E238: 뎁 존스(Deb Jones) - 협력적 케어, 젠 워크, 그리고 동의

So I know that you've kind of turned cooperative care into your niche. So I wanted to kind of, because I want to talk about that a little bit today. So to kind of ease into the topic a little bit, what was it that really got you started and kind of interested in the topic initially? That's a really good question. At one point, and this has been about 10 years ago, I think or so, Star was young because she's 10 and a half now. So she was in her first year. And she had a very bad experience with a vet and that it was very traumatic for her. It wasn't that they did anything horrible, but I think she panicked and freaked out. And I wasn't there. I was actually out of town when she had to go to the vet. And it turned into something that stuck with her. And all my previous dogs, they went to the vet. They did what they did. They liked it or they didn't, but we got through it. And you never thought about actually preparing them anyway. You just expected you get these things done and you learn to live with it. And then Star was like, no, no, ma'am, I am not going to live with this. This is not going to happen. So my sweet little dog turned into, you know, very, very scared and defensive. And so I knew I had to do something. I'd always, you know, at that point, I taught a lot of dogs a lot of things. We did a lot of sports specific skills. We did a lot of real life manners. I did tricks and all that. And I realized I, maybe I should start applying this to the work she's going to need at the vet's office in particular, okay? Because it wasn't going to get better on its own. It was clear to me that this was only going to get worse and worse. And she was a very young dog and had a lifetime ahead of her, where she was going to need people to be able to do things to her. So that's what really got me started on it. And when I started doing this, nobody else was working on it. There wasn't like anybody, we didn't talk about cooperative care or husband retraining or any of that because nobody was doing it. Everybody was doing exactly what I did, which was just taking it for granted that you'd be able to get your dog through the grooming and vet care they needed. Some liked it, some didn't. That's how it goes. But I started looking at it from a couple of different perspectives and trying to find ways to make it all easier for everybody involved. And that got me working with veterinarians much more so because it's only to their benefit if their subjects are cooperative, if their patients are cooperative when they're working with them. And so that got me started down the path. So I can thank STAR for that. Baby STAR.

Yeah, I thought she was a good girl. You touched on this a little bit, that answer, but I'd like to talk about it a little bit more if we can. You know, when we're talking about cooperative care, what behaviors are kind of included under that heading? What kind of gets dumped in that bucket? Yeah. And the first thing I would say about that is it's not really just behavior. In fact, the bigger part of cooperative care, I think, is emotional and feelings of comfort and security. And that what I saw early on, that's the root of the problem. If you're not comfortable, it doesn't matter what behaviors I've taught a dog, they can't do them. And so that made me take a step back and look at this from the perspective of learning emotional and physiological states and classical conditioning rather than operant conditioning, meaning emotions rather than behaviors. So we want our dogs to be comfortable with this whole process, but also they need to be more passive than active for a lot of cooperative care, meaning we're not asking them to do something so much as to let us do things to them. And that's a whole shift in how I approach things. It's like, I don't want you necessarily to give me your foot. I want you to let me take your foot. And those are two very, very different things to teach. And so I was starting to see that if you went at it from the behavioral perspective, the operant behavior perspective, you were cueing behaviors, but your dog still couldn't do them if they weren't comfortable enough with the process and with being handled, with being restrained. And those are the two kind of big things for me. Let me handle you. I talk about it all the time. I say we want our dogs to think we just do weird stuff to them all the time, but it pays off. So let me touch you. Let me poke you. Let me move you around and manipulate your body in a bunch of ways. And here, I'll pay for it. I'll pay you to let me do those things. And that makes them more comfortable. And going along with letting me restrain you. Sometimes I have to hold you still. And for a lot of dogs, that causes panic, which we don't want to happen because we don't want them fighting and defensive. So we have to work up to being able to restrain them while they're still very comfortable with the whole process. So it's much more about the behaviors that we do as the handlers than it is about what we're asking the dogs to do. I'd say probably 90% of what my dog to do is just relax and chill out and hold still. And I know that sounds almost impossible for a lot of dogs. You think, okay, I've got that seven-month-old puppy.

He doesn't like to hold still. But I can make it worth his while enough that he does it and he understands, oh, this will pay off. So that's the approach, which is a little bit different than the idea, oh, I have to teach my dog these behaviors. No, really, we have to teach our dogs to tolerate a whole lot of things happening to them. And once we start down that path, it typically feeds on itself and it generalizes and it gets easier and easier. The more they learn to trust you and that what you physically do to them doesn't scare them, doesn't harm them, then the more that grows. So that's what we're trying to build that sort of relationship with our dogs. Okay, fair enough. It was a whole lot to do. Did that quite answer it? I hope so. Yeah, no, I think it kind of covered what I was looking for there. But let's say that I haven't done cooperative care before with my dog and I just kind of want to take that first bite into it, right? Like take that first step in the right direction. Where should I kind of get started with teaching some of this stuff? Yeah, I can tell people first that we have a couple of really good free resources. And so I would say, look at, I have a Facebook group and I also have a YouTube channel and they are both called Cooperative Care with Deb Jones. They're not very creative, but descriptive. So both of those things. Yeah, the Facebook group is great. Lots of support, lots of ideas. Very, very friendly to people who are lost and don't know what to do or where to go. So we have lots of professional trainers. We have lots of veterinary professionals on there as well. I'm actually getting close to 10,000 people in that group. Yet it feels like a very small, friendly group. It doesn't feel like this huge group. So I'm amazed when we see how close we're getting to having that many people in the group. So that's one place to go. And you can ask questions and people will help you troubleshoot and get you down the right path for what to do there. The YouTube channel I have has a lot of public instructional videos. So if you're looking for something in particular, you can put that in the search bar on the YouTube channel and probably some things will come up that might be helpful to you and get you started down the path. So those are the places I would tell people to start. And then from there, we have a whole bunch of other stuff we'll get to. Fair enough. All right. So I know there's this kind of component of consent that is pretty involved in some of the stuff that kind of you teach that fits into this category. So I want to talk about that too.

Can you just kind of talk to me about what it is, what it can do for my training, how it kind of impacts my dog's care, kind of what role it plays in all this stuff? Yeah. Consent has become one of those kind of trendy concepts in dog training recently. And for good reason. I think it's a very, very good thing for us to be thinking about because it wasn't something we thought about in the past. You train the dog and the dog did what you trained it to do. But now we're looking more at the dog buying into the training session with you and agreeing to go along with what you're doing. Right. And since our dogs can't talk to us, we have to have some sort of communication system so that we know when they're comfortable. I assume that they're consenting to something if they stay in the session when they could leave. My dogs always, in every training session I do, they have the option of leaving. As long as it's safe, of course. Not out in traffic, but anywhere else. They have the option of opting out of the session, just physically walking away. And I think that's important. So by staying, they're giving me consent to continue on. If my dogs did leave, which is an extremely rare event, but if it happened, that would tell me I was pushing them too hard. And if I push them to the point where they can't remain in the session, I need to rethink what I'm doing and go back to something that's going to be more comfortable to them. Um, it's easy to inadvertently, um, coerce our dogs into staying in sessions and working with us, um, by putting a little bit of pressure on them. Right. I actually teach my dogs as part of my training process that, okay, if you come up on this grooming table where I do most of my cooperative care training, I have my grooming table sitting in my living room all the time. You come up here, you get a lot of cookies, but if you want to leave, you still get cookies. You can leave and get cookies. It's not like I'm going to withhold the reinforcers. So I teach them, get on the table, have 10 cookies, get off the table, have a cookie. You want to come back up, here's some more. You want to leave, have another one so that they're not feeling punished by the removal of the reinforcer. If they have to leave, if they, if they chose to get off the table, that would still be okay. Um, I do a lot of work with a Zen bowl. So I have the bowl, open bowl of food out while I'm working with my dogs. And so most of my dogs will use that as a focal point. They'll be looking at the bowl because that's where the food is. Why wouldn't you look there?

And so as long as they're able to look at the bowl and they're thinking food thoughts, I assume that what I'm doing is comfortable for them and I can continue. If they stop paying attention to the bowl. And especially if there's like a really sharp head turn towards me when I'm doing something, I'm like, okay, you just told me that's uncomfortable. I need to back off and I need to do something differently going forward. So I'm trying to read their body language for consent. And I'm, I'm really thoughtful about, you know, the ears are going back. Is the tail going down? Is the dog stiffer than they were? Every dog has different tells, different things in their body language that tell you whether they're comfortable or not. So I'm reading those for consent all the time as well. And trying to make sure that my dog stays in their comfort zone. And when I have to, sometimes we do have to move them out of their comfort zone. Sometimes we are going to have to do something that they're not that comfortable with, but we need to do it slowly and thoughtfully and carefully. Probably to me, one of the biggest things is just holding still. If you can hold still while I do something to you, I'm taking that as your consent. If you can't hold still, I'm going, okay, we need to go back a couple of steps and work on that part of the process first, and then we'll come back to it. So I want, I guess overall what I'd say is I want my dogs to choose to stay in sessions with me. And that gives me, that makes me comfortable that I have their consent to continue on when they freely choose to stay, even though they have other options. You mentioned the Zen stuff in there a little bit. So can you tell them more about kind of how that factors in? And maybe even before we get there, let's, let's maybe just talk about what Zen work is, what it is, what it involves, give people kind of a picture of that. And then we'll come back to the, how it factors into cooperation. I use the term Zen work a lot. People call it some different things. It could be called impulse control or self-control exercises, something along those lines. But I kind of like this concept of Zen, being calm and relaxed, yet still thoughtful about what you're doing. And the work that I do, the Zen work that I do, I want to work, as I mentioned before, as much on their emotional state and their arousal. I want it to be low. I want them to be relaxed. I want them to be calm, especially in the face of things that they might want, which normally we were talking about food here. If you want food, some dogs get very highly excited about that whole process.

We want to calm that all down. Zen work basically is a way for my dog to learn that getting what you want often involves just waiting. And again, a hard concept for a lot of dogs, especially active, sporty type dogs. You know, just waiting seems ridiculous to my board of colleagues. Why would we wait for something when we could take it? So the Zen work tells them it's in your best interest to wait. And I will tell you how to get the things you want. I will give you the clues to how to access what you want. But the dog's part of it is, hold on, listen to what I'm going to tell you next, and then you can have what you want. And so there are a lot of specific then exercises that are built around that central concept of waiting for you want what you want, waiting until I tell you what to do. I like to think of it as we're really building more thought and less reaction in the dogs. And that's vitally important. And we can do this even in puppies who have their all reaction and their no thought. But you can start to build it up even in puppies. And it becomes a habit at some point in time. So yeah, I have a number of then specific Zen exercises. I mentioned Zen Bowl before. And that's a common one that people use. But then we have a lot of other Zen exercises that we work through with the dogs so that they get this general concept of when in doubt, wait a second and actually even orient towards me and see what I'm going to tell you is going to happen next. And that saves us so much grief in so many training scenarios if we can get that to happen with our dogs. So that's kind of my basic description of Zen work, I think. Okay. So now let's talk about how that kind of factors into cooperative care. How do those two things kind of overlap or work together? And how does that all come together? Yes. Yeah. Zen has, I didn't realize that I think at the time, but Zen work became a central part of being successful with cooperative care. I wrote down a seven step process for how to go through your foundation for cooperative care. And Zen work is the second step. The first step is establishing a place where you're going to do your husbandry work and making it the best place your dog's ever been. But then the second step is to start doing your Zen work there. Um, when I remember when I was talking to my vet, um, who I've had for about 15 years now about what would be helpful. If you could have dogs come in knowing how to do any particular thing, what would be helpful? And she looked at me and I'll never forget. Cause she just shocked me. She said, just stand still.

If the dogs would just stand still, our jobs would be so much easier. That wasn't what I expect. I don't know what I thought she'd say, but that wasn't it. But that then is kind of the basis of Zen. Just wait. Just because something's happening around you or to you doesn't mean that you have to be active and start moving around. So just hold still. Okay. Um, but calmly. We don't want dogs who freeze because they're scared. And we don't want dogs who are going to explode in anticipation. We get that a lot with some dogs that hold still, but the, the arousal gets higher and higher and higher and higher. And then that's not really what we want either. So Zen work can help us get that calm, that body still brain relaxed, you know, thinking, but not overreacting to things. So all of that comes together. And whenever somebody says something to me like, okay, I need to, to put eye drops in my dog. What should I do? My answers are always, my answer is always going to be the same. Let's go back to the, you know, we need to go back. And if you do Zen work first, this will be so much easier because your dog will understand the concept of holding still to get what they want. And once they get that, then you can start adding all kinds of things, including, you know, cleaning the ears and putting in eye drops and brushing their teeth, but we've got to get that stillness in there first. So to me, that's a real strong, a really, really strong foundation for everything that comes after is if we can get the Zen work right. You'll cut the difficulty of all of this, at least in half, if not more. In half, huh? At least. That's a big promise there, Deb. I know. And it's true. And I'm making up the in half part because I don't really know how hard it would be, but I'm saying it makes it a heck of a lot easier. So it's worth the effort on the front end. If you put in that effort, you're glad you did later because jumping into the actual procedure without doing the Zen work or the foundation work tends to be harder. You get a whole lot of conflict going on with dogs. And that's where you start then putting pressure on them to let you do what you want to them. And then they start resisting. And you often end up having to go back to the beginning anyway, or just not ever getting it really right. So to me, that's a key part of this whole process is get that Zen work in there first. Absolutely. Makes sense. So for those who are listening and kind of nodding along and like, okay, but how do I actually do some of this stuff? I know you've got some stuff coming up.

If people are looking for more help, do you want to kind of talk about what options you offer for coaching and classes and whatnot? Sure. Yes, definitely. The first thing that I always recommend is to get the book. There's a book. It's called Cooperative Care, Seven Steps to Stress-Free Husbandry. You can get it on Amazon. That's the easiest way to get a hold of it. Um, and the book really does lay out step by step by step, first this, then this, then this. So I tell people, go back to this, you know, and, and that will really give you a good foundation. Um, I'm also going to be teaching my cooperative care class at FDSA. Um, I'm only teaching it once a year now. So this, this is the only time it'll happen for probably close to another year. And the, it's what I call the big class kind of, we would consider it like a sampler class. There's everything in it. Uh, you're not, you're not going to come out of it knowing how to do everything or your dog's not going to come out of it comfortable with everything, but it's how you start everything and all of our foundation steps. And we hit on all the important things, um, that people are most likely to need when they're either grooming or doing veterinary stuff with their dogs, healthcare stuff. So that, that class is coming up in classes. Well, we're, we're taping this ahead of time. Classes start the first. Classes will start the day this comes out, I think. Oh, okay. Hey, what, what good timing I have here. And, um, and then the final thing that I'm offering right now or this year is, um, a workshop called your daily Zen. And so the workshop starts, I think the 10th of October and it's, I set it up as an every one, every day there's a new Zen exercise and they build on each other. So I want people to do them in order and that they should take, you know, more than 10 minutes a day working two or three short sessions. So it's not a lot of work, but it's work that will have a huge impact and pay off. So I go through seven Zen exercises in the week. Um, you may or may not get through all seven. That's fine. You know, people are going to be at different places with what they do, but the idea is to go back and make sure you've done all of these things and that they're, um, in good shape before you try to add on more challenge or difficulty to them. Um, so I just finished up making that workshop and most of the videos are with my, with, with wizard who is the, the youngest one. And so you see his learning process in it. Um, and I'm, I'm a big believer in just leaving mistakes in and talking about what they are and moving on when I do videos.

Um, so we had some errors, but I showed how to fix them and they're very common errors, um, that I show people how to fix when that happens. So my dogs are far from perfect and they all have to learn just like everybody else. So I'm really pleased with this workshop. So I hope people will take advantage of a really, really dense week of working on it. You'd be amazed at how much that will help with everything else you do with all your training in the long run. And so that's what I've got going on in the near future. Awesome. All right. So I want to kind of round this out with one last question. Um, if we were to kind of drill down all the stuff we talked about today, right? Um, kind of leave people with one takeaway, one final thought that you kind of want them to walk away from listening to this with, um, what would that be? Well, I'd actually have two things. I have two thoughts. I can't just have one thought. I have two thoughts, but they're both pretty, pretty short here. The first thing is train it before you need it. Okay. When your dog has an eye infection is not the time that you can train eye drops. It's too late. And then you're in a situation of having to do something that's going to be unpleasant for everybody involved. So train it beforehand. Look at it like you would any other sort of foundation training and do the basics long before it comes into play as much as you possibly can. So that's my one big thing. The other one is a saying that I always say, um, that my students are very used to, which is be the turtle in your training, slow, steady, persistent. That pays off over time. It's not when you put in this big push of effort for a day or two, it's what you do every day over months and months. And it doesn't have to be a lot. I'm, I'm also a big believer in very short training sessions. So a couple minutes here and there that will pay off for you. So don't, and don't worry if, if progress is slow, it's still progress. And it's actually usually better that way if it's slow. So those are my two. Excellent. All right. Well, thank you so much, Deb. I'm really glad that I got you on the podcast this week and that we could chat about some of this stuff. I am too. I was really happy to be here. You know, I love to talk about this stuff. So anytime. Yeah. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in and we will be back next week with Nicole Wiebush and Nancy Ghilardi Little to talk about healing. So we will be talking about all the different bits and pieces about how people get stuck and how to get started.

If you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast and 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 Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Line. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. Music by Benita Doolittle. Music by Benita Doolittle.