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Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast

For the last 4 years, FDSA has been working to provide high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports online, using only the most current and progressive training methods. And now we’re bringing that same focus to you in a new way. Each episode of the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast will feature an interview with a leading name in the competitive dog sports training world, talking in depth about issues that often get overlooked by traditional training methods. We'll release a new episode every Friday, so stay tuned--and happy training!
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Now displaying: 2018

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Feb 15, 2018

SHOW NOTES:

Summary:

Julie Flanery has been working professionally with dogs and their handlers since 1993. She focuses on the needs of the dog and helping people form a strong relationship, through clear communication, and positive reinforcement.

She has placed Obedience, Freestyle, Rally-Obedience, Rally-FrEe, Parkour, Agility, and Trick Dog titles on her dogs. She began competing in Musical Freestyle in 1999 and was the first to both title and earn a Heelwork to Music Championship on the West Coast. In 2001 she was named "Trainer of the Year" by the World Canine Freestyle Organization and has been a competition freestyle judge since 2003. Five years ago Julie developed the sport of Rally-FrEe to help freestylers increase the quality and precision of their performances. It has since become a stand-alone sport enjoyed by dog sport enthusiasts all over the world. Julie has been a workshop and seminar presenter both nationally and internationally. She currently trains and competes with her Tibetan Terrier in both Musical Freestyle and Rally-FrEe.

Next Episode: 

To be released 2/23/2018, featuring Kamal Fernandez, to talk about the benefits of competition and the concept of leadership in dog training.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we’ll be talking to Julie Flanery.

Julie has been working professionally with dogs and their handlers since 1993. She focuses on the needs of the dog and helping people form a strong relationship, through clear communication, and positive reinforcement.

She has placed Obedience, Freestyle, Rally-Obedience, Rally-FrEe, Parkour, Agility, and Trick Dog titles on her dogs. She began competing in Musical Freestyle in 1999 and was the first to both title and earn a Heelwork to Music Championship on the West Coast. In 2001 she was named "Trainer of the Year" by the World Canine Freestyle Organization and has been a competition freestyle judge since 2003. Five years ago Julie developed the sport of Rally-FrEe to help freestylers increase the quality and precision of their performances. It has since become a stand-alone sport enjoyed by dog sport enthusiasts all over the world. Julie has been a workshop and seminar presenter both nationally and internationally. She currently trains and competes with her Tibetan Terrier in both Musical Freestyle and Rally-FrEe.

Welcome back to the podcast Julie!

Julie Flanery: Thanks.

Melissa Breau: To start people out, can you just remind folks a little bit of information about your dog, what you do with her, and who she is?

Julie Flanery: Currently I work with my 7-year-old Tibetan Terrier, and we are competing in Musical Freestyle and In Sync, which is a version of Heelwork to Music, and also Rally-FrEe. She’s earned her Championships in both Freestyle and in Rally-FrEe, and a Grand Championship in Rally-FrEe, and we’re working towards our Grand Championship in Musical Freestyle and our Championship in In Sync.

Melissa Breau: Do you want to share her name?

Julie Flanery: Kashi.

Melissa Breau: Kashi. Excellent.

Julie Flanery: Kashi. Like the cereal, you know? Good for you and makes you feel good.

Melissa Breau: I like that! So I think we have a pretty fun topic lined up for today. I wanted to talk about the skills that trainers need but they sometimes don’t learn until they get pretty into dog sports. To start us out, I wanted to start with talking about shaping. What aspect of shaping do you feel is usually the hardest for new trainers to implement effectively and why?

Julie Flanery: I think there are a couple of things that can be really hard for trainers. The first thing, I think there is a very fine line between clicking what you observe and anticipating what the dog will do, so that your click is well timed. There’s a tendency to wait until you actually see it, and then in that moment we have to process that information before we can act on it and actually click it. While this happens really quickly in the brain, there’s still some latency, and this can actually result in late clicks, so you’re giving the dog information that isn’t actually what you want to convey. So first, having a picture in your head of the path the dog is likely to take, and shaping that behavior.

Let’s say you’re shaping going under a chair. You can picture the dog’s most likely path from where he’s starting, as well as from where your reward is placed, and have a sense ahead of time of where your click points will be. You want to anticipate those click points. You at least want to have the precursor to your click points in mind and what they’ll look like. This way you’re going to be able to anticipate the dog’s next likely action, and that’s really imperative to good click timing.

In a lot of respects this also relates to raising criteria, which is another place that handlers tend to have a lot of difficulty, and they’re often getting stuck by clicking the same criteria for longer than is actually beneficial. You can often get stuck by clicking that same criteria for longer than we want, longer than is beneficial, so having that picture ahead of time can actually help the handler move forward in their criteria shifts as well.

Melissa Breau: You mentioned the going under a chair example. If you know you’re going to have the dog go under the chair, what is it that you’re looking for? That first drop of the head? The drop of the shoulders? Am I on the right track?

Julie Flanery: Depending on where the dog is starting, you might just be looking for looking at the chair. That might be your first click point. And certainly before the dog can move toward the chair, he’s going to look at it. Before the dog can go under it, he’s going to move towards it. But before he can move towards it, he needs to look at it. So you’re looking at that progression and the behavior to determine where your click points are going to be so you can anticipate those things. If you put your chair out and then you go stand next to the dog and wait for something, you’ve probably already missed that first click. So setting that chair out, the dog is likely to look at it. That would be your first click. And then moving towards it, we can anticipate he’s going to take a step towards the chair if he has any experience interacting with props. So we’re anticipating that, and we’re looking for it to happen, and we’re trying to time our click and mark it just as he’s doing that. If we wait until he actually does it, we’re probably going to be late in our timing.

Melissa Breau: Talking about timing, I know that one of the things you stress in your shaping class is the importance of good handler mechanics. I wanted to get into that a little bit. Can you share what you mean by that and how it’s supposed to work? Maybe where folks tend to go wrong when it comes to mechanics?

Julie Flanery: Sure. I think that we make it much harder on our dogs to shape than it needs to be sometimes. The dog needs to concentrate on the task, the task of figuring out “How do I earn reinforcement?” Remember, the dog doesn’t know we’re working toward something specific. He doesn’t know there is an end-behavior goal. We know that, but he doesn’t. He only knows that if he does certain things, he earns rewards.

But I do believe that experienced shaping dogs do learn there is an end result and that they are working toward completion. They learn there is a process being followed and can anticipate the next steps, what we sometimes call “learning to learn.” They can anticipate within the process, once we have allowed them to experience it enough, which I believe is why some dogs seem to be better at getting behaviors on verbal cue while other dogs seem to struggle with that a bit. So the more verbal cues the dog learns, the quicker he learns the next ones, so there’s an understanding of the process, what comes next, and the understanding from experience that verbal cues have meaning and value.

In terms of clean training, clean training is really about creating the best environment for the dog to concentrate on the task and not be distracted from that. So in shaping, the primary information we want to provide to the dog is the marker and subsequent reinforcement. This is really all he needs within the shaping process in order to progress toward the handler’s end goal. Yet we’re constantly hindering their ability to do so in a variety of ways. Hovering over the bait bag, hands in pockets, reaching for food, or having food in our hands all indicate reward is imminent. The only thing that should indicate that reward is imminent is the sound of our marker. Anything else is overshadowing and diminishing the meaning and value of that marker: the click. That’s our most powerful communication tool while shaping, and yet we’re constantly putting in these extraneous movements or chattering to our dogs, and all of this, if done when shaping, can draw their attention away from the task.

Think about if you’re concentrating on a crossword puzzle and someone keeps interrupting you to ask a question. It’s going to take longer to complete your puzzle, as there’s all this extraneous stimulus that you keep having to deal with. So in our attempts to help our dog — getting the treat out faster, saying encouraging things, moving in a way that we think will prompt the dog — he’s having to filter through what is relevant and what is not, and in our efforts to help, we’re actually pulling the dog off task. So let them work. Your job is to provide relevant information and not to cloud the learning process by doing things that distract the dog from working towards that task. Does that make sense?

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Sometimes it just helps to stop and think about, OK, this is the process I’m actually following: it’s a click and a pause and then reach for the treat, that piece.

Julie Flanery: Right. In terms of mechanical skills, those are the things we’re talking about. We’re talking about, What is the handler doing with their body? Is their body still and quiet? Are they allowing the dog to focus on what’s important, or are they taking the dog’s focus away from that because there’s something going on with the handler that isn’t really adding to the learning process and is actually detracting from it.

Melissa Breau: Even knowing all that, people tend to get frustrated when they’re trying shaping, especially if they haven’t done a lot of it, because they wind up with a dog that does one of two things. They wind up with a dog that stands or sits there and stares at them, especially if they’ve done a lot of focus work, or they get a dog that is throwing out behavior so fast that they’re having trouble targeting one specific thing or getting motion towards the behavior that they’re looking for. Any tips for folks struggling with those issues? I don’t know if there are generic tips that apply to both, but maybe you could talk to that a little bit.

Julie Flanery: That can be a huge deterrent and pretty frustrating to someone that’s just starting out in shaping, and I know many, many trainers who gave up or basically said, “It doesn’t work.” It’s not that the process and protocol don’t work. It’s that they need to learn how to apply it effectively. So these are two separate issues: the dog that stands still and does nothing, and the dog that just starts frantically throwing behaviors at you. But in general I’d say they have the same solution, and it’s a pretty easy mantra to remember: Click for anything but. Anything but standing still and staring earns a click, even if you have to toss a cookie to start them moving and give you an opportunity to click. Anything but standing still. A lot can happen, even in a dog that’s standing still, but for a lot of new shapers, the two-legged kind, larger movements are going to be easier for them to see. So getting the dog moving and clicking anything but standing still will help.

For those dogs that are frantically throwing things at you, you want to click way early, before they have an opportunity to start throwing behaviors out. You want to be ready before you get the dog out. A lot of dogs, we give these cues that we’re about to start shaping. We pick up our clicker, we put the bait bag on, we put our hand in our pocket, we go to a certain place, and our dogs, before we even in our minds are starting to train, are already starting to throw behaviors out at us. All of those “pre-cues” that we’re giving are actually cues to the dog to offer. So be ready before you get the dog out.

The worst thing you can do with both these kinds of dogs is look at them expectantly, like, “OK, do something,” or “Do something else.” Sometimes we have to create those first few clicks to get the dog on the right path, so setting up our environment or a session to prevent both of those things by creating some type of an effective antecedent. So if a dog is constantly throwing things at me, then I might use a prop to direct his activity. Or I might click upon coming out of the crate and each step forward toward where we want to train.

Often, dogs that throw behaviors just aren’t being given enough information of what to do, so they’re giving you everything they can think of in hopes that one of those will get clicked. So rather than shaping toward something, the handler is waiting for it to occur. I want you to click — again, it’s “Click anything but,” so if you can take that moment of behavior — a single step, a single look, coming out of the crate — and click that, that can start to define for the dog the path you’re going to lead them onto. It can tell them, “Oh, I don’t have to keep throwing all of this stuff, because she’s already clicking something. Now what did she click, so that I can repeat it?”

The other thing that often happens with these dogs that tend to throw things or push farther in the criteria than we want them to be is although we aren’t willing to drop back in the criteria, to move forward again. When the movement gets out of hand and you feel like the dog is pushing, or you’re pushing, or you’re rushing, it’s OK to just stop, breathe, go back earlier in the criteria, click something way less than what you’ve been clicking, and then build it gradually back up again. So again, I think the answer is the same for both those situations: Click anything but.

Melissa Breau: Excellent. I like that. It’s nice, short, and easy to remember. This seems like a good point to dig in more a little bit on criteria. You were talking a little bit there about thinking about your criteria maybe a little differently than most people do. Are there general guidelines for how fast to raise criteria? I know you talked a little bit about going backwards in your criteria. When is it a good idea to do that?

Julie Flanery: For me, and I think most of the Fenzi instructors, we all have a pretty common idea about raising or lowering criteria, and that is when it’s predictable, when you can predict they’re going to give you the exact same criteria again. I like to include the word confident, so when it’s confident and predictable, then increase criteria, and if you have two incorrect responses in a row, then it’s time to lower criteria.

For my dog, oftentimes she’s ready to raise criteria and looks confident, and for me, it’s predictable in her within three repetitions. I can tell whether it’s time to raise criteria, stay where I’m at, or lower criteria. A response might be predictable, but I’m not seeing quite the confidence I want to see, and so I might hold off another repetition or two to ensure that she really has some good understanding of that. But certainly if I see two incorrect responses in a row, then I’m going to lower criteria.

Now that precludes that you know where your criteria shifts are, because when I say “incorrect responses,” you have to know what that is and what that isn’t. Let’s say I’m training a bow, and I am watching for the head and shoulder lowering, and she’s moving in a progression forward, so I’m clicking the head drop, click the head drop again, then she lowers slightly lower, I click that, and I’m anticipating what her next movement is, so that I can actually see and anticipate, through my click, when she will do that.

Let’s say, for shaping, an incorrect response might be either less than what I previously clicked or no response whatsoever. She’s predictably dropping her head and starting to lower her chest, but maybe her elbows aren’t on the ground yet, and she’s done that same thing three times in a row, then I’m not going to click that anymore. I’m going to wait, and hopefully she’ll give me a little bit more, based on the fact that I’ve clicked this previously, she knows she’s on the right track, and she’ll be like, “Hey, did you see this?” and give me a little bit more, and I can click that.

So it was predictable that she was going to drop her chest a little bit and her head is lowering. I don’t want to keep clicking that because I’m going to get stuck there, because she’s going to think, “Oh, this is right, I think I’ll keep doing this.” If she is at that point, say, and the next offering, the next rep, her head isn’t quite as low, so I don’t click that and she just stands up. So she offers again and she still doesn’t get as low as the previous one, and she just stands up. Then I’m going to say, “OK, she doesn’t have clear enough understanding of what the next step is, so I want to build confidence in the previous.” In that case I’m going to lower my criteria maybe for a couple more reps and then start to build back up again. Does that make sense?

Melissa Breau: Absolutely, and that was a great example because it walked us through thinking through the different steps and the bits and pieces there.

Julie Flanery: Hopefully you can actually visualize that a little bit so you can actually see and be able to anticipate what that next step is. We all know what it looks like for a dog to bow and bring his chest and elbows down to the ground. You can map that out in your head and be able to anticipate what comes next, and if what you expect to come next isn’t happening, you’re stagnated, or you’re getting lesser responses, then that’s showing that the dog doesn’t understand what that forward progression is next.

Melissa Breau: You said something recently, and I can’t remember if I originally heard it in a webinar or if it’s from class, but you were talking about “leaps of learning” and how to respond if, while shaping, the dog suddenly makes a big leap in the right direction. Maybe we’re trying for four paws on a platform, they’ve been struggling to give two, and suddenly they step on it with all four paws. Obviously you click it. Do you mind just sharing it here? Because I thought it was really interesting and I hadn’t heard that before.

Julie Flanery: I don’t know if I will say exactly what you remember, but I understand what you’re asking, and it did come up recently in the shaping class I’m teaching that you are a student of — and you’re doing very well, by the way.

Melissa Breau: Thank you.

Julie Flanery: So there are times when it seems like our dogs get it right away, like, all of a sudden — what you just described —they were struggling with two and all of a sudden there’s four and “Yay!” That doesn’t mean you’re going to hold out for four feet on the platform now. One correct response doesn’t indicate understanding, and yet sometimes we forge ahead as if it does.

I want to see not only predictable responses, I want to see confident, predictable responses, so that leap up of four feet on the platform might have looked confident, but we don’t really know if it’s predictable until we get a few reps. So I want to make sure that I see confident, predictable responses before I increase criteria, even if it appears that they’ve got it.

Now, having said that, I don’t want to stay stuck at the same criterion too long, so each handler has to determine what that looks like in their dog. For me, I can recognize confidence in my own dog, in Kashi, and for her, if she provides the same response three to four times in a row, that’s predictable, and I’m going to go ahead and raise criteria there. If I made an error in judgment, I can always drop back down, but my goal is still going to be always forward progression. I don’t want to stay stuck in any single criterion for too long, and that might be different for each dog, but consider your definition of predictable. For me, again, if she does it three or four times in a row and she looks confident in her actions, I can predict that she’ll do it that fourth time or that fifth time. If I can predict it, I don’t want to stay there.

Kathy Sdao talked about criteria shifts in one of her lectures in relation to a recording being played on a record player, and how the needle can get stuck in a groove and not advance, so the record keeps skipping over the same place in the music. Well, if we click the same criteria for too many reps, the dog will get stuck in that groove, and you risk some increased frustration in working to get out of that groove. Sometimes lowering criteria is the way out. Sometimes withholding the click is the way out. Either way, you need to get out of that groove.

Melissa Breau: Frustration on both the dog and the handler’s part.

Julie Flanery: Exactly, exactly. It’s kind of like that dog that stands still and does nothing. You need to get out of that groove. What I talked about earlier about having a picture in your mind of the likely path the dog will take – that will help you not get stuck. I think sometimes people get stuck because they just don’t know what to click next. So having a picture in your head, thinking ahead of time, “What is this process going to look like?” will help you anticipate that and will help you move forward in the process, to progress in the process, and not get stuck at any one point.

Melissa Breau: What about duration? First of all, is it possible to actually shape duration, and then if so, how is shaping duration different than shaping more active behaviors?

Julie Flanery: That’s a really interesting question, and it’s interesting because of the way you framed it. You said, “Is it actually possible to shape duration?” and that surprised me because yes, it’s totally possible to shape duration, and I think really in general all duration is shaped in that we are marking and rewarding in small increments towards that end behavior, towards that extended duration of behavior.

Shaping duration is like shaping any other skill, though your increments need to be sliced very thin in order to not get some other behavior in there. You’re still withholding the click for a little more, and for most dogs withholding the click means do something else or push ahead. Duration needs to be more finely sliced so that we don’t get some of that junk behavior in there. But that little bit, little generally less than what you might hold out for in a moving behavior, so you’re not waiting long chunks of time, too, what we have to measure can be more difficult, so it’s not as difficult to measure movement, as there is time and space, you can see a dog’s action and how it carries him forward. So clicking movement, marking movement, in increments is not too difficult for the observer.

In building duration, there’s only time, there’s no space, and we aren’t very good at keeping track of time. If I paused here, then I asked three different people how many seconds did I pause, they would all have a different answer. So I often either count in my head or out loud to measure the advancement of my duration criteria. In appropriate criteria shifts for duration, especially since they should be sliced thin, we often aren’t very consistent in our forward progression of time, and that can lead to inconsistency and a lack of understanding in the dog. I think that the reason people have difficulty shaping duration is because they aren’t slicing those increments of time small enough. They’re thinking of it like they would shape movement and larger pieces of behavior, and in shaping duration you can’t do that because the dog is going to pull off.

Let’s take for example a sustained nose target. We want the dog to hold that nose target for — let’s say our goal is three seconds. Four seconds, three seconds. Initially we click the act of pressing the nose and we click immediately. That tells the dog what the intended behavior is to which we’re now going to start to attach duration. Once the dog presses the nose and expects a click and it doesn’t come, he’s likely to pull off, which is not going to get clicked either.

Often when we withhold a click, which is what just happened here, on the next rep we will see a slightly higher-energy behavior, a little bit more, a little bit stronger, again it’s like that “Hey, didn’t you see this? Look, I’m going to do it a little bit more so you can see it.” In that moment of that second offering after the withheld click, you’re likely to see a little more pressure — and I know it’s hard to see, and this is why hand touches are a good thing for this, because you’ll feel that pressure — and in that moment of more pressure, that takes a slightly longer amount of time. The time it takes for your dog to just touch something, and the time it takes a dog to touch something and put a little pressure, is slightly longer, and that’s what you’re clicking.

That pressure is also criteria of sustained nose target, because they’re going to have to put a little pressure there in order to keep their nose there. So that slice right there is super-thin, and once the dog pushes on again, you may have to go through a couple of clicks of he pushes, or, I’m sorry, he touches, it’s not sustained even for a fraction of a second, you wait, that second one is sustained a fraction of a second, you click. Then you can start to extend by not seconds but almost fractions of seconds. So you’re not counting one-one-thousand. You’re counting one, click, one two, click, one two, click. If the dog pulls off, there’s no click.

So the dog is starting to understand, through both the withheld click for when he comes off and the click for continued small slivers of duration, that by keeping the nose to the hand, or the wall, or wherever you wanted the target, that’s what he’s building toward. But as soon as you start to increase that too far, too fast, you’re going to get frustration, you’re going to get poking at the wall, which is not what you want, and so the key to duration, to shaping duration, is really making sure that, number one, you are slicing those increments very small, and that those increments are very consistent, that you’re not going all over the place with your duration, and that’s where the counting or doing something that helps you measure that passing of time so that you have appropriate clicks will help.

I’m not going to deny that it’s a harder concept for some people to get, or it’s a harder skill for some people to get, but if you understand the concept of shaping, and progressing through a behavior through small increments, it’s just a matter of how finely you slice it for duration. That’s all.

Melissa Breau: That’s really interesting, because typically you think of it’s always easier to teach a dog to do something in the absence of a behavior.

Julie Flanery: Correct. But you have to think of duration as a behavior. Does that make sense? Duration isn’t the absence of a behavior. It’s the continuation of a behavior. It’s the absence of movement, and we’ve always been taught “Click for movement, feed for position” — still a very, very good rule. But in duration it seems as if it’s the absence of a behavior, when in actuality it’s the extension of a behavior.

Melissa Breau: That gives me a lot to think on.

Julie Flanery: Yeah, I’m sure.

Melissa Breau: Hopefully it gives a lot for everybody to think on. But I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about training in general. I think you gave a great webinar last year on verbal cues, and it’s part of what inspired the topic for today, the idea of what you didn’t learn in puppy class. I feel like the concept of when to add a cue and how to go about it sometimes gets glossed over for a number of reasons, obviously, when dog owners are first learning to train. So when do you typically add a cue to behavior and how do you go about it?

Julie Flanery: For me, something that I touched on earlier, I like the dog to have confident, predictable, correct responses that include the majority if not all of my criteria for that behavior. I say majority because there are some times, or some things, that I can add later, and the cue actually helps me draw that base behavior out of the dog.

So, for example, duration or distance may be something I don’t have yet, but will go ahead and put it on cue and build those in later. The behavior may or may not be fully generalized when I put it on cue, depending on the behavior. I may use cue discrimination as part of my generalization process. For me, the criteria, the majority of the criteria, needs to be predictable and confident and I’m certain that I’m going to get correct responses. As soon as I have that, I will start the process of putting the behavior on cue.

Now, having said that, that will fluctuate, so I might have predictable, confident, correct responses in a session in the morning, and so partway through that session I start to add the cue. But maybe that afternoon or the next day, when I start my session, I’m not seeing the same confidence or the same predictability, and in that case I’m not going to continue to use the cue or add the cue in that session.

There’s kind of an ebb and flow to our dogs’ ability to maintain predictability when they’re first learning behaviors. It has to do with that leap of learning we were talking about earlier, about not assuming that because the dog does it correct once that they have understanding, and it’s the same with adding the cue. I do want to take advantage of my dog’s predictable responses in any given session, those predictable responses that again that are confident and contain the majority of my criteria. But just because I’ve started putting the behavior on cue doesn’t mean that that next session, or that next location that I might work the behavior, that my dog is ready then to put it on cue.

It’s kind of like Denise’s “Work the dog in front of you.” That dog changes from session to session, and so my training strategies have to change session to session, depending on what he’s giving me at the start of that session. So again: predictable, I’m going to insert the cue; not predictable, I’m going to hold off a little bit. And that may all very well be with the exact same behaviors over different sessions.

I think you are right in using the term “glossed over.” It’s a part of the process that few spend very much time planning or implementing. It’s either almost like an afterthought — “Oh yeah, now I need to put the cue on” — or they make the assumption that if they just start using the cue while training, the dog will get it somehow. So that process they apply is often random and very inefficient.

Overlapping the behavior and the cue is a really common thing that I see. Cues should always precede behaviors with nothing in between, no junk behavior in between the cue and the behavior. You want it to have meaning for them. In putting behaviors on cue or transferring the cue, you really need to set that up. So if you’re shaping, you first need a predictable, correct response. Are you noticing a theme here, Melissa? A predictable, correct response with confidence — that’s really key to the dog’s understanding. If the response is confident and correct and predictable, then we can start to assume some understanding. Until that happens, though, we’re still working towards that. Once you have that, you insert your cue just prior to the dog either offering the behavior or the behavior being prompted.

For example, we might have used a hand signal, we might not be shaping, we might have used a hand signal, or we might be prompting the dog in some other way, a visual cue or a prop might prompt the dog to interact with it. So just before the key phrase is, just prior to the dog offering the behavior or performing the behavior, that’s when you insert the cue. Not as the dog is doing the behavior. Cues always precede behavior. It’s why they’re called antecedents. It’s that old ABC: the cue is the antecedent, then behavior, then consequence.

So when putting a cue to shape behavior, where people tend to shoot themselves in the foot is continuing to reward offered behavior. They might have started to put the behavior on cue, great, the dog is predictable, the dog is consistent, you’re doing the correct thing by inserting the cue before the behavior, but unfortunately, you might be continuing to reward that offered behavior. So once you start to put the behavior on cue, execution on cue is the only thing that gets rewarded. Otherwise there’s no value in the cue to the dog. If he can offer and get rewarded, or if he can get rewarded for doing it on cue, you’re not going to get stimulus control because there’s no value in the cue. Now there’s a caveat to that.

Melissa Breau: Of course.

Julie Flanery: Yeah, and you’ll learn about it next week in class, but there are times when you have a behavior that’s on cue and you’re going to want to remove the cue and encourage the dog to offer it again so that you can either fix or improve on the behavior. Maybe something’s gone a little bit wrong, or you’re not getting the criteria you used to have with it. It’s gone a bit south. Then you want to remove that cue so that you can refine or improve the behavior, and then put that cue back on. That’s a little more advanced process that is an important process too.

Cues are cool. To me, putting the behavior on cue is the most important part of training the behavior, if you ever want to be able to draw it out of your dog. If you want the dog to respond reliably, then you have to really apply that process of putting it on cue very succinctly and very deliberately and not in a random fashion. We don’t need cues if we don’t care when the dog performs the behavior. But we do care. That’s why we train. So cues should be a priority, and understanding how to put behaviors on cue should be a priority in any handler’s learning.

Melissa Breau: I think a lot of people struggle with that concept: the idea of getting something on stimulus control, getting a behavior to the point where it is reliable but also only actually happens on cue.

Julie Flanery: And the reason is exactly that, because we have a tendency to still click off the behavior when it’s offered. We love it, we like it, it’s cute, I mean, “Oh, look at you, you did it again. How great,” and we have been patterned to click that offered behavior. We have to get ourselves out of that pattern. The rule is: Once you start putting the behavior on cue, you only click it when you cue it. That’s what builds stimulus control.

Melissa Breau: Let’s say that you like to train, and you often get behaviors to that point where they’re reliable enough for a cue. Is there any downside to having a bunch of half-trained behaviors that you never actually attach a cue to? …

Julie Flanery: Well, that depends a little on your goals. If your goal is to compete and you need those behaviors, well, that’s a really obvious detriment. But even more than that, in leaving behaviors what we’re calling “half-trained,” you’re denying your dog the opportunity and the experience to learn how to learn, how to learn a behavior to completion, and how to understand when you want him to perform that said behavior.

Like most trainers, I love the acquisition stage. I love shaping, I love developing a behavior, but I also need my dog to understand the whole process if I ever want those behaviors to be of any use to me. I need my dog to learn how the process of adding a cue works so that he can also anticipate what comes next in the process.

The more experience I give him at learning the whole process complete through generalization, adding the cue, and fluency, the faster and easier it is to train the next behavior, because it becomes something we are both working through the pieces to completion. The dog can help drive the process forward. That not only builds stronger behaviors, that builds faster behaviors, and that builds truly greater teamwork, in my mind, because you both are on the same path. You both have the same type of goal.

But if we have a lot of half-trained behaviors, and only some of our behaviors are trained through completion, the dog just doesn’t have enough experience to understand the full process and help drive that process to completion.

Melissa Breau: A little birdie told me that maybe you’re working on a class on that topic.

Julie Flanery: I was asking the other instructors if they thought a class on finishing up all those half-trained behaviors would be a good idea, and they all jumped on it. So I’m planning to call it Mission Accomplished, and in effect you’ll be providing your dog lots of opportunity and experience at learning how to learn.

I think, for some, the reason that they haven’t finished these behaviors is because they and their dog just need more experience at how to do it effectively and efficiently. People can get stuck in the process, just like dogs, and oftentimes that’s why we have those half-trained behaviors. Maybe we don’t know what we should do next, how to get it on cue, how to generalize it — all of those things that are involved in having a completed, reliable behavior.

So hopefully that class will help some people. I think it will be a really fun class, and I’m just starting to develop it, but you’ve given me a lot of ideas in this podcast now that I can include in there, so that’s super.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. Do you have any idea yet when it’s going to show up on the schedule?

Julie Flanery: Oh my gosh, I have no idea. I’m just trying to get through this session. But I am keeping some notes and have some ideas floating around in my brain, and the schedule is a little bit set, but every now and then I’ll add in a class if it’s ready to go, so hopefully within the next few sessions it will be up on the schedule.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. I’m looking forward to it, I will tell you that.

Julie Flanery: Good.

Melissa Breau: I think the other topic that gets overlooked — for lack of a better word — in pet training classes where most of us start out is fading treats from the training picture, so how to start reducing reinforcement. At what point in the process do you feel like a behavior is well enough established that you can start that process, and how do you usually tend to go about that?

Julie Flanery: First thing somebody said is, I don’t want the behavior well established before I take food out of my hand. That’s personally for me. My rule of thumb for luring and removing the food from my hand is really first session, three to five reps, then present the hand cue, it needs to look exactly like my active lure, and I use it as a test. In general, especially dogs that have gone through this process, most dogs can do at least one correct response, or a partial response, without the food in your hand, due to the perception that the food is actually there, and you can build on that.

Again, this is kind of important in terms of what we just talked about, about dogs learning the process. If a dog has gone through lure reward training and understands that at a point early in the process the food will no longer be an active lure, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be rewarded for following the hand signal, then that’s a much easier leap for them than the dog that has an expectation of having food in the hand all the time, and really the only time he gets rewarded is when there is food in the hand. So that’s one of the issues is we tend to reward less if we don’t have the food right in our hand.

But really it goes back to that teaching the dog the process so he has an appropriate expectation, and so it’s not difficult to make those criteria shifts. The criteria shift of having food in the hand to having no food in the hand — that’s criteria shift that the dog and handler go through. So three to five reps, and then I will remove the food from my hand and I will click early. I won’t wait for the full behavior. I will click the dog following an empty hand cue on the path to the end behavior. I don’t need to have the full behavior before I click the first time I take food out of my hand.

If you tend to lure, if you use the lure for several sessions, then that’s what your dog is going to expect. Lures are really effective for showing criteria, I do use lures on occasion, they’re very effective at building patterns for the dog, but the sooner the dog learns to offer the criteria without food in your hand, the faster you’re on your way to a more robust behavior, one that’s going to, in my mind, have more strength and more longevity. So when I use lures, it’s as a means to jumpstart my dog’s understanding of what they should be offering.

I think lures are an important tool, and I don’t think we need to remove them from our toolbox, but I do think that people tend to keep food in their hand for far too long, far too deep into the process, so it becomes too much of an expectation for the dog, too much of a prompt, certainly. I hate to use the word “crutch,” but in a way it is, because really, until the food is gone, they’re just following food. I don’t believe that that stronger learning process starts to take place until the dog is initiating the behavior without prompts.

Melissa Breau: That certainly matched my experience.

Julie Flanery: I think that’s why so many trainers now are really delving into shaping and are really starting to use that more as a primary tool than luring.

Melissa Breau: Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Julie! I really appreciate it.

Julie Flanery: I had a great time. I hope I get to come back again. I’m sorry I took so long. I get excited about this stuff and I love sharing it, and I want to share that with people, so I really appreciate you having me back here.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. I think folks are going to take a ton out of this. There’s a lot of great information here, so thank you, seriously.

Julie Flanery: Super.

Melissa Breau: And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in!

We’ll be back next week, this time with Kamal Fernandez to talk about the benefits of competition and the concept of leadership in dog training.

And guys, this week I want to repeat my special request from the last few episodes. If you listen to podcasts, I’m sure you’ve heard other people say this, but reviews in iTunes have a HUGE impact on helping new people find the show and in letting iTunes know that our show is worth listening to. It helps us get recommended and it helps us get more eyeballs on the podcast and ears. So if you’ve enjoyed this episode or any of the previous ones, I’d really appreciate it if you could take a moment and leave us a review over in iTunes.

And if you haven’t already, subscribe while you’re there to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

CREDITS:

Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Feb 9, 2018

SHOW NOTES:

Summary:

Denise Fenzi is the founder of the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy (FDSA). She has competed in a wide range of dog sports, titling dogs in obedience, tracking, Schutzhund, Mondioring, herding, conformation, and agility.

She is best-known for her flashy and precise obedience work, as demonstrated by two AKC OTCH dogs and perfect scores in both Schutzhund and Mondioring sport obedience. Her specialty is in developing motivation, focus, and relationship in competition dogs, and she has consistently demonstrated the ability to train and compete with dogs using motivational methods in sports where compulsion is the norm.

Next Episode: 

To be released 2/16/2018, featuring Julie Flanery, talking about all the things you were never taught in puppy class.

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 Denise Fenzi.

At this point, Denise probably needs to introduction, and I want to save every minute of this interview that we can for what we’re here to talk about today: the benefits of play.

So welcome back to the podcast Denise!

Denise Fenzi: Hi Melissa. Thank you for having me.

Melissa Breau: I’m excited. This is a good topic. To start us out, do you want to just remind listeners who each of the dogs is that you share your life with right now?

Denise Fenzi: I have three dogs. Raika is the oldest. She’s 13-and-a-half and doing very well. There’s Lyra, and I believe she’s about 6 now, and she is also doing well. And there is little Brito, my terrier mix. He’s 4 now.

Melissa Breau: It seems like it was not long ago that you got him.

Denise Fenzi: Yeah. Every time I think about it, I’m kind of amazed at how time goes by.

Melissa Breau: As I mentioned in the intro, we’re going to talk about play today… and I think a lot of people who sign up for your class on the topic, they’re thinking about one thing: its benefits for competition. So do you want to just briefly talk about what those are, and how play fits into the competition picture?

Denise Fenzi: Sure. My online play class covers personal play, which is interaction without toys and food, and also covers toy play and play with food. Most people, when they talk about play, personal play, are thinking in terms of what they can do when they go in a competition ring with their dog when they don’t have their cookies and toys. That’s actually pretty understandable and is actually what caused me to explore the issue in the first place. But the longer I’ve been playing with it, and teaching the class, and exploring the topic, the more I’ve realized that the question’s a little bit premature. It probably makes more sense to think about play in terms of building the underlying relationship, and less energy should be spent on what you are going to do with that play.

The reason it matters is because the play you can use in the ring may have absolutely nothing to do with the play you do at home while you are working to develop your relationship. But you can’t jump ahead. You have to go through the process. So it’s kind of an issue of goal versus process.

I have noticed — I’ve taught this class many times now, I would say maybe five times — and I have noticed that the students come into the class with a different perspective. The very first time I taught the class it was kind of universal. Every person said the same thing, which is, “But how will I use this in competition?” And honestly, this term, so far not one student has actually said that. So change is taking place. I don’t know if it’s because the reputation of the class has encouraged that, or if it’s our student base has developed and they see things differently. I’m not sure, but it certainly has saved me some time writing to people, “Please let’s focus on the process for now. We’ll get to that later.”

Melissa Breau: What kind of benefits can learning to play with your dog really have on that underlying relationship?

Denise Fenzi: The one I usually bring up first is that to play well with a dog without food or toys requires an incredible amount of attention to how the dog is responding to what you are doing, kind of on a second-by-second basis, because if you do something that you think is attractive to your dog and your dog has a different opinion, you have about a half a second to figure that out before your dog avoids you. Now I look at this as all a great big learning opportunity, so it’s not a problem that your dog runs off when you do something. You say to yourself, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t do that again.”

What I find is that the process of teaching play is probably the fastest way for me to teach people how to observe their dog’s body language, because everything is so immediate. The handler does something, the dog responds, the handler responds, the dog gives a final response, and if you made good decisions at those two junctures, then you will have a good response or a neutral response, and if you misread the dog’s behavior, you will get instant feedback, and I find that’s invaluable.

Melissa Breau: So how does that compare or maybe mix with play’s role as a motivator for training?

Denise Fenzi: Well, within training, if I still have my food and my toys, I primarily use it as a way to break up sessions. For example, over the last month I’ve been recording every single session with Lyra and Brito learning to heel on my right-hand side, which is a new thing for all of us. That means I’m spending longer than I should on each training session. So let’s say that an ideal training session with a new skill is a minute, which is probably about right. After I’ve taken the time to set up the video camera and make it happen, just for purely pragmatic reasons I cannot do that. But what I can do is train for a minute, stop, and play with my dog. It can be as little as five seconds. As a matter of fact, it often … that would be normal. Five seconds, 10 seconds, maybe 15 or 20 seconds — that would be unusual — and then I can ask for another minute or two.

Those little mini-breaks relax everyone. They relax me and the dog, and they let go of the stress which is invariably part of learning. So while positive reinforcement training is designed to be fun and to be low stress, that doesn’t change the fact that sometimes the dog or the human is not getting it right and that builds up stress. So being able to play in the middle of a session is really a fantastic thing for everyone. If nothing else, it reminds the handler of why they have their dog, and it reminds the dog that “Everything’s good, mama still loves me even if I make some mistakes, everything is fine here.”

Melissa Breau: I know you touched on this a little bit already, but how does learning to play really help people read their dog and why is that beneficial?

Denise Fenzi: I think for anybody involved in dog training, being able to read your dog is 90 percent of the game. It’s actually so significant that now when people describe to me what is happening with their dog, I almost refuse to answer if I don’t have a video, because I find it so common that I see something different than they see. So when people can see what their dog is doing and accurately interpret it, their training is going to skyrocket. It’s hard to underestimate the value of accurately reading your dog’s behavior.

For example, when dogs walk off in the middle of training to sniff, the vast majority of novice trainers see that as the dog finding something better to do. They found a good smell. It takes a lot of time to learn that most of the time the dog is actually avoiding you, and while that’s a little uncomfortable, recognizing it for what it is, it’s not a condemnation of you as a person. It simply means that whatever you are doing at that moment at that time is causing distress to your dog. It’s nothing more than that. So if I’m in a training session and it seems to be going OK, and my dog starts to scratch or shows some other sign of distress, I don’t get upset about it. I just change my ways. That is something that play can give to you — that quick ability to in real time instantly identify how your dog is feeling.

And while I specifically called that distress, that’s equally true of a happy dog. So what are your dog’s happy signals? What do the ears do? What does the mouth do? What do the eyes do? What does the tail do? There’s a lot to the picture. And there’s just the sheer fun of it, right? So for the handler to look at their dog and recognize their dog really wants to be there, and to feel confident in that assessment, that really does amazing things for your training.

Melissa Breau: What about specifically for anxious dogs? Are there benefits to learning to play for those dogs?

Denise Fenzi: Personally, I don’t go in that direction in my classes. What I tell people is, “My job is going to be to help you become a better play partner to your dog.” That is my emphasis. However, I know that, for example, Amy Cook, who also teaches at the Academy, she uses play as a way of relaxing dogs in stressful situations, and also as a barometer for the dog’s suitability for the place where it’s at. So being able to play with an anxious dog is actually super-critical to behavior work. The other thing is, in my opinion, when you play with your dog, what you’re able to tell them is that everything’s OK and that you’re on their side. To be able to communicate that is a big deal. If I’m with somebody and I’m feeling a little nervous, they can absolutely hand me something to eat, it will certainly distract me. But if they put their hand on my shoulder and tell me, “You know what? It’s OK. It’s going to be OK. I’m right here with you,” that’s a completely different level of support. And I think being able to play with your dog, especially with an anxious dog, will take you in the right direction.

Melissa Breau: What about me as the human or handler? Is play really all about the dog, or are there benefits for me, too?

Denise Fenzi: A few years ago I was going to give — not a webinar — a presentation on play to an audience, and I thought it might be a tough sell to that particular audience. So I felt the need to have a little bit of background and backup for my assertion that I think play is important — and I sure hope nobody contacts me and asks me for the information now, because I don’t have it anymore — but I found quite a few studies which talked about the effects on both the dog and the handler on mutual interaction. In some cases the interaction was simply looking at each other. In other cases it was playing together, sometimes it was about playing ball or whatever. And there was just a lovely thread of discussions about how the hormones on both sides of the picture here, for both the dog and the human, the happy hormones went up, the sad hormones went down, and the end result is a more content picture. Like I said, I don’t have that anymore, but I’m sure if somebody wants to investigate it they can find that information again.

Melissa Breau: It would be interesting to look up some of that stuff and be able to point to some of those studies. I know that you also teach engagement, obviously, so do you mind just talking a little bit about how play, or being able to play with your dog, can impact or influence your engagement training? And maybe just start out with a little bit of explanation on what engagement training is, for those who may not know.

Denise Fenzi: The word engagement is a little bit complicated, because when we say “to engage another,” we simply mean to mutually interact. When I talk about engagement training, I’m actually talking about a very specific training process which teaches the dog that it’s their responsibility to let the handler know, first of all, when they’re comfortable, and secondly, that they would like to work. The second part of that involves the dog engaging the handler in play or strong interactive behaviors. So an example of play would be that the dog play-bows at the human and the human responds. An example of just a strong behavior might be that the dog jumps on the person. So there’s variations. I teach engagement online, and I find that students who already have developed some repertoire of play with their dog have a much easier time with it because, first of all, it actually occurs to their dog to offer play, because engagement is a shaped process. It crosses the dog’s mind that maybe they should ask the owner to play and see what happens next. So that’s a huge benefit right there. The handlers who don’t have play training or some comfort with play, they struggle. Not only do their dogs not think to offer it, but even if their dog does think to offer it, they don’t know what to do next, and so now it sort of stops the process of training engagement and we redirect into the process of training play. And while that’s not terrible, I just find that most people came into engagement class to learn engagement, and the ones who came in with play already make a lot more progress on that skill, and the ones who have to stop and redirect simply don’t go as far. Now that’s no emergency, but for sure having play skills will make your engagement training easier.

Melissa Breau: Let’s assume that some of the folks listening are convinced… they want to give this a go, they want to focus on trying to play more with their dog. Where should they start? What are some good ways to start play, especially if it hasn’t been a big part of life with their dog before now?

Denise Fenzi: Well, right off the bat, loud and crazy is probably not the direction you want to go. Generally when people think about play, they think they’re going to imitate how dogs play with each other. That’s a little unrealistic in terms of a place to start. So unless you’re 5 years of age, you are not going to run around the back yard like a crazy person with your dog, and even if you did, your dog would think that was so bizarre and out of character that you would actually be likely to frighten your dog. And then I’ve noticed that people get a little intense and nervous because that’s not the response they were looking for, and that’s when they start to sort of, for lack of a better word, assault their dogs. They come up and start — they call it “playfully,” but anyway — they start pinching and pulling and doing weird things, and that drives the dog further into avoidance. So Rule Number One: start low key. I find it so much more effective to start with what we would normally call praise rather than play. Pet your dog, scratch their ears, gently and sweet. Now, from there, can you ratchet that up to look something like what happens when you walk in the front door and your dog is glad to see you? So maybe you went from a gentle massaging-type interaction, let’s call that a 1 or 2 out of 10, to something a little more “Oh boy, you’re home, Mom, I’m so glad to see you.” Let’s say that’s in your 3 to 6 range, depending on your dog. Can you start to get that behavior you get at the front door in your play session when you don’t have that context? What do you do at the front door? How do you interact with your dog? Do you clap? Do you pet them? Do you talk to them? And what happens, and what does your dog look like at that moment? What kind of an expression does your dog have? All of that should feel fairly natural and seamless to most people. From there we can start ratcheting up, and little taps and running away. That brings me to my second rule of thumb: I generally strongly suggest that people try to figure out on a scale of 1 to 10, what energy level is your dog showing you right now, and can you match that plus or minus 1? So if your dog’s being kind of crazy, and you don’t really want to hang out at a 10 with a Great Dane, the problem is you can’t go to a 1 because you’re not going to register and your dog’s going to leave you. So can you get to a 9, and then quickly to an 8 and a 7 and a 6 and a 5? From my point of view, it’s perfectly legitimate to put a toy in the dog’s mouth or use food for redirection, if it’s really rambunctious and you need to get your dog to a level that’s more sustainable for both of you. But using the matching system, the number system, helps a lot. It helps people match their dog and stay in the game without it getting out of control, feeling free to add food and toys if you need to. This is a little bit new for me. A few years ago I tried to do a lot more without that, and I don’t do that as much. And also starting on the low end of the scale and working your way up — that is also something I would say is new to me. Over time I have discovered that works much, much better for all parties. The final thing I would mention is really watch for signs that your dog isn’t having a good time, and take your dog seriously. Respect that. So if you can get one great minute, that’s fantastic. Just stop. Don’t go for 5 or 10. And if your dog says they want a little break, honor that. It’s not personal. Your dog didn’t take a break because they think you’re horrible. Your dog took a break because he needed one and he recognized that he was struggling with his own arousal — too high, too low, whatever. If you pursue, you will drive your dog into avoidance. So I think I would start with that package and see where that gets you.

Melissa Breau: Do you mind just talking a little bit more about that toy piece? What made you change your mind, or how can people use that in a way that it doesn’t become all about the toy?

Denise Fenzi: Well, I think a lot of it was simply safety. Dogs can hurt us with their teeth, whether they mean to or not, and if you give the dog a toy, and they chomp on the toy instead of on your arm, that’s obviously a lot more pleasant. There’s all sorts of other things that go with that, you know — habits, and teaching your dog that it hurts when you bite, and all kinds of stuff. The problem is, asking a dog not to use their mouth in play is a lot like asking a human child not to use their hands. That is how dogs communicate with each other. It’s how they communicate in play. And so if we’re going to do that, we’re going to have to spend a lot of time teaching them how to do that. So in the same way that if you tried to teach a child to play with their hands behind their back, while doable, if you gave them something to hold in their hands behind their back while they were doing that, they would be much more likely to remember, and it would give them something to do with their hands, to grip a thing. If you give the dog something to hold, and they have those urges to bite down or to grab, they have something in their mouth already. With Lyra, I don’t think I tried to play with her without a toy in her mouth until she was probably 2 years old, and what I discovered is after that time we had made enough progress that she didn’t need it anymore. And so then, when the toy was out of her mouth, she didn’t have that desire to grab me. She knew what to do. And the time when the toy was in her mouth gave both of us time to learn how to play with each other and kept us out of over-arousal situations while we were learning the game. So it solves a lot of problems. Now if the dog says, “It’s all about the toy. If the toy’s in my mouth, then let’s play with it,” that’s actually not that much of a problem. What I do is I will pull on the toy, let’s say every 10 seconds, just enough to keep the dog holding it. But the rest of the time is spent quick little tap, run away, little play bow, clapping, finding ways that the dog keeps the toy in their mouth but redirects their energy to me. When I say the dog holds a toy, I don’t mean you never touch the toy, and I don’t mean it’s not OK to play with the toy a little. It’s a balance issue. So let’s say the first day it’s 50/50: 50 percent of the time you’re playing with the toy and 50 percent of the time you’re playing with the dog. The next day could you get that to 48/52? So over time can you get it to the point where it’s 10 percent toy, 90 percent dog, and eventually can you get it where you take the toy away from the dog, play with the dog for 10 seconds, and then go get the toy together and go back to your 90 percent playing with the dog, 10 percent toy. That’s how I’m approaching it these days.

Melissa Breau: That’s really interesting to hear how you’ve evolved that concept a little bit. What about those people who want to do this, they try to play with their dog and … their dog just doesn’t seem to be interested. What might be going on there? Is there still hope that they can figure this out, that they can do this?

Denise Fenzi: Well, there’s definitely hope. I’m actually amazed at how many people who go through the play class make significant progress when they were pretty sure they weren’t going to get anywhere. And, in fairness, I have read some introductions where my initial reaction was, “This is going to be really hard.” And most people progress. Now I define progress exactly as that word states. It’s progress. I’m not a goal-oriented person, so what I’m looking for is did we move forward? If we moved forward, I’m probably pretty happy, and I find most of my students get there. So is there hope? Absolutely positively. Might it look the way you thought it was going to look? Might it look like your neighbor’s dog? Well, maybe, but that’s not really the point. It doesn’t need to look like your neighbor’s dog. It needs to work for you and your dog, and honestly, if that never gets past the point where you are able to scratch your dog’s head and thump your dog’s side, even though you’re in the middle of a training session and you have access to food and toys and your dog knows it, I’m happy, because as soon as I can get the dog off that look of “Don’t touch me, I want my food and toys,” I’m going to be happy. That to me is a huge success. So rethink your goals, and make sure that you’re really being reasonable, and I think you will progress.

Melissa Breau: If people want to see some examples of this stuff, if they’re having a little trouble picturing it, because some of this stuff is complex and it’s hard to visualize, can you talk about where they might be able to go to find some of those examples, which pieces of this you cover in class?

Denise Fenzi: This particular class I believe has over a hundred videos. It’s incredibly dense and complex. One of the cool things about the class itself is the active students, the ones that are learning. Every term I learn a new way to play with a dog. Somebody does something I’ve never seen before and I go, “Oh, I never thought to cover the dog with a towel and snap it off. I never thought to cover myself with a towel and let the dog find me.” So little things like that. It’s a constant process of evolution. Deb Jones and I did write a book on the topic of play, so the third book in the Dog Sports Skills series is on the topic of play and has an awful lot of detail. Having said that, I would say that between a class and a book, this is something … I think you make a lot more progress if you watch videos, because it is so second-by-second, so that is one place where I think video would serve you well. I’ve never actually searched YouTube for videos of playing with a dog, but you know what, if you are not interested in taking classes, that’s not your cup of tea, and you don’t really want to sit down with a book, the first thing I would probably do is go to YouTube and search “playing with a dog,” and something has got to come up. It has to. In this day and age there’s so much out there. That’s probably where I would start. The second thing I would do, if I really wanted to go it myself, is just go back through this podcast, because I gave you a lot of places to work from and a lot to start with, and just give it a shot. See what you get. If you end this podcast feeling inspired to try it, then you’re halfway there already.

Melissa Breau: I was actually going to add to that, if you don’t mind, that I think that some of the TEAM videos have some really nice examples of engagement, and some of those samples of engagement have really nice pieces of play in them, if people wanted to see some additional examples. That’s just on the TEAM site free.

Denise Fenzi: Not only that. I forgot about that. The Fenzi TEAM Players Facebook list is very active, and a couple three weeks ago I did do a flash challenge on the topic of engagement. So many people did put up their examples of working on engagement, and because it was a flash challenge, I respond to those videos, so I would have given my input and my thoughts on that. That would have been playing more specifically focused towards engagement and work, but regardless, you got to see play there, so maybe join that list.

Melissa Breau: That list is free, right? Anybody can join that. They’re welcome to join.

Denise Fenzi: Sure.

Melissa Breau: Just a last question here. If somebody does want to take the class, is there a dog that’s good for the class, or maybe not a good fit for the class? Is there anything they should think about from that stance?

Denise Fenzi: This term I probably have the widest variety of dogs, off the top of my head, that I’ve ever had. Let me think about it. I have a Great Dane, a Mastiff, then I have some more typical dogs, Sheltie, Corgi, then I have some teeny guys. I’ve got a Chihuahua, a softer. more fragile dog, I have a small mix, I think she said it was 10 or 11 pounds. I do believe there might be an Aussie in there, a Corgi. I have much greater size discrepancies than I’ve ever seen before, so I’ve got the tiniest and the largest, which is fun and interesting. I have non-players. I have dogs that have shown no interest whatsoever in a toy. And actually those dogs, the first week’s lectures, the ones that have been released this week, are all about toy play. So we are focused on toy play right now, but I’ve seen the baselines for all types of play. So right off the bat the toy play’s going really, really well, and the owners are excited because they’re seeing things they hadn’t expected. Next week, around the 9th or so, is when I start releasing the personal play lectures, and having seen the baseline, there’s going to be a little of everything. There are going to be dogs that tend toward over-arousal, and there are going to be dogs that think it’s all kinds of crazy and don’t want to stay in the game at all, maybe showing avoidance, and I think there will be some middle ground as well. My personal preference when I teach a class is an incredible variety of dogs, and when people join the class I really try to encourage them to understand that there are no good dogs or bad dogs, there are just dogs. So it’s OK, the responses your dog gives you, they’re not right responses or wrong responses. They’re just the response that the dog gave you, and we can just keep changing direction. That’s no problem. We explore and look for what works for a more serious dog, a more anxious dog, not an aggressive dog but an assertive dog, and try to find a way, find a route, that makes you love your dog a little bit more and makes your dog think you’re just a wee bit more interesting than they did yesterday. Which does bring up a point I meant to say and I forgot it. In my experience, when I go back and read my survey results for this class, probably the most common thing that people say to me at the end of class is that they’re surprised at how much more their dog watches them in life. Without being trained to do so, the dog simply finds them more worth their while than they did before, and the dog checks in more. So when they go on walks, the dog just checks, “Are you coming? What are you doing?” The dog just seems to recognize that they offer more than Pez-dispenser-style training. They’re more than a food dispenser or a toy machine. They are a valuable person who means more than the next person, and if I get that feedback, if I get that result, then I have won, and I feel very good about that.

Melissa Breau: That’s awesome, and I think that’s a great point. There’s some really great gems in there for people that want to tease them out. Thank you so much, Denise, for coming back on the podcast. It was great to chat again.

Denise Fenzi: It’s always great to be here, Melissa. Thank you.

Melissa Breau: And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week, this time with Julie Flanery, and we’ll be talking about the things no one ever told you in puppy class. That is, we’ll be diving into some of my favorite topics — handler mechanics, verbal cues, all those types of things.

And guys, this week I have a special request. If you listen to the podcasts, or you listen to other podcasts, I’m sure you’ve heard other people say this, but reviews in iTunes have a HUGE impact on helping new people find the show and letting iTunes know that our show is actually worth listening to. So if you’ve enjoyed this or any of the previous ones, I would really appreciate it personally if you could take a minute to just go into iTunes and leave us a review.

And if you haven’t already, subscribe while you’re there, and our next episode will automatically download to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

CREDITS:

Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

 

Feb 2, 2018

SUMMARY:

Dr. Deborah Jones -- better known around FDSA as Deb Jones -- she is a psychologist who specializes in learning theory and social behavior. An early innovator in the use of clicker training, she has owned and worked with a variety of breeds and has earned top level titles in agility, rally, and obedience over the last 25 years.

In 2004 Deb worked with agility trainer and World Team member Judy Keller to develop the FOCUS training system. FOCUS stands for Fun, Obedience & Consistency lead to Unbelievable Success. Deb has also worked with Denise Fenzi, co-authoring the “Dog Sports Skills” book series and authored several other books, with more in the works!

At FDSA, Deb offers a wide range of popular classes, including a number of excellent foundations classes. Her focus is on developing training methods that are enjoyable and effective for both the dog and the trainer.

Links

Next Episode: 

To be released 2/9/2018, and I'll be talking to Denise Fenzi about Play, so stay tuned!

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we’ll be talking to Dr. Deborah Jones -- better known around FDSA as Deb Jones.  

Deb is a psychologist who specializes in learning theory and social behavior. An early innovator in the use of clicker training, she has owned and worked with a variety of breeds and has earned top-level titles in agility, rally, and obedience over the last 25 years.

In 2004, Deb worked with agility trainer and World Team member Judy Keller to develop the FOCUS training system. FOCUS stands for Fun, Obedience & Consistency Lead to Unbelievable Success. Deb has also worked with Denise Fenzi, co-authoring the “Dog Sports Skills” book series, and authored several other books, with more in the works!

At FDSA, Deb offers a wide range of popular classes, including a number of excellent foundations classes. Her focus is on developing training methods that are enjoyable and effective for both the dog and the trainer.

Hi Deb! Welcome back to the podcast.

Deb Jones: Thanks, Melissa. I’m really happy to be here.

Melissa Breau: To start us out, do you want to just reacquaint listeners with the furry friends you share your household with?

Deb Jones: At the moment, we have four dogs and one cat. We have a wide variety. Smudge is the oldest dog. He’s a Blue Merle Sheltie. He’s 14 now, and sadly, he’s sort of in the hospice stage of life. He’s having more and more issues, so that’s always a tough thing to deal with. But we’re taking it day to day and seeing how he is.

Then I have Zen, my red Border Collie, who’s 10 years old. Zen still is his wild and crazy self. I don’t think that’s ever going to change. Star is my black-and-white Border Collie, and she’s going to be 7 this year, which is just stunning to me because it seems like she’s still just 2 years old. I can’t believe they keep getting older. I tell them to stop, and I tell them 7’s a perfect age, just stay 7 forever and I’d be thrilled because it’s just the right time.

Then we have little Tigger, who is the tiny little Sheltie. He is just going to be turning 2 next week, and he only weighs 7 and a half pounds, so he’s very, very small for a Sheltie, but he’s full of himself. He’s got enough attitude for everybody.

And finally we have Tricky the cat. I think Trick’s about 8 or so now. He’s been around for a while. He was the star of the Cat Class that we put on last year. So that’s the group for the moment.

Melissa Breau: Last time you were on the podcast, I know we talked quite a bit about focus, since that’s a big part of what you teach. For anyone who’s listening who wants to go back and listen to that, which I recommend, it’s Episode 14. But I did have a question or two that we didn’t get to last time, so I wanted to dive into that just a little bit. On your syllabus for the Get Focused class, you have a line that says, “What is focus? How is it different from attention?” So I wanted to ask, what is your definition of focus, and how is it different from attention?

Deb Jones: OK, I’m glad to talk about that. That’s a common question that we get all the time. The way that I think about focus is that it’s the ability to concentrate on a task despite distractions. So whatever it is that we’re doing, you can keep doing that without being pulled away or pulled in other directions by things going on around you.

In the dog training world, attention is often considered to be either the dog’s looking at you or making eye contact with you. Focus is a lot more than that. That’s a part of it, but it’s actually a small part. With focus, my dog might be working on a task totally independently of me, and I don’t want them looking at me or making eye contact. You can imagine, for example, pretty much most of agility, nosework, working in obedience at the upper levels in particular, something like go outs — there are lots of times when the dog needs to focus on what they’re doing, and then appropriately switch back to trainer focus when it’s necessary.

So there’s a lot more going on there than just “Look at me,” because if you just look at me all the time, we’re not going to get very far in our training. We start out with that, we start out with “Pay attention to the trainer,” because that is really the first step. But it’s also, I think, a lot more about persistence at the task, sticking on task once you start doing something, no matter what is going on around you. That’s sort of my expanded answer of the difference there.

Melissa Breau: A lot of people tend to ask about focus. They’re those students that have worked really hard, and they finally managed to achieve good focus from their dogs, and then they’re really scared to ruin it. They’re working at their desk, or they’re watching TV, or who knows, but they’re doing something of their own that does not involve the dog, and the dog comes over and offers focus, offers to engage, and wants to work, and they feel like, OK, my choices are ruin my dog’s focus and all this work that I put in, or ignore my dog, and they struggle with that a little bit. How do you handle that? What do you recommend in that kind of situation?

Deb Jones: That’s something that does start to happen, especially if you’ve done very much focus work. All of a sudden now, too much focus is a problem. But it’s really not a problem. We’re all happy when we have more focus. We can’t say that’s a problem.

Melissa Breau: It’s a good problem.

Deb Jones: Yes, it’s a very good problem. So if your dog wants to interact with you, I always think that is fabulous. Take it. I always acknowledge it. That doesn’t mean I’m going to get up and train you right now, but I am going to respond to you in some way, even if I’m just petting you and saying we’re going to do something later. That’s still responding to you. I don’t jump up every time that you focus on me.

In our work, in the system that we have set up and the way we teach focus, we set up expectations for when we want focus and when we don’t need it anymore, and we’re clear about when those times are. We want focus work for training sessions. When I’m training my dog, I want focus a hundred percent of the time. But when we’re lounging around the house, we don’t need focus anymore. So we set up the dogs to understand, These are the times, these are the signals I’ll give you that focus will be reinforced, and these are the signals that I give you that we are done for now and you can pretty much do whatever you want … well, within reason. You can’t get into trouble, but you can pretty much do whatever you want. So we have those on and off cues that we use with them.

If I had a dog, though, who was very sensitive, or really hardly ever engaged with me and was very new to this, I would probably leap up from my desk and have a party if they showed me that they wanted to be engaged. So it really very much depends on the dog, as well as the level of training you’re at.

If I did that now, though, with Zen, I would never do anything else. It would be like a constant 24/7, so with him it’s the opposite. It’s “We’re done for now. We don’t need any more focus at the moment.”

We do actually in focus training, the second exercise we do, we capture focus when it happens, and we acknowledge it with something that’s non-food. So we want to get into the fact that my paying attention to you, my interacting with you, playing, praise, petting, all of those things, we will do. And what surprises people is how often then the dog starts focusing on them around the house. So it shows us that they’re willing to do it, as long as we’re willing to acknowledge it.

The other thing I want to mention here, because this is something that also comes up a lot, is people will talk about doing focus work while they’re walking their dog, or hiking, and I tell them, “Don’t do that.” To me, that is totally separate from my focus work. When we’re out hiking, or out walking, that’s my dog’s chance to relax, and to sniff, and to do again whatever they want to do within reason. I’ll stop when they stop, I’ll move when they move, I don’t make a big deal about it. It’s for them to relax as much as for me, and that’s not a time when I want focus. I may have to give you a cue at some point, I may have to call them back to me, or ask them to lie down or something, as necessary, but we don’t ever combine focus work with those informal activities. We keep those totally separate, again so it’s clear to the dog: I’m expecting focus from you now; I’m not going to be expecting it from you in these other situations.

Melissa Breau: Hearing you say this, it almost sounds like you’re essentially putting it on stimulus control.

Deb Jones: Exactly. I could have said that and not gone through all these explanations. Yes, that is exactly what we’re doing is putting it on stimulus control. Maybe I need to stop being so wordy.

Melissa Breau: No, no, I think that was good, because I’ve taken the class and I hadn’t thought of it that way until you described it this time around. That’s an interesting way of thinking about it. Now, I know in addition to Get Focused this session, you’re teaching a new class, and the topic is kind of fascinating. You called it Achieving a Balance Between Motivation and Control, which I think everybody wants that, right? So can you share a little bit about what the class covers?

Deb Jones: Well, I can probably share a lot about what the class covers, because it’s on my mind. Whenever we develop a new class, we think about it 24/7. It’s on my mind a lot, and I’ve been thinking about this class for a long time and trying to figure out how to put it into the format that I wanted in order to teach it. When I was thinking back, I realized I was writing lectures for this when we went to camp last year, on the plane to camp, so it’s been a while. I’ve been working on pulling this together, and the thought’s been in the back of my mind even longer.

This is another what we would call a concept class, meaning the class is not about any particular behavior or skill. It’s more like it’s built around a theme, and everything we do then kind of supports that theme or helps us explore it or find ways to make changes based on that. Concept classes in general are harder because they require more from the trainer. They require more thought and effort. And they’re harder for the instructor for the same reason. They just are a little bit different. A skills class is just, “We’re going to work on this thing, like a retrieve, and that’s all we’re going to work on for six weeks,” which is a lot more straightforward. But concept classes tend to be a bit different.

I first really started thinking about this idea of balance in dogs back when I was doing a lot of agility. You would see what would happen over time pretty regularly. Somebody would start out, say, with their first agility dog, and often the dog was never gotten with performance in mind. They just stumbled into it. And as they started to do agility, typically what happened was they would say, “Oh, this dog isn’t fast enough,” “This dog isn’t interested,” or “This dog isn’t very driven” — and I’ll talk about drive in a second here — and then they would go, “I need a dog that’s going to be better suited for this,” which I’m good with that. I think that’s a very smart thing to think about: Is the dog I have suited for what I want to do?

But then they would get a faster model, oftentimes a model with no brakes, so typically a herding breed. And then they have this little baby puppy herding-breed dog, and they spend about a year building drive in the dog because they’re so worried. Since their last dog didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm and energy, they’re going to get it with this next dog. Of course what happens is this dog already had plenty of motivation, and what you’re doing is not building drive in any way at all. What you’re doing is building over-arousal. So now you have dogs that are high as kites, and what happens? No control, because the person was afraid to work on control because that was a bad idea with their last dog. We’re pretty much always training our last dog, and it’s usually very different from what the dog in front of us needs right now. So we end up with these dogs that are highly over-aroused, often around agility, and that’s just the first place I saw it. People do it in other sports as well.

Let me get back to the term drive, though, because this is one that I very carefully left out of the description of the class. I purposely thought about it and left it out and changed it to motivation. The term motivation, I think, is a better one for what we’re talking about. When you’re motivated, you want to do something. You have a reason to do it, you have the energy to do it, you have the desire to do it. That’s what we think of in dogs when we talk about drive. But scientific terms we never use the term drive. That’s just something that’s seen as not even a real thing. It doesn’t exist. It’s a word that can be described better in many other ways, or a quality that can be described better in many other ways.

On the other hand, dog trainers use it all the time, so it’s not like I can say I will never use that word, because people do understand what you’re saying when you talk about drive. Actually, in my first lecture in the class, I talk about … say a little bit about this and why I don’t use that term, but I understand that a lot of people do. To me, it’s more of a motivation issue than it is a drive issue. That’s why I don’t use that term a lot. I may lapse into it now and again, if I forget myself.

But typically, so let’s go back to my example of the totally over-aroused dog. So now what we’ve got is no control. What that really means is there’s no balance. You’ve got all arousal, no control, or all motivation, no control. That’s not a good place to be for the dog or the trainer — trust me, I’ve been there. You wish greatly for your more careful, thoughtful dog when you have a dog that just “go, go, go” a thousand miles an hour, and you cannot get them to slow down for a second. That’s a problem. That’s a big problem.

I think in general it’s hard for us to know who our dogs are, to really, clearly see them, and to see what they actually need. Again, we have this illusion that either we’re training the dog we had before, or we have this mythical, idealized version of who the dog is. So we’re not actually thinking and really analyzing who’s this dog and what do they need to get them more into this balanced place where they can do whatever we want, yet they can still make good choices and decisions and think about what they’re doing.

This is where we get into nature and nurture a little bit in my thinking about it. Genetics matters. There’s no question about that. You can’t say they don’t, and I sort of believe they matter more than 50 percent. Of course in psychology, for years we’ve talked about the nature-nurture controversy and what determines how you turn out as an adult. Was it all determined by your genetics, or does your environment and experience have a lot more to do with it? Of course it’s not one or the other. It’s an interaction of the two. But lately the thinking has been going back to the nature part of it, and that there are some things that were hardwired into us, and it’s really hard to change them. You can’t override nature. You can modify it a little bit.

So we’re going to be looking at what has nature given you with this dog. I have sort of a temperament test. It’s not really a test. It’s you answering questions about your dog from what you know of them, trying to answer them honestly in terms of what is this dog, who is this dog, what do they bring into the world in terms of core characteristics? In humans we talk about something called the “big five personality characteristics,” so I sort of built it off of that, that these are the things that people think are genetic. Where do you fall on introvert/extrovert, where do you fall on resilience when something bad happens and you recover from it — those kinds of things.

So we’ll look at that, but of course the flipside of that is your environment and experiences. They matter. They may not again override what you normally are going to be, but they certainly matter a lot. So we’ll look at those as well and talk a little bit about it.

It used to be the early behaviorists like John Watson would say, “Give me a baby and I can make him anything I want him to be.” And I’m, like, Oh, I don’t think so. Parents everywhere would tell you that is so very wrong. That’s not the case at all that you could possibly … nobody comes into the world a blank slate, or the Tabula Rasa idea that we have from John Locke. That just doesn’t happen, really.

We’re not all interchangeable when we could be whatever we wanted, and that’s not true for our dogs, either. We know they’re different, and we have to take that into account. So we look at that interaction. I’m going to talk a lot about that the first couple weeks of class, the interaction of nature and nurture, and look at where we’re standing with these dogs right now. So, what is my dog, to the best of my knowledge, really like?

Then we’re going to talk a lot about arousal levels. I’ve mentioned arousal a few times because you can have too much. Too much, too little, over- and under-arousal. But that’s something that we can modify. Classical conditioning, in particular, plays a huge role in this process of arousal. We connect certain stimuli to being over-aroused or under-aroused.

So we’ll talk about how that works, and look at how we might change some of those fairly automatic responses. They just happen. When you are exposed to stimuli, you have that response. I’ve had dogs, personally — Smudgie, the old dog, right now is a good example of that. You get within a certain distance to the agility ring, and he had no brain. Absolutely no brain. Screaming, lunging, just … you know, he didn’t do it on purpose. It was just his automatic response because the stimuli of agility brought out that response. We had to work very, very hard to change that and to get him at an appropriate level where he could think at least a little bit as he went into the agility ring, because if you go in like that, nothing good ever happens afterwards. It tends to be a train wreck. So we’ll talk a little bit about — I’ve had some train wrecks now and again — we’ll talk a little about how arousal levels and classical conditioning work.

One of the things that has been fascinating to me lately is to think about what they call “tells.” Tell is a subtle sign that you could easily miss that something is happening or is going to happen. They talk about it in gambling, that if you’re good at understanding another player’s tells, you can tell what kind of hand they have, even if they’re trying to hide that. So learning this about our dogs, what are the precursors to arousal changes? If we can see those early, we can jump in there and make some changes so that they don’t go too high or too low. We can get them in that optimal state of arousal where they have plenty of energy and yet they still can think and learn.

Tells are really different for every dog and very, very easy to miss. I think here’s where video is really helpful, because you didn’t see it when you were training, but when you go back and look, you start to see this pattern. I was actually doing some video for this class, for the later parts of this class, talking about tells, and I realized that I was ignoring one from Star. I was getting it regularly that it was definitely one of her tells, and I was ignoring it and not even thinking about it. When I looked back over the videos, I was like, Oh, she does do that regularly when she’s too aroused, and then the next thing’s going to be a bark. So that led me to go, If I could change when I see this, the very beginnings of it, then everything would go better. So we’ll work with people to try to figure out what their dogs’ tells are, and to pick up on them earlier in the training process.

I think there’s a lot here, and it’s taken me a long time actually to pull it together in a way that made sense to me. We still go on things like … typical things like the reinforcers we’re using, when we’re using them, how we’re using them. Even the markers and the fact that markers can lead to different levels of arousal. I know I see that in many dogs. There are lots of dogs that the click is a signal for over-arousal, and as soon as they hear a click, they’re off. They’re just higher than possible. I can’t even use a click — I rarely use a click, I should say — with Zen in shaping anymore because I realized I had done that with him. So I switched to a verbal marker, and he doesn’t get nearly as high when we do that.

The other thing we’ll look at here and talk about are energy levels from us and our dogs, and the fact that we want to change their energy level. We want more or less of something, but we have to be very subtle and careful about how we go about doing it. You can’t force it. You have to move them very slowly in the direction you want. If we change our energy levels too drastically, it doesn’t really help. It only frustrates them or causes them to avoid us. So you have a low-energy dog and you’re acting like a clown — clowns are on my mind because I’m doing the webinar on classical conditioning, and scary clowns seems to come up a lot — so you’re acting like a clown, and you’re actually going to turn your dog off and push them even further away from you, rather than if you just bring up your energy a tiny bit, they’ll likely come up to meet that. So we have to experiment with that and see what works for any particular team.

A lot of this, in fact all of this, is very, very customized to different teams. The good thing is usually in Gold spots you get enough variety in dogs that you see a little bit of everything. We don’t get dogs that are all the same. So we’ll be looking at over-arousal, under-arousal, we’ll be looking at things I’ve probably never seen before in terms of arousal, and working with that, which is always the fun part of teaching — when you get something you didn’t expect. OK, so that’s the long version of what the class is about.

Melissa Breau: It sounds even more fascinating now than it did before. I just think it’s going to be such an interesting topic. It sounds like the Gold spots are going to be invaluable in that class.

Deb Jones: I think it can help people in many ways. I think it really can. As I said, it’s going to be challenging for the trainers because they do more work than the dogs. It’s the same as trained Focus class. It’s more about giving you a lot of information to help you start to see things differently and start to approach your training differently. I think that that’s definitely going to be something that comes out of this.

Melissa Breau: I know the title includes the word balance, and you talked a little bit in there about looking at different skills and thinking about where your dog is. I’ve always thought of it as a little bit of a game of tug-of-war, where you work a little bit on precision, then you have to work a little bit more on building drive, and they impact each other. Is it ever really possible to have a dog that’s equally motivated and controlled?

Deb Jones: I think that there are some dogs who just by nature are pretty equally balanced. It’s nothing we do. They just came that way. In fact, Judy Keller’s first Sheltie, Morgan, I’d say he was just the perfect dog. In terms of arousal and control, he was ideal. She didn’t do anything to cause that. He was her first performance dog. She didn’t even know what she had at the time. Looking back now, you know what you had. But it’s like, yeah, by nature, some dogs are just like that. They just come prewired that way.

But most of us are not that lucky. We’re going to get dogs that come at all different levels of this, and yes, we’re going to be constantly working on it. It’s maintenance. It’s always maintenance. You will push your dog too far in one direction and then have to go a little bit back in the other, though most of them we know.

For example, I know with Zen, his lifetime is about a little more control, because he’s got all the motivation in the world. With another dog, like my Papillon from years ago, Copper, he had so much control just naturally, and he was a little inhibited naturally, so everything for Copper was always about more motivation. That’s all we worked on. I never worked on control because he didn’t need it. He already had that. And in fact the day in agility when Copper actually was running so fast that he missed his contact on the dog walk, we were stunned, and I’m, like, Good for him. The fact that he was in it so much, and moving so fast that he didn’t even hit the contact on the way down, I was proud of myself and him because it’s like, that’s the motivation I want. And in fact the judge didn’t even see it and didn’t call it. We didn’t realize it until we watched the video later, because he was so fast, and I’m sure the judge never expected that this little dog was going to miss a contact zone.

So yes, we’re constantly trying to get them in the zone, in the optimal level or state of arousal is how we often refer to it. There’s something called the Yerkes-Dodson Law that is well known to quite a few dog trainers. It talks about your level of motivation, and when you get too much or not enough, that’s not good. You want that optimal middle state that you’re in, where everything is flowing along, and it’s perfect, and you have enough of both things. You do everything with lots of energy, yet you can still make thoughtful decisions as you go along.

Melissa Breau: Stacy talked a little bit about that when she was on, just looking at that curve and what it means and what it’s like. I know she’s got her puppy now who’s on the opposite end of the curve than what she’s used to.

Deb Jones: Yes, she does, and that’s exactly the thing. It’s almost like you have to learn to train all over again when you get a dog that’s the opposite, because if you don’t, you’ll make some pretty big mistakes along the way and have to try to fix them later on down the line.

Melissa Breau: Looking at it as a balance, how can people start to get an idea of where their dog is now on that scale or in that balance, if they’re too much on the control side or too much on the motivation side?

Deb Jones: First thing I always look at is the energy and enthusiasm level. How excited is the dog to do whatever it is you’re asking them to do? It really doesn’t matter what the task is, but how much energy do they normally bring to it? And is it appropriate for the task? Is it going to be enough? The energy level you need for competition obedience is different than the energy level you need to do well in agility. So are they bringing the right amount of energy? If you take the energy for agility and you put it in a competition obedience ring, it’s probably going to be a hot mess because you’re just going to have too little control. So we look at are they doing what’s appropriate for what we’re working on?

The other part of that is looking at how, say, clear headed your dog is. Can they think while they’re working? Can they seem to make decisions? Can they learn to regulate themselves a little bit and come up or down? That’s one of the things we work on, we want to help them with, is this idea of modulating arousal. Can they do that? Can they respond to well-known cues? Do they have enough control for that or not? If they don’t respond, it isn’t usually a skill problem. It’s a problem of arousal, much of the time.

Melissa Breau: If you have a dog that you know tends to be more on the control side, or more on the arousal side, how do all those different factors play into that? How many different sides of a dog can there be?

Deb Jones: Everything affects it. Everything affects it, and every moment can be different within a given dog. It’s a constant process of adjusting to what your dog is giving you right now. It’s definitely different from dog to dog, but it’s also different in the same dog, I would say, not even day to day but sometimes moment to moment, if you have dogs that can be wildly inconsistent in terms of their ability to work and respond appropriately. So it’s this constant fluid process.

Arousal isn’t a static thing. You don’t get the same level of arousal, because it’s what is the behavior itself, what are the reinforcers you’re using, what is your mood? My little Papillion Copper, for example, who was fairly inhibited, if he thought for one second I wasn’t in a good mood for whatever reason, even if it had nothing to do with him, he was done. That was the end of the day. I might as well just not even bother. So it’s a constant fluid process.

We always have to be thinking about all of those factors and how they’re affecting what we’re trying to do right now, because people say, “Well, my dog did great in this situation and not in another one,” and I’m, like, “Well, I believe that.” I believe that to be the case, and there are probably a dozen things that went into that difference. So at least being aware of them and knowing that there’s going to be a lot of variation. Our job is to read our dogs and to try to help them stay on the path, to try to help them be as consistent as possible with their emotional states and their reactions. That’s what we do.

Melissa Breau: I wanted to ask you to share a couple of tips. First, looking at the dog who is well-mannered and very much under control, but maybe who they are struggling to get to enthusiastically respond or feel really motivated about training or work. Do you have a tip or two that people can try or do to work on that?

Deb Jones: Yeah, kind of a general suggestion. Dogs that are too controlled for whatever reason, either they’re inhibited themselves, or they’re controlled because the environment makes them a little nervous or uncomfortable, or they’re worried about being wrong, there’s a million reasons, but they don’t have enough energy or confidence to do what we want them to do. For these guys, I think the most important thing you can do is to never, ever, ever let your dog know that he made a mistake, ever. The dog is never wrong. You have to keep up that hugely high rate of reinforcement so that success builds on success, and success also builds confidence.

A more confident dog is a sturdy dog. A confident dog can take things that don’t go perfectly and roll with it and move on. But a very sensitive dog cannot, and so letting them know they’re not right is the biggest mistake I think people make. So I’d say that’s the one thing: Don’t ever let them know they’re wrong.

And they learn that, of course, our behavior tells them. They don’t know it’s wrong unless we tell them it’s wrong somehow, so you’re going to have to control your own reactions in order to not let them know that there are mistakes, and then make it easier, or make it easy enough, so they can be successful. That’s the one thing about those types of dogs. They need to feel free to make mistakes, just to do things, and once they start to feel freer, then you start to get a lot more confidence building.

Melissa Breau: What about the opposite? What about those dogs that are driven, they’re motivated, but maybe they’re a little less under control.

Deb Jones: Yeah, a lot of experience with these dogs. A whole lot of personal experience. The dogs that are like, “go, go, go, do, do, do, move, move, move,” any activity is often very addictive to them. Moving feels good. We call them adrenaline junkies, because movement starts to release a lot of these different hormones, adrenalin being a big one, and they’re like, Oh, man, this feels so good. It feels so good to do things where there’s lots of action. It doesn’t feel so good to do things where there’s a lot more control.

The problem with these guys is if we try to squash that enthusiasm, to overdo control work, to stop them from doing the things that they want to do, that typically leads to frustration, and so we get a lot of frustration behaviors like barking and spinning. At the end of agility runs you’ll see dogs that, because they have to stop now, they leap up and start biting their handlers. That’s a frustration, because they’re now having to inhibit something that felt really, really good to them. So it’s a little tricky here because we want to help these dogs see that they can still do everything. They don’t need to be high as a kite to do it.

I have a little section in the class called Arousal Modulation: learning to change your arousal level without going immediately from zero to a thousand, but coming up a little bit and then going back down, and getting used to these changes or transitions in the amount of energy that you would see from a dog for different exercises or different things that we’re training. We start to see these guys like to move. So what happens if you do a moving exercise, and then you go into one that requires more thoughtfulness and control? We work through some experimenting here to see what kind of transitions work best, how can we move from one activity to the other and help them not get too high when we’re doing it. So teaching them basically to gear down, but doing it carefully, and not completely squashing their desire to do anything, because that usually ends badly then.

Melissa Breau: Everybody wants that dog that’s perfectly balanced between motivation and control. But I wanted to ask who you really think is an ideal fit for a Gold spot in this class. What would make a dog a really good candidate? What skills do they need? Can somebody take it with a brand-new puppy? Should they be taking it with a slightly older dog? What kind of dog are you hoping will enroll?

 

Deb Jones: It’s true for almost everybody that you want that perfect balance, so I would think that a lot of people would. Of course we’ll see certain people who are having problems right now and they want to work on those. If you’re having issues training and showing, and it’s not a skills problem, so you see lots of times dogs do great at home, or great in familiar environments where they’re comfortable, but then you get them out into other settings, and they get too high or too low and they can’t perform, that would be the kind of dog that I think this could help, and the kind of team, I should say — not just the dog; I hope to help the whole team — that this should help.

So when you see that inconsistency between different contexts with your dog. Of course what we always say, “My dog did it perfectly in the living room,” and if I had a dollar every time somebody told me that, I’d be rich. And I believe that. I believe that is very true. Your dog did do it perfectly there because their arousal level was at a good level. It wasn’t too high, it wasn’t too low. So if you see different things in different situations.

If you are one of those people who find yourself saying, and I’ve done it too, “He knows how to do this,” when your dog is clearly not doing it. It’s like, “But he knows this.” Again, I don’t know that it’s a skills issue anymore. I think that is definitely much more an arousal issue, and so that means we have to look at the bigger picture, not just look at, OK, I’ll train some more on this behavior. It doesn’t ever hurt to strengthen behaviors, but I don’t know that that actually addresses the problem that you’re having. It only partially does. So anytime you have a lot of inconsistency in the dog’s behavior.

We don’t have any sort of restriction on age or experience for dogs for this class. In thinking about it, a lot of the things that I think about and do, I do this with my puppies, I start very early on, and I work on it basically their whole lives, so young dogs are fine. Older dogs that are having issues are fine as well.

The one thing I would hope for is that you have a few behaviors that are on cue. It doesn’t have to be much. But for some of our later exercises, we like to move between some trained behaviors and a few behaviors in process that you can use in the exercises. I don’t care what the behaviors are. We’re not even actually going to be critiquing your behaviors in any way. They’re just necessary so we can work on the new things that we’re going to try to be instilling in this class, so the exercises are sort of just we’re going to ignore those. We’re going to ignore the behaviors that you bring in, unless you really want feedback, but that’s not the point. The point is can they do them in these different settings and states and in different ways.

So the class is pretty open, I think. As always, our job is to adjust for every team that we get. We do the best we can to meet them where they are, and to try to help them from that point. That’s why I expect that there’ll be a lot of variety in Gold spots. I think we’ll have it all over the map, and so that makes it a little challenging for me in terms of I can’t just give you any sort of canned answer to something that comes up, but I think that’s also what makes it more interesting for people to watch, the people who are in the Silver/Bronze spots, to be able to see that much variety. So we’re pretty open, and people can always contact me if they have questions about whether they think their situation would be appropriate for class. I’m very happy to answer any questions they might have about that.

Melissa Breau: It really does sound like a fascinating class. I think it’s going to be great. The students who get Gold are going to be lucky, lucky people.

Deb Jones: Let’s hope they think so when class is done.

Melissa Breau: I have every confidence that they will. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Deb! It was really good to chat again and to learn a little bit more about the new class.

Deb Jones: Oh, thank you, Melissa. I always have fun talking about training. What could possibly be better? So I always enjoy this.

Melissa Breau: Thanks again, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week, this time with Denise Fenzi to talk about Play.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

Credits:

Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Jan 26, 2018

SUMMARY:

Chrissi Schranz is a dog trainer, translator, and chocolate addict. Chrissi is based in Vienna and Lower Austria. She has been fond of dogs of all sizes, shapes, and personalities for as long as she’s been able to think, especially the so-called difficult ones. After training the dachshund of her early teenage years in traditional ways at her local obedience club, she learned about clicker training and got hooked on force-free, motivational methods.

Her work days are spent doing the things she loves most: thinking about languages, writing, and teaching pet dog manners and life skills to her clients and their dogs. Her German-language puppy book was released last year, and her recall book is scheduled to be released this fall. In addition to all that, in case it wasn’t enough, Chrissi loves working with people and dogs, and training, playing, and hiking with her own dogs.

Links

Next Episode: 

To be released 2/2/2018, and I'll be talking to Deb Jones about balancing motivation and control through dog training so stay tuned!

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we’ll be talking to Chrissi Schranz, a dog trainer, translator, and chocolate addict. Chrissi is based in Vienna and Lower Austria. She has been fond of dogs of all sizes, shapes, and personalities for as long as she’s been able to think, especially the so-called difficult ones. After training the dachshund of her early teenage years in traditional ways at her local obedience club, she learned about clicker training and got hooked on force-free, motivational methods.

Her work days are spent doing the things she loves most: thinking about languages, writing, and teaching pet dog manners and life skills to her clients and their dogs. Her German-language puppy book was released last year, and her recall book is scheduled to be released this fall. In addition to all that, in case it wasn’t enough, Chrissi loves working with people and dogs, and training, playing, and hiking with her own dogs.

Hi Chrissi. Welcome to the podcast.

Chrissi Schranz: Hi Melissa.

Melissa Breau: To just start us out, can you remind listeners just a little bit about who the dogs are that you share your life with? And I think you have a new addition, don’t you?

Chrissi Schranz: Yes, I do, so there are four. Fantasy, my oldest, is my greyhound. His main job is to hold down the couch and get all the old dog benefits. And then there’s Phoebe, my poodle. She’s always happy and cheerful and up for anything. My favorite thing for her is training tricks and taking her on hikes and also taking her to all kinds of places. She can go to restaurants, and she’s just good wherever you take her. She just fits in. Then there’s Grit, my young Malinois. With her, I’ve been working on tracking and on obedience foundation. Maybe we’ll get our TEAM 1 sometime soon. That would be nice. I also hope that sometime this year we’ll do our BH. That’s the first trial for obedience sports, for FCI sports. And my new addition, that’s Game. She’s also a Malinois, almost 6 months old now, and in pretty much all respects she’s still a puppy. Lots of puppy brain and puppy behaviors and puppy-ness.

Melissa Breau: I can’t believe she’s already 6 months. It feels like not long ago you brought her home. Let’s start by talking about her a little bit. What kinds of foundation stuff have you been working on with her? I know you shared some awesome videos on Facebook, and for our listeners, we’re going to put those in the show notes for you guys because Chrissi shared the YouTube links with me. Do you want to just talk about those a little bit?

Chrissi Schranz: Yeah. So in general I think you can train skills later in a dog’s life, but you really need to put a strong foundation of confidence and relationship on them as early as possible, because the younger they are, the more moldable they still are, and the more open they are to new experiences. So I usually take puppies out into the world, introduce them to people and dogs and places and smells and sounds. It has been really interesting working with Game because she’s so different from Grit. Grit is very handler focused and Game is very environmentally focused, also extremely confident and very social too. So when I take her out, I try to not let her directly meet people and dogs because she already thinks people and dogs are awesome, so she doesn’t really need more of that. We mainly work on being OK just sharing space with people and dogs without always approaching and playing with everyone. So usually I give her time to acclimate, and then I transition into playing with her, sometimes without any food or any toys, sometimes just food, sometimes toys. I talk about that more in the videos you mentioned.

Melissa Breau: I think it was cool to watch some of the stuff and how you handled some of when she got distracted or what happened. It was really interesting to see all that. You’ve mentioned that Game and Grit are pretty different. Do you want to talk a little more about what you mean by that and how it has influenced your training?

Chrissi Schranz: Grit is really handler focused, so it was pretty easy to get her to focus on me in any environment. We didn’t really have to work on it. She just offered that, even as a puppy. Game, on the other hand, is super-environmental. She thinks the world is fun, smells are fun, sounds are fun, people are fun. She needs to check it all out. I haven’t had an environmental dog since Snoopy, my dachshund, and he was the most difficult dog I’ve ever trained. He was so independent. So I’m really glad that I know more now than I did then. With Game, I was confident that if I just gave her time to check out the environment, then always would come the moment when she would push me to interact with her. In the beginning, when I took her interesting places, she didn’t show a lot of interest in me, and I just accepted that because I don’t think it’s possible to make yourself more interesting than the environment anyway. I worked on our relationship at home. I could actually see how her interest in playing with me increased every time we went out into the real world. I think in hindsight it really was the best approach I could have taken for her. She’ll now happily engage with me soon when we’re entering new space, and it’s always her choice and not my request, which I really like. I like it to be that way. But I’m pretty sure her environmental interests will come back when she hits adolescence, so this will be very interesting.

Melissa Breau: As somebody who has a young dog and is working on foundation stuff, what do you feel is the most important skill — or skills, if you want to dive into more than one — to really focus on or teach a new dog?

Chrissi Schranz: I think it really depends on the owner and their goals for themselves and their dog. For me, I really want a strong relationship. I find that more important than anything else. In order to get that, I start with lots of playing and being together, and doing things together that the dog enjoys. I want the dog to know that they can trust me and feel safe with me. Also I want off-leash reliability because I really love hiking. Everything else is secondary to this foundation.

Melissa Breau: Part of, I’m guessing, that off-leash reliability is recalls, and since you teach a class on it, and have a book coming out on it, do you want to just tell us a little bit about the book, when it will be out, where it will be available?

Chrissi Schranz: Yes. The book is in German, unfortunately, so I’m afraid many of you won’t be able to read it, but it will be out this fall. The publisher is Kynos, and it should be available on Amazon. It’s a workbook, so it has lots of free space to take notes, and tables and checklists that the reader can fill in. I want it to be a fun book that you can take places, and it will give you a clear training plan on one hand, and it helps you keep track of your progress on the other hand.

Melissa Breau: Your syllabus, to shift gears and talk about your class a little bit, mentions establishing a radius. You mentioned earlier off-leash reliability. I think that’s maybe not something I’ve thought about before with recall training, the idea of establishing a space. What do you mean by that? Can you talk us through it a little bit?

Chrissi Schranz: When you walk your dog off leash, you probably don’t want him to run more than maybe 40 feet away from you, so that’s the radius you want him to keep. With radius training we teach an awareness of this distance where the dogs learn that fun things happen 40 feet from us and closer to us. There’s various elements to this. One of them is that we play all kinds of games within that radius. Another one is that we change directions when they step out of the radius. So basically the way they were just headed sniffing, that ends if they go further away than the radius we want them to have.

Melissa Breau: You also mentioned the idea of auto check-ins. Do you want to talk a little bit about what those are and how they help with recall training?

Chrissi Schranz: That’s one of those things that I want to happen within the radius. When I casually walk my dog and she looks at me unprompted, that’s an auto check-in. The more often you capture that — for example, with a click — the more often it will happen. It’s part of what I call shifting the responsibility to the dog, because I want the dog to think it’s her job to make sure not to lose her off-leash human and not the other way around. It’s more relaxing for the human if the dog makes sure not to lose you than if you constantly have to make sure not to lose your dog.

Melissa Breau: Right. I think a lot of people probably would love it if they could trust their dog not to lose them. One of the common analogies out there that people talk about when they talk about recall training is the concept of this piggy bank. You’ve got to put a lot of money in before you can make a withdrawal out. I have no idea where that concept or that analogy came from, but I was hoping you could explain a little bit about how that works and what that concept means.

Chrissi Schranz: I don’t know where it comes from either, but I also like the image. For me, it means that I always try to follow a recall up with good things. If you keep calling your dog and then ending the off-leash fun, she’ll learn that she better shouldn’t come. So every time I call and then pay her well or let her run off again, I put money in the piggy bank, and every time I call and put her on a leash or end the play date, I’m making a withdrawal. I feel that you want to have as little withdrawals as possible.

Melissa Breau: Part, I think, of what most people struggle with, they can get the recall in the house, they can get the recall maybe in the yard when there’s a low level of distraction, and maybe they get it 100 percent of the time awesome. So the first time they face something hard to recall their dog off of, they’re shocked, amazed, terrified, horrified, whatever word you want to choose, when the dog doesn’t come. The problem there is they struggle with generally adding distractions in training and actually thoroughly proofing the behavior. Since recalls are often most important when distractions are their highest, proofing is perhaps even more important with this particular skill than with most of the things we teach. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about how listeners can do it the right way.

Chrissi Schranz: I think you already touched on the most important part: proofing. Many people just forget about that part when it comes to real-life behaviors. They remember to proof sports behaviors and competition behaviors, but somehow just expect the recall to work in real life after training it in the house or in the training building. But of course it doesn’t because it’s a very different environment. There are always sudden distractions. So ideally you think of it just as you think of any other behavior. You train it in an easy environment first — for example, your house, or a training building, or your yard — and then you don’t just skip a few steps and ask your dog to recall off a dear; you gradually build to this environment, and gradually introduce distractions. For example, you can work with a low-value food distraction in your own house, and then a slightly higher-value food distraction, and so on.

Melissa Breau: Kind of building complexity at home before you take it out.

Chrissi Schranz: Yes, exactly.

Melissa Breau: Is it realistic to believe that every dog can have a strong recall cue, or are there some dogs that simply are always going to struggle with it?

Chrissi Schranz: I think some dogs will always struggle, and I’m sure some people disagree, but while training is important, it’s only part of the picture. There’s breed tendencies and individual temperaments, and those are also really important factors. For example, a dog who’s genetically wired to work independently of humans, and a dog who has a strong prey drive, that’s a dog that will be much harder to train when it comes to a recall for off-leash hiking, for example, than a handler-focused dog with a high will to please and no prey drive whatsoever.

Melissa Breau: Right. What do you do with those dogs that maybe don’t have a lot of built-in interest for reinforcers? How do you handle that?

Chrissi Schranz: That’s a great question. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’m actually developing a class on building reinforcers. I think we usually assume that a reinforcer is a thing that the dog wants, and that we just need to have the thing and give it to the dog, and we can reward the behavior anywhere, anytime. But very often it just doesn’t work that way. For example, some dogs only take treats at home, or they’re only interested in toys in certain contexts. For example, you can’t reward a recall with something the dog doesn’t want when he’s out. It doesn’t matter how much he likes that same thing at home. So I think it’s really useful if we try to see reinforcers as behaviors rather than things. So instead of food, we have the act of eating, and instead of a tennis ball, we have the act of playing fetch, and so on. If you think of a reinforcer as a behavior, all of a sudden it’s pretty clear that reinforcers can be trained and generalized just like any other behavior. We actually shouldn’t expect them to work anywhere and everywhere without building them and generalizing them and working on them.

Melissa Breau: Since you’re working on a class on that concept, any thoughts when we might see it on the schedule, or anything else you want to get into about what it’s going to cover?

Chrissi Schranz: I’m not sure, but it will probably be on the schedule in June, and we’ll go into all kinds of reinforcers, including the ones we don’t typically think of. For example, there’ll be lectures and games about environmental rewards, like chasing squirrels or chasing birds, and we’ll talk about things that are genetically reinforcing, like, for example, herding might be for a Border Collie.

Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much, Chrissi, for coming back on the podcast. I really appreciate it. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We’ll be back next week, this time with Deb Jones, to talk about achieving a balance between motivation and control in our dogs through training.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

Credits:

Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Jan 19, 2018

SUMMARY:

Lori Stevens is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch® Training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health all interact.

She uses intimidation-free, scientific, and innovative methods, in an educational environment, to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, WA. She is also the creator of the Balance Harness.

Lori’s most recent of three DVDs by Tawser Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao and called The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs. It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She teaches the popular FDSA course Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs, and will be introducing a new course this session called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness in Five.

Links

Next Episode: 

To be released 1/26/2018, and I'll be talking to Chrissi Schranz about building reinforcers and recall training, so stay tuned!

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we’ll be talking to Lori Stevens.

Lori is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch® Training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health all interact.

She uses intimidation-free, scientific, and innovative methods, in an educational environment, to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, WA. She is also the creator of the Balance Harness.

Lori’s most recent of three DVDs by Tawser Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao and called The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs. It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She teaches the popular FDSA course Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs, and will be introducing a new course this session called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness in Five.

Hi Lori, welcome back to the podcast.

Lori Stevens: Hello Melissa. Thanks for having me back.

Melissa Breau: I am very excited to talk to you again today. To start us out and remind listeners who you are, do you want to recap who the animals are that you share your life with?

Lori Stevens: Sure. Since you made that plural, I’ll add in my husband because humans are animals.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough!

Lori Stevens: Anyway, I live with my husband, Lee, and I live with my 12-and-a-half-year-old Aussie girl, Cassie. You know, I used to teach about aging dogs without actually having one, and now I have one. So after several years of teaching basically senior dogs how to have a better life, now I have one and I’m putting it to work. So it’s nice to have a 12-and-a-half-year-old who’s excited about doing fitness, and going to the park, and the beach, and trail outings, and all sorts of good things.

Melissa Breau: You shared pictures. She’s clearly in great shape. She looks awesome.

Lori Stevens: Yeah, she’s doing well.

Melissa Breau: Good. I know from last time we talked that you’re an advocate for canine fitness — probably not surprising based on what you do. But can you share a little about why it’s important, especially for sports dogs?

Lori Stevens: I’ll start with sports. I have personal experience with seeing athletes go to the next level, and I think it’s the cross-training, because they’ll come in and basically say something like, “My dog keeps hitting bars. I think we need to improve something.” When we start doing some cross-training, or strengthening the core, or strengthening the legs that are involved in a jump, all those things, we see improvement in performance —surprise, surprise.

I think a lot of time in sports the training is going to classes, practicing the sports, but sometimes you need to do one more level of fitness to get that extra little bit. There are so many benefits in canine fitness, things like strengthens muscles is obvious, but it really strengthens and helps the dog know when and how to engage their core muscles. That would happen automatically. It’s not like they think, OK, it’s time to engage my core muscles, but we do exercises where we start engaging them a lot and then it becomes more natural.

You build better joint support through stronger muscles, improving flexibility, improve alignment and posture, balance and stability improve. And with that, what you get is fewer injuries, you get more confidence, you get more body awareness. And so dogs, when they’re faced with a quick decision or a quick body move, they’re more prepared and more confident to make that move, and stronger in that movement than they might be if they were just doing the regular training as a sport. It improves gait, movement, I just think it’s fantastic.

But another part of it, which I think we often leave out, is that it’s a behavior changer. I have worked with fearful dogs that that was the way that I broke through to them. That confidence they get with suddenly doing things with their body that they’ve never done before, like hind leg targeting, I think that’s a huge, huge exercise for dogs’ awareness of where their back end is, their confidence. It seems to be a game changer, really, in terms of behavior, I have found. It’s all the stuff you would naturally think of with fitness, but it also does a lot in terms of confidence, body awareness, and building trust even. I mean really being able to build trust, or doing something joyful that doesn’t have the pressure of competition in it.

Melissa Breau: I think that, for a lot of people, when they talk about fitness, they think about their own experiences. I don’t know about you, but for me at least, the gym is not my favorite place to be. How does that compare to how dogs generally feel about fitness and what’s the difference there?

Lori Stevens: I hate the gym. Can I just say that? Really hate the gym.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely.

Lori Stevens: I have a personal trainer now. I love my trainer. And so maybe that’s more like working with your dog. What pops to mind when I think of going to the gym is a sweaty place that doesn’t smell great and has a lot of grunting. Canine fitness, what pops to mind when I think about it, is joy, joy, joy. That’s what my canine gym is, my canine gym room. Doing fitness together is just a blast. I have to say that every dog I’ve ever worked with loves it, and that’s why it’s my sport. It’s my sport, I’m calling it my sport because I don’t have another sport, but to me, it really is. It’s truly a fun activity and it’s all about the joy. So they aren’t really comparable, those two things.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough, and I guess if someone was sitting there feeding us cookies for everything we did at the gym, we might enjoy it a little more too.

Lori Stevens: Yeah, true.

Melissa Breau: I think the other place that our concepts about our own fitness struggles sometimes hold us back is with the expectations around how much time we have to put into it. Most people probably think about spending an hour — or more, maybe — at the gym each time they go. Based on the upcoming course name, I’m going to guess that canine fitness differs there too. So how much time should people really be spending on canine fitness?

Lori Stevens: You know that five is five hours. No, I’m just kidding. It’s five minutes. You know, that goes for people too. When you’re out walking your dog, and you’re out in the woods, or on a trail, or in the park, it’s OK if it takes an hour. But when you’re in your house with your dog and you want to do some focused exercises, you want to stop and do a little training, so you might as well do a little fitness, five minutes is plenty. I do believe in warming up and cooling down, and the five minutes is the strengthening part, but if you wanted to turn that into two minutes of strengthening and a couple of minutes of warm-up, and a short cool down, that’s fine too.

I actually think, with people, they don’t need to do an hour workout either. If I stop and do five to ten minutes of working out, that’s better than if I don’t do any at all, so the time thing, I think, often gets in the way.

I also think we can over-train our dogs. I have a 12-and-a-half-year-old, and I set a timer. I set it for five minutes of training. If she’s cold, like if she’s been sleeping for a few hours, then I wake her up, I set my timer for five minutes, and we do five minutes of warm-up. Then I set it again, we do five minutes of strengthening, and then we do a few minutes of cool down, usually another five on the cool down. So I just set my timer. I think I got that idea of five, five, and five from Leslie Eide, a rehabilitation vet in our area. She also teaches fitness work. I think she’s done some for Fenzi.

I think the thing is that it’s important to warm up a bit and cool down a bit, but you really don’t have to spend that much time doing it. So all of the workouts that people are going to develop in my class are going to be five-minute workouts. We don’t have to overthink this, you know. We can be creative. We just don’t want to work the same muscles every day to fatigue. So we just want to be careful on that side of things.

Melissa Breau: How much do fitness behaviors — maybe including or maybe not including warm-up and cool down stuff; I’ll leave that up to you — but how much do those skills or those behaviors differ from other skills and behaviors that we teach our dog for sport or just for daily life?

Lori Stevens: It’s all behavior. How does it differ? I think the way it differs is that we need to be safe. So we need to pay attention to alignment, we need to start on the ground, and what I mean by that is we really need to build a foundation, just like with any sport. You’re not going to get past the foundation stuff. You don’t put your dog directly on a peanut and start doing things.

One of my goals in teaching fitness is to really teach people how to be wonderful, incredibly sharp-eyed observers, and teach them what to look for when they’re doing fitness, and how to start on the ground and build up. All these exercises that we do as foundation exercises, they’re all going to get harder because we’re going to be doing them on the ground first, on a stable platform, then an unstable platform, unstable equipment.

Training fitness is not training for a competitive sport, so the pressure isn’t the same, but you still have to have a good foundation for it. Just like with agility, you don’t go in and start running courses. You teach the dog how to get on the equipment, how to exit the equipment, how to use the equipment safely. This is all a good thing, in my view, and that’s why I can call it my sport, because there are a bunch of nuances.

But it’s also a very joyful thing to do. Not to say that sports isn’t joyful. Most people do it because it’s a blast. But precision is important in fitness training, just like it’s important in competitive sports. It’s just different in the sense that it’s something you can do year-round. You might change your focus based on what you see in your dog, and all of it is about teaching behaviors, so the better you are at training and timing, the better your fitness work will look.

Melissa Breau: You mentioned in there the idea of equipment. Do people need special equipment to do canine fitness?

Lori Stevens: I think people like an excuse to buy equipment.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough.

Lori Stevens: I really do. I think it’s funny, I do think they like that. But let’s just say they can’t afford it or they don’t like it. There’s a lot of things you can build. You can use things around the house. Do you have to have fancy cones? No, you can use potted plants. Do you have to have a fancy Cavalletti set with cones with poles through it? No, you can use your mops and brooms and put them on cans and use painter’s tape. Do you have to buy fancy platforms or an aerobic platform? No, you can use books and bind them with duct tape and put anti-slip material around them. You can use air mattresses and pillows for unstable equipment. I’m betting most people will want to buy a piece of equipment or two, but you don’t have to.

Let me just add that the outdoors, when you go for a walk in the park, it is full of exercise equipment. I’m going to give you yesterday’s example. We haven’t gone for our walk today yet. Yesterday’s example was we went to the park and Cassie wanted to jump on every park bench. She sees the bench and she starts targeting for the bench, and she wants to go on every single bench. She can put her front legs up to work her hind legs, or she can push up all the way to do a little jump. Then we do uphill sprints because I’m in Seattle, so there’s a lot of hills. We do uphill recalls and she sprints up the hill. We hind leg target curbs on our way to the park, and we were walking across a bridge, and I noticed there was this little shelf, a little curb-like thing that you could step up on. So we did ipsilateral work — I’d better say what that is — we did targeting with same-side legs on the little raised part of the bridge, and we turned around, did the other side, and I took a photo of it. We do that in the class, ipsilateral work. We ended with nosework in the park, followed by walking up a very steep hill. And I did a workout with her that day, too. But this was a really good workout just utilizing, there’s often a big rock she likes to jump up on, and there’s all sorts of logs that are a little slippery right now because it rains here nonstop for ages. There’s exercise equipment everywhere. Maybe I should do a class someday on just outdoor equipment.

Melissa Breau: That would certainly be cool. It would be interesting.

Lori Stevens: Yeah.

Melissa Breau: For those people who are interested in buying a couple of pieces of equipment, are there specific pieces you usually recommend for getting started, or good places to get their feet wet?

Lori Stevens: First a caveat: You’re talking to someone who has a ridiculous amount of equipment, so maybe I shouldn’t really be allowed to answer this question. Older dogs do really well with a balance pad, and you don’t have to buy it. You can get a balance pad on Amazon for people and it’s not very expensive. You can do a lot of things with a balance pad.

I like for people to have a Fitbone or two, or a couple of 14-inch discs. Those pieces of equipment, either one, a Fitbone or a 14-inch disc, or two Fitbones or two 14-inch discs, you can do a lot with those. Platforms are super-useful. Where do you buy a platform, right? A lot of people have been making platforms recently, so there’s a lot of how-to’s on that.

But you asked me about buying. An aerobic step bench is actually a useful platform. Michelle Pouliot has a place that she links to that builds platforms according to her specifications, so I’ve got a couple of those.

And then Paw Pods. They’re inexpensive and they’re a blast. You just have to make sure you get the ones that are nice and soft, so I get the FitPAWS ones. They’re really fun, because then you can target one paw at a time, target all four, do turns, and do side steps onto them and all sorts of things. Back onto them, back onto all four, there’s a million things you can do with the Paw Pods. OK, I’ll stop. Was that just a couple of pieces?

Melissa Breau: No, that’s excellent. Paw Pods are fascinating. I’ve never taught a dog to use them, but just in general I’ve seen some stuff done with them and they’re pretty cool. They require a real awareness of where all four of your feet are.

Lori Stevens: Exactly, and it is just fun. It’s fun to teach and fun to do them.

Melissa Breau: I know you have, and you mentioned this earlier too, this idea of fitness foundation behaviors. I know that’s part of what’s on your syllabus, so I wanted to ask you what you mean by that, and what are some examples of something that counts as a fitness foundation behavior.

Lori Stevens: One isn’t even a fitness behavior, but having a good nose-to-hand touch where your dog can … so targeting is a big one, so first a nose-to-hand touch, and that’s super-useful for positioning. Having an easy go-to default behavior they can do when you just ask them to do something and they don’t do it, you can just say, “Touch.” So when you practice that in all sorts of ways, and moving them into position with your nose-to-hand targeting, then you’ve got something that you can use during fitness training that gets them to a certain place, gets them on something, gets them off of something. Getting off of equipment sometimes can be challenging for some people.

So just to continue with the targeting, being able to target with one paw, target something, your hand, with each of your four paws — not your four paws, your dog’s four paws — targeting with one paw, two paws up, four paws up, is a useful foundation skill.

Hind leg targeting is, in my opinion, hind leg targeting is a useful skill for all dogs, period. Being able to hind leg target something is really important, but then, of course, it’s a foundation behavior when you’re just teaching a dog to hind leg target a mat. But it becomes more skillful and more of a fitness behavior when you’re targeting something unstable and higher up and asking to hold that position and maybe do shoulder exercises with their hind end up. So these things that start on the ground that don’t seem like that big a deal, they build and become more difficult and more challenging fitness exercises or strengthening exercises. Backing up, side stepping — both of those are foundation exercises, but side stepping on unstable equipment is a different thing than side stepping with all four feet on the ground. I call them foundations because you’re giving the dog the idea of what is side stepping and what is backing up, or asking them to do it on something difficult.

Melissa Breau: What are some of the basic exercises that you teach most often? What do those look like, and what are the benefits of doing some of them?

Lori Stevens: Let me just start with the simplest concept, and that is, when you put two front feet up on something, your dog is usually, not always, but you can help them shift their weight to their back legs, so the further they’re standing up, the less likely that they’ll have the weight on their front legs. The benefit of putting two paws up on something and holding is that the hind legs are being used more. If the hind legs are up, then the weight is more down on the front legs, so you’re building front leg muscles. Things like tuck sits and sphinx downs require more core work. There’s something that is often said in physical therapy, and that is, you stabilize, you strengthen the proximal, which is the core, which is the trunk, to get better distal mobility from a strengthen position. So it’s important to be able to have the strength of that stability in your trunk and in your core, your stabilization muscles, your multifidi, your transverse abdominus muscles. It’s important to be able to automatically engage those, your serratus, in order to do some of these other exercises. So the benefits of the core work is to be able to do more difficult things safely.

The benefits of some of the other exercises we work on, like, let’s just say crawling. Crawling, you’re down in a sphinx down position and then you’re moving forward on the ground. So you’re working the back muscles. You’re utilizing all four limbs, and those limbs, especially the back legs, really have to work the rotation of the hip. The benefits of these exercises are pretty amazing.

Another example would be with the dog standing on all four legs. If you lift the left front leg, you’re going to put more weight on the right back leg, so if you’ve got a dog that’s in a habit of standing to the side because maybe they hurt their right knee two years ago, so they got in a habit of unloading that leg, well, lifting the front left paw loads that leg, and in their body they start getting the muscle memory back of, Oh yeah, I can use that leg like I used it before. It doesn’t hurt at all.

Let me just add that I still think it’s important that everybody who does fitness is checked out by a veterinarian, and if they’ve had any sort of problems that they’re cleared for the exercises first.

But there’s a lot of benefits that come from doing this work that sometimes people don’t even see until they start doing it. It’s pretty cool.

And then there’s the behavior benefits, like I said earlier. The body awareness, the bonding that occurs, the trust and joy. And do you know that some of the agility dogs I work with have never slowed down, and they’re like, “Ha ha ha, my dog will never slow down,” and they walk over those Cavaletti poles. But slowing down helps dogs go faster, because in slowing down they really get to know their bodies better, and they get to know where they’re not just pushing through. Being the little masters of muscle compensation that they are, when you’re moving slowly, it all stands out. You have to know what muscles you’re using, you have to know where your feet are in a different sort of way, and so the slow work doesn’t slow your dog down on the course. It helps your dog because they’re even more confident and more aware, I think.

Melissa Breau: I wanted to ask if there are differences in the behaviors you’d recommend for daily fitness versus those you use to warm up and cool down, or whether the behaviors are multifunctional. Maybe you could just talk to all that a little bit.

Lori Stevens: The exercises are multifunctional, or at least some of them are. In my warm-up I might do a few tuck sits and a few tuck sits to stand. I might do some short recalls. I might do some targeting, some spins, some bows, some Cavalletti work. But I’m not going to do ten tuck sits to stands, three sets, with feet upon a Fitbone, as my warm-up.

So the concept of the exercise is the exercise might be the same, but I’ll just do two or three of them in a warm-up versus ten of them, really hard, three sets. I want the dogs, as they’re warming up, to go through the different movements. I want them to back up and side step, and all that’s on the ground during a warm-up, really.

I often just come in from a walk, like, I walk Cassie for however long, usually we walk at least 30 minutes, and we walk in the house and she’s pretty warmed up, so we just do a few exercises right after that. But it’s spins and turns to get the … or spins in each direction, sorry. It’s good lateral flexion for the spine, so it warms up the spine muscles.

Cavalletti work is a nice warm-up exercise when you’re trotting across them, but I’m not going to raise them real high and have a dog do high steps, or side stepping, or backing up over Cavelletti poles as a warm-up, because that’s taking it a little bit further.

So they’re multifunctional, but they’re done in the simplest way during warm-ups and cool downs. I probably made that into something longer than it needed to be.

In cool downs I’m even going to go lighter and do less in a cool down than I would in a warm-up.

Melissa Breau: You mentioned this earlier, and you talk about it a little bit in your syllabus, this concept of alignment. I wanted to ask what you mean by that, and if you can talk a little bit about why it’s important.

Lori Stevens: It’s super-important, and why it’s important has to do with the muscles that are engaging. I’m an alignment geek, I admit. If a dog sits with a leg shooting out to the side, or just a super-sloppy sit to the side, the first thing I want to know is why that’s happening and let’s change it. If a back is roached up or humped up, I want to know is something wrong. Hunched up, back roached, I don’t know how you’d say roaching, but hopefully people know what that is.

Sometimes what I see is a dog can stand with their feet under them perfectly fine, but as soon as they step up on a platform, their back feet go really wide, or their front feet go really wide. Have you ever seen people that are standing with their legs really wide? They’re not using their core. They’re just creating this super-broad base that they don’t have to use any muscles. I mean, you have to use muscles to stand, but it’s a rather lazy, non-core way of standing. Sorry if you’re thinking, I do that all the time!

So what I’m looking for is that dogs are using the muscles I expect, they have nice, long spines, neutral necks, their tail is not tucked. If the dog’s tail is tucked — some dogs tuck their tails a lot — but if the dog’s tail is really tucked and their legs are wide, then I think either, They’re not comfortable standing like this. Maybe we’re standing on something a little bit too high. Maybe for one reason or another they might or might not be hurting. It’s really hard to tell because you can’t ask. So I want to see if we can change their position in a way that puts them in better alignment and if they’re comfortable doing that.

Now if the dog regularly really goes wide in the back, I know how to encourage them to have their legs under them, but if I all of a sudden start doing the exercise with their legs in, they might be using muscles they have never used before. So I have to really be careful with not just bringing their legs in and then doing a million exercises, because the dog needs to get used to using those new muscles.

So anyway, alignment is a really, really big deal. It’s just safe. It’s safer. There’s no reason to do things with improper alignment. It’s the same thing in human training as well.

Melissa Breau: I’ll let you talk a little more about the class specifically. I know it’s called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness In Five, and it’s in February, so lots of f’s. What does it entail, what is it going to look like? Do you want to just talk us through a little bit?

Lori Stevens: It’s going to be fun, it’s going to be educational, it will benefit your dog and help him in sports. At the end of, so every week, I think this time I’m going to release everything the first day of the week. You’ll have lectures that will tell you a bit about why I want things to go a certain way, or things to keep in mind, or learning about fitness. So I’ll have lectures.

Then I’ll have exercises, and I’ll say how to get the behaviors, what they’re good for. I’ll say the setup, what you need in your environment, the instructions, the number of repetitions and sets, I’ll have video of the exercise. So we’ll do that.

And then, at the end of every week, I’m going to have something called The Five-Minute Workout, it’s just called Five-Minute Workout. I’m not going to create the five-minute workout. However, I’m going to give everybody the tools to create their own five-minute workout. So you can imagine what the homework will be. The homework will be showing the exercises, or for sure showing videos of the exercises that you’re having trouble teaching.

But also I’m going to want to see parts of the five-minute workout. The first week, you’re learning how to do a five-minute workout. You’re not all of a sudden, “Here’s my five-minute workout.” It’s going to build across the weeks, and every week your five-minute workout can incorporate, like, let’s just say we’re in Week 3. Your five-minute workout can include the exercises from Week 3, 2, and 1, so we can get creative and more mixing and matching.

Anyway, that’s basically how the class is laid out. I’m going to have lectures on things like raising criteria. I’ll talk about the benefits, the kinds of movements, the anatomical terminology, like what is cranial and what’s caudal, what’s lateral and what’s medial. I’ll talk about exercise frequency, repetitions, durations, and sets. I’ll talk about physiological issues, muscle actions. So there’s things I’ll just talk about, but then there’s the exercises, so people will have both. They’ll learn about fitness and they will learn the exercises.

Melissa Breau: They’ll learn both the whys and the hows.

Lori Stevens: Yeah.

Melissa Breau: I think you hit on the things that people are most likely to have questions about. I feel like anytime people talk about this stuff, it’s like, “OK, but how much do I do? How long do I do it?” and all those pieces.

Lori Stevens: Yeah, right. Exactly. And it’s really different from the Aging Dogs class. In the Aging Dogs class, depending on the age of the dog, for sure, I’m not always this picky about everything. I’m likely to be a little bit more picky about alignment and how we’re doing the exercise than I am in the Aging Dogs class. It all depends on the dog, but when you’re working with a 16-year-old dog, teaching him fitness exercises, you’re going to go really slowly, give that dog the time to learn them, and you’re not going to be super-picky about, you’re going to be as picky as you can be about alignment, but it’s different.

Melissa Breau: You hit on something there, and I didn’t tell you I was going to ask you this, but you brought it up and I think it makes sense to maybe talk about it for just a quick second. Is there a type of dog that is a good fit for the class, or maybe isn’t as good a fit for the class?

Lori Stevens: I would say if it’s a dog that … OK, first of all, if it’s a puppy and the growth plates aren’t closed yet, then puppies probably should not take the class, because everything about repetitions and sets aren’t going to apply to the puppy. Somebody could take it if they have a puppy. I recommend they audit it. Then, when their dog’s growth plates close, then they can start applying it, or they can take it again later. It’s a lot of material. You could audit it, then take it later, and still go, “Oh, I don’t remember doing this.”

If your dog’s coming off a pretty serious injury and you’ve got contraindications, things you really shouldn’t be doing, maybe don’t take it at Gold. Maybe just audit it. Check with your vet. It’s different if you’re coming here and you’ve been released from the rehab vet to come to me to do exercises. But if you are taking this as a fitness class, I’m going to assume your dog is pretty healthy. Other than that, pretty much all dogs can take it.

For sure the dogs that are pretty mobile that have been in my Aging Dogs class, they can take it. They may not be able to do everything, but the ones that are pretty mobile, there’s some I have in mind that could definitely take it. But if you’ve got a dog that can hardly move, this will be challenging, is my guess.

But there’s always something, you know? I have to do some harder exercises for the dogs that are more performance dogs. They’re strong and they’re used to doing things. And then you can always just stick with the basics and build really, really gradually until you’re ready to go up a level. So it really depends.

Melissa Breau: If people have questions, they can message you, right?

Lori Stevens: Whatever people have, yeah. I think it’s going to be a well-attended class, based on the interest I’ve seen so far, so I hope. It should be really fun. It should be a very positive experience for the dogs and people.

Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Lori. This is fun to learn a little more about this stuff, and I feel like every time we talk about it, I’m like, Hmm, I really should be doing that. So thank you for coming back on and talking through this with me.

And thank you to all of our wonderful listeners out there for tuning in. We’ll be back next week, this time with Chrissi Schranz to talk about building reinforcers and recall training. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice so our next episode will automatically download to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

CREDITS:

Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Jan 12, 2018

SUMMARY:

Stacey Barnett is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, and the host of the Scentsabilities podcast -- but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love.

Links

Next Episode: 

To be released 1/19/2018, and I'll be talking to Lori Stevens about how you can help your dog reach optimum fitness in about five minutes, so stay tuned!

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we’ll be talking to Stacy Barnett.

Stacy is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility, and Barn Hunt, and the host of the Scentsabilities podcast — but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love.

Hi Stacy, welcome back to the podcast.

Stacy Barnett: Hi Melissa. How are you?

Melissa Breau: I’m doing well. So this is our third take, thanks to technology. So hopefully this time we have good sound and everybody does well.

To start us out, Stacy, do you want to tell us just a little bit and remind listeners who your dogs are? I know since last time we talked you have a new addition, so maybe you could share a little bit about that.

Stacy Barnett: I do, I do. I love talking about her anyway, so that’s really great. I have four dogs now, so I’m getting closer to the “crazy dog lady” status. I don’t think I’m there yet, but a little closer. I have four dogs. My oldest dog is a 10-year-old Standard Poodle named Joey, and Joey is competing in the NW3 level right now in nosework. I have a 6-year-old miniature American Shepherd, or mini Aussie, and he is at the end of E2 level.

Then I have two Labradors now, so my main competition dog that I’ve done most of my competition with out of these dogs is Judd. Judd is — I can’t believe it — he’s 8 years old now. Time flies. He’s an 8-year-old Labrador Retriever, and he’s a dog that’s my elite dog that I competed at the 2017 NACSW National Invitational this year. He’s really the one that brought me into nosework in a big way.

Then I have a brand new addition. I have a — she’s going to be 9 months old, believe it not, this next week — and she is a Labrador Retriever from working lines. I’m very proud of her breeding and her breeder because they produce professional dogs for the professional sector, like FEMA dogs, cadaver dogs, that kind of thing. So she’s bred for detection. She’s definitely living up to her breeding, which is really exciting. But she’s a really super dog, I absolutely love her, a little peanut, she’s only about 35 pounds right now, but she may be small, but she’s mighty.

Melissa Breau: I know that you mentioned on Facebook a little bit, and some other places, that Brava’s been a little bit of a change from some of your other dogs. She’s a little different. Do you want to share a little bit about that?

Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. Brava is, she actually thinks her name is Bravado. That’s her attitude. Her nickname is actually Big Bad. She’s really a piece of work, but I absolutely adore her. She is what people would typically refer to as a high drive dog, but she’s also a high arousal dog. With my other dogs, I can get them into drive, but they are not what I would call high arousal dogs. I would say that they’re either low arousal or moderate arousal. But with her, she’s a high arousal, so it’s totally on a different side of the Yerkes-Dodson arousal curve.

Melissa Breau: I want to talk a little more about that. Do you want to explain what the curve is and how it works, and what you mean by saying she’s on one side and they’re on the other?

Stacy Barnett: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’m actually really interested in Yerkes-Dodson Law because I find that it is the number one success criteria. Like, if you want to be successful in nosework, and probably a lot of other sports, but the number one key to success is managing this curve. So this is a really important concept.

Basically, with the Yerkes-Dodson Law — and it’s a law, by the way — it’s not something you can break. Picture a curve that looks like a bell curve. It’s actually a normal distribution curve, but it looks like a bell curve. As your arousal increases, your performance increases. So as the dog — or whatever we’re talking about, but we’re talking about dogs right now — as the dog’s arousal continues to increase and increase and increase, the dog’s performance also goes up until it gets to a point at the peak of the curve. And at the peak of the curve, this is the point at which I consider the dog to be in drive, and that’s at the point where you’re going to get the highest amount of performance, the highest degree of performance, out of the dog.

But now what happens is, as the dog continues to increase its arousal — so your high arousal dogs tend to live on that side, on the right side, of the curve — so as they continue to increase that arousal, their performance actually decreases. So as the dog is more and more aroused, the performance gets worse and worse and worse, and it gets to the point where it becomes beyond arousal. It’s actually the high anxiety, and it’s that anxiety that is kind of like there’s a point of no return at that point, where the dog’s totally out to lunch.

That’s basically the curve, and like I said, it’s a law, so to be successful, you can ride the curve a little bit. So trying to figure out, you want to take a look at what your dog is giving you, where their emotional state is, and then modify that emotional state so that you can try to get the dog back to the peak. When you get the dog back to the peak, the dog’s in drive and you’re going to have the best performance.

Melissa Breau: To talk about that just a little bit more, what does it look like when the dog is on that right side of the curve and getting to the point where they’re so over-aroused that it’s impacting their performance? Maybe what are some of the things people can do to bring that back down?

Stacy Barnett: OK. Let’s talk about the right side. The right side is — this is the part of the curve that Brava is really highlighting to me. I have to say, though, she’s just to the right, like, she’s able to focus, which is really nice. With a dog who is high arousal, you’re going to see a number of different things. You can see … let’s say the dog is waiting. Waiting is really hard on these dogs. They tend to sometimes … they might be barking. So if you see a dog and they’re obviously very agitated, and they want their turn, they want to go now, they want to go now, they want to go now, they want to go now, those dogs that are barking, they’re in high arousal state. Or if the dog is pulling you to the start line. Or they’re coming off of the start line and they’re exploding into the search area. These are indications that your dog’s arousal is too high. It’s basically picture a 3-year-old child on a sugar high. That is high arousal, right? They can’t focus.

Melissa Breau: Sort of the way people think of a dog who stresses up.

Stacy Barnett: Yes, yes. And actually there is a direct relationship, like, if you think about stressing up. I actually like to think about this in terms of real arousal and perceived arousal. We

perceive high arousal dogs that stress up to be high arousal dogs because it’s very obvious to us. So the real arousal equals perceived arousal.

Interestingly, there’s also another kind of stress that we see that doesn’t look like high arousal, but it really is, and that is when the dog stresses down. So the dog is still stressed, the dog still has high anxiety, and it’s still on the right-hand side of the curve, but you see these dogs and they’re shut down, and it’s very easy to misinterpret this, to think that the dog needs to be lifted up in its arousal state. So sometimes you see people try to jolly the dog, or “Hey, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” maybe some toy play, and all they’re doing is actually increasing the arousal even more, they’re increasing the dog’s arousal even more, and the dog actually can’t get out of that anxiety state. That’s where the perceived arousal is very different than the real arousal.

Melissa Breau: You started to touch on it there, the other side of that curve, the left side of that curve. By contrast, what does that look like, or how does that work, and what should people be looking at?

Stacy Barnett: The left-hand side of the curve is our lower arousal. If a dog is really low arousal, he’s basically asleep. So you have the really low arousal that might be a little … very laid back, very like, “Hey, I’m here,” they might be a little bored, they might seem bored, they might be a little slow, they might be a little over-methodical, they might be unmethodical. Those are the dogs where you just want them to give you a little bit more. Those are the dogs around the lower side, and as long as they’re not too low on the arousal curve, it’s actually pretty easy to get them up the curve.

I actually find that the ideal state is slightly to the left as a natural state, because a dog has a natural arousal state, and then they have the state that they’re currently in. So if their natural arousal state is slightly to the left, just the fact that being at a trial will actually put them at the top of the curve.

I’m actually very lucky Judd’s one of those. He’s slightly to the left as his natural arousal state. I take him to a trial, he loves trialing, it puts him right at the peak arousal, and he’s in drive.

Melissa Breau: We all want that dog, right?

Stacy Barnett: Yeah, right. Everybody wants Judd. Everybody loves Judd.

Melissa Breau: We talked before this and we talked a little bit about this just kind of outside of this context, but I know another big thing for you is really adapting your handling and training to the dog you have, and not just in terms of arousal levels. You also talk about the importance of adapting your training and handling based on how secure your dog is, or how confident they are, and whether they’re more handler focused or more environmentally focused. I wanted to ask you a little bit about that. Can you share what some of that looks like and how people can adapt accordingly?

Stacy Barnett: Absolutely, absolutely, and I just want to give a little bit of a plug for Denise’s book Train the Dog in Front of You. Now, again, this is focusing on nosework, but I think every competitor, if you do dog sports, buy the book. And no, she’s not giving me any kickback on that — I just wanted to let you know! Basically because the most important thing that you can do from a dog training perspective is to know what kind of dog are you dealing with. I don’t mean are you dealing with a Border Collie, a Labrador, or a Shih Tzu. It’s the dog, the personality type, the very specific what makes your dog tick. What’s really cool is Denise has actually broken down the dog’s personality into dimensions, and these dimensions, if you can understand where your dog falls, it can give you insight into what’s the best way to train your dog, which is really cool.

For instance, what I like to focus on specifically, especially for all our nosework stuff, is there’s two particular dimensions that I think are really important. One of them is, is your dog secure or is your dog cautious. The dog who is secure, that’s ideal. We want that secure dog. The dog who’s cautious might be a little bit more timid.

Actually Judd, as an example, is a cautious dog. So you have a cautious dog, but then you compare that to Brava, who is very secure. You see the difference in their searching style. I did a search just the other day in my back room, and there was a tight space. Brava was really pushing into that tight space, where Judd was like, “Ooh, I don’t know, it kind of makes me nervous.” So you have secure versus cautious.

Then you have another dimension, which is also really important, which is either handler focused or environmentally focused. Along with other sports, we do like to have the dog fairly handler focused. However, in scent sports specifically, we need to have a dog that’s a little bit more on the environmental side, but not so environmental that they’re prioritizing their environment over target odor or over working with us as a team, because again, this is actually a team sport with you and your dog, and you have to work together as a partnership. So ideally you actually have a dog who is somewhere in-between handler focused and environmentally focused. But if you can understand which side your dog is, that can give you insight into how to train your dog.

Melissa Breau: So what it seems to me is like what you’re talking about really is balance, this idea that you want to hit this perfect in-between on a couple of things, right? Working to balance out our dog’s natural tendencies, whatever they may be. So I wanted to ask about one more skill where balance is important. How do you achieve that right balance that you’re talking about in teamwork, between teamwork and independence, especially during a search?

Stacy Barnett: There are some handling things that you can do. For instance, one of these things, I actually call it proximity of influence — it’s just a term that I coined — that the closer you are to your dog, the more influence you’re going to exert on your dog. There’s actually a sweet spot, and every dog is slightly different in terms of where their sweet spot is.

You don’t want to be so close to your dog that you’re influencing your dog too much, because at that point you’re providing a little bit too much input into the search, and let’s face it, we don’t have a nose. I mean, we have a nose, but it doesn’t work very well. But you also don’t want to be so far away that you’re not a partner with your dog. So by understanding a little bit about is your dog environmentally or handler focused, it can tell you how sensitive they’re going to be to your proximity.

I know, for instance, with Judd, Judd is actually quite independent. He’s pretty … from an environmentally focused perspective, he’s more on the environmental side versus handler focused, and he will actually tolerate a lot of handler interference because he just tells me to get in the back seat anyway.

Whereas if you have a dog like Joey, my Standard Poodle, who is actually very handler focused, he’s very open to suggestions. I actually did a search this morning where I had a hide, and it was in the proximity of an area where there’s probably a little bit of residual odor from a few days ago. Joey paused for a second and he looked at me. I made the mistake of saying, “Joey, go search,” because as soon as I did that, I actually prompted him, especially because of my proximity and where I was, it in effect prompted him to alert on residual odor, because he was like, “Oh, OK, you think this is where the hide is absolutely. I think it is too,” so he alerted. These are the types of things that had I been a little further away from him, or not talked to him, I think he would not have alerted there.

So this is just an example, and the really cool thing is I got it on video. I love video so I can share it with people. It’s different kinds of things like that, so you can really work that balance based upon the position of your body with a dog and your voice.

Melissa Breau: I think when we talked about this before, you talked about there’s a certain kind of angle that you like to see between you and the dog.

Stacy Barnett: Yes. The 45-degree angle.

Melissa Breau: Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. This is something I actually talked a little bit about in my handling class, but it’s also going to be in my Win By A Nose class. We’ll talk about it there also. I think, personally, there is a perfect position in relation to the dog, when the dog is searching, for the handler to be. That position is actually 45 degrees behind the dog, but out away from the dog. You’re not parallel to the dog.

Let’s say the dog is searching a vehicle. You’re not parallel to that dog. You’re actually behind the dog and at an angle of about 45 degrees. What this does is it puts you into a neutral position. That neutral position is something that helps to offset that suggestion that we have. Dogs are very suggestible, and some dogs are more suggestible than others. And understanding how suggestible your dog is actually is really good information to know.

The interesting thing, this is my theory, is that our dogs don’t understand that we have a really bad sense of smell. Our dogs don’t know that because our dogs just assume that whatever they’re smelling — they’re smelling birch, anise, or clove — that we can smell it too, and a highly suggestible dog is going to be like, “Well, I think it’s here. Do you think it’s here? I think it’s there. Do you think it’s there?” And then they start an alert at you. Having a 45-degree angle can help to negate that and offset that. It’s cool stuff.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. I know that nosework isn’t the only sport you’ve done. It’s where your focus and where your career is now, but you started out in obedience, you’ve done a little bit of agility, so I was curious. Is there anything that you’ve learned from those other sports that has carried over into nosework for you?

Stacy Barnett: Oh absolutely, absolutely, and I think a lot of the times with nosework, I think sometimes people forget that it’s just another dog sport. Granted, the dog is out there, they’re doing something that they are very adept at doing because they have this great sense of smell, and because it’s a dog sport, it has a lot of corollaries to other dog sports. Those corollaries, things like the dog has to be able to acclimate, that sort of thing, and from a behavior, there’s a lot of behavioral corollaries.

There’s also from the perspective of … so I’m going to use an example: movement. If you do agility, you’d learn that your body position and the way you move affects your dog. It tells your dog where to go. Now interestingly, the same thing happens in nosework. But in nosework we’re sometimes very oblivious to that because we start off with the dog doing most of the work and we do like to have 80/20, we want the dog really driving the search. But it’s very easy to forget that our body movement, our body motion, and our acceleration or deceleration, how we’re standing in relationship to the dog, that all that is communicated to the dog. So if we look at, say, agility, and all the motion cues, and the body position cues, and all these cues that you give to your dog, you can actually look at that and say, “Hey, those are natural cues,” and those type of cues also apply to nosework.

Melissa Breau: I know that your life has changed quite a bit since we last talked. Not just the new puppy, but you’ve been working with the AKC on their new scentwork program. I wanted to ask you what being an AKC contractor is about, what are you doing? Do you want to just share a little bit about what you’re doing for them, what’s involved there?

Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. I’m one of the contractors. There’s a small handful of us. We’re basically consulting, so we’re helping the AKC with … we’re just bringing some thoughts, some ideas, to making sure and really helping to support the program so that we end up with a really excellent sport coming out of it, because that is a new sport for the AKC. So we’re helping to consult. We’re also supporting some of the trials, like maybe if there’s a new scentwork club or something like that, to make sure that they have the support that they need for trials, and to answer questions and that sort of thing. And we’re working at doing some judges education, so we’re helping to define what we need to do to help make sure that we have the very best judges out there.

Melissa Breau: Last question. I know you’ve got your Win By A Nose class coming up on the schedule for February. Do you want to just share a little bit about how much of all of this is incorporated into that class, and maybe a little bit about what else you cover?

Stacy Barnett: Yeah, so that’s great. A lot of this will be incorporated, but the Win By A Nose class is all about successful trialing and training strategies. So it’s how do you get from the point that you’re going to be good to great? What is it going to take to help to become a really great competitor? And we’re going to get into, there’s probably going to be a little bit of mental management in there, there’s going to be a little bit of this, a little bit of that, some different trialing strategies, different cue strategies. We’ll be talking about arousal, we’ll definitely be talking about a little bit of handling, a little bit of what’s the best way to set your training strategies up so that you can get yourself ready for a trial, all this type of stuff that comes together to get to the point where you are really ready to go out there and hit a home run.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. It sounds like a good class.

Stacy Barnett: I think it’s going to be fun. I think it’s going to be good, yeah.

Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Stacy, and for sticking through the technology fails. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We will be back next week, this time with Lori Stevens to talk about how you can help your dog reach optimal fitness in about five minutes at a time. If you haven’t already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

CREDITS:

Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Jan 5, 2018

SUMMARY:

Dr. Amy Cook has been training dogs for nearly 25 years and has been specializing in the rehabilitation of shy and fearful dogs for over 15 years. She’s the creator of The Play Way, her process for helping dogs learn to cope with the world around them. She’s also a certified dog behavior consultant, a long-standing professional member of the Association of Professional Dog Trainers, and has attended all four Chicken Camps in Hot Springs, Arkansas, taught by Bob Bailey.

Amy returned to school in 2006 to get her PhD in psychology from UC Berkeley. Her research there focused on the dog/human relationship and its effect on problem-solving strategies dogs employ. She’s also recently started a blog at playwaydogs.com, and everyone should definitely go check it out.

Links

Next Episode: 

To be released 1/12/2018, and I'll be talking to Stacy Barnett about nosework handling, so stay tuned!

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we’ll be talking to Dr. Amy Cook.

Amy has been training dogs for nearly 25 years and has been specializing in the rehabilitation of shy and fearful dogs for over 15 years. She’s the creator of The Play Way, her process for helping dogs learn to cope with the world around them. She’s also a certified dog behavior consultant, a long-standing professional member of the Association of Professional Dog Trainers, and has attended all four Chicken Camps in Hot Springs, Arkansas, taught by Bob Bailey.

Amy returned to school in 2006 to get her PhD in psychology from UC Berkeley. Her research there focused on the dog/human relationship and its effect on problem-solving strategies dogs employ. She’s also recently started a blog at playwaydogs.com, and everyone should definitely go check it out.

Hi, Amy. Welcome back to the podcast.

Amy Cook: Hi. So good to be here, second time around, love it favorite thing to do, talk with you.

Melissa Breau: To start us out, do you want to remind listeners who the dogs are that you share your life with?

Amy Cook: My dogs, of course. Can I use the whole 45 minutes? I could do that just on my dogs. Marzipan, first off, my darling Whippet. She’s 6 now, which I cannot believe. She’s my lovely girl. She’s on a break right now from agility. She got majorly injured a year ago, a year and a half ago, and so it was a long recovery that we just very recently got a clean bill of health on, which I’m really excited about. So now it’s all about reconditioning her body and getting her brain back in the game. As an aside that isn’t really an aside, I don’t think I really appreciated the psychological effects of what you have to do to really isolate a dog from using their body correctly, and what that does to their minds. Because I think in a lot of ways she’s forgotten how much she can push me into work and forgotten how she can have free agency and try to get things done, because so much time was spent asking her to settle down and not do anything. So rehabilitating her psychologically has been part of this. So that’s where she is. And then Caper, my darling Chihuahua something-something, my Ikea assembly dog who seems to have come with no bones. If you follow me on Facebook, you’ll see lots of pictures of her being made out of rubber. Both of them do agility, and I’m fooling around on my down time on playing with TEAM stuff. I think if the two of them were one dog we’re good on TEAM 1 and 2, but they’re two dogs, so that doesn’t work, so I’m filling in the holes as I go. They’re a blast, so everyone follow them on Facebook. They’re so much fun.

Melissa Breau: I have to agree with that. I definitely look at their pictures, cute puppy pix. I know that you’re probably most known at FDSA for something that I mentioned in the intro, your reactive dog classes that use your play-based approach to treating reactivity. But I want to focus on your Science of Training class today because I know it’s coming up. So to start us out, do you want to share a basic summary of what the class covers and what it’s all about?

Amy Cook: Yeah, sure. I love this class. This one is so fun to teach. It was first conceived of in concert with Denise’s The Art of Training class. We wanted to throw in The Science of Training to get people all on the same page about what the fundamentals are, but also how to get these mechanics in your body, how to get these details really solid before you go ahead and deviate from them and experiment and try to do different things that are outside of those experiences.

What my class is really focusing on is tightening trainer technique and finding these little areas that I think we don’t spend the time on, that we neglect, either because we’re not sure if they’re important, or we’re maybe not so good at them, and we practice the things we’re good at a lot. So I want to make sure we get right down to them and really understand them.

The class assumes that people have a very basic understanding about operant conditioning. You don’t need to be able to do it chapter and verse. I’d assume some experience shaping with a clicker, but that’s about it. I found that as I was growing as a clicker trainer, there were all sorts of little holes I’d find, little areas where I thought maybe models conflicted, or didn’t really match, or how do I get this done when I’ve heard of this. I would always keep little notes about that, I think maybe waiting for some future audience when I could finally pass that information along. So that’s what this class has become for me. It’s my baby in that way.

I aim to be practical and so much of the scientific approach to training dogs gets lost and gets intellectual, and I want us to get down to be clear with your body, be clear with your clicker, be really clear with your parameters and what you’re doing, because that ultimately serves your learner. And there’s no better place to learn that than Chicken Camp and trying to learn how to train chickens. It’s really humbling to train a bird, very much.

Melissa Breau: That leads us nicely into the second thing I wanted to ask you about, because I happen to know part of the answer. I wanted to talk about the name of the class, and the second half of that name is Think, Plan, Do. I wanted you to maybe share where that came from and a little bit about what it means.

Amy Cook: You can Google “Think, Plan, Do,” and you’ll see that it’s just a phrase that a lot of people use in a lot of different industries and domains. It’s an organizational psychology phrase, a motivation phrase, but to us, to dog trainers, that phrase is highly connected to Bob Bailey. That is a Bailey-ism, and it’s what I feel, at least for me, what I really took as one of the main takeaways from going to Chicken Camp that is often missing in dog training, we don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking. We don’t spend a whole lot of time making our plans. We spend our time doing. We pick up the clicker, we get the treats, and we just start training. And with a nod thrown at what we’re training this time, of course, but really when you train chickens, you spend a lot of time making a plan and thinking it through before you ever bring that bird out on the table and try to train something. And so, as an homage to the great Bob Bailey, I think the place to start to improve yourself in training is to think something through, to really have a plan — even if it’s a plan that doesn’t work, you’ll find out — make a plan before you do anything. Don’t have just a loose goal, because that’s not going to be optimal to your learner. Your learner is at your mercy. They’re just there to receive all the things you’re about to do, and the better you are at doing them, and the more concrete your plan, the better the experience is for your learner, which is ultimately one of our highest goals, and I think it should be.

Melissa Breau: To maybe dive a little more into that, what kind of things should people be thinking about before they begin to plan out a specific training session? What kind of factors or what kind of things should they take into consideration and think through?

Amy Cook: Well, going in order, first spend time thinking. What specifically are you trying to do in this session? What are you trying to do with your dog in general? But today you’re thinking, I have my 10 minutes, I’d like to do something. What specifically? Not I need to improve the retrieve we’re working on. What specifically? Really have that in mind. And is it realistic for you today? You can have a long goal, but the small part you’re going to work on right now needs an entry point, and that needs to be thought through. Also, as you’re picturing that, what don’t you want in this picture? Let’s say … oh, I know something we all don’t want. How about barking?

Melissa Breau: Whining, barking.

Amy Cook: There’s all sorts of things you can write a list about. Think ahead of time about all the stuff you’re not going to want, because if you see some of it, you don’t want to be thinking, Oh I don’t know what to do with that, or Oh, I think I’ll ignore that, or I don’t know what to do with that; I’ll go past it. Maybe going past it is going to be the right thing to do. It really depends on too many factors for this answer. But you shouldn’t be caught going, Oh, oh, I don’t know what, oh shoot, what is he doing now? You should think ahead: If he barks, this is what I’ll do. If I start to get whining, I’m going to stop. Think it out about what this training is going to be like, so that you’re not stopping. You can concentrate. You have a plan. Even if the plan isn’t going to work, you find out, you’ll be more settled.

You should also think, at least right then, what is your learner like today. Think about where they are, what they like best from you in terms of your speed, your clarity, how they need you to be, and are you feeling that today? Are you there? Are you in a place to provide that today? Settle down so that you’re in that good place. It will be a whole lot less confusing for your learner. If you have to think during the session when you’re training, you will slow down, and you’ll build in pauses, and pauses build in lapses of attention in your learner as they go, Hello? What happened? You don’t want to be thinking a whole lot during it. You don’t want to leave them spaces. I think it has an effect on all of us when we do that, even if we do that by default habit, our learners get pauses built in, or get some frustration or confusion built into it, and then we do too, because now we’re feeling the clock ticking, we’re feeling the dog looking at us like, Oh, ah, what am I doing here? Thinking calms everybody down when we think ahead of time. So that’s the first part.

Really, once you’ve thought it through, as best you can, you’re going to have to come up with a plan that’s at least this one session. Another thing people do is they look for a grand plan: I’m going to be teaching the retrieve. That’s not a plan. What you’re teaching is literally this next one minute of your time with your dog. You need to think that through in detail. I even suggest people write it down. I make people write that down as homework. Of course, in the class you write it down in the forum. You may decide later that writing it down isn’t necessary, but if you don’t write it down and find out it is necessary, you’ll feel sorry about that, so write everything down.

The kinds of things you want to have in your plan are, What am I going to do about, let’s say, my environment? Have I picked an environment that is conducive to my goal? Am I going to have a cat strolling through my environment? Is that going to be OK, or is that going to really, really matter? So no, I need to plan, I’m going to train my dog to do this behavior, and I’m going to do it in this room on purpose. You do know what you’re going to do. You have a plan for what you’re going to do when your dog’s nose goes to the floor. But you didn’t clean the floor ahead of time. Do you need a clean floor? Maybe you don’t need a clean floor because you’re going to be working on nose is going to the ground. And you have a plan for what you’re going to do when nose goes to the ground. So you don’t care about your floor, but maybe you want a really clean floor so think that out -- so thinking and planning, right, they go together. Your environment is really going to matter.

Also, how much time are you going to spend, and how do you know when you’ve spent that time? Do you have a timer? How long is too long to train? How long is too short to train? That’s different for everybody, but I say go pretty short, go 30 seconds to a minute. If you don’t have an answer to that question immediately in mind, don’t go more than a minute. And then find out. You might find out it’s longer, but don’t start longer and find out you should have gone shorter. So in your plan should be how long you’re going to train and how you’re going to measure it. Will it be by time or will it be by number of treats? Count out 20 treats, and when your 20 are gone, you will stop and you’ll reassess. It really matters that you keep things short because you can get into the weeds really fast. You’re clicking for something, you’re training for something, your dog offers something else. You’re like, hey, that looks great, you follow it along, and soon you’re not training not only what you intended to train, but you may be getting behaviors you’re really not going to want in your final picture. It’s not good to just keep training as long as you like. You need to stop and review what you did, reassess, and stick to it.

And your plan should be for what are you going to do with your dog when you stop. I find people rarely put this in their plans, but it flummoxes them when they start to go through the session. Let’s say you train for a minute and then you review your video. Well, the dog wasn’t done in a minute. The dog was having a good time, hopefully, so what are you going to do to make sure your dog can stop while you review? If you stop it entirely and just put them up, that’s kind of no fair, right? So knowing your dog, and what they’re like, and what their challenges are, you will have to find a way to stop and keep your dog happy at the fact that that’s happening and maybe ready to go again. That might be a skill you want to install way before you start training the actual behavior you were planning. You’re going to plan certainly criteria, you’re going to plan exactly what is correct, and everything else that is not going completely correct, and you’re going to have to set up for that. The correct behavior that you’re looking for is what you’re going to be getting. It takes a lot of thought and a lot of planning, more than people usually give credit for, and that shows up as soon as you start seeing videos: Oh I didn’t realize, I didn’t even think about that, oh gosh. All the time spent thinking, all the time spent planning makes the minute or five of you doing much smoother and really successful for your learner, I find. Don’t just keep going. Don’t dig a hole. Stop and think. And review.

Melissa Breau: I think you hit on a lot of the pieces there, and I know, just even from keeping up with the FDSA Facebook page, people tend to really struggle with all of that. They really struggle with planning out their training sessions and figuring out how to break things down, and no wonder, because we start training and the dogs apparently forgot to read the plan. So I wanted to ask you a little bit more about how you balance that concept of having something that’s detailed enough but also keeping it flexible enough that if a dog shows you something you weren’t expecting, or the dog in front of you that day is a little bit different than the one you usually have, how you can roll with that.

Amy Cook: Well, I think making plans and thinking about it is not natural to a lot of us. I was going to say all of us, just because it’s not natural to me, and that’s not fair; I’m not an example for people. But I think it’s really common for us to just go with things as we see them, and I don’t think that’s a bad trait at all. We should be able to think on the fly. We should be able to roll with changing conditions. But when you have a goal, a specific goal, and you’re shaping, there’s not a lot of room for improvisation. I don’t think you should be … I think the word is flexible, but I want you to be exactly in the training session that you’re doing.

So you set yourself a minute and it’s not working, I don’t know, on hold for the dumbbell. Your dog shows you something else. Things didn’t go exactly as you planned. Don’t keep going. Stop and think about that, because maybe you do want to go with it. Maybe you do think that is a way better idea, that’s a better way to explain that stage to my dog, or she’s getting something I didn’t realize she’s getting, and I like this a lot better. Stop for a second and really think about that. Because you just spent time thinking about this plan and it was a good one when you enacted it, and whatever your dog is coming up with may be and may not be, and I don’t think you should just run with it. Stop for a second, really think about it, and now start again with your new idea, with the new thing your dog is doing. Because, if nothing else, even if it would have been fine if you’d gone with it, if nothing else, it gives you the discipline, the habit, of not just saying, “Oh, great idea, go, go, go, let’s just quit that, let’s just go,” which is maybe really natural to you and can get you in the weeds.

There is no downside if you just stop and say, “Let me think that through first for a second. Here’s something for you to chew on, dog, let me think about this and really decide if that’s the way I want to go,” and you might realize there is a downside to that, “Actually that’s not the way I want to go. It looked good for a second, but hang on, I want to stick to what I’m doing.”

If you have a careful plan, your criterion will be so tight, the little pieces clicking will be so specific, and your rate of reinforcement, which I’m sure we’ll get to in a bit, will be so high that the session will be going exactly toward what you’re headed for. If you planned it well, and if you’re executing it, there isn’t going to be a lot of room for experimentation.

That might be different from when you’re hanging out with your dog and just fooling around, but that’s not training toward a goal, and this is how to get from A to B specifically. So I say don’t be flexible, which is a weird message, I realize, but if a stroke of brilliance happens, there’s nothing wrong with thinking it through before you follow the path. That’s my opinion right now.

Melissa Breau: I want to talk about the review piece a little bit. I know that most of the FDSA instructors strongly endorse the idea of videoing and reviewing their training, and Denise in particular has come out in strong, strong favor of it. I wanted to ask why it’s helpful, and what people should be looking for when they do go back and watch those videos, which of course is everybody’s least-favorite activity of all time.

Amy Cook: Everybody’s least-favorite activity of all time because we can’t not look at our messy house, and what we chose to wear, and of course how sloppy we just trained that, right? That’s what you’re going to find. That’s what you’re going to find. And the videos are super-helpful, super-helpful. I have always underestimated how helpful they are. I think if every bronze student videoed themselves just like the gold, and watched it back every single time, they’d be shocked at how much they’d get out of a bronze level of instruction. I really believe that.

It’s amazing what videos can teach you, if you can remember that this is all in support of you. The point of videoing yourself and looking at it is not to give yourself an opportunity to shred yourself and notice how much you suck. That’s not what we’re hoping you learn from a video review. I think in this specific context, video is helpful in everything I teach and everything we all teach, in this specific class, I think what I’d be looking for is, hey, I made a plan, and I predicted what my dog would be like for this minute, and how tight, how shaved my criterion was, and how good my rate was going to be. You should look at that video and just say, “Did I do that? Did I do that at all? Did I get use these 15 cookies in in 30 seconds? Did I do that? How much am I moving?” We’re using marker words, or marker sounds, to train a dog, so we have to really isolate them. Still, did I do that? You can see clear as day whether you moved first or clicked first, because the video doesn’t lie, but your memory does. It totally does. Did I follow the plan, and was the plan a good one? Looking at the video, you can honestly go, Oh, absolutely not. That is not where I need to start with her. She’s way more confused about that than I thought she was. I thought we were in a good place. And that enriches your next plan. You stop, you revise your plan, and with that new information your next session should be much better. You often don’t need anyone to tell you what went wrong, because you can just look and go, That is not what I was planning at all. That’s not what I meant.

And also I think you should really look at what your dog says, because you don’t see it as clearly in real time. You just don’t. I think we’re always trying to get better at that, to see right then and there that your dog is not feeling great about it, or that your dog is confused -- what does your dog’s body say in this video? -- especially at a different angle, you’re just looking at them head on and if you get a video from the side, you may be able to see more. It might tell you that you need to slow down, or shift your feeding choice, or the way you’re reinforcing, so that you can be more clear. Or they might tell you to speed up, that you give them way too much time in between and that’s leading them to whine, or whatever it is. And if you look at it and you still don’t know what you’re doing, you can see that there’s a disjoint to it, but you’re just not sure what’s wrong, you have something to show somebody. You don’t have to train your dog again to show them what’s wrong and having your dog experience it. You can say, “Hey guys, what am I doing here? What is this?” So it pays to not only take the video, but to have the ego strength to say, “Hey, I’m not perfect, nobody is, none of you are, can you all help me with this?” I think that’s how we all approach it here. It’s why the trainers, all of us, show what we do and show when we don’t do it well, because we’re all in the same boat, trying to improve ourselves more than we are, and video keeps us really, really honest. If you lie to yourself, and again, we all do on some sort of level, we think it went well and it really didn’t go well, the one who pays is your learner, they may not know what’s going on, and their mind is a valuable thing, their willingness to do this stuff with us is valuable, and when we’re clear and we’re motivating, they’re having a lot of fun. When we’re not, those take a hit and your dog will get less out of the game. There’s nothing worth that, there’s no precision, there’s nothing you have to train that’s worth their attitude. So keep holding your own feet to the fire. It makes you better, but it’s really in service to your dog.

Melissa Breau: As you were saying that, I was thinking, gee, not only that, but forcing yourself to watch your videos really helps ensure that you keep them short and your training sessions short because nobody wants to sit there and watch themselves for eight to ten minutes.

Amy Cook: No kidding. Oh goodness. I hadn’t videoed myself playing with dogs before teaching the play class, and now I’m like, do we do jazz hands with everybody? Is that what I do? Do I do jazz hands? I had no idea. No idea. Yes, keep them short, keep them to the point. Dogs think way faster than we do. Their clock speed’s way higher. There’s a lot going on for them. This is cross-species modes, so the heavy lifting is for us, not for them, so we have to watch ourselves.

Melissa Breau: You’ve broken up the syllabus for the class into six specific topics. I wanted to dive into those a little bit. You have observing the learner, reinforcement, CERs — conditioned emotional responses, for anyone who doesn’t know the abbreviation — mechanics, ABCs, and naming behaviors. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about each of those. Why is observing the learner important, and what kinds of things should people really be looking for when they are doing that?

Amy Cook: Observing the learner may be my top biggest maybe best “think, plan, do” takeaway from Chicken Camp, oh my god, because to be able to click when you need to, to be able to mark exactly what you need to, you need to know what your dog looks like when they’re doing something well, and right before they’re about to do something well, the thing that you want. Because it takes you a second to get that sound out of your mouth, or to get that thumb depressed onto the clicker, and that time is lost. You will be late if you don’t know really precisely what your dog looks like right as they’ve decided, and right as they’re contracting the right muscle to do the thing that you want, that you’re trying to get them to do.

I learned that by clicking my dog. I was trying to teach her to tug open the fridge. I kept clicking when she was tugging, but the click would come just slightly too late, and she had finished tugging when the click sound happened, because the tugs were little short tugs, as you can imagine. It kept being imprecise. I remember I asked Bob, I explained in more detail than you guys need here, I asked, “What am I doing?” He didn’t even need to know. He said, “Observe the learner.” I said, “What? I’m watching her. She’s tugging. I’m clicking when she’s tugging.” He said, “What does she look like before she tugs? What does she look like when she’s about to tug?” He was right. What I was missing was contraction of neck muscles, shifting of weight, all the stuff that was right before and as the behavior was commencing. I saw a full tug and clicked right as it ended, because that’s how long it took my brain to send my thumb the signal.

I learned from that, so many pieces. So let’s say you’re shaping a down. There’s lots of ways a dog can get into a down. There’s so many. There’s many that we like and some that we don’t. You have to think, What position am I looking for first, and how exactly do I want them to get into it? Do you want them to fold back? Let’s say you want them to fold back. Fine, you want that one. Well, do you know exactly what it looks like when your dog does that? What any dog looks like when they fold back? Listeners who are listening right now, picture it. What happens? Does it begin with a nose dip? Is that what kind of starts for a fold back? Or does the head stay up? Do you know? Do you know what your dog does? Maybe it starts in the shoulders. You don’t want maybe, because you’re not going to click when the dog gets all the way down.

You have to break this apart if you want that precise behavior. So you need to know what this natural behavior, what this behavior, looks like for your dog, and if you don’t spend time observing really specifically, you won’t be clicking the very things that are on the path toward the behavior that you want. If you know that your dog always puts her head down a little bit first, then her shoulders fold, and then her hindquarters, you won’t be tempted to click when you see hindquarter movement at first, which might result in a sit. So getting to be a really good observer of what your animal looks like before they perform behaviors vastly, I think, increases your accuracy and gets your timing better. That’s just one example of the many reasons we want to really observe dogs, because our dogs can’t tell us anything, except through what they’re doing, and so to be able to talk with them, communicate with them, we have to watch them, I think, really carefully. I think Denise goes through that with her Art class, too, from a totally different perspective of observing your learner in a totally different way. It’s really neat to watch that.

Melissa Breau: The second piece there was on reinforcement, and when talking to Sarah Stremming a few weeks ago, we got into a little bit about how reinforcement differs from rewarding your dog. They’re not exactly the same thing. My guess is that you go a little bit deeper. How does a good understanding of things like timing, rate of reinforcement, and criteria actually impact our training?

Amy Cook: I do. I get so geeky in this. For me, it’s all about clarity. If you want to get from A to B, you have to be able to explain the path to B, and that’s all in your mechanics. You don’t get any other way to explain that. That’s all you have to work with. Your rate keeps your dog in the game. It keeps you from asking for these big jumps that are too big for your dog to accomplish easily, because if you have to keep your rate up really high, the behaviors your dog are giving you are small and easy to do and they’re just little slices, so that keeps your dog in this game. Your rate is really important. That means you have to pick specifically a criterion that allows you to reward at that high of a rate at a sufficiently high rate for your learner.

Everybody’s rate is different. You don’t feed rabbits at the same rate you feed chickens. But if you pick something too hard, your dog will struggle and your rate will fall, so they go hand in hand. How you pick your criterion, your specific one that you’re going to work on now, will impact the rate that you get to work at. And your dog tells you what the rate needs to be to keep them in the game, keep the learning fun. So it’s not just that, hey, I’m going to work on this one. That is not enough of a slice for your plan. You have to think about how it affects the rate of reinforcement that you have to work with. You want your learner plunging forward. they’re confidently doing the thing they think that you are rewarding, just doing something really clear and simple and isn’t stuck thinking or worrying or feeling frustrated and starting to whine. You don’t want any of that.

Again, video is going to be your best friend here. Your video tells you what your rate is, not your intuition in any way. Your rate is the one you want to serve. You pick a criterion that helps you work with that correctly. And then timing. Is there anyone listening at all, anyone within any earshot of anything having to do with dog training, who doesn’t know we all have to be better about that? I don’t think so. Every one of us is trying to improve our timing, because we’re human, and we’re slow, and we have neurosystems that take a while to engage. Dogs are plenty forgiving, I think, about our lateness. I’ve watched perfectly successful training videos where things are pretty obviously late, they happen after the behavior has ended, and the dog is like, “Somehow I get this. I will do the behavior that was just before you clicked, no problem.” That’s wonderful. That’s great if your dog is like that, and many of them are. They’re plenty forgiving. But almost no other animal I know of is, and we shouldn’t really rely on dogs to do heavy lifting like that, to figure out what we were trying to click.

Timing is our mechanical skill and we need to practice it. In fact, “Timing is a mechanical skill” is a Baily-ism. It’s what Bob Bailey says at camp all the time. It’s a mechanical skill and you have to keep it sharp. You have to keep practicing it. All of us are late sometimes. I’m late all the time when I’m not concentrating well enough, when I didn’t see what I thought I saw, I’m late, I’m a person, and I don’t know if when we’re thinking about this, if I think, This is a skill I need to keep sharp. I need to practice my timing all of the time to keep it really good. It’s not something you can just understand and then do well. You have to practice it like a physical skill, and that’s where your clarity comes from. If you can explain what you meant to explain, and click on the thing you wanted, and keep your rate high enough to keep your dog in the game, it will force you to pick your criterion that works. Those things all do more than impact your training. They are your training. That’s how you’re talking to your dog, so it’s really crucial that we get some of these tightened up, I think, for all of us. We can all improve.

Melissa Breau: You mentioned in there that it’s about clear communication. I think that links back to that conditioned emotional response thing. I know that, I’m pretty sure it was last year, you shared a line that all the instructors have mentioned they love, and it’s come up a couple of times since, about how we’re always working on our dog’s conditioned emotional response to the things that we’re teaching, whether we’re aware of it or not. So I wanted to ask you to explain a little bit about what a CER is, and what you meant by that line at camp.

Amy Cook: Gosh, I think now that’s a couple of years ago.

Melissa Breau: Was it?

Amy Cook: Well, I think it was, well i think it was Purina. Was that last year? No, last year was Portland. I think it was Purina. Time flies. Yeah, every time you’re teaching your dog what to do, you’re teaching him to feel. CER stands for conditioned emotional response. That’s another way to say … conditioning is another way to say learning. It’s a learned emotion that they’re having. It’s another way to say that that’s the way they feel right now, what they’re feeling from the situation they’re in with you and how you’re teaching them and what you’re trying to have them learn.

They’re getting emotions, like you are, all of the time, and you’re folding it into your picture whether you intend to or not, whether you plan to or not, whether you want to or not, whether you like it or not. We don’t get to get away from it, ever. And if you are confusing your dog, by accident, if you’re worrying them by a slower rate than you intended, if you’re frustrating them by a slower rate than you intended, or late clicks, or rewarding them well, then the emotions that come up there for them, they’re getting learned and they’re getting folded into the very behavior that you’re also trying to teach.

You may not see that in an obvious way at first, but you can’t escape them being in the picture just tied to everything you’re doing. So you may as well take control of this. You may as well take control of things and just use it to your advantage and let it make you better. Training, first, to me, serves an emotional goal, then it serves behavioral, then it serves precision. If you are frustrating your dog while you are having a clicker training session, you need to find out why. Find out why you’re frustrating your dog. Find out why you’re so confusing. Because we want more than anything for our dogs to be enthusiastic and cheerful learners, motivated to be there, and that’s on us to create. It’s on us to help them achieve that. Too often we put that on them. Why isn’t this dog more into this kind of stuff? Why is she so hard to motivate? Well, I don’t know. Maybe those things are true. But that’s your first job. Your first job is helping them fall in love with you and training and earning stuff and doing things with you, far beyond any precise behavior you’re ever trying to teach.

So if you don’t have a happy attitude and a great willing learner, it doesn’t matter what precision you really have. This is the way I feel. So getting control of that is something you can do on purpose. In this class we have an assignment where I just ask people to create a CER out of whole cloth, just create an emotion — you’re not creating, you’re not inventing, an emotion … just a brand new emotion, come to my class and we’re going to invent new emotions! The assignment is you take a neutral item, an item that you prove to me is neutral — a tchotchke from your shelf does just fine — that your dog thinks nothing about in particular, and for the week you try to make your dog really, really excited about seeing this. You’re going to create that emotion and attach it to this neutral object. And sure, it’s completely arbitrary. It’s not something you’re needing for a specific training task. But I like people to see that they can take a previously neutral object and get a dog really excited about seeing it.

You know, we do this all the time anyway. Leashes are neutral until they become signals that we’re going to go for a walk, and shoes are neutral or delicious, either way, except that they signal that it’s a work day instead of a fun day for dogs day. For dogs you’re creating this kind of stuff all the time outside of basic training scenarios. But I give people an assignment that helps them literally create a specific emotional response to the specific thing, so that you get familiar with the principals of how that’s done. And then we talk about how to provide training sessions so that our dog always feels really good about what we’re doing, because that’s our goal. That’s what we want. We can’t keep putting on them that they don’t have great attitudes in training. Their attitude is ours to inspire, and we should pick up that mantle.

Melissa Breau: The other part that the class covers, and you mentioned this a little bit earlier, is improving your training technique, from mechanics to things like understanding ABCs and when to name a behavior. I want to ask you if there’s any one place where people tend to struggle, and if you can offer any tips. It would also be great if you could explain what ABCs are in there somewhere, just because you’ll do it better than I will.

Amy Cook: Training ABCs in that particular, it doesn’t mean the generic term of that, like, training ABCs -- training basics. It’s more ABC means antecedent, behavior, and consequence, how to get everything in order. Your antecedent is your cue, the thing that signals to the dog that the behavior, it’s time to perform that behavior, and then there’s behavior, and then there’s the consequence. If you do those all in order. That of course sounds very elementary. Of course it goes in that order. But people get that kind of thing, there’s reasonable places in which that’s confused, and so I make sure that people have each of those elements identified in every moment of their plans.

But it’s not the place I think people tend to struggle most. I think … the thing that pops into my head when you ask that is I think people struggle the most with doing less. I think we always want to do more. We want to just have one more rep. We just want to say we want to end on a high note, and we push and push longer to get there. We think things are going great and we want to keep riding high on how great that was, let’s do it one more time, that was awesome, let’s get more practice in. People suck, all of us kind of suck, at doing less, at stopping ourselves. When the time is up, when the preplanned number of reinforcements have stopped, stop yourself and look at what you’re doing. Almost no one does this easily, willingly, naturally — Oh, this is a great time to stop after 30 seconds. It often doesn’t feel right, whatever the time, it often doesn’t feel great to us because we want to keep going. I think that’s where people … I hear — and not just in this class, but in all sorts of classes, or even in our own training — it’s like, “Yeah, I know it’s gone a little long, but I just wanted to show you.” I was just out training with a friend of mine a few days ago, and we videoed the whole thing and we watched it and went, “Wow, that was a really long training session. What are we doing?” You can just get caught up in doing it. That’s why it’s like, “These are the rules. There’s a timer. The timer will go off. You will stop.” It’s not to say that you always have to stop exactly when the timer goes off, but it helps you with the discipline of countering something that I think we all will struggle with. I haven’t yet seen a person who’s like, “Yeah, it’s really easy for me to stop. I don’t want to keep going.” Well, of course not. We totally want to keep going.

So I do focus on getting people to really think about that and not get off in the weeds again. And don’t improvise. Don’t just keep going. You deviate, you improvise, you explain things you didn’t mean to explain at all, you’ll wonder why your dog has no idea of what’s going on, then they get frustrated. Definitely not worth it. So get your timer on, get your camera on you, don’t show anybody, it’s fine. But watch it and keep yourself honest. That’s the best tip for tightening yourself up. Watch it and keep it short, for sure.

Melissa Breau: Last question. If you could share just one key lesson from the class, what would it be?

Amy Cook: Hmm … one key lesson. Well, that’s what I built the class around. I’d say spend more time figuring out what you want to do and how you go than you spend training. Don’t take 10 or 15 seconds to figure out, Yeah, I’ve got to do that, that, that, and that. Let’s go, dog. Spend more time on the thinking and the planning than you spend on the doing, by a lot. If you’re new to anything that you’re doing — I don’t mean new to dog training, although new to dog training too — but if you’re new to this class, or you’re not sure how it goes, or new to the sport, or anything, new to the class, mentally rehearse without your dog. Practice physically without your dog. Things that we don’t spend time doing — do those things, because if you think things through and plan all your action ahead before you pick up that clicker, then you don’t pass on as many mistakes and as many … you don’t let the dog do as much of the heavy lifting, and that’s what I want people to take away. That and just quit while you’re ahead. Just quit pushing. There’s always tomorrow. There’s always an hour from now. You’re fine. Don’t rush. Don’t push. Your dog is depending on that. That’s what I think.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Amy. I really appreciate it.

Amy Cook: I love it! You should interview me every day. Every day.

Melissa Breau: I’m sure there are people out there who would love that. Careful what you agree to here.

Amy Cook: Like, subscribe, whatever it is, share.

Melissa Breau: I may try to talk you into it.

Amy Cook: Oh god! That’s a play button on my chest, and you push it and I just start talking.

Melissa Breau: I’m sure it would fit so well into all the other things you have going on every day, too.

Amy Cook: Yes, I professionally talk for a living. It is a pleasure. I’m so glad you invited me again for a second time. I really enjoyed it. I would do it in a heartbeat anytime. Thank you so much.

Melissa Breau: Well, thank you, and I do think it was a great topic for our first thing heading into the new year. The idea that we’re talking about plans and planning and setting everybody on the right path heading into 2018 will be good.

Amy Cook: Oh yeah, like a resolution of sorts. A little mini-resolution each time you bring your dog out.

Melissa Breau: It’s almost like I did it on purpose.

Amy Cook: No, you couldn’t possibly have! You’re so clever.

Melissa Breau: Well, thank you. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. We will be back next week. This time I’ll have Stacy Barnett back and we’ll be talking about Nosework Handling. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice and our next episode will automatically download to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

CREDITS:

Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

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