에피소드 14: 데브 존스 인터뷰 - "도그 트레이닝의 집중과 기초"

Star is my next oldest dog, Border Collie, who is, I say constantly, the smartest dog I ever met. She's scary smart. And Star is also a great demo dog. Also showed her as well. And my youngest boy now, who is actually Zen's nephew. Hilo is going to be three. A lot of people have seen him in class videos ever since he was a puppy. He's been working for FDSA in some form or the other. And kind of the latest youngest Sheltie is Tigger, who is a tiny little seven-pound thing. And he is just so full of himself and full of life. And he's a lot of fun. So, he's also in quite a few of the class videos, and he enjoys every second of it. And then the other two Shelties are a little bit older, so they have what we call old dog immunity, which means, again, you get to do whatever you want. And they enjoy that. Fair enough. It's a busy household. I'd imagine. But I've seen some of those videos you share, Tigger. He's so cute. Oh, he's a little firecracker. To have such a tiny little dog, he's way below size for what Shelties usually are. And this was just by chance. It was just a fluke that he was this small. But, oh, is he full of it. So, he makes us laugh every day. That's the thing we say about Tigger is he makes us laugh constantly. So, there's a lot of value in that. So, I wanted to ask about how you originally got into dog sports. I know that, you know, you've done a lot of different sports and with a lot of different dogs. So, what kind of got you started? Yeah, I have. I've had a lot of different dogs over the years. Settled on herding dogs now. But I actually started out with a Labrador Retriever, that lab named Katie. And I was in graduate school. And I'd been in about two years and just had to have a dog. I'd always had dogs, you know, just as pets. I'd never done a lot with them. But I really felt the need to have some sort of companionship in graduate school that was non-stressful. So, I got Katie, who was a rescue from a rescue. She was about 18 months old. And training classes, took her to local training classes. And this was in 1992. So, at that time, all there was was obedience. If you wanted to show a dog in anything, you were going to show it in obedience. So, I went through a number of classes. I met a lot of people. I got to know quite a bit about obedience competition. And the only problem was I was already trained in behavioral psychology and learning theory. And what I saw happening in classes did not match at all my expectation for how we should be training animals. It was still very, very heavy-handed and traditional back in those days. So, I liked the idea of competition and performance.

But I didn't like the way that people told me you had to trade in order to get to it. So, that sort of started this conflict in me about I want to do this, but I don't want to do it that way. And made me work very hard to try to figure out how can I apply what I know from academics and get successful performance. And so, that was the start of it. So, how did you bridge that gap? What actually got you started on that positive journey? And at what point did you get introduced to clicker training? Around the same time I got Katie, I was introduced to the book Don't Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor. Which was probably the very first book that many dog trainers ever saw that had anything to do with positive training. I'm a voracious reader. So, I read every dog training book out there. And this was one of many. But this was the one that really, really spoke to me. And said to me, you can take what you know from science. You can apply it to training the animal that you're working with now. And you can be successful. Except the thing was nobody else. Nobody had actually done it. It was theory. It wasn't yet application. And so, that set me on the path of being able to do this training the way I want to do it. And having an enthusiastic and very willing animal partner. Rather than one who was basically forced to do it. Because there would be unpleasant consequences if they didn't. So, I really would credit the book with getting me started on that. Awesome. Is that also how you were introduced to clicker training and shaping and all that good stuff? Yeah. It all came around about the same time. There was actually the first internet email group that I was ever on. Which was called Click L. This is really ancient. This was also back in about 1993 or so. When we first got internet at home. Which was a big deal at the time. But Click L was a group of like-minded people. And we were all just simply trying to figure out how do we do this? How do we apply this? And Karen Pryor was on the list. Along with a number of other people who are still training today. And we were all just kind of talking and throwing ideas around. And trying to figure out how we could use this kind of technique. A clicker training technique. To get all different sorts of behaviors. So it was a time when nobody was really an expert. Because nobody had done it yet. But that's really what I wanted to work toward. Was to make it work in our day-to-day training. I bet back then you never would have thought you'd be teaching online in today's day and age. Absolutely not.

But no, I still, I remember my great excitement the first time my modem actually hooked up at home. Because for the longest time we only had, we only had access at school when I was in graduate school for the first couple of years. So I could never have foreseen that one day I would be involved in these online classes. That just would not have ever crossed my map. So one of my favorite lines to come out of the podcast so far. Sue made this whole analogy during her interview about focus. Training without focus being almost like sending a kid to school without clothes on, right? Like you would never imagine sending a kid to school without his clothes on. Like why would you train a dog if you don't already have their focus? So I wanted to talk a little bit about kind of that concept. Focus seems like a place where people just tend to struggle. And I was kind of curious to get your take on why you think that is. Oh, so many reasons. Yeah, Sue always has the best descriptions of focus. And I think that one is perfect. The problem with focus though is that it's invisible to a large extent. Oftentimes people have the illusion that they have focus because they have cookies and they have toys. And they're in a training mode. Then they try to go into performance and all of a sudden it becomes very clear it was only an illusion. You did not have actual offered focus from your dog. You thought you did, but you didn't. So that's about the time people contact me. They're like, I don't know what went wrong. Everything was going so well. And then they're really surprised. Sometimes people equate focus with eye contact. And what we say is that's only part of it. Because you can be focused but not looking at each other. Looking at each other is not always focus. It's easy to look at somebody and to be a thousand miles away in your mind. And dogs do it the same way that people do it. So it's more than eye contact, which can be a trained behavior. There has to be this desire to want to do whatever the activity is or the task is. And if that desire isn't there, there's not going to be any focus. You're always going to be looking around for something else that's more interesting. And I think people just don't realize any of this. You're training your dog. You're teaching behaviors and skills. But you're not teaching it with focus. And it falls apart very quickly when it's put to the test. It's very hard to, I mean, even as a person, right? If you're focused on one task, there's a big difference between being focused on the task and having, you know, eight million tabs open on your browser.

And you're jumping back and forth between Facebook and, like, the thing that you're writing and something else. Yeah. Yeah. And it takes a while. It's not something we can expect to have immediately. Every once in a while, and it's very rare, you get a dog that just is naturally focused. But it's really rare. I've only known one dog who I would say was really, truly always just focused from the get-go. That's not the norm. So we all have to work at it to get our dogs to that place. And people then don't know, okay, they want focus, but then they have no idea what do you do? How do I get focus? And that's really the tricky part of it because there's a lot of things you do. Some of them work. Some of them don't. So how do you approach it in the class? We have two classes that address focus. And the first, I always hope people take them in order. The first class is get focused, which is what I always recommend people take first. And then a follow-up to that is called focus games. And we always try to offer it get focused in one term and then focus games in the next so people can follow through with it. What I try to do is isolate focus. Take it out of the context of anything else and distill it down to this mutual desire to interact with each other. So convincing the dog that what we're doing is what he wants to do, which sounds hard and it is hard. Sometimes it is very difficult. It's not easy. We have a number of very specific exercises to work on letting our dogs know that focus pays off. And if you focus on me, I'll pay you for it. And we try to get people quickly to move from food to toys and back and forth and to personal play as well so that you get paid in some way for focusing. There's a reinforcer for focusing. Then we start adding work to focus. But what we do is typically the opposite of what everybody else does. We have to have focus first before we ask for work or play even. If the dog isn't focused, we do not go on. We never train an unfocused dog. And I say this, this is like a million times. I say this over and over again. My dog's not focused. I need to stop. And this is really, really hard for people to do because they have a plan in their head for something that they wanted to train. But training a focused dog is just a waste of time. If you truly want to develop this, work and training always has to be combined with focus. So we go through a series of exercises designed to improve focus and also to teach people what to do when it's gone. What do you do? What's the protocol for when the focus is lost? Because lots of times that people are just kind of stuck.

They don't know what to do. So they take responsibility for focus and try to make it happen rather than allowing the dog to offer it. That whole being more exciting than a clown on crack line from Denise, right? Like that idea of just trying to be more and more exciting and your dog just continues to ignore you. Yeah. Yeah. That ends up being kind of a death spiral. Things never go well. If I have to add more and more energy to the interaction, then there is a problem. I'm giving everything. My dog's not doing anything. We need to go back to getting the dog to want to focus and work with us. And so we continually go back to that. And we don't try to overwhelm the dog with fun and excitement because that's a dead end. You won't get very far with that. It works. The problem is it often will temporarily work, but it won't work over the long term. It won't hold up. We work on all of this in the Get Focused class. When we move on to the Focused Games class, that's a lot more about finding the flow and the rhythm to working together and extending it out and adding things like movement and, you know, taking food off our bodies and still getting focused. So we add all those kinds of things in there. So it's a good 12 weeks worth of focused focus on focus. Right, right. So both the focus class and your current class, the Performance Fundamentals class, seem to fall into that foundations category, right? So I wanted to ask you what you thought it was so, like, what is it about building a good foundation that is so critical when it comes to dog sports? Foundation really is everything. I truly believe that. If you do your foundations well, you won't run into problems later on or I won't say you won't. You won't run into as many problems later on. Or if you do run into problems, you will have a way to fix them because the problem is in the foundation. Ninety-nine percent of the time, something wasn't taught to fluency or you left something out somewhere. You've got a gap or a hole. So going back to foundation and making it strong is always the answer. It's never a wrong thing to do. So I really like being able to try to get in that really strong basis for everything else you want. I don't care what sport people are going into or even if they're not going into sport at all. If they just like training and they want to train their dogs, a good foundation prepares you for any direction in the future. Because oftentimes we change direction. You have a dog you think you're going to be doing obedience with.

But if you focus in the beginning too much on obedience behaviors, it may end up that dog just isn't right for that. And so you have kind of these gaps for, let's see if I want to switch to agility. Now I need to train a new set of behaviors. We don't want that to happen. So we've got the foundation for pretty much everything. To talk a little bit more about the fundamentals class specifically, do you mind just giving some details around like what you cover in that class and kind of how you work to set up that foundation within the class syllabus and within the class, within kind of, I guess, what you teach there? Sure. Sure. Yeah, sure. We approach performance fundamentals very differently than many other people do or the way that people think they should approach dog training. I'm considering typically as a class that you either start with a puppy or you've gone through a puppy class and now you're ready to move on to the next thing. So that's where we would come in. I also think that it's a really good class for people who haven't done a lot of positive reinforcement training and they don't quite understand how to get started with it and what to do. I think it's also a good place for that. But the thing is, rather than focusing on skills and behaviors, I don't care at all in a class if the dog learns to sit or lie down or do whatever it is on cue. In fact, lots of times they won't and they don't need to. What they need to do in performance fundamentals or what I want them to be able to do is to build the foundation for a good working relationship so that, again, the dog is ready. The dog is willing. The dog really wants to do what you're doing. We work hard on balancing things like getting dogs to play as well as food motivation and going back and forth with those quite a bit. And my goal is always to make it seem like the dog doesn't know if you're playing or training. If they don't believe there's any difference, that's perfect. That's perfect training. So we do a lot of the foundation things like targeting behavior. So you might have the dog targeting to your hand. You might have the dog with their nose to other objects, have the dog targeting with their front feet or with their back feet. So we would explore, okay, there's all these different things we can do with targeting behavior. And those are all going to come in handy for you on down the line. We'll look at and play around with shaping because shaping is one of my favorite techniques. And it's also one that's really, really hard for people. It takes a lot of practice and you make a lot of mistakes.

There's just no way around it. It's experimenting. So we play around with shaping. And I always like to shape tricks and things that people don't care about a whole lot. So if you mess it up, nobody cares. It's no big deal, you know. You don't want to start being like on your competition retreat. You don't want that to be the first time you shape because that matters to people. And so we try to get them to do the easier things first. In that class, we're also just looking at can you effectively use, once we've taught targeting, you know, can you use luring? Can you use shaping? You can teach any behavior any number of ways. And so we look a bit more at the techniques that underlie that. And there's, you know, people can make decisions about what they want to train and how they want to go about approaching it. And we help them with that once they make some informed decisions. First of all, I felt like writing the questions for this talk, like I felt like there were 8 million things I wanted to ask about. And, like, jumping back and forth between focus and then, you know, the performance fundamentals class. And I've taken the cooperative canine care class and, like, loved it. So I wanted to at least, you know, briefly kind of touch on the other subjects. We'll definitely, like, have to have you back to talk more in depth about them. But can you tell us a little bit about the cooperative canine care class and a little bit about the new cat class you're working on? Can you give people a sneak peek? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, cooperative care has turned out to be one of my favorites. Which I think we've only been teaching it for a couple of years. And I was, became interested in this whole idea of husbandry work and working on grooming and veterinary procedures with animals. After I had gone to a training, a week-long training seminar at Shedd Aquarium a few years ago. And the majority of the training they do is cooperative care type training. They train every day for things that their animals may or may not ever need. But if they need them, then it's there. So training their dolphins, for example, to flip upside down and hold still so they can take blood out of the vein by their tail. And that's something they work on every day, even though it happens very rarely. And that got me thinking a lot about what we do with dogs. Because mostly what we do with dogs is we wrestle with them. And usually because we're a little bit stronger and because they're nice, they don't bite us. But in reality, we do some pretty unpleasant things to them and we don't prepare them for it.

We just do it. So I wanted to really explore with dogs, what can we do to make this more pleasant, more fun for everybody involved? Because it's no fun for the people either. It's just a stressful thing all the way around. When you have to do something to an animal that it's afraid of and doesn't want you to do. So that was the idea for it. And we've had a lot of fun with it because if you make it all into games and tricks and trained behaviors, it really tends to be amazing what they will cooperate with and what they will allow you to do. And I've used my own dogs as guinea pigs, of course, for everything on this. And really been amazed at how much better it is for them than it was in the past. One of my dogs, Star, had developed a terrible fear of the vet. I was out of town and she ended up having to be spayed and it was unpleasant and just terrible things happened to her at that point. To the point that I was worried she would bite somebody at the vet. And now she goes in, she's pleased with herself. She jumps up on the table. She wants to do her chin rest and take her squeeze cheese. And it just made her, it just made everything so much better for her. And that made me so happy. And that's what I hear from students all the time. It's these little things, you know, that my dog went to the vet and jumped on the scale by themselves. Or, you know, they held still while the vet gave them a shot and didn't even act like they noticed. And that's what I want to hear. That's those are the kind of things that make that class worthwhile. And I know, like, for example, I have a German Shepherd with some pressure issues. And just the working through the class and working through being able to touch them in different ways. And, like, that just helped her so much, like, in terms of wanting to cuddle and be a little bit closer to me at different times. And, like, it just had so much of a positive impact in the relationship overall. I can't recommend the class highly enough. Oh, that's, I'm really happy to hear that. I just love hearing things like that. Because I think when we give our animals a choice, everybody's afraid to give them a choice because they're afraid they're going to say no. We're afraid they're going to say, no, I don't want you to touch me. No, I don't want this to happen. But if we approach it in, you know, in a very incremental systematic way and make it highly reinforcing, they're much more likely to start saying yes. And the whole idea that they have a choice, I think, makes them brave. It makes them confident.

And it increases our bond with them because we no longer have to, you know, wrestle them to the ground to try to do something with them. So they trust us more. Right. Do you want to share a little bit about the cat class? The cat class, yeah. I was just thinking about that. I'm still working on the cat class, which I honestly, honestly, when I said it, it was a joke. I didn't necessarily actually ever intend. When I first brought it up, I was like, you know, oh, I'm so busy. So here I am thinking about teaching a cat, you know, a class to train cats. And I thought that was funny. But people started jumping in. And what I realized from that is every video I get from a student that has a cat, the cat is there. Like I said earlier, the cat's in it. The cat's interested. So what the heck? And people really do not believe that cats can be trained. They think cats are totally different than any other creature on the planet. And you could train everything else but not a cat. So I have working with my own cat, Tricky, who's about six years old now, I think. I've worked quite a bit with Tricky over the years. He likes to train. And he trains differently than a dog. But in some ways, he's faster. In some ways, a little bit. It's a little bit more challenging than I expected. So it's an exploration. It's an experiment. But I'm looking at, you know, started looking at what could we do with a class like this? How could I set it up? So it's going to be a little bit different than some of my other classes. Because first, we have to convince the cats that they want to work with us. And I think that's a little, that's even more than it takes with a dog. Because our dogs, we tend to be a little more social with anyway. And cats, sometimes we allow them to be very independent. And we assume that's what they're supposed to be. So convincing them now that they want to do something with us and that it's going to pay off, I think that's going to be a big step. But other than that, 90% of what I'm looking at, it's the same way you train any animal. We use lots of positive reinforcement. We break things down into small bits. And we work our way up. So I don't know that it will be that vastly different. It's not like there's one way to train cats and then another way to train every other animal in the world. It's that we train the same way. But we have to remember that they are cats. And that there are some things that we'll have to keep in mind that make them different than dogs. So it's an interesting challenge. And I'm really excited about it now. So I'm spending the summer training my cat.

I can't wait to see some of the videos from that. It sounds like it'll be entertaining and really useful. I mean, it's always, I feel like any time we learn more about training a different species than dogs, right, it only improves your overall ability to train. Oh, definitely. I think I've learned more from other species by far than I have from training dogs. They're always more challenging. You have more to learn about them, approach them differently. So, yeah, I love training other species. That's one of my favorite things to do. We're getting towards the end of the podcast. So we're at those last three questions that I ask every episode. So what is the dog-related accomplishment that you are proudest of? Oh, that's a tough question. First, because you think, okay, I'd want to talk about titles or something, but not really. What I think I'm most proud of just overall with all of my dogs is that they all want to work with me. If they have a choice between me and anything else in the world, they'll choose me. And there's a lot of effort on my part in terms of training that went into that. But I'm very proud of the fact that my dogs freely make that decision. And I don't ever have to coerce them to make that. So I'd say that has to be my overall answer. I think that's an accomplishment like almost everybody listening to this would love to have. So I definitely think that's a good answer. What is the best piece of training advice that you have ever heard? Oh, that's a hard one, too. These are hard questions, Alyssa. I've heard lots of good and bad training advice over the years. But most recently, what's sticking in my mind comes from Denise, actually, which is train the dog in front of you. Train the dog you have right now, not the dog you want or the dog that you think you ought to have. But train the one that's standing there. And that is harder than it seems to be. But I think that's a very good piece of advice. They're all different. And we need to work with each one as a unique individual. And even as a unique individual, I mean, the dog you have today is not the dog you have next week. And it's so hard to see that sometimes. Oh, it is. It's really hard because we just have built up in our mind this image of what this dog is like. And even if the dog changes, our image doesn't always change. So I think that's a really good point. And I sometimes I'm so bad, I forget which dog knows which behavior. It's like, so I'll tell Hilo to do something that Zen knows how to do. And then I'll look at him like, oh, I never taught you that.

So I need to focus a little more on the dog that's in front of me at the moment. That's funny. And then finally, who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Oh, and quit asking me hard questions. Well, I have to say as a group, really, truly, every instructor at FDSA is just amazing. And they really inspire me. I feel like I feel like challenge to always do better because of the people I'm working with, because the instructors are also awesome. And I don't want to kind of be the weak link. So I always feel like I have to do more and work harder because of them, which is a really good thing. But if we move out of that realm a little bit, somebody that I do truly admire would be Ken Ramirez. I worked with him at Shed, got to know him and worked with him at Shed Aquarium when I was there and have seen him several times since then. And I like his approach and I like the fact that he's worked with so many different species and that he still maintains the science of it. But at the same time, it's not like clinical that it's also humanized in a way. I don't know if that even makes any sense. Very practical. It's applicable. Yes, very, very applicable to a huge variety of situations. So I admire that. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Deb. It was really great to chat. Oh, thank you for asking me. Yeah, no, I was thrilled that you could make some time and that we could fit this in. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We will be back next week, this time with Andrea Harrison, to talk about the human half of the competitive team. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.