Welcome to Dog Pro Radio. Welcome, Jason. Hey, how are you? I’m good. How are you doing? Hanging in there. It’s warming up. So it’s full pollen season here in North Carolina. It is the same in Tennessee. And we’ve got a tough day ahead of us ’cause you and I have to act smart, so we’ve got our work cut out for us.

That’s gonna be a struggle. All right. I thought about getting some like horn rimmed glasses or something and putting them on that way and then I could push him up. So everything I said, people are like that guy. He seems smart. It’s hard. We’ve got a tough guest here. She’s a doctor. She knows all kinds of stuff.

Dr. Melanie Uda back for round two by Popular Demand. Thank you for coming on again. We are [00:01:00] excited. My pleasure. I’m excited too. I could talk about this all day and happy to come back anytime. Good, because after we got done last time, why don’t even know if we were off the air yet and we were like, do we have so many more questions?

There’s so much more we wanna talk about. So we are excited to do this again. ’cause after we got off and we talked about it, we just had so many questions and I feel like everything we talked about, we thought we could have talked about each of those subjects for five times longer. So we are excited to have you back.

My pleasure. Again, better than dead silence after talking to people. It would be bad, right? Yes. We did not have that problem. There’s a lot of directions we could go. Jason, do you, you wanna lead off, ’cause you were talking earlier today about some things you wanted to jump into about the kind of the exercise programs and I think 20 minutes was some magic number.

Yeah, so this came up in the first episode and I really put it together in my head today. We so going back probably eight, nine years ago, we wrote an article on our [00:02:00] website specifically talking about using a bicycle to help with specifically behavioral issues in dogs and how we did a lot of that.

We used to do a ton of it. And I’ve got a, I’ve got a trainer that works for me who exercises a lot of the boarding and train dogs he has with a one wheel. He rides on a, he’s older than I am and he can ride a one wheel. I cannot ride a one wheel. Full transparency here. I would absolutely break my neck, but I hate to interrupt, but is that the same as a unicycle?

What’s a one wheel? No, it’s a wheel. It’s a skateboard with a wheel in the middle of it. Oh my gosh. That’s the best way I can describe. That’s the best way I can describe it. Okay, good. And he treks off through the woods on this thing. He rides it over fields on the roadways all over the place. Up here.

We’re pretty rural, but back to my point is you brought up something in that first episode talking about and I’ll probably misquote this, Matt’s the smart one here, not me. You, you said something about a dog trotting for 20 to 25 [00:03:00] minutes and how that somehow rewires the brain.

That’s what I took away from it. About the time we wrapped up that episode, we had a dog in our program. She’s probably a year standard poodle. She’s been really solid environmentally real, real resilient when you take her out to new places. But all of a sudden she started getting just a little squirrely.

And I was dealing with that problem about the time you said 20, 25 minutes of trotting. So I’m like, Hey, why don’t we put her on a bike like we used to do pretty frequently. So sure enough, three days straight, half an hour trotting on a bicycle, and three days later she’s a different dog.

She’s, again, back to being incredibly resilient when we take her to new places. She’s not, glancing around and doing some of those strange things she was doing before. Two questions if I got that right, number one, how does that work number, oh, why does that work? And then number two, what other tips do you have for US trainers [00:04:00] or even pet owners that we can use in our day-to-day lives with dogs to improve their mental state.

I’m going right down to the nitty gritty part here. I love it. That, those are a good question and very interesting for me to hear too, the feedback when, you have such cases that you are working with. So with the exercise in particular, I’ve been diving into this topic probably more intensity the last three, four months.

Just because, I guess it coincides with me working out more too. So I figured it will be not a good to know more about it. But there is some, like everyone talks about dogs need to exercise more. Obviously we have in the US 60% of the u of the docs, the pet docs are overweight. And clearly there is a problem happening here.

Obviously it’s not just the lack of exercise has something to do with nutrition too, but certainly a lack of exercise. [00:05:00] But then when you go into, and I did that with a couple studies, I cannot cite them right now, but they usually, these are surveys probably a little bit overestimated, but usually you hear, yeah, I take my dog on a walk 30 minutes twice a day.

And that sounds like good thing, like it doesn’t sound like dogs don’t get enough exercise again. It’s probably more so 15 instead of 30 minutes. And it’s probably more one day instead of one time instead of two times. ’cause it’s a survey. But then it makes you wonder what, why is that not enough?

And that brought me down in general, like to what is the optimal exercise. And like I said in the first episode, a lot of those studies are done with rodents and other animal models. Although there are some really cool studies done with dogs too. But overall there is something that needs to happen.

In terms of how the body communicates, how the brain communicates with the muscles for change to happen. And that’s something that is just generally true for any [00:06:00] kind of change. Whether this is growing muscles or whether this is changing anxiety pathways in the brain. There has to be signal enough intensive enough for it to make sense to change.

Otherwise, why would we change if everything was constantly changing with every single input? Our bodies, the dog’s, bodies would go from lean to fat to athletic, to lean to fat again constantly, right? So it can’t be just a input, it has to be a intensive, strong enough input for it to change. So what that means is walking is so much so like energy conserving, as in it doesn’t require a lot, that it doesn’t necessarily change much in terms of the brain chemistry that I’m interested in.

What that means is certain type of exercise like trotting and trotting works the best because it is the most. Natural to a dog. There’s some what’s the word? [00:07:00] Some exceptions, for example, border colleagues, they’re a little bit more into caning, meaning they’re a little bit faster based on what they were bred for, if it’s a working line, whatnot.

But in general, trotting and they can trot dogs, control it for a very long time. It’s energy efficient in that sense, but it gives the certain input to the brain if done long enough to say, Hey, we are on this marathon. We are on the go here and we seem to be going for quite some time and now it’s time to adjust.

We are being better, become more efficient. And it is not about energy bursts like you would get with a fetch, right? Or with an intense sprint or a flyball, if you will. So like a sport, it’s really a consistent kind of like zone two runners will understand that it’s a consistent, strong enough exposure of muscle contraction so that the brain is like, Hey, we gotta do something to make sure we stay safe, we to make [00:08:00] sure we are optimal in our energy and whatnot.

And they’re like a bunch of processes happening. One of those that I find the most interesting is. Because certain molecules are being released by the muscles as they contract for longer than just a few minutes. That’s why I say 15, 20, 25 minutes trotting. That will then communicate to the brain, Hey, this is good for us too.

Let’s grow, let’s make certain parts of the brain stronger, that are good for memory, that are good for impulse control. Happen to be good for impulse control. Happen to be good for controlling fear behaviors and anxiety behaviors. And in order for those to work well, the neurons, the neuro connections, they have to be really strong and really efficient.

And that kind of exercise does that basically. And it doesn’t have to be every day, right? And it doesn’t have to be an hour long, but it has to go past the five minutes or 10 minutes. That is way too easy for a dog. It has to go past the, just [00:09:00] walking around the neighborhood. And it does not have to go all the way to crazy sprints, crazy fetch either.

It’s really the sweet spot in between. It is also the best for the dogs in order to not make them get injured. But exercise enough for the brain is like, Hey, we feel good now. We feel better. We can control our impulses, meaning we don’t react as quickly to our environmental in stimuli. We stay more thoughtful in, who we are as a dog.

And again, this is coming from animal models and rodents, but given how dogs function in their anatomy, I. That’s the number that I see, or that I came up with. That was a very long answer. Sorry, that was a very long answer to your question, but I hope it makes sense. No, it makes, yeah, absolutely. No, I appreciate the long answer.

So I was looking, thinking about the mechanics of it too. When we take a dog for a walk unless it’s an incredibly structured walk, for lack of a better way to put it, the dog has the opportunity [00:10:00] to focus its attention in a lot of different places in a very short period of time.

However, when we’re running with a dog or we’re using the bicycle, one wheel or some other device that dog has to it has to focus or spend a lot of its energy, mental energy focusing on the speed of this device and what we’re doing. And it just simply doesn’t have the time. Does that have an impact on this at all or is it just the exercise?

I, it probably does. I think. Because usually if you just walk, we usually walk so much slower than dogs would want to, migrate together anyways. That, that they get distracted easily. And when you when I, whenever I run with my dog, I think there is obviously an understanding of we are running together and you’re not there is obviously a most likely a lesion involved unless the dog is really good off leash.

But there is a sense of we are moving together, it’s becoming a little bit more goal oriented. At least it feels like that to the dog. [00:11:00] And we are moving in a certain speed together. And I think some people talk about it triggers a little bit the pack migration mindset. I wouldn’t be able to prove that because it’s very hard to prove anything like that switches the mindset of a dog.

But I would assume that like we are all moving together and it seems very clear to the dog that there is a direction involved and not just randomly, going from left to right and whatever. And I think there’s something else happening that shifts the focus from be curious about everything around you to being more goal oriented in a very extreme way.

You could even think about a dog seeking out some sort of rewards. It’s very goal oriented versus a dog exploring and sniffing around is not goal oriented. Could be still moving quickly or at a certain pace, but the mindset is very different. And anything that is very goal oriented, that shifts the focus on something.

That the dog wants to seemingly achieve in the future, which again, could be almost [00:12:00] subconsciously happening when the person and the dog move together, trotting together in one direction. That usually allows the dog to fade out the environment or things that are not important in that moment.

And we take advantage of that for anxious dog that get too triggered too easily by just everything around them to give them something to do to allow them to fade out the environment that is otherwise way too distracting. And sometimes it’s the only way for dogs to let go of that obsession, to understand everything around them and just Hey, we are just doing this together right now.

And that itself by itself, not just the movement, but that by itself helps the dogs to become more comfortable. You kinda get into the flow with them and become more comfortable with the environment and changes a little bit how they feel when they’re out and about. Yeah. As you’re talking about that, I’m thinking of sled dog teams and some of the environments that they [00:13:00] work in, the wildlife in those environments, and a lot of scary things and how that group works together again.

Very goal-oriented group that’s moving through some pretty, pretty hectic places. Yeah. And the same thing here. That’s the extreme example of being goal driven or motivated to reach something. And they don’t necessarily know it’s gonna be a run of, I dunno, a hundred miles or what they just know we do this together.

And obviously there’s some input and guidance coming from the human in the bag. But other than that, they’re just going right. And not, none of them usually is oh, wait a second. I wanna check out this deer over there, hold your thought. I’ll be back. None of this happens, right? They can’t anyways physically, but also they don’t want to, right?

They just wanna be in it and do it together. And I think that teamwork, we often forget when we go out and about with our docs, especially pet docs, those who don’t have working docs and [00:14:00] want to have a goal-oriented, motivated dog and outside. Usually as soon as we get a pet dog, you go on a walk, it’s always this, you’re on your own, you do you on the other end of the leash and explore your environment.

And that kind of creates a certain context for the dog to be outside. That is the opposite of let’s be outside together. And that obviously exposes then the dog to a variety of behavior issues if it goes down the wrong path.

I’m just listening and thinking, and as dog trainers, often we know something to be true, but we might not know why it’s true. We know it’s true from experience, right? We’ve lived it enough times, but maybe we couldn’t maybe explain exactly what’s happened in the dog’s brain to cause it.

And what Jason said a moment ago about, when you’re doing the dogs trotting, they can’t do everything they want to, right? They can’t pull left, they can’t pull, right? What I explain to clients a lot is dogs need to learn. When I was a kid, my mom said, do something constructive. And what that [00:15:00] meant was like, don’t just don’t be crazy, right?

Don’t be wild. Don’t get into everything. Do something constructive. I tell it to my clients all the time we need your dog to do something constructive. Meaning, if they’re just always exercising their craziness, that’s gonna become their default setting. So if you go out and their only exercise is fetch, that’s, they’re gonna get really good at fetch, but you open the door and they’re in fetch mode, right?

If they’re a high drive dog, they’re gonna be stress whining or panting, or who knows what, laser eyes, they’re gonna be ready to go. And if they don’t ever get that chance to just do the calm thing, that’s not gonna become a habit for them. So how much of this do you think, what you were describing, the 20 minutes is the fact that it’s releasing the right neurotransmitters or chemicals or whatever, and how much is just teaching the dog.

You can’t always exercise your exciting impulses, right? Your desire to bite, jump, run. Do you think it’s a combo of those, or do you think this really is more of a release of something happening in the brain? Yeah. Real quick, [00:16:00] Matt. I know you’re not on social a lot, but due to some recent social posts, fetch is, it’s off a table now.

It’s canceled. What does that mean? Yeah. No more fetching. Is that, did I step in a minefield here? Absolutely. You gotta get back on Facebook, man. Fetching, fetching is no longer allowed. I don’t you, you missed that whole memo. Yeah. Research did Trump announce that with the tariffs? Is it like, no research?

This is research driven information that says no more fetch for dogs. Because it was making ’em too crazy or what’s the deal, basically? Okay. Basically the primal, untamed mind. Yeah. You got mad. You have some ketchup to do here. When you brought up fetch, that was my first thought that you getting going there with that research article.

But yeah, that’s, yeah. She, oh, I like the air quotes. So I was, I feel like I, I was gonna do it. I was gonna do the air quote. I need to cut up. So I guess answer, Dr. Melanie answer whatever you want to. I’m curious about this fetch thing, but I had my question. Whatever. Let’s just, i’s running through your [00:17:00] mind.

Let’s go back first to your actual first question. The unintended pun there. It is depending on what kind of dog you’re dealing with, right? If you have a dog that is low motivated, a little bit obese, but can still be somewhat anxious and super distracted, but has no motivation for anything, right?

Bringing them up to do some high motivated work is very hard. You can probably much more successful to meet them in the middle, which is, let’s say the trotting on the leash, good leash work, working together, like around the block running kind of thing. Obviously careful with, I have to say this, careful with any kind of medical condition that doc might have and whatnot.

For a dog that, doesn’t wanna do anything but sprint after the fetch vegetable or, bite work and is crazy context driven, meaning everything outside becomes a cue for its time to play a hundred out of a hundred energy [00:18:00] levels. There it’s almost toning down their kind of how much they invest in energy and how they see movement, right?

And it might not be something, a picture that they’ve ever seen as in okay, usually we go somewhere in a training field or we drive somewhere with a huge, and then I can run and do zoomies or run after something or do some obedience. But then, I get rewarded with release. Intense play. And some dogs are depending on the training history, really good at that.

And others, they kinda lose their mind especially if they can’t find the right recovery otherwise. And there the trotting has some sort of a little bit of a different function. There. It is. The benefits of new transmitters and all that still applies, but the mindset also of moving doesn’t always mean.

It’s gonna end up in some sort of intensive play. But that would then be literally part of just this kind of training. It’s like now we are doing this, and this is a little bit milder version of exercise that the dog might not have seen for some dogs that [00:19:00] are, they I did some gait analysis with a sport doc the other day, and all I wanted was the handler to put the dog in a trot and just like trot down a straight line and the dog was able to, for three, four strides to do it.

And then whoop went into a focus teel and then tried to jump up to see can I get my owner to produce the ball, the toy? It’s kinda became very contextual as in this is the side I’m on with my handler and this is the training field. I know what’s coming. And the dog had a hard time to collect and keep the trotting going in a structured way and was like trying different things.

Going to the focus here and putting a lot of energy in making the owner produce the reward and figuring out what is this what we are doing? And there this kind of trotting where the dog’s supposed to don’t look up the owner, this is literally look forward and do your thing and go trotting and like a, it’s moving, it’s a, it’s like a moving.

Meditation or meditation in motion for a [00:20:00] dog and the owner, like the trotting, like a run, and again, can calm down in some areas, gets still keeps the focus on something without exerting all the energy. And I think that for dogs that have a harder time to control them and just can’t sit still, I think this is a good in-between thing to do with them and just showing them different pictures of how to move through space with your owner.

If the high arousal is a normal default state for some dogs, but you are allowed to play fetch so what was the deal there maybe do you think every listener already knows about this and they’re like gonna be bored to tears by this conversation? Because if so, we can skip it.

I can catch up later. No, I think it’s, I don’t think so. No. So I saw you made some air quotes when you said study or so what’s your take on the fetch situation if you had to give a high level overview? I think the discussion per se, like it goes back to something that you just at the beginning where trainers know something by feel like through experience, but not [00:21:00] necessarily why.

And then some, sometimes people take the why into realms of science that may or may not be confusing. The context of the fetch why people got upset is the message that came through with a very long post on social media that various peoples forwarded to me and asking me what I think about it, is very heavy on scientific terms in the neuroscience field, coming down to a conclusion that if you play with your dog fetch for too long or too often the primal mind takes over.

And the primal mind is like this untamed something that makes the dog uncontrollable and crazy for the ball and ultimately create reactivity and anxiety. And then you have this monster of wolf like wilderness in your home. And it’s all because you played fetch too much. And I think there, there have been a lot of discussions and a lot of unhappy faces and [00:22:00] saying that, fetch is one of the greatest thing that you can do with your dog for exercise and all that.

And what I, and he that the author, he clarified his message I think after he got a lot of probably very angry messages himself in response to his post. But ultimately the idea is, like you said. Yourself. I think in the context of fetch, you do this as a reward, you can incorporate certain training that requires the dog to, remain thoughtful about where am I’m in a position, just not like wildly playing fetch and so forth and so on.

But actually even then, every now and then playing wildly fetched, not gonna cause the dog to, to become an untamable monster. But even scientifically, some of the things were a little bit exaggerated and there were a lot of passwords thrown around where dopamine obviously plays a role, but it’s not that fetch itself loosens up [00:23:00] all inputs, controls and fetch itself because it is tapping into a predatory drive behavior or parts of the predatory sequence.

It’s not loosening up all kinds of strings that would prevent an a dog to, to. I keep saying the same thing, to be like totally untamable, to totally be uncontrollable. And as a suggestion, I think instead of fetch, tugging was suggested as being a little bit more structured in the fashion, depending with the what kind of dog you have could have the same effect.

The wild unstructured tugging could end up being a little bit dangerous for your hands. Same as like a wild unstructured fetch could be a little bit dangerous for the joints of the dog, but I would be more concerned about the physical health. Anyways, that was probably a very boring, like non controversial answer to that.

But I think the intention was ultimately to say if you play fetch every day layer in some commands, but the way it was wrapped in a very [00:24:00] science buzzword, heavy context to convey a lot of, conviction that this is rooted in science, was my personal opinion to that. A little bit over exaggerated, a little bit too dramatic.

We don’t see that in dogs. And the dogs that play fetch and become really hard to control. They usually have also issues in other areas. It’s not because of fetch, but it’s because they also are out in control and have no boundaries and structures at home or anywhere in their life. And it’s very easy then to say don’t play fetch as much.

And it might be a starting point, but it’s not because of fetch. Did I misunderstand it or was there some correlation in that? ’cause it did get a little muddy there for a while. But was there some correlation between the dog’s innate desire to catch and kill something and its inability to do that was gonna cause some issues or something along those lines that Yeah.

I totally forgot about that. Yeah. So the idea was that probably, that was probably the main part that I totally forgot. Maybe because it seems [00:25:00] so weird to me. The idea was that if you play fetch and you leave your dog hanging without a kill bite, because you can’t obviously just have a bunny there, you just use a ball.

There is some sort of neurobiological and dissatisfaction or incomp completion which means the dog will never feel fulfilled because it’s always fetching, but never killing because the kill bite is the completion of the predatory sequence. And that’s absolutely false. That’s.

Completely false and absolutely not true. There is no such thing as like new biologically in like stuck. That’s not how the brain works for one. And then as again, as a trainer, experienced trainer, you know that the kill byte per se is not a thing anymore. Most domesticated dogs, otherwise they wouldn’t need domesticated.

And even then, certain elements of certain, sure there is a grab bite in some dark breeds and there’s a thrashing. The grab bite is not the same as kill bite and most dogs wouldn’t [00:26:00] even know they kill accidentally more so than going out. Obviously if it’s like a certain pre, they do kill with the kill bite.

But it’s not in fetched that they don’t feel satisfied. In fact, it’s the chase itself that is the satisfaction where the satisfaction comes in not having to kill or the kill bite itself. And I think that was a little, not just a little, probably a lot upsetting to say that the dog will be left in anxiety state and never be able to fulfill, to complete the stress cycle, to fulfill anything inherently because there is no kill bite at the end of fetch.

And that’s again, that’s not true. Yeah. And it seems to me, and this is just my opinion nothing to back it. But it seems to me as though over, over the years we have really bred a lot of the predatory behaviors. I. Through elective breeden, we’ve bred a lot of those behaviors out of dogs.

Is that, what are your thoughts on [00:27:00] that? Yeah, so what that means. So the genes, technically they I haven’t identified them or seen it in the genome, but the genes that they’re silent, right? And that’s through the environment and epigenetics that there is no need for those genes to be expressed, meaning no need for those genes to attach to behavior that is needed for survival.

Some breed like border colleagues are perfect to showcase the stocking, right? Most dogs do, like some chase, there’s some grab bite. That’s why the retrievers are so great, right? The grab bite without killing or breaking the neck, they just grab it and they’re pretty good at it. They’re like holding things.

So we have intensified certain elements, but have like disjoint all the elements that usually would see in, in, in the wolf like that. And the kill bite is not prevalent in most in most dog breeds. I think they’re like some, I know the Pese might be more capable of doing it guarding livestock and the coyote comes in [00:28:00] then obviously Chihuahua giving a little toy.

But ultimately, yeah, we have intensified the things that are functional to us and through the domestication. And almost no case or no situation is to be, require a dog to, to be really hooked on the kill bite. Now someone will argue, my dog has killed another dog. My dog has killed a squirrel and is now addicted to that.

That’s not as simple to say. It’s because of the kill bite. The satisfaction comes from chasing the satisfaction of a living animal thrashing in your mouth and you shaking and thrashing it, which then ends up, ends up being a dead squirrel, for example. Is very different than saying there is this inherent kill bite with the intention to kill.

I don’t know enough to say for sure that isn’t true in any animal, on any dog, but like you said, Jason, and most, in most dark breeds, we have spreaded out of [00:29:00] them. Meaning, the expression of those genes is not part of their normal behavior when even within the predatory sequence. On the flip side of that I can’t tell you how often though we get a call where someone’s dog has killed a small animal and they’re in a panic about it, and they’re like, I’ve got kids and I’m worried.

And we have to explain to ’em like, your dog killed a bunny and your dog, if it gets a chance to kill another bunny, it’s gonna do it again unless you work and teach ’em not to. But that makes them like 0% more likely. To mu or kill your child if there wasn’t an issue there. This is not gonna change that.

But people have all these preconceived notions, right? That, maybe he’s tasted blood. We hear that from time to time, which I can’t believe people still say, or that it’s awakened their killer instinct and we have to walk him, talk him off of the ledge basically, and say your dog is still, it’s the same dog it was this morning.

It wanted to kill a rabbit yesterday. Just didn’t get the chance today. It got the chance. Still the same dog. But any thoughts [00:30:00] there on, I’m, as I’m assuming you get a lot of calls from people whose dogs have just been into a fight or just killed another animal. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I heard a variety of those things too.

The more rural you go, the more my dog tasted the blood and wants to do it again. And it actually happened within the dog fight, so you could say maybe it was more reasonable to think that. But even then, yeah, it’s sure. Like they’re still predators, right?

And it’s what triggers is the behavior of prey animal. It’s not the idea that the dog wants to kill. There is a bunny, a smaller one, maybe identified as not being another dog, and it runs and that. That is still there. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have dogs do all the work that they do for us. And that’s the triggering part.

Then the dog falls into the predatory drift and goes after it and grabs it and doesn’t, come out of it easily because now it’s hooked on the activity, which is, [00:31:00] again, it’s not the same than wanting to kill or hurt, especially another human is a wildly different like mindset of an animal, of a dog wanting to chase a scroll of a dog, wanting to start a fight with another dog, and a dog wanting to start a fight with a human.

These are like three very different things for most dogs. And just because again, a dog was going after school, which you could argue is the most normal thing, and a dog going after human, which is there’s something not gone right here is we don’t often make the di the this distinction because we as humans, we just have this reasoning for ourselves.

Like we don’t, vegetarians, we don’t kill cows to eat and we don’t hurt each other in an situation. Some people now even don’t wanna eat. Life plans because we might hurt them. And it goes, it got, we like have this blanket of reasoning that we like to put on [00:32:00] everything. And then we keep forgetting that there are so many nuances that go onto certain behaviors and animals that we just don’t understand fully yet.

And then we do the same thing with them. Like just because I see it here, I also see it there. And we have to take a step back and say, this is maybe a completely different situation for the dog and completely driven by other things. And when we kinda ask these questions, then we can dig deeper and it’s okay, let’s find out what was the motivator, what was the trigger, what was the context?

And then you can, with the trainer who can help you talk through these things, you can come to the conclusion. It’s okay, my dog is not gonna kill me in my sleep because my dog can A bunny in the yard yesterday, he’s gonna kill you if you take off running, but not in your sleep. Yes. So just walk carefully in your yard.

You gotta tiptoe around your dog. Did you say some people don’t eat plants? Did I hear that right? Yeah. Life [00:33:00] plans, you have to wait until the apple is fallen off the tree before you can eat it because you disconnect it. Wow. But you don’t dis can you, but you don’t disconnect it purposely. You have to wait till the apple comes off.

Wow, that sounds like a bad use of resources. So bugs get it first or whatever. Sounds like hungry way of living for sure. Huh? Okay. I’m learning something. Jason, it sounded like you were about to say something. Yeah, I’ve got a dog. Actually, one of my dogs loves chasing squirrels. Loves chasing cats.

She would chase cats to, to the end of time, but she also sleeps with a cat. She has no desire to hurt or kill the cat, but man, if it’ll run she’ll definitely chase it. If it won’t, she has little to no interest. Yep. And not even that. So now you have the difference between an animal not doing something and an animal running away.

Lesson learned here. If your dog doesn’t wanna play with you’re probably too boring, so you gotta be more like a cat. But [00:34:00] the other way too, like my dog, my German shepherd, I wouldn’t say he’s friends with my cat, but they tolerate each other and he hangs out and there’s none whatsoever danger of him.

Even when he runs and he does his, like even my cat has a zoomies, right? Like cat zoomies. He will be totally unfazed. Completely different story as soon as I step outside the house and there’s another cat, which is not, his home buddy is not his big brother it’s a different cat. And now everything becomes a trigger, a lion cat, a running cat, a meowing cat, a purring cat.

Everything is like a trigger for him now. And. Again, like here. Also the conclusion is just what’s happening inside the home is very different. What happens outside the home? We gotta look into the dog themselves and like what their context is. It’s contextual. It’s this is not my home. This is definitely not my body and now I’m going into predatory mode.

People definitely [00:35:00] underestimate that dogs can understand who’s part of their family, who’s their buddy, you know who’s part, who’s part of the pack, if you want to use that phrase. And I think most of us see that, right? You have a cat in your house and the dog’s school with it, and we have a cat, but my neighbor has some barn cats and if they come on our property, my dogs are over there at a hundred miles an hour chasing those cats out of there and they come back in the house and lay with our cat and it, but that’s their buddy and the other cat’s an intruder that.

They’ve gotta get rid of and they do. Oh, they do every day. It’s funny you said that about the be more like a cat. We have we’ve got a school here, so we get students who come in twice a year, and a lot of times in the beginning, those students will be assigned new dogs. And, after a couple days they’ll come to us and they’re like, man, I can, I can’t get this dog to do anything.

It won’t, it won’t focus on me. It, I, nothing, it’s, all it wants to do is sniff the grass. And our response to ’em always is you’re gotta be more interested than the grass. [00:36:00] We see people who are just way too boring to engage with yeah. Dogs in a way that the dog’s willing to participate.

That’s a hard skill though, Jason. Dog trainers have it, but that’s a hard one to learn. And I’m sure that running a school, it’s hard to learn how to really engage and connect with a dog. And you can’t learn that in a book. No. A YouTube video in my opinion. Yeah. But they can be helpful, but, you’ve gotta get your hands on lots of different dogs.

You really do. You do. And again, like the way we like to communicate with dogs is verbally more so than anything else. And it’s the same way the perception, like the world of a dog is not. Driven naturally by language, we make it so that they have to learn to listen to commands. But normally they would not, they listen to smelts and movement, not even the color, right?

Like even that we forget sometimes and [00:37:00] buy all kind of colorful toys, which I do too. But we are like, oh, my dog will that too. And can’t see any of those colors. But they respond to other things more so than our words. And once we change a little bit how we communicate and we make pay attention to what do they respond to, what do they pay attention to, and then leverage that in how we interact.

We have a much better chance of becoming a little bit more interesting rather than talking. And the first inclination ever, always is when the doctor doesn’t pay attention to, is we keep saying the name. We keep waving probably some food, which is, none of this is false.

It’s just, if it doesn’t work, we gotta move on to other techniques. And that’s when you really get to know how to interact with the dog when problems show up. Yeah. So if I can back up just a minute to the quick fingers on the fetch. Research and then something you posted on social about [00:38:00] I think it was something along the lines of things that bother you as a scientist that people say.

And one of ’em is the science agrees that. So my kind of forte is detection. I did a lot of detection. I read a lot of detection research. And what I’ve found over the years is that all of the research is, and all of the science doesn’t necessarily, number one, doesn’t necessarily point us in the right direction.

Number two isn’t necessarily useful, and I’m talking to a scientist here, so you’ll have to forgive me. But just kinda curious what your thoughts are on that. I think that’s the quote of the day that research isn’t useful. That probably hits the nail on the head a little bit. Because from my experience, and I am hanging out at conferences, doc trainers, and I’m hanging out at conferences for the canine signs and then back at Columbia generally science conferences and the gap in between is like massive, like what they’re [00:39:00] doing.

No one cares on the other side and what people care on, like the hands-on experience. The research feels like, I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know how to create a research project around it. And I agree with that statement. And I also think that there’s limitations to dark research that we can do ethically and morally.

That technically would bring us further in understanding how they see the world, but we just can’t do it because it would involve discomfort in one way or another. I’m not just talking about immersive training methods, but just how we would have to guide them through a long experimental setup. But also, I don’t necessarily think it’s needed.

I think what’s needed is talking more to trainers with the experience, not just one side, but like all the sides. And then plug in nuances that may have been [00:40:00] shown in research, not necessarily with but like fun, fundamental concepts that have been shown to be valid in other animal models, in a variety of other animal models.

And then fill the gap. And from there some new research projects could arise, but we don’t really do that. We create this gap that still exists where we believe that with this scientific study. And the, in that real, the reason why I’m saying that is. It’s very tricky if you get down a rabbit hole of, let me find a handful of research studies on topic, on a certain topic, on fetch, for example.

And you will find five that seem relevant to you. But if you want to disprove yourself, if you’re honest and say, let me find research papers that say the opposite, you’re most likely finding it in one way or another. And probably with everything, with all the topics. [00:41:00] And that’s because different reasons, but one is usually the experimental setups differ a little bit and they’re not always controlled, especially when we talk about docs.

It’s impossible to control for everything. And that’s where I think the experience of trainers needs to come in more so than we allow them to do. Because nothing agrees ever on anything in the science world and even doc trainers on anything. And that’s okay. That’s the nature of it, right? But saying like science says and, sure, I’m, someone will say, you said it before, I probably have said it before and I will say it again to draw attention to certain concepts and aspects, but I think ultimately what one does with it has to come, has to be married to the experience.

It has, there has to be room to adjust and change the scientific narrative. And it’s not that the training is driven by science, and it’s not that science is driven by training. It’s really like these, the combination that would create something new. But [00:42:00] again, that doesn’t really happen. Dog trainers, just to clarify, dog trainers do agree pretty consistently.

We have a saying and it says that the thing two dog trainers can agree on is what the third one’s doing wrong. I think that may also be true in the scientific community as well. But there’s at least some agreement. Oh, the third one’s wrong for sure. A hundred percent. They are, they don’t know anything, and with science, it wasn’t that long ago we were throwing people in prison for not thinking the earth was the center of the universe.

So Sure thing, we have to be humble enough to know things are always changing. Yeah. Yeah. And two, we, I hate to keep bringing up social, but a lot of times this comes up on social where, we post anything. And a lot of times we get people responding, saying for example, if we have success with a particular training tool, there’s always this, show me the research that says that training tool works.

And that research [00:43:00] really. There’s no, in my opinion, no really good research out there. And I don’t know how you would even begin to set something like that up, right? That’s a problem the way a really good study would have to be set up. That kind of gives you a lot of insights that are somewhat clear.

We would have to have a lot of different dogs. We don’t have tens of thousands of dogs, but a good sample of dogs, of different temperaments. And we would have to conduct longitudinal studies, meaning we would observe these dogs from the very beginning. Maybe when they’re puppies, we would allow them to enroll in different training programs.

And we don’t have to think about extremes here. And I’m, I’ll come back to this in a second, but when we talk about do aversive control methods have a place in dog training, we are past the point where [00:44:00] we need to shock the dogs to a level that is insane to them and then wonder if they’re stressed.

Yeah, of course. But also, no one does that. That’s not what modern dog training is anymore, right? But a really well designed program that allows for differences in the versus control. The temporary inclusion of things and whatnot. And then we would have to in that longitudinal study, observe how they’re doing.

And then everyone also talks about welfare. But welfare for some reasons will never goes past one or two months after the training. That’s not welfare either. What is the dog gonna look like in half a year, in two years, maybe even five years? When real world scenarios hit the dog, surprisingly not part of, I’ll just put you in the lab and see how you react when I drop something surprising.

And observe them and have parameters to observe them. And once we had that would be the way to say, one method helps more with certain things than the other, but this will never happen [00:45:00] because no one will fund this. And it takes so much time to have objective observers and this person would have to train all of these dogs in the same way.

So it’s impossible to set it up. And that’s why there’s no good study. And that’s why there’s also no good study that proves anything in the opposite. Because whatever someone says, research says, with this doc training method, we can go in and say this was not accounted for, this was not controlled for.

And the other thing that is the, something that bothers me the most is, we have this force free or reinforcement community and they. By they, and like I’m obviously we’re all using positive reinforcement. It’s not like they, and we don’t use positive reinforcement, but we put this positive reinforcement on a pedestal saying there’s so many nuances and so many reinforcement strategies and this and that.

I don’t know why we assume that this is not the case with [00:46:00] nuances and strategies when it comes to versive control. It’s not that aversive control is this one flat, highest level possible, pushing the dog into avoidance without understanding what happened and being traumatized for the rest of his or her life method.

There’s strategies and nuances to it. Two, and I dunno if all balance trainers understand the strategies and nuances, probably not. And we know not because that’s what gives the bad rap in social on social media. But also like the four three, they should acknowledge that there are some things they just don’t understand and they’re judging it without understanding these nuances on both sides.

They are nuances and their strategies and their thoughtful approaches. And we say, it always sounds that other reinforcement has all these, miracles happening and the words of control is just this one size fits all. And we talk about it that way, but it’s [00:47:00] not true. And there again, there is no good study where I would say this was so well conducted with all the thoughts that need to go into where I would be convinced or where I would be willing to cite it as, yes this method is better than the other doesn’t exist.

Yeah. And I think one of the things that bugs me about those force free folks is this concept or idea that if you’re just using food and you’re just using positive reinforcement, no matter how terrible you are as a trainer, you can’t do any harm. I’ve got clients that I’ve got one I worked with very recently who ended up with a dog that developed, learned aggression over food because of strategies that were taught to that client.

Maybe she didn’t do ’em exactly right. But the [00:48:00] reality is the dog soon figured out that if he bit her hand, she’d drop more food and that the dog could manipulate and control the food that way. So that turned into stitches and hospital trips using only food and positive reinforcement. So I think the claim that nothing can go wrong if you’re doing that is, is absolutely absurd.

I think part of that, Jason, is people don’t understand or some people don’t understand what an aversive is. And to them aversive is a shot collar’s an aversive. Sure, that’s an example, but it’s up to your dog to tell you what’s aversive and withholding food is pretty aversive and you get a food motivated dog and withhold food and they’re frustrated and they’ve never learned impulse control and bam, there you go.

Stitches. And I get frustrated by that, this idea that when people say what’s an aversive? And it’s like a prong collar. Sure, but there’s many things and the word no, there’s an aversive cloth collar if used [00:49:00] with a given a tug. There’s an aversive. And it’s amazing to me how many people want to only paint these like two tools as an aversive and don’t think about how they’re living with the dog and all the aversives on a daily basis, especially the ones around food.

Yeah. I ran across an article, I don’t know how and I did lose 20 minutes of my life diving into this, but the article I think is still up and a lady wrote an article about how we as trainers, when we bend at the waist to give a treat, to lure a sit or a down, how that bending and leaning toward the dog was aversive, quote, body pressure.

And that trainers should stop it.

So what’s the solution then? I don’t know. But what I do know, and I thought was funny was that she had a set up, an example in her article and she didn’t even do it with a real dog. She [00:50:00] did it with a stuffed dog because she was so cautious not to ruin an actual dog by leaning and bending at the waist.

I just think there’s so many extremes. Number one, number two, it’s always been my position. I don’t know what your thoughts are on it. Dogs are going to deal with Aversives in their environment. This world brings aversives to humans, to dogs. They’re just out there, whether we’re in control of ’em or not.

And, if we don’t prepare a dog to deal with that on some level it can be an incredibly conflicting experience for ’em. Yeah. I’m gonna go down on the little rant here and stop me at any time because No, go for it. This is like all my I could talk about this all day, but on my social, this could be just this one only topic that I ever talk about.

Because I, there’s this idea that in, in pop psychology, we talk about stress. We always [00:51:00] say only focus on this, on the good stress and then never do the bad stress. Why? That doesn’t make any sense In the world we are living in, we are living in the pretty chaotic, crazy world was not the case.

I know thousands of years ago where you don’t get hit by a truck or I dunno, a plane falls off the sky or you actually need to travel across the world, right? And none of that stuff where you get fired from one day or another, right? Science is being canceled. Like all kinds of things happen nowadays.

And none of that stuff is good stress, like none of it. And if it was good stress, we wouldn’t have to worry about any kind of anxiety breakdowns or PTSD or depression. And yet we have the highest rate of anxiety and depression we ever had in the history of humanity. And at the same time we talk about avoid all the bad stress.

How about we learn how to work through bad stress so we don’t crumble like a cookie when it hits us really hard? And the same thing applies to our docks. [00:52:00] They do not wanna live in an urban environment where you see 10 ducks in an elevator. If they had a choice, they would rather not do that. And yet we put them through it, but at the same time, we try to bribe them with cookies while they’re like losing their mind and think this is the worst living situation in my entire life.

Instead, we could just help them be okay. When they’re not okay or be functional and thoughtful while being stressed. Is this good stress? No. Hell no. It’s not good stress. None of this is right. But we gotta understand that unless we help them through, and our power as handlers is to control the intensity of the stress to ma help them understand, to prepare them to give cues if needed to help them.

It’s yes, you gotta get handled at the vet. You’re not gonna ask you for consent because you need to get handled at the vet. So now at home I’m gonna handle you. I’m not gonna ask you for consent, but you’ll be okay. And I’m [00:53:00] setting up the intensity, I’m setting up cues, I’m setting up a training session to help you through it.

And that’s, that is science that we know. And it is not, cannot be argued for sure. That’s what creates resilience. Avoid does not create resilience. It avoid, it creates avoidance. And then when you’re faced with this, you crumble. And that’s the same concept that we apply with dog training methods and all that, right?

Not even bending over when your dog is in front of you is insanity. That creates a dog that might be able to live in the world that doesn’t exist, where there is literally no stresses at all. But even then, they probably create some sort of stresses because they’re also bored as hell to not have any excitement in their life.

And. Acknowledging and modeling and the science of resilience, how you create resilience and you can see an anxious dog that you put through like little bouts of stress very thoughtfully, but yet some kind [00:54:00] of stress or dog rather is not in. And you see them come out so much stronger.

You see them holding their head a little higher. You see them being less reactive when they get startled or coming down much faster. And you see them be more responsible to the cues of the owner and just feel more content and okay, this world now makes so much more sense to me. I don’t have to be worried about everything and I don’t have to constantly soothe myself by seeking our treat or pleasure, right?

Because some dogs then start this as a default. It’s oh, I feel stressed. Ask for a treat. Ask for a treat, but then never work through this without the treat. And if we were to be able to for our own lives as humans, but also like then by extrapolation our dog’s lives, we’re able to acknowledge a little bit more than resilience doesn’t come from just play and treats, but help them work through stress.

I think we will have. [00:55:00] I know someone gonna hate me for this, but I think we have less medication subscription. We would have less generalized anxiety, neurotic docs, maybe less issues with just being heritable. A heritable trait for other, like in breeding situations, we would overall have a healthier pet dog population.

End of rant. It seems like it all goes hand in hand with this whole trend to not discipline children, right? And to, for kids to grow up with no real boundaries on their life. Because, I don’t remember this being as much of a thing 25 years ago of no one should have stress and everyone should win everything.

And as we’ve, gone to the generation of, everyone gets a trophy and there is no second place. Like kids, for years have played soccer where there’s there is no winner. They just kick the ball around until they stop. And like, how do those kids learn to handle [00:56:00] the disappointment of losing and how boring that is too, right?

Yeah. And kids, they crave, like my kids, they always ask us like if they make something, they’re like, who’s do you like best? And don’t do that parent thing where you say they’re all good ’cause we know one of them is the best and they want you to tell them someone’s is the best.

One wants to hear everybody one. And. It’s I think we’re like hardwired right? To compete and to want to win and to handle some stress. And if you don’t learn to handle it, like you, you use the phrase crumble like a co, like a cookie. And then we put our dogs through nothing and let them get away with everything.

And then we’re surprised that when something’s stressful, handles that you can’t make go away, that they handle it poorly. Who saw that one coming and, on, for exactly that topic. Like overcoming these challenges. And it’s not just, again, it’s not like these, what we see as an enrichment and balancing on a ladder, like an agility, like overcoming real challenges coming out of the end.

Like it’s not just meant to we [00:57:00] know neurobiologically that dopamine spikes endorphin spike. It’s a good feeling. It’s like an exhilarating feeling that the, and it feels like rewarding it’s relief, but it’s also that builds the confidence. And just like in kids, right? When they win.

All the effort they put in, that’s what makes them feel confident about their ability to cope in a challenge that might be a little bit more difficult next time or might be surprising in life unrelated resilience that way generalizes a lot easier and better than reward seeking behaviors. So you can have a dog that will seek out the treat and you have some sort of distractions, other dogs walking around and then you hope you kinda overcome all the reactivity, but that doesn’t generalize well in other contexts.

Stress resilience, on the other hand, generalizes better because the stress response itself is [00:58:00] rather generic. It’s not specific to a specific trigger. It’s the same kind of pathways that are being activated. So whenever the dog does feel stressed in a different context, and the dog has learned to work through this and stay thoughtful and listen to the cues, it generalizes better.

And that’s ultimately what we need when we face our chaotic society with surprising moments something’s gonna hit you and you’d be surprised and comes around the corner, or cat running across the street kind of thing. Coming back from that works a lot better than saying, now you should focus on the reward, which doesn’t, which is where often o obviously things fail.

I’m curious what phrase you use in this scenario. We use the phrase a calming technique. So when a client’s worried about their dog becoming stressed in a scenario, I’ll explain to ’em, you just need a, you need a calming technique, right? We don’t wanna push ’em over a threshold. And I explain what that is and then you need some sort of calming technique.

It’s not gonna be food we heal is generally mine, but it’s something [00:59:00] to give the dog something else to do that’s calm, to help them get past that stress. What are some actual practical things you either explain to a client or walk them through to, to show them how to handle and I’m not talking like an insane, stressful scenario, but low level stress, seeing something in public that they’re nervous about or the garbage truck goes by.

What are some techniques you give to people or some talking points? Yeah, so for me the term I use is prompting. Prompting redirection usually. And depending on where the dog is at. And I’m just assuming that, there is no good heel command and plays or no good obedience and plays. I wouldn’t wanna overwhelm the dog with obedience that much in those situations and rather have the dog just engage with the owner, focus on the owner through movement, right?

Like we talked at beginning with chasing movement is what catches a dog’s attention. The last thing you want is some sort of stationary. Commands, at least at the beginning, right? So you start out rehabbing anxiety or reactivity sit [01:00:00] down a focus stationary, things can add a lot of conflict depending on the dog.

But if the dog is oh, I’m not so sure about this, and fight or flight kicks in either way muscles prepare themselves to contract, right? So they’re prepared to move. If you watch a tennis game right before the game starts, tennis players, they hover from left to li right from left to right.

’cause if you’re in movement, you are much faster to then jump to the left or to the right. So in the same fashion, the dog kind of want is preparing him or herself get ready to move. Stationary behaviors can add the conflict to the internal urge of moving in that sense. So I tend to then redirect and keep moving though.

And depending on where we are in the training stage, it will either be away from the situation or later on. You do wanna face the trigger a little longer and you do wanna hover in that situation a little longer and then you add more calmer behaviors. But at the beginning I [01:01:00] prompt the redirection, look at me, remove together maybe I change my pace.

I use food at the beginning to continue the icon. I don’t bribe for the icon. I don’t bribe for the engagement. I reward the engagement. And I. I use the leash communication and mild leash pots to redirect or the name or any kind of physical touch, right? And that way I cannot teach the dog like, you see something, don worry about it.

Here’s what triggers your engagement. And then later on I layer in any kind of obedience that needed heel. For example, when the dog can collect himself or hold himself or herself a little better together or depending on the situation further, much later on, then I say, okay, we’ll stay in that spot.

I don’t necessarily require you to be in a sit, but we gotta stay here. I do give them my dog, the, or that dog the ability to sit or go on down. And yeah, my dog, she just lies down at some point. [01:02:00] So I don’t wanna overwhelm her with having to obey to all the commands. But I do kind dictate then this is this position that we are in, you can’t pass me.

I want you to see the trigger. And that’s where I then have to decide a lot of judgment calls, whether or not to stay longer in the situation, to expose them, to have them, be stressed and regulate again. Or if I feel like this is gonna go overboard, too much of a threshold and not gonna come back, then I remove the dog from the situation.

Okay, so sounds similar. Jason, I’m assuming you. Or doing something similar there, giving your clients technique to manage it as opposed to avoid. Yeah. I think one of the struggles that we oftentimes have is teaching clients to identify when their dog is anxious or stressed. And it’s, we see two classes [01:03:00] of dogs.

Those that are anxious and stressed who have these very outward expressions, barking, race, hackles, lunging. Those for people are super easy, right? Incredibly easy. It’s the ones that don’t have those outward expressions where we really have to put in the work, I think, with clients to have ’em identify, understand what this dog’s going through in the moment, and then how to, understand where those thresholds are and how to identify thresholds and how to know when to move, when to stay, when to do, when to not do those sorts of things.

I think one of the most important parts is just being able to communicate it to a client, right? It’s, of course, all of us can look at a dog and see what’s going on, and even if you see what’s going on and you try to explain it, if you don’t explain it well, and the client misses the point, then I. You’ve, made no progress.

We often explain the commands, I [01:04:00] explain ’em in order. So I say heal would be first, then sit, stay down, stay, and then come see him as this order, like a spectrum. If you can’t, if your dog can’t heal perfectly, a scenario without stress, you’re probably not gonna put him in a downst stay.

That seems pretty hard on the dog. And if he can’t heal and sit and stay on leash you can’t unhook him and let him go and then call him back to you. Not a chance. So see it in that, in order there. So you get to the vet’s office and your dog is stress whining and nervous. Don’t sit down and put him in a downst stay.

If you can’t heal perfectly, you’re not ready to move on. And obviously you’re not gonna take the leash off and let ’em go. And I find that framework seems to really help people where they can see it as, okay, I’m seeing a problem right now at the heel stage. Maybe I shouldn’t bother asking my dog to sit yet or lay down or stay, I’ll fix this.

And that seems to resonate with people because they can look at it and they don’t have to identify much besides, does my dog seem calm and happy in this command? If not, I’m not ready to advance yet. Yeah, I like that. It’s, if I [01:05:00] had to take that, yeah, I would say like moving, like the umbrella the decision tree almost like moving is better than stationary at the beginning.

And then within moving, you can have. Rather free moving still on the leash, like what I mentioned with redirection or more structured moving under command like heel. And that probably also determines like where you’re at with your dog. If your dog has never heard a heel command or has been like all over the place, then moving together away is still better than stationary.

But you probably wanna get to the point where you have a little bit more control over how and where your dog moves. And then with the stationary behaviors, the same like staying in place and allowing the dog to go into a sit or down, but as long the dog doesn’t charge past you. Probably like easier for some dogs then, adding the conflict of having to be in a don’t stay or sit stay or whatnot, where all of these things you obviously work on outside of the triggering situations and then implement it [01:06:00] as needed.

So backing up a lot in this conversation and it, we can go anywhere, but just, I was thinking, I heard you say earlier, it was interesting way at the start of the conversation you mentioned that ex lack of exercise is one of the big problems that causes issues with dogs. And the other was diet.

And I thought it was interesting that those were your two, exercise and then diet. Do you wanna spend some time on diet? Because I do feel like that’s something that most dog trainers. Don’t know very much about. And we get asked as dog trainers, which we feed our dogs, and you give some, general advice, but most dog trainers are not experts on diet anything.

And I, we need to be careful. I don’t know what your topic is for conference this year, but we can’t ruin that. So I don’t know what exactly you’re talking about. We do need to stay away from those topics today, or Jason and I are gonna get in trouble. No that’s should be, I’m not gonna talk about nutrition doing [01:07:00] that.

So nutrition is a tricky topic and I’m not a per se nutritionist and definitely not a canine nutritionist. Just in case someone compliances whatever I say, has to be taken with a grain of salt. Everything I say, everything everyone says should be taken with a grain of salt, right?

Critical thinking is indeed a good skill to have. But where I’m coming from, and this is like in general, like my research on at Columbia University when I was researching the gut brain access in psychological diseases and neuropsychological diseases in humans but it becomes very clear that the gut brain access is very powerful.

And I think it’s it bi-directional, right? So if a dog is very anxious one thing to look at is the diet for sure. Say in a second why? But the other way around too, like if a dog, for example has like certain allergies, food allergies, or if a dog has constantly [01:08:00] diarrhea people tend to then change, go through different diets.

But sometimes it’s also the brain communicating with the gut that like more or less that something isn’t right and the dog’s just constantly stressed. Maybe going to a daycare where the dog gets bullied every day, three times a week, whatever it is. And that can cause allergies and some completely like seemingly unrelated behaviors in relation to diet, but it’s actually rooted in the stress, the lifestyle of the dog.

So it’s like nutrition and diet isn’t in just to keep a dog full. It’s part of quality of life too. We are unfortunately in a situation where just by what a dog owner can afford already dictates what the dog is eating. And I don’t know if this is ever gonna change, maybe if people demand a little bit more insights into how certain things are being, produced for dogs.

But either way, let’s just say like this, they’re like pros and cons to every [01:09:00] diet, right? My dogs, they get a little bit of kippe in the morning and they otherwise eat raw and they get a bunch of supplements, they get a raw egg here on there. They get some vegetable trail mix, how I phrase it.

And it is mainly the main reason for that is just to keep the gut microbiota healthy and strong by offering different things to digest. And those things should be, not a burger, but should be something healthy and wholesome. If one can only buy a forer is for some reason, like convinced Kibo kibble is the best diet for the dog, even then maybe rotating through some different high quality kibble every now and then is better than just sticking to one brand the entire life.

Because the gut microbiota has so much power over a lot of things that comes to dog behavior. And you can easily add on some fresher [01:10:00] foods too, right? To, to a kibble diet. With raw food, let’s just take the contamination part out of the discussion because no one has control over. And sure there is a risk, if you were to ask science is what’s the question?

Let’s say if raw food is dangerous, right? The science would give you mixed. Responses mainly because of the contamination thing. ’cause there’s, it is raw food, it can be contaminated. Salmon is a thing. E coli is a thing. If you’re careful, I think you can avoid it. But that’s the main reason why most people don’t like raw food.

There are other reasons too, but it’s the main one. If you ask if kibble is unhealthy, not necessarily dangerous, but unhealthy, you also get mixed responses. Contamination is not as big of a problem happens too. There have been like tests taken of KS that has some another [01:11:00] contaminations. But then there are also other things that are unhealthy and that comes down to byproduct of the processing.

The way cables are processed and various components of that processing has been associated with health risks. It’s very hard for any kind of dietary intervention to come to clear results. ’cause again, just like with behavior, so many things contribute to what at the end. And we don’t have a laboratory clean set up at Docs where we could say this is definitely because of the diet, but these kind of components that are byproducts of the processing of KIPP can be associated with, in certain cases, higher risk of cancer in certain cases.

Other health issues with the GI tract. That is not the case in raw food because it’s from the highly processed kind of output that you have with some people. But again, you can then help supplementing these kind of things [01:12:00] and on top of that, so there’s just the quality of food and on top of that, they’re like some research or some ideas about how often and how much we feed dogs.

So how much, I think the normal recommendation on the kibble bag, for example, is probably, could probably be a little bit lower. And it’s hard because vets, for example, on average, they’re also not used to seeing a very lean dark. It seems like the dog is underweight when you see the ribs, but that’s usually in a certain angle you should be able to make out and at least touch depending on the thickness of the undercoat and the fur.

You’ll be able to see the ribs and touch the ribs. That would be a lean healthy dog. But it’s very rare that you see that they’re little, many little tanks wobbling through the streets of the us. And it looks cute. It does look cute from some dogs, the smaller ones, right? It’s not cute at all, but people are like, oh, that’s a little, [01:13:00] tank there.

But then not just how much free feeding. Really bad, like some dogs, they just don’t know how to stop. And even if they know how to stop, it’s already way too much given relation to the exercise that they get. But then also how often, and there I think is very interesting where the research is going.

Similar to intermittent fasting, what we talk about in, in humans. I’m not so much a bigger fan of saying dogs have to fast intermittently, but in, I’m the client to say in association or in correlation with their natural rhythm, like their circadian rhythm of being hungry in the morning, potentially being hungry in the evening, having most likely success in hunting or whatever during those times.

Not necessarily eating much later than this is like some of the research that’s been out eating much later than after sunset, like when dark outside and they’re already in sleep mode, then giving them a big meal might not, be so [01:14:00] good for the GI tract long term. So it’s better to have long stretches in between overnight where the dog doesn’t eat at all, not even treats.

And then it can have one or two meals throughout the day. There’s research that says one time a day is better than two times a day. They’re less likely to have potentially some long-term GI issues when they’re aging. I don’t think necessarily that is true, but I would say having. A good stretch in between where the the stomach can be empty is better.

Dogs that have hunger PS and they’re sensitive to empty stomachs, you can’t really do that. So you have smaller portions there and that’s where all these things get really complicated. So if I was a newbie and I had my first stock ever and I didn’t know anything, I would probably start out with saying, okay I don’t know, two times a day and just making sure that whatever I give in between, in terms of trees, whatever I use this for, training or not, is [01:15:00] not an add on to the normal portion, but subtract a little bit.

Have healthy add-ons, some sort of vegetables, a little bit of fiber, an egg in there, fish oil or fish and that way don’t have to worry too much whether or not I’m ready for raw food or whole cooked meal, they’re good quality kle. And then move along the lines of complexity and how much you wanna give a dog as diet.

That is a deep rabbit hole you can go down Yes. With the food for sure. So is that something you touch base on with a new client? If you have a new client come in, they’re having whatever they come to you for reactivity issues, you’re helping them solve that. Are you discussing food or does it only come up if they say, Hey, Dr.

Melanie, what do you think I should feed my dog? If the dog is overweight, I, I will. Discuss it. If the dog is very stressed, I will discuss it too. If the dog is otherwise okay looking and has the engagement or [01:16:00] motivation for food, I may touch on it later. Depending on if other things are taking priority and because it seems like so unrelated to a lot of things that that, that owners want to deal with or want to get fixed, that I don’t wanna start with something that they, that makes no sense to them.

That makes sense. Choose your battles. I, my approach is fat shaming. I fat shame them if their dogs are weight, I’m like, Hey, quiet. Listen. You hear the dog’s kneecaps popping. Yeah. You need to get about 30 pounds off of that dog. A little different approach or budget for your two ACL surgeries that are gonna be coming up in the next year.

One, and then six months later you’re gonna do the other. Yeah. Yeah. They’re like, so what am I supposed to do? I’m like, scoop out its normal amount of food, let it smell it and then put it back in the bag. Don’t feed it.

Sure. [01:17:00] That’s the way to go. Yeah. We have problems dieting like. Ourselves again, like with the amount of food that is constantly available and all the things that we have problems with as the human species. Somehow the dogs have problems with too, and you wonder why. It’s because we, they share our lives in such closeness.

And we anthropomorphize anyways. Everything that hits us somehow hits the dogs too. But if only, same thing here. If only people were aware how costly it can get later with the dog having to go to the vet. And it’s not just here and there like a surgery, like once the dog has diabetes it’s just like with humans too, it’s gonna get really expensive And usually at some point there will be heart disease coming in too, which is also expensive.

And that will happen until the dog dies. And obviously we don’t want them to die and they’re gonna die a little bit earlier, but by the time they die, it’s out of the sudden $30,000 in for bed [01:18:00] builds, and all the comorbidities of that. And from what I like, I had done a little bit of research recently and they are dogs that are already obese by the time they’re six months old.

And that’s. Just like again, childhood obesity has also skyrocketed in the US so I think we gotta really pay attention to what we put, what we provide our dog in terms of eating. And the pet industry doesn’t make it easy because there’s so much crap out there and we have the same issues. Kinda like you said earlier, budget dictates a lot of it.

And it’s expensive to eat healthy as a human in the us, right? If you’re trying to cut out a lot of chemicals from your diet, unless you’re growing it yourself, it’s pretty expensive to eat healthy. And same for the dogs as well. So switching gears a little bit, what do you think? Anytime I’ve traveled internationally, I see a lot of really good dogs that are just roaming the street and [01:19:00] they’re eating whatever they’re doing, whatever they feel like all the time.

And I look around, I’m like, these dogs aren’t fighting each other. They’re not lunging at new people. They’re just like trodding down the sidewalk and they’re just like living their life. And it blows my mind, right? Because then I like, and when you talk to someone, and especially if you’re in a really rural area and maybe a not so developed country, and they’re like, you’re a dog trainer.

Like it blows their mind. They’re like, that’s a thing. Like what? What do you do? Any thoughts on that? ’cause I’m assuming you’ve seen similar things that there’s a lot of good dogs out there that are given no training and they’re just out living their be best life. And why do we have such troubles in this country for people to raise dogs that are not psychotic?

Yet these free ranging dogs in a small town in South America are just like super chill. Yeah. I mean that, that could be also a topic for like hours and hours. One of the, so first one of the thing is to consider when you go onto like a certain country where village and street dogs are all around, you don’t see the [01:20:00] sick ones that often, right?

There’s a huge proportions that are suffering, that are sick, that are too hungry to walk and roam and the die like age of two, especially the pregnant moms, miserable life. So you don’t really see that. You have a selected view, but the ones that you do see, they seem to, might add second anthropomorphic word, but they seem to be happy in a way, right?

They, they just live their life and they do what a village dog would be doing, roaming, begging for food, and then going off and ignoring everything else that doesn’t bother you staying alive. And again, it’s that’s probably selection because that’s the only way to live long enough in the village without getting into two problems, which is, the aspect of avoiding now the village dog population.

Is somewhat interesting because it’s not quite a wolf and it’s [01:21:00] not a pet dog either. And you could wonder for a pet dog is a pet dog more like living a life like a wolf or living a life like a village dog. And if you really think about it, it’s a kind of mixed, because village dogs they live a life of individuality, if you will.

So they don’t have packs per se. Yes. They know each other and they, have some sort of a territory, but they don’t have family packs and male docs they don’t build create pairs with other females. They go here and there and everywhere. Without consideration of what protection I have to provide for my direct family.

And they don’t have strong bonds with each other either. That’s why you see they ignore each other. They don’t even play much with each other. I saw a couple dogs playing at the beach in Costa Rica. There was like a zoomie for two seconds and then it literally went like opposite directions.

That’s not how pet docs live, right? Like we don’t, we have families, we have packs. So in terms of [01:22:00] creating a strong pack mentality, it’s more like a wall would live in their family. But at the same time, we don’t have actual wolves. They’re like dogs. Dogs, no. So it’s somewhat in between there and.

In terms of socialization, I think the biggest message or lesson we can learn is from village docs. They are what it means to be social. Because I was, whenever I see this and I’m in the country, and I was in Jamaica Jamaica and Thailand, and then in Costa Rica we see these village dogs. And whenever I see them I’m like, ugh.

People in, in where I live now, Atlanta or Santa Rosa would hate these dogs. They would not want them as pet dogs because they’re way too neutral. They have no interest in you. And, we love a good cuddle with the dog and we love having fun with the dog, and we love, them coming up and wagging their tail until it becomes, they take a dog, takes it to the next level and becomes problematic with the jumping.

But we love this [01:23:00] kind of interaction. But these dogs, they don’t, they want your food, but they don’t have really interest in you as I wanna bond with you. And it’s we take it personally oh, this dog doesn’t like me, but I’m a doc person. And, but that’s what true socialization really means that you’re being neutral to everything else.

It doesn’t matter to you much. And without pet dogs, we could basically take it from there and say, Hey, you have strong engagement with us, your family, but I want you to be neutral to other dogs you don’t know, to other people you don’t know. And if allowed, you can interact with them, right? But don’t get too big feelings about them.

But this is not how we see pet ownership. We see dogs playing with other dogs and dog parks, and we see having coffee on a terrorist in a coffee shop. And then, my dog being friends with my best friends and these kind of things. So we put dogs in situations that where they have no good way out because they can’t be too [01:24:00] friendly.

But they should be. If they’re too friendly, they’re too excited, we need to stop the jumping. If they’re too avoidant, then we need to re-expose them more and stress them out more. And they just have to find the right balance of being a friendly dog, strong engagement, being okay with other dogs even though they’re not part of the family.

We are not wo, we’re not village dogs. And the expectations to be a pet dog is like really high. It’s like these poor dogs and village dogs have it easier because they’re like, I don’t like you. I’m going to the neighboring beach to my other favorite restaurant where I probably get some chicken wings.

And that, that to me is very interesting to see how, these dogs navigate the world. And one reason why they don’t have all these problems again, is because you don’t see the ones that do have problems. They certainly are aggressive dogs that are probably being isolated and they’re probably not gonna make it very long.

But we carry them on in the us or as pet docs, we push them through life with us and we work [01:25:00] with 10 different trainers virtually and online programs and board and train to push them through this to be these pet docs that we want them to be without necessarily considering what they’re capable of.

Given the genetics of the dog, individuality of the dog, the puppy experience of the dog. And that makes it very complicated to be a dog and to be a trainer and to be a dog owner at the pet dog versus the village dog. I got a quick sort of follow up to that. So you made a delineation between the village dog, the wolf, and the pet dog.

What are your thoughts on social hierarchies amongst I know you talked about the village dogs and how they didn’t really have a social hierarchal structure. Do you think that exists in pet dogs? Do you think it exists in wolves? Because there’s been a lot of discussion about it over the years.

It does exist and it doesn’t exist the way we think it is exists. It exists through experience and observation in docs. [01:26:00] Dominant social hierarchies is a huge topic. Researchers have always been interested in trying to understand like you can find, I don’t know and bees and wolves and like all kinds of animals that have some sort of hierarchy.

And it works so beautifully. Everyone knows what they’re supposed to do. How the heck do they know what they’re supposed to do? You’re born into some sort of like hierarchy and you understand what you’re doing. And from a neuroscience perspective, something has to happen. Something has to signal something somewhat to not approach the dominant one and go play with the one that is maybe your rank.

And it does indeed happen that way, but it happens through experience and observation. Meaning let’s say an extreme, the wolf, and not to say the alpha, right? We know that this doesn’t exist, but exists is a family structure with the ones who are the oldest, the wisest, the most experienced one are being the the [01:27:00] leader pair the alpha wolf pear, which is not because they’re the strongest alpha.

They don’t lead with violence, they do lead with just experience and being respected by everyone else. And everyone else is like part of the family. They literally are family. For example, some monkeys, they’re like, like that some monkeys are wholly violent and they lead with like beating up everyone around them.

But that’s not what wol are and that’s not what dogs are either. They don’t need that. But what they do need is early on if you decide you have to be very, you have to have a vision of what kind of dog you want through leadership. That word I don’t actually lie, but through guidance showing consistently, this is your boundary and this is your freedom.

This is what you’re allowed to do. This is where I’m gonna prevent you from doing certain things. And the keyword here is [01:28:00] being consistent. That’s how ultimately the dog will learn. This is my role in this family. So a dog that can roughhouse with a kid and later on is not allowed to play hard with a kid anymore.

That’s not consistency, right? That’s creating problems because it’s a confusing message that you’re sending a dog that can cuddle and have certain interactions with a kid, but not in a way that becomes roughhousing and really strong play will never come get the idea later on necessarily. There will be some boundaries testing, but in on average, when you prevent that over and over will not necessarily go out and say, I wanna play in rough house with you and, be really physical with you may not be the best example, but this basically just through consistency, the dog will learn.

And there are some neural patterns even that has been identified in rodents where you can put in the cage a rank high [01:29:00] rank highest rat and a rat that is of lower rank. And they know who is who and then they drop some sort of there’s a portal and then they drop some sort of reward piece of cheese or whatever.

And per se, the, if the dominant one the high, the rank highest mouse or red wants to get it, there’s no problem. We’ll get it. You can go. But every now and then the ride that is of lower rank will win and go for the cheese too. So it’s not this strict idea of I always have to prevent you from winning.

You’re never allowed to win, you’re never allowed to grab the toy from me. You’re never allowed to pass by me, jump on the couch. It’s not, that’s not the case. There will be challenges and it’s okay. The dog will challenge you every now and then. But mainly because the dog, or in that case, in that experiment, the rat saw a chance.

Because the dominant mouse signaled, I don’t want the cheese right now, or I’m not paying attention, or I’m just not [01:30:00] interested right now. And then the other red is okay, then I go get it. It’s not about challenging the rank, it’s just seeing a situation to get a piece of reward. A dog does that.

If you had a good relationship and all of a sudden dog jumps up on you or what never has done before or barks over I don’t know what the situations are where people say, my dog is challenging my rank or dominance, probably not the case given you had a good consistent relationship. It’s just life.

The dog just wanted to have a little bit of fun. So again, long story, but basically the answer is yes, there is ranks, there’s clearly a rank. You’re living in a family. For animals to make sense of their world, they have to know boundaries. And boundaries per se means there’s a rank because we as humans.

We probably have the most access to everything. And they obviously see that, they see that we have access and can do and lead and guide the way and, drive the car like they [01:31:00] understand enough to say, okay, you have more privileges than I do. And then on us, it’s just really being consistent enough so that they can learn that this is their role without having to violently roll them over, push them into a corner, be louder than them physically stronger than them.

That’s all not necessary if you’re consistent enough and know your boundaries that you wanna communicate. So you used the word dominance and dominant a couple times in that answer. Yeah. So what would you say to people who very loudly claim that? It’s a couple things. One, science agrees that dominance only exist in amoeba, number one.

It doesn’t exist in any other species on the planet. And that there are zero credible studies that clearly demonstrate that dominance is a construct that dogs even understand. [01:32:00] That’s the first time I heard hear such a strong view on dominance. I think. What we associate with the word dominance has been a construct because we associate this with violence and we associate this with aggression, which is the problem here.

You have a clear ranking and elephants and who is the leader? It’s the mom. It’s the oldest, wisest woman of the pack. And how does she, you don’t see her beating up everyone else. She’s clearly the dominant one. Everyone follows her, but she doesn’t use violence. She uses wisdom and she kills her with kindness.

Right? And that’s dominance. That has nothing to do with aggression. Then you go to certain baboons monkeys in a Sub-Sahara, and yes, that’s all about violence and aggression. The loudest the most powerful ones will go to a different tribe, beat up everyone he can just to impregnate all the other females in that tribe.

That’s also not what we [01:33:00] necessarily want with our dogs. That’s also dominance. And then again, you have the wolves where dominance is purely based on the grandpa and the grandma who’ve been around the longest and probably know the best, where to go, how to hunt. That’s dominance. It’s just how we interpret dominance.

Like I am in my pack. I could say I’m the dominant. Don’t tell my husband, but I’m the dominant one here. Oh. Have to cut that part out, Matt. No, this is, that’s gonna be the title and we’re gonna open with that in the thumbnail. It’s gonna be all of it. I’m the dominant, don’t tell my husband.

But, I don’t use violence or aggression and physically I wouldn’t even be able to overpower neither my shepherd nor my male, nor my husband. And I think we kinda created, it’s just like this, creating this fear inducing narrative around a word that has never been like in the science world, never been constructed the way we use it now to say there is no [01:34:00] research that says dominance has, there’s like plenty of them, and you just need to understand the animal kingdom a little better.

It’s just how certain dominance behaviors are executed matters to me. It seems like, oh, sorry. Go ahead, Jason. No, there’s a, industry expert who makes those claims very, again, they’re very clear and very loud. I’ll be talking about happy to get you up the industry expert. Maybe.

So I have a thought as to why. So we did a probably a two hour deep dive on our podcast into dominance and some of those wolf studies. David Mack, I think, and Conrad Lorenz. And, we read up on it and, really dove in pretty deep. And where we came out at the end of it was, I really believe the reason there’s so many people now that say that extreme thing you said a minute ago, Jason, that there’s no dominance at all is partly because so many people saw dominance everywhere and over, everything was dominance for, let’s say [01:35:00] 15 years ago.

And then you had people that took it extreme, right? And people doing stupid stuff like spitting in their dog’s food before the dog would eat and mixing it. Oh, you haven’t heard that one? No. Oh my gosh. There’s obviously some nuts out there. So all these crazy things that were done in the name of dominance, and to me it’s like politics, right?

If one side of the aisle, has this new whatever, they jump onto something the other side’s now I hate it. That must be horrible to me. That’s a lot what’s happened with dominance where. People, everyone admits that submission exists and it’s what’s the opposite of that?

They’re, what are they submissive to? They have to be submissive to something. They’re not just submissive to nothingness. And I think part of it is that it was so overplayed. You had these force free trainers that became so resistant to the word dominance. ’cause they hated how it was being used then.

Then it turned into dominance just doesn’t exist. Because I can’t see logically any other reason ’cause of stuff Both of you has said we, obviously it exists, it’s, but it’s not, random [01:36:00] violence. But, no reasonable person ever said it was random violence for, for no reason.

I the, like some of the studies that you see are like some of the constructed arguments around this is, again, it’s like context really matters. And when you sometimes get hung up on one little thing, we get this tunnel vision. We don’t see the context around it and the pattern around it.

You can observe a wolf pack at any given moment and you might seem different kind of rankings, right? Because it doesn’t mean it’s super fluid, it’s just what as a pattern on the average. Probably moments when it really matters more so than randomly when you were next to a bush hanging out with them and they’re having a good time.

And then the other situation is in dog parks, a bunch of these studies come from observing dogs in dog parks and do they exhibit some sort of rankings or dominance? Some of them clearly do, and you just need to watch one of those rambunctious dogs and like trying to literally bully every single dog in the dog park.

But then [01:37:00] the conclusions was, it differs. One dog could be a little bit dominant here, but then it seems to be submissive. That’s the nature of play and we can’t mix that pattern of ranking in the family with play because play has completely different rules, if any at all, other than, obviously don’t kill me.

But the play idea here is that sometimes I’m submissive and I make myself a submissive and sometimes I’m more dominant and we are gonna have fun together ’cause that’s how we play. And on top of that, these are also like sometimes random dogs that meet each other and they have been raised to be part of a family and that they meet random dogs.

So we can’t necessarily assume they would, immediately show certain behaviors that would indicate whether or not they’re dominant or submissive. So the context really matters and what we observe and the window of the glimpse we get into an animal’s life. And it just depending on what kind of preconceptions you have, you come up with different solutions.

And this is also what happens a lot. You can [01:38:00] take any kind of study and any kind of observation and spin it to make it work for your argument. And then yeah, do doesn’t exist is not true. Have you ever seen more than one dog together? Because if so, you’ve probably seen some expression of dominance, basically.

Yeah. But again, like you can say this is not true dominance, but that’s where we really need to start the conversation and identify what dominance really mean and again, what it does not mean. Because what it means really depends on the situation and the animal you’re looking at.

But it does not mean, you have to, you don’t have to, the violence and the aggression and being the loudest and physically overpowering, that’s not what dominance means. And it has never meant that we just took it to that place. And I think that was one of the most interesting things when we started reading a little more of David Mack, the one who kinda, the famous wolf study [01:39:00] who studied captive wolves and talked, about the alpha theory and then later on renounced it and said it wasn’t, he wishes. He had never said it, but as you read up on it he basically said, Hey, this whole alpha thing is not true. They don’t use random acts of violence, but they do control each other through little nips and other, and body language and everything he said.

I’m like that’s what any normal trainer thinks. Yes we’re still on the same page here. So what’s interesting is people will say it doesn’t exist and because this study has been refuted, but you look at how he’s refuted it and it still stands to reason with everything you said a few minutes ago, Dr.

Melanie, of, there’s some control that’s done without wild aggression, but it’s still control. And sometimes it is done physically, but it’s not mauling them. It’s, control nips or body language. Definitions definitely matter. How would you describe dominance if a client said, what’s your definition of dominance?

Or what is it? That’s a good question.[01:40:00] 

Yeah, I would have to think about it. I’m not, I tend to, just like what we did, I tend to give a really contextual con explanation for things if I get asked these things. But when it comes to clear definitions, you, I will have to send you to my social media because I’ve spent more time thinking through my words there.

I’ll get back to you on this. I do want to have my working definition for that, but yeah, I can, I couldn’t come up with one right now. I always define it as just the ability to control others and how you take that is up to you. There’s, you could do it the right way, the wrong way, but it’s the ability in my mind, the ability to control others.

And if your dog controls the other dogs in your household, it’s probably the, we’ll make quotes here, the dominant dog, if they’re somehow controlling resources and controlling the actions of the others, maybe control others within the circle of influence, something like this, because obviously you don’t have to control [01:41:00] other dogs in other households.

Yes. That’s when things go sideways, do that too.

I am curious to touch base on socialization. So you had mentioned that when we were talking about the dogs in other countries and the wolves and village dogs. How much do you think when I, when I see dogs in other countries that are just random, wild dogs walking around and they seem friendly, in my mind, a huge part of that has to be socialization because, in this country I feel like so many people do a terrible job of socializing.

They don’t get their dogs out much. They live a fairly unsocial life is, I don’t know if that’s a word or not, but an unsocial life themself as a human. And oh, their only social stuff is work and the dog can’t come with them to work. So then they come home. And where does the dog get its outlet and meet new people.

And it’s just pe Some people don’t even know their neighbors. And they don’t have a real sense of community. And then big surprise, the dog’s not social. How much of it do you think is just that, if we took genetics out of it, [01:42:00] dog breeds out of it, how much of the issues in the US do you think are just based upon poor socialization?

Oh, it’s huge. Huge. I think it’s a we take it to, like we do what we always do. We go into extremes. We somehow always have a hard time to meet in the middle. I don’t know why, but we just not good with meeting in the middle. We need to take it to the extreme. So it’s either you meet a hundred, you cuddle with a hundred people in a hundred days type of socialization.

Or you don’t do it at all. And then everything that really is supposed to happen is being missed. And socialization is something I just recently started to think a lot about because I’m gonna get another puppy in three weeks and I’m gonna be faced with the socialization aspect of it and. It all kinda, again it’s very helpful before anyone gets a dog to have a vision of what they want the dog to be like.

And not just be like, but in what environments? The dog’s supposed to function well. And [01:43:00] then you can just work your way backwards from that. And that means for one, if you want your dog to go on a walk without blowing up at other dogs in either super excited way or an aggressive way, then you better, once your dog can go on walks and you have certain foundations in place, you better expose your dog to those situations where the dog learns to ignore those things.

If you want your dog to be nice to your family members that you go visit every two months, then, during those initial puppy stages, you better go say hi with your puppy there and have a good time together. And the intensity we can, we then sometimes make the mistake and oh, I want my dog to be okay with people.

So I go say hi and make it a point. I go outta my way to go say hi to every single person and dog on the walk. Did I ever imagine. I kind, I’m stalking people. I see people like I walk behind people until they turn around so they could say hi to my puppy. [01:44:00] No, don’t do that. That is not what socialization is.

Again, learning for a dog is putting life into context and what is the picture supposed to be like? The pictures supposed to be going on a nice walk without having a dog pulling and wanting, going over to everyone. So we don’t create that habit. If you ever wanna travel with your dog, you probably, at one point should go to crowded places so your dog can learn to be in crowded places when the dog is capable mentally of taking that in, right?

But this all happens and like within the first year, but so that you can do a lot there and the pace and how fast you can go there. Maybe that’s where genetics come in because not every dog can take a lot early on. Some dogs are better than others and if you don’t pay attention to what your dog can take, that’s where reactivity starts.

That where anxiety can start too. Because if the dog’s overwhelmed with everything, it might not show the signs of [01:45:00] stress and anxiety that we think the dog should be showing and is maybe just particularly sniffy or particularly wiggly, which then for the dog is I don’t know, my way out here.

So I’m gonna try to soothe myself as much as I can. That can create problems. ’cause now the dog becomes avoidant to those places. And if you keep the dog. Exposed and pushing and pushing more. Then eventually the dog is no one is looking out for my needs. I can’t avoid it, so I’m gonna react next time.

And so it’s it’s a very, it’s supposed to be a smooth ride. And when I have my puppy, I’m gonna go, I’m gonna go on long walks immediately. But it was like, I’m gonna take my puppy and it’s here, there’s a cow. ’cause I know we’re gonna go on trails. Trails here, hiking, and they’re just, cows are everywhere.

And I need my puppy to see a cow. It’s not a cow, without interacting with a cow. It’s the same with people. And socialization. Like you can do a lot of good things, right? [01:46:00] And again, when you push it to the extremes where you would think, I’ll just do it for one or two weeks and then that’s it.

You can do a lot of things wrong. Or if you push it to the other extreme, you can also do a lot of things wrong. And we, I think our bigger problem is the extreme of doing too much too fast because a dog kinda, needs some time to process what’s happening. We forget that they’re babies. We sometimes treat them as like they’re already dogs that are, done and growing and need to like, be able to go to the birthday party and go to the dog park and here and there, and we forget that they have babies.

They struggle every day with what’s happening. And things need to make sense. The only, the two main functions the brain has is maintain your body functions so you stay alive and make sense of your environment around it. So you can predict what behavior is best to serve survival. [01:47:00] And if the dog is constantly overwhelmed with social interactions, the brain will start to predict, oh shit, this again, oh, here we go again.

And then the appropriate behavior is get outta here. Either through a reaction of aggression, proactivity, or fear and avoidance and hiding. But either way, the dog learned learning is gonna happen. We gotta make sure that we, that the learning happens in the right bucket of things. Oh, I don’t need to worry about this.

I’m having fun with my owner here. Oh, this is nothing for me to worry about. Oh, I don’t always have to say hi even though I want to. And that way is okay, the world makes sense. And then you have much better control over saying, okay, now I’m allowing you to interact with this dog. I’m allowing you to interact with this person, leadership dominance.

And that way you create a contextual life for the dog that is functional. Yeah. My buzz words for socialization are [01:48:00] neutrality and habituation. And I think people lose sight of that sometimes. Socialization is, there’s a lot of neutrality involved in socialism. They don’t have to interact with every single thing in their environment.

Now, if you have a neutral dog, oh, that’s what you have with the village dogs mainly. But a neutral dog is better than an excited dog. I’ll take a neutral dog, I’ll go on hyper excited dog. And obviously maybe a neutral dog is better than an aggressive or reactive dog. I like what you mentioned when you said you were getting a puppy, that you have a vision for what you want out of your dog, because I think that’s missing with a lot of people to say, fast forward a year, what do you, what’s your vision?

What do you want out of your dog? And if they say, I wanna walk ’em and be able to pass people and dogs and whatever without an issue, then there’s two things they have to do, right? They have to make sure the dog is trusting enough of them to [01:49:00] not, hate them, but also that they haven’t taught their dog.

That it can pull to every single dog to say hi. ’cause then that’s a pain to fix as well. And taking ’em through that little thought exercise, I’m sure could be really helpful. And it’s always better to put the work upfront than having to fix something later on, because that’s a lot more frustrating for everyone involved.

And maybe if we get pe more people to think through that vision then you can ultimately come to the question, okay, what’s the right dog? And, wanting to have picnics and, sitting in the beer garden and adopting a melon from a shelter might be clashing in terms of the vision that you have and the dog that you potentially get.

Not just the breed, but the experiences that particular dog has gone through determines a lot what the dog is capable of in the future. And going a little bit away from the looks of a dog to, on [01:50:00] average, what can we expect with that kind of breed. And, genetics is just like giving you some sort of range.

Can be very beneficial, but looks is the most important. I want a white German Shepherd and that, or a silver lab. That’s it. Those are, we get so many clients, they come to us and they’re like, I want a White Shepherd or a silver lab. I’m like you’re gonna need a, you’re gonna be seeing me a lot.

You’re gonna need a lot of training. One the fluffy Pyrenees that is the best family dog, all my other cats. And you know what you said, it super, it is super important. Sitting there thinking, we train a lot of police dogs. You know what I tell people, people are like, how do you select dogs for police work?

I have to go a 6, 8, 10 months in advance and I have to have a vision of what that finished dog looks like in order to be able to select a dog here. That’s gonna get me there. Because if I pick the wrong dog here, [01:51:00] I’ll never get there. If I don’t have a good plan of approximations to get me from here to there, I’ll never get there.

So it takes, those are really important. I’ve never thought of, do you pick ’em out by fur color? Yeah. We look particularly for the white ones. But it’s, it is important to understand what the end goal is. And I’ve never looked at it from a pet dog perspective, I guess always been from working with service dogs, working with police dogs, detection dogs.

We’ve always having we always have a very clear plan. We always know what we’re looking for in the beginning. But yes, that’s pretty cool to look at it from a pet dog perspective. And the reason I said that about the white German shepherds and silver labs is ’cause in our business it happens all the time.

People like those two for some reason. And so they decide I’m gonna go get a White Shepherd. But they’re hard to find. So then they just get the first White Shepherd they find, and a lot of them tend to be neurotic and skitzy, but their vision was, I want a white German Shepherd. For some reason not, I want and they don’t think about.

A good family pet and all those other [01:52:00] things. And they just tend to get the first dog they find that meets that criteria. And then their life is hard. Yeah. The mutant, the chances that the mutant is the most well-behaved dog is that sounds not nice, actually, towards the white German Shepherd, but Yeah.

Chances are there might be problems. Same with the Silver Labs. So the Silver Labs. It does sound nice though. I wanna see too.

We have covered a lot of ground today. This has been fun. Anything else we wanna get through today? I could talk, I can talk all evening. I got one before we go. As Matt alluded to earlier both of us did in fact have our lives threatened by somebody. I won’t mention names or talk about Marlene in this podcast.

But don’t talk about their class. Don’t let ’em sit and talk about their class. So you say, we haven’t done that, but do give everybody an idea of what they can expect. If you can give us a 30 or 62nd synopsis of the class and what they can expect to take away from it that you’re teaching [01:53:00] at the upcoming conference in July in Savannah.

Yeah the good thing is I can’t even share too much because I haven’t planned it all out yet either, so I can’t don’t even know yet every detail either. But the under the umbrella of I, I forgot I even forgot my title, the title of my talk, but under the umbrella of saying calmness and I will basically explain how we understand calmness and we talked about the perfect pet dog or the vision, right?

And it usually is associated with some sort of being well-behaved, being calm, and how that mentality leads us down the wrong rabbit hole of how to raise a pet dog in a very chaotic world that is anything but calm. And what we go into. And I will touch on certain topics that all kinda intertwine on that path from being a calm dog to actually being a [01:54:00] good pet dog.

We will touch a little bit on, what it means to be resilient in a different number we cover today. But what it means to be resilient. What calmness, really, how calmness really happens, and how the dog perceives. His or her world, how we sometimes create unnecessary conflict.

And what our way out of this is. And I will add my classic, usual nerdy notes where we look into some, what I think break groundbreaking studies and other animal models that kind of give us hints along the way where experience really matters and comes in and how to construct basically this framework of how to race or be with live a life with a pet.

Cool. As a reminder that class is called or presentation a case against calm, why our dogs become less resilient in a world of chaos. Yeah. So that’s a good title. I like it. I’m excited to hear that because as a pet dog [01:55:00] trainer, that’s one of our biggest focuses is helping people keep their dogs relatively calm in the household, and very often they’re not exercising them or training them enough.

And we’re trying to create that plan for them to solve the problems. So I thought it was gonna, your title was gonna be how Dr. Melanie dominates her husband and dogs and runs the household so that’s two years from now. I’m looking forward to that one. That sounds also good. Sounds like a good clickbait here.

So we’ll put links to canine, decoded and all of your stuff in the description here. So thank you. Instagram, Facebook anywhere in particular you want people to go? No, I think these are the main things I’m hanging out most of the time anyways. Awesome. It’s been fun. Yes. Thank you for taking the time and thanks for coming back a second time.

We appreciate it. No, my pleasure. It’s been a lot of fun. It was good. And then we can chat more in July, which also comes up quite quickly. Looking forward to it. Yes. [01:56:00] Same. Welcome to, to Pro Radio. Radio. Radio. Go listen to Pro Radio yo at to Pro Radio Brisbane. The buses to Pro Radio. When made to Lion the radio Dispatch tonight to Pro Radio Yo Radio.