E59: Eileen Anderson - "Meeting Our Dogs' Needs"

Summary:

Eileen Anderson is a writer and dog trainer. She is perhaps best known for her blog, Eileenanddogs, which has been featured on Freshly Pressed by Wordpress.com and won the award “The Academy Applauds” in 2014 from The Academy of Dog Trainers. Her articles and training videos have been incorporated into curricula worldwide and translated into several languages.

Eileen also runs a website for canine cognitive dysfunction, which she started in 2013. That site is www.dogdementia.com, which has become a major resource for pet owners whose dogs have dementia. Then, in 2015, Eileen published Remember Me? Loving and Caring for a Dog With Canine Cognitive Dysfunction.

She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music performance and a master’s degree in engineering science.

Links

• www.dogdementia.com
• www.Eileenanddogs.com

Next Episode: 

To be released 4/27/2018, featuring Kathy Sdao, author of Plenty in Life is Free: Reflections on Dogs, Training, and Finding Grace, to talk about crossing over, how training dogs and marine mammals compare, and the future of dog training.

TRANSCRIPTION:

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

Today we’ll be talking to Eileen Anderson.

Eileen is a writer and dog trainer. She is perhaps best known for her blog, Eileenanddogs, which has been featured on Freshly Pressed by Wordpress.com and won the award “The Academy Applauds” in 2014 from The Academy of Dog Trainers. Her articles and training videos have been incorporated into curricula worldwide and translated into several languages.

Eileen also runs a website for canine cognitive dysfunction, which she started in 2013. That site is www.dogdementia.com, which has become a major resource for pet owners whose dogs have dementia. Then, in 2015, Eileen published Remember Me? Loving and Caring for a Dog With Canine Cognitive Dysfunction.

She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music performance and a master’s degree in engineering science.

Hi Eileen, welcome to the podcast!

Eileen Anderson: Hi Melissa, thank you so much for having me. I am stoked about this.

Melissa Breau: I am too. To start us out, do you want to just share a little bit about each of your dogs, who they are, and anything you’re working on with them?

Eileen Anderson: Sure. That is the easiest thing in the world to talk about. I currently have two dogs. I have Zani, who is a hound mix. She looks kind of like a black-and-tan Beagle, and for those who have seen any of my pictures and videos, she’s the one who tilts her head adorably. She was a rehome. I found her at age 1, and took her from someone who could not take care of her any longer. She has a fantastic temperament, and anybody would love to have Zani.

What I’m working with her right now on is that she unfortunately had an accident in February and ran full-tilt into a fence, actually was driven into the fence, I suspect, by my other dog. I was there, I saw it happen, and she got a spinal cord concussion. She was knocked completely out and turned into a little noodle, and I thought I had lost her. But I took her to the vet, she got a CT scan, and they said they didn’t see any permanent damage, that she had just gotten this jolt to her spinal cord. She was quadriplegic. I took her home, her not being able to walk or anything.

But the vet was right — she did gradually recover, and she’s still recovering. We’re more than a month out now, but we’re mostly practicing getting around safely, walking, going up and down the steps, and she’s a little trooper. She hasn’t had any mental problems at all. But it’s been quite a challenge for me. I had to make her a safe space where she couldn’t fall down because literally she couldn’t walk at first.

Melissa Breau: That’s so scary.

Eileen Anderson: It was really scary. It scared me to death. I thought she had died. I thought I had seen her pass away. But as those kind of accidents go, ours was pretty lucky.

And my other dog is Clara. She’s an All-American, she’s bigger, she’s about 44 pounds, and she is the one that I found as a feral puppy. I’ll talk about her now and then through the podcast, but she has come so far. Right now we’re working on just widening her world more. We have another friend’s house that we get to go to now. She’s met another dog, she’s liking another person, and actually because of all the work I’ve done with her, she is a lot more stable in many new situations than lots of “normal dogs.” It’s just such a gas to have a dog who’s resilient. But that’s what I’m doing with Clara right now.

Melissa Breau: That’s awesome. I mentioned the degrees in music and engineering science. How did you end up in dog training? Obviously you didn’t start out there.

Eileen Anderson: My career has kind of been all over the place. I was working first as an editor at a university, and then at my current job, which is a social services job helping women find health care for breast problems.

I was all but dissertation in engineering science. I had passed my qualifying exams and was going on to be an engineer in acoustics, and I got a dog who was a challenge for me, and like everybody else, I got into dog training because I got the difficult dog. That dog was Summer. That was in 2006, and she was more than I was prepared to take care of. She chewed everything, she bullied my younger dog — my smaller dog, sorry — she jumped the fence, she was just basically a busy teenage dog.

Right now I think back and it’s like her problems were nothing, but at the time they were huge for me, so bad that I got depressed because it was changing my life so much to have this dog whom I loved, I loved her pretty much right away, but every time I turned around there was a new problem.

And so I looked for help in the usual ways. I got on the Internet, I found a local obedience club and went through the usual things there, and somewhere along the line — of course I got a good teacher — but along the line I got hooked. And actually dog training made me quit graduate school because I was like, This is a lot more interesting than active noise control to me.

Melissa Breau: You mentioned you started out finding a club. What got you started as a positive trainer?

Eileen Anderson: I started at the very beginning as a positive That’s what I want to do trainer, a wanna-be. I would read about it on the Internet and I thought, That’s what I want to do. But when you’re on your own and you don’t have any coaching, and you’re going by … and this was in the earlier days of the Internet and there weren’t as many good instructions out there, so you try something and it’s kind of in a vacuum, like “be a tree” when your dog pulls when they’re walking on leash. You know, stand still and they’ll stop doing that. I did that for months and it didn’t work because I didn’t have the other half of it, which was reinforce them for walking by your side. So I figured, Well, this positive reinforcement stuff sounds good, but it’s not very practical, or maybe my dog’s not very smart. I did go … those things we think, you know.

I did go to a balanced obedience club. I’m still a member there, the people there adore their dogs, and we get along just fine. I’ve seen a lot of good changes there while I’ve gone there. But I knew that collar pops were not something that I wanted to do, but I could not find other ways to, for instance, get Summer to keep from wandering off into the wide blue yonder mentally whenever we were together and from physically wandering off whenever she had a chance.

And so I did go that direction. I did the collar pops, I did a prong collar for a while, and then I found the agility part of the club, and that’s a familiar story, I’m sure, to a lot of people as well. They were more positive — not completely, but more positive — and through them I found my current trainer, who is Lisa Mantle of Roland, Arkansas, who was trained by Bob and Marian Bailey — Bob Bailey lives here in Arkansas, by the way — and that’s when I really started to get it. Lisa is a great teacher, and that’s pretty much when I turned the corner.

Melissa Breau: I think you mentioned some exciting news related to your experiences there. Do you want to share?

Eileen Anderson: Yes. I am writing another book. I’m writing Summer’s story. Summer, I sadly lost her last summer at only the age of 11. I thought she was going to live a much longer time. She was very healthy. But she got hemangiosarcoma, and after some misdiagnosis of back pain for about a month, we got the news, and by the time they did do exploratory surgery, but it was too far gone and I did have to euthanize her. I wasn’t ready for that at all, nobody ever is, but I didn’t have any lead time on it.

But she was my crossover dog. She went through all of this with me patiently as I learned how to do things and how to treat her better, and she was a lovely soul, and I’m writing a book about that. It’s the story of Summer and me, and also I’m threading into it how I came to change my training ways, and I’m trying to do it in a non-preachy way. I’m writing to pet owners in the book. Recently I saw an op-ed in … I think it was the New York Times, by somebody who just wrote a nice little piece about her old dog, and there were the hallmarks of someone who didn’t know a lot about training. There were humorous moments about how they had to chase the dog down and force the pills down his throat and it took all this, and it wasn’t mentioned as any kind of morality thing. It was just part of the story.

I want our positive training stories to be part of the story too. Not as a preachy thing necessarily, although I can preach with the best of them, but as just part of the story, incidental, this is how we did things. I am feeling like that would be a very persuasive way to write the book. Also I just want to write the book because I loved my dog. But I’m hoping it will be another way just to get the message out in a very incidental way that there’s nothing abnormal about this. This is how I trained my dog, and this is how we learned to get along.

Melissa Breau: When are you thinking it’s going to be available? Do you know yet, and is there anything more you want to share into how you’re planning to talk about that crossing-over experience?

Eileen Anderson: I’m aiming for 2019, which probably means 2020. I’m telling the story of our lives together, and that is my crossover story. Of course I can pull from blogs, which help me get a timeline there. It’s hard to remember what happened when, but I will be incorporating some of the blogs. I’ve written many blogs about her over the years. But again, I want to tell the story. I don’t want to have villains. I do want to have heroes, and I want to talk about how my mind changed as things went along, how my perspective changed, because it changed my whole life. Having an epiphany about positive reinforcement really does filter through your whole life, once you get it, and I hope I can tell that story in a very casual and again non-preachy way and make it interesting for people.

Melissa Breau: Now, you mentioned that this is going to be another book. It’s not your first book. I do want to talk about that first book a little bit. Can you share a little bit about Remember Me? Loving and Caring for a Dog With Canine Cognitive Dysfunction? What IS canine cognitive dysfunction, first, and how do you talk about it in the book?

Eileen Anderson: Canine cognitive dysfunction is a term for mental and behavioral decline that’s associated with changes in the brains of aging dogs. It’s not just normal aging. We all lose some of our marbles as we age, but this is abnormal aging, it’s a neurological condition, and it has behavioral symptoms. It’s way under-diagnosed and it’s undertreated.

In the book I tell the story of my little dog, Cricket. She was a rat terrier and she lived to be probably 17, could have been even older, because she was a middle-aged dog when I got her from a rescue. She got canine cognitive dysfunction, and she had it for at least a year before I identified what was wrong. I didn’t know what to tell my vet. Her first symptom was anxiety, and so I just thought she was getting nervous. I didn’t realize that that could be a symptom of CCD.

So the book is the story of Cricket, and how things went for her and for me. The message of the book is that there is help out there and that we need to know about this disease so dogs can get diagnosed sooner. There’s no cure, but there are drugs that can ameliorate the symptoms, there are drugs that can help the dogs and the people have an easier life, and there are so many ways you can enrich the dog’s life. They can still have a good life.

Melissa Breau: If you could tell people just one thing about Canine Cognitive Dysfunction, what would it be? What do you wish people really knew about that?

Eileen Anderson: I might cheat and I’m going to say two. One is talk to your vet. I am not a veterinarian. I can’t diagnose your dog. There’s lists all over the Internet now of symptoms, I certainly have one, but you can read all the symptoms but you cannot diagnose your dog. You need to talk to your vet many times about this and get educated, and if you’re worried at all about your dog, talk about a diagnosis.

The second thing is just from my heart. If your dog is diagnosed with Canine Cognitive Dysfunction, your dog’s life is not over. Like I was saying, there are many ways to enrich your dog’s life, and if we can get over our own preconceptions, see the dog standing in the corner and go, “Oh, poor thing,” well, sometimes, yes, some of their symptoms are pathetic and uncomfortable for them and need some intervention, but lots of the things they do, I think they’re just in la-la land. They don’t know what you know about what they used to be able to do.

So that’s my little lecture on that is don’t give up on your dog, don’t think they’re miserable unless you have good evidence that they are, because some of this is just unfamiliar to us. They do odd things, and odd doesn’t necessarily mean that the dog is unhappy. You need to learn about that, and again, talk to your vet about all of it.

That was more than one thing. I’m sorry!

Melissa Breau: That’s OK! Sometimes the best things are the more than one thing, right?

Eileen Anderson: Right.

Melissa Breau: To move from your books to your site for a little bit – and for listeners I will make sure to include links to both of Eileen’s sites in the show notes — for listeners who haven’t been

to your site or aren’t familiar with it, can you share a little bit about the topics you usually write about?

Eileen Anderson: I write about training dogs, I write about learning theory, and the thing that I’m able to do that lots of professional trainers are not is that I write about my mistakes a lot. I show things that I’ve tried that don’t work and I show things that I’ve tried that do work. But on my site you get to see videos of dogs who have never learned a behavior before, and me trying to train them with the best intentions and with a lot of information, but with gaps in my understanding. You can see a typical person training their dog and making mistakes, and you can learn from my mistakes.

I talk about dog body language a lot too. Having all the different dogs I’ve had, I have great footage of the interesting things they do with each other and with us. You know, body language is a whole other part we need to learn about when we’re trying to train our dogs well. But I take a scientific approach to the training, but I show a human trying to do it.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough. You mentioned the scientific piece there, and I think one of the things that I like best about your work is that you really do approach things pretty scientifically. A while ago you wrote a post asking the question, “When is citing a research study not enough?” and I’d love to talk about that a bit. When IS citing a research study not enough — at least if we want to be right about the facts and present ideas that are actually backed up by research?

Eileen Anderson: OK. One research study is almost never enough. Usually when we want a research study, it’s because we want to win an argument these days, or we want to know something for a fact, you know, “Let’s get to the bottom of this. Let’s figure it out.”

The problem is that we need to look at the bulk of the literature. One brand new study, if it’s the first on a certain topic, that’s just the beginning of the research, and you can’t flap that around and say, “Hey, I’ve proved it now.” You have to look at the bulk of the research, and one example I like to give is that some topics don’t have studies because they are so basic that they are in textbooks. One good example of that is that people will come along and say, “I need a research study that proves that you can’t reinforce fear.” OK, well, as far as I know, there isn’t one, per se, and there’s not one with dogs, and the reason is that that information is implicit and explicit in textbooks and review papers.

To answer that question, all you need to know about — all you need to know about! — you need to know about the difference between operant behavior and respondent behavior, you need to know about how emotions work, and you need to know about the sympathetic nervous system response. And if you put all that together, which is in any psychology book, pretty much — you might have to crack a biology book for some of it — you can see why they didn’t have to do a study to show that emotions are operant behaviors and you don’t reinforce them. You can reinforce behaviors that come around them. But that’s an example of it.

You know, people want one study for something, and it’s either something that’s so basic that you could just open a book and find out, or it’s something that’s so new that we might have one study that shows it, but we need for five or ten more to come in. So I always tell people, “Look for the review study, look for the one that summarizes the research, because that’s going to do the work of assessing whether the study is any good.” Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a psychology degree. I do have a graduate degree. I have two of them. So I’m familiar with research, but I don’t have the basis, the basic knowledge, to really assess a study. So I have to go to the people who can help, and that’s the people who write the review articles and the people who write the textbooks.  

Melissa Breau: I think that’s great advice and a good thing for people to remember, especially in this day and age, like you said, we tend to want to win an argument instead of thinking, Wait a minute, let’s make sure we have our facts straight. The example you mentioned in the post was a post you wrote about errorless learning. I was hoping you’d be willing to maybe share that story with our listeners.

Eileen Anderson: Sure, and this is an example of making a mistake. It was Susan Friedman who told me a couple of years back when I was cringing about making public mistakes and she said, “That’s like science. Science gets it wrong, and then somebody comes along and gets a little better and you get a little closer. You’re shaping the knowledge. So there’s no shame in it, even though it really feels like there is.”

I took exception to the term “errorless learning,” because I read the work of Herb Terrace, who did the famous work, I think it was in the ’60s, with pigeons, where they did thousands and thousands of repetitions of pigeons pecking on a lit disc, and it had, I think, a green light on it. The errorless part was that they made it super-easy to peck on that disc, and then they were teaching them also not to peck on a red disc. At first the other disc was way far away. Then, when they did light it up, they lit it very dimly. In other words, they kept that green disc very attractive and just kind of snuck in the other one. And in thousands of repetitions, when this was done gradually, some of the pigeons had less than one percent error rate, which all of us should aspire to.

Well, I just took exception to that, because they were in completely controlled, a lab environment, the pigeons were starving, you know, they always take them down to a low body weight so they’re wanting to work, they controlled many, many more variables than we ever can, and it just didn’t seem like something we could really emulate. And even the term to me — I nitpick words a lot — but it was not errorless. They had a one percent error rate, so you can’t call that errorless.

So I wrote a little … kind of a ranting article about that, and I snorted around about it. I had a friend — she could have done this through the public comments, but she didn’t — I had a friend whose parents were Ph.D. students under Skinner, so she’s one of the few people in the world who grew up as a human in a positive reinforcement environment, and she said, “Eileen, that’s not quite right. Herb Terrace, his experiments, yes, they were famous, but he was not the first one to talk about errorless learning, and you kind of got it wrong.”

She educated me, and it turns out that Skinner, back in the 1930s, was talking about errorless learning and errorless teaching, because of course to him, if the student made an error, it’s really a mistake of the teacher. And it was — some of us have read about it since then — it was kind of the same principal, but of providing a path for the learner where the easiest path to go is to the behavior you want with the fewest number of errors possible. He had had an argument with Thorndike, who said, “You have to make errors to learn,” and Skinner said, “No, you don’t.” And Skinner kind of won that one.

We think of Skinner as just this dry, cold guy, but he was passionate about teaching and learning, and he was trying to be as humane as possible and make an easy path for the learner, and there’s nothing bad about that, in my opinion. There’s nothing bad. And so I wrote a Part 2, and I left Part 1 up. I was tempted to get rid of it, but I left Part 1 up and I just put a note at the top saying, “If you read this, there are mistakes in here, so please read Part 2, or just read Part 2 instead.”

Melissa Breau: Fair enough. I think it’s awesome that you were willing to leave that up. I think that that really says something about your willingness to be transparent about all of this. Like you said, you feel like you can show those errors and those mistakes, where a trainer may not feel comfortable with that. So I think that’s fantastic.

Eileen Anderson: Thank you. That’s something I try to do for the community, even though even for me it’s pretty hard sometimes.

Melissa Breau: How do you try to keep up to date with the latest information, and how do you try to make sure that you’re conducting good research on this stuff when you’re writing?

Eileen Anderson: One thing I learned in my science degree is you don’t just read the paper. Your job is then to go through all the footnotes, to read all the footnotes, and then get on Google Scholar and look at who has cited the paper later. Because if you looked up a paper in 1975 for “Why do humans get ulcers?” that paper would say “From stress and acidic foods.” If you don’t look later in the literature, you won’t find out that, woops, actually it’s from an infection, which they discovered in 1981 or ’82. So you have to look before the research piece that you’re reading and after it.

What I do personally, I set up some Google Alerts, both from standard Google and Google Scholar, and there are a couple topics — one of them is dementia in dogs, and the other one is sound sensitivity and sound capabilities of dogs — and I get alerts whenever anything new is published. Most of it is crap, but I get the good stuff too. I get stuff from Google Scholar when there’s a new paper, for instance, on dog dementia, which one did come out this year.

That’s pretty much how I try to keep up. I try to keep focus because there’s way too much for anybody to learn these days. But I use the tools that are out there and I try to be thorough in terms of also looking at who is arguing against this. That’s the hard part, especially when you get attached to something. You don’t want to read about why it’s wrong, but I try to do that too.

Melissa Breau: That’s awesome. To shift gears a little bit, you’ve also written quite a bit on your site about Clara, and you mentioned earlier that she was a feral dog and you’ve done a ton of socialization work with her. Do you mind just sharing a little bit about your approach there and how you’ve gone about that?

Eileen Anderson: I would love to, and I have to credit my teacher, Lisa Mantle, with whom … I could not have done this without her. She’s had a lot of experience with feral and other very challenged dogs. She actually says that Clara is one of the most challenging ones she has had.

When Clara came to me, she was between eight and ten weeks old, and her socialization window was in the act of shutting, probably that very night. She was scared of me, and avoidant, and I didn’t think I was going to be able to catch her. She was slinking away and acting like a wild animal. But when I opened my front door, little Cricket, the rat terrier, was barking inside, and Clara pricked up her ears and slunk by me like I wasn’t there, and came into my house and sat down next to Cricket in her crate. And so it was the other dog that got Clara into the house.

Within the evening she decided I was OK, and part of that was because of spray cheese, which she still thinks is manna from heaven. But I assumed, silly me, that since I had gotten in, everybody would get in, you know, Now she likes people, look, she thinks I’m great, she’s sitting in my lap, she’s flirting with me, she’s jumping up and down. And so the next day I took her somewhere, and I had her in the crate in the car, and I said, “Look, I’ve got this puppy,” and opened the door and Clara went, “Grrrr,” this little tiny puppy growling in the crate. I thought, Oh dear, I’ve got more of a problem here than I thought.

Back to getting to socialization, it was technically not socialization at some point because she was past that window — and there’s a terminology dispute about this, and I try to placate the people who say, “It’s not socialization after they’re a certain age.” We were doing desensitization, counterconditioning, and habituation, but we started with people a hundred feet away. That’s how fearful of people, and we had to start very far away. We did very, very careful exposures, and this was over the course of months and years.

We did a lot of it at a shopping mall, which sounds crazy, but the layout of the place was such that we really could go a hundred feet away and there wouldn’t be anybody to bother us. But it was extremely gradual, and every appearance of a person, whether they were fifty feet away or, later on, walking by on the sidewalk, was paired with something awesome, which, you know, spray cheese or something else she loved. McDonald’s chicken sandwiches were also very popular.

But it was just very gradual, and my teacher was very good at, when we’d hit a bump in the road or get to a plateau, sometimes we could work through it, sometimes we’d just take a different approach. She has good intuitions about that. And one day she said, “Let’s just take her down the sidewalk in the mall,” and by golly, she was fine. She could walk among throngs of people, as long as … there’s things she doesn’t like. If someone walks up to her and says, “Oh, a puppy!” and stares at her, she’s going to chuff at them. But people walking by, people brushing against her, sudden changes in the environment, wheelchairs, anything that might bother a lot of dogs, she is great with, and she has come such a very long way. But it was all very gradual, and it was done through desensitization, counterconditioning, and habituation.

Melissa Breau: Just to give people a little bit of an idea, when you say “very gradual,” how old is she now? How long have you been working on this stuff?

Eileen Anderson: She is 6. The point where we could walk her around in the mall was about two years after we started. But she was happy. It wasn’t this, OK, she’s all right walking around. She was great.

Melissa Breau: Right, right. I think it’s interesting to ask for the timeline a little bit there, because it helps people understand how much work goes into it sometimes. But also there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

Eileen Anderson: That’s right, that’s right. And thinking back, a lot of people have had harder situations than we have, but we did have a pretty hard one. She basically was like a wild animal. I didn’t see her as a fearful dog, she wasn’t congenitally startling or fearful. She was just different, you know. She was like a wild animal and had that natural distrust of humans.

Melissa Breau: I don’t know about other people necessarily, but I really find that I personally struggle with what feels like two conflicting pieces of advice out there when it comes to socialization or even the stuff you’re talking about. The idea that, Option 1, bring your puppy lots of places, but don’t overface them, make sure it’s all positive, but bring them all the places you go. And the second is never bring your puppy places unless you’re absolutely sure you can just get up and leave if it’s too much for them. I was curious how you handled determining what to expose Clara to, what she’s ready for, and what is likely to still even today be too much for her.

Eileen Anderson: That’s a really great question. With her, of course we had to take mostly the second method. That was being careful that we had a way to get out. She was not a puppy that I could lug around everywhere and expose her to. I think there can be value in that, as long as you can protect the puppy from people who do the wrong stuff, which any reactive dog group will tell about those people who are going to do stuff to your dog if they get a chance.

But today I feel like I need to just be careful and watch her. For instance, even without really working on veterinary visits, she’s good at veterinary visits now, just because of the general work we’ve done. There’s some times you have to take your dog to the vet, and she does really well. And I feel like I could take her to a new place with people and walk around and she would do fine. I would just watch for situations where people would be too assertive towards her. So it’s not so much the environment, it’s not environmental changes, it’s not crowds. It’s that person who zeroes in and says, “Oh, what a beautiful dog! Can I pet her?” while you’re running away.

Melissa Breau: Right. We’re getting to the end here, and I have these three questions I typically ask everybody the first time they’re on the show, so I’d love to work through those. The first one is: What is the dog-related accomplishment that you’re proudest of?

Eileen Anderson: It is that I used classical conditioning to prevent Clara from picking up on Summer’s barking. Summer was a reactive dog and she barked regularly at things that went by the house, particularly delivery trucks and things that were hard for me to control. You can’t control those, and I wasn’t always home. So she had some untreated reactivity, and I did not want Clara, the baby puppy, to pick up on that. She had enough problems.

And so, from the very beginning, very consistently, when Summer would bark, wherever she was, I would give Clara a magnificent treat, usually again spray cheese. It didn’t matter what the dogs were doing, what was happening. So I did a classical pairing of Summer barks, wonderful treats fall from the sky. Lots of the things I think up on my own don’t work out really well because I can’t see down the line well enough to see the end ramifications, but that one worked out great. I have a dog who, when she hears another dog bark, looks at me eagerly instead of running to go bark with them.

Just considering that she had so many other challenges, I didn’t want her to have that challenge. I have a video of her literally drooling when she heard Summer bark, and so I can prove, yes, I have the Pavlovian association there — another dog barking means yummy stuff is coming my way. I am really proud of doing that. It has paid off in so many ways.

Melissa Breau: That’s awesome, and that’s a fantastic idea. The other question, and usually this is one of my favorite questions of the podcast, is: What’s the best piece of training advice that you’ve ever heard?

Eileen Anderson: Watch the dog. And I can say that in two ways. One of them is learn about dog body language. I posted a blog just yesterday, I think it was, two days ago, about accidentally using punishing things because you’re following a protocol and trying to do everything right, and you don’t notice that you’re snapping your hand in the dog’s face or something like that they really don’t like. So watch the dog. Make sure that what you’re doing is OK, even when you’re concentrating on your mechanics and following the directions that you’ve read from your teacher. So that’s one way. And also I do agility, and so many times when I made an error, it’s like my teacher would say: “You weren’t watching your dog.” And of course there’s times we have to take our eyes off them, but “Watch the dog.” That’s my mantra.

Melissa Breau: Excellent. It’s nice and concise and easy to remember, too, which is a plus. Last question here: Who is somebody else in the dog world that you look up to?

Eileen Anderson: My friend Marge Rogers. Marge and I kind of grew up together in the dog training online world and we started our journeys together. Marge became a professional trainer and I became a writer.

But Marge, before there was ever a Fenzi Academy and people sharing these wonderful ideas of how to be humane to dogs in competition, before there was ever that, Marge trained her dogs way over fluency before she ever competed them. She’s also fantastic at using multiple reinforcers just as a matter of course. Any dog that goes to her is going to end up being able to switch back and forth between a plate of food and a tug toy, and they can tug when the food’s on the ground, and they can eat food even if they love to have a ball. They will get not only multiple reinforcers but the ability to respond to the trainer to transfer back and forth between those reinforcers. She’s just fantastic at that.

She helps me with all my problems. She can usually give a one-line response to whatever stupid thing I’m doing. And not only that, she’s humble. She’s always learning. She’s one of the most humble people I know, and I just love her training.

Melissa Breau: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Eileen. This has been fantastic.

Eileen Anderson: You are welcome. It is my pleasure. I love to talk about this stuff, and I am very honored to be on the Fenzi podcast.

Melissa Breau: Well, thank you, and thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week with Kathy Sdao to talk about everything from training dolphins to dog training — it should be a pretty deep dive on behavior!

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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.