Show notes
SUMMARY: Donna has had a lifelong love affair with dogs and is fascinated with dog behavior. She has broad practical experience in the dog world: volunteering and working in kennels and shelters, dog sitting and walking, fostering rescue dogs, teaching behavior modification privately, and teaching reactive dog classes. She also has a background in zoology and teaching. She is active locally as co-founder and professional member of Vancouver Island Animal Training Association (VIATA) and the founder and instructor for the Service Dog Training Institute. Donna has competed in agility, flyball, and rally O and teaches people to train their own service dogs. Next Episode: To be released 7/13/2018, featuring Stacy Barnett talking about tailoring your nosework training (or really any training) to your dog's unique strengths. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Donna Hill. Donna has had a lifelong love affair with dogs and is fascinated with dog behavior. She has broad practical experience in the dog world: volunteering and working in kennels and shelters, dog sitting and walking, fostering rescue dogs, teaching behavior modification privately, and teaching reactive dog classes. She also has a background in zoology and teaching. She stays current in dog behavior and learning by regularly attending seminars by top trainers and researchers. However, she is probably best known for her YouTube videos. I'll make sure to include a link to her YouTube channels in the show notes so listeners can check her out. She is active locally as co-founder and professional member of Vancouver Island Animal Training Association (VIATA) and the founder and instructor for the Service Dog Training Institute. With her own dogs and other pets, Donna loves to apply learning theory to teach a wide variety of sports, games, tricks, and other activities, such as cycling and service dog tasks. She loves using shaping to get new behaviors. Her teaching skill is keeping the big picture in mind while using creativity to define the small steps to help the learner succeed. That is to say, she is a splitter! Donna has competed in agility, flyball, and rally O and teaches people to train their own service dogs. Hi Donna, welcome to the podcast! Donna Hill: Hi, how are you doing? Melissa Breau: Good, good. I'm excited to chat today. To start us out, can you refresh everyone's memories by sharing a bit about your dogs and what you're working on with them? Donna Hill: OK. Jessie is a little, sensitive, German Shepherd dog, possibly Min Pin mix, that's 11 years old. She's getting a little bit of gray on her, we used to call her milk chin, now it's moving up on her little face. We got her from the city pound at 7 months, so we've had her quite a while. Lucy, my other dog, is a really drivey, 9-and-a-half-year-old Border Collie mix that we got at almost 2 years of age off of an unfenced acreage, which totally relates to the topic today. Right now we're experimenting with using a combination of shaping and mimicry for training, and one of my longtime behaviors I've been working on — and I haven't had a whole lot of success, but I'm starting to now with that combination — is working on their rear paw nail file. So think about that. You've got the back feet of the dogs, and not only do they have to have back-end awareness, they have to have awareness of their nails, not just their pads, scraping the area. So it's been a tough one. So for the last couple of nights … well, for the last while, we've been bringing out the scratchboard and trying something new, and it's actually been a fun process, and we're almost there. Melissa Breau: That's pretty neat. Donna Hill: Yeah, it's pretty cool. Lucy's consistently digging with her one back paw, and Jessie's about halfway there. She'll do, like, half a scratch. So she's starting to get there. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. We didn't get to chat about it much last time, but you're very involved in the service dog world. I mentioned in the intro you run the Service Dog Training Institute. Can you share a little about that? Donna Hill: Oh, absolutely. Service Dog Training Institute is an online community for people who are training their own service dogs. We offer self-paced online classes that of course they can check out 24-7, and we have web-based coaching sessions, so they can get on their webcam and chat face-to-face with me, and a few webinars, we haven't done a whole lot yet, and we also have a new program called Fast Track Training, where people can get either daily help or twice-daily help for the period of a week. Melissa Breau: Wow, that's kind of awesome. Donna Hill: Yeah. We also offer in-person training, and that's fairly recent. I've actually added another trainer to help with those, and she also helps with the online Fast Track Training too. But the key thing people want to know is there's tons of free resources on my website. I've got over 300 training videos, I've got a blog, I've got general information like laws and stuff about service dogs, so their best bet is to check out the website and read through, click on every link, and see what's there, because there's tons of information there. Melissa Breau: I know you mentioned owner-trained service dogs. Are there advantages and disadvantages to owner-trained service dogs? Would you be able to share your perspective on that whole thing? Donna Hill: Absolutely. There's both advantages and disadvantages. I feel a person needs to carefully consider if training their own service dog is right for them. It's a huge time and energy investment, and even though you are doing most of the training, it still costs money. You need to do group classes with other dogs, and every trainer, whether they're a professional trainer or an owner who's training, they still need to get some help at some point in time, whether it's a fear period or they've run into a situation that sort of went south, those kinds of things. One of the biggest problems for a lot of people, they do it because they want to save money, but lack of funds are a super-common issue for owner-training teams. The other thing that I find is tough for a lot of people is the lack of focus to take the time to do the job right and not rush the dog through the process. Because of course everyone wants their dog trained yesterday, but it can take up to two years or sometimes longer, depending on the dog that they've chosen. The big advantage is that you can train the dog of your choosing, so if there's a specific breed that you're interested in that you think would work better for you and your lifestyle, then that's a choice that you can make. You also get to learn the process of how to train, so when down the road your health changes and you need additional tasks, now you know how to do that, or at least you can figure it out or you know where to get the help to do it. Whereas if you get a program-trained dog, some of the programs actually tell you not to train your dog at all. They just want what the dog is already trained to do. So that can make a big difference. And of course one of the big bonuses of training your own dog is that the bond starts from the day you bring the dog or puppy home, so you don't have to wait for two or more years for the program-trained dog. Thinking on the disadvantages side, it takes a lot of time and energy and focus to do it, and not everyone's got that ability. I always say, just like it takes a community to raise a child, so does it take a community to raise a service dog. And it's so true because there's all the pieces that need to come in. Your caregivers need to be on board with helping you in the way that you need help, you need to have trainers lined up for assistance, you need people to act as distractions, and you have to go get resources and all those kinds of things, so you have to know how to go out and get those resources. Finding the right dog is another huge barrier for many people. They'll go out, they'll find a dog that they immediately fall in love with, and it's not necessarily the best service dog candidate. So they have to be really careful. For that, I recommend bringing in someone who's less emotionally related, someone like myself, who can help them assess and look at the weaknesses and strengths of that particular dog before they move forward. The other disadvantage is that, owner-trained or not, sort of an educational component here, is that the handlers in general need to take on an education role at any time, because the public really doesn't know much about service dogs. Many people want to interact with all dogs they see, including your service dog. Whether it's in training, whether it's professional, they don't care. And of course you're doing all of this while you're living with a chronic medical condition that requires the need for the service dog, so that can certainly slow the process. It can throw some glitches into the gears. So it's a real balancing act, and you have to seriously look at is it a good thing for you, is it a bad thing for you, would a program-trained dog be better. Maybe there's even other alternatives. Some people jump immediately to the dog aspect when sometimes there's assistive technology that might be a better choice for them, and they don't have the responsibility of maintaining the dog or keeping the dog. It's a big-picture thing, and you have to sit back and look at your lifestyle, look at your family, and see if that would all work out, and if you can in fact wait the approximately two years until the dog would be technically ready for public access and be able to go with you into places. Melissa Breau: Right. You talked a little bit in there about evaluating your dog. What are some of the important traits that people need to objectively evaluate their dog for, if they are considering training it as a service animal? Donna Hill: This applies to whether you already have a dog in your home or whether you're going to look for a dog. The first and foremost is a known health history of both the dog and his parents, if you can at all possibly get that, and also looking at getting the pups and the parents and also your dog at 2 years of age medically tested for the common diseases that their breed suffers from. Oftentimes they'll take it to the vet and the vet goes, "Yeah, looks fine." Well, there's a whole lot that the vets can't see unless they take the proper tests and the proper scans. Yeah, the vet says it's good, but two years down the road, three years down the road, hip dysplasia "appears" out of nowhere. Well, it was probably there, but they just didn't look for it. Hip dysplasia, epilepsy, cancer, heart conditions — those are common health reasons why a dog is pulled from service after it's been trained. It's heartbreaking. You spend two years, or whatever it is, to train this dog, and then you get maybe a year and a half, or if you're lucky, two or three years, and then suddenly, "Oh, sorry, you can't use that dog anymore because of health conditions." So that's one thing. Another characteristic you look for is a calm temperament. Basically a dog that's unflappable, meaning nothing fazes them. You really, really want a dog like that, because things like a sheet metal dropped in the next aisle, or a baby screams on the plane in the seat right next to you, your dog should be aware of it but not really worried about it. Both of those things a lot of dogs will react to, and it may take them a while to calm down from. So we want a dog that would notice that, certainly, and be aware that it's happening, but go, "Oh yeah, no worries. I've seen it, done it, been there." We also know that there's a number of things that affect temperament, so the more you know about the history of a dog, the better. For example, genetics has an important role to play in both fear and aggression, as well as a solid temperament too. You've got a solid-tempered mom, more likely you're going to have a solid-tempered puppy. The mom's stress level during carrying the puppies, how good a parent the dog mom is, and also the physical and emotional environment the puppy is raised in, as well as the physical and emotional environment the adolescent dog is raised in. So you're seeing before the puppies are even born, and then you're seeing while the puppies are with the litter, and then what happens to the puppies after they've left the litter. Those are three key components that can really affect the future of this dog. There's a couple of other things. People-oriented. We want a dog that has the ability to bond strongly with the handler and yet he's friendly with strangers, and that can be a tough one if you're looking at some of the protection breeds. Some of them are very protective by nature and their family is very highly regarded but strangers are not, so that's a safety issue for emergency personnel and things like that, that are dealing with them in public. You want an animal that's good with other animals, so dogs, cats, birds, prey species, ideally ignoring them when in public. It makes your life a whole lot easier if you don't have a dog with a really high prey drive, like Lucy does. Trust me — been there, done that, for a lot of different things, so I have to be on guard, and as a service dog you don't want to have to be on guard to protect other people or other animals from your dog, and likewise from your dog doing damage to someone else's animal. That can be a real stressor in itself, so that's one of the key things you look for as well. The sensitivity level's a real interesting thing. You want a dog that has a sensitivity level appropriate for the person that they're helping. We want them to be sensitive enough that they notice changes in their handler, but not so sensitive that the dog mirrors the emotions of the handler, like anxiety. This is a common issue that I find with people with PTSD and anxiety is that they tend to pick dogs that are very sensitive, and then they end up with an emotional mess that they can't use as a service dog, so that's a toughie. A dog that's food-motivated/willing to learn, those come together, it's much easier to teach complex behaviors, we know, to a dog that's food-motivated, of course using clicker training, marker-based training, whatever you want to call it. And medium to low need for exercise. That's assuming this fits the lifestyle of the handler. The vast majority of people out there really don't want to take the time and energy, or they don't have the energy, to take a really high-exercise-need dog out for an hour or two a day for exercise, so you really want to make sure that that's going to meet your needs. Unless you want a dog for competition, and you want an active dog if you're out and about and your disability doesn't stop you from hiking two hours a day or whatever it is, then that would be fine, as long as the dog can learn to calm down in public. The last one I'm going to leave you with is a quiet dog. If a dog barks or causes a disturbance in public, a team can be asked to leave. So you…
Full show notes at the publisher 
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
