Podcast appearances and mentions of patricia mcconnell

Zazie Todd is at the forefront of the move towards positive animal welfare and kind, humane dog training methods. Her third book, Bark! The Science of Helping Your Anxious, Fearful, or Reactive Dog is a compassionate and practical guide to overcoming your dog's fears. In this panel from Bark! Fest, you'll learn how to help your dog feel safe, how your presence can help your dog, and get a new understanding of the training techniques that can make a difference, as she shares tips from Bark!. We talked about:How Bark! Fest came aboutHow to counsel people that slow is the new fast when it comes to fearful dogsDecisions about how much of the "why" and "how" to include in the bookWhy tricks training is included in a book for fearful and anxious dogsHow to keep dogs and people safeWhether pandemic puppies really do have more behaviour issues, and how we can use management to help a fearful dogThe gorgeous cover of Bark! and how much input authors get into book covers and titles with a traditional publisherPlus Zazie did a reading from the bookBark! is out now in paperback. It is available wherever books are sold.Find out about upcoming events and learn more about Zazie Todd, PhD, on her website https://www.companionanimalpsychology.com/p/home.htmlAsk Me Anything on Anxious, Fearful, and Reactive Dogs: June 11th at 11am Pacific. Registration required. Details: https://www.companionanimalpsychology.com/2025/05/ama-about-anxious-fearful-or-reactive.htmlBark! paperback launch and book signing, June 14th 1-3pm at Black Bond Books, Maple Ridge. Details: https://www.companionanimalpsychology.com/2025/05/bark-is-coming-in-paperback-and-you-are.htmlThe recording of Bark! Fest with Patricia McConnell, PhD, is here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2183505/episodes/16149739Send us a text to say hello!About the co-hosts: Kristi Benson is an honours graduate of, and now on staff with, the prestigious Academy for Dog Trainers and has her PCBC-A from the Pet Professional Accreditation Board. She lives in beautiful northern British Columbia, where she helps dog guardians through online classes. She is also a northern anthropologist. Kristi Benson's website Facebook Zazie Todd, PhD, is the award-winning author of Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy and Purr: The Science of Making Your Cat Happy. She is the creator of the popular blog, Companion Animal Psychology, and also has a column at Psychology Today. Todd lives in Maple Ridge, BC, with her husband, one dog, and one cat. Facebook Instagram BlueSky

Buy the book: https://amzn.to/3CZZ1Mr

Send us a textPatricia B. McConnell PhD is an internationally-renowned applied animal behaviourist who has dedicated her life to improving the relationship between people and animals. Amongst her many treasured dog training books, The Other End of the Leash draws our attention to the human side of dog training. McConnell's memoir, The Education of Will, is a beautifully-written and uplifting account of how to reclaim life after trauma, for both humans and dogs. Join us to talk about dog behaviour, overcoming hardships, and the importance of compassion and science in dog training. This recording is of a panel at Bark! Fest, the book festival for animal lovers, that took place in September 2024. Bark! Fest was organized to celebrate the launch of Zazie Todd's third book, Bark! The Science of Helping Your Anxious, Fearful, or Reactive Dog. Bark!. All of the Bark! Fest books are available from good bookstores, including from Bookshop (which supports independent bookstores): https://bookshop.org/lists/bark-fest-the-book-festival-for-animal-loversWe talked about Dr. McConnell's writing process, how she became interested in the human side of the leash, why she wrote The Education of Will, understanding trauma in people and dogs, differences and similarities between people and dogs, finding grace, and healing.In The Education of Will, bestselling author and internationally renowned animal psychologist and dog trainer Patricia McConnell “gives a voice to those who can't speak in words and provides hope for fearful animals everywhere” (Temple Grandin) in this powerful and uplifting memoir about healing. Dr. McConnell mentions several books in the conversation. They are:After Silence by Nancy Venable RaineGood Morning, I Love You by Shauna ShapiroUnlearn Your Pain by MD Howard SchubinerPatricia McConnell, PhD, CAAB Emeritus is an author, speaker, and animal behaviorist who has consulted with pet owners for over thirty years about serious behavioral problems. She co-hosted Calling All Pets with Larry Meiller on Wisconsin Public Radio for fourteen years, and has educated and entertained audiences around the world about animal behavior (human and canine!). Patricia taught "The Biology and Philosophy of Human/Animal Relationships" in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for twenty-five years. Her self-published books About the co-hosts: Kristi Benson is an honours graduate of the prestigious Academy for Dog Trainers and has her PCBC-A from the Pet Professional Accreditation Board. She lives in beautiful northern British Columbia, where she helps dog guardians through online teaching and consultations. Kristi is on staff at the Academy for Dog Trainers, helping to shape the next generation of canine professionals. Kristi's dogs are rescue sled dogs, mostly retired and thoroughly enjoying a good snooze in front of the woodstove. Kristi Benson's website Facebook Zazie Todd, PhD, is the award-winning author of Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy and Purr: The Science of Making Your Cat Happy. She is the creator of the popular blog, Companion Animal Psychology, and also has a column at Psychology Today. Todd lives in Maple Ridge, BC, with her husband, one dog, and one cat. Facebook Instagram BlueSky

In this episode, Bobbie and Ferdie discuss the Resilience Rainbow framework and various ways to apply it for shelter dogs. We discuss:How the Resilience Rainbow framework was created.Applying the Resilience Rainbow to shelter dogsSniffaris and decompression for shelter dogsPhysiological and behavioral changes related to resilienceBobbie Bhambree (CDBC, CPDT-KA) is a Certified Dog Behavior Consultant and the Director of Education at Behavior Vets. She is also a faculty member of CATCH Canine Trainers Academy and Agility University. Bobbie started her career in 2003 as a pet behavior counselor with the ASPCA Animal Behavior Center. While there, she implemented behavior modification programs for dogs who had been surrendered by the public or seized by Humane Law Enforcement. In 2007, Bobbie joined the Humane Society of Westchester, spending the next nine years as their shelter trainer. She created and implemented training and enrichment programs for the dogs, counseled adopters, trained volunteers, participated in community outreach programs, and performed evaluations.Learn more about Bobbie here.Links:July 12-14, 2024: CONTROL UNLEASHED CONFERENCEhttps://www.unleashtherainbow.com/August 3-4, 2024: The Resilience Framework - Pittsburgh, PAhttps://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-resilience-framework-pittsburgh-pa-tickets-845230014727?aff=oddtdtcreatorSeptember 18-20, 2024: APDT Annual Conferencehttps://www.apdtconference.com/A Framework for Behavior Modification and Training Plans to Help Build and Maintain Resilience: The Resilience Rainbowhttps://journal.iaabcfoundation.org/the-resilience-rainbow/Maddie's University Free On-Demand Webinar: Resilience Conditioning for Shelter Dogshttps://university.maddiesfund.org/products/resilience-conditioning-for-shelter-dogs-building-bounce-back-for-life-in-the-real-world-ondemand  Patricia McConnell's blogs on resilience from 2015:https://www.patriciamcconnell.com/theotherendoftheleash/the-boy-who-was-raised-as-a-doghttps://www.patriciamcconnell.com/theotherendoftheleash/resilience-can-we-increase-it-in-dogsExamples for shelter dogs:LATTESocial support and agencyBehavior plan for Chewy - Biting related to arousalTheme music composed and performed by Andy SellsContact Behavior Vets tweet us @BehaviorVets follow us on Facebook follow us on Instagram Online courses Webinars and seminars Email Ferdie at ferdie@behaviorvets.com

SummaryIn this conversation, Dr. Patricia McConnell and Dr. Kristina Spaulding explore the concept of flow, which is a state of complete absorption and engagement in an activity that is intrinsically rewarding. They discuss how flow can vary among individuals and how it relates to different activities dogs might do. The conversation highlights the importance of providing opportunities for animals to engage in activities purely for their own enjoyment. They also discuss the importance of providing animals with opportunities for agency and choice, allowing them to actively engage with their environment and gather knowledge. The conversation highlights the need for balance in caregiving, reinforcing ourselves for the efforts we make, and giving animals the space to learn and explore. For more information on Dr. McConnell, go to www.patriciamcconnell.com or visit her blog, at www.theotherendoftheleash.com, and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.For more information on Dr. Spaulding, go to www.sciencemattersllc.com, or click here for Research Bites or here for the Unlocking Resilience course.

The legendary Patricia McConnell stops by to discuss human-animal relationships and how she creates a sense of safety and security for dogs. We talk about her life's mission and how her own personal trauma has shaped her work. Her courage, compassion, and energy is an inspiration to all of us. Her life's mission to improve human-animal relationshipsThe relationship between security and resilienceHow to create a sense of safety & securitySafe spacesWriting a mystery novelPatricia McConnell, PhD, CAAB is an author and animal behaviorist who has consulted with pet owners for over thirty years about serious behavioral problems. She taught "The Biology and Philosophy of Human/Animal Relationships" in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for twenty-five years, co-hosted Calling All Pets with Larry Meiller on WPR for fourteen years, and has spoken around the world about canine behavior and training. Her self-published books on behavior and training have sold over a quarter of a million copies. Her nationally published books, The Other End of the Leash, and For the Love of a Dog, are considered classics, and together have been translated into 15 languages. Her latest book, The Education of Will, a memoir focusing on healing from trauma in both people and dogs, has generated heartfelt praise and helped other trauma victims around the world. Patricia and her husband live with their working Border Collies, Skip and Maggie, and a very spoiled flock of sheep. For more information, go to www.patriciamcconnell.com or visit her blog, at www.theotherendoftheleash.com, and follow her on Facebook and Instagram. LinksPatricia McConnell's websitePatricia McConnell's blogTheme music composed and performed by Andy SellsContact Behavior Vets tweet us @BehaviorVets follow us on Facebook follow us on Instagram Online courses Webinars and seminars Email Ferdie at ferdie@behaviorvets.com

A dog's environment has a lot to do with its behavior. Patricia McConnell is back to explain why your rescue dog might have behaved differently at the shelter than it does at home.

In this episode of The Chihuahua Podcast we sit down and talk dog training on TV with our special guest, Nanci Creedon! Qualifications Primary degree in Zoology from UCC Master's degree in Animal Behaviour and Welfare from Newcastle University Certification Certified Dog Behaviour Consultant with the International Association of Animal Behaviour Consultants since October 2013. Provisional CAB with Association of Professional Behaviour Councillors. (APBC) Currently undergoing assessment to become full CCAB, will be submitting for the Sept 1st 2023 deadline. Research Research paper on Dog Bites published in the Irish Veterinary Journal “Dog bite injuries to humans and the use of breed-specific legislation: a comparison of bites from legislated and non-legislated dog breeds” Continued Education Has attended – PACT – Introduction to Clinical Animal Behaviour - Ongoing Jim Crosby – The Forensics of Aggression Online Course IAABC 2022 IAABC – Stress and the Animal in Front of You - 2021 Dr. Karen Overall (Animal Events UK) 22nd-24th September 2017 Woof 2017 (Domesticated Manners) 10th-12th Feb 2017 Dr Karen Overall (Animal Events UK) May 8th, 9th, 10th 2015 Professor Jaak Panksepp - World Leading Neuroscientist 1 Day Seminar 21st April 2015 APBC Annual Conference 14/09/2014 Rise VanFleet The Human Half of Dog Training 15/09/2014 Canine Aggression & Case Investigation 16th & 17th June 2014 Dog Bite Prevention Conference (Victoria Stilwell Organisation) May 31st June 1st, 2014 APDT Ireland Annual Conference 22/06/2014 Sarah Kalnajs Seminar, 2nd March 2013 Leash reactivity: From Cause to Cure “WOOF”: The European Training & Behaviour Conference22nd, 23rd, 24th February 2013 Collection of seminar DVD's worth over £1500 acquired over the past 8 years with speakers from Patricia McConnell to Ken Ramerez, to Chirag Patel, to Nicolas Dodman and many others in between. Expert Witness Has provided expert witness in two cases in Irish courts. Professional Experience Creedons Dog Care 2010-2022 Former owner of Creedons Dog Care, Ireland's oldest doggie daycare centre, opened in 2010, and sold in 2022 to former manager. During my time at Creedons I ran weekly puppy classes, obedience classes, private training sessions and behaviour modification sessions. Creedons College 2015-Present Director at Creedons College, a nationally accredited adult educational institution running online and classroom-based courses. I have designed, developed and delivered multiple classroom, and online based educational courses. I delivered both the Practical Dog Training course and the Professional Dog Training Instructor courses from 2015 to 2020. The programmes are now delivered by Josanne Dodd, a certified behaviour consultant. RTE 2013-2020, 2022- I appear on RTE's Today Show with Maura and Daithi delivering dog behaviour advice on live TV. Channel 5 2020 Featured on a 4-episode TV series, Cats and Dogs at War with Chirag Patel, where I provided dog expert advice to families where the cat and dog are not getting along. Channel 4 2022 Feature in series 1 of 8-episode series The Dog Academy, for Channel 4, staring alongside Victoria Stilwell. I provided insight into the development of dog's behaviour challenges to pet owners during clinics. www.nancicreedon.co.uk Find us on Facebook at The Chihuahua Podcast Find Kate at Carry on Canine! Find Hayley at Halo Pups! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thechihuahuapodcast/message

Do you ever think that you and your dog aren't communicating very well? You can get much better at it! Dr. Patricia McConnell's work as a zoologist and an applied animal behaviorist been groundbreaking in helping people to understand canine body language — and how our own primate-style body language confuses our dogs, and weakens our relationship.  In this episode, we use McConnell's classic book "The Other End of the Leash" as a jumping off point, discussing all the simple things you can do to improve communication between yourself and your dog.  As the episode continues, we delve into McConnell's fascinating research on vocalizations between species — if you want your dog to come quickly, then don't use one long slow note to call! —  and then finish with a more abstract conversation on the complex issue of "dominance." NOTES Patricia McConnell is a delightful speaker, and we highly suggest that you search her out on your podcast app! She has been a guest on: Drinking from the Toilet Pod to the Rescue The Bitey End of the Dog  

It's very common to overlook sleep disorder signs. But have you ever called them cute? Parents and baby admirers alike are guilty of this crime. But we get it. It's not a subject that people understand.What comes to mind when you hear these words: snoring, breathing with your mouth open, drooling, talking in your sleep, and sleep walking? Jokes? Cartoons? Nostalgic stories from your childhood? Yep. We've gotten so used to these behaviors that we don't think anything of them. But unfortunately, they are sleep disorder signs. Anyone who has one or more should discuss them with a medical professional. LIsten to this conversation between Meredith Brough, a sleep expert, and Patricia McConnell, a trusted source on all things airway to learn A LOT more on this topic. She is a myofunctional therapist. She specializes in treating disorders of the mouth and supports patients in improving their sleep! She is easy to talk to and so knowledgable and enlightening. You're going to learn so much!Topics: Signs of sleep disorders What are some causes of sleep troubles Who can help What tongue & lip ties are What posterior tongue ties are How they are overlooked & ignored What's wrong with this The sleep problems they cause What myofunctional therapists do & how they can helpSources:https://thebreatheinstitute.comhttps://aomtinfo.orghttps://www.iaom.comMy Myo Works, Patricia McConnell (Quad Cities, IA Area): https://tmcconnell0.wixsite.com/websiteContact Trish: https://tmcconnell0.wixsite.com/website/contactIf you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or review!If you'd like to work with Meredith, set up a Sleep Intervention Call here.If you're interested in learning more about the Baby-Centered Sleep Coach School or Mastermind for sleep coaches and consultants, set up a call here.Ready to understand your child and sleep better?Then take the Sleep Temperament Quiz. Reveal your child's sleep nature and unlock the keys to your exhaustion in just 5 minutes. Click the link below.Babies Toddlers

Welcome to Season 4 of The Bitey End of the Dog. I'm really excited to be launching 17 episodes with so many incredible conversations centered around the topic of aggression, and all of the ways we can help dogs and their people.Many of this season's episodes focus on the human side of aggression cases, and while I didn't actually plan for that, I am truly happy many of the conversations took a deep dive into understanding why the human element is such a crucial part of dog aggression. In this episode, I have the distinct honor to chat with one of my all time heroes in dog training, Patricia McConnell. Her work was pivotal in helping me learn more about kinder, gentler methods to dog training, and her knowledge, kindness, and generosity will forever be etched into the betterment of humankind.I also want to take a moment to provide an important content warning for this episode. This was one of the most emotional episodes for me to record, and Trisha and I go deep into some very sensitive subjects. We discuss Trisha's book, The Education of Will, and the topics of trauma, abuse, and assault are focused on throughout the conversation. Listener discretion is advised. I also want to note that while we focus much on the human side of trauma in our discussion, we also discuss how trauma impacts dogs, and it's impact on aggression as well. Learn more about Patricia on her wonderful website here.Purchase The Education of Will here. Please consider donating to the RCC here.Learn more about help for dogs with aggression here. Support the show

‘Timmy was never in the well. Yet, the phrase “Lassie! Timmy's in the well,” inspired by a 60-yearold television show, lives on.' With a foreword by Patricia McConnell, author of The Other End of the Leash, APA is very excited to publish a brand-new book on Companion Animals. In this 22nd episode of Psychiatry Unbound, Nancy R. Gee, Ph.D., editor of The Role of Companion Animals in the Treatment of Mental Disorders sits down with Dr. Laura Roberts to go between the covers of this fabulous book -a passion project for Nancy and the contributors- which examines the therapeutic bond between humans and animals. Gee also discusses her work at the Centre for Human Animal Interaction at VCU. In this episode: Introduction (1:00) Dr. Gee reflects on the book's creation (1:52) Pookie the dog's influence on APA editorial policy (2:50) What's it like to be surrounded by psychiatrists? (3:11) Therapy dogs (5:09) Partnering with animals in the context of mental health (8:00) The role of aquariums in boosting the caloric intake of seniors (10:40) Dr. Gee's background in psychology (13:10) Intended take-aways from the book (15:40) End credits (18:28) Show Notes and Resources:The Role of Companion Animals in the Treatment of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association Publishing) 2023 Learn more about Nancy R. Gee, Ph.D. Transcript and further episodes: https://psychiatryonline.org/psychiatry-unbound

A dog's environment has a lot to do with its behavior. Patricia McConnell is back to explain why your rescue dog might have behaved differently at the shelter than it does at home.

In this episode, the amazing team of Dr. Kathy Murphy and Bobbie Bhambree discuss how they developed the Resilience Rainbow, a framework to build resilience in dogs and other companion animals, and how it works. We discuss:What is resilience and what it looks likeThe stress response cycle and the HPA axisSeven domains of the Resilience Rainbow:PredictabilityDecompressionCompleting the stress cycleMental and physical well-beingSafety and securitySocial supportAgencyDr. Kathy Murphy's bio:Dr Kathy Murphy (BVetMed, DPhil, CVA, CLAS, MRCVS) is a veterinary surgeon and neuroscientist. She graduated from the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons UK in 1999, initially working in mixed clinical practice before studying for two post graduate clinical qualifications with the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, in Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia, and Laboratory Animal Science.Bobbie Bhambree's bio:Bobbie Bhambree (CDBC, CPDT-KA) is the Director of Education and a Certified Dog Behavior Consultant at Behavior Vets. She is also a faculty member of CATCH Canine Trainers Academy and Agility University. Bobbie started her career in 2003 as a pet behavior counselor with the ASPCA Animal Behavior Center. While there, she implemented behavior modification programs for dogs who had been surrendered by the public or seized by Humane Law Enforcement. In 2007, Bobbie joined the Humane Society of Westchester, spending the next nine years as their shelter trainer. She created and implemented training and enrichment programs for the dogs, counseled adopters, trained volunteers, participated in community outreach programs, and performed evaluations.Links:Bhambree, B. and K. Murphy. A Framework for Behavior Modification and Training Plans to Help Build and Maintain Resilience. The IAABC Journal. Feb 2023. Issue 26. https://iaabcjournal.org/the-resilience-rainbow/Resilience Rainbow Tour 2023Madison, NJ: May 20-21Truro, Nova Scotia, Canada: May 27-28Denver, CO: June 3-4https://behaviorvets.com/https://www.facebook.com/neuroscienceisawesome/The Education of Will: Healing a Dog, Facing My Fears, Reclaiming My Life by Dr. Patricia McConnell - read about Dr. McConnell's own story of resilience and adventure with her border collie named Will. Podcast with Sarah Stremming on decompression walksContact Behavior Vets tweet us @BehaviorVets follow us on Facebook email us at nyc@behaviorvets.com follow us on Instagram

Session 113 covered some training goals to teach a dog to stop certain behaviors, specifically barking and "counter conditioning".  I was surprised to find that Session 113 brought on a record amount of feedback! I got a lot of positive response, but some criticism as well. In this episode I respond to some of that, including a letter from someone who suggested that they were a trainer, and took issue with some of the content in session 113. I wasn't sure where in the show they heard it, but one part in particular was regarding Patricia McConnell's teaching about counter conditioning, and that somewhere I suggested that they shouldn't use her method. It turns out that I didn't suggest that. I addressed that they had been coached to try that and it didn't work.  Most of this advice is based on a few things; where in the training their dog is, their age, what approaches have been tried in the past and which have not. In some instances a tried and true approach doesn't work, and alternative methods should be applied.  I'll review it from a psychological approach and explain the intent and hopefully clear up some confusion on the subject. I wanted to talk about another category of feedback I received that was that they tried it but had mixed results. This is what real training looks like in the execution stage. There are techniques and shifts in the approach with every type of dog and behavior. Trina was one of the people who responded and said that using the "tug upward" method to give negative feedback for barking. I asked her a few follow up questions to get a better sense of what she needed to eliminate confusion for her dog.

Sean and Haley talk about embracing the mythical magic of our relationship with Scout (how incredible is it that we harmoniously share life with a creature of a whole different species?!) while also staying rooted in an accurate perception of what makes our cattle dog, well, a dog. Sometimes we see animal lovers delving into "folk nonsense" and expecting unfair things from their companions (or creating potentially dangerous situations by assuming our pets automatically understand societal norms, illnesses, or so on in ways they actually might not). On the other hand, we also see trainers try to dismiss the potential depth of connection between dog and owner in favor of a more robotic or negative view of our pets. I personally think the healthiest approach is one in between! Books mentioned: For the Love of a Dog by Patricia McConnell (the first I read this past week) Dog Sense by John Bradshaw (the second I read this past week) Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are by Frans de Waal (I just can't stop talking about this one!) Dog is Love by Clive Wynne (apparently I also can't stop talking about this one...) Some related blog articles: Does My Dog Want to Please Me? Yes and No Pros & Cons of Thinking About My Dog as a Human Friend What Advocating For My Dog Means & Why It Matters (the first part of this talks about honoring my dog as a canine) Imagining My Dog's “Umwelt” Helps Us Grow as a Team (all about trying to understand how Scout experiences the world)

Dans ce nouvel épisode, je suis ravie de vous partager ma conversation avec Géraldine Merry. Géraldine est comportementaliste canin spécialisée en chiens des rues et en troubles anxieux chez le chien. Dans cette discussion, elle nous raconte son parcours atypique de formation et ses voyages humanitaires à travers le monde desquels elle n'est pas revenue seule. De son approche scientifique à ses propres recherches, en passant par son expérience de terrain, Géraldine nous partage tout ce qu'il faut savoir pour accueillir et prendre en charge les chiens des rues dans nos maisons. Sommaire : 00:10 : Présentation du podcast 01:24 : Présentation de Géraldine et ses chiens 05:35 : Le parcours international de Géraldine 25:00 : Ce qu'il faut savoir sur les chiens des rues adoptés en métropole 36:30 : Ce que ces adoptions impliquent 39:10 : Les troubles anxieux chez le chien et ses prises en charge 01:13:00 : Soutenir le podcast On en parle dans cet épisode :  L'étude de Coppinger sur le rapport entre l'humain et le chien des rues : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159109001014 Le Blog de Géraldine (remplit de ressources, à lire absolument) : https://blog.voxcanis.fr/ Le film Stray : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC38BqP2_fI Les livres et le blog de Patricia Mcconnell : https://www.patriciamcconnell.com/ The other end of the leash - Patricia Mcconnell Le compte instagram de Vox Canis : https://www.instagram.com/voxcanis/ La page Facebook de Vox Canis : https://www.facebook.com/voxcanis/ Le site de Vox Canis : https://www.voxcanis.fr/ ✨✨ Merci à Qru de soutenir le Podcast✨✨ ▶️ 20% de réduction sur ta première commande (lien affilié) : https://moncompte.qru.pet/?p=La_niche_aventure

How's Tricks Bookshelvers?  We can hardly contain our excitement this week as we have a lovely conversation with, friend of the podcast and all round wonderful human Patricia McConnell. This is Patricia's second appearance and we are already planning the third (which is likely to take place in person at a pub somewhere)!!  Patricia is one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming PACT Connecting Communities Conference so we thought it would be great to talk about why meeting real people, in real life that share your passions is one the best feelings in the world.  Patricia needs no introduction and if you haven't heard her original appearance on the show we would encourage you to delve back to episode 8 where we discuss her mind blowing career and game changing books.  Little did we know, however, that there was a very special treat in store for us in the form of a bloomin' WORLD EXCLUSIVE!  Talking of "world exclusives"... Is that the patter of tiny puppy paws at the Sista Behaviourista household???  So sit back, grab a cuppa and enjoy... WOOF!Link to the buy ticket for the Connecting Communities ConferenceConference 2022 — Professional Association of Canine Trainers (pact-dogs.com)Link to our Patreon page to help support us make the show!https://www.patreon.com/BookshelversLink to Grant Sharkey's Spotify page (Grant's amazing song 'Grow' features each week as our outro tune).https://open.spotify.com/artist/13PaCwwgVR77TbJH6XAVHQ?si=EOQGmWdCRCiXdECNmJvNAQn

Sometimes using behavior modification is a better option than traditional training methods. We talk about the differences with Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist, Patricia McConnell. We also talk about whether dogs understand when you apologize.

UNLOCKED from our Patreon page, it's “The Other End of the Leash Book Club”! Interested in more Book Clubs? Want to vote on what we read next? Feeling FOMO at getting this a full year late? Wish your 2 CEs for listening to the episode were FREE??? Join us on Patreon to get all of our episodes a week early, access to these bonus episodes, plus other goodies. As voted on by our patrons, we read and discussed Dr. Patricia McConnell's "The Other End of the Leash". Jackie was thrilled to suggest that our summer book club choice feature one of her favorite writers/speakers about dog behavior. But, this book wasn't just another training manual: It delved a lot deeper into both dog and human patterns of behavior. We learned that humans love to talk, dogs don't love being patted on the head, and just why these two Peter Pan species get along so darn well. This episode is worth 2.0 LEARNING CEUs References for this episode McConnell, P.B. (2002). The other end of the leash: Why we do what we do around dogs. Ballantine Books. If you're interested in ordering CEs for listening to this episode, click here to go to the store page. You'll need to enter your name, BCBA #, and the two episode secret code words to complete the purchase. Email us at abainsidetrack@gmail.com for further assistance. Want these CEs for FREE? Just subscribe to our Patreon at the $10+ levels and visit the original post for a discount code.

Whether you're fostering or adopting, bringing another dog into your home is an exciting time! Dr. Patricia McConnell is back to talk with Emily and Libby about integrating multi-dog households. They discuss the common myths we face when bringing a second (or third or fourth) dog home, why that sweet rescue pup who was described as “good with other dogs” in the shelter is now growling at your resident dog, best practices for introducing new dogs to one another, and some skills to cultivate as a multi-dog guardian. To learn more about Dr. Patricia McConnell, visit her website: https://www.patriciamcconnell.com/about-patricia/ ASPCA webinar: https://www.aspcapro.org/webinar/20140129/multi-dog-households#video-player Parallel walking: https://youtu.be/sZVJyE-KLS0 Trauma, Decompression, and Going Slow with Patricia McConnell, PhD, CAAB: https://www.podtotherescue.com/dr-patricia-mcconnell1.html Management with Mary Angilly CTC, CPDT-KA: https://www.podtotherescue.com/management.html For transcripts, visit www.podtotherescue.com Credits: Libby Felts and Emily Wolf (Hosts and Creators). Original music by Mike Pesci. Production and editing by James Ede of Be Heard. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/sdr7/support

When the universe matches two people committed to education and personal development, and combines them with a love of dogs and a desire to make the most of their talents, the magic of Social Pet Hotel is born. Meet Bill & Amy Hillis, Owners of Social Pet Hotels in Charlotte & Pineville, NC. They are too humble to admit it, but this dog-loving power couple is paving the way for the future of pet care, committed to educating pet parents about behavior and understanding that each dog is unique and deserves customized care.https://socialpethotel.com https://www.facebook.com/socialpethotel/ https://www.facebook.com/socialpetcharlotte https://www.instagram.com/socialpetpineville/ https://www.instagram.com/socialpetcharlotte/  https://www.instagram.com/socialpetspa 

Tune in for the final portion of our interview with the world's foremost expert on fatal dog attacks, Jim Crosby.  In this portion, we ask more hard-hitting questions: Are certain breeds the cause of more attacks than others? Can dogs that have been bred to fight in illegal dog fighting be re-integrated back into society? How can you stop an approaching aggressive dog?If you or someone you know has been struggling after a dog attack, check out the American Psychological Association's website for tips on helping someone who's struggling, or you can find a licensed therapist through Psychology Today.If you have an aggressive dog, you may want to seek help from a veterinary behaviorist. There is another podcast called The Bitey End of the Dog by Michael Shikashio (CDBC) that explores the topic of dog aggression further, and Michael's website AgressiveDog.com has great professional resources related to dog aggression and behavior.For tips on how to stop an approaching aggressive dog, you can check out the video at Patricia Mcconnell's website, or read more tips at Whole-Dog-Journal.com You can find Jim on Twitter @TheDogGuyJim and contact him at canineaggression@gmail.comFollow us on Instagram,  Facebook, and check out our website GetOutAlivePodcast.com and join us on Patreon!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/getoutalivepodcast)

In this episode, I talk to Dr. Patricia McConnell (PhD, CAAB) about trauma, developing resilience, different types of social support, providing a safe space, increasing agency for the learner, the importance of rest, and what gives her hope for the future of animal welfare.  Recorded June 1, 2021.Patricia McConnell's bio:Patricia McConnell, PhD, CAAB is an Ethologist who has consulted with pet owners for over thirty years about serious behavioral problems. She taught "The Biology and Philosophy of Human/Animal Relationships" in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for twenty-five years and has spoken around the world about canine behavior and training. Dr. McConnell is the author of eleven books on training and behavioral problems, as well as the critically acclaimed books The Other End of the Leash (translated into 14 languages), For the Love of a Dog, and Tales of Two Species. Her newest book, The Education of Will, is a memoir focusing on healing from trauma in both people and dogs. Patricia and her husband live with their working Border Collies Skip and Maggie, along with cats Nellie and Polly, and a very spoiled flock of sheep. For more information, go to www.patriciamcconnell.com or visit her blog, at www.theotherendoftheleash.com, and follow her on Facebook or on Instagram.LinksPatricia McConnell's websitePatricia McConnell's blogTheme music composed and performed by Andy Sells

On episode 32 of the podcast, Marissa is thrilled to speak with one of her heroes, Dr. Patricia McConnell. She is not one that needs a formal introduction since she's a household name when it comes to behavior and training, has written so many books Marissa has lost count, and has made such an innovative impact on our profession! Today we will be discussing how to build resilience in our dogs and ourselves.

Meet Kendall Duncan and Angie Pickren from Canine Cabana near Tampa, FL. These two became best friends at Busch Gardens caring for all kinds of crazy animals, and chose to make the leap together to open their own pet care facility in 2008. Their love of animals matches beautifully with their love of growing young people, and creating a culture that folks can't wait to work in! Owner Bios: https://caninecabana.biz/who-we-are/Social:FB: https://www.facebook.com/caninecabanaflIG: https://www.instagram.com/caninecabanafl/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/CanineCabanaFL

After recording our latest patron book club on the dog behavior book, “The Other End of the Leash”, we were ecstatic to have the opportunity to learn even more about applied animal behavior from the author herself, Dr. Patricia McConnell. We discussed how “The Other End of the Leash” isn't a typical dog training book, how human behavior is intertwined with animal behavior, and what Dr. McConnell would add in a second edition. McConnell, P.B. (2002). The other end of the leash: Why we do what we do around dogs. Ballantine Books.

Michael Scott & Tammy Medsker, two artists and animal lovers, sold their home and most of their belongings and are traveling full time in their RV with their pets! We talk about art, life, rescue animals and more. Happy tails abound. Buckle up end enjoy the ride! Is that one too many campy puns for you campers? Wooo, let's go! YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TilFurtherNoticeTammy & Scott's bio/blog post: Blog story https://www.tilfurthernotice.com/post/the-big-leap-how-we-came-to-live-the-rv-lifeTil Further Notice Website: https://tilfurthernotice.com Tam's Creative Corner:IG: Mixed Media Res Artist, Tammy (@tamscreativecorner) • Instagram photos and videosYouTube: Tams Creative Corner - YouTube

As summer winds down, we're still brining the heat with some hot research topics to discuss. First up, what's the deal with token economies? Is one of our oldest applied technologies still all it's cracked up to be? Then Dr. Meg Martineau has some thoughts on sustainability research for those of us who'd prefer some of our surface areas don't become beachfront property in the next 50 years. And, while we take a much needed vacation, enjoy some bonus episodes discussing the awesome, inaugural Black Applied Behavior Analysis conference and an interview with applied animal behaviorist Dr. Patricia McConnell (featured on our recent book club cast). Articles for August 2021 Token Economies McLaughlin, T.F. & Malaby, J. (1972). Intrinsic reinforcement in a classroom token economy. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 5, 263-270. doi: 10.1901/jaba.1972.5-263 Bassett, J.E. & Blanchard, E.B. (1977). The effect of the absence of close supervision on the use of response cost in a prison token economy. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 10, 375-379. doi: 10.1901/jaba.1977.10-375 Fox, D.K., Hopkins, B.L., & Anger, W.K. (1987). The long-term effects of a token economy on safety performance in open-pit mining. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 20, 215-224. doi: 10.1901/jaba.1987.20-215 Zlomke, K. & Zlomke, L. (2003). Token economy plus self-monitoring to reduce disruptive classroom behaviors. The Behavior Analyst Today, 4, 177-182. doi: 10.1037/h0100117 Sustainability w. Dr. Meghan Martineau Schneider, S.M. & Sanguinetti, A. (2021). Positive reinforcement is just the beginning: Associative learning principles for energy efficiency and climate sustainability. Energy Research & Social Science, 74. doi: 10.1016/jrss.2021/101958 Keller, J.J. (1991). The recycling solution: How I increased recycling on Dilworth Road. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 24, 617-619. doi: 10.1901/jaba.1991.24-617 “The Other End of the Leash Book Club (in case you missed it) McConnell, P.B. (2002). The other end of the leash: Why we do what we do around dogs. Ballantine Books.

As voted on by our patrons, we read and discussed Dr. Patricia McConnell's "The Other End of the Leash".  Jackie was thrilled to suggest that our summer book club choice feature one of her favorite writers/speakers about dog behavior.  But, this book wasn't just another training manual: It delved a lot deeper into both dog and human patterns of behavior.  We learned that humans love to talk, dogs don't love being patted on the head, and just why these two Peter Pan species get along so darn well.   Even though you may not currently be one of our premium $10 patrons, enjoy this preview of our full length discussion, including our thoughts on dogs, general chat about the book, and a detailed breakdown of the first chapters.   Want to hear the rest of the episode and earn 2 CEs.? We invite you to join us on Patreon to hear the rest of this and our other full-length book clubs (plus early access to shows and some other goodies).   And, if you enjoy the discussion (or just enjoy dogs), tune back in in August for our interview with Dr. Patricia McConnell!   References for this episode: McConnell, P.B.  (2002).  The other end of the leash: Why we do what we do around dogs.  Ballantine Books.

What started as a texting group of Mueller dog moms including entrepreneur Joana Zarur has grown into the development of an app where people can set up play dates for their dogs! Creative Director, Joana Zarur and Software Engineer Rob Cowart have joined forces to bring the app to life.  The goal of the app is to create moments, connections, and great memories for dog moms and dads – making life better for energetic dogs who need socialization and exercise. The benefit for you? Find local people who have playful dogs that want to meet up. It's a dog party!Links: Postnet Austin (Downtown)https://locations.postnet.com/tx/austin/1401-lavaca-st Dog Dates on Instagram dog dates (@dog_dates_atx) • Instagram photos and videos Euphoria Technologies Euphoria Engineering – your online solution provider (euphoria-tech.com)

In this episode, Libby and Emily are excited to sit down with Dr. Patricia McConnell - she's kind of a big deal in the dog training world. The trio talk about the initial time of decompression for your rescue dog, the importance of the secure attachment base, and how we can show our dog safety and stability. Dr. McConnell discusses trauma: the nuts and bolts of it, how it manifests, and ways to build resiliency and offer choice and control when recovering from it. Do not miss this episode if you've rescued a dog - you might learn something about humans, too! To learn more about Dr. McConnell, read her blog, find her incredible books and more, visit her website: https://www.patriciamcconnell.com/ To learn more about decompression, visit: https://decompressforsuccess.com/nine-steps-to-success Credits. Libby Felts and Emily Wolf (Hosts and Creators.) Original music by Mike Pesci. Graphic design, editing, and production by Alex Lee-Ammons and For The Love Media, LLC. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/sdr7/support

From corporate law to cleaning homes, Angela Spencer is giving people back their lost quality time by cleaning up. Angela talks about her journey into small biz ownership, why she's so passionate about her job, and with Bart's help, ways we can keep our house clean with all our messy, loveable pets. Links:Two Maids Website: https://twomaidsroundrock.com Two Maids RR Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/2MaidsRoundRock Angela Spencer's Bio:  About Us | Two Maids Round Rock

In this episode we talk with Robin Bennett, CPDT-KA and Susan Briggs, MA, CPACO from The Dog Gurus. We work with them frequently and always appreciate their time and insights. We talk about their history working together, working with other pet care professionals, their philosophy, and much more! Their mission in their own words, "...is to help fellow pet care business owners learn from our experience (and the wrong turns we’ve made along the way) to avoid costly mistakes, increase profits, build the brand you’ve always envisioned, and, ultimately, find the freedom to love your pet care business just as much as you love the pet that inspired you to start in the first place!" Come and learn with us from some certified gurus!Links:Https://thedoggurus.com Https://paccc.org

We catch up with long time friend Sheri Soltes, President and Founder of Service Dogs, Inc. Her organization has been helping dogs learn how to help people since 1988. This is THE episode to share with every dog lover you know! Tune in to one of the most entertaining locals from the Texas dog world where we discuss everything from their work training service dogs for the disabled, first responders and children in court to how positive training evolved from training whales. Let's dig in!Links:Website: https://www.servicedogs.org Calendars: https://www.servicedogs.org/product/dogs-hearts-2021-calendar-with-shipping/Donations: https://donate.servicedogs.org/give/201304/#!/donation/checkout

For everyone out there who’s been a listener of this podcast, even if you’re brand new to Fire & Soul, connecting with you, my audience, brings me so much joy! So today, I want to get personal and share more of myself with all of you out there.Having had the opportunity to connect with you so intimately and authentically each week means that you always know what’s on my mind. But, there are so many other elements of my life that come together to shape “Michelle Sorro”. Today, I want to share those day-to-day building blocks that make up who I am. And, I’m willing to bet we’ll have a lot in common! In this episode, I’m sharing all of my favorite things, from books, to movies, to my favorite foods. There are brilliant podcasts and incredible mentors that I want to be sure you know about, because if they helped me, they just might be meaningful for you too! I’m also going deep and sharing my favorite vacation I took a few years ago, and how those three weeks made such a profound impact on my life and growth. This week, I’m sharing all of my favorite things. Are you ready to get personal? In This Episode You Will Learn: My very specific sleep regimen (3:07)My most recent food obsession (8:15)The people and podcasts that have changed my life (10:21)The music that moves me (16:01)My favorite books of all time (18:00)Guilty pleasures: movies and Netflix (22:10)How I invest in my growth (26:26)The trip of my lifetime (29:18)People Mentioned in this Episode:Nancy MeyersTony RobbinsJack CanfieldPanache DesaiEvan Mark KatzJairek RobbinsReverend Michael BeckwithMary MorrisseyJean HoustonMatt BoggsDalai LamaPodcasts Mentioned in this Episode:Amy Porterfield: Marketing Made EasyJames Wedmore: The Mind Your Business PodcastKathrin Zenkina: The Manifestation BabeAbraham Hicks Rampages and MeditationAbraham Hicks NEWConversations With Abraham HicksAlec Baldwin: Here’s the ThingLewis Howes School of GreatnessJay Shetty: On PurposeBrene Brown: Unlocking UsBooks Mentioned in this Episode:The Untethered Soul by Michael A. SingerThe Velveteen Rabbit: Or How Toys Become Real by Margery WilliamsThe Little Soul and the Sun: A Children's Parable Adapted from Conversations with God by Neale Donald WalschThe Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs by Patricia McConnell, PhDYou Can Heal Your Life by Louise L. HayTV & Film Mentioned in this Episode:Notting HillThe Family ManThe King’s SpeechSchitt’s CreekTed LassoBridgertonReal Housewives of New York CityReal Housewives of Beverly HillsReal Housewives of Orange CountyResources: My FREE Masterclass: How to Master Zoom and Live Video Sales Like a Pro Free MasterclassSferra Luxury Bedding Mountain Valley Spring WaterAmy Porterfield’s Digital Course AcademyJames Wedmore’s Inner Circle Mastermind CourseMichelle’s Date with Destiny Spotify Playlist See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today we get to know Debi Krakar, founder of The Dog Alliance, and a woman with a huge heart for dogs. Debi discusses the many programs offered, including the Train Your Own Service Dog program, Hounds for Heroes, and their force free Shear Excellence Grooming Academy. Her heart for positive training knows no bounds!Debi Krakar, CPDT-KA, Founder & Executive DirectorDebi Krakar founded the Dog Alliance in 2006 with a vision of improving the lives of families in her community based on the powerful bond we have with dogs. She is the driving force behind creating the therapeutic programs of The Dog Alliance.The Dog Alliancehttps://www.thedogalliance.org/ Bow Wow Reading Dogs Virtual Reading Programhttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2WEPeEoAeQav6LYir0CewINSsjF3rNtZ Petco stops selling shock collarshttps://www.cnn.com/2020/10/06/business/petco-shock-collars/index.html Veterans Service Dog Programhttps://www.thedogalliance.org/houndsforheroes Shear Excellence Grooming Academyhttps://academy.thedogalliance.org/w/events/28-shear-excellence-dog-grooming-academy Assistance Dogs Internationalhttps://assistancedogsinternational.org/

We sat down with Don Hanson from Green Acres Kennel Shop in Bangor, Maine. Don is an incredible resource in the training community, and a joy to talk to. We deep dive on the reason he's so passionate about positive reinforcement training, and his commitment to moving the needle toward a world without shock collars and other aversive training methods and tools. We always enjoy getting to spend time with Don, and we hope you will too!Links:Green Acres Kennel Shop - https://www.greenacreskennel.com/ Pet Professional Guild - https://www.petprofessionalguild.com/ Shock Free Coalition - https://www.shockfree.org/

What a great time we had talking with Kate Knecht of Tomlinson's, a 4th generation family owned pet store in Central Texas. Kate tells the story of the family biz, their core values, and how she helped carry the family business through Covid and into the next generation by creating their online store. We also learn how they choose to grow and ways they give back to the community. Don't miss the speed round at the end. It's eye popping!https://tomlinsons.com/

Pablo Director, Dog Trainer, and Two Authors- Jason Jon Anderson, executive director of the Pablo Center at the Confluence, will be on “Spectrum West.” The program will also feature dog trainer and former Wisconsin Public Radio host Patricia McConnell, an interview with a Minneapolis writer, and a talk with Eau Claire’s B.J. Hollars.

In this episode of the podcast, we talk with the Austin Humane Society's own Frances Jonon about ALL our memories together, Bart bidding $3K he didn't really have to spend, and all the awesome work Frances does leading a great organization that helps a huge amount of animals every year.Links:https://austinhumanesociety.org Summer Kids Series: https://austinhumanesociety.org/summer-kids-seriesTeddy Bear Surgery: https://austinhumanesociety.org/teddy-bear-surgeryFrances is the President and CEO of the Austin Humane Society, a non-profit animal shelter in Austin, Texas. AHS serves approximately 11,000 dogs and cats annually through adoption, disaster and spay/neuter services. As President and CEO since 2005 Frances has overseen a 300% increase in animals served, an annual operating budget that has more than doubled, the addition of an endowment, a Feral Cat Clinic, a core of over 750 volunteers, a partnership with Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine, the launch of several new initiatives including an education series inspiring compassion in over 1300 kids and their families annually, and, currently underway, a capital campaign for a new campus. Frances lives in Austin with her husband Mike, 4 year old daughter Julia, Olivia the pug and Mia the cat.

LINK TO BLOG POST: https://bit.ly/TOSK34CopingWithANewPuppy   We are so excited to bring you a new episode of The Oh Sh*t Kit Podcast that's all about the new additions we took home during lockdown. Who else got a new puppy? Seemed like such a great idea at the time, didn't it. The statistics on how many people got new dogs who found a great home during lock down have been amazing!! But when it comes down to it, regardless of how well behaved they are, there's always an adjustment period where getting a puppy can be really stressful. So in an attempt to keep as many pups as possible from being returned to the shelters, we wanted to share our tried and tested strategies that we have found helpful when bringing a new puppy into our home. Some highlights: How Leora's anxiety differed between getting Jordie (her first pup) compared to Davey (her second) since her anxiety has been properly managed.  How should you prepare mentally and in your environment? How and when you should ask for help.  Tools Taking time off or flexing hours so you can sleep in a little later because your sleep will be messed up for a little while. If you have a partner, make a plan to switch every day so you're able to get a good night's sleep consistently. Beware that there's so much bad information out there.  Know that we as humans have to be trained properly before we can fully train the dog to make sure we're doing it the RIGHT way.  Read “The Other End of the Leash” by Patricia McConnell. Consult with a trainer if you'd like to have 1-1 sessions.  Go to puppy classes which can give you community and reassurance as well as seeing other owners and how they handle their pups.  Make sure to get a crate as they aren't able to be safely left alone. Have lots of things for them to chew on! What has been helpful to you? What did we miss? Let us know.  

This is a rebroadcast of one of our first UNLEASHED (at work & home) episodes. Patricia McConnell, PhD, joined me to talk about the importance of emotions and, as always happens when talking with her, the conversation veered out into larger life lessons as well. https://colleenpelar.com/7

Howdy Bookshelvers!Steve and Nat are back for another episode. When we started our journey as dog trainers there was one particular book that really spoke to both of us. 'The Other End Of The Leash: Why we do what we do around dogs' is quite simply a masterpiece and we are still pinching ourselves from this one. We had the ABSOLUTE pleasure of talking to Patricia about her career as one of the most influential writers of dog training books in the world. As well as delving into this MUST OWN book. We have the welcome return of 'practical applications' this week as well as hearing all about what we've been up to in lockdown UK.We really hope you are enjoying our shows and if you fancy dropping us a question, review or anything else please get in touch at....barksfrom@gmail.comPatricia McConnell BioPatricia McConnell, PhD, a Zoologist and Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist, (CAAB) Emeritus has made a lifelong commitment to improving the relationship between people and animals. She is known worldwide as an expert on canine and feline behavior and dog training, and for her engaging and knowledgeable dog training books, DVDs and seminars. Patricia has seen clients for serious behavioral problems since 1988, and taught "The Biology and Philosophy of Human/Animal Relationships” for twenty-five years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her radio show, Calling All Pets, was heard in over 110 cities around the country, where Patricia dispensed advice about behavior problems and animal behavior research for over fourteen years.A highly-sought after speaker on dog behavior and training, McConnell has presented seminars all over the United States, and in Canada, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Belgium, Scotland and New Zealand.She is the author of the much-acclaimed books The Other End of the Leash (which is now published in 13 languages), For the Love of A Dog: Understanding Emotions in You and Your Best Friend and Tales of Two Species. Her memoir, The Education of Will: A Mutual Memoir of a Woman and Her Dog was released in February of 2017. Click Here to order a copy.Dr. McConnell’s books and booklets on dog training and dog and cat behavior problems continually receive rave reviews from professional trainers, veterinarians and dog and cat lovers from all over the world. Dr. McConnell was also the behavior columnist for The Bark magazine, "the New Yorker of Dog Magazines," and writes for many other publications, including APDT's Chronicle of the Dog and Natural History. She has made numerous television appearances, including spots with Anderson Cooper on CNN, Martha Stewart and Wayne Brady.Patricia has two dogs, one confident cat and a very spoiled flock of sheep on a small farm in Southwestern Wisconsin. Her Border Collie, Maggie, along with Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Tootsie, keep her outside and active, and the memories of her beloved Border Collie Willie keep her humble. Trisha suffers from Separation Anxiety each time she leaves her dogs on her numerous speaking engagements around the country.LINKSLink to Purchase 'The Other End Of The Leash' on Amazon.https://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-End-Leash-Patricia-McConnell/dp/034544678XLink to Patricia's websitehttps://www.patriciamcconnell.com/Link to Patricia's fantastic Blog.https://www.patriciamcconnell.com/theotherendoftheleash/Link to the Come, Sit, Stay Podcast Patricia mentioned.https://youtu.be/CPQmlEcY0HYLink to Drax's Galactic Adventure Facebook page (Nats rescued Irish Wolfhound)https://www.facebook.com/Draxthewolfhound/Link to Steve &a

Podcast outline 1:40 – Introduction 4:06 – Patricia’s behavior odyssey 24:13 – A discussion on the human animal relationship 52:57 - What the word “communication” means to Patricia 58:25 – Patricia’s hopes for the animal training and behavior world in the next five to ten years 1:03 – Find out more about Patricia and her work at www.patriciamcconnell.com

In this Q+A episode, Annie answers a question from a puppy owner whose dog is scared of the crate and stresses out when left alone, and then considers another dog owner who asks if "Attachment Theory" applies to dogs. Visit AnnieGrossman.com/ask or leave a voicemail at 917-414-2625. NOTES Products: Annie's preferred crate, the Revol (get $25 off the Revol with code SFTD25 at checkout through March 31, 2019) - See through pen on Etsy by ClearlyLovedPets - See through crate on Etsy by PrettyKennels - Treat and Train - The Toppl toy Books: Treating Separation Anxiety in Dogs by Malena Demartini-Price - I'll Be Home Soon by Patricia McConnell, PhD Sites: Evolutionary Parenting article on Attachment Theory and Attachment Parenting by Tracy Cassel PhD Shoutout: You can witness Gilby and Ghost's playdates at @GhostFrench and @GilbyKriss Fun Dog Fact: The Beatles song that contains a secret dog whistle --- Partial Transcript: [Intro] Annie: Hello humans. Today I am going to be answering some dog training questions that have come down the pipeline. If you have a question you'd like answered in a future Q&A episode, you can find us on Instagram @schoolforthedogs. You can send a direct message. Or go to Anniegrossman.com/ask and you'll find a nifty little form there. So our first question comes through Instagram from a listener named B. She writes: "Hi Annie. I've just finished listening to your crate training episode. I love how no nonsense you are with most subjects, and this one is of particular interest to me. My husband and I fostered a few dogs before we adopted. All the dogs we had before, including puppies and adults slept in a crate. However, our last foster and now adopted member of the family hates the crate. He'll go in if there's food, but if the door closes he immediately loses it and won't eat. He tries to eat the bars, jumps up and throws himself against the bars, and generally cries until you open the door. We've also tried pens, et cetera. We want to crate train for all the reasons you mentioned on the podcast and also because I want him to stop sleeping in our bed. He moves around and I'm always scared he'll fall off. He was rescued from a puppy mill. And I've been following the Best Friend's guidelines, which say that some dogs will never adapt to crates after being born in a puppy mill. He is five months old. He also hates pens. I've tried covering the crate to make it more den like, but he barks and jumps the whole time. Occasionally he goes quiet. I've even filmed him and left the apartment, and he keeps jumping and barking until I’m back. "He is very happy when he's let out. He also won't eat if he knows he's closed in the pen or crate. He's very stuck to me in general... Full transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcasts

In this podcast we discuss guilt, jealousy and whether dogs really protect people or if it's all just self-preservation. Patricia McConnell is a Certified Applied Animal Behaviourist and has worked with clients for serious behaviour problems since 1988. She got her PhD in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin Madison where she is also an adjunct professor. She's well known for her books including For the Love of a Dog, The Other End of the Leash and her recent memoir The Education of Will. All of which have made her a very sought out international speaker. Show Notes: www.nickbenger.com/patricia-mcconnell Free Engagement Guide: www.barkplayteach.com/the-engagement-guide 75% off Butternut Box: www.butternutbox.com/nickbenger

Dr. McConnell is an internationally known zoologist and a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist. In her career, she has worked with dogs with all kinds of serious behavior problems. She was also the host of the nationally syndicated Radio show "Calling All Pets", and she is a retired assistant professor of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is an amazing speaker… in fact, she was one of the first real dog seminars that I ever went to…possibly THE first if my memory is correct. So she is partly responsible for getting me hooked on dog training in the first place. She is the author of many beautifully written and well-researched books, most of which I have in my house, and are among some of my favorite books that I read over and over…particularly "The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs", which again was sort of a gateway dog book for me. And her book "For the Love of a Dog: Understand Emotion in You and Your Best Friend", I have in both hardcover and audiobook format. Her new book, "The Education of Will", which I have read and will read again, is also beautifully written and insightful. It’s a little different in that it’s written as a memoir. She shares stories from her own life and her experience with trauma, fear, and anxiety…something I know a lot of us can relate to. But they are interwoven with stories about the dogs she’s worked with, particularly her own dog, Will, and their journeys with trauma and anxiety. And among those of course, she includes glimpses into what we know about the science of fear and what we can do about it. Fair warning, I did cry a little. So just a heads up. In the book, the theme of resilience comes up. And it’s a topic that really fascinates me. Why do some individuals bounce back after a bad experience and others don’t? What can we do to help our dogs recover quickly after something stressful happens? How can we set ourselves and our dogs up for success? And that is exactly what we talked about during our conversation. For full show notes, visit: www.wonderpupstraining.com/podcast/60

Dr. Patricia McConnell joins Julie Fudge Smith and Colleen Pelar to talk about the "glamorous" side of dog training and why they love what they do.   For show notes and more see: Your Family Dog

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

Welcome Dr. Patricia McConnell to Ask Your Dog Guru! In this highly anticipated episode of Ask Your Dog Guru Victoria is joined by Dr. Patricia [...] --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/askdogguru/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/askdogguru/support

Julie Fudge Smith and Colleen Pelar talk with Dr. Patricia McConnell about her book, The Education of Will, trauma in dogs, and what you can do to help your dog if it is traumatized.   For show notes please go to: Your Family Dog To purchase Dr. McConnell's book: The Education of Will

Dr. Patricia McConnell discusses emotions with Colleen Pelar on the UNLEASHED (at work & home) podcast. Learn how emotions help us and how they can trip us up. A fascinating look at the behavior of dogs and of people. www.colleenpelar.com/7

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

The Dog Show #454 – November 8, 2017 Highlights from conversations over the years: Dr. Patricia McConnell, Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, Dr. Michael Fox, and more! Enjoy this “Best of” variety!

SUMMARY: Shade Whitesel returns to talk about toys and the process of introducing work to play. For those of you who haven't heard the previous episode with Shade, Shade has been training and competing in dog sports since she was a kid. She has successfully competed in Schutzhund, AKC obedience and French Ring and her focus is really on clear communication with your dog. Links Shadesdogtraining.net Next Episode:  To be released 11/10/2017, featuring Patricia McConnell, to talk about what she's learned over her time 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 have Shade Whitesel back with us again, this time to talk about toys and the process of introducing work to play. For those of you who haven't heard the previous episode with Shade, Shade has been training and competing in dog sports since she was a kid. She has successfully competed in Schutzhund, AKC obedience and French Ring and her focus is really on clear communication with your dog. She also recently launched a blog on her website, which all of you should check out at www.shadesdogtraining.net. Welcome back, Shade! Shade Whitesell: Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be back. Melissa Breau: I'm glad to have you. So I kind of want to jump straight into things here. So when we talk about play, I think most people think, It's play, and think it should just kind of come naturally to them and to their dog. But all too often that's not the case. So why is it that play can be hard? Shade Whitesel: I think when you're talking about competitive dog sports, we're thinking about play as a reinforcement, and so the dog's idea of what's reinforcing and our idea what we want to teach them might be different. So it's not always easy. And also I think we have in our mind this ideal thing, this ideal of our childhood dog who always brought the ball back, and things like that. My childhood dog didn't. Maybe that's why I teach this, because I had work to do to get her to bring it back. But, so keeping in mind that I'm talking about play with toys, it's basically an interaction between the dog and the handler using toys. It's hard because it involves shaping on the handler's part, where they're working from approximating a little behavior that the dog is giving you to a bigger behavior that you want to eventually use to reward stuff. So it's kind of like even though it's play, we still have to train little parts of it and make it more … train rules in it might be a good way of putting it, where you've got, you know, you can reward with a ball, but you've got to get the ball back. So kind of like those things are all caught up in our word of play, basically. Melissa Breau: So you mentioned in there kind of the bringing the ball back bit, and I think probably one of the most common issues that you hear about when people are talking about play is the dog takes a toy, runs away in the corner, and enjoys it all on their lonesome. What's going on there — and how do you go about teaching the dog that you really can be part of that fun? Shade Whitesel: Well, the dog, when they're going away and they're chewing it, they're really fixated on the object itself, and so they're thinking that the object itself is fun. And what we need to do is we need to teach the dog that they need us for the interaction. So they need us to activate the toy, whether that's taught or whether we're throwing it for them to chase. And that is more fun and we need to create more value for that, rather than the dog taking the toy away and chewing it off in the corner. And one of those things that we need to do is figure out how to play in a way that the dog likes. It really starts there. And once they figure that out, once you figure out how to play in a way the dog likes, they bring the toy back to you automatically. And then value building for having you in there just works. The problems come when we expect the dog to play how we want them to play, like, for instance, how another dog we have played, or, like, what our sport wants our dog to play like, and then it's no longer play and the dog may have other ideas of what they consider play. So it's important to take what the dog offers to you and then reinforce that by giving the dog what they want, which is normally possession of the toy. I find a lot of people just don't want to give the dog the toy because they're so afraid it's going to take it away and chew it up, because that's what they do when they're babies. But in order to get what you want, you kind of have to give the dog what they want, and a lot of times in the beginning of training that's giving them possession, and honoring that, and being OK with that. So later on, and this affects right at the beginning, it is you also need to think about the tugging itself. One of my favorite things is to tell handlers to make it 50-50 when you're tugging with your dog. And that means that 50 percent of the time the dog pulls you around. The other 50 percent you pull the dog around. Most of the issues I see with dogs and handler play is that the handler is pulling the dog around 95 percent or worse, and then the dog doesn't think you're fair. They don't think they can beat you. So then when you finally let them have the toy, they leave. They're kind of saying their opinion of your playing and it's not all that fun for them, so ... And sometimes that's hard to hear, you know. We've got to start with little tiny parts, so … Melissa Breau: It is a little funny in some respects that kind of the dog wants the toy, but the person wants the toy too. Shade Whitesel: Right, and you need to learn, too, the word that occurs to me is cooperate. I'm not sure I mean that. To compete in a way that each creature has fun with it, and compete in a way that the dog thinks they can win, and maybe look at it that way, not that you're just tugging them around because you think that's what they should do. Melissa Breau: So you mentioned kind of the dog has to think it's fun. And we're talking mostly tug and fetch here. So what kinds of cues should people be looking for in their dog's body language to make sure their dog's enjoying the game and actually having fun? Shade Whitesel: Well, they kind of really have to be all in. So I'm not going to really describe what their actual body language looks like, that's probably different with each dog, but one of the things that I don't like to see is a dog that I think is frantic or hectic. And so I want to see a dog that's calmer than frantically tugging backwards. So I think many handlers are conditioned by their sport, or what they've been exposed to, to think that a dog that is frantically tugging backwards, growling and thrashing, is happy, and I'm not sure that that's always the case. It might be frantic and hectic and not so happy. The simple thing to ask the dog is, you know, when you let them have it, do they like it? Do they run laps? Do they come back and play with you, in which case they like that type of play, or do they race away? So that's kind of what you're looking, the actions that they're doing, rather than, like, their actual body language, because I just think that's open to a lot of interpretation based on people seeing other dogs play, things like that. It's really what does the dog do when you give it and how into it are they. So, yeah, that's what I'd be looking at. Melissa Breau: Looking at tug specifically, what are some of the common mistakes maybe that people make -- either in your toys class or in general -- and how would you address them? Shade Whitesel: Well, the biggest thing is we have to remember we're bigger than the dog, and so we kind of overwhelm the dog with the tugging, especially if the dog is young or if it's smaller than us. I mean, you know, really what I see people accidentally doing is they're dragging the dog all around and they're never allowing the dog to drag them around. And the dog has to affect you, they have to feel like they can pull you down and get the toy, or make you move, or make your hands go loose, or something like that. And then the other common thing is people never give the dog the toy, and that's just a big deal, because they're scared that the dog might not bring it back, and so they don't give it to them. It's a teaching thing. It's teaching trust around your hands near toys. Hands near the dog. My dog thinks hands are good. He thinks they're for shoving toys into. And that's what I want dogs to learn, rather than being overwhelmed. So that's kind of why I'm really big on letting the dog have it and then choose to come back. That gives me information on how I'm playing and if the dog likes that. Melissa Breau: With fetch or with ball play, are there common mistakes you see people make? Shade Whitesel: Yeah, they start, like, they get really concerned with the dropping, which, you know, we have to get the dog to drop it, so, but they start commanding it and cuing it and verbally making the dog do it, and using a little bit of coercion to get the dog to come back and drop it. And those, I'd say, what I want my dogs to figure out is that their dropping activates me, so when a dog drops a toy at my feet, that activates me to bring out another ball in sight and throw it. That's what I want them to look at the out as, rather than this thing that has to be commanded. So dogs will tell you a lot about what they think of the game when they're coming back to you. So, like, people get really concerned with dogs circling, with arcing, and all that kind of stuff, and it's good to notice that, but when you're training that, it's OK as the dog works it out that, yes, I can come back and drop it. So that's a little bit of a common mistake. Melissa Breau: Everybody kind of probably has heard the idea that you should start with the fun and then gradually add work in. So can you talk a little about that? How do you decide when and where you add work to the game? Shade Whitesel: Well, I have, like, a rote fetch game that I teach with rules, where the dog has to drop it, the handler has to have a marker word, and eye contact has to be added. And the dog needs to know that it dropped the ball to make the other ball in sight. So it's kind of a two-ball game, but you have to make sure that the dog understands that their dropping produces the other one in sight and that you're not bribing or prompting them with the one in your hand to drop. So once you have that basic thing for the chase game, then I would feel confident adding some behavior skills through either obedience or agility. With tugging, the dog needs to be bringing it right back. But also with tugging, the dog needs to have the self-control of not just jumping all over you. That self-control with the tugging is a big thing, so I want to physically cue the dog to jump on me when it's allowed, and that way when they've got, when they want to come back right away, but they're also looking for that signal that they're allowed to come back and shove it at you, that's kind of they've got some self-control in the game and some thinking in there. It's not just a frantic thing. When I see that, then I say that you can start to add simple behavior skills, and say you've got the rules, and you can start adding behavior skills. And your focus, especially at first, is to add the skills to the game. You don't want to just run an agility sequence and reward the dog with the ball. You want to basically put the behavior skills into the game itself. So it might look like you throw the ball to the dog a couple of times and then you cue a jump. And then you throw the ball for the dog a couple of times, and if you're doing obedience you might cue a sit. And then throw it a couple of times and then a hand touch. So what you're doing is you're adding those behavior skills in gradually, and you're keeping in mind that it's about the play and the reinforcement of the play. And then in fact it's easier for the dog. You can start to make that reinforcement of play thinner and thinner. And then, when you start doing that, so that leads to a whole other thing, basically, where eventually you're going to want to thin the reinforcement schedule so that you can get some stuff done. You don't want to have to, for the rest of the dog's life, have it three ball throws for one sit, you know? But that's what I call a tell, where, assuming you've got all your games really well taught and the dog is bringing back the ball, your dog's tell are what starts to deteriorate when your rate of reinforcement is too low, or the environment is too hard, or the behavior you're teaching is too hard for the dog. And so in a fetch game a lot of times what the dog will do is, let's say you only gave one ball throw for the sit and they thought that was kind of cheap. Then they'll arc on their way coming back to you when previously they would have run straight back to you. Or they'll not drop the ball quickly. They'll chomp it a couple of times. So those are the things that the dog will start deteriorating, the game skills will deteriorate, and that's what I call the dog's tell. So in tugging, the dog might start growling on the tug, or it may jump on you before being cued, or it will re-bite the toy. All those things that you hopefully trained past in your game skills when you were training for reinforcement will then start to resurface when you add things, behavior skills, too quickly. So, like, thinking of behavior skills as work and the game skills as the fun and the play, your game skills will start to deteriorate if your work is too much, in the dog's opinion. And then you want to figure out as the handler what how your dog is telling you that, because they each have different ways they tell you that. Like, a border collie will usually always give you the ball, but they'll usually arc. Arcing is usually what a stereotypical border collie will do. Whereas a German Shepherd will fully come back to you, but he'll stop dropping the ball. So different types of dogs have different tells. Melissa Breau: Gee, I wonder if I've ever seen that behavior before. Maybe a little. Shade Whitesel: Yeah. Anybody who's had a German Shepherd has seen the “Drop? What's that?” Melissa Breau: The chomp, chomp, chomp. Shade Whitesel: Chomp, chomp, exactly. Melissa Breau: I know kind of before we scheduled this to have you come back on, we chatted a little bit about the idea that you've spent a lot of time lately thinking about training loops and kind of how they feed into how a dog feels about a training session…. And I wanted to dive into that a little bit, but before we go too deep, just to make sure everybody kind of knows the terminology, can you explain just a little bit what a training loop is and why it's really important for the dog to feel good about the training session? Shade Whitesel: Well, I'm not sure this technical way of describing it, but for me right now what a loop is, is think about behaviors as a three-part process. You've got first the dog doing behavior, let's say it's sit, and then the second part is he's collecting his reinforcement, let's say a treat, and then that little part between the treat and when you cue sit again is what I'm calling a reset. I'm sure there's another technical name for it. So you've got behavior, collecting reinforcement, and a reset. And what I've really been interested in, so that all that forms a loop, because once a dog resets back to you, you can then, you know, cue another behavior. What I'm really concentrating on nowadays is that little part of the reset, because we train it, you can, you know, start paying attention to the dog noticing you and then cue a reward or something, but that's where it all starts to deteriorate. You've got your big loop. And what you're doing is you're seeing if the dog decides to do the behavior again or connect with you. So things happen right there where they'll start to deteriorate, and what I mean by that is the dog will start sniffing, they'll start glancing at the environment, and all those are little signs that the dog, how the dog is feeling. So with treats, you give the dog a treat and he'll always eat the treat, but they'll sniff around before they look back at you for the next cued behavior. For toys, that's exactly what the whole toy class is about, basically, teaching the dog how to give up the toy. So they won't give up the toy if that little reset isn't trained, or if they think the reinforcement is too thin. So what I've been noticing is that part of a behavior loop deteriorates before everything else. So you'll have a dog that's sitting, but they're glancing away. And so I'm really interested in that, because as positive trainers we really need to notice that, because it's telling us that the dog is not all into the training session, and I want to know that as their teacher right there. So it's just that reset, where the dog shows they're stressed or their conflict, is just something that I've really been noticing lately and trying to train better and also to address when it happens. Melissa Breau: So you talked a little bit there about some of the things that you've been doing. Is there more you want to say about that? I mean, I know you mentioned you get a little ahead of yourself, but is there more you want to say about what you've been playing with or you know, what you've been doing? Shade Whitesel: Well we need to intentionally notice it. I feel like I never noticed it until the last couple years, and so we need to intentionally also train it so train the reset. And how we do that is we, instead of prompting a dog to look at us — we can call it focus, we can call it engagement — but instead of, like, prompting them to look back at us after they've eaten a treat, we can actually wait and have the dog notice us, OK, and then reinforce that. And so that's we're reinforcing the dog's check-in, and the dog understands that it leads to work or another behavior. So being positive trainers, kind of like I said before, we need total buy-in. And if they're looking away, or they're sniffing, or they're not dropping balls, or arcing on the return, we don't have total buy-in. And so it's really, I think it's awesome because we can, like, address that there in the training session instead of waiting for our behaviors to deteriorate. Hopefully that makes sense. It's, like, the action the dog does between eating a treat or chasing the ball and then doing the next behavior starts to show the stress of the training session on the dog before the actual behaviors deteriorate. Melissa Breau: You know, most of the time you don't notice until the behavior starts to change. Shade Whitesel: Totally, totally. We don't notice until the sits get slower, or the dog doesn't sit, or — heaven forbid — we notice when the dog's not taking food. But I want to notice that stuff before, and I want to address it right then. Because my dog, like, say he starts chomping his ball and he doesn't want to give it up. Then that tells me he doesn't trust me to give him enough reinforcement for what behavior he just did. That tells me that it's hard. Like, if I ask for 50 steps of heeling and I throw the ball, and he brings it right back and drops it at my feet, he's telling me that 50 steps of heeling was not hard. If he doesn't drop his ball right away, he's telling me that was hard, and he needs a lot of ball throws, and he doesn't trust me to do that. When you start noticing that — I call it listening to the dog — then it's so helpful, for me anyway, in my training to know that. And then I can, like, cue another chase. I can throw the ball a couple more times. I can tug a little bit before I ask for 50 more steps of heeling. I can go, “Oh, you can do 50 steps of heeling at home, it's not that big a deal. But here out in the field with lots of other dogs around, this is a really hard behavior.” So I just like knowing that kind of stuff, and so I've been really interested in that the last, especially the last six months. Anyway, lots more questions about that kind of stuff as we all train. Melissa Breau: Yeah, no, I think it's really an interesting concept to kind of think of, and I think you hear everybody kind of say, you know, they have that “just one more rep” problem, right, and that seems like such a good way to kind of check in with yourself and check in with your dog before you ever get to the “one more rep” problem. Shade Whitesel: Yes, exactly. And you know, I think, I think as trainers we all notice this and we call it different things, you know, focus, or engagement, or I call it the reset. So I think we're all kind of talking about the same thing, but we all describe it a little differently. And it just, it's neat and fascinating for me because I always want to know my dog's opinion. I want to know, so yeah. Melissa Breau: So for those kind of interested in learning more about this stuff, how much of this do you explore in the advanced toys class, since it's coming up in December? What do you focus on there? Shade Whitesel: So the advanced toy class is, it's Part 1 working on impulse control and making sure everyone, the handler and the dog, has the mechanics down. So we work on presentations, we really work on the different marker words, so “In spite of the tug in front of your face, when I say ‘yes,' you need to take food,” that kind of thing. And then the second part of it is kind of figuring out where your dog's tell is, adding the work to it. Some people can get through that in the regular toy class because I do include it there, but the advanced toy class I usually get a lot of students who really want to concentrate on, like, adding behavior chains and things and figuring out how arousal plays a part, because a toy's arousal is always there. Melissa Breau: Of course, yeah. Shade Whitesel: So and it catches you by surprise sometimes. So yes, we do really work on that reset, basically, and trying to figure out how individual dogs are feeling about their session. Dogs who would do best in class are ones obviously … the prereq is the basic toy class, but they don't have to have all the skills from the basic toy class, but they do have to have the basics of the fetch game and the tug game. But they just need to work on the specifics. So yeah. Melissa Breau: Awesome. Shade Whitesel: Yeah, it's really a fun class. Melissa Breau: Hey, Shade, I think any class with you would be fun. Shade Whitesel: You're too kind! Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast Shade. It's always a joy to talk to you about this stuff! Shade Whitesel: Good, yeah, I love to, so thanks so much for having me a second time. I feel honored. Melissa Breau: Well, for all of our wonderful listeners, we'll be back next week with Patricia McConnell. Patricia will be on the podcast to talk about what she's learned over her time in dog training. Don't miss it! It if you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. CREDITS: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

The Dog Show #433 – June 14, 2017 Dr. Patricia McConnell, author of “The Education of Will – A Mutual Memoir of A Woman and Her Dog”. In this book, Patricia McConnell courageously shares how her easily startled Border collie, “Willie”, … Read More

The Dog Show #417 – February 22, 2017 Welcome back Patricia McConnell, Ph.D.! Today Julie talks with the author about: “The Education of Will – A Mutual Memoir of A Woman and Her Dog”. In this book, Patricia McConnell courageously … Read More

We are giving away ONE signed copy of Rescuing Penny Jane by Amy Sutherland. It’s a very meaningful book for the rescue dog hero in your life. To qualify to win, write us a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or both. Deadline is end of day (midnight Pacific Time) on Sunday, March 12, 2017. Winner to be announced in an upcoming episode. iTunes: http://thisispawprint.com/itunes Stitcher: http://thisispawprint.com/stitcher Amy Sutherland lives in the Boston area and is the bestselling author of four books. Three of them are about animals - Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched; What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage; and her latest, Rescuing Penny Jane. Amy’s popular Modern Love column in The New York Times, which led to her book What Shamu Taught Me..., became the paper’s most emailed story of 2006. Amy Sutherland shares her home with her husband Scott, and two dogs, Penny Jane and Walter Joe. About Rescuing Penny Jane Drawing on her work at a shelter, her experiences living with two rescue dogs of her own, and years of research, bestselling author and Boston Globe columnist Amy Sutherland takes us on an unforgettable journey into the special world of rescue and shelter dogs—and the growing number of dedicated people who are deeply invested in saving these precious lives. Amy’s Website http://amysutherland.com/Amy_Sutherland/Home.html Amy’s 2006 New York Times article, “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage.” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/fashion/what-shamu-taught-me-about-a-happy-marriage.html   Some of the organizations and people mentioned in the interview Muttville Senior Dog Rescue (San Francisco) http://www.muttville.org Animal Humane Society (Golden Valley, near Minneapolis) https://www.animalhumanesociety.org San Francisco SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) https://www.sfspca.org Downtown Dog Rescue (Los Angeles) http://downtowndogrescue.org Patricia McConnell http://www.patriciamcconnell.com Karen Pryor, author of Don’t Shoot The Dog https://www.karenpryoracademy.com Thanks to Amy Sutherland. Additional thanks to Leslie Cohen and Harper Collins Publishers.   About Nancy and Harold Rhee We have been married over 20 years, fostered over 60 dogs in the past four years, and we love animal rescue and the amazing people who dedicate their lives. And of course, the dogs and cats! If you want to learn more about Nancy and Harold, go to our About Us page at http://thisispawprint.com/about or listen to our introductory podcast episode, "Fifty Puppies and a Podcast." http://thisispawprint.com/000 About Pawprint Pawprint (or Paw Print) is a weekly podcast dedicated to animal rescue, adoption, and the heroes who make it happen. Volunteer, walk, adopt, or foster a dog, cat, rabbit, or other wonderful pet through your local shelter, humane society, SPCA, pound, and animal control. Stop abuse, and help increase animal protection, welfare, and rights.  http://thisispawprint.com http://animalrescuepodcast.com   Sign up for our email list If you want to join our animal rescue community and receive two free bonus dog-training resources from Irith Bloom, positive reinforcement dog trainer, go to http://thisispawprint.com/ask. Irith can be found at http://www.thesophisticateddog.com/   About Pawprint’s Music All of Pawprint's music is composed by Luke Gartner-Brereton. Luke is based in Australia, and he composes a wide variety of songs and musical loops http://vanillagroovestudios.com http://soundcloud.com/luke-gartnerbrereton 

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Having two dogs is much more than twice as hard to manage. And adding a third or fourth to the mix can complicate things even further. If you think you’re ready to bring another dog home, this episode will help you figure out if it’s the right thing to do, how to make a smart choice of which dog to choose, how to introduce the new dog to your existing pack and how to train multiple dogs at once. There’s a lot to think about and it’s easy to get in over your head pretty quickly. However, if you get informed and do things the right way it can be an awesome thing for you and your dogs. In this episode 2:13  Should you add another dog to your family 4:45  Picking the right dog that will fit in 8:24  How to properly introduce dogs 11:05  Why rules and structure are a must 14:56  What to do if the dog’s don’t get along 18:30  Status issues between dogs 20:54  Training more than one dog 25:45  Training tip of the week Patricia McConnell’s video of her working stay with her dogs

Have you heard about positive training but aren’t sure what it is or how to get started? Well, I can give you a road map to success with four great books to get you on your way! These four books cover different aspects of a positive approach to training and living with our dogs: Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor, The Culture Clash by Jean Donaldson, The Other End of the Leash by Patricia McConnell, and How Dogs Learn by Burch & Bailey.. Questions or Comments? Send them to: eric@petliferadio.com More details on this episode MP3 Podcast - Learn Positive Dog Training on Pet Life Radio

Scientist and author Dr. Patricia McConnell wrote The Other End of the Leash, a classic book for dog trainers. She talks about the emotional and cognitive abilities of dogs — do they think and feel just like us? There's a lesson on How to Pet A Dog. Snoopy Goes Shopping for Lubrisyn, a product that […] The post Paws & Effect – Happy, Ecstatic, Jealous, Resentful — Is Your Dog Emotional Just Like You? appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

Victoria describes her experience training a piglet named Mud for a recent episode of It's Me or the Dog, and also her time training chickens and recording rap songs with dog owners from the show. Also discussed: Victoria's exciting new global network of positive reinforcement dog trainers - Victoria Stilwell Positively Dog Training. Victoria answers a fan's question about the people who influenced her as a dog trainer and are now Positively Expert Bloggers here - Karen Pryor, Ian Dunbar, Patricia McConnell, Nicholas Dodman, etc. Victoria's good friend and songwriter/pianist Elio Pace - the artist behind the Positively Podcast themesong 'Addicted to the Phone'. Ask Victoria questions about: Food aggression misdiagnosed as rage syndrome. The leave it command working on cats as well as dogs. How to train a dog to pee on a weewee pad. Birthday wishes to a special listner in Minnesota Dogs sniffing people with old injuries

It’s never too early to start training your puppy. Your puppy’s behavior is equally as important as its well-being and physical health. Dr. Patricia McConnell, along with Brenda Scidmore, have written the perfect six-week training program to help you and your puppy get off on the right paw. Dr. McConnell will be talking to us about how to humanely and effectively teach your pup the rules of your house and much more. As she says "While your pup is maturing, remember, Lassies are made, not born." More details on this episode MP3 Podcast - The Puppy Primer - with Pia Silvani on PetLifeRadio.com

People living with more than one dog know that the more dogs you live with, the less time you have for yourself. Yet, life with many dogs doesn’t necessarily have to be overwhelming. Whether you are looking for some tips to help your dog enjoy living with other dogs or dealing with canine chaos, Dr. Patricia McConnell will be discussing the approach she takes with her dogs so everyone can live in peace and harmony. More details on this episode MP3 Podcast - Feeling Outnumbered? How to Manage and Enjoy Your Multi-Dog Household - with Pia Silvani on PetLifeRadio.com

Once again animal behaviorist & author, Dr. Patricia McConnell joins us to regale us with "tails" of the fur kind and how to get along with them better. Join us for a fun and engaging show as we learn that playing with our dogs is serious stuff! More details on this episode MP3 Podcast - Playing with Our Dogs: Serious Stuff - with Kim Bloomer & Jeannie Thomason

We're back for 2009! In this show: Listener letters, a brief chat about Raw Diet, and a quick answer for Ted on drive, which we'll be dedicating an entire episode to very soon. Primarily, we discuss handling and grooming (it's Spa Day at Canine Campus!) <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-alt:"Calisto MT"; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1107304683 0 0 159 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1073750139 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-priority:99; color:blue; mso-themecolor:hyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} span.EmailStyle16 {mso-style-type:personal; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-size:11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; color:windowtext;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> LINKS: Whole Dog Journal: http://www.whole-dog-journal.com/ Patricia McConnell: http://www.patriciamcconnell.com/ Susan Garrett:  http://www.youtube.com/clickerdogs Shirleychong.com Doggie Nail File: http://www.shirleychong.com/keepers/nailfile.html Raw feeding on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_feeding

Deven Gaston's delayed report from her last day at the 2006 APDT conference, with reports on Dr. Esther Schalke's research on shock collars ("Stress Symptoms Caused by the Use of Electric Training Collars on Dogs in Everyday Life Situations"), and what Dr. Patricia McConnell had to say about her new book, "The Biology of Emotion in People & Dogs". Further Info from the APDT website:Stress Symptoms Caused by the Use of Electric Training Collars on Dogs in Everyday Life SituationsEsther Schalke, PhDThis class will review the research that has been conducted into the efficacy and welfare implications of the use of electric shock collars. After which the reasons why the Institute of Animal Welfare and Behavior at Hanover University of Veterinary Medicine decided to expand on this research. Their methods, findings and the implications for the use of these devices in practice will be discussed in detail.The Biology of Emotion in People & DogsPatricia McConnell, PhDEver looked at your dog and wondered how much of her emotional life is like your own? Learn the biology of emotion in you and your dog, and why it's reasonable to believe that both species share the emotions of love, fear, sadness, happiness and anger. This presentation will introduce Patricia's new book: For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend. Be the first to learn what emotions are, how the brain controls them and why we share so many of them with our dogs.Links: The Biology of Emotion in People & Dogs, by Patricia McConnell, PhD The Expression of the Emotions in Man And Animals, by Charles Darwin(wiki) Esther Schalke, PhD, DVM Music provided by the PodShow Podsafe Music Network: Anne Heaton: Underdog