E417: 데니스 펜지, 페트라 포드, 카렌 디즈(Denise Fenzi, Petra Ford, and Karen Deeds)와 함께하는 집중과 교감

and engaged and what's kind of the difference maybe between those two terms for you anyone want to go first sure i'll start since no one else jumped in um i think well my dogs can be can appear to be focused on me so they could be staring right at me and ignoring the environment but that does not mean that dog is fully engaged zayna is a perfect example of that she will sit beautifully in heel position look up at me with her beautiful brown eyes and her little nose is off to the left and i know when her nose is off to the left that i don't have her full engagement so her focus is kind of split yeah she's doing what she was taught which is look at me but she's still thinking of something else so the dog can be focused on different things it could be focused on the environment it could be focused on internal things but that does not necessarily mean they're engaged i feel like you need focus in order to get engagement um but focus in and of itself doesn't guarantee that you're going to have engagement at least not in my sport with my dogs fair enough so i would say with focus i have a i work with a lot of dogs that have focus but they have focus on the wrong things um the squirrel in the environment the other dog the other person the car um things that we don't want them to focus on they're very focused on it because they want to watch what's going on but like petra said it's not the kind of focus that's reusable what i do need is to get them to uh engage with me around that type of focus so it's it's not a matter of i want them to focus on me as much as i want don't want them to focus on the other thing which implies that i need them to engage with me so that they're not focused on the other thing just sounds very convoluted but basically it sadly it does make sense right i want them to engage with me and but that doesn't necessarily mean i have to have the kind of focus that petra does um i just need them not to focus on the other things and to to start for starters just to know that i exist that would be a big plus for sure so for me engagement i'm assuming it's engagement with me we could be out for a walk and my dog is engaged with me paying some kind of attention interacting with me we could be playing we could be working uh it's definitely me focused whereas focus is not focus is to the task so the task may require focusing on me healing would be a good example because it's something we do together and you need to be closely aligned with what i'm doing but a lot of what i do is like bite sports and when my dog is being sent to bite and such

the correct focal point is not me it's the activity in front of them so in that case the question is can i teach you to focus correctly so it might be on the decoy with a little bit of an ear to me because i might ask for something different or it might be if you're doing search and rescue then your focus really should be on finding the person it's the task that i need whereas engagement is a me thing and good engagement lots of engagement with me makes it a lot easier to teach my dog to focus on other things because i'm directing where i want your focus so i want you to focus on finding the person i don't want you to focus on the squirrel and i think to get good focus on work you need good engagement because you're the one who's going to direct that um that direction of focus if the dog is focused on the task would you then you would not would you say the dog is engaged with that task or no i would yeah okay just curious but that they they have an ear towards you so that they're still listening um there's they're still waiting for affirmation or for further direction even though they're focused on a different task and sometimes that's that's all i get is you know that i have a dog that has an ear can actually respond to a simple cue like a marker cue or name cue or recall cue um so i i agree agree with the patriot it's kind of hard you know they're focusing on something else i don't want them to engage with something that they're going to react negatively to so i work more on engagement and focus towards me uh versus the task because for my behavior cases it's not about that type of focus it's very different from the sport dogs but i think it it carries over very nicely into how we we get them to focus on the right thing regardless of what that thing is that also makes me think about deb uh jones and i used to talk a lot about the difference between attention and focus so in the old days and maybe somewhat still today the way you taught a dog to look at you was to correct them for looking away and so you you could certainly teach a dog to orient its eyes and face towards you but then as petra so nicely illustrated the nose gives away where the brain actually is and i do not even bother to teach my dogs to look at me what i do is create paths of work that make it impossible not to look at me because you won't be successful you cannot heal with me if you're not looking at me it's just it's close to impossible because of how i move but looking at me isn't really the name of the game so i don't have a word that says hey look at

me right now all i have is we're going to heal in order to do that you need to look at me and that's a little bit intentional because i don't really want the dog looking at me as a cute behavior i want it to be what we do when we're working unless you are given an alternative so if you're in heal position and you're looking forward that's a problem because part of healing is looking at me but it's not like i say look at my face or whatever i don't even have it anymore i used to uh and i wonder how many people in life this makes me think of uh in obedience when you're doing the uh sent the i'm sorry the hand signals how many dogs have looked right at their owners and the person's giving the signals and it is lights out nobody home and then they're like i don't know why that happens and sometimes i want to say to people and probably do or i'll say it right now if i haven't it's really hard for me to help you because your dog has been taught to look at you and i can't figure out what's upsetting them if you let your dog look because my dogs will just look right at the scary dog behind them and it's like oh now at least i know what i have to work on because you're looking at the problem whereas if i had taught my dog no you have to look at me that actually washes out information that i want to have about where the where the challenge might lie so i'm a pretty big fan of internally generated focus i.e desire via understanding the expectation of the exercise as opposed to externally forced focus which may or may not reflect the dog's desire and kind of makes it hard for me to know what's going on and yeah it's that whole they're looking at you but that doesn't mean they're engaged right like my dog can be standing there in front of me next me whatever and i all i have to do is look in my dog's eyes and i'm like i know you're not with me here i know you're not fully engaged in the task so then i work on engagement first because i know absent that why even bother giving any additional cues it's not going to go well so i like address why are you struggling right now let me help you through that and let me make sure you're engaged before you know i give you a cue and i think that's where i know a lot of my students struggle with that like they equate the dog looking at them with the dog being mentally fully engaged and that's absolutely not you know necessarily true right engagement is like a whole nother step i teach my dogs to offer engagement so if they're offering it then everything else is no longer an issue for them

right and it's their choice they're doing it when they can and when they're ready and so there's no conflict there either yeah i do the same and actually if my dog is looking at me and a stranger would say he's not attending to the environment but i'm the ears aren't right you know um to me that's not engaged the dog actually might be focused on me because there's an absence of focus externally but i just know it's not going to go well i can just look down and say something in there is not motivated or happy right now um and i understand you're focused on me but i can just feel that the energy is not right here do some dogs bring more to the table where focus and engagement are concerned or is it something that you know you kind of need to build regardless of the dog i'd love to have the puppy that just comes innately focused and engaged on me out of the womb i have yet to get one and again it goes back to what do we want them to focus on and i want them to focus on not the scary thing not the bad thing not the moving thing um if that focus is going to lead toward to some negative reaction um so i'm i'm looking for them to be able to see that and then like denise and patronage both said is to offer offer engagement back to me um and i do find there are absolutely some dogs uh border colleagues probably that are very in tune with their people but they're also very in tune with the environment so you've got that split going on i mean i just in my house alone my labrador if i even wiggle in my chair his eyes pop open and he's going where you going where you going where you going right can i be with you so his is very natural uh he he should have been a competition dog he wants to do things all the time he's constantly staring at me whereas the border call he's like yeah but the cat did you not see the cat the cat's over there why should i look at you because there's the cat so his focus is a lot more torn than the labradors for sure so it's not always breed it's um it's a lot of temperament in their genetics matter for sure but uh just depends well let me tell you i got that dog yeah i do uh ice is that dog he's 14 or 15 months old but it's not me he's focused on it's work it would not matter who was on the other side of the leash i don't know if he likes me more than the next person really but i'll tell you i'm the person that brings the work if i bring herding anybody could be out there with him it does not matter if i'm doing obedience he can walk he did this he walked into a seminar he's never been in a seminar

for honest to god he probably didn't even leave his ranch you know i got him at eight months of age pretty much stayed there or was in a truck going somewhere but probably very limited environmental socialization walks into my building with a seminar going on and works like a five-year-old seasoned dog like i would say he gave three seconds to the environment and that was it he is he is focused on work i'm just the bringer now i will say that in the beginning it was really really hard to work with him because he's he's a complicated dog he's very very sensitive so the way you introduce the idea of work he has to understand it obedience is not innate to him he's not you know an obedience dog but once he understood oh this is a form of work and i go to some trouble to make it understandable i've never had a dog that had this much natural focus on the activity i've had belgian girls who had lots and lots of natural focus on me to get to the reward so their motivation was driven by the toy usually so it was if i do this then i get my toy ice more than any dog i've ever had we're going back 40 years it's the activity itself it is going to be a walk in the park getting rid of motivators because that's not why he's doing it it's doing the thing it's really uh cool and if i may say so myself i deserve this i agree i agree i agree you do i have worked so damn hard and like zen is very independent and right now uh ice runs circles around zen when it comes to focus uh and that's okay i love zen but man i gotta work hard and so now i got this dog and i'm like i'm so glad border collies weren't my first breed because i would be insufferable like i would be that person who's just like well why don't you just pat your side and ask him to come and call him like i'd be that person right i'm not that person because i've been through it but um it's really fun it's really really fun once you figure out the key to the dog the key to the dog is challenging but it is not a focus problem uh there is an engagement problem with me if he um if he gets it all muddled he really struggles badly but if he understands and if engaging with me is what is required at the moment walk in the park i think it sounds almost like um melissa when you were asking like is you know are some dogs better at focus i may it almost sounds more like you get your you have a better chance of getting good focus if your dog has some sort of motivation that you can manipulate right so i have labs they live for food um i'm sure i have an easier time getting focused than another dog that

might not be food motivated or might not be innately task oriented like ice because now how am i going to motivate this dog to want to focus on me yeah and you know like if you think about a lab if you're doing field work with your dog you actually do have to ignore a lot of really interesting things out there i mean i understand that the bird is innately interesting right they've been bred for that for a billion years but there's other innately interesting things out there too so it still requires that the dog sort of pick one thing out from the noise and really focus they got to go for hundreds of yards not seeing any of the other stuff so it's kind of it's interesting to think about how a dog's breed it's back not breed so much but lines background what it was bred for help or hinder because i know people with labs who are like i can't trial outdoors and obedience because my dog looks up at the sky sees a bird and it's over i would not look forward to doing obedience around sheep that's for sure it has to do with training too though like i mean in field trials they're setting things up to make the dog fail in essence because it's a test so at the end of the day even though yes you do need a dog that has really good focus but you still have to teach it not to get diverted or not to go off the line or there's so much teaching still involved that's not natural like if there's a tiny little corner of water like it's just faster to go around it a dog will go around it but no in a field trial they have to go through that little corner that's all training i mean for sure it would be almost impossible to do that with a dog that didn't have strong bird focus or the line or the genetics but there's still an insane amount of for lack of a better word artificial training involved a lot and i'm working with a lot of dogs that don't have any of that right i mean these dogs barely have air drive for the most part they're they have no desire to please people or because maybe they're so worried about things in their world they don't have a way to engage with the human because they're worried about everything that's around them and for those dogs food just just creating food motivation for some is where i have to start is i have to have something that the dog wants and sometimes that's just that's distance um you know it's not just the work although i love when i get reactive dogs that that are that love to work i can replace the bad stuff with the good stuff and that's kind of what i do with that active acclimation thing that we're going to talk about but uh when i have a dog that

brings nothing to the table it's not like ice who just wants to work or your labs were like god just give me food uh you know when i'm working with a dog in fact i've got several in a couple of my online classes right now it's really hard to get these dogs even to eat food we're on week three and i've got a couple of dogs that will barely take food from their owner that's right and that's really hard stuff to work that's very hard it's really hard way harder that's super hard and i know sometimes i mean we talk about pre-mackinale but it's easier to talk about it absolutely like in a practical applied sense it's it sounds great on paper but i'm like well have you ever actually tried to do it because there's certain things it does very well but damn it's hard in an uncontrolled environment yeah i mean i can't let that dog chase a squirrel and in fact i had this conversation earlier this morning with somebody with a black mouth curve in an apartment building oh geez well that's gonna go well right um because he sees a squirrel he's on a leash and she's gonna go flying if he takes off um so and i can't go okay well let's just pre-mack it we're gonna you know give me eye contact and you get to go chase a squirrel well there's not a fence yard now we we can can apply that concept in her mom's house where she's living for the next two weeks but when she goes back to the apartment now that's probably not going to work i have i don't have that capability uh luckily he's semi food motivated and probably even toy motivated but you know as a reinforcer those are all things that have to be taught even to that dog you got your work cut out for you karen yeah yes i do i mean i always do you do i'm glad you're out and about because this is the kind of um kind of realistic help that people need what do you do when you're living in an apartment with a dog without food drive and you got to get out the apartment door for your dog to pee four times a day and it's it's definitely a level of complexity that i did not deal with when i was doing behavior stuff because i was only doing behavior in relation to competition dog sports so the dog that's reactive but actually if it's doing dog sports it brought a lot of other things to the table and so we have things to work with whereas what you're describing is kind of every trainer's like i yeah yeah if they're being honest if they're being open and honest like wow that's when that creativity really comes out because you you have to have something yeah it's much harder much harder so you guys were talking earlier about

that dog who you know maybe they're standing staring at their handler but their nose is somewhere else the lights just kind of aren't all on upstairs um what causes that how do we avoid that how do we you know work with that once we realize we have that what do we what do we do that's what my uh presentation is kind of about avoiding actually so i am personally a really big fan of making sure that dogs are comfortable in the environment before i ask things of them uh and i think that's something you better start when they're young i'm not saying you don't train them in public and work with them but learning how much time your dog needs in different environments to feel safe and comfortable i call that acclimation i think that's so critically important especially with the sensitive flower dogs the dogs who are a little bit more prone to fear than curiosity dogs that are curious you got a little bit more options and range but dogs that struggle like they're looking at you but they're feeling unsafe and the reason they're feeling unsafe is not because there's something unsafe in the environment but because they haven't had enough time to look at it for themselves and determine that they're absolutely safe i made a terrible mess i won't tell the whole story but with a dog many years ago where i hadn't really grasped any of this yet and um i didn't let her look around just because i kept her busy and she left to work so that was not hard to do but then i went to a started to compete with her and the wheels came off the bus uh because she didn't know how to function when i didn't have toys and food because i had taught her to rely on those things under stress and the solution for her and for so many dogs has been teaching a structured approach to acclimation before work so it's not just free-for-all dog walks all over the place while you follow them on a loose leash because if you do that you might be the freight hours but it's a structured way of making sure that the dog feels safe and that once that path is set then i build on that with uh several stages of teaching the dog to push me to start the work and i like that way of doing it because it teaches people like you go through stage one they get to do what they want stage two the dog just checks in with you you know they're sort of these stages that they work through and when i was teaching this as a class i sort of found that the class was split half the people were pushing their dogs too hard too fast and the dogs were struggling to work because they weren't ready they were emotionally being dragged into spaces that they

hadn't acclimated to and were struggling and with those owners i had to work so hard to just let your dog breathe give your dog time and then the other half of the class would be the opposite they weren't asking anything of their dogs their dogs are just sort of strolling around kind of doing whatever they want and they have no idea what to do when the dog is checking in and out of work and so my presentation really is very much about handling both of those extremes you can use the same path you're just looking at it it's as much handler generated as dog generated because people tend towards one or the other they're either of the oh my gosh the poor thing looked away he must be having troubles go be a dog and it's like that's not quite the answer and then the other extreme is you must never look away from me here look how fun i am and that's not really the answer um so anyway there's my answer i just gave a plug for my whole presentation well then i'm going to do the same thing because i'm talking about a different approach to acclimation which is a much more active approach however it still doesn't negate passive what i call passive acclimation which is like what you're saying denise is to allow the dog to explore and sniff and feel safe and to do those things um and then i'm not actually asking it's it's kind of like it's an intermediate step between the you know the the lounge and look and to hang out and make sure you feel safe and then focusing on me because i've added in or i use these little games i've got four things that i i will be talking about in my presentation about how i use a more active approach where i use really and truly it's almost like using props cues uh visual cues and verbal cues um to to stimulate you know it's stimulating dopamine whether it's the box whether it's a mat whether it's two bowls or whether it's words those words have been conditioned that that box has been conditioned that mat has been conditioned those two bowls set up in a specific context have been conditioned to start engagement within that game and so that's where i'm i'm taking that process or those processes and i'm putting them out into public i've got you know a lot of my pet dogs of course uh once they learn these these games and it's it's a whole lot easier with a dog that's reactive versus shut down the shutdown dogs are going to take a lot longer they're going to take a lot more like denise said they're going to take a lot more to feel safe um so i still have to give those the time to do the

acclimation the passive acclimation before i could potentially start uh with a more active approach and that could be one of the four things that i'll be talking about so i think that in addition to acclimation um so i i go through that process with my dogs but i could still get that look right um so then i have to ask myself why because i need in order to help my dog i have to know what is the root cause of your problem the dog it could be i could have made a handling error i could be doing something that's confusing my dog um my dog maybe with some people their error ratio is too high so the dog's like oh god oh god oh god like they're not confident right they're very unsure they're they don't know what to do to be right um my dog could be feeling pressure from like for example gates or from a judge a person behind them or a person approaching them so all these things i would not necessarily handle them the same way right i would say okay what is the root cause now how do i make my dog so comfortable around this problem so that the dog can now be fully engaged and not for lack of a better word distracted by whatever um is bothering them so i think that's really important i know a lot of people if the dog's looking at them they give the down signal the dog doesn't down it's like naughty dog you didn't down i think it's way more complicated than that way more complicated dog training is so complicated it's so complicated i mean we're always talking about like this concept of nuance but that it's the truth right it's just all gets down to the well it depends you know i yeah it depends what what happened and you know one dog is going to do so much better with one route than the other but endlessly fascinating it is it's very fascinating um all right so you guys talked a little bit about uh acclimation in that last question but can we can we maybe dive a little bit deeper into kind of how acclimation allows or creates a focused dog like what did what how do those two pieces kind of tie together hey trick go on me because denise and i already spilled our guts about acclimation it's your turn well i kind of feel like people on some level they want to communicate to dogs like humans right so they like to tell the dog whole sentences why didn't you do that buddy you know that and i'm like stop talking dogs don't talk like that but on on another level they don't think of dogs like us at all so when i walk into a store it's not even a conscious thing i look around everybody does it's it's just a natural reaction you're it's safety you're looking to see where everything is you're orienting

yourself and then you're moving on right well a dog's gonna want to do the same thing even more so because they don't even know why they're at the store and they don't know what's going on right and their dog so they look at motion they smell they listen in order to be safe so for me to take my dog somewhere like a parking lot or a store or even somewhere easier but different for the dog if i just start working that dog my dog's gonna be completely uncomfortable my dog's um not gonna be able to give me focus so just like with me i need to look around you know um where is everything where is everybody are there people with dogs here are there not let me get the lay of the land now i can concentrate on my training my dog needs to do the same thing right so i need my dog to be able to look around and sniff and just kind of get oriented you know get the lay of the land feel safe there's nothing going on here and then my dogs will look at me and they'll go okay i'm ready i can work now and only then will i ask them to focus and even then if my dog starts but can't sustain it okay you just need a little more time no problem we can walk around um a little bit more so in a sense like they're not that different than us but people just like don't think about that like i had this crazy experience so i parked my car so i was at a show i got there i had to lug all my equipment in so i parked my car i brought my arms full and i start walking into the building and as i'm walking into the building towards the door i hear a car coming behind me now i know that the parking lot is several feet behind me so i know that i'm safe and this car is not going to hit me but i felt this overwhelming urge to look at the car and i'm like oh this must be what like the dogs feel like and then i'm like don't look don't look don't look and as soon as i stopped saying don't look what did i do i turned and i looked right it's instinct it's not i'm being a naughty dog it's just instinct so of course if i set my dog up for signals and my dog needs to look behind it to the left and to the right to make sure they're safe knock yourself out of course i'm going to let you do that that's okay you know it's ironic so i think that so go ahead i like you know what you're saying about how you do it so think about this you're in a dog training building with your dog and somebody comes in the door and you just briefly look up at the person and you go back to what you were doing we do that all the time but when our dog does it we lose it right so it's like hey you're supposed

to be watching it's like wait you just did the same thing or the person stops and has a little side conversation and some people actually expect their dog to sit in heel position staring at them i'm like you can't even pay attention for five minutes and now you're upset because after 20 minutes you're harassing your poor dog watch watch no sniff watch watch it's like that's really unreasonable that you're taking mini breaks constantly over the hour and then you're upset with your dog who's like just trying to you know a little mini break here and there it's like it's it's to me if you're asking it of your dog you need to ask it of yourself if your dog is being asked to attend to you you need to be given equal focus and engagement and if you can't at the very least be sympathetic to the plight of the poor dog i said that's what i tell all my students because i make them leave the house and then they're always like that was really hard and i'm like well imagine how your dog feels but it's a good experience for them because it really does it makes them more aware of what we're asking and how challenging that is do you want to weigh in karen and i think putting some predictability into that past that point so let's say you take your dog into a new situation you let them do what i call passive acclimation and there's like okay now now we need to work but if we're training something new or even something that's more difficult i like to go back to something that's really pretty simple eating eating as a behavior is pretty simple for a lot of dogs not so much for every dog but for some dogs and so you know just the uh the predictability of eating on cue uh can help the dog to feel more comfortable and then you apply that to okay this is this is my mat this is where i always feel good and you let them look around while they're on their mat um and then you know i play the two bowl game and it becomes another active it's an activity that requires focus on the game not necessarily engagement to you um i'm allowing the dogs to focus on something um whether it's the environment but be engaged with me periodically uh but when i start adding some of the games like the dopamine box or the uh the two bowl game i want that's going to help the dogs to understand that we're here to do some focus work and at that point in time once i've got a little bit of focus on two bowls um or marker cues where i'm actually tossing a mark a piece of food away and the dog immediately comes back and says hey i'm ready to do that thing again then i know that i have a little bit of

offered engagement and i have with the bowls or the even the mat if i lay down a mat my dog dives for it i know that my dog is probably kind of ready to work uh but then i can even use that predictable visual cue um as part of the process to allow the dog to feel better about itself because it's very familiar so you can go from that uh you know look and and watch and smell and sniff and all that to go okay now are you ready to do a little bit of work and it might just be eating food and then it might be laying on your mat and looking around and then it might be the two bowl game or it might be the box um so those are you know kind of active processes that might help you do some stair stepping into uh into work you know i like i like that way of thinking about it this weekend um i was using cavaletti that way and it was basically if you can't trot through six cavaletti and back you can't focus well enough to do obedience and to me cavaletti is a throwaway behavior in the sense that i don't actually care if you do it poorly so it doesn't matter that much to me and when he could do that i started putting a cookie on the ground for him to stare at while i walked away and again it's a throwaway behavior so it doesn't actually there's no competition where he will be asked to do that but boy did it give me information and from the information i learned that if he can do his cavaletti both directions he actually is going to do all right and then i can go into the next phase and it was a little hard to do because the lessons were 15 minutes each and i was eating up half of my 15 minutes on these um checking behaviors but you know i'm i see the force for the trees if that's how i need to use my 15 minutes that's how i need to use my 15 minutes um and it was a really good decision we had by far and away the best work we've ever had in a seminar because his head was in the game and it's such a simple thing like can you walk through cavaletti and walk back but for him that takes a lot of mental concentration to get it right and um when he could do it i had a dog yeah i'm always encouraging people standardize everything make it predictable right so don't have like first of all have a set warm-up right like a set kind of routine that you go through do it all the time and then please do the same thing when you go to a show don't do something completely different people love to do that and then the dog's like i have no idea what's happening here right just do it the same way do it the same way at home i do it in my front yard and then as i

progress to different places we kind of have a routine and sure sometimes my dog won't get through the whole warm-up or they'll just get through step one or two and that's okay but it's it's the same every time and therefore it's predictable so if i take my dogs to a new location i start my acclimation and then within a few you know after a while when they're more seasoned they're like oh yeah got it they look at me we're doing that thing right i'm like yeah we're doing the thing and they're like okay and then and that's only because i'm a hundred percent consistent and the same every single time i train no matter where i am all the time so let's throw another curveball into this as you guys said a lot of times things depend um but how does arousal impact focus and engagement how how do how should we be factoring that into this conversation all right i'll start again my god this is what this is what your topic is about at the conference this is what my talk is about at the conference um i'm gonna put it right back again to we should think like a human because our dogs are very similar to us right like i love when people's dog it's like lying down it's half asleep it's looking off into space sniffing the ground and they come over and they go tell the dog get up and let's heal and the dog's like hello i was just taking a nap or i was just watching netflix or i was just sitting on the beach and now you want me to go from that instantly to doing an activity that requires an enormous amount of concentration and focus like a really complex behavior right and the dog's like dude i can't i like can't and then people are like oh come on dog you know this no the dog literally can't do it it's in too low of an arousal at that moment it needs to bring its arousal up just like i would if like if it's the end of a long day and i've done a lot and i'm a little fried and i'm like all right i'm gonna give myself an hour to relax and then i'm like oh god i have to do my homework like i can't just pull the commute computer over and do it like i have to get up i have to move around i have to motivate myself okay come on you can do this now and then i can do it so i think it's the same with dogs it's the same if their arousal is too low we need to bring their arousal to an optimal level so that they can then concentrate and focus and learn and be engaged same if the dog's overly aroused if you're like a nervous wreck before you're giving a big presentation or you're super excited you're watching like the super bowl and then someone's like asks you a complex question you're

like i can't deal with this right now i can't focus on that so i always adjust my dog's arousal first before i do anything i adjust their arousal i make sure they're an optimal arousal because if they're not i'm not even going to bother asking them to do anything because i know it's going to be problematic and then we're just going to go down a rabbit hole and that's my fault that's not the dog's fault genese karen either you want to add anything arousal boy when i'm working of course you know behavior cases um i much prefer the over aroused dogs versus the under aroused dogs or i should say the over aroused reactive dogs versus the over aroused shut down dogs because even the shut down dogs are over aroused uh they're not just sleeping they're like shut down they're emotional just like the ones that are barky lungy spinny whatever um and uh case in point dog that i just had this morning um the one that likes to chase the squirrels black mouth kerr thing um guess what he's very over aroused when he uh when she's at the at the door and so i tried doing a scatter not that he really knew the the word yet but i tried putting food on the ground and he says are you kidding i can't eat food on the ground there's a squirrel and i'm like okay well maybe maybe you can't eat that but can you eat this from my hand and he went nope can't do that either i said well here can you chase this and he went you know what if i can't chase mr squirrel and i can chase a cookie absolutely i can do that so i was able to take his high arousal state and somewhat put it under my control and then so i did a few tosses and then he kind of went oh i kind of forgot about mr squirrel because this is lots of fun and now oh wow you've got a cookie in your hand i can do that now and oh now i can actually eat food off the ground so i went from really highly aroused down to lower versus you know i'd like to start you know to make that jump from way high to to right down to low to a scatter but i'd say 50 of the time i can't um i have to actually meet them where they are and then bring them down that way before i actually have a dog that's able to uh to be in that optimal arousal state um and then that might be where i say okay now can you do some of these other skills can you now um you know do the two bowl game or if i throw down a box can you can you offer that behavior um and i'm looking for the same type of engagement that patriot is where i want the dog to go hey i want to do this thing and my things tend to be a little bit different than your things uh that's okay i just want them i don't i want them

just to not want to eat the other thing that would be awesome such a start high high bar there so what i like about the examples you guys gave is that there's a misunderstanding that arousal and stress are the same thing and people tend to see high arousal as unhappy and stressed it might be i mean if somebody tries to break into my house and i call the police and it all gets settled out i'm going to be in high arousal in a stressy arousal unhappy but you know if the right team is winning the super bowl and if i actually cared about that which i don't but we'll just run with it and then i'm i'm all wound up because the super bowl is on that's not that's arousal but it's not unhappy if i win the lottery i'm not unhappy but i still can't give you my social security number right because all of these are happy arousal and i think we have inadvertently in the dog world um we've made it seem like stress and arousal are the same and so that gets us into the well how do we calm dogs down it's like well what is a life worth living if it's always bored like i i don't want to live a calm life i want to live a happy engaged life but that must generate degrees of arousal or like you can't have true happy if you don't have arousal it's true you can't have real fear if you don't have arousal either you're gonna you've got to have it but let's not wash out emotions like i'm all for arousal i love a happy up dog that really wants to push it does come with challenges because it's very easy to tip over into the point where the dog is too high and now you're not really it becomes unfunctional and then you can even have both kind of arousals at the same time on my own dog we have massive issues with over arousal one i think because he's addicted to work so right there that creates so much intensity around it but the second is because the environment overwhelms him you know there's a bunch of people out there we're in a trial he knows we're going to do bite work and where does one start in the other end like which one is the happy emotion generated with arousal pushing and which one is the stress because of the environment and the changes you know and i can't even really really tease those apart but i know they're both at play i can tell by where his focus is is he focusing on me or is he focusing both like i'm so excited i'm trying to look at you because i want to do the thing but at the same time i have to look around because i don't know what's going on out there so um again you know arousal just like focus just like all these things is

complex uh and not good or bad and and it just is and then what are we going to do with it for our circumstance before i knew what it even was which i learned from a behaviors because they know way more than we do um everything the answer to everything was tug more right and it didn't matter so with my one of my first dog who was i apologize to this dog every day of my life he was so adrenalized how this dog did anything is a miracle judges would always look at me and go i don't know how you held that dog together because everything was tug more tug more and for his whole career he had a quote unquote problem that we tried to fix we we said he has a distraction problem in healing because his eyes are flicking every time i heal and therefore i don't have his full attention now mind you he was a pretty good healer but whatever but the point being we never resolved it then one day i'm in my yard with another dog tugging tugging tugging tugging tugging tugging tugging put the dog in heel position start healing and wouldn't you know it dog's eyes are flicking just like tyler's were hmm maybe it wasn't an attention problem turns out my dogs were so over adrenalized they were like struggling to concentrate and they were dipping into anxiety and i think that's a huge problem in my sport and a lot of other sports is like um i want an um a happily aroused dog right i i like to put my dogs a little bit on that edge but um a lot of dogs spill over and then they have anxiety which is not comfortable and then they're making all kinds of errors be it lack of impulse control um you know uh being twitchy like not focusing the way they should and then they get in trouble for that and um but people see they're like oh it's moving fast it's it and they they really confuse the two right and so um i remember when the behaviors tried to get me to understand that my dog needed to be a little calmer and i was like but then my dog's gonna be sucky and that's gonna look terrible and bless her heart she yeah she didn't give up on me right and i finally learned and understood it um and and i talk about it all the time now because it's still i think widely under recognized in sport dogs that line between when your dog is happily aroused and when your dog has been kicked over into anxiety and arousal to where they have trouble functioning then they're getting into trouble for that which makes them more anxious and vocal and the whole thing on the wheels come off and whatever it just gets crazy and we would always get asked to evaluate dogs that are high drive

and uh highly energetic and we would get there and we would see this anxious energy versus a usable energy there really wasn't anything for us to use so to speak um you know there was nothing that they the dog would focus on the dog is you know spinning and barking and and chasing a toy but they but there's nothing that's going to give me uh enough attention to apply to a job because we're looking for working dogs and so a lot of people's perception about that arousal well he's so overly aroused i said yeah but that's not a good thing um this is an anxious arousal versus a usable optimal arousal and we always want to find that that dog that can kind of teeter on that edge right that can go from i don't from from optimal to a little above and back down and you know you're applying a little bit of a break versus the accelerator and we just we just don't want them to get flooded right we don't want them to go all the way over and spill over into over arousal that's not functional i actually teach my dogs cues this is i i still find this super fascinating so i teach my dogs an up cue right increase arousal i teach my dog a calm cue and then i'm constantly adjusting the thermostat for the dog initially right so i'm like okay we're gonna heal so up cue till my dog's like okay let's go and then just a touch a calm all right you're good and this is the fascinating thing so i do this now i learned it on a dog several dogs ago um he was my experiment i taught i didn't he was older not probably five six maybe seven by the time i taught it to him he learned to self-regulate which was super fascinating and um all my dogs since then i just thought oh that was him nope i have dogs those personalities could not possibly be more polar opposites and after a while like if i um you know tug or reinforce my dog put them into heel position and say we're gonna heal my dog will go hold on give me a second self adjust and then go okay i'm good now um i i can work now uh depending on what it is i'm asking them to do right if it's a retrieve they might be like yeah good i can hold myself in a stay long enough i'm good to go but if it's something that where they're like oh this is going to be really you know i really need to focus on this they may sneeze or or yawn or do something to bring themselves down a little bit and then they're like okay yeah it's pretty pretty interesting do you find that karen that dogs learn how to if you teach them that they kind of learn i think most of the dogs i'm working with typically

i i look the thing that i get the most is either a yawn or a shake off and it's almost like they they get worked up they get worked up we help them come down a little bit and then all of a sudden it's like there's the big shake off and then they go okay now i feel better what are we doing and uh so that's when i i'm like okay that we just shook off we probably have more of a dog now and let's let's try that exercise again can your dog eat now um can it do the skill now can it you know can it walk by this other dog without losing its its stuff um you know and normally if i i get that arousal and they they do that adrenaline flush because that's exactly what's happening is they're adrenalized too and it's a matter of getting them to kind of flush out that adrenaline and sometimes that big stress yawn that's that's vocal that that big yawn like that um that's normally it almost comes with a head uh shake as well that's normally when i go okay my dog's gonna start feeling better now because it's kind of allowed itself to come down i honestly haven't other than maybe duration exercises like chin rest duration nose targets or even a settle um asking for something like that to give the dog a a opposite behavior might be considered something that i would teach as kind of a calming cue a duration nose bridge chin breast no uh nose target something like that where the dog has to go yeah that uh that tends to help kind of set the stage for okay now i have a brain now we can do the thing all right denise what do you want to say about arousal i want to say that arousal is the bane of my existence that's what i want to say um i knew and i would also say that have i went through it with a dog some odd years ago and i didn't know what i was looking at i didn't understand it and i did succeed with that dog uh it took a lot of time to understand and a lot of working through and i have often said over time i wish i could do that dog over because she brought so much cool stuff to the table and i thought i had mastered it and now here i am with another dog who's also very cool and i'm like you know what i didn't master this as well as i thought i did and i'm not so sure if i had that first dog again that way it would have been all roses and smooth sailing because i'm like you know once again it gets down to this each dog is an individual and the the different pieces are matter now i do think i figured out with that first dog late in her career how to help her and i got better but it's just interesting that you know they say you get what you need i kind of feel like i got another dog that was

like her but more just more powerful um and i'm i think we're getting better but um it's it's so far from straightforward and the things that worked for her do not work for him um and so kind of the all right this is why i tell people like don't learn things one way learn them from as many people as you can because something that works for one dog and makes a lot of sense can be the best method in the world but just not the right one for your team it could be you it could be the dog it could be both uh and so stay open rather than it didn't work i want you to think about maybe it didn't work at this time maybe it doesn't work for this dog on this day there's so many variables or maybe your dog is at a 10 and this would work great if you can get your dog to a six so maybe look at it again in a couple years maybe there are other techniques that are going to get you from a 10 to an eight learn things as many ways as you can and just keep your mind open you haven't mastered it yet suck in as much information as you can about all of these topics but arousal is an interesting one because it was not common to talk about it even five years ago um i would actually give a lot of credit to fdsa for that one uh coming through people like amy cook and the behavior folks um for really bringing that topic front and center and helping us all understand better about the differences between drive and arousal and being able to look back on our own dogs and go gee i thought that was drive that was actually arousal or i thought that was a drive and it was anxiety and as we refine more but again it's a new topic understanding that arousal can be driven by happy things and unhappy things and what works to modify with one dog is not going to work with the next dog but you know just keep your mind open keep learning keep taking in information and you know until you find a path that works or maybe won't work with the dog you have now because you're you haven't learned enough yet or maybe let's just all acknowledge that some dogs are going to be really really challenging for whatever reason the combination of things they bring to the table so an anxious fearful dog with a lot of arousal that you want to do dog sports you might get there you might not because trying to tease apart the arousal from the anxiety from the drive it's really hard and complicated so you know give yourself a little bit of a break but keep your mind open and learning because just because you think you mastered it for one dog you might get smacked down when the next dog comes along and it

doesn't work so well and that's why i love i love working with all of all of you guys all of the sport people because i learned so much i'm not a sport person anymore used to a little bit uh but i still learn from everybody here at fdsa and and beyond uh and how it can apply to the dogs that i work with which are behavior cases some sport dogs some not or most not but uh i look at that arousal and i've learned so much more about it and been able to apply all the different techniques that denise was talking about every dog may be different same thing with my dogs is you know what i use on this dog i may not use on that dog um and that's why there has to be a more of an integrated approach of okay this works for your dog but it doesn't work for yours so we're going to do this with your dog instead of this dog and and it's it's nice to have that information that's coming from the people that actually utilize arousal in a good way that would be the sport dog people uh at fdsa anyway um that are are really encompassing and embracing the appropriate type of arousal versus the anxious arousal or the uh uh the under the stressed arousal because that's arousal too so uh i'm just very thankful to uh be able to learn from the sport dog people and apply it to the behavior world because like picture was saying she took the behavior stuff and applied it to her sport dog stuff so they're very symbiotic very very much so quick karen can i ask you a quick question sure how many how many times did you go to the rally nationals and compete four okay could we like stop with me oh i don't know i just dabbled you did not you did not just dabble you uh trained your dog to a high level you competed with your dog and you are fluent in many of the conversations around um dog sports even if you are not currently choosing that well and i appreciate that and i want to thank you for that um um for now for golden nationals and for rally nationals so yeah i've been there done that one a few ribbons uh and i appreciate that denise i really do and i have to admit the stuff that i take from sport dogs i look at these i look at i watch patra's dogs and i watch zen and i go oh my god that dog reminds me of this dog that i'm working with you know i look at a dog like zen and i go i hope i don't get a dog like that as a pet dog but guess what i have a client with that dog it's like this is not a fearful dog this is not a dog it's a bolseron this is not a dog that um takes things lightly he is a very serious dog don't freaking touch him he doesn't like that doesn't like that even from his owner

so there has to be extreme obedience to deal with his behavior issues it's not fear guarantee it's not we got to get melissa to have us back to talk about is all reactivity your base we got to have that conversation because it's getting lost man out there not everything is fear and for some reason we don't like that conversation so melissa make a note on that that we need to have a conversation i just did i just wrote it down yeah i think it's an important topic because some dogs are just uh just a handful and uh they're not afraid they're just they're just and a lot of them even and this may be out of the scope of this particular conversation but some of them have learned to do behaviors because it started in fear i can think of some big shaggy dog that we worked with it at the ranch a couple weeks ago um you know she hers may have started out as fear but by god she's doing the things uh because it's fun she loves bouncing and barking at another dog and then she turns around to mom goes hey did you see that wasn't that fun that was cool can we do it again and i'm like no honey we cannot do that again so no um so yeah i mean they can it's called habit she has developed a habit that we need to break and i don't mean break by with punishment by any means it's just a matter of yep we're not going to do that today so yeah whole other conversation i did i wrote it down awesome i got it yeah melissa wrote that down as a question yeah i also just want to say for sport people they tend to be very pigeonholed right so if you have an obedience dog you go to obedience instructors for help and if you have an agility dog you go to agility instructors for help i had a dog that was not wired right so i went to a behaviorist for that dog and i didn't even bother bringing my other dog because my other dog did not have quote unquote behavior issues but that is the person that helped me like without that person's help that my other dog i don't even think would have gotten a notch never mind winning a national like and i learned you know i learned an enormous amount and that taught me i should not limit myself right so i will listen to something by just about anybody i don't care if it's a behaviorist i don't care if they did sport or they didn't do sport i don't care if it's a freestyle person i don't care if it's an agility person i have learned things from all people from all different sports and some of the most important things or impactful things i've learned have been from not been from quote unquote obedience instructors it's been from

other areas so when denise is saying like get all this information she means don't just get it from one source get it from as many different sources as possible because they may just have a different perspective or a different nuance or they may they're just maybe experts on reading a dog right like i mean it doesn't mean that just because i'm an obedience instructor i can't watch a dog in agility and go oh boy that dog is like way over adrenalized right um so i think people just should just be really as open-minded as possible and feel super fortunate that we have the internet and we have mountains of information now obviously it's not all good it might not all be in line with what you're doing but you can tweak it out and i've listened to podcasts and got me i didn't really get anything out of that and i listened to some and got oh that's a clever idea how can i apply that to what i'm doing um so being open-minded and not you know picking someone based on your sport or what ribbons or titles they've gotten does not mean you know um necessarily that they're good or bad or you should not go to them for information get more fluent especially if positive reinforcement is important to you i had a lot of problems with my dog's hold and bark he was coming in and biting not barking and i solved that by asking my friend how do traditional trainers address this and then i listened to what she said and i just reminded myself positive reinforcement is the same as traditional training just three seconds earlier so i took the information i asked myself what's three seconds before they would have corrected the dog and i inserted my alternative and it solved my problem not overnight because they've been going on for a while but just remember that if you have knowledge of traditional training it really is the same you just have to respond three seconds earlier with your intervention which is appropriate for you so instead of three seconds later correct three seconds back cookie right it doesn't actually matter brilliant i love that i'm stealing it run with it run with it hey it saved my butt and i was struggling and sometimes just stepping out of the situation and saying look i i don't have a culture to help me because so few of us are doing this so tell me what the traditional trainers do and i don't know why i didn't think of that sooner you think after 40 years my brain would engage a little more reliably but it does not i still need outsiders to come in and hit me on the head and say why don't you do this we all need help i i need help all the time so believe me and

i'm not embarrassed to ask oh god no somebody asked me they said well would you reach out to a balance trainer for help on something if you if you couldn't solve this i said i don't even get to the balance trainer i got lots of people i can ask i said every single week i am reaching out for help for something i'm not loving and i have lots of people to bounce off i don't care who i'm getting the information from i'm looking at the problem and i'm saying who do i think is most able to help me with this situation but i thought it was so funny that the person assumed i don't ask for help i'm like are you crazy i can't get through a week without asking for help yeah i have to say it's one of my favorite parts of hosting the podcast is sometimes you're talking to somebody about something not related to a training problem you're currently facing and all of a sudden out pops a solution that you wouldn't have thought about within your sport but uh it really does help solve the problem um all right so i know we've kind of talked a little bit about your present your individual presentations for the conference uh throughout but do you mind each kind of giving us the couple second summary here of you know what you're talking about during the conference and maybe who specifically will benefit from attending your talk uh karen you want to start us off sure um i'm doing this thing called active acclimation which is um kind of an intermediate step uh i think for the most part uh with your sport dogs where you would allow them to do passive acclimation which is the explore and sniff and look around or lay there and look around um and i've applied a little bit more of an active approach um because i'm actually taking advantage of dopamine which is released anytime there is movement involved as well as reinforcement or the access to rewards um and so the the actual prop of a mat can immediately trigger that dopamine release same thing with the two bowls same thing with the box uh the words uh the words my my marker cue words again when i say the word scatter my dog goes and my labrador immediately sticks his nose to the ground and my border collie kind of bounces up because he knows that oh my god i get five instead of just one and if i say the word toss to my border collie he's like oh my god yes which direction so i know it has an emotional response carried with it and so i'm going to use those those those things to affect their emotions um and i do this with obviously my behavior cases i've got a couple of sport dogs uh in fact i'm heading out tomorrow uh for nashville to work with a a bunch of

agility people and i don't even do agility uh but it's all behavior type stuff um agility barn hunt is a big issue or a big deal i'm working with a lot of barn hunt dogs right now because guess what waiting in in the blind is really hard for a lot of dogs it's a really big problem and so uh i have to have that emotional mindset that's appropriate for them to be still in the blind versus you know waiting outside the ring for their time frame and if i can start to uh to utilize a little bit more dopamine uh in the dog's brain it's short term and then there there's immediate short term and long term dopamine that builds and i'm hoping to take the skills that i'm teaching and pass it on to you guys so that you can use it as a short term dopamine release that will carry you into the ring so to speak or on the walk uh and then over time it creates that long term dopamine so that when you show them that same picture they go oh yeah i remember this this is cool i feel really good right now so you that care that stays with you that's my thing um mine is uh the as i mentioned earlier the impact um of arousal on focus and engagement so i talk about um how to recognize when your dog is over aroused when your dog is under aroused and when your dog is an optimal arousal um and then i give you a bunch of techniques that can help raise the dog's arousal and a bunch of techniques that can lower the dog's arousal and then um i also teach you um how to teach your dog an up cue so that um and very quickly with just a couple cues you can bring your dog's arousal up and then i also have a calm cue and then very once it's fluent you can very quickly bring your dog's um arousal down which is great because um so i do this in training all the time but it's really helpful in the ring because if my dog starts to get a little nervous or my dog starts to get um a little under aroused i have tools where i can bring the arousal up as needed and i have tools where i can um bring it down or help them just feel more calm um and i can do that very quickly so it's very functional right it doesn't take a lot of time so every time i move from one exercise to the another i utilize that every time i set my dog up um before i say before i tell the judge i'm ready i make sure my dog's arousal is right where i want it um yeah that's pretty much what mine's about mine's about um a very structured and formal plan of preparing your dog for training or competition that starts with how you acclimate your dog to the environment and moves through very long routines uh without necessarily

any reinforcement and it's 2.0 because i put a lot of energy on helping people how to understand what to do when the environment is no longer available for acclimation so i've always talked about that but there are absolutely circumstances like um obedience for example you cannot go in the ring beforehand so i talk about what to do when acclimation is not an option and also what to do if your dog fails so how do you handle that not in competition by the time he gets a competition you got what you got but how to train your dog such that if they struggle what to do next because we don't think we talk enough about handling failure so i work that well into the presentation it is a very dense presentation there's a lot of information you'll want to go back many times and sort of view the charts and squares and what i'm saying there and it's definitely targeted towards the competition uh crew doesn't matter what sport fantastic all right anybody have any final thoughts you kind of want to leave books with you covered a lot of ground we did i just love hanging out with people i do too i miss you i love these and i love the panels the discussion panels when we do that i do too yeah awesome all right well thank you all so much for joining us i appreciate your time thanks thank you melissa thank you melissa absolutely and thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in we'll be back next week don't miss it if you haven't already subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available today's show is brought to you by the fenzy dog sports academy special thanks to denise fenzy for supporting this podcast music provided royalty free by bensound.com the track featured here is called body audio editing provided by chris lang thanks again for tuning in and happy training