall class, you have problems with your old recall cue, and it's usually easier to train a new cue than to revive an old one that they have already learned to ignore. Yeah, and then we systematically introduce distractions, and then we go out into the real world and increase the level of difficulty, still like integrating lots of games into the whole training so that the recall always feels like something really, really fun, not necessarily something that gets rewarded with a piece of food, but very often something that gets rewarded with some game that is a little bit of extra they have been looking forward to on their walk. And in the last week, we're actually looking at environmental rewards like swimming or chasing squirrels, or maybe even eating food they found on the ground. Anything that's safe and the dog likes can be a reward. Melissa Breau: Are there any success stories you particularly want to share? I mean, I know that just kind of hearing you talk about it at a little bit online, it sounds like there are some students who are really struggling with particular distractions that manage to accomplish some pretty awesome results, so… Chrissi Schranz: There's like actually so many people I'm so impressed by. well the Gold students, i don't really see the others, but they've come so far in such a short time. Like Tia, Jill's dog, who started recalling around chipmunks now, and you can really see that they're more connected now on their walks, or Shila the lab who can now call up…he has started being able to play and focus on her owner near animal carcasses, which is her biggest distraction, and then we have a dog located in Africa. Her owner is an American expat, and she kind of met that dog out there in Africa and then they kind of became an item. It's a very independent dog and very interesting. The first week of class, we were like really trying to figure out how to get him to be engaged and to enjoy interacting with his person more than just exploring by himself, and when I look at their videos now, they're like such a cool team. They're really having fun together. He's starting to really enjoy coming back and play with his person. Melissa Breau: I've always thought that if someone has relationship issues, a recall class is always a great place to start to work on rebuilding those, because it's so positive and it's all about coming back and coming in, and… Chrissi Schranz: It's a good relationship class, too. Melissa Breau: Yeah. So I know that there are two other classes that you currently have on the schedule. At least, there were when I was prepping. I was looking, and those were the two that I saw, so Finding Five and The Perfect Pet. So I want to start with Finding Five. What's the concept there? What's the idea behind that class? Chrissi Schranz: I wanted it to be a class for dedicated dog owners, pet owners, and dog sports people. So it's basically for people who have very busy lives, and they feel like they're never doing enough with their dogs. There's never any time to train, but they really want to train. I had the idea when I talked with a friend. She'd just got a dog. It was her first dog, and she asked me a few dog training questions, and I ended up telling her that it's usually more effective if you have several short sessions than one long session, and she was like, yeah, that makes sense, but I can't do that. Like, I don't have time to train several times a day, and I started thinking about this, and I realized that like lots of people have this problem, so I thought there should be a class about this. It's still very much a work in progress. I have so many ideas that I want to include, and I know it's only 6 weeks so I have to narrow it down, but there are two things I want to focus on. One is how to find time to train your dog and how to build new habits and make yourself feel accountable so that you actually really use that time, and the other one is to learn to fully enjoy that training time and to use it to unwind yourself, so even if the rest of your life is crazy busy, or especially if the rest of your life is crazy busy, training your dog shouldn't feel like just another thing you have to get done. It should be something you're looking forward to, so it's little bit about relationships and a little bit about smart ways of training and planning. Melissa Breau: Do you have any tips for those people who are super excited now and don't want to have to wait until December? Chrissi Schranz: Well, one easy thing that might actually help you train more regularly, or just feel more accountable and make time for training, is to write down your training goals for each of your dogs. So you could make a poster and put it on your fridge. Write down three things you're working on with each of your dogs, and every time you practice one of these things, give yourself a checkmark or a smiley face on your poster, and it will make you feel good and motivate you to do that again. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Now the third class you currently have on the schedule is The Perfect Pet, and that's just around the corner. It's coming up in October. Do you want to share a little bit about what that class will cover? Chrissi Schranz: That'll be a basic pet dog class. We'll teach things that make life with a dog easier and more fun for human and dog, so loose leash walking, coming when called, polite greetings, things like leave it, settle on a mat, sit to say please rather than jump up and bark. So we'll work with the clicker and then starting with an introduction to clicker training. So I'm picturing a person who is really new to the world of dogs and dog training but wants to learn more, so I'm hoping for this to be kind of gateway drug to our nerdier classes. Yeah, so people can get their feet wet and see how much fun positive reinforcement training can be. Melissa Breau: So it's the perfect class for everybody who's listening to recommend to at least three of their friends. Chrissi Schranz: Yes. Melissa Breau: I want to talk for a minute about kind of the balance between sports skills and pet skills, and I think that with so many sports dogs, people focus so much time on the sports skills that they don't always take the time to focus on those life skills, things like loose leash walking, or you know, the kind of actually sitting to say please. Like, those skills are so often overlooked in our sports dogs, so I wanted to see if you had any thoughts on ways that people can better manage or better balance, I guess, those sets of skills as they kind of build out those foundation behaviors on their dogs. Chrissi Schranz: Yeah. That's a great question. From what I've seen, people who integrate their sports dogs into everyday life as well, they usually have good life skills as well, and people who only share sport related things with their dogs, they often have rather poor life skills, so I think a good way to balance this is to make an effort to share non-sports related activities with our dogs as well. So for example, take them along when you go shopping or when you're meeting a friend for ice cream, or take your dog to Home Depot when you need to go there anyways, have them meet your guests rather than keeping her in a kennel, and a good way to start this would be to decide on one day for each week where you will take your dog on all the errands where dogs are allowed, because I'm sure if you know how to teach sports skills and make an effort to just put your dog into real life situations, you'll end up teaching life skills without even noticing it, and it will probably also improve your relationship, so I think just doing more non-sports related things with our sports dogs will almost automatically increase their life skills. Melissa Breau: Is it ever too late to teach an adult dog those types of skills? You know, having a pet class coming up, are there differences in how you teach them to a puppy versus an adult dog? Chrissi Schranz: No, it's never too late, and I basically teach most of the skills the same way, too. The only difference is that it usually takes longer in an adult who…because that dogs often have had time to practice unwanted behaviors, and the more you practice something, the more ingrained it gets and the harder it is to change it, but yeah, then the puppy, for example, hasn't discovered leash pulling yet, so it's easier to teach loose leash manners, but it's never too late to start training. Melissa Breau: So I wanted to kind of end off with the three questions I always ask at the end of the interview. So the first one is what is the dog-related accomplishment that you are proudest of? Chrissi Schranz: I think that actually that feeling of being really, really happy with where I am and what I'm doing, it happens every time. I feel like I didn't just train a dog, that I kind of touched someone's life. That happens occasionally, and it's like a really, really nice feeling. For example, a while ago, I taught a beginner group class, and there was this woman in her 60s, and she had a mixed breed dog. She had never really done anything with him before, but she wanted to try training him, and I showed everyone a few things, and then I went from person to person as they were practicing, as I usually do, and every time I walked past Sammy, she was…that's her dog…he was already holding a sit or a down or whatever we were practicing. He was already there, and she told me it was going great, it was going great, and I noticed whenever she was working on a down, he was laying on his side, which seemed a little strange. He did not seem like a very confident dog around the other dogs, so I was like, that's weird. That looks like a very…I don't know. Well, anyways, she told me things were going great, so I moved on, and I only noticed what was going on in the second lesson of that group class. Right before I got to them, the owner would physically push him into whatever position. Melissa Breau: That's just terrible. Chrissi Schranz: And I don't know, she didn't…like the only way she knew how to like put him in a down, for example, was to actually tip him over, and he would just lie there. Like, she didn't want me to see this, she just wanted me to see the result and think that everything was going well. So I saw it before I got there, and I was like, wow. She is really afraid of making mistakes, so I didn't say anything. I just showed again, like to everyone again, how to lure the sit and how to lure the down, and then to make sure to do something her dog would be really good at, so I think we played leave it, which is what's very clear, her dog would excel at because he was not the kind of dog who would steal anything. So then I could tell her in front of everyone how well Sammy was doing. I also made it a point to explain again that the most important thing to me in my classes is that everyone makes sure their dogs are comfortable, and for example, if they are not ready to lie down yet because they're a little nervous about another dog who is close by, then they should just do a sit instead or give them a little break. I never directly addressed her, but I could start seeing…because now I was, of course, always looking that way and trying to see what she was doing, and I could see her starting doing things differently, and then when I caught her not pushing him into a down the next time, but feeding him for a sit, I went over and told everyone how awesome it was that she was just paying attention to his needs and that this is what I was talking about. This is one of the most important things a dog owner should learn, and of course, by the third lesson, he was lying down like the other dogs and it wasn't a problem for him anymore. The exciting thing for me was that I could see that she was feeling so much more comfortable, and she actually started asking questions when she didn't understand something, and I really felt like I had given her a new learning experience. She seemed like happy and relaxed, and talked to people, and it was like a different person, and I really love it when that happens. I feel like she took something away from the class that was more important than training her dog, and that's the atmosphere I want to create. I want to create an atmosphere where people can be themselves and let their guard down online as well as in person, and it always makes me so happy when I feel like I actually accomplished that. Melissa Breau: There's a second question I like to ask, is what is the best piece of training advice that you have ever heard? Chrissi Schranz: There's lots of great things out there, but I think I'll go with Kathy Sdao, “communication trumps control.” Well, yeah. It's true for every aspect of our lives. We can either try really hard to control everything and everyone around us, to control our dogs, to control our partners, or we can communicate with them and find out what the reasons for their behavior are and get to our goal that way, and that's actually a better way to get to your goal, even if you reach the same goal, because both parties will be happier. Melissa Breau: And then my last question is who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Chrissi Schranz: Again, like lots and lots of people including pretty much all my colleagues here at the FDSA, if I had to pick on person it would probably be Susan Friedman. A few years ago, I attended my first seminar with her, and I think she was the first big name trainer who I felt was as nice and gentle with people as she was with animals, and that was so nice to see, and it really made me want to be that way, too. I had hung out with positive reinforcement trainers for a while by then, and very often, I felt like they really didn't like people or they didn't like their clients, and it never made sense to me. Susan Friedman made sense, and I really love the way she worked with us, and she was authentic and gentle, and you just felt that she genuinely liked the people she worked with. That's just something I aspire to, too. Well, yes. I think I mostly do. Melissa Breau: I think that that's a…it's a great goal for everybody to aspire to, right, that they make other people feel that way. Chrissi Schranz: Yes. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Chrissi. Chrissi Schranz: Thank you for having me. Melissa Breau: Absolutely, and thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Sue Yanoff to talk about canine sports medicine for sports dog handlers. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.

Summary: Nancy Tucker is a full-time 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 US, and in Europe. Most of her time is spent doing private in-home behavior consultations with clients. She specializes in common behaviour issues that affect the family dog, and is skilled and experienced in treating aggression and anxiety cases. Nancy has written numerous articles on dog behavior for various French-language Quebec publications, and is a regular contributor to the Whole Dog Journal. At FDSA she's wrapping up a great class on Separation Anxiety and has a class coming up in December on teaching door manners when guests come to visit. Links Mentioned: Next Episode:  To be released 9/8/2017, featuring Chrissi Schranz talking about fitting training into our busy lives, teaching a reliable “real life” recall, and other pet skills that help us build a better relationship with our dogs. 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 full-time pet dog training 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 US, and in Europe. Most of her time is spent doing private in-home behavior consultations with clients. She specializes in common behavior issues that affect the family dog and is skilled and experienced in treating aggression and anxiety cases. Nancy has written numerous articles on dog behavior for various French language Quebec publications, and she is a regular contributor to the Whole Dog Journal. Here at FDSA, she's wrapping up a great class on separation anxiety, and there's a class coming up in December on teaching dog door manners so when guests come to visit. Hi, Nancy. Welcome to the podcast. Nancy Tucker: Hi, Melissa. Thanks for having me. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Excited to learn a little bit about your upcoming classes and about you today. To start us out, I know you're expecting a new puppy. Do you want to share the details? Nancy Tucker: Oh, man. We are so excited. He's a Border Terrier and we're picking him up to take him home this weekend. He's nine and a half weeks old and I haven't raised a puppy in decades since my last four dogs were all adult, so I will get to practice what I preach when I dole out advice, and I'm sure it will probably cause me to have a lot more empathy for my clients after this experience. Melissa Breau: By the time this comes out you'll probably actually have the puppy so everybody can go on the Facebook group and check out the cute puppy pictures. You'll share those, right? Nancy Tucker: Oh, there will be plenty of puppy pictures. Melissa Breau: So I want to go a little bit into your background. What got you started in dogs? I mean, how did you end up where you are today? Nancy Tucker: It's a bit of a funny story and it's the type of story that's actually pretty common in trainer circles. You know how you can meet a bunch of trainers who had all kinds of fabulous careers before they were dog trainers and somehow ended up as a dog trainer, so in my life before dogs as they say, my career had nothing to do with training at all. I was a freelance writer and I worked in marketing in public relations and I ended up a trainer quite by accident and then eventually it became my full-time job. So like most people in that situation, I've always loved dogs, I've always had dogs, I felt I knew dogs, and years ago I thought that I could offer my services as a PR and marketing consultant to our local shelter just to kind of help out, see what I could do in terms of marketing and PR, so I thought that I could donate some time and services to the shelter in my field of expertise. And then I learned that the majority of dogs who were surrendered there are there because of behavior problems, that was kind of my first insight into shelter dogs. So I thought well, if I can learn some basic training skills and maybe I could also offer those service to help get more dogs adopted. I don't know if you can see where this is going, but I was very green, very naive. I had no clue about how anything worked in a shelter, but I wanted to help and I was sure that I could. So I'm grinning here because, well anyway, I bought some DVDs, I read some books, all on positive reinforcement and after a very short time I was convinced that I was an awesome trainer and I could save all the dogs everywhere. And so I volunteered as an assistant to the head trainer at the shelter who used to give group classes, so I was her assistant for a little while and we hit it off, we became really good friends, I learned a lot from her, and eventually I was teaching my own classes and couple years later opened my own school. And actually working with dogs and their owners was a huge learning experience for me. It's not like just you and your own dog, you're working with people and their dogs, so if anyone's listening to this and they're thinking about becoming a professional trainer, I highly recommend getting involved with training shelter dogs and the people who adopt them because you'll get tons of experience dealing with all kinds of different dogs with different issues and varying human dog teams. Anyway, at the time I was just teaching basic skills, just regular basic training, and then I adopted Woody. He was a dog who would introduce me to separation anxiety. So it was living with Woody and trying to figure out how to help him that I ended up really diving into the world of dog behavior and to this day I continue to study and learn about behavior. Melissa Breau: So this is kind of like a big ambiguous question, but why are you a dog trainer? What is it that inspires you every day? Nancy Tucker: I would say that I'm a dog trainer today for the same reason that I accidentally became one in the first place. I want to help reduce the number of dogs that are surrendered to shelters for behavior reasons. I want to help families deal with their dogs' behavior issues. Just as people can be when they surrender a dog to a shelter, the truth is that most of these people absolutely adore their dog and they're simply at the end of their rope. They can't handle this problem any more and they don't have the tools or skills or knowledge to work it out, so that's why I'm a dog trainer, I'm trying to keep dogs in their homes. Melissa Breau: And I think it's so common to hear things like, “He's such a good dog, I'm sure he'll be adopted. Or, “He's such a good dog in this situation, that situation. I'm sure he'll find a great home,” and they kind of make themselves feel a little better because they do love their dogs and they do believe that they're great dogs and they're just, like you said, they're at the end of their rope in that one area. Nancy Tucker: Absolutely. Yeah, and sometimes it just takes a little bit of guidance and a little bit of help, a little bit of support. It doesn't always work out, of course, but most of the time things can turn around for the better, so that's what keeps me motivated. Melissa Breau: Do you have a particular philosophy or training philosophy that you kind of believe in? I mean, how would you describe your training approach? Nancy Tucker: My main focus when working with people and their dogs is creating or repairing the bond between them, and I say repairing because sometimes it's a matter of trust has been broken or like we mentioned a couple of minutes ago where somebody's at the end of their rope and they just don't like their dog any more, so I think a lot of my work is about repairing that bond. And once that bond is there and it's healthy and it's strong, then all kinds of good things start happening. The training becomes easier, training becomes more fun, interaction in general becomes more fun, and I think that a large part of building a really strong bond is letting go of expectations. Let go of this idea that we have in our mind about how things should be, and letting go of some of the rules that we tend to put on ourselves and on our dogs' behavior. I am a big fan of letting dogs be dogs and training them so that our lives can coexist in harmony without kind of training the dog out of the dog. Melissa Breau: So I kind of mentioned in your bio that you're wrapping up the class on separation anxiety. I know that's a really, really hard thing to work on with some dogs, so why is that so hard and kind of how are you approaching it in class? Nancy Tucker: Yeah. Separation anxiety encompasses a lot of different emotions, for both the dog and the human. So there's fear, there's frustration, there's resentment often. There's guilt, there's sadness, there's loneliness because you find that as a human living with a dog with separation anxiety often your social life is severely affected, you can't go out, so it's a super tough situation all around. And of course there's a lot of emotions involved for the dog, too. So in this course I skipped a lot of the theory behind this type of problem, you know, the possible causes and symptoms, for example. I figured if people were signing up for the class it's because they're already experiencing it, and spending more time on theory means spending less time on working towards solving problems. So because it can take such a long time to solve this type of problem, I wanted to start right away and make the best of the six weeks that we have together. So right now students are working on very gradually helping their dog learn not to fear being alone, and it is a very gradual process but if it's done right, we begin to see improvement at every step, and then a spark of hope gets ignited. And then the next thing you know you're on your way to solving the problem, so for most students this is true. They'll be able to solve the problem, but there are some cases unfortunately where it's not so easy to solve or that it just won't ever be resolved, and this is true, so those are super tough on the student who's trying so hard. Melissa Breau: Right. Right. Sometimes it's just out of their control. It's not that they're doing anything wrong, it's not that there's anything wrong with the dog, it's just that that's who the dog is. Nancy Tucker: Exactly, and to take away that guilt that some people have where somehow they think that it's something that they've done that's caused the dog to have this problem and that's so untrue. Melissa Breau: I mean, behavior issues in general are just, I mean, they're so hard. I know personally it often feels like because those behaviors are so tied to emotions, right? They're different than skills, like obedience skills. Because of the emotions, they're often so much more difficult to teach. Would you agree with that? Can you speak to that a little bit? Kind of how do emotions and behavior interact? Nancy Tucker: Yeah, for sure. When we're working on a problem like separation anxiety, for example, we're directly addressing the dog's emotions, so how they perceive what being alone means, and this is true for any sort of behavior issue where there are very strong emotions involved, like aggression. So in this case we want to take him from feeling intense fear or panic to being alone, to feeling confident and perfectly okay with being alone at home. So we are working on the emotions and that's quite the journey, and this is why it takes time. So we're not training any new behaviors at all really, we're not putting any movements on queue, that's not the type of training we're doing at all. So what we're doing is helping the dog feel better, helping him feel safer and more confident about this whole being alone thing, and we're doing this through what's called systematic desensitization. And just very quickly, systematic means that we're working on it very methodically, not making progress at random; there's a plan. And desensitization means that we're working to reduce or eliminate this negative emotional response that the dog has to being alone and we're doing this by exposing him to the situation very, very slowly. So we start with super easy situations that they can handle and then we very slowly make it a tiny bit harder as we move through the program, so during this six weeks it's really just all about gradually making the exercises a little teeny bit harder until the dog can handle longer periods of being alone. Melissa Breau: Yes. Now I imagine that you're talking about very different emotions in your upcoming class where it's door greeting versus something like separation anxiety. I mean, in your opinion, what's kind of the common issue that we tend to see when dogs are just way over the top at the door, kind of what's going on there? Nancy Tucker: My God, this is actually one of my favorite training issues to work on because we're dealing with an issue that's actually fun to solve, and I just want to clarify here that we're not talking about dogs who are fearful or who behave aggressively when someone enters the home, that's a whole other issue. What this class will address, and this is in December, what this class will address are those dogs who scramble to get to the door when someone walks in. They push their way through to greet visitors and they usually come on way too strong, so it might be barking with excitement, they might be jumping up, they might be scratching legs or if they're big enough they can just lean so hard into people that they knock them down. And as happy as they appear to be, I think a lot of these dogs are experiencing some sort of conflict of emotions and that's why we see kind of the over excited behavior. So there's a huge difference between what the dog wants and needs to do when someone walks through the door and what we want them to do, and I think that's when some over exuberant behaviors are born. Melissa Breau: So you said something really interesting, though. You said there's a conflict of emotions. do you mind just explaining a little bit more what you mean by that? Nancy Tucker: If they want to greet the people, they want to see the people, they want to smell the people, they want to see what's going on, they want to interact, but there may be somebody standing behind them pulling on their collar or yelling at them. They know that this seems to be a situation where their human gets very excited or very upset and they're not quite sure how to behave, but they have this overwhelming sort of urge to go and greet the people at the door. So I think that that's where I see the conflict of emotion and that's where we see a bunch of appeasement behaviors or the dog just gets over excited and it's just overwhelming emotion. Melissa Breau: Yes. I think that sometimes people aren't really sure kind of what that phrase means. I mean, I did, there's this conflict of emotion, it's like well, I know what I want you to do, why aren't you just doing it? You should know better. If our dog really knew how to do better they'd be doing better. But I did want to ask you, though, why door skills are so important for the dogs and kind of why the focus on that. So why is that such an important skill? Nancy Tucker: For safety reasons, first of all. Safety for your guests, and of course I should mention that there are dogs who aren't nearly as interested in the people walking in the door, they're more into the fact that the door is open and here's the chance to slip out for an unauthorized adventure. So it's safety for the dogs, safety for your guests, and it's also a  matter of being able to have people come into your home without being accosted by your canine welcoming committee. Not everyone's into that, to getting jumped on or to get greeted by a whole big gang of dogs come running at the door, if you have multiple dogs, of course. I am, though. When I walk into people's homes I'm all about greeting the dogs first. It's actually a fault of mine, I don't even see the people, you know, can you get out of the way? I want to see your dogs. But not everybody's into that, so it's nice to have some sort of control over what happens at the door and it's nice to have friends who actually want to come over to your house because when you discover that people aren't coming over any more because walking into your place is such an unpleasant experience, well, that really should probably be addressed. Melissa Breau: Yes. Can you share a little bit of detail about how you'll be addressing it in class and maybe even a tip or two for students who are super eager to get started? Nancy Tucker: Sure. There's a lot of different ways to deal with this issue, so they don't all involve sending a dog to a mat which is a legitimate way, of course, to train a dog to behave when somebody comes to the door but it's not the only way and that can actually be a very difficult thing for many dogs to do. That's a lot of impulse control to go and sit on a mat away from the door and watch people come in. So that is a way, but there are others and we'll be covering a lot of different ways during the course, and I've personally always allowed my dog to be part of the greeting committee at the door. They've always been there, I've never sent my dogs away when somebody comes in. But we worked it out so that I could open the door without tripping over my dog. Sometimes dogs just get so excited that they're at the door first and you can't reach the door because the dogs are there. I can leave the door open without a dog trying to slip out, and people can walk in without being accosted. So for me my dog being there to greet is important. They're part of my family and I'm okay with that as long as they do it politely. And I think that the first tip that I would give to people who are dealing with this type of issue is to take a deep breath and try to remain calm. It's easier said than done, but for sure raising your voice or trying to corral a bunch of dogs by grabbing collars or shouting orders is not helping at all and it might even be contributing to the level of excitement. So the next step is to look at your dog and be thankful that he's super happy to see people walking in because it could be worse. You could be dealing with a pooch who greets aggressively. An impolite door greeting is far easier to modify and it's actually a fun process. Melissa Breau: I know this wasn't in my prepared questions for you, but how much is the class going to require that students have that other person to be that person at the door and how much of it's independent skills that they can really work on without those set ups? Nancy Tucker: Oh, set ups. Well, set ups will be very important, that's for sure, but set ups, I think that comes later. The dog needs to learn certain skills before we start setting them up in actual scenarios, so management will play a very big part of it and training all kinds of different games and skills. And I think, too, that in a lot of training where we are requiring some sort of impulse control I find that the more restraint we put on a dog the worse it is. They learn to control their impulses and doing it in this sort of game in a fun game fashion seems to work so much better than putting any restraint on the dog. Not any restraint, but we'll be using management but we won't be putting physical restraint most of the time on the dog. So if I remember your original question, you were asking if set ups will be a big part of it? Yeah, definitely it will be but not ‘til later. Melissa Breau: Okay. Yeah, because I was asking like somebody like me, it's me and my dogs at the house, right? So the problem is huge but it's very hard to train a problem when you don't have somebody who's willing to come knock on your door 18 times because they live with you. So I was just curious about how much that, like people should be prepared to call up a few friends and be like hey, are you willing to help me train my dog this weekend? Nancy Tucker: It is an important part but it's not the entire course, it's a part of it. Melissa Breau: Excellent. So to kind of round things out, I want to ask you the last couple questions that I've asked everybody who's been on the podcast. So the first one is, what is the dog-related accomplishment that you are proudest of? Nancy Tucker: Yeah. This one's a bit hard to talk about because it has to do with the dog that we lost this summer, our girl Chili. When we adopted her she was almost three years old and it was impossible to manipulate certain parts of her body, she became very aggressive. She reacted to being touched like around her paws and ears, for example, those two particular places she really didn't want to be touched, and unfortunately those are two places that we needed to touch regularly. So anyway, we worked on these things and we eventually got to a point where she did really, really well and we could do her nails and we could clean her ears without any problem at all. But the absolute best part, and this is what I consider to be my greatest accomplishment because of the situation. When I taught her to accept a needle aspiration for a lump that she had on her chest, we were able to get it done at the vet's office with zero restraint, so in just a little over a week I taught her to lie down and roll over on her back and to lie still while the vet aspirated the lump, and she never flinched. So we know that this can be done and we can teach dogs to be cooperative participants in their own care, and having done it now with a dog who was previously extremely aggressive when we manipulated her, to me that was just such an eye opener to see that it can be done, and it was a huge accomplishment for myself to be able to train it because I was emotionally involved in the situation, attached to the dog, so sometimes that can be a little bit harder. Melissa Breau: Yes, absolutely, and that's really impressive. I mean, that's quite a skill to have taught and to have accomplished. I mean, somebody who has a dog who's not thrilled at the vet, I can understand how difficult that can be and yeah, that's quite an accomplishment. My next question for you here is, what is the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Nancy Tucker: The advice that's always stuck with me and that I incorporate into every single training scenario is that the learner is always right. So if I'm trying to teach a dog something and he keeps offering me the wrong behavior, the problem lies with me as the teacher. The dog is doing the right thing. If I want him to do something different, I'm the one who needs to adjust my approach, so I think that that has been the handiest piece of advice, the most, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Not handy…Not convenient. Melissa Breau: Applicable? Nancy Tucker: Yes. Yeah. For any scenario. Melissa Breau: And then my last question for you here is, who is somebody else in the dog world that you look up to? Nancy Tucker: Oh, my. The list is endless, it truly is. I couldn't possibly try to narrow it down to a single person, but I can tell you this much. The people that I'm drawn to are those who promote a two-way communication between the trainer and the learner. Those who teach with respect for their learners' needs and for the learners' unique personality. That's what I'm drawn to and those are the people that I really, really love to learn from. Melissa Breau: I think that you are not alone when it comes to that here in the FDSA community. Nancy Tucker: Yeah, I definitely detected that and it's fantastic. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Nancy. Nancy Tucker: Oh, my pleasure. It's been fun. Melissa Breau: It was fun. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. I will be back next week with Chrissi Schranz to discuss how to fit training into our busy lives, a very important topic, and teaching a reliable, real-life recall, plus a couple other pet skills that help us with a better relationship with our dog. If you haven't already subscribed 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.

Summary: Melissa Chandler has competed in conformation, agility, obedience, hunt tests, nose work, and rally. She's also successfully trained and handled non-owned dogs to many titles and championships. Today her focus is on nose work and parkour, both of which she teaches here at FDSA. Melissa's strengths are problem solving, by looking outside the box, and working with soft dogs. Owning and working with soft dogs has given her the ability to coach others to help build confidence, and has taught her how to set up training sessions, specifically with soft dogs in mind. She enjoys helping others and brainstorming to help other teams succeed. She has taught private lessons in agility and nose work that focus on solving specific training problems. Next Episode:  To be released 8/25/2017, featuring Heather Lawson to discuss the importance of life skills for competition dogs and advanced training concepts we can teach our dogs. 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 will be talking to Melissa Chandler. Melissa has competed in conformation, agility, obedience, hunt tests, nose work, and rally. She's also successfully trained and handled non-owned dogs to many titles and championships. Today her focus is on nose work and parkour, both of which she teaches here at FDSA. Melissa's strengths are problem solving, by looking outside the box, and working with soft dogs. Owning and working with soft dogs has given her the ability to coach others to help build confidence, and has taught her how to set up training sessions, specifically with soft dogs in mind. She enjoys helping others and brainstorming to help other teams succeed. She has taught private lessons in agility and nose work that focus on solving specific training problems. Hi Melissa, welcome to the podcast. Melissa Chandler: Thank you, glad to be here. Melissa Breau: Excited to chat today. This is definitely a, you know, get into parkour a little bit, get into some of the nose work stuff. It's a new topic for me so that's exciting. Melissa Chandler: Good, I'm glad. Melissa Breau: So, to start us out, do want to tell us a little bit about your own dogs? Who they are? What you're working on with them? Melissa Chandler: Sure, I'd love to. Edge is my (several) year old Weimaraner who's responsible for this awesome nose work journey we're on. He currently has two nose work, three legs. We've only competed in two nosework three trials and he qualified and placed in both trials. We're currently getting ready to enter more trials for this winter to work on our nose work three elite, and for those that are not aware you must qualify in three nose work, three trials, in order to earn your nose work three elite. Neither one of us can handle heat so our competition window is basically October to April, depending on spring weather. Edge also loved obedience. He's trained to utility so we do a lot of that just for fun. His absolute favorite thing is the dumbbell so we play a lot of fun retrieve games and a lot of times it's his reward after a training session. He also loves fitness, which I think comes from all of the parkour exercises and obstacles that we've done, and he also loves working on tricks and he's very awesome at them and he makes them look really easy. Bam is my 3-year-old Vizsla and he's actually responsible for our parkour adventures. He took puppy classes, Karen and Abigail who are the founders of the International Dog Parkour Association, and he was a superstar. He had incredible balance and rear end awareness for such a young puppy and he was always like a little kid at Christmas every time they introduced a new obstacle. It became part of our class whenever they brought something new out, we would turn Bam to face the wall so he couldn't see, and then everyone would watch when he would turn around because he would just smile and light up with a new obstacle to start with. It was so cute. He loves agility, hunting, obedience, and he's a super nose work dog, but he also loves quartering. So, we've been working really hard at increasing motor value and slowly incorporating that into the environment with fun, easy highs, and also using some Premack, and I'm actually sharing our adventures of this journey in my current nose work 120 class and I think it's a nice fit in that class because we're starting all the different elements. And then, I'm also planning on turning it into a full proofing and distraction class at the beginning of 2018. Melissa Breau: You mentioned the heat. Where are you located? Melissa Chandler: We're in Ohio, so we have hot, humid summers and neither one of us can handle it. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. I did a summer in Charleston at one point and that was pretty bad too so, I can sympathize. Melissa Chandler: That's one thing I love about my training building now because we have a place to go train that's air conditioned in the summer. Melissa Breau: Can't beat that. Melissa Chandler: No, here we get up at 6 o'clock in the morning, if it's cooler, and get out and get a little bit of training in before the day starts. Melissa Breau: I want to just kind of take it back a little bit to the beginning of your journey. I know you kind of mentioned each of your dogs has helped you get into a different sport. How did you originally get started out in dog sports? Melissa Chandler: I've always enjoyed dog training before I really knew anything about it or what it was. I think when I was like 10 or 11 a friend of the family asked me to show her Schnauzer in conformation and I did one show and I was addicted. I convinced, or maybe, for a lack of better term, I negotiated with my dad to get a poodle. I actually asked for a Great Dane knowing I wouldn't get a Great Dane, but I was able to negotiate down to a poodle, and we started some junior handling, and then from that I started doing conformations, and then I got into a 4H and AKC obedience. We competed locally at our county fairs and every year we were fortunate enough to win a spot to go to state fair. So, we got to go to big competitions, for us, being at that young age in 4H, and my parents were so supportive. They had to drive me all over for training and trials, and every weekend we'd go off to some remote place to do a conformation or an obedience trial, and I fell in love with it so much, and then I met a Weimaraner and I knew I had to have a Weimaraner and I got my first Weimaraner and started obedience, and then I got my second Weimaraner and that's when agility was just coming to the US and started agility and it's kind of all history from there. So, I've been doing this for a really long time. Melissa Breau: Now I know you mentioned Edge got you into nose work, do want to share that story a little bit? Like, what was it about nose work, or about him in nose work, how did that happen? Melissa Chandler: Sure, as I said, Edge was responsible for this awesome nose work journey that we've shared and we both have such a passion for the sport now. He's very soft and he stresses down. He loves to train and work, but he could not handle a trial environment and we went to several trials and he just wasn't happy, and if he's not happy, I'm not happy. So, I was looking for something for him to do and his breeders were in California and they had mentioned the great new sport called nose work. There wasn't anything in our area so I had traveled and gone to a couple seminars and thought yes, this is for us, and was looking for some ongoing instruction and that is when Denise actually offered her very first online class before FDSA even existed. So, we're from the pre FDSA days and we took her very first online class, nose work. We started that and never looked back, took all of the classes online, and I'm one of those people, once I learn something, I want to learn anything and everything I can about it. I just want to know everything I can so I can help my dogs adjust. So, I traveled to a lot of different seminars, I went to different people, different philosophies, different ideas, and just absorbed as much as I could about nose work. I also volunteered at trials, even before Edge and I were competing, so I could learn what it was all about. I learned so much from the judges and debriefings. There's things that, to this day, that still, they're like little gems of information that I share with my students that I learned at debriefings. So, I highly recommend anyone that can volunteer at a trial to do it because it's definitely, it's a great education and you learn a lot of information. Melissa Breau: Not to put you on the spot but do you mind sharing one of the tips that you picked up at a debriefing, just kind of for the audience? Melissa Chandler: Not at all. One of the things, especially when you're starting nose work, is your dog's getting close to the source, close to the source, and you want to step in there and look, or step in there to get ready to reward, and the judge's comment was whenever you feel like you need to step in, you step out — and that is so true because if your dog starts bracketing and working the odor the last thing you want to do is be in their way. So, you just take a step back. They don't need you. You can't help them. So, it's just, get out of their way, they'll tell you when they find it, and then you can step in and give them their reward. I've passed that onto so many students and I still remember it sometimes, you know, we're working, working, working, you start to step in and it's like no, take a step back, because if you do get in the odor you can prevent them from following the scent cone before, so, I find that to be very, very valuable. That was probably the very first trial, that I worked at, that I learned that information. Melissa Breau: And I think that, just in general, kind of attending trials and helping out is such a great tip, I mean, I know I've been trying to do that for obedience stuff locally, because my dog's not ready to trial, and it lets you meet people, it lets you get to know the local community, it lets you kind of see some of the judges and their different styles, I mean, it's just, it's incredibly invaluable. Melissa Chandler: Absolutely. And I, if possible, at the nose work trials, I try to get a job that I have some interaction with the judge because most of them love to teach, so they tell you different things and you can just absorb so much information from them just, you know, if you're a timer or something because they love to share that information. Melissa Breau: Now, having worked with a soft dog, do you have tips for others who have soft dogs, kind of to help them let their dog shine or that they should know about setting up training sessions? I mean, what kind of advice would you share? Melissa Chandler: Sure, this is another subject that I did a lot of research and I attended a lot of different seminars to try and get information, mostly to help Edge, and I think, first and foremost, it's so important to keep your dog safe and build their trust because once they trust you, that you will keep them safe, that gives them more confidence, and as I always tell my dogs, I have a chew, it's called I have your back. So, if they see something and they get concerned, I'm like, I got your back. So, that's our communication of whatever it is, I see it, you're fine, I got you, and it just takes time and by keeping them safe you build that trust that they know that you do have them. I would say never lure or trick your dog into doing something that they don't feel comfortable doing. Sometimes we find that in parkour because someone really thinks their dog should be able to do that behavior and the dog doesn't feel comfortable in that environment, so they tried to take cookies and lure them there. Just back off, work on it somewhere else, and eventually it'll happen. If you lure them, and then they get up there and they're really afraid, they're never going to want to do it again. If you let them do it on their own then they'll be able to do that anywhere in the future. Teach new behaviors in a familiar, comfortable environment, and then when you're ready to take it to another room or on the road, lower your criteria and reward any effort that the dog gives you in trying to do that for you. And one thing, when you're setting up your training sessions, make sure you're not always asking for difficult behaviors or, in nose work, difficult searches. You want your dog to always look forward to and succeed in your training sessions. If your sessions are always difficult and challenging your dog will no longer look forward to them. Have fun sessions that you reward everything, or just play, or do whatever your dog enjoys most. I had mentioned how much Edge loved his dumbbell, there's times we just go in the other room and we play with the dumbbell and he loves that, and just think of the value you're building in your relationship in your training because we just went and did what he loves doing. And then, for nose work, play foundation games. Just have one or two boxes out, do the shell game, play with your game boxes so it's fun, fast, quick, highly rewarding searches. And, I have a thing that I put in most of my classes, it's kind of like your recalls but it's for odor. How much value do you have in your odor bank. And, when you set up these fun, fast, foundation games, you're putting lots of value in your odor bank so, then when you have a more challenging side, you have deposits in that odor bank that they can pull out in order to work harder to find that odor. One of the other things I recommend is to be consistent and build routines. Soft dogs feel comfortable in routines, as they know what to expect, and then things are not so scary. And, empower your dog to make decisions and have a party when they do. Again, nose work is great for this. Soft dogs do better with shaping or decision making when they have an obstacle to interact with, versus just blank space that they have to figure something out, so, that's where parkour comes in. So, parkour is great at empowering your dog, just give them an obstacle and let them do anything they want and reward the interaction with that obstacle. Back to Edge's dumbbell again, but find what your dog loves or loves doing and incorporate it into your training and use it as their reward, or even its odor value, your dog loves odor, do something else and let him go do a search for the odor. And I think it's always important to check in with your soft dog and see how they're feeling with what you're doing. We build emotional attachments with everything we teach and do. We need to make sure our dog is not stressed and then we build a positive emotional response with that behavior. I also like to start off my sessions with an energy game. That helps build energy into the training, and one of the simple ones that I like is the chew cookie toss and it's just toss the cookie to the left and send your dog to get it and as they're eating it toss the cookie to the right and send your dog to get it and you're actually building energy. Most of your soft dogs stress down, they don't have the energy to put in the training and that's just kind of a good start. Edge's first couple nose work trials, I actually did that at the van, you know, I kind of helped just play this cookie game. And you can even do it in your hands, if you have a really small space, just have them bounce back and forth to your hands. Melissa Breau: It's kind of the idea of just get them moving a little bit so that they can feel it, they can get a little happy because their body's moving. Melissa Chandler: I mean, and it's like, and I understand how they feel because a lot of times when I get stressed I could do jumping jacks or you jog in place, I mean, it's amazing what it does, just that little bit of energy really helps get you out of that stress and get your adrenaline going to be able to do what you're asked to do. And, I actually have a lecture that I have written for my parkour class, it talks about how to deal with soft dogs and a lot of different ideas because, again, not all dogs are the same and different ones will work different for different jobs so it's just a lot of different things to try. A lot of energy games. I really believe in mat behaviors as the dogs have a safe place to go to their mats. Talk about how to train mat and what you can use it with. And it is for my parkour class but I end up sharing it in most of my classes because, for one, I think people with soft dogs attend my classes for a reason, as well as, with those who work in parkour, those classes are set up for soft and stressy type dogs, so most of them that come in need that lecture. Melissa Breau: You know, kind of, what is it about those sports that make them so good for softer dogs? I mean, you mentioned that they're kind of set up for them. What do you mean by that? Melissa Chandler: For nose work it's amazing to watch a dog build confidence through nose work. Part of it is we take something that all dogs love to do, sniffing, and we turn it into a highly rewarding behavior. So, it really doesn't take a lot of energy for them to begin, it's just put your nose on this odor and they get lots of cookies, and then we start incorporating the cookie toss, so it kind of goes back to my other game but it's kind of a reset so then they're driving back because they know as soon as they get into that odor they get rewarded. So, we build a strong foundation by increasing the value of the odor, which then encourages our dogs to work independently. We also nurture our dog's excitement for nose work. The pulling you to the lines should not always be discouraged, and this is one of those, know your dog, know your team, I mean, you know, you don't want your dog to pull you down or…it just can't go very fast, you don't want your dog pulling you but I let it pull me, I think it's fabulous because there were times we'd go to other trials, he didn't even want to go in the building, you know, he's like, I can't handle it, and now he's like dragging me to the line and I think it's awesome. So, you know, it's good for us. So, know your team and let your dog do it if you think it's good for your dog. The other thing too is nose work classes are set up for only one dog to work at a time, so the dog doesn't have to worry about the environment, they don't have to worry about where the other dogs are, they can just go in and practice. You can do a lot of both parkour and nose work in home so you can do it in the comfort of your own home where they feel safer in the comfort of their own home so they don't have to worry about anything else in the environment. And then also, when you go out and you train with friends, only one dog should be out at a time, so you have lots of opportunities, and when you're out training with your friends they should understand and they should be able to keep their dogs in the vehicle until it's their turn. So, our dogs no longer focus on the environment, but they focus their energy on finding the odor. And the other thing I think is really great about nose work is I had talked about keeping their routine for your soft dogs and nose work is fabulous for routine. I think everyone in nose work should have a good start line routine, and it basically starts at the vehicle or the crate, wherever you're getting your dog, and you have a routine of when you put the harness on, when you put the leash on, what warm up you do. I have a pre-cue as we're going to the search area, just to say, hey, this is what we're going to do, and once you hit the start line I have a place where I stand, Edge has a place where he stands so that he can take in the odor, and they look at it differently than we do. We may look into a search area and go, oh my gosh, look at all that stuff. They look into a search area and say where is the scent cone. So, every time they go to a start line they know they're looking for a scent cone. So, it's all routine for them. So, I think that's another reason why nose work is fabulous for soft dogs because it's just one long routine. They don't look at it like we do, and I think the most rewarding part is seeing a dog change over time, so you have a dog that's not confident, and it's a little soft or stressy, and then, all of a sudden you can see the chest come out, and you can see the confidence in the body language as they're heading into a search area, and it's just fabulous to see that transformation with your soft dogs. Melissa Breau: And you just opened a nose work training academy, didn't you? Melissa Chandler: Yes, I did. I'm so excited about it. I've always wanted my own training center. It's been a dream for a long time. I've always taught group classes and private classes and I've done it in a lot of different sports and then recently I've been doing a lot of nose work seminars, and I've been looking for a facility for over a year, but this is a part time venture for me so I was limited on budget, and I live in an area that real estate is very expensive. So, I actually was presented with this great opportunity, and it's like a 30 minute from my house, which in Columbus isn't bad. So, I'm like, I have to go for it, it's like, it kind of fell in my lap and then it was perfect timing. I took possession on July first and then started teaching classes mid-July. So, I am very fortunate that I have great students and great friends, they all gave up their fourth of July weekend to come and help me paint and clean and put down flooring and so, we had shifts and people came in and helped and I was actually…took possession on a Saturday and I was teaching privates on a Thursday, so, we did good. Melissa Breau: Yeah, that's quick. Melissa Chandler: Yeah, I know. I am so lucky. I had so much wonderful help. I have a snoopy sign as you walk in the door, it's a little snoopy sign that says, welcome to my happy place, and that is definitely true. It's wonderful, and the best part is, my building is fabulous for nose work because I have a really nice training arena, and then I have a hot room where I store all of my odor containers, and then I have a cold room which is for all the non-odor containers, and then I have several rooms that I can work on different interior setups, and I have a suspended hide alley where we have permanent shower rods across the ceiling that we can do suspended hides. And everything I purchase was with nose work in mind so I've kind of like…my décor is for nose work and everything has a purpose as far as searching. So, I guess I am truly living the dream now of having my own facility and it's set up perfect for what we want to do. Melissa Breau: That sounds great, I mean, that really sounds, I mean, to be able to have both the hot room and a cold room and, I mean, that just all sounds ideal for what you want. Melissa Chandler: I know, yes, it's like it couldn't have been better because, you know, if you just had one big open building that really isn't the best for nose work unless you build a bunch of rooms, where this was just set up perfect. So, it was a great opportunity. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. I wanted to kind of shift gears a little bit. We've talked a bunch about nose work and a little bit about parkour. I want to dive into the parkour bit a little more. For those who have, like me, seen a little bit about this sport but don't know a lot about what it is, can you explain kind of what it is, and how you compete in it, and what's involved? Melissa Chandler: Sure. Parkour is also called urban agility, as there are different obstacles that are used for climbing, jumping, balancing, as I said, it's another great sport for building confidence, also fitness and teamwork. It can be for a very athletic dog, depending on the level, but all dogs can play. Dogs at a novice level can go on to earn your championship because championship and parkour is documenting your journey and your successes. So, you video all your sessions and when you start you show a video, it's like oh, see, my dog isn't able to do this yet, they need to build more strength or more confidence, and then you show your journey of how you got there. So, we did something lower and then a little higher, and how did you get from point A to point B. So, that's what a parkour championship is, so it's not who's the fastest or fittest or can jump the highest, it's documenting your journey and how you took something that they were not able to do, for some reason, and built on those strengths to get to the finished product. Edge is a big Weimaraner, he's 100 pounds, so, he did novice parkour. Because of his structure I would never do any other level with him because I don't think that's safe, and he can do championships, where Bam, you know, Bam can go all the way, in fact we're working on expert level with Bam right now, so, but there's something for every dog, so every dog can play, and they also have, I believe, senior dog or, you know, if your dog has a handicap you just have to contact the organization, explain it to them, and you can modify some of the obstacles because they truly want to make it so everyone can play. It's also a great sport for fearful or reactive dogs because, again, it can be done in the comfort of your home, and then as you slowly build skills you can move those out into the environment. Safety is extremely important in parkour because your dogs are going to be jumping, they're going to be doing high obstacles. They do what's called tic tacs where it's kind of rebound, it's like a flyball box rebound, but it's done on a tree or a building and some dogs can really get up high on their tic tacs or rebounds. So, we always recommend a back clipped harness, dogs are always spotted, and that's one thing that I highly emphasize in my class is spotting your dog, and even have a spot your dog that weighs as much as you do, because you can do it, you just have to have the proper technique to make sure that you keep your dog safe at all times. There's really no competition in parkour, it's all about the journey and the relationship, and good fitness for your dog, and you submit for titles. So, there's different roles and different widths and heights and dimensions on the different obstacles, and that's part of the fun is going out into the environment and finding all these different things, and then you video them and you submit them to the organization and then they judge them for your title. Between parkour and nose work it's like a whole different world because you're always looking for a great place to search, or a great place to climb, and so you look at everything differently now. You know, we'll take pictures and…look what I found here, this would be a great such and such obstacle, but it's fun, it's a lot of fun for the dogs and the people. Melissa Breau: So, you mentioned the tic tacs, and you mentioned kind of climbing on things and jumping over things. Are there like, general categories of some of the different behaviors you're looking for? Like, how does that break down? Melissa Chandler: It's actually obstacles, so you have like an over, an under, an in, you have your tic tacs, two feet on, four feet on, you do a weight, you do arounds, a 10 foot send, you do what's called a gap jump where they jump from one obstacle to another and the intensity or the difficulty increases as you go up levels. So, you have training level, which you do not have to do, it's more for young dogs because, you know, we don't want anything very high and it's just to get them introduced to parkour. And then you go to your novice level and you have certain criteria, and then as you move to intermediate then, like, the balance in novice it's the width of the shoulders, but once you go to intermediate it's half the width of the shoulders. So, they need to be able to walk on an obstacle that's half the width of their shoulders. So, the difficulty of each obstacle increases as you go from novice, to intermediate, to expert. Melissa Breau: You mentioned teaching, like, how to support your dog and can that piece for, you know, as part of what you include in your class. Do you want to just share a little more about what you kind of cover in the class you offer? Melissa Chandler: I offer parkour in April and it covers the training, novice and intermediate levels, and then I have an advanced parkour class that'll actually be in October, and it starts back with intermediate and covers expert and championship. Intermediate seems to take the most time to master as your dog will be gaining strength and skill to complete their requirements, so this level overlaps both classes, and I've had people start in April and then they continue working during the down time and then come back in October, for like, the finishing up, or the tuning of the actual obstacles, and then normally they're ready to submit their title at that point. My October class, last year, we had several intermediate and a couple expert titles that came out of the class, so that was exciting. I have very detailed, step by step videos for each of the obstacles. There's dogs at different levels, different size dogs in the videos, and I even took my brothers' Vizsla strike, who's never done parkour before, and did all the obstacles with him to show…here's how you do it, true beginner dogs, so I could work through some of the issues and I didn't have a dog that already knew the obstacles. So, not only was it fun, but it's been very informative to the class.   I also include three to four videos of different dogs, showing the finished obstacle, so they can see what it looks like with different dogs and different obstacles that's passed and earned a title. It's a really fun class and, like I said, there's been a lot of titles earned while in the class. The fun part now is I have nose work students taking my parkour class to teach their dogs how to interact with the environment. So, if they have a soft nose work dog that doesn't like to get into corners, or doesn't like to put their feet up on things, now they're bringing them into parkour to teach them parkour to carry over into their nose work training, which I think is absolutely fabulous. And so, I keep teasing them, I'm going to have to offer a nose work parkour class, and just combine the two together. So, and it's funny because I have to be careful now when I place hides and looks because my dogs have, like, jumped up on something very high above the hide, if they have access to it, now that they have those parkour skills. So, again, it makes you look at the world totally different than you did in the past. Melissa Breau: Rather than just try and indicate that something's up high they'll just be like, well, there's something here, I'll just go up there and find out. Melissa Chandler: Absolutely. I'll just go put my nose on it. Melissa Breau: That's great. Melissa Chandler: It's funny because one of my students, I think it was in my very first parkour class, she messaged me after and she says, I need you to add something to your class, she said, please warn people that once they've taught them parkour, when they go out on walks, they need to watch their dog, is it jumping on things, and I mean, she meant it in a good way, she's like, I take my dogs on walks and they want to jump on this and jump on that, and she's like, it's fabulous but it caught me off guard. So, I added that to my class, it's like, be careful because parkour happens everywhere. Melissa Breau: So, I want to finish up with kind of the three questions I ask everybody who comes on. So, the first one is, what is the dog related accomplishment that you are proudest of? Melissa Chandler: That's tough. I think I would almost have to say I would have one per dog as each of my dogs have different goals and different accomplishments and it's all about the relationship in getting there, it's not about the outcome, but it's the, what you build along the way. Melissa Breau: I'll let you share one per dog, you could do that. Melissa Chandler: For Edge, with his soft dog style, his very first nose work trial, it wasn't surprising to me that he went in and he had very subtle indications, as far as you know he'd looked and saw where everybody was and he kind of put his nose toward it and rolled his eyes at me; knowing Edge very well, it's like, I knew where it was and that was fine, we did great. So, then we went in to our nose work two trial and the hide was in a really short stool and it was kind of between a couch and a furnace and he indicated on it and felt that I didn't call it fast enough, and he took his paw and he flung the stool across the room. And, you know, it was like, yay, wow, look at him, you know, I was so excited. I mean, this was my soft dog slinging a stool across the room, and my friends were like, well, what if he got disqualified, I'm like, Edge slung a stool across the room in a trial. So, it's just, I mean, that almost brings tears to my eyes talking about it because that was just awesome for him, that he felt that comfortable and that confident to do something like that. So, again, it's not about the outcome but it's our journey and our process getting there, so, that was just very, very exciting. And then the other, I had a father-son Weimaraner team, I co-bred the litter and so, he was a confirmation champion, and I had a home bred champion, but they are two of the only three USDAA ADCH Weimaraner's, and it was just really thrilling to have a father-son team, that I bred, competing at national events and, you know, competing at higher levels, and again, all about the journey. It was just so fun being able to do that with them and what we were able to accomplish, and just the memories on that journey. So, but I feel very blessed to have all the awesome dogs in my life that I have and each and every one of them has taught me something different, so, I think they all come into our lives for a reason and they've all taken me different paths and made lots of wonderful memories along the way. Melissa Breau: So, our second question, and this is usually one of my favorite ones of the podcast is, what's the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Melissa Chandler: I think this kind of goes hand in hand, but I think we need to let the dog make a decision and trust your dog, and I remember this way back in my agility days, you know, this was like, in the early 90s' I think, everyone was trying to control what the dog did, you know, especially on the contacts and I was fortunate enough to work with Linda Mecklenburg at that time, and she was like, let the dog decide, let them take ownership, you know, so, way back when it was let the dog make a decision, let them take some responsibilities, and when you allow that to happen it's amazing the teamwork because you're not stressed trying to micromanage them and they're not stressed because they're being micro managed. So, it becomes more a teamwork than a controlling, but I think humans try to be so controlling and always want to tell their dog what to do and we need to let our dogs make the decisions and accept responsibility. And again, I think this goes hand in hand with nose work, that's what I'm always telling people, let the dog make the decision, and I love thinking dogs, I love dogs that think outside the box and work through problems, and I just love working with thinking dogs. Melissa Breau: So, our last question is about other people in the dog world. So, who is somebody else that you look up to? Melissa Chandler: There have been so many that have helped inspire me along the way, and I think I take pieces of advice and put things together for what I need to do for my dogs. It seems like they all come into my life when I need them most or maybe I go and seek them out when I need something. I think probably what's helped me the most with where I am with my dogs right now would be Leslie McDevitt's Control Unleashed. That just, before I found nose work, that really helped me a lot with Edge, and you should see my book, it's like, every page has a sticky and notes. It's looks so used books, but it almost seems like the book was written specifically for Edge, I mean, it was amazing and I now used a lot of those with Bam and I recommend a lot of her protocols with my students, but I think that has been very important in Edge's success. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast Melissa. Melissa Chandler: Thank you, I really enjoyed it. Melissa Breau: And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Heather Lawson to discuss the importance of life skills for competition dogs. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcasts 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.  

Summary: Kamal Fernandez is an internationally renowned dog trainer and seminar instructor, Championship Obedience Judge, Crufts competitor and the head trainer and owner of East London Dog Training. He has over 25 years of practical dog training experience, based on a combination of science and hands on work that have led him to establish a reputation for positive training and to champion reward-based methods all over the world. Kamal has made a study of psychology and began his career as a police officer working with young offenders -- this has shaped his training philosophy and helped him craft a style that gets the best from his students, human and canine alike. He's probably most well-known for teaching heelwork, his primary focus here at FDSA, but he's successfully used rewards based methods in a wide variety of dog sports, including obedience, agility, protection sports and canine freestyle. His training specialty revolves around using play and games to create motivation and control. Links Mentioned: Dogs Might Fly Youtube Channel Next Episode:  To be released 8/18/2017, featuring Melissa Chandler talking about nosework, parkour, and problem solving for soft dogs. 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 Kamal Fernandez. Kamal is an internationally renowned dog trainer and seminar instructor, Championship Obedience Judge, Crufts competitor and the head trainer and owner of East London Dog Training. He has over 25 years of practical dog training experience, based on a combination of science and hands on work that have led him to establish a reputation for positive training and to champion reward-based methods all over the world. Kamal has made a study of psychology and began his career as a police officer working with young offenders -- this has shaped his training philosophy and helped him craft a style that gets the best from his students, human and canine alike. He's probably most well-known for teaching heelwork, his primary focus here at FDSA, but he's successfully used rewards based methods in a wide variety of dog sports, including obedience, agility, protection sports and canine freestyle. His training specialty revolves around using play and games to create motivation and control. Hi Kamal, welcome to the podcast! Kamal Fernandez: Hi Melissa! Thank you for having me. Melissa Breau: I'm so glad to chat. Heelwork is always everybody's favorite topic, so.. Kamal Fernandez: Yes, so this should be an interesting conversation. Melissa Breau: To start us out, can you tell us a bit about your own dogs -- who they are and what you're working on with them? Kamal Fernandez: I have a malinois, I have border collies, I have a German spitz, I have a boxer, and I have a poodle-cross Jack Russell. So I have a real array of dogs and they do various things. Obviously, the primary focus for the majority of my career has been  as an obedience competitor, but I've recently moved to begin doing other disciplines. Primarily for a bit of a change, really. I think I've been doing it for quite a long while, and I was looking for new challenges and something to sort of take my training a little bit further, and I've dappled with lots of disciplines throughout my career. So my border collie and my spitz both compete in agility, and my boxer, the intention with him is to do IPO. He's in the midst of training at the moment; he had quite a long period off with injury, 2 years out with quite a severe injury, so he's just been, probably in the last year, been brought back into work so we've got a lot of catch-up to do. And my malinois and my older border collie, they both do obedience. I'm sort of shifting my goals as it were to new disciplines and I've sort of done obedience for so long I just want to have a little bit of a change and I think for an instructor and a teacher it's really good to keep fresh and to teach your dog new things, and also be a recipient of being a student as well. I think that's really healthy.        Melissa Breau: So you're pushing into Agility, is that what you're saying? Kamal Fernandez: Yeah, so I've just started -- my spitz does agility. He's up to… I'm not sure what the equivalent would be in the US but he's at grade 5 level now, and my border collie bitch is just starting her competitive career. So they're both doing… I've been really really pleased with them, I've only.. My times a bit… well, obviously, I have a young child now -- a baby -- so my time's a little bit limited, which is always a constant battle. Bless their hearts, they seem to be carrying me a little bit at the moment, to be honest, but that's a good foundation. They're great; they're all doing really really well.       Melissa Breau: That's awesome. I know you mentioned you started out in obedience, so how did you first get into that -- how did you start out in dog sports? Kamal Fernandez: So, I was always obsessed with dogs and I was always fanatical about the prospect of owning one. And I badgered my parents for years and years and years about getting a dog and they eventually succumbed, and they buckled in to me to get a dog. And that dog was absolutely every single behavioral issue you can probably ever encounter, that one dog had. And it was largely down to pet dog owners -- you just, just naive people thinking “I tell it sit, why doesn't it sit?” “I let it off the lead, why doesn't it come back?” We just didn't understand the concept of training a dog, we just -- like a lot of people -- we just assumed the dog came hard-wired to do it. I actually was watching agility on television, and there was a guy there called Greg Derrett who anybody who knows about agility, he's one of the top competitors and trainers in the world, and Greg's a little bit older than me, and he was there competing at Crufts in the junior competition and I always thought, well, if he can do it as a junior -- and i think he won that year -- I thought well it must be achievable, i must be able to do it. So I tried to contact the local agility club and at that point they said you can't start bringing a dog to agility until you've gone to obedience training. She wasn't a puppy-puppy, she must have been 6-10 months old, and they said you can't start with her until she's well over a year, so I thought, “Oh god, what am I going to do for this time?” Anyway, they said take your dog to obedience training. And I took her to obedience training and it was just domestic pet training, very, very, very old school, you know. Choke chains, walking around the whole, choking the dog, which you know at the time -- this was 26 years ago -- wasn't unusual to be honest, in this country. And it just so happened that I stayed on one evening to watch the more advanced people train their dogs and there was somebody doing competitive obedience, and it just really really inspired me because of the level of control she had over her dog and I remember she left it at one end on a stage that's actually at the hall where i now teach, and she did like 6 position changes and I was just blown away by the fact that she could -- there's my dog that I can't even let off the lead and she could leave her dog at the other side of a room and give it positions which appeared to be on some sort of magic slash electronic remote control, i don't know, i was just blown away by it. So it just really made me go “wow I want to do that” and my career just really went in that path. I sort of got more and more interested in it; I saw her train numerous dogs to do heel work and I just got addicted to that as a concept, really. And I never really followed up on the whole agility thing, and it's ironic that now, 26 years later, I'm finally getting into agility. I'm a slow learner, but there you go. Better late than never as they say. Melissa Breau: Hey, you got there. You just took your time. So you mentioned that you started out choke chains and traditional training, all that stuff. How would you describe your training philosophy today? Kamal Fernandez: I talked recently at a conference, and was speaking about my personal journey in dog training and how it's really taken a really, really diverse route in that we started out like, i think, a lot of people that have been training dogs for 20+ years, in more compulsion based dog training and in dominance-based theories to training dogs; you know, you have to be the boss, you have to be the pack leader, and it was very much rout learning with them. The dog's thoughts, feelings, emotions were never considered, really. It was just make the dog do it, but i always instinctively felt there was a better way out there and it didn't sit with me as an individual; I thought, “Oh, I'm not a forceful person,” I'm determined, I'm very goal-oriented, but I'm not one for force. I wouldn't force somebody to do something; i wouldn't force my dogs, it just didn't quite align with who i was. And then i gravitated to more motivational methodology, which was slightly more what I'd call show and tell, so you'd show the dog what you wanted them to do, you'd reward the dog, and if the dog didn't do it you'd show them again, and if the dog didn't do it again after that you'd probably correct it and then reward it. So there was more reinforcement being used, but still that element of compulsion in there. And I was never extreme in my use of -- other than the choke chain scenario, which was just sheer ignorance -- I was always somebody that wanted to interact with my dogs, I wanted to… I mean I used to take my dog that i first had, she was my friend more than anything, I used to take her out and we used to go out for the whole day and we used to go play at what we call the dumps and stuff, so she was my little friend so there was a real conflict between what i was doing in training and how i was with her in general. So I gravitated to what you would now call reinforcement-based dog training and as clicker training became more prominent, in this country I'd say probably 15 years ago, something like that -- 15-20 years ago -- and initially the reaction was “oh gosh, this is rubbish” but I was inquisitive about it and i was skeptical, but the more and more I watched it I thought there's something to this, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Again, it's amazing how life takes you on this journey, I did psychology while I was at college and I did it later on as a -- I studied it as part of a certain degree and an element of it was psychology which part of it talked about learning theory and operant conditioning and classical conditioning and so forth, and it then sort of all fell into place and made more sense. So then i started to delve with the dog that i had into clicker training and my initial reaction was… I tried it, i pressed the clicker, I gave her a reward and the dog didn't miraculously do it. By that point i was a little more astute but i thought, “I'm missing something,” this isn't -- i just can't work this all out. Anyway, it was niggling away for me, and with that dog i sort of tried it and thought, okay this doesn't work, chuck the clicker, chuck my teddies out the pram, and flounce my skirt and I thought right, that doesn't work I'm going to go back to what i did. And I trained that dog more, what I'd say, traditionally. Flash with a bit more clicker training interspersed there, and he wasn't what I'd say was a straightforward, easy dog, but there were a couple of key things that made me realize, “you know what, i have to change what I'm doing.” Because the things I clicker trained where so -- the responses and the reaction and the dog's understanding were so more salient than what i taught him traditionally. And that's not to bash traditional training, it could be my application, it could be my understanding, it could be a thousand and one things, so with my subsequent dogs I made a commitment to say that's it, I'm going to do this or die, basically. I'm going to clicker train these dogs from the get-go, and if i don't clicker train them I'm not going to train them at all. I had that in my head. So I really sort of held a gun to my own head and said you're going to do this. And it was the making of my dogs and my career and how i perceive dog training. And now my philosophy in dog training is about reinforcement -- find a way to reinforce the dog and minimize the use of punishment, even just withholding reinforcement. Find a way to reinforce the dog and create the dog being correct and successful. And be strategic in your use of withholding reinforcement, etc. And it's brought me to a place, a dog training place that i feel really really  comfortable with. I feel morally, ethically, even to be … it sound a bit grand, but even spiritually, I like the way that i train my dogs now. I feel comfortable in it, it sits with me on a personal level, it sits with me in terms of the relationship I want with my dogs. They make choices; they don't want to work, they don't train. I don't force them, I don't push them, I convince them that what i want them to do is interesting and kind of enjoyable and actually really really fun. And so the relationship I have with them, the relationship I have with my dogs now they're not waiting for the Jekyll and Hyde split personality, i was always very much about interacting with them, but occasionally I'd suddenly be this person that would say, hey now you're going to do this, and on some level I always felt there was that element of… they were waiting for that person to turn up. Now I don't have that with my dogs and I have… trained more dogs with reinforcement based methodology than not. And I was just fortunate that the dogs that I had that I trained alternatively were just very very forgiving. So my training philosophy, it's about really, reinforcement is the key. It builds behavior. If you learn nothing else about operant conditioning and clicker training reinforcement will save the day so-to-speak. Melissa Breau: So, I did some googling of you, before this call… I mentioned in your intro that you teach seminars internationally and they seem to be on a wide variety of topics, everything from foundations to extreme proofing... So I wanted to ask: what you enjoy teaching, what your favorite thing to teach is? And… why? Kamal Fernandez: That's sort of a real easy one. My actual favorite topic is foundations for any dog sport -- that is by far my favorite topic, because that's where all the good stuff happens. That's where you really lay your… well, your foundations, for a successful career in any dog discipline. And I think the irony is that people always want to move on to what I would call the sexy stuff, but the irony is the sexy stuff is actually easy if your foundations are laid solidly and firmly. And I think I've had more  “ah-ha” moments when I teach foundations to people than I have with anything else. I also, i have to say, i like behavioral issues. You can make GREAT impact, and literally change somebody's life and their dog's life, or save somebody's life because behavioral work and giving them a new take on how they deal with their dog at present but i would say really really extreme behavioral cases are really really juicy to get involved in, and dogs that people say they're on the cusp of writing the dog off, and the dog is so phobic or aggressive or dog reactive or whatever the case may be and you can literally turn that person and that dog's relationship around. That's really rewarding and enjoyable to work with. But I would say as a standard seminar, I would say foundations by far. It's just you've got young, green dogs, you can see the light bulbs going off for the dogs, you can see the pieces strung together, that are going to ultimately lead to the dog being this amazing competitive dog, and you can see it literally unfold before your eyes. Melissa Breau: Right, and with the behavioral thing, a lot of people just think of that as a challenge so I think it takes a certain type of personality to be like, no this is actually pretty cool. Kamal Fernandez: Yeah, absolutely. I think you have to be a little bit odd to enjoy it, but i think we've seen so many changes in terms of dog training and I think there is a massive lack of knowledge in terms of behavior and how to deal with behavior so that the dog can actually function in the real world and also, I think there's more a sway toward behavior management versus actually helping the dog, and dealing with the actual cause of the issue, which is where i like to -- I'm all about management, I think that's great, to have skills to manage your dog and to have knowledge and awareness, etc. but what I really want to do is let's deal with the core issue. The core issue is this -- the dog is frightened, scared, apprehensive, whatever -- let's whittle it back and deal with that and let's help this dog be a confident, well adjusted member of society. Melissa Breau: Focus on the emotions and not just the behavior. Kamal Fernandez: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's stripping it back to the real core, and the beauty is it's all done with reinforcement. It's all on just focusing on what you want the dog to do versus the symptoms of - let's actually get down to the real nuts and bolts of it, and help this dog, you know? As opposed to managing it, you know? Melissa Breau: Absolutely. So I want to switch topics a little bit and dive into heeling, since that's the thing you're most well known for. At FDSA, I know that's mostly also kind of your focus -- so since you're in the UK, and you do FCI-style heeling... and I'm sure you get this question all the time, but can you share some of the differences between the English, FCI and North American styles of heeling? What is that? Kamal Fernandez:  So there is even from FCI obedience, to UK obedience, to AKC obedience there's slight changes. The basic principle of how i approach teaching it is all the same stuff, I just make minor little adjustments depending on the code that you subscribe to. Obedience in the UK, the general gist of it is that we allow contact with our dogs in heelwork, that our dog can be very very close to the leg where in FCI obedience and AKC or CKC or even Australian obedience the dogs are ideally, they should be a gap or a freeness between the leg and the dog. So that's the biggest, core, visual difference. There is technical differences between FCI obedience and, say, AKC and that is a different requirement of the test, in the UK our test is probably a lot longer than American heeling, in that it can go up to 5 or 6 minutes of heeling, you can do patterns, you can do weaving, you can do circles, you can do changes of pace and you do positions in motion. So our heeling is probably more complex, in a lot of ways, than AKC heeling. The FCI heeling test there's actually quite a lot to it, because they do changes of pace, they do positions in motion, they do side-step heeling, they do different little intricate moves. So there's complexities to FCI heeling that again, it just makes it interesting. Anybody that's a heelwork or heeling junkie i think that they appreciate that heeling is quite a complex exercise, there's so many entities to it, there's so many layers to it, and anybody that's into detail, that's into the fanatical little details of dog training would love heeling and the way in which i teach it.   Melissa Breau: So, talking about how you teach it… How do you approach teaching heelwork? How do you start? Or how do you approach the bigger picture and break it all down? Kamal Fernandez: Yea, so everything is component trained in my training. Everything is broken down into tiny tiny little pieces of a puzzle and the pieces of the puzzle probably look nothing like the greater exercise or the greater goal, but what it does is it allows me to fast track the process of me teaching my dog heeling. And what looks like a very complex exercise for the dog is actually very simple because it's broken down into tiny little sections. I use a combination of shaping the dog and i will use lures but I fade the lure very very quickly. I minimize the use of a lure, but I use it very, very specifically, and I'm very aware of the times that I would use a lure. I'm looking for the dog to perform heeling with both drive and enthusiasm, but also accuracy and have a really comprehensive knowledge of its body, where it's body should be, where it's feet placement should be, where every single part of its position is. So it's quite a detailed process, and I'd say for people that really like the details of dog training. It's definitely one of the exercises they would gravitate to and this methodology is… also I appreciate that this methodology and this approach isn't for everybody because it's quite… it's quite intense and quite intricate in some of the maneuvers and handling. But once you have trained it, the way in which i explain it to people it's like you've got a dressage horse, which has the ability to react to a slight little adjustment in movement and they understand the tiniest little detail. For me, it gives the dog a greater level of knowledge and confidence and understanding, and also the end picture to me is far more appealing. Melissa Breau: So you mentioned in there that you break it down, sometimes even to pieces that don't necessarily look like heelwork - do you have an example of that, just so that we can wrap our brains around what you're talking about there? Kamal Fernandez: Yes, so one of the things I would teach would be a hand target, and i use the hand target as a means to teach the dog that then i transfer the hand target to a heelwork position, and then i transfer the hand target on my leg and I fade that out of the equation. So that would be one example. Another example - i teach the dog to do a foot target. The dog has to position its foot in a very specific place, next to the instep of my left foot. So again that one detail looks nothing like the picture of your dog moving and being in motion, but those two simple exercises - a hand target and a foot target - are core entities of how i teach heeling.   Melissa Breau: So, in your bio I mentioned you use games and play to create motivation and control… and those two things, they can often seem like total polar opposites when you're actually training. How do you walk that fine line to achieve balance? Kamal Fernandez: You know, this stuff that we ask our dogs to do is largely mundane and boring, and unless there's an element within the dog that finds the behavior self-rewarding, like tracking or herding can be intrinsically rewarding for some dogs, but the stuff certainly for obedience for a lot of dogs can be very mundane and very monotonous, if there's a lot of repetition in it, which for a lot of dogs, they're not going to relish the thought of. So for me, the baseline commitment is i have to create the dog wanting to do this mundane boring stuff. Because at the end of the day it's just about my ego and my goals, the dog doesn't really care. He'd be quite happy going for a long walk and having a good time chasing little furry things. So for me i make that committment to motivate my dogs and to make sure the dog wants to engage in every part of their training. In doing so, obviously i need to create motivation, i need to build drive. But I'm always balancing that with self control around the reinforcement and I would do that, again, in my foundation. So there's foundation games that I play with my dogs that I strongly advise anybody in dog sports to make sure you have these skills. But there's also a lot of listening and a lot of thinking while in a high state of arousal that I implement via those games. So then when I move that onto actually teaching an exercise, the dog already has the ability to have self control, to have impulse control, understands the concept of proofing, etc. So the two things to me, although they are polar opposites, they're both striving for the same thing. You know, to have a dog that has loads and loads of enthusiasm, but is largely out of control, to me is displeasing to the eye. To have a dog that has lots of accuracy, if you want or technical correctness, but has no spirit or soul, to me, again is unpleasing to the eye. So it's about having both ends, and the reason i love obedience so much is that the sport itself is almost like a conflict of  both those things; you absolute drive and accuracy, and it's so hard to get both and that to me is the appeal. I would say that to me, the most skilful trainers in the world, that I've seen, are from an obedience background and they have a strong obedience background, and the ability to create drive but also ultimately accuracy which i think, to me, is the absolute pinnacle of dog training.    Melissa Breau: Kind of understanding those two and creating the balance, and having a dog that exhibits both of them so clearly. Kamal Fernandez: Yeah, absolutely. It's always a battle. When you get one, you create drive, you lose accuracy; when you create accuracy you lose drive; and the two things, I always say, it's about tipping the scale -- and I can count on one hand the number of times I've gone in there competitively and I've gone, wow my dog absolutely… it's like always get one thing and then you lose another; that's what you're striving for. It's a bit like winning the lottery, that one day when everything goes in your favor and all the years of training culminates in that magic moment, so to speak.   Melissa Breau: So what it sounds like what you're saying is it's almost a constant process -- you're training one, and then you're training the other. And then you're training one… Kamal Fernandez: It's constantly in play. But to me that's the joy in it really, you never stop training, you never stop learning and you never stop growing, really. Melissa Breau: Well, it's time for us to get to the last 3 questions that I ask everyone who comes on the show. So first, what's the dog-related accomplishment you're proudest of? Kamal Fernandez: There's so many things, and not necessarily competitively related that I'm very proud of. I would say I'm proud of the first dog i ever trained competitively, he became an obedience champion and that was a bit of a personal journey as well as a dog training journey, so that was something that I'm immensely proud of. And the other thing that I'm also proud of when it comes to dogs, was being involved with Dogs Might Fly, a project where we took rescue dogs and we taught them to fly a plane as part of a project on television. The proudest moment in that is that those dogs were largely just discarded; they were rescue dogs. The impact, all those dogs found homes, but that was members of the production crew, largely -- like the makeup artist had one, the cameraman had another, a couple of trainers took dogs on, and it was great; everybody was so for the dogs in that project, it was all about the dogs and showing what can be achieved with good dog training and also that rescue dogs are capable of such great things, so I'd say that was something I'm very proud of, to be involved with something that had such a positive outcome. Melissa Breau: So, wait a minute - back up. You taught them to fly a plane? Kamal Fernandez: Yeah, yeah! So it's a project I did - oh god, it's got to be about two years ago now. We took 12 rescue dogs and we were with them for probably about… oh gosh, it was all the summer, so it must have been 6-8… probably 6 months? And we took these 12 dogs and they were literally sourced across the country, all rescue dogs, like one of them was due to be put to sleep the next day, another one was discarded… loads of different background stories, and we were involved with rehabbing them, from whatever issues they had and teaching them basic skills, and then the end goal, 3 of the dogs from the 12 were selected to go on to be trained to control and fly a plane. It was on Sky television - I don't know if you have that in the States, but it was a really, really great project to be involved with. Victoria Stilwell was involved with it, a guy called Mark Vette, who was involved with the driving dogs, I don't know if you've ever seen that on YouTube… Melissa Breau: I haven't, but now I'm going to have to go look it up. Kamal Fernandez: Yeah, search for Driving Dogs, Mark Vette. So that was, it was his brain child and I was one of the trainers involved with doing it, so that was a really really rewarding project. Melissa Breau: So when you say fly a plane, what exactly were they doing? What was the behavior…? Kamal Fernandez: The dog had to control the plane. So it was on a rig. The plane was got… by a pilot up, because they couldn't do it to land and to take off, but once the plane was flying, the dog had to control the plane and perform a figure of eight, and they ended up with 3 dogs -- actually I saw one yesterday, Thursday and Friday, a friend of mine now owns him -- and they took 3 dogs and they flew up in the air. If you google it, Dogs Might Fly, you'll see all the information about it. Melissa Breau: That's really interesting. Kamal Fernandez: Yeah and one of the dogs that I trained, because what happened was there was two phases, there was the initial phase, where they had the 12 dogs, and then they selected out of the 12 dogs the 3 dogs, and then they were passed on to 3 trainers to work intensively on it, and initially there were 4 trainers who were given 3 dogs each, and then they were whittled down to 3 dogs and then they took 3 trainers on. And one of the dogs that I worked with closely, his name was Reggie, he was a labrador-german shepherd cross, he went on to be one of the dogs that flew the plane. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Kamal Fernandez: So that's really rewarding and he now lives in New Zealand, and when I went back to New Zealand recently I went and met him and he gave me the most amazing welcome, and I put it on instagram and what-have-you; just an amazing dog.      Melissa Breau: For our listeners - I will try and find the links to those videos and share them in the show notes, so you guys don't have to go google a ton. They will be right there for ya. Okay, so this is usually my favorite question, though i think you might have beat it with that last one…     What's the best piece of training advice you've ever heard? Kamal Fernandez: The best piece of training advice I think is a Bob Bailey-ism, and I those well versed in dog training, or animal training… it's just Think. Plan. Do. Review. So think what you want to train, plan your training sessions, then go do it and then go and review your training sessions. That's one thing and the other thing is use video recording devices to record your training sessions; it's absolutely revolutionized my own personal training. It's like I have my own instructor that's with me 24/7 and whenever i want him to he can turn up and give me feedback about my dog training. If nothing else, I would suggest that everybody do both, which is what the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy is so great for, using the medium of the internet and video to facilitate great learning and i think it just encapsulates how powerful that resource can be if used effectively. And I know people are a little bit self conscious and a little paranoid about watching themselves, but by gosh, you will glean the benefits 10-fold over. So I'd say those two bits of advice -- Think. Plan. Do. And review your training - so be a mindful dog trainer as opposed to a reactive or responsive dog trainer, be thoughtful, be efficient in your use of your time and also video your training sessions. Melissa Breau: And then, finally… who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Kamal Fernandez: The first person who really really influenced my training was someone called Sylvia Bishop, she lives actually down the road from me now, but she was a pioneer in the concept of play equals work equals play. And Sylvia trains a lot in the states, and our training is different a little bit, now… we don't necessarily follow the same approach to training dogs, but what i would say about Sylvia is that Sylvia was the first person that talked through the concept of -- or brought to my attention the concept of breaking exercises down into component parts and also making your training a game. And she was so far ahead of her time, when she was around and god she's been training dogs for… it's got to be 40-50 years now. And when she first came into dogs or obedience it was very very compulsion based and she was one of the first people that openly used toys and play, etc as a medium to train dogs. So she was somebody that was a massive influence, although as I say our paths are different now, and that's absolutely fine, i have the utmost respect for her in terms of the influence she had on me. The second person, or group of people, I would say is a really close friend of mine -- somebody called Susanne Jaffa, who is a british obedience trainer and working trials trainer, and she trains australian shepherds and she's one of the people that really really influenced my change over to clicker training, and she's again one of the first people that made - or one of the first people that was very very successful clicker training. There was somebody else, who now lives in Canada, a friend of mine called Kathy Murphy. They were the people that were really vocal about, we're going to clicker train our dogs, and we're going to do it and be successful at it. The other person who I'm sure numerous people will quote is Susan Garrett; anybody that knows me knows that I'm a massive, massive Susan Garrett fan. I think she's phenomenal in what she does, I think being a bit cynical, the internet and good marketing, often create the illusion of somebody being a good dog trainer but having been in Susan's presence when she's trained her dogs she's a phenomenal, phenomenal… her timing… and I would say all those people have what i call dog training hands. You can tell if somebody has dog training hands just by watching them; You know, the way in which they move, they interact, and she has a very comprehensive knowledge of science, and the science behind what she does. But her ability to interact, read, and the relationship she has with her dogs, there's nothing put on or fake about it. What you see is very much what you get. Yeah, but those are the people for me that I look up to, admire, and I constantly, if i was ever going to look for… and I look in the most weird and wonderful places for inspiration and ideas for my own training, but those would most definitely be… And the other person is Bob Bailey. Bob Bailey, world-renowned animal trainer, a constant reminder of what is effective dog training or animal training, reinforcement placement, etc etc, the endless list of pearls of wisdom that Bob gives out. So yeah, those are the ones that have really influenced me, or that I look up to, I should say. Melissa Breau: Awesome, well thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Kamal Fernandez: No, my pleasure. Melissa Breau: And thanks to our listeners for tuning in! We'll be back next week with Melissa Chandler to discuss nosework, parkour, and problem solving for soft dogs. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.

Summary: Amy is the owner of Great Dane Photos and teaches the dog photography classes offered through FDSA. She is the also official show photographer for many of the premier agility events in the United States, including the AKC National Agility Championships, AKC Agility Invitational, USDAA Cynosport World Games, and NADAC Championships, as well as numerous local trials, regional events, and breed national specialties.  She has photographed a wide variety of dog sports, including agility, obedience, rally, and conformation, and dog events, including FDSA camp.   Her start in professional photography came by taking pictures of her friends' dogs at conformation shows, and quickly grew to outpace her interest in showing her own dog -- and today she's here to talk to us about the reason a great number of people use the internet each day -- dog photos!   Links mentioned: Great Dane Photos Next Episode:  To be released 8/11/2017, featuring Kamal Fernandez talking about FCI heeling and balancing motivation and control.  TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sport using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Amy Johnson. Amy is the owner of Great Dane Photos and teaches the dog photography classes offered through FDSA. She is also the official show photographer for many of the premiere agility events in the United States including the AKC National Agility Championships, the AKC Agility Invitational, the USDAA Cynosports World Games, and the NADAC Championships, as well as numerous local tryouts, regional events, and breed national specialties. She has photographed a wide variety of dog sport including agility, obedience, rally and conformation, and dog events including the FDSA's Camp. Her start in professional photography came by taking pictures of her friend's dogs at conformation shows, and it quickly grew to outpace her interest in showing her on dog, and today she's here to talk to us about the reason a great number of people use the internet each day, dog photos. Hi, Amy, welcome to the podcast. Amy Johnson: Hi, Melissa. Thanks so much for having me on. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to chat. Amy Johnson: I am too. Melissa Breau: So to kind of start us out, do you want to just tell us a little bit about the dogs you have, who they are, and what you're working on with them? Amy Johnson: Sure. I have two dogs and one of them is here in my office with me, and well, if he makes any noise, but his name is Costner, as in Kevin, and so he is a Great Dane, a Fawn Great Dane, if anybody is interested in those details. He's about 39 inches at the shoulder, about 190 pounds, and that is ribs still visible kind of. That's just how big he is. so he's kind of a goof. We joke that he just has 3 neurons, he can eat, sleep and poop, and you know, he's just a really good hang out around the house dog. And then our other dog is a 60-pound Yellow Lab mix and her name is Dora. We don't do a lot with our dogs. They are companions, they like to go on walks, they like to go for hikes in the woods, they like to just be near us, and so they don't have any real special skills. Melissa Breau: I assume they can pose. Amy Johnson: They can pose. Although Costner is…if I try and put a camera in his face he generally kind of backs off and is like, what's that? So his actual special skill is that he is an AKC Breed Champion, and I cannot take any credit for that because we got him after his championship was finished from a friend of ours who were involved in the breeding of him, so he can look really pretty, so that's his special skill. He just doesn't really enjoy looking pretty, so what gets posted online of him are funny things where he's got drool or his lips are spread out on the floor where he's lying down, or you know, he's massive, and he takes up huge amounts of space, and so the pictures that I take are the ones that are just trying to show that and communicate that. We joke that he's a house pony, you know, he's not even really a dog, he's horse size, and then Dora…it's funny because she's the small dog in the house that people look at me and suddenly say we have a 60-pound dog that's considered the small dog, and then they, you know, okay, but she's got a few more brain cells in there. I do joke that I have to have dogs in my house that are dumber than me, so to call Costner not that smart is really, in our house, it's not an insult. That's just my reality. I admire the people who have the Border Collies, and the Jack Russells, and the Shih Tzus, and all those really, really smart dogs. That is not who I am and what I want to live with, so we have just dogs that are really good dog citizens and they know the routines. Costner knows that he has to sit before he gets his food. Sometimes he just stays sitting, even after I put his food down, but so we have our routines, but basically, we just want our dogs to be good citizens, and I think we've kind of got a good balance of that, so. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. So I mentioned in your bio that you got your start taking photos at conformation events. Was that kind of where your interest in photography started? Where did kind of you get started just in photography in general? Amy Johnson: In general, I got started back in junior high. My dad had a Minolta film camera, SLR camera, manual focus, and he taught me the basics of photography, the basics of exposures. So he taught me about shutter speed, and aperture, and at that point it was called film speed, now it's called ISO, but he taught me the basics of the exposure triangle, as it's called, and how to focus a manual focus camera, and how to set my exposure so that I expose the film properly. I never did any dark room work. It was always take the 35mm film canister to the WalMart, or wherever, and get it developed, so I'm not quite that much of a purist, but my beginnings definitely were in film, and with my dad, and we would vacation on the North Shore of Lake Superior here in Minnesota, and so he would take pictures, and then he would show me how to take pictures, and so kind of that father-daughter bond was really enhanced by our experience with him teaching me how to use a camera, and how to take pictures, so I kind of babbled with it throughout the years as I was growing up. I was given by my brother and my parents one year for my birthday they gave me a film Sor of my own, and this was a little more advanced. It was a Canon EOS Elan II, I think, and it had autofocus, so I didn't have to do the manual focus thing anymore, which you know, there's a little skill involved in manual focus, and I admired the photographers who could do it, and do it well. It's not my thing, but I understand the appeal of it. It kind of forces you to slow down and really takes things in, but so I had a film Sor that I, again, just kind of kept babbling, and various things, and then I got into dog shows, and that's a whole long story that we could talk about some other time, but I was showing my second Great Dane, her name was McKenzie, I was showing her in conformation. I was terrible, awful. She didn't have the temperament for it. I didn't have the skills for it. We tried for about a year and didn't really get anywhere other than I made a lot of friends, and really enjoyed learning about the conformation world, and understanding even just the rhythm of a conformation show, and understanding okay, these dogs are going in the ring, and then they're coming out, and then they're going back in, and so you know, it's very confusing at first, and then you kind of figure out oh, okay, I know what's going on, those dogs aren't going back in, and yeah. So I learned a lot about dog shows, and I learned a lot about the people who breed dogs, and that was fascinating to me. I was taking a camera to most shows that I went to and just taking pictures of my friends, and then one time, and this was actually with a digital camera, one of the very, very early digital cameras that actually use the three and a quarter inch floppy disks in it, so not even memory cards. These were, you know, not the five and a quarter, but I think they're three and a half inch floppy disks, and that was your memory card, so and that didn't respond very fast to a dog moving across the ring, you know, you'd hit the shutter button and about two seconds later it would actually take the picture. Well, there's no more dog left in the frame if it takes that long to take the picture, so one time I brought my film camera with me and really enjoyed the success I had with getting dogs moving in the ring, rather than just the ones where they were stacked. So then my vet invited me to photograph her club's agility trial, and that's where it really kind of took off for me, so I really enjoyed the different games, I think it was a USDAA trial, but I'm not 100 percent sure, but the different games were, you know, some were all jumps, and some where you didn't know where the dog was going to go, which I know now are gamblers, and again, that camaraderie around the ring, of all the people and their dogs, was really intriguing to me, and just was very welcoming and fun, and there was a market for the photos there. There was nearly no market back in ‘99, 2000 for candid photos ringside at conformation shows. Nobody was doing them, nobody knew what those were, you know, but agility trials, on the other hand, there was a market for that, people understood what that was, people likes pictures of their dog doing agility, so there was a market there for it being a business, not just a, you know, I'm going to show up and have fun. So I did one agility trial with a film camera, and then quickly realized that I would go broke on film and processing, and then digital SLR's were just coming out, so this was in 2000, and I convinced my poor husband to let me buy a digital SLR, the Canon D30, and as he's hitting submit order on B&H's website he's looking at me saying, "just promise me you'll try and make some money from this," and the camera paid for itself in I think two shows. We realized we had kind of a winning formula there, and so I never have even thought about going back to film, of course, and digital cameras have gotten amazingly good, and amazingly fast, and responsive, and make my job easier with every new camera that I get, so. Melissa Breau: Can you show a little more about how you went kind of from that stage of your business to where you are now, because now you do really, really, big shows, and I mean, just kind of interesting evolution. Amy Johnson: Right. Yeah. It started out as me and the camera, and sometimes my husband would come. My first national event was actually in 2001, and you know, I look back on this and I really had no business doing it, but I was invited, again, so the social aspect of it, I had made friends, and they said will you come, and I said okay, sure. So 2001 they'd have championships and it was in Minnesota, it was in Mankato, which is about, I think, five hours south of me, and so it wasn't like going out of state, and I made the leap. Now, the only really interesting part of this was I had a five-week-old baby at that point, so it was me, and a camera, and Ben, my husband, and Mika, our five-week-old baby, who made the trip down to Mankato, and I had told my friends who were in charge of the show, I had said if this isn't working for me with having a baby here we're going to just have to cut and run at some point, and they were like, that's fine, you know, you do what you need to do, but it all worked, and we had an amazing time, and I got an exposure to what a national events was, and there's a lot of adrenaline that comes with that. In 2007, I was invited to AKC Agility Nationals, so from 2001 to 2007 I was just mostly doing weekend stuff, 07 was AKC Nationals, and again, it was still just me and Ben. Ben was in the booth running the sales side of things, I was taking pictures. Gradually, over the years, I've added photographers, and over the past two years, maybe two and a half, when I go to a national event I've really tried to make sure I had a photographer in every ring, and then also increase the size of my booth staff so that if someone comes through the booth and wants to look at pictures they don't have to wait to get some help to do that. So the whole business has been a very gradual…well, let's try this now, and let's add this now, and what if we do this, or what if we change this. I've never taken out huge loans for the business. It's always just kind of grown under its own as it can support more, you know, I'll put a little more money out, and then it's just been a very gradual, making sure everything still feels as comfortable as it can be when you're running your own business. Melissa Breau: You started to talk for a minute there just about having a photographer on each ring and things like that. What's that process, like you mentioned, you know, having a booth, and then having people shooting photos. I mean, how do you get from one to the other and handle all of that in the midst of a big show going on? Amy Johnson: A lot of deep breaths and a lot of screaming in my head that I don't let come out of my mouth. No, it's all good. I think if I had tried to go from me, and a camera, and my husband to covering six rings, and having six staff in the booth, you know, and the funny thing, I would have probably decided it was crazy and I was never going to do that again, but it went from…so one of the early AKC Nationals that I did probably in 08 or 09, there was me that was there, Great Dane photos was there, plus another photography vendor was there, so we just very amicably divided it. Well, okay, I'll take these rings on these days, and you take those rings on those days, and so there were two photographers there, and each of us had, I think, at least two photographers that we could cover all the rings, but it was between two different companies, and so that's okay. I can manage a few people in the booth and a few people out shooting for me, and then it's just gradually shifted to where AKC and these different agility organizations have said, you know, I mean, if you can cover the whole thing we're happy to allow you to do that, and so if It was a sudden transition I would've probably not managed it, but just gradually adding more and more. It's like anything, once you are comfortable at one level of participation you kind of go oh, let's see, how else could I get involved, or what more can I add onto my plate, and you know, at some point you may go oh, that's too much, but adding photographers has been kind of just word of mouth, and knowing people from other events. One photographer who had shot for me I had seen his work from a previous special event, and he did a really nice job, and so I invited him to come and work for me, and that's actually happened a couple of times. One of my photographers is someone who approached me at a trial here in Minnesota, and said you know, I'm really interested in this, do you want to just take a peek at what I've done, and she lived close enough to me that she could come to a lot of my different local shows, and I could mentor her, and well, okay, that shot didn't work so well, so what could we do differently, or oh, well, that's a great one, if you get a chance to do that kind of a shot again, go for it, so I think that's the beginnings of the education peaks, you know, I really enjoyed that mentoring process, and she now shoots…I mean, our styles are very similar, and so it makes it really easy to have her in the booth or as a photographer because the experience for the customer is that's a Great Dane photoist's photo, not that's Amy's, and that's so and so's, and oh, that's another person. It's all very cohesive and that's really important to me that the experience is one of I can go in any ring and get a good photo, not oh, shoot, I'm not in that ring today, so I'm not sure what I'm going to get, so yeah. Melissa Breau: So I'd imagine that there are probably more than a handful of unique challenges that come with photographing dogs, especially sorts dogs, compared to people, or other common photography subjects. Do you mind just talking about what some of those challenges are and how you guys deal with them? Amy Johnson: Sure. The most unique challenges really do come with the dog sports, especially…it all comes down to speed. You can have an Olympic sprinter in an Olympic stadium doing their race, and I can track that with a camera really easily. Cameras have been tuned to recognize the human form and whatever algorithms are built into their little tiny brains these days. Well, and if you think about it, so many cameras have facial recognition, well, how does it know what a face is and what is a face? Well, it's not looking for dog faces, it's looking for human faces, so there's something about the human from that a camera has been tuned to identify, and prioritize, and its ability to focus. So I'm constantly fighting against some of those things that are engineered into the cameras, so fast, black dogs in bad light are like my nemesis. They are, and the smaller they are, and the fuzzier they are, the worse it gets, but I've taken that on as a challenge. Okay, so that is my hardest subject, fast, tiny, fuzzy, black dogs in bare light, so what I do is make sure that my film and my gear is all prioritizing being able to take a picture of that worst-case dog, and it's nothing against black dogs, believe me, but they are just the hardest thing to photograph, and there's nothing like that in the human sports, or even cars, or you know, whatever. There's nothing like it out there, and so that's the most unique challenge I think, and so every time a new camera comes out I'm always hoping for some feature that makes my job of photographing a small, fuzzy, black dog in bad light a little bit easier, but even just the typical dog, you know, they do move very fast, they can move in very unexpected directions, they have really good reflexes, and so tracking that motion can be very difficult. They don't speak English, so if you want to tell them hey, pose for me, you got to figure out what that word is, you know, is it treat, or is it go for a ride, or is it are you ready. Figure out what the trigger word is to make their ears go up, and their mouth close, and their eyes kind of get a little brighter and go oh, oh, something's going to happen, and then that's the moment you click, as opposed to a human where you just say okay, look at the camera, and then you say cheese, right, and everybody follows directions. Now, when you get a teenager who's really not into this you might still get some not so great results, but at least you can speak to them in a common language. Well, and the other challenge I'm fighting that is actually fascinating to me is as people work on their relationship with their dog, which is a fabulous thing, and that's one of my favorite things about going to a dog show and seeing those relationships, but as they do that it makes it really hard for me if I'm trying to do a picture of the human, and the dog, and a ribbon, the dog is gazing adoringly at the human, and I can't get them to look at the camera. I don't care what word I throw out. There are times where the dog won't look at me because they are so engaged with their human, and that's a lovely thing, and generally, it's not been a problem, you know, the person is generally okay with that, but still, if you want to get the dog it's kind of a funny, you know, it's a good thing that the dog is so engaged with their person, but it makes my job just a little bit harder, so it's those weird things.   Melissa Breau: You mentioned kind of following gear, and new things coming out, and things like that, so I was curious what equipment you use and you know, you kind of got a little bit into the why there, but if there's more you want to elaborate on? Amy Johnson: Sure. No, and oh man, I could talk gear for hours. I love gear. I love camera gear, and it's a really good thing I have a job that lets me write it off because otherwise, that would be a problem. So I shoot canon, primarily, and I have canon's top of the line sports camera. It's called the 1D X Mark II. It is their latest and greatest and it shoots 14 frames a second. It has a really high ISO rating or can shoot at a really high ISO, which is the piece that's critical in shooting in the really bad lighting, and actually, my definition of bad lighting is somewhat different than the average Joe Shmoe on the street, you know, a camera needs a descent amount of light to shoot in, and our eyes are amazing, our eyes can really come in the huge range of lighting conditions, and cameras aren't quite to that point yet, so I need to high ISO so that I can have a high shutter speed so I can stop the motion of my small, fuzzy, black dog in bad light. A Canon Body is the best that money can buy, at least in terms of an SLR. I use what's called fast glass, and that means that it's a lens with a really big opening for the light, it's a big aperture, and so my favorite lens for shooting agility is a 400mm F2.8, as my husband says, it just means is has a really big light bucket so it can collect a lot of light, and make sure I'm getting enough light to again, get that fast shutter speed so that I can stop motion. I also have a Nikon camera, and I bought that about six months ago, primarily, because I felt like I needed to learn Nikon camera bodies for my students. I am able to give really specific advice and troubleshooting information about Canons, and I was not able to give that same level of troubleshooting advice for Nikons, so I got a Nikon D500, which is not quite the top of the line, but it's a really good performance camera for wildlife, and I got a big lens for it, and I use that for a lot of my bird photography these days. So learning the other major brand of camera has been a really good experience for me. It's given me a new appreciation for oh, yeah, this is what it's like to open up a camera that you've never had your hands on before, and be a little overwhelmed by all those buttons, and dials, and menu items, and all that, but yeah. So my equipment, I tend to get the best I can, which is easier for me to justify, again, because it's a business, as opposed to just a hobby, you know, you got to be a little more careful about how you spend that money, but I do love gear. You know, there's also of course, all these accessories. There's monopods and tripods, you know, there's more lenses than just that 400mm, and that could be a whole other podcast episode. Melissa Breau: It's really kind of awesome that you are able to provide that kind of support in a class or to a student when you're talking about a Nikon versus a Canon. I would love to dive a little more into what you cover in your classes at FDSA. What are some of the skills you teach? I know right now I think there are two classes... Are there more than that on the calendar?     Amy Johnson: Right now, what's coming up in August are two classes. One of them is my foundation class called Shoot the Dog, and in that class, we really just start from assuming people are starting from ground zero. We learn the basics of exposure, we talk about shutter speed, we talk about aperture, we talk about ISO, we talk about the effects that each of those has on the way a photo looks, as well as just the technical details of, what does it mean to have a fast shutter speed, or what does it mean to have a wide open aperture versus a closed down aperture, and then what does ISO mean? We don't delve too deeply into the uber techie stuff, but we do talk about that a bit, but really, it comes down to if I change the shutter speed how does that change how my photo looks? If I change the aperture how does that change how my photo looks? When should I care most about aperture, and when should I care the most about shutter speed, and we really work on kind of creating photos that communicate to a broader audience than just you yourself. So one of my students used the phrase that she had read somewhere, and I don't where, but the difference in doing an emotional portrait and a photograph, and we kind of laughed about it at first, but the more I think about it I think that's an important distinction. If I take a quick snapshot of my dog and it's not really in focus, and the light's really not that great, but there is something in that expression that just screams oh, that's my dog, that's like the essence of my dog. It doesn't matter about the technical bits. It doesn't matter if it's not quite as sharp as I would want it to be. It's an emotional portrait. I have an emotional connection to that. Now, if I post that online my friends are probably going to say oh, that's great, yes, that looks like Costner, that is so Costner, that's wonderful, but if I post it to a photography site in general, they're going to think I'm crazy because they can't see that emotion, they don't know my dog, they don't understand that, that is his quick, essential, expression. They think I can't really see what's going on in his face because the photo's a little dark, and I can't see his eyes all that well because it's really not that in focus, so what I really want students to do is to be able to conquer those technical bits, the sharpness, and the exposure so that they can make the soul of the photo really come through, and be obvious to anybody, rather than have all the technical stuff be in the way and mask the true soul of that photo, the true meaning of that photo. So that's a hard thing for people to do because it takes stepping back and really applying a critical eye to your photos and saying oh, yeah, I see how I can see the dog's expression, but I can see how someone else wouldn't be able to see it and read it as clearly as I can, because they don't have the emotional connection to the dog, to the subject that I do. So that's something that really has started to be a common thread in all of my classes. We want to move beyond the emotional portraits, and believe me, they have their place, you know, I don't have any beef with them, but in my classes I want to move beyond that and into something that can speak to a broader audience, and get that emotional connection across. Melissa Breau: So in August you're teaching a foundational class, and what's the other class that you're offering? Amy Johnson: The other class is called Chase the Dog, and this is kind of my wheelhouse, and that is dogs motion, so we'll talk about…I kind of break it down into two different kinds of motion. There's motion that's predictable, and motion that's unpredictable, so the prime example of motion that's predictable is agility, and you know, in general, there are always exceptions, but in general, the dog will go where it's supposed to go. There's a pre-established path, their obstacles are numbered. You do this one, and then you do that one, and then so I know when I can anticipate where the dog is going to be at any point in that run, so I can do things differently with that than if I'm just photographing a dog that is having a good romp in the field for play time, so that would be the unpredictable motion. So you let your dog out and you want to take pictures of it just playing around. Well, unless you set up some sort of fencing it just portions the dog's path, you know, you have no idea where that dog's going to go, so tracking that…camera's, you know, there's a limit to how fast they can track that motion, and then there's a limit of how fast I physically can track that motion, and this is where our fast dogs…you know, this is tough, there's a lot of skills, and a lot of practice that just has to happen of getting that muscle memory in you, and once you can track your own dog really well that doesn't necessarily mean you can track another dog, because all the dogs have a different rhythm, they all have their own unique characteristics about how they move. So the class is really about offering some skills for how to do both predictable and unpredictable motion, but it's also about setting some realistic expectations of what can I expect to get out of, you know, a 10 minute photo session with a dog just running and playing in the field? Well, you're not going to end of with every photo being perfectly in sharp, or perfectly in focus, and you know, a true winner. You're going to get a lot of junk, and that's okay, and that process of being okay with the junk is really hard, and take someone like me saying it's okay, I have those too, and what students in the class are going to see are a lot of my…you know, rather than just the edited versions, here are the ones that I kept, they're going to see well, here was a whole series that I shot, and notice how many of those were actually good photos, and notice how many of those were not so great. Here's my junk. They're going to get to see my junk photos. Okay, well, I better be a little more careful here. They're going to get to see my junk photos, and I think that's a really important process to understand that there's no camera in the world good enough to capture everything, so let's talk about what's realistic, let's talk about what you can expect, let's talk about ways to increase the percentage of those keepers, but let's also become comfortable with the idea that you're going to have some clunkers in there. Melissa Breau: Now I wanted to ask if there's one piece of advice that you can give listeners, something they can start working on today or tomorrow, to help them take better photos of their dogs, what would that be? Amy Johnson: The first piece of advice I give everyone who asks me that question is to get down to the dog's level, and it's really easy, and it's really basic, and it does not matter what kind of camera you have, but if you change your perspective instead of shooting the photo from your standing height and looking down on the dog, get down to their level. You know, if you've got a tiny little dog it may mean that you are on your belly in the grass taking a picture of that dog, but you will be amazed at how much of a difference that makes in the photo of your dog. If you don't want to get down to their level then bring them up to your level, so if you have a grooming table throw a nice tablecloth over it and put the dog up on the grooming table. Bring the dog up to your level. Just be on the same level as the dog that you're trying to take a picture of and it transforms the whole thing, so that's my go to piece of advice for anybody. Melissa Breau: That's great because that's something that people can really just go do. Amy Johnson: Yeah. Exactly. Melissa Breau: I know that we're talking about kind of a little bit of a different subject than we usually do here on the podcast, but I still wanted to ask you those key questions that I always ask at the end of an episode, because I'm going to let you go into photography related stuff if you so choose. So to start, what's the dog or photography related accomplishment that you are proudest of? Amy Johnson: There's the experience of going to the national and that's huge, that's great, and there's a feeling of kind of I've arrived with that, but the most recent thing that I'm proudest of is actually my experience at camp. I had five of my students that came and were my minions, as I called them, and they were the ones who actually did all of the photography for the events at camp, and being able to stand back and watch them in action I was really proud of them, and that was a more of a feeling of accomplishment than going to a national. Don't get me wrong, I love going to nationals, I love interacting with people, I love watching a great run, and then being able to find them later and say I saw that run and that was phenomenal, and it was beautiful, and I was so happy I was able to capture that for you, but working with students and then watching them take the skills they've learned in my classes and do that for others, you know, capture those moments, that was cool, that was really hard to beat. And now to extend on that, one of my sons is showing interest in photography, and he was able to shoot the jumpers courses at AKC trial that I had shot last weekend, and so again, when I had a break I went over to his ring and just stood back and watched, and seeing the next generation whether it's, you know, the literal next generation or just a new group of photographers that have come through my courses, being able to pass that information on has been really an amazing experience.   Melissa Breau: That's really cool because it's something that you managed to learn from your father and now you're passing it on to others. Amy Johnson: Exactly. Yeah. Melissa Breau: What is the best piece of advice, and this can be either production or photography, that you've ever heard, and bonus points if it applies to both, but it doesn't have to. Amy Johnson: The best thing that I've learned to do over the years, and I don't know that it's ever been told to me exclusively, but it's the thing that I have learned to do is to slow down, and to think, and to just breath, and so that is the thing that I try and tell my students all the time because there's this urge to…the action in front of me is happening really fast and so that means I have to grab my camera fast, and throw it up to my face, and press the shutter, and get the picture really fast, and it doesn't work that way, or it doesn't work well that way. So taking a moment to make sure your camera is set correctly for the situation you're trying to photograph, making sure that you understand what's going on in front of you, and can maybe anticipate what's going to happen next, and then just breathing because if you get out of breath or find yourself holding your breath because you're just so excited you end up messing it up more often than not. And that advice I think applies to dog training as well. Slow down, think, just breath, and that kind of brings you back to center, and lets you focus on what's important, and focus on what the task at hand is. Block out everything else that is going on around you and just take it one thing at a time, and the results will be much better. Melissa Breau: Bonus points earned. So our last question, who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Amy Johnson: There are two people that come to mind immediately, and it's not because of their dog training skills, it's because of the way they handle pressure in running their dog businesses, and so the first one is Denise. Who isn't amazed by Denise and the way she handles FDSA really, and not trying to get brownie points from her, but as a business owner myself it's really important to find those people who are running their own business, and who I admire how they handle that business. You know, Denise has the pressure of thousands of students. She has the pressure of all of the instructors who…meeting some of them at camp was an eye-opening experience, and I love them all, but I admire Denise even more for her ability to handle all of us and our quirks, but to watch her handle that pressure of both the negative and the positive has become important to me. I know one of her things is people won't remember what you say, but they'll remember how you made them feel, and that is a phrase that runs through my mind constantly as I am dealing with customers, or if I'm dealing with students, and even with my family. It's changed the way I interact with everybody, including my family, and to say in my mind, you know, yes, I really want to make that snarky comment, but that's probably not the best way to handle it because it's going to make me feel better, but it's not going to do anything for our relationship, and it's not going to do anything for them and the way they feel, so that's been a really good thing for me. The other person that I look up to for similar reasons is Carrie DeYoung, who is the head of AKC agility, and I work with her a lot because I do both of AKC's big agility events for the year, so I watch her and how she interacts with her staff, and then watch how she interacts with the exhibitors at those national events, and her calmness, and her…I have never seen her flustered. I'm sure inside there are probably moments of, you know, face palm, or screaming, or whatever, because we all have those, but she does a really good job of on the outside she holds it all together, and that's something that I don't always feel like I do very well, but watching her has helped me do that better, so she's another person I really admire in the way that she…granted, she doesn't own AKC, but she is the queen bee of the agility piece, and I just really admire the way she handles all of the…I mean, if you think about any agility organization there are things that people want to tell them to do differently, things they like, things they don't like, and to be able to handle all of that constantly takes some real talent and skill. I mean, I admire anybody who trains dogs because I don't have that talent, and I don't have the patience to develop it. I know that I could, but it kind of goes back to the whole I live with dogs that are dumber than me, and so I mean, I love watching good trainers, I loved coming to camp and watching all of these amazing instructors that I get to call my colleagues. I loved watching them work with people, and with dogs, and that kind of level of discipline fascinates me, so there's lots to admire about the training side in the dog world in that respect, but for me what's been most important is to find those people, and specifically, women that are at the top of their game and dealing with those pressures that come with being at the top of their game. Melissa Breau: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Amy. Amy Johnson: You're welcome. It was a pleasure. Melissa Breau: It was. It was a lot of fun to chat. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Kamal Fernandez to discuss what it's like to be a man, in a female dominated job. Just kidding. We'll be chatting at FCI style of heeling and more. If you haven't already subscribed to the 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.

Summary: Lori Stevens is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch® Training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health interact. She uses intimidation-free, scientific, and innovative methods, in an educational environment, to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, WA. She is also the creator of the Balance Harness. Lori's most recent of 3 DVDs By Tawzer Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao and called 'The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs.' It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She will be teaching at FDSA in August for the first time, with a class on the same topic, called Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs. Links mentioned: The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs Seattle TTouch (Lori's Website) The Feldenkrais Method Next Episode:  To be released 8/4/2017, featuring Amy Johnson talking about taking photographs of our pets.  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 Lori Stevens. Lori is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health interact. She uses intimidation free, scientific, and innovative methods in an educational environment to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, Washington. She is also the creator of the balance harness. Lori's most recent of three DVDs by Tawzer Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao, and called The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs. It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She will be teaching at FDSA in August for the first time with a class on the same topic called Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs. Hi, Lori. Welcome to the podcast. Lori Stevens: Hello. Thanks for having me on. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to shout today. Lori Stevens: Yeah, me too. Thanks, Melissa. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. So to get us kind of started out, can you tell us a little bit about your own dogs, kind of who they are, and what you're working on with them? Lori Stevens: Yes. So I'm going to talk about two. One is with me now because both of them actually got me into this business. So right now, I have a 12 year old Aussie named Cassie, and I got her when she was two years old, and at two, what I was working on is very different from what I'm working on now with her. At two we worked on a lot of behavior related issues, especially on leash, what you might label reactivity. She was barking a lot every day, she was unfamiliar, really, with being out in the world, and so I learned a lot from her. Basically, you know, how do you calm, and communicate, and build trust with the dog that basically didn't have trust in the world, so I learned loads from her, and we're always working on life with her. Our sport is fitness. We started out in agility, but over time, I figured out that, that was really hard for her, she wasn't really enjoying it, probably because of all the environmental sensitivity, and as much as I worked with her it just didn't seem like her thing. She loved it when she was running, but when she wasn't running it was really hard to hear all the noises and see the other dogs running, so we moved on, so now we do fitness, we do standup paddle boarding, we do lots of hikes, and now I'm living with an aging dog. So I actually have firsthand experience now in living with a dog that's getting older, but I wanted to bring up my first dog because that is the dog, Emmy, who got me into any of this work at all, and basically, she had a lot of health challenges, a lot of physical challenges, I learned just loads of stuff from her, and that's how I originally got into TTouch Training and massage, so I'll talk a little bit about that more, but I just want to bring up that Emmy is always present, even though she's been gone 10 years. She's been gone quite a while. Melissa Breau: They do manage to have quite a lasting impact sometimes. Lori Stevens: That is so true. So true. Melissa Breau: So what led you to where you are now? I mean, you started to mention Emmy a little bit, but how did you kind of end up working with dogs for a living? Lori Stevens: Well, so Emmy had all these physical issues and I just took a TTouch class, basically, to learn things to help Emmy, and I kept going to my vet, and my vet kept saying you're just doing wonderful work with her, if you would just get cards made up I would send all my clients to you, sent lots of clients to you, and it's kind of strange because…I won't say when, but way back when I ended up with a degree in computer science, but before that I was in occupational therapy, and I was also in the University Dance Company. I danced for many years, so I have this kind of weird dual interest, both in things physical, movement, bodywork. I always had that interest with occupational therapy and dance, but then I ended up in IT for many, many years. I just retired from the University in April 2017, from the university of Washington, but in 2005 I started my practice, and that was at the urging of a vet, so I got cards made up, and I didn't really think a lot was going to come of it, but in fact, that built my practice. So I went to four days a week at the University and had a practice one day a week for a long time, and then I went half time at the University. I just kept, you know, kind of building my practice and working in IT, and am out of IT, and totally focused on animals, which is fantastic. Melissa Breau: Indeed. Congrats. That's so exciting being able to focus on that full time. Lori Stevens: Yes, it is. Now I'm spending full time writing this course, which is really great fun, but it's a lot of work, and so it's a good thing I don't have my job too. Melissa Breau: So there are lots of kind of interesting pieces there, right? Just kind of all the different things that you work with, and all the different techniques you have, but I want to start with TTouch. So for those not familiar with it at all can you kind of explain what it is? Lori Stevens: I can. You're right, there's all those pieces, and oddly enough, they do all fit together, but what is Tellington TTouch Training? So people here touch and they think it's only body work, but Tellington TTouch Training is actually a lot more than body work. It is body work, and there are a variety of body work touch techniques, but there's also an element of it that is movement, which includes slowing down dogs and having them move precisely over various equipment on different movement patterns over different surfaces, stopping, turning, really slowing down the nervous system and letting them feel themselves, their bodies, in a way that maybe they haven't felt them before. It's interesting how many dogs move really, really fast, and it's uncomfortable for them to move really slowly when they're working with someone, so you learn a lot from that, and there's also several tools and techniques that go along with TTouch. One of those is leash walking and making it more comfortable for dogs to walk on a leash, and to fit well in their equipment, and that's pretty much how, you know, it's that awareness that caused me to develop, over years, the balance harness, but there's also the really learning to observe the dogs, and to give them choice. So there's a lot in TTouch that many years ago other people weren't really focusing on, and now, thankfully, many people are focusing on it all over the place, so it's kind of nice that, you know, it's now overlapping more with other work that people are doing, and anyway, I hope that gives you a better idea, but it's not just body work. Melissa Breau: Okay. So I wanted to ask kind of how it works too, and does it work for all dogs, is it something that works, you know, for some dogs better than others, is it something I could learn to do? I mean, how does that all kind of work? Lori Stevens: Absolutely, you could learn to do it. Does it work for all dogs? I have to answer that…and you know, of course, there's an element of it that works for all dogs, but you have to define what you mean by works, and everything depends on the dog and what you're trying to do, but the thing that makes Tellington TTouch work unique is that it's not habitual. In other words, the way you touch the dog is not the way the dog is used to being touched, so it sort of gets the attention of the nervous system in a different way. The way you move the dogs is different from how they typically move, so it kind of gets their attention in another way. It's almost as if they're listening to the work sometimes. It's super interesting. The nice thing about it is that I can get a dog that's so fearful in my practice that I can't touch the dog, but I have other tools to use with that dog, so I can move the dog, and over time, with that movement I build trust and we have a dialog going on between us, and eventually, that dog says okay, I'm ready to be touched now. I mean, they really do, they come up to your hands, and then once you start the touch work you've got another set of things you can do, so it's really got a depth to it that isn't so visible on the surface, and the fact that it's called TTouch often just leads people into thinking that it's just this one thing where you touch your dog. There's work in humans called Feldenkrais, so it was developed years ago, and it's a technique that moves people in nonhabitual ways to kind of develop new neural pathways to give them freedom of movement again. So people that have serious injuries, and they're, you know, varying them for whatever reason, a variety of reasons, have very limited movement, they can work with the Feldenkrais practitioner, or in a Feldenkrais class called Awareness Through Movement that really slows down and moves your body into nonhabitual patterns to regain new freedom of movement in your own body. It teaches your body to move in another way to get to the same place. Linda Tellington Jones, who developed Tellington TTouch Training, went through that Feldenkrais training for…she did it in order to work with the riders in our Equine Center, the horse riders, so then she started applying those ideas, and those techniques to animals, and that's where the work came from.      Melissa Breau: Interesting. Lori Stevens: I know. It's a well-kept secret. Melissa Breau: So you know, you're also a small animal massage practitioner, and you're a certified candidate in massage, so how did those pieces kind of mesh? What are some of the differences between something like TTouch and massage, how do you use them in conjunction? Lori Stevens: There is overlap and there's also quite a bit of difference, so with my massage training I can really focus on if I'm working with a dog who is super tight in the shoulders from doing too much agility over the weekend, and has big knots, you know, I can get those knots out because I have that training. Also, my training is in rehabilitation massage, so I can do manual lymphatic drainage, so if the dog has lymphoma say, and has huge swollen lymph nodes in the neck that you can actually see how swollen the lymph nodes are, I can do this very gentle work to bring that swelling down, to move the lymph node system lymph fluid again, so I can do very specific work that has a very physical effect. In TTouch body work I can work on a tail and change the behavior of a dog, so…what? So it's very different, you're more working with fascia and skin in the nervous system than you are working muscles, although muscles can change as well. Both of the techniques can change gate. It's all very, very interesting how, you know, both of them can change gate from working on the bodies, and I'm sure there's a lot of overlap, even when you're focusing on different things, but they really have kind of a different focus. And the TTouch work is much…I won't say lighter, because they both can be quite light, like even when I'm working on a knot in a muscle I don't dig in there, you know, I'm very…I go with the muscle, but I would just say they have a different focus, and therefore, you can end up with a different result. And the TTouch body work can actually…I see more changes in behavior than I do with massage, and I don't know if that's because I'm focused upon that, I don't know. I mean, it's kind of interesting, but you know, when a dog gets really uptight, often times out on a walk, my dog's tail will start to go up. That will be one of the first things I see. Maybe her ears and head, but I'll see her tail go up. If I actually reach down and just stroke her tail and bring her tail back down it actually brings her back down. Melissa Breau: Interesting. Lori Stevens: Yeah, I know. It's kind of interesting. I might have to teach that in my next Fenzi course. Melissa Breau: Hey, I'd certainly be interested in learning a little more about it. So it sounds like to me…and I could be totally of base, obviously, but if the TTouch is a little bit more focused on kind of the physical and behavioral tied together, whereas, the massage is more kind of on the physical and performance side. Is that kind of right? Lori Stevens: Well, sure. You can put it that way. I would just say they are different techniques. There is overlap, but there are different techniques. TTouch in no way does it do manual inside drainage, for example, that is a massage technique, and when I'm doing just message to get knots out I'm not generally looking for changes in behavior. I'm looking for changes in the body. So…I don't know, I mean, they're both touching the body, both body work. Melissa Breau: Now, you're also a certified canine fitness trainer, so how does that factor in? Lori Stevens: So that factors into the movement work, so I have been doing the Tellington TTouch training moment work for years, and it wasn't really getting dogs to the point that…it wasn't getting them where I wanted them to go if they were showing weakness in their muscles. Having a background in dance and being active my entire life, I was really looking for ways of helping the dogs be stronger, and more flexible, and more agile, and more confident, and blah blah blah, and some of those TTouch gave, and some of those it didn't, so it was natural for me to take it a step further. I mean, all the stuff I do sounds like a bunch of certifications, but they're all really interwoven. I had been doing some fitness with dogs for years, and then when the University of Tennessee offered the certified canine fitness trainer program and partnership with Fitpaws I jumped on it, because that was the first program that I saw that I thought would be worth doing, and just going ahead and getting my certification in it, plus I learned things. When I see…especially a dog's age, is weakness, or you know, I see habitual movement patterns that maybe a dog got injured when they were two, and at six they're still carrying the same pattern, they just never quit taking all their weight off their back right foot, say, so fitness really allowed me to take it a step further and help those dogs get back to being more functional, and stronger. And it's really fun, and it's a fantastic way of building trust, and enjoying communication with your dog. It's just another…well, like I said, it's my sport, one of my sports, so I just think it's fantastic. Melissa Breau: So I want to kind of shift gears for a minute and look at your interest in older dogs. What led to that? Was it Cassie getting older or was it something else? Lori Stevens: No, no. I've been working with older dogs for years. It's funny how long I worked with them before I had one, although, I have had older dogs before, but because of the kind of work I was doing the veterinarians were sending lots of senior dogs to me, and because I was helping them get functional again, and helping them feel better I just kept getting them, so I had a lot of experience. Even in 2005 I was getting the older dogs sent to me and I just kept building up that knowledge of working with them, and helping them feel better. I wonder what year it was. I want to say it was 2014, but I can't be certain. Kathy Sdao and I decided to do Gift of a Gray Muzzle together and really focus on aging dogs in a video in our workshop. We just gave that workshop recently again. It's kind of a passion of mine because you know, everybody when they get a puppy they're very enthusiastic about their new puppy, and you know, they have to learn a bunch of things, but there's a motivation to learn a bunch of things because you have a new puppy, you just went out and got it, but our dogs age gradually, and it's not the same kind of oh boy, I've got an aging dog, and I'll go out and learn all these new things. You know, books on aging dogs don't sell, and the thing is that there's a real joy of working with aging dogs, and watching them get new light in their eyes, and watching them physically get through things that maybe they weren't getting through before, so anyway, that's what led me to it. Melissa Breau: To kind of dig into that a little more, what are some of the issues that older furry friends tend to struggle with where your training and presumably, also your upcoming class may be able to help?      Lori Stevens: Well, I think even with people, keeping our dogs minds, or keeping our minds and bodies active is incredibly important, and this thing happens as dogs age is they all of a sudden get really comfortable sleeping for a very long time, and I think we go…especially if we have more than one dog I think we kind of say to ourselves well, our older dog's fine, you know, I'll put more energy into my younger dog, you know, maybe don't think that, but that's what ends up happening, and then one day you notice oh my god, the hind end strength is going, and the proprioception is going, which both of those naturally diminish with age. I better say what proprioception is. Proprioception is your conscience ability to know where your body is in space during movement, so if you think of a toddler at a certain age, they can't hold their cup up with juice in it, they're just pouring it upside down and then they're upset their juice is gone, but then at a certain age they suddenly know how to keep their cup upright while they move. That's proprioception. Well, you lose it with age, and so you have dogs that used to be able to step over and run over everything, running into low poles, or low logs, or whatever, and so hind end strength and proprioception naturally diminish with age, and so in the course, and when I work with older dogs, and when I do the workshops, that's what I'm helping people do is get those back. Also, I think we're not quite prepared as humans to all of a sudden, we have this senior dog, and our dog can't do as much as it could do before, and so we have to change as well, so how do our expectations need to change, and how can we make this time together, which hopefully, will be many years as wonderful as it can be. You know, we have to change our expectations, and rather them be disappointed, find joy in that as much as our dogs need to find joy in a different kind of life as well. Not meaning…this isn't bad, this is all good stuff. I mean it all in a very good way. It's just that's it's different, and so you know, in the course I give lots of tips on the easiest way to get your dog in and out of a car, or on the sofa, the functional things that dogs could do when they were younger, sometimes those go away, and so how do we bring back that function or maintain that function and joy with our aging dogs. So we'll be doing lots of activities in that course on keeping our dogs minds and bodies active, but also tools and techniques we can use to participate in making their lives as good as we can. Did that help? Melissa Breau: Absolutely. So if you were to make one recommendation for everyone listening who happens to have an aging or older dog, what would it be? Is it about mind shift, is it about, you know, exercise? I mean, what kind of piece would you pull out of that? Lori Stevens: Well, I certainly have one. Surprise, surprise. I would say be your dog's advocate, trust yourself. If you suspect something is wrong, be a detective until you get to the source. I can't tell you how many times the answer is well, your dog's getting older, you know, you're making stuff up, or that's just natural, your dog's getting older, and there really has been something, so I do think it's really, really important to be your dog's advocate, and to trust yourself, and it's okay to take your older dog to acupuncture appointments, or TTouch appointments, or massage appointments, or swimming appointment, you know, whatever you want to do to make yourself feel better. That's a good thing, but if you notice that…and your dog feel better, but if you notice something seems off it can be really hard to find what it is, and just be your dog's advocate is all I can say. Go to another vet if your veterinarian isn't willing to work with you through figuring out what it is. Melissa Breau: And finally, the questions I ask  in every episode. I want to ask you kind of the same three questions that I asked everybody whose come on so far. So to start, what's the dog related accomplishment that you are proudest of? Lori Stevens: My observation skills. I mean, they have developed since 2005 and I'm happy that I can now recognize how developed they are, and how important observation skills are, and really honoring the dog's needs rather than my own agenda, right. I mean, you know, sometimes it's natural when you have a practice to think through I'm getting ready to see this person and dog, and here's my agenda for the hour-long session, we're going to do it, X, Y, and Z, and then the dog gets there and goes no, we're not, you know, I want to do something else. So really being observant to be able to tell that, and then honoring the dog's needs, and the person, of course, has the say in what you do as well, but you know, really honoring the dog's needs. And I've actually…I will say it's only happened once since 2005, but I lost a client for not forcing a dog to do things, so I didn't mind losing that client, but… Melissa Breau: It's important to stand up for your principles and kind of do what you believe is the right thing. Lori Stevens: Yeah, and I'm just not comfortable forcing dogs into position for a massage. Melissa Breau: Right. So what about training advice, what is the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Lori Stevens: You know, it's funny. I don't really think these are what you have in mind, but… Melissa Breau: That's okay! Lori Stevens: Yeah. Meet the dog where she is or he is. That was the best piece of advice I heard and that was in TTouch, but just kind of change to meet both learners, the dog and the person, where they are. You can't really tell people to change, right, you have to guide them gently, and kind of move with them when they're really to move. People have to decide for themselves to make changes, and communication is so incredibly important. I've seen dogs and people go from, you know, a pretty dark place to an incredible place, and I'm so thrilled with what, you know, with the influence that I had on that. I would have to say just meeting everybody where they are, and recognizing how important communication is, and that it's not just about what we think, or how we think it should be done, but bringing the person and dog along at their own pace. Melissa Breau: And finally, who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Lori Stevens: Well, you know there's several, but I have to say Dr. Susan Friedman and Ken Ramirez probably are two top. Melissa Breau: Ken's well regarded among the FDSA staff. I've heard his name a couple of times now. Lori Stevens: Yeah. He's pretty great. So is Dr. Susan Friedman. I think you'll hear her name more and more if you haven't already. Melissa Breau: Cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Lori. Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on. Melissa Breau: I feel like I learned a ton. Lori Stevens: That's great. Melissa Breau: Yeah. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Amy Johnson to discuss photography and our dogs. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have or 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.  

Summary: Dr. Debbie Gross Torraca has been involved in the field of animal physical rehabilitation for over seventeen years and has both a masters and a doctorate, as well as other advanced certifications in her field. She currently owns a small animal rehabilitation practice in Connecticut called Wizard of Paws Physical Rehabilitation for Animals. Over the last 12 years, she has lectured throughout the world on the topic of small animal rehabilitation, and is one of the founders of the Certificate Program in Canine rehabilitation from the University of Tennessee. She has been widely published, both professionally and in venues for dog enthusiasts. Links mentioned: Wizard of Paws Physical Rehabilitation for Animals Fitness Trainer Certificate Program FearFreePets.com Next Episode:  To be released 7/28/2017, featuring Lori Stevens talking about how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health interact.  TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports broadcast 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 Debbie Gross Torraca. Dr. Torraca has been involved in the field of animal physical rehabilitation for over 17 years and has both a master's, and a doctorate, as well as other advanced certifications in her field. She currently owns a small animal rehabilitation practice in Connecticut called Wizard of Paws Physical Rehabilitation for Animals. Over the last 12 years, she has lectured throughout the world on the topic of small animal rehabilitation, and as one of the founders of the certificate program in canine rehabilitation from the University of Tennessee, she has been widely published both professionally, and in venues for dog enthusiasts. Hi, Debbie, welcome to the podcast. Debbie Gross: Hi, Melissa. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to chat with you. This is not a topic a I know a lot about, so it's always fun to learn something. Just to start us out, do you mind just telling us a little bit about your own dogs, who they are, and what you're working on with them? Debbie Gross: Sure. Yeah. So I currently share my home and my life with two dogs. Bogaurt is a Clumber Spaniel, and so that's a fairly different breed, and then we also have a nine-year-old Cocker Spaniel that was rescued. He was unfortunately beaten by a gentleman in uniform, that's all we know. So we've had him for about six years and we've had to overcome quite a lot of fear issues, and all that sort of stuff, so he's been my different sort of training in progress, and every day I learn from him, and the Clumber Spaniel does a little bit of everything. He's definitely…I've had Clumbers now for almost 10 years and they're just a joy to work with, and you know, people often will ask, "why don't you do agility or other sports with him?", and that's where kind of I come in and look at the body frame, and that sort of stuff, even though a lot of Clumbers can do agility, his body is just not meant for that, so sadly, we stick to other things, and he's always my willing demo dog, or sometimes unwilling, so that's always…yeah, exciting. He seems to know when it's guinea pig time and he'll take off if he doesn't feel up to it, so. Melissa Breau: He'll let you know if he's not in the mood, huh? Debbie Gross: Exactly. I mean, he's like typical Clumber, so sweet, but about 22 hours a day, so. Melissa Breau: Now, I know in your bio I left out some of the alphabet, you've got a lot of credentials, so I wanted to give you a chance to talk a little bit about how you got into animal rehabilitation. What is it that drew you in that direction? Debbie Gross: Sure. I've always been drawn to animals and you know, just adored them, and when I went to human physical therapy school there was a lot of hands on, a lot of palpation. Eventually, my roommates got tired of being guinea pigs, and at the time, I had an Alaskan Malamute and he was a more than willing participant, so I started to look at his body and say, oh, you know, if we could do all these things for people, why can't we do these for animals, and this was back in the 1980s, and one of my professors said to me, "don't be silly, this is a dog, no one's ever going to spend money or care about that much on a dog." So I kind of, you know, laughed at that and said, okay, and kind of kept that in the back of my mind, and I graduated. I took my first job in New York City and I was working with a lot of dancers in New York City Ballet, and definitely started to appreciate different types of movement, so if a ballerina or another type of dancer's missing five degrees of motion in their big toe, it's going to be significant. And I think about all those minor things so often today when I work with performance dogs, you know, dogs that are involved in high level competitions, but I stayed with human physical therapy for a while, always kind of thinking about my dream of working with dogs, and I fully just started to do a lot of independent learning, a lot of reading, spending a lot of time with veterinarians, and going to different vet schools, and studying anatomy, and things like that. And then eventually, it turned into more and more, and I then started teaching at the University of Tennessee. And the CCRP letters are the Certified Canine Rehabilitation Practitioner, so I helped establish that program, and continued to teach with them, and it's really kind of, you know, it can be kind of a common sense thing. Dogs and other animals suffer many of the same injuries that people do. For example, an ACL injury in people is very common in dogs as well, and there are many different breeds that suffer with that, but things like arthritis, and neurological diseases, and sports related issues. I mean, certainly, everything that we know from the human filed we can just benefit, you know, help the dogs, so it's been pretty awesome to start out with this almost 20 years ago and watch it kind of just be an idea, and now it's definitely becoming more and more commonplace. And I love looking on Facebook or talking to people from all over the world and they're taking their dog for rehab, or they're perusing other options, and they're doing things like that, which is just fantastic. Yeah. So that's been…you know, it is. It's great when, you know, and I laugh at the professor that I…every once in a while, I'll see her at a conference, and I'll say to her, hey, remember that kind of thought or dream I had, I said, that's kind of what I do now 24-7 about, so. And a lot of people that have gone through rehab can definitely relate, and they understand, and so I'm always thrilled when more and more owners are perusing different options for their pets, and really, the moto of our clinic is every dog deserves the best quality of life for the longest time possible, and no matter if the dog is seven weeks old or 17 years old, you know, so important just to make sure that they're pain free and have the highest level of function. So it's really been this incredible journey and I love it. Melissa Breau: You started to talk a little bit there about some of the differences and similarities between physical therapy for people and that for dogs. Are there other key differences you can kind of speak to? Debbie Gross: Yes. So a lot of…you know, besides the obvious, people being biped and dogs being quadruped, I joke to a dog is not…they have no idea that something should make them feel better. You know, they're so truthful, they're…either a treatment's going to work, or it's not going to work, so there's no secondary games, they're not messing with an insurance company, or anything like that, but you know, for the same kind of similarities, whenever there's pain or inflammation there's going to be weakness that evolves. So like I tell my kids, if your body perceives pain it's going to shut off all the muscles in the area, so very similar. A person can say, hey, my knee hurts, I need to do something about it. Very often take an Advil or a Tylenol. A dog can't say that to an owner, so a lot of times that unless the owner is very perceptive and notices a slight change in their behavior, it's hard to determine if they're in pain until it gets pretty bad, you know, so recognizing pain is definitely a big difference. I encourage all my owners, all my students, to make sure they go over their dogs on a monthly basis just to check for any pain, or soreness, or anything like that, but many of the on-scene treatment modalities that we would use in human medicine, we use in the animal. So like moist heat, or ice, laser or photobiomodulation is commonly used to help reduce pain and inflammation, and a lot of the exercises we do are very similar. Of course, we have to get a little bit more creative with a dog, but pretty much everything used in human medicine we could, you know, transfer over to the dog, so it's pretty cool. Melissa Breau: Now, I think that veterinarians and the medical field in general isn't always known as the most positive part of dog sports, so I'd love to get your take on that. How do positive training and rehabilitation overlap, and are there places where they just can't? Debbie Gross: Yeah. And that's a very good question. I belong to an organization, I sit on the board called Fear Free, and their whole goal and mission is to establish fear free veterinarian offices, rehab offices, looking at training facilities, boarding facilities, things like that, so it's all aimed at making sure the experience is positive and fear free. And certainly…you know, we laugh in our clinic because we're not the vet, so dogs come in and they know they're getting copious amounts of cookies, and it's going to be a great place, and they love it, and so I think it's very important to, you know, right off the bat we want to make sure the owner and the dog are very comfortable. Certainly, dogs often will become fearful or potentially aggressive if they're in pain, so I always tell the trainers that I work with, assume that it's physical before behavioral. Now, I'll hear so many times from owners, "oh, my dog didn't want to do the A-frame this morning. It's probably because…" You know, they make something up and then get steak for dinner. They swear they don't think like that. You know, they probably didn't want to do something because they're in pain. Something like the A-frame puts a lot of stress on the dogs back, and the hips, and stuff like that, so understanding if a dog is fearful, or doesn't want to do something, looking at the reason why, you know, so is it pain that is prohibiting them from doing something. And certainly, some dogs are not candidates, like we've turned dogs away because they're either too fearful, or they just can't do…they don't want to do anything, and rather than forcing them, we won't do that. You know, and that's a little bit different than traditional vet medicine where dogs need to go in. They may need to get an exam, or their vaccinations, or things like that, but this fear free movement is fantastic, and you know, looks at everything from the lighting, their potential pheromones in the air to relax the dogs, and cats also, and other animals, so most the time in rehab dogs love it. They love coming into our office, and it's fun, and it's all positive, and you know, that's the way I want it to be. I mean, I love when the dogs pull their owners into the office, so you know that they're having a great time, so it's great. Melissa Breau: Now, is there a website that's conceded with the Fear Free Organization just in case you'd want to look it up? Debbie Gross: Yeah. I believe. I'll look. I think if someone just googled fear free it would pull up, and actually, fear free pets.com. So and their moto is "Taking the Pet out of Petrified," and it is very nice. It's a nice group that…and the number of practitioners getting certified in Fear Free are growing constantly, so you know, that's really great, and I highly encourage owners to seek out one of these facilities because they just are a little bit more in tune with things, and make the experience as positive as they can. Melissa Breau: I'll make sure to include a link to the site in the show notes for everybody. Debbie Gross: Perfect. Great. Perfect. Melissa Breau: So I want to drill just a little bit more into rehab itself, rehabilitation sort of implies this idea that something's gone wrong and now it's time to try and fix it, so I was curious of how much of what you teach is about preventing problems, and how much of it is about really fixing them. Debbie Gross: Great question. And we probably…I would say half the dogs that I see have an issue that can be fixed. So for example, they've had a torn ligament, they had surgery, and now we're rehabbing them, getting them back to normal. The other half is all about prevention and looking at what the dog does, what the dog needs to do, and how to get them stronger. So for example, we run a program called The Biggest Loser and it's a weight loss program, so we know that so many dogs…the obesity causes so many orthopedic issues, as well as other issues, and you know, helping owners and the dogs to understand how to get going, and just start a weight loss program, a successful weight loss program. Then we have older dogs that just need some exercise, and they just need to get moving, and we'll start implementing a simple exercise program. And then on the other end of the spectrum are you know, some of your…we see a ton of conformation dogs where they need to get into shape, and for whatever reason, they haven't been in shape, and they vary from doing something. We have underwater treadmills. They may run in the underwater treadmills for 30 to 45 minutes, just depending on what they're doing, and but you know, helping to build up their strength and conditioning. And that goes too with different athletic dogs, your Shih Tzu dogs, your agility dogs, obedience work, anything like that, so really on both sides of kind of fixing something, but also the goal is definitely preventing injuries from happening. So we do a little bit of both. Melissa Breau: Now, are there things that dog sports enthusiasts should be doing to keep their dog in top shape, or does that kind of vary based on sport, or based on breed? Debbie Gross: Yeah. That's another great question. So I think that if we look at human sports, no matter whether it's on the collegiate level, the professional or Olympic level, any of our human athletes is involved in a conditioning program, so they have a program set for them, and they would never think about not engaging in a conditioning program, but on the canine side that's not always the case. Now, I hear so often, you know, the dogs are just weekend warriors, so they just go to an agility trial over the weekend, and the owner does nothing with them during the week. And I think every dog, if they're involved in performance sports, whether it's just a couple times a month, or every weekend, they need to be in a conditioning program, and a conditioning program should definitely include core strength. So working just like you and I would work on our back strength, our abdominals, all the large muscles of the body, working on endurance. So sometimes it's just simple walking or jogging, and then sports specifics, so a dog involved in agility is going to need more power or explosive events like plyometrics, working on their strength going over jumps, but also stopping quickly, and making sure that their shoulders and their hip flexors are strong enough, and of course, that will differ from your conformation breed. That may need more endurance to run around the ring and also more core strength, so it does depend on the sport, and its also going to depend upon the breed. And I often laugh where I love the big, you know, the gentle monsters, your Newfoundland's, and giant mastiffs, and you know, of course, their activity. If they walk 10 minutes in the underwater treadmill they're sleeping for the next 24 hours, where you have a Border Collie that's already active, they're going to need more exercise, so it will vary by breed, or also vary by age. So very young dogs anywhere under 24 months, you want to be respectful of their growth plates, and their psychological ability to exercise. And then on the flip side, your older dogs, you don't want to overdo it either, so you want to be respectful, but hands down, any dog that competes in any kind of event, or just does it for fun should be doing some sort of core work, and it doesn't take much to make a big difference. Melissa Breau: I'd imagine that there are some injuries you see a lot more often in dog sports than others. What are some of the things that do crop up most often and you know, what are some of the things maybe you do when you work with those types of dogs from a conditioning standpoint, or even from a rehabilitation standpoint? Debbie Gross: Yeah. So I think probably two of the more common injuries that have just been unfortunately gaining more popularity are iliopsoas injuries or injuries to the hip flexor, which is back near the front of the dog's hip, and shoulder issues. And I think the iliopsoas is a soft tissue injury and I've definitely been seeing an increase in these injuries as dogs are not really…they're being trained at a younger age without a lot of adequate core strength, and because they're being pushed a lot further, and they don't have the strength in their core or their hip flexors, so they start to develop this weakness, and this injury, and it's probably one of the more stubborn injuries to rehab from, and part of it is because most owners…and I'm right up there, are impatient, you know, as soon as the dog starts to look better you want to get them out there and play. It's commonly injured by a dog slipping, or excessive ball playing, and that's something that so many people love to do, toss the ball, and if the dog doesn't have enough strength they're going to put a lot of stress on that area, but it's the same thing with the shoulder injury, the shoulders stop the dog from moving forward. So for example, when a dog comes over a jump the shoulders are what stabilize the body so the dog doesn't fall flat on their face, and if there is a minor injury, weakness will develop and then it will start to become an issue. So really, with both of these cases, again, going back to lots of core strengths, and working on sports specifics, so working on the landing over a jump, and building up the strength, working on a lot of what's called eccentric strength, so you know, really preparing them for that. And the other things are proper warm ups and cool downs, so always making sure that the owners are working on that and doing that. Melissa Breau: Now I know you're offering the Canine Fitness trainer courses through FDSA. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, kind of what they are what the goal is there? Debbie Gross: Sure. So the fitness trainer courses are so much fun. They're such a great, dedicated group of people because there's four courses in a row, and the goal really is to educate people to either work more with their dog or go out there and help other dogs. So many of the people that have graduated and successfully completed the course and their exam are out there kind of for, you know, if we equate to people, working as a personal canine trainer, so helping dogs with weight loss, helping dogs with different types of exercises, and they've gone through…it's fairly intense. So the first two sessions focus on functional anatomy, so learning about the different muscles, and how to use them, and different exercises to give for them, tons of safety information, and you know, then kind of putting it all together, so talking about the different sports, and what they need, or just different dogs and what they'll need, and how to set up a program that's safe and effective, you know, for an individual dog. So it's so much fun, and I learn something every time we go through a different group of people because they're just incredible, you know, what they think, and the different types of dogs, and so it really has been fantastic, and it's a lot of work, and I'm so proud of everyone that's completed it because it definitely takes a lot of dedication. Melissa Breau: At the end of the four classes they can take a test, right, to become certified, is that right? Debbie Gross: Correct. They submit four case studies, so four dogs that they've been working with, and then there's an exam, yes, and then they become a Certified Professional Canine Fitness Trainer. Had to think of that for a minute. Melissa Breau: Very cool. I want to talk too about some of the other classes you offer at FDSA. Do you want to just share kind of what they are and kind of what you cover in those classes? Debbie Gross: Yeah. So I offer a bunch of different ones and one is the basic canine conditioning, which I cannot stress, as I said before, that anybody involved in dogs should…it's such a great course for people to take because it just goes over basic things that anyone can do at home, so it doesn't have to be with equipment, or anything like that, but just basic exercises that anyone can do, and can make more difficult as demands, you know, for the dog. And then the second canine conditioning course just gets into a little bit more depth, but we've had dogs that are 14 or 15 years old and the owners have just been working with them to improve their quality of life, and we've had other dogs that are high level competitors in class, and so it's so wonderful to see just the different effects simple canine conditioning can have on the individual dogs. And I teach a course called The Bum Knees and that's…knee injuries are unfortunately very prevalent in dogs, and we talk about different prevention strategies for knee injuries, what to do if your dog has had a knee injury or does have a knee injury, and talk about, you know, safe exercises to go through. And I think there's a course on the iliopsoas, which as I mentioned before, definitely a muscle in an area that is just a hot topic, and it goes over also injury prevention, what to do, how to recognize an injury, and what to do, what different types of exercises. And I believe there's a shoulder course does the same thing, but just focuses on shoulders. You know, we're looking at different types of should injuries and that sort of stuff. So off the top of my head, I think that's it. There could be some more, but I love the other…oh, go ahead, I'm sorry. Melissa Breau: I was going to say maybe you should do a few more. Debbie Gross: Yes. You know, there's just so, so many wonderful things that people…people have been asking for a course for senior dogs, so maybe that will be my next project. Melissa Breau: So I do want to ask you the same questions that I ask everybody who comes on kind of towards the end of the podcast. So what's the dog related accomplishment that you are proudest of? Debbie Gross: I have to probably involve the dog that I have worked with for quite some time, and she continues to be just an accomplishment that I'm so proud of. A beautiful Irish Setter that I had worked with for a year and she had won, I think 31, best in shows, and it was just amazing to watch her move, and knowing what was kind of lying underneath her, so it was pretty fantastic, and her handler became her owner, and she had been retired, she had 15 puppies, and 14 weeks after the puppies he had come to me and he said, "do you think we can get her ready for Westminster?", and I looked at him and said, are you crazy? You know, this dog has been doing nothing for quite some time, had 15 puppies. And I accepted the challenge, and worked with her, and did so much with her, and I had gone to Westminster that year. My own dog had won the breed in bullmastiffs, and a Portuguese Water Dog I had bred won the breed. And then I watched this beautiful Irish Setter, and she went on to win the breed, and so I was all done, ready to watch the groups, and I thought, okay, my day is done, I'm just going to kick back and relax, and this dog that's an Irish Setter won the group, so she was going on to best in show. And it was, you know, just a pretty incredible experience and not only for me, but also for my staff, and then we did it, she went on to win Irish Settler National as a veteran, which was pretty incredible, so even though it wasn't my dog, it felt pretty incredible to be part of that. So I look back on that and just knowing everything that she had to go through, so it was pretty incredible. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Congrats. So even though we didn't necessarily talk about training today, I did want to ask you what the best piece of training advice you've ever heard is. Debbie Gross: You know, I think, like I always tell myself, and I always tell people always listen to the dog. From what I do, dogs always tell us what's wrong with them. You just have to open up your eyes and your ears, and watch, and listen, and they'll tell you. So I know that's not specifically training, but you know, from what I do, listening to the dog they always know what's right for them. If a dog wants to rest, there's a reason, you know, where sometimes we don't listen to. Melissa Breau: Right. And then finally, who is somebody else in the dog world that you look up to? Debbie Gross: There are a lot of people that I look up to. Probably coming from my background with structure and all of that sort of stuff, Pat Hastings is someone that I look up to, just form her knowledge, and I've taught with her a few times, and it's been, you know, pretty incredible. And probably too then, you know, from a dog looking at training and that sort of stuff, I am a big fan of Denise's and watching her calmness, how she works with dogs, and there are a couple people that train in my area, the same thing, you know, there's definitely people that just understand dogs, and dogs understand them, so yeah. It's hard to pinpoint to just one. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Debbie. Debbie Gross: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Lori Stevens to discuss supporting our aging dogs. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!  

Summary:   In this episode we share a recording of Denise Fenzi's Welcome talk from Camp 2017, followed by a newly recorded Q&A about camp, this year's theme, and how her welcome lectures have evolved over the last few years. Links mentioned: 2016 "Ripples and Bubbles" Camp Welcome Talk 2017 "Be a Superhero" Camp Welcome Video Recording Next Episode:  To be released 7/14/2017, featuring Denise Fenzi talking about FDSA camp 2017. 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're bringing you a special episode. We'll share Denise Fenzi's talk on superheroes from our 2017 FDSA Camp Welcome session. Afterwards, we'll have Denise herself on to answer a few questions about the session and about camp itself. Enjoy. Deb Jones: So now I'm going to introduce you to our fearless leader and superhero, Denise Fenzi. Denise Fenzi: I don't know where this started, the whole costume thing, and the superhero theme is a pretty easy one, yes, and I bet all of you Wonder Woman, how many of you have looked at what Wonder Woman wears? I'm not going to wear underwear in front of these people. Well, if you're not sure what Wonder Woman… would you come up here please? All right, there's Wonder Woman, pretty close. So I thought I would represent a more middle-aged Wonder Woman, and so that's us, right? So I just thought that was a far better choice, and the shoes, for those of you who didn't attend the first year, I wore the boots, and I'm very, very lucky I lived through that experience because I don't wear heels, and they were like that. It was scary, but this year, I went with slippers. I just thought that was more appropriate for our age. There's actually two reasons I wore… did not wear boots. One is our age, and the second is I was a little concerned about stepping on my dog, and yeah, if you can't see him it's because he's invisible. He's a super dog, and I didn't want to hurt him, and can you imagine stepping on your dog with those big heels like that? The thing about my dog, he is a super dog. He's not an ordinary dog. So if I had stepped on him, nothing would have happened. He wouldn't have bitten me or run away, right because that's what it is to be a super dog. Nothing bothers him, and if you notice, I just walked right in here. I didn't let him acclimate at all, and then I just asked him to law down, and he's in a perfect place now. Right there, Hannah. Notice the quality of that down, and I'm going to leave him there, and he is going to be no trouble until I'm done talking. He's pretty good. That is because he's a super dog. Because he's a super dog, he doesn't need me to be a superhero. He doesn't need me at all. If he needs anything, he just talks in real words. So if you want to be a superhero for your dog, it's not going to be that easy, is it? Your dog doesn't talk in words, so you're going to have to maybe approach things differently. So let's take a minute to think about what does a superhero do? Alright, so you've got Batman. We use props. Batman goes to a party. Bat is having a great time hanging out with friends, meets a nice girl, boy whatever. I think it's time to sit and chat, having a drink. Friends are all there, and the bat call goes off, and what does Batman have to do? Get up and leave. Does Batman want to leave that party? Probably not, no. Do you think other people appreciate it when Batman, because nobody knows he's Batman remember, jumps up and runs out? Do you think that girl thought that was nice that she just got abandoned like that, or the host of the party? He just left. Being a superhero is not a simple thing. It actually means you are going to be inconvenienced a lot because you know things that other people don't know. Nobody else heard the bat call. You heard it. So the first thing is Batman has to pay attention, and when he's needed, he has to stop doing things that he wants to do because he's responsible for the underdog, for the ones who cannot take care of themselves or cannot hear what needs to happen, and he'll often have to do it at personal sacrifice. He can't explain to people. He has to go. So to be a superhero, you actually have to have willingness to sacrifice to help others. You also need courage. It takes courage to walk away when there are people who don't understand why you're doing that. I will give you an example of courage. It happened to me yesterday. Eight o'clock in the morning, I lose my room key. Yes, some of them are laughing already. They thought it was funny. Sometimes, that's how things work, isn't it? So I went up to the front desk and asked for another one. This is not unusual. Would this be a good time to tell you that only the room owner can get a key? Probably that information will come up, that will be me. So anyway, I get my key, go to my room, walk in and see my costume. I'm like, “Oh, I'll show the instructors.” So I put my key down, put my outfit on, zip next door, show them, and then can't get back in my room. Now the choices are limited here, guys. You can go to the front desk, Wonder Woman style or what? I didn't have a choice in that matter, right? So I did it. I'm like, in the room, “Oh, there has to be another way.” They're like, “No, hunny, you go on up to that front desk.” That was forced courage. I am actually referring to the more organic kind where you get a choice. I mean, really what else can I do, just take off all my clothes? No. So being a superhero for your dog is kind of similar to what Batman does for people. Your dog can't talk. So you're going to have to pay attention. You're going to have to see some body language. If there's one thing I can give to people, I tell all my classes this. If there's one thing I can give to you to improve your dog training, you have to pay attention. If your dog is on a leash that way, and you're talking to him this way, that's a problem, all right because you're supposed to be with your dog. You wouldn't do that with a person, just have them out there on a leash. If you just pay attention, you will see what you need to see, but if you're not paying attention, you'll not see what is happening. So you won't know that you're needed. If Batman is listening to loud music, he does not hear the bat call. You have to pay attention. So now that you're paying attention, what are you going to do if you come into a space like this or a dog training class or whatever, and you see that your dog is struggling? Your dogs have a little doggie meltdown. The first thing is it would be very normal to feel resentful because you actually might not get to do what you had wanted to do. You might have spent a lot of money to bring your dog somewhere. You might have been so excited, so looking forward to it. People you want to see, friends you haven't seen in awhile, but your dog is saying, “I need you right now.” There's kind of a few things that you can do if you notice your dog is struggling, cover some basics. One is distance, if you can see the things that's upsetting your dog, get further away and reassure your dog. Pet your dog. Tell your dog everything is okay, all right? It's okay to do that. You will not reinforce the fear. The second one is can you change the intensity of what's upsetting your dog? So let's say the other dog's barking, it's the intensity that's bothering your dog. Is there anything you can do to help the other person get their dog to stop barking? So think about that. Is there anything you can do to make the situation better? If it's a room that's very noise, can you go to a different room that's just a little less noisy?   Time is a paradoxical one. The amount of time you are in an environment can have two effects on your dog. One is to make them feel better because they acclimate. They get used to the circumstances, but the other is they run out of good brain cells. What I say is especially reactive dogs, they'll be good in the morning, but they run out of good. They just use up all their good, and then they're tired and exhausted, and then really the only answer is the dog just wants to be taken out of this space. They can't recover anymore, so be aware of the paradoxical nature of time. So if you do all these things, isn't it like a one-way street right, and you're just feeding your dog all the time, and I don't mean literally feeding, giving your energy. The thing is it's not a one-way street because if Batman came in this room right now, and there was an emergency, where would every person in this room look? Every person in this room would look at the superhero because they have experience, and they know that person will keep them safe, will tell them what to do, and it's going to be all right. So if you get in the habit of taking care of your dog and protecting your dog, what happens over time is when your dog is unsure about what to do, feeling a little nervous, your dog will start to look at you for direction, and will say, “What should we do now?” and then when you say to your dog, “Everything is all right,” your dog will say, “Okay, I believe you.” My dog is a super dog. The thing is that pup doesn't exist. There's no dog. There are no super dogs. There are just dogs, ordinary dogs. What you can do is take the dog you have and make it the best dog possible for you. So today here, I want you to understand that you're going to be a superhero to your dog as best you can, and we, the staff, the volunteers, and everybody else in this room, you will be a superhero to each other. If you need help, ask. If you're struggling with your dog and you're not sure how to solve the problem, ask and we'll try to help you. We want this to be super positive experience for everybody because some puzzles are very hard to solve, right, and then you need to think about what is the right thing to do for your dog under these circumstances. Sometimes we can help you, but you have to ask, and we'll step up and do what we can. Melissa Breau: So Denise, you talked about two different ideas during your welcome, the idea of being a superhero for your dog and the idea that there are no super dogs. So let's start with that first one, the idea of being a superhero for your dog. What were you really hoping that people would take away from that metaphor? Denise Fenzi: If I had more time, I did mention, you know, if I could just get people to pay attention. That is a hard thing to teach. It comes with time. People sort of develop it on their own, but I find it difficult to communicate regularly, like when I'm saying it, I can get them to do it, and the analogy I use is imagine, as a parent, when you go out in the world with your toddler or young child, you don't generally use a leash, and you don't use a stream of M&Ms either. What you do to interact with your child and to get them not to run out into the street and get themselves killed is you pay attention. So when you go to the park, and your kid sees a red ball, you've had enough time with this child to know if that even matters, but you're constantly scanning the environment, right? It may not matter. Maybe your kid is into trains, and the next one is into balls, but you know when you need to pay attention, and the reason you know is because you have paid attention, and the reason you've paid attention is you didn't want your kid to get killed, and you didn't have a leash, and you didn't have M&Ms. So all you had left was preventing it. So things like when I talked to people about if you have a problem, get further away. I don't have to tell a parent that. If a parent goes to the park, and their child sees a ball, they already know how far it needs to be before it will be a problem, and now they are paying attention. If I could get that way of looking at it to human parents of dogs, my life would be much easier, and then you are a superhero, right? Then kids do look to their parents when they're unsure because it's always worked for them. So sometimes I just want people to visualize what a life would look like if you didn't have a leash and you didn't have food. Tell me you wouldn't be way more in tune with your dog because you'd have no choice. So that's what I meant by being a superhero, if you develop that relationship with your dog that you are paying attention, then your dog will naturally look to you for support when they need it. Go to the vet, if you don't know what that looks like. So go to the vet, and watch a waiting room full of people on their cellphones not watching their dogs, and their dog's having varying forms of meltdowns, and some of the dogs are asking the owner, “Please pay attention.” They're distressed. They're clearly asking, and the owner's paying no attention, and then there are other dogs that have completely given up on asking and are now making mischief in various forms because nobody is paying attention. These kinds of things, you know, when you watch it, it's the saddest thing ever, you know, and I see this, and I see the dog just is asking for something, and over time, dogs stop asking when we stop paying attention. So if I can give people that, that would really help them both in a performance sense and just really in their enjoyment of their dog. Melissa Breau: I feel like, I mean just kind of reading posts on the alumni group and things like that, that you often say basically, “Imagine your dog was a child, and behave appropriately.” That seems like a really helpful kind of metaphor for people to kind of understand the idea of what they should do instead of what they're doing. Denise Fenzi: Yes, it annoys some people because it's sort of … scientists sort of say not to do that, but boy does it work. So at the end of the day, I'm a really pragmatic trainer, and I find that if I tell people to visualize their child as a 2-3 year old that they become much better trainers and owners. So I will continue to use my metaphors in spite of what some people think about them. Melissa Breau: So the flip side of that, you know, instead of just being a super hero for your dog, you mentioned the idea that there are no super dogs, that despite the fact that you had your little pretend dog come out with you and do a perfect down and stay beautifully, that doesn't exist. Denise Fenzi: We live in a world where people communicate two things about their lives. Facebook is such a great example, right? You have those who focus on everything that goes wrong. If they have an unhappy moment, you will know about it because that's just what they tend to do, that is how they process, that is how they great through the world, and that's fine. Then you have other people who don't believe in sharing any negative thoughts at all. So if you read their Facebook posts, you'd begin to think they must lead a truly charmed life, like wow, have they ever had a bad day? That's great too, that's another side. What I've noticed though is people do this with dogs. Say you go out and you bought a dog, if you bought a dog at eight weeks, and its purpose bred. So you bought it for dog sport, then you have a lot of stuff in your head about expectations, and then you go out and you look at other people in the world, and either their puppies are complete meltdown messed up horrors, and you're going, “Oh please not that,” or their dog seems to be like these amazing dogs that never do anything wrong. That's just not true, that's because people present what they want others to see, and 95 percent of dogs are neither one of those things. It's just that some people talk about all the wrong, bad things and other people talk about all the wonderful, great things, and that totally discounts the actual reality. The reality is 90 percent of the time, you're all in the middle. So you have a training session and on balance, you feel good about it, but there are one or two things that weren't quite right, wrong balance. It wasn't a great session, but honestly, if you look at it, there was probably right in there than you knew. The reason this is a problem is when people get their dog, they're constantly comparing it to what they think other people have, and if you bought an eight week old puppy specifically to do things, eight week old puppies are generally not that damaged. I mean, how much can be wrong? You haven't done anything yet. You haven't trained that dog yet. So you're not going to know what you have. It's not until you actually get into the process three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten months of age that you start realizing that the puppy has issues. All puppies have issues. All of them one day will… I remember walking a dog over a grate, and the dog startled over the grate, and my first thought was, “Oh my God, what does it mean?” which is ridiculous. It means nothing. It means the dog stepped on a grate, but it's very easy for us to say, “Oh wow, do I have to fix this? Does this matter? Is this career-ending?” We tend to do that, and the more people look around them and look at the things they like in other dogs, the harder they are going to be on themselves and on their own dogs thinking, “How come my dog isn't like that? How come I didn't get that dog?” Nobody got that dog. You choose what you want to emphasize. Every dog I have in my house has some pretty notable challenges for competition purposes, and I almost never talk about them because it's not what I want to talk about with my dogs because if I do, it makes me focus on them, and it makes other people focus on those things. I'm aware of them, and I worked gently over time to try to make things better, but I try really hard not to focus on them, but then sometimes maybe other people think, “Oh she always gets good dogs.” That's not quite true. I get the dog I'm supposed to have, and then I make the best out of the one I have, and I really work to see the things I love about the dog because I find that over time, people who find and focus on what is right, their dog becomes more of that dog. They live up to expectations. So I think that might be what I would have talked about again. I think I get 10 minutes for my intro so that is probably what I would have added if I was going to expand on that. Melissa Breau: I think that's so interesting because in a way, it's almost like shaping other people's impressions of you and your dog, right? Focus on the good or your focus on the bad. You're positively reinforcing it or you're negatively reinforcing it. Denise Fenzi: I do talk about things that go wrong. I just don't emphasize them, and I often talk about them after I resolved them. So I worked through this thing, and I talked about how I worked through that thing. So I acknowledge it exists. I think I'm honest enough about it, but I don't dwell, and I think it's the dwelling that is doing people in and making them wish they had a different dog than they have. Melissa Breau: … and that's more interesting for people to read about anyway. They don't really want to read, “Oh woe is me” so much as it is, “Oh, how do I overcome this?” Denise Fenzi: Yes, probably true. Melissa Breau: So this year was the third year of camp and the third theme. So I wanted to talk a little bit, kind of take a trip through time here. So what was the theme the very first year? Do you want to share a little about that? Denise Fenzi: What was the theme the first year? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that would have been the red dress year. Okay, so that came about, it was an accident, and I won't go into that whole story, but anyway, I decided to do it because it was fun to dress up in the dress, and the basic idea was don't worry about what other people think. So for those of you who didn't see the red dress, it was a short red dress, and the boots had high, high heels, very out of character for me, made me quite nervous actually, but I figured if I can get through that, I could do anything, and honestly, the subsequent years have been easier, but the basic idea was don't spend your energy worrying about what other people see and what they're looking at. That's not really what's important. What's important is what do you think is right and doing what you think is the right thing to do. So that was where I went that year. Melissa Breau: So I hear echoes of that idea in this year's welcome talk about the superhero theme. How is that idea evolved for you over the last three years? Denise Fenzi: There's kind of two ways I'm going to look at that. One is I put so much more energy into classical conditioning, how a dog feels, every single year that goes by than the last year. It actually amazes me now how much time I spent on this. It's constant. So I think three years ago, I would have been seeing it more from a training perspective. So what I mean is I would have seen it more as skill based. When you're in a public space, what should you be working on skills-wise, and I would say now, I am in my mind, I'm thinking more about emotion based. How is your dog feeling, and what are you going to do about that? So when I go, or when anybody goes to a dog place and choses to spend their ring rental time sitting on the floor petting their dog and playing ball, that's an unusual way to spend your time, and I would say that is where I'm at now would be more about making sure your dog is comfortable, and three years ago, if you had asked me that question, I think it is more likely I would have talked about doing extremely simple behaviors. So that would be an evolution in my thinking because I don't think teaching behaviors is hard. I think getting in the ring is hard. So that's where I'm at, I think now.   In terms of the challenge level, I think every year that goes by, dog sports are evolving to becoming kinder and gentler, and I do think that dog sports enthusiasts are becoming much more educated just across the board, so kind of regardless of how they choose to train. I think knowledge of training, trained principles, approaches to training, options have skyrocketed in the performance world. So people are just much more knowledgeable, and as result, things that would have been particularly bizarre if somebody had seen you do it three years ago probably won't seem bizarre anymore. They've seen it all. So the first time somebody trained with food 20 years ago, I'm sure that stood out like a sore thumb, and now we're at a point where nobody would think twice about that. I think a person sitting on the floor and choosing to play ball with their dog for 10 minutes in the ring now would not get that much notice in many parts of the country whereas I think a few years ago, it would have. So we are changing. We are evolving. Melissa Breau: Last year, your topic was more about being ripple and kind of spreading that message, right? You dressed up as a mermaid. What was the message there? What were you trying to convey? Denise Fenzi: Well ripples and bubbles, we talk about those issues a lot within the schools. Ripples are spreading the information you have a teeny tiny bit at a time, which is not the same as cramming it down another person's throat because that actually does not change behavior. So I spent a fair amount of energy that year sort of walking through how we might choose to approach people who are doing things differently than we are, how we might choose to approach a conversation if we choose to approach one at all, how we know when it's time to walk away from the conversation or when it's time to proceed so that you maximize respect for both sides. By doing that, you leave the lines of communication open. Now the reason this is important is I have gotten emails or notes or whatever from people that I knew a very long time ago, and we've gone in different directions in our lives, and so we may all still be training dogs, but they have chosen to approach it differently than I have, but I get along with them fine, and what I have found is as the years go by, if they do want to make changes to how they train, if they want to explore alternatives may be gentler ways of training, they are comfortable coming back to me because I kept the lines of communication open. I'm not angry with them. I don't think they're bad people. I just think we've made different choices, and I'm available if they want to have that conversation, and they do. If I go in kind of guns blazing, pissed off, “You shouldn't do this. You shouldn't do that,” well, I embarrass people for starters. At the very least, you embarrass people, but also you harden them and you actually make change that much harder, and that's really what I talked about with ripples is how to do that in a way where you really, truly effectively change behavior, and the second part is the bubbles. That's the idea that especially if you feel that you are in a minority position, whatever that is, so in obedience, I would say that positive reinforcement trainers are in a minority position, maybe not so much in agility though. If you are in the minority position, you need to have a place you can go that feels safe when you're just overwhelmed with the reality of being different. Being different is hard. It's exhausting, and if you always do things that are different when you're around other dog people, it can feel very isolating. So your bubble might be your friends. It might be your family. It might be an online list that you subscribe to, it doesn't matter what it is, it's just a place where like-minded people can talk and decompress, and I think it's really important that we have our bubbles because if you don't, you end up a bitter person, and what fun is that? So that was the second part of that talk. Melissa Breau: For anyone who's listening who's interested, I'll include the link to Denise's full talk from last year. She wrote it out and posted it. So I'll include the link to that in the show notes. So if you want to take a look, you can. Now Denise, I also wanted to ask you just about the idea behind camp in general. Where did the idea for an in-person camp for an online dog training school come from? Denise Fenzi: I don't remember who it was. Maybe if the person knows, they can listen to this podcast and pop up. First of all, my husband was probably out of town because he's usually out of town when I make mischief, usually. So he probably went away for a few days and left me unsupervised, and somebody said something along the lines of, “We should have an in-person camp,” and that would have been on a Thursday afternoon, and yeah, yeah, yeah, and then all these people saying, “Yes, we should. We should,” and I'm like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and by Thursday night, I'm thinking, we should have an in-person camp. So I sent a note to Terry who does a lot of stuff with me, and said, “We should have an in-person camp,” and she said, “Okay,” and we just did, and we had it arranged four days later. We had a location. We thought that's all it took. So we're smarter now. That's all right, you learn. Anyway, we had a fantastic time. We did have a camp, and once you've done it once, and you've had a great time, then it becomes your annual camp, and now we have an annual camp. So I'm really excited about that. Melissa Breau: So I know you feel it's pretty important to have that kind of in-person aspect. Do you want to kind of talk about the value of that, and why you think so? Denise Fenzi: Well, I live a lot of my life online. I'm very comfortable online. I have a lot of friendships that way, and I really value my online interactions and communities. I also have an in-person life, and I get different things from those two aspects of my life. So I have a family and a husband, and I do actually do things that are not dog related, and I think there is a lot of people out there who really are living their lives almost exclusively online or working, and I think we are losing community, and I think community is very important. So one advantage to in-person training is that you go to dog training school once a week or wherever you go, and not necessarily in private lessons because when I was teaching, I was teaching private lessons. I'm referring to people who go to a school where there's classes, and whether or not I think that's good training, what I think it does offer is community, and I think it's important to look at people and talk to people and interact and develop sympathy for the reality of life, not the online one which is what other choose to present to you. So I think getting people together in a like-minded community where we look at each other's faces and become sympathetic to each other, I think is just critically important, plus the fun factor. I think camp is a whole lot of fun, and so I'm actively looking for ways to increase community, and I do encourage students who live in similar areas to get together, and they do. They're all over the world, you know, these groups get together. So that is absolutely a driver for me, for camp. Melissa Breau: I know, just kind of having personally been now twice. It is. It's a lot of fun, and it really does bring that sense of community kind of home. Denise Fenzi: Yes. Melissa Breau: So finally, I know there was a bit of confusion about next year's dates. Do you mind just kind of clearing that up for everyone once and for all? When and where will camp be held next year? Denise Fenzi: It's in Wilmington, Ohio, and I'm a little freaked out, but I'm pretty sure the dates are the 1st to the 3rd. Melissa Breau: That's what I heard. Denise Fenzi: Is that what you think? Melissa Breau: That's what I think. Denise Fenzi: Oh good, thank God. Yes, no, we're good. We're the 1st through the 3rd. We're going to permanently confuse people. I won't even mention the alternative dates so nobody has to worry about it, and it's at the Eukanuba Center, Roberts Hall, I think it's called, and I'm told it's a super nice facility, and we will do the full round of things that we offer. So we should have a pile of instructors and a great experience either to audit or to work. So please, if you cannot work a dog, your dog is not suitable or you don't have a dog, or you'd have to fly in, don't discount this camp because it is the only dog sports camp, and it will give you different and maybe more things than you might get out of another camp if you feel like you've sort of covered it all. So if you're a dog sports person, this is kind of a winner for you. So I hope to see some new faces. Every year, we grow so I know I will, but we are extremely welcoming of new people. So come, even if you come alone, and we will go to some trouble to make sure you're not alone. Melissa Breau: I have to say, even working as a volunteer, I feel like I've learned so much just going, and I'm so excited that next year is close enough. I can drive. So I can bring a dog. Denise Fenzi: Oh, super. Melissa Breau: Yes. Denise Fenzi: Good for you, not me, but good for you. Melissa Breau: So thanks so much for coming back on the podcast, Denise. Denise Fenzi: Oh anytime. Melissa Breau: All right, well we'll be back next Friday, this time, with Debbie Gross to talk canine conditioning. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast and iTunes with 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Summary: Laura Waudby was, until recently, a service dog trainer helping to prepare dogs for different types of service dog work. Now she's a new mom. In her "free time," Laura trains and competes in obedience, rally, agility, and dabbles in disc dog and trick training. She was halfway to her OTCH with her UDX Corgi Lance before his early retirement. She has also competed at the Masters level in agility. Due to the special behavior needs of her Duck Tolling Retriever Vito, Laura has developed a strong interest in learning how to create motivation and confidence in dogs that struggle, either through genetics or through less than ideal training, to make it into the competition ring. At FDSA Laura offers classes through the Fenzi TEAM Titles program and teaches ring confidence and several specialty classes including a class on articles and a class on stand for exam. Links mentioned: The Dogs are Really in Charge Silvia Trkman (lolabuland.com) Next Episode:  To be released 7/14/2017, featuring Denise Fenzi talking about FDSA camp 2017. 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 Laura Waudby. Until recently by day Laura was a service dog trainer to prepare dogs for different types of service dog work. Now she's a new mom. In her free time, and that's in quotes, Laura trains and competes in obedience, rally, agility, and dabbles in disc dog and trick training. She was halfway to her OTCH with her UDX Corgi Lance before his early retirement. She has also competed at the Masters level in agility. Due to the special behavior needs of her Duck Tolling Retriever Vito, Laura has developed a strong interest in learning how to create motivation and confidence in dogs that struggle, either through genetics or through less than ideal training, to make it into the competition ring. At FDSA Laura offers classes through the Fenzi TEAM Titles program and teaches ring confidence and several specialty classes including a class on articles and a class on stand for exam. Hi, Laura. Welcome to the podcast. Laura Waudby: I'm glad to be here. Melissa Breau: So to start us out, do you mind just telling us a little bit about the dogs you have now and what you're working on with them? Laura Waudby: As you already mentioned, I have the Corgi, his name is Lance. He did have to retire due to an injury, so right now he's pretty much just kind of my old dog at home. He's very sassy, pretty much barks his way through life. Occasionally competes at organizations that have a jumper on the ground, but he's my sassy man. Then I have the Toller, his name is Vito and he's my special need dog. He does have a lot of anxiety issues and some pretty severe ones, but luckily I've been able to kind of accommodate him through my lifestyle. Mainly right now we're working a lot on engagement training and choosing to work. He does compete in agility where he's mostly conquered his anxiety issues, but obedience is oh, kind of halfway on hold while we work on attitude, attitude, attitude. And then my youngest dog is the Duck. Her name is Zumi and she's two and a half years old so we're primarily working on foundations for agility, obedience, some disc dog field work, pretty much all the things right now. She did just start to compete in agility this past summer but hasn't really made her way yet into the obedience and rally ring. Melissa Breau: So how did you originally get started in dog sports? Laura Waudby: Well, when I was in high school I saw agility on TV and of course that's the flashy, the fun stuff and it kind of got me hooked on wanting to do that. Obedience, though, I kind of only started taking competition classes when I knew I wanted to become a dog trainer and I thought it would prove my skill, I thought I wouldn't like it very much and it was kind of lame, and then I actually started doing it and I realized how hard it was. and that's really what I came to love about it was trying to get that happy attitude in the ring along with the precision, so pretty soon I was kind of hooked on the sport of obedience which I thought I would hate to begin with. Melissa Breau: It's funny how much, those of us who enjoy dog training just because we enjoy training behaviors to a certain extent, I mean, obedience certainly appeals to that part, right? Laura Waudby: Oh, yeah, and it helps that the Corgi was very easy with me, kind of held my hands as I was learning things and showed me one by one where I kind of sucked in all the training and he eventually helped me fix them. Melissa Breau: So you mentioned you still have your Corgi. Have you always been a positive trainer? Did you start out that way with him? If not, what kind of got you started down that path? Laura Waudby: Yeah, he's always been positive training, at least in the traditional sense. So when I first started training dogs I was doing more pet training route and that was pretty positive, at least at the time, and I was also really lucky that we have one of probably the few, maybe the only I don't know, a positive-trained AKC club in the area, and so that was my introduction for the competition world. It's not very popular in the area because most people want to go to the traditional route, but we exist and we're trying to encourage people to compete positively, so I was really lucky to be pretty much positive straight from the get-go. Melissa Breau: And what area are you in? Laura Waudby: Minneapolis, Minnesota. Melissa Breau: I kind of mentioned in the intro that you were training service dogs full time. How long did you do that for? Laura Waudby: Seven years. Melissa Breau: Wow. So how did you go from training pet dogs to training service dogs? Laura Waudby: Well, my first experience with training service dogs actually was my last year of high school. I was able to do a community service class where we were able to volunteer with whatever we wanted to for basically half the day, and my parents were very generous and they allowed me to puppy raise during that time, so I took a little black lab service puppy home to live with us and I was responsible for all of its training. So that was my kind of my very first experience, and after I kind of graduated from school and their lack of dog training stuff, I went back to volunteer for them and they happened to have a job available at the same time I was volunteering again, so I was very, very lucky in that regard. But I'd say my first experience was as a high school student being a volunteer puppy raiser. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. I think so many people would love to spend all day doing nothing but training dogs. Laura Waudby: It certainly is easier than training people. Melissa Breau: Most of the time I'd go so far as to say, but… Laura Waudby: Yeah, most of the time. Melissa Breau: So I believe, and certainly correct me if I'm wrong, so you trained several different types of service dogs, right? Laura Waudby: Yeah. Another organization up here trains five different types of service dogs, which was actually really nice because allows us to have a very high success rate because the dogs who are lower key might do really well in one type or as the kind of nuttier job might do better at another type of job, so I guess the five types of dogs that we trained were mobility assist dogs. Those are the dogs who retrieve things, tug open doors, tug the laundry basket, help with the laundry. Those are most fun for me to train because kind of all the tricks that you think of in the service dog world. And then we have the hearing alert dogs. Those dogs are trained to alert to sounds in the environment. The diabetic alert dogs who are trained to alert to the smell of low blood sugar, the autism assist dogs who help kids with autism who tend to bolt, and then seizure response dogs who respond once a seizure is happening and help the person get through that seizure. Melissa Breau: That's quite a range of different skills. Laura Waudby: Yeah, it can help break up the day a little bit. Melissa Breau: I would think that the hardest part of teaching all that is really proofing the behavior for all environments. I mean, when you're talking service dogs you really need a dog who's going to do the work kind of no matter what's going on. Is that your perspective, is that really the hardest thing or is there something else that sticks out as maybe more difficult? Laura Waudby: Yeah, the training behaviors are really the easy part of the service dog training. It takes time to train their skills to be pretty solid, but that was great, the fun part. The hard part is that dogs have to focus anywhere and everywhere without any acclimation time. We talk a lot about acclimation time with our competition dog training, but the service dogs don't get that. They might arrive at a store and have to pick up keys at the entrance way, or maybe they just really get out of the car and they have to alert to a low blood sugar, so they kind of have to be ready to focus anywhere no matter what's going on, and that definitely takes quite a bit of training which is why most of the dogs who are two to three years old by the time they're placed with a client and they're still very, very young but definitely no longer puppies at that point. And of course the general public doesn't help, either, with all the I know I shouldn't but as they reach to pet your dog or are barking at your dog and all of the crazy stuff people do in public. Melissa Breau: Do you mind sharing just a little bit about kind of how you teach that so that the dogs can kind of do their work in those types of environments? Laura Waudby: Yeah. I'd say a lot of it is their personality. A lot of dogs simply aren't able to do that, like of the dogs I have now in my house, Lance, like the perfect Corgi, sassy guy, he'd probably be the only one who would make it as a service dog. Vito's anxiety issues, he couldn't do that. My young dog Zumi had a little bit of confidence issues where she's not quite ready to focus all the time. So their natural temperament has a lot to do with whether they make it or not. But past that point I do a lot of choose to working, a lot of distractions out to the side, rewarding focus, and of course we do it all without a command just like we do want the competition dogs to do. We don't want to be saying “Watch me, watch me, watch me,” or “Leave it, leave it, leave it.” We want the dogs, their name if they see something, that means their job is to look back at you. Kind of the exact same stuff we do with our competition dogs, just everywhere. Melissa Breau: And it's really teaching the dogs how to make the choice and think a little more independently at least than most people probably think about, right? Laura Waudby: Oh, yeah. It's a lot of free choice, especially because the clients, they might have limited range of mobility. They can't force the dog to do anything, the dogs have to want to do it, so it's a lot of choice-based training with the service dogs. Melissa Breau: So I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about TEAM. I know Denise and I talked about it briefly the very first episode of the podcast, but for those who aren't familiar with TEAM at all, do you mind just explaining a little about the concept, kind of what it is and how it works? Laura Waudby: Sure. So TEAM is an online video-submitted titling program. There are currently six levels that you can title in, and I think there might be plans to have more, I'm not sure. But the goal of TEAM unlike some other organizations, the emphasis isn't really on finished behavior change whereas I'm teaching the dog and the human each individual piece to get to a really high level of perfection. So basically even if you only get through the first three levels of TEAM, we're working on those foundational pieces being very solid to get you through pretty much any level of obedience training. Melissa Breau: Really kind of the concept, right? Is that if you do TEAM you can probably do almost anything else. Laura Waudby: Oh, yeah. Definitely takes you beyond utility even, I think. Melissa Breau: I don't think there's been an episode of the podcast yet where a guest hasn't talked about how important foundation skills are. I know that that's kind of one of the places where TEAM shines, right? How does it kind of do that, how does it approach teaching a foundation? Laura Waudby: Well, the way that testing is laid out, you're pretty much forced to work in all those little pieces. The first level you use a ton of props in it, throughout the testing so it pretty much guarantees that the dog is learning those little perfect movements. Basically you don't really teach just a sit and just a down, but you use a target to help us. The dog is not learning how to sit and down but they're learning how to do the individual position changes with zero forward movement so by the time you get to 40 feet away, the dog already knows how to do that perfect fold back down, tuck up sit without having any forward motion. It's kind of the little pieces that people tend to skip over if they don't know what the end result should look like. And the levels themselves I think really reward the handler for being patient and not rushing through those foundations because… Melissa Breau: Because they're really easy to rush through. It's easy to overlook kind of the precision that you're going to want later on early when you have a puppy who's eight or ten weeks old and you just want to sit. Laura Waudby: Yeah, definitely. Melissa Breau: So I believe you're teaching TEAM one in August, right? Laura Waudby: Yeah.   Melissa Breau: I know you've taught it once or twice now. Is there a skill that kind of stands out as something that people struggle with a little bit, and do you mind just sharing a couple of tips maybe on how they can approach it? Laura Waudby: Sure. Heel position is probably one that people struggle with the most. Primarily in the TEAM level one and two we're working on the foundational piece of pivoting, teaching the dog exactly what heel position looks like and how to move with the handler to maintain it. And a lot of people who haven't taught it that way before, because it's not the way heeling has been traditionally taught, it's a really hard skill for people to kind of figure out how to hold their hand and how the dog is supposed to move into you. And there are a lot of ways to teach pivoting, there's not. just one way. I tend to use a blend of shaping and luring that's a little bit more lure-based based. And generally probably the biggest tip for people is they want to use a really big arm where they have the dog go really wide, but generally you want the dog's head to be up a little bit more. Turning their head out causes their butt to swing in towards you, and sometimes it's easier to see that using a mirror so you can watch the dog's back legs easier, but generally not having such a big, wide head lure, but really keeping the dog's head nice and close to your body so he can focus on the head turning out and the back legs moving towards you. Melissa Breau: And that's what lets you get those really pretty corners, right? When you're making your turns in heeling? Laura Waudby: Oh, yeah, and makes the heeling look really sexy when you do all the side stepping, the backing up, the pivots, and so by the time you do any forward motion your dog already knows all those really fancy moves. Melissa Breau: I like that, it makes heeling look really sexy. So I want to kind of end things the way I normally end the episode, which is kind of what I guess my three favorite questions, so first, what's the dog-related accomplishment that you're proudest of? Laura Waudby: When I started thinking about that I first thought I would go with some of the service dog teams, but then I realized that's actually pretty self centered, and so definitely has to be about my own dogs. And Vito, my very special boy, we've been through a lot together, and my most proud accomplishment, and no particular trial with him, but just the ones where he's radiating pure joy where he's so happy to be with me and I can just see what the focus he has in me that all of his worries about the people and the stewards have kind of melted. You don't have that every time but the ones that he does do that for me is just really special, that shows all that hard work that we'd done. Melissa Breau: That makes it kind of magical. Laura Waudby: Yeah. Melissa Breau: I think this is probably the question I get told is the hardest question a lot of time, what is the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Laura Waudby: There's been a lot of good ones out there already, so I thought I would pick the you don't need to end a session on a good note. Generally if things are going pretty well you should enjoy it, quit before that just one more piece. But when things start going down hill, and they will, just end the session. Quit before you're digging yourself a hole that's even harder to get out of. I also would make sure that neither you or the dog are getting frustrated about it. So I have no problem just going well, I guess we're done for today, or at least done with that exercise, move onto something else before things get worse. Melissa Breau: And finally, who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Laura Waudby: One of my favorite trainers is Silvia Trkman, the famous Slovenian agility star, and while she only does agility, she doesn't actually compete in obedience, I really love her philosophy about having fun with the dog, not being afraid to experiment, respecting the dog in front of you. And Silvia is one where I got a really great piece of advice to help me and my Vito, teaching happy tricks to release stress, and that was probably the biggest change to help Vito a couple years ago to get him barking at me on the start line, get him sassy, jumping up, so that even if he doesn't feel brave and happy it forces him to kind of act like it and that has helped him a ton. So I really like Silvia Trkman a lot. Melissa Breau: I love that idea. They kind of have that line for people where if you stand in the Superman pose for two minutes before a talk it makes you feel more confident and like your body chemistry actually changes. It's a similar idea kind of for dogs, right? The idea that if they get happy and bouncy... Laura Waudby: It works a lot with people and I think it helps the dogs, too. Happy-making tricks. Melissa Breau: Yeah. I like that a lot. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Laura. Laura Waudby: Well, you're welcome. Melissa Breau: And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with a special episode with Denise Fenzi to discuss the inspiration behind the theme from camp a few weeks ago, and to chat a bit about next year. If you haven't already subscribed 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Summary:   Sara Brueske has been training dogs for over 15 years; she became a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner in 2011 and jumped into the world of professional dog training. Sara and her dogs work at Purina Farms in Missouri where they demonstrate the sports of disc, agility, and dock diving for the public in over 400 shows each year. She and her dogs also compete nationwide. Currently, she is active in the sports of disc dog, agility, mondioring and dock diving -- plus, she's a trick dog enthusiast. Sara has recently re-entered the world of competitive Disc Dog and is the 2016 overall UpDog International Champion as well as the 2017 UpDog Freestyle Champion. Sara believes in positive reinforcement not only for dogs, but for their handlers as well.  Her biggest joy in training is watching a handler and dog become partners and grow as a team. Links mentioned: Disc Dog Discussions Facebook Group Heeling is just another Trick DVD Drinking from the Toilet, What to do when you get stuck (full episode) Next Episode:  To be released 7/7/2017, featuring Laura Waudby. 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 Sara Brueske. Sara Brueske has been training dogs for over 15 years; she became a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner in 2011 and jumped into the world of professional dog training. Sara and her dogs work at Purina Farms in Missouri where they demonstrate the sports of disc, agility, and dock diving for the public in over 400 shows each year. She and her dogs also compete nationwide. Currently, she is active in the sports of disc dog, agility, mondioring and dock diving -- plus, she's a trick dog enthusiast. Sara has recently re-entered the world of competitive Disc Dog and is the 2016 overall UpDog International Champion as well as the 2017 UpDog Freestyle Champion. Sara believes in positive reinforcement not only for dogs, but for their handlers as well.  Her biggest joy in training is watching a handler and dog become partners and grow as a team. Hi Sara! Welcome to the podcast. Sara Brueske: Hi Melissa, thank you for having me! Melissa Breau: Absolutely. I'm excited to chat a little bit.   Sara Brueske: Definitely. Melissa Breau: So, to start us out, can you tell us a bit about your dogs and what you're working on with them? Sara Brueske: I have a whole bunch of dogs. My job kinda dictates that i have more dogs than the average owner. I have 14 current in my household. So all 14 of them are either in training or participate in my job, which is doing shows at Purina Farms. I compete with a handful of them outside of that job as well. So it depends on the dog, what I'm working on with them. My main sports that i do with all of my dogs is agility, disc, and dock diving. And my malinois i compete and train in mondioring as well.   Melissa Breau: Do you want to give us a little bit of an idea of who you have in the household? I know you've got a mix of breeds and all sorts of stuff. Sara Brueske: Yeah, Sure! I'll do the run down. I have a whole bunch - I really like variety. I have 3 australian koolies, which is a little bit of a rare herding breed here in the United States. I imported 2 of them from Australia and I had my very first litter this year, so I have their daughter, too. She's about 11 weeks old now. And then I have 2 border collies, both of them are rescues. I have a border staffy, who is a rescue as well, and a whippet -- a rescue actually from the same house as the border staffy. I have 4 malinois, one of those is actually a permanent foster through the malinois ranch rescue in Tennessee. And I have a boston terrier mix, a papillion, and a labrador. Melissa Breau: Wow, some of those I actually hadn't seen pictures of before; it's definitely a household, huh? Sara Brueske: It's a full household, they're all very very active dogs other than the elderly foster; she's a little bit slow these days, but… Melissa Breau: How did you get started with all of this? Obviously, where you are today -- it probably took a little while to get there, but how did you first get started in dog sports? Sara Brueske: I was actually 11 years old when I begged my parents to let me buy my very first sport dog. I wanted a border collie and i wanted to compete in agility and that was because I watched the Purina Incredible Dog Challenge on TV. So I saved up all my money, and I found a border collie in a newspaper, which is the worst place to get a dog, and we went out and i bought my border collie. And so then I did my backyard training -- we had stick-in-the-ground weave poles made out of PVC, my tunnel was actually a construction drainage pipe that my dad found and gave me, and that's how I trained all my agility and I started competing as a junior handler. He actually got injured, and so I had to stop training him in sports and that's when I figured out about trick training. When he was 7 years old, he knew about 50 different tricks. Melissa Breau: wow. Sara Brueske: So like, high five and wave and spin, and other ones were throwing away my empty soda cans, and turning off the light because by then i was a lazy teenager. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. So I think that just goes to prove that anybody… people don't have an excuse if you could do it in your backyard with sticks and PVC pipe… Sara Brueske: Exactly! And I think my parents always were hoping that I'd outgrow this, go to school and maybe be a veterinarian, but here I am, with 14 dogs and training is my career. Melissa Breau: So agility is generally thought of as pretty positive -- same with trick dog training. Have you always been a positive trainer? Sara Brueske: I actually wasn't -- I was kind of what you'd consider a balanced trainer back then. All my agility training and trick training, that was all done with clickers, so I had read up on clickers and learned how to do that, kind of a self-study, but my parents were very much punishment based and they should be dogs and they should behave as dogs. And so that's kind of the background I have with that. I didn't have any formal dog training, so it's a mish-mash of everything you can imagine… and I actually was that way until I had a great dane and he was not the most balanced - mentally - dog, he was a little bit reactive and he was a big dog, and everyone told me I had to show him who's boss, and everything else and alpha roll him, and come-to-jesus moments and all that. Well, the dog out weighed me and it wasn't working. So that was when I switched and I became a positive-only trainer. That helped him tremendously. Melissa Breau: And I know that now you've done the Karen Pryor Academy, and everything else -- it sounds like that was kind of your pivot moment there… but it sounds like then you went that next step with it, right? Sara Brueske: Absolutely. So when i had that great dane i also actually on the path to becoming a professional dog trainer. I was looking for ways to enhance my education, looking for places to teach group classes, and that's where the Karen Pryor Academy came into place - it was a formal education that I could put on my resume and show people that I was serious about becoming a dog trainer. Melissa Breau: So, I think most dog trainers -- at least professional dog trainers -- would say their dogs are both their life and their work, right? Because of the nature of what you do at Purina, it seems like it takes that to a whole other level. Do you want to just talk for a few minutes about what you do a Purina and what that's like? Sara Brueske: Sure. So my job at Purina is to promote pet ownership and Purina believes that your life is really enhanced by owning a pet, so my job at Purina, at Purina Farms is to talk to the public, promote pet ownership by putting on shows every single day. So my shows are three times a day, 6 days a week. And I bring my dogs with me to work everyday and we show them what you can do with rescue dogs, what you can do with your dog at home, which is really why i like to have a variety of dogs. So my goal at Purina is to hear the audience go, “We should go home and train Sparky to do that.” That's my favorite thing ever to hear. It means they're going to go home and play with their dog -- and that's huge to me. And so, because we do so many shows a day I actually bring between 11 and 13 dogs with me every single day to work. And that means my dogs are with me from the time I wake up, I feed them, we get ready, we all go to work - I work with them all day long, I come home, I unload them, I feed them, and they're with me all evening. My dogs are literally with me 24/7. Melissa Breau: When do you find time to train, if you're working with them so much? Sara Brueske: To train? So that's my job at Purina, is to train them -- between the shows that's the time that I have to train my dogs and work them and make sure they're getting what they get. Melissa Breau: Wow - that's a very full day. Sara Brueske: It's a very, very full day - yes. Melissa Breau: You're basically relying on your dogs for your livelihood; I'm sure that's had a lot of impact -- and like you said, you're with them 24/7 -- on the actual relationship that you have with them. Do you want to just talk for a minute about how you think that's impacted things for you? Sara Brueske: Sure. It's really… you hear a lot of the time people in my line of profession looking at their dogs like they're just part of their paycheck. They have their job - they're tools of the trade. That's very much NOT how I view them. The reason why i have so many dogs is that i don't want my dogs to be burnt out; I don't want my dogs to hate their job. I want my dogs to have fun, just as much fun as I have working with them. You can't do this job and have that many shows to perform in and only have 6 dogs… you'll end up ruining your relationship with your dog. You'll end up hurting your dog. And really their well-being in the long run is the most important part. That's what I care about the most and that's why i have so many dogs. But, I mean, it is what it is. My dogs pour their heart out for me every single day. And I appreciate that so much. But they also really love what we're doing. So I have dogs that love frisbee, i have dogs that love dock diving, I have dogs that love working with me, and that's a big part of it as well. Melissa Breau: I know you mentioned you typically bring up to 13 of the dogs with you each day… how many tend to compete in any given show? Sara Brueske: So we run 5-6 dog shows. And I rotate through those. So I don't like my dogs to do more than 3 shows a day, and I actually rotate days. So for instance, yesterday it was Zip Tie, Nowie and Taboo and Zuma's day to work. I rotated through those dogs for the show, the other trainer covered the rest of the dogs in the show. And then tomorrow, since today was my day off, I'll have 4 different dogs that I'll put in the show again.   Melissa Breau: It's so interesting, just kind of juggling all of it, and managing schedules. Sara Brueske: Yeah, we count a lot of shows. We tally it all up and make sure everybody's not working too much all the time, and it's helpful having other trainers there because we each pull equal weight on any given day. Melissa Breau: So I want to switch gears and talk a little more specifically about disc -- I know that's kind of what you teach at FDSA. I think, like you were talking about having watched agility on TV, I think a lot of people have seen some of the cool tricks disc dogs can do and I think that some people probably look at it and go, “my dog couldn't do that.” So, I was curious what skills a dog actually needs to be able to learn some of those disc tricks. Sara Brueske: Sure. So freestyle is what you always see on TV and in the incredible dog challenge and really, in reality, that's just a tiny little aspect of the frisbee dog community and the competitions. It's actually not even the most competitive, you could argue. There's a ton of different games you can play with your dog in each competition, in each venue. Just like there's AKC agility, NADAC agility, USDAA and they all have different rules and different games, the same thing applies to disc dog. So your tradition frisbee dog competition will have freestyle and a toss-and-catch competition. And the toss-and-catch competition is just like it sounds -- it's a game of fetch, a timed game of fetch where you get extra points for distance and accuracy, so you want to throw in a certain zone, and how many throws you can get off in a minute or the 90 seconds that you have. So really, to compete in toss and catch at the novice level all you have to do is have a dog that loves to play fetch. I mean, whose dog doesn't really like to go out there in the backyard and catch a frisbee, right? So that's pretty applicable to any dog. Oh so you also have your handler, who has to be able to throw… but lucky in like the novice competition you just have to throw 20 yards, which isn't very far. Then there's other venues, such as UpDog, which is my preferred venue, it's just come out in the last 3 years or so. And they really cater to new disc players -- they do something that's called a roller, which is you throw the disc on it's edge on the ground and it rolls and the dog has to grab that. So you don't even have to be able to throw a frisbee to be able to compete in novice. And they have a bunch of strategy games, each kind of tailoring to each dog's individual strength and each handler's individual strength. So that's kind of cool; they're really starting to incorporate the idea that anybody can play frisbee with their dog, which is really interesting. Melissa Breau: So, in your classes at the academy, what are some of the common things or tricks that you wind up teaching? Sara Brueske: So all the tricks that we wind up teaching in the academy classes, the tricks themselves, are for freestyle. There are some that apply to the other games, such as the flatwork and stuff like that -- and that's just moving your dog around the field and connecting with your dog. That's where I really like to lay my emphasis with my classes, it comes from my agility roots - it's a lot like handing in agility. But the tricks themselves, for freestyle, we teach a whole bunch of different things. We do dog catches - which is where you literally catch your dog, with or without a disc. We do rebounds, which is where… it's kind of like a flyball box turn, but on your body, so the dog hits you and then jumps off. And then leg weaves, which is really good for any sport because it's a nice warm up, and then we also teach things like stalls, where they actually jump up onto a part of your body, and hang out there for a while. Melissa Breau: That's kind of neat. Sara Brueske: Yes, it's very exciting. Melissa Breau: So If somebody's trying to decide if they should take the class, are their any skills they need or their dog needs to start to do some of those tricks? Sara Brueske: We teach all those tricks actually with food, first. So if your dog has food drive, then you're pretty much golden for it. You can actually wind up taking the class and teaching those tricks for food and not ever touching a frisbee if you want to. But ideally, if you want the whole frisbee aspect of the class then your dog should have some sort of toy drive or disc drive, because I don't hit on that a whole lot in the classes. There are plenty of other Fenzi classes that build on toy drive, and I want to make sure that mine focuses just on the frisbee aspect of it. Melissa Breau: If someone was just interested in getting started, what's that first step -- where should they start out? Sara Brueske: The first step, which is what i always recommend to anyone looking at any sport, find a local club, find some local help that can give you hands on help because that hands on help is going to be priceless. And hopefully there's somebody there that's actively competing, and who has gone to the world's level to help you out. That's where I would start. There are a whole bunch of places on facebook that you can look - disc dog discussions is a group that you can check out and they have a whole bunch of different clubs that participate in that discussion group, so you can always post where you are and somebody will chime in to give you some contact information. After that, the online class at Fenzi is a pretty good one for foundation, and there are other online classes as well for disc dog foundations currently. Melissa Breau: Awesome. And kind of the way that we end every episode -- our big three questions -- what's the dog-related accomplishment you're proudest of? Sara Brueske: So I thought long and hard about this question. I have a whole lot of accomplishments that I'm very, very proud of. But the reality of that is that I get to experience something that a lot of people don't get to experience -- forming a new relationship with a whole bunch of different dogs. So in the last 4 years I've had 14 different dogs plus many fosters and dogs I've raised come through my house. And all of those dogs I've started in training and formed relationships with. My most favorite accomplishment i've ever had is with each of those dogs is when that dog really kind of has that light bulb moment and goes, “I really do enjoy working with you. This is fun, this is a game!” That's what I'm most proud of. Melissa Breau: That's definitely like that golden moment, that everybody is looking for, right? To form a relationship. Sara Brueske: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Melissa Breau: So, what's the best piece of training advice you've ever heard? Sara Brueske: That everything's a trick. From my history -- when I couldn't do agility anymore, I just did tricks with my dog. So when I actually started looking into IPO and Mondioring, and looking at these very complicated obedience maneuvers, and precision things it was really kind of eye opening to remember that everything is a trick. And that kind of came from Sylvia Turkman's DVD, Heeling is just another Trick. And that was kind of a light bulb moment for me -- this is just like teaching all those other things I teach. Melissa Breau: I think that's really interesting, because you mentioned it specifically in relation to Mondioring, which is not a sport people look at usually and go, “oh it's just tricks!” Sara Brueske: No they definitely don't. Melissa Breau: And then finally, who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Sara Brueske: So Sylvia Turkman. And the reason for that is that when i first started my dog training career she was the one i went to for online classes, i watched all the DVDs, and it was her upbeat attitude and her relationship with her dogs that really inspired me to be that kind of trainer. I wanted [my students] to be happy - i wanted to think that they're still going to come out the other side and they're still going to enjoy their dog and they're sitll going to be having fun. Melissa Breau: Thanks so much for coming on the podcast Sara -- and thanks to our listeners for tuning in! This week have a special treat -- FDSA's own Hannah Branigan Also runs a podcast, called Drinking from the Toilet - and today we're sharing an excerpt from her most popular episode, “What to do when you get stuck.” Enjoy! Hannah Branigan: Hey there - you're listening to Drinking from the Toilet and I'm Hannah Branigan. Today we're going to talk about what you can do when you get stuck. Why are we even talking about this? Well mostly because I was sitting here trying to think what topic i should make my next podcast be about, and I got stuck. I couldn't think of anything to talk about. So I kind of sat here, I looked at a few things on the internet, facebook, took a few pictures of my dog with my phone, and pondered on how many other places in my life I feel stuck, maybe feel like a failure. And at least one of those places in my life where i feel stuck is when I'm training a dog. So I thought, well, let's do a podcast about getting stuck when you're training because I think that's a fairly ubiquitous experience. There's probably people out there that sometimes get stuck when they're trying to train a behavior. And so in my previous life, when I would run into a problem, it really was almost a pattern, really… so I'm working on training a behavior or maybe untraining a behavior problem and I would get so far; I would make a certain amount of progress and then I would get stuck and i would revert to punishment. Maybe intentionally, as a training choice, or unintentionally as an emotional expression of frustration. But either way I would often fall back on these old habits -- after feeling like I was running out of choices. And so as my journey continues, i continue to improve my understanding of behavior, i have a better picture of the behaviors I'm trying to train. My knowledge in that area increases and I think clarity in your goal of your behavior is always helpful. And I learned more and my skill set improved. I had better tools for manipulating behavior and for manipulating contingencies, particularly those using reinforcement. Better understanding of how reinforcement works --  both in general, in concept and in theory, and then also in practical application. And so overtime, i can get a lot further before i would resort to that old habit. So eventually, maybe about 10 years ago at this point, I made a conscious decision to just take punishment totally off the table. So aversives are no longer an option for my training. So I still have frustration attacks occasionally - I am human - but i do try to recognize them for what they are. They're just emotional expressions, they have nothing to do with training the dog and i don't have any expectation that they're going to change either of our behaviors for the better in the long run. But I still have a lot of situations where I still get stuck. And now there's a vacuum. I'll still get training to the same point -- a little further each time because I'm learning more -- but when I get stuck, there's a place where I would punish or I would use an aversive in some way, which may or may not solve the problem because we know that simply bringing in punishment is no guarantee of getting the results that we want. And so now I'll get about 80% of the way there -- I'll get about 80% of the behavior trained that I want -- and then I'm stuck. And simply not punishing doesn't give me any information about what i should do instead to continue making forward progress. I end up with a kind of vacuum. So sometimes I quit. I don't have all the answers. And I know that's disappointing to hear, because frankly it disappoints no one more than i disappoint myself when i don't know the answer to a problem, when i don't know the solution…. Well, maybe my father. He has pretty high standards so he might be more disappointed but I learned it from somewhere. And I'm willing to bet that you get frustrated sometimes too. And your stuckness may not manifest in quite the same way that mine does, maybe instead of frustration, anger, and potentially aggression you turn to other defensive strategies. Maybe like rationalization. Sometimes I find myself thinking thoughts like, “Maybe my dog just doesn't like to do obedience. Maybe my dog actually can't do this -- it's not possible. You know, maybe he has a health problem! Maybe it's his thyroid -- he could have a thyroid, he could have low thyroid! So if my training plan didn't pay out the way that I expected it to, clearly the problem is caused by his thyroid and no protocol would have worked. He needs medication! This dog needs pills to fix this problem, and it has to be just the right medication, and it might take weeks or even months, or years, to find what that medication could be and so none of this is actually a training problem, it's not in my control. It's not me, it's the dog, right?” Okay. Now, to be clear, I'm not trivializing endocrine disorders in any way. They're very real and certainly having a health problem does throw a wrench into the works and can add contingencies beyond those that we can realistically control within the context of a training session. So if you're worried or suspicious that your dog has a physical or medical problem, it's always a good idea to consult with your vet. Get that physical problem ruled out. Make sure your dog is healthy and sound. I know I certainly have no problem paying my vet $100 -- sometimes maybe more -- to be told I'm crazy and there's absolutely nothing wrong with my dog. But just to be clear again, every now and then I'm actually right. And so I have that long interval of random reinforcement effect that maintains my behavior on dog after dog, year after year. Anyways, okay. Let's assume that we've ruled out any physical issue. What can we do when we get stuck trying to train something? So it is a training problem, we're stuck with the training, we need to change something about the training to get past this obstacle. Ok. So here's a pretty common scenario. You're trying to train some behavior. Maybe you're following a training plan or a recipe that you found on the internet -- or you saw on youtube, or maybe you've just been to a seminar and this is now Monday morning and you're trying to apply the technique you learned at that seminar to your training in real life and now the powerpoint slides aren't there and the presenter isn't there, and so you're on your own. And so maybe you get through the first couple of steps --  you're shaping and things seem to be going ok. You think you're doing it right; you think you're doing it the same way as you learned in that seminar. And then all of a sudden you hit a plateau. And the dog keeps doing the same version of the behavior over and over again without progressing to the next step. So maybe you've made it through steps 1 and 2, and step 3 - instead of performing step 3 a couple of times and then moving on to step 4 your dog keeps doing step 3 over and over and over again. You can't see why you're not able to make the leap to that next step. This is a common problem that I run into with different behaviors with different dogs and certainly see it in my own students periodically. Maybe you're trying to teach your dog to retrieve an object and your shaping plan is I'm going to start by clicking when the dog looks at the object and then click him for sniffing it and then I'll click him for touching it with his nose or targeting it. And then the next thing I'll click is for him to open his mouth and bite the object… but instead of biting the object he just keeps touching it with his nose over and over again and he never opens his mouth. What do I do then? Another common place where we'll run into this situation would be adding duration or distance to an existing behavior. So you can get the dog to hold the sit for 8 seconds -- as soon as you reach for 9 seconds the behavior falls apart. Or you can get your dog to respond to a cue -- maybe he'll lay down if you give him the cue at 6 feet but one more step back and the behavior disappears or starts to degrade. And it's really frustrating - and then it's easy to think this isn't working, something's wrong with this technique, this method is ineffective, or we can continue to spiral down and think about what might be wrong with the dog, and then the world in general. And so obviously continuing to repeat the thing that's not working isn't the right choice; that brings to mind that quote that I know i've seen lots of different places… I often see it attributed to Einstein but I don't know if that's true or if it's just internet-true. So, to paraphrase, the idea that repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. So, I may still be crazy, but this totally applies here. Even if we just look at the A-B-C operant contingency, repeating that same A-B-C … the same Antecedent or A, the same Behavior or B, and the same Consequence - “C” - then yes, we're probably going to continue to get the same result. So, we need to change something. I like thinking about it this way because it gives me three solid categories of things to look at -- and three is my favorite number, also it's a prime number so a lot of things to recommend it. Three categories is a very achievable way to start putting stuff in buckets and structure our thinking. So let's start with A -- antecedent. So the Antecedent, this is the cue. It's what's inducing or causing the behavior, what's associated with the behavior. And when we're thinking about this in terms of cues from us -- so I say sit and the dog sits --  well that's easy to recognize and understand. In active training, when we're learning, the antecedent really is much bigger than that. It's a bigger idea; it's more than just the cue you're deliberately giving, but it's that whole picture, all of the stimulus and all the pieces of the picture. So it's the whole set up that the dog is associating with a particular behavior. It's your body, your body position, where you're situated in space, your dog's position, any props that you might be using, if you're using a platform or a target or if you're using an object in the case of that retrieve. And it's the environment in general -- where the dog is, where you're training, all of the sounds, smells, feels, tastes maybe, all of those things are in that big stimulus picture and that whole picture functions as the cue when the dog is learning the behavior.   Melissa Breau: Thanks to Hannah for letting us share that with you -- I hope you'll consider subscribing to both our podcast and hers if you haven't already, in itunes or the podcast app of your choice. We'll be back next week, this time with Laura Waudby to talk Fenzi TEAM training and training service dogs. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

SHOW NOTES:  Summary: Amanda Nelson has been traveling the country and teaching seminars for 20+ years teaching all levels of agility, with nearly all dog breeds. She focuses on teaching teamwork and how to create a strong connection between dog and handler. She works with all styles of handling, from running with your dog to distance handling, and tailors each training session, large or small, to the dog and handler. She's always looking to help bring out the best in each team. Amanda's handling system, “Cues for Q's” works off her three base cues: Upper Body Cues, Lower Body Cues, and Verbal Cues. This system was derived from the natural cues that most dogs read and pick up quickly. Amanda teaches handlers how to use all of these cues, together, to create a customized handling system that can be tailored to their unique dog. All of these techniques have resulted in Amanda earning numerous top agility titles with her own dogs. Links mentioned: www.fluidmotionagility.com Next Episode:  To be released 6/30/2017, featuring Sara Brueske. 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 Amanda Nelson. Amanda has been traveling the country and teaching seminars for 20 plus years teaching all levels of agility with nearly all dog breeds. She focuses on teaching teamwork and how to create a strong connection between the dog and the handler. She works with all styles of handling from running with your dog to distance handling and tailors each training session, large or small, to the dog and the handler. She's always looking to help bring out the best in each team. Amanda's handling system, Cues for Q's, works off her three base cues, upper body cues, lower body cues, and verbal cues. This system was derived from the natural cues that most dogs read and pick up quickly. Amanda teaches handlers how to use all of these cues together to create a customized handling system that can be tailored to their unique dog. All these techniques have resulted in Amanda earning numerous top agility titles with her own dogs. Hi, Amanda, welcome to the podcast. Amanda Nelson: Thank you for having me. This is great. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to chat. I'm not an agility person, so it'll be fun to learn a little bit more about the sport and hopefully learn some things that I didn't know before. Amanda Nelson: Yeah. Melissa Breau: So to start us out, do you want to just give us a little bit information about your dogs and what you're working on with them? Amanda Nelson: Yeah. So, in the house I actually have three dogs, but one of them belongs to my boyfriend, who's Trip. I obviously work with him in a lot of stuff, but Jimmy runs him and competes with him and all that, so he's in my house but he's technically not my dog. I have Nargles who is 8 years old, and everybody always asks me what her name is and it's from Harry Potter because I'm a huge nerd like that, so Nargles is 8, and this season I'm working towards doing conditioning with her and getting her prepped to go to the NADAC Championships in Ohio in October, so that's my focus with her this year. Then I'm also working towards earning her Platinum Speed title, which is a NADAC title that consists of...it's a certain number of runs that all have to be extremely fast. In NADAC there's DRI which is the dog's run index, and you earn so many DRI points kind of for how fast your dog goes and a Platinum Speed Star, an award, that focuses on how fast your dog is. So I'm working on running that with her this year as well as taking her to the NADAC Championships. And then Allons-y, again, I'm a bit of a nerd, so Allons-y is from Dr. Who, that's where her name comes from, I call her Ally for short. She's 4 years old this year, and her main goal and my main goal I guess with her is prepping her for the NADAC Championships, so that'll be her first year competing in that, but I want to take her...and I'm not focused on winning as much as I'm just really wanting to go and experience the atmosphere of it and have a good time. So, I'm doing a lot of prep work with her and bigger agility trials, and let her get used to atmosphere of all the dogs and all the people and all that sort of stuff, and then just working on her skills that she'll need for the championships themselves. Melissa Breau: Now, are they Border Collies? Are they Shelties? Amanda Nelson: Yes. All three are all Border Collies, yes. Melissa Breau: Okay, Border Collie household, for sure, huh? Amanda Nelson: That's right, yes. Melissa Breau: So how did you get started in dog sports? What was kind of the beginning for you? Amanda Nelson: I've actually been involved in dog stuff and dog sports since I was extremely young. I actually did obedience with my Cocker Spaniel when I was I think maybe like 4 or 5 years old. My mom was very much into obedience at that time and then she later was very much into agility, so I kind of grew up with it. So I started, like I said, with my Cocker in obedience and then agility kind of really started taking off and it was a lot of fun. So I had a corgi also, named Sunny, and I started with her in agility. We did USDA. I competed in the European Nationals many times with her. I think I started doing agility when I was like 6 or 7. I don't remember a lot of it, but there's pictures to prove it, so I can only remember bits and pieces every now and then. Melissa Breau: So you definitely grew up in this world, so to speak. Amanda Nelson: That is right. That is right. Melissa Breau: What kind of Cocker was it, an English Cocker, American Cocker? Amanda Nelson: American Cocker. Melissa Breau: Okay, okay. My grandmother breeds English Cockers so I've always kind of followed Cocker Spaniels. They have a special spot in my heart, so... Amanda Nelson: Oh, that's very cool, very cool. Melissa Breau: So, starting off in obedience a while ago, have you always been a positive trainer? If not, kind of what got you started down that path? Amanda Nelson: So at heart I know I've always been a positive trainer. I'm pretty sure I took some detours now and then, you know, as I learned. I try to surround myself with people who are also positive trainers, but I would have to say that I really...you know, because I started so young you kind of just do as everybody else is doing sort of thing, but I really wanted to start training my own dog. I had a Border Collie before Try and he was 10 and I did agility with her, but I don't remember really training her, if that make sense because I was young. Try was my first dog that I really...I had her from when she was a puppy and she was really, you know, I trained her I guess - as odd as that sounds. Honestly, my mom helped a lot with my dogs when I was younger, so Try I felt like was my first, I'm going to train her, train her, you know? And so, I just went in to want to read all these books and I had this cute little angel puppy and she was...she really, really loved clickers and shaping, and I really started getting into it because she loved it so much that she had thought that that was the coolest thing in the whole wide world, so then that really shoved me into the positive world and I just wanted to immerse myself in everything. And so, any book I could get my hands on, YouTube videos, anything I could do to learn more for her I guess, and really I wanted her to be so happy, and then that kind of...I started bringing it into agility, you know? She didn't really at that point in time, the way I was teaching the weave poles, like it didn't work for her, like she didn't get it, and I'm like, well, I don't understand why we're not getting it. So, I started doing all this shaping with the weave poles and then all this targeting and stuff like that and I'm like, oh, my gosh, she really likes this. So I started, you know, what else could I do in agility that I could shape, and that really opened a lot of doors and it also opened my eyes to...then also like a lot of the business work that I do, shaping is a huge part of it now because it really brings it into the dog's realm that they can...they're learning. You know, it's not just kind of a forced thing, and I don't say that in a negative way like I'm dragging the dogs out there forcing them, but more of the dogs are making their choice. I don't know if that makes any sense, but they're making that choice. They're being shaped and going, okay, I'm going to go out here and do this and my, you know, Amanda really likes that so I get a click, you know that sort of thing, and she really, really opened the door for that. She was the kind of dog that any sort of correction, even just me kind of going, oh, you know, and I can't help it sometimes, you know, something would happen and I go, oh. She would really take it to heart, so I really learned that she liked all that positive, and it really changed the way I looked at things and the way the dogs look at how I could teach something. Melissa Breau: As someone who hasn't really done much in the agility world, I definitely did a little bit of research before we had got on the call and it seemed like you can be pretty heavily in NADAC? Did I pronounce that right? Amanda Nelson: Yes, you did. Melissa Breau: So, would you mind talking a little bit about how that differs from some of the other agility organizations out there and maybe why it appeals to you so much? Amanda Nelson: So a lot of focus within NADAC is it's floating courses that test the dog's ability to collect and extend. So for example, it might be a really kind of open wide sequence that then comes into a really tight serpentine or pinwheel and it goes back into this really fast extended sequence. So NADAC really focuses on testing the dog's ability to really extend, really stride out, and then collect in for this nice tight sequence, and then really extend out again, and it tests the handler's ability to read those sequences, to read, okay, I need my dog to really extend and go fast through this loop here and then run in to collect, collect, collect, and do this really technical sequence here, and now I want them to extend again. So I like the variety as far as, you know, there's definitely dog tests I guess on the course as far as testing the dog's ability to do that kind of collection/extension, and then it tests the handler's ability to know the dog, know what the dog needs, and to read those sequences. NADAC also has some focus in distance handling and they have awards aimed at the distance handling, and that's something that I've done for a long time and I really...again with Try, she loved doing that distance work, so NADAC also was a big part of that and I could do a lot of that big distance stuff that she really liked and we liked doing it together as a team. So, I like the variety with NADAC, but I can go out and I can run right with my dog and be with her and do that sort of thing, and then the next course I look at and go, oh, I'm going to try a distance on this one and I can now work on distance skills all at the same trial, so I really like that variety within NADAC, but I can do different things with my dog whether it's distance or running with them and looking at the course for those collection/extension sequences and all that sort of fun stuff. Melissa Breau: Just having watched some distance handling type stuff, it's just so cool when you see somebody who, you know, they can send the dog out and they have good control and the dog's doing the things in the right order and you have that distance, it's just really an impressive skill to watch, it's really pretty to watch. And I know that one of your specialties at FDSA is teaching distance, so I wanted to ask a little bit about the kind of skills that a team needs, I guess partly as a team, right, but also just like what skills the dog needs before they can start to introduce distance into their training and before they can really...what they need to be successful with that, right? I would imagine it needs some special skills. Amanda Nelson: Yeah. So there's many different ways to teach distance and the way that I do it is my whole philosophy with distance handling is it has a very unique skill in the fact that you're asking the dog to move away from you and that can be moving out of their comfort zone, and so confidence plays a humungous part in everything I do with my dogs which kind of goes back into all that shaping and clicker training stuff that I do, is that I want my dogs to be super, super confident. I want them to be confident in my handling, confident in their skills, you know, they'd know how to do dog up, they'd know how to do a jump, all that sort of stuff. So when I start working with a new handler or a new dog or even someone who's been competing but they want to start introducing distance, the first thing that we sit down and do is like, okay, now let's see where is your dog at and what is their confidence level at. Are they okay 5 feet away, 10 feet away, you know, where's their limit? And if say their limit is at 10 feet and their handler really wants them to be 15 feet away, we're going to build the dog's confidence up at 10 feet. And my biggest thing is because of that confidence I want my dogs to trust my handling, I want them to be confident in my handling. So for example, if I tell my dogs “out” and I want them to...out means for them to move out away from me. So I tell them out, and so they understand that, and let's say I'm at a trial and I've forgotten all the core skills, so I've said out but in all reality I actually need them coming in towards me and I'm like, oh, no, I've given them the wrong cue. So my reaction and almost all reactions, the same reaction happens for every handler, is you know we're trying to save that cue so we're going, no, no, no, no, come in, come in, come in, you know, and we'll try to save it and get the dog in, and dogs are forgiving and dogs are awesome so they'll just turn on a dime and come in, but what happens with that is then the dogs don't trust their handling anymore. You know, we've said out, they're going out, but now in our heads we're telling ourselves, oh, I screwed up, I screwed up, I needed to say “come in”, but in the dog's head they're viewing it as, well, she said out, I went out, and now she's saying no, no, no, come in, and so that's what kind of chips away at that trust. So the first thing I really, really get into with all my students is if you've given a wrong cue sometimes you just have to suck it up and go and know that you just lost that run, but you're going to gain ten more down the road because if the dog doesn't have confidence in our cues then when we do need that distance and we tell our dog out I never want my dog to look back at me and go are you sure? Like I just want them, when I say out they go, yeah, all right, here we go, she means it, you know, and off we go. So that's a big thing. I do lots of ground work. I use road cones and teach my dogs a lot of confidence work around just the road cones because it's a nice, easy ground work exercise, and also teaches me, myself, and all my students, the timing that they need for all their cues. I teach them the speed the dogs are going to run, and it's all about equipment so that we're not also working toward dog knocks a bar and it's like oh, no, no, we have to fix that. We can just focus on getting our dogs to move out away from us and build that confidence. That's basically my training philosophy. Everything revolves around confidence. Melissa Breau: No, I mean that makes total sense because especially when, you know speed is also important and obviously agility, speed is important. Getting a dog to move away from you and not doubt. If they doubt you they're going to move slower than if they believe that they're doing the right thing. So even if the dog did come in right, like you might have shaved some seconds the wrong direction... Amanda Nelson: Exactly. Exactly. Melissa Breau:...your next run. So, even though I haven't done agility I do Tribal and that's also kind of a distance sport, and I know that for me when I was training distance, reward placement was just so important to kind of get that confidence and get the dog to understand, you know, to stay out there and not come back in for a treat, so I'd assume that was a big part for you for training agility too. Do you want to speak to that a little bit and talk about...I mean you can totally correct me if I'm wrong too, you know, I'm kind of guessing a little bit but... Amanda Nelson: No, no, reward placement is huge, huge, huge, which is why I love using toys when it comes to distance work and it's super easy, you'll be able to pass that toy out there, reward at a distance, you're either handler talking or get toy placed down or something like that. You have to understand they maybe aren't a big fan of toys, they only want food which Ally absolutely hates toys, she has zero interest in them, but she loves food so for her, you know, reward can be a little bit difficult with her because my other dogs, you know, they love going after the toys so it makes it “a little bit easier.” With Ally I use those Lotus balls, you know, and they're Velcro, kind of open, you can put food in, so I use those as some I would be able to...she does a really nice distance sequence. I can either have it placed out there for her out away from me or she can then open it up and get her treat, or a lot of times I just always carry one on me so if she does something really awesome out there at a distance, I can just toss that toy and reward right there. I also have students that the Lotus ball, it does not work for them. Either the handlers don't really like tossing it, maybe the dogs don't like it, that sort of thing, so even tossing food is good. I still vary my rewards because a lot of times, at least with something like distance they get so focused on all this distance and distance and distance, and so they reward  all this distance out-away, out-away, out-away, which is great but there are some courses where the dog has to come in, and so sometimes we get a little bit stuck on, oh, my gosh, I'm not going to let my dog out there and the dog gets used to always being say 10, 15 feet away from a handler, but then when we go out of sequence where they need to be say 5 feet within the handler the dogs don't want to come in. So, I still do kind of vary my rewards in that sometimes they will come in to me for a treat so that we're still kind of keeping a nice balance between my dog going really far out and staying out away from me or coming in, but I would say I definitely reward out-away a lot more than I do next to me because I want them again it's all about that confidence. I want my dogs to feel confident and high reinforcement way out there away from me as well. Melissa Breau: Yeah, some dogs really struggle with distance and building that confidence to go out there. I have seen that in my own sport, and I think it's kind of neat that reward placement really can make a huge difference in just communicating and building that confidence. So I wanted to ask if there was a particular aspect of distance training or really kind of anything in what you do that people usually struggle with, and if you kind of walk us through a little bit how you might problem solve that or some of the solutions you might try out. Just kind of give people a sense of what you teach and how you teach it. Is there anything that jumps out at you? Amanda Nelson: Yeah. So for me I would say across the board the biggest aspect that I see with all handlers whenever they want to get into distance is they want to stop all movement. They get nervous, especially if there's a Gamblers line on the ground or _____(20:01) or something like that, and they see that line and we just stop dead. So a lot of...the way I handle and the way I teach is all based on my body. So my lower body, my feet, are...that's what creates impulsion. So even, you know, like my videos I use it a lot because people say, “oh, you tell us when we have to keep moving, but your video doesn't, you know, you're not.” But I am. It just has to be, even if it's a small non-movement, even if it's just one step, one step, you're still creating movement, and dogs if they see us just kind of come to that brick wall, you know, when we stop right at that line, well, that's cueing a collection, you're telling them to stop. So what I try to tell my students all the time is if you want your dog's feet to move, your feet need to move. It doesn't mean you have to race them, it doesn't mean you have to run. Even the smallest step, that motion is going to help them continue to move and continue to push out there. So again, back to road cones, I do tons of work with footwork for the handlers teaching them, you know, I want you to practice this distance, but you need to always kind of be moving a little bit, you know, always be creating a little bit of motion in your lower body so your dog will continue to read that. And I do a lot of work laying lines on the ground and teaching handlers not to be scared of them, they don't have to stop right at them, and even staying off that line just by a foot gives you that little bit of cushion that you can still kind of push it on up and they get a little bit of movement, and I would say that to me is the biggest aspect because dogs naturally read our body language. You know, when you take a little 8-week-old puppy and you start to walk, they're going walk with you and you stop, they stop, you know, they naturally will read it, whereas we can teach distance with just a verbal cue and teach the dogs to get out there. I know many distance handlers that don't use a lot of body language, it's all verbal, and they do extremely well, but it's a taught skill, it's not natural to the dog, and I like to do as much natural stuff as I can for the dog so that it makes things easier, and I think for both of us as a team it just makes things easier. I don't have to teach something that is harder for both me and the dog to teach them, okay, I'm standing perfectly still, but I want you to drive out 30 feet, and it's harder on the dog and it goes again back to that confidence. It's harder to gain that confidence when the dog doesn't feel that level of support from their handler, so I would say that's the hardest thing that I've across with handlers and it's just a matter of just muscle memory. You know, teach them that you really...it's okay. You can keep moving at that speed, you'll be okay, sort of silly -- the line is not going to bite you, I swear. Melissa Breau: So I mentioned in the bio, and I mean you talked about it a little bit there in that last answer that you have your Cues for Q's handling system, and I want to make sure we talk about that a little bit more. You kind of mentioned the idea of adapting to what the dog does naturally and building on that, but can you explain the concept a little bit more and maybe touch on how the system can allow a team to really create their own unique handling system? Amanda Nelson: I kind of break things down into...I have lower body cues, upper body cues, and then my verbal cues. So my lower body cues, that should be basically my primary cue, that should be the first thing my dog sees. So I always want to point my feet or point my foot, you know, if you're running you're not going to be able to point both feet at the same time, but point this way where you want your dog to go, so that's going to be kind of their first cue. Your foot is pointing at that jump you want them to take. And then your upper body is going to define that cue. Do you want them really continue to push, you're going to have your arm out because you're really driving them down that line, or is your dog closer to your body because we're going to collect after that jump? So your upper body is kind of defining what your lower body is doing, and then your verbal cue should be kind of backing that whole thing up. So, the picture that I would want to see is if I have a student who, they need to do an out-tunnel is that their foot should be pulling at the tunnel, the hand should be pulling in at the tunnel, and then their verbal cue should be backing all that up by saying out or whatever cue that student uses. Where I go from there is that I don't feel that every dog can handle the same way. I've had multiple dogs and worked with multiple students' dogs and run student's dogs, that every dog is unique, every dog is different, and not everything is going to be exactly the same, you know? Like I have all Border Collies and every single one of them is different. I handle every single one of them different. They don't all just kind of come out of the cookie cutter that just because they're Border Collies this is the way I'm going to handle them, you know, they're all very, very different. So I can adapt this handling system into something that works for each dog. So for example, Trip, that my boyfriend runs, he is much more dependent on Jimmy's upper body, then he has his feet, and he was trained, you know, all my dogs go through the same foundation training as every other one before them and one after, and Trip and Ally, the two youngest, they were trained in exactly the same way, but for some reason Trip just, he responds better to upper body. So we just adapt the handling a little bit into, okay, instead of Jimmy's foot is now pointing where we want to go, we really focus on his upper body. His arm really needs to be pointing, this is the jump we're going to take, and then his feet then become more of a defining cue and not a verbal, if that makes sense. So it just kind of swaps the order. Whereas now Ally, Ally 100 percent reads off my lower body and then upper body is her defining cue, and what she doesn't like, and maybe it's just a phase she's going through, it's a teenager phase, she does not like to hear me talk. So verbals cues are just a no-go for her. Every time I say something to her like go or something like that, she barks or she gets a little angry or yeah, I feel like we're having a teenager stage, you know, don't tell me what to do. So, for her I use very little verbal cues and she reads my lower body like there's no tomorrow, you know, she'll pick up that foot cue and she just goes with it. So, we just mold and adapt things within that. I have my students kind of follow the base of it, you know, most dogs are going to read your foot and here's your arm and your verbal, but I let my students pick. They can use any verbal they want as long as it makes sense to them and it makes sense to the dog. They can say spaghetti for all I care as long as it works for them and we all understand it and that's awesome. I want them to be happy. My biggest thing and I guess I learned this years and years and years ago. I taught a seminar and I was working with this woman who just, you could tell she was struggling, like she was just having a hard time, she couldn't get her cues out right, and her handling was very stiff, and so I sat and talked to her, like what's going on? What's the issue? She's like, well, I've been taught that I need to handle like A, B or C and I need to do this and I'm like, well, but it's not working. You know, you're not happy, which in turn is now making your dog not happy. So I said what would you like to do? Let's talk about it. So she had shown me and said, okay, now this is how I wanted him. I'm like, well, let's do that. As long as it works for you and your dog let's do that. So my biggest thing is take kind of the baseline basically, you know, here's how most dogs respond to things, but then mold it into what you like and what works for you. You know, just like Jimmy and Trip, if I were to force them and say no, no, no, you must use your leg and that is what's going cue him, but if he doesn't like that, you know, if the dog doesn't respond and that doesn't work for him then it's just a constant battle. So my biggest thing when I'm teaching any seminar or anything online is my poor students have to hear me say and over and over again, do what works for you and your dog. Don't get caught up in this, that, or the other that you saw online or whatever. Take something, take an idea and go, okay, how can I make this work for me and my dog, how can I mold that into a training idea or how I handle that makes sense to me and my dog because a Bulldog is not going to remember the same as a Border Collie and they should be handled and trained in each of their own unique way basically. Melissa Breau: Right. So you kind of mentioned that each dog has their own unique handling system. Is it hard as a handler to have two dogs with a slightly different...I mean I know you mentioned your boyfriend's dog, but your down dogs I'd assume and also slightly different. Is it hard as a handler to remember which dog you're handling? Amanda Nelson: Extremely...extremely hard. So, yeah, I ran with Nargles and like I said, Ally, I'm assuming it's a phase, perhaps doesn't like my talking, but Nargles on the other hand loves it, she likes the verbal. So sometimes I'll work in the ring and I'll start talking to Ally and she starts barking... I'm like, oh, wrong dog. It is extremely hard and I know I forget and I'm actually working with a student online right now who has two dogs and they are like night and day and she is just having a hell of a time. I'm like, well, you know, when you figure it out you let me know because... Melissa Breau: I'd imagine that's the hardest part in some ways because like you said, part of it is muscle memory and you're trying to teach yourself to remember to do the same things and be consistent for your dog and when you have two different dogs who want to do things differently you have to learn two sets of muscle memory. Oh, goodness, it's funny. So, I want to end the episode the same way I kind of end most of the episodes which is asking you what's the dog-related accomplishment that you're proudest of? Amanda Nelson: Oh, my gosh. So the 2011 NADAC Championship I won and it is one of the proudest accomplishments I have. So I was competing against Super Stakes which is a distance class, and it's a very, very hard distance class. Most of the time the distance challenges, your dog is 60 feet, if not 80 feet away from you, extremely hard, and I was competing. It was in Springfield, Illinois and my friend Sunny and I were competing and I was running Try, and we were basically kind of going back and forth between first and second and her and I were probably both having absolutely the best weekend of our lives in dog agility terms, like she was on, I was on. Her dog, Vanessa, we train together all the time, so it was just awesome to go out, and I would  have this amazing run and then out comes Sunny and she would have this amazing run. It was absolutely fantastic. So we ran in the finals. I ran first and oh, my God, it was just a fantastic run, an amazing connection I had with Try. It was one of my best runs. To date it still was one of the best runs I ever had with her. Sunny and her dog, Vanessa, ran after me and they again...it was an amazing breathtaking run and we were 24 seconds apart and Sunny ended up winning. It was the most amazing weekend of my life as far as I just every...you know, four days is how long the championships are, and the level of connection that Try and I had that weekend was absolutely amazing, and to lose to my friend was fantastic. For her to have such a fantastic weekend as well was just awesome, and that second place ribbon, I love that second place ribbon because every time I look at it all I can think about is we were on fire that whole weekend. It was just such an amazing weekend and competing there with my friend, who was also having the best weekend of her life, it was just one of those things that is just amazing. So I have to say it's not a title or award or anything like that. It's my happiest second place ribbon I've ever gotten. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Sometimes, you know, there's really something to be said for the relationships you form in the sports world, right, and you're cheering on your friends and  your teammates and your training buddies and it's not always just about you and your own dog, but that's awesome. Amanda Nelson: Yeah. Melissa Breau: Well, my favorite question of the whole series always, what is the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Amanda Nelson: So this is again from Sunny, she told me just to let it go. I feel like I should start singing Frozen or something. You know, things are going to happen, mistakes are going to happen, you know, what kind of mistake you had as a handler is a mistake you had as a trainer, you know, stuff is going to happen and just let it go because if you keep dwelling on it, you keep thinking about it, you keep beating yourself up over, oh, my gosh, I would've handled that differently or if my dog hadn't missed that contact, you know? Learn from it. Learn from it, move on, and just let it go and think about your next run.  That's the best training advice I've ever had. Melissa Breau: And finally, who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Amanda Nelson: I would say all of my students. Every time I teach a seminar and in all my classes, all of that, I learn so much from all my students. They inspire me every day to be a better handler, a better trainer. Even I'm in the middle of a Fenzi class I'm teaching right now, I am learning so much from them. The questions they ask, you know, they'll ask me a question like, oh, you know what, there's probably a different way to teach this and it brings about how we can approach things differently, how we can train things differently. I have to say working on all of those awesome people, they inspire me and I look up to every one of them, you know, how we can train different things, you know, all that sort of stuff I just...as corny as it sounds, it's probably all of my students. I love every single one of them and they do, they truly inspire me to be better, to just be better in general. Melissa Breau: That's not corny at all, it's sweet. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Amanda. It was great to get to chat and to learn a little bit more about what you do. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. Amanda Nelson: Well, thank you so much. This was fantastic. Melissa Breau: Yeah, it's always good to learn a little bit more about some of the different sports out there, and agility is pretty mainstream but it's still new to me. And we'll be back next week, this time with Sara Brueske to talk training and competing for disc sports. 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 and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!