Aimee Sadler. Welcome to Dog Pro Radio. Hi, how are you? So, thank you so much for having me. It’s a huge honor. Absolutely. It’s an honor to have you here. We are excited. And you were, you know, we get a quite a few crowd, uh, crowd requests and you have been one of ’em that we get a lot of requests to, to he, you know, to hear about dogs playing for life because what dog trainer would not be interested in dogs playing for life?

It’s, it’s impossible not to be intrigued. It’s definitely intriguing for sure. Well, I would assume, basically every one of our listeners knows of your organization, but a lot of people, myself included, have so many questions about what it is you do. Could we just start, give us a high level overview of who you are, what your organization is, what it is you do, and then we’ll dive in.

Sure. Well, thank you for that. I, um. I’ve been working with animals professionally since I was 19. I was an apprentice for a dolphin and sea lion show in California and then would just literally from that stage of my life, bounced around from one animal job to the next. And I was raised, uh, my mom loved, loves animals.

And remember we had 17 rescue dogs at our farm at one point, so I was always around a lot of dogs in groups together. And then as I went, kind of bumped along in my animal training career, I ended up was working horses full time, not making a lot of money. So I had to start doing some private dog training.

This was after I had done like some studio work and had been working with exotics and doing all this kind of stuff in LA. And so I started doing some private dog training on the side to make a little extra money. And then I bumped around with that for quite a many year, quite a number of years in la.

Um, and then one of my clients, I had moved them to New York and one of my clients, when I showed up at our house one day, she said, you know what? The dogs are doing great. They’re no longer trying to eat each other. And she said, but I would love to take you for the session down to the shelter where I walk dogs.

’cause I’d love to see if you can help some of the dogs there. I remember feeling like I, I would cry when I would go into shelters, to be honest with you. Like I, I just hated seeing the dogs kept like that, but she kind of got me started. She would pay for my time to go down and work with the shelter dogs.

And there were, it was a pretty, it was an older, pretty dilapidated facility. Had I think about 36 kennels, 40 kennels. And because I’d been around dogs in groups and because I had been taking my clients’ dogs into my home, didn’t have a kennel environment. So that was like my big, that was my big thing is that you’re the board and train with me is my kids were crawling around on the ground.

They were eating dinner with us. They were dening up in the bedroom at night. Like I was living a real life with dogs that didn’t have a kennel. So that was kind of my shtick. And so I went out to the director and I said, you know, can I use those yards out there? Can I just get all these dogs out? Just let them play together, get their yayas out.

Because you know, when you would go and try to work with them in their kennel and you’d start try to get some training in manners. A lot of times they didn’t even want food. They were either too aroused or too frightened or whatever. So like I, you couldn’t even, like, you couldn’t even work with them like that.

They were so pent up and so frustrated and so miserable. So to me it was like playgroups was an efficiency issue for me. How, and, and it just, this particular client ended up paying me full time, hired me, and then donated me to the, to the shelter. That’s really how it all started. 

That’s crazy why were twist.

That’s. 

That was in 1998 when she brought me to that shelter in South Hampton. And then, um, I did that full-time for a while. Then she shipped me out to Colorado and I did a whole, built up a whole training and behavior program for shelter dogs that really revolved around, get them out first. All the dogs have to get out, let them, I know the mo the most I could possibly learn about a dog, in my opinion, is letting them be as close to a natural dog as possible.

And so if they all wanna be out there hanging out together, to me, this is where I’m really gonna get to know who you are. And then the dogs that were still struggling after that and, you know, were starting to get really jumpy, mouthy, or still really fearful, then I could focus my training time on them.

And then they were much more bid at that point anyway, because they, they had expressed all those, all those natural things that they should express. So I, I was starting with a more whole dog at that point, and then I could kind of tune ’em up a little bit, make them more appealing to adopters. That’s really how the whole thing started.

And so I did that for her. I worked for her from 1998 until 2015. And then I ventured out and, and created the nonprofit and started dogs playing for life on my own. Probably either the smartest or stupidest thing I did in my career. And, uh, so we are, it’s been 10 years that we’ve been bouncing around and we go to shelters all over the country.

We visited over, I think we’re at over 420 shelters around the country, unique shelters. And then we’ve done over 600 plus gigs on the ground. So that’s kind of who we are and what we do. 

Okay. So to sum it up, you are getting, you’re going to shelters and you are helping set up playgroups so the dogs can be out playing so they’re less stressed in the kennels, so that presumably they’re adopted much quicker after that.

Yeah. And a lot of adopters come in and say, Hey, I already have a dog at home, which dogs are good with other dogs. And so I think as professionals, we all know. You have no idea if a dog has the ability to be social or not when you’re trying to test them on leash, or if you’re trying to assess their behavior behind a barrier.

We know that there’s could be a completely different picture when they can actually interact with one another. And so that’s really our foundational premise. You know, we want every dog getting outta their kennels every day in shelters across the country. That is not happening. And if you’ve got high volumes of dogs, how’s the, the only way you’re gonna be able to do it in shelters?

They don’t. Most of them are under-resourced. Not all, but a lot of them are. So how are you gonna do that? Let the dogs go out and play together. That’s really to us, it’s the foundation for everything. And then, then we’ve got a dog, then you can build from there. 

So let’s spend a second on that. Sometimes when you step back and you look at something, you realize how ridiculous it is, even though it’s been in front of your eyes forever.

Right? And there’s a lot of examples, but, and I’m not knocking shelters at all here, but how did we get to a point where dogs being in a run by themself all day is the model? Uh, you know, 99% pretty much every shelter I go into, that’s the model. How did we get there? Was that an evolution or did, do you think they started that way?

No, it started there because, you know, the shelters originally were for the, you know, it was for public safety and to get the, the stray animals off the streets, right? And animals were brought to shelters and they were contained for a certain amount of time and then destroyed if nobody came to get them.

And that was it. And so we tried to make these kennels. Some shelters have beautiful kennels and they seem pretty fancy. They got pretty pain on the walls with the experience for the dogs. Even if you have a fancy kennel, if they’re isolated and in a kennel run, even if you have indoor, outdoor and blah, blah, blah, blah, and all the, and toys and bedding and all that kind of stuff, which is great.

Which would be the ideal if you have to be in a kennel, it’s still. Not a healthy environment for a very social species. Right? So it’s hard on them. It’s really hard on them. And so that environment by itself can deteriorate them faster than we can help them. But you ask like how I, I still am per perplexed as to why we are still building shelters to keep animals and social isolation.

I don’t really get it. I keep hoping to have some influence over that as shelters are being built moving forward. But I’ve also learned that. Even if the dogs have to be kept that way temporarily, there’s so much that we can do for them that can mitigate the risk of them being in those adverse conditions.

And it’s all the, all the programming and the things that you can do for the dogs by getting them out of the kennel, not just in kennel enrichment, but out of kennel enrichment. We call it ook O, right? So we just wanna make sure all the dogs are getting and outta the kennel so that I think that we just are stuck in that model.

I think there’s shelter systems in different parts of the world that just have big pens and all the animals are living together and there are risks. Not all dogs are gonna do that well, so it’d be nice if the dogs that could do that. Well, we had enclosures that were closer to that, and then we had individual kennels for the ones that that didn’t cope that well.

Speaking of different parts of the world. Have you seen the video? I’m, I’m assuming you probably have of, I don’t know if it’s in China, it’s somewhere. It’s these big, uh, there’s all these dogs in this huge fenced in area. Yeah. And this one big, like a dog trots over and everyone submits to ’em on the way, and then he breaks up a fight and you like, if you’re interested in dog body language, you watch that video.

It’s amazing. 

Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen them a ton lately. Yeah, I’ve seen those. And then I’ve seen, I think it was in Costa Rica, there’s one that’s got hundreds and hundreds of dogs and they all go migrating around this huge property. So Yes, to your point, I love those kind of funky, those dominant dog videos that have been circulating and people are getting, like, people have sent them to me.

I’m the most gullible fool about AI stuff. My kids get so mad and they’re like, mom, that’s ai. I’m like, isn’t this the coolest thing? I’m like, oh. And then I feel like I got duped. Right. Um, but everybody sends, everybody that sees those that knows me, sends them to me is like, is this the A ai? And I’m like, no, that’s not a, that’s normal.

That’s actually good stuff that you’re seeing there. That’s actually really interesting. I love that. How that dog keeps the peace with everybody. 

Yeah, that’s neat. 

I also see, think that in those videos there’s probably some that they’re not sharing where it gets a little bit intense. Mm-hmm. It definitely looks like there’s a little, there could be some tough dynamics with that group, but I, with the things that they’re selecting and that they’re sharing, it’s for a good reason.

And it is, this is how dogs can, they have their own conflict resolution skills that doesn’t equate to shredding each other. I don’t know why we have that fear. I think that people have that fear because we don’t have any faith in the dogs just being dogs together. So we think we’re gonna micromanage all of their interactions and we’re the ones that blow it.

And we’re the ones that cause a lot of this reactivity and, um, guarding that’s above, that’s aberrant compared to what they would do on their own. I mean, to be honest with you, I’ve been seeing a lot of my stuff that gets fed to me is a lot of animal stuff. And I just was watching like an elephant birth that happened out in the wild.

And I remember, um, in the zoos because. These animals and when they give birth and her, it’s such a hot commodity. And I remember, um, one of the zoos saying, yeah, we now do it more naturally. We let the elephants do what the elephants are gonna do. But when that baby would drop, they would, the, the mother was chained when they knew she was gonna give birth, right?

So she couldn’t start pummeling the baby ’cause they thought there’s something wrong with that. Either that, or they should have known better that there wasn’t something wrong with that. ’cause that’s what they do in the wild to get them up and moving right away. Um, but also, you know, the investment, right?

So no, as human beings, we wanna make sure that that be, be elephant is safe. So we’re not even let mom do what mom naturally do because we’re gonna whisk it off to the veterinary care and make sure like that kinda summarize being nuts. Sometimes they feel like people, we ruin everything. 

Well, humans don’t have a good, we don’t have a good track record of messing with the natural wor world and mother nature.

That’s for sure. A hundred percent yes. 

Yes. 

So you mentioned a minute ago kind of letting dogs, uh, kind of do what they’re gonna do, so. And I agree with you. I mean, like, I mean, leash reactivity is one of them, right? Like obviously humans create that and you see nice dogs that are super friendly and social, that are wild, and, you know, maniacs on leash.

How does that apply? So when you’re at a shelter and you’re setting up a playgroup, you’ve got all these dogs, they’re pent up, they’re wild. I mean, every shelter I’ve ever seen, the dogs are either shut down or they’re at a level 10. There’s not much Yep. In between. Right. How do, how do you start? So you go to a new shelter, what does that even look like?

Well, we do start with a, a, a very comprehensive classroom presentation. Right? And it’s all, it’s a lot. It’s three and a half hours. And so we know, especially nowadays, we know that attention spans are shortening right. It’s very comprehensive. It’s the why, the what and the how. Right? It’s, you know, why are playgroups even important for your organization, right?

What are the benefits and the impact that you, the results that you should have, and, and what’s the reason that you should do it in the first place? Why would you take the risk if you think it’s a, it’s a risk reward kind of demonstration. And then we’re talking about, you know, what we incor body language with dogs and everything to prepare people to be able to read them and be able to manage them appropriately in groups.

A big chunk of that. And then there’s a big chunk of how to improve your handling when you’re out there with ’em, so that you don’t make a mess of things. Right. So after everybody’s watching that and they’re like, Hmm. Then in the afternoon we go, and typically we call it startup. Like if we’re with a shelter that hasn’t been really allowing, maybe they do pairs here and there, but they don’t really do larger, um, socialization.

We actually typically rotate the population on our own so they can then watch us model everything that we just showed them in the classroom. So they have a beat to watch that. And then some shelters just have people starting to jump in, right? Whomever wants to handle the dogs of the playgroup, then we start coaching them, uh, while we’re there.

So it’s the. The seminars are anywhere from like two to eight days, depending upon the number of dogs that they have on the ground. Right? So we basically, we base it on two days for every 50 dogs. So that’s the classroom. And then we demonstrate and then, and we do the demonstration. When the dogs are a little bit, the mo the most challenging ’cause the startup, they’re usually pent up.

They don’t know what’s going on. By the time we’ve rotated the population the first time, that’s where we identify the super social dogs that can then help us with the dogs that are struggling. Then we bring people in and coach them on their handling so that we can then hand off the program to them.

Did I answer that well enough for you? 

Yeah. I mean, I have a million follow-up questions and I’m sure you know all, all trainers listening do. So let’s say you’re at a shelter. Let’s make, keep it simple, 50 dogs. Are there, just like your average kind of smaller, um, shelter, are you getting all 50 generally of those dogs out or are there usually a couple that just can’t partake or, 

well, look, I, yeah, what I meant.

What I meant by that are the eligible dogs. They’re always in every shelter. Either they’re medically restricted or there might be some dogs that are being held with legal restrictions that we wouldn’t be able to. But those are the only things that could, should restrict them. And oftentimes we come to some shelters that are more risk averse or just not as comfortable.

They’ll try to say, oh, these dogs, we don’t want you to work with these dogs because these dogs probably aren’t good. Going to be good in playgroup. And we always encourage them that please don’t restrict them behaviorally, let us help you with that. I have never, we have never done a seminar, I’m gonna lie lying to you.

There’s one, one shelter that was maybe 15 dogs, and they were all like older medical cases. I kind of thought, I didn’t even know why they, they brought us in. It was a very funny, funny seminar. But anyway, most, most of the shelters never in any of the others have we not had them bring out dogs that they’re like, and they assume that they’re gonna be terribly dog aggressive.

That don’t end up being not only successful in play groups, but like a greeter, what we call greeter or a helper dog. So every single time we can demonstrate you don’t know how to identify dog aggression. If you’re restricting yourself to unleash or barrier assessments, you don’t know. And so that really, it’s, it’s, you know, we could talk till we’re blue in the face to try to convince people, but what really helps people is seeing it for themselves.

And the dog. Show them the dog, show them how well they can manage so many things, and the most exciting ones for me are the ones that are terrified and shut down. And people think that we’re forcing them into playgroups and that we’re making them endure playgroups because they’re in the corner, like, ooh.

And then they’re coming around and playful. We’ve had, there was one time we went to a, a shelter and there had been a dog that was living, I’m not exaggerating, this was living in the office. Literally never left that office for years. Bathroom breaks, nothing. Years lived in the office and getting her from the office to the play yard, it was admittedly challenging, and people were like, you know, really upset because now we’re just gonna get her there.

It’s like pulling off the bandaid. And she loved playgroups, and a staff member did end up taking her home shortly thereafter because they realized she was actually much closer to a normal dog than they thought that she was. They thought that they were just gonna care for her for the rest of her life like that.

It was completely unnecessary. 

That’s amazing. Well, you know, as you, I’m just picturing once again, you’re in a new shelter. You’ve got all these dogs and they say, Hey, this, this one here. Like, don’t get George out, he’s, he’s dog aggressive. Are you using muzzles very often or how are you actually starting the introductions?

And also, again, when people tell us the dog is dog aggressive, we’re always gonna, we wanna judge that for ourselves. If he had history right of getting into a fight with dogs, especially if it was an injurious fight, especially if they know for a fact this dog caused injuries to another dog. Historically, they’re always gonna be muzzled when they first come out.

And it depends, you know, if it was this dog killed another dog, okay, that’s actually more of a, what do you as an organization have the threshold for? You know, is this even appropriate to move forward with this dog as a placement candidate? But it depends if, if they’re a sanctuary type setting or whatever, but yes, so the, what triggers us to use muzzles is if they have a documented, known history of causing injuries to other dogs, or fighting, just fighting, even if it’s not even a really, it’s more for injury.

But when they come to the gate, everybody comes up and we do what we call gate greetings. And so we have some dogs in the yard and we let everybody say hello. And we’re very explicitly clear about that. We do not want the handlers restraining the dogs on the leash at all. We want the runners to be kind of behind the dogs.

So they’re really freely showing us that the. How they seem to feel about coming in. But most importantly, the dogs that we know that are already being successfully social in the yard, we trust those dogs to tell them what they, they think. So we watch them more than the one that’s in the catch pen. And it’s very one, one, um, I wasn’t doing the seminar, but there was one dog that came in on a muzzle and there was a bunch of dogs in the yard.

We use it in our playgroup, uh, presentations. And when this dog was let into the yard, all the dogs went off to the side and laid down, like completely avoidant of the dog. And I said, there’s nothing more I need to see that dog can go out. We weren’t even gonna continue because we feel like the dogs know a lot better than we do about that one coming in.

And that dog had a history. And so it’s like, it wasn’t the, wouldn’t even be fair to subject to the other dogs, to that dog. But a lot of times what happens when I used to do the seminars. If a dog came out and they were really very reactive, maybe they would try to bite at the chain link or something. It looked pretty serious.

I would send them away for that moment and say, I would never, I’m not gonna make a call about that dog because I don’t know enough yet. But I would send that dog away. I’d get through the entire population, and then I knew which dogs were. When we call a dog a helper dog, it means they’re kind of mentally, physically stout enough.

We think they can withstand if a dog is really rude to them. When we call a dog a greeter dog, that’s kind of like a, a friendly soft dog, that their feelings could get really hurt if someone was mean to them. But they’re good at bringing out fearful dogs. So we would pick, I would pick a really good helper dog.

So oftentimes by the time we cycle back and bring those re reactive dogs out, and the dogs now are acclimated to playgroups and they kind of know this is a fun gig. It’s interesting how many of them are not reactive when they’re brought out the second time. Right. But sometimes if they’re still reactive at that point, then yeah, we muzzle them and we bring them in, uh, with an appropriate helper dog.

Okay. So muzzles. What’s interesting to me is some trainers, and I’m not knocking them, but spend obscene amounts of time acclimating dogs to muzzles. And if you have it, great, right? I’m not opposed to spending two weeks to acclimate a dog to a muzzle. If you have two weeks and that’s how you wanna spend your time, uh, very often you don’t have that time.

So what is, like, what’s your process? You’ve got a dog who’s never had a muzzle on, you want to get him in the playgroup. Mm-hmm. Do you have any tips and tricks people could use that would like to speed up their own muzzle acclamations? 

Yes. And you make a very good point when we’re using it as just hopefully a momentary stop gap, right?

To just make sure that we don’t have a big oopsie and somebody gets hurt. Like that’s the point of using the muzzle. We just need to get them in because we could be wrong. A lot of times the muzzles can come right off, right? Uh, it just protects them from making a mistake that is and ends up at the expense of another dog.

Um, so we do have our, the. Techniques that we use to muzzle a dog that’s not acclimated, because I think most of us have had that experience of, especially a dog that is defensive to handling or vetting and is wise to a muzzle, right? If you try to come at any of us just face first, to try to put something on your face like this, every, everybody, we would all be avoidant.

So we definitely don’t do that. We don’t just have four people hold the dog down and shove it on their face. We do this whole thing. We test touch them, we step over their back, make sure they’re comfortable with that. We step on the leash so they have a little bit of, um, limitation in their front end. So we kind of have them controlled in the back end.

We kind of have controlled a little bit from the front and we put them, we pre lace the muzzle, so it looks like a big. And we put it over their head, just like a collar. So the muzzle is dangling down in front of them and it’s already pre laced. And so what happens is kinda when they’re not paying attention, we come up from underneath whoop, and then we have a hold of that strap.

So it’s very difficult for them. And we’re also straddling them and not necessarily restraining them, right? So we can even use our legs. We do use our legs as like a squeeze box, right? So if you start to struggle, we’ll put a little bit gentle pressure on you. When you stop struggling, we release the pressure.

So it’s this whole technique of how to get a muzzle on a dog that is avoidant of it and doesn’t know anything about it. And the worst thing is when they really fuss with it like crazy. Um, I hate, like if they’ll catch, if they catch their de claw or something, that’s a bummer. Um, sometimes they just go so nuts.

But we get them right in because then when the dogs come around them, usually that distracts them from fussing with the muzzle. ’cause they kind of have to deal with the fact that all these other dogs are around them. And then we, and then depending upon how it goes, they either remain muzzled or we pop the muzzle off and we pop the muzzle off when a, they don’t come in aggressing.

There’s a big difference between defensively being aggressive and offensively being aggressive. That’s a whole nother topic. Right. But if they don’t come in and just try to go after a dog, and maybe they’re reactive because they feel defensive, right? That’s a different thing. But once, if they’re not aggressing, and if the other dogs aren’t worried about them, then we pop the muzzle off.

So usually it’s pretty quick. Now to answer your other question, people are gonna wonder, but if I decided this dog, I think if I wanna improve their behavior through playgroups, so I think that they’re gonna have extended muzzle time, then yeah, we’ll do training sessions on the side of acclimating to the muzzle, and we will do, we’ll, we’ll train them to muzzle up on cue so that they’re doing it voluntarily, just like you would with a no contact animal, right?

We just teach, you know, present it muzzle up and boom, they put their face in. I just presented this yesterday in my webinar. Put their face in, we lead, you know. Fix it all up. They go do fun things on the muzzle, it comes off, you know, so we make it, try to make it a positive association. Um, and we give them the time to be more comfortable with it if we know that it’s gonna be extended.

Okay. 

I think that’s great advice. What kind of muzzles are you typically using? 

That’s such a bummer of a question at the moment. Um, we used to use Baskervilles exclusively because there’s those rubberized basket puzzles. Mm-hmm. Who changed their model. Their model now for people like us that need to put muzzles on and off, all different sized dogs, um, the new model that they have, which is more appropriate if it’s an owner with their one dog and they can fit it one time to fit their dog and that never has to change.

Um, I still think those are great muzzles, but they are, and we do everything to try to, if we find the old model on eBay or whatever, we try to buy them. Somebody was, another professional trainer just came to visit us the other day at our canine center and said, if you have the old Baskerville Muzz muzzles, where did you get them?

They also, we bought from them everything that they had from their old stock and everything. They sometimes will donate some if they come back in, but the newer ones, it’s kind of hard to explain, but it has this little triangular clip. It’s just difficult. You have to fit it correctly. You can’t just pop it on and off and, and change the fitting.

It’s a real nuisance. There’s some other muzzles that we use that just one failed recently and I’m gonna be respectful and not name that company because it was, it was shared with me. We had to buy the muzzles from them because we had to go around because they would not sell them to us because they did not approve of what we do.

Interesting. We got somebody else to buy them. And I almost wanna go, Nina, Nina, we have your muscles, but try to be polite. 

Let, let’s talk offline. I’m curious to hear what that brand was because we use a lot of different muzzles and obviously failure is a, a big problem. 

Well this one, I mean they, they do get grave reviews and they’re quite expensive and we spent a lot of money purchasing a large set of them for our teams to go around the country.

So it really kind of chapped me and I’m not doing it again. But then one of them just happened to fail, but I, I’m sure those muzzles are so that’s probably unfair ’cause everything will fail at one time. But I’m just cranky with them because they won’t sell their muzzles to us. But now we invite many.

That’s 

wild. 

So, I guess let’s circle back. You mentioned earlier about just interfering with dogs, and we talked about interfering with nature in general. It’s, from my understanding, that’s a big part of how you’re running your playgroups, is letting the, and I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, but is letting the dog sort some of this stuff out.

Can you, uh, walk me through that? What, what does that look like? What are things that you allow that you think maybe others don’t, that you think it’s fine to let the dogs work out? And then I guess we could also talk about what are some things that you all, you might always say, like, this needs to stop now, even if it’s maybe not aggression.

Well, there’s a couple of things that, especially if we circle back to shelters, a couple of them have gone into like bringing dogs into the play or on leash. And like, I, I just don’t, there’s so many people that run, uh, doggy daycares and are professional trainers that will do on leash introductions with dogs and, and they’re artful at it and they can do it well.

But for the general broad stroke, most people they’re handling really does, you’re inhibiting how the dogs can move. There’s another, uh, playgroup, they teach playgroups to seminars, but it’s a completely polar opposite model. And they do all the leash introductions and people are, you know, running around like crazy trying to not interfere with the dog’s interactions.

But you’re also right there. You can’t help it, of course you’re interfering. Um, so I hate that when people do that. I say anytime you feel like you wanna hold a leash because you’re that insecure about how the dog is gonna do, I would say put a muzzle on them, drop a leash and have a good helper dog and just let them in.

You know, have a leash dragging so you feel like you’ve got a safe way to get ahold of it if you need to and go to a helper dog. That’s always what I would prescribe. Um, other things that people do, so we use. I don’t, I don’t condone the use of food in our playgroups. That’s another thing. So I’m not trying to reward the dog’s behavior.

I really want the dogs to be, I really want the dogs to be focused on each other. I think the best, I used to say that we’re almost just like hall monitors, but somebody said, we’re like a lifeguard. I think that’s a better way to put it, right? We’re not gonna teach people how to swim, right? We’re just there in case you can’t swim and you get into trouble, then we’re gonna be in there to interfere and keep everybody safe.

But you guys are gonna figure out all your communication on your own. So I think that’s, we are constantly coaching people to not hover so much. Stand back, mark. Use your voice first, then come in with your tools to reinforce. So you ultimately want you to establish some verbal control from a distance. So you can tell the dogs once you, when you want them to slow down or stop and they start to be responsive.

So there is some training that goes on from that perspective. Um, there’s a bunch of other stuff. Tell me that question again because I started rambling and lost my train of thought a little bit with, 

you know, I’m not sure, but how about a new question? So you said no food. How about toys? Are those No, not in a, 

again, you’re thinking about sometimes we are rotating hundreds of dogs, literally.

And so we do not want, we want the dogs to be focused on social interaction. So we all know as trainers that that can get sticky when you have especially high drive dogs and you bring out a toy that, that brings out those kinds of, the part of a predatory sequence and everything else that we’re utilizing in our play now is not the time.

So we don’t use any toy play for our playgroup, but we’re talking about putting together larger groups of dogs. Right. That’s why. 

Okay. No, I, and I, I’m with you and I don’t see a need for toys. They’ve got each other to play with and stuff to do. Yeah, that’s a good point. 

That’s the point. We want them to focus on their social interaction.

We want them to develop conflict resolution skills. We want them to learn that my warnings are quite effective. I don’t have to fight. I can just lip lift. You know, I can just snarl a little bit. I can boom, boom at you and tell you to back off and you’re gonna respect my space and that they can communicate and relax, you know, and then just enjoy each other the way that they wanna enjoy each other.

So let’s talk about that. So you mentioned snarling, lifting the lip. Obviously a lot of people get involved instantly when they see that. So it sounds like you’re not, what do you allow and why? 

That’s interesting. And back to, I think that original question. I knew there was something else I wanted to talk about mounting.

Is a big thing, especially in, in private doggy daycares, especially ones that have cameras. Clients are sensitive to that. And so people are constantly wanting to interrupt, mounting. And there was a study done, um, of public dog parks, which is a very different dynamic ’cause you have owners and their dogs, right?

We all know how much can go wrong in a public dog park. Right. Um, the study showed that the, the most predictable precursor to a fight was not mounting, but people trying to interrupt. Mounting was the biggest, the most predictable precursor to fighting. So for us, it’s really, you’re allowed to be dogs, do what you wanna do, and mounting is part of how dogs interact and play with each other or assert themselves with one another.

So sometimes mounting is dominating, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s just playful to us, as long as it’s mutual and a dog is not playing at the expense of the other, or a dog is not. Responding disproportionately to the feedback that they’re getting from the other. So if a dog, let’s say kind of a sexually motivated dog is persistently mounting and the dog is lip curling and err, I want you off, I want you off.

And the other one is just, just not listening. We’ll back up. The one that’s being vocal, we’ll back up. The one that’s snapping and correcting, because the other one’s just, we call them one track mind dogs and the other one’s got something else on his mind and is not listening to those social cues. Um, and so we’ll back up the one that’s doing all the snarling and snapping and everything, right?

So people, sometimes they get, they think whatever dog is vocalizing is the one that I would correct, which is, is very oversimplified and not necessarily true. We want them to verbally or vocally communicate so that they don’t have to go to their teeth and be more physical. So did I answer all of that one?

Got the mounting thing done. And also the thing about mounting that I think is so funny is I think people don’t look like. People feel awkward about watching mounting, either because they think it’s a precursor to aggression. They think that alt mounting is dominating behavior or assertive behavior, or they think it’s awkward because they do think it is as a sexual behavior, and then they don’t wanna watch it.

And some people think it’s the weirdest thing that I would say, but I think it’s so strange that we will sit there and watch a dog defecate. We’ll watch the whole action of defecation. We don’t think there’s anything weird about that. And yet if they’re mounting each other, we’re like, oh, I don’t wanna see that.

People are weird. 

That’s funny. Mm-hmm. So you mentioned earlier, I don’t know exactly what phrase you used, but when I’m coaching clients on how you know how to let their dogs play or when we’re introducing a neighbor, dog, whatever I explain like we need, we need give and take. So that’s the phrase I use.

If you have a dog, nice. Another one slams one dog down on the ground is on top of him. That doesn’t worry me as long as he lets the other dog up in an appropriate time. And I don’t really like to see one always on top and one always on bottom unless I look at it and say like, they really seem that one wants to be on bottom all the time.

Is that, I mean, is that something that, like, do you get involved? So if I see one dog that if I look at and I say, this dog is really annoying, the other dog and I don’t see that dog standing up for himself, or I think he might wait too long and then he blows up because the other dogs annoyed him for too long.

I’ll usually get involved and stop that. Do you, is that part of your model or would you allow that to play out for quite a while? I 

think it’s congruent. I think our language is, I think you’re describing a version of what I was saying before. It’s like if one is playing at the expense of the other, right?

If we see that one is, you know, stronger than another and one is getting tired out and okay, this isn’t so much fun for that one anymore. Right. But maybe they just, they’re not the type of dog to correct hard enough or they, the dog itself reads that this one’s not listening to me. That’s when we’ll go in and inter intercede or intervene.

And I think that. To your point, it’s supposed to be playgroups. I don’t mind. It’s just like kids on a playground, right? You know, like sometimes the dogs are playing and banging into each other and all this kind of stuff. They’re having a good time, but then one of them pinches the other one and they just end up mad at each other for a moment.

But clearly their intention is to play with one another. It’s very distinct when you can tell, tell you’re not actually trying to interact with this dog, or you’re not actually trying to, um, play with this dog. You actually have some other motivation, like you’re looking, it’s like a make my day kind of dog.

You’re looking for your opportunity to just assert yourself with this dog or cream, this dog, or you described a play style where we call it seek and destroy play style. Where is, um, role playing? So there’s one that is like the, the chaser and one that is the chay. And typically when two dogs match up with that.

The Chasey is typically the one that controls that game so that when they stop, the game stops, but then they get up and run again because they’re like, ha, come chase me. And they like to roll over and be all dramatic about like, you got me. And then the one that’s the chaser is like, yeah, I caught you and I aha.

Pretend that the part of the predatory sequence that they pretend is that I caught you and, and, um, capture you, but I’m not gonna finish through with eviscera and all the other stuff. Right? It’s a game. Right. And all of this is what dogs do in preparation for those real things in life. These other sequences that happen for real, they practice, you know, they model in play.

You’re modeling sexual behavior and predatory behavior and all that stuff. And so I think that, I think it’s really about if they’re having expense fun at the expense of each other. If they’re consenting, they like the academics say things like, oh, we gave it a consent test. Right? So I use language like that.

Just so that it, we can be congruent, congruent with the academics, but typically for me it’s like, okay, if one looks like they’re being victimized, right? And you think, oh, I should go in. ’cause that one’s like you said, on the bottom too much or for too long. And if that by its, that’s not by itself enough for me, I’d have to see.

’cause sometimes they do that and then they jump up and go tag that dog to come chase them again. So if you actually stand back and just observe a little bit, if it’s mutual, if it’s mutual and one is not playing at the expense of the other, we really do just let a rip. Like we don’t, it doesn’t matter to us be dogs, you know, it doesn’t matter.

Interesting. So this. I mean, I’ve got so many questions and I’m, I’m trying to keep them kind of in, in order here. So you have, you mentioned a play style, seek and destroy. And as trainers very often we’re explaining to our clients like, Hey, your dog likes to play rough. Or like, your dog likes to run around and be chased, and he doesn’t like dogs tackling them.

But it’s, at least for me specifically, I don’t have, you know, any categories. I just describe what I see that their dog likes. Uh, but it sounds like you have specific categories, right? Of different play styles and different types of dogs. Could you walk, walk us through those? 

Sure. We have a really great video.

We are really, um, privileged that, um, Petfinder Purina and Petfinder came down and did a video specifically about play styles and it’s on their pro page if anybody wants to find it. And so we, I, I identified basically four play styles and it was just, again, observing the same thing you observed. We call the rough and rowdy are the ones that are the grapplers and they’re the ones, usually the thing to me that.

Distinguishes rough and rowdy play. ’cause you can have really high energy play, but it’s different styles of play. But it can be very high energy. But the rough and rowdy to me are the grapplers, the one a lot of physical contact banging around. They’re kind of rolling around, they’re going belly up, they’re, they’re practicing all different kinds of things like a wrestling match that’s different.

Then we have the push and pulls, which are the ones that like to play tag those dogs, you won’t see them rolling around and going belly up so much and they don’t. The thing about the push and pulls with the rough rowdies. Is that the push and pulls will become a third wheel for the rough and rowdies, like you’ll have a couple of rough and rowdies that are going at it grappling, and then you have this third wheel coming in and tagging, doing some healing behavior.

A lot of your herding type dogs will have that type of play style, but we’re never gonna paint brush that all German shepherds will play push and pull. All pit bull type dogs are gonna play rough and rowdy. You gotta see each individual dog, but you do see tendencies, right? So those herding type dogs that like the push and pull and like to play tag sometimes can really be antagonistic to the ones that are having a, a grappling match, right?

So we’ll watch for that. Then we have Seek and Destroy, which is kind of like, you know, the Chay, the Chaser, and the chay. So it’s, it’s practicing. I’ve caught you of the predator predatory sequence and I’m gonna mush you into the ground to pretend that I’m killing you, but I’m not really killing you because it’s all in play.

So, but they’re very, that one I don’t, it looks a lot like rough and rowdy. It looks like a combination of the rough and rowdy and the push and pull. But what I, when I say, oh yeah, that’s a prey, like seek and destroy dog. It’s the one that is pretending that they’re the prey. And then there’s the one that’s pretending that they’re the predator and it’s funny how they can find each other.

And then they play that game beautifully together. Um, and then the last one, we just call it gentle and dainty. And typically those are the ones that will do a little play bowing. They’ll bounce around, but there’s not a lot of physical contact. Usually the energy’s a little bit lower. Um, and then they will typically even rest.

They have like small bouts of play or they might just mingle around, like they just like to be, they’ll say hello, wag sunbathe for a little bit, but they’re not into that kind of heavy play. So those, there were the three that are more engaged physically, and then the gentle and dainty. We also then categorized dogs as social tolerant, selective defensive or offensive selective.

I really want the world to understand that selective is normal. It’s just like people, we don’t all get along with everybody, right? We all have certain things that drive us nuts. The thing it’s important that when we’re in shelters and we identify dogs as selective, we’re just trying to tell the next person that’s gonna run playgroups, Hey, this dog can’t just be thrown in with anyone.

And if we call a dog selective, it means what would we wanna identify? Are they less tolerant of males? Are they very vocal players? ’cause sometimes that can stir the pot, right? Are they, um, do they have propensity to be conflict driven? In other words, they love playing and everything, but if two other dogs get into a fight, they’re gonna wanna jump in.

So there’s things that you have to be mindful know about this dog to make sure that you’re curating a correct playgroup for them. When we have the social and the tolerant dogs, those dogs, whether their energy levels or their play styles are different, once we get that top energy, like if you have some really pent up rough and rowdy dogs that are social.

They’re gonna, and you put them in with a bunch of social, gentle and dainty dogs, that’s, that’s not gonna be fun for everyone. The gentle and dainty are probably gonna get overwhelmed, but guess what? If you let those rough and rowdies that are social burn off that top energy and bang around on each other and bring all that down a little bit, they sh social dogs can pretty much intermingle.

You just then have to be mindful of their energy levels. Like you have to find that dial, right? So social intolerance should all be able to inter mingle pretty well. Selective dogs, you wanna think about their play styles, you wanna think about their energy levels and you wanna think about any other little notes that you found out about them that this one doesn’t like?

Um. This one’s intolerant of push and pull play, just making stuff up. You could, it could be a million things. Sometimes we say This dog has a kick me sign. In other words, this dog likes to play and likes to be social, but for some reason that we can’t identify other dogs will pick on them. Right? So we wanna make sure that we, we curate a yard correctly for them so we don’t have super assertive dogs coming in with that dog.

Right. There’s a, a gazillion, we have a legend of terms that’s columns and columns of these kind of descriptors that we’ve figured out over the years. 

That was gonna be my next question. So are you giving handouts to the shelters where, let me make up a spec, like an example, and I have no idea if this is true, but use, you use the word selective.

So you have a selective dainty dog. Are you telling them like a selective dainty should never play with a rough and rowdy when they’re, you know, full of energy or, I, I don’t know. I’m trying to give you a specific example. Are there like things you can cross reference where you say this is, this is a recipe for disaster.

Don’t mix this, this type of dog together. 

Yes, in that big classroom presentation that we provide, I’m sorry, I thought I had that turned off. That big classroom presentation that we provide, uh, they get that as a handout. We also have a learning library that anybody can access. Um, you just have to give us your email and they add to an email list.

And, um, so we’ve got a, a video library that people can refer back to and check on stuff. And then we also have our legend of terms that we leave people with. Um, and we have the webinars that we’re hosting a lot. So there’s a lot of ways that people can circle back around and refresh. And if they feel like, man, maybe I had a couple of fights and I feel like I’ve forgotten something or missing something.

Yeah, we have a lot of materials and, um, Jason, I was gonna thank Jason directly. Um, I was really honored and felt privileged that on their website, in their shelter resources now, they asked us to share some of our stuff. So they now refer people on their website to our, um, deliverables and everything so that people can have some support with that.

That’s great. I’m, yeah, I’m intrigued to take a look at that. I think anytime you can share information like that, it’s awesome and it’s great to learn and obviously you are putting way more dogs into playgroups together than probably pretty much any trainer out there. So it’s great to learn what’s working on a large scale.

Yeah, and I think there are a lot of trainers that do have professional doggy daycares. Right? And I think Heather, Heather Beck and I met, oh, we were just, I mean, years and years we were, we were in the old huddle days of I-A-A-C-P way back when we were going every year together. And so she was running her doggy daycare.

So the thing that comes up a lot with the, with doggy daycares compared to what we do, there are some contextual differences, right? You do have to manage client’s dogs a little bit differently. You don’t have. Not that in shelter dogs, like we don’t care what happens to shelter dogs, but you do have to micromanage that more, not micromanage, that’s gonna sound like, I think you have to be more attentive to different things that the, the objective and the goal is a little bit different.

So a couple of times I’ve been asked to present to, um, the dog Wizard asked us to come out and do a presentation for them. And so I told her that I’m gonna tweak my materials for you because I don’t want you to practice exactly what we do in shelter playgroup, because I think you have to be more mindful of some other things.

The biggest thing that came up with that when we did that, um, training for them is a couple of the franchise owners were very, um, we were letting dogs in and interrupting them by yielding them out, and a lot of professional trainers wanna be on that line and managing and restricting the dogs from behind with the line.

And that is a different picture that we showed them. And so it was something that they could add to their toolbox. Right. So again, can, 

can you explain that more when you say the behind the line. 

So, in other words, that that was the biggest con, uh, conversation that we had, is we demonstrated, ’cause they had brought some clients’ dogs and everything to that, to that seminar.

’cause it was different. It wasn’t at a shelter and one that was problematic and was muzzled. And the tendency was to stay behind the line, the dog and kind of anchor them with a line. Right. And we were saying, you can drop that line. We’re gonna be in the dog in the yard with the dogs. And we have our interrupting tools.

We use squirt bottles, shake hands, like a regular shake hand. Like I have one sitting over here. I’ll show you. I’ll grab it because it’s right here. This is one that we. An example is just a bottle with some pennies in it. I have my sticker on it. It’s just something old noisemaker, a little rattle maker.

And then we have what we call the monster shake hand. It’s a very funny story about that, but it’s just basically a milk jug or, um, you know, like a bleach jug or something like that. Um, so it’s bigger and it kind of can behave like a shield. Um, so we have like, that’s the monster shake hand if you wanted to use that.

Then there’s the pet corrector, the air blast, and then also an air horn. You know, like that you hear, uh, boats use them or an, um, soccer fields or games, you know, the big noisemaker that’s kind of, if you have to scatter dogs, like if you have, if it, if it really goes down, I was about to swear and I call myself, you 

say whatever you want.

Okay. If JJ was on yours, then I know that we, I’m safe, right? 

Yeah. We, we couldn’t bleep enough. It would’ve, there wouldn’t have been anything left. 

That’s so funny. That’s so funny. So at any rate, the, um. The air horn is for when if you’ve, you’re in an emergency situation, you’ve gotta scatter dogs or it’s really on, or whatever the pet corrector, the air blast, we do tell people have to be, that’s the one that dogs will redirect on more than any other tool, which I don’t know if anybody expects that.

And I don’t exactly know why, but that, that air blast, we, we tell people to do that from, make sure you’re at a little bit of a distance. Don’t get right up on a dog and do that, uh, at first. ’cause we just, that’s the one that we’ve had dogs turn around and focus on the handler. So what’s nice about that monster shake hand if a dog does turn around, you can kind of shield yourself with that.

Um. And then the squirt bottle is really good. If you wanna talk to one dog, like there’s one that you’re trying to steer a little bit and you don’t really wanna have to have a negative impact on any of the other dogs. ’cause any of the noisemakers, we say audible for multiple. So if I wanna talk to a number of dogs at one time, I’ll wanna go to one of those audible tools.

If I’m really trying to pinpoint let everybody play. But I wanna talk to one dog and they’re not really listening to me. And so I wanna have the great thing about a squirt bottle and it’s just water. We don’t put anything in, nothing else has to be in there is you can kind of touch them from a distance and you can also be very directional with it if you wanna yield them out and drive them in a certain direction.

Squirt bottle can be really effective to say, just that one dog, I want you to do something differently. Everyone else can keep going. Right? But back to the conversation with the trainers is this one dog. When the dog would come barreling in to go after the other dog, they wanted to just manage that dog with a leash and anchor them from behind.

That can be in a very effective strategy and we use that as kind of like our last. That is where we go. If a dog is demonstrating that they will be offensive, which means they’re not even trying to interact, they’re just coming and bombing in with, you know, intent. Right? And this client, this client’s dog that they had, had displayed that kind of behavior.

So my son, Cody was on that one with me and we said, you can have the, the least dragging, but we want to drive the dog from the front. We want that dog to try to come bombing in and we’re gonna put ourselves between and, and try to interrupt them and drive them out and say, Hey, you need to think you don’t get to just come bombing in like that.

They were really struggling because the concern is what if that dog gets around and does damage? And again, we’re get, we’re, we have a muzzle on that dog then if most doggy daycares can’t have a dog in playgroup on muzzle, right? That’s not, you don’t even go there, right? It’s not even really the way, you don’t really.

I shouldn’t say that. Sophisticated trainers that are really using their doggy daycare to also work through problems and doing behavior modification for their client’s. Dogs, of course, are using muzzles, but if you’re just talking doggy daycare just for the sake of enriching dogs and coming to camp every day and you’re not trying to modify behavior, then no, you have to screen those dogs out.

Obviously, they can’t participate in that. Does that make sense? 

Mm-hmm. 

So it was inter introducing the concept of, I wanna be able to drive a dog as effectively as I want to be able to draw a dog. I don’t wanna just have to be reliant upon pulling a dog out of something. I wanna be able to be in front and say, I’m sending you away.

I want you to go away that way. 

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Aurora even has a heated vest made, especially for dogs. Visit aurora.com. That’s OROR o.com to find the perfect heated apparel for you and your pup. Use code IACP to get 15% off your new heated gear. So obviously what you do, anything with dogs involves risk, obviously, and with what you do. And I’m, once again, I’m very careful to not put words in anyone’s mouth, but the way I see it is.

Obviously getting these dogs out to play the benefit way outweighs the risk of the dogs having a good life getting adopted out. But obviously there is some risk. As trainers, very often we have to get our risk like profile down to almost zero. So, uh, very often if I’m doing an intro with a client’s, you know, client’s, dogs and a one’s reactive and they’re trying to get ’em buddies with the neighbor’s dog, and the neighbor like has no tolerance for risk, we do a lot of leash intros.

I mean, and I won’t bore you with all the details. We, he’ll teach both dogs to walk. We let one smell the other’s rear end while we’re moving. Then we switch and it’s a very risk, it’s, you know, slow. It might take 30 minutes to do something you could do in five, but you know, it’s very risk averse.

Obviously you don’t have the time for that. The ability to do that. And once again, I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, some amount of risk is obviously worth it to allow the dogs to ha, you know, have a good life. Is that, do you get pushback on that? Is that a tough sell for some shelters? When you say, let’s do this, and they say, well, what if someone gets hurt?

What if someone, you know, this one bites this one. How do you navigate that and how big of a challenge is that for you? 

Interestingly, so we don’t solicit shelters. We never have. Uh, so they’re always coming to us because they want us there, you know, they realize they’re already prepared to look at that risk reward model, right.

And they’ve learned something like on our website we have our impact report, which is lengthy. I don’t know who’s ever gonna read it. 20 something pages long with a lot of data. We have a lot of data. So what I can tell you is it is in, it is statistically insignificant. About fights and especially even fights with injury.

I have never participated. I, I mean, I’m trying to think. We’ve never had in our playgroups that were running them or teaching shelters like broken bones. We’ve never had something, we haven’t had a dog kill another dog in playgroups, which is like the extreme right. The worst thing that had happened was, uh, we had, there was a, a dog that ended up, it got injured, but it was in a shelter, and the medical team opted to euthanize the dog instead of treating the dog.

And that was just, that was devastating. That was devastating for us because it wasn’t, you know, it was just, they just felt, we don’t, we’re not gonna apply more resource in the situation. They just opted to go that way. So that was really devastating. But it’s, it’s like the, the. Heaviest thing that happens is a laceration, you know, that needs a stitch and maybe a drain.

And I’m not saying that that’s okay. I mean, that’s not, we obviously wanna mitigate all that risk, but I’m telling you the number of times that those things happen, um, again, it’s statistically insignificant. So if you think about, if you think about the behavioral damage that can be done by isolating dogs and not getting to them as efficiently, efficiently, and as effectively as possible, and this doesn’t even just pertain to playgroups.

I think I was watching a little bit of Heather’s interview and I think she was talking about some of that with like the blockades that get put up because people don’t prefer an approach to training or tools, for example, and shelters that will say, oh no, we don’t want you to stress our dogs by doing those things that we have been categorized as inhumane to us.

Right? It’s like, do you not think that them being isolating and, and isolated and not having their needs met and behaviorally deteriorating, you think that that is humane? So. That’s where it gets kind of tricky. But for us, I can just tell you that we have data. If you’re just looking at it from literally that perspective, it’s statistically insignificant.

I think that’s a good thing, obviously, for people to hear and think about. I’m sure that puts a lot of minds at ease. But you know what you just said about humane and, and that’s, I mean, a debate in the dog training world constantly. Yeah. Right. Is, is it humane to have a dog? What? Whether it’s playing with other dogs or not able to go for walks in public and whatever, not able to live a good life, is that humane just because you’re avoiding tools and.

One conversation I have with clients a lot is put yourself in your dog’s position. And obviously your dog can’t answer this for you, but pretend they could. Would you rather live the rest of your life not playing with another dog or not going for a hike off leash? Or would you maybe prefer to get in trouble a couple times and learn right from wrong and then get to enjoy the rest of your life?

And any reasonable person would answer that by saying, I think my dog would probably like to get in trouble maybe a couple times and get to enjoy the rest of their life. Then be locked up forever. 

Yeah, and I think, I mean I’m, I always say, I guess I’m a naturalist. Like I just think there, there is no model in nature, no model in nature that is force free or there is no such thing as errorless learning in nature.

So therefore, therefore it doesn’t make much sense. It’s a human construct. Mm-hmm. In my opinion. Now, and that’s not to say. I don’t have mad respect and all of the techniques and everything that are used by, um, anybody, trainers that do not want to use a verses all or anything like that. Mad respect for all that.

And we have mastered tons of all those techniques too. And we start there and use all that just as much. But I’m gonna try to get as close to natural responses to things, right? I mean, again, and people have probably heard me say this on other podcasts is, you know, the whole, the whole concept of controlling environment and access to resources so that we can mentally manipulate another species to do things that don’t have intrinsic value for them.

Pretty twisted if you think about it. I don’t know what, why we think that that is so. It’s cool. It’s actually really cool to, to do things like that. When I, when I say animals, no contact animals, it’s like, well, maybe they shouldn’t be caged and confined anyway. Right. So it gets like, where does it all start?

But what I’m saying is I think it’s a pretty twisted concept to think, and I love, like when I teach place, when we teach our dogs place, we frees shape it. That’s how we train it. Unless the dog has absolutely no food motivation, then we’ll do it a different way. Because what do I need to do to create motivation for food?

There’s got probably gonna be some kind of deprivation involved in that, right? Potentially. So it’s just, it’s all. A messy bucket of stuff, and it’s just whatever opinions you have, you have. I’m just saying that I will tend to go to whatever’s closest to a, a more natural way of doing things. How do dogs, how do dogs communicate with one another anyway?

How do they tell them when they like or when they don’t like something from each other? Right. And what is the closest thing that I could do that would make sense to them, the way they would communicate? Why would I go through all these efforts to get them to understand things in this weird human construct that I’ve created?

And then we have all these conversations about, but the dogs need to have agency and choice and all this stuff, and Sure. I think that that’s all really cool too. But do I wanna take my dog for a nice off leash walk? But they’re gonna chase every bicyclist that goes by or anybody that jogs, you know what I mean?

It’s like, it, I, I just think it gets ridiculous, but I probably will start ranting, so I’m gonna stop. 

Well, that’s good. You’re probably preaching to the choir with our audience right now. Yeah. I mean, obviously agency has its time and place. Yes. Well, I, I mean, I see a lot of people that don’t want to correct and talk about how they wanna give the animal agency, but then they never have the dog off leash.

And to me that’s the opposite of agency. I think the best gift you can give your dog is off leash training because then they can run and then they, and then how many of us, 

and then how many of us cra training and advise that our clients do crate training, right. And put all this effort into the dogs feeling comfortable.

But you know, we all know that there’s also a limit when, if you’re creating a dog for too much, like what kind of a life does it have? Right? So then there’s that too. And then there’s all these thresholds of working dogs and non-working dogs and pet dogs. And, and what is the ultimate goal for this dog, and what is this dog’s role in a family or with their handler, whatever that they’re doing?

I mean, it’s complicated. It’s complicated. I’m just working with dogs and shelters. So our mission is to improve the experience of sheltered dogs. That’s the bottom line. I just wanna make it. Suck a lot less for them to have to be in a shelter. And what can we do to do that? And, and the other thing is, I also want to be, what I hate about what’s happening in animal welfare in the name of trying to save as many lives as possible, which we also wanna do, that is this absolute denial of there are times when no, that dog is not a safe dog to place, right?

That really is on the dog. Unfortunately, sometimes, maybe it’s because something terrible has happened to them and sometimes we don’t even know what the reason is. But that behavioral expression right there, that is not a dog that should be safely placed. And I want us to do a much better job of being able to identify that dog, the dogs, that this is language that I wanna, I will die a happy woman, go to my grave happy if the animal welfare industry separates dogs that are at risk from dogs that pose a risk.

Big difference. And I want us to be able to know, nope. Oops, that dog poses a risk. So we’re not gonna continue with that one. This one is acting like an idiot and looking risky, but it’s because of what we’re doing to them. They are at risk and therefore we’re gonna keep trying for them. 

Yeah, and that’s a very tough line I think for a lot of trainers, self included.

For years ago, I was much more in the camp of now I wasn’t in favor of locking dogs away and just like, you know, we can’t put ’em down, but you know, we can’t fix ’em. I was much more in the camp of we should try to fix every single dog, including the ones who were a risk. And as I look back with, you know, I’ve been doing this since 2006, as I look back at decisions from almost 20 years ago, I look at someone like that was probably pretty stupid and I’ve evolved a lot over the years.

But as trainers, it’s hard because very often we see something and we’re like, I think I could fix it. I think I could get that dog better. But then you also have to look at, are there resources there? Who’s gonna manage this dog? You know, just because someone could be the right home, are you actually gonna find that right home for them?

And could you save 20 other dogs instead of the resources that would go into that one? It becomes, I think, a lot more nuanced as you gain a little more life experience and, you know, learn from the past. 

Told that all the time, like, why would you put that much resource into one dog? So I am always down to try.

Unless, unless now. Okay. So animal welfare is changed right now. We were working with the most advanced behavior dogs for a couple of years, and we learned a lot. We have a proof of concept. We learned a lot. Right. But now we’ve verted in it. Can you stop 

there for for one second though? When you say you were working with them, where was that?

Do you have like a home, home base that you’re operating outta? 

The, our Canine Center Florida was donated to us in 2017 expressly for the purpose of working with dogs who were at risk of euthanasia for behavior. And, um, and we ended up getting a population of dogs at the onset. This is what, how I met JJ and why I met JJ originally.

It was a fight bust from, uh, Canada, so we learned a ton. There was a person that was investing in those dogs and, um, we were contracted to continue to try and work with them. And we learned a lot from those dogs. But now is not the time in animal welfare. Right. So, as a private trainer, when I went into my client’s homes, like I, I think most of, a lot of the ISP trainers.

Are seeing very severe cases. And I had plenty of clients that, yeah, they had dangerous dogs, but they had ownership of that dog. They took responsibility for that dog and they were hiring, they’re hiring us to tell them how to install training so that there is some insurance, right? That if that dog was charging out after the landscaper, I can recall my dog anyway, right?

So that’s what trainers come in for, and to teach families how to properly and responsibly manage their dogs that do pose a risk, but that’s an owned dog that somebody says, I’m not euthanizing my dog. We have a different job in that situation when I come into the shelter and I put my trainer hat on, knowing all of those families that I helped, and knowing all the dogs that I took home that were behavior cases, the regular person that just wanted a companion animal, right?

And then a bunch of these animals end up in the shelter. I’m gonna go through all the steps to try to flesh out who are, who are you really? What problems do I really need to solve for when you are not being handled correctly? Like, who are you? What’s your worst case scenario? So if they don’t have. If I have a dog in the shelter now that doesn’t have a prohibitive, documented, accurate bite history.

Like if I know, if I knew that a dog in public had gotten out and chased down people offensively aggressed to people like, I don’t want to, I won’t. I was never interested in resolving offensive aggression to people. It was rare when we identified it. That was it. We would call it on that if a dog was defensive and making mistakes, I’d go to the ends of the earth to try to change their mind about what was a threat to them.

Right? But then there comes a point, if they cannot demonstrate generalized skills, which mean they can’t be handled by our volunteers, our students, and everything else, or if we change their environment, they revert back to what they were then, we’ve gotta call it on that dog too, because they still pose a serious, they still could be a serious bite risk.

Right. That’s very different from the dogs that we, that we all have worked with, whether it’s in a private home or in a shelter, that you know that these dogs just had these bad behaviors because of experiences they had in the past. And they do respond. They respond to training, they respond to behavior modification, and they show you they don’t have a desire to go to that behavior anymore.

They just didn’t know they had options. So that’s where we all really wanna get to, is this dog. You don’t really have to manage this dog so much anymore. They don’t even want to do that. Right? They just did that because that’s the only option they thought that they had. I really want us in sheltering to be better, because right now, dogs that are behaving badly.

For a lot of, a lot of advocacy, sadly, does not have any room for, no, this dog might actually just be a bad dog that is posing a risk and we really can’t help them. If you wanna place that dog, that just means you’re putting people at risk or other animals at risk or whatever it might be. So I, I do want us to get better at that, but if, but I’ll always try and I don’t think that we all, you know, as we get older, I’m a little bit older than you, I would assume.

As we get older and you work with a lot of these, it’s really hard not to start just anticipating what the outcome is gonna be in training. So I still have to remind myself to not cheat because I’ve seen this picture 50 times before already. I know how this is gonna end and still go through some authentic effort to make sure, yep, that’s how it’s going.

So I do think that we still owe dogs and families in our communities to be a humane nation. We should try. But then we need to know when it’s like despite effort, this is where this dog still wants to go and this is not a suitable companion animal. 

Yeah. And very often we just, we don’t know. Right. Until you put some time into the dogs, you have learned to behavior obviously.

And so you have dogs that are showing what looks often, especially to the untrained eye, like what I think what you would call forward aggression as opposed to defensive. And it really isn’t coming from a place of wanting to be aggressive, but they’ve learned to do that. And until you, you know, get some time with them and really get to know them, it can be hard to identify what dog wants to bite.

And one dog just kinda looks like they want to bite. 

And a dog that is defensive if that strategy has worked for them. We all know if that behavior is reinforced. If they make the scary thing go away by aggressing, it’s gonna be their first go-to strategy. And then it gets even doubly triply reinforced.

So you can have dogs that actually are defensive, that are presenting as if they’re offensive because they just go straight to it. They don’t waste their time with everything else anymore because it’s effective for them. So those are like peeling back those layers to really understand why a dog is doing what they’re doing.

Um, it’s complicated. It’s not so simple. I think that we should keep trying, but I also think that they are companion animals now, not for everybody. Listen, the, the audience for this podcast isn’t my typical animal welfare audience, right? These are you guys pros and these are trainers that are working sport dogs and working dogs and all that.

So there, that’s a different kind of dog that is considered appealing, right? And wanting the dogs to stay and drive. Like my job is to make sure a dog will come out of drive. I might understand why a dog wants to go into drive or get into that mindset, but we really wanna make sure, okay, fine. If you have that mindset, if we can flip, flip that, switch on.

I just have to make sure that switch can be flipped off by anybody. Not because this is a big distinguishing thing from our program from a trainer’s perspective, is that within shelter, and even at my own training center, like I never allowed, and I’ve had many, many trainers that that come to mentor us that I respect tremendously that have said, you should give this dog to a person.

Right? So I have a project dog for this because this dog will do better if they have a person that they can really rely upon that relationship. And I’ve thought about, I don’t think that that is untrue. But in our circumstance, we were then placing the dog. They had to go to another placement center and then go to a family.

We were never even necessarily meeting the person this dog would end up with. So they had to have very generalized skills. And I think when we allow them to depend upon that bond and that relationship in our work, it’s not in the best interest of the dog. We wanna be cool camp counselors. The dogs are having fun with us, with everybody.

They realize that people aren’t scary, so that it’s not about, I work really well for Matt. Right. And now Matt has to teach somebody how to, how to have you work well for them too. I want this dog to just work well, and I don’t want this dog to fall apart just because they’ve changed environment. That’s another thing.

As private trainers, typically we don’t have to worry as much about the dog’s changing environment. I mean, sometimes they want their dog to go to the coffee shop and they’re rude. But most trainers are not necessarily encouraging their clients to take their offensively aggressive dog to a coffee shop with them.

Right. Most of us would say, that’s not the appropriate activity for your dog. Right. If he keeps wanting to charge a people and bite them, right. Whatever. We could tell tons of stories about that. So not relying upon relationship to be the reason the dog is progressing and our world is a big thing that I will, I will preach that till the day I hit the grave.

And if I’m understanding you correctly, what I see happen at a lot of shelters is you’ll have one volunteer that bonds with a dog and then they say, Hey, Jake’s trouble, but he’s whatever. You know, Mike can handle him. And that person gets him out, takes him for a daily walk of, very often it’s a volunteer who’s there like six or seven days a week, they become the buddy.

And that dog really only gets handled by them. Is that kind of what you’re describing? 

Yeah. And then the, the hard part is then that person and that is so bonded to that dog in return. Every time that dog is, you know, attempts to try to meet somebody, it really doesn’t go well and the shelter is stuck hanging onto that dog.

And think about, I understand this because I’ve been through it myself. I just talked to my team about this. You know, when you’re mushing their faces yourself every day. ’cause they’re all good until they’re not. Right. If you’re the one mushing their faces every day, it’s a lot harder to come to that conclusion.

When I now get to sit and look at something on paper and records on paper, the dog, I see a different picture of the dog than the person that’s mushing their face every day. Right? And so with the advocates and the volunteers and the staff members that wanna hang onto that dog, that can do well for one or two people, my answer to them only is totally get it.

But then you need to take that dog home. You can’t expect this shelter to keep this dog here for the rest of his life and or to put other people at risk by sending the dog home with other people. Well, the dog, but he bonded with me. Why couldn’t he bond with somebody else? Okay? That that is not necessarily untrue.

But again, if they are a serious bite risk. You know, the person that says that is also not the one respons responsible in taking liability of that dog. That’s the big difference is when you’re the one that’s like, if the shelter is the one that’s gonna be sued, if that dog goes out and bites, it’s not the advocate that’s gonna get sued.

It’s the shelter that’s gonna get sued. And trust me and our industry, the issues around insurance right now, I don’t know if in the, in the, I think in, I think we’ve been talking about it, IACP for private trainers as well, but in the animal welfare world, all of the, um, liability and insurance issues, it’s huge.

Interesting. My company hasn’t had as big of an issue with that. We see, I mean, insurance is climbing, obviously, where, you know, workers’ comp is somewhat problematic, but general liability hasn’t been too rough. But luckily, business insurers of the Carolinas, I guess a plug for them is pretty awesome. Yeah.

Yes. 

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, animal sheltering is a little bit different. Again, you’ve got kennels of hundreds of dogs and strange people handling them and adverse conditions and you know, it’s the same with veterinary care right there at a higher risk. 

Mm-hmm. You know, 

um, medical practices and the defensive behavior at medical practices, I mean, it’s a much higher risk.

Right. You would think, hopefully with trainers that we wouldn’t, you know, we’ve always, you know, with trainers, you always, you actually wanna brag that you don’t get bitten much, right. Because you know how to read the dogs, you know how to set the dogs up for success and so on and so forth. Yeah. I swear I thought I had this off.

I’m so sorry. 

Hey, you’re popular. 

It was a new phone and I just don’t know why the volumes aren’t working. I’m so sorry. Okay. Anyway, I’m gonna try. I 

switched to a Mac for the first time ever, maybe, I don’t know, six months ago. And it took me forever to learn how to use it, which was problematic enough. But then my phone and text messages sometimes ring through on it, so I’ll be on a call or on a podcast and all of a sudden.

I’m like, can you hear that? ’cause it’s like popping up on the screen and, 

yeah. Well I just powered it off so we should, we should be good. 

So I’m a little embarrassed to say I had no, I have no knowledge of your facility. So could you fill me in a little more on what that is and what you do there? I think that’s really interesting.

Yeah. So this, the property is in, um, north, like central Florida and it’s not open to the public. It was literally just to serve shelter dogs. And so we shifted the model recently. So we were trying to work with a higher volume of dog that was at risk because in animal welfare, the placement for dogs that had any prohibitive bite histories, even if we would stand by the dog and like we have an explanation for what happened and we can demonstrate over and over and over again that this is dog is not going to that behavior.

And the dog is super solid. It’s just placement partners, we’re not taking them. So, and we’re seeing the shelters filling up, filling up, filling up. Placements in general are down. And so a lot of dogs are being warehoused in shelters, like too many just struggling and not getting outta their kennels because there aren’t the resources.

So we wanted to work with a higher volume of dogs that a little bit of a lower level. So they’re starting to get like that jumpy, mouthy, the arousal behavior that becomes risky. Bruising, people like getting too wound up and people don’t know how to help them through that or that. Or the super fearful dogs that just are not responding and just still cowering in the back of their kennel, whether they have defensive behavior or not.

Those are the kinds of dogs that we’ve been working with. But it’s not open to the public. So we had, you know, we had a shadow program that was working outta there and, um, and we’re about to shift locations, so it’s kind of up in the air. Like we’re gonna, we’re not quite sure what we’re gonna focus on for that facility, uh, for 2026, but, uh, we’re gonna be expanding more.

But it, it was a great, we’ve had a great time working with dogs there and I have learned so much and have had tons of students coming through there. I don’t even, I wish I had that number for you, the, a couple of hundreds, hundreds of students that we’ve worked with there. But it’s a beautiful facility.

It’s great, great setup for dogs. 

And so specifically, what is the goal? Is it you’re taking dogs in your, are you adopting those dogs out once they become really social? Or what, what’s the actual goal? 

That’s what’s really interesting. I did, I never wanted to be an adoption center because in animal welfare I didn’t, the work that we were trying to do, if we were trying to help the dogs that were outside of what was considered the adoptable box, right?

We were trying to help the next level. I couldn’t be measured against my S save rates or my live release rate, which is a different way to calculate how many animals are ending up outta your shelter alive. Because I didn’t anti, I thought maybe we were gonna have 50% of our dogs would make it. We knew that some of them we weren’t gonna be able to make it with, but we were gonna learn by trying.

So ours was basically just a, consider it like a board and trained facility, but for unowned dogs. So the owning shelters were sending them to us. They maintained ownership of the dogs. We worked with the dogs, and then if we felt like they were placeable, then we had a pool of shelters that were our placement partners, so then the dogs would transfer to them.

So the originating shelter would transfer ownership to the, the placement partner, and we were just a contracted board and train in between. That makes sense. Yeah. We just happened to be also training, training trainers while we were there too. 

Okay. And the trainers, you’re, you’re training, is that to go out and kind of further your model?

Is this Yes. You know, just within head dog trainers or, 

Nope. I mean. We’ve had pet dog trainers that have come to us to work dogs, and we have a lot of volunteers from shelters that then up doing private dog training on the side. But our objective was not to train, uh, private dog trainers. Our objective was to help people work with dogs that were in shelter environments and to learn how to do effective training and behavior modification within a shelter environment.

That was really what our purpose was. 

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Am I understanding correctly? It might be like a volunteer at a shelter that says, Hey, I really wish we could be better at playgroups.

I’m gonna go here in Florida for a week or some period of time, gonna learn a lot, come back, and then help get a program going here. Is is that kind of it? 

Yeah. Yesterday we just ended, uh, our level one mentorship. So we had a couple students from Canada, Iowa. A couple of people, and I think that these guys were all staff members.

I don’t think they were volunteers. I didn’t run that mentorship, so I just was popping in and out and seeing the students working with ’em. So they learn about, um, playgroups and then we teach kennel routines, how the dogs are mannerly, and it’s really fun. Lately with this new population of dogs, we teach like three different kennel routines.

So depending upon some shelters, you’re not allowed to step into the kennel. They just have a policy for safety. So how can you train a dog to be polite? Being LEED up and taken out when you’re not even allowed to step into the kennel. So we’ve developed a whole routine to do that. And then we have what that’s called, the crack we call it, instead of crack and slip, which is what a lot of shelters do where you crack the door and you try to get the slip lead on.

It’s the best way to train expert door darting dogs when you do that really bad. So we’ve taught the KRA and sit, right? So it’s how you open the door and get the dog to hold a sit and maintain a sit while you put all their equipment on or whatever training so that you can go take them for a walk, right?

So we have a crack and sit kennel routine. Then we have a mind your manners kennel routine where you can go into the kennel, but they don’t have any kind of a play sport or anything. So you come in and they hold their sit while you put the equipment and everything on them. Sounds very simple for professional trainers.

Not so simple for the average volunteer and staff worker at a shelter that’s trying to manage hundreds of dogs maybe at a time, right? It seems almost unac accomplishable. But we’re like, no. It is so accomplishable and it’s so important for the mental stimulation for the dogs and to help them to be more appealing.

We teach a lot of environmental cues, so when our dogs walk up to a door, they automatically sit and give eye contact to be released to walk through. We just install that so that they’ll do it automatically for anyone wherever they are. And then our last, uh, kennel routine that we’ve always taught, um, is we call it the rockstar kennel routine, so that they do have a place board in their kennel.

And so when you show up at the kennel, they’ll automatically go to place and hold place while you come and leash them up and they’ll wait to be released to come out. That’s the kind of stuff that we’re teaching the shelter, shelter workers. 

That’s amazing. Can you go into a few specifics on crack and sit?

So obviously there’s many ways you could teach that. How are you going about that? 

It’s really funny. So we have those three levels and what our team determined was the easiest one to start with is the level two, which is the mind your manners where, where you can go in the kennel, right? So typically when the dogs come to us, we train that one first.

So they already have a really sticky, solid sit. Right? It’s just ’cause it’s more challenging for them. Especially a dog that has no skills and knows nothing and is going bonkers. Right? You imagine you wanna open the door of the kennel, but you can’t go in, right? A lot of ’em are just gonna be trying to bust past you.

So I mean we’re, we use a lot of opening and closing of the door. So we use all four quadrants always. And when we teach, we talk about when you were doing this, this is the quadrant we’re using at what time and we’re teaching people to be able to move through the four quadrants and identify what they’re doing, name it.

So we’re using tons of positive re a lot of marking and rewarding and approximations, tons of positive reinforcement. But if the dogs are not taking treats, then what are you gonna do? So we teach people how to use masterful pressure and release work, which is your positive punishment to your negative reinforcement quadrants.

So we’re using the GA to block them. We’re using our body pressure to block them. We are, um. If they’re really rowdy or whatever, we’re just getting the equipment on so then we can go to our leash to help support them to get into that sit and start staying in that sit. Um, we capture eye contact like crazy.

That’s a really different thing about our program too. We never queue, we never do a watch me or a look at me command. We just get tons of eye contact as a default behavior just by capturing it. Um, and then we’re just doing, it just sits for duration, right? So, you know, all the trainers are gonna be listening to this, will know how to do, teach a dog to hold a sit with duration, distance, duration and distraction.

It is a little bit challenging when a dog is frantic to get out of their kennel, right? So even now you have to do it. So you just have to build upon it, and you do it in little tiny pieces. So we will teach them first by going in and supporting that. So at least they have that picture, they’ve got some muscle memory around it and everything.

Then we condition them to do it with a person standing outside of the kennel. Work it just the same. And then the ones that are with us long enough, we, we’ll start teaching them to send a place. And we teach that. We teach all of our kettle routines in the context. Of the kennel routine, like we just build upon it.

But if we have a dog, the the ones that are gonna do the rockstar kennel routine, we sometimes will do place board work and train it outside of the kennel if they can’t think it through in the kennel, if they’re just, if they’re not taking rewards ’cause they’re too frantic to get out. Um, I don’t know.

You can ask me some more specific questions. I don’t mean to be vague. Yeah, 

no, it’s, I think the answers are great. Just what I’m thinking and what I, I assume a lot of the trainers listening are thinking is you give me a dog and say, Hey, teach this dog to sit. Okay. It’s really easy. Right? Or teach this dog to place.

Okay. Really easy, even if the dog’s fearful, whatever. But you go to a shelter and you have, let’s say a hundred dogs in a very long room. It’s really loud. Everyone’s barking. It’s echoy, everyone’s stressed. And the person doing it probably doesn’t have, you know, full isn’t a full-time trainer and doesn’t have all the time in the world to work with this dog.

I’m assuming you’re making a lot of modifications and doing things different than the average trainer would, and little tips and tricks just because of the cards you play, the cards you’re dealt. Right. Where we would, I would tell my clients, no, go ahead. Oh, you, oh, I was gonna say, I would tell my clients, you know, you want to, and I hate to use the word win, but like generally speaking, you need to get the behavior you want.

Right? And if you’re trying to get the dog to sit, get them to sit. If it’s too stressful in an environment, well that’s on you. You need to, you know, take it back a few steps. With the dogs in the shelter, that’s where you are. You are in a stressful environment, so there’s just a lot of management. I’m assuming that must go on, and I’m just curious how you do, how you handle that.

Well, to be honest with you, this is what was so interesting when I, because I’ve been in shelter since 1998 and I remember for a long time. When I would, at the communities I was working with, I wanted to create relationships with all the, the trainers around town. And obviously trainers are competitive with one another.

We know what the joke is. The only thing two of us can agree upon is what the third one’s doing wrong, blah, blah. I say that all the time. Um, but I was able, number one, ’cause I wasn’t competing with anyone, right? So I was able to create, create this comradery and I would invite trainers to come in and it was common that they would come in and they were gonna wow me with all the things.

And it was funny how quickly they would get tripped up and say, well wait, I have to establish a relationship. I’m like, you can’t. You gotta do it now. You’ve gotta get them outta the kennel. Well, we need distance. The dog is reactive. We need a low stress environment, we need distance. We don’t have to distance, we’ve gotta get them outta the kennel.

No, we have to train it right here, right now. Like this. This is not ideal. This is a mash unit, right? We’ve gotta do it like this. So the real honest answer is yes, it’s true. We have handlers that don’t wanna be professional dog trainers, but I do teach them about the four quadrants and I make sure they understand.

How to apply those effectively and identify when a dog can respond to something and it can’t. And the biggest, the cleanest answer I can give you is we break it down into very small increments. So maybe all the dog can manage today in the session is to not be barking and yelling, jumping and barking in my face so they get to exit the kennel when they’re just not doing that.

But I will teach that dog to do the rockstar kennel routine over time. But today, for the next maybe six times, they come out, all I want is the four feet on the floor and quiet. So the trick in sheltering is to be able to see what are they capable of right now in this moment, in this circumstance. And the art and science combining them is to be able to observe what’s in front of you.

Realistically, you can go in with a plan, but you have to be able to switch gears really quickly if it’s not going the way that you want, and identify quickly, what can I get right now and, and what can I not tolerate? So the thing for some of the word advanced dogs that we’re working on is. If, I mean, leash climbing is a big thing that comes up.

Leash climbing is a huge thing. It can get really dangerous. We’ve had, we’ve had some seriously dangerous leash climbing dogs where they, they’re targeting the handler, not the leash anymore. Right, because the leash also has been weaponized. So it is, it is also the art of being able to interrupt behaviors that we won’t, don’t want, no when, no, this is, this needs to be off the table.

So we need to go to punishment clinically because we need to extinguish this. ’cause I can’t even get to the good stuff until I extinguish this. But what a mistake to go in with that approach for a dog that would, would easily give you something you wanted if you just gave them something accomplishable.

You just didn’t know how to identify that one little step that is accomplishable for them. So I think that’s, it is clean quadrant training, but identifying what’s possible. 

That’s maybe a wimpy answer. No, I, I don’t think so. What, what I’m hearing is, or at least in my own mind, is that you would have different expectations.

So if I go to a client’s house and I said, all we’re gonna do today, we probably won’t even get ’em to sit. We’ll just, do you know, the client would look at you like, I thought you were a trainer. I thought we were gonna accomplish things. Exactly. And, but the difference in the shelter, it sounds like one is that you have more time so you can in, in the sense of it doesn’t have to happen today, but you’re also 

No, but you are racing the clock because they might deter, deteriorate faster than you can help them.

Or if you don’t show improvement by a certain time, they are going down. So we do have those pressures on us. Yeah. I think what, as a private trainer, my pressure was just to what you said, if you’re charging whatever we charge an hour now. I know what I was charging back then. It’s an investment for a lot of people to have us come in.

Mm-hmm. You better show them something in every session that is accomplishable for them or else they’re not gonna feel like you’re worth the money. So you do have to get, that is the assessment part. And when and how you get into influencing the dog’s behavior in a private training world is a much higher pressure than for us.

But for us, what’s higher pressure is we have to be successful as a MA without anything being ideal. The, the training, the environment is so far from ideal that we have to do it almost against the grain. Whereas in private trainers, it’s like. Sometimes the family is against the grain. We all have those families, like they have unrealistic ex unrealistic expectations and unfair expectations of their dog.

And they’re not willing to do the work. They just want you to give them a dog that has a remote control. And I don’t necessarily mean a remote control for a collar. They want like a tv. You know, they want, they wanna just spend money and go sit on the couch eating bon bonds and then you deliver them a perfect product, right?

And we know the challenge of that, how hard that is in sheltering. Sometimes private trainers would treat me like I was a shelter trainer ’cause I couldn’t make it in the real training world. And I can tell you, even with the exotic work and the studio work and everything that I did it before, nothing made me a better trainer than working dogs in the shelter.

And I hope one day that sometimes trainers can be real stinkers to us. I’m like, all right, why don’t you shut the F up and come on down to the shelter and come work the dogs with me. And I’m telling you, so many people start to wobble out as soon as like, no, no, no. You don’t get it ideal. You gotta get it right here.

And I was really grateful when Ivan. Interviewed us and, and he and I, ’cause I thought, why are people listening to Ivan’s podcast gonna wanna listen to me? And um, and he was really, he, he said, oh no, I’m telling you, she’s got some real dogs down there. So I, I do think shelter training is a real challenge.

It really is. But we gotta do it because some of these dogs. Just like we do for private clients. You know, some private clients will give up on their dogs and then they’re gonna end up in the shelter and then they’re really gonna fail. So the pressures are the same. It’s just the landscape is different.

The landscape is very different. And I’m not saying this just because you’re on the podcast, what you know, what you do I know is chall. It’s challenging. I spent a lot of time in shelters and an example I can give you is it’s hard to get the dog. A lot of times you can’t go through the outdoor run because of if someone’s up north, there might be snow, whatever you have to walk down the row.

But with runs on each side with the dog trying to fix leash reactivity there, like in a client’s house, we would teach heel in the house with zero distractions, right? Then we would go outside and we’d work on heel in the driveway. Then we’d go down the road and maybe this takes a half hour, maybe it takes three lessons, right?

It depends on the dog. And then when you’re happy with where you’re at, then you start. Passing dogs and, you know, and really, you know, increasing the challenge in a shelter. You’re there day one. So I, I’m curious with something like sit, are you often telling them, Hey, just get the dog out of the run, take them to the quietest place in the shelter, you can find and do some training there?

Or is most of it happening in their run before they come out that first time? 

We do as much as we can in the run for the dogs that can give us something because that is the environment that they have to cope with. So I’m trying to help them cope and thrive with this right here. Right? Mm-hmm. But some can’t.

And they can’t think and they can’t process like that. So yes, then, then that is the art of it, identifying that this dog can’t give me anything reasonable here. So I do have to provide them something outside, but anything that I can get from them and build upon right here, right now in this difficult situation is what’s gonna help them the most.

And I think that is the hardest thing. I think that is really, that’s our superpower. Is being able to really break those things down and get to, again, again, I’m gonna laugh ’cause Ivan gets really mad at me when I still say this, but the, one of the first times he came to me, he said, your obedience is shit.

And I, and I, and he gets mad when I now say that because he, maybe he feels badly about it, but it’s true. Like our obedience, we’re not gonna, these dogs are not gonna go compete, but what they are gonna be is they’re gonna look like manly dogs that can go into, into a home and have an, an average, normal person look like this is a pleasant dog to handle.

Right? So our working walk is not a heel. We don’t teach a dog to heel and stay in position. We teach a dog to be soft on collar or soft to whatever equipment they’re wearing. And if I shorten my length, the only place that they can be is right by my side. And I create a light, a lot of value of being right by my side.

And so they walk really politely by our side, even up and down the kennels. Right. And we teach them that skill. But could they go to an obedience competition? Can they, can I go outside and put the say down, walk away and go do a bunch of things and know that my dog is gonna hold this reliable down for all levels of, uh, distance, inspiration, distraction?

Some of them we get pretty good, but most of them, I’m not even trying to get to that. I’m just trying to get them to be able to walk politely down with the dog screaming at them on both sides with the kennels, right? That’s what we would, and coming out of the kennel politely, it’s, I wish I could show some videos of it, but, um, it seems boring, but it’s actually quite challenging and then so rewarding in the end when they can hold it together.

Despite all that stuff, 

I don’t think it sounds boring at all. And anyone who knows enough about dogs knows anything with a shelter is, is not gonna be boring. So I think that’s a good segue to just start wrapping up. I mean, what is something that you wish trainers knew about what it is you do, or shelters in general that you wish trainers knew and maybe something actionable they could do to help?

Definitely wish that all trainers would volunteer their time with shelters. I think the most important thing is, I think what we really need right now are professional trainers that can foster some of these dogs where the shelters are like we think that they’re good, but we’re really not sure somebody who knows what they’re doing that can take them out into the community and give the shelters the answer of, uh, yeah, sure.

This dog is gonna be, um, this dog is fine. And they, and tell us they do do much better when they’re in the foster. I mean, lots of shelters are just sending animals out to foster, but I’m talking about the population that they shouldn’t just be sending this dog out to foster, but before we kill this dog, maybe if we just get it outta the shelter.

I think that the shelters have some responsibility to do some intervention within their care, right? And that’s what’s the most challenging for them. So it is really nice when trainers will come in and work with dogs that are more serious cases in the shelter. But a lot of trainers will say, I need to take them home.

And every, and that’s great. Sometimes we need the answer When they go home, are they really placeable dogs or not? What I found troublesome is when I, we had a pro foster program and it didn’t work out as well because the trainers that would sign up for that, I needed the dogs to live a normal life, not the life like a trainer, not a crate and rotate.

And I’m gonna take you out and work in sessions. I need the dog to really just be able to live like a normal dog. And a lot of trainers just didn’t have the capacity to provide this dog with that environment. So it didn’t give us all the answers. They did great with the dogs, but it took them too long to to, um, we took us a long time to get them placed and everything.

So I think trainers, if they could volunteer their expertise to shelters. Some shelters don’t wanna take you if you’re not force free. That’s a real, if you can have a thick skin, try to help. Try to adjust and give them, try to go to a shelter and help them in a way that they will allow you to help. And if you just demonstrate some results, then maybe they’ll open up to what you do.

Even if they thought that they were resistant before. ’cause that happened to me every time. There’s tons of resistance to the resistance to the things that I wanted to do and then I demonstrated through the dogs. Right. So I guess I still don’t think that’s a great answer. Help shelters for sure help shelters for sure.

And you know, I am noticing though, a lot of people are, it’s becoming kind of sexy to say, I see a lot of, you know, influencer trainers that are on social media. More and more trainers are all of a sudden showing up at the shelters and, oh, look at this wonderful work that I did with this dog. And I’m like, there’s part of me that’s a little bit like, really, but then I’m happy for it.

’cause I’m happy for the dog to get that attention. Of course. And then a little bit of me is like, nobody ever wanted us competing with you and now you’re coming into our turf. But you know, I don’t care. I just want the dogs to be helped but also come in. You gotta do it to volume, but is it No you don’t.

If you come in and you help one dog as a professional trainer get out, that wasn’t gonna get out alive. Yay. Do it. That is a good dog. That is gonna be a nice companion animal in our communities. Yeah, come help for sure. The one mistake that I think the trainers make and IACP allowed me to do this talk a couple years ago was a lot of trainers go to shelters with the ultimate goal of getting them to refer clients to them.

And I think you gotta go in with a little bit more of a pure heart that you really wanna help. That will come anyway if you do a good job. But I think you have to authentically just go to help first. 

Well, hopefully every IECP member and everyone listening to this podcast will help one shelter dog. And that’d be, that’d be a huge number right there.

Yep, exactly. 

Exactly. Alright, well thanks for coming on Amy. Appreciate you taking all the time. 

My pleasure. It was a great interview. It was fun. We had a good conversation. 

Absolutely. 

Thank you.