Podcast appearances and mentions of Linda P Case

In this episode of The Woof Meow Show from July 11th, 2020, Don and Kate talk about pet nutrition with author, and animal nutritionist, Linda Case. People often ask Linda, Kate, and I what we feed our pets. Unless they know us well, they are often surprised by our answer. In many cases, it may be the first time that person does not hear “Feed this brand of food, and this formula and never, ever change.” In this episode of The Woof Meow Show, Kate, Linda, and I discuss what criteria we look for in pet food, the various types of pet food, and then what we each actually feed our pets. During the course of our conversation, we address the pet food industry’s lack of transparency and all too frequent deceptive marketing. Pet food ingredients are a big topic in this show. Did you know that some of the ingredients used in pet food are considered “inedible?”  Are you aware pet food companies are prohibited from using any quality descriptors for ingredients on their label? During the show, we talk about the pictures that appear on a bag of kibble, such as a delicious roast chicken and how that photo in no way accurately portrays the frozen chicken frame that was actually used to make the food. We talk about kibble, the most common form of food fed to cats and dogs despite its dehydrating effects. If you want to learn what Kate, Linda, and I feed our pets and why you do not want to miss this podcast. You can listen to The Woof Meow Show on Z62 Retro Radio, AM620, and WKIT HD3 at 9 AM on Saturday. If you are not near a radio, listen on your computer at http://bit.ly/AM620-WZON or your smartphone or tablet with the free WZON 620 AM app. A podcast of the show is typically posted immediately after the show. You can download this show and others at http://bit.ly/WfMwPodcasts, at Don’s blog http://bit.ly/Words-Woofs-Meows and the Apple podcast app.   Contact Info Linda P. Case, MS AutumnGold Consulting and Dog Training Center Mahomet, IL (217) 586-4864 Autumngoldconsulting.com https://www.facebook.com/pg/LindaCaseAutumnGold/posts/ https://thesciencedog.wordpress.com/ Don Hanson & Kate DutraGreen Acres Kennel Shop & The Woof Meow Show Bangor, ME (207) 945-6841 https://www.greenacreskennel.com/ https://www.facebook.com/GreenAcresKennelShop/ https://woofmeowshow.libsyn.com/ https://www.facebook.com/WoofMeowShow/   Recommended Resources Articles on Don’s Blog ( http://www.words-woofs-meows.com  ) GAKS Philosophy on Pet Nutrition – http://bit.ly/GAKS_Nut_Phil Pet Foods We Offer At Green Acres Kennel Shop – http://bit.ly/GAKS_PetFood_Brands Pet Nutrition – Which Companies Are Behind Your Pet’s Food?  – http://bit.ly/PetFoodComp Things I Wish I Had Known… The Importance of What I Feed My Pets - – WWM-MAR2019 – http://bit.ly/Things-Nutrition-1 Pet Nutrition: Some Myths and Facts – Part 1 – My story with Gus – Maine Dog Magazine – Winter 2017 – http://bit.ly/Gus-Nutrition Pet Nutrition – What Should I Feed My Pet? – http://bit.ly/What-Should-I-Feed-My-Pet Pet Nutrition – What Do You Feed Your Dog? – WWM-JUN2016 - http://bit.ly/WhatDoYouFeedYourDog Pet Nutrition – The Wisdom of Rotating Your Pets Diet – Part 1 – http://bit.ly/DietRotation1-30JUL19 Pet Nutrition – The Wisdom of Rotating Your Pets Diet – Part 2 – http://bit.ly/DietRotation2 Podcasts from The Woof Meow Show ( http://bit.ly/WfMwPodcasts ) Podcast – DCM, the FDA, and Dog Food-the Science and the Hype with Canine Nutritionist Linda Case - http://bit.ly/Blog-DCM-FDA-8AUG19 Podcast – Is Feeding A Grain-Free Food to Our Dogs Dangerous?, with Linda Case, MS - http://bit.ly/Podcast-FDA-Grain-Free-LindaCase-29SEP18 Podcast – Pet Nutrition with Kymythy Schultze Author of Natural Nutrition for Cats: The Path to Purrfect Health – http://bit.ly/KymythySchultzeCatNutrition-Podcast Podcast – Pet Nutrition with Dr. Richard Patton - http://bit.ly/DrPatton-Podcast Podcast – Pet Fooled – A Look Inside A Questionable Industry with Kohl Harrington - http://bit.ly/WfMw-Pet-Fooled

Holy Hot Topics Batman! Question... Who fancies talking about Canine Nutrition with someone who actually knows what they are talking about? WE DO! Nat & Steve get thier brains well and truly schooled when joined by Linda P Case. What a show!!!! Its a double Booker Bookshelvers as we delve into " Beware The Straw Man" & "Only Have Eyes For You". As well as top notch reflections and reviews on these books we also get to chat with Linda about what we should be considering when we choose our dog's diet.Of course we are bants heavy again and this week you'll all be treated to a cautionary tale of Steve's diet disaster that landed him (after many painful weeks) in Southampton General Hospital.Linda's BioLinda Case is a dog trainer, canine nutritionist and science writer. She earned her B.S. in Animal Science at Cornell University and her M.S. in Canine/Feline Nutrition at the University of Illinois. She was a lecturer in canine and feline science in the Animal Sciences Department at the University of Illinois for 15 years and taught companion animal behavior and training at the College of Veterinary Medicine for five years. Linda is the author of eight books, including most recently, "Dog Smart", "Dog Food Logic", and "Beware the Straw Man."Link to Only Have Eyes For Youhttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Only-Have-Eyes-You-Exploring/dp/1508862087Link to Beware The Straw Manhttps://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1495389774/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_1495389774Link to Dog Food Logichttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Dog-Food-Logic-Decisions-Choices/dp/1617811386Link to Linda's popular blog "The Science Dog"http://thesciencedog.wordpress.com

In this second of a two series, Kate and Don interview dog trainer and author Linda Case about her book Dog Smart: Evidence-based Training with The Science Dog. In the last episode, we focused on foundational material covered in the book. This week we get into the nitty-gritty of dog training and talk about: The benefits of working with a professional dog training instructor. Qualities to look for in a dog training instructor and what to avoid. Why it is so important to teach students how a dog learns and the most important things we can teach them on this topic. What is clicker training and why it is so useful when training a dog? The power of using food as a reward when training a dog. How we help students address undesirable behaviors, they experience with their dogs. The four most valuable behaviors we teach our students to train their dogs. If you want to learn about your dog and how to live together happily, you will want to listen to this show and read Linda’s book. Linda P. Case, MS AutumnGold Consulting and Dog Training Center Mahomet, IL (217) 586-4864 Autumngoldconsulting.com https://www.facebook.com/pg/LindaCaseAutumnGold/posts/ https://thesciencedog.wordpress.com/

In this first of a two-part series, Kate and Don interview dog trainer and author Linda Case about her book Dog Smart: Evidence-based Training with The Science Dog. When Don read and reviewed Linda’s book last December < Click to read review > he stated “If you love dogs or work with those who love dogs, you need to read this book!” and he knew we needed to get Linda to talk about her book on The Woof Meow Show. In this first episode we discuss some of the foundational material in the book such as the damage done by the myth of dominance, pack hierarchy and violence focused training, why your dogs breed matters, the importance of socialization and how it is often misunderstood, and the importance of understanding canine body language. If you want to learn about your dog and how to live together happily, you will want to listen to this show and read Linda’s book. Linda P. Case, MS AutumnGold Consulting and Dog Training Center Mahomet, IL (217) 586-4864 Autumngoldconsulting.com https://www.facebook.com/pg/LindaCaseAutumnGold/posts/ https://thesciencedog.wordpress.com/

  To tell if your dog becomes uncomfortable or frightened when greeting or playing with other dogs, watch for these three body postures – the name of which all begin with the letter “s”.  We begin this episode by introducing you to the 3 S’s. Then, do you ever wish your dog would hurry up and relieve itself quicker when on walks? Dog trainer, Katie K-9 joins me to tell you how to teach your dog to eliminate on command and it works for both puppies and adult dog with established habits.  We also talk about what she recommends for dogs that just keep pulling on their leash. Next, did you know that kittens need to be socialized just like puppies do? If you have or will be getting a kitten between the ages of two to seven weeks old, you’ll want to hear what to do for your feline, that makes all the difference for how she/he will behave and get along with others, for the rest of its life. Resources for the Episode: Source for the story about the three S’s.    Dog Smart by Linda P. Case. (On Amazon) Dog Trainer, Katie K-9’s website. Katie K-9 Radio Show. Katie K-9 on Facebook. Resources mentioned by Katie-K9 Starmark’s collars. Herm Sprenger prong collars Please support this podcast by subscribing and telling your friends. To subscribe on iTunes (so you never miss an episode) here is the link.  

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

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