에피소드 22: Dr. Stewart Hilliard

So, you also founded the American Ring Federation, which was the first French ring organization, from what I recall, right? Yeah, with a number of other people, but I was instrumental in starting it, yeah. And then, you became the first French ring decoy that got your certification in France? I think that could be the case. I was one of the first. I might have been the first to do it in France, yeah. Pretty impressive stuff, and we're not even halfway through what you've done. At that point, I was still young and very dumb. And, yeah, don't you wish to go back to it? Actually, no. I was really dumb. I much prefer being how I am now. Eventually, you ended up co-authoring the very famous and the first book for Schutzhund, the Schutzhund Theory and Training Methods with Susan Barwick. I think it was 1991. Even today, when I open the book and I go through it, so many years later, the way things were laid out then still makes sense and still gives a very good presentation of what that type of dog training is. You did plenty of seminars around the country for clubs, from law enforcement agencies around the world. You did a lot of the script for canine training systems, if not all of them at one point, including mine, which we're going to get to that because that has a special place that I definitely want to talk about. Man, then you had a bachelor's in psychology early 80s, and then 1990 you went to graduate school. You got your animal behavior and learning degree. Then you kind of disappeared. And then the only way I could find you, and really we will get to this because it's very interesting stories, but then all of a sudden a bunch of different studies came out, which I would like to hear your personal take on them instead of reading them finally. You got a job at the Department of the Defense Military Working Dog Program. You became the Chief of Military Working Dog Course at the Lackland Air Force Base. You were responsible for the testing and all the purchases of the dogs and selection and training courses and pretty much really instrumental in anything Lackland had to do with dogs. I think we can go on, but from here on, I would let you kind of give anything that I missed, and we go from there. Okay, those are, I mean, you have more of a bio on me than I thought you would because I, well, anyway, you have more of a bio on me than I thought you would because I am a United States Air Force employee. What I do need to do is do kind of a standard disclaimer because I'm appearing in my private capacity rather than my official capacity. So I'm an employee of the United States Air Force,

but I'm appearing here in my private capacity. I'm not representing the U.S. government. I may refer to my activities or responsibilities as a civil servant, but my opinions expressed are solely my own, do not imply or constitute United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or U.S. government endorsement. My appearance on this podcast does not signify that the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government approve, endorse, or authorize obedience without conflict or any products or practices associated with my host, Ivan Balabanov. That's just kind of a standard disclaimer that one has to make when one is in government service and has to pay attention to ethical kinds of concerns. So I don't expect there to be much controversy, but that's just a necessary step I have to go through. Yeah, that's kind of roughly my bio. Between 1980 and 1990, I was very busy as an amateur and breaking into professional dog training at breeding as well. And then basically the story is my back started to hurt, right? Because more than anything else, I was what we call now a decoy. Although that's not my favorite expression because it doesn't evoke the interplay of mood and conflict and challenge and aggression and all that kind of stuff in dog training. But that's sort of the expression we use now is decoy. So I did a whole bunch of decoy work. My back started to hurt. I began to realize, hey, I'm not going to be able to do this all my life. I need a professional. And I was very attracted to academia, higher education. I'd become very interested in behavior. So I got myself admitted to the graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas, where I was lucky enough to become the student of a very eminent psychologist named Michael Domian, for whom I have great reverence and respect and also a ton of liking because he's just immense. He's a great guy. At that point, my destiny was to be a college professor someplace, to go on, you know, wear sandals, take long summer sabbaticals and so forth and teach lots of students and do research and write grant proposals to get research money, all that kind of stuff. And what happened instead is at the time that I got my degree, I had two offers. One offer was to go work for a lady named Karen Shuttleworth at the University of Toronto as a postdoc in her laboratory, which would have been fascinating and wonderful. And the other option was to work, to take a contract position at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, which is what's called the schoolhouse for the DOD military working dog program.

And so I received that offer to do some initial psychophysical research with substance detector dogs and also to begin a couple of breeding programs. And for a bunch of personal circumstances, I just decided that I would go for the job at Lackland Air Force Base. That was in 1998. I had been there ever since. I'm what we call a lifer, right? So there's some of us walking around that base who work with dogs, who've been there a long, long time, and we're not going anywhere until we retire. And I'm one of those. And I'm lucky to have the job because I get to spend a lot of time thinking about and working with dogs. And these are working dogs, of course, but because they're practical working dogs, selected, trained, created for, prepared for, real-life responsibilities and tasks, the emphasis is very much different. And I guess, I don't know. That's about all I'd say about it, unless you have any questions. No, I'm curious. I mean, it's two different worlds. Basic dog training and sports dog training and behavioral problem dog training and then going into science. But you pick the behavioral science, which naturally dogs had an influence on you, right? And which one came first to you? Like... The interest in dogs or the interest in behavior? Yeah, yeah. Like how... I had my first dog when I was like 13 years old. And I had another dog when I was 15 or... Actually, maybe younger than that. And I had a relatively... A publication from the 60s about competitive obedience training. And I would read the book on competitive obedience training and then try to train my poor dog. So that was the kind of kid I was. I thought I was going to grow up to be a veterinarian. That's all I wanted to do for many years is become a vet. And then when I was older, I both appreciated the fact that my ability to do things like physics, calculus, and organic chemistry was somewhat limited. And also I was becoming very, very interested in... And those are the prerequisites for vet school. And also I was becoming much more interested in behavior. And then a funny kind of an accident happened when... Actually, not very funny. We were... When I was a very young man, about 19 years of age, I was living with my mother and my brother on Capitol Hill in Denver. And we were the victims of a home invasion before home invasions were fashionable, right? Like an early home invasion. And it scared the crap out of all of us. It scared us so bad that my mom hired an off-duty cop to sort of stay with us a couple nights while our nerves settled down. And so my brother and I spent a lot of time talking to the cop. And at one point I asked him,

so, you know, what's a good way to prevent this kind of thing from happening again? And he said, well, dogs are great. Dogs are great deterrents. You know, I suggest maybe you should look into getting a dog. Which I took as the perfect excuse to kind of encourage and compel my mother to get a German Shepherd dog. And so I wound up doing a little bit of research. And this is back when you took Dog World magazine. Yes. And you flip to the German Shepherd dog breeder section of Dog World magazine. And you look through all the different ads and you start making phone calls and so forth. No internet, no email, nothing like that. You like were sending letters and asking for letters back and stuff like that. And I wound up buying a bitch puppy from Kirchenthal Bloodlines from a guy named Ernest Harper who was an MD in Arkansas. And he basically said, do you have any familiarity with working dogs? I'm like, no. And he said, okay, why don't I send you a female? Because that just might go better. So he sent me a bitch. And to make a long story short, one of the things that went wrong with my early career in training is I got as my first dog a really, really good dog. A super good dog. To make all of my worst and earliest mistakes with. And I remember at one point, one of my earliest mentor was probably Susan Barwick. My next mentor after that was Johannes Graeva, who was a gentleman who emigrated to North America, to the United States with his family in the kind of early 80s. He had been a German police officer in the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen, I think. And he, interestingly enough, wound up having a lot of effect on the law enforcement dogs in North America because what he did was to influence the people who worked at the leadership of the Landeschule für Dunst. I'm sorry, this is my bad German. Landeschule für Dunst. I've forgotten the expression. It's a long, long name for the German police dog school at Nordrhein-Westfalen, where they breed dogs, they train handlers and all that kind of stuff. So he essentially got a couple of American cops named Wendell Knope and Ted Sexton into the Nordrhein-Westfalen program as handlers so they could go through the German program and get certified and so forth. And those guys went on to start something called PSP America, which was one of the forces that introduced German police dog training methods, standardization, professionalism, and education to the North American police dog scene. So that was my guy who wound up being the training director of the Rocky Mountain Schutzland Club as one of the first guys to ever take me, this big, dumb, eager young kid,

and say, here, put this thing on your arm and run that way, right? And don't worry about anything. And so one of the things that Johannes said to me is at one point we're like drinking beer and he says, it's too bad about your bitch. I'm like, what do you mean it's too bad about my bitch? And he said, it's a really good bitch. It's just too bad. And I'm like, what do you mean? He said, well, that you got that dog first. And I didn't really understand that for a lot of years because it was an exceptionally good female dog. And of course, she didn't go too terribly far with me because I didn't know much. I got her Schutzman 3 with decent scores, but bad tracking and all this kind of stuff. She could have had a career. We almost qualified for the Deutschmeisterschaft. I believe whatever the thing that was open to international competition. And so Johannes had gotten something going with the German Shepherd Dog Club of America, a working dog club who was desirous of becoming relevant in working dogs and had gained the privilege of sending dogs to this championship. And so at one point I competed in the qualification trial with a bunch of other people, including Johannes, and got myself whistled off of the track as a result of not believing my dog that I'd spent all summer getting ready and told me the truth and I didn't believe her. And the judge whistled me off in an instant. And then everybody at the trial that day came up to me at some point during the trial to tell me what an idiot they thought I was, like how nice my dog was and how dumb I was. So anyway, that was my female dog. And then I went on to see... Let me stop you here because this is something I always come back to. It happens quite often where somebody gets a dog and it's that great first dog. It's definitely not an exception. Like, it happens. And it makes me sometimes think, and I want to hear your thoughts on this, how much do you think the unexperience of the owner contributes to promote the excellent dog to excel even though there is no structure, so to speak, and correct training? What are your thoughts on this? Because it happens often, quite often, to where a first-time handler ends up with a super dog. And then it's very difficult for them to get that next one. Have you thought of that? I haven't thought of it in terms of a frequent phenomenon, but I have wondered. So I guess my take on it would be this. There are some of us who are very adept at puppy-bearing and puppy development and to build a sort of a self-confident, powerful, drivey, stress-resistant dog, right, with willingness and commitment and all that good stuff. And then there are others of us

who are good at taking that dog once it's formed and creating elaborate routines of behavior and high performance and all that kind of stuff. And then the people who are exceptional are the ones who can do both at the same time. And sometimes it's difficult to predict who will be best at both tasks. And sometimes it's difficult to predict who will be able to do both. I've seen some really expert trainers who struggled to rear good puppies and essentially farmed it out to other people. Like, here, raise my puppy for me because I'll mess it up. Please take care of it for me. And then once the dog is ready to go, I'll train the dog. I feel confident in my ability to do that. So I guess that's the extent of my thoughts on it. Yeah, yeah. That's like, I have that same thing. Sometimes I'm like, no, I wish I can give you a puppy to raise for me because whatever you're doing, your dog believes it's, it rules the world. And, and... We have a breeding program at LACA. Yeah, so, so back to, back to my job for the Air Force. So you, you alluded to the roles that I played at the, what's called the 341st Training Squadron at Lackland Air Force Base, the quote unquote schoolhouse. And it's a, it's a large organization, large dog training organization that trains handlers, procures dogs, trains the dogs, and gives the dogs their initial qualification that says that they're sufficiently well trained to go to the field. And sometimes people, sometimes people get it wrong and they think that I ran the whole place. Like I'm in India, not a chief, but, but, and always have been. But what I, what I have done at various points is been the, the section or the flight chief of the different offices of the squadron that ran procurement or ran breeding. That's what I do right now as I direct the breeding program or ran the dog training school and so forth. So at various points, I, I have played important roles for the overall functioning of the squadron, but it's a big team. There's a lot of stuff going on. There are a lot of people that are important. I'm just one of them. Right? Got it. Got it. If we go back to Johannes, because he was a, I mean, he was very influential also in the whole United Schutzhund clubs of America at the time. I don't know if he still does anything, but. He, he actually, he is living in Costa Rica. Okay. With, I think his second wife. He's still a German shepherd man. He's still actively breeding dogs. And, and it was kind of, I didn't speak to him, but he and I emailed back and forth a little bit about, about a year ago or so. And he's still like carrying the flame, right? Like he's still carrying the torch because what Johannes was about

was the, he was a really traditional German shepherd dog club of Germany, German shepherd man, right? Which means he wanted a beautiful dog that, that was in accord with the standard. And he also wanted the dog to have character, which is saying a lot, right? That's not easy. And that was what he really admired. And I think he's still doing that exact same thing. So when I talked to him, he told me that they just had a litter on the ground, that the litter was a repeat of a bunch of dogs that were like a year and a half old or two years old or something like that. And that the dogs in the previous litter were showing good character and succeeding in training and all that kind of stuff. And I'm sure that at the same time, the dogs are going for their confirmation ratings and the Kürklasse and, and the whole deal. Like he's, he's still doing his thing. He's still a German shepherd man in the traditional mold trying to build a complete dog. Wow. Do you think the, what was it called back then? because we had the, we had the Schutzhund trial together with the police trials. Was it DPO or something like this? Yeah, I think, I think it was DPO. Something. Was that part of, was he part of this? How did that start? Cause that, like this is before the time I came. When I came to the States, I already, this was already in place. And it was a very cool thing to have the police and the sport people training and competing on the same platform. I'm talking here about something I'm not all that knowledgeable about. If we had like Kevin Sheldahl or somebody like that on here, he could, he could tell us all about it. Right. But as I understood it, DPO was the international sport equivalent of IPO, which was the international form of Schutzhund, right? And, but it was meant for serving police officers and their dogs, right? Serving handler dog teams from police with rules that were mostly mapped straight on to IPO with some differences for police dogs. That's my understanding. And they did indeed, like, I think if there were major championships, there would be an IPO portion of the championship. And then also at some of them, a DPO portion of the championship. Yeah. And so you'd be like on the podium, there'd be these cats up there in their duty uniforms with their dogs, right? Receiving their, it was, it was amazing time, their trophies. I wish, I wish somehow this gets, we get back to this because, um, it's, it's the same, the same concepts and we have the same, I mean, we're looking to create and maintain the same type of dogs, I think. Um, I'm not sure. Do you think that, so I have been, you alluded to how I've been under the radar and where, where sport work is concerned, I've been very much

under the radar because I've been in a different world of professional, professional working dogs, right? And so, and also I'm not really, I don't do social media, I'm not on the internet, I kind of don't know what's going on, but I, I do hear some rumblings. So I hear about changes in the rules, changes in emphasis, um, the, the, what they call the helper in, in German, in German parlance, uh, not being allowed to vocalize at the dog, not being allowed to, um, use tickets on the dog, also other changes in, in emphasis combined with a shift towards much more sophisticated training, which functions in most cases to reduce the stress on the dogs. Do you think over the last 30 years or so, that's produced a different kind of working dog than we had in the old days? I, I, you know, like I could go, I could take either side on this, but, um, I, for sure, we are changing and I don't think we're changing for the better, uh, the dog sports and, I'm sure, I, I know, this is also, I don't know how is it for you guys in the army, but, um, sport, protection sports are under a lot of pressure lately, um, and lately, I mean, at least for 15 years, progressively, it's becoming more and more problematic to, and I think, um, all the big organizations that are responsible to educate and promote and, and, and present the sport as something valuable are failing to do that, so, um, yeah, the pressure is being, uh, really just very progressively increasing to where it becomes really watered down, especially, I mean, think of how many times when, when the name started to change and everybody's like, well, what is going on? Like, how many names we went through until right now we have IGP, which who knows how long that's gonna stay for. I'm not really hooked in well enough to understand the changes in rules and emphasis and, and positioning that were involved in those changes of name, but I do know, do know, they're not just changes of name, right? They're, they're policy changes that are signaled by a change in name. Correct. Um, and, and the, the organizations, of course, they want to, uh, they're, they're fundamentally, you know, except for, well, even DVG, but, but, fundamentally, dog sport began as a selection mechanism to try to ensure the, the suitability of dogs that were used for breeding, a way of, at least, Schultz, in any way, a way of trying to ensure that the best dogs were used to produce the next generation of dogs. Right. And, and most of us, we still have that a little bit that same mentality. It's a competition. We get involved in training, all that kind of stuff, you know, but, but ultimately the idea is it's an imperfect idea, right? Because it's not always the dog with strongest character. We all know that winds up on the podium with, with the, the, the trophy.

But in principle, what competition does is select out the best dogs, um, in actual practice, not so sure, but the, the organizations, that's kind of the, you know, that's the agenda is to assure the future of the breeds and the future of the sports. And they're under such pressure that I think sometimes they are forced to take a middle course where they concede something like, okay, it's not that important that the decoy be allowed to vocalize at the dog. And if it gives everybody the wrong idea that this sport is about violence between a man and a dog, okay, we can give that up to try to ensure the other 96% of our sport remains intact and we can continue on. And the question is at what point that when you make those concessions, at what point you start to lose really important aspects of the original intent and design of the sports. dogs, and I've talked recently with Michael Ellis some about, because Michael and I have occasional sort of heart-to-hearts about the very, very difficult business of breeding dogs. And one of us always brings up the specter of what Michael calls, where Mowing is concerned, golden retrievers that bite, right? So these are dogs who are fully equipped with vigorous drive. They innately show really desirable behaviors like biting like this, calmness, durability, under control, all that kind of stuff. but they may also be lacking some things. And what they, what they lack for me is the, the emphasis in, in dog sport when I first started was the Schutzhund as a protection dog, right? The idea was that you were actually conducting an assessment on the field that had some relevance to preserving the dog as an agent of personal protection or patrol or police dogs or whatever. And over the years as training has become ever more sophisticated as the technical level of more and more and more trainers have become extraordinarily high the, the selection has been both in rule and emphasis and also in the performances on the field. It's my impression that the selection has been away from the dogs with the capacity to display real aggression in favor of predatory behavior, right? Yeah. And also, as I understand it, in recent years, there's been a shift back in the rules where there's kind of a newfound concentration on trying to recover some of the, what you might almost call ethological balance of the behavior displayed on the field by the average high-performing dog. Can this dog show engagement with the person animating the bite equipment as well, like social competition with that person as well as engagement with the equipment, right? And it's my impression that, that some trainers out there are doing really creative things about the control of mood using context and cue to, as in the old days, teach the dog

to make very fluent transitions in mood between aggression and predatory behavior. Yeah. Well, you're spot on. Although, of course, in back in the days, it was much more primitive, and primitive has its place, I think, too, because it's, it's, it goes very deep into the roots of the natural instinct and these transitions to where the skillful training of today can manipulate and can mask and, today, we can create a picture that it's very difficult for a judge to evaluate and compare two dogs on the field and to justify why they will give certain points to the one dog and not to the other dog. And, quite often, they, the judges can be very wrong because, just because the pictures are so close, you know, like, I give some analogies of this, you know, like, if I, if I get into some yoga position and, but there is a real yogi next to me in the same position, I'm going to be suffering and begging to end where he doesn't, time is not a factor to him, but we look alike. And, and I think, um, yeah, the topography is the same. Correct. But the content is different. Correct. And it can be difficult to see the content. It is becoming dramatically difficult because of the skillful training and isolating and, and focusing on the details that are important to, to amplify. But, they don't come from within. They come as a select, not even selected, but a, a made-up behavior. It's not a, it's not something, like, we can have a dog that has, really lacks confidence and we can train him to look as he rules the field. Yeah. Unless, unless he's really tested. And this becomes problem. And of course, it's, because the dog is so well constructed, it's very difficult to find a way to test him that he's not prepared for, right? Yes. So, it's, it's, in, in the old days, we were in sophisticated enough, primitive enough, that it was relatively easy to put the dog in difficulty to see how he behaved in difficulty. Now, if you... And sometimes we put it in difficulty because we were, we just didn't know better. It wasn't even on purpose. It just happened accidentally, right? Because we were bad dog trainers. Exactly. It would just happen accidentally. Or we were bad decoys or whatever. But, so, these days, I think I'm more familiar with the picture that you see when you appraise or evaluate dogs on the open market for sale as, as, as practical working dogs. I'm more acquainted with that than with the business of evaluating dogs that are more highly trained and are actually kind of veteran, you know, trained working dogs. But, on the, on the dog business side, the people who rear dogs, most commonly in Eastern Europe, have become so proficient and so good at, at making the dogs impervious and impregnable, regardless of what, to testing, regardless of what their innate gifts are, that it can

be extremely difficult to find a situation in which you can crack the dog open a little bit and look past his conditioning and preparation to see who he really is. Very much the same thing, yes, that's, that's so well said. And so, so tell me, I mean, sometimes it takes quite a bit of time for, to realize that that dog is not who you thought he is. Like, like you, you would go to the vendors and you will select and you will test and you will take the dog and little by little things get exposed. How often that happens? The most important dynamic for me, and I think that most people in the dog market or the practical working dog realm would agree that the most common finding, which is kind of a, kind of a type 2 error, right? Like you wind up keeping a dog that you shouldn't have kept because the dog doesn't quite meet your needs. The, the most common finding or cause of that is not that you find out that the dog's drive wasn't as good as you thought it was, or you find out that the dog's environmental behavior wasn't as good as you thought it was. So certainly that happens. But the most common and pervasive and more significant effect is that we are very often buying dogs who have very little experience learning from a human tutor. Like they haven't established normal relationships with, with handlers such that when their behavior is interrupted or when they experience some stress in the course of training that they then recover and persist and so forth. So the picture can be dogs that appear to be very, very rugged under control, difficult to control, and then when you find a way to control the dog, you find that actually you're dealing with a very, very sensitive animal. And it's difficult to, it is easy to accidentally degrade the quality of the dog with your training because you didn't realize the picture he presented was of a dog that's hard to control and insensitive to his handler. Well, that's because he's not paying attention to his handler. When he starts paying attention to his handler, he can turn out to be very, very sensitive indeed, and that can happen very rapidly with effects that are then difficult to recover from. I think, I think there is this world movement that, and I'm not sure who is behind it. I don't think it's Peter. I mean, I'm sure animal rights have something to do with it, but I think it's much more wider than that. Don't believe that protection sports... society has changed, right? So one thing, I just finished watching your podcast last night in which you concentrated mostly on empirical results of studies having to do with the suppression of behavior, of undesirable behavior with positive punishment, aversive control, all that kind of stuff, and I was actually surprised how many papers that you could find because... They are hidden. They are not easy to find anymore.

societal attitudes through the developed world, what we might call the Western world, have changed enough in your and my lifetime that they have changed the kind of science that one can easily do. So, and I'm not advocating for the ruthless exploitation of animals. I'm not saying, oh, we can't do the science we want to do now because everyone's concerned about the animals. I'm concerned about the animals too, but it's just a basic fact that if you look back at a bunch of the seminal canon, that's C-A-N-O-N, the seminal literature about the way that animals respond to stressful circumstances and avoid harm and all that kind of stuff through learning, etc., a lot of that literature is very old. It comes from the 50s and the 60s and sometimes the 70s. So I was surprised at how you were able to find a lot of references to what looked like controlled empirical studies of relatively recent vintage because now, in order to do any kind of research in which you're going to subject animals to discomfort or stress, you have to go through an institutional animal care and use committee and you have to meet a lot of standards and concerns. The biggest one being is the question that you're addressing of sufficient importance that we as a society are justified in stressing or making uncomfortable or harming the welfare of other creatures in order to answer this question. And I am not saying that is a bad thing. That is a good thing. But one of the disadvantages is that it leaves us with a comparative paucity of recent good empirical information about the way that animals interact with aversive circumstances, right? So overall, things have changed tremendously. My attitude personally has changed tremendously. The kind of things that I would accept as normal in dog training in the 80s are absolutely unacceptable to me now. And that's across the board, right? And that's a good thing. That is a good thing. But there are unintended consequences. So one of them is the one that we're talking about, is that as we get more and more sophisticated at shaping and constructing behavioral repertoires and all that kind of stuff, we can become better and better at counterfeiting what many of us would agree is the original goal of selective working dog breeding, which is to produce animals of sufficient character, spelled with K, right? I'm using that word instead of temperament, because temperament is a little bit more of an English language kind of thing for, you know, what is the dog's personality like? And it's a little bit non-evaluated, right? So if I say a dog has a lot of personality, it doesn't mean anything, right? If I say a dog has a lot of character, that is a little closer to the original European use of the word to say that the dog represents aspects of behavior

which, for good or for ill, map onto some of the aspects of behavior that we find admirable in human beings, like steadfastness, persistence, courage, if you will, ability to bear up under stress, all that kind of stuff. So most of us, particularly those who started in the old days, we think of the dogs in terms of character. And it could be the case that our overall rapidly increasing sophistication in creating elaborate behavioral repertoires can be masking the loss of the original qualities in the dogs that we prize so much. This is where the, the, there is, there is this wider community that don't want, don't understand, and are very much against protection sports. and they're doing it in a very smart way, but they do want to get rid of all together with any sport that has a protection element in it, which I don't think they're going to stop there. If this happens, I'm sure agility will be next and then any dog sports will get affected gradually. And the way they do it is by increments. They don't say, well, on January 24, we're going to ban IGP. No, they're doing it by increments to where it's like, well, we're going to change the rule. Yes, you're not going to like it, but you still can play your game. so there is not this big uproar and protest. There is a scientific word for this kind of mind fuck, you know. It's a political thing, and it's little by little. They take your rights to where you feel like, okay, we can live with that. We can live with that. Kind of like what was that, and I don't think how real that test was with a boiling frog, you know, where they, so it's a very similar strategy what they are doing to us. But this is where we're going, and unfortunately, everybody that is in the higher positions, they don't defend the sport. They are happy to be there. I know I'm going to get a lot of hate for what I'm saying, and maybe some point deductions on the field, but I have to say what I feel, and I wish that the people that are elected in those positions, like working dog commissions and executive boards of different sport clubs, that they take care of educating and standing the ground to protect the sports, because these sports give a purpose and a very special meaning for a dog, that dogs like to challenge themselves. Like, you want to punch a sandbag and see how good you are. You want to test yourself, and you're successful, and then there is challenges. Like, I would have any 14, 15-year three-legged blind dog that's been doing protection work. They hear that whip or they smell the sleeve, and they get all like, they want to do it. They cannot walk. They're crawling, but they want to do it. And it's not because they're brainwashed. It's a very,

it's a, as close as nature feeling, because dogs are so domesticated. We can walk them on a flexi around the block all day long, and we can talk about enrichment, and we can do all positive reinforcement. I don't think dogs want that kind of life. It's, there is no meaning in it. I don't, I don't know, because I don't know what's in a dog's head, right? But, but what I do know is what interests me about dogs is dog behavior. And I, I like to see dogs expressing the full spectrum of their canine behavior, right? Within the limits of safety and law and all that other kind of stuff, because obviously dogs cannot exist safely in a society in which they follow every impulse they have. That's the importance of training, right? But what I find compelling about dogs is to watch them engaging in dog-like behaviors. So what I see during a protection performance, or a tracking performance, or a detector dog performance, is a dog being very, very dog-like, right? And, and obedience is a little bit of an outlier, because obedience is not very dog-like. These are very, very artificial behaviors, and that's the difficulty of it, is, is learning to take the dog's motivations, his dog-like behaviors, and transmute them, put them in the service of this elaborate repertoire of artificial behaviors behaviors that, that wind up constituting a healing routine, and a, uh, uh, a come four, and a finish to heal, and all that other kind of stuff. So, um, it, it's clear, like, I, I personally do not like to own a dog that is professed, that is profoundly aggressive to people. that's, that's not what I want to have, um, because I don't care for the responsibility, and I don't think that I need it. Um, so, to the extent that society is concerned that the continued existence of protection in sports will provide for the continued production and existence in our, in our, our communities of aggressive dogs, you know, that's, that's kind of a, that's kind of a, of a valid concern. But the point is that the sports of which we're aware, they do not select for uncontrolled, indiscriminate, fear-based aggression. They select for the balanced dog, the social dog, the dog that is socially neutral, uh, and also the dog that can support training so that all its impulses come very much under stimulus control of cues provided by the ham, right? So, so if, if you ask me, I would say that compatibility of dogs with vital canine behaviors and society are promoted by the existence of dog sports and the behavioral technologies that are spawned by dog sports and much less promoted by a population of dogs that are regarded as pets or ornaments and, and appendages to, to, to normal life. So, so basically what I'm saying is

I think, uh, dogs that are participants in dog sports make the best and the safest and the safest citizens despite the fact that they possess vital dog-like behavior like aggression in some very specific circumstances, strong predatory behavior in very specific circumstances, et cetera. I think they make better citizens rather than, uh, uh, lesser citizens. Super point. Yeah, like I, I cannot agree more with that. Um, I mean, and especially working, spending time in shelters and working with aggression dogs and I know you did that in your previous life. Um, um, but there should be, instead of these blank statements and legislations, even, even some statistics can show what you just said. Um, those that are in a sport, they have an outlet. They, they become in a way like a kid that goes in the gym and train jiu-jitsu. You know, that's exactly what it is. You, you can, you can liken it to the analogy of, um, one of, one of the approaches to excessive barking and noise making on the part of your average pet dog is to first teach the dog to bark on cue, then teach the dog when not to bark. In other words, to put vocalization, under stimulus control, and then limit its generalization to inappropriate circumstances, right? Put it under strong stimulus control so it only shows up when you want. Well, in a way, one of the effects of taking your dog to a dog club a couple, three times a week, is that the dog learns the appropriate context and its behavior, any, any behavior that could result in harm to people, other dogs, livestock, wild animals, comes under strong and narrow stimulus control of cues provided by the training setting at a dog club, right? So in, in a way, you can say, and this is one of the problems, this is one of the technical challenges in, in training dogs for practical bite work, is that it can be said in, in a, in a defensible way, it can be said that the more bite work I do in a structured setting with sleeves and suits and stuff like that, the less likely my dog is to bite somebody for real. Right? A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Because those kinds of behaviors come under, uh, come under the stimulus control of cues provided by equipment and a bunch of stuff that, that is not featured in normal interactions and settings. Yes. If we gather some history of, uh, any dog with, with aggression problems or, or even separation anxiety, any, anything that it's, it basically, it's a typically not a pathological problem. It's a good dog that doesn't have any outlet and it becomes a problem and a nuisance and in a lot of times danger to society. simply because it's a restraint from being and allowing just, just as you said, to, to display and satisfy those innate drives

and genetics that it comes programmed with. The number of dogs that I've encountered, uh, in many, many years that I have come to the conclusion were aberrant in behavior, like endogenously aberrant in behavior, that whatever disordered or challenging or undesirable behaviors they showed were not the products of, of, um, reinforcement history and so forth. The number of dogs that I thought were crazy that I've encountered disordered in their behavior in a way that could not be adequately addressed by good training, good change of, of environment, circumstances like that is very, very small. Yes. Yes. I think I encounter more people I thought were nuts than dogs that I thought were nuts. Most of the time it's just dogs that have got the wrong reinforcement histories and are, um, existing in the wrong, uh, social and physical environments. But these are the conversation that we, we have to have and we have to, uh, um, we have to educate and, and, and, and, you know, like right now, I'm, I'm not sure how, if you heard, but the latest thing in IGP, Schutzhorn, IPO, and so on, the latest thing that the rule change was removing the stick hit altogether. Uh, yeah, I heard something about that. Right. So that happened January 1st. Strangely enough, it wasn't even by pressure of, of some animal rights organization. They just, uh, uh, the working dog commission, well, in, in Austria, for example, or Switzerland, it is against the law. But in other countries, it's not. So if we have a competition in Austria, we can respect their law and not use a stick hit. But that doesn't mean that we should have taken it all away. This is like boxing, like shadow boxing instead of actually boxing. You cannot, at some point, right now, when you threaten a dog with a stick, they have experienced a stick hit, so you can kind of play with their mind. But in the next generation, you will have dogs that they're like, yeah, you're just shadow boxing. That doesn't, I'm not impressed. I'm not threatened. I don't need to respond in the way I typically would. I don't consider that as a threat anymore. This is a game changer in breeding, in, in selection, in training. And ultimately, we will have dogs that we will selectively continue to breed, now weaker dogs, that will end up having problems, that will end up having, like when I worked in the early 90s at the SPCA in San Francisco, there was not one single dog for my five years in there, there was a protection sport dog that ended up in the shelter. Not one. We had a lot of nutcases, including German Shepherd sometimes, but not that often. But we've never had a dog that was, end up in the shelter because of protection sports.

There are epidemiological studies of dog bites, right? Like morbidity of dog bites, what the risks are, correlations with breed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm not aware if anybody's looked at the comparative risks of trained dogs, of working dog breeds versus just regular old dogs. But I'd be quite surprised if many serious and inappropriate dog bites were attributed in non-accidental contexts taking place at dog clubs and stuff like that, were attributed to trained sport dogs. This kind of statistics, this kind of studies will be very beneficial to be done. And hopefully somebody, maybe somebody is listening to our conversation right now. Maybe, maybe it's some of the executive boards of different places of dog sport communities and FCI. And, and take it seriously to, to make that move and become proactive. Where the stick hits, I'm sorry if you interrupted you. Where the sticks, where the stick hits are concerned, it's, it's an interesting topic to consider, right? So we, we might liken the stick hits to the kind of conflict that human, the kind of contact that human athletes experience in vigorous sports like jujitsu and football and stuff like that. There are many ethical concerns right now surrounding the voluntary, more or less voluntary exposure to the cerebral trauma of football players and other kinds of athletes as a result of, of choosing to participate in their sports. But the, the theme essentially is the human beings have the choice, right? Like they can, they can choose to engage in those activities or not. And then the question is, could a stick it be, have any potential for the kind of harm to a dog that strong contact in human sports might? And then also does, does the dog have free will? Does the dog have the choice to say, Hey, if I find being threatened and then struck with the stick on the dorsal muscles on each side of my spine in a non harmful way, if, if I find that stressful enough, do I have the choice to not go down there and bite and declare myself to not be a good subject for this training? So I'll never be trained again and I'll never be called upon to do this again. I don't really know the answers to these questions, but what I would do, what I would say is that for all the time that I participated in dog sport, I never saw, you know, using, using a stick in the manner of Schultzlin or IPO. I never saw a dog that I thought was, um, seriously psychologically or physically injured by stick heads. Um, and the stick heads did serve the purpose of assessing the dog's resistance to stress while he was carried out in the particular of duty, the particular duty of contending with a

human being in, in a trained way, apprehending even being a protected human being in the way that he was trained to do. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and the moment a dog showed, I wouldn't even say the moment they start to question and they let go. Typically this is where the routine ends. And this is the dog's choice. It says, I don't like to do that. And there is nothing we can do to make that dog do. I mean, we know better that there is dogs that like it and dogs that don't. So it's a very, to me, a clear cut to say, well, yeah, we, we did the training, we tried, but the dog doesn't like to do it clearly. Yeah. And that's where it ends. It's very, it's very rare. I think to see a dog, uh, become unsteady under the stick in trial. And the reason is that in training, the dogs have been prepared with the stick. And if they showed in training reluctance or aversion to the challenge with the stick, well, the person owned that dog got themselves on another dog to train who willingly went under the stick and stood there for it and loved it. Right. And then there's the other issue of, um, of the effective mood and context. Right. So if, if I am, if I'm eating breakfast, you know, eating breakfast cereal first thing in the morning and you offer to knock me flat on the floor and ask me if that, if that'll be positive, I'll say, no, it won't be at all positive because I'm not physiologically prepared for it. On the other hand, if you catch me in another circumstance that is appropriate for arousal and physical, physical contact, then I'll declare that activity fun. And part of that is the counter conditioning of vigorous contacts that, that might be construed as aversive in one context, but they're counter conditioned by positive reinforcers so that their meaning is changed. Right. So you can get knocked down in football and get up and go, Ooh, that was a good hit. That felt kind of good to get knocked down. Right. There is something about experiencing aversive and overcoming it that, that, um, you kind of search for it. You know, um, even, even if you are afraid, you still feel like you want to explore it. There is some force in you that's trying to. That's very, that's very much been my personal journey is, is, uh, learning to engage in athletic pursuits. That involve discomfort, physiological challenge, and beginning to crave those pursuits and need those pursuits. So I would say I would say I would say I would say I would say I would as an athlete, modest athlete, though I was, and also as a human being who will be called upon in the course of his life to endure stress, pain, discomfort, difficulty, the knowledge about my

ability to do those things that has come from voluntarily engaging in stressful, challenging activities, and learning what I could from those experiences has been invaluable to me as a human being. Now, I don't know what's going on in the dog's mind, right? I don't know if he has the same sort of adrenaline high that I have after I engage in really, really profoundly challenging physical training. I don't know. But what I do know is that the dog gravitates again and again to the opportunity to engage in that kind of behavior. And that is, it's a little bit of a circular definition of reinforcement, but that is kind of the definition of reinforcement, right? Very true. This is, you know how we talk about the dogs having a choice, and I guess an argument will be that, well, we are breeding them, we're selecting them to not have that choice. And that is not correct, because when we look at pit bulls and ring fights, these dogs are truly selected to, even when they know they're weak and they're going to lose the fight, they don't have a flight instinct. They're there, they're just in there, and they will, it's not a courage per se. It's like they are, I would speculate to say that, yes, they're afraid, they don't want to, but they don't, it's selected out of their repertoire to check out. And on top of that, they're in closed ring to where they don't have a choice but to engage in a fight. If you're saying that dogs that are bred, selected, and prepared to fight other dogs are victims of the people who make that possible, I couldn't agree more. And part of the victimization is creating dogs with behavior and then shaping that behavior such that they are committed to a path from which they cannot depart. And the better a dog it is, the more committed the dog is to that path from which they cannot depart. And it's a sad, sad to see. And I, again, I've... It's tragic, it's revolting. I've, back when I was in San Francisco in the 90s, they used to have these conferences of fighting and we used to go and bust them with the cops and the animal care and so on. But what I was going with this is, in protection sports, you have an open field and you basically say, hey, do you want to engage in a fight? And the dog says, I don't want to. Okay, game over. Nobody, you're not in the fight ring. You have a choice. And that selection normally takes place long, long before the trial field. That selection takes place when the dog is four months old, five months old, eight months old. When you're first asking the dog, do you have the capacity and the pleasure in engaging in this vigorous competition

with a decoy for possession of an object or mastery of a situation? And will you gravitate again and again back to that place, that opportunity? And also, will you show steadfastness in so doing or will you show stress? And if you show stress, then you will not be a good working dog for competition because the judges are trained to specifically look for stress and go, that's not what we want to see on the trial field. We do not want to see on the trial field a dog who's an unwilling participant in this activity. And that's from the genetic point and from training point of view. So, anything that, any kind of training that, you know, how we talked about the 80s. I mean, you were here. I was in Eastern Europe. But we did, I'm sure we did identical things. Even though there was no internet, it was a very straightforward, primitive kind of training. Then we evolved, which is an interesting thing to talk. I'm going to kind of even sidestep here. Because, you know, by the time I wrote my book, I think it was at least 10 years after you did, and I was talking about negative punishment. And, I mean, we all jumped on that wagon of how much can we do with positive reinforcement only. And, I remember, for those of you guys that don't know, like, Stuart helped me tremendously with the script of my DVDs that I did before. You know, but what you did that I haven't had a chance to tell you, as you were asking me questions and trying to put everything as a script, you really made me want to learn animal behavior and the science approach to it. And so, when you're talking about that video and how that presentation of YouTube, all that came from this time in the early 2000s, when you and I were having endless conversations on the phone, and you would throw some terminology. And I'm like, and then you knew that I don't get it. So, then you had to go around it and explain it to me in a bunch of different ways. And I'm like, okay, yeah, that clicks. And that really pushed me to where, from that point on, like, understanding the scientific part of how dogs learn, what is important. It just preoccupied, became an obsession. And, but we were at that time, and I don't know if you will remember this, but I was talking how I claimed that I can train a dog to do protection sports without ever having to use electric collar. And I was, I remember saying even to Doug and you, like, we can put electric collar out of business. But then, from the one extreme going to the other extreme, then I had to return back a little bit. Because I started to find out that if we go all the way into that no force paradigm,

reaches a point where it's a little bit more challenging as a trainer to bring quicker clarity in what you want to do. Meaning, like, being the ability to even verbally say, hey, you're going on the wrong path. Makes, brings clarity and speeds up any training problem. And I think a lot of us went, we all got excited. I had that podcast with Michael last year. We were talking about this, how we kind of all jumped on it. But we had to come back and not, people think that we're coming back to a little bit more, and I wouldn't call myself balanced trainers because that's a very, I think it has a lot of bad luggage with it. But it's not because of points. What people think is, well, you're just using this kind of stuff because of competition and because you want to. It's because it's about you, not about the dog. And that's not the case. It's really just being able to say, hey, you're on the wrong path, buddy. I'm helping you. It brings clarity in training. It makes training much, much better. Because any training, there is a puzzle to it, right? When we're presenting the dog with some task. And for that task, if we decide what we're going to do, errorless learning. And we're going to just focus on positive reinforcement and we're going to ignore all this. I don't believe that the dogs, if they have a choice, they will choose that route. Especially when they have a motivation to reach an end goal. When you and I started training dogs, pretty much it was very heavily aversive training. In any shade of it, right? Then we shifted. Karen Pryor came along. We started to think a little bit different. We started to become more aware of what we can accomplish with better approaching training and teaching. And we realized that a lot of the force that was used in the past really wasn't needed. Then we ended up going further and further to where, well, how much force, how much aversive can we just eliminate it all together? Can we train dog without telling the dog a verbal no? Which would be a conditioned punisher. But to have a no to be a conditioned punisher, obviously we have to condition it. What I'm trying to say is that I went that way, but then I had to come back to the opportunity to tell my dog that there is a trial and error and there is a good and bad. Okay, so what you're saying is essentially that by having conditioned cues that were conditioned by aversives, it gave you a whole other set of tools to convey to the dog information about the contingencies between its behavior and outcomes and allowed you to guide the dog with much more information to the criterion behavior.

And that you think, given the choice of continuing to engage in trial and error in a world in which the only cues are about the availability of reward or the non-availability of reward, that you think dogs maybe would choose an environment that had more information, even though there were some aversives. And there's actually, there's a little bit, I don't know, it might be a little orthogonal to that point, but there is some data that speaks to some extent to that, which is that in laboratories, animal subjects can be shown to choose to make instrumental choices to be exposed to aversives that are signaled, more intense aversives that are signaled, as opposed to less intense aversives that are unsignaled. So that the, the, whatever the hedonic value to the animal of the aversive is greatly affected by the animal's foreknowledge, such that, that we prefer events that we can predict, that are predicted by information that were given by the environment, over events that we can't predict, even when the events that we can predict are, are potentially more aversive or stressful. Yeah, yeah. The contingent versus non-contingent. That you can provide the dog with more predictive information about what the outcomes of his behavior will be. He, he might prefer that even if some of the information comes through instruments that are conditioned aversively, through conditioned punishers or, or cues that are conditioned aversively. And I don't, I don't find that difficult to accept. That, that seems within their own of possibility to me. Although, yeah, I don't know what, as I said, as I've said many, many times, the, the influence of behaviorism is strong enough on me that I'm very cautious about making guesses about what's going on between a dog's ears. Let's change a little bit. Something I was curious, before we, we decided to talk, um, Schutzehund and ring sport. How do you see them, um, as far as, like, if you, if you have to compare, what would be the part that you like in the one program versus the other? Um, that, that's interesting. That's, that's kind of a subject near and dear to my heart, because I, I first became interested in French ring, um, in the mid eighties, when I was very, very thoroughly steeped in, in Schutzehund at that time. And, um, it took me a very, very long time to begin to understand the dynamics of French ring from the perspective of French ring, rather than from the perspective of Schutzehund. And I'll give, I'll give you an example. So when I first began training ring sport, I began with a Dutch, uh, crossbred dog who was

probably half Malinois, half, uh, Bouvier, who was an extraordinary animal, pretty high quality dog. And I had the stated purpose of, I was going to show French trainers how to teach obedience. I was going to teach spirited obedience because I thought their obedience was lamentable because what you saw when a French ring competitor asked his dog to heal was you very often saw a dog walking very placidly and calmly at his side with his tail hanging straight down, um, emitting minimum energy to get the exercise done. I thought that was lack of understanding how to train that exercise. Right. It wasn't until much later that I began to realize that had to do with the internal dynamics of the sport, the point structure, and most of all, what these people admired in dogs and what they trained the dogs for. So what an animated heel is in the context of French ring is a big waste of energy, right? So an animated elevated heel, I think at, in my day, it was a five point exercise and you got a three or 400 point program. Uh, the dog is going to be on the field for some 45 minutes and ring three. He will do, um, jumps, quite demanding jumps. He'll do a bunch of obedience and then he'll do the longest and most demanding bite work program in the world. You could argue you can, you know, you can, you can quibble about what's harder, you know, Belgian ring or Mondio ring, which is, which is ring heavily, heavily influenced by Belgian sport, um, or French ring. But it's a fact that the dog does a ton of hard work in the course of a French ring, a bite work routine and shows in comparison to a Schutzen where the dog has maybe four basic skills that it masters in order to do a protection routine, right? Like obedience in the presence of the decoy, hold and bark, search, out. And that's about it, right? That's, that's what the dog's got to know how to do. He's got to know how to do those things at a very, very high level. Simple, simple tasks that are going to be examined minutely by somebody with a very, very trained eye looking for, as you and I discussed earlier, the content with which, you know, the style and the topography and the content of the behavior. Well, in French ring, it ain't like that, right? In, in French ring, the dog has many, many skills to master a stopped attack, a guard of the object, a surge, an escort, all this kind of stuff. And the primary dynamic going on is that the Omdatak, the guy who works in the suit, the attack man is not the dog's friend. He doesn't cooperate with the dog. He's not a motor or a platform for the equipment on which the dog can demonstrate his biting

ability and style and stuff like that. He is the dog's adversary. He or she is there to foil the dog in every way possible to prevent the dog from biting, to keep the dog off the suit, to make the dog forget it's out. If it succeeded in staying on the suit and so forth. And that is enormously, enormously demanding of the dog. It is crazy. So if, if what I began to realize is that they know exactly what they're doing when they train their dog very, very quietly to spare its energy and do a little low energy heal. And they're not just sparing the dog's physical energy. They are maximizing every opportunity that the dog has on the field to relax, right? Right. Yes. To relax and rest and to be, uh, when necessary, watchful to show vigilance, right? And so when that is especially, um, expressed, I got, I got an object lesson on this, um, in the suit one day in Colorado in the 1987 timeframe, uh, we had a seminar with, uh, Michel Bayer. Oh, wow. And Bayer had a, a dog performing at the highest level of French ring in France at that time. Um, which means that he would go to the selectif, the selection trials for the different, um, regions of France. And he would pass through the selection trials with high enough scores to arrive at the cup of France, the championship trial. And then the champion of France was determined by scores across the selectives and also the cup trial. Right. And what everybody said was, well, the cup trials, a wonderful display, but it's not hard like the selection trials. The selectives are hard. Right. And so I'm passing this dog on the suit. And I think we were doing escort and he was, the rules was a, a small typey dog of the law, uh, after the model of, of typey French dogs of the bloodlines of those day, uh, of those days, uh, rather sensitive, hot blooded, all that kind of stuff. Um, and essentially to make a long story short, um, I was wearing a, a suit that had been built for me by, um, by, uh, Michel Moreau, who was a suit builder and he had a particular design of suit in which he already in the States at that time or not? Um, no, he was not. He was not yet. He, he built the suit for me in France and I took it back and I was wearing it and it had an inner protection that, uh, that had a scene like this. Right. And so, um, there was a vulnerable part on the inside of the suit all the way from your ankle up to your crotch and back down to your other ankle. So to make a long story short, I began the escort exercise with the rules. The dog was very quiet and the dog watched me and he was completely relaxed.

When I tried to make the fleet, which is a little attempt to escape, to take meters from the dog. It was as though the moment I thought about moving, the dog bit me. It was as though he didn't, he didn't wait for the muscular action for me to try to escape. It was like he caught me before I had begun to move. And he went in one moment from complete relaxation and watchful, relaxed vigilance to biting me like a grizzly bear on the leg. And he just happened to bite with a really big mouth and a tremendous amount of force right on the seam of that suit. And then, um, I would begin to come to make this cessation, right? That where, where I stopped moving, the handler's command would come in. And the rules would release instantly with, and then go back to relaxing and escorting me. And the next time I thought about making the mistake, the escape, he would do that to me again. And we did perhaps six or seven bites. And by the time we were done, the rules was not the least bit tired. And my legs were done for the seminar. I was so badly injured that we were done for the week, right? Like, I was messed up. And, and I realized that, that, that product, that ability to go into complete vigilant relaxation and the next moment mobilize all the power to stop the, the, on the attack, and then to relax again into vigilance. That is the objective of the entire program. And part of it is the way the dogs are taught to heal. And I realized, I don't know shit about French rank. What I need to do is listen to these people and as much as possible, learn how to understand the way they approach dogs, why the way they train, why they train the way they do. Yeah. Yeah. When you, when you don't have the knowledge, it's a very, when you, when you look at the healing, you look at the change of position, any, any of the obedience exercises, you would think the dog is, just doesn't want to be there. But actually it's about pacing and endurance, as you said. And never, they never really lack concentration. They're just very trained and selected also, I think, bred selectively, but mainly trained to pace themselves and not to get overly excited and waste the energy at the wrong time. Waste the energy or lose control of themselves so that they're not there for the command, right? It's, it's, it, the, the training is different on subtle letters, the levels, the, the training and the product of good French ring training is, is so different on very subtle levels that it's, it's difficult to understand the difference until you really become aware of it. And, and the different dog sports, that's what I came to appreciate.

There are these debates. So for instance, when I first got involved in ring sport, there would be a kind of a dialectic between the French guys who would tell the Belgian ring guys, yeah, well, we are in your sport, there's no opposition from the decoy. So it means nothing. Right. And then what the French guys would say is, well, yeah, we don't want to see, we're not there to see the show put up by the athlete in the suit. We're there to see the dog fight. And the ultimate X, the ultimate exhibition of fighting is the dog who fights and bites with no encouragement from the decoy who exerts all power and a perfect topographically perfect bite. When the decoy is not doing anything to support that. I don't want to see the dog just hang on to a decoy who's flying all over the field. I want to see the dog punish a decoy with energy from within. And I want to see him challenged by another never ending variation in environmental demands. That's how we challenge the dog. And after a while you realize that they're, they're not, it's not a case of one point of view is correct and the other is wrong. It's a completely different way to admire what dogs can be trained to do and to perfect an art of producing a particular aesthetic product. Right. And all the sports are characterized by this, right? Like, like Schultzen is, or IGP is directed at one outcome, which is sublime and marvelous at its highest expression. And Belgian ring, same thing, completely different product that is sublime in its highest expression and also French ring. My only, my, my worry about French ring is that I worry that it is too hard for the dogs, that it is too much opposition, continual opposition to the dogs, because I want to see the dog challenged, but victorious and always wanting to go on the field again and do it again. And sometimes I worry that the French dogs, there's too much opposition. I had Peter Engel one time say to me many years ago, Peter Engel is a German guy, one of the people who was responsible more than any other for bringing the working Malinois to, to Germany. And he said to me a long, long time ago, he said, well, French ring, it can be a little anti-dog sometimes. Right. And I don't like that anti-dog element. I am for the dog. I love the dogs. Yeah, this is a very interesting one. There is definitely that, that part in French ring when a dog can get clearly defeated and feel, and the dog, you see the dog feels defeated. Yeah, yeah. But then. I don't, I don't like it. I don't, I don't like to see it. But then you see them in the next exercise and they're full out again. A lot of times, a lot of times.

Yeah, it can happen. The dog can, can completely fail in one exercise and you see it. Like the picture of a dog when the object is taken at Gadobe and the Omdatak is leaving. Yes. With the object. The picture of dejection and sort of confusion that the dog shows. It's, it's, it's, it's wonderful to see the dogs overcome it with the highest training. But I, I don't like to see the dogs when they're defeated. I don't think anybody does besides when you're, even, even when you're a good trial decoy, you still don't like to, to. The best, the best guys have a little bit of ferocity for the dogs, right? And, and, and, and in a way they establish their reputations by posing such challenges to the dogs that sometimes the dogs are defeated. So for me, if there's a weak, if there's a weak point to the sport, that's it. And there is another, like in, in the comparison, um, um, um, I guess you could, in Schutzhund, you could really promote the, the aggression and dominance to where if you promote it too much in French ring, you're going to start to lose control. And it's hard to promote it because a lot of the, the protection during the bite work, um, the decoy is heavily involved teaching and orchestrating and telling the dog what it can and cannot do. The development, the development is utterly different. Um, there, there was a period in, in France when the, uh, under the influence of a very famous trainer whose name I suddenly can't remember. Uh, he was the trainer of a very, of a very celebrated and famous dog called Urgo de Turenfels. And, um, and he was one of the first guys, he was an Alsatian of enormous talent. And he was one of the first guys to establish, um, procedures and an approach of teaching very young dogs, all the exercise, all the exercises of French ring, especially in bite work when they were still quite young at low levels of motivation. Right. Right. So the dogs were kept very clear headed, very quiet. They went through the motions. They did everything that, that, that was required. They carried out the topographical requirements, but you'd look at it and go, well, I'm used to other sports where we're really energizing the young dogs more than this. What's, what's going on here? What's, what's the result going to be? Am I going to have an adult dog that's not really firing on all cylinders? Um, and, and the result, essentially the approach was I'll teach them to understand everything. And then as the dog's maturity comes and as the opposition comes, the dog will develop.

And part of it was an expression of the kind of dog that they chose for high level competition, which was a dog with relatively, uh, relatively high levels of sensitivity. So that he could be controlled high levels of excitability so that the dog could be easily made more. Yes. Yes. Um, and the entire plan was, was to come up with, with a dog who developed his power later after he'd learned understanding of all of the exercises. And part of that was habitual, uh, obedience to command. Um, and when you arrived at that point, the dog already had learned the routines of control so that the dog knew what an instant out was. The dog knew what a stopped attack in the last meter and a half was. He carried out all those behaviors many, many, many times. So when the dog's power started to come, it wasn't out of the question to say, okay, you're a lot more dog now, but I want you to do it like you did it when you're seven months old. Yeah. All that, all that sparring, so to speak. Evolved into. Okay. Yeah. And of course, the, the tradition in IGP and Shotsun is utterly different where we try to get the dog to express maximum energy at a very young age. And then harness that energy to these very, uh, relatively simple behaviors that they're called upon to do in bite work, right? Four main skills that the dog has to do, but he has to do them with style and an exact topography and tremendous content. Right. And so the, I think the approach there is to develop the dog's spirit. At least it used to be to develop the dog's spirit first and then to take control of the topographies and the performance, but without damaging spirit. Yes. And I think now there's, there's more of an approach to developing the two together, get the dog's understanding when he's young. And then also to begin to develop the spirit and to develop them a little in parallel. So here is another follow-up to this. How do you, like if you take agility and you compare an agility skill for agility trainer to a skill for protection trainer, what do you see as differences? And, and, and, and, and because they, a lot of times they, like the, the, my understanding at least and experience is that the agility trainers, not all of them. And I, I, I have talked to, and I have some friends that are world champions and they understand protection sports and then they really, really have a great appreciation. But a lot of other trainers do believe that dog training is dog training and whatever we can do in agility, we can actually be quite successful with the same approach in protection sports. And have you thought of those comparisons?

In protecting sports, is that what you said? Yeah. Like the same approach to an agility is, well, what's, what's interesting. So I, I don't know anything about agility, right? I don't know anything about agility other than when I see agility practice at a high level, I know I'm looking at really good dog training. Right. And, and it's, it, and I relate to it. I appreciate it because the dogs are performing under very, very high levels of motivation. That's what I like to see is I like to see dogs. Controlled madness. Yes. All of their power and their energy. With, and then the challenge is to, to harvest all the energy, all that power, all that excitement, all that motivation to behave. And then harness it to very exacting and demanding topographies. And when you see agility practice at a high level, that's what it looks like. Yes. And, and I had, I had some friends named Danny and Julia Grayson who worked with me in the dog club in Austin, Texas when I was a graduate student where I was kind of a participant in dog sport and kind of not. I mostly just used to go out to the club sometimes and, and, and, and, um, help train dogs and, and so forth. But anyway, they used to, you know, they used to, you know, they used to, you know, fly ball is. Yes. All right. So they had a whole pack of German shepherd working dogs that used to come to the club with them. Right. And they also went to fly ball. And what they basically said is they thought their dogs came into stronger drive, higher levels of arousal to do fly ball than they did to, to come to the club and do a protection sport. And the, the, and like all the other fly ball participants are staying the hell away from the German shepherd dogs and stuff because the dogs are so excited to do the sport. Um, and so I guess what I would say is that the parallels between agility and something like IGP are much stronger and more meaningful than the parallels between, for instance, IGP and AKC obedience competition. Because if AKC obedience competition is like it used to be, the dogs function with very, very impressive exactitude, but they function in, at relatively lower levels of arousal. Right. So, so if you asked me who's going to have a harder time getting, getting, uh, adept at training, uh, biting dogs for, uh, uh, control performances, all that kind of stuff. Somebody from the world of competitive obedience or somebody from the agility world, I'd say, oh yeah. Somebody who can get the absolute most from a border collie and an agility course.

That person is a long way towards understanding the special dynamics and rules under which dogs work when they're at intense levels of arousal. And I think the right agility trainer could, could pick up, uh, teaching, uh, uh, biting dog routines, protection sport routines pretty dang fast. Yeah, that's a good, good way to think of it. There is a different emotional state to some level though, between, between the, um, and, uh, a border collie being mad in drive and speed and control, which is, as you said, a high level skill. Well, the, the challenge there is all from understanding and control, right? So the dog has, has two major challenges. The handler dog team have two major challenges. One of them is for, is for the dog's exacting understanding of something difficult, like a, what do they call the little yellow touch plates that the dogs are supposed to catch? The contact. Right. Contact. Contact. Contact. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, one, one thing is, uh, there's nothing super difficult about a dog mastering, making contact with a particular surface with its feet. We do that kind of stuff all the time. Now you get that dog traveling at a really, really high rate of speed, go in someplace. Yes. Yes. And he has to control his own motivation and his locomotion and his momentum and everything to make that touch pad and be aware of proprioceptive cues from his pad so that he knows he caught the touch plate and, you know, and all that kind of stuff. So, so understanding is one. And then the next one is the raw harnessing of the dog's motivation, having control of the dog, the dog having control of its impulses so that it can carry out these feats when it's aroused. But in bite work, there's at least one other whole challenge, which is the contention, the oppositional interaction between the decoy or agitator or om datak and the dog. So it's an, another whole additional load where the dog has to mobilize power in order to meet a challenge, but at the same time, he has to remain mindful and he can't lose himself in it. He has to remain under control, alert to commands, all that kind of stuff. So, so I'd say, yeah, there, there is an added dimension to bite work, sport, performance that, that is perhaps not seen in agility with the caveat that I don't know anything about agility, despite the fact that I wrote and produced, produced a series of videos about it years ago. That's true. That's true. Yeah. I mean, I can tell you the first time and I didn't know, didn't know anything about agility. I just go to this lady's place to start writing her agility videos.

And they have these hot rod dogs that are so excited and are showing such vigorous, powerful behavior combined with clear understanding of their task in ever changing circumstances. Right. Because if you think about it, there's a parallel between agility and Belgian ring. The dog doesn't know exactly the routine it must perform. And that's an enormous, enormous, and exactly the circumstances under which it'll have to perform them. And that's a really significant factor. And it's common between agility and Belgian ring. So I'm like sitting up on a ladder next to a tree, like videotaping down in this training field, all these dogs doing agility. I'm like, Hey, this shit is cool. These dogs are drivey and they are here to work and they're expressing energy. And also they are having the best time expressing dog-like behavior, expressing every facet of their behavior. That's what I appreciated about agility. That's what I appreciate about most any good dog work that I see. Agility is, you can, I mean, one can argue that it's just as dangerous on the dog as French ring. Do they experience a lot of injuries, a lot of orthopedic injuries? Oh yeah, it's probably actually much more than any other sport. And we get back into the ethics of it. Because, you know, if you assume that a dog is capable of a choice, then every time you're saying, Hey, do you want to go out on the field and perform in view of the cumulative damage to your musculoskeletal system of performing? If you could pose that question to the dog, what would he choose? And then also, is he capable of making that choice? And it's a difficult ethical thing. I mean, I can definitely, definitely see myself looking at my dog thinking, Oh, your frame cannot endure the demands that we're putting it through. Practicing the sport that you and I love. And we spend our most important time together doing. I think I have to make a decision. Right. Right. And, and this is the difficult part with the dogs. You know, if you really care about the dogs, there are many places where you reach these forks in the road. Me, for example, yeah, my shoulders hurting, my knees hurting, whatever, but. But I made that decision. I'm going in. I knew I was breaking myself down. Yes. Please don't stop me. Yeah. I knew I was, I knew I was beating myself down in my twenties and I was doing it in some ignorance because I didn't know what it was like. I couldn't know what it was like to be 63 years old and have, you know, realize the sort of emotional stresses and adversities of losing my physical powers as a result of how much I beat my body up when I was young.

So I didn't make a fully informed decision, but I made, I had full agency when I decided, okay, I'm going to keep doing this work, even though it's kind of beat me down. And, you know, I realized it's going to, it's going to cause me to age in some respects before my time. I'm still doing it. Well, I don't think the dogs can make that choice. So, so we have to make it for them. And it's a difficult, it's a difficult choice because you have to choose between what the dog to use in anthropomorphic terms, what the dog appears to love doing and what's good for his long term welfare. And, and these are personal decisions that we all have to make with our dogs. And, and the best we can expect to do is to try to keep our personal feelings out of it. Right. So I think about this when I think about the end of a dog's life. It's, it's my conviction that my dog has no intimation when it nears at the end of its time that it's losing its life, that it's going to lose experience. My conviction is that the dog doesn't know any about any, anything about that stuff. So if I make a decision to give my dog six more months as a result of some kind of physical treatment or whatever, am I taking care of myself or am I taking care of my dog? Um, so, you know, am I, am I trying to postpone the emotional pain I'll have when I lose my dog? Or am I trying to make sure the dog has more pleasurable experience? Well, we all have these decisions to make about, about our dogs. And, and hopefully we keep the dog at the front of our mind and what's good for the dog at the front of our mind. And we make secondary our own wishes in the matter, whether we would really love to have our beloved dog with us for six more months or not at the cost to him. If his welfare is not good. Yeah. That's, I mean, I'll give you a, a, a perfect example of this, like with my, my own dog, um, seven and a half years old. Last competition was supposed to be in Romania, the, the FMBB, the Belgian Shepherd World Championship. Two weeks, two weeks before he tore the ACL. And it's not, not during protection or obedience. He's just walking around playing with his friends on my property. He comes three-legged. I'm like, okay, one day, two days, three days. Okay, things are not good. I, I've been, it's not my first row of you. I'm like, okay, let's go. ACL. So we do a surgery. The doctor is like, yeah, it can be pretty good. We can, you, you, you're obviously going to miss that competition, but you can do another one. I know at this point, seven and a half year old dog, torn ACL, surgery, pins.

If I put him again, the only thing that's going to happen is he's going to be for sure crippled by the, in another couple of years because of my desire to go and compete with him. And if I was to ask him, there is no question he will die. He will crawl on two legs to get the sleeve. But it's my responsibility at this point to say, we can do other things. Yeah. And, and, and, uh, yeah, that's a, that's definitely a situation. I mean, these, these are kind of lonely ethical decisions that we make that often will have no witnesses except ourselves. Right. Do we do the right thing for the animal or not? And, um, and it's, it's a very different calculus for, uh, people who live with their dogs in a different way. So I recently, uh, read a piece by somebody who appeared to have an animus towards people who participated in dog sport with their dogs. So the, the, the writer used the expression dog sport addict, the kind of dog sport junkie and like use it again and again, implied that the dog was again and again, um, exploited or its welfare was compromised. So that the owner could follow their compulsive desire to engage in dog sport. Um, and so it appeared that what this person thought of as a quality life for a dog was, uh, a, a life with very little in the way of psychological, emotional, or physical challenge. Right. So as far as that, that person was concerned, a dog's life should be passive above all safe and, and free of stress. Um, free of almost. Accomplishments, striving, right. Difficulty, all that kind of stuff. Um, and that person would come to a very, very different calculus about a situation like that, like having the dog engage in any kind of vigorous activity, whether it's like frisbee chasing or whatever. That might subject the dog to higher risk of injury. Um, and for me, there are my wishes. I want to enjoy my dog's life with me. And then there are also my conclusions about what leads to more raw experience and gratification and pleasure in life for that dog. Um, being utterly safe from all risk and hazard or engaging in vigorous activities in which it can express powerful dog-like behavior. But at a higher risk of injury or stress or shortened life or whatever. Um, and these are questions nobody used to think about very much. You know, 50 years ago, it wasn't a question, right? You would go to your trial because your dog's purpose, he was your, you know, your, uh, possession. You loved him and cared for him, but he was your possession and he served a purpose.

And by God, you were going to a trial, especially if you're a professional and you needed that trial result and all that kind of stuff. It's, it's, it was, I think, rare for people to agonize over decisions like that 30 or 40 years ago. I think it's much more common for us to agonize over decisions like that now, because I think all of us think more about our dog's welfare, which is a good thing because it's accompanied by, um, better standards for the care of dogs. Better, better standards for the training of dogs, all that, all that kind of stuff. But you and I have, have kind of explored in the course of this conversation, a few different ways in which that pursuit of better and better care and welfare for the dogs might prejudice some of the things that we valued in the dogs when we first began 30 or 40 years ago. Right. Yeah, we kind of really circled, full circle really, from wondering why there is concerns about what we do as far as protection sports or any dog training. Um, coming, coming right now to the, the reasons ourselves why that can be a concern. Um, and, and, and that's a challenge for, for everybody to find that middle ground because they are, they are critically important. They both are critically important for the well-being of the dog. There, there's an additional complicating factor, which is that, um, the place for practical and important work for dogs in the world is, is not in it. Right. So, uh, dogs are astonishingly important for national security or civil security, um, for protection against, you know, individual and societal threats of all kinds. They've never been more important than they are now. And in order to carry out these functions, uh, the dogs have to have certain select characteristics that make them appropriate, not only for things like national defense, but also make them important for participation in amateur sports, like gun, you know, gun dog trials or shotsun or ring sport or whatever. So, um, to the extent that we as a society might decide that the best thing to do is to refrain from training dogs for anything other than having them just be nice, peaceable companions in our communities. We also impoverish some important fields where important endeavors are to be accomplished depending on the availability of quality dogs, of quality working dogs. So, I mean, does that mean that police dogs and military working dogs need still to be available and produced for their missions, but that's not going to be a civilian amateur occupation anymore?

That any breeding program for that kind of dog is going to be strictly agency run and professional? And that we're going to completely change the paradigm where the vast majority of working dogs that are used by agencies and by government are produced by amateurs in the pursuit of their sports and their occupations that they've been doing for 120 years? And I guess I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I personally don't know the right answer to all these questions, but what I do know is that things stand to be lost that I would regret to see lost. Everything from brave dogs of character that stir me to pride and admiration when I see them, to brave dogs of character who carry out very, very important missions that can't be carried out by any instrumentation or engineered device that we can think of at this point, to the personal challenge that I have when I work with a dog like that and try to make myself better in interaction with him and sort of actualize my skills, my concentration, my ability to advance as a person who's engaged in a very difficult endeavor that I try to get a little bit better at every day. There's a lot of things that we can lose if we make decisions that fall a certain way. There are harms on each side. And the question is to pick a very, very, very wise course in the middle. Yes, and we need to collectively brainstorm and make that decision without – there is an emotional aspect. We cannot avoid that, and it's a good thing. Of course it's a good thing. Everybody has to come together to the conversation, I guess, at some point, because it's an important conversation, very important conversation. I know you did a few studies back in, what, 10 years ago or so, and I'm curious what made you like the one – I think they were all kind of related. It was all about personality and performance in the military dogs, right? Yeah, it's what we call psychometrics. So – The measurement of behavioral variables and traits. So what made you do the study and what – Well, I'll tell you what, that's a little bit of a long subject and conversation. Yes, we can leave it. But I definitely would want to eventually talk to you about this because it's a personality and performance in military dogs. It's definitely something very interesting to talk about. It's also a topic for sport dogs and, you know, we're in the business of choosing dogs for their roles in life as early as we can. And guess what? It's super difficult and it involves science. And some advanced mathematics also, which I don't have any understanding of. I have to rely on other people for that.

Okay, Doc, one last question. Yeah. If you were to do a study today, anything to do with dogs, where would you go? Have you thought of anything? Yeah. As a matter of fact, I thought of a recent project having to do with the context specificity of extinction. So very many of the dogs that are acquired normally from overseas, most often from Eastern Europe, are prepared for tests of auditory environmental behavior. That's a long, fancy way of saying gunfire tests, right? So the kind of gold standard for most testing for practical working dog suitability involves a manipulation where you shoot a gun over or near the dog. That's just it's been kind of the gold standard for like 120 years. It has to do with operational relevance, convenience, custom, you know, all that kind of stuff. Anyway, the vast majority of the dogs that we receive through the global market have been taught to show, have been conditioned to display acceptable behavior under this test as a result of excitatory conditioning using some really strong US, you might call it, which usually has to do with access to a Kong or access to a bite or whatever. Overriding it. Yeah. Yeah. So that's basically a long way of saying most of the dogs that you see from overseas, if you gun test them, they will go bananas when you shoot the gun. Right. And that behavior is directly at odds. The way most of us test dogs, that will get you a passing score that will get the dog bought because the dog's not showing fear. But at the same time, that behavior is utterly incompatible with most duty modes. That's not what we need a dog to do under strong environmental stimulation, get super, super excited. Like I can't think, I can't think of any job the dog is supposed to do off the top of my head that will be, that will be facilitated by the dog coming instantly into a ton of arousal in response to an auditory cue like a gunshot. So that is prior excitatory conditioning. We would normally, there's a couple different ways to suppress that prior condition response. One of them is extinction where you simply present the CS, withhold the US many, many, many times and watch the documented behavior. It turns out that that, that what is learned in extinction is not symmetrical with acquisition. So extinction is not just the opposite of acquisition. It's another kind of learning that is superimposed upon acquisition. And in a way that excitatory conditioning, what I mean by excitatory conditioning is that proceeding, is that conditioning procedure in which I shot the gun and let the dog bite and shot the gun and let the dog bite.

That particular kind of conditioning is relatively independent of contextual cues. So it transfers, it generalizes pretty readily to other contexts. Well, guess what? But when I set out to abolish or suppress that responding by shooting the gun and not having the dog bite and shooting the gun and not having the dog bite or procedures somewhat like that, that turns out to be highly context dependent. So I can carry out extinction procedures and they can be very effective in the context in which I've done that. And then through a number of different manipulations, it can happen through spontaneous recovery, reinstatement, all kinds of stuff like that. I can move to another context or I can re-expose the dog to the U.S. And the responding that I've suppressed through extinction can recover in more or less full form after I've done all the work to get rid of this problem behavior. And so one of the study I thought of doing most recently was some sort of a study of how to abolish or suppress excitatory responding to gunshots in dogs bought off of the open market. Like how best to do that. And there are some some basic guidelines about how to accomplish counter conditioning and extinction in the most efficient ways. And I'd like to do some work investigating that. That would be so quite interesting. Because it's of critical importance for a bunch of applications. Dogs need to be quiet when they're excited or when they're excited by environmental stimuli in all kinds of applications. Or they need to be calm under environmental stimulation, especially auditory stimulation. Not just quiet but stable. That's the important part. Because like I, I mean that clearly this is the way to override. Well it depends of course on the level of, of severeness, right? Of the noise sensitivity. But a lot can be overridden in the way you just explained. Where we put them in the bite. And this is when we talk about the differences of, of the different sports. We have in ring sports attack with a gun. And in Schutzkorn you have the quiet lay down and the gun. Different evaluation of how they respond to the noise, right? So that will be a very interesting one too. I, I, that's definitely will be a good one. It has, it has important practical implications as well. So that's, that's the, the most recent idea for a project that I've had. Very cool. So, it's been a great pleasure. Thank you very much for, for asking me on. One thing I didn't get a chance to say, you and I discussed a little bit about maybe how I would speak about how the people I'd encountered over the course of my career had influenced me. Yes.

And, and one thing I'd like to say before we go is that you're one of the people who's influenced me to a very great extent because the time that I spent with you producing your videotapes brought some real aha moments that have had a lasting effect on me. And, and I thank you for it. You've, you've enriched me enormously. I think it's a mutual stuff. Like, as I said, like if, if, if we didn't have this phone conversation over and over, I probably would just be training dogs and never dive into the mind and the psychology and the animal behavior and learning. So, you're the best. Thank you. I, I returned the sentiment. Um, thank you very much. Um, hello to the, to the viewers out there. Uh, I hope you enjoyed this and, uh, I hope I'll talk to you again soon. I've got. Doc. It was a pleasure. Like really, really a pleasure. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.