Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast

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E29: Cassia Turcotte - "Channeling Instinct & Drive" Sep 22, 2017

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Summary: Cassia Turcotte has been involved with the dog training world for nearly two decades and has been training professionally since 1999. She has a background in private behavior modification, and has worked as a kennel manager, volunteer shelter staff, veterinary technician, Search And Rescue training officer, and taught classes for both reactive and fearful dogs. She completed her first professional certification in 2003. Midway through her career, Cassia decided to combine her passion for positive dog training with her love of the outdoors, and a background in waterfowl and upland game hunting. She channeled her training efforts into developing a program for versatile real world hunting companions, building hunt test teams using positive training techniques. Her students have titled dogs for both retrieving and pointing breeds. During the hunting season, you will most likely find Cassia and her dogs in a duck blind or kayak doing what they love most. Cassia has titled her own dogs in numerous dog sports including hunt tests, obedience and rally, agility, conformation, and Nosework. Additionally, she has been involved with both wilderness and urban Search And Rescue teams, including the evaluation of operational readiness. Cassia believes in finding joy in the process of training rather than adopting an outcome oriented mindset and she believes strongly that dog training should be a form of structured play. She is an advocate for positive training methods for field dogs. Next Episode: To be released 9/29/2017, featuring Donna Hill to talk about training service dogs, perfecting the retrieve, and cue concepts. 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 progressive training methods. Today, I'll be talking to Cassia Turcotte. Cassia's been involved in the dog-training world for nearly two decades and has been training professionally since 1999. She has a background in private behavior modification and has worked as a kennel manager, volunteer shelter staff, veterinary technician, search and rescue training officer, and taught classes both for reactive and fearful dogs. She completed her first professional certification in 2003. Midway through her career, Cassia decided to combine her passion for positive dog training with her love of the outdoors and a background in waterfowl and upland game hunting. She channeled her training efforts into developing a program for versatile, real-world hunting companions, building hunt test teams using positive training techniques. Her students have titled dogs through both retrieving and pointing breeds. During the hunting season, you'll most likely find Cassia and her dogs in a duck blind or kayak, doing what they love most. Cassia's handled her own dogs in numerous dog sports including hunt tests, obedience and rally, agility, confirmation, and nose work. Additionally, she has been involved in both wilderness and urban search and rescue teams, including the evaluation of operational readiness. Cassia believes in finding joy in the process of training rather than adopting an outcome oriented mindset, and she believes strongly that dog training should be a form of structured play. She is an advocate for positive training methods for field dogs. Hi, Cassia. Welcome to the podcast. Cassia Turcotte: Hi. Thanks for having me. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. To start us out, can you tell us a little about your dogs and what you're working on with them? Cassia Turcotte: Oh, sure. I have six Chesapeake Bay Retrievers and they're currently all in different levels of retriever hunt test training. Some of them are versatile hunting companions, so they do both retriever work and real-world hunting and upland hunting. I have one who just started nose work training, literally like day one, and she's the one we refer to as the soccer mom. She's never done any performance sport before, and I didn't get her until she was five, so she's just learning how to learn, but everybody else is various stages of training, and we do the breed ring, so we do a little bit of tracking and a little bit of nose work. Melissa Breau: Awesome. How did you get started in dog sports and training? Cassia Turcotte: Oh, gosh. Originally, let's see, I was involved with helping a sheriff's department with laying tracks, and I think I was about 16, and they were kind enough to let me tag along on their training because I think I annoyed my parents to death training our cocker spaniel, and so they let me volunteer, and eventually, I did some decoy training with them, and I got really involved in search and rescue and ended up getting my own dog, and the dog I got at the time was a problem dog, so he had quite a few issues in terms of…he was, you know, nervous with people. So we did the search rescue training just as kind of a fun thing to do with him, and he ended up becoming certified later down the road, which was kind of a pretty cool thing. So it sparked my interest in both behavior modification and how that works as well as, you know, performance sports and working dogs. Melissa Breau: I don't think there are many people who can say they got their start working with police dogs, so that's a pretty neat start. Cassia Turcotte: It was a small town. Melissa Breau: So what got you started…I mean, maybe it was right from the start, but what got you started on positive training specifically? Cassia Turcotte: Well, it was a little bit right from the start. I think I was fortunate to be part of a program that, while they certainly weren't purely positive, they were really exploring newer methods, so I would say it was more a balanced program that I started out in, but the first dog that I started with, I had the grandeur that he was going to be a great retrieving dog, and I still remember taking the ball out and throwing the ball, and he took off after it, and it was going to be this great moment, and then he just sniffed the ball and kept on running, and he had zero retrieve desire whatsoever. And so I ended up having to look for alternative methods to teach his retrieve, and that ended up being with Karen, how…you know, Karen Pryor's Don't Shoot The Dog, and we learned how to shape or retrieve, and it was all downhill from there. Melissa Breau: So if you were to describe your philosophy now and kind of how you train, how would you describe that for people? Cassia Turcotte: I think it's really about living with and playing with dogs. You know, I love teaching. I like breaking things down, and I like for them to have a purpose, but I'm okay if they pick their purpose, you know? I have Chesapeakes, so generally, retrieving is something that they enjoy, but you know, my philosophy is really about let's find what the dog's good at and expand on it and teach them games and things that they really seem to naturally want to do, and you know, every dog has strengths and weaknesses, and it's about finding balance and making them enjoy the things that are their weakness and how that works, so really just living and playing with dogs. Melissa Breau: I know I mentioned in your bio that you believe dog training should be a form of structured play. It sounds like that's a little bit what you're talking about, but can you explain a little more what that phrase means, or at least what it means to you, and what it looks like in practice, like within a training session? Cassia Turcotte: Sure. I think that…I'm trying to think where I actually first heard that term, and it may have been even Lindsey that said it, but really, it's…you know, I don't want the dog to feel like what we're doing is work. If you feel like you're being dragged to work every day, it's mentally hard, but if they go out and they go, oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing ever, I can't wait to do more of it, then the attitude's up, the motivation's up, and you don't have any trouble with compliance. You know, they're really willing to play the game, and it's fun. It's fun for me and it's fun for them, so you know, it's one of the things…you know, how would it look in a training session? One of the things that we do in field work is called the walk up, and all that is, is a bumper is thrown in the air as you're heeling with the dog, and it's thrown in front of the dog, and the point of it is to challenge the dog to stay heeling and stay steady with you, and the traditional way would be to correct them for not doing that. So in our way, we jackpot with Chuckit! ball or tug or food as a reinforcement for being steady, you know, so they see the bumper go up, and they sit, and we say, oh my gosh, that's awesome, and we throw a Chuckit! ball in the opposite direction, and so it's all a game, and it's about keeping them guessing and mentally challenging them and getting it so that they really understand what they're being asked to do, and they're not just corrected for not understanding. So I think that's pretty much what it would look lie in an average day. Melissa Breau: So I know that you've got a new class in the schedule for October called Instinct Games - Leadership In Drive, so I was really…I wanted to dig into that a little bit and find out what that means, and then kind of what you'll cover in the class. Cassia Turcotte: Well, instinct games, the way I initially thought of it was all different types of dogs have different natural instincts, whether it's sighthounds who see things or scent hounds who smell things or retrievers who, you know, as in my breed, they tend to pick things up. They don't necessarily want to give it back, but they tend to want to carry things in their mouth, so there's a lot of different natural instincts that are governed by the dog's senses, and I think that's the piece that as trainers, we frequently miss. We miss that moment where the dog is…there's a change in arousal or a change in stimulation based on the initial sensory response, so all of a sudden your dog's toddling through the woods, and oh, their body language changes because they smelled something. You know, certainly search and rescue handlers notice those really minor alerts that a dog, when they first start getting with the something, but they haven't gotten fully into a scent cone. You know, I notice with my dogs, the second they're watching a bird or a bumper fly through the air, they're visually watching it, there's a change in the body language and there's a change in their stimulation, and I think that in general, in dog training, if you miss those initial moments, it's really hard to stay ahead of the dog and to be the leader in the relationship and to kind of drive where you want to the train to go. If you miss that first moment, you're always reacting, and you're behind the eight ball, and I think a lot of people struggle with that, so what I started doing with all of my puppies is just developing games that were meant to not only work on self control and impulse control and all of those things that we need for a functional adult dog, but they also work on developing the handler's awareness of, oh, there's that moment that I need to respond to, and how do you get that moment, an increased arousal levels? So, you know, when you're dealing with a high-drive dog, your reaction time has to be really fast, and to be able to really stop them out of motion, you have to be able to read them, and so it's all about developing the team based on little games that mean nothing to any sport, but they can be applied to pretty much any sport you do with your dogs. Melissa Breau: I kind of mentioned that you've done a number of different dog sports, but I'd imagine that something like hunt skills are very different than something like agility, so how does teaching those different skills kind of involve a different process for you, or how is it…maybe it's very similar and just you kind of figured out the secret. I don't know. Cassia Turcotte: Well, I think there's a lot of vast similarities, and then there's differences. I think the biggest difference between, say, agility and obedience with a breed ring for us would be that you're generally within a confined space, whereas in fieldwork, the distance and the environment is such a big factor. So you know, even when I do other sports, going to a big venue where there's big loudspeakers, that's something I have to generalize, but we're still generally in a similar looking ring. When we do field work, you know, especially when we travel around the country, there are so many…there's different plants, there's different smells, there's different animals, and there's so many factors, and I think that's the big thing. The generalization factor itself is the biggest difference, so it's really just about people have to get out there and do it, and they have to do it in a number of different environments until their dog feels really confident doing it anywhere, and I think that's one of the challenging aspects, but I think that the underlying teaching…you know, I teach my dogs to go over the hay bale the same way I would teach them to go over a agility jump, and in fact, I use a lot of the skills that I learned from agility instructors years ago to teach that stuff. You know, look for the obstacle to jump over, so it's a lot of that foundation stuff is going to be the same. I teach my obedient jumps the same way, so the underlying methodology is the same. I think it's the generalization, that it really is different. Melissa Breau: Now, kind of to pull those two questions together, I guess, is it possible to take the dog's natural instincts and their drives, things like those things from herding or that nose work, kind of those things that are in them instinctually, and channel them for all sports, or is it kind of more specific to the sports…you know, some sports are a better fit than others, for those types of skills? Is it possible to kind of harness those things for everything? I mean, it sounded like a little bit from your class description, it can be, if it's done well. Cassia Turcotte: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the way to look at it is every dog's an individual, and you know, they need to have a great class on actually train the dog in front of you, and I can't emphasize how important that is to me, too. You know, it's the...it really is about each dog is an individual, and yes, they have these natural instincts. First of all, you know, knowing your dog, and what are their natural instincts? You know, I talked about the dog that has no natural birdiness, and she also has very little desire to just hunt for things. Is she better suited to be a retriever or be a hunting dog? Maybe. Maybe not, you know, but she's doing fantastic right now, and what we did was we developed those things that she doesn't have naturally. We developed those, and then the things that she does have naturally, we tried to put a stimulus control on them so she doesn't just do it all by herself. Understanding how your dog, you know, how they sense those things…first of all, how they sense those things that are natural to them and how they react to them, and then being able to harness them and use them as part of your training system, regardless of what sports you're doing, so you know, if you've got a dog who's really interested in scent…

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E28: Sue Yanoff - "Canine Sports Medicine for Performance Dogs" Sep 15, 2017

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Summary: Sue Yanoff graduated from Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, New York in 1980. After three years in private practice she joined the US Army Veterinary Corps. While on active duty she completed a three-year residency in small animal surgery at Texas A&M University, and became board certified by the American College of Veterinary Surgeons. She retired from the Army in 2004, after almost 21 years on active duty. After working for a year on a horse farm in Idaho, she returned to Ithaca to join the staff at Cornell Veterinary Hospital as their second surgeon. Sue retired from Cornell in December of 2009. After all her on call schedule was interfering with those dog show weekends. The following month she started working for shelter outreach services. A high quality, high volume spay neuter organization. About the same time Sue joined her colleague, a physical therapist and licensed veterinary technician to start a canine sports medicine practice at the Animal Performance and Therapy Center in Genoa, New York. The practice is limited to performance dogs, and now she's joined the team here at FDSA to teach a class on canine sports medicine for performance dog handlers. Next Episode: To be released 9/22/2017, featuring Cassia Turcotte — we'll talk about positive gun dog training, and her upcoming class on channeling dog's natural instincts for high level behaviors while they are in drive. 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 Sue Yanoff. Sue graduated from Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, New York in 1980. After three years in private practice she joined the US Army Veterinary Corps. While on active duty she completed a three-year residency in small animal surgery at Texas A&M University, and became board certified by the American College of Veterinary Surgeons. She retired from the Army in 2004, after almost 21 years on active duty. After working for a year on a horse farm in Idaho, she returned to Ithaca to join the staff at Cornell Veterinary Hospital as their second surgeon. Sue retired from Cornell in December of 2009. After all her on call schedule was interfering with those dog show weekends. The following month she started working for shelter outreach services. A high quality, high volume spay neuter organization. About the same time Sue joined her colleague, a physical therapist and licensed veterinary technician to start a canine sports medicine practice at the Animal Performance and Therapy Center in Genoa, New York. The practice is limited to performance dogs, and now she's joined the team here at FDSA to teach a class on canine sports medicine for performance dog handlers. Hi Sue. Welcome to the podcast. Sue Yanoff: Hi Melissa. Thanks. Melissa Breau: I'm looking forward to chatting. I think that most of the students who have been with FDSA for any period of time have probably seen your dogs in one class or another. But for those that haven't, do you want to just tell us a little bit about the dogs you have now, and what you're working on with them? Sue Yanoff: Sure. My older beagle is Charm. She's 12 years old. She's a breed champion. She has her UD, her rally excellent, MX, MXJ, and TD. She's pretty much retired from performance right now, but I am still doing tracking with her, and would like to get a TDX on her. And then my younger beagle, Ivy, who has been in a lot of Fenzi classes is six years old. She's also breed champion. She finished her mock last year. She has her rally novice title, and a TD, and she has two legs towards her CDX. Melissa Breau: Well congrats. Those are some seriously impressive stats, especially with beagles. Sue Yanoff: Thanks. Melissa Breau: So how did you get your start in dog sports? What got you started there? Sue Yanoff: A beagle. Between my sophomore and junior year as an undergraduate here at Cornell, I went home to visit my parents, and I also went to visit the vet I used to work for when I was in high school, and there was a little beagle puppy with a cast on his hind leg coming out of anesthesia, and I picked him up, and I cuddled him. I said oh I want to take this puppy home, and they said well you can because his owners had him for just a couple of days and then their little boy broke his leg, and they were going to pick him up from the vet that afternoon, and take him to the animal shelter. So some phone calls were made, and I got the puppy and took him back to college with me, and I didn't know anything about dog training. I had never heard of crate training, so I would just leave him in my apartment, that I shared with two roommates, while I went to class, and of course he destroyed things, and did all the naughty things that puppies do. So I thought I need to do something, and I enrolled him in the kindergarten puppy class at the local dog-training club. That's how it got started, and I ended up getting a CDX on that dog while I was in Vet school, and that got me started in dog sports. Melissa Breau: Wow. So to go from, you know, never having done anything dog training wise before, to a CDX. That's pretty impressive Sue. Now I'd imagine being both the sports dog handler and the vet has led to some pretty unique insights into each field. How has being involved in both influenced your views in each of those? Sue Yanoff: Yeah, that's an interesting question. As a dog trainer all my dogs have, at one point in their careers, been injured, and I know what it's like to have to restrict your dog's activity. You can't train them. You can't show them. It's very frustrating, and so as a vet when I have to tell a client okay you can't train, you can't show, you have to restrict your dog for weeks, or months sometimes, I know how frustrating that can be, and how hard it can be, but I also understand where they are coming from so I think I can see it from both sides. Melissa Breau: Is there anything in particular about veterinary medicine that sports handlers often just don't understand? Sue Yanoff: Yeah. I don't think it's just sports handlers. I think it's a lot of people. Veterinary medicine is a science, and the decisions that we make have to be based on science, and not just what people think, or what they heard, and so when you're making a decision about what the best diagnostics are for a condition, or how best to treat the condition, it has to be based on a series of cases, not just on what somebody thinks, and I go a lot based on what I learn at continuing education conferences, and what I read in the veterinary literature. Because papers that are published in peer reviewed journals are scrutinized to make sure that the science behind the conclusions are valid. So while, you know, it's fine for somebody to say well I did this with my dog and he did great. What I want to make my decisions on is what worked well for many dogs, dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of dogs, and not just something that might have worked for your dog where we don't' even know if the diagnosis was the same. So I think I want people to know that veterinary medicine is a science, and we have to make our decisions based on science. Melissa Breau: I think that, you know, especially with the internet these days it's very common for people to turn to their favorite local forum, and be like well what should I do, but… Sue Yanoff: I know like let me get advice from everybody, and I know it's hard to make decisions when it involves your dog and you're emotionally involved, and that's one of the reasons I want to teach this class, to give people information that they can use to make those hard decisions. Melissa Breau: What about the reverse? Are there things about sports that you think most vets just they don't understand? Sue Yanoff: Oh yes. Yes there's a lot. Unless you're a vet who's involved in this thing, most vets don't understand the time and the effort, and the emotion, and the money that goes into the training, and the trialing that we do. They don't understand the special relationship that we have with our dogs when we put the time and effort into training them. I have had dogs that were wonderful pets, and I loved them but I never showed them for one reason or another, and there is a different relationship when you accomplish something special with that dog. So I think that's important thing. The other thing that most vets don't understand, and might not agree with, but I have had some clients where we have diagnosed an injury, and said okay we need to restrict activity, and do the conservative treatment route, and they say I will but my national specialty is next week, and she's entered in whatever class. Or they say I have a herding finals coming up in two weeks, and I really want to run her in those trials, and I'm okay with that if the dog has an injury that I don't think is likely to get much worse by doing a little more training, or trialing, then I'll say okay. Well let's do this in the meantime, and when you're done with your national or with your specialty or whatever, come on back and we'll start treatment. So I think a lot of vets would not understand that point of view, but I'm okay with it as long as I don't think that it's going to do serious harm to the dog, and as long as the owner understands that there's, you know, a slight chance that things could get worse. Melissa Breau: I think it's really kind of interesting that you focused a little bit on performance dogs. So I wanted to ask about what led you to that, I guess, to focus on that. Was it your own interest just in the being involved with sports when you joined the practice in New York? Sue Yanoff: Yeah. No. It's my own interests. I'm mostly retired. I've retired from three different jobs now, so I don't have to do this sports medicine stuff to make a living, and to pay my mortgage. So I became interested in it when I joined the practice at Colonial Veterinary Hospital about the same time my colleague Lynn joined it. She's a physical therapist. She was a physical therapist for people for 20 plus years before she decided she wanted to work on animals, so she went to vet tech school to become a vet tech, and get some animal education. And I remember when I first met her she said to me well what do you think about physical therapy for dogs, and I thought I don't know anything about it. So the more I learned about it, the more I realized how important it is, and I did a lot of reading, and I went to continuing education about sports medicine, and about the same time, like a few years later, the American College of Veterinary Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation was getting going so the whole topic of canine sports medicine was getting more popular and people were learning more about it. So the more I learned about it, the more I liked it and of course since I did dog sports, I understood what's involved in dog sports. So when Lynn and I started this little practice, we did see pets for the first year or two, but then we said you know what, we don't want to deal with people. Performance dog people, in general, their dogs are better trained. They're better behaved, which make it easier to examine them. Not all of them but most of them. They're definitely more committed to doing what needs to be done to get their dog better. So they are more willing to put the time into it, and the work for treating, and rehabbing the dog, and the money that it costs to get their dogs better if the need surgery, or other treatments. So, you know, when Lynn and I started seeing more and more animals we said okay, we're not doing pets any more. We're just going to work on performance dogs. Melissa Breau: Now I want to talk a little bit about your upcoming class. So in some ways it's the first of it's kind here at FDSA. Do you mind sharing a little bit about what students can expect to learn? Sue Yanoff: Well basically the goal of the class is to, in the words of a friend of mine that I was discussing this with, is to make people better consumers of healthcare, for their animals. I want to give them information about the various injuries that the dogs can get, and how they are diagnosed, and what the treatment options are, and what's the best chance to get them back to competition. I want them to understand the importance of a good sports medicine exam. When I was a surgeon when I saw an animal for an injury, or a lameness, I would examine the leg that was lame. Most of the time, we knew which leg was lame and I would examine that leg and tell them what surgery I think the dog needs, and that was that. With a sports medicine exam, I examine the whole dog. At times I don't even know which leg is lame, because the owner doesn't know which leg is lame. We come with a history of knocking bars, or popping weaves, or not being as active, and they think there might be something wrong, but they're not sure. So it's a totally different type of exam from when I just did surgery to now doing sports medicine. So I want people to understand that, and I just want them to be able to make informed decisions if and when they have to deal with an injury. Melissa Breau: I'd imagine it was probably pretty hard to decide what things to fit into the class and what things were kind of beyond the scope of what you could cover in those six weeks. So what are some of the common types of injuries that you'll be discussing in those six weeks? Sue Yanoff: Yeah. It was really tough. When I started writing lectures, I had no idea how much material I was eventually going to cover. So people can go to the website to look at the course summary to see what we cover from week to week. But three of the common injuries that we see in sports medicine are injuries to the muscles and tendons of the shoulder, the biceps and supraspinatus specifically. Injuries to the iliopsoas muscle which ten or so years ago I never heard of, and now it's a very commonly diagnosed injury. And then, also talking about cranial cruciate ligament injuries because just based on a recent thread on the Fenzi Alumni Facebook page, there's a lot of information out there about cranial cruciate ligament injuries, and some misinformation. We have a whole lecture just on cranial cruciate ligament injuries to give people, you know just the basic facts of what's based on science. What's not based on science. What the options are, because there's always options. There's no one best way to treat almost anything. So those are probably the three most common things that people know about that they'll learn. But there's a ton of other stuff in the class. Melissa Breau: Now I know that the syllabus mentions prevention a little bit, and I wanted to know if you could talk for a minute about the role that prevention plays when it comes to these types of injuries. You know, how much should sports handlers focus on preventing problems? If you can, even beyond that, are there skills that they should teach that would make dealing with these kinds of problems, should they occur, easier before there's ever actually a problem for them to be worried about. Sue Yanoff: Yes. Well prevention is always best, and as far as preventing injuries in dogs the bottom line is that we don't know what we can do to prevent injuries. Everything…

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E27: Chrissi Schranz - "Finding Time to Train" Sep 08, 2017

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Summary: Chrissi Schranz is based in Vienna and lower Austria. She has been fond of dogs of all sizes, shapes, and personalities for as long as she's been able to think, especially the so-called difficult ones. After training the dachshund of her early teenage years in traditional ways at her local obedience club, she learned about clicker training and got hooked on force-free motivational methods. Her workdays are spent doing the things she loves most, thinking about languages, writing, and teaching pet dog manners and life skills to her clients and their dogs. Her German language puppy book was released in April, and a recall book will be released next spring. Chrissi loves working with people and dogs and training, playing, and hiking with her own three dogs, who we'll learn a little more about in a second. Links Mentioned: Training Website - www.clickforjoy.org Blog - www.clickforjoy.wordpress.com. Calvin & Hobbes Comic Next Episode: To be released 9/15/2017, featuring Sue Yanoff to talk about canine sports medicine for sports dog handlers. 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 most progressive training methods. Today, I'll be talking to Chrissi Schranz, a dog trainer, translator, and chocolate addict. Chrissi is based in Vienna and lower Austria. She has been fond of dogs of all sizes, shapes, and personalities for as long as she's been able to think, especially the so-called difficult ones. After training the dachshund of her early teenage years in traditional ways at her local obedience club, she learned about clicker training and got hooked on force-free motivational methods. Her workdays are spent doing the things she loves most, thinking about languages, writing, and teaching pet dog manners and life skills to her clients and their dogs. Her German language puppy book was released in April, and a recall book will be released next spring. Chrissi loves working with people and dogs and training, playing, and hiking with her own three dogs, who we'll learn a little more about in a second. Hi, Chrissi. Welcome to the podcast. Chrissi Schranz: Hi. I am excited to be here. Melissa Breau: I'm looking forward to chatting. To kind of get us started and to dive right in, do you want to tell us about your own crew and what you're working on with them? Chrissi Schranz: Yeah. So I have three dogs right now. The oldest one is Fanta, my greyhound. I got him from Ireland as a retired racing greyhound, and by now, his main job is to be a couch potato and get lots of belly rubs. He basically does everything he wants, but he's also my assistant when I'm working with reactive dogs. He's really good for this because he's very calm and communicates very well, so he's a very good decoy. Then there's Phoebe, my standard poodle. You might have seen her in pictures or videos. She is very crazy. She has an endless supply of energy, is very extroverted and outgoing. Everyone loves her, but she can be very exhausting to live with sometimes. If I didn't force her to, I think she would never sleep, never stop. So I've tried lots of different things with her. She was the dog I tried pretty much everything I could think of with her to see what I like. She likes everything, so she's up for anything. Now, I'm mainly focusing on nose work with her. That would be her sport of choice and my sport of choice for her because it's one thing that she loves but she doesn't get overexcited about, so she doesn't lose her mind. She can focus and enjoy it. That's her biggest issue, that she gets excited so easily that her brain freezes, and she's just like, oh my god, oh my god, life is so good. Yeah, and we do lots of hiking together and just play. Melissa Breau: And then you've got one more, right? Chrissi Schranz: Yes, my youngest one. That's Grit, my mal. She'll be a year in September. We are working on obedience foundations and some tracking. It's been really fun to work with Shade here at the FDSA. I think the way she teaches is a perfect fit for her. She's probably my favorite, but please don't tell my other dogs. We'll hopefully be doing a little obedience in the future and tracking, and maybe we'll get into protection as well. We'll see. Yeah. My dogs usually get a say in what they want to do as well, so… Melissa Breau: It sounds like three very different breeds and three very different dogs. Chrissi Schranz: Yes, they actually really are. Melissa Breau: So what led you from teaching your own crew to becoming a dog trainer? Chrissi Schranz: So I grew up with my dad's dogs, and then when I was 12 or 13, I had my very first own dog. That was the dachshund. He was really difficult. When I had him, I started reading a lot and going to seminars and workshops, and I wanted to learn as much as I could about training. I didn't plan on becoming a dog trainer yet, but I got more and more fascinated by it, and I started dog-sitting for other people and fostering for a rescue organization, so I got to play with all kinds of different dogs with all kinds of different issues. I started working as a teacher for German as a foreign language, which was really fun, too, because I've always liked teaching. It doesn't matter what that species is, and then I got Phoebe, and I took her to school with me every day, so she could come to work, and I also started a dog trainer course, which is supposedly teaching you to be a professional dog trainer, but well, I won't go into that because it was not a very good class, but I still just thought I'd want to learn as much as possible to be a good trainer for my own dogs. But then the building that our school was located in, the German school, implemented a new policy that there were no dogs allowed anymore in the building, so I couldn't bring Phoebe anymore, and that kind of annoyed me, so I finished up that term of teaching, and then I quit and opened a business focused on translating and dog training full-time, and yeah, I think it's the best decision I've ever made. Melissa Breau: So I'd imagine that having previous teaching experience was pretty useful when you started teaching people how to train dogs. There's got to be some crossover there, right? Chrissi Schranz: Yeah, actually, a lot because even when you're working with dogs, you're really working with people because it's the people who are living with the dogs every day, and you're teaching them a foreign language, which is dog, basically, or a foreign language which is German, so there are many similarities, actually. Melissa Breau: That's such an interesting way of looking at it, as both just being, you know, kind of different languages that you need to help people understand. Chrissi Schranz: Yeah. I feel like it kind of is. Melissa Breau: So I wanted to get into your training philosophy, and lucky me, I got a sneak peek before we started. You sent me over the link for this, but I'd love to have you kind of share your training philosophy and how you describe your approach, and for those of you who are going to want to see this after she talks about it, there will be a link to the comic in the show notes. Chrissi Schranz: Yeah, so I'd say my training philosophy is based on my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. So Calvin has a shovel and he's digging a hole, and then Hobbes comes up and asks him why he's digging a hole, and Calvin says he's looking for buried treasure. Hobbes asks him what he has found, and Calvin starts naming all kinds of things, like dirty rocks and roots and some disgusting grubs, and then Hobbes gets really excited, and he's like, wow, on your first try? And Calvin says, yes. There's treasure everywhere, and that is the kind of experience I want people and their dogs to have with each other. I want them to feel like life is an adventure, and there's so many exciting things to be discovered that they can do together. I want people to learn to look at the world through their dog's eyes a little bit and find this pleasure and just be together, and doing things and discovering things, whether that's digging a hole or playing in dog sports. Yeah, I want them to feel like they're friends and partners in crime and have that Calvin and Hobbes kind of relationship, because I believe if you have that kind of relationship as a foundation, you can do pretty much anything you want, no matter whether you want to have a dog you can take anywhere or whether you want to compete and do well in dog sports. I think if you have that kind of relationship as a basis, everything is possible. Melissa Breau: I love that, just on so many levels, that comic works for what you're talking about, right? From the almost literal sense of, okay, they're digging a hole and they find buried treasure that's rocks and grubs and things our dogs would actually find pretty fascinating, to that metaphorical level of, like, just wanting to kind of explore and find joy in the everyday with our dogs. I mean, this is just a great illustration, I guess, of kind of a philosophy in a comic. It's really quite neat. So I want to dive into a little bit the classes that you teach at FDSA. So I know that your first class at FDSA, I think it was your first class, right? Calling All Dogs? Chrissi Schranz: Yeah. Melissa Breau: Okay. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that, and start off with I guess what may be a little bit of a controversial question. Is there such a thing as a 100 percent reliable recall, and kind of how do we balance the idea of giving our dogs freedom with the realities and dangers of life? Chrissi Schranz: I don't think there's 100 percent reliable recall. I don't think you can get 100 perfect reliability on any real life behavior, really, simply because you can't control your environment, so you can prove your recall against lots of distractions, but there's no way you can prove it against all of them because there's always unexpected things that will happen and things that will show up that you didn't even know existed. I mean, it's different with competition behaviors because those, you only need in very specific environment, so you can prepare for the ring easier than for the real world in some ways. So you know there won't be kids on bikes in the ring, and there won't be loose dogs, and…hopefully not. There won't be any squirrels, but you don't know these things about the real world, so I don't think there's an objective answer to how we should balance freedom and safety for our dogs. It's more like a personal decision. So we take risks that we think are worth it because they increase our dogs quality of life, and we don't take those risks that scare us too much, and I think everyone draws this line differently, and that's okay. I think dogs can be perfectly happy even if they never get to be off leash in an unfenced area. So off leash freedom is one of many ways to enrich their lives and share things with them, but it's not the only way, and yeah, I think there's just no right answer. Everyone has to answer this question for themselves. Melissa Breau: Right. It kind of goes back to almost to the comic idea again, like that the Calvin Hobbes comic, just the idea that finding the pleasure in the everyday and what those pleasures are going to be are going to vary. So saying that you can't get a 100 percent reliable recall, obviously the point of the class is still to teach a really strong, reliable recall, so how do you approach that? How do you teach a recall that's as strong as you can get it? Chrissi Schranz: That also goes back to that comic, in a way. I think my approach to recall training is different to many other people's approaches. For example, so the first one or two weeks of class, there's no…we don't even really talk about the recall, but we focus on the relationship. So most people want a recall that they can use when they're hiking or when they're…yeah, distractions around or maybe when they're in a dog park and there are other dogs and so much exciting stuff going on. So the first weeks are about getting to know your dog in new ways, to observe them, to learn new things about them. I have students offer their dogs various reinforcers and let the dog choose their favorite one, and often, they'll find out interesting things that they didn't think were their favorite ones. Melissa Breau: Do you have an example? Chrissi Schranz: Well, for example, with my own dogs, when I make the videos for this class, and I haven't…like, I sometimes do these experiments, but I hadn't done it in a while, and I was convinced that Phoebe's and Fanta's favorite treat was this salmon pâté, but when I offered them various different kinds of treats…and that's the last thing they ate, so that is not true anymore. Sometimes we just believe that hot dogs is our dog's favorite treats because that's what we assume is a dog's favorite treat, or we ask them when they were puppies and then never again. Their tastes may have changed in the meantime. Yeah, and there's lots of games that I ask people to play out on walks and at home in their yard to just make their walks more interactive and to experiment with what kind of games their dogs want and enjoy, so with toys, with food, with food trails, with using their nose, with running, so by the time I actually start conditioning a recall cue, the student's should have learned something new about their dogs, and they should have started building this kind of invisible connection that they can take with them out into the real world to all the places where they actually want a strong recall. Yeah, and then it's pretty straightforward. Classical conditioning of a recall cue, I ask everyone to choose a new one because I'm assuming if you're taking a recall class, you have problems with your old recall cue, and it's usually easier to train a new cue than to revive an old one that they have already learned to ignore. Yeah, and then we systematically introduce distractions, and then we go out into the real world and increase the level of difficulty, still like integrating lots of games into the whole training so that the recall always feels like something really, really fun, not necessarily something that gets rewarded with a piece of food, but very often something that gets rewarded with some game that is a little bit of extra they have been looking forward to on their walk. And in the last week, we're actually looking at environmental rewards like swimming or chasing squirrels, or maybe even eating food they found on the ground. Anything that's safe and the dog likes can be a reward. Melissa Breau: Are there any success stories you particularly want to share? I mean, I know that just kind of hearing you talk about it at a little bit online, it sounds like there are some students who are really struggling with particular distractions that manage to accomplish some pretty awesome results, so… Chrissi Schranz: There's like actually so many people I'm so impressed by. well the Gold students, i don't really see the others, but they've come so far in such a short time. Like Tia, Jill's dog, who started recalling around chipmunks now, and you can really see that they're more connected now on their walks, or Shila the lab who can…

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E26: Nancy Tucker - "Behavior training" Sep 01, 2017

Show notes

Summary: Nancy Tucker is a full-time pet dog trainer and behavior consultant in Sherbrooke, Quebec. She regularly teaches seminars, webinars, and workshops on dog training, dog behavior, and the business end of training to dog owners, trainers, and veterinary staff in Canada, the US, and in Europe. Most of her time is spent doing private in-home behavior consultations with clients. She specializes in common behaviour issues that affect the family dog, and is skilled and experienced in treating aggression and anxiety cases. Nancy has written numerous articles on dog behavior for various French-language Quebec publications, and is a regular contributor to the Whole Dog Journal. At FDSA she's wrapping up a great class on Separation Anxiety and has a class coming up in December on teaching door manners when guests come to visit. Links Mentioned: Next Episode: To be released 9/8/2017, featuring Chrissi Schranz talking about fitting training into our busy lives, teaching a reliable "real life" recall, and other pet skills that help us build a better relationship with our dogs. 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 Nancy Tucker. Nancy is a full-time pet dog training and behavior consultant in Sherbrooke, Quebec. She regularly teaches seminars, webinars, and workshops on dog training, dog behavior, and the business end of training to dog owners, trainers, and veterinary staff in Canada, the US, and in Europe. Most of her time is spent doing private in-home behavior consultations with clients. She specializes in common behavior issues that affect the family dog and is skilled and experienced in treating aggression and anxiety cases. Nancy has written numerous articles on dog behavior for various French language Quebec publications, and she is a regular contributor to the Whole Dog Journal. Here at FDSA, she's wrapping up a great class on separation anxiety, and there's a class coming up in December on teaching dog door manners so when guests come to visit. Hi, Nancy. Welcome to the podcast. Nancy Tucker: Hi, Melissa. Thanks for having me. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Excited to learn a little bit about your upcoming classes and about you today. To start us out, I know you're expecting a new puppy. Do you want to share the details? Nancy Tucker: Oh, man. We are so excited. He's a Border Terrier and we're picking him up to take him home this weekend. He's nine and a half weeks old and I haven't raised a puppy in decades since my last four dogs were all adult, so I will get to practice what I preach when I dole out advice, and I'm sure it will probably cause me to have a lot more empathy for my clients after this experience. Melissa Breau: By the time this comes out you'll probably actually have the puppy so everybody can go on the Facebook group and check out the cute puppy pictures. You'll share those, right? Nancy Tucker: Oh, there will be plenty of puppy pictures. Melissa Breau: So I want to go a little bit into your background. What got you started in dogs? I mean, how did you end up where you are today? Nancy Tucker: It's a bit of a funny story and it's the type of story that's actually pretty common in trainer circles. You know how you can meet a bunch of trainers who had all kinds of fabulous careers before they were dog trainers and somehow ended up as a dog trainer, so in my life before dogs as they say, my career had nothing to do with training at all. I was a freelance writer and I worked in marketing in public relations and I ended up a trainer quite by accident and then eventually it became my full-time job. So like most people in that situation, I've always loved dogs, I've always had dogs, I felt I knew dogs, and years ago I thought that I could offer my services as a PR and marketing consultant to our local shelter just to kind of help out, see what I could do in terms of marketing and PR, so I thought that I could donate some time and services to the shelter in my field of expertise. And then I learned that the majority of dogs who were surrendered there are there because of behavior problems, that was kind of my first insight into shelter dogs. So I thought well, if I can learn some basic training skills and maybe I could also offer those service to help get more dogs adopted. I don't know if you can see where this is going, but I was very green, very naive. I had no clue about how anything worked in a shelter, but I wanted to help and I was sure that I could. So I'm grinning here because, well anyway, I bought some DVDs, I read some books, all on positive reinforcement and after a very short time I was convinced that I was an awesome trainer and I could save all the dogs everywhere. And so I volunteered as an assistant to the head trainer at the shelter who used to give group classes, so I was her assistant for a little while and we hit it off, we became really good friends, I learned a lot from her, and eventually I was teaching my own classes and couple years later opened my own school. And actually working with dogs and their owners was a huge learning experience for me. It's not like just you and your own dog, you're working with people and their dogs, so if anyone's listening to this and they're thinking about becoming a professional trainer, I highly recommend getting involved with training shelter dogs and the people who adopt them because you'll get tons of experience dealing with all kinds of different dogs with different issues and varying human dog teams. Anyway, at the time I was just teaching basic skills, just regular basic training, and then I adopted Woody. He was a dog who would introduce me to separation anxiety. So it was living with Woody and trying to figure out how to help him that I ended up really diving into the world of dog behavior and to this day I continue to study and learn about behavior. Melissa Breau: So this is kind of like a big ambiguous question, but why are you a dog trainer? What is it that inspires you every day? Nancy Tucker: I would say that I'm a dog trainer today for the same reason that I accidentally became one in the first place. I want to help reduce the number of dogs that are surrendered to shelters for behavior reasons. I want to help families deal with their dogs' behavior issues. Just as people can be when they surrender a dog to a shelter, the truth is that most of these people absolutely adore their dog and they're simply at the end of their rope. They can't handle this problem any more and they don't have the tools or skills or knowledge to work it out, so that's why I'm a dog trainer, I'm trying to keep dogs in their homes. Melissa Breau: And I think it's so common to hear things like, "He's such a good dog, I'm sure he'll be adopted. Or, "He's such a good dog in this situation, that situation. I'm sure he'll find a great home," and they kind of make themselves feel a little better because they do love their dogs and they do believe that they're great dogs and they're just, like you said, they're at the end of their rope in that one area. Nancy Tucker: Absolutely. Yeah, and sometimes it just takes a little bit of guidance and a little bit of help, a little bit of support. It doesn't always work out, of course, but most of the time things can turn around for the better, so that's what keeps me motivated. Melissa Breau: Do you have a particular philosophy or training philosophy that you kind of believe in? I mean, how would you describe your training approach? Nancy Tucker: My main focus when working with people and their dogs is creating or repairing the bond between them, and I say repairing because sometimes it's a matter of trust has been broken or like we mentioned a couple of minutes ago where somebody's at the end of their rope and they just don't like their dog any more, so I think a lot of my work is about repairing that bond. And once that bond is there and it's healthy and it's strong, then all kinds of good things start happening. The training becomes easier, training becomes more fun, interaction in general becomes more fun, and I think that a large part of building a really strong bond is letting go of expectations. Let go of this idea that we have in our mind about how things should be, and letting go of some of the rules that we tend to put on ourselves and on our dogs' behavior. I am a big fan of letting dogs be dogs and training them so that our lives can coexist in harmony without kind of training the dog out of the dog. Melissa Breau: So I kind of mentioned in your bio that you're wrapping up the class on separation anxiety. I know that's a really, really hard thing to work on with some dogs, so why is that so hard and kind of how are you approaching it in class? Nancy Tucker: Yeah. Separation anxiety encompasses a lot of different emotions, for both the dog and the human. So there's fear, there's frustration, there's resentment often. There's guilt, there's sadness, there's loneliness because you find that as a human living with a dog with separation anxiety often your social life is severely affected, you can't go out, so it's a super tough situation all around. And of course there's a lot of emotions involved for the dog, too. So in this course I skipped a lot of the theory behind this type of problem, you know, the possible causes and symptoms, for example. I figured if people were signing up for the class it's because they're already experiencing it, and spending more time on theory means spending less time on working towards solving problems. So because it can take such a long time to solve this type of problem, I wanted to start right away and make the best of the six weeks that we have together. So right now students are working on very gradually helping their dog learn not to fear being alone, and it is a very gradual process but if it's done right, we begin to see improvement at every step, and then a spark of hope gets ignited. And then the next thing you know you're on your way to solving the problem, so for most students this is true. They'll be able to solve the problem, but there are some cases unfortunately where it's not so easy to solve or that it just won't ever be resolved, and this is true, so those are super tough on the student who's trying so hard. Melissa Breau: Right. Right. Sometimes it's just out of their control. It's not that they're doing anything wrong, it's not that there's anything wrong with the dog, it's just that that's who the dog is. Nancy Tucker: Exactly, and to take away that guilt that some people have where somehow they think that it's something that they've done that's caused the dog to have this problem and that's so untrue. Melissa Breau: I mean, behavior issues in general are just, I mean, they're so hard. I know personally it often feels like because those behaviors are so tied to emotions, right? They're different than skills, like obedience skills. Because of the emotions, they're often so much more difficult to teach. Would you agree with that? Can you speak to that a little bit? Kind of how do emotions and behavior interact? Nancy Tucker: Yeah, for sure. When we're working on a problem like separation anxiety, for example, we're directly addressing the dog's emotions, so how they perceive what being alone means, and this is true for any sort of behavior issue where there are very strong emotions involved, like aggression. So in this case we want to take him from feeling intense fear or panic to being alone, to feeling confident and perfectly okay with being alone at home. So we are working on the emotions and that's quite the journey, and this is why it takes time. So we're not training any new behaviors at all really, we're not putting any movements on queue, that's not the type of training we're doing at all. So what we're doing is helping the dog feel better, helping him feel safer and more confident about this whole being alone thing, and we're doing this through what's called systematic desensitization. And just very quickly, systematic means that we're working on it very methodically, not making progress at random; there's a plan. And desensitization means that we're working to reduce or eliminate this negative emotional response that the dog has to being alone and we're doing this by exposing him to the situation very, very slowly. So we start with super easy situations that they can handle and then we very slowly make it a tiny bit harder as we move through the program, so during this six weeks it's really just all about gradually making the exercises a little teeny bit harder until the dog can handle longer periods of being alone. Melissa Breau: Yes. Now I imagine that you're talking about very different emotions in your upcoming class where it's door greeting versus something like separation anxiety. I mean, in your opinion, what's kind of the common issue that we tend to see when dogs are just way over the top at the door, kind of what's going on there? Nancy Tucker: My God, this is actually one of my favorite training issues to work on because we're dealing with an issue that's actually fun to solve, and I just want to clarify here that we're not talking about dogs who are fearful or who behave aggressively when someone enters the home, that's a whole other issue. What this class will address, and this is in December, what this class will address are those dogs who scramble to get to the door when someone walks in. They push their way through to greet visitors and they usually come on way too strong, so it might be barking with excitement, they might be jumping up, they might be scratching legs or if they're big enough they can just lean so hard into people that they knock them down. And as happy as they appear to be, I think a lot of these dogs are experiencing some sort of conflict of emotions and that's why we see kind of the over excited behavior. So there's a huge difference between what the dog wants and needs to do when someone walks through the door and what we want them to do, and I think that's when some over exuberant behaviors are born. Melissa Breau: So you said something really interesting, though. You said there's a conflict of emotions. do you mind just explaining a little bit more what you mean by that? Nancy Tucker: If they want to greet the people, they want to see the people, they want to smell the people, they want to see what's going on, they want to interact, but there may be somebody standing behind them pulling on their collar or yelling at them. They know that this seems to be a situation where their human gets very excited or very upset and they're not quite sure how to behave, but they have this overwhelming sort of urge to go and greet the people at the door. So I think that that's where I see the conflict of emotion and that's where we see a bunch of appeasement behaviors or the dog just gets over excited and it's just overwhelming emotion. Melissa Breau: Yes. I think that sometimes people aren't really sure kind of what that phrase means. I mean, I did, there's this conflict of emotion, it's like well, I know w…

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E25: Heather Lawson - "Life skills and Training Concepts" Aug 25, 2017

Show notes

Summary: Heather Lawson is a Certified Professional Dog Trainer, a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner (KPA-CTP), a CGN Evaluator and a Free-style judge. She has been training dogs and their humans for more than 20 years after deciding that the corporate world just wasn't cutting it anymore. She is the owner of dogWISE Training & Behaviour Center Inc., where she teaches group classes for companion pets, competitive obedience, and rally in addition to providing behaviour consults and private lessons. At FDSA, she teaches several classes focused on life skills, including the upcoming Loose Leash Walkers Anonymous and Hounds About Town; she'll also be teaching a new class on "Match to Sample." Links Mentioned: www.dogwise.ca Next Episode: To be released 9/1/2017, featuring Nancy Tucker talking about the roles of emotions in training, and how to modify behaviors when they are tied to strong emotions in our dogs. 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 Heather Lawson. Heather is a certified professional dog trainer, and Karen Pryor Academy certified training partner, a CGN evaluator and a free style judge. She's been training dogs and their humans for more than 20 years after deciding that the corporate world just wasn't cutting it anymore. She's the owner of dogWISE Training & Behavior Center where she teaches group classes for companion pets, competitive obedience, and rally in addition to providing behavior consults and private lessons. At FCSA she teaches several classes focused on life skills, including the upcoming Loose Leash Walkers Anonymous and Hounds About Town. She'll also be teaching a new class on Match to Sample. Hi, Heather, welcome to the podcast. Heather Lawson: Hi, Melissa, glad to be here. Melissa Breau: Looking forward to chatting. SO to start us out, I know we talked about this a little bit before turning on the recording, but do you want to just tell me a little bit about your own dogs, who they are and what you're working on with them? Heather Lawson: Okay. Well, my breed of choice, who happens to be currently rumbling in their crate at the moment, is German Shepard. I have two, one a male by the name of Tag, who is 11 years old and he's retired from active working. He's just a family companion and does everything else that Piper does but on a lower schedule, and then I have Piper who is a 2-year-old female, and she's my current work in progress, and I hope to be taking her into the competitive obedience ring, rally, and anything else that I can wrap my head around with her. Melissa Breau: How did you get your start in the dog sports world? Heather Lawson: Well, as you mentioned in my bio I was in the corporate world, in human resources, retail management, and after about three downsizings consecutively in a row, it was just that time of the '90s and so forth, I just decided that I didn't want to go back to work and I'd rather stay home and do things with my dogs, and believe it or not I ended up working at a school, an obedience school back east in Ontario and got competing with my own dogs, and then from there just went all over the place wanting to develop my education and just become a better trainer, and I've had so much fun doing this that I've never looked back on the corporate world since. It's just been so enjoyable because I get to meet so many new dogs and so many lovely people. Melissa Breau: I wanted to ask you a little bit about your training philosophy. How do you approach training? Heather Lawson: For me personally I like to approach it as a teamwork situation. I want to look at the dog that's in front of me and work with what they are giving me, and work at the level that they're capable of at that particular moment I guess you could say. My philosophy, you get the old, 'Well, I want to do positive,' and everything like that. It just never occurs to me to do anything but positive and I want to make sure that I'm consistent, that I'm fair. I give my animals the better side of me at all times. Above all else my animals are family companions so not only do I have to worry about what I'm doing in training, but I have to worry about what we're doing when we're not training, and so everything has to mesh and come together, and it's just basically a family unit. Melissa Breau: I wanted to talk a little bit about the classes that you're going to be offering coming up in October, so let's start with the Loose Leash Walkers Anonymous class, and I am sure at least once, if not more than that, I will somehow manage to jumble those words because Loose Leash Walkers Anonymous is almost a tongue twister, but why are life skills like that, like leash walking, such an important skill for sports dogs and why is it such an incredibly difficult thing to teach? Heather Lawson: Well, like most people who do dog sports we travel, so we go to competitions, we do things with our dogs, we have to stay in hotels, we have to be out in the public, and having a dog with good manners, including loose leash walking skills I think is very important because your dog is only working and doing those activities for a very short period of time. The rest of it, if they're like most people…my dogs, as I said, are part of my family so when I'm not doing those skills or competitions, or anything like that I'm taking my dogs out into the community. I don't want to be dragged all over the place. I want to be able to take them on the sea bus that goes from one side of the inlet to the other, I want to be able to take them up and down elevators or into stores and do all of those types of things with them without people turning around and saying, 'Look at that. The dogs out of control,' and I think it's important too even when you're competing that you have your dogs under control, that they're not going in every different direction, they're not dragging you to and from whatever it is that you're doing, whether it's conformation, or obedience, or even agility, or nose work. I mean, sure the dogs get excited but at the same time, it's still nice to have a little bit of management and manners in place, and that's my own personal view, and I think it's important. The other side of it, why is it so hard to teach, simply because we aren't consistent enough, I think, and we don't think of it as a priority, and by priority I mean I picked up on something a long, long time ago from Sue Ailsby, who's also teaching at Fenzi, and that was when the leash goes on that is your only priority of teaching loose leash walking, so getting from A to B is your only priority on a loose leash, and that has never, ever steered me wrong. If we put the leash on at one point and then we go and we let the dog pull us to their favorite friend, or we let them pull us to go and sniff to something, or pull us to go to the dog park. If we're inconsistent in our requirements then we never get that loose leash walking as part of regular manners skill, and you know what…and it's true. If I don't have the time to work on that, if I haven't given myself enough time, if my dogs are going to be excited, and the dogs get excited, and with a little bit of a reset okay. Yeah, okay mom, we remember. If I don't have that time I just will take them and use a muzzle magnet, which is basically a fistful of food, let them nibble on it as I go from point a to b so that I don't get that loose leash pulling, but I get the loose leash, so I try to be consistent with everything that I'm doing, and I think that's why the dogs don't get as far ahead in their loose leash walking because we're also very concerned about teaching them all of these other behaviors that one of the most important things is the loose leash walking because if they don't have that loose leash walking they don't get out into the community, they don't get out to socialize, they're not much a pleasure to be around because they're hard on your shoulder, they're hard on your elbow, hard on your back and so they end up only doing certain things and they don't have a well-rounded life, and especially with pet dogs they end up getting stuck in the backyard so they don't get the exercise. They don't get the exercise then they have problem behaviors, they have the problem behaviors then they get surrendered, so loose leash walking, whether it's for your competitive dogs or for your family companions is one of the most important skills, at least in my view anyways. Melissa Breau: And I think you hit on that, like that consistency point. It's so common to see somebody go into a class, trach loose leash walking, and then the moment they leave the room suddenly they forget everything that they have learned. Heather Lawson: Oh yeah. Yeah, and if I catch my students, my in person students coming up the walkway and the dog is dragging them up they know, they look at me and they immediately turn right around and go down to the back, and they do their leash walking all the way up, so now it's actually a running joke in class, is that oh, she caught us. Uh-oh we've got to go back, and now they've almost…almost every single person who's been there by about week three they all know that they've got to practice their skills coming and going because that's the whole point of it, right. You've got to practice it 24/7 in order for it to stick, and if you don't then it's not going to happen and you're giving the dog an inconsistent message, and dogs don't work in grey they work a little bit better in black and white. Melissa Breau: And I think that kind of leads really well into the next thing I wanted to talk about, which is this idea of the dogs being able to go out and about with you and do things. So I know you also teach the Hounds About Town class, which I'm assuming kind of touches on that a little bit. What are the actual skills that you teach in that class, and how do you approach it? Heather Lawson: Okay. With the Hound About Town, again, we teach loose leash walking, not as in depth as in the Loose Leash Walking Walkers Anonymous, but we teach some loose leash walking. We teach leave it, okay. We don't need hoovers because there's so much garbage, and things like that, and bad things that the dogs could pick up, as well as we don't need them going after that little child in the stroller that's coming towards them with that ice cream cone that's right at their level, so a good leave it comes in handy. Many of the dogs live in condominiums now, so we teach elevator etiquette, which also transfers nicely into riding on transit for those people who are lucky enough to travel on transit. We work on chill and settle on the mat, a little bit of recalls, grooming and touch for the veterinary care, door manners, and some of the other things that we do is we consider etiquette for when you are traveling and staying in hotels, or staying in other locations, and how to manage your dog in busy situations, just the basics, what would you do in your everyday life when you're out and how to make it easier to take your dog with you more places. The other thing that we do is we also encourage people to take their dogs more places, don't just leave them at home all the time, of course weather permitting, because it's good social interaction for our dogs. They don't necessarily have to be always just going to the dog park. They need to be with you and be out and about, and part of the community, and the better behaved animals we have in the community the more access we're going to have for them, and that's the key thing. People say that there isn't that much access for animals, but that's because there's been perhaps maybe some inconvenient encounters that haven't gone so well because the dogs haven't been well-trained. Also too, all of the things that we cover in here can be applied to the…I think in your end of the woods it says CGC, which is the Canine Good Citizen. In our area it's Canine Good Neighbor and then you also have…then there are other levels. The urban K9 title as well. If you were to go through the Hound About Town you would be able to go and take your test and get your certificate, so it's just another way to promote responsible dog ownership, right. Getting them out, getting them trained, and getting them part of the family. Melissa Breau: Now, you didn't touch on two of the things that stood out to me when I was looking at the syllabus, which were the Do Nothing training, and Coffee Anyone, so what are those and obviously how do you address them in class? Heather Lawson: Yeah. I always get kind of weird sideways looks when I talk about do nothing training, because it's kind of like…people say, 'What do you mean do nothing training,' and I say well, how often do you just work on having your dog do nothing, and everybody looks at me, well, you don't work on having the dog do nothing, and I say oh yeah, you do. That's what we call settle on the mat, chill, learn how to not bug me every time I sit down at the computer to do some work, not bark at me every time I stop to chat with the neighbor, stop pulling me in all different ways, so it's kind of like just do nothing, because if you think about it the first maybe six months of your dog's life it's all about the dog and the puppy. Then when they get to look a little bit more adult all of a sudden they're no longer the center of attention, but because they've been the center of attention for that first eight weeks to six months, and there's been all this excitement whenever they're out and people stop, and you chat or you do anything it's very hard for the dog all of a sudden now to have this cut off and just not be acknowledged, and this is where you then get the demand barking, or the jumping on the owner, or the jumping on other people to get that attention, whereas if you teach that right in the very beginning, okay, and teach your puppies how to settle, whether it be in an x pen, or in a crate, or even on a mat beside you while you're watching your favorite TV show. If you teach them to settle, and how to turn it off then you're going to not have that much of a problem going forward as they get older. The other thing too is that by teaching the dogs all of these different things that we want to teach them that's great, and that's fabulous, and we should be doing that, but most dogs aren't active 100 percent of the time, they're active maybe 10 percent of the time. The other 90 percent they're chilling out, they're sleeping, they're…while their owners are away working if they're not luck enough to be taken out for a daily hike then they've got to learn how to turn it off, and if we can teach them that in the early stages you don't end up with severe behavior problems going forward and I've done that with all of my puppies, and my favorite place to train the do nothing training is actually in the bathroom. What I do with that is my puppies, they get out first thing in the morning, they go their potty, they come back in, we get a chewy or a bully stick, or a Kong filled with food, and puppy goes into the bathroom with m…

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E24: Melissa Chandler - "Nosework, Parkour, and Training Soft Dogs" Aug 18, 2017

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Summary: Melissa Chandler has competed in conformation, agility, obedience, hunt tests, nose work, and rally. She's also successfully trained and handled non-owned dogs to many titles and championships. Today her focus is on nose work and parkour, both of which she teaches here at FDSA. Melissa's strengths are problem solving, by looking outside the box, and working with soft dogs. Owning and working with soft dogs has given her the ability to coach others to help build confidence, and has taught her how to set up training sessions, specifically with soft dogs in mind. She enjoys helping others and brainstorming to help other teams succeed. She has taught private lessons in agility and nose work that focus on solving specific training problems. Next Episode: To be released 8/25/2017, featuring Heather Lawson to discuss the importance of life skills for competition dogs and advanced training concepts we can teach our dogs. 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 will be talking to Melissa Chandler. Melissa has competed in conformation, agility, obedience, hunt tests, nose work, and rally. She's also successfully trained and handled non-owned dogs to many titles and championships. Today her focus is on nose work and parkour, both of which she teaches here at FDSA. Melissa's strengths are problem solving, by looking outside the box, and working with soft dogs. Owning and working with soft dogs has given her the ability to coach others to help build confidence, and has taught her how to set up training sessions, specifically with soft dogs in mind. She enjoys helping others and brainstorming to help other teams succeed. She has taught private lessons in agility and nose work that focus on solving specific training problems. Hi Melissa, welcome to the podcast. Melissa Chandler: Thank you, glad to be here. Melissa Breau: Excited to chat today. This is definitely a, you know, get into parkour a little bit, get into some of the nose work stuff. It's a new topic for me so that's exciting. Melissa Chandler: Good, I'm glad. Melissa Breau: So, to start us out, do want to tell us a little bit about your own dogs? Who they are? What you're working on with them? Melissa Chandler: Sure, I'd love to. Edge is my (several) year old Weimaraner who's responsible for this awesome nose work journey we're on. He currently has two nose work, three legs. We've only competed in two nosework three trials and he qualified and placed in both trials. We're currently getting ready to enter more trials for this winter to work on our nose work three elite, and for those that are not aware you must qualify in three nose work, three trials, in order to earn your nose work three elite. Neither one of us can handle heat so our competition window is basically October to April, depending on spring weather. Edge also loved obedience. He's trained to utility so we do a lot of that just for fun. His absolute favorite thing is the dumbbell so we play a lot of fun retrieve games and a lot of times it's his reward after a training session. He also loves fitness, which I think comes from all of the parkour exercises and obstacles that we've done, and he also loves working on tricks and he's very awesome at them and he makes them look really easy. Bam is my 3-year-old Vizsla and he's actually responsible for our parkour adventures. He took puppy classes, Karen and Abigail who are the founders of the International Dog Parkour Association, and he was a superstar. He had incredible balance and rear end awareness for such a young puppy and he was always like a little kid at Christmas every time they introduced a new obstacle. It became part of our class whenever they brought something new out, we would turn Bam to face the wall so he couldn't see, and then everyone would watch when he would turn around because he would just smile and light up with a new obstacle to start with. It was so cute. He loves agility, hunting, obedience, and he's a super nose work dog, but he also loves quartering. So, we've been working really hard at increasing motor value and slowly incorporating that into the environment with fun, easy highs, and also using some Premack, and I'm actually sharing our adventures of this journey in my current nose work 120 class and I think it's a nice fit in that class because we're starting all the different elements. And then, I'm also planning on turning it into a full proofing and distraction class at the beginning of 2018. Melissa Breau: You mentioned the heat. Where are you located? Melissa Chandler: We're in Ohio, so we have hot, humid summers and neither one of us can handle it. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. I did a summer in Charleston at one point and that was pretty bad too so, I can sympathize. Melissa Chandler: That's one thing I love about my training building now because we have a place to go train that's air conditioned in the summer. Melissa Breau: Can't beat that. Melissa Chandler: No, here we get up at 6 o'clock in the morning, if it's cooler, and get out and get a little bit of training in before the day starts. Melissa Breau: I want to just kind of take it back a little bit to the beginning of your journey. I know you kind of mentioned each of your dogs has helped you get into a different sport. How did you originally get started out in dog sports? Melissa Chandler: I've always enjoyed dog training before I really knew anything about it or what it was. I think when I was like 10 or 11 a friend of the family asked me to show her Schnauzer in conformation and I did one show and I was addicted. I convinced, or maybe, for a lack of better term, I negotiated with my dad to get a poodle. I actually asked for a Great Dane knowing I wouldn't get a Great Dane, but I was able to negotiate down to a poodle, and we started some junior handling, and then from that I started doing conformations, and then I got into a 4H and AKC obedience. We competed locally at our county fairs and every year we were fortunate enough to win a spot to go to state fair. So, we got to go to big competitions, for us, being at that young age in 4H, and my parents were so supportive. They had to drive me all over for training and trials, and every weekend we'd go off to some remote place to do a conformation or an obedience trial, and I fell in love with it so much, and then I met a Weimaraner and I knew I had to have a Weimaraner and I got my first Weimaraner and started obedience, and then I got my second Weimaraner and that's when agility was just coming to the US and started agility and it's kind of all history from there. So, I've been doing this for a really long time. Melissa Breau: Now I know you mentioned Edge got you into nose work, do want to share that story a little bit? Like, what was it about nose work, or about him in nose work, how did that happen? Melissa Chandler: Sure, as I said, Edge was responsible for this awesome nose work journey that we've shared and we both have such a passion for the sport now. He's very soft and he stresses down. He loves to train and work, but he could not handle a trial environment and we went to several trials and he just wasn't happy, and if he's not happy, I'm not happy. So, I was looking for something for him to do and his breeders were in California and they had mentioned the great new sport called nose work. There wasn't anything in our area so I had traveled and gone to a couple seminars and thought yes, this is for us, and was looking for some ongoing instruction and that is when Denise actually offered her very first online class before FDSA even existed. So, we're from the pre FDSA days and we took her very first online class, nose work. We started that and never looked back, took all of the classes online, and I'm one of those people, once I learn something, I want to learn anything and everything I can about it. I just want to know everything I can so I can help my dogs adjust. So, I traveled to a lot of different seminars, I went to different people, different philosophies, different ideas, and just absorbed as much as I could about nose work. I also volunteered at trials, even before Edge and I were competing, so I could learn what it was all about. I learned so much from the judges and debriefings. There's things that, to this day, that still, they're like little gems of information that I share with my students that I learned at debriefings. So, I highly recommend anyone that can volunteer at a trial to do it because it's definitely, it's a great education and you learn a lot of information. Melissa Breau: Not to put you on the spot but do you mind sharing one of the tips that you picked up at a debriefing, just kind of for the audience? Melissa Chandler: Not at all. One of the things, especially when you're starting nose work, is your dog's getting close to the source, close to the source, and you want to step in there and look, or step in there to get ready to reward, and the judge's comment was whenever you feel like you need to step in, you step out — and that is so true because if your dog starts bracketing and working the odor the last thing you want to do is be in their way. So, you just take a step back. They don't need you. You can't help them. So, it's just, get out of their way, they'll tell you when they find it, and then you can step in and give them their reward. I've passed that onto so many students and I still remember it sometimes, you know, we're working, working, working, you start to step in and it's like no, take a step back, because if you do get in the odor you can prevent them from following the scent cone before, so, I find that to be very, very valuable. That was probably the very first trial, that I worked at, that I learned that information. Melissa Breau: And I think that, just in general, kind of attending trials and helping out is such a great tip, I mean, I know I've been trying to do that for obedience stuff locally, because my dog's not ready to trial, and it lets you meet people, it lets you get to know the local community, it lets you kind of see some of the judges and their different styles, I mean, it's just, it's incredibly invaluable. Melissa Chandler: Absolutely. And I, if possible, at the nose work trials, I try to get a job that I have some interaction with the judge because most of them love to teach, so they tell you different things and you can just absorb so much information from them just, you know, if you're a timer or something because they love to share that information. Melissa Breau: Now, having worked with a soft dog, do you have tips for others who have soft dogs, kind of to help them let their dog shine or that they should know about setting up training sessions? I mean, what kind of advice would you share? Melissa Chandler: Sure, this is another subject that I did a lot of research and I attended a lot of different seminars to try and get information, mostly to help Edge, and I think, first and foremost, it's so important to keep your dog safe and build their trust because once they trust you, that you will keep them safe, that gives them more confidence, and as I always tell my dogs, I have a chew, it's called I have your back. So, if they see something and they get concerned, I'm like, I got your back. So, that's our communication of whatever it is, I see it, you're fine, I got you, and it just takes time and by keeping them safe you build that trust that they know that you do have them. I would say never lure or trick your dog into doing something that they don't feel comfortable doing. Sometimes we find that in parkour because someone really thinks their dog should be able to do that behavior and the dog doesn't feel comfortable in that environment, so they tried to take cookies and lure them there. Just back off, work on it somewhere else, and eventually it'll happen. If you lure them, and then they get up there and they're really afraid, they're never going to want to do it again. If you let them do it on their own then they'll be able to do that anywhere in the future. Teach new behaviors in a familiar, comfortable environment, and then when you're ready to take it to another room or on the road, lower your criteria and reward any effort that the dog gives you in trying to do that for you. And one thing, when you're setting up your training sessions, make sure you're not always asking for difficult behaviors or, in nose work, difficult searches. You want your dog to always look forward to and succeed in your training sessions. If your sessions are always difficult and challenging your dog will no longer look forward to them. Have fun sessions that you reward everything, or just play, or do whatever your dog enjoys most. I had mentioned how much Edge loved his dumbbell, there's times we just go in the other room and we play with the dumbbell and he loves that, and just think of the value you're building in your relationship in your training because we just went and did what he loves doing. And then, for nose work, play foundation games. Just have one or two boxes out, do the shell game, play with your game boxes so it's fun, fast, quick, highly rewarding searches. And, I have a thing that I put in most of my classes, it's kind of like your recalls but it's for odor. How much value do you have in your odor bank. And, when you set up these fun, fast, foundation games, you're putting lots of value in your odor bank so, then when you have a more challenging side, you have deposits in that odor bank that they can pull out in order to work harder to find that odor. One of the other things I recommend is to be consistent and build routines. Soft dogs feel comfortable in routines, as they know what to expect, and then things are not so scary. And, empower your dog to make decisions and have a party when they do. Again, nose work is great for this. Soft dogs do better with shaping or decision making when they have an obstacle to interact with, versus just blank space that they have to figure something out, so, that's where parkour comes in. So, parkour is great at empowering your dog, just give them an obstacle and let them do anything they want and reward the interaction with that obstacle. Back to Edge's dumbbell again, but find what your dog loves or loves doing and incorporate it into your training and use it as their reward, or even its odor value, your dog loves odor, do something else and let him go do a search for the odor. And I think it's always important to check in with your soft dog and see how they're feeling with what you're doing. We build emotional attachments with everything we teach and do. We need to make sure our dog is not stressed and then we build a positive emotional response with that behavior. I also like to start off my sessions with an energy game. That helps build energy into the training, and one of the simple ones that I like is the chew cookie toss and it's just toss the cookie to the left and send your dog to get it and as they're eating it toss the cookie to the right and send your dog to get it and you're actually building energy. Most of your soft dogs stress down, they don't have the energy to put in the training and that's just kind of a good start. Edge…

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E23: Kamal Fernandez - "Motivation & Control" Aug 11, 2017

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Summary: Kamal Fernandez is an internationally renowned dog trainer and seminar instructor, Championship Obedience Judge, Crufts competitor and the head trainer and owner of East London Dog Training. He has over 25 years of practical dog training experience, based on a combination of science and hands on work that have led him to establish a reputation for positive training and to champion reward-based methods all over the world. Kamal has made a study of psychology and began his career as a police officer working with young offenders -- this has shaped his training philosophy and helped him craft a style that gets the best from his students, human and canine alike. He's probably most well-known for teaching heelwork, his primary focus here at FDSA, but he's successfully used rewards based methods in a wide variety of dog sports, including obedience, agility, protection sports and canine freestyle. His training specialty revolves around using play and games to create motivation and control. Links Mentioned: Dogs Might Fly Youtube Channel Next Episode: To be released 8/18/2017, featuring Melissa Chandler talking about nosework, parkour, and problem solving for soft dogs. 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 Kamal Fernandez. Kamal is an internationally renowned dog trainer and seminar instructor, Championship Obedience Judge, Crufts competitor and the head trainer and owner of East London Dog Training. He has over 25 years of practical dog training experience, based on a combination of science and hands on work that have led him to establish a reputation for positive training and to champion reward-based methods all over the world. Kamal has made a study of psychology and began his career as a police officer working with young offenders -- this has shaped his training philosophy and helped him craft a style that gets the best from his students, human and canine alike. He's probably most well-known for teaching heelwork, his primary focus here at FDSA, but he's successfully used rewards based methods in a wide variety of dog sports, including obedience, agility, protection sports and canine freestyle. His training specialty revolves around using play and games to create motivation and control. Hi Kamal, welcome to the podcast! Kamal Fernandez: Hi Melissa! Thank you for having me. Melissa Breau: I'm so glad to chat. Heelwork is always everybody's favorite topic, so.. Kamal Fernandez: Yes, so this should be an interesting conversation. Melissa Breau: To start us out, can you tell us a bit about your own dogs -- who they are and what you're working on with them? Kamal Fernandez: I have a malinois, I have border collies, I have a German spitz, I have a boxer, and I have a poodle-cross Jack Russell. So I have a real array of dogs and they do various things. Obviously, the primary focus for the majority of my career has been as an obedience competitor, but I've recently moved to begin doing other disciplines. Primarily for a bit of a change, really. I think I've been doing it for quite a long while, and I was looking for new challenges and something to sort of take my training a little bit further, and I've dappled with lots of disciplines throughout my career. So my border collie and my spitz both compete in agility, and my boxer, the intention with him is to do IPO. He's in the midst of training at the moment; he had quite a long period off with injury, 2 years out with quite a severe injury, so he's just been, probably in the last year, been brought back into work so we've got a lot of catch-up to do. And my malinois and my older border collie, they both do obedience. I'm sort of shifting my goals as it were to new disciplines and I've sort of done obedience for so long I just want to have a little bit of a change and I think for an instructor and a teacher it's really good to keep fresh and to teach your dog new things, and also be a recipient of being a student as well. I think that's really healthy. Melissa Breau: So you're pushing into Agility, is that what you're saying? Kamal Fernandez: Yeah, so I've just started -- my spitz does agility. He's up to… I'm not sure what the equivalent would be in the US but he's at grade 5 level now, and my border collie bitch is just starting her competitive career. So they're both doing… I've been really really pleased with them, I've only.. My times a bit… well, obviously, I have a young child now -- a baby -- so my time's a little bit limited, which is always a constant battle. Bless their hearts, they seem to be carrying me a little bit at the moment, to be honest, but that's a good foundation. They're great; they're all doing really really well. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. I know you mentioned you started out in obedience, so how did you first get into that -- how did you start out in dog sports? Kamal Fernandez: So, I was always obsessed with dogs and I was always fanatical about the prospect of owning one. And I badgered my parents for years and years and years about getting a dog and they eventually succumbed, and they buckled in to me to get a dog. And that dog was absolutely every single behavioral issue you can probably ever encounter, that one dog had. And it was largely down to pet dog owners -- you just, just naive people thinking "I tell it sit, why doesn't it sit?" "I let it off the lead, why doesn't it come back?" We just didn't understand the concept of training a dog, we just -- like a lot of people -- we just assumed the dog came hard-wired to do it. I actually was watching agility on television, and there was a guy there called Greg Derrett who anybody who knows about agility, he's one of the top competitors and trainers in the world, and Greg's a little bit older than me, and he was there competing at Crufts in the junior competition and I always thought, well, if he can do it as a junior -- and i think he won that year -- I thought well it must be achievable, i must be able to do it. So I tried to contact the local agility club and at that point they said you can't start bringing a dog to agility until you've gone to obedience training. She wasn't a puppy-puppy, she must have been 6-10 months old, and they said you can't start with her until she's well over a year, so I thought, "Oh god, what am I going to do for this time?" Anyway, they said take your dog to obedience training. And I took her to obedience training and it was just domestic pet training, very, very, very old school, you know. Choke chains, walking around the whole, choking the dog, which you know at the time -- this was 26 years ago -- wasn't unusual to be honest, in this country. And it just so happened that I stayed on one evening to watch the more advanced people train their dogs and there was somebody doing competitive obedience, and it just really really inspired me because of the level of control she had over her dog and I remember she left it at one end on a stage that's actually at the hall where i now teach, and she did like 6 position changes and I was just blown away by the fact that she could -- there's my dog that I can't even let off the lead and she could leave her dog at the other side of a room and give it positions which appeared to be on some sort of magic slash electronic remote control, i don't know, i was just blown away by it. So it just really made me go "wow I want to do that" and my career just really went in that path. I sort of got more and more interested in it; I saw her train numerous dogs to do heel work and I just got addicted to that as a concept, really. And I never really followed up on the whole agility thing, and it's ironic that now, 26 years later, I'm finally getting into agility. I'm a slow learner, but there you go. Better late than never as they say. Melissa Breau: Hey, you got there. You just took your time. So you mentioned that you started out choke chains and traditional training, all that stuff. How would you describe your training philosophy today? Kamal Fernandez: I talked recently at a conference, and was speaking about my personal journey in dog training and how it's really taken a really, really diverse route in that we started out like, i think, a lot of people that have been training dogs for 20+ years, in more compulsion based dog training and in dominance-based theories to training dogs; you know, you have to be the boss, you have to be the pack leader, and it was very much rout learning with them. The dog's thoughts, feelings, emotions were never considered, really. It was just make the dog do it, but i always instinctively felt there was a better way out there and it didn't sit with me as an individual; I thought, "Oh, I'm not a forceful person," I'm determined, I'm very goal-oriented, but I'm not one for force. I wouldn't force somebody to do something; i wouldn't force my dogs, it just didn't quite align with who i was. And then i gravitated to more motivational methodology, which was slightly more what I'd call show and tell, so you'd show the dog what you wanted them to do, you'd reward the dog, and if the dog didn't do it you'd show them again, and if the dog didn't do it again after that you'd probably correct it and then reward it. So there was more reinforcement being used, but still that element of compulsion in there. And I was never extreme in my use of -- other than the choke chain scenario, which was just sheer ignorance -- I was always somebody that wanted to interact with my dogs, I wanted to… I mean I used to take my dog that i first had, she was my friend more than anything, I used to take her out and we used to go out for the whole day and we used to go play at what we call the dumps and stuff, so she was my little friend so there was a real conflict between what i was doing in training and how i was with her in general. So I gravitated to what you would now call reinforcement-based dog training and as clicker training became more prominent, in this country I'd say probably 15 years ago, something like that -- 15-20 years ago -- and initially the reaction was "oh gosh, this is rubbish" but I was inquisitive about it and i was skeptical, but the more and more I watched it I thought there's something to this, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Again, it's amazing how life takes you on this journey, I did psychology while I was at college and I did it later on as a -- I studied it as part of a certain degree and an element of it was psychology which part of it talked about learning theory and operant conditioning and classical conditioning and so forth, and it then sort of all fell into place and made more sense. So then i started to delve with the dog that i had into clicker training and my initial reaction was… I tried it, i pressed the clicker, I gave her a reward and the dog didn't miraculously do it. By that point i was a little more astute but i thought, "I'm missing something," this isn't -- i just can't work this all out. Anyway, it was niggling away for me, and with that dog i sort of tried it and thought, okay this doesn't work, chuck the clicker, chuck my teddies out the pram, and flounce my skirt and I thought right, that doesn't work I'm going to go back to what i did. And I trained that dog more, what I'd say, traditionally. Flash with a bit more clicker training interspersed there, and he wasn't what I'd say was a straightforward, easy dog, but there were a couple of key things that made me realize, "you know what, i have to change what I'm doing." Because the things I clicker trained where so -- the responses and the reaction and the dog's understanding were so more salient than what i taught him traditionally. And that's not to bash traditional training, it could be my application, it could be my understanding, it could be a thousand and one things, so with my subsequent dogs I made a commitment to say that's it, I'm going to do this or die, basically. I'm going to clicker train these dogs from the get-go, and if i don't clicker train them I'm not going to train them at all. I had that in my head. So I really sort of held a gun to my own head and said you're going to do this. And it was the making of my dogs and my career and how i perceive dog training. And now my philosophy in dog training is about reinforcement -- find a way to reinforce the dog and minimize the use of punishment, even just withholding reinforcement. Find a way to reinforce the dog and create the dog being correct and successful. And be strategic in your use of withholding reinforcement, etc. And it's brought me to a place, a dog training place that i feel really really comfortable with. I feel morally, ethically, even to be … it sound a bit grand, but even spiritually, I like the way that i train my dogs now. I feel comfortable in it, it sits with me on a personal level, it sits with me in terms of the relationship I want with my dogs. They make choices; they don't want to work, they don't train. I don't force them, I don't push them, I convince them that what i want them to do is interesting and kind of enjoyable and actually really really fun. And so the relationship I have with them, the relationship I have with my dogs now they're not waiting for the Jekyll and Hyde split personality, i was always very much about interacting with them, but occasionally I'd suddenly be this person that would say, hey now you're going to do this, and on some level I always felt there was that element of… they were waiting for that person to turn up. Now I don't have that with my dogs and I have… trained more dogs with reinforcement based methodology than not. And I was just fortunate that the dogs that I had that I trained alternatively were just very very forgiving. So my training philosophy, it's about really, reinforcement is the key. It builds behavior. If you learn nothing else about operant conditioning and clicker training reinforcement will save the day so-to-speak. Melissa Breau: So, I did some googling of you, before this call… I mentioned in your intro that you teach seminars internationally and they seem to be on a wide variety of topics, everything from foundations to extreme proofing... So I wanted to ask: what you enjoy teaching, what your favorite thing to teach is? And… why? Kamal Fernandez: That's sort of a real easy one. My actual favorite topic is foundations for any dog sport -- that is by far my favorite topic, because that's where all the good stuff happens. That's where you really lay your… well, your foundations, for a successful career in any dog discipline. And I think the irony is that people always want to move on to what I would call the sexy stuff, but the irony is the sexy stuff is actually easy if your foundations are laid solidly and firmly. And I think I've had more "ah-ha" moments when I teach foundations to people than I have with anything else. I also, i have to say, i like behavioral issues. You can make GREAT impact, and literally change somebody's life and their dog's life, or save somebody's life because behavioral work and giving them a new take on how they deal wi…

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E22: Amy Johnson - "A Snapshot At A Time" Aug 04, 2017

Show notes

Summary: Amy is the owner of Great Dane Photos and teaches the dog photography classes offered through FDSA. She is the also official show photographer for many of the premier agility events in the United States, including the AKC National Agility Championships, AKC Agility Invitational, USDAA Cynosport World Games, and NADAC Championships, as well as numerous local trials, regional events, and breed national specialties. She has photographed a wide variety of dog sports, including agility, obedience, rally, and conformation, and dog events, including FDSA camp. Her start in professional photography came by taking pictures of her friends' dogs at conformation shows, and quickly grew to outpace her interest in showing her own dog -- and today she's here to talk to us about the reason a great number of people use the internet each day -- dog photos! Links mentioned: Great Dane Photos Next Episode: To be released 8/11/2017, featuring Kamal Fernandez talking about FCI heeling and balancing motivation and control. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sport using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Amy Johnson. Amy is the owner of Great Dane Photos and teaches the dog photography classes offered through FDSA. She is also the official show photographer for many of the premiere agility events in the United States including the AKC National Agility Championships, the AKC Agility Invitational, the USDAA Cynosports World Games, and the NADAC Championships, as well as numerous local tryouts, regional events, and breed national specialties. She has photographed a wide variety of dog sport including agility, obedience, rally and conformation, and dog events including the FDSA's Camp. Her start in professional photography came by taking pictures of her friend's dogs at conformation shows, and it quickly grew to outpace her interest in showing her on dog, and today she's here to talk to us about the reason a great number of people use the internet each day, dog photos. Hi, Amy, welcome to the podcast. Amy Johnson: Hi, Melissa. Thanks so much for having me on. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to chat. Amy Johnson: I am too. Melissa Breau: So to kind of start us out, do you want to just tell us a little bit about the dogs you have, who they are, and what you're working on with them? Amy Johnson: Sure. I have two dogs and one of them is here in my office with me, and well, if he makes any noise, but his name is Costner, as in Kevin, and so he is a Great Dane, a Fawn Great Dane, if anybody is interested in those details. He's about 39 inches at the shoulder, about 190 pounds, and that is ribs still visible kind of. That's just how big he is. so he's kind of a goof. We joke that he just has 3 neurons, he can eat, sleep and poop, and you know, he's just a really good hang out around the house dog. And then our other dog is a 60-pound Yellow Lab mix and her name is Dora. We don't do a lot with our dogs. They are companions, they like to go on walks, they like to go for hikes in the woods, they like to just be near us, and so they don't have any real special skills. Melissa Breau: I assume they can pose. Amy Johnson: They can pose. Although Costner is…if I try and put a camera in his face he generally kind of backs off and is like, what's that? So his actual special skill is that he is an AKC Breed Champion, and I cannot take any credit for that because we got him after his championship was finished from a friend of ours who were involved in the breeding of him, so he can look really pretty, so that's his special skill. He just doesn't really enjoy looking pretty, so what gets posted online of him are funny things where he's got drool or his lips are spread out on the floor where he's lying down, or you know, he's massive, and he takes up huge amounts of space, and so the pictures that I take are the ones that are just trying to show that and communicate that. We joke that he's a house pony, you know, he's not even really a dog, he's horse size, and then Dora…it's funny because she's the small dog in the house that people look at me and suddenly say we have a 60-pound dog that's considered the small dog, and then they, you know, okay, but she's got a few more brain cells in there. I do joke that I have to have dogs in my house that are dumber than me, so to call Costner not that smart is really, in our house, it's not an insult. That's just my reality. I admire the people who have the Border Collies, and the Jack Russells, and the Shih Tzus, and all those really, really smart dogs. That is not who I am and what I want to live with, so we have just dogs that are really good dog citizens and they know the routines. Costner knows that he has to sit before he gets his food. Sometimes he just stays sitting, even after I put his food down, but so we have our routines, but basically, we just want our dogs to be good citizens, and I think we've kind of got a good balance of that, so. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. So I mentioned in your bio that you got your start taking photos at conformation events. Was that kind of where your interest in photography started? Where did kind of you get started just in photography in general? Amy Johnson: In general, I got started back in junior high. My dad had a Minolta film camera, SLR camera, manual focus, and he taught me the basics of photography, the basics of exposures. So he taught me about shutter speed, and aperture, and at that point it was called film speed, now it's called ISO, but he taught me the basics of the exposure triangle, as it's called, and how to focus a manual focus camera, and how to set my exposure so that I expose the film properly. I never did any dark room work. It was always take the 35mm film canister to the WalMart, or wherever, and get it developed, so I'm not quite that much of a purist, but my beginnings definitely were in film, and with my dad, and we would vacation on the North Shore of Lake Superior here in Minnesota, and so he would take pictures, and then he would show me how to take pictures, and so kind of that father-daughter bond was really enhanced by our experience with him teaching me how to use a camera, and how to take pictures, so I kind of babbled with it throughout the years as I was growing up. I was given by my brother and my parents one year for my birthday they gave me a film Sor of my own, and this was a little more advanced. It was a Canon EOS Elan II, I think, and it had autofocus, so I didn't have to do the manual focus thing anymore, which you know, there's a little skill involved in manual focus, and I admired the photographers who could do it, and do it well. It's not my thing, but I understand the appeal of it. It kind of forces you to slow down and really takes things in, but so I had a film Sor that I, again, just kind of kept babbling, and various things, and then I got into dog shows, and that's a whole long story that we could talk about some other time, but I was showing my second Great Dane, her name was McKenzie, I was showing her in conformation. I was terrible, awful. She didn't have the temperament for it. I didn't have the skills for it. We tried for about a year and didn't really get anywhere other than I made a lot of friends, and really enjoyed learning about the conformation world, and understanding even just the rhythm of a conformation show, and understanding okay, these dogs are going in the ring, and then they're coming out, and then they're going back in, and so you know, it's very confusing at first, and then you kind of figure out oh, okay, I know what's going on, those dogs aren't going back in, and yeah. So I learned a lot about dog shows, and I learned a lot about the people who breed dogs, and that was fascinating to me. I was taking a camera to most shows that I went to and just taking pictures of my friends, and then one time, and this was actually with a digital camera, one of the very, very early digital cameras that actually use the three and a quarter inch floppy disks in it, so not even memory cards. These were, you know, not the five and a quarter, but I think they're three and a half inch floppy disks, and that was your memory card, so and that didn't respond very fast to a dog moving across the ring, you know, you'd hit the shutter button and about two seconds later it would actually take the picture. Well, there's no more dog left in the frame if it takes that long to take the picture, so one time I brought my film camera with me and really enjoyed the success I had with getting dogs moving in the ring, rather than just the ones where they were stacked. So then my vet invited me to photograph her club's agility trial, and that's where it really kind of took off for me, so I really enjoyed the different games, I think it was a USDAA trial, but I'm not 100 percent sure, but the different games were, you know, some were all jumps, and some where you didn't know where the dog was going to go, which I know now are gamblers, and again, that camaraderie around the ring, of all the people and their dogs, was really intriguing to me, and just was very welcoming and fun, and there was a market for the photos there. There was nearly no market back in '99, 2000 for candid photos ringside at conformation shows. Nobody was doing them, nobody knew what those were, you know, but agility trials, on the other hand, there was a market for that, people understood what that was, people likes pictures of their dog doing agility, so there was a market there for it being a business, not just a, you know, I'm going to show up and have fun. So I did one agility trial with a film camera, and then quickly realized that I would go broke on film and processing, and then digital SLR's were just coming out, so this was in 2000, and I convinced my poor husband to let me buy a digital SLR, the Canon D30, and as he's hitting submit order on B&H's website he's looking at me saying, "just promise me you'll try and make some money from this," and the camera paid for itself in I think two shows. We realized we had kind of a winning formula there, and so I never have even thought about going back to film, of course, and digital cameras have gotten amazingly good, and amazingly fast, and responsive, and make my job easier with every new camera that I get, so. Melissa Breau: Can you show a little more about how you went kind of from that stage of your business to where you are now, because now you do really, really, big shows, and I mean, just kind of interesting evolution. Amy Johnson: Right. Yeah. It started out as me and the camera, and sometimes my husband would come. My first national event was actually in 2001, and you know, I look back on this and I really had no business doing it, but I was invited, again, so the social aspect of it, I had made friends, and they said will you come, and I said okay, sure. So 2001 they'd have championships and it was in Minnesota, it was in Mankato, which is about, I think, five hours south of me, and so it wasn't like going out of state, and I made the leap. Now, the only really interesting part of this was I had a five-week-old baby at that point, so it was me, and a camera, and Ben, my husband, and Mika, our five-week-old baby, who made the trip down to Mankato, and I had told my friends who were in charge of the show, I had said if this isn't working for me with having a baby here we're going to just have to cut and run at some point, and they were like, that's fine, you know, you do what you need to do, but it all worked, and we had an amazing time, and I got an exposure to what a national events was, and there's a lot of adrenaline that comes with that. In 2007, I was invited to AKC Agility Nationals, so from 2001 to 2007 I was just mostly doing weekend stuff, 07 was AKC Nationals, and again, it was still just me and Ben. Ben was in the booth running the sales side of things, I was taking pictures. Gradually, over the years, I've added photographers, and over the past two years, maybe two and a half, when I go to a national event I've really tried to make sure I had a photographer in every ring, and then also increase the size of my booth staff so that if someone comes through the booth and wants to look at pictures they don't have to wait to get some help to do that. So the whole business has been a very gradual…well, let's try this now, and let's add this now, and what if we do this, or what if we change this. I've never taken out huge loans for the business. It's always just kind of grown under its own as it can support more, you know, I'll put a little more money out, and then it's just been a very gradual, making sure everything still feels as comfortable as it can be when you're running your own business. Melissa Breau: You started to talk for a minute there just about having a photographer on each ring and things like that. What's that process, like you mentioned, you know, having a booth, and then having people shooting photos. I mean, how do you get from one to the other and handle all of that in the midst of a big show going on? Amy Johnson: A lot of deep breaths and a lot of screaming in my head that I don't let come out of my mouth. No, it's all good. I think if I had tried to go from me, and a camera, and my husband to covering six rings, and having six staff in the booth, you know, and the funny thing, I would have probably decided it was crazy and I was never going to do that again, but it went from…so one of the early AKC Nationals that I did probably in 08 or 09, there was me that was there, Great Dane photos was there, plus another photography vendor was there, so we just very amicably divided it. Well, okay, I'll take these rings on these days, and you take those rings on those days, and so there were two photographers there, and each of us had, I think, at least two photographers that we could cover all the rings, but it was between two different companies, and so that's okay. I can manage a few people in the booth and a few people out shooting for me, and then it's just gradually shifted to where AKC and these different agility organizations have said, you know, I mean, if you can cover the whole thing we're happy to allow you to do that, and so if It was a sudden transition I would've probably not managed it, but just gradually adding more and more. It's like anything, once you are comfortable at one level of participation you kind of go oh, let's see, how else could I get involved, or what more can I add onto my plate, and you know, at some point you may go oh, that's too much, but adding photographers has been kind of just word of mouth, and knowing people from other events. One photographer who had shot for me I had seen his work from a previous special event, and he did a really nice job, and so I invited him to come and work for me, and that's actually happened a couple of times. One of my photographers is someone who approached me at a trial here in Minnesota, and said you know, I'm really interested in this, do you want to just take a peek at what I've done, and she lived close enough to me that she could come to a lot of my different local shows, and I could mentor her, and well, okay, that shot didn't work so well, so what could we do differently,…

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E21: Lori Stevens - "Behavior, Movement, Health and Learning" Jul 28, 2017

Show notes

Summary: Lori Stevens is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch® Training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health interact. She uses intimidation-free, scientific, and innovative methods, in an educational environment, to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, WA. She is also the creator of the Balance Harness. Lori's most recent of 3 DVDs By Tawzer Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao and called 'The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs.' It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She will be teaching at FDSA in August for the first time, with a class on the same topic, called Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs. Links mentioned: The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs Seattle TTouch (Lori's Website) The Feldenkrais Method Next Episode: To be released 8/4/2017, featuring Amy Johnson talking about taking photographs of our pets. 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 Lori Stevens. Lori is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health interact. She uses intimidation free, scientific, and innovative methods in an educational environment to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, Washington. She is also the creator of the balance harness. Lori's most recent of three DVDs by Tawzer Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao, and called The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs. It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She will be teaching at FDSA in August for the first time with a class on the same topic called Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs. Hi, Lori. Welcome to the podcast. Lori Stevens: Hello. Thanks for having me on. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to shout today. Lori Stevens: Yeah, me too. Thanks, Melissa. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. So to get us kind of started out, can you tell us a little bit about your own dogs, kind of who they are, and what you're working on with them? Lori Stevens: Yes. So I'm going to talk about two. One is with me now because both of them actually got me into this business. So right now, I have a 12 year old Aussie named Cassie, and I got her when she was two years old, and at two, what I was working on is very different from what I'm working on now with her. At two we worked on a lot of behavior related issues, especially on leash, what you might label reactivity. She was barking a lot every day, she was unfamiliar, really, with being out in the world, and so I learned a lot from her. Basically, you know, how do you calm, and communicate, and build trust with the dog that basically didn't have trust in the world, so I learned loads from her, and we're always working on life with her. Our sport is fitness. We started out in agility, but over time, I figured out that, that was really hard for her, she wasn't really enjoying it, probably because of all the environmental sensitivity, and as much as I worked with her it just didn't seem like her thing. She loved it when she was running, but when she wasn't running it was really hard to hear all the noises and see the other dogs running, so we moved on, so now we do fitness, we do standup paddle boarding, we do lots of hikes, and now I'm living with an aging dog. So I actually have firsthand experience now in living with a dog that's getting older, but I wanted to bring up my first dog because that is the dog, Emmy, who got me into any of this work at all, and basically, she had a lot of health challenges, a lot of physical challenges, I learned just loads of stuff from her, and that's how I originally got into TTouch Training and massage, so I'll talk a little bit about that more, but I just want to bring up that Emmy is always present, even though she's been gone 10 years. She's been gone quite a while. Melissa Breau: They do manage to have quite a lasting impact sometimes. Lori Stevens: That is so true. So true. Melissa Breau: So what led you to where you are now? I mean, you started to mention Emmy a little bit, but how did you kind of end up working with dogs for a living? Lori Stevens: Well, so Emmy had all these physical issues and I just took a TTouch class, basically, to learn things to help Emmy, and I kept going to my vet, and my vet kept saying you're just doing wonderful work with her, if you would just get cards made up I would send all my clients to you, sent lots of clients to you, and it's kind of strange because…I won't say when, but way back when I ended up with a degree in computer science, but before that I was in occupational therapy, and I was also in the University Dance Company. I danced for many years, so I have this kind of weird dual interest, both in things physical, movement, bodywork. I always had that interest with occupational therapy and dance, but then I ended up in IT for many, many years. I just retired from the University in April 2017, from the university of Washington, but in 2005 I started my practice, and that was at the urging of a vet, so I got cards made up, and I didn't really think a lot was going to come of it, but in fact, that built my practice. So I went to four days a week at the University and had a practice one day a week for a long time, and then I went half time at the University. I just kept, you know, kind of building my practice and working in IT, and am out of IT, and totally focused on animals, which is fantastic. Melissa Breau: Indeed. Congrats. That's so exciting being able to focus on that full time. Lori Stevens: Yes, it is. Now I'm spending full time writing this course, which is really great fun, but it's a lot of work, and so it's a good thing I don't have my job too. Melissa Breau: So there are lots of kind of interesting pieces there, right? Just kind of all the different things that you work with, and all the different techniques you have, but I want to start with TTouch. So for those not familiar with it at all can you kind of explain what it is? Lori Stevens: I can. You're right, there's all those pieces, and oddly enough, they do all fit together, but what is Tellington TTouch Training? So people here touch and they think it's only body work, but Tellington TTouch Training is actually a lot more than body work. It is body work, and there are a variety of body work touch techniques, but there's also an element of it that is movement, which includes slowing down dogs and having them move precisely over various equipment on different movement patterns over different surfaces, stopping, turning, really slowing down the nervous system and letting them feel themselves, their bodies, in a way that maybe they haven't felt them before. It's interesting how many dogs move really, really fast, and it's uncomfortable for them to move really slowly when they're working with someone, so you learn a lot from that, and there's also several tools and techniques that go along with TTouch. One of those is leash walking and making it more comfortable for dogs to walk on a leash, and to fit well in their equipment, and that's pretty much how, you know, it's that awareness that caused me to develop, over years, the balance harness, but there's also the really learning to observe the dogs, and to give them choice. So there's a lot in TTouch that many years ago other people weren't really focusing on, and now, thankfully, many people are focusing on it all over the place, so it's kind of nice that, you know, it's now overlapping more with other work that people are doing, and anyway, I hope that gives you a better idea, but it's not just body work. Melissa Breau: Okay. So I wanted to ask kind of how it works too, and does it work for all dogs, is it something that works, you know, for some dogs better than others, is it something I could learn to do? I mean, how does that all kind of work? Lori Stevens: Absolutely, you could learn to do it. Does it work for all dogs? I have to answer that…and you know, of course, there's an element of it that works for all dogs, but you have to define what you mean by works, and everything depends on the dog and what you're trying to do, but the thing that makes Tellington TTouch work unique is that it's not habitual. In other words, the way you touch the dog is not the way the dog is used to being touched, so it sort of gets the attention of the nervous system in a different way. The way you move the dogs is different from how they typically move, so it kind of gets their attention in another way. It's almost as if they're listening to the work sometimes. It's super interesting. The nice thing about it is that I can get a dog that's so fearful in my practice that I can't touch the dog, but I have other tools to use with that dog, so I can move the dog, and over time, with that movement I build trust and we have a dialog going on between us, and eventually, that dog says okay, I'm ready to be touched now. I mean, they really do, they come up to your hands, and then once you start the touch work you've got another set of things you can do, so it's really got a depth to it that isn't so visible on the surface, and the fact that it's called TTouch often just leads people into thinking that it's just this one thing where you touch your dog. There's work in humans called Feldenkrais, so it was developed years ago, and it's a technique that moves people in nonhabitual ways to kind of develop new neural pathways to give them freedom of movement again. So people that have serious injuries, and they're, you know, varying them for whatever reason, a variety of reasons, have very limited movement, they can work with the Feldenkrais practitioner, or in a Feldenkrais class called Awareness Through Movement that really slows down and moves your body into nonhabitual patterns to regain new freedom of movement in your own body. It teaches your body to move in another way to get to the same place. Linda Tellington Jones, who developed Tellington TTouch Training, went through that Feldenkrais training for…she did it in order to work with the riders in our Equine Center, the horse riders, so then she started applying those ideas, and those techniques to animals, and that's where the work came from. Melissa Breau: Interesting. Lori Stevens: I know. It's a well-kept secret. Melissa Breau: So you know, you're also a small animal massage practitioner, and you're a certified candidate in massage, so how did those pieces kind of mesh? What are some of the differences between something like TTouch and massage, how do you use them in conjunction? Lori Stevens: There is overlap and there's also quite a bit of difference, so with my massage training I can really focus on if I'm working with a dog who is super tight in the shoulders from doing too much agility over the weekend, and has big knots, you know, I can get those knots out because I have that training. Also, my training is in rehabilitation massage, so I can do manual lymphatic drainage, so if the dog has lymphoma say, and has huge swollen lymph nodes in the neck that you can actually see how swollen the lymph nodes are, I can do this very gentle work to bring that swelling down, to move the lymph node system lymph fluid again, so I can do very specific work that has a very physical effect. In TTouch body work I can work on a tail and change the behavior of a dog, so…what? So it's very different, you're more working with fascia and skin in the nervous system than you are working muscles, although muscles can change as well. Both of the techniques can change gate. It's all very, very interesting how, you know, both of them can change gate from working on the bodies, and I'm sure there's a lot of overlap, even when you're focusing on different things, but they really have kind of a different focus. And the TTouch work is much…I won't say lighter, because they both can be quite light, like even when I'm working on a knot in a muscle I don't dig in there, you know, I'm very…I go with the muscle, but I would just say they have a different focus, and therefore, you can end up with a different result. And the TTouch body work can actually…I see more changes in behavior than I do with massage, and I don't know if that's because I'm focused upon that, I don't know. I mean, it's kind of interesting, but you know, when a dog gets really uptight, often times out on a walk, my dog's tail will start to go up. That will be one of the first things I see. Maybe her ears and head, but I'll see her tail go up. If I actually reach down and just stroke her tail and bring her tail back down it actually brings her back down. Melissa Breau: Interesting. Lori Stevens: Yeah, I know. It's kind of interesting. I might have to teach that in my next Fenzi course. Melissa Breau: Hey, I'd certainly be interested in learning a little more about it. So it sounds like to me…and I could be totally of base, obviously, but if the TTouch is a little bit more focused on kind of the physical and behavioral tied together, whereas, the massage is more kind of on the physical and performance side. Is that kind of right? Lori Stevens: Well, sure. You can put it that way. I would just say they are different techniques. There is overlap, but there are different techniques. TTouch in no way does it do manual inside drainage, for example, that is a massage technique, and when I'm doing just message to get knots out I'm not generally looking for changes in behavior. I'm looking for changes in the body. So…I don't know, I mean, they're both touching the body, both body work. Melissa Breau: Now, you're also a certified canine fitness trainer, so how does that factor in? Lori Stevens: So that factors into the movement work, so I have been doing the Tellington TTouch training moment work for years, and it wasn't really getting dogs to the point that…it wasn't getting them where I wanted them to go if they were showing weakness in their muscles. Having a background in dance and being active my entire life, I was really looking for ways of helping the dogs be stronger, and more flexible, and more agile, and more confident, and blah blah blah, and some of those TTouch gave, and some of those it didn't, so it was natural for me to take it a step further. I mean, all the stuff I do sounds like a bunch of certifications, but they're all really interwoven. I had been doing some fitness with dogs for years, and then when the University of Tennessee offered the certified canine fitness trainer program and partnership with Fitpaws I jumped on it, because that was the first program that I saw that I thought would be worth doing, and just going ahead and getting my certification in it, plus I learned things. When I see…especially a dog's age…

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E20: Debbie Gross - "Canine Fitness + Rehab" Jul 21, 2017

Show notes

Summary: Dr. Debbie Gross Torraca has been involved in the field of animal physical rehabilitation for over seventeen years and has both a masters and a doctorate, as well as other advanced certifications in her field. She currently owns a small animal rehabilitation practice in Connecticut called Wizard of Paws Physical Rehabilitation for Animals. Over the last 12 years, she has lectured throughout the world on the topic of small animal rehabilitation, and is one of the founders of the Certificate Program in Canine rehabilitation from the University of Tennessee. She has been widely published, both professionally and in venues for dog enthusiasts. Links mentioned: Wizard of Paws Physical Rehabilitation for Animals Fitness Trainer Certificate Program FearFreePets.com Next Episode: To be released 7/28/2017, featuring Lori Stevens talking about how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health interact. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports broadcast 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 Debbie Gross Torraca. Dr. Torraca has been involved in the field of animal physical rehabilitation for over 17 years and has both a master's, and a doctorate, as well as other advanced certifications in her field. She currently owns a small animal rehabilitation practice in Connecticut called Wizard of Paws Physical Rehabilitation for Animals. Over the last 12 years, she has lectured throughout the world on the topic of small animal rehabilitation, and as one of the founders of the certificate program in canine rehabilitation from the University of Tennessee, she has been widely published both professionally, and in venues for dog enthusiasts. Hi, Debbie, welcome to the podcast. Debbie Gross: Hi, Melissa. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to chat with you. This is not a topic a I know a lot about, so it's always fun to learn something. Just to start us out, do you mind just telling us a little bit about your own dogs, who they are, and what you're working on with them? Debbie Gross: Sure. Yeah. So I currently share my home and my life with two dogs. Bogaurt is a Clumber Spaniel, and so that's a fairly different breed, and then we also have a nine-year-old Cocker Spaniel that was rescued. He was unfortunately beaten by a gentleman in uniform, that's all we know. So we've had him for about six years and we've had to overcome quite a lot of fear issues, and all that sort of stuff, so he's been my different sort of training in progress, and every day I learn from him, and the Clumber Spaniel does a little bit of everything. He's definitely…I've had Clumbers now for almost 10 years and they're just a joy to work with, and you know, people often will ask, "why don't you do agility or other sports with him?", and that's where kind of I come in and look at the body frame, and that sort of stuff, even though a lot of Clumbers can do agility, his body is just not meant for that, so sadly, we stick to other things, and he's always my willing demo dog, or sometimes unwilling, so that's always…yeah, exciting. He seems to know when it's guinea pig time and he'll take off if he doesn't feel up to it, so. Melissa Breau: He'll let you know if he's not in the mood, huh? Debbie Gross: Exactly. I mean, he's like typical Clumber, so sweet, but about 22 hours a day, so. Melissa Breau: Now, I know in your bio I left out some of the alphabet, you've got a lot of credentials, so I wanted to give you a chance to talk a little bit about how you got into animal rehabilitation. What is it that drew you in that direction? Debbie Gross: Sure. I've always been drawn to animals and you know, just adored them, and when I went to human physical therapy school there was a lot of hands on, a lot of palpation. Eventually, my roommates got tired of being guinea pigs, and at the time, I had an Alaskan Malamute and he was a more than willing participant, so I started to look at his body and say, oh, you know, if we could do all these things for people, why can't we do these for animals, and this was back in the 1980s, and one of my professors said to me, "don't be silly, this is a dog, no one's ever going to spend money or care about that much on a dog." So I kind of, you know, laughed at that and said, okay, and kind of kept that in the back of my mind, and I graduated. I took my first job in New York City and I was working with a lot of dancers in New York City Ballet, and definitely started to appreciate different types of movement, so if a ballerina or another type of dancer's missing five degrees of motion in their big toe, it's going to be significant. And I think about all those minor things so often today when I work with performance dogs, you know, dogs that are involved in high level competitions, but I stayed with human physical therapy for a while, always kind of thinking about my dream of working with dogs, and I fully just started to do a lot of independent learning, a lot of reading, spending a lot of time with veterinarians, and going to different vet schools, and studying anatomy, and things like that. And then eventually, it turned into more and more, and I then started teaching at the University of Tennessee. And the CCRP letters are the Certified Canine Rehabilitation Practitioner, so I helped establish that program, and continued to teach with them, and it's really kind of, you know, it can be kind of a common sense thing. Dogs and other animals suffer many of the same injuries that people do. For example, an ACL injury in people is very common in dogs as well, and there are many different breeds that suffer with that, but things like arthritis, and neurological diseases, and sports related issues. I mean, certainly, everything that we know from the human filed we can just benefit, you know, help the dogs, so it's been pretty awesome to start out with this almost 20 years ago and watch it kind of just be an idea, and now it's definitely becoming more and more commonplace. And I love looking on Facebook or talking to people from all over the world and they're taking their dog for rehab, or they're perusing other options, and they're doing things like that, which is just fantastic. Yeah. So that's been…you know, it is. It's great when, you know, and I laugh at the professor that I…every once in a while, I'll see her at a conference, and I'll say to her, hey, remember that kind of thought or dream I had, I said, that's kind of what I do now 24-7 about, so. And a lot of people that have gone through rehab can definitely relate, and they understand, and so I'm always thrilled when more and more owners are perusing different options for their pets, and really, the moto of our clinic is every dog deserves the best quality of life for the longest time possible, and no matter if the dog is seven weeks old or 17 years old, you know, so important just to make sure that they're pain free and have the highest level of function. So it's really been this incredible journey and I love it. Melissa Breau: You started to talk a little bit there about some of the differences and similarities between physical therapy for people and that for dogs. Are there other key differences you can kind of speak to? Debbie Gross: Yes. So a lot of…you know, besides the obvious, people being biped and dogs being quadruped, I joke to a dog is not…they have no idea that something should make them feel better. You know, they're so truthful, they're…either a treatment's going to work, or it's not going to work, so there's no secondary games, they're not messing with an insurance company, or anything like that, but you know, for the same kind of similarities, whenever there's pain or inflammation there's going to be weakness that evolves. So like I tell my kids, if your body perceives pain it's going to shut off all the muscles in the area, so very similar. A person can say, hey, my knee hurts, I need to do something about it. Very often take an Advil or a Tylenol. A dog can't say that to an owner, so a lot of times that unless the owner is very perceptive and notices a slight change in their behavior, it's hard to determine if they're in pain until it gets pretty bad, you know, so recognizing pain is definitely a big difference. I encourage all my owners, all my students, to make sure they go over their dogs on a monthly basis just to check for any pain, or soreness, or anything like that, but many of the on-scene treatment modalities that we would use in human medicine, we use in the animal. So like moist heat, or ice, laser or photobiomodulation is commonly used to help reduce pain and inflammation, and a lot of the exercises we do are very similar. Of course, we have to get a little bit more creative with a dog, but pretty much everything used in human medicine we could, you know, transfer over to the dog, so it's pretty cool. Melissa Breau: Now, I think that veterinarians and the medical field in general isn't always known as the most positive part of dog sports, so I'd love to get your take on that. How do positive training and rehabilitation overlap, and are there places where they just can't? Debbie Gross: Yeah. And that's a very good question. I belong to an organization, I sit on the board called Fear Free, and their whole goal and mission is to establish fear free veterinarian offices, rehab offices, looking at training facilities, boarding facilities, things like that, so it's all aimed at making sure the experience is positive and fear free. And certainly…you know, we laugh in our clinic because we're not the vet, so dogs come in and they know they're getting copious amounts of cookies, and it's going to be a great place, and they love it, and so I think it's very important to, you know, right off the bat we want to make sure the owner and the dog are very comfortable. Certainly, dogs often will become fearful or potentially aggressive if they're in pain, so I always tell the trainers that I work with, assume that it's physical before behavioral. Now, I'll hear so many times from owners, "oh, my dog didn't want to do the A-frame this morning. It's probably because…" You know, they make something up and then get steak for dinner. They swear they don't think like that. You know, they probably didn't want to do something because they're in pain. Something like the A-frame puts a lot of stress on the dogs back, and the hips, and stuff like that, so understanding if a dog is fearful, or doesn't want to do something, looking at the reason why, you know, so is it pain that is prohibiting them from doing something. And certainly, some dogs are not candidates, like we've turned dogs away because they're either too fearful, or they just can't do…they don't want to do anything, and rather than forcing them, we won't do that. You know, and that's a little bit different than traditional vet medicine where dogs need to go in. They may need to get an exam, or their vaccinations, or things like that, but this fear free movement is fantastic, and you know, looks at everything from the lighting, their potential pheromones in the air to relax the dogs, and cats also, and other animals, so most the time in rehab dogs love it. They love coming into our office, and it's fun, and it's all positive, and you know, that's the way I want it to be. I mean, I love when the dogs pull their owners into the office, so you know that they're having a great time, so it's great. Melissa Breau: Now, is there a website that's conceded with the Fear Free Organization just in case you'd want to look it up? Debbie Gross: Yeah. I believe. I'll look. I think if someone just googled fear free it would pull up, and actually, fear free pets.com. So and their moto is "Taking the Pet out of Petrified," and it is very nice. It's a nice group that…and the number of practitioners getting certified in Fear Free are growing constantly, so you know, that's really great, and I highly encourage owners to seek out one of these facilities because they just are a little bit more in tune with things, and make the experience as positive as they can. Melissa Breau: I'll make sure to include a link to the site in the show notes for everybody. Debbie Gross: Perfect. Great. Perfect. Melissa Breau: So I want to drill just a little bit more into rehab itself, rehabilitation sort of implies this idea that something's gone wrong and now it's time to try and fix it, so I was curious of how much of what you teach is about preventing problems, and how much of it is about really fixing them. Debbie Gross: Great question. And we probably…I would say half the dogs that I see have an issue that can be fixed. So for example, they've had a torn ligament, they had surgery, and now we're rehabbing them, getting them back to normal. The other half is all about prevention and looking at what the dog does, what the dog needs to do, and how to get them stronger. So for example, we run a program called The Biggest Loser and it's a weight loss program, so we know that so many dogs…the obesity causes so many orthopedic issues, as well as other issues, and you know, helping owners and the dogs to understand how to get going, and just start a weight loss program, a successful weight loss program. Then we have older dogs that just need some exercise, and they just need to get moving, and we'll start implementing a simple exercise program. And then on the other end of the spectrum are you know, some of your…we see a ton of conformation dogs where they need to get into shape, and for whatever reason, they haven't been in shape, and they vary from doing something. We have underwater treadmills. They may run in the underwater treadmills for 30 to 45 minutes, just depending on what they're doing, and but you know, helping to build up their strength and conditioning. And that goes too with different athletic dogs, your Shih Tzu dogs, your agility dogs, obedience work, anything like that, so really on both sides of kind of fixing something, but also the goal is definitely preventing injuries from happening. So we do a little bit of both. Melissa Breau: Now, are there things that dog sports enthusiasts should be doing to keep their dog in top shape, or does that kind of vary based on sport, or based on breed? Debbie Gross: Yeah. That's another great question. So I think that if we look at human sports, no matter whether it's on the collegiate level, the professional or Olympic level, any of our human athletes is involved in a conditioning program, so they have a program set for them, and they would never think about not engaging in a conditioning program, but on the canine side that's not always the case. Now, I hear so often, you know, the dogs are just weekend warriors, so they just go to an agility trial over the weekend, and the owner does nothing with them during the week. And I think every dog, if they're involved in performance sports, whether it's just a couple times a month, or every weekend, they need to be in a conditioning program, and a conditioning program should definitely include core strength. So working just like you and I would work on our back strength, our abdominals, all the l…

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