E351: 사라 브루스키(Sara Brueske) - "스포츠견의 통제된 행동 구축하기"

I try to skip steps as much as I can. And for the dogs that are a little bit more handler sensitive or less resilient, that can be a little more damaging for them as far as their emotions go in training. So I actually have one of my dogs that I ended up placing because for a variety of reasons, but her and I just were not a good fit. And that's Frizzle. She's actually here staying with me for the week, and we're having fun revisiting all of our old training stuff. And she's definitely a lot more resilient now. But man, her and I, we just did not kind of make a great team when we were in training. And I did the best I could. But ultimately, I do best with dogs that are a little bit more resilient. And so that's what I look for now specifically when I'm training or picking a sport dog. So while we all kind of want that perfect puppy, right, that dog who comes out of the womb with like all of the things built in, most of us tend to instead maybe just get an awesome puppy, not a perfect puppy. And I think a lot of times when we're talking about sports dogs, we get kind of a bias for action or sometimes you get a more thoughtful dog. How do you kind of evaluate that dog in front of you and figure out what types of skills they need to kind of build that ultimate sports dog? Yeah, absolutely. And if you find that perfect puppy, let me know because I have yet to meet the perfect puppy. I have some puppies that are pretty darn close, but every puppy is going to have the thing that you have to work on. And so when picking a puppy, really, it's about being honest with yourself and knowing what your strengths are so that you can use your strengths to help boost up that puppy's weaknesses. So especially for if you're seeking out an action-based dog, their weakness is going to be control and thoughtfulness. So my strength is adding that to my dog. So I love having a puppy that I have to add more control to, more thoughtfulness to, and focusing on that to build more of a well-balanced dog. Cake, my young dog right now, she was pretty close down the middle as a baby baby. So kind of right, a nice balance between balance and action. But I could see and I know her lines that tend towards action. And so right away, I started focusing on thoughtful and calm and duration behaviors because I knew she was going to bring that go, go, go. And she definitely has. And so I'm really glad that I have focused more on calm, duration, control, all of that when she was a younger dog. Because now that's coming into super handy now that the toy drive has hit through the roof. She's finding agility so fun and disc so fun.

Now I can go ahead and go back to all of those control games that we trained when she was younger. And she's like, oh, that's I have to sit and stay. I can do a chin rest here. I can do my baseline games here. And I'm bringing back that thoughtfulness into her games and her training. And it's balancing back out just beautifully. She's really a nice, clear-headed dog in work. And I don't know if she would have been that way if I would have just focused on action, action, action with her. So when picking that puppy and really coming up with your foundation behaviors that you're working with, so you have your puppy and you're realizing they're more action-based, I really like to focus on that control stuff in their babies. Making it fun, obviously. That's why it's control games and not control, period. That way it's becoming fun to play those control games. They're learning about control and working with you as a handler to get what they want right from the beginning. If you have a more thoughtful puppy, that's when we want to tweak those games and make them more action-based and more fun in that way and reduce the level of control. So we can use the same games. We're just going to approach them in a slightly different way. And we're going to focus more on getting our puppy to engage and be action-based. And so really, it's kind of taking a peek at your puppy. Start training them. See what areas do they excel. Did they nail that down stay right away or that chin rest right away? They might be a more thoughtful, more controlled puppy. Now, if they nail that recall right away and that choose to heal or they're bouncing next to you and they're really enjoying that movement and the stay stuff and the duration stuff is a little bit more difficult for them, that might be a more action-based puppy. And so we want to adjust their foundation training accordingly to help fit them and boost up their weaknesses. I love that. You mentioned in there the idea of a clear-headed dog. Do you mind just explaining what you mean by that phrase really quick? Yeah. When I say clear-headed, I mean a dog that is still able to be thoughtful and listen to cues without a lot of help or guidance when they're in high drive mode. So when I bring out those Frisbees for cake, that's her highest drive mode. Can she do the baseline games? And when I say baseline games, I mean the treat toss game, the pattern games that I've established with her since she was a puppy. Are those easy for her to do or do I have to kind of babysit them and help her out?

For cake, she can nail those pretty much right off the bat even if she's in a high level of drive. She listens to her verbal cues. She listens to her directionals without a lot of extra help or guidance. Vibrant, on the other hand, my three-year-old Cooley, no. She is not a clear level-headed thinking dog. She hits high drive and she is out of there. Like there is not a lot. I have to really go down and help her stair step down in arousal, meaning I start – if she's in high drive, then I'm going to ask her to do a game that's higher or high-ish drive and then medium drive and then normal drive and then low drive to help her come down in that arousal level. Where cake, she doesn't need that extra help. She can just kind of go from high drive to lower drive easily without those extra steps mixed in. Awesome. Super helpful. Thank you for explaining. So I think a lot of times we're trying to kind of stack the deck for dog sports, right? So a lot of times people do tend to go towards that action-based or action-biased puppy. How do you approach that stuff? How did you approach it with cake? How would you approach helping the dog learn it's not always go time all the time and actually start to introduce that control? That's what this class is all about. So control games for all the sports is about creating those games, those pattern games that help my dog access that control part of their brain, the thoughtful part of their brain. And then what we do is we artificially increase their arousal. Not really artificially. We help their arousal increase in kind of a more controlled way. So I'm going to do different games that bring out the action part of their brain and then help them come back down using those other games that we built that are a little bit more thoughtful. And so by kind of methodically increasing their arousal and then bringing it back down, they're learning to go into high arousal and then helping manage their thoughtfulness while they're there and come back down in arousal. And pretty soon we won't have to babysit it nearly as much. But all these games are based on duration behavior. So play stays, control around reinforcers. So the food bowl game, pay attention to me to get the food that's in the bowl. It's one of the bases for all of my classes is that food bowl game. And then creating fun games that do allow them to release some of that energy in a way that we want them to rather than them just going, I have all this energy. I have to go somewhere. Maybe through the roof or off the walls. Can you walk me through just an example of a game? Yeah, absolutely.

So the food bowl game, I mentioned that one. This is my favorite way for teaching my dog that they can access what they want by working through me, the handler. So initially we just teach them, hey, I'm putting this food in the bowl. My hand is in their collar. That teaches my dog to look at me at that point. I mark and we move away from the food bowl. So then I'm going to go ahead and reward them just for staying focused on me, just for staying focused on me. At one point when they are with me, I'm going to go ahead and release them to the bowl using a separate word. So this teaches them two different things. It teaches them that I'm reinforcing and that I will allow them to go back to the bowl. If they just stick with me long enough. And then two, it helps teach them verbal cues. So teaching the difference between yes, food from my hand versus take, which means take the food from the bowl. So that's pushing them into that thoughtful state of mind because they're really having to pay attention to the words that are coming out of my mouth. It's much harder to do than just watching my body for body cues, right? And so this game specifically is teaching my dog really pay attention because what I say matters. And that's going to help us in the future when we're using verbal cues for like agility or obedience or whatever sport we're going into. Because we're already teaching my dog to pay attention to the words that are coming in our mouth and to work with me to get the thing that they want. Can you maybe just elaborate a little more on kind of the finished behaviors that this stuff can build to? So what specific sports behaviors are we looking to kind of set the foundations for? Yeah. So not just the verbal cues, right? So what we're going to end up doing is increasing the amount of work around that food bowl. So instead of just paying attention to me, they're getting the food, whatever. I'm going to start playing some of my pattern games. So we might move into choose to heal around the food bowl or we might move into the treat toss game. So now they're moving away from me and learning to come right back to me, even with that distraction present. And so from there, I can increase the behaviors, the complexity of the behaviors and difficulty so that they're learning to work with me around that distraction. So now, conceptually, that distraction could be replaced by anything. It could be the judge in the ring. So my dog's learning to heal around that distraction before going back. They're learning to stay with me, even if I don't have reinforcers on me.

So getting them ring ready in the future. I can change together behaviors, do a whole obedience routine. It could be my toy back by my leash for agility. If you do like UKI, you can bring a toy in. And so I can do a couple of agility obstacles, maybe work my start line stay, then send my dog back to that toy. So that's the foundation for that. So there's a lot of different ways this can go. And that's why it's such an important foundation game for my dogs. But yeah, it can go for pretty much any finished behavior. Awesome. So as you mentioned, the control games for all sports is on the schedule this session. And you're using the name control games. So what do you actually mean by the word control in this context? For control, I want my dog to be thoughtful and listen to my cues for direction on how to get their reinforcer. Reinforcer. That's specifically what this class is teaching. And so we will be using some behaviors in this class. But it's going to be mostly focused on reinforcement delivery and how to access those reinforcers. And then we'll give the steps on how to add behaviors and how to elaborate on. But control just means look to me for guidance on the next step. Excellent. So what types of behaviors or problems might somebody see if their dog doesn't understand this piece or kind of lacks that understanding of control? The dogs that really struggle to engage with the handler and focus on the handler in new environments, around people, around other dogs, around reinforcement. So if your dog continually runs back to the toy or continually runs to where the food is, or they only focus on you when you have food, or that they are breaking their start line stays in high arousal situations, they're chasing other dogs on the other side of the fence when you're running agility or whatever it might be. Those are the type of dogs that would really benefit from this. This is geared specifically towards sport dogs and sport dog behaviors. So those family dogs might not get a whole lot out of this class, even though there are still good foundation behaviors to teach. It's more geared towards the sport dogs. Got it. Okay. Talk to me a little more about the class. What else are you going to cover? Who should consider it? That kind of thing. Yeah. So this class is based on my protection sports class. So the control games for protection sports. There are some big tweaks in it, though. So that class specifically has decoy or helper activities. So sending your dog to the person they will ultimately bite for fun, obviously. So that class, I took those same foundation exercises.

We're keeping those the same, but I'm going to show you how to tweak them specifically for other sports that don't involve sending your dog to bite a person. Fair enough. All right. So any final thoughts or key points you want to leave listeners with? No, I think this is a great class. If you have a young dog, a puppy, absolutely fantastic. Or if you have an older dog that's doing sports and you just want to kind of revisit the control and the handler engagement stuff, definitely a class to check out. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Body. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. Be right. Thank you.