Training Without Conflict® 팟캐스트 에피소드 22: Dr. Stewart Hilliard

the American ring Federation which was uh uh the first French ring organization from what I recall right yeah with with a number of other people but I was instrumental in starting it yeah and then uh uh you you became the first um French ring Dakota got uh got your certification in France I I think that could be the case I was I was one of the first I might have been I might have been the first to do it in France yeah pretty pretty impressive stuff and and we're not even halfway through what you've done um 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 um eventually you ended up uh co-authoring the very famous and the first book Theory and training methods with Susan Barwick I think it was a 1991. even today when I opened the book and I go through it so many years later the way things were laid out then still make sense and still give a very good presentation of what that type of dog training is you did plenty of seminars around the country for clubs from low reinforcement agency around the world you did a lot of the the scripts for canine training systems if not all of them at one point including mine which we're gonna 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 to graduate school uh you got your animal behavior and learning degree then you kind of disappeared and then the only way I could find you and and really we will get to this because it's very interesting stories but then all of a sudden bunch of different studies came out which I would like to hear like your personal take on them instead of reading them finally you you you 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 um you were responsible for the for the testing and uh all the the purchases of the dogs and selection and training courses and pretty much really instrumental in anything Lachlan had to do with dogs I think we can go on but from here on I would let you kind of give give uh anything that I missed and and and we go from there okay though those are I mean you you have more of a bio on me than I thought you would um because I uh well anyway you have a more of a bio on me than I thought you would um 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 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 activity as a responsibilities as a civil servant by but my opinions Express are solely my own do not imply or constitute the United States Air Force Department of Defense or U.S government endorsement my appearance on this podcast does not signify the United States Air Force the Department of Defense or the US government approve endorse or authorize obedience without conflict or any products or practices associated with my host Ivan beloved um that's just kind of a standard uh disclaimer that one has to make when one is in government service and has to pay attention to ethical kinds of concerns so um I don't expect there to be much controversy but that's just a necessary step I have to go through um yeah that's that's kind of roughly my bio between 1980 and 1990 I was very busy as as an amateur and breaking into a professional uh dog training at breeding as well and then uh basically the story is my back started to hurt right because more than anything else I was I was what we call now a decoy um although that's not my favorite expression because it doesn't evoke the interplay of mood and conflict and Challenge and aggression all that kind of stuff in in dog training but that's 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 gonna be able to do this all my life I need a professional oh um and I was very attracted to Academia higher education um I'd become very interested in Behavior so I got myself admitted to uh The Graduate School at you know at the University of Texas at uh Austin Texas where I was lucky enough to become the student of a very eminent psychologist named Michael domyan for whom I have great reverence and respect and also a ton of liking because he's just a man she's a he's a great guy um I at that point my my destiny was to be a college professor someplace to go on you know where sandals take long summer uh sabbaticals and 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 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 um 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 school house for the dod military working dog program and

um so I I received that offer to do some initial psychophysical research with substance detector dogs and also to begin a couple of breeding programs and um for a bunch of personal circumstances I just decided that I would go for um 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 are some of us walking around that that base who worked with dogs who've been there a long long time and we're not going anywhere until we retire and I'm 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 but 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 that the emphasis is very much different um and I guess I don't know that's that's about all I'd say about it unless you have any anything no I'm curious like I mean it's a it's two different worlds basic dog training and uh Sports dog training and we have your problem dog training and then going into science and and but you you pick the um Behavioral Science which naturally dogs had an influence on you right and uh which one came first to you like the interest in dogs or the interest in Behavior yeah yeah like how how mine was 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 um 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 so that was that was the kind of kid I was I thought I was gonna grow up to be a veterinarian that's all I wanted to do for many years has become a vet and then uh 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 uh and those are the prerequisites for vet school and also is becoming much much more interested in behavior and then a funny kind of an accident happened um when uh actually not very funny we were when I was a very young man about 19 years of age uh my 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 early home invasion um and it scared the crap out of all of us and 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 top and at

one point I asked him um 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 is 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 flipped to the to the German Shepherd dog breeder section of dog roll magazine and you look through all the different ads and you started making phone calls and and so forth no no internet no email nothing like that you're like we're sending letters and asking for letters backs and stuff like that and I wound up buying a [ __ ] puppy um from kirchen tall Bloodlines from a guy named Ernest Harper who was an MD in um in Arkansas and uh he he basically said you do you have any familiarity with working dogs I'm like no he said okay why don't I send you a female because that just might go better so he sent me a [ __ ] and um and to make a long story short one of the 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 right a super good dog to make all of my worst and earliest mistakes with right and I remember at one point one of uh my earliest Mentor was probably Susan Barwick my next Mentor after that was Johannes greva 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 noron vespaulin I think and he um interestingly enough wound up having a lot of effect on the the law enforcement dogs in North America because what he did was to influence the people who worked at the leadership of the LA National I'm sorry this is my bad chairman Landes Chula uh I've forgotten the expression it's a long long name for the German police dog school at norgrine best fall where where they breed dogs they train handlers and all that kind of stuff so he essentially got a couple of American cops named Wendell nope and Ted Sexton into the Nord Ryan best Fallen program as handlers so they could go through the German program and get uh 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 um German police dog training methods um standardization professionalism um and education to the North American police dog scene so that that was my guy who wound up being the training director of the Rocky Mountain children 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 uh one of the things that Johanna said to me is in one point we're like drinking beer and says it's too bad about your [ __ ] I'm like what do you mean it's too bad about my mess he said it's a really good [ __ ] it's just too bad now like what do you mean it's well that you got that dog first okay and I didn't I didn't really understand that for a lot of years because it was an exceptionally good female dog um and of course she didn't go too terribly far with me because I didn't know much I got you know I got her shoes on three with decent scores but bad tracking you know and all this kind of stuff she she could have had a career um we almost qualified for the um for the Deutsche Meister shaft uh I believe whatever the thing that was that was open to International competition and so Johannes had gotten something going with the German Shepherd Dog Club of America uh working dog Club who was desirous of becoming uh relevant in working dogs and had uh gained the privilege of sending dogs to this to this championship and so at one point I competed in the in the qualification trial with a bunch of other people including Johannes and uh and got myself whistled off of the track as a result of 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 drug the the judge whistled me off in an instant and then everybody at the 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 so anyway that was that was my female dog and then let me stop you here because this is a uh something I always come back to um the 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 uh uh structure so to speak and correct training what are your thoughts on this because it happens often quite often to wear a first-time Handler ends up with a super dog and then it's very difficult for them to get that next one yeah we thought of that um I I have I I haven't thought of it in terms of a frequent phenomenon uh but it I have wondered so 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 to build a sort of a

self-confident powerful driving um stress resistant dog right with with willingness and 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 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 um sometimes it's difficult to predict who will be best at both tasks and all sometimes it's it's difficult difficult to predict who will be able to do both um I've seen some really expert trainers who struggle to rear good puppies and essentially formed 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 that August is ready to go I'll train the dog I feel confident on my ability to do that um so I guess that that's the extent of my thoughts on it yeah yeah that's uh like I I have that same thing sometimes I'm like no I I wish I can give you a puppy to race for me because whatever you're doing your dog believes it's that the he rules the world and yeah and and we have a we have a breeding program at like so so back to back to my job for um the Air Force um so you you alluded to the roles that I played um at the What's called the 341st training squadron at Lackland Air Force Base the quote-unquote schoolhouse um and it's a it's a large organization large dog training organization that trains handlers uh 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 um sometimes people sometimes people get it wrong and they think that I ran the whole place like I'm in India and not a chief but but and always have been but what I what I have done at various points is been the the um 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 is I direct the breeding program um 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 if we go back to Johannes because he was a I mean he was very influential also in the the whole United shooting clubs of America at that time um I don't know if he's 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 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 uh German Shepherd Dog Club of Germany uh 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 um and that was what he really admired and and I think he's still doing that exact same thing so when I talked to him he told me that um they just had a litter on the ground that the litter was a rep heat 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 and training and all that kind of stuff and I'm sure that at the same time the dogs are going for their um confirmation ratings and the kirklasa 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 doll wow do you think the uh what was it called back then because we had the we had the shotgun trial together with the police Trails was a DPO or something like this yeah I think I think it was DPO something was that part of uh um was he part of this um how did that start because like this is before that 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 uh 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 something 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 shoots one right and but it was meant for serving police officers and their dogs like serving uh uh Handler dog teams from police with rules that were mostly mapped straight onto IPO with some differences for police talks that's my understanding and they did indeed like I 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 see 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 they're 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 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 it in a different world a professional professional working dogs right and so and and also I'm not really I don't do social media I'm not on the internet you know I kind of don't know what's going on but I I do hear some rumbling 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 stick hits 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 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 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 present the sports 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 shuts on how many times when when the name started to change and everybody's like what is going on like how many names we went through until right now we have iqp 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 we're 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 changing 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 what's on anyway a way of trying to ensure that the best dogs were used to produce the next generation of dogs 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 the with the the the trophy but in principle what competition does is Select out the best dogs 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 percent 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 yeah and I've 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 one of us always brings up the Specter of what Michael calls where Malinois breeding 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 from me is the the emphasis in in dog sport when I first started was the shotzun 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 uh the the selection has been both in Rule and emphasis and also in the performances on the field it's my impression 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 wet 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 queue 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 um although of course in in back in the days it was much more primitive and primitive has its place I think too because it's it's a 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 uh close you know like I I give some analogies of this um uh you know like if I if I get into some yoga position and 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 uh um made of behavior it's not a it's not something like we can have a dog that has really lacks confidence and we can train them to look as he rules the field yeah unless unless he's really tested and this becomes problem and of course it's it because the dog is so well constructed it's very difficult to find way to test him that he's not prepared for right yeah so it it's it's in in the old days we were insophisticate enough primitive enough that it was relatively easy to put the dog in difficulty to see how we behaved in difficulty now and sometimes we put it in difficulty because we were we just didn't know better yeah right because we were bad dog trainers exactly which happened accidentally or we were bad decoys or or whatever but so these days I think I I'm more familiar with the picture that you see when you appraise or evaluate dogs on the open market for sale as as um 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 uh on the on the dog business side the people who rear dogs most commonly in Eastern Europe have become so proficient 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 um kind of a type 2 error right like you wind up keeping a dog because 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 all certainly certainly that happens but the 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 um 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 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 uh 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 Carl I think that is this world movement that and I I'm not sure who is behind it I don't think it's Peter I don't I'm I mean I'm sure animal rights have

something to do with it but I think it's much more more wider than that don't believe that protection Sports Society has changed right so true so one thing I I just finished um 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're not easy to find anymore societal um attitudes through the developed world you know what we might call the the Western world have changed enough in your my lifetime that they have changed the kind of science that one can easily do so uh 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 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 how you were able to find a lot of references to uh 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 of um 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 um 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 um so overall things have changed tremendously um my attitude personally has changed tremendously the kind of things that that I would accept is normal in dog training in the 80s are absolutely unacceptable to me now and and that's that's um that's across the board right and and that's a good thing that is a good thing um 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 um 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 it a dog's personality like and it's a little bit non-evaluated right right so if I say a dog has a lot of Personality 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 um courage if you will uh ability to Bear up under stress all that kind of stuff so um so most of us particularly those who started in the old in the old days we think of the dogs in terms of 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 um that is that is this wider community that don't want don't understand and are very much against protection Sports and they're 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 gonna stop there I I if this happens I'm sure agility will be next and then any 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 gonna ban igp now they're doing it by increments to where it's like well we're gonna change the rule yes you're not gonna like it but you still can play your game so there is not this big uproaring and protest there is a scientific word for for this kind of uh mind [ __ ] you know it's a political thing and it's little by little they take you right to where you don't you do you feel like okay done we can live with that we can live with a kind of like the what was that and I don't think how uh real that uh test was with the boiling frog you know where they so so it's very similar strategy what they are doing to us and um 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 gonna get a lot of hate for what I'm saying and and maybe some point deductions on the field but I I have to say what I feel and and I wish that the people

that are elected in those positions in like working dog commissions and uh executive Boards of different uh 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 a very special meaning for a dog that um dogs like to challenge themselves like you you want to you want to punch a sandbag and see how how good you are you want to test yourself and you're successful and then there is challenges like I would have a any 14 15 year three-legged blind dog that's been doing Protection work they hear that Whip or they smell the sleep 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 are brainwashed it's a it's a very uh it's a as closest 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 uh do all positive reinforcement I don't think dogs want that kind of life it's there is no meaning in it I 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 kind of canine Behavior right within the limits of safety and law and all that other kind of stuff because um 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 dogs motivations his dog-like behaviors and transmute them put them in the service of this elaborate Repertory let repertoire of of artificial behaviors that that wind up constituting a healing routine and a uh a come for 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 balance 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 asked 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 citizens despite the fact that they possess vital dog-like Behavior like aggression and some very specific circumstances strong predatory behavior and very specific circumstances Etc I think they make better citizens rather than a a lesser citizens super Point yeah like I I cannot agree more with that and especially working spending time in shelters and working with aggression dogs and I know you did that in your previous life um but there should be instead of this 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 trains jujitsu you know that's exactly what it is 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 contacts 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 100 because those kinds of behaviors come under uh I'll 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 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 and 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 I think I'd encounter more people I thought were nuts than dogs that I thought were not most the time it's just dogs that have got the wrong reinforcement histories and are existing in the wrong uh social and physical environments but these are the conversation that we have to have and we have to uh we have to educate and and and you know like right now I'm not sure how if you heard but the latest thing in igp shooting IPO and so on the latest thing that the rule change was removing the stick hit all together uh yeah I heard something about it so that happened January 1st strangely enough it wasn't even by pressure of of some animal rights organization they just 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 secret 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 a game

changer in breeding in in selection in training and ultimately we will have dogs that um we will selectively continue to breed now weaker dogs that will end up having problems that will end up here like I when I worked in the early 90s in 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 nut cases including German Shepherds sometimes but not that often but we've never had a dog that was end up in the shelter because of protection Sports and yeah there there are epidemiological studies of dog bites right like like morbidity of dog bites so what what the risks are um correlations with breed Etc et cetera et cetera and I'm 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 um serious and inappropriate dog bites uh were attributed in non-accidental contacts taking place at dog clubs and stuff like that were attributed to to transport dogs this kind of Statistics this kind of studies will be very beneficial to be done um and hopefully somebody maybe maybe somebody has listened to to our conversation right now maybe maybe it's uh 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 for interrupting you with the sticks where the tickets are concerned um 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 the kind of contact that human athletes experience in vigorous sports like Jiu Jitsu and football and stuff like that um there are many ethical concerns right now surrounding the voluntary more or less voluntary uh 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 that 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 ticket be have any potential for the kind of harm to a dog that strong contact in human sport 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 exactly 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 um 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 shoots on her IPO I never saw a dog that I thought was um seriously psychologically or physically injured by stick heads um and this tickets 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 human being a protected human being in the way that he was trained to do yeah yeah and and the moment a dog showed I 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 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 why 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 on 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 asked 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 Funk 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 oh that was a good hit that felt kind of good to get knocked down right now 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

that's very that's very much been my personal journey is is learning to engage in athletic Pursuits that involve discomfort physiological Challenge and beginning to Crave those Pursuits and need those Pursuits as part of my development as 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 come 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 if he has the same sort of adrenaline tie that I have after I engage in really really uh 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 right and 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 um you know how we we talk about the dogs having a a choice and um I guess an argument will be that well we are breeding them we're selecting them to to not have that choice and that is not correct because um when we when we look at pit bulls and and and and ring fights these dogs are truly selected to even even when they're not they're weak and they're gonna lose the fight they don't have a flight instinct they're they're just in there and they they will it's not a courage per se it's like they're of I I would speculate to say that yes they're afraid they don't want to but they don't it's selected out of the repertoire to check out and on top of that they're enclosed uh ring to where they don't have a choice but to engage in a fight if 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 and part of the victimization is is creating dogs with behavior and then shaping that behavior um such that they are committed to a path from which they cannot depart yeah 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 I again it's revolting I I I've um back when I was in San Francisco in the 90s they used to have this conferences of fighting and we used to go and bust them with the cops and the animal care and so on but where I was going with this is in in protection Sports you have an open field and you basically say hey do you want to

engage in a fight when the dog says I don't want to okay game over nobody you you're not in in the fightering you have a choice and that selection normally takes place long long before the trial field that selection takes place when the dog is is uh four months old five months old eight months old uh when you're first asking the dog um 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 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 anything that any kind of training that you know how we talked about the 80s I mean you were you were here I was in Eastern Europe but we we did I'm sure we did identical things even though there was no internet we it was a very straightforward primitive kind of training um then we evolved which is an interesting thing to talk I I'm gonna kind of even sidestep here because um you know by that time I I wrote my book oh I think it was at least 10 years after you did and I 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 Stewart helped me tremendously with the script of my the DVDs that I did before um 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 that all all that came from this time in the early 2000s when you and I was 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 um but we were at that time and I don't know if you will remember this but I I was talking how I I claimed

that I can train a dog to do protection Sports without ever having to use electric color and and I was I I remember saying even to Doug and and you like we can put electric colors out of business but then from from 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 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 to bring quicker Clarity in what you want to do meaning like being the ability to even verbally say hey you're you're going on the wrong path makes brings Clarity and speeds up any training problem I think a lot of us went we all got excited I had that podcast with Michael last year we were talking about that's how we kind of all jumped on it but we had to come back and and not people think that we are coming back to a little bit more and I wouldn't call myself balanced trains because that's a very uh I I think it has a lot about luggage with it um but it's not because of points what people think is our world 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 any training there is a puzzle to attract when when we're presenting the dog with some task and for that task if we decide what we're gonna do errorless learning and we're going to just focus on positive reinforcement and we're going to ignore all this and I I don't believe that the dogs if they have a choice they would choose that route especially when they have a motivation to reach an end goal when you when you and I started training dogs pretty much it was very heavily of aversive training in in any shade of it right then then we we shifted Karen Pryor came along we you know we we started to think a little bit different we started to become more aware of what we can accomplish with better approach in 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 at 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 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 so so what you're saying is 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 uh the Criterion behavior and and that you think given the choice of continuing to engage in trial and error in 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 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 uh in Laboratories uh 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 subversives that are unsignal so that the the whatever the hedonic value to the animal of the aversive is greatly affected by the animals for knowledge 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 um potentially more aversive or stressful yeah yeah the contingent versus non-contention that you can provide the dog with more predictive information about what the outcomes of his behavior will be he might prefer that even if some of the information comes through uh instruments that are conditioned aversively through uh conditioned uh punishers or or cues that are conditioned aversively and I don't I don't find that um a a difficult to accept that that seems within their own possibility to me although you know I don't know what as I said as I said many many times the uh 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 uh something I was curious um before we we decided to talk um and ring sport how do you see them 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 80s when I was very very thoroughly steeped in in Schultz one at that time and [Music] 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 shoots one and I'll give I'll give you an example so when I first began training ring sport I began with a Dutch crossbred dog who was probably half Malinois half Bouvier it 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 he 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 it in my day it was a five-point exercise and you got a three or four hundred 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 Mondeo ring which is which is ring heavily heavily influenced by Belgian sport um or French rank 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 shoot someone where the dog has maybe four basic skills that it Masters in order to do a pressure protection routine right like obedience in the presence of the the decoy Olden bark search out and that's about it right that's that's what the dogs 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 search 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 um 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 yeah to relax and rest and to be uh when necessary watchful to show vigilance right and so when that is especially expressed I got I got an object lesson on this um in the suit one day in Colorado in the 1987 time frame we had a seminar with uh Michelle Beyer oh yeah they had a a dog performing at the highest level of French ring in France at that time 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 trial is 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 virus was a a small typey dog of the law after the model of of Type e French dogs of the Bloodlines of those day 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 Michelle 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 no um no he was not he was not yet 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 dog was very quiet and the dog watched me and he was completely relaxed

when I tried to make the sweet 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 the 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 I stopped moving the Handler's command would come in the loose would release instantly with and then go back to relaxing and escorting me and the next time I thought about making the mistake the 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 Lewis was not the least bit tired right 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 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 [ __ ] about French ranks 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 it's a very uh 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 are just very are trained and selected also I think bred selectively to but mainly trained to Pace themselves and not to get overly excited and uh 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 um it the the training is different on subtle letters the the levels the the training and the product of good french ring training is is so different on very subtle level 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 um 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 Belgium guys yeah well we are dog 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 this 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 never ending variation in environmental demands that's how we challenge the dog and after a while you realize that there um 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 Blake Shelton is or ITP 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 right uh 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 I had Peter Engel one time say to me many years ago Peter engel's a a German guy one of the people who is 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 um that there is definitely that that party in French ring when a dog can get clearly defeated and Phil 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 and I don't like it then you see them in the next exercise and therefore out again A lot of times a lot of times yeah it can happen it all can can completely fail on one exercise and you see it like the picture of a dog when the object is taken at Gabe and the Omni attack is leaving yes with the object the picture of dejection and

and sort of confusion that the dog shows um 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 I 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 um and in a way they establish their reputations by posing such challenges to the dogs that sometimes the dogs are defeated um so for me if there's a weak if there's a weak point to the sport that's it and that is another like in the comparison um uh um I guess you could in shoots when you could really promote the the aggression and dominance to where if you promote it too much in French ring you're gonna start to lose control and it's hard to promote it because a lot of the the protection during the bite work the decoys heavily involved teaching and orchestrating and telling the dog what they 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 and um and he was one of the first guys he was in 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 so the dogs were kept very clear-headed very quiet they went through the motions they did everything that that was required They carried out the topographical requirements but you 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 gonna 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 others 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 they 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 ooh developed his power later after he learned understanding of all of the the exercises and part of that was habitual obedience to command

so only when the dog became powerful enough to be challenging to control um when you arrived at that point the dog already had learn 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 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 spotting so to speak the tradition in igp and children 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 relatively simple behaviors that they're called upon to do and by work right four main skills that the dog has to do but he has to do them with style and an exact typography 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 a dog's Spirit first and then to take control of the topographies and the performance but without damaging spirit and I think now there's there's more of an approach to developing the two together get the dogs 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 skillful protection trainer what do you see as the differences in in 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 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 is that what you said yeah like the same approach to an agility experience 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 all of their power and their energy with ex 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 exact thing and demanding topographies and when you see agility practice at a high level that's what it looks like and and I had um I had some friends uh 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 at dog Sport and kind of not I mostly just used to going to the club sometimes and and um help train dogs and and so forth but anyway they used to you know what 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 High 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 a Fly ball participants or stand 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 dog's function with very very impressive exactitude but they function in at relatively lower levels of arousal right so so if you ask me who's going to have a harder time getting getting 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 in 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 a 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 a border collie being mugged 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 dogs 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

yeah so so you know one one thing is 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 going someplace 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 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 these Feats yeah when it's aroused but it might work there's at least one other whole challenge which is the contention the oppositional interaction between the the decoy or agitator or on the attack and the dog so it said 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 um biteworks board uh performance that that it is perhaps not seen in agility with a caveat that I don't know anything about agility despite the fact that I wrote and proved produced a series of videos about it years ago that's true yeah well I mean I I can tell you the first time and I didn't didn't know anything about agility I just go to this lady's place to start writing your 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 a normal 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 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 [ __ ] is cool these dogs are driving 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 yeah 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 as far as do they do they experience a lot of injuries oh yeah it's it's probably them probably actually much more than than any other Sport and we and we get back into the ethics of it because you know do if 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 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 and it's it's a difficult ethical thing I mean I can definitely definitely see myself looking at my dog thinking uh 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 if you really care about the dogs there are many places where you reach these Forks on the road me for example yeah my shoulders hurting my knees gardening whatever but I knew I was breaking myself down please don't stop me yeah I I knew I was I knew I was beating myself down in my 20s 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 these 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 sport even though it's kind of beating me down and you know I realize it's gonna 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 anthropomorphic terms what the dog appears to love doing and what's good for his long correct well Fair um 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 um feelings out of it right so I think about this when I think about the end of a dog's life uh 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 uh 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 I mean I I'll give you 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 tours the CL and it's not not during protection or obedience it'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 Rod you know 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 obviously gonna 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 the only thing that's going to happen is 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 I know 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 per the the writer used the expression dog sport addict the kind of dog sport junkie and like use it again and again and 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 and so it appeared that what this person thought of as a quality life for a dog was 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 my subjective dog to a higher risk of injury and for me there are my wishes how 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 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 at welfare for the dogs might Prejudice some of the things that we value 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 adult training um coming coming right now to the the reasons ourselves why that can be a concern and and that's a challenge for for everybody to find that middle ground because they are they're critically important they both are critically important for the well-being of the dog 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 ended 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 shoots one or ringsport 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 were important Endeavors are to be accomplished depending on the availability of quality dogs of quality work windows 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 um so these are and I guess I'm just saying 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 that stir me to Pride and admiration when I see them to um 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 um 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 to pick a very very very wise course in the middle yes and we need to I mean we need to collectively brainstorm and and make that decision without there is an emotional aspect we cannot avoid that and it's a good thing um of course it's a good thing everybody has to come together to the conversation I guess at some point um because it's an important conversation very important conversation um I I know you did few studies back in what 10 10 years ago or so and and I'm curious what what made you like the one that I I think they were all kind of

related it was all about personality and performance in the in in the military dogs right what yeah it's what we call psychometrics so the measurement of Behavioral variables and traits so what what made you made you do the study and and what well I'll tell you what that's a little bit of that's a little bit of a long subject and conversation yes we can live 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 um it's also a topic for sport dogs and you know exactly in the business of of choosing dogs for their roles in life uh 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 if you were to do a study today anything to do with dogs where would you go have you thought of anything uh yeah as a matter of fact I I thought of a recent project um having to do with the context specificity of Extinction so so very many of the dogs that are acquired normally from overseas most often from Eastern Europe are prepared for tests of um auditory environmental Behavior that's a long fancy way of saying gunfire tests right so the the kind of gold standard for uh most testing for practical working dog uh suitability involves a manipulation where you shoot a gun over or near the dog right that's just it's been kind of the gold standard for like 120 years um it has to do with operational relevance convenience custom you know all that kind of stuff um 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 U.S you might call it which usually has to do with access to a 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 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 um 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 think I can't think of any job the dog is supposed to do off the top of my head that will be um 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 to to suppress that prior condition response one of them is extinction where you simply present the Cs withhold the US many many times and watch the document and behavior it turns out that that what is learned and 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 um that particular kind of conditioning is relatively independent of contextual cues so it transfers it generalizes pretty readily to other contexts well guess what when I set out to abolish or suppress that responding by uh shooting the gun and not having the dog bite and shooting the gun and not having a dog bite or procedure somewhat like that that turns out to be highly context dependent so I can I can carry out Extinction procedures and they can be and related 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 have through spontaneous recovery reinstatement all kinds of stuff like that I can move to another context or I can um 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 um one of the the study I thought of doing most recently was uh some sort of a study of how to abolish or suppress excitatory responding to gunshots in um 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 um counter conditioning and Extinction uh in in the most efficient ways and I'd like to do some work investigating that for a bunch of applications dogs need to be quiet when they're excited for when they're excited by environmental stimuli uh in all kinds of applications or they need to be calm under environmental stimulation especially auditory simulation not just quiet but stable that's the important part because uh like I I mean that clearly this is the 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 you have the quiet laid down and the gun different evaluation of how they respond to that noise right so that would be a very interesting one too I I um that's definitely will be a it is important practical uh implications as well so that's that's the the most recent idea for a project that I've had very cool so uh it's been a great pleasure thank you very much for um for asking me on uh one thing I didn't get a chance to say you and I discussed a little bit about maybe how I would um 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 uh great extent because the time that I spent with you uh producing your videotapes brought some real aha moments that have had a lasting effect on me and um 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 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 I hope you enjoyed this and uh I hope I'll talk to you again soon Yvonne donkey was a pleasure like really really a pleasure take care [Music] thank you [Music]