Podcast appearances and mentions of Karen Pryor

Eine Stunde nützliche Fun Facts über Katzen! Sie haben sich selbst domestiziert. Sie unterscheiden sich genetisch kaum von der Wildkatze. Sie miauen nur mit Menschen – weil sie merken, dass das bei uns zieht. Katzentrainerin und Creatorin Anika Moritz erklärt ihre Lieblingstiere.Zur Person:

Last week Dominique and I were talking about the Clicker Expo. We shared our impressions of the Expo and then I talked about my presentation on the participating horse. This week we are continuing to explore what changes in the relationship that established when active participation is encouraged. Active participation very much means that it is safe for our animals to say “no”. We begin with a discussion of what a “no” really represents. We consider what it means for our animals to have a lifestyle of choice - an expression that comes from Dr. Susan Friedman. We discuss the use of multiple marker signals, treaties clicks, keep going signals, and treating without clicking. And we celebrate the wonderful clicker expo training community that is part of Karen Pryor's legacy.

Visit us at shapedbydog.com    Recently, dog training advocate Zak George asked me about crossover dog trainers, and framed the question in such a different way that it inspired replying with a podcast episode. When I crossed over from balanced training to reinforcement based training in 1996, many people asked me why and told me it would not work. I'm sharing my start in dog training, pivotal moments, people and dogs that led me to change my approach, what I learned about myself along the way, and the reasons I never went back.    In this episode, you'll hear:   • About my transition to becoming a crossover dog trainer. • The question from Zak George that inspired this episode. • When I decided to leave balanced training behind. • What I learned from my terrier puppy, Shelby. • The book that changed my thinking - Don't Shoot the Dog! by Karen Pryor. • When I first saw true autonomy in dog training and how choice transformed my approach. • About my "Shaping Badly" era. • How learning from Bob and Marian Bailey helped me refine my training with clarity and intention. • The shift to shaping with success. • Why judgment holds trainers back. • That change is possible. • Reasons trainers resist crossing over to a positive reinforcement approach. • A special offer for podcast listeners who want to be coached by me and my team.   Special Discounts to Join or Gift our Online Programs Check out our 300TH Episode & 5th Anniversary Celebration Page - https://dogsthat.com/celebration-central/   Resources:   1. Zak George - https://www.youtube.com/@zakgeorge 2. Podcast Episode 146: Balanced Dog Training: Does It Really Exist? - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/146/ 3. Book: Don't Shoot The Dog! By Karen Pryor - https://shop.clickertraining.com/en-ca/products/dont-shoot-the-dog-karen-pryor?srsltid=AfmBOoqkL4DLKYAPB1xQMDtJGYDwa1AR0r-AdPOhXo5LFMYe2REoECS7&variant=33778264965258 4. Podcast Episode 34: Time Outs for Dogs: Does Your Dog Need One? - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/34/ 5. Bob and Marian Bailey: Behavior by Bailey - http://www.behavior1.com/ 6. Podcast Episode 245: Make Dog Training Easy! Quick Guide To Antecedent Arrangements - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/245/ 7. Podcast Episode 71: Pro Dog Trainer's Secret to Help Your Naughty Dog - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/71/ 8. Podcast Episode 295: Fear Of Criticism? Why Facing The Camera Is The First Step To Becoming A Better Dog Trainer - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/295/ 9. The American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior - https://avsab.org/ 10. The International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants - https://iaabc.org/ 11. Podcast Episode 297: Why In 2025 We Still Have Dog Trainers Who Believe “Reinforcement Dog Training Doesn't Work” - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/297/ 12. Podcast Episode 290: The Red Flag Of Dominance Based Training: Why It's Hurting Your Dog And What To Do Instead - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/290/ 13. DogsThat YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@DogsThat 14. DogsThat YouTube Playlists - https://www.youtube.com/@DogsThat/playlists 15. Watch this Episode of Shaped by Dog on YouTube - https://youtu.be/rajGh9u8gkw

In this first episode of a multipart series, Verena and Jesse tackle the thorny and complicated topic of navigating dog training industry as a dog guardian. The first step to hiring the right professional is understanding how dogs learn... and things get a bit nerdy. Go down the rabbit hole with us... and learn to understand your dog - and yourself - a bit better. Our shoutout goes to Reaching the Animal Mind and Don't Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor. We would appreciate your support for the Reward Your Dog Podcast by liking, rating, reviewing, and sharing. It helps us so much! You can also:Join the RYDP Patreon (no paywalls unless you *want* to subscribe)Buy us a coffeeMore info on Reward Your Dog Training can be found here:WebsiteBlue SkyFacebookInstagram

This is part three of a conversation Dominique and I had at the end of January 2025. Part 1 was a tribute to Karen Pryor. Part 2 was a celebration of Robin's 30th birthday. I don't know his exact birthday so I am celebrating all year long. For me, 30 seems like such an important milestone for a horse to reach. It's like a person reaching their 90th birthday - it's quite an accomplishment, especially if they are still in good health. Robin has played an important role in the development of equine clicker training. In the previous episode I shared some of the many ways in which he showed us what is possible. Thirty years is a long time. When your horses reach their senior years that raises the question of what comes next. That's what we're going to talk about in this episode. Even if you are the one in your twenties and you've just gotten a young horse to start out with, this is something to think about. Horses live a long time. The full arc of their years not only takes us through many changes in our own lives, they help to shape those changes.

Last week we celebrated the life of Karen Pryor. My horses have lived a much better life because of Karen's work. That includes my young horse, Robin. I suppose I should stop referring to him as my young horse because this year he has reached an important milestone. Robin is thirty years old. That's like a person reaching their 90th birthday. It's an achievement that needs to be celebrated which is what I am doing in this episode. I don't know Robin's actual birthday so I will be celebrating his 30th Birthday all year long. Robin has had an enormous impact on equine clicker training. He showed us what is possible. So in this episode I am going to share Robin stories. We'll be talking about trick training, the “pose”, default behaviors and of course, balance, balance and more balance.

Episode 312 Remembering Karen Pryor At the end of January 2025 Dominique and I got together for an afternoon's conversation. This is part 1 of that conversation. I primarily wanted to talk about Karen Pryor. Karen died on January 5 2025. This episode celebrates her life.

HAPPY 250TH EPISODE, TEC TALK! To celebrate this fun landmark, Ari and Chris are joined by four amazing people who've had a huge impact on us and our field: Ken Ramirez (Karen Pryor Clicker Training), Steve Martin (Natural Encounters, Inc.), Susan Friedman (Behavior Works), and Tim Sullivan (Brookfield Zoo Chicago)! Our guests talk about how they all met each other (spoiler alert: everyone was intimidated by everyone), reflect on the impact on their lives of the late Karen Pryor, share some of their current biggest peeves/vendettas/crusades, reveal things they are working on about themselves, and give us suggestions for topics and guests for future episodes. It's an incredible talk with incredible people, and our way of saying thank you to our listeners for supporting the show - here's to the next 250! If you have a shout-out you'd like us to share, a question or a topic you'd like us to discuss, or a suggestion for a guest we should have on the show, let us know at podcast@naturalencounters.com! References from the episode: A Celebration of Life: Karen Pryor The Modern Principles of Shaping by Karen Pryor ⁠Modern Animal Care: A Skinnerian Perspective on Choice and Control⁠ by Christy Alligood and Susan Friedman

The animal and behavior training world lost a true revolutionary recently with the passing of Karen Pryor. Prolific writer, scientist, trainer, lecturer, and business woman with an entertainer's spirit, she changed the exotic and domestic animal training world forever with her ever popular book, Don't Shoot the Dog. She followed up her writing successes with the launch of Clicker Training and legions of trainers, students and fans, workshops, Karen Pryor Academy, and much much more by advancing the use of those mechanical behavioral markers and reward-based operant conditioning across the globe.  Her longtime friend and colleague, Terry Ryan of Legacy Canine, shares her earliest memories of meeting, traveling, learning from, and working with Karen for decades. Animal Care Software 

Karen Pryor was a pioneer in modern positive reinforcement animal training practices. She was a mentor to thousands of trainers, whether they met her in person or just knew of her from her dozens of books, courses, and programs. If you know clicker training, you have Karen to thank. Karen passed away at the age of 92 on January 4, 2025. She will be greatly missed but her legacy will live on with every person who takes on the mantle of caring for animals. I'm honoring Karen today with a discussion of her book On Behavior, a collection of essays and articles from her decades of teaching others the way of positive reinforcement training. Listen to related Zoo-notables: Don't Shoot the Dog and Lads Before the Wind Want a copy of Karen's books? Check out Karen Pryor Academy. Connect with other animal trainers at ClickerExpo (January 24-25 online)

Ari and Chris are back together to talk about everyone's favorite topic in the professional animal care world: dealing with the grief following the loss of an animal in your care. We share some great advice from others, some old attitudes that we think aren't helpful , and some excellent resources to help all of us deal with the worst part of our jobs. Also, stick around for the end, where we share some quick thoughts about the loss of a foundational leader in the animal training field, Karen Pryor, who passed away on January 4, 2025. If you have a shout-out you'd like us to share, a question or a topic you'd like us to discuss, or a suggestion for a guest we should have on the show, let us know at podcast@naturalencounters.com! ---------------------------------------- We're excited to announce the return of our sponsor, Magic Mind! To learn more about how Magic Mind can help you build your "Mental Wealth" and take advantage of a special 45% savings offer, visit https://www.magicmind.com/thetecjan - thanks Magic Mind!

This is Part 1 of our conversation with Lucy Butler. With her fiancé Lucy founded the River Haven Sanctuary in Rhode Island. The sanctuary is home to about fifty animals, pigs, geese, ducks, chickens, goats, donkeys, and three horses. The Sanctuary gives forever homes to animals that were in crisis. Lucy and her fiancé Jeff have plans for developing the sanctuary into an educational center. In Part 1 Lucy introduces us to the Sanctuary's three horses, Pearl, River, and Nieve. Initially, clicker training was used to help the horses settle and to fill in the huge gaps in their basic education. It's been a healing process for them physically as well as emotionally. This sets the stage for the main purpose of our conversation - which is to talk about lateral work. Lucy is in the early stages of introducing her horses to lateral work. The discoveries she's making and the changes she's seeing in her horses are well worth sharing. For me central to all performance work is the horse's balance. The training helps the horse find his optimal balance and use of his body. Whatever your performance goals are for your horse, a central, fundamental focus on balance will help you get there. And it will get you there without compromising your horse. Balance matters for the lifetime of your horse. Lucy has been an active participant in my on-line clinics so I've been watching her horses' training develop over time. All three have reached the point where lateral work is beginning to pop out. In the last coaching session Lucy talked about the exciting changes she's seeing in her horses. The changes in all three horses have been so remarkable, we had to share. Normally when someone is invited to talk about lateral work, it is because they are an expert in this type of training. In Lucy's case it is because this work is so new to her that I wanted her to join us. The changes she's seeing in her horses are very much worth sharing. I always add something at the end of each episode. This week I have included a tribute to Karen Pryor who died on January 4, 2025 at the age of 92. Do please join me in honoring her work.

Pet Grocer is proud to support and shine a spotlight on the incredible work our local rescues do for our community. This month we have the pleasure of featuring podcast interviews with three local rescues an we are excited to help them get their message out.Outrun RescueOutrun, co-founded by Emily Day in 2020, specializes in rehabilitating rescue dogs that face behavioural challenges, particularly those with aggression and anxiety issues. Emily's journey into dog training began after rescuing an aggressive dog named Zip, which inspired her to pursue formal education in applied animal behaviour at the University of Washington. With her extensive experience in the veterinary field and certifications like Karen Pryor and Fear Free, Emily is committed to helping overlooked dogs in shelters get the behavioural support they need to increase their chances of adoption.Location: Lisle, OntarioWebsite: outrunrescue.comTop three things to know about Outrun:Specializes in Behavioural Training: Outrun focuses on helping rescue dogs with behavioural issues, like aggression and anxiety, making them more adoptable through targeted training.Founded by Experienced Trainers: Co-founded by Emily, a certified animal behaviourist, the organization is backed by her extensive experience and certifications in dog training.Volunteer-Driven Effort: Outrun operates with two volunteer trainers, offering positive reinforcement-based training to rescue dogs, aiming to fill a gap often overlooked by shelters.Rescue Needs:More volunteer trainersDonations - Funding for training materials and resourcesSupport for rescue dog behavioural training programsIncreased awareness and collaboration with local sheltersFollow Pet Grocer on FacebookFollow Pet Grocer on InstagramVisit our Website **The content in this podcast is not meant to replace veterinary advice. Always consult your holistic veterinarian prior to using any recommended items or supplements.**

For the 50th episode of the podcast, special guest Ken Ramirez, Karen Pryor Clicker Training breaks down what it means to provide animals with choice and... control. Ken discuss why these terms have often been connected and how to ensure that we are providing both for animals. Ken also speaks to the importance of training in a modern animal setting and how it can be used to help animals get to the "yes" behavior in order to provide control. This episode is filled with practical examples that can provide clarity and help to focus these topics into welfare discussions. Stay tuned in for Ken's "Training Tale" about how he and a rescued dog accidentally ruined a show at the Shedd Aquarium. For questions or suggestions about the podcast email abc@theabma.org and to reach Ken you can follow him on Instagram at ken_ramirez_kptc Let's talk some training and banter about behavior! 3:55 Introduction to Ken Rameriz  12:05 Introduction to choice and... control  13:45 Definition and practical application of Choice  17:10 Definition and practical application of Control  29:15 Giving animals control while still getting to the yes  37:00 Why are these two terms connected  48:21 Practical example of control  52:10 Can an animal have control but not choice?  59:10 How choice and ... control fit into welfare and future advancements  1:05:40 Advice on how to start using training and behavior to give animals choice and... control  1:08:10 "Training Tales" 

This episode Kelli Meyers, ZooTampa at Lowry Park, discusses The 10 Modern Principles of Shaping as created by Karen Pryor and how they have evolved from "The 10 Laws of Shaping". Kelli breaks down each principle and gives advice on how to best implement and think about each of the principles. The 10 principles can be found below in the timestamps for this episode. Stay tuned in for Kelli's "Training Tale" about how she had to get really creative with her body positioning (hint: it included floating in the middle of the habitat) to help teach a sea lion a "clapping" behavior. For questions or suggestions about the podcast email abc@theabma.org and to reach Kelli you can email kelligolota@gmail.com Let's talk some training and banter about behavior! 1:40 Introduction to Kelli Meyers  4:30 Introduction to the 10 modern principles of shaping  6:50 Principle 1: Be prepared before you start  10:35 Principle 2: Ensure success at each step  12:25 Principle 3: Train one criterion at a time 14:10 Principle 4: Relax criteria when something changes 15:40 Principle 5: If one door close, find another  18:55 Principle 6: Keep training sessions continuous  20:20 Principle 7: Go back to “kindergarten” if necessary, take a step back and then move forward 21:45 Principle 8: Keep your attention on your learner  25:50 Principle 9: Stay ahead of your learner  26:45 Principle 10: Quit while you're ahead  33:20 “Training Tales”

What if “bad behaviours” are actually your dog communicating they don't feel safe? If you have experienced challenges with your dog's behaviour, and traditional operant approaches haven't really helped, then this conversation is for you! It's also for you if you're interested in understanding your dog's behaviour from a more emotional and trauma-informed perspective. AND, it's also for you if you want to learn how to be a better advocate for your dog.  I mean, basically, anyone who likes dogs, works with dogs, or lives with dogs needs to listen to what Laura has to say, because when more people are able to have compassion for dogs' trauma and their own traumas, I am convinced the world will become a more loving place. Dr Laura Donaldson is a former university professor-turned certified dog trainer, certified dog behaviour consultant, and Karen Pryor certified training partner whose work really focuses on, in my opinion, creating a paradigm shift around how we frame and approach “undesirable” behaviours in our dogs like reactivity and aggression. Laura has dedicated herself to improving the wellbeing of dogs by getting rid of the notion of the “well-behaved” dog, and instead, focusing on how to support dogs in experiencing deep safety, and emotional resilience, so that they can navigate anything they encounter in the world. In this conversation, Laura and I talk about how asking our dogs the question “what do i need to learn from you to help you feel safe in this context?” can be truly be life-changing for your dog, and for you. We talk about how understanding the impact of trauma on our dogs, and the links between trauma and aggression, can help us to understand and have compassion for our own traumas. We also discuss some techniques that you can use with your own dog to help them release and ground the charge they feel in their bodies from trauma, including Laura's grounding work, and other processes like Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) and energy work. Laura is launching a new training this January called Transforming Puppies, which she talks a bit about in this conversation you're about to hear. You can find out more about this training, and all of Laura's other trainings on her course platform, which you can find below. For more information about Dr Laura Donaldson and her work, visit her website: https://fourpawsfourdirections.com/ You can find out more and register for her webinars on her course platform: https://laura-s-school-1f3f.thinkific.com/collections This episode is supported by Aspirationery, which, in full transparency, is another project of mine where we create books, notebooks, and stationery to help you become all you aspire to be! If you are looking for a safe space to explore shadow work and your own traumas, our moon magic and shadow work journals and workbooks might be a useful support for you. You can take a peek at them on our Aspirationery instagram account. TIMESTAMPS 00:22 Intro 05:50 Prioritizing your dog's emotional needs through grounding 08:15 The body keeps the score - trauma is stored in the body 11:15 Understanding and redefining “bad” behaviors 19:20 The link between trauma and aggressive behavior in dogs 21:05 Redefining reactivity in dogs: why this label doesn't work 31:00  Building emotional resilience in your dog 33:35 How Laura embarked on this journey 38:38 Why trying to stop the behavior is not a helpful approach 45:25 Practical tips you can do to help your dog with trauma, including EFT and the Triple Heater meridian 50:44 Teaching your dog non-violent social processing as a strategy  56:33 A client example: a dog in Manhattan who was too scared to go outside 1:03:24 Transforming puppies and puppy class: Changing the expectation of dogs being seen and not heard 1:12:05 How Laura's experiences with dogs have helped her address her own trauma

Are you embracing technology or are you frustrated by the rapid changes in the industry and pet care? Whether we like it or not, more and more clients are brining high tech devices into their homes to care for their pets. From smart feeders, to more advanced litter robots, our roll as pet care providers is becoming a lot of tech support. Beth Pasek, owner of Finicky Cat Sitting and Behavior, joins the show to share how to make technology part of your business, and how we still provide immense value to clients, regardless of the devices they bring in. She shares how to use technology to deepen the relationships we have with our clients and to provide even higher quality care to their pets. Main topics Rapid changes Embracing technology Deepening relationships Fear Free visits and technology Main takeaway: Use technology as a tool to deepen your personal relationships with your clients. About our guest: Beth Pasek is the owner of Finicky Cat Sitting and Behavior, LLC in Ohio, USA. In 2020, the organization celebrated 10 years in the pet care industry as a multiyear award-winning pet sitting and animal behavior company for both cats and dogs. She has worked with several rescues as a volunteer cat behavior consultant for special needs diabetic cats in transition and provided a foster home for kittens and critical care cats. She is a supporting member of both the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants-Cat Division and the International Association of Animal Hospice and Palliative Care. Her ongoing course work includes certification through Karen Pryor's Train Your Cat and she is author of "Understanding Cat Behavior, A Comprehensive Guide to Compassionate Training and Communication" published by Rockbridge Press. Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books A Million. Links: Previously on: https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/132 beth@finicky.us https://amzn.to/46mxOgv https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrb1J129zUXnioxAOKDEPkA https://finicky.us/blog/f/is-artificial-intelligenceai-right-for-my-cat https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100095633257186 https://finicky.us Buy PSC Merch Give us a call! (636) 364-8260  Follow us on: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter Email us at: feedback@petsitterconfessional.com Full show notes and transcript   Sponsored by: ❤️ Our AMAZING Patreon Supporters   Time to Pet Visit: https://timetopet.com/confessional Code: 50% off first 3 months   Peaceful Pet Music - Calm Music for Pets

Training Without Conflict® Podcast Episode Twenty-Eight: Steve WhiteThe latest TWC podcast features guest Steve White.Steve is a seasoned expert in K9 units from the state of Washington, accredited as a Master Trainer in 1993.He is a key figure at major Police K9 conferences.In addition to his extensive career in police K9 units, Steve is also a prominent figure in the force-free training community. Notably, he was a founding instructor at Karen Pryor's ClickerExpo, frequently presenting at various “Positive Only” events.Our conversation dives deep into various training methodologies, industry trends, and much more. This conversation is close to 4 hours, we had a lot to talk about and I hope you find it interesting too.Ivan Balabanov is a 2-time World Champion dog trainer, Ot Vitosha Malinois breeder, trainer of Premier Protection Dogs and founder of the revolutionary Training Without Conflict® dog training system.For more information about Ivan Balabanov and information on how to train your dog using the Training Without Conflict® system, check out: https://trainingwithoutconflict.comhttps://malinois.comhttps://premierprotectiondogs.com

Ari and Chris are back in their office to finish off their incredibly-surface-level review of The Ten Laws of Shaping from Karen Pryor's Don't Shoot the Dog! In our wrap-up episode for this topic we realize that we don't know who first "shot the dog," we don't remember when we talked about "ending on a good note" (but we're pretty sure we did), and we don't know where our old copies of the book are and exactly how they differ from the one we're using now. Hey, we're being vulnerable, ok?!!? Have an idea, topic, or question you'd like us to discuss on the show? Let us know at podcast@naturalencounters.com!

Chris and Ari return to Karen Pryor's Don't Shoot the Dog! to discuss another batch of guidelines from her "Ten Laws of Shaping"! Solid advice all around, with the added spice of some thoughts on where and when folks might want to consider veering away from them when it's in the best interest of the animal, the session, or the project.  For this second go around, we discuss Laws 4-7:  When introducing a new criterion, temporarily relax the old ones.  Stay ahead of your subject: Plan your shaping program completely so that if the subject makes sudden progress you are aware of what to reinforce next.  Don't change trainers midstream; you can have several trainers per trainee but stick to one shaper per behavior.  If one shaping procedure is not eliciting progress, find another; there are as many ways to get behavior as there are trainers to think them up.  Want to share your thoughts about the Ten Laws of Shaping, or anything else about training, animals, or behavior? Let us know at podcast@naturalencounters.com!  

If you've heard of clicker training but you're not quite sure what it is, this episode is for you. “Clicker training” has become shorthand for positive reinforcement training, and marine mammal behaviorist Karen Pryor is credited with bringing this incredibly effective technique to the dog training world. Here, we talk about Pryor's classic book “Don't Shoot The Dog,” and cover why, how and when to use a clicker.

Vandaag heb ik het met ⁠Jessica Brouwers⁠ wéér over gras! Trainen en wandelen gaan vaak prima totdat het gras begint te groeien. Jouw paard graast echter niet alleen omdat hij honger heeft. In deze aflevering bespreken we de voorbereiding op én de vijf fases van grastraining. In de podcast benoemen we het boek 'Don't Shoot the Dog' van Karen Pryor, waarin de zogeheten Shaping Laws van clickertraining worden beschreven. ⁠Lees meer over de uitgebreide cursus 'Trainen met Keuzevrijheid'.⁠ GRASTRAINING 2024: Doe mee als ⁠praktijkdeelnemer⁠ of als ⁠toeschouwer⁠ !! Heb jij ideeën of vragen voor Stokpaardje? Stuur een e-mail naar stokpaardjedepodcast@gmail.com of vind mij op ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ of ⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠.  Wil je 1 op 1 begeleiding in force free paardentraining en grastraining? Ga dan snel naar ⁠⁠JannekeKoekhoven.nl⁠⁠; ik kijk heel graag met je mee. Muziek: Dar Golan

I love this book! Have a listen and go get the book right away on Amazon! https://amzn.to/3Je9cxm Websites to find a qualified trainer near you: APDT CCPDT IAABC

In this podcast I'll be talking about my thoughts, views and insights of popular books on dog training, dog behavior & even dog nutrition. Check back soon for the first episode where I'll be talking about the book 'Don't Shoot the Dog' by Karen Pryor.

Ari and Chris reconvene in their office to discuss Don't Shoot the Dog's Ten Laws of Shaping! Having not read the book in years, we were interested to look at Karen Pryor's ten suggestions for successful shaping through the filter of our current training practices and understanding of the science of behavior change. Because we can talk forever about this stuff we only get through the first 3, so this is the first episode in a new TEC Talk mini-series - how fun is that? (Also, we're making it clear right now that we own "DRSA" as a training term since we coined it in this episode. You can't have it. So there.) This time we share our thoughts on the following: Raise criteria in increments small enough so that the subject always has a realistic chance for reinforcement. Train one thing at a time; don't try to shape for two criteria simultaneously. Always put the current level of response onto a variable schedule of reinforcement before adding or raisining criteria.  Have thoughts to share about the Ten Laws of Shaping, or anything else you'd like to share? Please do so by emailing us at podcast@naturalencounters.com!

Today's Zoo-notable was a no-brainer as it is Karen Pryor's birthday. It's also appropriate for Mother's Day because I consider Karen the Mother of positive reinforcement training. Don't Shoot the Dog is considered the animal trainer's bible. But it isn't just for training animals, it's about teaching and learning for everyone! There's so much to share, and I can't wait to discuss it with you! Want a copy of Don't Shoot the Dog for yourself (or know someone who needs a copy)? Grab a copy from Karen Pryor Clicker Training, and check out some of the training courses offered at Karen Pryor Academy (I highly recommend courses held at The Ranch!) Related Zoo-notables: Lads Before the Wind by Karen Pryor The Eye of the Trainer by Ken Ramirez Atomic Habits by James Clear- Part One and Part Two As always, stay connected with ZooFit online, so you can eat clean, live green, and TRAIN POSITIVE everyday!

Clicker training is based on learning theory, and therefore has a scientific background behind it's use. However, there are several studies that have looked specifically at clicker training in dogs, including how it affects the speed of learning, impulsivity, and more, with interesting results. Learn about the science behind clicker training in dogs in this episode. Check out the associated blog post for the scientific references at The Behaviory Blog.  If you're interested in learning more about the theory behind clicker training and how to use it with dogs, check out Karen Pryor's book 'Don't Shoot the Dog'. Want to chat behavior and training science, as well as learn more? Follow Dr. Janet Cutler on Instagram @janetcutler.phd.

Linda has always felt a strong connection with animals. Her early interest in behavior studies quickly paired with her love of animals to build a career in animal training that has spanned more than 40-years and is still going strong. Linda was in the right place at the right time to attend behavior & training related classes through the Life Learn Program at the Ontario Veterinary Collage, University of Guelph, Canada. She considers herself very fortunate to have attended many in person clinics with Karen Pryor as she was presenting, with Gary Wilks,  in the late 1980's. Over her long career Linda has attended countless clinics, webinars, and workshops. She reads extensively and is always seeking opportunities for further education, knowledge, and growth.  Linda's motto in life is “Only Connect” and continually seeks deeper understanding and abilities in this goal with both people and animals.  When not working Linda attends Master Classes on a diverse range of subjects spanning from rocket science to resilience, to storytelling. She studies music, unrealistically hoping to be a great jazz musician one day, she spends quality time with her dogs, and takes every opportunity to spend time in the wilderness hiking and kayaking. For links check here >>> https://atamember.com/2023/03/02/linda-brodzik/   

Today's Topic: Have you just learned (or are starting to suspect) that your puppy may be going deaf or blind?  Or is your adult dog showing signs that their hearing or sight is becoming more and more impaired?  These are, by nature, difficult waters to navigate, and finding reputable resources to help guide you and your puppy or dog during this time may prove difficult or frustrating, even if you're absolutely dedicated to giving your blind/deaf puppy or dog the best life possible.  That's why we've invited certified professional dog trainer (CPDT-KA), Karen Pryor clicker training partner, and the founder of Down To Earth Dog Lady, LLC., a dog training company specializing in blind, deaf & disabled dogs, Erin Marion, to the pod, to discuss whether deaf and blind dogs can truly live a "normal" life, her thoughts on vibration collars, whether blind dogs have super hearing (or deaf dogs have super sight), what a "sensory garden" is, and so much more!`Guest Bio: Erin Marion is a certified professional dog trainer (CPDT-KA), a Karen Pryor clicker training partner, a Training Partner for the All4Paws Rescue in Malvern, PA & Speak! Rescue and Sanctuary in St. Louis, MO., and the founder of Down To Earth Dog Lady, LLC in Chester Spring, PA. After fostering multiple foster dogs and adopting her own blind and deaf dogs, she is extremely passionate about helping special needs pets and their guardians connect using force-free training methods.Connect With Erin Marion: WebsiteFacebookInstagramTik Tok

Karen Pryor and Fear Free Certified Dog Trainer Corinne Gearhart was a recent guest expert in The Dog Gone Calm Club. She's known as The Doodle Pro, specializing in training, grooming and boarding Doodles. But, her training tips apply to all dogs. In this episode, she educates listeners on recognizing nervous barking and shares force-free ways of managing barking  and helping dogs diminish their fears.  Listen to club members'  barking  challenges  with their dogs at home and Corinne's brilliant and simple answers. More about Corinne here. DOG GONE CALM, Vol. 1 FULL ALBUM ON ALL STREAMING CHANNELS:Click to listen on your favorite streaming appJOIN THE DOG  GONE CALM CLUB WAITLIST (We're opening next week!)MembershipTHEME MUSIC ON THIS EPISODE:Vivaldi Winter Largo from Four Seasons arranged for Left Hand by Lisa Spector HOW TO LEAVE A REVIEW:Gina shows you here YOUR TREAT (PDF with Tips):Using Music to Calm Your Dog's AnxietyCONNECT:Instagram: @My_Zen_Pet   @LisaSpectorPianoFacebook:       My Zen Pet      LisaSpectorPianistPodcast Website: MyZenPet.com/podcastLisa Spector's Website: LisaSpector.comClubhouse: @lisaspectorYouTube: LisaSpector

Episode #73 with Steve White Over 40 years of mostly K9-centered law enforcement career, Steve White is the only person to have served as a handler, trainer, and supervisor for the Seattle Police Canine Unit. Accredited as a Master Trainer in 1993 by the Washington State Police Canine Association, Steve is also a past executive board member of that body. He served as vice president of the Certification Council for Professional Dog Trainers, and is a consultant and instructor for the K9 Academy for Law Enforcement. Steve has instructed at seminars in the U.S., Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom. He has served as a primary instructor for Karen Pryor's ClickerExpo and the Karen Pryor Academy for Animal Training and Behavior. His articles have appeared in police K-9 and dog training publications in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Finland, and Japan. He specializes in teaching behavior modification, tracking, and scent work through the use of positive reinforcement-based operant conditioning. He provides consultation and training to K-9 units on administrative and legal issues, and has been recognized as an expert witness by Washington and federal courts in Police K-9 and dog behavior matters. Steve now has his business www.proactivek9.com email Steve@proactivek9.com CDTA URBAN TRACKING SEMINAR WITH STEVE WHITE, PROACTIVE K9 OCTOBER 8 & 9, 2022 Show Sponsors: Sci K9 Home of the TADD and NOTA http://www.scik9.com Getxent: Training absorbent tubes for all your odor needs http://www.getxent.com Precision Explosives: Get all your safe and REAL training odors (no permits needed) http://www.pre-exp.com Sheepdog Guardian: All your K9 Legal information and updates. http://www.sheepdogguardian.com Ford K9: All your Detection Dog learning needs at one spot. http://www.fordk9.com 

Join Kassie and me for this episode where we chat with Erin Marion from Down to Earth Dog Lady about blind, deaf and blind/deaf dogs. This conversation is full of some great points on what its like caring for, living with and training disabled dog and, of course, we bust some myths along the way too! Erin says "I have over eleven years of experience working with dogs. I am a certified professional dog trainer (CPDT-KA), and a Karen Pryor clicker training partner. I absolutely love bringing dogs and their guardians together using the power of positive reinforcement-based training. I love all dogs and all aspects of working with dogs. I have worked in many dog-related areas - large vet hospitals, daycare facilities, feed stores, dog training academies and rescues. Throughout the last 10 years, I have gained a wide range of knowledge about dog behavior, health, emotional care, training, and nutrition. In 2018 I fostered my first deaf and blind dog. After learning how to care for a dog with special needs, I knew that it was what I wanted to truly wanted to focus my career on. I currently have fostered multiple deaf and/or blind dogs and have one of my own (Darla). I also have a fully blind rough coat collie." You can find Erin at https://www.instagram.com/downtoearthdoglady To find out more about working with me visit www.rplusdogs.com Remember to subscribe, share and leave a review if you like what you hear! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/doglogical/message

Jesse Sternberg is a man who unexpectedly began experiencing pain that eventually arose to the level of being completely debilitating for him. Don't stop thinking that this is just another story about suffering and possibly overcoming a problem. You will never guess how Jesse worked through his pain and how it led to a fascinating career as a dog trainer.   Jesse will provide us with some interesting insights about being a leader through his dog training business. He also will show how what he learned helped him in his personal life as well and how the leadership principles he now teaches can assist you as well.     About the Guest: Jesse Sternberg is an author, meditation instructor, and dog trainer. He has been working with animals for more than 30 years.  He lives in Toronto with his two kids and his pup, Jimmy.     About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is an Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe to your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes UM Intro/Outro  00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i  capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.     Michael Hingson  01:16  Hi, and welcome to unstoppable mindset. Glad you're here with us wherever you happen to be. If you've listened to a number of these episodes, and have learned my story, you know that I've been working with Guide Dogs for quite a number of years, actually, it will be 58 years in July. And one of the things that I have learned about working with guide dogs is that every time I go to get a new one, what I'm truly learning is only in part, how to work with that dog, what I'm learning are new and advanced and more innovative dog training techniques. And, of course, what that really means is human training techniques, which we're going to get to Jesse Sternberg is our guest today. And he's very much involved in doing a lot of work with dog training, meditation, mindfulness, and you're gonna see how all that comes together, as well as learning his unstoppable story. So Jessie, welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Jesse Sternberg  01:20 Thank you, Michael, what a great introduction.   Michael Hingson  01:47 Wow, there's not a great introduction. It just popped out. Well, so tell me a little about you about your life and in what you where you came from, and all that sort of stuff.   Jesse Sternberg  02:38 Oh, man, okay, let's get the can of worms out of the way. I had a lot of personal things that I've had to work through, just like everybody. But I was fortunate to take lessons from all of them, and not let any of the situations knock me down. for about 10 years, I owned a dog daycare, dog grooming dog training business. And I was already having some spiritual awakening experiences that had me hungry for just figuring out what those things meant. So I was studying spirituality and esoteric stuff and whatever, I could get my hands on mindfulness based material and learning about looking after dogs and also running a business. That was sort of the fertile ground for which all of my knock downs came from. And also the ground where I learned how to connect with up to 3040 50 new different dogs who didn't know me on a daily basis, six, six and a half days a week for a decade and go beyond traditional training techniques. Asking one dog to sit with a with some treats in your pocket is different than needing 48 dogs to be quiet and then you know, put a timeout to some playtime because, you know, you're a one man shop at the moment and you're answering a phone call. So I had a different set of requirements, and that I brought to the idea of training dogs.   Michael Hingson  04:33  Well, tell me about some of the Musa you had a number of knock downs and so on. What do you mean by that?   Jesse Sternberg  04:39 Wow, okay. I would say the first significant thing that happened to me was I had some hip pain after a golf swing one day, and then slowly, slowly over a year I had that pain drip as if it was poisoning To my hip, and down my thigh, I had full blown sciatica and could no longer put my socks on, I could no longer run my business. I couldn't pick up my children. I went into deep depression. My business started tanking, my marriage started tanking, and my mental state tanked to the point where I got suicidal, very depressed, bottom, bottom of the barrel. And so, you know, rallying back to full health, from that, and healing the relationships and, and growing, growing up is a significant thing.   Michael Hingson  05:50 How did you overcome all of the pain and deal with the hip issue?   Jesse Sternberg  05:59 Pain is a really good teacher, Michael. Pain brings you right into the present moment, and it puts in front of you. Something that you can't take your attention off. Now sometimes that's a good skill to have. And sometimes you want to have the skill of pivoting away from that and being able to juggle your balls and function. The other thing that Payne taught me was emotional intelligence, because we're talking about a mind body type of the illness the sciatica thing, and I had to really start to get present with how I was feeling because on a moment to moment basis, something in the environment could stress me out and just shut my hip down. And then the opposite was how do I find healing from this? And of course, love is the answer to everything so. So actually, when I didn't know what I felt like, my heart was black. I didn't know what living without anxiety felt like. That's why I was so into mindfulness. I tried so many things, Michael, doctors physio, Cairo, literally everything. What ended up working was Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a shamanic brew. It's like a to plants it's made into a tea can its root, it comes from the Amazon rainforest. And so it's very strong, psychedelic. Hallucinogenic. Basically, what it did was it just revealed to me the root causes of my PTSD. I didn't know what PTSD even was. And it allowed me to get the wisdom from what that PTSD really was about. And it was a big is a big can of worms. And ultimately, it led to me, learning how to open up my heart, learn how to feel more connected to the intelligence that the human organism has, with its emotional moment to moment, indicators. And that's a huge tie in to dog training. And we'll get into that later. I'm sure.   Michael Hingson  08:19 So you, you, you do trace it back to some sort of PTSD, which, which tells me I would think that somewhere as you worked through becoming more aware, you discovered what the causes of the PTSD were.   Jesse Sternberg  08:38 Yeah, yeah. And you know, what's crazy about that, is, science can explain that this is multigenerational. No, I, I'll share an interesting story I'm so I, I immediately went back to being six years old and a very traumatic physical accident, and replayed for me, in my mind, but with a totally different flavor. And I was able to have a much broader perspective of, you know, how my caregivers were reacting in those moments, and I was able to instantly find forgiveness for something I didn't even know that I wasn't allowing forgiveness to. So that was epic. And I also hallucinated that I went way, way, way, way back many, many generations in the bloodline and saw some things there too. And that kind of messed my head up a little bit. Because you know, when you see things, even if, you know, are they real, are they not real and they feel certain way. You can't unsee you can't and feel things and so I went through a little bit of psychosis after drinking this stuff because I I needed some time to make sense of some new things. probation that just seems so bizarre.   Michael Hingson  10:04 But you work through it, and you got rid of the pain. Absolutely. Which is ultimately the bottom line, that is all the other things that the traditional medicine arena couldn't do, you were able to work through, which is, which demonstrates, as many times we hear, even from traditional medicine today that a lot of what occurs is in your, well in your mental psyche to be psyche to be able to address.   Jesse Sternberg  10:41 It is the bottom line and, and that's part of the the drum that I'm beating. And part of the essence of the book here is like, I don't think I'm a unique man, I think I'm undigested pain, emotional pain is something that our species is just discovering is important to deal with. And that we didn't have the information growing up about how important it was, is a skill that needs to be developed. And it's something that can't be seen. So it's not easy to talk about, you know, feeling sad, the roots of the feeling sad how to let sadness flow through. And then also the workings of the mind, which is why is my mind always focusing on the sad or on the pain? Why can't I take my mind off of this? Why can't I be happy? It's all threaded together. And it that's the secret of life, right? When we when we, when we figure this stuff out. What we're left with is a better version of us were calmer or more peaceful, wiser. It's like we have a better sense. The pain taught us when we got through it. What really matters, what really matters in life.   Michael Hingson  12:07 A number of episodes ago, we had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Gabe Roberts, who is a psychologist, a doctor who discusses the concept of holographic memory. And what he describes our minds our memory is really a hologram. Which means that inside the hologram, every single thing that is ever made up, part of our being is stored in some little piece of this hologram. And it's it's a way to describe it. Because if you go back and look at holograms that that are created today, every hologram is actually composed of all sorts of little pieces, all of which basically are the same thing that still make up the bigger hologram. But the doctrine is the template. Yeah. But Dr. Roberts talks about helping people work through their issues of pain and illness, by going back and literally opening the pieces of that hologram and finding out what's stored. And getting to that one thing that needs to be addressed or changed. Because everything that you've ever experienced or has ever been a part of your life is stored and just as vibrant as ever, whether you remember it or not. And so opening and getting into that hologram and getting to the various components of it is extremely important, which is really what you're saying as well.   Jesse Sternberg  13:40 It is it's also an element that I bring into the dog training world because they have their anxieties and neuroses too. And that's usually the result of their bad behaviors. The reason why I'm getting called over to clients, how do I stop my dog from barking, lunging, jumping? Well, you know, your dog's got some fears.   Michael Hingson  14:01 Well, you went through this whole experience of pain and so on how did that lead to, to dog training?   Jesse Sternberg  14:10 You know, they were happening at the same time. You know, my path, my path of acquiring the wisdom and going through the pain. I was the temple that I was quote unquote, was working in and living in at the time was my business. So I was I was functioning, I was functioning through it. Actually cannabis and small amounts helped me open up a little bit and keep moving in a very non recreational way.   Michael Hingson  14:53 Yes, in a number of ways where, where cannabis and CBD oil and other things medically do help. So anyway, Go ahead.   Jesse Sternberg  15:02 Yeah, so actually I was learning who I really was, is what was happening while this was going on and who I am is very sensitive empath is I've always liked being alone with lots of dogs I liked, I liked being able to feel what they were feeling. And I liked being able to get a big group of them into a tranquil state. There was something about that communal vibration that was just so therapeutic is well, people who have dogs, no dogs are therapeutic. Obviously, it's not, it's their presence, right? They have a presence is a presence of benevolence, of joy, of love. These are flavors of love, by the way, and earlier I said Love is the answer to everything. And love is like a higher law, learning about it, what it really is, what its vibration feels like what his vibration does to ourselves, getting connected to that vibration, and what that allows you to do go into the hologram and reprogram and these things happen organically with the frequency of love flowing through you. It's called Heart coherence going into a state of heart coherence. And I like to say in the book, what I'm what I'm basically saying is, you have no idea what happens to your dog, when you go into heart coherence. And Vaser. Some experiments that I was accidentally running was I would get into these very elevated, meditative, highly lucid conscious states, while looking after these large packs, animals and what I started to see was okay, dog training is really just about communicating. The more effective I can get at communicating with the dogs, the faster I train them, obviously, I'm in the business of train them as fast as possible, but according to some like, and the fastest way is to connect with them at their own level. And in order to connect with them at their own level, you do it from a place of peacefulness, with mindfulness, with the wisdom of how their body language system works with the wisdom of how they frame reality for themselves, which is from a pack, mammal based reality was a non language, non verbal, non manmade language constructs, very much natural element construct. So there's an element of self growth that has to happen because you have to strip away so much conditioning to get into this kind of state to connect with your dog at the level that I'm talking about. But it's not difficult to do, there's a path to do it. They have signals that they make their signals that are good, and their signals that are bad. They are never not paying attention. They are highly present. So you know, adjusting to their way of being is really what mindfulness is, though the same lessons.   Michael Hingson  18:18 Interests, you bring up a really good point, and I'll go back to guide dog training. I believe that. As I said earlier, the most important thing that I learned when beginning to work and continuing to work with guide dogs is the most important thing is learning how to be a dog trainer and using your terminology. That really means that I'm learning how to become aware of my partner, my teammate, my guide dog, I'm learning how to communicate with them and to work with them. And as I described to people, my job is to be the pack leader. And to be the coach to the cheerleader, the teacher, the the Confessio, the person that they communicate with,   Jesse Sternberg  19:19 there were a lot of hats, you got to wear all the hats.   Michael Hingson  19:23 You got to wear all the hats and wear them with poise. I've seen so many people who use guide dogs who with the slightest little bit of unexpected interaction or unexpected things that that go on while they're working become very stressed. And that of course, gets passed right to the dog.   Jesse Sternberg  19:50 Interesting to just to color that in. It's just imagine being the dog and you know a series of moments. Your, your coach, your teammate, your, you know, your buddy who's in charge is calm. Well, that means everything's kosher. And all of a sudden, they get strict big spike with stress. Well, that's alerting, right. That's really alerting and unnecessary. It scans scary. And so now who's the one triggering that actual behavior?   Michael Hingson  20:26 Interesting, right? Right. It's not the dog.   Jesse Sternberg  20:29 It's not the dog. And I want to just so that the guests get back to the hats, right? Knowing which hat to wear. And when isn't a reflection of self? Yeah.   Michael Hingson  20:44 Well, or which hats or number of hats to wear, because I think that in reality, I have to wear a number of hats all the time, it's an awesome responsibility.   Jesse Sternberg  20:56 It is. And when you go ahead, actually, that's meeting them at their level, right. And that's the fastest way to make a leader the fastest way, I think a leader can make a connection, and earn respect, and earn influence in a non dominating way. And like a Yo, this is just aligning, it's good attraction is to meet at their level, not to make them meet at your level, it's true for every relationship, if you can meet that any relationship at their level. And then there's the least amount of resistance and communication from there.   Michael Hingson  21:40 You, you may want to get them to work at it, whoever at a different level. But you still have to begin by knowing where they are understanding where they are. And that's also in part what is called establishing a rapport, but you can't do it unless you truly understand and are aware of   Jesse Sternberg  22:03 exactly. yourself, you have to get there first, and then off. So with dogs, you know, with healing dogs, behaviors or feelings, you have to come in with that mindset. First, that's the beginning. Because a feeling of fear, if I'm feeling scared, I'm wanting calm reassurance from my leader. That's gonna fix it, from wanting encouragement, give me the courage.   Michael Hingson  22:34 But I can reverse that. And also say, as the leader, I may very well from time to time, be looking to my colleague, my partner, to see how they're behaving, because that will tell me things. And I think that is not just true of Guide Dogs. But my my story around that. First and foremost is, of course, what happened on September 11, because when I had a colleague in the office, who was saying there's fire smoke above us, we got to get out of here right now. I was well aware, even then, that dogs senses are so heightened that if there were something that was an immediate crisis, I'm going to be able to sense that in the dog.   Jesse Sternberg  23:22 Yes, well, and you really aren't.   Michael Hingson  23:26 And the fact is that, what happened? Well, so there was fire and smoke. I wasn't smelling it. But I also knew that I worked 24 hours a day with someone who would probably detect that stuff before me. And I knew her reactions to different things so that if something changed, I would sense it from her first. Well, I didn't sense it. And that told me a lot of how to behave. So it does go both ways. But that only comes when you establish a true real two way, trust. Zack, recognize that there are times that your partner also must take the lead.   Jesse Sternberg  24:14 Exactly. Being a leader doesn't mean you're always leading. It means you're attuned. Actually, the best leaders are so you don't even know they're there.   Michael Hingson  24:25 Yeah, they're so soft. If you're truly being a good leader, then as I tell every sales person I've ever hired, my job isn't to be your boss and tell you what to do. My job is to add value to what you do. And if you can't find ways to do that, and if you decide you're not going to be successful, then you won't be able to work here but the smart people always recognize that there were ways that I could add value because my experience rinses were totally different than theirs. And there were ways to combine our experiences to greatly enhance what we do. And then, for me to add in the fact that I'm working with a dog that gives me information, that I don't care what anyone says you won't get from eyesight all day long, is important, too. So I think that there is a real key advantage to having that kind of a relationship that you're discussing and describing.   Jesse Sternberg  25:35 Yeah, agreed. And actually, you know, this is not new. Okay? This is the way this is what dogs gave humanity. This was technology for us.   Michael Hingson  25:44 Sure.   Jesse Sternberg  25:46 And when you think about that train of thought, you take that just back a little bit more, but the dog is capable of doing and how they want to be on your team and what they want to be stimulated and challenged to do. We're not even taking them out of kindergarten. No wonder you know that they're not fulfilled.   Michael Hingson  26:10 I've maintained for years, that, in reality, I am I am able to communicate with, with my dogs, and learn so much from them, I submit that I've learned a lot more about team building, and trust, from working now with a guide dogs. And they've changed my behavior. Because of that. I've learned more than I ever learned from all the management theory books, and all of the other kinds of things that people write about how to live better lives and be better team builders, and so on, because working with the dog puts it into practice.   Jesse Sternberg  26:57 Right? And if they clearly show you when you're not a good leader,   Michael Hingson  27:05 yeah, they really do. It's just part of their nature.   Jesse Sternberg  27:09 And they clearly reinforce when you are a good leader, you   Michael Hingson  27:12 are a good leader. Yeah, absolutely. And the fact is that they do want you to be their leader. I believe, when people say that dogs love unconditionally, I believe that, yes, unless, unless they unless they're taught in some horrible way not to brag, in which case, they go into their shell. But I believe that dogs love unconditionally, but I don't think that they trust unconditionally, but they're open to trust unconditionally, unless somebody destroys that. So being open to trust is really the first part of it. And that's what they bring to humans and humans should learn that concept of being open to trust, a lot more than love to talk about   Jesse Sternberg  27:57 this, let's take this thread somewhere. Because trust is so important. Here's what and and it's the not trusting your dog vibe, operates below consciousness. Okay, so let me give you an example. You're walking your dog. So when you see someone's walking their dog, and they are sensing their dog is going to react in a couple of seconds in the future, because maybe they see the squirrel that their dog hasn't seen yet. Or maybe they see somebody or a scooter or a skateboarder coming by, okay, so what do they do in that moment, when they don't really recognize that they're not trusting their dog, they feel stress. And then when they feel that stress, they act in a way where they're going to manage that stress, okay? And so they'll wrap the coil the leash up tighter on their hand, or they'll change direction, or now they've got a feeling that is stressful, that they're emitting. And now they've got an action that they're using to communicate. And all of this is happening unconsciously. They're not thinking about doing this. They're not the same as, but the dog is taking these as conscious communications. Often what they're saying is, okay, I'm scared about what's approaching us. Well, what, what would you expect a good teammate to do? You offer a little protection, which is obviously bad behavior. And so how do you untrain that thing or how do you grow in that thing? The question is, how do you earn How do you create trust? How do you test trust in the relationship? How do you practice giving opportunities for the pet to show you you can trust them, and when those and when you can figure out how to do that and when you can let them rise to the occasion. That's training your dog.   Michael Hingson  30:03 So let's go back to your example of you're walking along, and you see a squirrel and you think the dog doesn't see it yet. What do you do? You, you, first of all need to trust the dog. Okay, you may very well know that your dog wants to chase that squirrel. But until the dog chases the squirrel, or starts to chase the squirrel, you got nothing to talk about, you have nothing to talk about. Now, when the dog starts to chase the squirrel, you got a conversation you have to have, then you can deal with it. But even before then, so you see the squirrel first, you can start talking to your dog, and you can say, you know, you're doing a great job, what a good dog. And try to keep the the dog's attention on you. And it may very well help or or lessen the reaction. But you should be doing that anyway. So if   Jesse Sternberg  31:00 you can, if you can do that, in a calm way, I know when you're where the dog is going to stay focused on you. And you can do that to get past the distraction. That's a band aid solution. You're managing it, and it's effective. And it works, right if you want the conversation to be Hey, buddy. Anytime you see a squirrel, I want you to just be close to me as if it's no big deal. I just want it to be, yeah, it's just us. We're chillin, I don't want you to tag me. And I don't want you to think that I have to, you know, do this whole thing rigmarole I want, then what you have to do is you have to, so that's the conversation when I say you have to know what the boundary is, in your mind, you have to know what is very clear boundaries, I just painted that picture. And then you have to spend some time and some energy and some calmness around that around the excitable item and rewire that programming. Because what you're really saying is, hey, hey, Doc, I know you can handle this strong impulse. Okay, let's get you there. Good   Michael Hingson  32:05 job. You can't do anything until there's something to do something about. And so you've got to wait for the dog to react. And by the way, you might well be surprised because you think the dogs gonna go after the squirrel zactly. But you may have the relationship with the dog such that the dog won't go after the squirrel.   Jesse Sternberg  32:31 Exactly. And what's cool about what you're talking about is self growth. Right? I just, I just got a strong thought it's it's stressful thought. How do I cope with it? How do I manage with it there, what you're saying is, be patient. Alright, see how let's see what's actually happening in the moment. Let's see how it actually plays out.   Michael Hingson  32:52 Now, I have been working with all of my guide dogs. Dogs are are bred at the schools, and are really taught well not to deal with distractions. But even so I can tell when the dog notes something. So let's say I'm to do the easy example. I'm walking with someone using my guide dog. And they they they say there's a squirrel coming up. I'm going to be alert to see what my dog does. Exactly. And when my dog doesn't go after that squirrel, I know the dog's got a look. And I can tell that the dog looks because the dog, you can feel it turn its head you can feel it. And so the dog looks goes and goes on. I will stop and praise and reward the dog for not being distracted. Which brings our relationship closer. But I'll do that. Once we get past the distraction, but that's okay. It's all about recognizing, yeah, I know what you're talking about dog. I know what you were you were looking at. But you did a great job. You didn't do it. You didn't go after   Jesse Sternberg  34:11 that squirrel. Yeah, good example.   Michael Hingson  34:15 And you got to you've got to have that level of trust, which is why dog training today with most people is really about training the person and not the dog.   Jesse Sternberg  34:28 Yes, yes. Well, because a calm dog doesn't need to be trained. A dog that's a dog that just stays in calmness. And you've, I'm sure everyone has seen these. They just follow you around calmly. And they have wisdom those pets. Those pets have a lot more wisdom about how the human world operates. That's why they're able to stay calm. So in other words, those dogs have higher consciousness and their owners gave it to them. Just state that you're in when you're walking your dog is very cool, because you're describing levels of connection to your dog without seeing your dog. And that's an advantage. Because your body language has much more mammal based leadership. You You never see an animal a mammal in nature staring at the other mammals. Usually when that and we do that to our dogs, in a in nature, the angle of making eye contact. The reason you never see it as it's almost unwritten, it's forbidden. I call it the forbidden angle. Making eye contact and holding eye contact generates contrast, strong contrast in the nervous system. It feels uncomfortable. Have you ever had? Can you ever sense that? Can you sense when someone's staring at you?   Michael Hingson  36:02 Yeah, sometimes I can sense when they're staring at me now making eye contact is a different story. But staring Yeah.   Jesse Sternberg  36:10 Okay, but when people are walking their dog, they're staring at their dog. When people are not trusting their dog, they shift into body language with it, which is staring at the dog. And so actually what they're doing is your current using the body language of the mammals by accident, and they are generating stress. Now, here's a little secret, a mindfulness Secret. Secret Sauce, say it that way. Sounds cheesy, but strong feelings equals need to act them out. at an unconscious level, very, very heightened energy, heightened feelings. You know, you're going up a roller coaster, that's a strong feeling. People are screaming, people are waving their hands. So when you're using that, anytime there's a strong feeling in the dog, they're going to act it out. And acting it out is always going to be bad. It's always going to be barking, whining, scratching, jumping, it's always one of those major ones. Okay, so that's not a calm dog. So the answer is get the dog calm. The biggest secret to getting the dog calm is understand how their language works. And understand when you're making them stress when you want them to be calm. And you're doing it by accident. That's a huge way of meeting them at their at their level. And it gives results faster than anything I've ever tried.   Michael Hingson  37:36 Most of the time, I still submit when they're not calm. It's true that you are part of the root cause of that. And so your behavior needs to change. And you need to communicate with this person who's looking to you in such a way that you can deal with creating the calmness again,   Jesse Sternberg  38:00 agree on that. And I'm also going to say the way that you communicate, do it with an action. Do it communicate with a well timed calm action and no need to flavor it in with your with your language. Right because that language is probably not going to be is not going to soothe them the way you think it is. It's actually a self soothing technique I find as too much flavor in the airwaves.   Michael Hingson  38:28 And maybe and maybe not it's really soothing even to you but right, it's how we get conditioned. Now I will say that our cat stares at our dog a lot. But   Jesse Sternberg  38:40 on purpose, okay, there's a power play happening when   Michael Hingson  38:43 there's a power play happening. That's absolutely right. And that's okay because he stares back at her and just ignores her. So she knows so she thinks she has the power. It's okay. Yeah. Yeah, they get along really well together though. It's, it's it's fine. They don't even steal each other's food much. So it's good. Yeah. Much. I would never want a dog and I've seen some dogs that are just absolute cat haters, and I don't know what what happened in their lives to make that happen or whatever. But I would never want a dog that can't get along with other creatures in the house.   Jesse Sternberg  39:29 Yeah, yeah, that's it's too intense.   Michael Hingson  39:32 Yeah. And sometimes it's very difficult to break into to deal with it. But still, I would never want that. At one time, we had a cat, a dog and a desert tortoise living with us and we had to take them all to the vet to be boarded for an afternoon because we were going to be doing some spraying and some Walking around the yard or having some spring done,   Jesse Sternberg  40:02 you turn the cat, the dog and the tortoise to the vet for the day. All   Michael Hingson  40:06 three. Yeah. And the dog and the tortoise. We unfortunately never got a picture of this, the vet regretted not having a camera, but the cat was in one cage. And the dog in the tortoise, we're in the other. The tortoise walked around the cage a little bit, came back over and got prone. The dog walked around the cage a little bit and then got prone, putting his paw over the tortoise, and last lap that way for about three hours. I love it. I love. So when we encourage that kind of relationship, and it works really well. We've been very happy with that. But the reality is, it's more our training that needs to happen, then what happens with the dog, or any training? And yeah, there are, there are things that you, you train a dog to do you train a dog to do specific things that you want the dog to do, but you train different commands, but again, how you train makes a big difference, the schools have become much more active in using clicker training. And I'm a fan of them too. Yeah, clickers are great, because it's a, it's an absolute instantaneous demarcation of what you did, right? You don't use it to point out a negative behavior, it's, you did it right click, and then you do a food reward. And it is so incredible, as to how much it is improved by dog training to do with that   Jesse Sternberg  41:40 way. But you know, as as as a lifetime dog trainer, and as a balance dog trainer, Mindfulness Based dog trainer, I view my profession as like, I'm an artist, you know. And the clicker is just a, a new, awesome tool, and learning how to use it in all of its creative ways. Very high potential, rehabbing fear base dogs, very high potential giving confidence as Mark has, you can mark those moments. But, you know, I just want people to appreciate it's a modality of communication, you it's not the it's not exactly meeting the dog at their level. It's not communicating to them moment to moment to moment with your body language. But when they're about to get conditioned out of being neurotic, or scared or anxious, then it becomes an awesome tool. Or we are reinforcing Poppy behaviors. Awesome tool, new training behaviors. Yes.   Michael Hingson  42:54 Right. And and that's probably the most powerful way it's used at the schools is reinforcing behavior.   Jesse Sternberg  43:01 And it's also difficult to use, I have to say, Michael, it's difficult you fumble with it. You have to have it ready. You have to have the treats, right? You have to really plan ahead for it.   Michael Hingson  43:12 Oh, absolutely. And the trainers keep the clickers in their hands. Even when we start working with the dogs, the trainers are the team leaders that the dogs are most used to. So for example, when I first started my first walk with Alamo, my current guide dog was a black lab. We were walking down the street, we got to a corner. The dog stopped appropriately. But even then, instantly, the trainer clicked. Yeah. And I gave the dog a food reward. And what we asked for time was to translate that to I carried the clicker and clicked just to reinforce the behavior, even though it was very clear that the dog knew   Jesse Sternberg  44:00 what yeah, great feedback. You're doing great.   Michael Hingson  44:03 You're doing great. And I recognize you're doing great. I want you to know it. We actually taught the dog to stop at a muzzle kind of a driveway. It was it was almost like an alleyway between two buildings. But there was no curb to really tell you it was coming. But between the trainer and I and clicking, we taught the dog to stop at that alleyway. And I submit that if we went back up to Gresham, Oregon today, he would still stop there. Of course, because behavior was so ingrained and clickers can do that. And if people want to learn about clicking behavior, they really should go study it. Karen Pryor was the one who brought it back to dogs. It actually started with dogs BEFORE HORSES and then they started using it with horses and it kind of fell away from dogs and then it came back and what around 2000 or so when has become a much better tool with dogs as well. And it just makes perfect sense to do. But clicking is a wonderful tool, but it is a tool and it's a it's a positive tool. It should not be used in a negative way. By but I find even today if I haven't been out for months, I can click the clicker and the dog's head will pop up. Yeah,   Jesse Sternberg  45:27 yeah. Yeah. So when you anytime you have a lot of power, you got to be responsible with that. It's a responsibility. Yeah, you can't. You can't misfire. No, you lose. You lose. What what happens when you misfires you lose trust.   Michael Hingson  45:44 So trust and you lose credibility.   Jesse Sternberg  45:46 You lose respect, you lose respect, which is one thing. I remember thinking, but I didn't get a chance to say is, yeah, dogs, you said this talks about the dogs love you. Yeah, you know what, you know, I thought, respect deserved.   Michael Hingson  46:02 Respect is absolutely earned. And people need to understand that most pet owners just have no real clue about integrating their pet into their family and making them a true family member and making them a true family member. It doesn't mean you let them just jump up on the bed or all those other sorts of things. It's a relationship issue.   Jesse Sternberg  46:26 Yeah, yeah. And they're just gonna reflect where you are, personally, you know, and just how you how you approach self love and your own boundaries, and you know, your own relationships with people, your dog is going to mimic that. And the reason why they mimic that is because they're never not watching your emotional frequencies. So when when you come home, from work, and no one's home, the dogs home and the dogs will be watching you Be who you really are watching how you behave, when you're talking on the phone, when the pizza guy comes everything. And when your dog then goes into life and is in being social in social aspect, either either new people or new dogs or new environments. If they're feeling free, if their frequency of their feelings matches up yours, when you're home alone, in those moments, they're gonna behave the same way. Yep. So you know, if you've got a hot temper, your dogs gonna have a hot temper. If your wedding, whatever it is, they match that. And what's cool is, when your dog's doing that you usually don't like how their dogs behaving, it will give you clues on how to heal it. That's just going to fix things in your life to without even thinking about without even trying it. My fourth, but you're talking about it. I mean,   Michael Hingson  47:53 I know what you're saying. My fourth guide dog Lynnie was one of the most empathetic creatures I ever knew we would go to parties. And our pastor of our church was a good friend of Lynnie, my fourth guide dog and observed her at various places. And she said one day when we would when people would come and visit us, or we would go somewhere and they said you can let her go loose and won't wouldn't do it unless they, they allowed it. I knew she'd be well behaved. But our pastor said, she always goes to the person who needs her the most first, because they're the most in pain. And then she goes around the room to see other people. And of course, she wasn't talking about physical pain.   Jesse Sternberg  48:38 Only the pain a pastor would know right after Congress and the pastor would know.   Michael Hingson  48:43 Yeah. As we observe as we observe Lynnae, that's exactly what we saw. And she would go over the   Jesse Sternberg  48:52 truth. She's a true healer, a true. True vessel of light.   Michael Hingson  48:57 An old soul. Yeah. Lovely. So tell me is people keep talking about the alpha dog and the Alpha creature in a team? And yeah, tell me about that concept of what you think of that.   Jesse Sternberg  49:12 I intentionally write about this quality called that I call peaceful out. And I say intentionally because I actually alpha is a trigger word for our present times, mainly because it's associated with toxic dominance, toxic masculinity. So I wanted to bring healing to that. Now, the idea of this peaceful alpha is that the way a dog the way you behave, if you behave in a certain way from your dog's perspective, as the calm leader, as the calm watcher, as being in The same level of attunement with the dogs feelings like you are when you're walking past a squirrel, knowing how to interact and bring it emotional peace, providing for it in a way that challenges and stimulates and grows them expands their consciousness, well, they end up giving you a certain kind of respect, they end up, give it they end up, you earn it, they end up showing you different quality behaviors. When I go to client's homes, even years after training the dog as a puppy, the dog gets up from their side and it comes to my side and it lays down by my side. I don't even talk to it. I haven't even looked at it yet. And I haven't even really touched it yet. So the dogs have a sense of presence, and a way of relating to presence and so peaceful alpha is a state of consciousness. It's there's a lot of wisdom, a lot of calmness, a lot of Swift acting, and a lot of recognition of you know, your dog's feelings. What could spike your dog's feelings? And, well, well, grooved boundaries, non challenged boundaries, fair, fair boundaries, no need to get excited at the door. No need to get excited, you know, by the squirrels. Mostly just the ability of keeping the dog calm.   Michael Hingson  51:50 The plan? Go ahead.   Jesse Sternberg  51:52 Well, yeah, I think I think you're gonna guess it say, No, go ahead. The point is, is that you're providing a richer quality of inner life for them and outer life for them. And that's why they respect you. And you can't do that, who's the one that's doing that, that's the leader. That's the position of the alpha. And that's what they're looking for in that. So I'm trying to say, Guys, you can get that all the power. You can get it through wisdom and love and self restraint and self discipline and emotional intelligence, and presence.   Michael Hingson  52:31 It goes back to the alpha position, doesn't need to be the boss position. It's not about bossing, it's not about dominating in exactly a way that is intimidating. It's all about spirit. And that's true. Yes, it's as true in the human human interaction as with the human dog interaction. And it's exactly   Jesse Sternberg  53:01 because of humans. If you behave this way. Humans gravitate to you. Because your word has wisdom in it doesn't let them down. You, you end up giving them what they already know they need, it's just a little bit of a boost, and there's no ego, you're not trying to get something in return for it. It's because you want to do it. And so this notion of being a peaceful alpha is like, you know, I just wanted to find a cheeky, clever way to take humanity on a journey of bettering themselves. And, you know, I worked with what I had with what I do my tool was I knew dogs. And so that was my mission and writing my book.   Michael Hingson  53:49 Well, we've been talking about dogs can you use the same behavior with other animals like cats and so on?   Jesse Sternberg  53:55 Actually, Michael any mammal, because if you understand the language, you understand that their body language is coming from emotions, and most of their so anything a calming sick, Google calming signals, Turid Rubis talks about calming signals for a long time now. That's the essence of the body language. But I also talked about that confrontational angle. All of the body language is around de escalating emotions. And so you're sitting at the poker table and somebody gets a good hand. They get excited. Yeah, they're acting out impulses, but those are calming signals, mammals happen. So you know, it's just about getting attuned to the fidgety the subtle, the, the inner workings of your own self. How do you behave? Do you bite your fingernails when you get anxious, you have an expression of your energy. So learning about how you move your body through space and mastering that in a way so like you're playing the angles with your dogs is going to show up, when you walk into a room full of people, you're gonna walk into a room full of people with a different posture with a different, more broadband consciousness, your eyes are going to pick up when other people are getting stressed around you. And if you're empathetic, if you're calm, you can bring a little attention to that. And that does wonders. So that becomes reinforcing. So this is just a skill at becoming a better human being.   Michael Hingson  55:33 But here's the real question. Does it work with training politicians? Just just tonight, check that out. It doesn't work against you go? No, it's it's a real challenge   Jesse Sternberg  55:50 for Iowa. If we could get politicians to drink Ayahuasca, Michael, that's totally   Michael Hingson  55:55 they would get a an interesting experience, wouldn't they? Tell me about your book?   Jesse Sternberg  56:03 Okay, my book is called enlightened dog training, how to become the peaceful Alpha your dog needs and respects. The first few chapters are examples of how the body language works with the dogs and what they're saying and how they're saying, and there's diagrams and there's pictures. And it also shows how humans accidentally tap into this. The rest of the book is really interesting, because each chapter is a unique case study of a human with their dog with the dogs problems with the humans characteristics, their neuroses, their anxieties, and these are all common, these are all common with every pet owner. And so the case study has a solution to it. And the solution is a mindfulness based solution that incorporates the dogs feelings, and some advanced but simple dog training techniques. And people the idea is that people read it and they go, Oh, my God, that makes so much sense. I see that. And I see how it works on my dog, and I see how I can grow from that. And then there's a, you know, at the end of each chapter, there's also a training tips, summary, bullet points, what exactly to do in these types of problems. And then there's a meditation, how to get yourself into that kind of calm state when such and such is happening. And just, you know, like a consciousness expanding, wrap up of each chapter. So that's the essence of how my book works.   Michael Hingson  57:32 So you, one of the things that people will ask is, but my dogs always afraid of thunder, you can fix that too.   Jesse Sternberg  57:41 Yeah, because we're just talking about fixing the relationship of fear. Yeah. There's actually every example is either example of working with a fear or working with an excitement. And that's what's cool is it doesn't start with that it starts with the behaviors, right? Why does my dog because, you know, let's go to Thunder, why does my dog run around hide under the howl and hide under the bed? When there's a thunderstorm? Well, lying down on the belly is what I described as the fourth stage of the fourth stage in the posture of surrendering maximizing the surface area on the earth. That's grounding. That's calm. That's wise. That's wisdom. When was last time you did that, when you were scared? What would happen if you did it? Okay, interesting. So there's a hint there, if your dog trusts you, and if the environment is safe, if you can get your dog to go into a lie down, and if you can get them to stay there, you can actually watch them restrain themselves from leaving. And you can watch them breathe, because they'll have you know, they'll have a rapid breath working, and you can time it. You can encourage them, give them courage, while they're breathing that out, while they're facing their fear. They're confronting it. And then what's left is experiential wisdom on their part. Wow, I got through that. Wow, you helped me get through that. Wow. Thank you. I appreciate you. And as you end up, you know, as you learned how to do that with your dog. You need patience. You need connection, you need calmness, but boys and rewarding the rewards from that never stop copying. Nope.   Michael Hingson  59:36 It all goes back to trust.   Jesse Sternberg  59:40 Exactly. And trust just so people will get this like trust is an expanding asset. It doesn't just you don't just flip it on and that's what you got. It never ends. It can do it.   Michael Hingson  59:54 And it's an ongoing process to evolve it and improve it and enhance it.   Jesse Sternberg  1:00:00 It's an expression of love, it's a virtue of love and love can keep expanding.   Michael Hingson  1:00:07 Well, this has been a lot of fun. And I've enjoyed it very much. But I want you to tell people how they can get your book and learn more about what you do and maybe reach out to you and, and engage in conversations,   Jesse Sternberg  1:00:24 all of those things they can do directly from my website, which is peaceful alpha.com. And you know, the book, it tells you where to get the book from there. But you know, if you just want the book, you can get it from Amazon or Books a Million, or it's a published book by intern press, which is owned by Simon and Schuster. So any bookstore can just order it for you.   Michael Hingson  1:00:52 Well, Jesse, this has been absolutely enjoyable. And I am really grateful that You have given us so much of your time and your insights and I hope people will reach out to you and I hope that everyone listening will take to heart what you have told us about learning to establish better relationships with our dogs and our pets and each other for that matter.   Jesse Sternberg  1:01:22 I really appreciate being on your show, Michael Time flew for me and I had a great time and really great energy and then just enjoyed our conversation. So thank you for having me and, and for your interest in in helping me share my story.   Michael Hingson  1:01:43 Well, thanks for for being here. And for all of you. Peaceful alpha.com is Jesse's website. Go there. And please check it out. I want to tell you I very much appreciate you being here today and listening to us. Talk. I think it's been fun. I hope you do believe the same and that you learn from it. Reach out if you have any comments or would like to make any suggestions about this or any of our episodes or have thoughts of people who you think ought to become guests on our podcast, you can contact me through email at Michaelhi M I C H A E L H I at accessiBE at A C C E S S I B E.com. Or go to www dot Michael hingson.com M I C H A E L H I N G S O N.com/podcast. And wherever you're listening to this, please give us a five star rating. We appreciate it. Your ratings are invaluable to us. So thank you very much again, and we hope that she'll be back next time for another episode of unstoppable mindset. Jesse again. Thank you, Michael.   UM Intro/Outro  1:03:01 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com. accessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. 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National Zookeeper Week is here! On this special episode of Zoo-notable, I sit down with Ken Ramirez, animal trainer extraordinaire, Vice President of Karen Pryor Clicker Training, and author of The Eye of the Trainer. We discuss training animal trainers, meeting people (and animals) where they are, how punishment works and doesn't work, and not jumping to conclusions, among many other topics covered in The Eye of the Trainer. From the book description on Karen Pryor Clicker Training site: "In The Eye of the Trainer, Ken Ramirez brings to life the power of positive reinforcement training to build trust and transform lives. Ken is one of the most creative, cogent, and effective animal trainers in the world. His positive reinforcement training principles and practices are studied, replicated, and applied in settings as diverse as conservation efforts with elephants on the African plains, canine search and rescue in Texas, oil-disaster recovery for sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico, butterfly training in England, and animal shelters in Chicago. In this inspiring, heartwarming, and hopeful series of essays chronicling his 40+ years of global exploration and observation, Ken shares not only the intriguing personalities of the animals that shaped his life, but how their unique challenges influenced his training choices, philosophy, and worldview. A must-read for anyone who lives with, studies, or works with animals, Ken's training wisdom, principled guidance, and practical advice call us to see the world through his eyes. Ken's world is one where great training transforms the shy animal into the confident one, the aggressive into the calm, and the mistrustful into the trustful—and even the unsupportive boss into an ally. See the world better. See it differently. See it through The Eye of the Trainer." Want more goodness from Ken and Karen Pryor? Join Ken on The Ranch to take your training skills to the next level, get certified, or join hundreds of other positive reinforcement trainers at the Karen Pryor ClickerExpo. Learn more at ClickerTraining.com Grab a copy of The Eye of the Trainer online, or at your local bookstore. And ask your library to get a copy for distribution. Want more ZooFit and Zoo-notable goodness? Join the ZooFit Pride on Patreon and get access to bonus material, excerpts from my new book, and opportunities to connect with me and other ZooFitters. And join me all week long on our blog at ZooFit.net for National Zookeeper Week celebratory blog posts. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Kathy Sdao, MA, ACAAB is an applied animal behaviorist. She's been a full-time animal trainer for thirty-five years, first with marine mammals and now with dogs. At the University of Hawaii, she earned a master's degree as part of a research team which trained dolphins to understand sign-language. She then worked for the United States Navy training dolphins for open-ocean military tasks. Kathy also worked as a marine-mammal trainer at Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in Tacoma Washington. After leaving the zoo world, she co-created Tacoma's first dog-daycare. Kathy launched Bright Spot Dog Training in 1998. Services include consulting with families about their challenging dogs and mentoring professional trainers who want to maximize the power of positive-reinforcement training. Kathy is proud to be an original faculty member for Karen Pryor's ClickerExpos; she's taught at forty-one of these popular conferences. Kathy has lectured at venues across the United States, Canada and Europe, and in Australia, Israel, Japan and Mexico. In 2012, she published her first book, “Plenty in Life Is Free: Reflections on Dogs, Training and Finding Grace”. “Plenty In Life Is Free” Kathy Reading "Plenty In Life Is Free" “LIMA beings” If you want to work with me, Susan Light, you can find me at: www.doggydojopodcast.com The music was written by Mac Light, you can find him at: www.maclightsongwriter.com If you like the show, please Subscribe, Rate, Review, and Share to help others find the show! I'll see you in two weeks with a brand new episode of the Doggy Dojo!

Karen Pryor turns ninety on May 14th! Annie is celebrating today and... plotting continued celebrations on this podcast in the coming year. If you're a Karen Pryor fan, join the celebration! If you're not, you'll enjoy learning why she is so worthy of it. In this episode, Annie interviews BF Skinner Foundation president Dr. Julie Vargas, about the importance of this incredible scientist, writer and entrepreneur who, over the last thirty years, has done more than probably anyone else alive to help show people how we can use operant conditioning and secondary reinforcers to train dogs with rewards: aka, clicker training. When her husband bought Sea Life Park in the 1960s, Pryor was tasked with training the dolphins to perform. She got her hands on a paper written by students who were working in BF Skinner's Harvard lab, and it outlined the basics of operant conditioning and how to use a secondary reinforcer, like a whistle, to pinpoint the moment a desired behavior occurred. It further described how to then use successive approximations to shape the behavior using reinforcement. She took what she had learned about dolphins and wrote a book about about using positive reinforcement in everyday life: Don't Shoot The Dog!, then started doing seminars on how to use a clicker with dogs in the 1990s. In the 2000s, she started running Clicker Expo, a conference which brings the worlds best positive-reinforcement trainers together several times a year, and began training dog trainers through her Karen Pryor Academy. Follow us on Instagram, @schoolforthedogs, where we are giving away her book Reaching The Animal Mind and a signed clicker this weekend. Learn more about Dr. Vargas: https://www.juliesvargas.com/ Learn more about Karen Pryor: https://karenwpryor.com/biography/ Learn more about the BF Skinner Foundation: http://bfskinner.org Books: Don't Shoot The Dog! https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Shoot-Dog-Teaching-Training/dp/1860542387 Reaching The Animal Mind https://www.amazon.com/Reaching-Animal-Mind-Clicker-Training/dp/0743297776 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dogs/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dogs/support

Welcome to The Veterinary Roundtable! In this episode, the ladies discuss how they'd spend one million dollars, a case of a German Shepherd eating a toy giraffe, answer training questions from Heidi Gossard-King, and more!Do you have a question for The Veterinary Roundtable? Ask us on any social media platform or email harrison@all-starvet.com!Episodes of The Veterinary Roundtable are on all podcast services along with Facebook and YouTube!TIMESTAMPSIntroductions: 0:04:41Icebreakers: 0:06:34Case Collections: 0:14:30Listener Questions: 0:28:47

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Notes from "Don't Shoot the Dog", published by juliawise on the LessWrong. I just finished Karen Pryor's “Don't Shoot the Dog: the New Art of Teaching and Training.” Partly because a friend points out that it's not on Audible and therefore she can't possibly read it, here are the notes I took and some thoughts. It's a quick, easy read. The book applies behavioral psychology to training animals and people. The author started off as a dolphin trainer at an aquarium park in the 1960s and moved on to horses, dogs, and her own children. There are a lot of anecdotes about how to train animals (apparently polar bears like raisins). At the time, training animals without violence was considered novel and maybe impossible. I read it as a parenting book since I don't plan to train dogs, horses, or polar bears. It's probably not the best guide to training dogs since a lot of it is about people, and not the best guide to training people since a lot is about animals. She's written a bunch of other books about training dogs and cats. But this book is an entertaining overview of all of it. The specter of behaviorism I can understand not wanting to use behavioral methods on children; the idea can sound overly harsh or reductive. The thing is, we already reinforce behavior all the time, including bad behavior, often without meaning to. So you might as well notice what you're doing. To people schooled in the humanistic tradition, the manipulation of human behavior by some sort of conscious technique seems incorrigibly wicked, in spite of the obvious fact that we all go around trying to manipulate one another's behavior all the time, by whatever means come to hand. There are still people who shudder at the very name of Skinner, which conjures in their minds some amalgam of Brave New World, mind control, and electric shock. (B. F. Skinner in fact believed that punishment was not an effective learning tool, and that positive reinforcement was much better for teaching.) Pryor argues that behavioral training allows you to get good results more pleasantly than with other methods. She describes her daughter's experience directing a play in high school: At the closing performance the drama coach told me that she'd been amazed to see that throughout rehearsals Gale never yelled at her cast. Student directors always yell, but Gale never yelled. ‘Of course not,' I said without thinking, ‘she's an animal trainer.' From the look on the teacher's face, I realized I'd said the wrong thing—her students were not animals! But of course all I meant was that Gale would know how to establish stimulus control without unnecessary escalation. Of course there are bad applications of behavioral training: “The psychological literature abounds with shaping programs that are so unimaginative, not to say ham-handed, that they constitute in my opinion cruel and unusual punishment.” I don't know a lot about ABA (applied behavior analysis), which is one application of behaviorism. My understanding is that its bad applications are certainly cruel and ham-handed, although there also seem to be good applications. I think that even people opposed to ABA should be able to find a lot of useful material in this book. You're already doing reinforcement training One point I think is underappreciated is that we all reinforce each other, and children train parents as well as the other way around. A child is tantruming in the store for candy. The parent gives in and lets the child have a candy bar. The tantruming is positively reinforced by the candy, but the more powerful event is that the parent is negatively reinforced for giving in, since the public tantrum, so aversive and embarrassing for the parent, actually stopped. It's also easy to accidentally reinforce bad behavior. I recently read Beverly Cleary's Beezus and Ramona w...

Learn all about animal acting with Dawn Wolfe, an Animal Talent Agent and Wrangler for almost thirty years. Dawn runs her own talent agency, PAWSITIVELY FAMOUS, a national Animal Modeling and Talent Management firm. It all began when Dawn was a little girl and fell in love with the scrappy dog known as Benji. Benji was one of the most popular animals ever in the history of cinema. Learn all about Benji, aka. Higgins the dog, and fascinating, hilarious, behind-the-scenes stories of animal actors and their handlers seeking fame, glory, and belly laughs. Want to follow up on our sources or watch any of the videos we mention? Go to ThisAnimalLife.com and click on Show Notes.  Interested in KLIMB tables and other Blue-9 products? Click here to learn more and apply our promo code, ANIMAL2020 to get free shipping and $20 off. References: lgonquin, the Story of a Great Dog, by Dion Henderson, Western Publishing Company, 1953.  Benji--The Full Movie, 1974, EncourageTV, YouTube, October 2020. The Big Book of Tricks for the Best Dog Ever, by Chris Perondi and Larry Kay, Workman Publishing, 2019. Beverly Hillbillies, Wikipedia. Captain (Arthur) Haggerty, Master Dog Trainer, Wikipedia. Clicker Training for Cats, Karen Pryor, Sunshine Books, 2001. Cooper, Diana C., “Higgins--from Shelter Dog to Beloved Benji,” Famous Dogs in History, July 2017. Dawn Wolfe Social Media Dawn Wolfe Instagram Pawsitively Famous, Dawn Wolfe's animal talent agency's website Pawsitively Famous Facebook Page Do More With Your Dog Dog Trick Titles and Stunt Dog Titles Do More With Your Dog Animal Actors Academie Internationale First Born, starring Elisabeth Shue and Dawn Wolfe's dog, Nikki, 2007. “Frank Inn: Animal Trainer,” full 4-hour interview, interviewed by Michael Rosen, Television Academy Foundation, The Interviews, August 8, 2001 “Frank Inn on the dog who worked on Petticoat Junction and starred in Benji,” Foundation Interviews,  “Higgins the Dog ~ Star of Benji, Petticoat Junction, Beverly Hillbillies, Lassie, Mooch,” The Humpy Awards, Miss Hope wins the humping competition, YouTube, June 2012. Hope in the “Westminster Commercial” for Treasure Island Resort & Casinos, YouTube. London, Jack, Call of the Wild/White Fang, Ann Arbor Media, 2006. “Maverick the Surfer Cat,” Cat People, YouTube, Netflix Futures, July 2021. Pawsitively Famous YouTube Channel Petticoat Junction, Wikipedia. Petticoat Junction, “Betty-Jo's Dog,” Season 2, Episode 1, YouTube March 2017. Prose, Eileen, “Remember Benji? Meet the movie dog and his trainer. See his tricks!,” YouTube, June 2017. Sasha, My Friend, by Barbara Corcoran, Atheneum, 1973.  Stanley Steemer, “Toby's New Trick,” The Loomis Agency, YouTube. TV Guide, “The Benji Issue,” December 2-8 1978. Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls, Yearling, 2000.  

Lads Before the Wind chronicles Karen Pryor's 8 years working with dolphins (porpoises as they called them) at Hawaii's Sea Life Park in the 1960s. She and her colleagues became pioneers in what is now standard practices of animal training with positive reinforcement. This book highlights some of those innovative techniques they created. Let's dive in and have fun learning how to apply these ideas to our own lives. If you would like to get your own copy of this fascinating book, hop on over to the Clicker Training website and check it out: https://shop.clickertraining.com/products/lads-before-the-wind-karen-pryor

Por esta semana dejamos de ser las Nietas de Pavlov, y pasamos a ser las Nietas de Josephine Ball en honor a las mujeres que nos abrieron el camino. Karen Pryor, Dian Fossey, Aleen Cust, Temple Grandin, Antonina Zabinsky, Jane Goodall, Sophia Yin, Teresa y Agustina Acchiardo. La historia de Josephine Ball la puedes encontrar en nuestras historias destacadas de instagram. Finalmente, damos comienza a la Loteria de las Nietas!

Welcome to the 11th episode of The Dog Real Talk! My name is Agnieszka Janarek and I am your host! My guest today is Theresa McKeon from TAGteach. If you haven’t heard about TAGteach you should definitely check out this episode! References: www.tagteach.com “After more than 30 years as a national level gymnastics coach, Theresa was determined to find a way to speed up skill acquisition for her athletes while simultaneously decreasing frustration all around. The answer was in the science of learning. The problem was the most beneficial tools defined in the “science” were clunky and difficult for coaches to procedurally implement. In response, Theresa along with Joan Orr and Karen Pryor created TAGteach, a vehicle that transported the science of learning from the rigid rules of academia to the riotous world of live teaching and coaching. Today, Theresa designs and presents TAGteach workshops and seminars around the world and has adapted the technology in multiple fields including: education, business management, industrial education and safety, military, medical training, corrections, professional sports, and family communication” WE would love to hear your feedback about this episode! Let us know in comments, emails, regular mails (yes they still work ;) ), Facebook messages or any other way you want!

Welcome to the 7th episode of The Dog Real Talk! My today's guest doesn't need an introduction. Ladies and Gentlemen Ken Ramirez! I feel very lucky to had a chance to discuss with him conservation training and challenges trainer may face when working with animals in the wild. From Ken's page: In October 2014, Ken Ramirez began his role as Executive Vice-President and Chief Training Officer of Karen Pryor Clicker Training where he helps oversee the vision, development and implementation of training education programs for the organization. This role aligns with Ken's philosophy of helping to bring positive reinforcement training to all corners of the animal training world. Ken previously served as the Executive Vice-President of animal care and animal training at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium, where he developed and supervised animal care and animal health programs, staff training and development as well as public presentation programs for the entire animal collection of more than 32,000 animals. He worked at Shedd for nearly 26 years. A 40+ year veteran of animal care and training, Ramirez is a biologist and animal behaviorist who served nine years at Marineworld of Texas. He also was a trainer and coordinator at Ocean Safari in South Padre Island, Texas, as well as acting as a consultant to many zoo and aquarium programs throughout the world. He began his training career working with guide dogs for the visually impaired and has maintained a close affiliation to pet training throughout his career. He hosted two successful seasons of the pet training television series Talk to the Animals that compared pet training to the important work done with training and caring for animals in zoological facilities. He has also recently worked closely with several search and rescue dog organizations, service dog groups, as well as with bomb and narcotic dogs. Since 2005, Ken has brought his experience as a trainer of many cognitive projects with marine mammals and primates to the dog arena. Most notable has been his work with modifier cues, adduction, matching to sample, mimicry, and counting. The latter two projects: teaching dogs to mimic or imitate other dogs; and to learn the concept of counting are in the process of being prepared for scientific publication. Both of these projects have documented cognitive abilities in dogs that have not been previously well documented or understood. Ramirez has been active in several professional organizations, including the International Marine Animal Trainer’s Association (IMATA), of which he is a past president. Ken has been actively involved in the creation of a certification process for animal trainers in zoological settings. He has been on the faculty of Karen Pryor’s Clicker Expos since 2005. Ramirez has written for numerous scientific publications and authored countless popular articles. He authored the book ANIMAL TRAINING: Successful Animal Management through Positive Reinforcement, published in 1999. He also teaches a graduate course on animal training at Western Illinois University. WE would love to hear your feedback about this episode!

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

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

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

SUMMARY: Dr. Patricia McConnell is a Zoologist and Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist who has made a lifelong commitment to improving the relationship between people and animals. She is known worldwide as an expert on canine and feline behavior and dog training, and for her engaging and knowledgeable dog training books, DVDs and seminars. Patricia has seen clients for serious behavioral problems since 1988, and taught "The Biology and Philosophy of Human/Animal Relationships” for twenty-five years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her radio show, Calling All Pets, was heard in over 110 cities around the country, where Patricia dispensed advice about behavior problems and animal behavior research for over fourteen years. She is the author of the much-acclaimed books The Other End of the Leash, For the Love of A Dog: Understanding Emotions in You and Your Best Friend and Tales of Two Species. Her latest book is a memoir that came out earlier this year, titled The Education of Will: A Mutual Memoir of a Woman and Her Dog. Links The Other End of the Leash (blog) The Other End of the Leash (book) For the Love of A Dog: Understanding Emotions in You and Your Best Friend Tales of Two Species The Education of Will: A Mutual Memoir of a Woman and Her Dog Next Episode:  To be released 11/10/2017, featuring Sarah Stremming, talking about effective behavior change. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we have a special guest -- I'm talking to Dr. Patricia McConnell. Although she probably needs no introduction, I will share a bit from her bio. Dr. Patricia McConnell is a Zoologist and Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist who has made a lifelong commitment to improving the relationship between people and animals. She is known worldwide as an expert on canine and feline behavior and dog training, and for her engaging and knowledgeable dog training books, DVDs and seminars. Patricia has seen clients for serious behavioral problems since 1988, and taught "The Biology and Philosophy of Human/Animal Relationships” for twenty-five years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her radio show, Calling All Pets, was heard in over 110 cities around the country, where Patricia dispensed advice about behavior problems and animal behavior research for over fourteen years. She is the author of several much-acclaimed books The Other End of the Leash, For the Love of A Dog: Understanding Emotions in You and Your Best Friend and Tales of Two Species. Her latest book is a memoir that came out earlier this year, titled The Education of Will: A Mutual Memoir of a Woman and Her Dog. Welcome to the podcast, Patricia! Patricia McConnell: Thanks for having me, Melissa. What fun. Melissa Breau: I'm so excited to be talking to you today. To kind of start us out a little bit, can you just share a little bit about the dogs and the animals you currently share your life with? Patricia McConnell: Oh, absolutely. The most important animal is the two-legged one, my husband, my wonderful, accommodating husband who puts up with my obsession for dogs and sheep and cats and animals and gardening. So that's Jim. And so we have three dogs. We have Willie, a 10-year-old border collie who is one of the stars of The Education of Will, and we have Maggie, a 4-year-old border collie who's my competition sheepdog trial right now and the silliest, funniest, most adorablest dog that ever lived, of course, and Tootsie, who's the other most adorablest dog, she's a little Cavalier who was a puppy mill rescue. And we have two cats, Nellie and Polly, and we have 16 sheep. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Patricia McConnell: Here we are. And we have Teresa the toad, who's living in the cat bowl often, and I could go on and on. We have a little farm, it's about 12 and a half acres, and so there are lots of critters on there, but the family ones I've already mentioned. I'll stop there. Melissa Breau: Excellent. Well, I know that you've shared kind of in some of the other interviews you've done that you've been in love with dogs and behavior for as long as you can remember. So I wanted to ask a little bit about kind of when you decided that was what you wanted to do with your life, and see if you could just share a little bit about those early days. Patricia McConnell: Oh yes, you know, it's almost like a feminist manifesto, because when I was … I was born in 1948, and when I was 5 — there's a story about me being asked what I wanted to do when I was 5, and I said, “I want to marry a rancher,” because in 1953 in Arizona, women made babies and casseroles. They didn't make, they didn't have careers, they didn't, you know, make shopping centers and business deals or even be veterinarians. And so gradually over time I had all kinds of different careers. I moved a lot with my first husband, and eventually I got to the point where I thought, You know what, I'm going to go back to school and I'm going to study animal behavior. And what I envisioned is that I would teach it. I would teach at some small private college, and I would teach animal behavior because I loved animals and I loved behavior. And I finally realized in my 30s, early 40s, you know, this is a way I could really enmesh myself in my passion and what I love. But then I went to an animal behavior society conference — it's a conference of academics, people who study behavior, mostly wild animals, mostly in the field — and I ran into John Wright, who was an academic, actually a psychologist who was an applied animal behaviorist, and so he took all of his training and behavior and used it to help people solve problems with family dogs. And I was like, Oh, really? I didn't know that was a possibility. So it ended up that my colleague, Dr. Nancy Raffetto, and I opened up Dog's Best Friend as a consulting service. Most people had no idea who we were, what we were doing. Nobody did it then. I mean, nobody did it then. People would call us up, Melissa, and say, “Do you guys groom poodles?” Melissa Breau: Oh goodness. Patricia McConnell: Yes. So this was in the late '80s, and this was a really new field. So it all progressed from there, but it certainly wasn't linear, and anybody who's in a path right now of, like, who do I want to be and what do I want to do, or maybe I'm going in a direction that I don't want to go, is don't lose heart. I mean, I didn't get into this until I was in my 40s. Melissa Breau: And you've quite clearly achieved quite a bit of success, so … Patricia McConnell: It's been very satisfying, you know. I feel so lucky. I feel very grateful and lucky and privileged and honored to be able to find the right niche, you know? Yeah. Melissa Breau: I think the rest of us have been pretty privileged that you've decided to do this too, so … Patricia McConnell: Well, thank you. Melissa Breau: So I wanted to ask, you mentioned that, you know, you've been in the field for quite a while, and I wanted to ask kind of how your philosophy is today and maybe a little bit of kind of how even it's changed over that time. Obviously the world is a very different place for dogs. Patricia McConnell: Oh, man, so true. I mean, I've written quite a few places about the first dog training class I went to when I was, I think, probably 19. The dog trainer was a Marine, and he hung a Basenji — as in, with a choke-chain collar — picked the dog off the ground, so all four feet were off the ground, and hung him there until he started running out of breath and was dying. Actually, it was not all that long, shockingly, not all that long ago somebody, a dog died from that and someone tried to sue, except they didn't … they weren't successful because they were told that that was standard in the industry. That was standard practice, so you can't blame the person for doing it. Yeah, so boy, have things changed. Boy, have things changed. My philosophy now is very much along the lines of “least intrusive minimally aversive,” you know, the LIMA protocol that I think is fantastic. I would say 99.95 percent of what I do with dogs is positive reinforcement, and I do use, I will use a correction. I mean, if Maggie starts to eat something I don't want her to eat, sometimes I'll say “Leave it,” or sometimes I'll go “Ah-ah,” you know, and that's positive punishment because I added something to decrease the frequency of a behavior, right. So, but, I think, you know, besides the really important focus that you see now on positive reinforcement, which I think is just so vital, I think interspersed with that, entwined with that, is a change in our relationship and the way we see our dogs. I mean, it was all about dominance before. It was all about control, and you're in charge, and sometimes it was just simply, like, well, you know, “You have to be in charge,” and other times it was suggested as a way, as something your dog needed, you know, the old “Your dog needs you to be the alpha of the pack.” But it was always about control. And now it seems to me, don't you think, it's more with many of us about relationship. They are our best friends, you know. They're great friends of ours, and that's what I want. You know, my dogs have to do what I ask them to do. Sometimes they have to. They have to lie down if they're chasing a rabbit towards the road or something. But I value them as members of my family and friends. I don't think of them as furry people. I think that's disrespectful to dogs. But they are an integral part of my life and my family and my love. Melissa Breau: That's definitely something that is kind of a core part of the kind of Fenzi philosophy, so I mean, I definitely think that we're seeing more and more of a shift to that, obviously. Not everybody's there yet, but hopefully they will be one day, right? Patricia McConnell: Absolutely, yeah, and I think the kind of work that, you know, Fenzi Dog Sports Academy is doing is vital to that, you know? We just, we all need to be out there as much as we can, just spreading the word, because it's, you know, it's not just more fun, because it works better. I just heard, I was just at APDT not too long ago and somebody was … it was Pat Miller was talking about Bob Bailey saying — who was a professional animal trainer, he trained for movies and commercials — and he said, “I use positive reinforcement because it works better,” he said. “I don't do it for welfare, I don't do it to be nice, I do it because it works better and it's more efficient. I would do, if I had used punishment if it worked better in order to do my job, that's what I'd do, you know, but,” he said, “it just, it works better.” But so it does work better, but it's also so much more fun, you know. It's so much more fun to not have to be a drill sergeant in your own living room. Melissa Breau: I did hear that you were awarded an award at APDT. Is that right? Patricia McConnell: I was so honored. They gave me the Lifetime Achievement Award, yeah. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Patricia McConnell: Yeah, thank you. I was really honored, yeah. Thank you. Melissa Breau: Obviously, you're really well known for your work in dog behavior, but I know from your first book that early on in your career you did quite a bit of research on cues, especially across languages. And I know that cues are always kind of a big topic and of interest to people, so I wanted to ask you to kind of share your top takeaway or two from that work. Patricia McConnell: Oh, thanks for asking, because, you know, that's how I got into this. I mean, I was … I started as an undergraduate looking for a project, a research project. As an ethologist, somebody who studies animal behavior, I had no thought of working with domestic animals or being an applied animal behaviorist. I was working with a professor who worked with fish, and so what I did is … the question at the time that was really hot in the field at the time was, why do animals take the risk of making noise, you know, what are they doing, are they just sort of expressing an emotional state because they can't help it, are they, is there some function of what they do? People honestly were asking questions about why are animals making noise, because it's risky, right, it attracts attention. So I used working domestic animals, the relationship between handlers and working domestic animals, as a kind of a model for that system. So I recorded the acoustic signals from over 110 handlers who work with racehorses and all different kinds of dogs, different kinds of horses, and they spoke, I think I got 16 different languages, and what I found was I found patterns in how people speed animals up and and how they use sound to slow animals down. And so basically what I learned was short, rapidly repeated notes are used all over the world, no matter what language, what field, to speed animals up, and long, slow, extended ones are used to soothe them, and quick, abrupt ones with an instant onset are used to stop them. So, you know, so it's the difference between [makes sound] or [makes sound] right, those are all used to speed animals up. “Whoa, lie down,” soothe, slow versus “Whoa!” to stop a quarter horse, for example. And so yeah, so what I learned was it's not what you say, it's how you say it, and that's had a profound influence on how I work with animals and how I think of how we communicate. Melissa Breau: So how does that kind of continue to influence what you do today? Patricia McConnell: It does professionally and it does personally. So, you know, with clients I was always paying attention, and I think we all are. All good trainers, when we're working with dog owners, we're paying a lot of attention to how people use sound and how they say things, you know. So, I mean, this probably happened to everybody who's listening is you had a client who would say, “Jasper, come!” and Jasper would stop in his tracks, you know. And that was standard obedience, by the way, is to shout it out like that, and to stand really stiff and really still and look straight at your dog and, like, “Come!” you know. And dogs had to get over, like, OK, I guess I'm supposed to come forward, rather than their natural instinct, which is, I clearly should stop right now because they're telling me not to come here. So I pay a lot of attention to how clients would speak, and, you know, I have to work on it too. I mean, I work with working border collies and who are sometimes 500 yards away from you, so you really have to pay attention to tone, you know, and how you sound. I mean, I've learned … Maggie, for example. Maggie's super sensitive and she can get really worried, and so when I ask her to lie down, I say, “Lie down, lie down,” just really sing-songy, really easy, and she's so responsive that she'll do it right away. So both personally and professionally I just pay a lot of attention to that. Am I perfect personally? No, of course not. But the other thing I learned, Melissa, after I finished my dissertation, after I finished all that research on sound, when I started doing dog training classes is I discovered how, yeah, sound has a huge effect on how dogs behave, but they're primarily watching us, and how unaware most of us are of how our … the movement of our body affects dogs. So that's the other big takeaway that I've learned about cuing is that just whether you're leaning forward a half an inch can make a profound difference in whether your dog is comfortable coming towards you, or breaks its stay, or you turn your head away from a dog who's uncomfortable, or stare at it, make it uncomfortable. So, you know, all my training as an ethologist, and study communication and subtle, subtle, tiny, subtle little signals, I think stands everybody who loves dogs in good stead because it's so important to be aware that less is more. The tiniest little change in inflection, the tiniest little movement, can have a huge effect on your dog's behavior. Melissa Breau: And it goes back to, like, the example you mentioned kind of of somebody standing straight up and strict as they yell “Come.” It's not just the language. It's also the body language there that's just so counter, counter to purpose. Patricia McConnell: Yeah, exactly. Melissa Breau: I wanted to make sure we talked a little bit about the new book, because I know there are a lot of people who are very excited that you wrote it. So how does The Education of Will differ kind of from some of the other books that you've written? Patricia McConnell: Oh, well, thanks for asking about it, first of all. It's hugely different. It's … this is a totally different work than I've ever done before. It's a memoir, so it's very personal. It's a memoir about me and Willie. That's why the subtitle — on the hard cover, anyway —  is A Mutual Memoir of a Woman and Her Dog. I intertwine stories about getting Willie as a puppy who came as if he comes straight from Afghanistan with some canine version of PTSD. He was the most, he was fearful, he was sound reactive, he was pretty much a mess as a young dog. He really was. But he also, you know, he was … when he was good, he was like the best dog ever. He has a face on him that can just melt your bones, and he still does. I mean, there's something about Willie's face. That's why the publisher put his face on the cover of the book, which I still am not crazy about because I don't think it tells people what the book is really about. But his face, he's just got the most gorgeous face, and he's so loving and so friendly and so playful, you know. The best of Willie is, like, just the dog everybody wants, but he came with all this baggage, and his baggage, as it turned out, triggered all kinds of stuff that I thought I had resolved from my past. I had a lot of traumas in my past. I was raped, I was molested, I had somebody fall and die, literally out of the sky and, like, fall by surprise out of the sky and fall at my feet and die. Yeah, and you know when things like that happen, it really changes … structurally, physically, changes your brain. I mean, when individuals get traumatized with that kind of a trauma and they can't, they don't, have enough resilience to bounce back from it, it literally structurally, physically, changes your brain structure. Your amygdala gets more active, your hippocampus shrinks, I mean, all kinds of things happen. And so I had my own version of PTSD and I thought I'd resolved it, but when I got this super, super sound-reactive little puppy who, when a butterfly in China came out of its chrysalis, would leap up barking, and it set off, it triggered, all this old stuff and all these old symptoms with me. And so I basically figured out eventually that I couldn't heal Willie until I really healed myself. So he forced me to go farther down and face some of the things I thought I dealt with but I really hadn't finished. So I didn't start writing it to publish it. I actually started writing just segments of it, of some of the traumas that happened to me, as part of therapy, because it's very therapeutic to write out just about anything. I highly, strongly advise it to any of us. I write in my journal almost every morning and I find it so balancing. But so I started … I wasn't going to publish this, Melissa. I was just therapizing myself and trying to get better. And then, as a part of that process, I read a couple of books that literally changed my life. I mean, you know, that sounds, it's used so often and I know we can overuse it, but they really did. That really is how it felt. And I started thinking if I could write this book where I intertwined Willie's story and my story to show people that both people and dogs can, that the effects of trauma on both people and dogs, because dogs can be traumatized, and I think a lot of people don't acknowledge that. Horses too, any mammal, but to also that we are ultimately so resilient, and that if we have the right support around us, people can heal from just an amazing amount of things and so can dogs. So that's why I ended up finishing it, publishing it, and putting it out in the world. Melissa Breau: How are you and Willie both doing today? Patricia McConnell: Oh, we're good, we're good. He's 10. I can barely believe that he's 10 years old. He's really happy. I think he loves having Maggie there. Maggie is great with him. You know, he's so much better now. I mean, he recovered so much. He's still super reactive, but now it's like happy reactive, you know, it's not panic, scared reactive. But he's also … he's not the best dog around other dogs, and so when Maggie came she'd, like, try and play, and he'd get grumpy and, you know, do a little one of those little tiny little, you know, grumpy tooth displays, you know, like, [makes sound] and she literally would be, like, “Oh Willie, come on, let's play,” and you could just see he'd be, like, “OK.” So yeah, they play, he gets to work sheep, he gets, he and I still cuddle, and he gets a belly rub, he's really good, he's really happy, and it makes me really happy, yeah. Melissa Breau: Good. Patricia McConnell: Thanks for asking. Melissa Breau: Yeah. When you wrote the book, what do you hope people will take away from it? I know you mentioned that you wrote it kind of inspired by these other books that changed your life, but when somebody finishes reading the book, what do you hope they've kind of learned or that they walk away with? Patricia McConnell: Yeah, yeah, thanks for asking. I would say, one, that about that resilience, about the fact that it's amazing if you know how to handle it, you know. You have to have the tools, you have to have help, you have to have a village. That if you have help and you know how to handle it, it's astounding how resilient people can be. And I've since heard stories, and we've all heard stories, about people who have been through just unbelievable nightmares and yet they're doing good, you know, like, how do you live through that? So people are really resilient. I really want to emphasize and get out into the world, past sort of the Dog Fancy world, that dogs can be traumatized, you know. I'm sure I don't have to tell you or listeners is that so much of “aggression” and “disobedience” are is basically behavior that's motivated by fear, you know. And I see … I saw a lot of dogs who I think were traumatized, I mean, even just in the dog park they got attacked from behind by some dog and then they become dog aggressive. And so knowing that, you know, this is not about dominance, this is not in the, this is not a bad dog, you know, that we need to be really thoughtful. Veterinarians need to be really aware of how terrifying it can be to a dog to have certain medical procedures, and I think veterinary medicine is starting to come on board, which is really gratifying. Dr. Marty Becker has a book coming out — it's actually available through Dogwise, it's coming out in April commercially or everywhere else — it's called From Fearful to Fear Free, and a lot of what he's trying to do is to change vet clinics so that they're more conscious, you know, using a lot of the kind of methods that Sophia Yin did such a great job of spreading out into the world. So that's another one of the things that I want people to be aware of — that animals can be traumatized and they need understanding. They don't need dominance. They need understanding. But, you know, the last thing that I would love people to get is that we all have stories, you know. We all have stories, and we all have things that we're ashamed of or afraid of. And I'm a big supporter of Brene Brown and her work about facing those fears, about putting light onto some of that, rather than hiding it in the dark. And, you know, we need to be aware of the person we're sitting next to, or the person who was rude in line at the supermarket or something, you know. We don't know their story. And even when people are successful and productive, you know, you don't know. You don't know. So the more empathy and benevolence and kindness we can have to everybody and anybody, whether person or dog, the better the world will be. Melissa Breau: I think that's such, like, a powerful and important message to kind of get out there and think about and to be aware of, not just in your interactions with dogs but also with people. Patricia McConnell: Thank you. And don't you think — and this is an authentic question I'm asking you — maybe because of social media, I don't know what it is about the world, is it in the water, I don't know, but, you know, it's true in many fields, and sort of parts of social behavior of humans, but there is a certain amount, in the dog world, of snarkiness, of, you know, of snappiness, of a lack of real thoughtful, benevolent consideration of other people, and I think that's too bad. I do think it's partly because of social media, but I just want everybody who loves dogs and is promoting positive training with dogs, if we all — and we all need to be reminded of, believe me, I am no saint, I have to take a breath sometimes too — but we all need to remember that no matter what method somebody uses or how much we disagree with them, we need to be as positive with people as we are with dogs. Melissa Breau: I think especially in kind of the sports world, or the competitive world, you've got a dichotomy there between competition where people want to be better than the others around them and they also do have that relationship with their dog, so I definitely do think that there's a snarkiness, and we all have to be conscious of our own behavior and our own words and kind of fight against that a little bit. Patricia McConnell: Yeah, yeah, you know, I don't do, I don't go to agility, I never competed in it, but I don't go. I watch it sometimes, but I don't do it a lot, but I'm in sheepdog handling and, you know, we all know how competitive some people can be. And I love the people who are competitive in a really good way, you know? They want to get better, and they love to, and yeah, it's way more fun to win. I mean, it's way more fun to do well. No question about it. It's way more fun to do well. But overriding all of these has got to be the health and happiness of our dogs and our relationship with them. Melissa Breau: I could not agree with you more. Patricia McConnell: Oh good. Melissa Breau: So I know we're kind of getting towards the end of the call, but there are three questions that I ask everyone who comes on the podcast and I wanted to make sure we kind of got them in and I got your perspective … so to start out the first one is what is the dog-related accomplishment that you're proudest of? Patricia McConnell: Well, you know, I have to separate it out. Personally, I think I'm proudest of giving my dogs a good life. I feel all wussy when I say that. I could just get all soppy and Oprah-ish. But I, you know, I'm not perfect and, I mean, I can beat myself up over things I haven't done perfectly and I could have done better, but I think, in general, I think I've provided quite a few dogs a really, really good life, and understanding them as individuals rather than just dogs and making them fit into some kind of a slot that I wanted them to fit into, so I'm really proud of that. And I also, I guess professionally, I think I'm proudest of combining my respect for good writing and my passion and love for dogs and my interest in science, combining all those three things. I love to read, I love good writing, I don't think anybody needs to hear how much I'm just stupid in love for dogs, and I think science is really important, and I found a way, sometimes, you know, I get on the right track and I combine all those three things in a way that I feel is good enough, and when that happens I feel really good about that. Melissa Breau: I love that, especially the bit about just knowing that you've provided a good life to your dogs. That's such an awesome thing to be proud of. I really, I like that answer. Patricia McConnell: Thank you, thank you. Melissa Breau: So this one may be a hard question, but what is the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Patricia McConnell: Oh man, oh wow, oh wow, let's see. Do I have to pick one? OK, I'll be really fast. Melissa Breau: You can share more than one if you want. I'll let you get away with that. Patricia McConnell: Good. The thing that pops up in my mind the first time I hear that is actually … it's not a piece of advice. It's just a saying and it makes me want to cry. I sound like such a crier. It makes me want to cry. The saying is, “We train by regret.” It just hits home so hard to me because I think every one of us who cares deeply about dogs and is really honest, and insightful, and learned, and grows, you know, admits that there's things we've done that we wish we'd never done and, you know, some of them are just tiny little stupid things. It's like, “Oh, I can't believe I didn't think of that,” or, you know, so I think that's a really important saying. But I think that the most important part about it is to remind all of us to be kinder to ourselves. I think a lot of the people I work with who are progressive dog trainers who just adore their dogs and move heaven and earth for them, we're so hard on ourselves. Don't you think? I mean, we're just, you know, I work with clients who are just … they're just, oh, they're being so hard on themselves because they haven't been perfect. They made this one mistake and it's like, oh man, you know, we are all human here. So I think that strikes home with me a lot. And I guess the other just sort of solid, quick, concise piece of advice is basically “Say less, mean more.” I just made that up, but I've heard people say versions of that, you know, so basically another version is “Just shut up.” I think, I mean, you can hear I like to talk, right, so I can get badly with my dogs, and I think it's confusing and tiring to our dogs. And I think, you know, some of the people who, you know, those people who dogs just don't ever want to leave, you know, they meet them, and the second they meet them they sit down beside them and don't want to leave. There aren't many of them, and I was never one of those people. I sometimes am now, which makes me really happy, but those are often people who are really quiet. So I think being very mindful of the way we use words and sound around our dogs is really, really important because, I think, frankly, our dogs are often just simply exhausted trying to figure out what the heck we're trying to convey to them, you know? So I guess I'd just stick with those two things. Melissa Breau: Excellent. Well, thank you. Kind of the last one here is who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Patricia McConnell: If you had asked that first we would still be talking. That's cold to ask me last when we run out of time! OK, I'll talk really fast. Susan Friedman — I'd kiss the hem of her skirt or her pants. I bow down to her. I think she's brilliant, funny, amazing, wonderful. I love Fenzi Dog Sports. I think that incredible work's being done. Suzanne Hetts is doing great work. Her husband, Dan Estep. Julie Hecht at Dog Spies. Karen Pryor, oh my goodness. Trish King. Steve White. Chris Zink, the … everybody in, you know, dog sports knows. Those are the people who just, like, rattle off the top of my head right now, but I could go on and on and on. There are so many amazing people in this field right now. It's just so gratifying. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Patricia McConnell: Those are just a few of them, yeah. Melissa Breau: We'll have to see if we can get a few of them to come on the show. Patricia McConnell: Oh absolutely, yeah. Melissa Breau: Well thank you so much for coming on the podcast Patricia! I really appreciate it. Patricia McConnell: Oh, it was really fun. Thanks for having me. Melissa Breau: Awesome. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Sarah Stremming. Sarah and I will be talking about life with your dog outside of training… and how what you do then impacts that training. Don't miss it! It if you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. CREDITS: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

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

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

 SHOW NOTES:  Summary: Dr. Deborah Jones is a psychologist who specializes in theory and social behavior and teaches those subjects full time at Kent State University. An early innovator in the use of clicker training, she has owned and worked with a variety of breeds and has earned top level titles in Agility, Rally, and Obedience over the last 25 years.  In 2004, Deb worked with agility trainer and World Team member Judy Keller to develop the Focus Training System. FOCUS stands for Fun, Obedience & Consistency lead to Unbelievable Success. Deb has also worked with Denise Fenzi co-authoring the Dog Sports Skills book series and has authored several other books with more in the works. At FDSA, Deb offers a wide range of popular classes including a number of excellent foundations classes. Her focus is on developing training methods that are enjoyable and effective for both the dog and the trainer. Links mentioned: www.k9infocus.com (Deb's site) www.k9infocus.wordpress.com (Deb's blog) www.thedogathlete.com (Deb & Denise's books)  Next Episode:  To be released 6/16/2017, featuring Andrea Harrison.  TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dogs Sports Podcast, brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we will be talking to Dr. Deborah Jones, better known around FDSA as Deb Jones. Deb is a psychologist who specializes in theory and social behavior and teaches those subjects full time at Kent State University. An early innovator in the use of clicker training, she has owned and worked with a variety of breeds and has earned top level titles in Agility, Rally, and Obedience over the last 25 years.  In 2004, Deb worked with agility trainer and World Team member Judy Keller to develop the Focus Training System. FOCUS stands for Fun, Obedience & Consistency lead to Unbelievable Success. Deb has also worked with Denise Fenzi co-authoring the Dog Sports Skills book series and has authored several other books with more in the works. At FDSA, Deb offers a wide range of popular classes including a number of excellent foundations classes. Her focus is on developing training methods that are enjoyable and effective for both the dog and the trainer. Oh, and she's working on a cat class, too. Hi, Deb. Welcome to the podcast. Deb Jones: Hi, Melissa. Thank you, very much, for having me. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to chat today. Deb Jones: Oh, so am I. Melissa Breau: So, usually to get started I ask people to tell us a little bit about their dogs and what they are working on with them, but since I know you also have the cat class coming up, do you want to just walk us through your full furry crew and what you're working on with all of them?  Deb Jones: Sure. Yeah. I have quite a crew right now. I have three Border Collies and three Shelties that I'm working with, along with the cat, Tricky, who is going to be the star of the cat class -- because he insists. Every time I train dogs he's there, so I figured if he's going to show up regularly he might as well earn his keep and be part of a class at FDSA. I have my three Border Collies that I work with the majority of the time now. Many people know Zen, who is almost 10 years old, which seems impossible. He is my demo dog for everything. Always willing to work. He's done Agility, Obedience, and Rally, and titled in all of those and, these days, he's pretty much semi-retired. He gets to do almost whatever he wants except what he wants to do is play ball 24 / 7, so we don't do that, but other than that he gets to do whatever he wants.  Star is my next oldest dog, a Border Collie, who is, I say constantly, the smartest dog I ever met. She's scary smart and Star is also great demo dog. Also showed her as well. And my youngest boy now, who is actually Zen's nephew, Helo is going to be three. A lot of people have seen him in class videos. Ever since he was a puppy he's been working for FDSA in some form or the other. And the latest, youngest Sheltie is Tigger, who is a tiny little seven pound thing and he is just so full of himself and full of life, and he's a lot of fun, so he is also in quite a few of the class videos and he enjoys every second of it, and then the other two Shelties are a little bit older, so they have what we call old dog immunity, which means, again, you get to do whatever you want and they enjoy that. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Deb Jones: So it's a busy household. Melissa Breau: I'd imagine -- but I've seen some of those videos you share of Tigger. He's so cute. Deb Jones: Oh. He's a little firecracker. To have such a tiny little dog…he's way below size for what Shelties usually are and this was just by chance. It was just a fluke that he was this small, but oh is he full of it, so he makes us laugh every day. That's the thing we say about Tigger is he makes us laugh constantly, so there's a lot of value in that.  Melissa Breau: So I wanted to ask about how you originally got into dog sports -- I know that you've done a lot of different sports and with a lot of different dogs, so what got you started?  Deb Jones: Yeah. I have. I've had a lot of different dogs over the years. Settled on herding dogs now, but I actually started out with a Labrador Retriever, black lab named Katie, and I was in graduate school and I'd been in about two years and just had to have a dog. I'd always had dogs just as pets, and never done a lot with them, but I really felt the need to have some sort of companionship in graduate school that was not stressful, so I got Katie, who was a rescue…from a rescue. She was about 18 months old and we did training classes. Took her to local training classes.  And this was in 1992, so at that time all there was, was obedience. If you wanted to show a dog in anything you were going to show it in Obedience, so I went through a number of classes. I met a lot of people. I got to know quite a bit about obedience competition and the only…the problem was I was already trained in behavioral psychology and learning theory, and what I saw happening in classes did not match at all my expectation for how we should be training animals. It was still very, very heavy handed and traditional back in those days. So I liked the idea of competition and performance but I didn't like the way that people told me you had to train in order to get to it, so that sort of started this conflict in me about I want to do this but I don't want to do it that way and made me work very hard to try to figure out 'how can I apply what I know from academics and get successful performance?' And so that was the start of it. Melissa Breau: So how did you bridge that gap? What actually got you started on that positive journey and at what point did you get introduced to clicker training? Deb Jones: Around the same time I got Katie I was introduced to the book Don't Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor, which was probably the very first book that many dog trainers ever saw that had anything to do with positive training. I'm a voracious reader so I read every dog training book out there and this was one of many, but this was the one that really, really spoke to me and said to me you can take what you know from science, you can apply it to training the animal that you're working with now and you can be successful. Except the thing was nobody had actually done it. It was theory. It wasn't yet application. And so that set me on the path of being able to do this training the way I want to do it and having an enthusiastic and very willing animal partner rather than one who was basically forced to do it because there would be unpleasant consequences if they didn't, so I really would credit the book with getting me started on that. Melissa Breau: Awesome. Is that also how you were introduced to clicker training and shaping and all that good stuff? Deb Jones: Yeah. It all came around about the same time. There was actually…the first internet email group that I was ever on, which was called Click-L. This is really ancient. This was also back in about 1993 or so. When we first got internet at home, which was a big deal at the time, but ClickL was a group of like-minded people and we were all just simply trying to figure out how do we do this? How do we apply this? And Karen Pryor was on the list along with a number of other people who are still training today and we were all just kind of talking and throwing ideas around and trying to figure out how we could use this kind of technique, a clicker training technique, to get the…all different sorts of behaviors, so it was a time when nobody was really an expert because nobody had done it yet, but that's really what I wanted to work toward was to make it work in our day to day training. Melissa Breau: I bet back then you never would have thought you'd be teaching online in today's day in age. Deb Jones: Absolutely not. No. I remember my great excitement the first time my modem actually hooked up at home because for the longest time we only had access at school, when I was in graduate school, for the first couple of years, so no, I could never have foreseen that one day I would be involved in these online classes. That just would not have ever crossed my map. Melissa Breau: So one of my favorite lines to come out of the podcast so far Sue made this whole analogy during her interview about training without focus being almost like sending a kid to school without clothes on, right? Like you would never imagine… Deb Jones: I love that. Melissa Breau: ...sending a kid to school…  Deb Jones: No. Yeah. Melissa Breau: …without his clothes on. Like why would you train a dog if you don't already have their focus? So I wanted to talk a little bit about that concept. Focus seems likes a place where people just tend to struggle and I was kind of curious to get your take on why you think that is? Deb Jones: Oh, so many reasons. Yeah. Sue always has the best descriptions of things and I think that one is perfect. The problem with focus though is that it's invisible to a large extent. Oftentimes people have the illusion that they have focus because they have cookies and they have toys and they're in a training mode. Then they try to go into performance and all of a sudden it becomes very clear it was only an illusion. You did not have actual offered focus from your dog. You thought you did but you didn't, so that's about the time people contact me. They're like I don't know what went wrong. Everything was going so well and then they're really surprised. Sometimes people equate focus with eye contact and what we say is that's only part of it because you can be focused but not looking at each other. Looking at each other is not always focus. It's easy to look at somebody and to be a thousand miles away in your mind and dogs do it the same way that people do it, so it's more than eye contact, which can be a trained behavior. There has to be this desire to want to do whatever the activity is or the task is. And if that desire isn't there, there's not going to be any focus. You're always going to be looking around for something else that's more interesting, and I think people just don't realize any of this. You're training your dog. You're teaching behaviors and skills but you're not teaching it with focus and it falls apart very quickly when it's put to the test. Melissa Breau: It's very hard to...I mean even as a person, right? If you're focused on one task there's a big difference between being focused on the task and having eight million tabs open on your browser and you're jumping back and forth between Facebook and the thing you're writing and something else and it…  Deb Jones: Yeah. There is and it takes a while. It's not something we can expect to have immediately. Every once in a while, and it's very rare, you get a dog that just is naturally focused but it's really rare. I've only known one dog who, I would say, was really, truly always just focused from the get go. That's not the norm, so we all have to work at it to get our dogs to that place and people then don't know. Okay, they want focus but then they have no idea. What do you do? How do I get focus? And that's really the tricky part of it because there's a lot of things you do. Some of them work. Some of them don't. Melissa Breau: So how do you approach it in the class? Deb Jones: We have two classes that address focus and the first…I always hope people take them in order. The first class is Get Focused, which is what I always recommend people take first and then a follow-up to that is called Focus Games and we always try to offer Get Focused in one term and then Focus Games in the next so people can follow through with it. What I try to do is isolate focus from…take it out of the context of anything else and distill it down to this mutual desire to interact with each other, so convincing the dog that what we're doing is what he wants to do, which sounds hard and it is hard. Sometimes it is very difficult. It's not easy. We have a number of very specific exercises to work on letting our dogs know that focus pays off and if you focus on me I'll pay you for it and we try to get people quickly to move from food to toys and back and forth and into personal play as well so that you get paid in some way for focusing. There's a reinforcer for focusing. Then we start adding work to focus but what we do is typically the opposite of what everybody else does. We have to have focus first before we ask for work or play even. If the dog isn't focused we do not go on. We never train an unfocused dog and I say this…this is like a million times. I say this over and over again. If my dog's not focused I need to stop and this is really, really hard for people to do because they have a plan in their head for something that they wanted to train, but training an unfocused dog is just a waste of time if you truly want to develop this. Work and training always has to be combined with focus. So we go through a series of exercises designed to improve focus and also to teach people what to do when it's gone. What do you do? What's the protocol for when the focus is lost? Because lots of times then people are just kind of stuck. They don't know what to do so they take responsibility for focus and try to make it happen rather than allowing the dog to offer it. Melissa Breau: That whole being more exciting than a clown on crack line from Denise, right? Like that idea of just trying to be more and more exciting and your dog just continues to ignore you. Deb Jones: Yeah. Melissa Breau: Yeah. Deb Jones: Yeah. That ends up being kind of a death spiral. Things never go well if I have…if I have to add more and more energy to the interaction then there is a problem. I'm giving everything. My dog's not doing anything. We need to go back to getting the dog to want to focus and work with us and so we continually go back to that and we don't try to overwhelm the dog with fun and excitement because that's a dead end. You won't get very far with that. The problem is it often will temporarily work but it won't work over the long term. It won't hold up. We work on all of this in the Get Focused class. When we move onto the Focus Games class, that's a lot more about finding the flow and the rhythm to working together and extending it out and adding things like movement and taking food off our bodies and still getting focus, so we add all those kinds of things in there, so it's a good 12 weeks worth of focused focus on focus.   Melissa Breau: Right, so both the Focused class and your current class, the Performance Fundamentals class, seem to fall into that foundations category, right? So I wanted to ask you what you thought it was so…what is it about building a good foundation that is so critical when it comes to dog sports?  Deb Jones: Foundation really is everything. I truly believe that. If you do your foundations well you won't run into problems later on or…I won't say you won't. You won't run into as many problems later on or if you do run into problems you will have a way to fix them because the problem is in the foundation. Ninety-nine percent of the time something wasn't taught to fluency or you left something out somewhere. You've got a gap or a hole, so going back to foundation and making it strong is always the answer. It's never a wrong thing to do. So I really like being able to try to get in that really strong basis for everything else you want. I don't care what sport people are going into or even if they're not going into sport at all. If they just like training and they want to train their dog this…a good foundation prepares you for any direction in the future because oftentimes we change direction. You have a dog you think you're going to be doing obedience with but if you focus in the beginning too much on obedience behaviors it may end up that dog just isn't right for that, and so you have kind of these gaps for.. "oh well, let's see if I want to switch to agility. Now I need to train a new set of behaviors." We don't want that to happen so we've got the foundation for pretty much everything. Melissa Breau: Talk a little bit more about the Fundamentals Class specifically. Do you mind just giving some details around what you cover in that class and how you work to set up that foundation within the class syllabus? Within the class…within, I guess, what you teach there? Deb Jones: Sure. Yeah. Sure. We approach performance fundamentals very differently than many other people do or the way that people think they should approach dog training. I'm considering typically as a class that you either start with a puppy or you've gone through a puppy class and now you're ready to move onto the next thing, so that's where we would come in. I also think that it's a really good class for people who haven't done a lot of positive reinforcement training and they don't quite understand how to get started with it and what to do. I think it's also a good place for that, but the thing is rather than focusing on skills and behaviors…I don't care at all in a class if the dog learns to sit or lie down or do whatever it is on cue. In fact, lots of times they won't and they don't need to. What they need to do in Performance Fundamentals or what I want them to be able to do is to build the foundation for a good working relationship so that, again, the dog is ready. The dog's willing. The dog really wants to do what you're doing. We work hard on balancing things like getting dogs to play as well as food motivation and going back and forth with those quite a bit and my goal is always to make it seem like the dog doesn't know if you're playing or training. If they don't believe there's any difference, that's perfect. That's perfect training, so we do a lot of the foundation things like targeting behavior, so you might have the dog targeting to your hand. You might have the dog targeting with their nose to other objects. Have the dog targeting with their front feet or with their back feet, so we would explore okay there's all these different things we can do with targeting behavior and those are all going to come in handy for you on down the line. We'll look at and play around with shaping because shaping is one of my favorite techniques and it's also one that's really hard for people. It takes a lot of practice and you make a lot of mistakes. There's just no way around it. It's experimenting, so we play around with shaping and I always like to shape tricks and things that people don't care about a whole lot so if you mess it up nobody cares. It's no big deal, you know? You don't want to start being like.. on your competition retrieve, you don't want that to be the first time you shape. Because that matters to people, and so we try to get them to do the easier things first.  In that class we're also just looking at can you effectively use…once we've taught targeting, can you use luring? Can you use shaping? You can teach any behavior any number of ways and so we look a bit more at the techniques that underlie that and there's…people can make decisions about what they want to train and how they want to go about approaching it and we help them with that once they make some informed decisions.  Melissa Breau: For sure. I thought, writing the questions for this talk, I felt like there were eight million things I wanted to ask about and jumping back and forth between focus and then the Performance Fundamentals class and I've taken the Cooperative Canine Care Class  and loved it, so I wanted to at least briefly kind of touch on the other subjects. We'll definitely have to have you back to talk more in depth about them, but can you tell us a little bit about the Cooperative Canine Care Class and a little bit about the new cat class you're working on? And give people…  Deb Jones: Oh. Melissa Breau: …a sneak peek? Deb Jones: Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. Cooperative Care has turned out to be one of my favorites. Which I think we've only been teaching it for a couple of years and I was…I became interested in this whole idea of husbandry work and working on grooming and veterinary procedures with animals after I had gone to a week-long training seminar at Shedd Aquarium a few years ago and the majority of the training they do is cooperative care type training. They train every day for things that their animals may or may not ever need but if they need them then it's there, so training their dolphins, for example, to flip upside down and hold still so they can take blood out of the vein by their tail and that's something they work on everyday even though it happens very rarely, and that got me thinking a lot about what we do with dogs because mostly what we do with dogs is we wrestle with them and usually because we're a little bit stronger and because they're nice they don't bite us, but in reality we do some pretty unpleasant things to them and we don't prepare them for it. We just do it, okay. So I wanted to really explore with dogs what can we do to make this more pleasant, more fun for everybody involved? Because it's no fun for the people either. It's just a stressful thing all the way around when you have to do something to an animal that it's afraid of and doesn't want you to do, so that was the idea for it and we've had a lot of fun with it because if you make it all into games and tricks and trained behaviors it really tends to be amazing what they will cooperate with and what they will allow you to do and I've used my own dogs as guinea pigs, of course, for everything on this and really been amazed at how much better it is for them than it was in the past. One of my dogs, Star, had developed a terrible fear of the vet. I was out of town and she ended up having to be spayed and it was unpleasant and just terrible things happened to her at that point. To the point that I was worried she would bite somebody at the vet, and now she goes in. She's pleased with herself. She jumps up on the table. She wants to do her chin rest and take her squeeze cheese and it just made her…it just made everything so much better for her and that made me so happy and that's what I hear from students all the time. It's these little things, you know? That my dog went to the vet and jumped on the scale by themselves or they held still while the vet gave them a shot and didn't even act like they noticed and that's what I want to hear. Those are the kinds of things that make that class worthwhile. Melissa Breau: And I know, for example, I have a German Shepherd with some pressure issues and just the working through the class and working through being able to touch them in different ways that just helped her so much in terms of wanting to cuddle and be a little bit closer to me at different times. It just had so much of a positive impact in the relationship over all. I can't recommend the class highly enough.  Deb Jones: Oh. I'm really happy to hear that. I just love hearing things like that because I think when we give our animals a choice…everybody's afraid to give them a choice because they're afraid they're going to say no. We're afraid they're going to say no I don't want you to touch me. No, I don't want this to happen, but if we approach it in a very incremental, systematic way and make it highly reinforcing they're much more likely to start saying yes and the whole idea that they have a choice, I think, makes them brave. It makes them confident and it increases our bond with them because we no longer have to wrestle them to the ground to try to do something with them, so they trust us more. Melissa Breau: Right. Do you want to share a little bit about the cat class? Deb Jones: The cat class. Yeah. I was just thinking about that. I'm still working on the cat class, which I honestly…honestly when I said it, it was a joke. I didn't necessarily actually ever intend,…when I first brought it up, I was like you know oh I'm so busy so here I am thinking about teaching a class to train cats and I thought that was funny, but people started jumping in and what I realized from that is every video I get from a student that has a cat the cat is there. Like I said earlier. The cat's in it. The cat's interested so what the heck? And people really do not believe that cats can be trained. They think cats are totally different than any other creature on the planet and you can train everything else but not a cat, so…and working with my own cat, Tricky, who's about six years old now, I think. I've worked quite a bit with Tricky over the years. He likes to train and he trains differently than a dog but in some ways, he's faster. In some ways a little bit…it's a little bit more challenging than I expected, so it's an exploration. It's an experiment but I'm looking at…started looking at what could we do with a class like this? How could I set it up?   So it's going to be a little bit different than some of my other classes because first we have to convince the cats that they want to work with us and I think that's a little…that's even more than it takes with a dog because our dogs we tend to be a little more social with anyway and cats sometimes we allow them to be very independent and we assume that's what they're supposed to be, so convincing them now that they want to do something with us and that it's going to pay off. I think that's going to be a big step, but other than that 90 percent of what I'm looking at it's the same way you train any animal. We use lots of positive reinforcement. We break things down into small bits and we work our way up, so I don't know that it will be that vastly different. It's not like there's one way to train cats and then another way to train every other animal in the world. It's that we train the same way but we have to remember that they are cats and that there are some things that we'll have to keep in mind that make them different than dogs, so it's an interesting challenge and I'm really excited about it now, so I'm spending the summer training my cat. Melissa Breau: I can't wait to see some of the videos from that. It sounds like it will be entertaining and really useful. I mean, it's always…I feel like anytime we learn more about training a different species than dogs it only improves your overall ability to train. Deb Jones: Oh. Definitely. I think I've learned more from other species by far than I have from training dogs. They're always more challenging. You have more to learn about them. Approach them differently, so yeah. I love training other species. That's one of my favorite things to do. Melissa Breau: We're getting towards the end of the podcast so we're at those last three questions that I ask every episode. So what is the dog related accomplishment that you are proudest of? Deb Jones: Oh. That's a tough question. First I…because you'd think okay I'd want to talk about titles or something but not really. What I think I'm most proud of just overall with all of my dogs is that they all want to work with me. If they have a choice between me and anything else in the world they'll choose me and there's a lot of effort, on my part in terms of training, that went into that but I'm very proud of the fact that my dogs freely make that decision and I don't ever have to coerce them to make that, so I'd say that has to be my overall answer. Melissa Breau: I think that's an accomplishment almost everybody listening to this would love to have, so I definitely think that's a good answer. What is the best piece of training advice that you have ever heard? Deb Jones: Oh. That's a hard one, too. These are hard questions, Melissa. I've heard lots of good and bad training advice over the years but most recently what's sticking in my mind comes from Denise, actually, which is train the dog in front of you. Train the dog you have right now not the dog you want or the dog that you think you ought to have, but train the one that's standing there and that is harder than it seems to be, but I think that's a very good piece of advice. They're all different and we need to work with each one as a unique individual. Melissa Breau: And even as a unique individual I mean the dog you have today is not the dog you have next week and it's so hard to see that sometimes. Deb Jones: Oh, it is. It's really hard because we just have built up in our minds this image of what this dog's like and even if the dog changes our image doesn't always change, so I think that's a really good point and I sometimes…I'm so bad I forget which dog knows which behavior. So I'll tell Helo to do something that Zen knows how to do and then I'll look at him like oh I never taught you that, so I need to focus a little more on the dog that's in front of me at the moment.  Melissa Breau: That's funny. And then finally, who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Deb Jones: Oh. Quit asking me hard questions. Well, I have to say as a group really, truly every instructor at FDSA is just amazing and they really inspire me. I feel challenged to always do better because of the people I'm working with. Because the instructors are all so awesome and I don't want to be the weak link so I always feel like I have to do more and work harder because of them, which is a really good thing. If we move out of that realm a little bit someone that I do truly admire would be Ken Ramirez. I worked with him at Shedd. Got to know him and work with him at Shedd Aquarium when I was there and have seen him several times since then and I like his approach and I like the fact that he's worked with so many different species and that he still maintains the science of it but at the same time it's not clinical. It's also humanized in a way. I don't know if that even makes any sense. Melissa Breau: Very practical. It's applicable. Deb Jones: Yes. Very, very applicable to a huge variety of situations, so I admire that. Melissa Breau: All right. Well, thank you, so much for coming on the podcast, Deb. It was really great to chat. Deb Jones: Oh. Thank you for asking me. Melissa Breau: Yeah. No. I was thrilled that you could make some time and that we could fit this in and thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We will be back next week. This time with Andrea Harrison to talk about the human half of the competitive team. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. CREDITS: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!