Podcast appearances and mentions of jessica hekman

In this conversation, Jessica Hekman, DVM, PhD discusses the work of the Functional Dog Collaborative (FDC) and the need to improve dog breeding practices in North America. She highlights the issues with current breeding practices, including the prevalence of large-scale commercial kennels. Jessica emphasizes the importance of moving the needle towards responsible breeding practices and reducing the number of dogs ending up in shelters. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the concept of heritability and its implications for selective breeding. In this conversation, Jessica Hekman discusses the concept of heritability in dog behavior and the role of genetics in shaping traits. She explains how selective breeding can influence behavior and the importance of considering both genetics and environment in understanding dog behavior. The study she conducted on breeds and behaviors was also discussed. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the importance of early socialization in shaping dog behavior. The functional dog collaborative        Podcast and Facebook group, Instagram, and Tik tok Groundbreaking study Companion dog project with associated companion dog registry  Dogzombie.com for more on Jessica and Jessica's webinars, teachings, and to get on her mailing list Lisa Gunter on The Functional Dog Collabrotive Poscast

It's almost impossible to think about animal behavior without thinking of dogs! Our canine friends are a subspecies of wolf that has been co-evolving with us for tens of thousands of years. The transition from wolf to pet has required intense natural and artificial selection for behaviors that allow dogs to live alongside humans, but behavior is not so simple. Join us for a discussion with Dr. Jessica Hekman and learn about dog welfare, behavioral genetics, and the quest to understand the dogs in our lives. 

In this conversation, Carly welcomes Dr. Jessica Hekman, the creator of The Functional Dog Collaborative, to the podcast.   The FDC was founded to support the breeding and raising of purebred, outcrossed, and mixed-breed dogs while prioritizing the physical and behavioral health. The FDC considers these functional goals more important than strict breed standard or closed studbook.Topics covered:The Functional Dog Collaborative (FDC) and it's aim to support responsible breeding practices and improve genetics and socialization in dogs. Functional breeding means breeding dogs that are physically and behaviorally healthy and resilient.Common genetic problems in dog breeds can be seen in extreme morphologies, (like brachycephalic faces) or traits that were not intentionally bred for (like epilepsy and shortened lifespans).Different approaches to breeding like outcrossing and creating new breeds, can address health issues. The current dog culture faces challenges in accepting new breeding practices and changing ideologies.Education and resources are needed to guide puppy seekers in finding responsible breeders. How the Functional Dog Collaborative aims to change the incentive structure in dog breeding through initiatives like the Data Canis platform. GUEST INFOfunctionalbreeding.orgFDC FacebookFDC InstagramFDC TikTokFDC Podcast FOLLOW WITH A DOG:InstagramTikTokSupport the showSupport the show

We all want to help our dogs experience less stress at the vet, and there is actually some scientific data to support two ideas that some might already be doing naturally: avoiding lobbies and staying with dogs through procedures. Break down the research, and also get into some of the culture of vet med with geneticist and veterinarian Dr Jessica Hekman. Find Jessica at http://www.dogzombie.com/ and functionalbreeding.org Sources: Hekman, Jessica P., Alicia Z. Karas, and Nancy A. Dreschel. "Salivary cortisol concentrations and behavior in a population of healthy dogs hospitalized for elective procedures." Applied animal behaviour science 141.3-4 (2012): 149-157. Perego, Roberta, Daniela Proverbio, and Eva Spada. "Increases in heart rate and serum cortisol concentrations in healthy dogs are positively correlated with an indoor waiting‐room environment." Veterinary Clinical Pathology 43.1 (2014): 67-71. - dogs in veterinary clinic vs dogs outside, same wait time, group A had higher cort levels Mariti, Chiara, et al. "The assessment of dog welfare in the waiting room of a veterinary clinic." Animal Welfare 24.3 (2015): 299-305. - behaviorist vs owner observations; “The behaviourist's evaluations were strongly correlated with the time spent by dogs showing signs of stress and moderately correlated with the number of displayed signs, whilst owners' evaluations were not closely correlated to those factors. Dogs rated as highly stressed by the behaviourist were more prone to display resistance (halting, refusing to budge) when moving from the waiting room to the consultation room. The results of this pilot study support the idea that the welfare of dogs in the veterinary waiting room is often impaired, and that owners are unable to accurately assess stress in their dogs in such situations.” Juodžentė, Dalia, Birutė Karvelienė, and Vita Riškevičienė. "The influence of the duration of the preoperative time spent in the veterinary clinic without the owner on the psychogenic and oxidative stress in dogs." Journal of Veterinary Medical Science 80.7 (2018): 1129-1133. - Dogs waiting for 12 hours prior to surgery had higher cort levels (and another measure, oxidative stress index) than dogs brought in 10 min before surgery. Csoltova, Erika, et al. "Behavioral and physiological reactions in dogs to a veterinary examination: Owner-dog interactions improve canine well-being." Physiology & behavior 177 (2017): 270-281. - 2 groups of dogs getting PE. Owners present for both, allowed to touch group 1 but not group 2. Group 1 had more lip licking, higher HR, and temp, also more attempts to jump off the table. Sign up for courses and join the membership here: https://cogdogclassroom.mykajabi.com/ Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cogdogradio Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay

The overarching question of where dogs come from, and why it matters, is the topic of discussion as Sarah and return guest Dr Jessica Hekman sit down for a crossover episode with the Functional Breeding podcast to discuss the recent partnership between SPCA Tampa Bay (a shelter) and Pinnacle Pet (a puppy broker)/Sunshine Puppies (a pet store). FInd Jessica Hekman here: Functionabreeding.org Cog Dog Classroom: https://cogdogclassroom.mykajabi.com/ Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cogdogradio Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay

In this podcast we discuss breeding collaboratives, outcrossing projects and functional breeding. Jessica Hekman is the founder of the Functional Dog Collaborative and the host of the Functional Breeding podcast. She earned her PhD studying fox genomics and has previously worked as part of the Darwin's Ark project at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Intro to Bikejoring event: https://www.houndplus.com/collections/workshops/products/intro-to-bikejor-scootering-with-cat-le-chevalier

This episode, Ji Khalsa is interviewing me, Jessica Hekman, DVM, PhD. I'm a veterinarian turned behavioral geneticist turned teacher and founder of the Functional Dog Collaborative, or FDC. I graduated from Tufts Veterinary School in 2012 with a dual veterinary and master's degree, which was on stress in hospitalized dogs. I completed a veterinary shelter medicine specialty internship at Maddie's Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Florida. I completed a PhD in Genetics, Genomics, and Biomedical Sciences in Kukekova Lab at the University of Illinois, studying genetic differences in the stress system in lines of foxes bred to be less afraid of humans compared to foxes bred to be aggressive. I did post-doctoral work at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and now teach online for Virginia Tech and run the FDC. Ji asked me to talk about the FDC - how it's coming, what we're doing, what we need help with. So here it is!

In this crossover episode with the Functional Breeding podcast, Jessica and Sarah discuss what fear periods in dogs are, and what they aren't. www.functionalbreeding.org Sign up for courses and join the membership here: https://cogdogclassroom.mykajabi.com/ Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cogdogradio Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay

Last week we heard from Dr. Jessica Hekman, a veterinary researcher and one of the topics we discussed was how breed impacts behavior. This week we're going to dive further into breed-typical enrichment and talk about implementation with the animals in your life.In this implementation episode, Emily and Allie talk about:The nuances surrounding breed-typical enrichmentSeeing with your eyes, not your ideasHow to determine when a behavior is maladaptiveYou can find the full show notes here.

In this week's interview episode, we are joined by Dr. Jessica Hekman, a  veterinary researcher. Jessica has a fantastic skill, among many others, of taking really complex topics and distilling them into digestible tidbits of information that the average non-sciency person can understand. Currently, Jessica runs the Functional Dog Collaborative, a non-profit group, which supports the ethical breeding of healthy and behaviorally solid dogs. In this episode, you're going to hear Emily and Jessica talk about:Undereducation overstates, especially when it comes to super complex topics like nature and nurtureBreed-specific enrichment, and why it may not be as important as you think it isThe nebulousness of science, and why pseudoscience is attractiveEmily & Jessica's thoughts about long-term solutions for decreasing animal overpopulationYou can find the full show notes here. 

In this crossover episode with the Functional Breeding Podcast, Sarah and Dr Jessica Hekman DVM dive into what the word “functional” actually means when it comes to our dogs. Cog Dog Classroom: https://cog-dog-classroom.teachable.com/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/cogdogradio

If you're on social media, or just have an interest in dog training and behavior in general, you might have seen the controversy surrounding a research article that was published around the end of April, so just a couple months before the release of this podcast episode. The paper is titled "Ancestry Inclusive Dog Genomics Challenges Popular Breed Stereotypes". It's a bit of a mouthful, but the short summary of controversy is that many in the mainstream media or on social media were saying that "breed totally matters, while others were staying, see, breed doesn't matter at all." So the first thing that came to my mind was, let's get one of the authors of the paper onto the podcast. And the next thing that came to my mind was, let's get Kim Brophey to be my guest host on this episode, as she is someone that has talked so much about breed and behavior tendencies in her past appearances as a guest on this show. And so I brought Jessica Hekman, who is one of the authors and Kim Brophey together, and and let's just say, these two brilliant minds do not disappoint in this episode, as we take a deep dive into not only dispelling some of the misunderstandings from the research, but also into genetics and aggression in general.  For additional resources on helping dogs with aggression, visit:https://aggressivedog.comIf you want to take your knowledge and skills for helping dogs with aggression to the next level, check out the Aggression in Dogs Master Course and get a FREE preview here:https://aggressivedog.thinkific.com/courses/aggression-in-dogsDon't miss out on the third annual Aggression in Dogs Conference  9/30-10/2/22:https://aggressivedog.com/conference/About Jessica:Jessica Hekman, DVM, PhD, is a behavioral geneticist. She is one of the founders of the Functional Dog Collaborative (functionalbreeding.org), a non-profit which seeks to change the conversation around dog breeding in the dog loving community. She also teaches behavioral biology at the Virginia Tech online Masters program for Applied Animal Behavior and Welfare, and offers webinars online and consults with breeders about genetic testing and breeding choices. Jessica lives in Raymond, NH with her husband and three dogs.About Kim:Kim Brophey, CDBC, CPDT-KA, FDM, is an applied ethologist and owner of The Dog Door Behavior Center in Asheville, NC. Kim's commitment to Family Dog Mediation® has been recognized internationally, awarded the APDT Outstanding Trainer of the Year and the Best Dog Trainer of WNC seven years in a row. She is a member of the International Society for Applied Ethology and the APDT, and a certified member and past board member of the IAABC. Kim Brophey's L.E.G.S. ® model of integrated canine science has been endorsed by prominent canine scientists such as Raymond Coppinger and embraced by reputable academics and dog trainers worldwide. From her applied ethology content in Michael Shikashio's Aggression in Dogs Master Course to her market-disrupting L.E.G.S.® Applied Ethology Family Dog Mediation® Course, Kim's work is a celebrated contribution to the field. Her groundbreaking sold-out first edition book, MEET YOUR DOG, TED talk, Beyond The Operant (BTO) collaborative, many public speaking venues, and countless radio and podcast features have made profound waves throughout the dog behavior world. Support the show

Jessica Hekman, DVM, PhD, is a veterinary genetics researcher who is fascinated by dog behavior. She works at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as a computational biologist, studying the genetics of behavior in pet and working dogs through the Darwin's Ark project and the Working Dogs Project. She teaches behavioral biology at the Virginia Tech online Masters program for Applied Animal Behavior and Welfare. She also offers webinars online and consults with breeders about genetic testing and breeding choices. She is one of the founders of the Functional Dog Collaborative (functionalbreeding.org), a non-profit which seeks to change the conversation around dog breeding in the dog loving community. Jessica lives in Raymond, NH with her husband and three dogs.

Join Sarah as she discusses the recent paper “Ancestry-inclusive dog genomics challenges popular breed stereotypes” (Morrill, et al) with one of the authors and repeat podcast guest, Dr Jessica Hekman. Affectionately known as “the mutt paper” amongst its authors, this research has been taking the internet by storm due to the click-bait-y articles that have been written about it. What does the paper actually say? What does it not say? What can we use this research for, as professionals? The paper and the supplementary materials: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0639?fbclid=IwAR0CY2tlftCuZPHGdR7rcioZRfj_hsqNHZ4uytNPcNQQAO5iRtYN-a-NYgY More about Dr Hekman: http://www.dogzombie.com/ and https://functionalbreeding.org/ Cog Dog Classroom: cog-dog-classroom.teachable.com/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/cogdogradio

Jessica Hekman, DVM, PhD, is a veterinary genetics researcher who is fascinated by dog behavior. She works at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as a computational biologist, studying the genetics of behavior in pet and working dogs through the Darwin's Ark project and the Working Dogs Project. She teaches behavioral biology at the Virginia Tech online Masters program for Applied Animal Behavior and Welfare. She also offers webinars online and consults with breeders about genetic testing and breeding choices. She is one of the founders of the Functional Dog Collaborative (functionalbreeding.org), a non-profit which seeks to change the conversation around dog breeding in the dog loving community. Jessica lives in Raymond, NH with her husband and three dogs.

What, when, why and how! Let's talk sterilization procedures for our dogs with guest Dr Jessica Hekman. Dr Jessica Hekman is a veterinarian who studies the genetics of behavior, and a friend of the podcast. She's also the mastermind behind the Functional Dog Collaborative which you can find here: https://functionalbreeding.org/ Anti-Racism Resources: https://robindiangelo.com/publications/ https://blacklivesmatter.com/ https://www.naacp.org/ https://www.ibramxkendi.com/how-to-be-an-antiracist-1 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cogdogradio Cog Dog Classroom: https://cog-dog-classroom.teachable.com/

Description:  The state of the rescue world and the breeding fancy have changed significantly in the last 50 years... Dr. Hekman and I chat about what those changes are, and what they mean for pet and sports dogs in the future.

Welcome, listeners! In today's episode we're going to be taking a look at our topic from a different angle than we usually do, and talk about some of the scientific research being done about working dogs. I had the chance to talk with Dr. Jessica Hekman, a veterinarian, computational biologist, and Team Leader of the Working Dog Project, which is a collaboration between Darwin's Ark, the Theriogenology Foundation, and other organizations to, according to their website, push "a new era of ultra-large-scale dog genetic research that will dramatically expand our understanding of the complex genetics of both behavior and health." Listen in as Jessica talks about canine genetics and other science-y things! On this podcast, we seek to highlight the work being done by working dogs of all disciplines. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to it, rating it, leaving a positive review, and sharing with people you know who are interested in this topic. This show exists in support of its sister photography project on the same topic and of the same name. You can learn more about that by visiting www.herobeside.me. We are currently trying to determine the future of this podcast and would love your feedback. Please take a moment to fill out this survey, and be sure to leave your email address so we can keep you updated! You can also reach out at hello@herobeside.me or on Instagram @herobesideme. Thanks for listening! Be sure to give the furry hero beside you some extra love today.

Why do dogs look and act so different from each other? Listener Finley has two Chihuahuas named Peanut and Maggie, and she wants to know why they have different head shapes. She thinks it might have something to do with their DNA. It turns out scientists are studying what makes dogs the way they are, with the help of gigantic books of doggie DNA. Geneticist Jessica Hekman takes us on a journey through the history of dog breeding and into the cutting-edge science that's helping us understand what makes our pups so special. Come explore genetics through dog breeds! Learn more about dog breeds and behavior in our interview with Jessica Hekman, available to our Patreon supporters! To get access with a pledge of just $1/month and up, go to patreon.com/tumblepodcastFri, 08 Jan 2021 10:00:00 GMT Tumble returns with all new episodes starting January 22! We'll have stories about fossils, telescopes, and baby falcons getting into big trouble. How does a koala eat eucalyptus leaves? Eucalyptus is toxic to most animals, but they're a koala's only food. In this episode, we look past the cuddliness to discover how koalas manage to chow down on the Australian tree species. Biologist Michaela Blyton shares the story of how she convinced some extremely picky koalas to try new foods in the midst of a conservation crisis. Spoiler alert: It involves starting a koala hotel, and inventing a pill with an unusual ingredient. No 00:21:57

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Why do dogs have whiskers? Why are dogs' eyesight black and white? Why do dogs have so many babies? Why do dogs have tails and we don't? Why are dogs thumbs so high on their paw? Why don't dogs sweat? Why do dogs roll in the grass? Why aren't dogs and cats friends? Veterinarian and dog scientist Jessica Hekman has answers. Dog Coloring Page Dog Breed Quiz Coloring Page Dog Breed Quiz Answers Transcript

Kayla sits down with Dr. Jessica Hekman of the Functional Dog Collaborative to talk about breeding dogs for behavioral and physical health. They talk about how the FDC aims to help 

Join Sarah as she interviews Dr Jessica Hekman. Jessica Hekman, DVM, PhD is a veterinary researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and teaches online classes about the biology and genetics of canine behavior. Jessica received her Ph.D. in Animal Sciences (Genetics, Genomics, and Bioinformatics) 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. Jessica's current work focuses on the genetics of behavior in both pet and working dogs through a citizen science approach. Jessica is passionate about using genetics to discover how brain function differs between confident and anxious dogs. www.functionalbreeding.org www.dogzombie.com

We have two incredibly intelligent and talented guests today to talk about a complicated and sometimes controversial subject; genetics and behavior. I promise this is worth listening to, and our guests bring a unique mix of scientific and practical knowledge that makes this episode one you don't want to miss.Guests:Dr. Jessica Hekman is a postdoctoral associate at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and teaches online classes about the biology and genetics of canine behavior. Jessica received her Ph.D. in Animal Sciences (Genetics, Genomics, and Bioinformatics) 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. Jessica's current work focuses on the genetics of behavior in both pet and working dogs through a citizen science approach. She’s also on the Darwins Ark team; a group that is working with pet owners to answer important scientific questions about genetics and behavior in dogs. I highly recommend you check that out at DarwinsArk.org. You can also view Dr. Hekman's website at dogzombie.com and her research at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jessica_Hekman Trish McMillan is a certified professional dog trainer and certified dog behavior consultant who holds a Master’s degree in Animal Behavior from the University of Exeter in England. She is an internationally recognized speaker, sharing her expertise in behavior modification, defensive handling, and animal welfare to trainers, shelter workers, veterinarians & vet techs, and dog daycares across the country and around the world. She specializes in training and behavior modification work with dogs, cats, and horses. Trish spent 7 years with the ASPCA, where she gained a wide variety of experience in the field of animal behavior. For three years she was the director of the animal behavior department at the ASPCA’s New York City shelter, helping staff, volunteers, and adopters work with animals and make great matches. Trish has also helped assess and rehabilitate animals from cruelty, hoarding, and dogfighting cases, as well as pets rescued from natural disasters. In addition to writing for the ASPCA’s Virtual Pet Behaviorist and other publications, she helped create and present several very popular webinars on dog and cat behavior and handling for the ASPCA Pro website.When she is not traveling around educating animal professionals, she lives at her farm, Pibble Hill in Asheville, NC, with a host of very cool animals including her (famous) pitbull Theodore, and sees clients through her consulting business, McMillan Animal Behavior. She is also Vice President of Behavior and Training with Instinct Dog Behavior & Training. Also, check out Pibble Hill and Pibbling with Theodore on Facebook (I misspelled this in the episode). I promise you’re missing out if you aren’t following her.

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Why do dogs look and act so different from each other? Listener Finley has two Chihuahuas named Peanut and Maggie, and she wants to know why they have different head shapes. She thinks it might have something to do with their DNA. It turns out scientists are studying what makes dogs the way they are, with the help of gigantic books of doggie DNA. Geneticist Jessica Hekman takes us on a journey through the history of dog breeding and into the cutting-edge science that’s helping us understand what makes our pups so special. Come explore genetics through dog breeds! Learn more about dog breeds and behavior in our interview with Jessica Hekman, available to our Patreon supporters! To get access with a pledge of just $1/month and up, go to patreon.com/tumblepodcast. Get more information about dog genetics and Darwin’s Ark on the blog post on our website, sciencepodcastforkids.com.

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Description: Drs. Jennifer Summerfield and Jessica Hekman both join me to talk about anxiety in dogs -- we talk about the cause, effect, and treatment of anxiety in dogs!

In this episode, we're diving into the connection between behavior and genetics in dogs. I'm joined by Dr. Jessica Hekman, who is a postdoctoral associate at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she researches how genetics affect behavior in pet and working dogs.

Description: This week we bring back Dr. Jessica Hekman to talk about what the science says on topics like when or if you should spay and neuter, how socialization actually works, and more! Next Week: 4/19 Helene Lawler to talk about herding and living with intact dogs.

Description: Ever wondered what the benefits are to canine massage? Lori Stevens joins me on the podcast to talk about how canine massage can benefit our dogs.   Next week: 4/12/19 Dr. Jessica Hekman, DVM, PhD on the biology of building a great performance dog 

Veterinary geneticist Jessica Hekman joins us for this episode of the Individual Animal to talk about breed traits and how they affect a dog's personality. She answers the question of whether or not they dictate personality (spoiler: they don't). We cover a lot of things in the episode. We talk about the role things like a dog's early environment play in who the dog becomes, the role of responsible breeders, how individual circumstances can change how a dog sees the world, and of course, we discuss how breed traits fit into all of this. We also talk about the fox domestication project and what that says about the evolution of dogs and their behavior. (another spoiler: It's not a clear cut answer.) You can follow Jessica on Twitter and Facebook.

Everything you could potentially want to learn about all them fancy new DNA breed identifying technologies! Grab your favorite beer, unless your driving, and join us in conversation about chromosomes and genetics. Jessica is Drinking: Vanilla Creme Soda, Davidian Brothers Farm Sarah is Drinking: The Devil's Invention Stout, 4 Hands Brewing Rebecca is Drinking: Lazer Raptor, Central State Brewing   Get in touch with Jessica Hekman Darwin's Ark Jessica Hekman   Visit Our Redbubble Store!        iTunes Discussion Group For direct inquiries and information about sponsorships, advertising, guest spots, and PR, please email Podcasthairofthedog@gmail.com  

Summary: I got an email a few weeks ago from a listener, asking if I’d consider doing a podcast on doing sports with rescue dogs and/or dogs who join the family as adults. She suggested a number of excellent questions … so this will be the second of two podcasts where we’ll look specifically at rescues and training for adult dogs. Next Episode: To be released 11/09/2018, we'll be talking to Linda P. Case, well known for her work in nutrition and focus on the science of dog training, about those two topics! 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 doing something a little differently. I got an email a few weeks ago from a listener, asking if I’d consider doing a podcast on doing sports with rescue dogs and/or dogs who join the family as adults. She suggested a number of excellent questions … so this will be the second of two podcasts where we’ll look specifically at rescues and training for adult dogs. The previous one was with Sara Brueske, and for this episode of the podcast, I’m here with Dr. Jessica Hekman. Dr. 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 Sciences in 2017 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she studied canid behavioral genetics, so very on-topic for us. Previously, she graduated from the Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in 2012 with a dual DVM/MS degree. Her Master's work was on behavior and the 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. Hi Jessica! Welcome to the podcast. Jessica Hekman: Hey Melissa. Thanks so much for having me. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. To start us out, do you mind just reminding everyone a little bit about who your current pups are, and maybe share where they came from and at what point in their lives? Jessica Hekman: Absolutely. We almost heard from them while you were in the middle of your intro. I think somebody went by outside and they both ran to the door and started squeaking a little bit, and I was like, “Shh, shh, dogs. I’m on a podcast. Be really quiet!” This is their downtime. So I have two. My older one is Jenny, that’s short for Guinevere, and she is a mixy-mix. I had her tested with Wisdom Panel, turns out she’s probably Labrador/Samoyed. She came from a shelter, and we know from the shelter that she is at least part Lab, so that much is true. She’s a very, very cute little blonde, 35 pounder. She looks like a little Border Collie who’s Golden Retriever colored, so she’s super-cute. And Dash, which is short for Dashell, is an English Shepherd and he is a little bit over 2 years old. I got Jenny when she was 13 months old, and Dash was my first puppy ever, so I got him at 9 weeks. Melissa Breau: There are, I think, lots of good reasons to have you on, but before we get into some of the professional stuff, I was hoping, as somebody who has one dog that was a rescue and one that you got from a breeder, if you’d talk a little about that piece. With Jenny, my understanding is you adopted a dog, you knew there was some serious stuff going on there, you’d have to work on it from a training perspective. Can you talk a little bit about where she was when you brought her home, where she is now, and what kind of work you put in to get her there? Jessica Hekman: Yeah, sure. Jenny definitely has a long and interesting story. I had just finished up my Master’s and was going back to finish up veterinary school. I was a third-year vet student and I had a lovely, behaviorally very healthy Golden Retriever named Jack, who I adored, and I wanted to get a second dog. So I was looking around at shelters, and a really close friend of mine was doing her shelter medicine internship and came across this dog. I later found out she was actually joking when she emailed me to say, “There’s this dog, maybe you want her,” because she was like, “This dog’s crazy. Clearly you wouldn’t want this dog, ha ha ha.” I got the email and I was like, “Oh, that sounds great,” and afterwards she was like, “I don’t know what you were thinking.” I like to say she comes from an “oops” litter, except it was the “dogs do that sometimes” litter. She was from a farm that was in rural upstate New York outside of Ithaca. I think they had some number of dogs they just knew were going to have litters sometimes — not so much of an “oops” litter as “oh yeah, that happens.” At some point Animal Control came to that farm and said, “You have nine dogs and that’s too many, and you need to give some up.” So they took the two 10-month-old puppies from their most recent litter, I gather, and took them in to Tompkins County Humane Society and said, “Here, you can have these, and that will get us back down to seven dogs and everyone will be happy.” Apparently the owner was surprised to discover that these two dogs were super-shy. They hadn’t noticed anything behaviorally wrong with the dogs, but due to the fact, I think, that the dogs had never, ever been off their farm at all, and I don’t believe any socialization had been done with them at all, then the dogs had thought that their whole world was this little farm, and when they came into the shelter discovered the world was much larger than that, they were horrified. There was one woman working at the shelter at the time as a behavior consultant, had a Master’s in behavior, and she referred to them as “toxically cute.” They were these ridiculously, looked like identical twins, girl and boy, cream colored, so cute, 10 months old, and she said they had people lining up to adopt them, but they knew that they were going to be behaviorally really challenging. So they gave these two dogs to a pair of guys who tried really hard with them but apparently didn’t have so much the dog skills necessary and did some stuff that we know is not the best way to convince a shy dog to like you, such as luring them close with canned cheese and then trying to pet them when they had lured them close, which then taught the dogs that cheese was terrifying, for example. After a month or so of that, the dogs were not warming up to them at all, and so Jenny came back into the shelter, but they kept her. She was fostered by this behavior consultant, and that was when I found out about her. Shortly after I took her, her brother came back and moved in and took her spot with the behavior consultant. They wanted to place her with me because I had this dog who was going to be a really good influence on her and teach her that people were not scary. When I first met her, I couldn’t make eye contact with her because she would tremble. She’s not aggressive at all. She just entirely shuts down, so she’ll huddle in a corner and shake. So I couldn’t make eye contact with her because she would complete decompensate when I made eye contact with her. I couldn’t touch her. We were living in Massachusetts, and my then-boyfriend and I drove out to Ithaca to meet her and decide that we wanted her and pick her up, and her foster mom had to lift her into the car for us because she would pee whenever we touched her, and when we got home and getting her out of the car, she peed. She lived for the first few weeks on her dog bed, and I kept a harness with a one-foot-long tab on her at all times. When it was time to go outside, I would crawl on the floor backwards, not making eye contact with her, to attach a leash to the tab so that I didn’t have to touch her, and take her outside. After a few days of this, I was going through this ritual of crawling backwards towards her as she stood up and very clearly said, “No. I understand the situation. I can take it from here, and you don’t have to put that thing on me. It’s horrifying.” So we went down outside together, and I had this big, safely fenced yard, but it was almost half an acre, and I remember thinking, Am I ever going to get this dog back inside? I was like, Well, let’s just see what happens. So I let her out and she did her business and came back in. And that’s very Jenny, being terrified of the world but really wanting to make her way in it, and thinking outside the box to try to figure out what’s going to happen. She did not let my husband, my then-boyfriend, touch her for about the first six months that we had her. It took a week before I could touch her. The first time I ever had a stranger in the house after I got her, she hid in a corner, pooped, and sat in it, so that was lovely. It took her weeks to stop submission-urinating. I still remember the first night that we were sleeping in the bed and she was on her dog bed at the other end of the room, didn’t want to sleep in the bed with us but was willing to be in the room with us, and I had given her a pig’s ear. Whenever I gave her food, she’d tuck it under her chest and be like, “I’ll eat this later when no one can see me and it’s safe.” I remember around midnight, after we’d been in bed for a couple of hours and it was dark, she felt safe enough and I could hear her start to crunch on the pig ear. I remember lying there in the dark, smiling to myself and thinking, Oh, she’s doing better. So what did I do with her? She came to me on fluoxetine, which is a behavioral medication that is effective in a lot of dogs, but it is the one behavioral medication that general practice veterinarians tend to feel comfortable with, and it was a general practice veterinarian who had prescribed it. So I took her to a veterinary behaviorist. I was a vet student at the time, so I had a friend who was doing her behavior residency. I had Jenny go meet with her. and she prescribed a different medication that she thought would be more appropriate for Jenny’s particular issues, and she has done very well on that. She has continued to improve. I’ve had her for nine years now. Our Gotcha Day anniversary is coming up on New Year’s Day this year. She’s just continued to improve. At first, it was really, really hard. When we let her outside, she had trouble coming back in if there had been a stranger in the house over the last few hours. If I was out and my husband let her out, sometimes she wouldn’t come back in. He’d call and say, “Can’t get her in,” and I’d say, “You have to leave the door open and walk outside and get behind her so she’ll go in,” and he’d say, “But it’s January in New England, can’t you come home?” I’d say, “No, I’m on clinics in vet school, they won’t let me leave for another twelve hours.” So it was really hard. She gradually started being able to make friends. I needed to have someone who could come let her out to pee when I was working these fifteen-hour days, so I had to pay this dog walker to come five or six times while I was there and pay her to come get to know Jenny, and then she was able to start coming and Jenny was able to warm up to her, so that was really nice. When I finished vet school a year-and-a-half later, and I moved down to Florida for my internship, had to drive the dogs down there, Jenny hadn’t ever taken a long car trip before or really been off the property all that much. We’d been to the vet a couple of times, but I was minimizing it because it was so traumatic for her. So we drove down to Florida, a five-day drive because we took it slow, and she didn’t pee for the first 48 hours, so that was terrifying, but she eventually did. She has continued to improve and to change, and so while we were in Florida, we got to the point where instead of huddling in a corner and shaking when people came over, she would roo, which is not the behavior I was aiming for in the end, but showed that she was feeling more confident. When we then moved to Illinois for my Ph.D., I still remember the very first day that she was willing to go to sleep in the middle of the floor, just stretched out laterally in the middle of the floor. She’d always slept on couches before. I had never seen her sleep in the middle of a floor. When I first got her, she wouldn’t go into the kitchen. She’d run from the kitchen really fast. Now she’s comfortable in any room of the house. While we were in Urbana, there was a lovely, really big dog park, really nice dog park, and I was able to go at off hours when there weren’t many other dogs there. She was able to do that and be off-leash, and make dog friends, and eventually even make human friends. She even had some human friends that she really liked there. Now we’re back in Massachusetts. She’s able to hike off-leash with us in the forest, she is able to go to her chiropractor — she has chiropractic problems, probably from being so tense all the time — and she’s able to handle that and not completely decompensate, and when people come over she now understands that while she thinks that all people are axe murderers, some of them do come with cheese, of which she is no longer scared, and so when people come over, she’s nervous at first, they toss her some cheese, and now she’s at the point where she’ll sit and make cute faces at people to get cheese, which is really nice. The huge thing recently was I have a dog walker come now for her and Dash, and I tell the dog walker, “Let them both out to pee, that will be fine, but only take Dash for a walk. Jenny won’t go for a walk with you.” I got this text message from the dog walker saying, “I asked Dash if he wanted to go for a walk, and Jenny was really excited about it too. Can I take her?” I was like, “Sure, just be prepared to go home if she freaks out.” But she didn’t, and I got these great photographs of her on the walk really happy. So she’s made massive progress. She’s a really different dog than she used to be. So a lot of behavior modification, a lot of management, a lot of time, and a lot of her trying as well. She really likes people, and she really likes being near people. She’s just scared of them, and I think she’s really made an effort because of that. If she wasn’t so people-social, I don’t think she would have overcome everything as well as she has. But she continues to improve. I thought she’d plateau after a couple of years, but she has not. Nine years and she continues, she’s better this year than she was last year. It’s amazing. She’s a fabulous little dog. Melissa Breau: Now on the flip side of that, with Dash you did all your homework, and I know you originally had some hopes to do agility with him, but now you’re not sure that that’s the path he’ll take you down. Are you willing to talk about that a little bit? Jessica Hekman: When I got Jenny, I was interested in fearful dogs and I got sort of a sad project. When I got Dash, I was like, “I want a dog that will be fun, and I want to learn about what it’s like to raise a puppy.” I was interested in socialization as part of my job and my research, but I also really wanted to do dog sports, and agility in particular. So I went to a breeder who did agility and nosework and some other stuff with her dogs and got Dash. She said, “He’s a very confident puppy and he’s going to be ideal for agility,” and he did start out that way. He then started around 6 months of age to have some fearfulness and to have off and on lameness. I’m a veterinarian and I am not afraid to take him to specialists. I took him to a bunch of specialists trying to figure out what was up with the lameness, and it took a year to find somebody who could diagnose him. It was a complex problem, and so when he was a year-and-a-half old, we finally figured out that he had a tiny little chipped bone in his right elbow, and because he’d been on it for so long now, that that elbow was really painful and his shoulder was showing changes as well because he’d been compensating. I’d been doing agility foundations and early levels of agility, not jumping full height, and I’d been doing this and hiking him, he’d been running in the woods, and we were doing parkour, so he was doing all this stuff with his broken bone basically. The vet said it probably was similar to walking with rocks in your shoes, clearly more and less painful at different times. He had also pretty clearly learned that when other dogs approached him, if they bumped into him, it was going to hurt, so he had learned to warn other dogs off proactively. When we finally had the surgery, got his elbow repaired — the elbow injury, by the way, pretty clearly a traumatic injury. I know the day that it happened. He was 5 months, 5-and-a-half months, running in the woods, and there was ice and snow. He came up lame that evening, and it kept coming and going ever since then. He probably had what the orthopedist called a “jump-down injury,” probably jumped off of something too high that he shouldn’t have and chipped that bone. Had the surgery, was a six-month recovery, and he is fully recovered, so technically I could go back to agility. There’s a couple of things stopping me. One is that given that he had this issue in that leg, it means that he’s going to develop arthritis earlier than he would have otherwise. The rehab that I was working with put it to me as, “You may only have so many jumps in him, and he’s going to be doing some jumping on his own — into and out of the car, on and off the bed — so maybe you could conserve the amount of jumps you’re asking him to do, so that you put off the arthritis as long as possible,” and that sounds reasonable to me. The other thing is that he had learned to be very slow and cautious in agility, and I think a lot of that was that it hurt, and also that I’m a green handler, and so we’re doing some stuff that he can learn to really enjoy. So we’re doing nosework right now, which he thinks is fabulous. It’s very low-pressure, there’s none of my expectations, there’s none of anything hurting, and so possibly we’ll go back to agility at a later point, certainly not anything that I would push him really hard to do a lot of jumping. So that’s how I got redirected with him down into a slightly different road than I had originally imagined. Melissa Breau: Personal experiences aside for a moment, you also deal heavily in all of this stuff professionally. Can you share a little bit about how your day job ties in? Jessica Hekman: I had been a computer programmer for twelve years or something like that, and I decided I wanted to learn about what causes dogs to have different personalities and to behave differently — why some are shy, and some are aggressive, and some are really friendly, what’s different in their brains. It turned out that the best tools that we have right now for getting at that kind of thing in pet dogs is genetics, because you can look at a dog’s genetics without having to actually cut their head open and get at their brain. It’s a better way of doing things than the other alternatives involving laboratory animals. I am, as you said, currently working at a research institute. The institute actually focuses mostly on human health, and the group that I’m working with, we use dogs as models for humans to study how genetics interacts with behavior, and how it interacts with diseases like cancer, to try to understand more not just about dogs but also about humans. And that’s great, that’s how we get our funding, saying that this is applicable to human health. I’m obviously in it because I care about dogs, figure there’s plenty of other people looking at human health, I’m really more interested in the canine health, but that’s sort of the focus of the lab as a whole. What we do, anyone who’s interested in learning more about that can go to DarwinsArk.org and check it out. The main project lets people come, sign up their dogs, answer a whole slew of questions about their dog’s behavior, and then get a kit to have us sample their dog’s DNA, which we do just through saliva, so it’s very easy. And then we run analyses and hopefully find fascinating things, although the project is young so far, so we have not solved all the questions of behavioral genetics quite yet. Melissa Breau: Quite yet. What CAN we know, what do we know about a dog based on their genetics? What kind of traits does research show us come “hardwired”? Jessica Hekman: A lot of it is still up in the air, and a lot of people are surprised to find out how much we don’t know. We do know that things like retrieving and herding and pointing, things that you see that are definite differences between breeds, and things that we know that people selectively bred for, those definitely can come hardwired, and so you can see dogs offering retrieving behavior or herding behavior without having been trained to do it, which I think is crazy. How do you program in the DNA that a dog really likes putting things in their mouth and bringing it back to you, or that they really like collecting sheep into a little circle? I think that’s just insane, and we don’t know what it is that does that exactly. We have some initial ideas, but we don’t know what genes are that do that. So we know that that can be more or less hardwired, although, as a lot of you know already, it certainly is not the case that every single Labrador Retriever is interested in retrieving. So even though a particular breed may have many or most dogs in it be hardwired for one particular skill like that, it doesn’t mean that every dog in the breed will be that way. When it comes to personality, there’s still a lot of differences between dogs. Every dog is really an individual, even though a breed may have some tendencies. So the kinds of stuff that we’re looking at with the Darwin’s Ark project is, what I’m personally interested in, is personality. I would say that personality are traits that change only very slowly over time, that tend to be fairly static over time. They can change, but slowly. Jenny’s example is … I’d definitely say she has a shy personality but that she has become less shy over time, but it has taken a lot of work. One initial question that we’re looking at based just on the surveys, not even on genetics, has been, “Are there certain personalities per dog breed?” because we know we feel like most Golden Retrievers are friendlier than most, say, German Shepherds, which are more aloof, that kind of question. The initial work that was done by the last person who had my job suggested that that’s not actually the case, that he wasn’t able to see any personality differences between breeds. It’s interesting, it has occasioned a lot of debate in the lab, because I was sort of like, “That’s shocking, and I think we have to question whether we’re approaching this the right way, because I’m convinced there are personality differences between breeds.” And my boss, Eleanor Karlsson, who’s the head of the lab, said, “Remember a hundred years ago we told ourselves there were differences between humans with different skin color, and we used to honestly believe that based on someone’s skin color we could make assumptions about their IQ. We now know that that was really wrong, at least genetically it was wrong. People of different skin color tended to get different levels of education, but that there were no real genetic differences in things like IQ or personality.” Fair enough, although I would respond that we have not been selectively breeding groups of populations of humans for particular personality traits, and we have been selectively breeding dogs for different personality traits. So I am in the middle of working on trying to dig into that data right now and see what I can see. One of the first approaches I took … Labradors are a great example for us because they’re the most popular dog in America, and so we have a lot of examples of them, and they’re also kind of behavioral freaks because they have really low risk of being fearful of things and tend very much to be friendly and outgoing. So they’re behavior outliers and there’s also a zillion of them. I look to see what questions in the questionnaire Labs scored really different from breeds of the same size on, and unsurprisingly one of the questions was, “Does your dog like bringing things to you?” Labs statistically, very significantly, were much more likely to want to bring things to you. Whether you want to call that a personality trait or not, I don’t know, but it was a good place to start. And again, very interesting, not all Labs wanted to bring things to you, but they were much more likely to want to than other dogs. So we’re starting to try to do an analysis of if all these mixed-breed dogs we have, if they have more Labrador in their ancestry, are they more likely to enjoy retrieving. So that’s one of the things that we’re working on right now. Melissa Breau: Digging into this stuff a little bit more, I think a lot of the time people will have their perfect puppy, and then something goes wrong. The dog becomes reactive or obsessive or … something. And then they decide, “OK, it must be genetic.” Is that true? Is that the case? Is there evidence to the contrary? Jessica Hekman: I would say that any behavior or ongoing behavior or personality trait is genetic. They’re all genetic. So the puppy being perfect was genetic and the puppy not being perfect was genetic, because it’s all about how genetics interact with environment. What I caution people against is imagining there’s this pre-programmed switch in the dog’s brain that’s programmed genetically that says, “Around 6 months this dog is going to become fearful, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.” I don’t think that’s true, at least not in our pet dogs. When we talk about some laboratory populations, where we’re selectively breeding animals, there’s a study with fearful Pointers where they were really, really heavily selecting for super-fearful dogs, and those dogs were never going to be normal. There’s the tame fox study that I used to work on, where they have for many, many decades been selectively breeding some foxes to be very tame and some to be very aggressive, and those, that’s all they breed for. They don’t breed for anything else. But in our pet dog populations, where we’re breeding for a lot of things, you just don’t see that genetics is going to force an animal to be a certain way in the sense of there being a switch that, “OK, the behavior appeared around 6 or 8 months and I don’t know what caused it and therefore it’s genetic.” I would say that genetics causes risk, and so genetically an animal may be at increased risk of developing fearfulness, for example, and that that risk is going to interact with the animal’s environment. So there may have been something … if you didn’t see the cause … if you see the cause, you sort of know what’s going on — he was just a puppy, and some dog came out of nowhere and bowled him over and bit him, and so of course he was traumatized by that and now he’s fearful of other dogs. You know what happened there. But sometimes … I think Dash is a fabulous example of I didn’t know what was going on with him. I was very lucky to get to figure out what was going on with him, but I started seeing this reactivity to other dogs. It was never terrible, but it was a real change from how he had been when he was younger and I wasn’t able to perceive that he was in pain and that was why it was. And it can be much more subtle than that. It can be this stuff that goes on in the environment that sets dogs up to develop in certain ways, can happen while the dog is still in the uterus, it can happen while the dog … super-important stuff happens during that first eight weeks when the dog is with the breeder, and again, stuff that we don’t necessarily have control over. It could be interactions with the other littermates. It could be this is the smallest dog in the litter, and the biggest dog in the litter bullied him and that’s how it turned out. Not the fault of the breeder, not the fault of the owner, but also not a genetic switch, but perhaps that dog was genetically at risk of becoming fearful and that experience made him or her more fearful. I also feel like we don’t fully understand always … it’s hard for us to grasp quite how complex this concept of environment is, and so you might say to yourself, “Just because two dogs are both in the same environment …” Dash and Jenny, they’re both living in our house, so it’s the same environment, but I would point out that their perception of what environment they’re in differs from each other. There’s been a lot of research in humans, when we look into how different siblings growing up in the same household basically perceive very different environments, certainly if they’re of different ages. One had been an only child for a while and also maybe was being raised by parents who didn’t make quite as much money early on, and then the parents started making more money and at the same time also had another child, and so the second child experiences a very different environment. They are not an only child, parents are much more affluent now because they’re older, maybe they’re being raised in a house instead of an apartment, so they have very different environments. Even twins, who you think, Well, they’re born at the same time, but they can have very different environments as well, based on just their interactions with each other where one starts being the bossy one, one starts being the more submissive one, they can have different friends in school and different interactions with that environment. And I think it’s really the same for our dogs, that we just don’t realize what tiny little differences there are that they have this whole world that they perceive that we don’t. So I think the answer is there isn’t a genetic switch to make a dog be one way or another. There’s only risk, and so it’s all this complex interaction that gets us there. I hope that answers that question. Melissa Breau: Yeah, absolutely, and you started to talk a little bit in there about how early life experiences can have a big impact on adult personality, right? Can you talk a little bit about some of the research or the science? I know you shared some interesting stuff when you did the webinar, and you’re planning on including some good stuff in your class. Jessica Hekman: I actually talk a lot about the socialization period in my class on The Biology of Building a Great Performance Dog, and that’s not yet on the schedule to come back, but I definitely will be offering it again. I am super-lucky right now to be working in the same laboratory as Dr. Kathryn Lord, who is also a post-doc working in Karlsson Lab, and she is the expert on dog socialization. She did her Ph.D. looking at differences in timing in dog versus wolf socialization, and she has amazing insight, so one of the reasons I love my job so much is I can just go hang out with my friend Kathryn and ask her questions about socialization and she will hold forth and I will learn so much. That has been amazing to add on to, in addition to all the reading that I had done on my own, because socialization is super-super-interesting. One of the things she really emphasizes is how important that first eight weeks is, how much is going on at that time, and how these puppies need to interact with their environment very early on and try to learn what’s normal and expected in their world. Puppies and other mammals are born without a strong fear response, just “whatever I’m interacting with for those early weeks.” Puppies start leaving the nest around 3 or 4 weeks. They don’t actually start being afraid of things until somewhere between 5 and 8 weeks, depending on the breed. And so they have somewhere between one and four weeks in which they’re interacting with the world without any fearfulness and just being set up to make good associations with everything that they see, the idea being that they would be carefully under their mother’s care at that time, and that then by 8 weeks they’re starting to venture out farther, and then it starts being really useful for them to be afraid of things, because at that point there might actually be predators and dangers that they need to be able to run away from. So that means that that really important time before they’re afraid of things, when they’re set up to make these good associations, is happening while they’re at the breeder’s. That’s before you get your hands on them, which is one of the reasons why, when I was looking at breeders, I looked into finding someone who had done a whole lot of work with the puppies, giving them a lot of enrichment and taking them offsite. One of the things that happened with Jenny was she had never left her farm until she was 10 months old. So with Dash, someone who takes the puppies out for exploratory field trips, and does early scent stimulation and all that kind of stuff, that’s really important to do early on, although I think we also sometimes discount how much interesting stuff is also going on with puppies in the uterus. There’s been a lot of work on that with laboratory rodents, and it turns out that puppies start having different experiences from their littermates even in the uterus, so they’re getting, based on where they are relative to the bitch’s blood supply, they can get fewer or more of her stress hormones, or fewer or more nutrients, just based on how the blood supply goes from one end of the uterus to the other, and if there’s a bunch of puppies, it may be a bit depleted of both stress hormones and nutrients by the time it gets to the puppies at the far end. Melissa Breau: Interesting. Jessica Hekman: Yeah, a lot of interesting stuff there that we don’t fully understand how that sets dogs up for issues later on, but we do believe that it does. Melissa Breau: That’s neat, and it’s very different from what some people necessarily think about. Jessica Hekman: We think about how important it is to socialize puppies when we bring them home, and for sure it is, I’m not discounting that. It is super-important. But there’s a lot that goes on before that first eight weeks that is also really important. Melissa Breau: I think we’ve gotten into this a little bit already, but thinking about our audience, if you have somebody who’s evaluating an adult dog and they’re not entirely sure where that dog came from, are there things about that dog’s personality when they meet them that they should consider “fixed”? How flexible is that when you’re talking about an adult dog? Jessica Hekman: Of course, because all dogs are individuals, it’s different for every dog, so it’s really hard to know, when you start working with a dog, how far they’re going to get. I love using Jenny as an example, as when I got her, I had no idea. I didn’t know. I had been doing rescue work before, and I had known through the rescue there have been some dogs who would come in super-shy, and they made these magical turnarounds in a month or so, when they realized they were in a new home that was safe. So she could have just turned around immediately. She didn’t. And then, after you’ve had the dog for a year, the question is, How far can she go? At the time, I figured, She’s never going to be a normal dog. I had pretty much given up on being able to take her for walks around the block, even. I thought, I’ll make sure to have houses with big yards, she can exercise in the yard at home, I will minimize trips to the vet and make home visits for her, and that was as far as I thought she was going to go for a long time. She has just continued to improve and that was surprising, and it was powerful to me to see how far some dogs can go. On the other hand … so I don’t consider personality completely fixed, but it’s also about how hard you want to work on it, and Jenny, obviously, it was really a welfare issue for her. She was terrified of the world, and it was really important to me to make her feel more comfortable in her own skin. I had taken her on knowing that was going to be a project and a learning experience for me that I really wanted to work on. In terms of sports, there’s this question of, if you get a dog who’s wrong for a particular sport, as it turns out — like I got Dash really wanting to do agility, and it turns out it may not be the best sport for him. Now could I get him to where he was competing successfully in agility and was really enjoying it? I probably could, if I put in the kind of time working just on that that I put in with Jenny. I’m sure that I could get him to where he relaxed more and figured it wasn’t going to hurt so much, and improve my own handling skills so that he’s more confident. I think I could get him much farther than I have so far. But is it worth it? It’s not a welfare issue for him. He doesn’t miss agility. He loves nosework, he loves parkour, so I’m focusing on that stuff. So there’s this tradeoff, definitely, of how much effort do you want to put into it, and are you doing it for yourself or are you doing it for the dog? Melissa Breau: Assuming that most of our audience is probably trying to determine whether or not a dog is suitable for sports, evaluating an adult dog most likely, from that angle, what things would you look at? What things would you consider? Jessica Hekman: For sure, it’s going to be easiest in an adult dog to evaluate how good their structure is, whether they are the right size and shape and conformation for the sport that you’re interested in, and whether they’re medically healthy. Assessing behavioral health is going to be another important thing. Depending on where they’re coming from, it can be harder to tell behavioral health. So if a dog has been in a shelter for months and is really shut down, it can be hard to tell if when you bring them into your house they’re going to open up. And then some dogs of course the opposite, that you have them in the shelter and they stress up, and so they become really jumpy, mouthy, crazy, and it’s hard to know if once you start working with them they’ll be able to have more self-control or not. It would be very rare to find a dog coming out of a situation where they’d been in a shelter for some period of time where they appeared behaviorally healthy, and it’s hard to know how easy it’s going to be to turn them around. Definitely looking to see if a dog has an interest in humans is going to be super-important, and that, for me, I think was Jenny’s saving grace was that she was really, really interested in humans and wanted to be around humans. Obviously Jenny is not the kind of dog that any of you I think would go and pick up as a sports prospect. I don’t think she’s ever going to be able to compete. I mean, she’s 10 now, so I’m not looking at her being able to ever be a competition dog, although I am actually hoping to put some parkour titles on her, because we can do that at home just on video. But for a dog who has their act a little more together than Jenny did, making sure that the dog is interested in people. If you go into the room and the dog is just not interested in you — they should want to check out the new environment first, that’s fine, but if after they’ve had a couple of minutes to sniff around, they should also want to come and check in with you. If a dog is just not interested in interacting with you, that is a major warning sign for me that that is going to be a difficult dog to work with. It’s also ideal obviously to try to assess right away whether the dog has some interest in toys and in food. But again, all of it can change when you bring the dog home. It’s too bad that there’s no way to a hundred percent guarantee that you’re going to get a dog that is really good at the sport that you’re interested in. It’s something that upsets everybody. We’d all like to have the guarantee that before we commit and tell the dog that they’re going to be our dog for the rest of their lives and we’re going to take care of them, and we become emotionally attached to them, we’d like to know that they’re going to be a good partner for the sport that we want as well, and there’s just not a way to a hundred percent tell about that, unfortunately, either route that you go, whether it be getting an adult dog that somebody else has had, or whether it be getting a puppy from a breeder. You can minimize your risks, but there’s always going to be some risks. Certainly when you get a dog as an adult you should try to take advantage of all the opportunities that you have to get information about how that dog was in its previous environment. So definitely if you’re getting a dog from a shelter, I would ask them, “Are there staff members who like this dog, who know this dog, who worked with this dog?” A lot of shelters will even have training classes that they do just for enrichment with their dogs, and they’ll be able to tell you some stuff about how the dog has responded to that. But even failing that, if you ask around, you’ll often find people who clean the kennels will say, “Oh, I love this dog, she really got to know me, she’s always so glad to see me.” That’s useful information. Or “She barks, and she seems really nervous of me and was unable to warm up to me, even though I tried to offer her treats.” That would be useful information too. If you go the rescue route and a dog has been in somebody’s home for a couple of weeks, that’s fabulous. That is just a goldmine of information. Hopefully you all know this already, but definitely sit down with those people and grill them for whatever they can tell you about that dog. Melissa Breau: Right. As trainers, I think we know that behavior modification works, but what does the science say about how that and genetics interact? You mentioned you’ve done so much work with Jenny, and I’d love to hear the other side of that, the research and that piece of it. Jessica Hekman: As I said, there’s just no guarantee and biology is really complicated. And it’s really early days yet, too, of figuring out how we’re going to be able to use genetics to predict anything. What we’re looking at right now is working with some groups who breed dogs for guide-dog work and assistance-dog work. They manage populations of dogs, and we’re trying to get to where an initial goal for us is to try to find some markers in the DNA that will help us say, “Dogs with this marker tend to do better on this trait,” whatever trait it is they’re interested in is. They’re interested in things like not afraid of thunderstorms, and not afraid of walking on unstable surfaces, and how easily stressed-out is the dog. We’d like to be able to give them some genetic tests for stuff like that, with the understanding that these genetic tests are useful for a population of dogs, and there’s always going to be this interaction with the environment, and so even if you have genetic tests like that, that’s to help you decide which dogs to breed and to try to make some selections among the litter, and these are the ones that are going to be better guide dogs and these maybe would be more useful going off and doing some kind of tracking work or something like that. But it’s still very much never going to be a black-and-white “Yes, he passed genetically, he’s going to be a guide dog.” We’re pretty much never, at least with the current state of the technology, not going to be able to say things like that. And it makes it even harder when you’re asking things about individuals. So those groups working with populations, what we’d really like as sports people would be to be able to say, “I don’t care about the whole population of dogs. I just want one for me that will do my favorite sport.” Genetics is always going to be really hard, so at this point we don’t even have any sort of tests that we can do. But even when we start getting to where we’re going to be able to do them, it will only give you a hint, it will only be a small piece of information to put into the rest of the picture and try to figure out what’s going on with that dog. Melissa Breau: To bring it back to what you said initially, it’s really about genetics may put a dog more or less at risk for particular behavioral traits, but there’s really quite a bit of flexibility within that. Jessica Hekman: Yeah, and remembering that genetics isn’t a switch. It’s all about risk, and whether a dog is more sensitive to their environment maybe and more at risk for developing some problem. But I think one thing I didn’t really say enough earlier in this conversation, though, is that if you are raising a dog from a puppy, and the dog does end up developing a shy personality, and you’ve done everything right, I do want to emphasize that it does not mean that it’s your fault. It doesn’t mean that the dog had some switch determining that it was going to be shy. It just means that there’s a lot going on that you may not be able to see, and it definitely means you shouldn’t give up and say, “This is just genetic, it can’t be changed.” It probably can be changed. You aren’t going to know going in where you can end up. I didn’t know going in with Jenny where I was going to end up, and she’s much less shy than I ever thought she’d get to be. I didn’t know with Dash going in where I was going to end up. I hoped I’d end up in agility. I ended up in nosework. In both cases I’m really happy with where I ended up. They are fabulous dogs and I love them so much. So working with your dog, I guess, and not giving up, but also being open to different paths is hopefully the answer. Melissa Breau: Okay, for those interested, where do they go to learn more? Jessica Hekman: I definitely mentioned DarwinsArk.org. That’s where my work project is. And I mentioned that we were working with guide dogs and assistance dogs currently, and we are hoping to start expanding into sports dogs soon. I’m definitely going to make so much noise about that on the alumni list when it happens, and I’ll probably call you up, Melissa, and see if we can do another podcast just talking about that. But it doesn’t hurt to get signed up now and be prepared for when that happens. I am also teaching a class pretty much about all of this stuff in December. It’s a class about the genetics of dog behavior, and with the help of some very creative people on the alumni list, I decided to call it The Melting Pot: Genes, Environment, and Personality. And so it’s very much about genetics, but it’s also about how it’s not just genetics, it’s also environment. That’s going to be in December. I think it should be on the schedule, and I’ll make sure that it definitely is by the time this podcast goes live. Also I am very active on both Twitter and Facebook, and I tweet and message on Facebook a lot of different stories about dog science. It’s some of the stuff that I’ve written, but more often I find stuff out there and share it. So people who want to know more about this stuff, following me both on Twitter and on Facebook is a good way to do it. Twitter is @dogzombieblog and Facebook is Facebook.com/dogzombieblog, or in either case if you just search for Jessica Hekman or go to dogzombie.com, in all those cases you’ll get links to those things. Melissa Breau: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast Jessica. This was great. Jessica Hekman: It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week, this time with Linda Case to talk about dog nutrition. 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.  

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: 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.

We recently did an episode all about dogs. But after that came out, Nash, from Fort Dodge, IA, sent us a question wondering if dogs ever get strep throat. So we reached back out to Jessica Hekman to get an answer!

Why do dogs have whiskers? Why are dogs' eyesight black and white? Why do dogs have so many babies? Why do dogs have tails and we don't? Why are dogs thumbs so high on their paw? Why don't dogs sweat? Why do dogs roll in the grass? Why aren't dogs and cats friends? Veterinarian and dog scientist Jessica Hekman has answers.