E79: Julie Daniels - Building Canine Confidence

Summary:

Julie Daniels has worked with dogs her whole life. In fact, she learned to walk by holding on to a German Shepherd. Today she is one of the foremost names in the sport of dog agility in the United States. She was one of the early champions of the sport and helped many clubs throughout the country get up and running.

She owns and operates both Kool Kids Agility in Deerfield, NH, and White Mountain Agility in North Sandwich, NH.

Julie is well known as a premier teacher at all levels of play. She has competed, titled and won with all sorts of dogs throughout the years, including two Rottweilers, a Springer Spaniel, a Cairn Terrier, two Corgis, and four Border Collies. She is the only person to make USDAA National Grand Prix finals with a Rottie or a Springer, and she did it two times each. She is also a two-time national champion and a two-time international champion.

Next Episode: 

To be released 9/14/2018.

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 Daniels.

Julie has worked with dogs her whole life. In fact, she learned to walk by holding on to a German Shepherd. Today she is one of the foremost names in the sport of dog agility in the United States. She was one of the early champions of the sport and helped many clubs throughout the country get up and running.

She owns and operates both Kool Kids Agility in Deerfield, NH, and White Mountain Agility in North Sandwich, NH.

Julie is well known as a premier teacher at all levels of play. She has competed, titled and won with all sorts of dogs throughout the years, including two Rottweilers, a Springer Spaniel, a Cairn Terrier, two Corgis, and four Border Collies. She is the only person to make USDAA National Grand Prix finals with a Rottie or a Springer, and she did it two times each. She is also a two-time national champion and a two-time international champion.

Hey Julie! Welcome to the podcast.

Julie Daniels: Hi Melissa. So glad to be back with you!

Melissa Breau: I’m glad to have you! To start us out, can you just share a little bit of information about the dogs in your life right now and what you’re working on with them?

Julie Daniels: Oh yeah, everybody’s favorite question. My current pack is just three Border Collies. I have one who’ll be 13 very, very soon, and she does whatever she wants, completely spoiled, it’s just wonderful to see. She’s doing great.

And my competition dog is now 10 years old, which seems impossible to believe. I’ve just moved him down from Championship to Performance and Preferred level so that he can jump a lower jump height. But he’s doing great and we’re having a ball.

And I have a youngster named Koolaid, whom anybody who takes my classes has been following now since the last couple of years. She’s just turned 3, and she’s dynamite and so challenging and fun to train. Always has been, always will be. She keeps me young, keeps me getting smarter, keeps my chops honed every single day.

So those are my three Border Collies.

Melissa Breau: I wanted to talk today about canine confidence. Can you define what confidence is when it comes to our dogs?

Julie Daniels: Oh boy. Confidence can be so elusive, and I also find confidence in dogs and people both to be very elastic. It sort of comes and goes, and they look great, and then all of a sudden we’re shrinking because something makes us feel insecure, and sometimes it’s not environmental, it’s mental. So confidence is tough to define, but let’s consider confidence to be a sense of personal well-being felt by the dog. How does that sound?

Melissa Breau: That certainly makes sense to me.

Julie Daniels: In other words, an optimism that all will be well.

Melissa Breau: If that’s our definition, what are the differences between a confident dog and a not confident dog? Why is that confidence so important for dog sports and stuff we want to be doing with our dogs?

Julie Daniels: I think it’s so important, because the world throws us curve balls on a regular basis and life does not go as expected. When that happens to the confident dog, as it will every single day pretty much, the confidence of some dogs carries through a sense of wellbeing and optimism that all will be all right when the world surprises them. A dog who is not confident doesn’t feel that way.

I think what happens is a dog who has an internal or higher level of confidence tends to say, “Oh boy, what is that?” when he sees something unexpected, and that’s of course what we’re trying to develop. The dog who is not confident, whether it be in the moment or whether it be an overall set point, that dog tends to say, “Oh no, what is that?”

So there are the two extremes: “Oh boy, something new!” “Oh no, I’ve never seen that before!” Those are the two extremes between the dog who has the wellbeing, the optimism, afforded by internal confidence versus the dog who has a much lower confidence set point.

Melissa Breau: How much of that is just innate — who the dog is — versus something you can train or teach?

Julie Daniels: Tough question, but not as tough a question as it used to be, because we know that quite a bit is innate, and we also know … actually, if I can borrow from research done on humans, we know for a fact that human beings can reset their confidence set point, their happiness set point, their optimism set point. We can rewire and reframe in humans.

And certainly it’s the same in dogs. You can see overall changes in the confidence set point and the happiness set point as you work with these problems, so it’s not a life sentence. If the innate set point is low in terms of confidence, happiness, optimism, all these things which we want for our dogs in their lives, there is so, so much we can do.

Thanks to research on humans via, let’s say, SPECT analysis and many other brain work, we can measure the activity centers and the levels of involvement in different areas of the brain, and we can know for a fact that it’s quite possible to reset and rewire even, neurologically, the happiness and confidence and joy centers in the brain.

So we can change, for our dogs as well as for ourselves, we can change the hand that we were dealt with. It is quantifiable and measurable, at least in humans, that many, many people have successfully done so. So it’s not something that is fated, if your dog happens to have been born less confident than you would like.

Melissa Breau: That’s really interesting. I hadn’t realized there was research that’s been done on that in people. That’s neat.

Julie Daniels: Let me make mention of my personal favorite book, which is definitely a layperson’s book. It’s by Daniel Amen, M.D. Dr. Amen is one of the leading experts in the world on SPECT analysis of the brain in humans, and his book is quite amazing. Change Your Brain, Change Your Life.

Melissa Breau: Interesting.

Julie Daniels: Well worth looking up.

Melissa Breau: For those who are starting out with a dog that’s a little on the less confident side, where do you start? What does that type of training look like? How do you help them reset their brain?

Julie Daniels: Well, it goes without saying, but it should be mentioned: there are no mistakes. We don’t call out mistakes on a dog who already is harder on himself than any of us would ever be. I think that’s probably the best start point is there are no mistakes. Anything that the dog offers is going to be well received and reinforced.

It’s not simple, and yet it is that simple. We want to build the dog’s feelings of wellbeing first, so no mistakes. By that I mean anything that the dog offers is by definition correct and reinforceable. That’s where to start.

And this is in daily life. This is not a measure of “I told you to do this,” or “I told you to do that.” I’m not talking about training. I’m talking about anything the dog offers in daily life.

Melissa Breau: What does that look like? Can you walk me through an example?

Julie Daniels: I would want to help any dog of any age who feels insecure. I would want to help that dog become attracted to life. To, let’s say, novelty. So one of the things that I advise people to do all the time, and I’m just saying this over and over and over, it’s so easy to do, and it’s amazing that days go by and we don’t think to do it. When your dog lacks confidence, you should make a habit of taking beloved familiar items around your house and putting them in unfamiliar places. That is the first step toward developing attraction for novelty. That’s what we want.

Remember when I said earlier we’re trying to develop the dog’s ability to say, “Oh boy, what is that?” and we currently have a dog that says, “Oh no, what is that?” So by taking beloved items … they can’t be just neutral items. They really should be things that the dog already enjoys, for example, his food bowl. There’s a good one. Put it on your head. Just put it upside-down on your head after you’ve washed it.

There you are, standing in the kitchen, washing the dog food bowls, and your dog’s probably going to be interested in that because it’s a beloved item, a familiar and well-trusted item, and there you go, you just put it upside-down on your head. Perfect. Do something like that every single day. Pretty soon, when you make yourself do it every day, pretty soon you’re doing it ten times a day because it’s just fun.

Melissa Breau: Makes you laugh.

Julie Daniels: But you forget, if you don’t make it a conscious effort initially, and sometimes you’ll think at the end of the day, Well, what did I show this dog that was different in a positive way, that was unexpected and novel in a positive way? Because obviously if you’ve scared him, you haven’t done any good. So it’s got to be a beloved item, and it’s got to be put in a novel place but a familiar place. We’re not talking about taking it on the road, because you said, “Where do you start?” You start at home. You start in a comfortable, happy place.

Melissa Breau: If you put that food bowl on your head, are you then going to get lower so that the dog can sniff you and sniff the bowl?

Julie Daniels: That’s a great idea! See? You’re good at this already! Yeah, that’s a great idea. But play that by ear, Melissa, because if your dog said, “Oh no, what is that?” then that’s a mistake. But if your dog said, “Hey, that’s my food bowl,” now it’s perfect, and I think what you said is just great: scootch right down.

You don’t need to say anything. This is one thing that I think is difficult to do. We want to talk our dogs into something: “Come and check it out.” And that really is not what you should do. You should allow the dog to show you whether he’s interested or curious enough to come and see it.

Anything that he offers you is reinforceable, even if he decides to leave the room. And the best reinforcement if he backs away would be what? What would the absolute best reinforcement you could give him if he backs away, because that’s not really what you intended to do, because you realize that unexpectedly you’re on the wrong side of confidence. So what it’s very important for you to do, if he shows you that he’s actually concerned, is take it off immediately.

I would say take the food bowl off your head, put it right side up, put it on the floor between you, and say nothing. Allow your dog to make a decision to be attracted to his beloved food bowl in this new context of it being on the floor “where it belongs.” Now you can have your reinforceable event and you’re not going to cause a problem.

I think very often, it happens so very often, either with young puppies or generally with dogs who lack confidence, I think so often we mean well, but we scare them.

Melissa Breau: Because they’re already not sure about things, and we’re throwing novel things at them, and that can be intimidating.

Julie Daniels: Yes.

Melissa Breau: I know a lot of people who wouldn’t appreciate being put in front of a full room to give a presentation, because that’s one of the things that makes them feel not confident.

Julie Daniels: Yeah, I think so.

Melissa Breau: Would you mind sharing maybe one of the other exercises that you use to help build confidence, or a little bit more on how you work on that with them?

Julie Daniels: Attraction to novelty, I think, is fundamentally first. That really is where to start. But let’s look at once we’ve made a few inroads, and now, in addition to being able to put the food bowl on your head and your dog thinks that’s funny, now you switch to a colander and you’ve got other things on your head.

So I think once you’ve got an inroad made with your dog, I think the next thing for me is substrates. Now you want to put things under foot and allow your dog to feel them. It’s not just about “Oh my gosh, plastic is so hard,” and “Tarps make a lot of noise,” and “Bubble wrap — oh no.” It’s not just about that. It’s about things that might feel different neurologically.

For example, when I started working with a teacher in canine fitness, my little Koolaid didn’t like the nubby Paw Pods. Anybody who’s done any fitness work knows about those little nubbies on the various pieces of equipment. They almost always have them, and she just didn’t like that at all.

This is in general quite a confident, self-assured puppy, but those things, boy, she just didn’t like the nubbies, and so of course being the mom I am, I thought, Well, why don’t I just teach her the skills on smooth surfaces first, and then we’ll transfer to nubbies, which would sound like a logical progression, but I was advised against it for a very important reason, which I have internalized and embraced. And that is those little nubbies are actually very important stimulators neurologically, and so we want the feet to be on the nubbies. I really took that to heart and went with it, and I am so glad that I did.

Just so you know the end of the story, Koolaid loves the nubbies and can pound onto four Pods, pretty much stick the landing, and is very happy beyond the nubbies. But it was a process getting her used to it. But that sort of fits the good advice that I was given from very good teachers who have the eye and have the chops to guide me in my canine fitness classes.

That sort of thinking fits perfectly with how I feel about substrate training to build confidence. You want obviously to start with things that are relatively non-threatening to that particular dog. Some dogs need to start with smooth surfaces. Plastic, for example, meaning hard, molded plastic. It just feels different and is smooth underfoot. Other dogs would do better to start with crinkled-up paper inside a box or shredded paper. Some dogs are a long ways away from being able to step on empty water bottles, and other dogs just jump into the kiddie pools full of empty water bottles. So it’s a continuum as to who likes what.

Remember you said earlier about it’s so a dog can be confident about one thing but not another thing. Well, look at little Koolaid who didn’t like the nubbies, but boy, she loves empty water bottles. And normal, everyday grinding sounds that many dogs are offended by, she was actually attracted to going in. So you never know. We all have different feelings about substrates, and I think one of the best things you can do as a second step after novelty would be to introduce and to find out the hierarchy of what feels good to your dog under foot and what feels a little bit concerning to your dog under foot, and try to build … not just tolerance, I don’t work with tolerance, but try to work for attraction to these things that might be concerning to your dog initially. So substrates come after novelty.

Melissa Breau: I want to talk about that just a little bit more. Some dogs definitely seem confident in a lot of situations, like you mentioned Koolaid, but they’re terribly unconfident in other situations, or in a particular setup, or something. I was curious how common that is, and how someone can work to break apart one of those more complex cases to figure out what it is that they’re actually seeing, what it is that the dog is maybe not so sure about.

Julie Daniels: It’s very common, and what is more, it’s very normal. I think probably most of us have little things that are harder for us than they are for other people, and little things that other people find difficult which we find easy. So I don’t think it’s the least bit strange. I think it’s to be expected.

I do find that if you have a dog who’s in general a little bit more reserved, it’s tempting to assume he’s reserved about everything, and that’s not necessarily the case either. So it could be that you just need to explore and experiment with what kinds of things do bother this dog, and what kinds of things is this dog a little bit more self-assured about. By that I mean he has an optimistic sense when he goes toward it that this might be a good thing.

When you see that in your dog, I think you want to make note of it, that your dog is not afraid of everything. Many people who think their dogs are afraid of everything are just plain wrong about that. And if you don’t give the dog a chance at this early level that you and I are talking about, then you really won’t know where your dog’s strengths do lie, and almost every dog has some.

Melissa Breau: So, I’m going to take the next step here. I know we’re planning a rerun of your webinar on all of this stuff on building canine confidence. That’s what inspired me to bring up the topic to do a podcast about it. Can you share a little bit on what you cover in that webinar? Maybe who might want to take it?

Julie Daniels: I hope everybody will take it! First of all, it makes me so proud and happy that I work for a person who values the quality of the webinar, the quality of the recording of the webinar, so much that she is going to give this webinar to the people who bought it the first time for free, because the audio — my fault, not your fault, Melissa — was absolutely terrible, and it was not what it should have been. So you and I have been practicing, you’ve coached me on where to be, and you and I have been playing with the microphone to make sure. I bought a better microphone, I have a better setup, and I know that the audio will not fail this next round.

But it just makes me so happy that I get another crack at this, Melissa. That I’m going to get a chance to present the material in a way that everybody can hear it the way I intended it to be heard. And the fact that my boss is somebody who wants everybody who bought it the first time to have the benefit of this improved recording production values makes me so happy. So I hope everybody will tune in, of course.

We will be talking about the various things that we can do to help dogs who feel insecure, and we’ll be talking about what’s that look like, what does it mean. We’ll pretty much take off running with the kinds of questions that you’re asking me here today.

We’ll be talking about creating attraction to novelty, and we’ll be talking about building of course a positive conditioned emotional response. The all-important CER that everybody talks about these days has so much to do with whether the dog is able to work on confidence in the first place. So this initial attraction, this initial feeling of wellbeing becomes a baseline of optimism so that the dog can feel happy about coming into training situations expecting to do well. It means a lot to me.

The next step is really that we want to build initiative. The subject of this webinar, building canine confidence, is way too broad. But we’re zeroing in on two factors: initiative and self-reliance. After we’ve talked a little bit about the baselines that you and I are talking about, we’re going to talk about building initiative as a major force in helping dogs become more confident and rewiring their brains to change their confidence set point and their happiness set point even, if you will.

So building initiative, obviously in small steps, and the first steps will vary from dog to dog, as we’ve already talked about. But all first steps should come from a feeling that all will be well. That’s what we’re after, that positive CER, and maintaining that positive conditioned emotional response as we go forward and ask the dog to experiment in the world with more and more novel stimuli.

I think I also will be talking a little bit about how it’s OK if the confidence of the team, the dog-person team, originates with the handler. I know many, many successful dogs in sports, and I’ve had several myself, who would not be able to run with anyone else, for example. And I know obviously many dogs who don’t much care who they run with. They just want to run, and if they get good information from their handlers, so much the better, but the game is so much fun and it has value of its own.

But it doesn’t have to be that way in order for a dog to be successful, no matter what the sport is. Obviously my sport is agility, but I don’t think it matters. I’ve seen many, many, many teams where the dog gets that initial charge of confidence from the handler, the leader if you will, and then from there it just energizes and snaps, and you can see that teamwork, that confidence, being passed back and forth from the dog to the handler. And they reinforce each other as they go, whatever the sport may be.

So I want to build that for people and their dogs, and it’s so very doable for us to be able to help dogs in that way and build a team using these kinds of exercises to build confidence. So I have several fun things to do along the way that make that much easier, including we raise the dog’s energy level, very important, motion builds confidence. I have people feeding in motion rather than, “Oh, we’re done. Now let’s stop and eat.” I don’t do it that way. I feed in motion because movement gets the brain working, movement helps optimism, movement builds confidence, believe it or not. It’s very important.

I also work hard to put the dog, if you will, in his prefrontal cortex, since we were talking about the brain earlier. But if you consider it a continuum from the unconscious reactions to the conscious reactions, the dog who has a low confidence set point is, generally speaking, operating from the limbic system, is operating where fear resides, operating where the “Oh no” resides.

What we want to do is bring him forward into his rational brain so he can be engaged with his brain, he can use his brain to solve problems in a constructive way. So here’s where we absolutely need the dog to welcome novelty rather than shrink from novelty, so that the dog can predict fun and predict happiness as he comes forward into a novel task, a novel presentation in the world, whatever it be.

And then we talk in the webinar a good deal about choice and control, how important those things are, how important it is to let the dog make decisions, to give the dog choices all along the way. Not just with the end goal behavior, but all along the training continuum the dog should be able to make small choices and find that every single choice is reinforceable.

The whole bit about breaking things down into small pieces, as you said, part of the beauty of being able to break things down into small pieces is that the dog gets to make all these tiny choices and every single choice is reinforceable. It’s a wonderful thing for the dog to learn how successful he can really be. So yeah, we might have an end goal behavior, and we’re breaking it down for that reason, but we really should be vested in the process rather than the outcome, and we should be thinking of this as, “He’s going to get to make twenty little choices, twenty correct choices, in the next two minutes, and that is plenty for this one session, and then we’ll come back and do it some more.”

Melissa Breau: That’s awesome, and I think that explains to people both what your approach is for this, and gives them a little bit of insight into what they can expect to learn even more about if they join for the webinar. I also wanted to ask you about the other thing you have coming up, which is your new Magic Mat class. Can you share a little on what the class will cover and what kinds of problems those skills help with?

Julie Daniels: Oh boy, yeah, let’s change the subject. This is a new class, which I’ve just been designing over the summer. It’s called Magic Mat: Where to be, when to go, and what to do. But it really is more broad than that. Magic Mat is a good, catchy name, and everybody knows me for my dedication to matwork, and certainly mats will be covered. But it’s really about what I call placement props – stations and platforms. So yes, we will cover some targeting and perch work and matwork, for sure, but we’re also doing platforms and stations and boundary training and that kind of thing, all by dog’s choice. So all kinds of methods and problem-solving techniques based on where to be.

I put up a picture in the course description today. I put in my front yard, in my door yard, driveway, I literally hauled out a whole bunch of stations and platforms and targets and various things, a perch or two, that I use around the house on a regular basis. I put them in my front yard and took a picture, honestly, because I want people to understand that (a) you need a variety and (b) you’ve got this stuff around your house. Everybody’s got something. You don’t have to buy an expensive item, a Klimb table. One of my favorite raised stations is a wooden pallet that I got for free, and I put a yoga mat on it.

It’s very common in my class for people to use a chair, a sling chair, a canvas chair because we take those to the shows all the time, so it’s very handy to have your dog trained to hang out on your chair. Not that you would leave them there, that’s not really what I mean, while you go have a Pepsi. But it’s a hangout place with you so that the dog can hang out with you in a comfortable and confident way without disconnecting. It’s a place to relax, a place to be, and a place to, for example, wait your turn or wait for something exciting to happen or be polite during dinner. That’s a good one. We use stations here for that.

It’s not taught by “You have to go to your station, now stay.” That’s the opposite of anything I would do. It’s taught around … here, I’ll just give you an example of how on earth would you train your dog to go wait in a certain place while you’re having dinner and just hang out there, and do it all the time.  

My now 13-year-old was instrumental in choosing her own place to wait during dinner, and she chose this very cushy armchair in the other room, the living room, being right next to the dining room. All of a sudden the other dogs were a little bit closer, and I noticed that she was over there in the living room, on this chair, with her adorable little chin coming over the top of the chair, “Hello, anyone, anyone?” So I decided, OK, she’s getting some macaroni. So I just got up from the table, walked over, and gave her a piece of macaroni. That’s awesome for her to decide.

My friend from Virginia used to say, “Go long. Teach them to go long.” Instead of being the dog who’s bugging the people, be the dog who’s out in the backfield, and good stuff will be thrown to you. So that’s how I treated her, and that’s how she taught herself to station on a chair in the other room when we were eating. Isn’t that clever?

So dog’s choice is a big component. For example, where I live now, in quarters that are a lot smaller, I have set up a couple of stations which I think will work fine during dinner, and I’ll let the dogs tell me whether I’m right nor not right. They will hang out, they’ll tend to go to the station and usually sit. One of my dogs would always choose down over sit. That’s fine. A default sit is what I’m developing in Koolaid, and so she would be more apt to sit on the station. But they can do whatever they want. This is a place where they are allowed to show patience in hopefulness of being rewarded.

I will admit out loud, here and now, that I am a person who would toss a piece of macaroni to the dog on the station. Perhaps you wouldn’t do that, so that’s fine. You’ll develop your own reinforcement delivery systems. But we’ll talk about things like variable interval reinforcement, and some of the things about how to develop duration by dog’s choice, because it’s not always that easy when good things are going on.

So in this class we’ll do things like take turns. We will use stations so that one dog is a waiting dog and one dog is a working dog, and then we switch back and forth. I’ll talk about things like, How do you do that by dog’s choice? Does waiting need to pay more than working?

I can use my own example of two brilliant agility dogs, Sport and Colt, who were very good at taking turns in this way. All of a sudden one day, I noticed a funny thing in Sport. I went to trade dogs and it was going to be Colt’s turn to wait on the station and Sport’s turn to work. As I made the switch, I saw in Sport’s face, as I said his name, I saw him say with his face, “Oh, OK, I wanted to be the waiting dog.”

Of course he came out and looked pretty happy to have a turn. However, why did he want to be the waiting dog? Dogs don’t lie. Why was it a disappointment for him to hear that it was his turn? You’ve got to look at those things, and in my family it was very clear: Sport had to be paid more for working and less for waiting, and Colt had to be paid more for waiting and less for working. It was much harder for Colt to wait. But in Sport’s case, once he learned what a great deal, a better deal, I had made waiting than working, guess what: “Actually, I’d rather be the waiting dog, if you don’t mind. If it’s all the same to you, just throw 17 cookies over here by the station, and Colt can have another turn.”

So you’ve got to go dog by dog, and you’ve got to be prepared to switch it up, as I had to do. Over time, the dog is a member of that thinking, working team, and the dog is going to have opinions, and the dog’s feelings are going to develop as the game goes along and the dog becomes an expert in the game. So be prepared. It’s a two-way feedback system. All training should be a two-way feedback system. Learn from your dog as the game goes on, and listen to what he’s saying about how it’s going to play.

Such fun, it is so much fun to use placement props. And of course if you’re interested in the TEAM Foundations training, I’m terribly interested in that, I absolutely love it. I don’t know that I’ll ever go for TEAM titles, although I guess why not? But I don’t think they’re necessary in order to get the utmost out of the program.

Denise did a podcast at one point, maybe you remember it, about TEAM, and one of the things that she mentioned still resonates with me. I still advise my students to do it. She said, “If you’re having trouble in obedience,” she of course was talking about obedience, but I’m not, I’m talking about agility, the exact same thing applies. She said, “If you’re having trouble with some of the advanced exercises in obedience, just take …” I think she said a week, maybe she said two weeks, but “take that time off from all that advanced training and just do the exercises from TEAM 1, Level 1, and then go back to your advanced work and see if you don’t notice improvement.”

Well, I heard that and decided I’m going to do that with my agility people, and it was such a resounding success for the exact same reason. TEAM Foundations is for all sports. It’s not just for obedience. I don’t think it’s sport-specific at all. And much of TEAM training benefits from good station work, good platform work, good targeting skills, perch work, all kinds of really fun challenges that use what I’m calling placement platforms.

Yeah, where to be, when to go, and what to do is the whole concept of this Magic Mat class, and we’ll use lots of fun things. Please, anybody who’s interested, go to the course description and click on the … I think it’s called Prerequisites and Supplies. Click on that tab to see the picture of all the cool stuff that I dragged out into my front yard, which is a subset of all the many different training props and placement platforms that I use around my own house in my everyday training. So you don’t need anything fancy.

I will want you to develop a station before class so you come to class ready with a target and with a perch and with a station and with a platform. It’s not hard. We’ll be talking about that before the class actually begins on October 1. So between the week and a half or two weeks between registration and the beginning of class you’ll have lots of chance to talk about what you’d like to build or make or find, or what’s the best dimension and size for your size dog. We gear the platforms, we gear the stations, to the size of each dog, so there are some good rules of thumb to go by, and we’ll be talking about those before the class gets going.

So it’ll be busy. All my classes are busy. I like them like that. There’s lots to talk about and lots of fun along the way as we see what the dog has to say about each game that we play. It’s a very, very fun process.

Melissa Breau: For folks who have already taken some of your other classes, which I know you do some matwork in some of those, can you talk about the difference between what they learn in that class and what the new material in this class will dive into and what you’re planning to cover?

Julie Daniels: I will cover matwork in Magic Mat. With a name like Magic Mat, I think you have to. But I’m best known for my matwork.

In Week 1 of the Magic Mat class, we will do both Step 1 and Step 2 of my four-step Magic Mat protocol, so we’ll go through it a little bit more quickly. The class I’m doing now, Cookie Jar Games, dives deeply into matwork, and likewise in Baby Genius I actually go through the different steps at length. But in this Magic Mat class we will do all four steps of matwork, but we don’t dive into it quite as deeply because we have so many other kinds of placement props to use.

But matwork is one of my dearest loves and really is a foundation behavior for any dog that I raise. And any dog that comes here for board and train learns matwork as well. I think it’s that powerful a motivator for the dogs.

Melissa Breau: If somebody’s listening to this and trying to decide if it’s the right class for them, do you have anything on who should take the class, what kind of guidance you can give for that?

Julie Daniels: Sure. I guess you could call it a concept class, because it’s a patience class. Some dogs lose confidence when they’re forced to wait, and some dogs just fry their brains over how difficult it is to wait. So it’s very compatible with people who have problems with impulse control in their dogs. For example, the dinner example that I gave is a good one. If your dog can’t hang out politely, if you have to lock your dogs away whenever you want to eat something, this is a very good class for you.

It wouldn’t hurt the over-eager door greeter, either, to do a little station work. It’s very helpful for them. In my limited experience with reactive dogs, station training is very, very helpful in giving them a secure place to be where nobody will bother them. So I think it could be useful for that, but I’m not an expert in that and will not be diving into that specifically. But in terms of impulse control, I think it’s a great class for dogs who need impulse control.

I think it’s a great class for confidence building and for training that is all about hurry up and wait: “We’re not going to go yet, and now you have to wait, and now we’re going to go now, and I need you at full energy now.” A lot of dogs who once you institute a pause, a major pause, in the action, inertia wins and now the dog has a great deal of trouble getting back up to full energy. This class is very good for that as well, because the “when to go” builds anticipation along with patience, and raises the value of the exercise that’s going to come after the station work is completed rep by rep. It actually builds the dog’s enthusiasm for the work at hand as well. So I think it does a lot of good for dogs who tend to get bored with training, and I think it has a lot to offer dogs who need impulse control in their training.

Melissa Breau: Gotcha. Awesome. I’ve got one last question for you, Julie. It’s the question I’m asking all of my guests at the end lately. What’s something you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training?

Julie Daniels: Oh gosh, that’s way too easy. It just hit me over the head this past weekend. I don’t get to show all that often in agility anymore, and my competition dog, Sport, who is now 10, is a pro. Thankfully, he’s still going strong, and we’re having a lot of fun whenever we do get to get out to an agility trial.

I got to trial this past weekend, not every day of the weekend, but two days out of three, and all of a sudden it became glaringly apparent that I had no start line. Here I am doing start line work on a regular basis in all my classes, in person and online. OK, I guess I haven’t trained that lately, but the dog is such a pro it would never have crossed my mind that my start line would break. But everything breaks. Everything breaks. Behavior doesn’t stay the same when you don’t work on it.

So that’s the lesson. We don’t stay in the same place when we stop training. We go backwards. That’s the way it is. And here’s me leading out on the outside of a curve because I have such a good start line, and my dog passed me going 90 miles an hour. I was able to save that run by having him wait in his contact, which drew uproarious barking from him. He thought that was about the stupidest assignment he’d ever heard. But he did wait, and I got around the corner and was able to complete the opening. Not pretty.

But that’s the lesson, boy, it just hit me like a ton of bricks over the weekend, like, Hmm, better do a little start line work with your pro dog, because nothing stays fixed if you don’t work on it. You have to constantly maintain all these foundation behaviors that you think you have control of.

Anyway, so that was my lesson, and boy, nobody had more fun with that than all my students who were at the show.

Melissa Breau: I’m sure you shared your lesson, and I’m sure they’ll take it to heart, right?

Julie Daniels: I hope so. I can only hope so, yes.

Melissa Breau: Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast Julie! It was great to chat again.

Julie Daniels: Likewise, Melissa. Thanks for having me. Such fun to talk to you.

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

We’ll be back next week with Sarah Stremming and Leslie Eide to talk about raising a performance puppy.

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!