Podcast appearances and mentions of kathy sdao

In this episode, Jesse and Verena chat about setting you and your dog up for success so that they do things you like and then finding ways to reward your dog's good behavior. You can find Reward Your Dog Training here: Website / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook YouTubePlease send any questions or comment to verena@rewardyourdogtraining.com - we'd love to hear from you!Our Shoutout for this Episode is: Bright Spot Dog Training, Kathy Sdao's dog training company

If you try one training method with your new rescue dog, try this one! This week, Emily and Libby speak with Kathy Sdao, world-renowned dog trainer, speaker, writer, and educator. Sdao's accessible training technique, SMARTx50, is a powerful tool that distills behavior science into the lay person's terms, making it accessible for our human learners: dog rescuers, fosters and adopters. They discuss how to use SMARTx50 to help our dogs fit into our human world, and this conversation is lively and full of both science and heart; evidence and experience. Some topics discussed are: How to take training out of the science theory realm into the practical, accessible world of humans training their dog Helping resolve dogs anxiety by using reinforcers How her work with marine mammals influences her training approach Human praise as payment - does it work or not? How the Smartx50 technique can be adapted to a shelter environment Kathy has been passionate about animal training ever since she quit a good job to move halfway around the world to train dolphins at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory at the University of Hawaii. Now, 35 years later, she offers her expertise as an applied animal behaviorist to dog owners in Washington State and across the world, to seminar and webinar audiences and to professional training organizations. Kathy has taught 300 seminars, workshops, conferences and webinars; many of these presentations have been professionally recorded and are available for purchase. Kathy's training philosophy and advice is summarized in her book, Plenty in Life is Free: Reflections on Dogs, Training and Finding Grace. For transcripts, visit www.podtotherescue.com Follow us on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/podtotherescue/ and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/PodToTheRescue! Credits: Libby Felts and Emily Wolf (Hosts and Creators). Original music by Mike Pesci. Production and editing by Alex Ammons of For the Love Media. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sdr7/support --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sdr7/support

Hey listeners, we're back! We have some exciting episodes planned for this season, including interviews with Annie Phenix, Kathy Sdao, and more industry veterans as well as up-and-coming trainers and rescuers. Make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts! And share with your rescue friends to make sure they don't miss it, either. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sdr7/support

Kathy's book: https://amzn.to/3Ot1nXH Kikopup on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-qnqaajTk6bfs3UZuue6IQ Find a qualified professional near you: CCPDT: https://www.ccpdt.org/dog-owners/certified-dog-trainer-directory/ IAABC: https://iaabc.org/certs/members

In episode 65, Marissa Martino and Kathy Sdao talk about a necessary topic for pet parents and pet professionals: listening. Some questions that are addressed during the episode include: What are the three levels of listening? Why is silence so important? How could our own best intentions be getting in the way of truly listening? When should we educate -vs- empathize? Can we do both? Kathy Sdao, she/her, is the owner of Bright Spot Dog Training in Tacoma, WA. She is one of the original faculty members of the Karen Pryor Academy ClickerExpo. She has trained animal actors, written for The Clicker Journal and the Seattle Times, consulted with Guide Dogs for the Blind and with Susquehanna Service Dogs. Kathy has taught more than 300 seminars, workshops, conference presentations & webinars, enjoying these opportunities to share her passion for the incredible power of positive-reinforcement training, confirmed over decades of working with dozens of species.

We're going to kick things off by introducing you to the work and wisdom of Kathy Sdao. Not only does she have an overall philosophy that we'd love to burn into the hearts and brains of our clients, but she also came up with our very favorite training exercise, the one we both use with almost every client, called SMART x 50, which we'll explain in this episode

In this interview episode, we are joined by Kathy Sdao, an applied animal behaviorist to discuss an always popular topic, food motivation. Food motivation is a term that comes up a lot when folks are talking about training their pets. While all individuals are intrinsically motivated by food, because they have to eat to survive, it can get a little more complicated when we're talking about the behavior of reliably eating, which is usually what many folks are really referring to when talking about food motivation. And not reliably eating, can lead to some sticky situations. You'll hear Emily and Kathy discuss: Being a detective when your pet doesn't eat, because it's a behavioral emergencyWhy the back of your pet food bag probably isn't an accurate recommendation for how much food your pet should eatHow you can create aversions to food, doing things that people very commonly doYou can find the full show notes here.

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!

In Episode 31, Marissa is joined by her fellow colleagues and co-founders of LIMA Beings, Dr. Chris Pachel, Lynn Ungar, Barrie Finger, and Kathy Sdao. They discuss the drive behind their triggers and what hooks them. As we try to discover the things that make us reactive, we can learn to let things go. We react to situations in certain ways and because of those reactions we can become stuck. We can learn to accept that if/when we make mistakes, we can always stop, go back, and make edits.

Een koe is een dier, maar een dier is geen koe. Zo is Force Free vooral gebaseerd op R+ technieken, maar is R+ training lang niet altijd Force Free. In deze aflevering leggen Janneke en Do de definities en de verschillen met liefde en plezier haarfijn uit. Want wanneer is iets dan eigenlijk dwang, en wat zijn 'degrees of freedom'?  En zouden we elk gedrag maar moeten trainen, puur omdat het kan? Dat en nog veel meer in deze lekker lange aflevering van Stokpaardje. We horen heel erg graag wat je van deze aflevering vindt, en waar een volgende aflevering over zou moeten gaan volgens jou! Stuur een email naar stokpaardjedepodcast@gmail.com of benader ons op social media op Instagram of Facebook.Klik hier om de flowchart te downloadenKlik hier om meer te weten te komen over dierentrainer Ken Ramirez Klik hier voor meer info over Kathy Sdao's boek 'Plenty in Life is Free'Muziek: Dar GolanFoto: Flynn (@blackunipown)

This special episode includes an interview with the Cognitive Canine's Sarah Stremming, and we talked with Sarah about her philosophy regarding behavioral wellness in our dogs. The four steps include Exercise, Enrichment, Nutrition and Communication. Sarah Stremming is a dog trainer, dog agility and obedience competitor, and dog behavior consultant. She travels the globe helping dogs and handlers understand each other better. Her credentials include a bachelors of science degree in psychology from Colorado State University, and more than a decade in the field of dog training and behavior. Her special interest area is problem solving for performance dogs. She is committed to education and growth in the field of dog training and attends the innovative training conference, Clicker Expo, every year. In addition to offering seminars both domestically and across the globe, she coaches teams online and is a faculty member at Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Sarah has a weekly podcast - which we highly recommend - titled Cog-Dog Radio, which you can find on all your favorite listening platforms. We discussed several great tools to use in your wellness journey. Great toys to encourage chewing: Kong Toys Toppl Toys Other natural chews for dogs: Bully Sticks Himalayan Yak Chews Other items that might help enrich your dog's life: Snuffle Mats We have a few videos on our website and YouTube channel that will help with your wellness journey. Would you like to discover what types of treats your dog prefers? Check out this video to find out how to determine this. Want some ideas for how to stuff your food toys? Check out this video to see how Elissa approaches this. We also discussed a few great books that we encourage you reference: Kathy Sdao's Plenty in Life is Free Brian Hare's The Genius of Dogs Alexandra Horowitz' Inside of a Dog We sincerely hope you enjoy this episode! Many thanks to Sarah for joining us today. Please be sure to rate, review and subscribe to the podcast. Even better? Share it with a friend!

Description:  In this episode Kathy and I talk about the "LIMA Being" project, and the key to a really good cue. 

In this episode, I chat with none other than Kathy Sdao, and we had a chance to dive deep into applied behavior analysis and its application in aggression cases and I get to pick her brain about things like reverse order conditioning and how that can be a significant problem in aggression cases, such as when a dog isn't taking treats in certain situations, the premium length of a session to work with a dog to modify aggressive behavior, and the dreaded undesirable behavior chains that can happen if we aren't careful.Kathy's WebsiteLIMA BeingsIf you want to learn more about helping dogs with aggression, we offer webinars, courses, conferences, and more!AggressiveDog.comAggressive Dog Educational OfferingsAggression in Dogs Conference

SMART x 50 is an extremely simple and powerful dog training technique that will help you improve your dog's behavior! SMART x 50 "forces" you as the pup parent to capture and reward naturally occurring good behaviors. SMART x 50 stands for See, Mark, And, Reward, Training. SMART. Again, the SMART x 50 method originated from Kathy Sdao. Learn more about her book "Plenty in Life is Free" https://amzn.to/32PQ8k3 Please leave a review and subscribe!! Thanks for listening

Join Marissa Martino interview one of her favorite mentors in the animal training industry, author of Plenty in Life is Free, Kathy Sdao. During the episode, they discuss what Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is and how we can use these principles when communicating with our canines and our loved ones. This approach resonates so much with Marissa and Kathy as it parallels and complements their shared philosophy when it comes to communicating and training with our dogs.

Marissa Martino of Paws & Reward Dog Training in Boulder, CO interviews Kathy Sdao of Bright Spot Dog Training in WA. In today’s episode, they talk about a very important concept that can make an impact in these 3 areas: Improving your dog’s behavior Improving your behavior when interacting with your dog Enhancing your relationship with your canine companion The concept is called Plenty in Life is Free which may seem contrary to the ever-popular dog training concept: Nothing in Life is Free.   

Each of us wants to be happy and healthy. Most people don’t see how closely the two are tied. Yes, you can be unhappy and healthy. And you can be happy and unhealthy. But did you know that improving one of these states almost always has a beneficial effect on the other? They’re closely interconnected. Lori Stevens is an expert in helping dogs age well, and I invited her to explore ideas of how pet professionals can age well also. She says that health, mobility, and engagement are three areas she focuses on for her canine clients. She wants the dogs to feel, to borrow Kathy Sdao’s phrase, the “spark of joy” in their lives. You deserve a spark of joy too. You deserve to feel a deep sense of connection with others and the world at large. You deserve to be excited and enthused by learning more about the topics that interest you and sharing what you’ve learned with others. You deserve a body that feels good and works well. You deserve to sleep comfortably and deeply and to wake up refreshed. You deserve to eat food that is delicious and nourishing. You deserve to spend time in beautiful surroundings, exercising and exploring, and also resting and relaxing. You deserve all that and more. Are you getting it? If not, what’s getting in your way? What choices—big and small—can you make right now that your future self will thank you for? Creating small, sustainable habits is a powerful way of making large, lasting improvements in your quality of life. It’s the best investment you can possibly make for aging well, happily and healthily. Lori shares lots of great ideas in this episode. I have no doubt you’ll be inspired to make a few changes that will support you. You may also be interested in the list of short (15 minutes or less), medium (about an hour), and long (2 hours or more) activities that the members of UNLEASHED Resilience came up with in a learning lab session. Perhaps these will spark some new ideas for you. https://colleenpelar.com/68

SMART stands for: See Mark And Reward Training. This was originally termed and talked about by Kathy Sdao in her book Plenty in Life is Free. You can buy that book here: https://amzn.to/2LmVNEf Let me know how trying this method out works for you and your pup! Pupdates in The Dog World: Dogs Help Our Heart Health ❤️https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/08/23/health/dog-study-heart-healthy-trnd/index.html Please review the podcast! :) Subscribe here on YouTube: http://bit.ly/subscribedwd Podcast here: https://anchor.fm/dogswithdevin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dogswithdevin/ Patreon (get personal video answers from me): https://www.patreon.com/dogswithdevin Email: dogswithdevin@gmail.com with any questions/feedback/ideas for a new episode or answers to your dog questions! Thanks for watching, and go love your dog!

Podcast Outline * 1:40 - Ryan introduces Kathy. * 4:00 – Kathy shares where she first learned about positive reinforcement animal training and some of the first animals she trained. * 22:22 – A couple of stories from Kathy about her time training dolphins. * 19:38 – What Kathy is up to now and where you can find her at www.kathysdao.com. * 22:57 – The difference between cues and commands and why this is important. * 42:13 – Some potential phrases from non-violent communication to use in consultations. * 47:31 – How Kathy deals with compassion fatigue or "attachment to outcome fatigue." * 52:50 – Five tips listeners can use to move toward non-violent communication. * 1:15 - Kathy discusses what she’d like to see happen in the next 5-10 years in the world of positive reinforcement animal training. About Kathy Sdao Kathy is an applied animal behaviourist. She’s been a full-time animal trainer for thirty years, first with marine mammals and now with dogs and their people. At the University of Hawaii, she received a master’s degree as part of a research team which trained dolphins to solve complex cognitive puzzles. She then worked for the United States Navy to train dolphins for open-ocean tasks. Next, Kathy worked as a marine-mammal trainer at the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in Tacoma Washington. After leaving the zoo world, Kathy created Tacoma’s first dog day-care. Since 1998, Kathy has owned Bright Spot Dog Training. 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 and has taught at thirty-eight of these popular conferences. Kathy has travelled extensively across the United States, Canada and Europe, and to Australia, Israel, Japan and Mexico. In 2012, she published her first book, Plenty in Life Is Free: Reflections on Dogs, Training and Finding Grace.

Kathy Sdao talked with Colleen Pelar about the idea of "worth." So many people struggle with feeling unworthy or think that they have to do something to earn their place. Not true. You are worthy just as you are. www.colleenpelar.com/39

In 2011, Annie Grossman and Kate Senisi were both trying to figure out how to make a business out of dog training. They met through the Association for Professional Dog Trainers' message board, and discovered they lived a block away from one another in Manhattan. They also discovered they had complementary talents: Kate had an eye for detail, a background in graphic design, a head for organization, and a passion for dealing with aggressive dogs; Annie had an entrepreneurial spirit, writing skill, and lots of creative ideas. They decided to join forces, and together turned Annie's living room into a dog training classroom--they called it School For The Dogs. Here, Annie and Kate discuss SFTD's early days and their paths to becoming trainers. Notes: AnnieGrossman.com/podcast22 Training videos: Tawzer.com Music: "Sister Kate" cover by Lloyd Davis lloyddavis.bandcamp.com/track/sister-kate Sponsor: Is your Inbox messy? You need SANEBOX! Get $15 off at SchoolForTheDogs.com/Sane Partial Transcript: Annie: This week, School for the Dogs’ podcast is sponsored by Sanebox, the email service that is designed to make dealing with email a breeze. Sanebox gives you a powerful set of tools that can work just about any email client. It’s kinda like artificial intelligence for your inbox. Sanebox will automatically sort your email for you, defer your email for a more convenient time, set up reminders and more. Get a two-week free trial plus $15 off when you sign up at schoolforthedogs.com/sane. **Music** Annie: So I am sitting here with my- what do I even call you… Kate: Partner in Crime? Annie: My partner in crime. My partner, not in sexual way… Kate: yes, I always worry about when I say.. introduce you as my partner. I clarify it with… business partner? Annie: Business Partner. She with whom I founded School for the Dogs. Kate Senisi. The one, the only and Kate has certainly been one of the most important people in my life. Kate: Well Thank you. Annie: in the last decade. Kate: And you in mine. I think we are also friends. … I’m just kidding. Annie: Kate, do you want to be friends? Kate: I don’t know it might interfere with our working relationship. Annie: Laughing Kate: Is it possible? Annie: No, I really feel so lucky that we found each other when we did and I, so, I brought Kate on to talk about how she got into dog training and talk about some of the things that we both love about dog training. I think one thing, among many things, that we both have in common is we both get really excited about geeking out on training and I knew early on that that we were going to be friends for a long time when we were curled up on your couch drinking wine watching, like, Kathy Sdao.. Kate: Oh yeah the Tawzer days.. Annie: recorded videos of DVDs of seminars on Saturday nights together after dog training all weekend or figuring out how to become dog trainers all weekend, we would watch videos about dog training with our dogs. I remember one of those nights thinking like, “This is it. I have found a certain kind of soulmate.” Kate: I found an equal nerd partner. Annie: So Kate and I started working to gather pretty soon after we first met which I believe was in 2011 Kate: I think so. Annie: And at that point we were both. We had studied dog training on our own in different ways, which we will talk about in a minute. I think we were both at the point of trying to figure out how to parlay our interest and knowledge into work... Full transcript at Schoolforthedogs.com/Podcasts

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.

Summary: Eileen Anderson is a writer and dog trainer. She is perhaps best known for her blog, Eileenanddogs, which has been featured on Freshly Pressed by Wordpress.com and won the award “The Academy Applauds” in 2014 from The Academy of Dog Trainers. Her articles and training videos have been incorporated into curricula worldwide and translated into several languages. Eileen also runs a website for canine cognitive dysfunction, which she started in 2013. That site is www.dogdementia.com, which has become a major resource for pet owners whose dogs have dementia. Then, in 2015, Eileen published Remember Me? Loving and Caring for a Dog With Canine Cognitive Dysfunction. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in music performance and a master's degree in engineering science. Links www.dogdementia.com www.Eileenanddogs.com Next Episode:  To be released 4/27/2018, featuring Kathy Sdao, author of Plenty in Life is Free: Reflections on Dogs, Training, and Finding Grace, to talk about crossing over, how training dogs and marine mammals compare, and the future of dog training. 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 Eileen Anderson. Eileen is a writer and dog trainer. She is perhaps best known for her blog, Eileenanddogs, which has been featured on Freshly Pressed by Wordpress.com and won the award “The Academy Applauds” in 2014 from The Academy of Dog Trainers. Her articles and training videos have been incorporated into curricula worldwide and translated into several languages. Eileen also runs a website for canine cognitive dysfunction, which she started in 2013. That site is www.dogdementia.com, which has become a major resource for pet owners whose dogs have dementia. Then, in 2015, Eileen published Remember Me? Loving and Caring for a Dog With Canine Cognitive Dysfunction. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in music performance and a master's degree in engineering science. Hi Eileen, welcome to the podcast! Eileen Anderson: Hi Melissa, thank you so much for having me. I am stoked about this. Melissa Breau: I am too. To start us out, do you want to just share a little bit about each of your dogs, who they are, and anything you're working on with them? Eileen Anderson: Sure. That is the easiest thing in the world to talk about. I currently have two dogs. I have Zani, who is a hound mix. She looks kind of like a black-and-tan Beagle, and for those who have seen any of my pictures and videos, she's the one who tilts her head adorably. She was a rehome. I found her at age 1, and took her from someone who could not take care of her any longer. She has a fantastic temperament, and anybody would love to have Zani. What I'm working with her right now on is that she unfortunately had an accident in February and ran full-tilt into a fence, actually was driven into the fence, I suspect, by my other dog. I was there, I saw it happen, and she got a spinal cord concussion. She was knocked completely out and turned into a little noodle, and I thought I had lost her. But I took her to the vet, she got a CT scan, and they said they didn't see any permanent damage, that she had just gotten this jolt to her spinal cord. She was quadriplegic. I took her home, her not being able to walk or anything. But the vet was right — she did gradually recover, and she's still recovering. We're more than a month out now, but we're mostly practicing getting around safely, walking, going up and down the steps, and she's a little trooper. She hasn't had any mental problems at all. But it's been quite a challenge for me. I had to make her a safe space where she couldn't fall down because literally she couldn't walk at first. Melissa Breau: That's so scary. Eileen Anderson: It was really scary. It scared me to death. I thought she had died. I thought I had seen her pass away. But as those kind of accidents go, ours was pretty lucky. And my other dog is Clara. She's an All-American, she's bigger, she's about 44 pounds, and she is the one that I found as a feral puppy. I'll talk about her now and then through the podcast, but she has come so far. Right now we're working on just widening her world more. We have another friend's house that we get to go to now. She's met another dog, she's liking another person, and actually because of all the work I've done with her, she is a lot more stable in many new situations than lots of “normal dogs.” It's just such a gas to have a dog who's resilient. But that's what I'm doing with Clara right now. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. I mentioned the degrees in music and engineering science. How did you end up in dog training? Obviously you didn't start out there. Eileen Anderson: My career has kind of been all over the place. I was working first as an editor at a university, and then at my current job, which is a social services job helping women find health care for breast problems. I was all but dissertation in engineering science. I had passed my qualifying exams and was going on to be an engineer in acoustics, and I got a dog who was a challenge for me, and like everybody else, I got into dog training because I got the difficult dog. That dog was Summer. That was in 2006, and she was more than I was prepared to take care of. She chewed everything, she bullied my younger dog — my smaller dog, sorry — she jumped the fence, she was just basically a busy teenage dog. Right now I think back and it's like her problems were nothing, but at the time they were huge for me, so bad that I got depressed because it was changing my life so much to have this dog whom I loved, I loved her pretty much right away, but every time I turned around there was a new problem. And so I looked for help in the usual ways. I got on the Internet, I found a local obedience club and went through the usual things there, and somewhere along the line — of course I got a good teacher — but along the line I got hooked. And actually dog training made me quit graduate school because I was like, This is a lot more interesting than active noise control to me. Melissa Breau: You mentioned you started out finding a club. What got you started as a positive trainer? Eileen Anderson: I started at the very beginning as a positive That's what I want to do trainer, a wanna-be. I would read about it on the Internet and I thought, That's what I want to do. But when you're on your own and you don't have any coaching, and you're going by … and this was in the earlier days of the Internet and there weren't as many good instructions out there, so you try something and it's kind of in a vacuum, like “be a tree” when your dog pulls when they're walking on leash. You know, stand still and they'll stop doing that. I did that for months and it didn't work because I didn't have the other half of it, which was reinforce them for walking by your side. So I figured, Well, this positive reinforcement stuff sounds good, but it's not very practical, or maybe my dog's not very smart. I did go … those things we think, you know. I did go to a balanced obedience club. I'm still a member there, the people there adore their dogs, and we get along just fine. I've seen a lot of good changes there while I've gone there. But I knew that collar pops were not something that I wanted to do, but I could not find other ways to, for instance, get Summer to keep from wandering off into the wide blue yonder mentally whenever we were together and from physically wandering off whenever she had a chance. And so I did go that direction. I did the collar pops, I did a prong collar for a while, and then I found the agility part of the club, and that's a familiar story, I'm sure, to a lot of people as well. They were more positive — not completely, but more positive — and through them I found my current trainer, who is Lisa Mantle of Roland, Arkansas, who was trained by Bob and Marian Bailey — Bob Bailey lives here in Arkansas, by the way — and that's when I really started to get it. Lisa is a great teacher, and that's pretty much when I turned the corner. Melissa Breau: I think you mentioned some exciting news related to your experiences there. Do you want to share? Eileen Anderson: Yes. I am writing another book. I'm writing Summer's story. Summer, I sadly lost her last summer at only the age of 11. I thought she was going to live a much longer time. She was very healthy. But she got hemangiosarcoma, and after some misdiagnosis of back pain for about a month, we got the news, and by the time they did do exploratory surgery, but it was too far gone and I did have to euthanize her. I wasn't ready for that at all, nobody ever is, but I didn't have any lead time on it. But she was my crossover dog. She went through all of this with me patiently as I learned how to do things and how to treat her better, and she was a lovely soul, and I'm writing a book about that. It's the story of Summer and me, and also I'm threading into it how I came to change my training ways, and I'm trying to do it in a non-preachy way. I'm writing to pet owners in the book. Recently I saw an op-ed in … I think it was the New York Times, by somebody who just wrote a nice little piece about her old dog, and there were the hallmarks of someone who didn't know a lot about training. There were humorous moments about how they had to chase the dog down and force the pills down his throat and it took all this, and it wasn't mentioned as any kind of morality thing. It was just part of the story. I want our positive training stories to be part of the story too. Not as a preachy thing necessarily, although I can preach with the best of them, but as just part of the story, incidental, this is how we did things. I am feeling like that would be a very persuasive way to write the book. Also I just want to write the book because I loved my dog. But I'm hoping it will be another way just to get the message out in a very incidental way that there's nothing abnormal about this. This is how I trained my dog, and this is how we learned to get along. Melissa Breau: When are you thinking it's going to be available? Do you know yet, and is there anything more you want to share into how you're planning to talk about that crossing-over experience? Eileen Anderson: I'm aiming for 2019, which probably means 2020. I'm telling the story of our lives together, and that is my crossover story. Of course I can pull from blogs, which help me get a timeline there. It's hard to remember what happened when, but I will be incorporating some of the blogs. I've written many blogs about her over the years. But again, I want to tell the story. I don't want to have villains. I do want to have heroes, and I want to talk about how my mind changed as things went along, how my perspective changed, because it changed my whole life. Having an epiphany about positive reinforcement really does filter through your whole life, once you get it, and I hope I can tell that story in a very casual and again non-preachy way and make it interesting for people. Melissa Breau: Now, you mentioned that this is going to be another book. It's not your first book. I do want to talk about that first book a little bit. Can you share a little bit about Remember Me? Loving and Caring for a Dog With Canine Cognitive Dysfunction? What IS canine cognitive dysfunction, first, and how do you talk about it in the book? Eileen Anderson: Canine cognitive dysfunction is a term for mental and behavioral decline that's associated with changes in the brains of aging dogs. It's not just normal aging. We all lose some of our marbles as we age, but this is abnormal aging, it's a neurological condition, and it has behavioral symptoms. It's way under-diagnosed and it's undertreated. In the book I tell the story of my little dog, Cricket. She was a rat terrier and she lived to be probably 17, could have been even older, because she was a middle-aged dog when I got her from a rescue. She got canine cognitive dysfunction, and she had it for at least a year before I identified what was wrong. I didn't know what to tell my vet. Her first symptom was anxiety, and so I just thought she was getting nervous. I didn't realize that that could be a symptom of CCD. So the book is the story of Cricket, and how things went for her and for me. The message of the book is that there is help out there and that we need to know about this disease so dogs can get diagnosed sooner. There's no cure, but there are drugs that can ameliorate the symptoms, there are drugs that can help the dogs and the people have an easier life, and there are so many ways you can enrich the dog's life. They can still have a good life. Melissa Breau: If you could tell people just one thing about Canine Cognitive Dysfunction, what would it be? What do you wish people really knew about that? Eileen Anderson: I might cheat and I'm going to say two. One is talk to your vet. I am not a veterinarian. I can't diagnose your dog. There's lists all over the Internet now of symptoms, I certainly have one, but you can read all the symptoms but you cannot diagnose your dog. You need to talk to your vet many times about this and get educated, and if you're worried at all about your dog, talk about a diagnosis. The second thing is just from my heart. If your dog is diagnosed with Canine Cognitive Dysfunction, your dog's life is not over. Like I was saying, there are many ways to enrich your dog's life, and if we can get over our own preconceptions, see the dog standing in the corner and go, “Oh, poor thing,” well, sometimes, yes, some of their symptoms are pathetic and uncomfortable for them and need some intervention, but lots of the things they do, I think they're just in la-la land. They don't know what you know about what they used to be able to do. So that's my little lecture on that is don't give up on your dog, don't think they're miserable unless you have good evidence that they are, because some of this is just unfamiliar to us. They do odd things, and odd doesn't necessarily mean that the dog is unhappy. You need to learn about that, and again, talk to your vet about all of it. That was more than one thing. I'm sorry! Melissa Breau: That's OK! Sometimes the best things are the more than one thing, right? Eileen Anderson: Right. Melissa Breau: To move from your books to your site for a little bit – and for listeners I will make sure to include links to both of Eileen's sites in the show notes — for listeners who haven't been to your site or aren't familiar with it, can you share a little bit about the topics you usually write about? Eileen Anderson: I write about training dogs, I write about learning theory, and the thing that I'm able to do that lots of professional trainers are not is that I write about my mistakes a lot. I show things that I've tried that don't work and I show things that I've tried that do work. But on my site you get to see videos of dogs who have never learned a behavior before, and me trying to train them with the best intentions and with a lot of information, but with gaps in my understanding. You can see a typical person training their dog and making mistakes, and you can learn from my mistakes. I talk about dog body language a lot too. Having all the different dogs I've had, I have great footage of the interesting things they do with each other and with us. You know, body language is a whole other part we need to learn about when we're trying to train our dogs well. But I take a scientific approach to the training, but I show a human trying to do it. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. You mentioned the scientific piece there, and I think one of the things that I like best about your work is that you really do approach things pretty scientifically. A while ago you wrote a post asking the question, “When is citing a research study not enough?” and I'd love to talk about that a bit. When IS citing a research study not enough — at least if we want to be right about the facts and present ideas that are actually backed up by research? Eileen Anderson: OK. One research study is almost never enough. Usually when we want a research study, it's because we want to win an argument these days, or we want to know something for a fact, you know, “Let's get to the bottom of this. Let's figure it out.” The problem is that we need to look at the bulk of the literature. One brand new study, if it's the first on a certain topic, that's just the beginning of the research, and you can't flap that around and say, “Hey, I've proved it now.” You have to look at the bulk of the research, and one example I like to give is that some topics don't have studies because they are so basic that they are in textbooks. One good example of that is that people will come along and say, “I need a research study that proves that you can't reinforce fear.” OK, well, as far as I know, there isn't one, per se, and there's not one with dogs, and the reason is that that information is implicit and explicit in textbooks and review papers. To answer that question, all you need to know about — all you need to know about! — you need to know about the difference between operant behavior and respondent behavior, you need to know about how emotions work, and you need to know about the sympathetic nervous system response. And if you put all that together, which is in any psychology book, pretty much — you might have to crack a biology book for some of it — you can see why they didn't have to do a study to show that emotions are operant behaviors and you don't reinforce them. You can reinforce behaviors that come around them. But that's an example of it. You know, people want one study for something, and it's either something that's so basic that you could just open a book and find out, or it's something that's so new that we might have one study that shows it, but we need for five or ten more to come in. So I always tell people, “Look for the review study, look for the one that summarizes the research, because that's going to do the work of assessing whether the study is any good.” Because I don't know about you, but I don't have a psychology degree. I do have a graduate degree. I have two of them. So I'm familiar with research, but I don't have the basis, the basic knowledge, to really assess a study. So I have to go to the people who can help, and that's the people who write the review articles and the people who write the textbooks.   Melissa Breau: I think that's great advice and a good thing for people to remember, especially in this day and age, like you said, we tend to want to win an argument instead of thinking, Wait a minute, let's make sure we have our facts straight. The example you mentioned in the post was a post you wrote about errorless learning. I was hoping you'd be willing to maybe share that story with our listeners. Eileen Anderson: Sure, and this is an example of making a mistake. It was Susan Friedman who told me a couple of years back when I was cringing about making public mistakes and she said, “That's like science. Science gets it wrong, and then somebody comes along and gets a little better and you get a little closer. You're shaping the knowledge. So there's no shame in it, even though it really feels like there is.” I took exception to the term “errorless learning,” because I read the work of Herb Terrace, who did the famous work, I think it was in the '60s, with pigeons, where they did thousands and thousands of repetitions of pigeons pecking on a lit disc, and it had, I think, a green light on it. The errorless part was that they made it super-easy to peck on that disc, and then they were teaching them also not to peck on a red disc. At first the other disc was way far away. Then, when they did light it up, they lit it very dimly. In other words, they kept that green disc very attractive and just kind of snuck in the other one. And in thousands of repetitions, when this was done gradually, some of the pigeons had less than one percent error rate, which all of us should aspire to. Well, I just took exception to that, because they were in completely controlled, a lab environment, the pigeons were starving, you know, they always take them down to a low body weight so they're wanting to work, they controlled many, many more variables than we ever can, and it just didn't seem like something we could really emulate. And even the term to me — I nitpick words a lot — but it was not errorless. They had a one percent error rate, so you can't call that errorless. So I wrote a little … kind of a ranting article about that, and I snorted around about it. I had a friend — she could have done this through the public comments, but she didn't — I had a friend whose parents were Ph.D. students under Skinner, so she's one of the few people in the world who grew up as a human in a positive reinforcement environment, and she said, “Eileen, that's not quite right. Herb Terrace, his experiments, yes, they were famous, but he was not the first one to talk about errorless learning, and you kind of got it wrong.” She educated me, and it turns out that Skinner, back in the 1930s, was talking about errorless learning and errorless teaching, because of course to him, if the student made an error, it's really a mistake of the teacher. And it was — some of us have read about it since then — it was kind of the same principal, but of providing a path for the learner where the easiest path to go is to the behavior you want with the fewest number of errors possible. He had had an argument with Thorndike, who said, “You have to make errors to learn,” and Skinner said, “No, you don't.” And Skinner kind of won that one. We think of Skinner as just this dry, cold guy, but he was passionate about teaching and learning, and he was trying to be as humane as possible and make an easy path for the learner, and there's nothing bad about that, in my opinion. There's nothing bad. And so I wrote a Part 2, and I left Part 1 up. I was tempted to get rid of it, but I left Part 1 up and I just put a note at the top saying, “If you read this, there are mistakes in here, so please read Part 2, or just read Part 2 instead.” Melissa Breau: Fair enough. I think it's awesome that you were willing to leave that up. I think that that really says something about your willingness to be transparent about all of this. Like you said, you feel like you can show those errors and those mistakes, where a trainer may not feel comfortable with that. So I think that's fantastic. Eileen Anderson: Thank you. That's something I try to do for the community, even though even for me it's pretty hard sometimes. Melissa Breau: How do you try to keep up to date with the latest information, and how do you try to make sure that you're conducting good research on this stuff when you're writing? Eileen Anderson: One thing I learned in my science degree is you don't just read the paper. Your job is then to go through all the footnotes, to read all the footnotes, and then get on Google Scholar and look at who has cited the paper later. Because if you looked up a paper in 1975 for “Why do humans get ulcers?” that paper would say “From stress and acidic foods.” If you don't look later in the literature, you won't find out that, woops, actually it's from an infection, which they discovered in 1981 or '82. So you have to look before the research piece that you're reading and after it. What I do personally, I set up some Google Alerts, both from standard Google and Google Scholar, and there are a couple topics — one of them is dementia in dogs, and the other one is sound sensitivity and sound capabilities of dogs — and I get alerts whenever anything new is published. Most of it is crap, but I get the good stuff too. I get stuff from Google Scholar when there's a new paper, for instance, on dog dementia, which one did come out this year. That's pretty much how I try to keep up. I try to keep focus because there's way too much for anybody to learn these days. But I use the tools that are out there and I try to be thorough in terms of also looking at who is arguing against this. That's the hard part, especially when you get attached to something. You don't want to read about why it's wrong, but I try to do that too. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. To shift gears a little bit, you've also written quite a bit on your site about Clara, and you mentioned earlier that she was a feral dog and you've done a ton of socialization work with her. Do you mind just sharing a little bit about your approach there and how you've gone about that? Eileen Anderson: I would love to, and I have to credit my teacher, Lisa Mantle, with whom … I could not have done this without her. She's had a lot of experience with feral and other very challenged dogs. She actually says that Clara is one of the most challenging ones she has had. When Clara came to me, she was between eight and ten weeks old, and her socialization window was in the act of shutting, probably that very night. She was scared of me, and avoidant, and I didn't think I was going to be able to catch her. She was slinking away and acting like a wild animal. But when I opened my front door, little Cricket, the rat terrier, was barking inside, and Clara pricked up her ears and slunk by me like I wasn't there, and came into my house and sat down next to Cricket in her crate. And so it was the other dog that got Clara into the house. Within the evening she decided I was OK, and part of that was because of spray cheese, which she still thinks is manna from heaven. But I assumed, silly me, that since I had gotten in, everybody would get in, you know, Now she likes people, look, she thinks I'm great, she's sitting in my lap, she's flirting with me, she's jumping up and down. And so the next day I took her somewhere, and I had her in the crate in the car, and I said, “Look, I've got this puppy,” and opened the door and Clara went, “Grrrr,” this little tiny puppy growling in the crate. I thought, Oh dear, I've got more of a problem here than I thought. Back to getting to socialization, it was technically not socialization at some point because she was past that window — and there's a terminology dispute about this, and I try to placate the people who say, “It's not socialization after they're a certain age.” We were doing desensitization, counterconditioning, and habituation, but we started with people a hundred feet away. That's how fearful of people, and we had to start very far away. We did very, very careful exposures, and this was over the course of months and years. We did a lot of it at a shopping mall, which sounds crazy, but the layout of the place was such that we really could go a hundred feet away and there wouldn't be anybody to bother us. But it was extremely gradual, and every appearance of a person, whether they were fifty feet away or, later on, walking by on the sidewalk, was paired with something awesome, which, you know, spray cheese or something else she loved. McDonald's chicken sandwiches were also very popular. But it was just very gradual, and my teacher was very good at, when we'd hit a bump in the road or get to a plateau, sometimes we could work through it, sometimes we'd just take a different approach. She has good intuitions about that. And one day she said, “Let's just take her down the sidewalk in the mall,” and by golly, she was fine. She could walk among throngs of people, as long as … there's things she doesn't like. If someone walks up to her and says, “Oh, a puppy!” and stares at her, she's going to chuff at them. But people walking by, people brushing against her, sudden changes in the environment, wheelchairs, anything that might bother a lot of dogs, she is great with, and she has come such a very long way. But it was all very gradual, and it was done through desensitization, counterconditioning, and habituation. Melissa Breau: Just to give people a little bit of an idea, when you say “very gradual,” how old is she now? How long have you been working on this stuff? Eileen Anderson: She is 6. The point where we could walk her around in the mall was about two years after we started. But she was happy. It wasn't this, OK, she's all right walking around. She was great. Melissa Breau: Right, right. I think it's interesting to ask for the timeline a little bit there, because it helps people understand how much work goes into it sometimes. But also there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Eileen Anderson: That's right, that's right. And thinking back, a lot of people have had harder situations than we have, but we did have a pretty hard one. She basically was like a wild animal. I didn't see her as a fearful dog, she wasn't congenitally startling or fearful. She was just different, you know. She was like a wild animal and had that natural distrust of humans. Melissa Breau: I don't know about other people necessarily, but I really find that I personally struggle with what feels like two conflicting pieces of advice out there when it comes to socialization or even the stuff you're talking about. The idea that, Option 1, bring your puppy lots of places, but don't overface them, make sure it's all positive, but bring them all the places you go. And the second is never bring your puppy places unless you're absolutely sure you can just get up and leave if it's too much for them. I was curious how you handled determining what to expose Clara to, what she's ready for, and what is likely to still even today be too much for her. Eileen Anderson: That's a really great question. With her, of course we had to take mostly the second method. That was being careful that we had a way to get out. She was not a puppy that I could lug around everywhere and expose her to. I think there can be value in that, as long as you can protect the puppy from people who do the wrong stuff, which any reactive dog group will tell about those people who are going to do stuff to your dog if they get a chance. But today I feel like I need to just be careful and watch her. For instance, even without really working on veterinary visits, she's good at veterinary visits now, just because of the general work we've done. There's some times you have to take your dog to the vet, and she does really well. And I feel like I could take her to a new place with people and walk around and she would do fine. I would just watch for situations where people would be too assertive towards her. So it's not so much the environment, it's not environmental changes, it's not crowds. It's that person who zeroes in and says, “Oh, what a beautiful dog! Can I pet her?” while you're running away. Melissa Breau: Right. We're getting to the end here, and I have these three questions I typically ask everybody the first time they're on the show, so I'd love to work through those. The first one is: What is the dog-related accomplishment that you're proudest of? Eileen Anderson: It is that I used classical conditioning to prevent Clara from picking up on Summer's barking. Summer was a reactive dog and she barked regularly at things that went by the house, particularly delivery trucks and things that were hard for me to control. You can't control those, and I wasn't always home. So she had some untreated reactivity, and I did not want Clara, the baby puppy, to pick up on that. She had enough problems. And so, from the very beginning, very consistently, when Summer would bark, wherever she was, I would give Clara a magnificent treat, usually again spray cheese. It didn't matter what the dogs were doing, what was happening. So I did a classical pairing of Summer barks, wonderful treats fall from the sky. Lots of the things I think up on my own don't work out really well because I can't see down the line well enough to see the end ramifications, but that one worked out great. I have a dog who, when she hears another dog bark, looks at me eagerly instead of running to go bark with them. Just considering that she had so many other challenges, I didn't want her to have that challenge. I have a video of her literally drooling when she heard Summer bark, and so I can prove, yes, I have the Pavlovian association there — another dog barking means yummy stuff is coming my way. I am really proud of doing that. It has paid off in so many ways. Melissa Breau: That's awesome, and that's a fantastic idea. The other question, and usually this is one of my favorite questions of the podcast, is: What's the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Eileen Anderson: Watch the dog. And I can say that in two ways. One of them is learn about dog body language. I posted a blog just yesterday, I think it was, two days ago, about accidentally using punishing things because you're following a protocol and trying to do everything right, and you don't notice that you're snapping your hand in the dog's face or something like that they really don't like. So watch the dog. Make sure that what you're doing is OK, even when you're concentrating on your mechanics and following the directions that you've read from your teacher. So that's one way. And also I do agility, and so many times when I made an error, it's like my teacher would say: “You weren't watching your dog.” And of course there's times we have to take our eyes off them, but “Watch the dog.” That's my mantra. Melissa Breau: Excellent. It's nice and concise and easy to remember, too, which is a plus. Last question here: Who is somebody else in the dog world that you look up to? Eileen Anderson: My friend Marge Rogers. Marge and I kind of grew up together in the dog training online world and we started our journeys together. Marge became a professional trainer and I became a writer. But Marge, before there was ever a Fenzi Academy and people sharing these wonderful ideas of how to be humane to dogs in competition, before there was ever that, Marge trained her dogs way over fluency before she ever competed them. She's also fantastic at using multiple reinforcers just as a matter of course. Any dog that goes to her is going to end up being able to switch back and forth between a plate of food and a tug toy, and they can tug when the food's on the ground, and they can eat food even if they love to have a ball. They will get not only multiple reinforcers but the ability to respond to the trainer to transfer back and forth between those reinforcers. She's just fantastic at that. She helps me with all my problems. She can usually give a one-line response to whatever stupid thing I'm doing. And not only that, she's humble. She's always learning. She's one of the most humble people I know, and I just love her training. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Eileen. This has been fantastic. Eileen Anderson: You are welcome. It is my pleasure. I love to talk about this stuff, and I am very honored to be on the Fenzi podcast. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you, and thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in! We'll be back next week with Kathy Sdao to talk about everything from training dolphins to dog training — it should be a pretty deep dive on behavior! 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.

SHOW NOTES: Summary: Julie Flanery has been working professionally with dogs and their handlers since 1993. She focuses on the needs of the dog and helping people form a strong relationship, through clear communication, and positive reinforcement. She has placed Obedience, Freestyle, Rally-Obedience, Rally-FrEe, Parkour, Agility, and Trick Dog titles on her dogs. She began competing in Musical Freestyle in 1999 and was the first to both title and earn a Heelwork to Music Championship on the West Coast. In 2001 she was named "Trainer of the Year" by the World Canine Freestyle Organization and has been a competition freestyle judge since 2003. Five years ago Julie developed the sport of Rally-FrEe to help freestylers increase the quality and precision of their performances. It has since become a stand-alone sport enjoyed by dog sport enthusiasts all over the world. Julie has been a workshop and seminar presenter both nationally and internationally. She currently trains and competes with her Tibetan Terrier in both Musical Freestyle and Rally-FrEe. Next Episode:  To be released 2/23/2018, featuring Kamal Fernandez, to talk about the benefits of competition and the concept of leadership in dog training. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Julie Flanery. Julie has been working professionally with dogs and their handlers since 1993. She focuses on the needs of the dog and helping people form a strong relationship, through clear communication, and positive reinforcement. She has placed Obedience, Freestyle, Rally-Obedience, Rally-FrEe, Parkour, Agility, and Trick Dog titles on her dogs. She began competing in Musical Freestyle in 1999 and was the first to both title and earn a Heelwork to Music Championship on the West Coast. In 2001 she was named "Trainer of the Year" by the World Canine Freestyle Organization and has been a competition freestyle judge since 2003. Five years ago Julie developed the sport of Rally-FrEe to help freestylers increase the quality and precision of their performances. It has since become a stand-alone sport enjoyed by dog sport enthusiasts all over the world. Julie has been a workshop and seminar presenter both nationally and internationally. She currently trains and competes with her Tibetan Terrier in both Musical Freestyle and Rally-FrEe. Welcome back to the podcast Julie! Julie Flanery: Thanks. Melissa Breau: To start people out, can you just remind folks a little bit of information about your dog, what you do with her, and who she is? Julie Flanery: Currently I work with my 7-year-old Tibetan Terrier, and we are competing in Musical Freestyle and In Sync, which is a version of Heelwork to Music, and also Rally-FrEe. She's earned her Championships in both Freestyle and in Rally-FrEe, and a Grand Championship in Rally-FrEe, and we're working towards our Grand Championship in Musical Freestyle and our Championship in In Sync. Melissa Breau: Do you want to share her name? Julie Flanery: Kashi. Melissa Breau: Kashi. Excellent. Julie Flanery: Kashi. Like the cereal, you know? Good for you and makes you feel good. Melissa Breau: I like that! So I think we have a pretty fun topic lined up for today. I wanted to talk about the skills that trainers need but they sometimes don't learn until they get pretty into dog sports. To start us out, I wanted to start with talking about shaping. What aspect of shaping do you feel is usually the hardest for new trainers to implement effectively and why? Julie Flanery: I think there are a couple of things that can be really hard for trainers. The first thing, I think there is a very fine line between clicking what you observe and anticipating what the dog will do, so that your click is well timed. There's a tendency to wait until you actually see it, and then in that moment we have to process that information before we can act on it and actually click it. While this happens really quickly in the brain, there's still some latency, and this can actually result in late clicks, so you're giving the dog information that isn't actually what you want to convey. So first, having a picture in your head of the path the dog is likely to take, and shaping that behavior. Let's say you're shaping going under a chair. You can picture the dog's most likely path from where he's starting, as well as from where your reward is placed, and have a sense ahead of time of where your click points will be. You want to anticipate those click points. You at least want to have the precursor to your click points in mind and what they'll look like. This way you're going to be able to anticipate the dog's next likely action, and that's really imperative to good click timing. In a lot of respects this also relates to raising criteria, which is another place that handlers tend to have a lot of difficulty, and they're often getting stuck by clicking the same criteria for longer than is actually beneficial. You can often get stuck by clicking that same criteria for longer than we want, longer than is beneficial, so having that picture ahead of time can actually help the handler move forward in their criteria shifts as well. Melissa Breau: You mentioned the going under a chair example. If you know you're going to have the dog go under the chair, what is it that you're looking for? That first drop of the head? The drop of the shoulders? Am I on the right track? Julie Flanery: Depending on where the dog is starting, you might just be looking for looking at the chair. That might be your first click point. And certainly before the dog can move toward the chair, he's going to look at it. Before the dog can go under it, he's going to move towards it. But before he can move towards it, he needs to look at it. So you're looking at that progression and the behavior to determine where your click points are going to be so you can anticipate those things. If you put your chair out and then you go stand next to the dog and wait for something, you've probably already missed that first click. So setting that chair out, the dog is likely to look at it. That would be your first click. And then moving towards it, we can anticipate he's going to take a step towards the chair if he has any experience interacting with props. So we're anticipating that, and we're looking for it to happen, and we're trying to time our click and mark it just as he's doing that. If we wait until he actually does it, we're probably going to be late in our timing. Melissa Breau: Talking about timing, I know that one of the things you stress in your shaping class is the importance of good handler mechanics. I wanted to get into that a little bit. Can you share what you mean by that and how it's supposed to work? Maybe where folks tend to go wrong when it comes to mechanics? Julie Flanery: Sure. I think that we make it much harder on our dogs to shape than it needs to be sometimes. The dog needs to concentrate on the task, the task of figuring out “How do I earn reinforcement?” Remember, the dog doesn't know we're working toward something specific. He doesn't know there is an end-behavior goal. We know that, but he doesn't. He only knows that if he does certain things, he earns rewards. But I do believe that experienced shaping dogs do learn there is an end result and that they are working toward completion. They learn there is a process being followed and can anticipate the next steps, what we sometimes call “learning to learn.” They can anticipate within the process, once we have allowed them to experience it enough, which I believe is why some dogs seem to be better at getting behaviors on verbal cue while other dogs seem to struggle with that a bit. So the more verbal cues the dog learns, the quicker he learns the next ones, so there's an understanding of the process, what comes next, and the understanding from experience that verbal cues have meaning and value. In terms of clean training, clean training is really about creating the best environment for the dog to concentrate on the task and not be distracted from that. So in shaping, the primary information we want to provide to the dog is the marker and subsequent reinforcement. This is really all he needs within the shaping process in order to progress toward the handler's end goal. Yet we're constantly hindering their ability to do so in a variety of ways. Hovering over the bait bag, hands in pockets, reaching for food, or having food in our hands all indicate reward is imminent. The only thing that should indicate that reward is imminent is the sound of our marker. Anything else is overshadowing and diminishing the meaning and value of that marker: the click. That's our most powerful communication tool while shaping, and yet we're constantly putting in these extraneous movements or chattering to our dogs, and all of this, if done when shaping, can draw their attention away from the task. Think about if you're concentrating on a crossword puzzle and someone keeps interrupting you to ask a question. It's going to take longer to complete your puzzle, as there's all this extraneous stimulus that you keep having to deal with. So in our attempts to help our dog — getting the treat out faster, saying encouraging things, moving in a way that we think will prompt the dog — he's having to filter through what is relevant and what is not, and in our efforts to help, we're actually pulling the dog off task. So let them work. Your job is to provide relevant information and not to cloud the learning process by doing things that distract the dog from working towards that task. Does that make sense? Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Sometimes it just helps to stop and think about, OK, this is the process I'm actually following: it's a click and a pause and then reach for the treat, that piece. Julie Flanery: Right. In terms of mechanical skills, those are the things we're talking about. We're talking about, What is the handler doing with their body? Is their body still and quiet? Are they allowing the dog to focus on what's important, or are they taking the dog's focus away from that because there's something going on with the handler that isn't really adding to the learning process and is actually detracting from it. Melissa Breau: Even knowing all that, people tend to get frustrated when they're trying shaping, especially if they haven't done a lot of it, because they wind up with a dog that does one of two things. They wind up with a dog that stands or sits there and stares at them, especially if they've done a lot of focus work, or they get a dog that is throwing out behavior so fast that they're having trouble targeting one specific thing or getting motion towards the behavior that they're looking for. Any tips for folks struggling with those issues? I don't know if there are generic tips that apply to both, but maybe you could talk to that a little bit. Julie Flanery: That can be a huge deterrent and pretty frustrating to someone that's just starting out in shaping, and I know many, many trainers who gave up or basically said, “It doesn't work.” It's not that the process and protocol don't work. It's that they need to learn how to apply it effectively. So these are two separate issues: the dog that stands still and does nothing, and the dog that just starts frantically throwing behaviors at you. But in general I'd say they have the same solution, and it's a pretty easy mantra to remember: Click for anything but. Anything but standing still and staring earns a click, even if you have to toss a cookie to start them moving and give you an opportunity to click. Anything but standing still. A lot can happen, even in a dog that's standing still, but for a lot of new shapers, the two-legged kind, larger movements are going to be easier for them to see. So getting the dog moving and clicking anything but standing still will help. For those dogs that are frantically throwing things at you, you want to click way early, before they have an opportunity to start throwing behaviors out. You want to be ready before you get the dog out. A lot of dogs, we give these cues that we're about to start shaping. We pick up our clicker, we put the bait bag on, we put our hand in our pocket, we go to a certain place, and our dogs, before we even in our minds are starting to train, are already starting to throw behaviors out at us. All of those “pre-cues” that we're giving are actually cues to the dog to offer. So be ready before you get the dog out. The worst thing you can do with both these kinds of dogs is look at them expectantly, like, “OK, do something,” or “Do something else.” Sometimes we have to create those first few clicks to get the dog on the right path, so setting up our environment or a session to prevent both of those things by creating some type of an effective antecedent. So if a dog is constantly throwing things at me, then I might use a prop to direct his activity. Or I might click upon coming out of the crate and each step forward toward where we want to train. Often, dogs that throw behaviors just aren't being given enough information of what to do, so they're giving you everything they can think of in hopes that one of those will get clicked. So rather than shaping toward something, the handler is waiting for it to occur. I want you to click — again, it's “Click anything but,” so if you can take that moment of behavior — a single step, a single look, coming out of the crate — and click that, that can start to define for the dog the path you're going to lead them onto. It can tell them, “Oh, I don't have to keep throwing all of this stuff, because she's already clicking something. Now what did she click, so that I can repeat it?” The other thing that often happens with these dogs that tend to throw things or push farther in the criteria than we want them to be is although we aren't willing to drop back in the criteria, to move forward again. When the movement gets out of hand and you feel like the dog is pushing, or you're pushing, or you're rushing, it's OK to just stop, breathe, go back earlier in the criteria, click something way less than what you've been clicking, and then build it gradually back up again. So again, I think the answer is the same for both those situations: Click anything but. Melissa Breau: Excellent. I like that. It's nice, short, and easy to remember. This seems like a good point to dig in more a little bit on criteria. You were talking a little bit there about thinking about your criteria maybe a little differently than most people do. Are there general guidelines for how fast to raise criteria? I know you talked a little bit about going backwards in your criteria. When is it a good idea to do that? Julie Flanery: For me, and I think most of the Fenzi instructors, we all have a pretty common idea about raising or lowering criteria, and that is when it's predictable, when you can predict they're going to give you the exact same criteria again. I like to include the word confident, so when it's confident and predictable, then increase criteria, and if you have two incorrect responses in a row, then it's time to lower criteria. For my dog, oftentimes she's ready to raise criteria and looks confident, and for me, it's predictable in her within three repetitions. I can tell whether it's time to raise criteria, stay where I'm at, or lower criteria. A response might be predictable, but I'm not seeing quite the confidence I want to see, and so I might hold off another repetition or two to ensure that she really has some good understanding of that. But certainly if I see two incorrect responses in a row, then I'm going to lower criteria. Now that precludes that you know where your criteria shifts are, because when I say “incorrect responses,” you have to know what that is and what that isn't. Let's say I'm training a bow, and I am watching for the head and shoulder lowering, and she's moving in a progression forward, so I'm clicking the head drop, click the head drop again, then she lowers slightly lower, I click that, and I'm anticipating what her next movement is, so that I can actually see and anticipate, through my click, when she will do that. Let's say, for shaping, an incorrect response might be either less than what I previously clicked or no response whatsoever. She's predictably dropping her head and starting to lower her chest, but maybe her elbows aren't on the ground yet, and she's done that same thing three times in a row, then I'm not going to click that anymore. I'm going to wait, and hopefully she'll give me a little bit more, based on the fact that I've clicked this previously, she knows she's on the right track, and she'll be like, “Hey, did you see this?” and give me a little bit more, and I can click that. So it was predictable that she was going to drop her chest a little bit and her head is lowering. I don't want to keep clicking that because I'm going to get stuck there, because she's going to think, “Oh, this is right, I think I'll keep doing this.” If she is at that point, say, and the next offering, the next rep, her head isn't quite as low, so I don't click that and she just stands up. So she offers again and she still doesn't get as low as the previous one, and she just stands up. Then I'm going to say, “OK, she doesn't have clear enough understanding of what the next step is, so I want to build confidence in the previous.” In that case I'm going to lower my criteria maybe for a couple more reps and then start to build back up again. Does that make sense? Melissa Breau: Absolutely, and that was a great example because it walked us through thinking through the different steps and the bits and pieces there. Julie Flanery: Hopefully you can actually visualize that a little bit so you can actually see and be able to anticipate what that next step is. We all know what it looks like for a dog to bow and bring his chest and elbows down to the ground. You can map that out in your head and be able to anticipate what comes next, and if what you expect to come next isn't happening, you're stagnated, or you're getting lesser responses, then that's showing that the dog doesn't understand what that forward progression is next. Melissa Breau: You said something recently, and I can't remember if I originally heard it in a webinar or if it's from class, but you were talking about “leaps of learning” and how to respond if, while shaping, the dog suddenly makes a big leap in the right direction. Maybe we're trying for four paws on a platform, they've been struggling to give two, and suddenly they step on it with all four paws. Obviously you click it. Do you mind just sharing it here? Because I thought it was really interesting and I hadn't heard that before. Julie Flanery: I don't know if I will say exactly what you remember, but I understand what you're asking, and it did come up recently in the shaping class I'm teaching that you are a student of — and you're doing very well, by the way. Melissa Breau: Thank you. Julie Flanery: So there are times when it seems like our dogs get it right away, like, all of a sudden — what you just described —they were struggling with two and all of a sudden there's four and “Yay!” That doesn't mean you're going to hold out for four feet on the platform now. One correct response doesn't indicate understanding, and yet sometimes we forge ahead as if it does. I want to see not only predictable responses, I want to see confident, predictable responses, so that leap up of four feet on the platform might have looked confident, but we don't really know if it's predictable until we get a few reps. So I want to make sure that I see confident, predictable responses before I increase criteria, even if it appears that they've got it. Now, having said that, I don't want to stay stuck at the same criterion too long, so each handler has to determine what that looks like in their dog. For me, I can recognize confidence in my own dog, in Kashi, and for her, if she provides the same response three to four times in a row, that's predictable, and I'm going to go ahead and raise criteria there. If I made an error in judgment, I can always drop back down, but my goal is still going to be always forward progression. I don't want to stay stuck in any single criterion for too long, and that might be different for each dog, but consider your definition of predictable. For me, again, if she does it three or four times in a row and she looks confident in her actions, I can predict that she'll do it that fourth time or that fifth time. If I can predict it, I don't want to stay there. Kathy Sdao talked about criteria shifts in one of her lectures in relation to a recording being played on a record player, and how the needle can get stuck in a groove and not advance, so the record keeps skipping over the same place in the music. Well, if we click the same criteria for too many reps, the dog will get stuck in that groove, and you risk some increased frustration in working to get out of that groove. Sometimes lowering criteria is the way out. Sometimes withholding the click is the way out. Either way, you need to get out of that groove. Melissa Breau: Frustration on both the dog and the handler's part. Julie Flanery: Exactly, exactly. It's kind of like that dog that stands still and does nothing. You need to get out of that groove. What I talked about earlier about having a picture in your mind of the likely path the dog will take – that will help you not get stuck. I think sometimes people get stuck because they just don't know what to click next. So having a picture in your head, thinking ahead of time, “What is this process going to look like?” will help you anticipate that and will help you move forward in the process, to progress in the process, and not get stuck at any one point. Melissa Breau: What about duration? First of all, is it possible to actually shape duration, and then if so, how is shaping duration different than shaping more active behaviors? Julie Flanery: That's a really interesting question, and it's interesting because of the way you framed it. You said, “Is it actually possible to shape duration?” and that surprised me because yes, it's totally possible to shape duration, and I think really in general all duration is shaped in that we are marking and rewarding in small increments towards that end behavior, towards that extended duration of behavior. Shaping duration is like shaping any other skill, though your increments need to be sliced very thin in order to not get some other behavior in there. You're still withholding the click for a little more, and for most dogs withholding the click means do something else or push ahead. Duration needs to be more finely sliced so that we don't get some of that junk behavior in there. But that little bit, little generally less than what you might hold out for in a moving behavior, so you're not waiting long chunks of time, too, what we have to measure can be more difficult, so it's not as difficult to measure movement, as there is time and space, you can see a dog's action and how it carries him forward. So clicking movement, marking movement, in increments is not too difficult for the observer. In building duration, there's only time, there's no space, and we aren't very good at keeping track of time. If I paused here, then I asked three different people how many seconds did I pause, they would all have a different answer. So I often either count in my head or out loud to measure the advancement of my duration criteria. In appropriate criteria shifts for duration, especially since they should be sliced thin, we often aren't very consistent in our forward progression of time, and that can lead to inconsistency and a lack of understanding in the dog. I think that the reason people have difficulty shaping duration is because they aren't slicing those increments of time small enough. They're thinking of it like they would shape movement and larger pieces of behavior, and in shaping duration you can't do that because the dog is going to pull off. Let's take for example a sustained nose target. We want the dog to hold that nose target for — let's say our goal is three seconds. Four seconds, three seconds. Initially we click the act of pressing the nose and we click immediately. That tells the dog what the intended behavior is to which we're now going to start to attach duration. Once the dog presses the nose and expects a click and it doesn't come, he's likely to pull off, which is not going to get clicked either. Often when we withhold a click, which is what just happened here, on the next rep we will see a slightly higher-energy behavior, a little bit more, a little bit stronger, again it's like that “Hey, didn't you see this? Look, I'm going to do it a little bit more so you can see it.” In that moment of that second offering after the withheld click, you're likely to see a little more pressure — and I know it's hard to see, and this is why hand touches are a good thing for this, because you'll feel that pressure — and in that moment of more pressure, that takes a slightly longer amount of time. The time it takes for your dog to just touch something, and the time it takes a dog to touch something and put a little pressure, is slightly longer, and that's what you're clicking. That pressure is also criteria of sustained nose target, because they're going to have to put a little pressure there in order to keep their nose there. So that slice right there is super-thin, and once the dog pushes on again, you may have to go through a couple of clicks of he pushes, or, I'm sorry, he touches, it's not sustained even for a fraction of a second, you wait, that second one is sustained a fraction of a second, you click. Then you can start to extend by not seconds but almost fractions of seconds. So you're not counting one-one-thousand. You're counting one, click, one two, click, one two, click. If the dog pulls off, there's no click. So the dog is starting to understand, through both the withheld click for when he comes off and the click for continued small slivers of duration, that by keeping the nose to the hand, or the wall, or wherever you wanted the target, that's what he's building toward. But as soon as you start to increase that too far, too fast, you're going to get frustration, you're going to get poking at the wall, which is not what you want, and so the key to duration, to shaping duration, is really making sure that, number one, you are slicing those increments very small, and that those increments are very consistent, that you're not going all over the place with your duration, and that's where the counting or doing something that helps you measure that passing of time so that you have appropriate clicks will help. I'm not going to deny that it's a harder concept for some people to get, or it's a harder skill for some people to get, but if you understand the concept of shaping, and progressing through a behavior through small increments, it's just a matter of how finely you slice it for duration. That's all. Melissa Breau: That's really interesting, because typically you think of it's always easier to teach a dog to do something in the absence of a behavior. Julie Flanery: Correct. But you have to think of duration as a behavior. Does that make sense? Duration isn't the absence of a behavior. It's the continuation of a behavior. It's the absence of movement, and we've always been taught “Click for movement, feed for position” — still a very, very good rule. But in duration it seems as if it's the absence of a behavior, when in actuality it's the extension of a behavior. Melissa Breau: That gives me a lot to think on. Julie Flanery: Yeah, I'm sure. Melissa Breau: Hopefully it gives a lot for everybody to think on. But I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about training in general. I think you gave a great webinar last year on verbal cues, and it's part of what inspired the topic for today, the idea of what you didn't learn in puppy class. I feel like the concept of when to add a cue and how to go about it sometimes gets glossed over for a number of reasons, obviously, when dog owners are first learning to train. So when do you typically add a cue to behavior and how do you go about it? Julie Flanery: For me, something that I touched on earlier, I like the dog to have confident, predictable, correct responses that include the majority if not all of my criteria for that behavior. I say majority because there are some times, or some things, that I can add later, and the cue actually helps me draw that base behavior out of the dog. So, for example, duration or distance may be something I don't have yet, but will go ahead and put it on cue and build those in later. The behavior may or may not be fully generalized when I put it on cue, depending on the behavior. I may use cue discrimination as part of my generalization process. For me, the criteria, the majority of the criteria, needs to be predictable and confident and I'm certain that I'm going to get correct responses. As soon as I have that, I will start the process of putting the behavior on cue. Now, having said that, that will fluctuate, so I might have predictable, confident, correct responses in a session in the morning, and so partway through that session I start to add the cue. But maybe that afternoon or the next day, when I start my session, I'm not seeing the same confidence or the same predictability, and in that case I'm not going to continue to use the cue or add the cue in that session. There's kind of an ebb and flow to our dogs' ability to maintain predictability when they're first learning behaviors. It has to do with that leap of learning we were talking about earlier, about not assuming that because the dog does it correct once that they have understanding, and it's the same with adding the cue. I do want to take advantage of my dog's predictable responses in any given session, those predictable responses that again that are confident and contain the majority of my criteria. But just because I've started putting the behavior on cue doesn't mean that that next session, or that next location that I might work the behavior, that my dog is ready then to put it on cue. It's kind of like Denise's “Work the dog in front of you.” That dog changes from session to session, and so my training strategies have to change session to session, depending on what he's giving me at the start of that session. So again: predictable, I'm going to insert the cue; not predictable, I'm going to hold off a little bit. And that may all very well be with the exact same behaviors over different sessions. I think you are right in using the term “glossed over.” It's a part of the process that few spend very much time planning or implementing. It's either almost like an afterthought — “Oh yeah, now I need to put the cue on” — or they make the assumption that if they just start using the cue while training, the dog will get it somehow. So that process they apply is often random and very inefficient. Overlapping the behavior and the cue is a really common thing that I see. Cues should always precede behaviors with nothing in between, no junk behavior in between the cue and the behavior. You want it to have meaning for them. In putting behaviors on cue or transferring the cue, you really need to set that up. So if you're shaping, you first need a predictable, correct response. Are you noticing a theme here, Melissa? A predictable, correct response with confidence — that's really key to the dog's understanding. If the response is confident and correct and predictable, then we can start to assume some understanding. Until that happens, though, we're still working towards that. Once you have that, you insert your cue just prior to the dog either offering the behavior or the behavior being prompted. For example, we might have used a hand signal, we might not be shaping, we might have used a hand signal, or we might be prompting the dog in some other way, a visual cue or a prop might prompt the dog to interact with it. So just before the key phrase is, just prior to the dog offering the behavior or performing the behavior, that's when you insert the cue. Not as the dog is doing the behavior. Cues always precede behavior. It's why they're called antecedents. It's that old ABC: the cue is the antecedent, then behavior, then consequence. So when putting a cue to shape behavior, where people tend to shoot themselves in the foot is continuing to reward offered behavior. They might have started to put the behavior on cue, great, the dog is predictable, the dog is consistent, you're doing the correct thing by inserting the cue before the behavior, but unfortunately, you might be continuing to reward that offered behavior. So once you start to put the behavior on cue, execution on cue is the only thing that gets rewarded. Otherwise there's no value in the cue to the dog. If he can offer and get rewarded, or if he can get rewarded for doing it on cue, you're not going to get stimulus control because there's no value in the cue. Now there's a caveat to that. Melissa Breau: Of course. Julie Flanery: Yeah, and you'll learn about it next week in class, but there are times when you have a behavior that's on cue and you're going to want to remove the cue and encourage the dog to offer it again so that you can either fix or improve on the behavior. Maybe something's gone a little bit wrong, or you're not getting the criteria you used to have with it. It's gone a bit south. Then you want to remove that cue so that you can refine or improve the behavior, and then put that cue back on. That's a little more advanced process that is an important process too. Cues are cool. To me, putting the behavior on cue is the most important part of training the behavior, if you ever want to be able to draw it out of your dog. If you want the dog to respond reliably, then you have to really apply that process of putting it on cue very succinctly and very deliberately and not in a random fashion. We don't need cues if we don't care when the dog performs the behavior. But we do care. That's why we train. So cues should be a priority, and understanding how to put behaviors on cue should be a priority in any handler's learning. Melissa Breau: I think a lot of people struggle with that concept: the idea of getting something on stimulus control, getting a behavior to the point where it is reliable but also only actually happens on cue. Julie Flanery: And the reason is exactly that, because we have a tendency to still click off the behavior when it's offered. We love it, we like it, it's cute, I mean, “Oh, look at you, you did it again. How great,” and we have been patterned to click that offered behavior. We have to get ourselves out of that pattern. The rule is: Once you start putting the behavior on cue, you only click it when you cue it. That's what builds stimulus control. Melissa Breau: Let's say that you like to train, and you often get behaviors to that point where they're reliable enough for a cue. Is there any downside to having a bunch of half-trained behaviors that you never actually attach a cue to? … Julie Flanery: Well, that depends a little on your goals. If your goal is to compete and you need those behaviors, well, that's a really obvious detriment. But even more than that, in leaving behaviors what we're calling “half-trained,” you're denying your dog the opportunity and the experience to learn how to learn, how to learn a behavior to completion, and how to understand when you want him to perform that said behavior. Like most trainers, I love the acquisition stage. I love shaping, I love developing a behavior, but I also need my dog to understand the whole process if I ever want those behaviors to be of any use to me. I need my dog to learn how the process of adding a cue works so that he can also anticipate what comes next in the process. The more experience I give him at learning the whole process complete through generalization, adding the cue, and fluency, the faster and easier it is to train the next behavior, because it becomes something we are both working through the pieces to completion. The dog can help drive the process forward. That not only builds stronger behaviors, that builds faster behaviors, and that builds truly greater teamwork, in my mind, because you both are on the same path. You both have the same type of goal. But if we have a lot of half-trained behaviors, and only some of our behaviors are trained through completion, the dog just doesn't have enough experience to understand the full process and help drive that process to completion. Melissa Breau: A little birdie told me that maybe you're working on a class on that topic. Julie Flanery: I was asking the other instructors if they thought a class on finishing up all those half-trained behaviors would be a good idea, and they all jumped on it. So I'm planning to call it Mission Accomplished, and in effect you'll be providing your dog lots of opportunity and experience at learning how to learn. I think, for some, the reason that they haven't finished these behaviors is because they and their dog just need more experience at how to do it effectively and efficiently. People can get stuck in the process, just like dogs, and oftentimes that's why we have those half-trained behaviors. Maybe we don't know what we should do next, how to get it on cue, how to generalize it — all of those things that are involved in having a completed, reliable behavior. So hopefully that class will help some people. I think it will be a really fun class, and I'm just starting to develop it, but you've given me a lot of ideas in this podcast now that I can include in there, so that's super. Melissa Breau: Awesome. Do you have any idea yet when it's going to show up on the schedule? Julie Flanery: Oh my gosh, I have no idea. I'm just trying to get through this session. But I am keeping some notes and have some ideas floating around in my brain, and the schedule is a little bit set, but every now and then I'll add in a class if it's ready to go, so hopefully within the next few sessions it will be up on the schedule. Melissa Breau: Awesome. I'm looking forward to it, I will tell you that. Julie Flanery: Good. Melissa Breau: I think the other topic that gets overlooked — for lack of a better word — in pet training classes where most of us start out is fading treats from the training picture, so how to start reducing reinforcement. At what point in the process do you feel like a behavior is well enough established that you can start that process, and how do you usually tend to go about that? Julie Flanery: First thing somebody said is, I don't want the behavior well established before I take food out of my hand. That's personally for me. My rule of thumb for luring and removing the food from my hand is really first session, three to five reps, then present the hand cue, it needs to look exactly like my active lure, and I use it as a test. In general, especially dogs that have gone through this process, most dogs can do at least one correct response, or a partial response, without the food in your hand, due to the perception that the food is actually there, and you can build on that. Again, this is kind of important in terms of what we just talked about, about dogs learning the process. If a dog has gone through lure reward training and understands that at a point early in the process the food will no longer be an active lure, but that doesn't mean you won't be rewarded for following the hand signal, then that's a much easier leap for them than the dog that has an expectation of having food in the hand all the time, and really the only time he gets rewarded is when there is food in the hand. So that's one of the issues is we tend to reward less if we don't have the food right in our hand. But really it goes back to that teaching the dog the process so he has an appropriate expectation, and so it's not difficult to make those criteria shifts. The criteria shift of having food in the hand to having no food in the hand — that's criteria shift that the dog and handler go through. So three to five reps, and then I will remove the food from my hand and I will click early. I won't wait for the full behavior. I will click the dog following an empty hand cue on the path to the end behavior. I don't need to have the full behavior before I click the first time I take food out of my hand. If you tend to lure, if you use the lure for several sessions, then that's what your dog is going to expect. Lures are really effective for showing criteria, I do use lures on occasion, they're very effective at building patterns for the dog, but the sooner the dog learns to offer the criteria without food in your hand, the faster you're on your way to a more robust behavior, one that's going to, in my mind, have more strength and more longevity. So when I use lures, it's as a means to jumpstart my dog's understanding of what they should be offering. I think lures are an important tool, and I don't think we need to remove them from our toolbox, but I do think that people tend to keep food in their hand for far too long, far too deep into the process, so it becomes too much of an expectation for the dog, too much of a prompt, certainly. I hate to use the word “crutch,” but in a way it is, because really, until the food is gone, they're just following food. I don't believe that that stronger learning process starts to take place until the dog is initiating the behavior without prompts. Melissa Breau: That certainly matched my experience. Julie Flanery: I think that's why so many trainers now are really delving into shaping and are really starting to use that more as a primary tool than luring. Melissa Breau: Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Julie! I really appreciate it. Julie Flanery: I had a great time. I hope I get to come back again. I'm sorry I took so long. I get excited about this stuff and I love sharing it, and I want to share that with people, so I really appreciate you having me back here. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. I think folks are going to take a ton out of this. There's a lot of great information here, so thank you, seriously. Julie Flanery: Super. Melissa Breau: And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We'll be back next week, this time with Kamal Fernandez to talk about the benefits of competition and the concept of leadership in dog training. And guys, this week I want to repeat my special request from the last few episodes. If you listen to podcasts, I'm sure you've heard other people say this, but reviews in iTunes have a HUGE impact on helping new people find the show and in letting iTunes know that our show is worth listening to. It helps us get recommended and it helps us get more eyeballs on the podcast and ears. So if you've enjoyed this episode or any of the previous ones, I'd really appreciate it if you could take a moment and leave us a review over in iTunes. And if you haven't already, subscribe while you're there 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: Lori Stevens is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch® Training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health all interact. She uses intimidation-free, scientific, and innovative methods, in an educational environment, to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, WA. She is also the creator of the Balance Harness. Lori's most recent of three DVDs by Tawser Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao and called The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs. It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She teaches the popular FDSA course Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs, and will be introducing a new course this session called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness in Five. Links www.seattlettouch.com Next Episode:  To be released 1/26/2018, and I'll be talking to Chrissi Schranz about building reinforcers and recall training, so stay tuned! TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Lori Stevens. Lori is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch® Training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health all interact. She uses intimidation-free, scientific, and innovative methods, in an educational environment, to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, WA. She is also the creator of the Balance Harness. Lori's most recent of three DVDs by Tawser Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao and called The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs. It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She teaches the popular FDSA course Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs, and will be introducing a new course this session called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness in Five. Hi Lori, welcome back to the podcast. Lori Stevens: Hello Melissa. Thanks for having me back. Melissa Breau: I am very excited to talk to you again today. To start us out and remind listeners who you are, do you want to recap who the animals are that you share your life with? Lori Stevens: Sure. Since you made that plural, I'll add in my husband because humans are animals. Melissa Breau: Fair enough! Lori Stevens: Anyway, I live with my husband, Lee, and I live with my 12-and-a-half-year-old Aussie girl, Cassie. You know, I used to teach about aging dogs without actually having one, and now I have one. So after several years of teaching basically senior dogs how to have a better life, now I have one and I'm putting it to work. So it's nice to have a 12-and-a-half-year-old who's excited about doing fitness, and going to the park, and the beach, and trail outings, and all sorts of good things. Melissa Breau: You shared pictures. She's clearly in great shape. She looks awesome. Lori Stevens: Yeah, she's doing well. Melissa Breau: Good. I know from last time we talked that you're an advocate for canine fitness — probably not surprising based on what you do. But can you share a little about why it's important, especially for sports dogs? Lori Stevens: I'll start with sports. I have personal experience with seeing athletes go to the next level, and I think it's the cross-training, because they'll come in and basically say something like, “My dog keeps hitting bars. I think we need to improve something.” When we start doing some cross-training, or strengthening the core, or strengthening the legs that are involved in a jump, all those things, we see improvement in performance —surprise, surprise. I think a lot of time in sports the training is going to classes, practicing the sports, but sometimes you need to do one more level of fitness to get that extra little bit. There are so many benefits in canine fitness, things like strengthens muscles is obvious, but it really strengthens and helps the dog know when and how to engage their core muscles. That would happen automatically. It's not like they think, OK, it's time to engage my core muscles, but we do exercises where we start engaging them a lot and then it becomes more natural. You build better joint support through stronger muscles, improving flexibility, improve alignment and posture, balance and stability improve. And with that, what you get is fewer injuries, you get more confidence, you get more body awareness. And so dogs, when they're faced with a quick decision or a quick body move, they're more prepared and more confident to make that move, and stronger in that movement than they might be if they were just doing the regular training as a sport. It improves gait, movement, I just think it's fantastic. But another part of it, which I think we often leave out, is that it's a behavior changer. I have worked with fearful dogs that that was the way that I broke through to them. That confidence they get with suddenly doing things with their body that they've never done before, like hind leg targeting, I think that's a huge, huge exercise for dogs' awareness of where their back end is, their confidence. It seems to be a game changer, really, in terms of behavior, I have found. It's all the stuff you would naturally think of with fitness, but it also does a lot in terms of confidence, body awareness, and building trust even. I mean really being able to build trust, or doing something joyful that doesn't have the pressure of competition in it. Melissa Breau: I think that, for a lot of people, when they talk about fitness, they think about their own experiences. I don't know about you, but for me at least, the gym is not my favorite place to be. How does that compare to how dogs generally feel about fitness and what's the difference there? Lori Stevens: I hate the gym. Can I just say that? Really hate the gym. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Lori Stevens: I have a personal trainer now. I love my trainer. And so maybe that's more like working with your dog. What pops to mind when I think of going to the gym is a sweaty place that doesn't smell great and has a lot of grunting. Canine fitness, what pops to mind when I think about it, is joy, joy, joy. That's what my canine gym is, my canine gym room. Doing fitness together is just a blast. I have to say that every dog I've ever worked with loves it, and that's why it's my sport. It's my sport, I'm calling it my sport because I don't have another sport, but to me, it really is. It's truly a fun activity and it's all about the joy. So they aren't really comparable, those two things. Melissa Breau: Fair enough, and I guess if someone was sitting there feeding us cookies for everything we did at the gym, we might enjoy it a little more too. Lori Stevens: Yeah, true. Melissa Breau: I think the other place that our concepts about our own fitness struggles sometimes hold us back is with the expectations around how much time we have to put into it. Most people probably think about spending an hour — or more, maybe — at the gym each time they go. Based on the upcoming course name, I'm going to guess that canine fitness differs there too. So how much time should people really be spending on canine fitness? Lori Stevens: You know that five is five hours. No, I'm just kidding. It's five minutes. You know, that goes for people too. When you're out walking your dog, and you're out in the woods, or on a trail, or in the park, it's OK if it takes an hour. But when you're in your house with your dog and you want to do some focused exercises, you want to stop and do a little training, so you might as well do a little fitness, five minutes is plenty. I do believe in warming up and cooling down, and the five minutes is the strengthening part, but if you wanted to turn that into two minutes of strengthening and a couple of minutes of warm-up, and a short cool down, that's fine too. I actually think, with people, they don't need to do an hour workout either. If I stop and do five to ten minutes of working out, that's better than if I don't do any at all, so the time thing, I think, often gets in the way. I also think we can over-train our dogs. I have a 12-and-a-half-year-old, and I set a timer. I set it for five minutes of training. If she's cold, like if she's been sleeping for a few hours, then I wake her up, I set my timer for five minutes, and we do five minutes of warm-up. Then I set it again, we do five minutes of strengthening, and then we do a few minutes of cool down, usually another five on the cool down. So I just set my timer. I think I got that idea of five, five, and five from Leslie Eide, a rehabilitation vet in our area. She also teaches fitness work. I think she's done some for Fenzi. I think the thing is that it's important to warm up a bit and cool down a bit, but you really don't have to spend that much time doing it. So all of the workouts that people are going to develop in my class are going to be five-minute workouts. We don't have to overthink this, you know. We can be creative. We just don't want to work the same muscles every day to fatigue. So we just want to be careful on that side of things. Melissa Breau: How much do fitness behaviors — maybe including or maybe not including warm-up and cool down stuff; I'll leave that up to you — but how much do those skills or those behaviors differ from other skills and behaviors that we teach our dog for sport or just for daily life? Lori Stevens: It's all behavior. How does it differ? I think the way it differs is that we need to be safe. So we need to pay attention to alignment, we need to start on the ground, and what I mean by that is we really need to build a foundation, just like with any sport. You're not going to get past the foundation stuff. You don't put your dog directly on a peanut and start doing things. One of my goals in teaching fitness is to really teach people how to be wonderful, incredibly sharp-eyed observers, and teach them what to look for when they're doing fitness, and how to start on the ground and build up. All these exercises that we do as foundation exercises, they're all going to get harder because we're going to be doing them on the ground first, on a stable platform, then an unstable platform, unstable equipment. Training fitness is not training for a competitive sport, so the pressure isn't the same, but you still have to have a good foundation for it. Just like with agility, you don't go in and start running courses. You teach the dog how to get on the equipment, how to exit the equipment, how to use the equipment safely. This is all a good thing, in my view, and that's why I can call it my sport, because there are a bunch of nuances. But it's also a very joyful thing to do. Not to say that sports isn't joyful. Most people do it because it's a blast. But precision is important in fitness training, just like it's important in competitive sports. It's just different in the sense that it's something you can do year-round. You might change your focus based on what you see in your dog, and all of it is about teaching behaviors, so the better you are at training and timing, the better your fitness work will look. Melissa Breau: You mentioned in there the idea of equipment. Do people need special equipment to do canine fitness? Lori Stevens: I think people like an excuse to buy equipment. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Lori Stevens: I really do. I think it's funny, I do think they like that. But let's just say they can't afford it or they don't like it. There's a lot of things you can build. You can use things around the house. Do you have to have fancy cones? No, you can use potted plants. Do you have to have a fancy Cavalletti set with cones with poles through it? No, you can use your mops and brooms and put them on cans and use painter's tape. Do you have to buy fancy platforms or an aerobic platform? No, you can use books and bind them with duct tape and put anti-slip material around them. You can use air mattresses and pillows for unstable equipment. I'm betting most people will want to buy a piece of equipment or two, but you don't have to. Let me just add that the outdoors, when you go for a walk in the park, it is full of exercise equipment. I'm going to give you yesterday's example. We haven't gone for our walk today yet. Yesterday's example was we went to the park and Cassie wanted to jump on every park bench. She sees the bench and she starts targeting for the bench, and she wants to go on every single bench. She can put her front legs up to work her hind legs, or she can push up all the way to do a little jump. Then we do uphill sprints because I'm in Seattle, so there's a lot of hills. We do uphill recalls and she sprints up the hill. We hind leg target curbs on our way to the park, and we were walking across a bridge, and I noticed there was this little shelf, a little curb-like thing that you could step up on. So we did ipsilateral work — I'd better say what that is — we did targeting with same-side legs on the little raised part of the bridge, and we turned around, did the other side, and I took a photo of it. We do that in the class, ipsilateral work. We ended with nosework in the park, followed by walking up a very steep hill. And I did a workout with her that day, too. But this was a really good workout just utilizing, there's often a big rock she likes to jump up on, and there's all sorts of logs that are a little slippery right now because it rains here nonstop for ages. There's exercise equipment everywhere. Maybe I should do a class someday on just outdoor equipment. Melissa Breau: That would certainly be cool. It would be interesting. Lori Stevens: Yeah. Melissa Breau: For those people who are interested in buying a couple of pieces of equipment, are there specific pieces you usually recommend for getting started, or good places to get their feet wet? Lori Stevens: First a caveat: You're talking to someone who has a ridiculous amount of equipment, so maybe I shouldn't really be allowed to answer this question. Older dogs do really well with a balance pad, and you don't have to buy it. You can get a balance pad on Amazon for people and it's not very expensive. You can do a lot of things with a balance pad. I like for people to have a Fitbone or two, or a couple of 14-inch discs. Those pieces of equipment, either one, a Fitbone or a 14-inch disc, or two Fitbones or two 14-inch discs, you can do a lot with those. Platforms are super-useful. Where do you buy a platform, right? A lot of people have been making platforms recently, so there's a lot of how-to's on that. But you asked me about buying. An aerobic step bench is actually a useful platform. Michelle Pouliot has a place that she links to that builds platforms according to her specifications, so I've got a couple of those. And then Paw Pods. They're inexpensive and they're a blast. You just have to make sure you get the ones that are nice and soft, so I get the FitPAWS ones. They're really fun, because then you can target one paw at a time, target all four, do turns, and do side steps onto them and all sorts of things. Back onto them, back onto all four, there's a million things you can do with the Paw Pods. OK, I'll stop. Was that just a couple of pieces? Melissa Breau: No, that's excellent. Paw Pods are fascinating. I've never taught a dog to use them, but just in general I've seen some stuff done with them and they're pretty cool. They require a real awareness of where all four of your feet are. Lori Stevens: Exactly, and it is just fun. It's fun to teach and fun to do them. Melissa Breau: I know you have, and you mentioned this earlier too, this idea of fitness foundation behaviors. I know that's part of what's on your syllabus, so I wanted to ask you what you mean by that, and what are some examples of something that counts as a fitness foundation behavior. Lori Stevens: One isn't even a fitness behavior, but having a good nose-to-hand touch where your dog can … so targeting is a big one, so first a nose-to-hand touch, and that's super-useful for positioning. Having an easy go-to default behavior they can do when you just ask them to do something and they don't do it, you can just say, “Touch.” So when you practice that in all sorts of ways, and moving them into position with your nose-to-hand targeting, then you've got something that you can use during fitness training that gets them to a certain place, gets them on something, gets them off of something. Getting off of equipment sometimes can be challenging for some people. So just to continue with the targeting, being able to target with one paw, target something, your hand, with each of your four paws — not your four paws, your dog's four paws — targeting with one paw, two paws up, four paws up, is a useful foundation skill. Hind leg targeting is, in my opinion, hind leg targeting is a useful skill for all dogs, period. Being able to hind leg target something is really important, but then, of course, it's a foundation behavior when you're just teaching a dog to hind leg target a mat. But it becomes more skillful and more of a fitness behavior when you're targeting something unstable and higher up and asking to hold that position and maybe do shoulder exercises with their hind end up. So these things that start on the ground that don't seem like that big a deal, they build and become more difficult and more challenging fitness exercises or strengthening exercises. Backing up, side stepping — both of those are foundation exercises, but side stepping on unstable equipment is a different thing than side stepping with all four feet on the ground. I call them foundations because you're giving the dog the idea of what is side stepping and what is backing up, or asking them to do it on something difficult. Melissa Breau: What are some of the basic exercises that you teach most often? What do those look like, and what are the benefits of doing some of them? Lori Stevens: Let me just start with the simplest concept, and that is, when you put two front feet up on something, your dog is usually, not always, but you can help them shift their weight to their back legs, so the further they're standing up, the less likely that they'll have the weight on their front legs. The benefit of putting two paws up on something and holding is that the hind legs are being used more. If the hind legs are up, then the weight is more down on the front legs, so you're building front leg muscles. Things like tuck sits and sphinx downs require more core work. There's something that is often said in physical therapy, and that is, you stabilize, you strengthen the proximal, which is the core, which is the trunk, to get better distal mobility from a strengthen position. So it's important to be able to have the strength of that stability in your trunk and in your core, your stabilization muscles, your multifidi, your transverse abdominus muscles. It's important to be able to automatically engage those, your serratus, in order to do some of these other exercises. So the benefits of the core work is to be able to do more difficult things safely. The benefits of some of the other exercises we work on, like, let's just say crawling. Crawling, you're down in a sphinx down position and then you're moving forward on the ground. So you're working the back muscles. You're utilizing all four limbs, and those limbs, especially the back legs, really have to work the rotation of the hip. The benefits of these exercises are pretty amazing. Another example would be with the dog standing on all four legs. If you lift the left front leg, you're going to put more weight on the right back leg, so if you've got a dog that's in a habit of standing to the side because maybe they hurt their right knee two years ago, so they got in a habit of unloading that leg, well, lifting the front left paw loads that leg, and in their body they start getting the muscle memory back of, Oh yeah, I can use that leg like I used it before. It doesn't hurt at all. Let me just add that I still think it's important that everybody who does fitness is checked out by a veterinarian, and if they've had any sort of problems that they're cleared for the exercises first. But there's a lot of benefits that come from doing this work that sometimes people don't even see until they start doing it. It's pretty cool. And then there's the behavior benefits, like I said earlier. The body awareness, the bonding that occurs, the trust and joy. And do you know that some of the agility dogs I work with have never slowed down, and they're like, “Ha ha ha, my dog will never slow down,” and they walk over those Cavaletti poles. But slowing down helps dogs go faster, because in slowing down they really get to know their bodies better, and they get to know where they're not just pushing through. Being the little masters of muscle compensation that they are, when you're moving slowly, it all stands out. You have to know what muscles you're using, you have to know where your feet are in a different sort of way, and so the slow work doesn't slow your dog down on the course. It helps your dog because they're even more confident and more aware, I think. Melissa Breau: I wanted to ask if there are differences in the behaviors you'd recommend for daily fitness versus those you use to warm up and cool down, or whether the behaviors are multifunctional. Maybe you could just talk to all that a little bit. Lori Stevens: The exercises are multifunctional, or at least some of them are. In my warm-up I might do a few tuck sits and a few tuck sits to stand. I might do some short recalls. I might do some targeting, some spins, some bows, some Cavalletti work. But I'm not going to do ten tuck sits to stands, three sets, with feet upon a Fitbone, as my warm-up. So the concept of the exercise is the exercise might be the same, but I'll just do two or three of them in a warm-up versus ten of them, really hard, three sets. I want the dogs, as they're warming up, to go through the different movements. I want them to back up and side step, and all that's on the ground during a warm-up, really. I often just come in from a walk, like, I walk Cassie for however long, usually we walk at least 30 minutes, and we walk in the house and she's pretty warmed up, so we just do a few exercises right after that. But it's spins and turns to get the … or spins in each direction, sorry. It's good lateral flexion for the spine, so it warms up the spine muscles. Cavalletti work is a nice warm-up exercise when you're trotting across them, but I'm not going to raise them real high and have a dog do high steps, or side stepping, or backing up over Cavelletti poles as a warm-up, because that's taking it a little bit further. So they're multifunctional, but they're done in the simplest way during warm-ups and cool downs. I probably made that into something longer than it needed to be. In cool downs I'm even going to go lighter and do less in a cool down than I would in a warm-up. Melissa Breau: You mentioned this earlier, and you talk about it a little bit in your syllabus, this concept of alignment. I wanted to ask what you mean by that, and if you can talk a little bit about why it's important. Lori Stevens: It's super-important, and why it's important has to do with the muscles that are engaging. I'm an alignment geek, I admit. If a dog sits with a leg shooting out to the side, or just a super-sloppy sit to the side, the first thing I want to know is why that's happening and let's change it. If a back is roached up or humped up, I want to know is something wrong. Hunched up, back roached, I don't know how you'd say roaching, but hopefully people know what that is. Sometimes what I see is a dog can stand with their feet under them perfectly fine, but as soon as they step up on a platform, their back feet go really wide, or their front feet go really wide. Have you ever seen people that are standing with their legs really wide? They're not using their core. They're just creating this super-broad base that they don't have to use any muscles. I mean, you have to use muscles to stand, but it's a rather lazy, non-core way of standing. Sorry if you're thinking, I do that all the time! So what I'm looking for is that dogs are using the muscles I expect, they have nice, long spines, neutral necks, their tail is not tucked. If the dog's tail is tucked — some dogs tuck their tails a lot — but if the dog's tail is really tucked and their legs are wide, then I think either, They're not comfortable standing like this. Maybe we're standing on something a little bit too high. Maybe for one reason or another they might or might not be hurting. It's really hard to tell because you can't ask. So I want to see if we can change their position in a way that puts them in better alignment and if they're comfortable doing that. Now if the dog regularly really goes wide in the back, I know how to encourage them to have their legs under them, but if I all of a sudden start doing the exercise with their legs in, they might be using muscles they have never used before. So I have to really be careful with not just bringing their legs in and then doing a million exercises, because the dog needs to get used to using those new muscles. So anyway, alignment is a really, really big deal. It's just safe. It's safer. There's no reason to do things with improper alignment. It's the same thing in human training as well. Melissa Breau: I'll let you talk a little more about the class specifically. I know it's called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness In Five, and it's in February, so lots of f's. What does it entail, what is it going to look like? Do you want to just talk us through a little bit? Lori Stevens: It's going to be fun, it's going to be educational, it will benefit your dog and help him in sports. At the end of, so every week, I think this time I'm going to release everything the first day of the week. You'll have lectures that will tell you a bit about why I want things to go a certain way, or things to keep in mind, or learning about fitness. So I'll have lectures. Then I'll have exercises, and I'll say how to get the behaviors, what they're good for. I'll say the setup, what you need in your environment, the instructions, the number of repetitions and sets, I'll have video of the exercise. So we'll do that. And then, at the end of every week, I'm going to have something called The Five-Minute Workout, it's just called Five-Minute Workout. I'm not going to create the five-minute workout. However, I'm going to give everybody the tools to create their own five-minute workout. So you can imagine what the homework will be. The homework will be showing the exercises, or for sure showing videos of the exercises that you're having trouble teaching. But also I'm going to want to see parts of the five-minute workout. The first week, you're learning how to do a five-minute workout. You're not all of a sudden, “Here's my five-minute workout.” It's going to build across the weeks, and every week your five-minute workout can incorporate, like, let's just say we're in Week 3. Your five-minute workout can include the exercises from Week 3, 2, and 1, so we can get creative and more mixing and matching. Anyway, that's basically how the class is laid out. I'm going to have lectures on things like raising criteria. I'll talk about the benefits, the kinds of movements, the anatomical terminology, like what is cranial and what's caudal, what's lateral and what's medial. I'll talk about exercise frequency, repetitions, durations, and sets. I'll talk about physiological issues, muscle actions. So there's things I'll just talk about, but then there's the exercises, so people will have both. They'll learn about fitness and they will learn the exercises. Melissa Breau: They'll learn both the whys and the hows. Lori Stevens: Yeah. Melissa Breau: I think you hit on the things that people are most likely to have questions about. I feel like anytime people talk about this stuff, it's like, “OK, but how much do I do? How long do I do it?” and all those pieces. Lori Stevens: Yeah, right. Exactly. And it's really different from the Aging Dogs class. In the Aging Dogs class, depending on the age of the dog, for sure, I'm not always this picky about everything. I'm likely to be a little bit more picky about alignment and how we're doing the exercise than I am in the Aging Dogs class. It all depends on the dog, but when you're working with a 16-year-old dog, teaching him fitness exercises, you're going to go really slowly, give that dog the time to learn them, and you're not going to be super-picky about, you're going to be as picky as you can be about alignment, but it's different. Melissa Breau: You hit on something there, and I didn't tell you I was going to ask you this, but you brought it up and I think it makes sense to maybe talk about it for just a quick second. Is there a type of dog that is a good fit for the class, or maybe isn't as good a fit for the class? Lori Stevens: I would say if it's a dog that … OK, first of all, if it's a puppy and the growth plates aren't closed yet, then puppies probably should not take the class, because everything about repetitions and sets aren't going to apply to the puppy. Somebody could take it if they have a puppy. I recommend they audit it. Then, when their dog's growth plates close, then they can start applying it, or they can take it again later. It's a lot of material. You could audit it, then take it later, and still go, “Oh, I don't remember doing this.” If your dog's coming off a pretty serious injury and you've got contraindications, things you really shouldn't be doing, maybe don't take it at Gold. Maybe just audit it. Check with your vet. It's different if you're coming here and you've been released from the rehab vet to come to me to do exercises. But if you are taking this as a fitness class, I'm going to assume your dog is pretty healthy. Other than that, pretty much all dogs can take it. For sure the dogs that are pretty mobile that have been in my Aging Dogs class, they can take it. They may not be able to do everything, but the ones that are pretty mobile, there's some I have in mind that could definitely take it. But if you've got a dog that can hardly move, this will be challenging, is my guess. But there's always something, you know? I have to do some harder exercises for the dogs that are more performance dogs. They're strong and they're used to doing things. And then you can always just stick with the basics and build really, really gradually until you're ready to go up a level. So it really depends. Melissa Breau: If people have questions, they can message you, right? Lori Stevens: Whatever people have, yeah. I think it's going to be a well-attended class, based on the interest I've seen so far, so I hope. It should be really fun. It should be a very positive experience for the dogs and people. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Lori. This is fun to learn a little more about this stuff, and I feel like every time we talk about it, I'm like, Hmm, I really should be doing that. So thank you for coming back on and talking through this with me. And thank you to all of our wonderful listeners out there for tuning in. We'll be back next week, this time with Chrissi Schranz to talk about building reinforcers and recall training. If you haven't already, I hope you'll subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice so our next episode will automatically download to your phone as soon as it becomes available. CREDITS: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

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

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

So what exactly *is* stimulus control? We're pondering (and attempting to answer that) on this episode featuring Kathy Sdao. For show notes, visit: http://www.wonderpupstraining.com/blog/podcast-22-pondering-stimulus-control-kathy-sdao

SHOW NOTES:  Summary: Sarah Stremming is a dog trainer, a dog agility and obedience competitor, and a dog behavior consultant. Her specialty is working with behavior problems in competition dogs. During her interview we talk about her approach to training -- including allowing dogs their dog-ness -- and the 4 things she looks at before making behavior recommendations: exercise, enrichment, diet and communication. Links mentioned: Cognitive Canine Blog Cog Dog Radio (also available for Android and iPhone) Next Episode:  To be released 1/20/2017, featuring Hannah Branigan.   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 Sarah Stremming. Sarah's voice may be familiar to some of you since she owns the excellent Cog-Dog Radio. Sarah is owner and operator of the Cognitive Canine. She has been working with dogs in the realms of performance training and behavior solutions for over a decade. Her special area of interest has long been helping dog owners address behavioral concerns in their competition dogs. Reactivity, anxiety, aggression, and problems with arousal are all major concerns for many competitors, and Sarah works to help her clients overcome these issues and succeed in their chosen arena. Hi, Sarah, welcome to the podcast. Sarah Stremming: Hi, Melissa, and thanks for having me. Melissa: Absolutely. Sarah, to start out, can you just tell us a little bit about the dogs you have now and what you're working on with them? Sarah: Sure. I have Idgie, who is an 8-year-old border collie, and she's competing in agility and her agility training is really just kind of in maintenance phase, but I'm getting her ready to go into the open level of obedience next year; and I have Felix who is also a border collie and he's a year and a half, so he's learning everything. He's learning agility, obedience, and mostly how to just kind of keep his head on his shoulders in the agility environment is our number one project… and those are my two dogs. Melissa: Excellent. How did you originally get into dog sports? Sarah: I saw agility on TV when I was probably nine or ten and immediately knew that that was for me, and it was like five years later that I actually got to do agility, but as soon as I saw it I wanted to do it and I've been doing it ever since. Melissa: That's awesome. So did you start out R+ then, since you started in agility or kind of what got you started on that positive training journey? Sarah: I definitely did not start with all positive reinforcement. I am definitely what I would call a crossover trainer. I started in not just agility but competitive obedience. Agility really got me started, but the kind of local dog training school required an obedience class before you started agility training, and I actually really liked the obedience side as well, so I competed in obedience and agility with my first dog Kelso. He had some really severe behavioral problems, primarily aggression towards other dogs, and so I learned to do all kinds of nasty things from people who…everybody I worked with was really trying to help me, and so I did all kinds of corrections as far as obedience is concerned and as well as his aggression was concerned. Because he had these behavior problems I reached outside of the realm of performance training into the animal training world and found out that all of these corrections that I had been taught from really the competitive obedience sector were not only not necessary but probably causing some of my problems. So when I started to realize that and started to change the way that I did things, he started to get better and that was really all that I needed to see. Melissa: I know that for most trainers it's definitely an evolving journey, so how would you describe where you are now in terms of what your training philosophy is and kind of how you approach training? Sarah: My training approach I actually have a philosophy that I really sat down and figured out and wrote out a while ago so that I could reference it and come back to it in my work with my own dogs as well as with other people and so it's kind of four different mantras, and the first one is ‘Do not deny dogs their dogness.' So meaning dogs are dogs, they're going to act like dogs. Dogs like to bark and pee on stuff and dig holes and do things like that, and we really have no right to deny them those things because we chose to bring dogs into our lives, but that segues into the next mantra, which is to teach dogs what we need from them in a kind way, so we need them to not do those things all the time and it's important for us to teach them what they need to know to live in our world in a way that is kind. Then the next one is ‘Provide dogs what they need,' which is a big deal to me to just make sure that their needs are being met. I find that a lot of dogs living with people don't have all of their basic dog needs met, and then the last one is just ‘Above all honor the dog,' which means always honor their experience of what you are doing, that this isn't just about you. They're here. They have autonomy. They have ownership over their own lives and we really have no right to not take their opinions and experiences into account.  Melissa: I know you kind of mentioned Kelso at the beginning, and your specialty now, at least as far as I understand it, is over-arousal in competition dogs. Does that kind of tie back to that or can you tell me kind of how you got started in that and kind of just a little bit about your work now? Sarah: That being my special interest area was really shaped by the competitors and the current climate of agility. Kelso actually wouldn't be described by anybody who knew him as over-aroused. They would describe him more as one of those shut-down type of dogs, so he was overwhelmed by the environment, but it translated into a dog that was slow and didn't do agility very fast versus most of the dogs that I work with now are kind of the opposite. They are also overwhelmed by the environment, but it comes out in big displays, big behaviors of biting the handler, excessive barking, not being able to stay on the start line, that kind of thing. I do work with the dogs that shut down too. Most of the dogs that I work with are over-aroused, and I think that that has been largely cultivated by just the culture in agility right now, which is we're breeding dogs with hair-trigger arousal on purpose and we are fostering really, really high levels of arousal in training and the reason is everybody wants faster. Everybody wants speed, and they really think that this is how they're going to get there. When you put all of this arousal into the picture and you're not actually sure how to deal with it once you've got it, you run into problems and it's everywhere. Every single time I go to an agility trial, which is frequently, I see dogs that are really struggling with the environment and really just if they were people would be screaming and banging their fists against the wall and instead they're a dog on a leash being asked to stand next to a handler quietly. So we see a lot of problems come out because that arousal has got to come out somewhere. Melissa: So I'm actually going to shift gears slightly and then come back to this topic. Before starting this podcast, I asked around for other good dog training podcasts. Cog-Dog came very highly recommended, which is how I first learned a little about you and a little about what you're doing. For anyone listening who may not be familiar with it, can you just briefly tell us a little bit what Cog-Dog Radio is and kind of how you have it set up? Sarah: Yeah. So I really started getting out there through my blog, which is at the cognitivecanine.com and I wanted to cover specific cases that I have worked on. I thought that was a good idea for material basically, and I tried to write them as blogs and they really weren't working out, and a friend of mine suggested that I try a podcast and so that's how Cog-Dog Radio was born and so it's my podcast. You can find it on SoundCloud or iTunes just by searching for Cog-Dog Radio. You can also get it through my website. The format is that I do a series of three episodes at a time, and the three episodes cover a case that I worked on. So I start out talking about kind of the basics of the case and then in the next episode I talk about specific behavior modification that happened in the case and then the third episode, which is turning out to be everybody's favorite episode is that I interview the owner of the dogs that we're talking about. Melissa: Now I know, kind of to tie this back to the previous question, which is why I wanted to make sure we talked about this first. In one of your early podcasts, you talked about like the four things that you consider before creating a program or a behavior modification process for a dog. Exercise, enrichment, diet, and communication. Did I get all of them that time? Sarah: You got them. So this is what I call the four steps to behavioral wellness and this is something that I came up with a long time ago when I was working primarily actually with the general public with their dogs so general public versus the dog sport public, which is more who I work with now, and it's basically just these four areas. If you come back to my philosophy in dog training, one of them was to provide dogs what they need, and since we examined these four areas, we find out where we maybe aren't giving them what they need and that way we can adjust it. So exercise is the first one that you mentioned and I really advocate a specific type of exercise for dogs. I find that them being allowed to just mill around and sniff around and be a dog in an open space type area is best so off-leash or on a long line and a harness if off-leash is not safe where you are. I find it really best for them as far as reducing overall anxiety and stress in their life versus the exercise that most dogs get, if they get any, it's fetching a ball or a Frisbee. Going to agility class, a lot of people tell me that they see that as a form of exercise for their dogs, and I would totally disagree, or just walking on a short leash around the neighborhood. A lot of times that even does the opposite of what we would like it to do. It creates more stress for the dog so exercise is a big one for me. I find that most dogs aren't getting enough and I would include my own dogs in that statement. I mean, it is very difficult to get them what I would call enough, right? And so the next one is enrichment, which is basically just that we've got a hunter/scavenger species on our hands here, and we put kibble in a bowl and hand it to them twice a day and we could be using those calories in a way smarter way. We could be having them work to find their food essentially, so giving them projects that they can do that help them meet their own needs somehow as opposed to a lot of people recommend giving all the food through training and there've definitely been situations where I've recommended that, but usually I think if they also are allowed to search and find food as their way of getting food as well as not all dogs are super-hot on food and we'll use toys and hide toys and have them find it. Just any kind of mental enrichment that we can give them that helps them meet a need of theirs on their own without human interaction tends to be really helpful and the people that I work with learn a lot about their dogs through these things. If you hide food and give your dog a puzzle to figure out, the way that they figure out how to get to the food or if they figure it out at all tells us a lot about them. So if you, for instance, wrap a bully stick up in a paper bag and then stick the paper bag in a box and then put the box underneath a blanket, there are going to be dogs that are not even going to try to figure it out. There are going to be dogs that are going to plough through it really, really quickly and really frantically. There are going to be dogs that think really hard but wind up getting there and basically learn a lot about what kind of problem solver your dog is and what kind of thinker they are just by giving them problems to solve. And then over time if you don't give them things that are too hard, but you give them things that are kind of just hard enough, they start to be this dog that says I can solve problems and their confidence in training gets better and their confidence in other situations, maybe competition, gets better because, and this is purely anecdotal, I don't think there's any research on this, but what I witnessed is that over time they start to have more self-confidence because we've provided them with puzzles to solve. Then diet is something that I am not specifically trained in and technically cannot advise specifically on. I get a lot of emails asking for specific diet recommendations and formulas and I always tell people that I can't give them that. What I can tell you is that what I observe anecdotally is that a fresh food diet is best when we're talking about behavior and I think all of us know that already when we think about ourselves, whether it's a better idea to have a meal made of fresh whole food or a pre-processed powder, I think we all know which is better for us. We just forget what's better for dogs because there are so many processed options for dogs that are supposedly healthy and good for them, and I've just seen too many of my cases where the behavior change that we really, really needed happened after the diet change. I have to mention it, and I really do think that even if you switched from one processed food to maybe a better one that works better for your dogs, diet should always be considered, especially when anxiety or over-arousal are involved. Then the final one, communication, I just want people to better tell their dogs when they're right and to have a better system for telling their dogs when they're “wrong.” But basically we need to be telling them when they're right more often. And I really like Kathy Sdao has a system for this that she calls SMART x50, and SMART stands for See, Mark, and Reward Training and then x50 is just that your goal is to do it 50 times a day. And all that means is you see the dog doing something right, you tell them, hey, that was right, I liked that and then you give them a piece of food or a game or something. So that's how you can reinforce behavior throughout the day that's working for you and then I have people do something so instead of corrections I want them to instruct, so we are going to replace correction with instruction and then always follow up that instruction with reinforcement. So if my dog is let's say barking at the front window and I ask her to go lie on the mat instead and then I give her a cookie for doing that, that's a more effective way for me to alter her behavior than to spray her with water or throw something at her or yell at her for barking. So those are my four areas.      Melissa: And I'm assuming those didn't sort of immediately pop into your brain all together fully formed. How did you come to that? Sarah: That's a good question, and to be honest I came to them through my own kind of journey with mental health. So I have an anxiety disorder and that really, even though it's not fun for me, it helps me to really help dogs better. There's some really great research in the human world as far as anxiety disorders go and other mood disorders go as far as what we can do in our daily lives to help lessen our needs for medications. One of them is exercise. You're not going to find a single resource on any mood disorder, whether it's depression, anxiety, or anything else that won't tell you exercise will help. For me personally I know that getting out and walking up a dirt path with a forest and trees and animals and everything is better for my brain than getting on a treadmill, and I see the treadmill as like us walking our dog around on concrete in the neighborhood. So that's the exercise piece. The enrichment piece is just you have to feel that's being satisfied in your daily life so that's liking your job, finding your job interesting, not being bored, that's the enrichment piece for people. Being involved in hobbies so not just sitting and watching a television but reading a book or writing or something like that. These adult coloring books. There's a craze right now, adult coloring books and it's because of enrichment. It's because we all need a little bit more of it in our lives. We need to unplug and do something with our brains and our hands and that's exactly what we're doing with dogs when we give them a puzzle to figure out. And then diet's a huge component. It's a huge component for me, and I know it's a huge component for everybody that I've talked to that has any kind of mental health concern but if they really examine what they're eating and really adjust what they're eating towards a whole food-type of diet, they get better and then communication for me that is mostly about dogs. That stems from my belief that I've kind of formulated over all this time working with dogs, that there is nothing that a dog finds more aversive than confusion and there is nothing that they will work harder to avoid than confusion, meaning that's why you have so many trainers who are still using x, y, z aversive tool, prong collar, choke collar, or shock collar, whatever, who say but look at my dog and look how happy they are working, and a lot of those people are right. The dogs do it great. The dogs look fine, and the reason is they're skilled using that tool and the dog is not confused. The dog fully understands how to avoid the correction and they're not confused. To be clear, I'm not advocating for that, but I believe that their priority one is to better understand what's going on in their own lives and that we throw them into kind of an alien existence and expect them to just figure it out and I do believe that it causes a lot of stress for them so that's where that one comes from.    Melissa: Well, I mean that's true with people too. If you have a boss and you just don't understand what he or she wants from you and you just don't understand how to succeed at your job, you get frustrated and upset and unhappy. Sarah: Absolutely. Any kind of human-to-human relationship that does not have communication will not work for very long. Melissa: Right. Right. So to round things out, I have three more short questions that I'm trying to ask kind of towards the end of each of the interviews. So the first one, what's the dog-related accomplishment that you're proudest of? Sarah: I have to think pretty hard about this one because I feel like every time my dogs do have some minor breakthrough, I'm really proud of it, but this last year at AKC Nationals Idgie and I made the Challengers round and if you're familiar with AKC Nationals, the Challengers round is not easy to get into. Just making the Challengers round that's not what I consider the proudest moment for me, but the fact that Idgie who's a dog that used to really struggle with arousal issues in agility was able to not only have a clean round and run really nicely but really fully be the dog that I have been training in the most intense pressure-cooker type of arena that she's ever been in. Just standing in the dirt in the Challengers round in the main arena with the crowd cheering and a lot of really intense competitors around us and to be able to just stand there ringside with her and know that she was okay and know that I was okay and we could both walk into that ring and we could both do what we know how to do, I would say that's my proudest moment in dogs so far. Melissa: I mean that's a pretty good proudest moment. My next question is what is the best piece of training advice that you have ever heard? Sarah: I'm not even sure if this is advice but just kind of, I guess it is advice, and it's not from a specific person but it's kind of a collective idea that is a common thread amongst some of my biggest influences in training, which is that if something that you're doing is species-specific, meaning it would only work for the species in front of you, there's probably a smarter way to do it. Melissa: I like that. So my final question to wrap everything up is who else is someone in the dog world that you look up to? Sarah: I look up to so many people in the dog world and a lot of people really in the training world, but a person who's a competitor in dog agility who I really look up to is my friend Tori Self, and she lives in Wales now, but she has been on the FCI Agility World Team multiple times with a lot of success and she's a person that to me is able to achieve the highest level types of achievement in my favorite sport and still maintain this really deep, loving connection for her dog that she would do anything for. For her it's always been about the dog first and the sport second and yet she's still able to achieve these really high-level things, and for me that's the ultimate because I know a lot of competitors really it is about the sport first and the dog second whether they would admit that in words or not, that's what I observe in their behavior, and that's never been the case with Tori and I really respect her for that. Melissa: That's awesome. Well, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate you taking some time out to chat through this with me. Hopefully it was fun for you. It was definitely fun for me. Sarah: Definitely. Thanks, Melissa. Melissa: Thanks for tuning in. We'll be back in two weeks with Hannah Branigan to talk about the relationship of foundation skills and problem solving. If you haven't already, subscribe now on iTunes or the podcast app of your choice and our next episode will automatically download to your phone as soon as it becomes available. CREDITS: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!  

In this episode (37:34) This is a continuation of our interview with Kathy Sdao. Click Here for Part 1. We talk about setting speed as your criteria, differential rewards, and Kathy’s new book Plenty in Life is Free. Mentioned Clicker Expo Eva Bertilsson & Emelie Johnson Vegh and their book Agility Right from the StartClick here to read the full article →

In this episode (32:11) We welcome Kathy Sdao to the podcast. Time to talk science, operant conditioning, classical conditioning, and cuing. This is part 1 of the interview, you can listen to part 2 here. Mentioned Clicker Expo The four quadrants of Operant Conditioning. What is a Venn diagram? Wonk : a person preoccupied withClick here to read the full article →