Welcome to Dog Pro Radio. Jason, I think today’s episode was unbelievable. How do you feel about how it went? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was a lot of fun. Definitely a lot of fun having that conversation for sure. No surprise there, right? Yeah, no. Who would’ve thought, who would’ve thought we’d get Robert Cabral on?

It’d be a lot of fun to talk to him. Didn’t see that one coming. Yeah, exactly. And I, it’s super gl it’s super cool to hear that he’s coming to conference to sing, too. That’s just, that’s amazing. It’s absolutely amazing. I was a little surprised, but that’s great. Yeah. The other cool thing that came out of is we got a new T-shirt, right?

We got a new tee shirt. Pretty awesome. Yep. I’m real happy about that. So Robert’s contributing to the marketing efforts of IACP as well. So that is huge. And I think we talked at the start of the episode about the framework for the episode, and then we just went off the rails and did something completely different.

Absolutely. Never made it there, but that’s just how it goes when you’re dealing with Robert. You never know where the conversation’s gonna lead. This is definitely an episode people are gonna wanna listen to. And it’s something I hope that a lot of younger, I always say younger, a lot of newer trainers listen to, to help guide their career.

’cause there was so much wisdom in there. Not necessarily dog training, do this in this moment, do this. We all get bombarded by mechanics on a daily basis, but the amount of wisdom in the episode that you can only learn through 10 or more years of dog training and shelter work and experience, I think is gonna be priceless for a lot of people.

I’m excited about that. Yeah, and I think there’s some takeaways too for people not only with how to approach dogs, again, how to approach people, how to approach clients and customers. He had a lot of good information there as well. I think this is something that for a lot of newer trainers could truly change their career.

They could listen to this and hear a couple hours of Robert’s advice about how to, how to work with shelter dogs, how to work with your clients, how to put the dog first, not the client first. That was a big one. There’s just so much in there to learn from. I think it’s, I think people are gonna love this.

Yeah, definitely need to stay tuned to this one. Yeah. Hey everyone, drop us a comment. Let us know what you think and obviously rate this show. And the correct rating is five stars. So go ahead and hit that button. Don’t forget YouTube. We got video on YouTube. Clearly you can listen to us on Spotify and Apple, but go to YouTube.

Be sure to subscribe leave us a comment. All right. Enjoy the episode everybody. Guys, we just want to give a quick shout out to one of our longtime IECP sponsors blue Nine Pet Products. So are you looking to level up your training classes and boost client success? The Climb by Blue Nine PET Products is the professional’s go-to platform.

It’s built for clear communication, easier class management, and better owner follow through. Plus,  it’s a proven way to increase revenue Trainers across the country sell the climb right from their facility, and I know we sell a lot of them. We use ’em in group classes, shelter programs, lots of different ways We implement the climbs and with exclusive wholesale pricing, there’s never a better time to get started.

Visit Blue nine.com to apply today and start building a better training business. Jason, it’s our, it’s a big day. It is. Once again, here we are, every day’s a big day, but we’ve been counting this one down between you and I the days to go time. Absolutely. Been looking forward to this one for a while.

Yeah. We have obviously an amazing guest who’s doing the introduction. You wanna introduce or you want me to go for it? Okay, good. ’cause I prepared for this. If you’re in the dog training world, today’s guest is someone who just, they, he doesn’t need an introduction, but I’m gonna do it anyways ’cause he deserves it and he’s awesome.

Robert Cabral is a nationally recognized dog trainer, behavior expert, author and speaker. I love him. I know Jason does as well  for his no nonsense approach to training. He has a ton of experience, hands-on, real life experience, and a great understanding of dog behavior. And on top of that, he’s one of really the only trainers out there who’s equally respected online and in the dog training industry.

He has a massive U YouTube channel, a super active Facebook and Instagram, account, and a huge membership program. His content reaches millions of people. And overall, what I would say is Robert’s, what I would call a trainer’s trainer rather than a celebrity trainer or a social media trainer. And coming from me.

That’s really the biggest compliment I can give. So with all of that being said, Robert, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for supporting the IECP, and thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. It’s awesome to be here. We are fired up today. There’s so many things we could talk about and Jason and I had trouble narrowing down the list of things we wanted to chat with you about, but just, oh, let’s start somewhere.

Yeah, just to start, I think everyone knows who you are, but let’s pretend they don’t. Could you tell us just a little bit about who you are and maybe a little bit of your dog training journey? I. Yeah, I’m just a simple dog trainer, I’m a person who loves dogs and I love the interaction with them.

I love to help people. I, I came from, I taught martial arts for many years. So I came from this part of the consciousness of taking what you know and spreading it further. I never want to be a dog trainer. I’ve said this for, for the last 20 years. I just love dogs. And I started this program to help rescue dogs from the shelters.

I, I had a dog and I helped my friend train his dog and another friend train their dogs. And I was working with these dogs in the shelters and just doing what I did with my dog and my friend’s dogs. And my vet was like, wow, you gotta be a dog trainer. And I’ve screwed up every passion in my life by making it a business, whether it was photography or martial arts.

And when it becomes a business, it sucks. And I didn’t wanna do that with dogs. And I was actually for the last 20 years, able to not really screw it up that bad. I love dogs and I really am passionate about people who love dogs. So working with them and getting to know them better and know techniques and see people who are friends of mine now that I looked up to early on, like world champion IGP trainers and other people, it really gave me this grasp of let’s make the world a better place for dogs and do it, kind of in a chill way, but sadly, social media has ruined that. Yeah. It has that effect sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. It’s just, you know what it is with social media. I was talking to my friend Kyle earlier today and he said something and I said, social media removes two very important components in life.

One is accountability and proof. In other words, you don’t need to prove that you’re a great trainer, you just can say you’re a great trainer. And people say that all the time. I posted this really beautiful picture of schoo and me doing a focus heel and some dope makes a comment and says I’d like to see that in, in the real world with very high distractions.

And that’s a very fair comment to say, but my dog is a puppy and we’re conditioning these behaviors. And then he’s goes on to say that he did all this stuff with wolf dogs and, which is an immediate red flag for me. And then as I always do, I click on their profile and there’s no pictures of dogs or anything like that.

So the accountability is removed from people. We don’t have to prove that we’re good. We can just make a really stupid comment. And the second thing that’s removed is the accountability of being punched in the face. That’s something that, that doesn’t happen through social media. If you can say, you can insult me, you can tell me, whatever you want, name you wanna call me, it is fine.

And at this point in my life, I probably wouldn’t punch ’em in the face anyway. But in reality, in the old days, if you walked up to somebody and said that, that risk was certainly there and it made people, I. Be nicer, be more respectful of people and it’s not respectful.

’cause I’m older than you or better than you, or more accomplished than you. It’s just respect that we should show our fellow human beings. Everyone is nicer in person without a doubt. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. That’s one of the things we train our trainers on in our company is if you have a client who’s not happy, don’t email back and forth with them.

Get them on the phone and get out there as soon as possible because you get in front of that person and all of a sudden you have that real human connection and you solve problems together. But you text or email, it’s way different. Yeah. It’s not happening. It’s really not happening. And I think that’s like the downward spiral of it’s really not dog training anymore.

What we’re looking at online, and I’m really against it, is these, it’s not even YouTube videos anymore. YouTube videos used to be good. We could actually learn something through YouTube, but TikTok, Instagram and Facebook have turned it into a 62nd, soiree of what you think. And then people have come to me and they say, my dog can’t do that thing that so and so is doing online.

The person who’s doing it online, that dog can’t do it either. It’s just edited together really well, and some really cool music. ’cause if you heard the dog screaming and leaking and you saw how many takes it took to get that 62nd reel. That’s something we’re not seeing. And people who are, people are very naive.

They watch movies and they think that it’s reality. They think, that these guys have private planes and these girls look like they look, but there’s filters for everything. I post something the other day where these fitness influencers, they’re doing 85 pound curls, but they weigh 15 pounds.

They’re hollow. So we’re all taken by it. And if it was just a nice thing, a song that you listen to, it makes you feel better. That’s one thing. And I’ve got no problem with that. I do have a problem when it costs dogs their sanity and sometimes their lives because spinning ’em too far outta control is dangerous.

And I, I hate those videos I see of Malis and I’ve had Malis and trained many Malises where they show ’em, the biggest thing I hate is when I show ’em the Jumping Malise and they’re up, 15 feet and then some guy catches it. Great, you caught your dog and if you didn’t you’re an idiot.

’cause you probably don’t care, but somebody else might not catch their dog. And when that dog lands on his back and breaks his back, that’s on you. But by sharing those videos, which I don’t do we’re perpetuating this fallacy that this is what these dogs are, they’re very intelligent dogs.

And we need to reestablish our sense of normalcy. Which, I dunno if that’s ever gonna happen, but it’d be, it would be nice. Maybe we just need to retitle and shift this entire episode to social media and dog training, because I think we could spend hours talking about that.

Yeah. I think it there’s a million things talking about Yeah. Whatever. Yeah. I think it really does set some really difficult expectations when when it comes to training. One of the things that I’ve seen, and we we just had a decoy seminar. We’ve got another one coming up in I don’t know, a few weeks.

And our decoy seminars are very different, I think than some of the others. Decoy meaning to teach people to catch dogs, right? And do development of younger dogs. And we start with just basics, right? Just fundamental. Where do your feet go? Where does your upper body go? And we practice with people with no dogs.

It’s, it is just core fundamental stuff. And, in talking to some of these folks they’ve made a circuit, and they’ve been to other seminars and I’m like, tell me about your experience with these others. And it seems like, a lot of people are attracting customers to those seminars with these cool flashy videos on Instagram and Facebook.

And now all of a sudden these folks are showing up and the expectation is. That’s what they’re gonna be doing in two or three days. And so because that expectation’s already set, now all of a sudden these people are trying to teach folks to do that, to get a cool video in three days. And the reality is things are going haywire quick.

So Yeah, I see where it, it has an impact on a lot of different, a lot of different aspects of the industry. Speaking to that point, I’ll give you a great example. I was working with my friend Frank Phillips, who’s undoubtedly one of the greatest to play the game of IGP. And we were talking about this I’d flown him out last year before the fires, and he was working with my young dog, Schmo, and he was he wasn’t even a year old.

He’s I dunno, eight, nine months old now, back then. And I said, I said he’s not even close to perfect. I’m, and I’m not rushing it. And he and I almost at the exact same time said, he doesn’t need to be perfect for another two years. And I think people have this vision because of this social media stuff that, oh, if I do this, that’s gonna fix the problem.

Forging in a heel, in a focus heel. Forging in a focus heel might take you six months to fix. It might only take you an afternoon to understand what you should do, but you’ve gotta unring that bell of forging and fix it. And when you see somebody who’s great at it, great at the game, they.

Understand that component and they’re not gonna rush it. And they, another comment we talked about was how many people, and you probably could speak to this Jason as well, they see something online okay, we’re doing this and we’re, we’re rattling  cans or we’re shaking a bottle when the dog’s coming in for a bite, but with the wrong dog, that’s not, that’s gonna set ’em off in the wrong direction.

Like using a whip on a dog. I’m not saying hitting the dog, but like a whip. The sound of the whip. That pressure is really great for building drive in dogs. But if you have a dog that’s working a threshold and you start to use the whip, now you’re gonna spin this dog outta control or elicit more aggression where you want more prey or you want more prey where you want more aggression.

And whenever somebody sees something online, they go, that looks good. I’m gonna use that without knowing what it’s for. It’s absolutely insane to me like that people just see something and go, I’m gonna try that. Not knowing why the person is doing that. And I think in this country, very much so we’re failing the dogs with that.

And in Germany, I think they’ve got a little bit better sense of, okay, we’re gonna educate people to do these things. We’re gonna show them why to do this, why to do that. And people spend more time. But here it’s, and again, there’s other places in Germany, it’s not perfect either. But I think people are losing sight of why they’re doing stuff and why it’s important and why that might not be the right tool or choice of exercise for a particular dog.

Yeah, I think people really have to understand that, I don’t know, 95% of what they’re seeing on social media is simply someone else’s snapshot of success. Plain and simple. Because if it’s, if we set it up and it’s garbage, just delete it. Yeah. We’re only gonna, we’re only gonna post the cool stuff, right?

Sure. One of the challenges I see is as dog trainers, we know the caveats we’d like to include in a video, right? You post the video and you would like to say, or at least me personally, two minutes of things, right? We’re doing this today because the dog is six months old. He understands come, but he’ll run from you every chance he gets.

That’s why we’re using the drag line or whatever. But if you give that two or three minute description, most people are gonna be bored to tears of the video. They want action right away. And what I’ve seen is social media prevents content creators from doing that. From explaining what you’d really like to explain, it has to be fun and exciting right away, which then people don’t get the context like you both just said.

You just have to jump right into it, and that does seem to be a big problem. Yeah. And I think it’s important for us, as, responsible trainers to I, I still put out content, long form content on YouTube, trying to explain stuff like, this is what you gotta get. And the YouTube long form content is much shorter form than what I put on my site, but it gives people this eye-opening moment where they say, oh, there’s something more to it.

It’s not gonna take 10 minutes for me to show you this, but it’s probably gonna take a half hour to a 40 minute video for me to explain this to you and try to get ’em over to my site. But YouTube is the last frontier for that, right? And it’s diminishing very quickly because of now they’re doing shorts and all this other stuff.

TikTok and Instagram really, people got a million followers really quickly if they showed some really wild and crazy stuff. I never was one for that. And I’d had people that came to me that wanted to work for me in marketing that said, oh, we can get you a million follower, a million subscribers, whatever it was.

And I said, sure. Tell me what I gotta do. And they said, this and that. And I said, I’m not doing that. I never really gave up who I was early on. And maybe that’s why I have, and a certain amount of respect in the industry, but I also don’t have the following that a lot of other people have.

I don’t have a million people on YouTube or a million people on Instagram or TikTok. But the bottom line is I never wanted to sacrifice my soul for the price of fame. So one thing I’ve seen Robert, looking at your, when I look at your stuff online, is the comments on your videos and on your posts.

A lot of ’em seem really intelligent. And it seems to me like you’ve built a following of either dog trainers or people that are really into dog training. I’m sure you get those crazy comments, like you said earlier. But I’ve seen a lot of people comment on yours that seem really educated and knowledgeable.

And that’s why I  called you earlier a trainer’s trainer. ’cause that’s how I see you. Something a like you’re a trainer that another trainer is interested in, right? We like to hear what you’re saying. How much of that, do you agree that you get a lot of those comments? And if so, do you think you’ve created, did you create that purposely?

Yeah. Again, I was always true to myself and I was always, my number one goal is to help dogs make the world a better place for dogs and the people who love them. That’s it, that’s all I cared about. Now, I did I was, moderately financially successful in my quest. And I’ve done very well for myself.

But my number one goal was to be responsible to that mission to help dogs. Remember I started in the shelters. Now my number one thing to this day still is helping dogs, not titling dogs, not competing with dogs, not being famous, but helping dogs. I still, I have a girl who works at the shelter here.

I’m not gonna say where or what her name is, but she’s been it for quite some time. And when my friend and I did the program, he was her mentor and he died of cancer a few years back. And I took over, so she works in a shelter, she’ll call me, what about this dog? What do you think? And she’ll explain it to me and send me videos and I’ll, or I’ll go down and see the dog and, I’m making the call.

Yeah I’d put that dog down and, I always wanted to be responsible for a greater good, not just fame or whatever. And I think most people who follow me are trainers, some very well-known trainers, and they see that I see things I. The way that maybe they wanna see it. But again, by the same token, I’m watching other trainers.

I’m, I’ve got a very close friends who are very good trainers and I’ll call them up and bounce an idea off. I could just call my friend Frank Phillips the other day and say, Hey, what do you think of this? So I’ll call, my friend Peter and Connie, she in Germany. Hey, what, how, what am I doing here?

Because it’s not, nobody has all the answers. Nobody, I don’t care who you are, you look at the top players in the game, they’re still figuring stuff out because each dog is different. Just because we’re dog trainers and we understand maybe how to get our dog to do something another dog, just ’cause it’s the same breed.

It may even be the same litter. It can be a completely different personality. Not everybody is like the Menendez brothers, where they’re just perfectly in sync to murder people that, some people have different options and different ideas. Yeah. I tell people all the time, if you meet somebody who has all the answers, run Yeah.

That’s the best advice you can give them. For sure man. Jason, you have no shortage of sayings? I love it comes from being in the south. Yeah. I had I had a crew here a while back. They would literally write ’em down on post-it notes and stick ’em on a board in the office. That’s a good idea. Yeah. So you had mentioned shelters.

Robert, I know you’ve done a lot of work there. Over the years is, did that help you get into the industry or were you already in the industry and decided to give back more to shelters? What was your start in the industry like? No the genesis was I was going to shelters and I was taking pictures and videos of dogs in shelters to help them get adopted.

And they weren’t allowing dogs to be together. You couldn’t put two dogs together ’cause they were afraid they would fight. And my first dog, as an adult was a Sharpe. And that’s a pretty gnarly dog. And the first dogs I trained were Chows, Sharpes like very dominant dogs.

So I knew the breeds and I knew how to work with them. And I was just going in the shelter and I was just, I said, look, I’m gonna put these dogs, put three dogs together, see if they get along, or what’s the worst thing that can happen. And we put ’em together and the, it’s funny to say, what’s the worst thing that can happen?

Because we know what the worst thing can happen is. And I’ve seen it happen with other people doing it. I was just, I’m super, particular on things. I’m very anal. I’m like a type personality. Like I’m gonna be a control freak on a dog. Even my two dogs, if they look at each other like for a minute too long, I’m like, no, we’re not doing that.

I shut that down. I’m a micromanager with things. And I think that’s accounted for my success. I kept doing this in the shelter, doing it, and then I started training dogs. And then somebody, this guy who was working part-time for me said, Hey, what about people who can’t afford to hire you to train their dogs?

Why don’t you do something on YouTube to help that? Yeah, and I’d already used YouTube to gain a lot of traction for getting dogs adopted from the shelter, like marketing them, which nobody was doing at that time. They’re doing it a lot now. But I started that early on and I said, oh, how complicated can that be? What I’m gonna teach a dogs, sit down, stand, come, leave it healing down, and it’s a couple simple things. It’s 10 videos and I shot these 10 videos and about six months later, maybe I edit ’em and I said, oh, yeah, put ’em up on YouTube. And I put ’em up on YouTube and I go there’s nothing else to possibly teach people.

How hard, I still think dog training is such a simple thing because I base it on a relationship with the dog. I don’t base it on what I want the dog to do. I base it on a relationship of getting the dog to want to do what I want them to do. And I thought I have no idea what other videos to put up.

And so people started asking questions. I go, oh, okay. I’ll make a video about that. And then another one, and now there’s, there’s over a thousand videos on my YouTube channel that, that, that relate to dog training. And then there’s countless videos about, q and as and little shorts that, that have had to have been forced to do now.

But I’d came into it as a trainer and I came into it wanting to help shelter dogs. And then that kind of spun out and had me working with a lot of other dogs because I truly believe if you wanna learn about dogs. Work with the shelter dogs because they’re very unique in their personalities that, first of all, you don’t get to say, does he bite if I do this?

Because nobody knows, he might, or he might not. So you’re always on guard, it’s like a really good, it’s juujitsu combat fighter versus a guy who did TaeKwonDo and got like a, an orange belt or a blue belt. You’re talking about really being able to think on your feet, really being able to physically handle a situation and mentally be able to put things into place that you need. 

That’s interesting that the tie into martial arts there. Yeah, I do that a lot. ’cause I did martial arts for, since I was 13 years old. So martial arts has saved my life and it has helped me do everything successfully that I’ve done. I think it’s a great thing that, more kids should get into martial arts and it doesn’t matter.

I’m not saying anything bad about TaeKwonDo. It’s a very great martial art, but I’m saying the way people approach things. Juujitsu and I taught martial arts of karate jitsu, which had striking SF in it as well. It gives people the ability to. Clear their head, one, two, be very humble and open to things that, that are gonna happen.

And I think that’s really missing. If I can segue in dog training, especially in a purely positive they have an agenda and it has to go by this agenda. And that is dangerous for dogs. And whether you’re purely positive or a lot of trainers that I know that are purely eco based, like it’s every dog comes in, they strap an eco on ’em and we have the system and there’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 it takes away the individuality of the dog.

And it may or may not work, but it certainly doesn’t allow the dog a freedom of expression of being themselves. And that’s something that, I’m sure you’re seeing it, Jason, in your sports as well. And I’m not sure if you’re doing IGP or PSA or whatever, but. The, a lot is being judged of how the dog works.

Not that, sure, everybody get a dog to focus heel, that’s easy. But look at a dog focused healing 15, 20 years ago. They look like, schlocks, their ears are back, their body’s hunched over. They’re like, yeah, I gotta do this. I’m gonna get my ass kicked. Where now when you see a dog focus here, look at Newt f at tace.

Look at Peter Sherick. Look at look at all these top people and you’re seeing a dog that’s yeah, I wanna do this. They’re free, they’re open. Frank Phillips’s dog. It’s it’s all this incredible power. It’s not a powerful dog that’s been squashed into doing it. It’s a powerful dog that’s been motivated into doing what you want them to do, because he’s gonna get to do what he wants to do If he gives you that, it’s a whole different psychology.

Yeah. Anybody can show you a dog that can do it. I wanna see the dog that wants to do it. Amen. Amen, brother. And that’s, I think, an important component. How many dog trainers do we see, bad dog trainers? And this is on, on, on both sides, right? This is on purely positive and dog training. I hate the word balanced dog training.

I, I really swore I will try not to use that. The thing that happens is 90% of dog trainers that I see in pet dog trainers, people who have no knowledge of the sport or anything else, and I always think people who are in dog training should at least put a title on a dog. It is something, some, I don’t care if it’s a, an a KC, obedience title, a hunting title, an agility title, an obedience or protection title, whatever.

It’s something because dog trainers fall in a huge pit. One, it’s easy to get started ’cause it’s an unregulated industry, and I do believe it should remain unregulated because the people who have regulated will destroy it. But they’re getting into it to teach dogs not to do stuff. Every time you call a dog trainer, you go, what?

What’s the problem with a dog? He’s pulling, oh, I can teach him not to pull. I can teach him not to chase. I can  teach him not to do this. I can teach him. You’re a no trainer, right? Don’t do that. Don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do that. Pop on the eco or bribe him with food or bang him on a leash, bribe him with food, give him a click or whatever.

That’s not how humans or any mammal’s brain works. A mammal’s brain works in the pursuit of doing something. And if you can teach the dog to do something instead of to not do something, then the dog is on its path to recover and to become a happy dog. If everything I’m you’re doing, and I’m trying to help you coach you, whether it’s martial arts or whatever, and I say, don’t do that, don’t do that, don’t do this.

I’ll give you 20 bucks if you don’t do it. Or I’m gonna bop you in the head. If you do it, you don’t grow. Dogs grow through teaching them what we want them to do, inspiring them to do that and blocking negative behaviors, not letting them fail, which a lot of dog trainers do. They allow the dog to fail over and over and over again, and the dog is then crushed.

The spirit is crushed. They just keep failing and failing. So people, dog trainers, everywhere. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care if you train with a clicker and a treat or an eco. You need to take the time to understand how to develop behaviors and what Jason said, develop behaviors that the dog offers to you.

The dog is pushing you like, Hey, I’m doing this. I wanna do this. This is great. I’m doing it. And they’re rewarded for that, as opposed to, I’m gonna pop you for doing the wrong thing or bribe you for doing the wrong thing and then shove a treat in your mouth or give you a ball. You can see how the dogs take the treats and you can see how the dogs play with the ball.

They’re not motivated. My dog, when he is coming to play with a ball, he is done something correct. He’s balls to the wall. He’s coming in full tilt and he wants to play and he’s a very strong and dominant dog. But dog trainers need to start to develop more and open themselves up to learning.

And there’s so much information on the internet now that you can learn from. Robert with everything you just said, how much of that the, the idea of, I always tell the client we need to spend more time teaching a dog what they should do versus what they shouldn’t do. We need 80% on teaching them should.

Maybe 20% is focused on telling ’em what they shouldn’t be doing. I wonder how much of this is caused by a lot of trainers. I see. They really feel like we work for the client. We need to do what the client asks us to do. And I run into this a lot with resource guarding. You get called in and people are like, I want you to teach him not to, growl when he, when we take his food and I tell ’em there’s a lot we have to do first, right?

Sure. And I walk him through the training process of why he needs to learn all this founda, all these foundational things. And when you explain it, they get it. But I’ve seen a lot of trainers, especially younger trainers, where I don’t know if they’re intimidated by clients or if they feel like hey, they’re paying the bills so they tell me what to do.

And that’s what I do. How much of that do you see in the industry? The people that I’ve, I don’t wanna help, helped learn better. I don’t work for the client, I work for the dog, and the only thing that I care about is the dog’s best interest. I fired plenty of clients that have then come back because they say here’s what I want the dog to do.

And I go your dog can’t do that. Your dog might not. Look, I would love to sing and play guitar more than anything in the world. I would give up so much of my life to be able to sing and play guitar, but I can’t do it. I know that I can’t. I suck. I have a guitar. It’s back there. I got it out from the fire, but I can’t sing.

It’s horrible when I sing, but I know that. And in the beginning I wanted to do it, and nobody told me, right? And I embarrassed myself. I said, went out and sang. And I was like, and I listened to it after I was like, God, that really sucks. But I learned from that, right? So I wanna help dogs, but I have to put my foot down with people.

Now, I came from a place where I commanded respect when I went in, because I was referred by very good people, and I had very good references and stuff. And my dogs were always exceptional. So I could say, you know what? It’s that’s not the way it’s gonna work. And I’ve had clients, I had one client who is an interesting story.

She’s a very good friend. I trained her dog Daisy, who’s since passed. But Daisy was a troubled German shepherd. And she would try to, kill other dog. She would run away. The very first trainer she had, she lived on on the beach in Malibu. And the dog would run away. So the trainer put an eco on the dog.

First day, put the eco on the dog goes to run away. She just burns the dog in the eco. The dog just kept running, right? They couldn’t get the dog back. And I said to her, I said that’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard in my life. So I fixed all that. I worked with this dog for two years.

And again, training really involves that kind of a commitment. I’m not gonna solve it in 10 sessions, 10 what I do in one hour today, you’re gonna screw up in the next 23 hours and in the next six days, that’s all you have so much time to screw up what I just did with your dog. So I always tell people, I said, we’re just gonna put little pieces together and I don’t want you to do anything with this dog until I see the dog again.

And I used to always try to, and great advice for trainers since I’m not doing private training anymore. Don’t book Thursday at 10 the first time. You should see this dog every other day or every day for two or three days and really start to get in the mind of the dog and show people they need to have this commitment.

But your responsibility is that dog. She took this dog. And this goes into the women’s right issue, which I have no problem with. My mom’s a woman. She was a woman. My wife is a woman. I love women. But when you choose, and this lady did, and she came back later and apologized. She chose this woman trainer who’s very well known, or she was well known.

Now I don’t hear about her anymore. She came in, she stormed into Malibu. She’s this great female, trainer. And she’s gonna do this. And I’ll be honest with you, most really good trainers are women. My wife is a fantastic trainer. I’ve learned stuff by watching her, and she’ll never admit she’s a dog trainer.

But women are great trainers because they come from a side of empathy. Men come from a side of ego. Ego does not train dogs, empathy trains, dogs. I’m, I digress. So she hired this woman to come in and this woman wasn’t like an em empathetic or she was quite mean to dogs, and I, she did some shelter work that I had to go clean up later.

She took this dog and I had pretty much solved the aggression issue, right? It was manageable Now, and aggression is not something you go, oh, the dog’s not aggressive anymore. That’s bull, right? Dogs learn skills in place of trying to kill the other dog. And you manage this dog for life.

It’s rare, if ever, that we solve or cure aggression. We teach the dog and us how to manage it. So we had a management issue. So she took this dog out, put a basket muzzle on the dog and walked it around dogs. Now I said, keep the dog five to six feet away. If something comes closer, give her a redirection, a little tap on the eco.

Get her to look at you, reward her, praise her, whatever. This woman’s idea was flooding. So she took this dog out in public in the park at the shopping center, and every time this dog looked at a dog with a muzzle on, she burned the dog well, and the dog learned. Th this is really, I really hate these other dogs.

Like I made the dog tolerate dogs and kinda like ’em as long as they weren’t bothering her. So three weeks or something, four weeks later after she started training with her, the dog almost killed this other dog, which she had tolerated this dog for two years through my training. And this, she tried to kill the dog.

She just, she saw this dog so many times, got shocked so many times in seeing this dog. She grabbed this dog and they barely got it away. Lawsuits. It was very wealthy people, her and her husband. And they paid the lawsuit off. And she called me back and she said, I’m so sorry. And she was a very big, women’s rights, which I’m big for women’s rights as well.

She said, but I made a huge mistake. I wanted to work with a woman that’s like saying, you know what, I only wanna work with white people or a black guy saying, I only want a black trainer or a gay person. I only wanna work gay trainers. Break these boundaries, right? We’re all people, some of my closest friends are black, gay, transgender, whatever.

I have no issue. But we gotta break these boundaries, whether it’s purely positive trainers, we need to be able to work with them and talk to ’em. They need to talk to us. But this dog almost lost her life because of stupid decision based on a check mark. Okay, you’re a woman, we’re gonna work with you.

And yeah, that’s probably not gonna win me A lot of friends, from people who are women trainers, but I will clearly say that I think, the girl that I’m taking agility from, my wife, I take agility from is a woman and she is hands down. Absolutely a brilliant and empathetic trainer.

She gets the dog, she gets, she knows what’s going on in the dogs. And that’s something you don’t see as much as a category. If you look at the sexes and the way that works. Women tend to be more sensitive to things and that’s what we need to look at with those. We need to have that component.

So you, you mentioned the word flooding there, and this is, I know that was a small part of what you said, but I Yeah, I found it interesting ’cause you said earlier you hate the term balanced training, which I can understand. I thought that label for years and finally have embraced it because, that’s what the people understand.

Yeah. Yeah. How do you feel about flooding? Because I feel like it’s given such a bad reputation from videos or descriptions of it being done horribly. So obviously you can flood and you can ruin a dog by doing that if you do it right. In my opinion. It can be a beautiful thing, but I think a lot comes down to how you define flooding and how you’re using it.

So what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, no I have used flooding with dogs, but I’ve used it properly, and I’ve used it in a situation where there was no other choice. There’s a video in my bound Angel University or the Shelter dog program that I show there was a little dog at a shelter in.

Ventura County. I never, I did the program, behavioral program there, and I moved them from 80% euthanasia to like a 30% euthanasia rate in a period of six months. We had this little dog in it. As rescue said, we can take him if you can just show that the dog’s not completely outta control, neurotic.

But the dog was completely outta control, neurotic, and the only way to solve this was to flood the dog, right? To push the dog past this thing. And I did it. I took the dog. I sat six people. She would hate to be touched. So I sat six people in a circle. I think it was six people in a circle. And I let the dog loose and I just put treats on the floor.

And I just waited. When the dog would come up, we touch the dog, and the dog would scream, and then we did it again. Did it again. At the end of I think it was a 30 or 40 minute session, the dog tolerated. And on video you could see the dog’s mind start to put together. Okay, it’s not that bad. I can get through this.

Where if we would done it with a measured approach, I don’t think the dog would’ve ever gotten it. It’s every, look, there’s good and bad in everything. People who are against ecos, use cell phones. It’s still technology. It’s still it’s still an electronic device. If you disconnect the battery from your cell phone, you put it to your tongue it’s shock.

It’ll shock you, but people have issues with what they don’t agree with. And in dog training, there’s very little I disagree with, I disagree with abusing animals, but corrections on dogs. I think it’s so fair to correct dogs, to prevent them from failing. Look at the famous dog trainer whose name I don’t mention.

His collection of videos is a complete symposium of dogs failing. Like they just fail and fail. And for some reason people think that’s kind I think that’s the most mentally abusive thing you can possibly do to any animal. I don’t care if it’s a, if it’s a sloth, a human being or a dog, don’t let them fail.

Show them how to solve the problem. And if they haven’t figured out how to solve the problem on their own, help them or else you are part of the problem. And the person I’m talking about is one of the most dangerous people in dog training. He’s an iil, he’s uneducated. I used to think he was just uneducated and I felt sorry for him.

Like he’s just this young guy who’s trying to figure stuff out. No, he’s actually a very mean person who tries to shut down people who are so far above him, and that’s what gets views, right? That’s what gets views. He gets tons of views and if I do something against him, I get tons of views.

I could make a career outta going against them, but I’d really rather train dogs and help dogs. Jason, where’s your T-shirt? Dude I got a fresh one out in a truck. Stole it. I saw you wearing it the other day. Yeah, I stole it from Robert. Robert. Robert posted it and said, I’m not, yeah, I’m not starting an online store, but go print your own.

So yeah, took his advice. Yeah, it just shows you I love him. The inconsistencies, right? It’s really about being inconsistent and that’s something that we need to really suss out because dog training, and again, like I want to cover this Matt, where you said you hate the term balanced training.

Balanced training, all training should be balanced training. And we shouldn’t have to say that. Like we shouldn’t have to say like as soon as I hear somebody say, I’m not racist, I think you’re racist, right? I mean I it’s the first thing I think about or oh, I have nothing against gay people.

I think you probably do because if you have to say that, so to say balance training well, but of course it’s balance. It’s just training. We’re just training dogs. Just like purely positive is a complete lie. And you’ve seen through my travels of doing this that I’ve gotten them to so many times, admit there is no such thing as purely positive.

But three months ago you were saying you’re purely positive. Then they say force free. Then the force free thing didn’t really work right, because that it is not really force free because if you’re holding onto the leash and he’s pulling away, I’m forcing him to not go away from me. So it’s just dog training.

We just need to get to that part and if it works. And my wife, when I met her, was truly a purely positive trainer. She went to Clicker Expo and there was a couple people there who were like talking, slamming my name. There’s an event I’ve never gone to, never invited, I didn’t even know existed. And she said to me, it was years later when we got back together, she said, oh my God, those purely positive people hate you.

And I’m like I don’t know why. And this was before like the big YouTube stuff. And so she was a purely positive trainer and she had a really nice black Labrador from a Guide Dogs was a career change dog. And she had a little mini dd and it worked perfectly with those dogs. Then she met me and she saw my malua goofy, my German Shepherd, Maya.

And then she got a dog named Dwayne, who’s sleeping on the bed right there. She couldn’t walk Dwayne on a leash, right? She couldn’t get Dwayne to drop the duck. She couldn’t get Dwayne to do this or that. And I said let’s look at an eco. Let’s just, she goes, oh, I don’t know. And I said look, put it on me.

You love me, no, for fun. I said, my working level is like a four to five. And she turned up to an eight or a nine, and I screamed, and I said, that’s what you don’t wanna do to your dog. I gave her the ability to do that, but never on the dog. And she totally now is really like angry about these purely positive people.

’cause they’re lying to people like, I don’t care. Ban the eco ban, the Pronk Crawl, ban the lip lead ban, ban it all. I don’t care. The amount of times that Schoo is on an eco is maybe one out of a hundred. And it’s when I’m in a park in a field, I don’t know the field, I don’t know what’s gonna be going on.

And I’m doing it for my self-assurance. And I’ve never pushed the button where he streamed or anything like that. I use it effectively, but I don’t need it. When our house burnt down, everything we had, I was done with, I had one caller. My, my first saver, my Herm Springer three millimeter shortening first saver.

That’s all I had. And it was gonna take me a while ’cause I was using Barts e calls and I need to order another call. And I needed to get this and need to get the prong call. Herm Springer’s gonna send me this and this that, but I can’t stop training my dog. So I went to the park, had a long line, had him on a fur saver.

Man, you know what? He listened just as good as when he was on an eco. Why? Because I developed a relationship. So it’s not a balanced dog trainer, a purely positive dog trainer. It’s a relationship dog trainer. It’s a trainer who takes into account the relationship between the human and the dog. And it’s not the trainer and the dog.

Right? That’s complete bull. Whenever you see trainers come in and go here, lemme see your dog here. I can get him to do it. But that’s stupid. Like the dumbest thing I see dog trainers do is grab the leash and go Here, sit. Hey, down here. Heel. Of course he’s gonna do it to you. He doesn’t know you. This, that’s what’s called the newness factor.

Very rarely is a dog gonna be aggressive in my hands. He’s probably gonna be aggressive in your hands ’cause he’s your dog. He’s territorial. He’s protective, he’s got different drives with you than he has with me. But trainers do it all the time. They show how they can do it. Okay, unless you’re gonna take the dog home and keep ’em, you haven’t solved the problem for the client.

You need to help the client understand what’s going on. Find that thing in the relationship that’s missing because that’s exactly what it is. There’s something missing. Most people say have you had the dog checked out medically? I certainly hope so. I certainly hope you don’t come to me for medical advice.

I’m not, I don’t even play a doctor on tv. Yeah, if you’re coming to me, you’ve gone to a vet, the dog is being horribly aggressive and the vet has checked him out and said it’s beyond me. And you didn’t make the mistake of calling the veterinary behaviorist who’s gonna put your dog on Prozac and try to solve the problem.

You’ve come to me. ’cause we’re gonna solve the problem through understanding the relationship and the dynamics between you and the dog. That word behaviorist is a loaded one for me. I sure. I’ve come to accept balance training. And for the record, we actually have named our company podcast Balance Training with Suburban Canine just because people recognize that.

But I cannot stand the word behaviorist. I don’t, yeah. And not a veterinary behaviorist, but when a trainer says, I’m a dog trainer and behaviorist, where I think, isn’t every dog trainer working on behaviors? Of course. Every pet dog trainer, at least maybe not someone who’s just doing agility or something like that.

I, I don’t know what your guys’ thoughts are on that, but we’re all doing that every single way. You’re Yeah. Behavior is what drives the dog? So the one that gets, the one that gets me is the, probably as bad as any of ’em, is the twist on science based and backed by science. The last time I checked all four quadrants were science-based. Again it’s really a play on words in this attempt to manipulate people’s beliefs. That, that drives me insane because it has no value really for the client, and it benefits the dog. None.

None. That’s, that to me is why it’s really just a, people sit around on social media and fight over this terminology that does nothing for nothing to benefit dogs or clients or their relationships themselves, which I think is probably one of the most important things that people spend the least amount of time focusing on.

Yeah, a hundred percent. It’s not in you’re called as a dog trainer to come fix a problem, right? You’re like a handyman. You’re not really a dog trainer. You’re a handyman. My faucet’s leaking. You know why it’s leaking. No, I don’t care. Just fix it. You know why your dog’s growling.

No, I don’t care. Just don’t let ’em growl. Yeah, we’re coming into this in a real bad way. So I think it’s important to educate people. Now, on the flip side, science-based people are insane, right? Because they’re so hung up on this idea of complicating things. And if you have to complicate something for someone, then you’re really bad at your job.

Like I can pretty much break down everything I see, that I’ve solved over the past 20 years and worked with and managed and fixed or whatever, super simply, like it’s dog training is the simplest skill you could po It’s more complicated to drive a car than to train a dog, right? It’s super simple.

But because people complicate it so much and because that kind of increases their mental picture of value. Oh, I can solve this because it’s a, it’s the quadrant of this and this, and then, and the science of the drive, and of this it’s, take all the big words out of it. Let’s break it down simply.

Your dog is doing this because X, Y, and Z and help people solve it. Hey. Help people solve it as opposed to continuing to make it complicated. And science. I didn’t do well in science in school, by the way. I’ll be totally honest with that. And I don’t have a, a pension against it because of that. I do.

Because life doesn’t need to be complicated, right? We don’t need to go see psychiatrists because we don’t get along with our spouse or something like that. We just need to communicate with them and say, Hey, what are you hearing? Why are you upset at this? Like, why are we having this fight and solve it, Don, it doesn’t need to be that complicated.

Very few things that need to be complicated. Hey. For the few things that need to be complicated in life, brain surgery is complicated, right? If your dog has cancer, god forbid, that’s complicated. You need to see a doctor for that. If your dog is resource guarding their food, there’s ways to fix that, right?

Let’s get to, let’s make it real simple. Let’s figure out how to fix that. Hey, a guest appearance. Yeah, that’s sh move right here. Yeah. Good. So that’s I think where people complicate stuff so much that they just feel that they can charge more or they’re worth more. And I’ll tell you something. I prided myself.

I was very expensive in training, okay? And I was a very, I charged a lot of money for training, but I also gave back to the shelters. I was never, nobody ever left my thing and said, God, this is gonna be really hard to solve with my dog. They always left and went, oh my God, it’s so clear.

It’s just so clear what I need to do. It’s a dog. It’s just, it eats and poops, right? That’s like us. We eat and we poop, and then we wanna be happy. Every creature, every mammal is in pursuit of happiness and things that feel good, and in constant fear of dying and suffering. That’s life. That’s it.

That it doesn’t get any simpler than that. And if you can break it down like that, okay, how can we, how can I be happy, right? I can eliminate people from my life who are jerks, who are annoying and stuff like that. I can eat food. I like, I can be nice to other people and they’ll be nice to me.

Let’s make life real simple again and put aside. And I’ve tried so many times to put aside this polarization with other, with the purely positive movement. I’ve invited people on chats with me let’s talk about dog training. Let’s get together because I’m sure there’s stuff I can learn from you.

And there, there is. I’ve learned more from positive training than. Than I ever could have fathomed. There’s so much to learn from luring, from shaping from refor reinforcement and all those things. But they certainly seem to think there’s nothing to learn from our side, which is beyond me.

They really believe that science involves one quadrant. The reason is called a quadrant. And I’m not the most intelligent person in the world, but quad refers to four. So you can’t say science is based on a quadrant, but we can only use one quadrant. That’s not science. That’s the anthesis of science.

It’s discounting 75% of science. But people believe it ’cause they say, oh, science. And you have people, like these dopey people on the internet who, they look nice, they’re clean cut, like you, Matt, not like me and Jason, and people go, oh, they’re really nice. I, I want them to date my daughter.

And, they’re gonna be nice with my dog. And not you, Jason, but Matt. But oftentimes they’re not they’re not nice with their dogs. I’ve seen purely positive people in IGP do some really mean things. Really mean things. And I was I was really like one dog.

One guy was trying to get a dog to track and he wouldn’t track. And he was a pure he used to be a balance trainer. He was a purely positive trainer. He switched over just like all the. Vegan bodybuilders who actually ate meat for 30 years and then gave it up for six months, and other vegan bodybuilders.

These purely positive people, like now they’re purely positive and they’re gonna do it. They’ll never title a dog to any level in IGP or PSA or Mon Ring being purely s It will never happen. And when you show me one that is, it’s not, I can guarantee you if I saw that dog from day one it had gotten corrections.

It was not purely positive. But this guy want this dog to track and he said, SU and the dog wouldn’t su he said, SU and dog wouldn’t su he kicked this dog all the way down the first leg of the track saying Sue. And I was thinking, wow, like a prong call. He would’ve done so much better. It would’ve been so much more efficient for the dog.

And, and if you can’t get a dog to be motivated in tracking like the kicking him down the track certainly did not, show you a clear, deep footprint, nose to footprint tracking. And he certainly would’ve passed over the article if you’re kicking him all the way past it.

So it, it’s just, it’s a lie. And I think that’s what upsets me so much is because I’m 61 now and I feel I’ll be 61. I just want people to understand the truth and the truth. Like I say, the truth will set you free, but you’ve gotta understand what it takes and that it’s simple. It’s not science.

Science is the study of what. The three of us do. And what all of, all the other changes, that’s science, right? Science is not developing a formula. Oh, here’s, we put this chemical and we do this, and we do this and that. That makes dog heal perfectly. No, they study what we do and say, okay, this works and that works.

And it’s already been proven that punishment works, right? I don’t like the word punishment. I think science should have chosen a different word. Back in the day, they should have said let’s not use the word punishment. We have a committee, three of us talk. Do you like punishment? No, I hate that.

Let’s use the word correction. Good idea. Just erase punishment, put correction. And so many people would’ve been so much happier about it. But that positive punishment, negative punishment, okay, we, the word is there. I don’t use it, but we need to get people to see the truth in it. That a correction on a slip lead or an eco is very humane.

Can be humane. It can it be abusive? A thousand percent. But you know what? So can withholding food. So can yelling at your dog. So can letting a dog drag you into the street. So can letting a dog be hit by a car? So can putting a head harness on a dog and yanking him and giving him cervical in injuries.

Those are all cruel things, but we just need to lead by example. Something that you mentioned resonated with me. A lot of what you just said resonated with me. But in particular, you said you will watch purely positive folks and learn something from them. And I think most balanced trainers do that, or, most average trainers, but you have the extremists, the peer, the purely positive extremists that don’t wanna learn from anyone.

And in fact, they want to destroy anything that isn’t exactly what you know, what they’re doing. And that’s a big difference, right? You’re an open-minded person who wants to learn. And the extremists are extremely closed-minded and wanna destroy everything. Not just, not even just not learn it. They want to actively destroy it and shut it down.

That’s a big difference. But look at them like I, there’s a couple, I’m not, I don’t mention any names of people I dislike. ’cause there’s too many people I do look at the people who will criticize me. For example I’m a great target ’cause I always put myself out there. I want you to criticize me because either I’m gonna learn something or you’re gonna look like an idiot.

Right? And most of the time I learned, right? But every once in a while I look at these people and like my wife is notorious when people criticize me, like I got thick skin, like I really don’t care. As long as my close friends first of all, my dog, my close friends, and my wife like me. That’s all I care about.

I do not care to be liked. I care to be respected, but not to be liked. Look at the pages of those people who criticize me. They’ll take my video apart and they’ll explain. What they think is happening in a video and cut out my audio, which that’s not what’s happening in the video, right? It’s absolutely not what’s happening.

But then they’ll sh you look at their videos and they’ve got like a 15 pound dog in a huge field and on a long line, right? And then when another dog comes, it’s behind a fence and they’re controlling it. They have no ability to prove what they’re saying. I can prove what I’m saying. I can prove in tons of videos, I had videos of goofy laying in the middle of the field and a whole slew of kids playing soccer around them.

Schmo at a year old was laying in the park, and there was one side of, they were playing softball, hitting the ball by him. The other side, there were kids playing soccer and there’s dogs running around behind him. I can prove what I’ve done, the success and the hu the humane aspect of it. I can prove all of those.

I can also prove it from a shelter. But, if you are not able to prove it, then you’re just you’re just putting it out there and you’re just criticizing me and it’s I, again, I don’t care. But what hurts me is that people will see it and go, oh my God, that eco is cruel. But they’ll never watch the video.

They’ll never watch what I did with the eco and that there was no screaming or jumping or anything like that. So can it be abused? Yeah. But I’ll tell you something. I’ve seen videos, and you guys probably seen it too. Of dogs with their mouths taped shut. With the dogs, with rubber bands over their mouth growing into the skin, most common thing you’ll see is a flat collar growing into a dog’s neck, not a prong collar.

I, there’s one picture I’ve seen in the internet of a prong collar growing in dog’s neck. I’ve seen hundreds of flat collars growing into the neck. Now both are wrong, but I’ve never seen a dog corrected so hard on a prong call that, that it leaves marks. Never seen it. And if I do see it, I’ll call that trainer out and I personally prefer to punch him in the face for doing it, but it looks cruel, yeah. There’s that one sort of flagship photo of what to me is clearly necrosis from a prong collar being on a dog that is always used. And I’m thinking, if this is happening at such a rate that you claim it is, why do y’all keep using the same picture? I got hold of the stats from La Animal Services through the Freedom of Information Act.

There was 50,000 AC cruelty cases, 50,000 cruelty cases that LA Animal Services had to investigate and prosecute. There was not one case of an eco in it. I believe so, if it’s so rampant, I would certainly think the animal control would be, would that would be cited. But it’s not, ’cause I think people see it.

You should learn how to use it. You should have to work with a trainer. But that should be common sense, right? You don’t need to, I don’t think, it’s been a long time since I took a driving test, but you don’t need to go to school to learn how to drive. You just need to be able to pass the driving test.

So you need to show that you can train a dog. And this is where IACP, a quick plug for IACP is so important because IACP brings all trainers together. Whether you’re positive, whether you’re balanced, whether you’re whatever your thing is, as long as you are an ethical trainer, you’ve got this community of countless people, professionals, people who’ve been doing it for longer than me and people who are just getting into it.

Day one, now they have this resource to be able to learn if they need to learn that we’ve got the CDT thing now. And it’s not based on you can’t use an eco you’re not, cuck holding people and telling, you’re not allowed to use this, and this, but you can only do this. You have to follow this dogma.

This is what makes IACP, such a great organization. And these other ones are all cult because you have to follow their dogma. And if you don’t follow the dogma, you’re out. Yeah. I got a question backing up. I wanna mix two things that we’ve already talked about. So we. We do a tremendous amount of work with our local shelters.

We take our students from our school. They go every Wednesday. They spend half a day or more there working with those dogs. We’ve done this program for quite a while. When we first started, it was it was pretty much the policy of the the local shelters that no training tools, no prong callers, no ecos.

So we no big deal, right? We go in, we do the work. However, we begin to see some dogs that clearly are gonna benefit from some additional training and the use training tools. We did some education, we were able to try it, and they saw it and they’re like, oh, that’s it. So now things have changed, right?

The policies changed and we’re able to we’re able to use training tools with a lot of these dogs, and we’ve seen recidivism decrease considerably. We’ve seen adoption rates go up. So my question to you is a long one here, but it seems like we’re seeing this, these policies being created in shelters all across the country, really.

And that’s being influenced by those force free folks. Yep. How do we, without going shelter to shelter, is there a path to create some change? In this belief system with these shelters, because again, we have seen dogs benefit from the trainers being able to implement some training tools in some of these strategies and working with these dogs.

So when I was at the shelter I was a victim to the same thing. Like I couldn’t use any training tools. I used a slip lead or a long line, and that was and treats. I could use all those and yeah, I can do it. You can do it right. We can gimme a slip lead. I can train any dog to do whatever.

You don’t need the tool. It’s not that easy though. And it’s a lot easier. I can’t hand the slip lead to, Mary Jones or Tom Smith and say, here, do what I did. ’cause you’re not capable of it. Sometimes the training tool makes it easier for the dog to understand the use of pressure and release so that, that’s important.

Shelters are afraid of that, especially municipal shelters that are funded by the public, right? So there’s people who vote and they can do a protest and they can do a change.org petition, all this other crap. And the purely positive people will come in and say, that’s cruel. But the one thing I always tried to stress to shelters was have them come in and do a behavior program.

Have them come in and give it, you’re gonna buy a car, like drive the Chevy and drive the Ford check them both out to see which one handles better in curves. We need to educate people that we’re open to comparison, and we’re I’m always fine. I had a challenge for 10 y 12 plus years in the shelters.

At any time when I was there, you could come pick any dog for me and I’ll pick any dog for you. But you get to go first. You can pick the worst one. And I would just use, I would use corrections, but I would only use it like that. And I always demonstrated in my classes how a prong color worked. Now, I usually brought my dog in to show it, or I put it on a person or put it on me.

’cause I didn’t want any liability to come back and then cancel my program because that’s exactly what radical people look for. They look for a way to stop anything that is productive and that, that goes through in so much of our society, right? If you find somebody who’s a radical, they’re not trying to promote something, they’re trying to take something away.

And in dog training, we, I think we just have to always put the work out there and show it. Show like how many times, look at this as a great example. Go online and search for great training on dog, whatever. It’s right. Like a competition thing or whatever, problem solving thing. Find the results of purely positive people and find the results of a normal balance trainer like, like Matt wants to say.

Find those two and see who’s making the greatest. Strides and encourage people who, whether they’re shelter management, this is what I did or or the public or other trainers, just do a comparison. Just find the stats to show. They’ll always tell you about the stats, how, eco is, are cruel.

What e what they’re saying. It’s kinda saying guns kill people. Guns do kill people, but the finger is what’s killing them. And what’s hurting the dog is not the eco, but it’s the finger on the eco. And if we can get people to understand that cruelty is not a tool, it’s a decision we make. And we can see that by using the tool in a humane, fair, ethical way.

It’s like using a cell phone to page somebody or screaming out the window and hoping they’ll hear me. Those are things we just need to get shelters to see more results. Here’s the video. The more videos like on Bound Angels. On the Bound Angels YouTube channel and Vimeo channel.

I had countless videos of dogs that had problems. And the corrections are up there on my Vimeo channel. There’s a boxer that was really aggressive and he got a whack, he was gonna, he was lunging at a dog. He got correct, he got whack. We went back, this dog was on the road to understanding, oh, I’m not supposed to do that.

But nobody else was gonna do that. And the people who complained to me, I said, you do realize that dog was gonna be killed? And the woman who was a manager of shelter was sitting right there and she said, yeah, that dog’s gonna be killed tomorrow. So what do we have to lose? No positive trainer was getting in there and saying, oh my God, that’s terrible.

We’re, we’re gonna get our clicker on our treats and our positive leashes together, and we’re gonna really do, they don’t do that. They don’t do that. They pick the easiest, they pick the lowest hanging fruit and show that those dogs don’t need corrections. And they’re a hundred percent right.

They’re a hundred percent right. Not every dog needs corrections. All dogs need corrections, but but they don’t need a strong aversive, right? They don’t need a prong collar. There’s tons of dogs that don’t need prong collars. There’s tons of dogs that don’t need ecos. But are we basing everything on what the greatest number of animals need?

A lot of people, most people don’t need hospitals, right? Most people are healthy, but we still have hospitals. Most people don’t have car accidents, but we all put a seatbelt on. I’ve had a car accident. I don’t wanna jinx it in a long time, but I still wear a seatbelt. I. So we’re not using these tools because every dog needs them.

We’re using them ’cause it’s humane to have them available for the ones that need them. And I think we just need to keep showing. And that’s what I said, instead of arguing with these dopes online, I just said, my wife actually said, she goes, just do great videos with you and schmo. Just just show this young puppy coming up and how you train him.

Sometimes he doesn’t eat Colorado. 90% of the times he doesn’t. Sometimes he gets a correction. Most of the time he has learned because I’ve shaped everything. But I like the idea of documenting stuff. That’s what I started out with. And we started out this conversation talking about I was putting stuff on YouTube early on with Bound Angels very early on.

And I continue to do it now with Schmo. I’ve done it with all my dogs. And I think if people really care about animals, they’ll educate themselves and they’ll want to see where are the results? Where are, where, where you know who I’m talking about. Show me his results with the dog at one way here and at the end being successful.

That video doesn’t exist. He always has to explain that he’s on his path, but then that  dog falls off the face of the earth, it’s, it just, they just disappear. Show the work, let shelter see the work we do be very open to them. We’re not coming to them and saying, oh, we never want this or that.

I’ve never said to a shelter, don’t ever use a clicker. That’s the most inhumane, cruel tool in the world. And I can tell you something, you could take a clicker and gouge a dog’s eyes out. That metal is very sharp in there. You could cut a dog with that. That’s not the way it was intended to be used.

But you could do that, now eco people say they were designed to inflict pain. No, they weren’t designed to inflict pain. If they were, then they would just have one number and it would be a hundred, right? If they’re, if people say if if, why is there a zero to a hundred? The same reason there’s a zero to 10 on my volume dial.

’cause I don’t wanna blast my ears out, but some days I don’t wanna listen to it louder. So we just need to educate people. We need to keep showing the work and getting people to understand that, we have the dog’s best interest at heart. I think we found our next quote shirt. Which one? What was it?

Right there in that little bit. I love that. Cruelty is not a tool, cruelty is a decision. Yeah. Robert Cabral right there. All right. We got new shirts coming. Alright. Kept me a large and it’s so true ’cause you can’t legislate away cruelty. Nope. You just, you can’t. It’s, but you already have.

No, but Matt, we have legislate away cruelty. It’s illegal to abuse an animal. Oh I agree. I think my point was, no amount of legislation is gonna stop a mean person from being a mean person. Oh yeah. It’s, it doesn’t matter. You could ban every tool in the world. A bad person is still gonna be a bad person.

And like you said earlier, you can put a cloth collar on a dog and yank on it, withhold food, yell at them, kick them. You can be a really mean person with a flat collar. Yeah. But nobody’s that, nobody’s trying to ban them. Yeah. That’s the most important tools we have in training dogs, really is our hands.

And nobody wants to ban those. Yeah. We need to just, and that’s what I’ve always said. I said, find the people who are abusing the eco and let’s go after those people. Seriously. And I think that’s a really important piece. If we know something’s going on, even if I criticized some trainer, I forget who it was, and says, oh, we gotta stick together and yeah, I gotta stick together with a dog, but I gotta stick together with my ethics.

I gotta be able to go to bed at night. If I see somebody abusing a dog, I’m gonna say something. First of all, I’m gonna say something to the person and then I’m gonna take it further. That’s really important. But. I, that’s cruelty, right? And there’s laws against it. Animal cruelty is illegal, I think, in every one of the states in the United States, and I think in every, almost every civilized country in the world.

So every trainer I know personally takes those things seriously. Where, and that’s what frustrates me, where you’re put into buckets of you’re an aversive trainer or some insane, term that they happen to use. Yeah. But every trainer I know with what you just said, if they see someone being cruel to a dog, they have a huge issue with it.

And it’s a problem. And for some reason, the, the science-based folks somehow are able to put everyone who’s not, who’s willing to correct in any way, shape, or form into the same bucket. And say, look, this person over here is evil, so then all of you must be evil as well. And we all know that’s very not true.

That’s a very racist statement. It’s, it goes, that goes right down the line of true prejudice, right? To say every single person who doesn’t do what you do is evil, is, it’s a page out of Hitler’s playbook. How do you not see that? You it’s a personal decision.

And cruelty should be illegal, whether you’re abusing the dog with an eco, a prong collar to your hand start. And by the way, the number one abuse that was cited outta those 50,000 neglect. Neglect is the greatest abuse we give to our dogs. We do onto our dogs. Not correcting them, not, okay. Do not like a mother giving a kid a swat on the butt. That’s not abuse. Abuse is leaving the kid at home. When you’re out drinking and doing cocaine that’s abuse. But why aren’t we talk about that? ’cause then we say, oh the way they were raised and whatever, the reason they murdered their parents is ’cause they were abused and stuff like that.

We better get our acts together because, it, it doesn’t make it right. Abuse is wrong and a men, the mental abuse is harder to fix as well. Any day of the week, I’d rather have a dog in for training that was abused physically than one that was neglected for six months. Yeah, for sure.

Especially if they were young during that timeframe. Trying to overcome that is so much harder than a dog who was just mistreated physically. Really. I have a question for you, Robert. So I have somewhat extreme views on this topic and I’ll preface this like I always do by saying this and not the views of the IACP or the board or anyone besides Matt Covey.

But the science-based folks, I think most of them are good people, and I think they’ve been hoodwinked and brainwashed into following something that’s not not true. But I do feel like there are dark forces, for lack of a better, for lack of a better phrase, at work behind the scenes. I feel like there’s a group of people in the world who don’t want pets.

They want pets to go away, and there’s no better way to get rid of pets than to make it really hard to own a dog. To make it no fun, to make it impossible to fix their issues. You ban crates, you ban any tool, all of a sudden owning dogs is no longer fun, and then pet ownership goes away.

When you hear that, do you tell me the truth. Do you think I’m a crazy person? Do you think there’s some truth there? What’s benefit your mind? No. No. Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA, was quoted, but that was almost a direct verbatim quote of hers. A lot of these organizations, and I fought against them.

And I said it the other day when I was criticizing our moronic mayor, Karen Bass in Los Angeles. We lost our home because of the fire, and now they’re taking $5 million outta the animal budget. Big organizations, A SPC, a Humane Society, best Friends, peta, there’s an agenda, right?

They have a huge, it’s a multimillion and billion dollar thing where they’re getting all this money as long as there’s dogs in shelters. Yeah, then they can keep taking money in, they can keep taking donations in homeless people in Los Angeles. You know why we have homeless people in Los Angeles? Because nonprofits, NGOs are taking in hundreds of millions of dollars to solve the problem if they solve the problem.

There’s no more homeless people, there’s no more NGOs. Peto was never, they never really liked the idea of pets. Ingrid Kurk says they’re, it’s a demeaning thing to have ’em as pets and as such yeah, no I think you’re spot on and, and I truly believe that the path forward is to get rid of first really dominant hard dogs that, that, that are performing these tasks that they love.

Protection dogs. I’ve been on this fight with Germany and Austria about them fighting to get rid of these dog sports. The sad part is, a lot of that deals with the military stuff. And we jumped in on that fight saying that, police and hey, police and military dogs will be done away with.

But these dip, these morons don’t care about military and police dogs. They don’t like the police because they’re cruel and it’s white supremacy. It’s the idea of saying these things is foreign to most people, but it’s shock value, right? So they tell you that, oh, to have a dog being a police dog is, it’s so dangerous and so unfair to the dog.

These dogs love what they’re doing. They love it. They absolutely would rather do that than eat, give ’em a bowl of food or a guy to bite it in a suit. They’ll take the guy in a suit 99 out of a hundred times. So they’re having fun. They’re also protecting two people. Hey, two people, the victim and the perpetrator, right?

That’s what people don’t get. A police dog is protecting the perpetrator because the guy’s not getting shot. It’s a less than lethal force. He’s getting a bite. If I was a cop, I wouldn’t sound my dog, I would shoot. That’s my policy. But they do, they make a humane decision, okay, we’re gonna send the dog in, the dog’s gonna bite him on the leg, and the guy’s gonna scream, we’re gonna handcuff him.

The other option is we’re gonna shoot him ’cause we don’t know. Once they get rid of those dogs and the bite sports, then they’re gonna say you know what, agility’s cruel dock diving is really bad. ’cause dock diving hurts. The, they’re, they get a lot of injuries and dock diving. They get a lot of injuries and agility.

So we’re gonna get rid of those sports and it’s gonna whittle down and we’re gonna have little dogs and they’re gonna say, oh we don’t want breeders. ’cause breeders are evil. And then we’re gonna get rid of breeders. I was in the animal rights movement for a few years. Alright, everybody, let’s take a quick break to talk about our friends, ORORO.

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And look, my mom was a vegetarian her whole life. I have not her whole life, like 50 or 60 years. It’s fine. If you wanna be a vegetarian, it’s fine. And if you wanna do it on an ethical basis, I get it. It’s fine. But don’t influence my decisions, right? We live in a free society. Most, not most of the world. A, a good portion of the world is still free.

Europe, America, whatever other countries your decisions are made for, you don’t come here and tell me what I have to do, what kind of dog I have to have, what I can and can’t do with my dog. If I’m not doing anything wrong, if I’m not offending anybody, if I’m not harming anyone, if I’m not doing anything wrong with my dogs, you go live your life.

Enjoy it. You don’t have to use an eco. Nobody’s telling you to use an eco, and nobody’s telling you not to use a clicker. We’re trying to cover this as, as smoothly as possible, but when you have organizations like peta, the quote you said was from peta, and they’re taking in and they have hundreds of millions of dollars.

Oh, it’s very easy for them to get on the, good Morning America and talk about how humane their agenda is when that organization and these are public numbers, is responsible for killing more dogs and cats, then any shelter in any shelter because they feel it’s more humane to put them outta their misery than to put them back in a home where they might possibly abused again.

And that’s the most idiotic argument I’ve ever heard in my life. Yeah. I, to your earlier point, we dealt with this, we did a podcast series 2020. So it was during Covid on the Iditarod. And man, they are, it seems like that is their number one target right now. As motion, yeah.

Those mosers, those sledding dogs, it seems like they, they really wanna push that. Out of the way, get rid of sledding altogether. And let me tell you man, it is that I tell everybody that I get the chance to, that is one of the most exhilarating experiences riding on one of those sleds. And those dogs absolutely love it.

They love it. Sure. A sled has, doesn’t have a gas pedal, it only has a brake. They only put brakes on them. They’re not forcing those dogs, and that’s the argument we hear a lot of, oh, they’re forcing the dogs to do this. They’re not forcing those dogs to do anything they don’t wanna do.

That’s why that slid only has a break. A break. Yeah. It seems like that is their path. And I, and I think one, one group that a lot of people don’t think about is service dogs. They’re adamantly opposed to people having service dogs Absolutely. Evenly even individuals with disabilities Yeah.

Who benefit from those dogs every single day. They’re opposed to it. And they’ve made that pretty clear. They don’t care. They have this agenda where they care so much about the dog but you’re not caring about the dog. If you really cared about the dog, and I’ve said this, these organizations have enough money to take every dog out of every shelter and solve the problem.

But they don’t wanna do that. They wanna continue the problem. ’cause that’s what leads to them, to donations. And if you wanna ever solve a problem, just follow the money. It’s a super easy way to do it. And it’s really. Clear to see how much money these organizations take and the wealth of power they exhibit when they get these huge celebrity endorsements and stuff.

And Oh, yeah, that’s cruel. And then, as soon as a stupid, I hate celebrities by the way, as soon as a dumb celebrity says, everybody’s oh, said, I almost said Brad Pitt, but I didn’t mean that, but like somebody said it, and then everybody’s oh, if Angelina Jolie says it, then Oh no.

Or if, if Pam Anderson said it, whoever the celebrity is, it’s, we’re just dumbed down. And all of society has gotten dumbed down, and animals have been a part of our co-evolution. Dogs in particular, have been an integral part of our co-evolution. We would not be where we are today if it wasn’t for dogs, but these people are gonna throw everything back to the stone ages.

That’s all they care about. Don’t drive a car, only drive an electric car, don’t have a dog. All these things everything is, back to wind power, it’s idiotic and I just always hope that I can just touch one or two people with a little bit of common sense where people will say, I.

Yeah, that, that kind of makes sense. Maybe I should think about that. How a dog is benefiting to me. I’m not even saying a service dog protection, but just the emotional and, emotional support, the emotional benefit I get from having a dog makes me a better person. ’cause you said before, Matt, that I’m a really nice guy.

I’ve got a lot of anger issues. People tell me that all the time. And I understand I have anger issues. My mom had dementia for the last three years of her life. My dad was murdered. I buried three dogs in six months. I do have anger issues, but they’re always triggered and fueled by people’s stupidity and ignorance.

Ignorance not as much as stupid. ’cause if you’re ignorant, you don’t know you’re stupid. That’s the key. But if you know you’re stupid and you keep doing stupid stuff after I tell you, put your dog on a leash, it’s gonna get hit by a car, and then you’re gonna argue that with me, then you’re stupid.

You’re not ignorant. So a lot of the listeners of this show are dog trainers. If you were to pass along a message from you to them about how to protect our industry, how to protect dogs in general as pets, what would that be? Show the work. Show the work. First of all, one thing that and this is Rick Alto and I talked about this a long time ago.

I said that I’m against people. Whether, and I dunno if you’ve guessed like this in your podcast or not, like I’m again against people who are going into the dog drink thing and saying, Hey, here’s how you can make six figures being a dog trainer. And the one person that I hit the nail on head with on this was Larry Crone.

’cause Larry Crone said he hated that too. And the reason I hate that idea is because don’t get into anything because you want to be rich, right? You will become rich. I was rich before I was wealthy because I loved what I was doing. I remember living on the floor of my karate school and I thought I, this was the greatest life in the world.

I was living on the floor of my karate school eating ramen. I had zero money, but I was teaching karate. Like I was, I had my own karate school in Los Angeles. I loved it. I thought it was great. With dog training, I was making a difference for people. And I didn’t have money, and then I made a good amount of money, but don’t be a dog trainer because of the financial gains.

Financial gains. I read this morning. Any billionaire will give you all of the money they have when they’re sick to have your health, right? So you need to look at what is the, what is true wealth. And true wealth is doing something that you love to do, that you affect other people in a positive way, and especially animals.

So that increases your wealth threefold. It’s not just you’re getting a check for, whatever, a couple hundred dollars, you’re training the dog, but you are feeling good about that. And you’re making somebody else feel good about it. So you’re getting all this extra positive reinforcement of what you’re doing.

You gotta show the work. You’ve gotta be able to say, maybe it’s not for you. Maybe if you keep training dogs and you’re not getting the results, there’s no harm in saying, I suck at this. Like my thing of I’ll never sing in public again. I just it’s I know I suck at it.

Being honest with yourself and having other people be honest with us is important. And we’re not honest with people, right? We’re terribly dishonest. Oh, you’re gonna get it. What means you’re gonna get it means you’re not getting it now. I would rather say to somebody, this might not be for you and be honest with people about that, but if you’re good at it, this is where IACP comes in.

We, we do these conferences every year. I’ve spoken to numerous ones. And it’s the nicest comradery of people. I met so many people at the conferences where I was like, wow, with the exception of one, I’m not gonna mention that guy’s name, but every person I met was like, oh yeah, let’s work together.

Oh yeah, this, can I ask you a question? Hey, can I pick your brain up about this? Hey, I’m having this issue with this dog. I had people stopping me after my speech and saying, I have a dog that I’ve been training for a client and da. And so he said, don’t ask him that he’s busy. I’m like, I’m not busy.

This is, if this is, if this, if you have the courage to come up to me and ask me that question, I’m humbled and I want to help you. If you took the time out of your day to walk up to me after I gave that speech, and you have a question and I can spend 10 minutes with you and steer you in the right direction, yeah, let’s do it, man.

Let’s do it. Let me help you because I only have to help you for those 10 minutes. That’s gonna go boom, all the way down the line for the next 20 years for you that I took my time to help you. So I’d be an idiot for not helping you. But ask questions, get advice. Are you doing it right?

Is it working? And show the work show, show the work, show the results. Don’t just show this one guy I know online, he, every time he shows this dog being super aggressive and then there’s a cut and then the dog’s work is perfect. That’s the worst thing you can show, right? A lot of people said you show stuff and sometimes you know, people don’t wanna see it.

Then turn it off. But this is the process, right? Changing a dog’s behavior is a process. It’s not a switch. It’s not oh, you just do this and he doesn’t do it. No, that doesn’t exist. Training a dog is reconditioning behaviors. Having the dog find a new way to understand things, a new way to feel safe and to feel protected.

Most every dog that has aggression issues, I used to say this aggression is 99% or 98%, whatever. A reaction. It’s not an action, it’s a reaction to something. Now it the dog, you may not be perceive that dog is being aggressive to your dog, but he thinks he is. So he’s reacting to what he’s perceiving.

And that’s the picture that needs to be changed. And we need to show that. We need to show how we came to that. And it doesn’t have to be scientific, it doesn’t have to be scientific at all. People thought that, Tesla was an idiot when he was saying, oh, we can, do this and do that.

And people thought Da Vinci was an idiot when he said, that we can have this thing spinning around. It’s gonna lift things up. And then the next thing is a helicopter a hundred years later, whatever, 200 years later. All those things need to just be proven. And then that’s your science, right?

You don’t need to follow science. You need to prove the science. And I think that’s something that we can really do to help other trainers is, when I get somebody who calls me and they have a question, Hey, let’s work through it. Let me help you. That’s my job. I’ve been doing it for 20 years.

I might know something that you don’t know. And if I do, it’s my responsibility to share it with you and I hope you’ll share it. And I hope you’ll keep that ball rolling and not be like other people who puts other people down for looking for help. There is a lot of attacking each other in the industry.

For sure. And you circled back it sound, for a minute to YouTube and the videos, and it comes back though to the attention span. Where you say, show the work, don’t make those videos where the dog’s aggressive and boom, now he’s friendly. But if you make that 15 minute video that we all know is what happens if you’re working with an aggressive dog 15 minutes, you’re working in calming. It’s not sexy, it’s not amazing. It’s not exciting. You’re laying the foundation and groundwork, but you post that video and people are gonna yawn. Yeah. What’s excited about that? And there’s the dopamine rush, I think, of posting the crazy before and after to get people excited and clicks, views, whatever.

But it’s not helping our industry. One thing that might be a good picture is, YouTube shorts used to be 60 seconds and now there’s, they can be up to three minutes. So maybe people’s attention span is expanding. When they announced that change, I was trying to decide, are pe is the attention span getting longer or are they basically just gonna get rid of long form videos and three minutes will now be considered Long form, yeah. And yeah, it’s true. It, I see it like if I put a 15 second, I put a 22 second clip up of talking about the re having a relationship before you can train a dog and you have to train a dog before you correct a dog. It was literally like a 22 second. That thing got a half a million.

That really got a half a million views in. Three weeks now for me to get half a million views on a real video, it’s nearly impossible. It used to be, I have a lot of videos that have a lot of views, but nowadays everybody is sucked into the 30, 60 scroll past. Okay. Boom. You can’t, they don’t even get to the end of the video.

They’re like, scroll, you can like, just scroll past it. You don’t need to get to the punchline. You can just decide if you wanna hear the rest of the joke. I just certainly hope that people will start to, like I see it in Mario. The kid I work with Shamu he’s 26, like I said, I could be basically be his grandfather.

But, he wants to learn, like he’s driving all the way to Vegas to work with a friend of ours, and he works, tries to go see my friend Frank and work with him. He tries to see me. There, there is hope, there is still good people. There’s always gonna be stupid people and, and there’s always gonna be lazy people.

You just hope that, I think those people aren’t, I think they kinda kick up a lot of, they splash a lot, like they say empty cans, make the most noise. Empty barrels make the most noise. You just let them go and, they go from one thing to another thing.

And every once in a while you’ll see me get attacked on a video and then I’ll fire back and, prove that I’m right, which they hate to see. And I don’t lose my cool, and I don’t use people’s names when I do it, and then it’s oh God, that sucked. And then they go with the tail between their legs and they go away again.

So we just have to keep showing the work. We have to show that, this is a result driven life, right? Life is about results. And you go to the gym and if you keep, talking on your phone, on the treadmill and, and going at the snail pace and you’re still fat, it’s, you’re not results driven.

You’re just just ’cause you go to the gym doesn’t mean you’re working out. And just because you have a clicker and a some food in your pocket doesn’t mean you’re training a dog. Where are the results? And it’s not the results of you or me or any, anyone, any one of the three of us handling that dog.

It’s getting that dog to understand and getting the human to understand. And those two understandings connecting, right? That’s a big component. One understanding, another understanding and the connection of the understandings. That’s what you gotta do as a dog trainer. That’s really simple, but it’s complicated for other people.

’cause they keep doing the thing which I say, Hey, let me see the dog. Oh, dog doesn’t do it with me. You need to do, no, you need to get this relationship corrected. And to our point earlier, maybe you gotta fire some clients. Like there, there’s, it’s been very few clients that I’ve had to fire, but sometimes maybe, certain people should work with somebody different.

Maybe there’s a different personality that works better. And I have no problem with that. I’ve taken tons of trained clients over from other people and I’ve farmed plenty of clients out. Not as many, I’ve farmed plenty out. Where I said, you’d be really better off to work with this person ’cause that’s gonna jive better with you.

You’re gonna understand that person better and they’re gonna be able to communicate better with you. That’s removing the ego from it. That can be hard to do for some people. That’s the biggest challenge. And it’s the expectations too. I think the one thing I wanna make sure I mention in this chat, ’cause we’ve gone off the rail several times, is it’s probably gonna upset a lot of people.

But that’s cool. It’s really important. I guess you want do a disclosure. I’m not citing the views of the IACP and I think everybody knows that. Not every dog is, I wanna say this the right way. Not every dog is capable of doing what you think they’re able to do.

Just like your child may never be a great UFC fighter or may never be a virtuoso on the piano. You have to still love that child. And when people bring their dogs and they go, my dog can’t do the focus heel like that, you’re right. And he’ll never be able to do that. That’s just not that dog.

One of the things I said early on is you got the dog you got and you can’t change that dog. You can make the dog better, you can help them, you can help them grow, but you can’t change the dog. So if a dog has a certain behavior they’re just, genetically wired a certain way. People, I get in this argument all the time, oh, genetics don’t mean anything.

Genetics mean. Everything. We can mask genetics, but they’re still underneath. We can manage genetics, but they’re still underneath. If your dog doesn’t have a great confidence to wanna play tug to bite, he’s never going to do protection sports. Now you can force him into it, but you’re gonna blow up that dog and you’re gonna destroy a really nice dog.

I just gave some advice to somebody the other day. They’ve got Shola Malinois that’s out of the lines of my goofy, and he wanted to do PSA and I said, please don’t do PSA with the dog. Please don’t. And I hooked him up with somebody who’s doing IGP. And then the guy, the IGP club said, oh, we’re gonna get this dog really hot.

And I said, don’t get this dog hot. The dog doesn’t have the temperament to be made hot. And making a dog hot is something so many people are doing nowadays, and it’s just blowing up dogs. And then when they blow up, they get rid of them. You have to understand you’ve got the dog you got, and as trainers, it’s our responsibility to tell people, this is your dog.

This is what he’s capable of. These are his limits. That’s it. He cannot run a four minute mile. He’s not a super athlete. He’s a nice dog. Honor your dog for who they are. Respect them for their who they are, and love them for who they are every day of their lives. Don’t try to make them into a super internet star because it’s not fair to them.

Just like I used to say that to parents, I said, is what you’re trying to do with your kid in karate class? It’s not fair. I. He doesn’t have it. He does not have it. He’s not a fighter and don’t try to make him a fighter ’cause he is gonna turn into a serial murderer. That’s the jump. So you gotta be fair with your dog and make sure they understand that’s what we need to do as trainers. Even if we lose clients, we get a lot of calls from people who want their dog to be a service dog and they all do. They just have this dog and they want it to be a service dog and you meet the dog and it’s just, it’s not the right dog for it.

They’ve got a two year-old dog that has all these issues and we have to explain a real service dog, generally speaking, is gonna be bred for that purpose. Sure. The best service dogs are bred to be service dogs and they have the temperament from day one and a lot of dogs that are bred to be service dogs.

Guide Dogs Foundation has I think a 60 or 70% fallout. Washout in their service dogs and they’re breeding specifically lines that are only bred for service dogs and they’re losing 50 to 70% of those dogs. How can you possibly think the dog you picked up outta the shelter that was abused is gonna be your service dog?

I dunno if you calls PTSD dogs. I don’t, I refuse to train service dogs. Oh, we do. You do? Yeah. Oh yeah. We get it a lot with we get it with service dogs, we get it with protection dogs. We get clients bringing us, we bought this. Malis because it’s a malis, they’re born to be protection and police dogs, right?

Yep. All of them. All of them. All of them. And they’ll come to us and they’re like, yeah, we got this Malis. And he’s nine months. And I’m like why did you get number one? Why’d you get a Malis? Number two, why’d you get this particular dog? What do you, what are your plans with that dog?

Oh we want a protection dog, and we evaluate the dog and, you have to go back to the client and you’re like, so I got a question. Do you want a protection dog or do you want this dog to be a protection dog? Because those may not be the same thing, right? And the same with service dogs. And, do you want a service dog or do you want this to be a service dog?

Because it’s not gonna make it. You saw that, you see that quote I put up Jason, I said not all tall people can play basketball. Not all short people can play mini golf, and not all mals are designed to do bite sports. That’s the key. People just, people do clump everything together.

They’re so biased, and I wanna say prejudice, but boy is a malawa, he’s gonna do protection. No, he is not. My goofy, I got him through IGP one. And that was easy. But when, the people I were working with couldn’t do it. And I was like, you know what? I’m not gonna do it. Because I saw what they wanted to do, and I knew who he was.

Now this guy is the direct opposite. This dog has so much power that I’ve kept people away from him because I wanna harness it in a certain way. But you gotta know what you’re getting. And again, you gotta embrace the dog. You got the dog you got. If you really love that dog, you can’t make that dog a service dog.

My other I back that’s the BS thing. Yeah. My other favorite is we bought this Shepherd Malis and he’s now, he’s a year old now and we simply don’t have the time for him. He bites my family members and people who come in the house and he sniffs a ground a lot. So you’d be a great police dog.

It’s crystal clear. He’s gonna be a police dog. Absolutely. Perfect. He was born to be a police dog and we’ve held him back. So yeah, please take him. Yes. And we’re like, no. Yeah, that’s that’s that same lie, Jason. I dunno if you’ve seen it like in the shelters, like you get these volunteers. I remember years ago this volunteers come up to me, they said, this dog, he’s really aggressive.

He’d be such a good police dog. I said, no, I actually wouldn’t be. And they said you don’t know, pit bulls, there’s a lot of shelter pit bulls that ares police dogs. I said, no, there’s not actually. And we got in this big argument and they found one pit bull that was out of a shelter that ended up being some kind of like a narcotics detection.

It wasn’t even like an apprehension dog. And I said, it’s just not, you have to be fair to the dog. It’s so unfair that these people always think, you know this, it has this behavior. Oh, my dog can jump over stuff. He’s gonna be great in agility. It’s all this crazy stuff. But, again, I think we as trainers.

It’s it like you, you’re probably much better much smoother than me. I just, I lose my temper too easy. But hey, you just gotta say to people, do you want a protection dog or do you want him to be a protection because they’re two different things. I think that’s a really nice way to say it for people to embrace it, that your dog is a nice dog, but he’s just not cut out for that job because I know what it takes to do that job and it’s not fair to your dog to expect that of him.

I think the best thing we could do as dog trainers is help people pick the right dog. And we work hard to get ahead of clients and help them do that, but, 95 or more percent of our clients call us after they get the dog. But think how much better this world would be and how much happier people would be if they chose the right dog for them ahead of time.

It’d be amazing. A hundred percent. Yeah. It would be, yeah. I’ve had people who say they signed up for my course before they got their dog, but it’s the smallest number. It’s maybe 2% of my clients. That my members that’ll do that. I applaud them so much when they do it. I’m like, Hey, let me send you a shirt, or lemme send you a hat.

Lemme do something special for you. ’cause that’s so brilliant to do that. But, people are buying airplanes and flying it to the flight school. It’s like it’s most idiotic thing you can think about, but yeah. It’s education and that’s where YouTube, and Instagram and Facebook should really be.

Used for is okay, let’s educate people, let’s help people to understand what it takes. And when I see people show mistakes in the dog chain I don’t mind showing my mistakes when I make a mistake in dog chain. ’cause we all make mistakes. People think, oh, Robert Bra never makes mistake.

It’s not true. The reason I’m good is because I do make mistakes. I know how to recover from my mistakes, but it’s like being a boxer and never getting punched in the face. Then you’re a horrible boxer. ’cause the one time you do get punched in the face, you’re going down, the what makes us good trainers is the mistake we made.

That didn’t work. Okay, let’s flip it. Let’s do this. Okay. That’s working. Okay, let’s keep doing that. Without that, it’s just a 62nd YouTube reel. Yeah. One backing up, just a little talking about dogs and people getting the wrong dog. We see that, we do see that unfortunately a lot at the shelter, oh yeah. And I think that’s one of the things that people don’t spend enough time on, particularly with shelter dogs, is the compatibility with their lifestyle, their environment. It’s something we’re hoping obviously to change but again, the needle moves slow. But I think that’s something people need to focus on.

But don’t you think the shelter, it, the reason it’s happening is because of the whole emotional component. I gotta get that dog out, like that dog is gonna die. And I’ve always said, if you let the dogs die, that really should die in the shelter. I, it is a very cruel statement, but I’ve said it for 20 years.

If you allow the dogs the aggressive of the feral, the very, very sick, the very, very old dogs, if you allowed the shelter to kinda dispose of those dogs and you got the dogs that are really nice out, your numbers would be directly changing, right? And people say that’s really mean because you can handle that dog.

But the people who get that dog that’s aggressive out of the shelter, oftentimes the dog gets, ends up back in the shelter. And then the dog bit somebody else and turned another dog to be suspicious and dog aggressive. Or bit a kid or something like that. We spend so much time trying to rescue the dogs that have a great story.

And what we need to do is find the dogs. This is a great thing that I used to always do in shelter. I would go through and I did the shelter program a couple years ago, and I’ll go through and I’d say, Hey, here’s a nice dog. And I say, oh, can you show this dog a bit, a kid in the face? But the kid put his face right in the dog’s face and I’m like, that doesn’t matter.

He shouldn’t have bit the kid. I don’t want that dog now biting another kid. And yeah. Can we train them not to bite kids? I wouldn’t trust him with my kid. I don’t wanna see that happening, but. All the good dogs that get killed in shelters while problematic dogs are taken out.

That’s not fair. That’s the same, stupid people who wanna teach, yoga to serial murderers in prison, like they don’t deserve yoga. They don’t deserve that. If you hurt somebody, if you murder somebody, if assault somebody, you’re in jail for a reason, there might be somebody in jail for, for maybe a dying bag of weed, which is, wrong or they did a petty theft.

Yeah. Those people we need to work with. But if somebody’s violent dogs that are in the shelter that have killed other dogs that have done stuff, I, I don’t have as big a problem letting them go as I do a really nice dog who’s just overlooked. ’cause he’s black or he’s dark brown, or he’s a little manje looking and he is a really nice dog.

And you can just, he’s a turnkey dog. I can hand him to anybody. Hey John here have a dog. Hey Mary here, take this dog. You, he doesn’t need any work with the other one. Keep him away from small, fluffy white dogs and he doesn’t like tall Hispanic men with hats and, all these crazy things.

It sucks. Yeah it’s, you’re playing God, it’s a Sophie’s choice. As a professional trainer, I can tell you which dog is gonna be a lot easier for you in the shelter. And I don’t encourage you to take the dog that has a bite history. I don’t know why somebody would want to take a dog with a bite history.

I’ve taken two dogs outta the shelter that I placed that had a severe bite history. One was Boots who I kept, who tried to kill my Sharpie. And and one was this dog named Zeus. That was a Malua Keita mix that I took out. And it was, I was very green. It was like, this was like 17 years ago and he was so aggressive.

He was horribly aggressive. I boarded him for a month on my dime and trained this dog every day with an eco. He tried to kill my other dog. He went after me and I finally got him to a place and I gave him to these, this family with a young kid. I said, he’s always gonna be on the eco. And they were fine with it.

And this dog developed into the best family protector dog. And it was good with a kid. It would sleep with a kid, everything. But in the time it took me to rescue that dog, train that dog, place that dog, and manage that dog, I could have rescued 10, 15 dogs. How many more? Yeah, so I’m right. I’m responsible for killing 15 dogs.

’cause my ego got in the way and I rescued that dog. But how long did it take you to learn that? Because I think many of us have been guilty of that. I know I started training in 2006 and for years I was going to shelters, training aggressive dogs, helping getting ’em adopted out. I took a lot of pride in that.

And after years of doing that, I realized I was doing it completely backwards. But it took me years to figure that out. How long did it take you to come to that realization? I think, we still come to the realization every day because there’s always that special dog like, oh, I can do this, I can do that.

And you feel bad. Like I, I said this before. I see myself in every dog I work with, right? I think this is what makes me different than other trainers. I see myself in the aggressive dog that’s misunderstood. I see myself in the scared dog that’s panicking in the corner. I see myself in the, the affable, playful, fun dog.

I see myself in all those dogs. So if I see myself in the dog, I’m like, ah, I gotta help that dog. So I’m still learning it every day, but I start to remind myself because of the years I’ve been doing this, that God I took Zeus out and he was a nice dog. And Lori and Joe, I think Joey deal.

They rescued the dog and it was a great dog and it was awesome. It was this, it was that. But so many other dogs died because I was busy with that dog and I couldn’t take another dog out then I couldn’t have another dog with me. I didn’t have a fac, I don’t have a facility. And under the time, and, it’s, we have to remind ourselves of that, that there’s nice dogs ending up in barrels at the end of the day because.

I chose that dog be, or I helped somebody adopt that dog. I’d prefer to talk people out of the dogs. I say Don’t get that dog. Please don’t rescue that dog. Let that dog die. A humane. Take him out and do, there was a dog. I don’t know, I dunno how much more time we have, but I’ll tell you a great story of a dog.

I still have the video I need to make. So this is prequel to what you will see when I do this video. There was a dog that was a police dog that was in the shelter and all these volunteers, oh, Robert Cabral, if you could pro promote this dog, if you could promote this dog. And I was like, okay, I’ll promote the dog.

And I’m like, oh dog. Hey, I talked to one volunteer. Oh, the dog is so sweet. The dog is great. The dog is this, the dog is that. And they’re like, oh, great. The dog is sweet. The dog’s great. The dog is all that. I never laid hands on the dog. Girl’s gonna rescue the dog. She’s in Arizona. Somebody drives down from Central California to get the dog.

They get the dog. I get a call from a connection who says, oh, did you rescue I don’t wanna say the name right now. And I said, yeah, why? He goes, remember I told you about him? And I was like, oh, that’s the same dog. It was a common name. And he goes, yeah. And he had told me that this dog had gone after him.

This guy was a cop five times. And this guy’s a very good handler. And he said, who’s rescuing it? And I said, I think the girl is like a barista at Starbucks. And he goes, oh. I said, hang on. I hung up. I called the, I called the shelter. It was clear. I called this other connection. Yeah, it was clear. And now I knew who the dog was.

This dog would’ve killed, this girl would’ve eaten her life. She has two like little malise show dogs. It would’ve killed those dogs. So I had to interject, and it’s the first time I’m talking about this publicly. I interjected. I told the girl, you can’t have this dog. I called the other girl who drove down from Central California.

I said, there’s no way I’m letting this dog go to somebody who’s not a skilled handler. ’cause this dog was, he was old, he was super dangerous. In fact, one of the guys who had him and I was talk about that they ground his teeth down. ’cause he bit so bad, they just filed all his teeth out. So when he would bite, he wouldn’t hurt as bad, but he was insane.

So I interjected, I got this dog, I took this dog down personally and killed him. I took him to the vet. I called my vet. I said, you gotta do this for me. She goes, if you said it, I’ll do it. I sat there. I never muzzled the dog. They, I had to hold the dog. I looked in this dog’s eyes, I’m gonna cry while I’m telling you this.

And I said to him, I said, I’m so fricking sorry that this has to happen this way. I’m failing you, but I cannot let you do this. And I knew it. And he looked at me and I, there’s a video of me on my GoPro. It was just, I’m just sobbing like a baby who just lost his first hamster, and I’m holding him and I’m crying.

And they put him down and there he was laying on the floor. And that’s when I opened his mouth and I saw all his teeth were all filed down and they knew what they did to him, but. Like this dog would’ve really hurt somebody. But these feel good emotional animal rights people, go after these stories.

’cause it’s a great story. He was a police dog. He was this, he’s misunderstood. He was a, he was dumped and nobody came and got him and he da. Yeah. And that’s all true. That’s all true. And he was a hor, it was a horrible failure for this dog. But are you gonna let that f You’re not gonna right that wrong.

You’re, that dog is going to do damage. It’s just it’s not. If it’s when, and if you know that information and you’re knowingly let that go, and God forbid that dog tears up this girl who’s a barista, or God forbid she has a little kid over, or her beloved dog gets killed by this dog.

That’s on me. But the humanity of taking that dog down to a vet, gave him a cheeseburger, hung out with him, took him for a walk, gave him a lot of love. And at that point, nobody wanted to go near him. He definitely looked the part. But I sat with, I said, if he’s gonna bite me, he’s gonna bite me.

He’s, later I found out he probably wouldn’t have done much damage with those teeth. But nonetheless I sat with him, I held him, I paid the fee, I put ’em down. And and I did it. I own it. I knew I had to do it. But people are cowards. People are they don’t wanna do the tough things.

And sometimes it’s not me, it’s the people who dump the dog in the shelter. That’s the key. Like when people tell you why don’t you get a rescue dog? I’ve already had rescue dogs, I’ve had several rescue dogs, but I chose to buy my last two dogs. Because I wanna do something, I wanna do the sport with ’em.

And maybe I could do it with a Malmo. I got the shelter, but maybe I couldn’t. But I’m 61. I don’t wanna roll those dice too much, now I want I think I’m entitled to what I want because I’ve never put a dog in a shelter ever in my entire existence. Yeah it’s a tough one, man. I’m it’s, we’re in a tough place, but the truth will set you free.

I believe that. I really believe we have to be honest, even if it’s painful, we have to be honest. We have to do the right thing. Yeah. It’s a pretty unpopular opinion, but and I might catch hate over this one too, but join the club. Yeah. I do believe that there are dogs out there whose quality of life is so poor.

That euthanasia is the most humane option for them. And it’s a quality of life thing. Yeah. It really is. Yeah. And again, people wanna, people pass ’em around like a fruitcake instead of doing the right thing. Yeah. Eventually it’ll happen. That’s the sad thing.

How much suffering has to go on and you always hear the story, oh, this dog was in the shelter for two years before he got home, and now he’s got a great home. And that’s awesome. Nobody’s happier about that than me. Like I’m the guy who cr who cries like a baby about I, I’m so emotional about dogs.

I get it. But the thing I have a problem with is if I’m gonna put somebody, I remember I, I testified in a dangerous dog case and I got this dangerous dog off that it killed a little dog. And this little dog belonged to a woman whose husband died. The husband died. All she had left was this dog. It was his dog.

She loved this dog. It was her whole connection to her husband who she’d been married to for 50 or some crazy thing. And this dog killed that dog. And I got called in to do the thing and I did the temperament test on the dog. And the dog seemed okay, I don’t, what do I know? I’m not gonna put another little dog in front of it.

I said, the temperament dog is fine. And I got that dog off. And when that lady left and I saw her face, and I knew that was her last connection to that dog, and I set free the dog that took that life and could potentially do it again. And I’ll tell you what happened in like in Karma. I got back together with my wife, who we weren’t married before we got back together, we were dating and her dog, her little dogs, and got attacked by a dog that had bitten other dogs and animal control, didn’t do anything about it, and then had bitten other dogs after that.

And I said, I will never do it again. If I know that dog had done something dangerous, then either you gotta get the dog out or something, but. People don’t retrain their dogs. People don’t take that serious. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Oh yeah, we’re gonna get training with the dog. We’ll get a trainer to sign off.

And you get some young trainers like, oh yeah, I’m gonna get 500 bucks for five visit. I’ll sign off. The dog looks fine. You don’t know. The dog looks fine. You don’t know what you’re looking for. And if you have a dog that’s shown the propensity to do something and then you get that dog off and he does it again, that’s on you.

It’s a tough thing. Being a trainer, there’s a lot of responsibility. People want you to sign off Fake service dogs. I don’t do that. They want you to sign off. The dog’s not dangerous. I don’t do that. I made a lot of money in dangerous dog hearings proving dogs weren’t dangerous, that weren’t and there was a couple dogs that were accused of being dangerous that weren’t, that I got off and put ’em in sanctuaries and stuff.

So I had the opportunity to do both. But it certainly hurts in retrospect. I think on my last day, I will look at things like that dog that I got off and think, God, I shouldn’t have got that dog off. Or, I feel bad about putting this other, the police dog down. But those are the things, those are the crosses we carry in our lives to to try to make the world a better place.

But we’ve gotta be honest. There’s, we make mistakes and we suffer by them oftentimes. And I forget what Jason said earlier, one of his phrases, but about knowing everything any person, especially a dog trainer who says, I’ve never made a mistake, right? I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I haven’t done something that I regret.

You’re gonna make the wrong judgment call, and all you can do is learn from it. And I think, yeah, we’ve all, if you take on behavior cases, especially tough ones, you are going to look back at some point and say, I made the wrong decision there. You just, and you just have to learn from it, right?

And get better. But you just hope you learn quick, right? Like you got, if you say that and you go, okay, you know what? I made a mistake, and then you can what? You can write that one or not. I knew when I made that mistake with that police dog, I was like, no, Uhuh I can’t I can’t let that one go.

And what Jason said, there are some dogs that should just be put down. And there’s been ca times in the shelter where I’ve done behavior assessments on dogs, and I said, you know what? This one’s gotta go. And I said, not, this isn’t I think this one should go. I said, this one’s got to go. And I walked the dog in the back and I said, if you need me to do it, I’ll do it because I, that, I believe that strongly in it, because God forbid, like a kid, I don’t if you, I don’t have kids, but if I did, I’d really I think I would like ’em, I, I certainly wouldn’t want ’em to get mauled by a dog.

And if somebody knew or had an inkling that this could happen and let it go again. It’s not like it’s the only dog in the shelter. I always said if you have, if you get rid of all the good dogs, then you can get trainers like us to go in the shelter and work with those other dogs and then suss it out.

And probably we could save more than half of ’em easy in a behavior case. It’d be easy to save half of them if that’s all you have to work on. But you’re, you don’t, you have dogs that are really nice dogs that are just languish into shelters, like sitting there breaking down emotionally and physically because they’re stuck there.

Those are the ones you gotta get out. The ones that have done something bad, maybe they’ll never do anything bad again, but they certainly did do something bad once. Not every person who murdered somebody is gonna murder another person. But they’re certainly a, a consistency factor that we have to look at that they might.

And I, I don’t want ’em living next to me. Yep. And there is such a difference, of course, between a pet dog in a home and a dog in the shelter. A very different scenario. Yes. The pet dog, the person already loves the dog and they say, I’m willing to spend money. They’re not thinking about saving another dog.

They just want to get theirs better. Whole different ball of wax and the shelter has 25 dogs and working on their worst one is gonna take more resources than the other 24 would take combined. Sure. That’s tough thing to learn. And the bigger shelters, you’re talking about a hundred or 200 dogs.

You and those numbers are still there, but most of the dogs in the shelter are nice dogs. They just have bad luck. They, their owners are morons. They’re born in a bad area. They had a lot of problems, but they’re not bad dogs. But there are bad dogs in shelters. When people say there are no bad dogs.

That’s a lie. That’s a big lie. There are bad dogs. There’s a, there’s several bad dogs. Some dogs are just, have learned to be bad. Dogs have to taught to be bad dogs, or some dogs are just born bad dogs. They just have a bad genetic component that makes them bad. It makes them dangerous. And if we’re gonna deny that we’re lying, just like there’s evil people, most people are good, most people in the world are good, but there are purely evil people in the world.

It’s it’s here. It’s a genetic component. It’s not like something different. You gotta be honest about that stuff. And if you’re a dog trainer and you pride yourself on being a dog trainer, then you should love dogs. And I’m gonna go back to what Jason said again, for some dogs it’s the most humane thing to let ’em go.

Maybe they’ll be reincarnated as a really nice Lassie or something, but this time around it’s not gonna work out. Some too I want to add is, for people, and I know we’ve got a lot of our membership who are younger people who are looking for experience, people who wanna understand dog behavior, or people who wanna understand and get better at working with a variety of dogs, go to your local shelter.

Yeah. There is no better opportunity. Go to your local shelter. It will it’s a great place to, to figure out if this industry’s for you. I’ll tell you that because you have to make some tough decisions there. You really do. Even in which dogs you’re gonna spend your time with, which dogs you’re gonna put your effort into.

You get a vast variety of breeds. Lots of different types of dogs, lots of different backgrounds, different sizes, different ages. And I would encourage everybody, if you’re within driving distance of a shelter, go put in the work. Go put in the what? That’s the best advice. I think any young dog trainer.

And that’s one piece of advice. They say, can I shadow you? Can I learn from you? I said, I’ll tell you what, better than that. ’cause I’m boring to be around, go to a shelter, like volunteer to shelter. And like even if you’re just walking the dogs, learn their temperaments, learn what they’re doing, their mannerisms and stuff like that.

And then see if you can train there, see if there’s a trainer there that you can apprentice with. And do that because yeah, there, there is nothing better for a young trainer or a young, green, I don’t mean young in age, but somebody who’s just getting into this to work with shelter dogs, that’s where you’re gonna, you’re gonna cut your teeth.

Yep. Totally agreed. Yeah. Why don’t we start moving? Let’s move to a fun topic. We’ve only, we’ve already spent a couple hours here. Tell us about your, everything you have going on, Robert. So you have a membership on your website where people can learn a lot of dog training. You wanna explain that a little bit?

Yeah. It’s I always feel like it’s such a shameless plug. I give most everything away because there’s people all over the world and the greatest response I’ve ever got is people on YouTube where they said, oh my God, I watched your videos. It helped me so much with my dog.

That’s my passion. That’s what I love. And there’s a lot of people in the world who can’t afford the 20 bucks a month it cost to join my site. But my site I think what makes it very different is it’s a huge, there’s a huge component to it, right? And it’s all mixed together. There’s everything in there from trick dog training to competitive obedience, to problem solving, to pet dog stuff, to I, everything, there’s everything in there.

And what I do is I put it all out there because I don’t wanna trickle it down and say, oh, you have to be a member for this long and this and da whatever. There’s people who have been a member of my site since day one. I think I’ve still got like a handful of people who started early on.

And I, I can tell that ’cause they’re paying 9 99 a month, and then there’s countless people who come along through throughout, and it’s every single kind of person from. People who just got their first dog, people who have had dogs for 30, 40 years and wanna learn more and grow more people who wanna do competitive protection sports.

I, I don’t have anything in there about bite work because I don’t like teaching it, and I don’t think people should be doing it on their own. So I think you should, if you’re gonna do any protection sport with your dog, you need to work with a person who understands how to bring that drive out in your dog and how to ke how to manage it.

Because if I’m just gonna show you how to do it and I can show you how to do it, you don’t know what you’re looking for and you don’t know the warning signs. So I refuse to put that on there. I asked my friend Frank to do a course, he didn’t wanna do it. I said, I’m not gonna do it. But the course there’s two things.

That’s the monthly membership. So they can go in, join up for 20 bucks and stay as long as they want. And there’s 200 and something different dog training lessons and it covers, there’s not a topic that isn’t covered. And on another side I have a course which is called the Shelter Dog Training course, and that is something that I filmed over God.

10 years teaching my behavior program in the shelters where it starts with step one on how to assess a dog. It’s got half of it as lectures on, the genetic components of dogs, the breeds, the behaviors, safety issues and everything like that. And then in the yard we handle how to assess a dog’s temperament, like how to do what I call the behavior assessment reactivity checklist.

How to handle the dog, what to look for, how to look for, what to look for in aggression, what to look for in fear. And also in that course, which is a separate course from my monthly membership, I have a a section on how we did our playgroups. How did we, how did my friend Lewis and I, God rest his soul, put, 1720 pit bulls that we just literally got out of the kennels and just got ’em in the yard.

And without ever having done a behavior assessment on it, we could take ’em out structure, how we start out, how we built it, and and how that program really worked. And there’s other organizations, by the way, that do the. Playgroup stuff, but it’s important to understand that a lot of those things are not adoption things.

Training dogs was what increased adoption is. Those things were what’s called enrichment programs so the dog could let off stress. And so it’s like licking a peanut butter off of the back of a Frisbee. That’s, it’s something you do with dogs and shelters just to satiate their mind so they don’t completely break down.

And playgroups was something we did for that, and it teaches all that. So there’s those two different components. And now I’m branching out into another part, which would be mini courses. And the first one I launched was the shelter the crate training mini course on in an hour. How to teach you how to get your dog to understand the crate, answer all your questions and stuff like that.

And those is more of those that are gonna be coming. It’s just, we’re living in a hotel right now, so I just, it’s hard for me to set up anything and do anything, consistently. ’cause I don’t have an office. I don’t have really, my whole studio got burnt down and everything, but I’m still able to kinda keep everything rolling in spite of that.

Yeah. Sorry. Sorry to hear about everything that’s going on. That is a tough pill to swallow. I’m glad you guys are safe. Yeah, that’s nice. That’s not that bad. Get rid of a bunch of clutter and I hope with everything you just said, for Young Train, or I shouldn’t say, I always say young trainers, but newer trainers, regardless of age, what a great resource.

20 bucks a month, I would think most anyone could afford that. And what a good resource to be able to go there and learn and. Any good trainer is humble enough to know they can learn from someone else. So love that resource is there for people and that it’s affordable. I don’t even think it’s 20 bucks a month.

I think we lower the price. I don’t I don’t, I think it’s whatever, but you can go to robert cabral.com and check it out. If you really wanna get great information, the course is very intense. It’s 25 hours of of lectures and demos and stuff like that, and there’s tests at the end of the, you have to go through to pass to the next level.

It’s very different. It’s I think a lot of people out there have courses and stuff. This one is in a shelter. It’s we don’t, you don’t know the dogs. It’s like random dog comes out. It’s not like my dog. Like I did a lot of the stuff on YouTube. And the YouTube is by the way, a great resource for people who don’t want to invest the money or don’t have the money or wanna get their feet wet to see if my style of training is for them, because it may not be for everybody.

It works for a lot of people, but maybe it’s not for everybody. Maybe my personality, maybe another trainer’s is, and I just certainly hope that if my style of training isn’t for you, that you’ll search out somebody whose training is for you to mentor you and to give you something to reflect back on, to bounce ideas off of.

’cause I have a handful of people that I respect immensely. Especially with trying to do the sports that are top world level competitors that I go to and say, Hey, I’m having a little problem with my tracking. Can you help me with this? Because. I could probably figure it out, but why would I waste my dog’s life doing that?

Why not just ask and ask a couple people and go, oh, okay, I can put those two together. That makes sense. And if my training isn’t for somebody then why not find somebody who is, because it’s guaranteed there’s somebody out there who you jive with. And maybe it’s one of you guys, maybe it’s somebody else, maybe, some people learn better from women.

Some people learn better from from sport dog trainers. Some people learn better from pet dog trainers. But the information’s out there, why bang your head against it while trying to figure it out, if you can just go out there and get it. Totally agreed. Jason, anything else you can think of we should cover before we start wrapping up?

Just one, one quick thing. Robert brought up conference conferences in Savannah this year. All our speaker spots are full. I know Marlene’s looking for entertainment, so any chance you’re coming to sing for? Yeah, no, I won’t. I will not do that. I may dance but I won’t sing. Had to put that one out there.

Yeah, I went, I didn’t go last year ’cause it was on my birthday and the year before I was there and the year before that I was there. So yeah, that was Minneapolis, I went to Minneapolis and I went to the one in or was Orlando or no, Jack Sawgrass. Yeah. That was Sawgrass near Jacksonville.

Yeah, that was 20. Yeah, that was two I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They were really nice. And the last one when I went, I literally came in for the day because my dogs were really old and sick and I lost, all those dogs had passed away. But I literally was like, I said to Rick, I said, I may at the last minute, I may cancel if one of my dog takes a turn.

’cause that’s my whole life, my dogs. I said, if I cancel last minute, I apologize, I’m not gonna charge you guys or, take any payment or anything. And and thank god it worked out. I literally flew in, I did the speech and then I was out. So that was, it was, I always love I-A-C-P-I think it’s such a valuable asset for every trainer, including me.

I value my membership in IACP ’cause it’s a community. We’re together in this we’re in this together for the good of the dog. And and for young trainers who are just getting started. Man, I wish I would’ve had it when I first started out. And I know, I think it was probably around then, but it’s you don’t learn about it.

So I try to talk to people now and I’m like, yeah, it’s such a good organization to get behind because it’s the only real agenda IACP has is to help dog trainers. It’s not like we’re not selling widgets and we’re not, selling an agenda of a certain type of training. We’re really about supporting fellow trainers who are trying to help learn and help their dogs.

Absolutely. Yeah, so very well said. Cool. As we start wrapping up, Robert, if you don’t mind hanging on the call for a second after we wrap up, there’s a couple things we’d love to talk to you about for a second offline. Sure. Alright, thanks for listening everybody. Welcome to Dog Pro Radio.