Understanding Canine Aggression through Chaos Theory with Brian Fleming

What does chaos theory have to do with dogs? Join us as we sit down with the charismatic and knowledgeable Brian Fleming, a dog behavior consultant and licensed Family Dog Mediator.
Brian takes us on a journey from stability to disorder, unraveling how this intriguing concept applies to complex aggression cases in dogs. He brilliantly illustrates the role of reductionism and its importance in understanding dog behavior.

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ABOUT BRIAN:
"I joined the Army right out of high school and served 6 years as a Military Police Officer in the Rhode Island National Guard. After that, I worked as an assistant trainer before branching off and working with dogs on my own. 

I'm always interested in continuing education, and I have completed the Aggression in Dogs Master Course, and the LEGS Applied Ethology Family Dog Mediation course, both of which have transformed how I view complex behavior cases. I grew a bad taste for dog behavior solutions that homogenized all dogs into simple input-output conditioning robots who just need more obedience training, I used those techniques, and they barely scratched the surface of the real issues dogs are facing. Thankfully I found a community of likeminded professionals who also want to look at the whole picture. I am currently working on educational offerings that I hope will benefit the applied ethology community. 

I specialize in complex cases and have been sought after by conferences and podcasts to speak on chaos theory & complexity in dog behavior cases.

I have an Australian Shepherd named Nova, who sometimes assists with training. She is pretty cool."

https://brianthebarkeologist.com/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

This episode is definitely one to geek out on. Brian Fleming joins me to discuss Chaos Theory and its application to aggression cases. What is Chaos Theory? In a way, it describes the qualities of the point at which stability moves to instability or order moves to disorder, and what does that have to do with dogs? A lot, so listen in and find out more. Brian is a dog behavior consultant and licensed family dog mediator out of Connecticut. He specializes in complex cases and is the author of the Chaos and Canine's blog and co-host of the Canine Complexity podcast. He owns Brian the Barchaeologist in Mystic and is someone I refer to all the time, and if you are enjoying the bitey end of the dog, you can support the podcast by going to aggressivedogcom, where there are a variety of resources to learn more about helping dogs with aggression issues, including the upcoming Aggression in Dogs conference happening from September 29th through October 1st 2023 in Chicago, illinois, with both in-person and online options. You can also learn more about the Aggression in Dogs Master course, which is the most comprehensive course available anywhere in the world for learning how to work with and help dogs with aggression issues.

Speaker 1: 1:19

Hey, everyone, welcome back to the bitey end of the dog. This is another super special and this is going to be somewhat of a super geeky episode as well. I've got Brian Fleming here with me, who is my neighbor. This is really cool because Brian lives in the same town as I do. It's really neat that I have a guest that is so close to me in many ways and we were kind of talking like we should have just gone to my house to record this show, but the way the technology is set up, we have to have two separate locations. So I'm excited for this.

Speaker 1: 1:48

I'm looking to dive deep into this topic. Welcome to the show, brian. I'm honored to be here Awesome. So we're going to be talking about a couple of deep topics here that, for anybody that's into dogs, might not make sense at first, but we're going to talk about why they are so important to consider when we are talking about dogs and dog behavior and many other things in life as well. So chaos theory and reductionism are a couple of the topics we're going to be talking about, but let's first define for the audience what is chaos theory? What does that mean?

Speaker 2: 2:21

So chaos theory in a nutshell is the notion of very small events producing very big outcomes and the idea of many, many, many, many variables coming together to produce very complex events. That resists our ability to perfectly measure and predict their outcomes.

Speaker 1: 2:46

Very well stated. I'm starting to wrap my mind around this. So what kind of got you thinking about this and its relationship to the work you do with dogs? Was there some particular moment you're like, oh, this totally makes sense, I want to apply it to my work with dogs and talk about it too. So what got you kind of focused on chaos theory?

Speaker 2: 3:05

So I've always been a fan of chaos theory, since I was a kid, watching Jurassic Park and reading the Jurassic Park novels, but I never really thought it would be applicable to my work until I was listening to a lecture by Dr Robert Sapolsky on YouTube. He has a whole human behavioral biology course on YouTube available for free and I was listening to that. And the human behavioral biology extends over to dog behavioral biology very easily because many of the mechanisms are quite similar. And there was one episode on chaos theory and sort of non-linearity in biological systems. For example, when a cell splits we assume that each cell gets 50% of the DNA. But that's not true. There's Brownian motion, which is when little molecules are vibrating, and the fact that the little molecules are vibrating means that you'll never get a 50-50 split. So after a few repetitions of cell splitting you're going to have a different distribution of mitochondrial DNA, just based on random chance. And this is something that's extremely tiny that could produce big outcomes later on, such as a genetic defect. This would also affect things like transposons. So genes aren't necessarily a linear system. There are genes that jump around. They're called transposons and they kind of move along the genome. If that gets screwed up even a little bit, you can have some serious problems.

Speaker 2: 4:43

So I was also looking at other areas where things are non-linear, such as your brain. So there's no such thing as one neuron that has one thought in it or one memory or one ability to perceive something. Your brain works in these neural networks and patterns of activation that cannot be reduced to a single component part. You kind of have to look at the whole network as a whole in order to understand how the brain works. Similarly, we don't have enough genes in our genome to code for every single branch point of your circulatory system. So if you needed a whole gene to tell your circulatory system when to split, you would run out of genes. So what we have instead are rules that teach the circulatory system how to spread out on its own, and these are all little things that kind of explain how you can't reduce biological systems to just their component parts.

Speaker 1: 5:56

All right. So help me tie this together now to sort of your work with dogs and observing behavior, and then we'll jump into reductionism as well. But so help us understand how this is tying in for you and how you explain it to clients. Even maybe Obviously you're not jumping in and talking about this with every client, but if you had somebody that was interested in or you're trying to express why this is so important for us to understand, can you kind of help us relate to that in terms of the training and behavior we see now?

Speaker 2: 6:24

Yeah, so typically the common notion is to kind of boil the dog down to the mechanisms explaining the problem behavior. So we kind of zoom in really far in order to kind of see what's happening at that event level occurrence where, like, the dog might be getting aggressive or having separation anxiety or having other issues. But sometimes we have to zoom out and kind of take the whole picture into the account because tiny little things kind of happening off on the peripheral of where you're examining could be having a huge impact. Pain, for example, undiagnosed pain, could be throwing a tat in the ring, so to speak, and totally throwing off your ability to make assumptions about what you're looking at just from the actual event itself. Things like gut flora, other medical conditions.

Speaker 2: 7:26

At the legs and motion conference there is another speaker who had a dog that was presenting with a lot of anxiety and they were having trouble figuring out what was going on with this dog and what they found was eventually, after ruling out many, many things, that a little bug zapper that was inside the house was going off and that was terrifying the dog. But this was something that the humans had kind of tuned out because it was a normal part of their life. But to the dog the house might have been haunted, so it never truly felt safe where it was living and we were seeing a lot of anxiety as a result of that. So they unplugged the bug zapper and all the anxiety went away. So a very tiny little thing could produce a very large outcome in terms of how big that little thing was to us versus how big it was to the dog as well.

Speaker 1: 8:29

I can set these chain of events in motion, right, and it's so important to have critical thought processes. When we're looking at a case and that's a perfect example and I'm just mentioning there of a bug zapper, of all things you never think, oh, I'm going to get a bug zapper and my dog's going to suddenly have all kinds of issues behaviorally, right. How about with aggression cases, because we're focusing on an aggression podcast here. Can you give us some examples of where you might see that? And I'm sure there's a million different ones we can think of. But how about in your recent work, where something so benign to us again caused that chaos, I guess, so to speak, in a particular case?

Speaker 2: 9:07

Yeah. So, kind of generally speaking, I see a lot of very complex social dynamics going on in the sense that you have a lot of people coming in and out, you have dogs coming over, You're going to doggy daycare, you know you're going to the dog park. The social complexity that dogs are being exposed to today versus, you know, say, 50, 100 years ago, is much higher. So, kind of within that, if you think of how many one-on-one relationships exist between even just like five or six individuals, people and dogs, you know that's quite a lot of little lines to draw and it can get very complex very quickly and dogs are sometimes kind of overwhelmed by that. So I'm seeing kind of the side effects of social complexity going on and dogs just kind of being tired of it and that just kind of may be defaulting to aggression because it's easier to kind of get their space respected and it's easier for them to understand to just engage in aggression, you know right off the bat, rather than trying to wrap their head around what a Super Bowl party is, because you know it takes a lot of mental resources to check these people out and see what they mean. And what does this person mean in regards to resource availability. Is this person going to be stealing my things? Is this person going to be denying the access to my people? Stuff like that? You know what does it mean when this person stands up? What does it mean when they sit down? What does it mean when they're petting the other dog? What's going to happen? All these things can kind of come together and make a situation extremely complex from the dog's perspective. That we don't appreciate, because we as humans were kind of used to that sort of setup. But from the dog's perspective it can be quite mentally taxing.

Speaker 2: 11:14

So kind of along those lines, looking at the social complexity of a situation is really important in aggression cases for me, as well as kind of looking at the whole picture. What are the genetics going on? You know what was this dog bred for? Are there any health issues going on? What does the dog's physical and social environment look like? What kind of enrichment is this dog getting? You know, are there needs being met? You know what's their learning history. You know what have they been through before? These are all things I learned through the LEGS program with Kim Brophy, which is awesome.

Speaker 2: 11:49

A little plug there, but it all comes together and kind of forms, this whole picture where we can't really just be zooming in on one little thing, like we can't just look at the learning history and, you know, forsake the genetics. And we can't just look at the physical environment and forsake the social environment. We can certainly can't forsake the internal environment that the dog is undergoing, whether they're in pain, you know, if they have some undiagnosed issue going on. There's a lot to look at and it gets very complex very quickly, which is why I applaud anyone who is dealing with aggression or trying to take aggression cases, because this stuff is hard. Don't let anyone tell you it's simple and easy, because if they're saying that, then they just haven't taken enough factors into account yet.

Speaker 1: 12:40

Yeah, you bring up so many great points that I want to dive into, but I wanted to jump back at something that really made me think for a second. It's just that you know over the years you know even the last hundred years just how many, how complex the social complexities you were mentioning have gotten for dogs in our world. You know, if we looked at 100 years ago, there's probably a lot less people that they're exposed to, a lot less sounds, a lot less sites, a lot less technology and all of these things that we as humans kind of adapted to because they become awful. They become often parts of our normal daily routines. And we can say the same thing of dogs. But did they make sense? Are they fitting into that dog's world in the same way we see it?

Speaker 1: 13:19

And you could think of a million things, like a drone, for instance. You know, talk about something that's odd to an animal, like what is this flying machine? But for us we're like, oh, it's just a drone. But that again adds the complexity you're talking about in a dog's world. Not just social complexity, it was just complexity, right? And another thought that's come into my head you and I were talking about relationships, let's say in a group of dogs. So you have four or five or six or seven dogs living in a home and for those of you that have that many dogs, you know, hats off to you to have that many dogs in your home. But can you talk a little bit about in proportion? Like so you have two dogs, you know they just have the relationship with each other, but what happens when you have three dogs or four dogs? Can you talk about sort of the math behind that as well?

Speaker 2: 14:01

So even with a group of dogs, I wouldn't discount the human's influence in that either. So I count the dog's relationships with both dogs and people as part of the social complexity going on in a situation. So let's say you have a mom and a dad, two kids and two dogs, so that's six people. That is 15 different relationships between each person, each dog, each dog and dog, each dog and person. And dogs are also observing what the relationship dynamics are between others. So dogs are looking at how people are interacting with each other. Dogs are looking at how other dogs are interacting with each other, how kids are interacting with their parents.

Speaker 2: 14:48

Dogs are kind of always observing what's going on and kind of figuring out what these social dynamics look like based on what they're observing, which also kind of throws in a chaotic randomness element to it, because if a dog doesn't observe an interaction then they'd glean no information from it. So sometimes just random movement you know, random positioning of social members can change what the perceived social dynamics are going to look like. But it gets much more complex from there the more you add people and dogs. So if you have seven individuals, that's 21 dyadic relationships. Eight is 28 relationships, nine is 36. 10 is 45., 11 is 55. And 12 is 66. So even if you have a doggy daycare room and say there's one attendant and 11 dogs, that's 66 relationships, it can get very chaotic very quickly, as I'm sure many people know.

Speaker 1: 15:55

There's so much I don't want to ask you. The thoughts that are coming to my mind has to do with reductionism or the reductionist approach of just saying, oh okay, so let's say we have a dog in that daycare and suddenly they go attack another dog or something happens, and sometimes the initial observer is going to jump right to all that dog's just being dominant or that dog's just having a bad day and we need to reduce it to like one simple statement, but we don't put critical thought into it. And that's actually why I love the most complex cases, because I actually enjoy that problem solving and kind of thinking about all of the other factors. Well, was it something? Maybe the dogs was experiencing pain that day?

Speaker 1: 16:33

What happened yesterday in that dog's life? What happened just before the dog came into the daycare? What was their interaction with that dog the day before or that day? What was it with the other dogs? Was it kind of agreeing that? And am I on the right track too in thinking about this? Really factor in all of the variables or the chaos that could be happening as well, in our observations and our assessment especially? I think it's so crucial to really look at all those variables, would you kind of agree in that, and am I on the right track too in thinking about this?

Speaker 2: 17:03

Absolutely, and I'll just kind of throw in there too. Even variables such as the order that the dogs enter the room or the area can change things. I've seen one dog enters the area first, the other dog enters second and no issues occur ever. And then you could have that second dog enter the area first and then the first dog follows, and now there's an issue. There could be other factors, such as the frequency of, say, like, attending that doggy daycare. The dog's experience is over time because dogs aren't static, they're always learning. So you may not see issues one day, but then you'll see issues the other day based on what individuals are present. For example, if you have, like, a dog in the group that is kind of a mediator kind of personality, they're kind of going in, they're kind of splitting in between other dogs, they're kind of running social interference in order to prevent conflict, and then the next day that dog doesn't happen to be there at daycare, you've lost a social member that was contributing to the stability of the social dynamic, and then you might see the consequences of that. But it all gets very unpredictable very quickly as soon as we start to factor in all those variables. So really we're just doing our best with all the crazy things that are going on.

Speaker 2: 18:23

We as people kind of have a tendency to reduce and to simplify things, because it costs less energy for us to think about things in a kind of simple manner. We have a tendency to linearize things, for example with data. If you have a scatterplot of data your points all over the place, what we do is we draw a line of best fit. So we draw a line through all the data because it simplifies it. It's easier to look at this line than it is to look at a million dots. Or if we're looking at an average, we pay attention to what the average is, not the whole picture. If you look at a bar graph, you're going to see an average and you're going to see little tick marks above and below it and that's your standard deviation. So that's your variability.

Speaker 2: 19:14

And there's kind of two ways to look at data like this. There's the reductionist way, which is to look at just the average and assume that the variability is a error or deviation from what the average is trying to tell us. If we're looking at that line of best fit, that the line is the phenomena and that all the dots all over the place are just error or deviations from that line of best fit. And then the other school of thought, the more chaotic one is to examine it from the position of variability, where that whole section of standard deviation is the phenomena, and all the dots on the scatter plot are the phenomena and the pattern that it makes. Rather than reducing it to a single line or a single average are kind of taking the entire system into account, and that's kind of how you would look at it from a data perspective.

Speaker 2: 20:13

But the point is that variability is not error. It is the system occurring as it naturally does, and the scientific process is meant to kind of reduce down and examine things from like one variable in a very controlled setting. Let's study just this tiny little thing, and there's nothing wrong with that. But past 500 years science has been extremely reductionist and that's given us technology, that's given us the industrial revolution, that's given us physics, all these things. But there's a point at which you can't do it anymore. There's a point at which reducing things doesn't work, because if you take that constituent part that you reduced it down to and try to extrapolate it to everything, you kind of lose your ability to predict and know what the system is going to do, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 21:09

It definitely does, and I think you've kind of defined reductionism a little bit there for us. So the listeners are clear. If you want to just give a short definition of what since we're kind of segueing to that topic now is what is reductionism? If you were just to define it and then I'm going to talk more about some specific examples, but your elevator pitch for, hey, Brian, what's reductionism mean?

Speaker 2: 21:32

So reductionism is the notion that to understand a complex system we need to understand its constituent parts. So if you want to understand how a body works, you have to know how the organs work. If you want to understand how the organs work, you have to know how the cells work. If you want to understand how the cells work, you have to know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. But the notion behind reductionism is that true insight and understanding comes from understanding the system at its smallest piece. There's kind of a search for the laws that are going on. So sometimes we call this physics envy, so being envious of physics trying to find the law of gravity, but for behavior, trying to quantify cause and effect in a manner where we can make laws out of what we're observing. But that falls apart even in physics. So there's this thing called the end body problem, which is the fact that, despite knowing the formula for gravity, we cannot predict the long term behavior of more than two celestial bodies. Because if you round off the mass of this planet to the eighth decimal point, the ninth decimal point that you missed out on, that's going to hold the information, that is going to throw off what you thought was going to happen. So the idea that we can break down the natural world around us into these very simplistic laws that are just supposed to work all the time and give us predictability is a fantasy. And that's why, despite all of our weather measurement systems, despite all of our calculations, we still can't predict the weather. We've gotten better at it, you know, sure, but you can't predict the weather long term.

Speaker 2: 23:29

And that's one of the reasons why I kind of thought the dog training industry is sort of like seeking the laws of behavior. You know so, like operant conditioning, classical conditioning, we kind of learn those first as sort of like this is always how it works. If that were true, then we'd be able to predict everything, you know. We'd know exactly what every dog's going to do. We would know exactly how every case is going to play out. There wouldn't be any arguments about training method because there'd be no variability, you know. We would be able to just say, ok, well, these are the laws of behavior and it works like this perfectly and every dog will respond exactly the same way. But it doesn't work like that Because there's so many more factors going on that we have to take into account.

Speaker 1: 24:17

Yes, yes, and I love how you helped me wrap my mind around all of that, because the examples I'm thinking of are a lot of the arguments that we see online and when we're having dog training debates or discussions is you'll see kind of very reductionist statements made is like, oh, it was that tool, or it was that owner, or that was the trainer, and you know what they did, or they used a particular tool, that's why the dog is doing X, y or Z. But all of those arguments you can't really have them, or you can't have any of those debates online without, or anywhere really, without having much more information about the case. So, kind of you know, when I see that like, oh, it's just that tool that caused that. Well, maybe, but there's so many more details. We would need to really start to scratch the surface of what might have happened.

Speaker 1: 25:04

That, and even then we still don't know for sure in a lot of cases because we don't know of all the other variables. You're talking about the chaos, and that can happen. So thank you for bringing that full circle for me and helping me kind of like wrap my head around everything that you're talking about. So am I correct to say then that it's not that reductionism or chaos theory are necessarily bad things and I'm using air quotes for anybody that can't see me. There's usefulness in both, but there's limitations to both.

Speaker 2: 25:30

Exactly, we kind of have to be reductionists in the sense that we don't have enough energy to take in all the factors. It's impossible, we don't have the resources to take in all the factors, so we kind of have to be reducing things down. In fact, right now I have to reduce all of chaos theory into a little podcast episode, which is extremely difficult, by the way, but it's easier. It costs us less resources to reduce things down and make them simple and make simple cause effect assumptions from those simple observations. But there's a difference between saying this phenomena is simple and I understand it perfectly from I'm reducing this down because it's so complex and I'm saving energy.

Speaker 2: 26:20

So yeah, like with the arguments and stuff like that, it's easier to boil it all down to one little thing, because if you were to try to take in all the different factors, you'd be sitting there in the Facebook comments all day going over the details and the nuances of every little tiny thing, and that's where time and mental resources come into play. So there's always this balance between the accuracy with which we look at something and the energy costs that it takes to produce that accuracy. So a perfect model of the world would cost a lot of mental resources to examine. So if we don't have that, we have limited time, we have limited energy. So we simplify things and that's where reductionism comes in, because reductionism is a way to conserve energy back to kind of like the means and like the scatter plots and stuff like that. It costs a lot less energy to look at the straight line, it takes a lot less energy to look at the average, and that information is extremely valuable. But we can't say that it stops there, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 27:38

Totally makes sense. Totally makes sense and I want to geek out with you some more, but we're going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors and we'll be right back. Hey, friends, don't forget to join me for the fourth annual aggression and dogs conference, either in person or online from Chicago, illinois, happening from September 29 through October 1, 2023. This year's lineup includes many of the amazing guests you've heard on the podcast, including Sue Sternberg, Dr Tim Lewis, dr Christine Calder, sinhore Bangal, sarah Stremming, sean Will and Masa Nishimuta and many more. Head on over to aggressivedogcom and click on the conference tab to learn more about the exciting agenda on everything from advanced concepts and veterinary behavior cases to working with aggression in shelter environments to intra household dog-dog aggression. We'll also have special guest MCs, taylor Barkoni and Geo Arcade, who are sure to bring their positive and uplifting vibe to the conference and, as usual, you'll find a wonderful, kind, caring and supportive community at the conference, both in person and online. I also want to take a moment to thank one of our wonderful sponsors this year Pets for Vets. Did you know that approximately one million shelter animals are euthanized in the US every year?

Speaker 1: 29:04

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Speaker 1: 30:23

That's Pets for Vets. Alright, welcome back. We're here with Brian Fleming. We've been geeking out on chaos theory, reductionism, but now we're going to kind of shift gears into order and disorder and I'm going to let Brian kind of explain what that means and the processes he uses, especially with clients. So first, brian, if can you just find you know what you mean by order disorder, and then we'll jump into why we are focusing on that.

Speaker 2: 30:53

Yeah, so I'll start with disorder. So that's kind of like the chaos that's going on, the randomness, the unpredictability, the lack of structure, the freedom, the randomness and order is kind of like the structure, the predictability, the patterns, the things that kind of hold the system together. So anytime I'm consulting with a client I'm kind of looking at like where's the disorder and where's the order and I'm looking at this both from the dog's perspective and the humans. You know say, for example, you have like a former street dog. A former street dog is not used to a very orderly environment. You know they're not used to leashes, crates, obedience, living in captivity. They're kind of more used to a more disordered environment where there's a lot more randomness and freedom. So kind of within that paradigm, sometimes something like too much order could be a welfare issue for that dog, where we're trying to put too much control and too much structure onto a dog. That would rebel against such notions. And then you have the opposite side of that spectrum, you know. So you have like a herding dog who craves order. You know we bred them to herd livestock and be very attuned to very tiny changes in events, to be very dependent on patterns and predictability. And we take a dog like that and there's too much disorder, you know, say they live in a house with, like, lots of people coming in and out. You know the social dynamic is unstable, dogs coming in and out, stuff like that. A dog that, say, wants to be on the more ordered side of the spectrum might be very distressed with disorder. That, you know, the street dog would be like this is great. You know I love all this disorder. So I like to kind of come in and observe these things and see like okay, well, how much order is there in this household and how much disorder is there. And I do feel like we as trainers you know, coming from a, you know, obedience standpoint or like operant conditioning, classical conditioning, this notion of we have control, so we should exert that control on the dog Quite often the solution is to come in and add order, add control, and in many cases that is the solution.

Speaker 2: 33:21

You know, if the environment is disorderly in a way that's unhealthy for the dog. But there are also cases where too much of that, too much obedience, you know, too much structure, too much leash walking, stuff like that could be detrimental and kind of crushing the dog, if that makes sense. So we have to kind of find what the balance is, both for that dog and for the human. So the human's going to kind of have an idea of how much order and disorder they are okay with in their life, and then there's going to be the dog's idea of how much disorder and order that they would like in their life and I kind of have to come in there and find a compromise.

Speaker 2: 34:01

I have to say, you know, okay, well, if you want to add order in this way, like you want a nice loose leash walk, you know, on a six foot lead that's very constraining for the dog. So if we're going to add order here in order to find balance, maybe we can add disorder somewhere else, you know, maybe like a 30 foot leash walk, you know, through the park, you know. So like thanks for putting up with this six foot leash. Now let's go on the 30 foot leash. We're like here's a strict obedience session that we just did, doing our sit some downs and stays and stuff like that. Maybe we balance that with some play, you know, or mental enrichment and stuff like that, trying to find because we never want to just lean too far into one or the other order or disorder. We want to kind of find the balance that works both for that dog and for the person.

Speaker 1: 34:54

Yes, and I think what I'm grasping around too is that when you hear the word disorder, it's sort of like hearing reinforcement and punishment, you know, depending on how you're defining them, but it's, you know, people think punishment is a bad, let's like a four letter word. But when you're looking at through the lens of like behavior analysis, it just simply means the reduction of the frequency of a behavior. And so disorder, I can see, also might have the same sort of emotional response in a human, like ooh, I don't know if I want disorder because that's always been in my mind a bad thing, but actually it may be what a dog needs. And some of those cases can you give us that like a recent case maybe you've had where you've actually said this dog actually needs much more disorder in their life? So not quite the border collie type of case, but or maybe there is a border collie case that needed more disorder. Well, can you give us something off the top of your mind that were you were like leaning more towards that?

Speaker 2: 35:49

Yeah, I had a case recently with a. It was a former street dog. The owner, being very, very dog savvy, wanted to go right into getting like the trick dog and like all the, all the obedience down and like canine, good citizen and all this stuff and kind of like really, really focusing down on that stuff and the dog just was not having it. You know, they were like this is too much, too fast. You know, like the, the life was too structured and too regimented and that produced a lot of like quote unquote rebellion or the dog, you know, understood the training process and was like no thanks, not having it, so kind of coming in there. This is a case where I really felt like we needed to add choice and agency and control, giving the dog control, you know, over what they want to be doing, adding in a lot of play, tug and fetch, you know, and having a good time, sniffy walks, enrichment and kind of autonomous backyard time, you know, kind of just letting the dog be a dog. But that's not the solution for every dog. You know there are many dogs who, when given too much freedom and too much agency and control, they don't know what to do with it.

Speaker 2: 37:06

Kim Brophy had a great quote that I'm going to steal here. You know they said I'm like hey, what if today you're going to fly a helicopter and you can push any button you want? You know it's your day, you have the freedom. You're not feeling very safe because you're not qualified to fly helicopters. So there are other dogs, you know, or even the same dog, in other areas where they might feel like Okay, well, I would like to have some disorder and freedom and choice and agency in one area, but in this other area that maybe gives me anxiety I'd rather the human kind of take control of what should be going on, you know. So these things can vary depending on the dog, depending on the person present, depending on the context. You know, over time, throw in all those confounding factors and it changes per day. You know you can have a dog that is really craving like structure and order one day and the next day they're like no, you know, let's, let's go for a run and play ball chaos theory.

Speaker 1: 38:07

It's finest moments, right, but I can think of like dogs that would definitely not do well with order. So, like you know or at least in my mind you know so, like a free roaming dog from the streets of somewhere that somebody pulls off the streets to go to live in an apartment somewhere in a big city in the name of rescuing the dog. So suddenly we have all of this order and I'm not faulting anybody out there either. I mean they just they mean well, they read things like Okay, we need to create train, we need to do structured walks, we need to do this, this and this For this dog that previously had a life of disorder in a sense.

Speaker 1: 38:40

You know they had their they're probably their own order to their universe. But it was much more freedom and that disorder that you were talking about. And since we're talking about aggression as well, I can see just how much that might feel. Things like frustration and lack of enrichment and all these other things that can impact the likelihood for aggressive behavior in a dog. Sometimes it could just be related to that, what you're talking about, that the order disorder in their life and how much it impacts their welfare and, of course, all the other factors, but it's just so interesting to me to think about just that as a could be a significant component. What do you? What do you think?

Speaker 2: 39:18

on that. Yeah, like, as far as aggression goes, you could see it both ways. You know you could have a dog that might be more trending towards disorder and then attempts to control their behavior they respond to with aggression, you know. So things like being collar grabbed, you know, or trying to move them, or saying no, all these things that might be exerting control over their behavior, that they respond to aggressively. But you might have the opposite side of the spectrum, where things are so disordered, the dog is now using aggression to create order, you know, in the sense of like, like a border collie running around nipping everyone in order to make them sit down, to make them stop running around. So there's too much disorder. The dog might use teeth or social pressure in order to add order into the situation. Or a dog may do the same to resist order coming from us.

Speaker 1: 40:14

So, since we're still on this topic a little bit, I wanted to kind of pick your brain about if you're working with a client or maybe the listeners to the show maybe they don't have somebody working with them yet and they're observing and they kind of have that big question well, oh, what am I leaning maybe too heavily towards? Am I giving too much order to my dog's life or disorder? How do they kind of self assess that or assess that in their unique situation? And there's some particular tools or ways of thinking about that that you can suggest.

Speaker 2: 40:41

Yeah, you kind of have to be your own scientist because your dog is an individual with all of their own chaotic factors. So there really is no way like to test order or disorder that works for every dog. You just have to kind of play the round with it. You know like, start adding a little disorder. You know like some free form, play some 30 foot walks. You know what effect does that have on your dog's behavior when you do that stuff? Add in some obedience training maybe, you know, or structured walks and stuff like that, and then what effect does that have on the behavior? So you kind of have to experiment with it and kind of observe the dog's responses to these things, because they'll tell you if you're moving in the wrong direction.

Speaker 1: 41:27

Yeah, and I think, again, there's that critical thought piece too, because a lot of things you're talking about might be also looked at as increased enrichment or increased exercise. So is that impacting the behavior or is it the disorder of it, in terms of taking a step back and looking at the whole picture of the dogs and life and those moments of order or disorder versus, okay, this dog is doing better because it's more exercise, more enrichment, or they're doing worse because we're doing that enrichment or exercise in a location where there's aversives in the environment, right, or maybe the dogs in pain while we're trying to play with them, so we're adding in disorder but we don't realize it's the pain. So, yeah, again, that's why I love these conversations, because there's so many things to unravel when we're considering what's causing behavior issues, right.

Speaker 2: 42:13

Yeah, and like exercise or mental enrichment too, those are two things that should kind of be balanced as well, in my opinion. There's always the notion of a tired dog as a good dog, but then you run them three miles a day and they become a super athlete that needs even more exercise in order to calm down. But the same goes for mental enrichment too. If the dog's entire day is like snuffle mats and congs and daycare and play and there's no downtime, then the dog's brain too is going too fast and there's never any chance to calm down. So that brings me into black and white thinking, the idea that we should be taking any kind of extreme approach for anything. As far as mental enrichment, exercise, stuff, like that order or disorder. We never want to go too far in any direction because it's going to destabilize things. We have to find the nuance and the balance that's right for that dog, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 43:19

Absolutely. So let's dive a little deeper into things now. And another topic you talk about is entropy and how that factors in. So there's another big term that not many of us may have heard, or maybe we have, but let's first can you define that again for the audience that might not know what you're talking about there.

Speaker 2: 43:39

Yeah. So once again, super nutshell, entropy, like the pop definition of it, is kind of like a measurement of disorder or uncertainty. So if you think of like a solid object, the molecules in that object are not moving very much, they're highly predictable, there's certainty to it. So that would be like a low entropy thing versus like a gas where the molecules are all over the place and spread way out. That'd be like high entropy. So this kind of borrows from the second law of thermodynamics, which I'm not going to get into, but sort of like the way that we communicate to each other, information is not transferred perfectly. When we use mediums like the English language or even Facebook, anytime information is going to be transferred, there's a sender, there's a transmission medium and then there's a receiver and what you're trying to do is you're trying to, as the sender, send information as accurately as possible, as easily as possible. When you're going to use words to do it, the problem is that different words could have variable meanings depending on both the receivers, personal experiences or the context of the situation. For example, if I were to say today is February 24th, eastern Standard Time 3.41pm, it cost me a lot of energy to say that, but I'm very precise and accurate, but if I'm like, hey, it's three o'clock, it could be 3pm, it could be 3am, it could be any time zone, it could be any day, what am I talking about? So the entropy of that communication is higher because there's more uncertainty. Even though I know what I'm talking about and I'm transferring that information to you, it costs you more resources to figure out what I'm talking about, because I was not as clear as the first example. And time is a very consistent construct where variability gets added in based on how we talk about it. But what if the construct that we're talking about is itself variable? So think of a heap of sand. So how many grains of sand is a heap of sand? Is it 10,000?, is it 10,001? Or here's a better example my genes are blue. So I might be right in telling you that my genes are blue, but that does not transfer over a perfect picture of what reality looks like into your brain, because blue is kind of a spectrum of different colors. But it didn't cost me much energy to say, hey, it's blue. But now if you were to try to guess the exact shade of my genes, that would be impossible based on just that information. And things get even more complex when you look up the definition of a word and that definition itself has vague terms in it. So the definition of a heap of sand is a large pile of sand. Okay, well, what is large? How many grains of sand is that?

Speaker 2: 46:52

So when we start getting into vague concepts, the amount of information that we're transferring, there's a higher odd of misunderstanding, because there's going to be information drop-off based on when we're communicating with these sort of vague terms. And that's something that I see a lot in the dog training community, especially these days. Words that people are saying that have a lot of emotional connection to that are very important to them, but they're undefinable. So it becomes very difficult to talk about these topics when nobody really agrees on what we're actually talking about and it gets very confusing very quickly. And the amount of resources necessary to kind of pull apart these definitions and these individual experiences and stuff like that, it's quite high. So some people might default to just not even talking about it or taking an overly simplistic view of it, so like that sort of black and white thinking.

Speaker 1: 47:57

Yes, there's so many things I want to say and there's so many questions I have, but the example of social media is a perfect example for me of when this can become a factor, because not only are we lacking the nuances of facial expressions and body language which humans use mostly to communicate, it's very difficult when we're not even defining the terms properly. So that's actually why I'm so careful about when I have a guest on. I always ask can you define that a little bit further? Or just to define it as best we can for this show? So it makes sense. So we're kind of talking about the same thing, at least in our conversations, and I also can see how this was going to relate to the client-consultant relationship or even the human-dog relationship and the clarity or lack of clarity or predictability in what our communications are is going to be problematic. And so can you expand more on that? You kind of use that in your work with dogs and clients as well.

Speaker 2: 48:52

Yeah, I mean even the word aggression. What is aggression? Everyone's going to have a different idea based on what they've experienced, despite the fact that dictionary definitions exist. So when you're talking with the client and I think this comes up the most when I'm kind of gathering information about a case I seek a lot of clarity when clients use terms that are vague. So the dog is aggressive, Well, okay. Well, what does that mean?

Speaker 2: 49:20

We need to kind of dig in a little bit deeper there so we kind of have to zoom in on the client's kind of too zoomed out and kind of, speaking in vague terms, the dog doesn't like guests. What does doesn't like mean. But there's also times when we kind of have to zoom out. So I might be taking a client's information and they're talking too specifically about a certain thing that I might not feel is as connected as I need to be paying attention to. So I might ask them to kind of zoom out and then I might redirect them back into what I need to know in order to kind of get this consultation off the ground.

Speaker 1: 50:03

And around our work with dogs too. Let's say, do you apply some of these, or at least maybe when you're explaining to the client too, about clarity of communication and how entropy could be a factor in our communications with dogs? Do you have a way of doing that, or do you talk about that with some clients if you feel the need to?

Speaker 2: 50:21

Yeah, with clients, I really kind of get down to what's actually happening when I do my best to avoid vague terminology. It's difficult, though, because vague terminology is so built into our language, so I do my best, for, like, if I say something that I know was probably kind of vague and I know that they need to understand it as clearly as I'm trying to get them to understand it, that's something that I might need to clarify. So I pay a lot of attention to kind of catching myself. Or, if I say something vague, I'll then be like oh, that was something vague that I said. Let me define that a little bit better for you, so that way there's no miscommunication. Brian said this, or Brian said that. I really want to kind of make sure that things are as clear as possible, and that's why a lot of my sessions are a lot of just talking and talking things out and explaining and like figuring out what happened this week, figuring out the nuances and the details of it, because it's very important that those things kind of get covered.

Speaker 1: 51:25

So, in a sense, we need to have lots of order in our conversations with our clients and avoid the disorder my mind's going into other spaces where I'm like the disorder is actually can be a good thing when we're talking about the human language or speaking with the, with somebody, or or reading something, right? So, like a fiction novel, you know is actually it's kind of nice to have lots of colorful language or different languages or words that have vague meanings, because it allows the reader to use their own imagination, to go off in their own universe, right? Versus when we're trying to communicate to a client or or a textbook, trying to communicate very distinct terminologies, where we do need that order and that sort of way of understanding a concept or a term, right? So, yeah, let's just be thinking out loud at the moment here, folks.

Speaker 1: 52:12

So if you were to wrap all this together now, we've talked about a lot of complex topics, right? So chaos, the reductionism, entropy, what are some final thoughts in terms of our relationship with dogs and the work we do with dogs? And if you had like a message wrapped around all of this for the listeners, what would it be?

Speaker 2: 52:30

I would say the take home message is that our life with dogs and our lives consulting with clients is very difficult. It's complex, it costs mental resources. It costs mental resources to go online and discuss these things with other trainers cost resources to make a podcast. All these things cost resources. So when we're looking at how massively complex these things are, we should be relying on our support systems. We shouldn't go too far into the complexity that you know we say that we can't handle. If I want to see if there's pain going on, I'm not qualified to do that. I need to get a veterinarian involved. Of behavioral medication, we need a veterinary behaviorist. So we go on Facebook and we talk about cases. You know we go on TikTok and we talk about cases and we get feedback. We rely on others to tackle these things together.

Speaker 2: 53:34

We look at studies, we watch these things happen and when you run out of mental resources, it's okay, take a break, be like. You know this is too much for me. I can't zoom in that far. There's too many factors, so I'm going to focus on what I know and do my best in essence. So, like, this world that we live in is extremely complex and we're all just doing our best and for that reason I do my best to give the benefit of the doubt, because what we're doing is really hard. When I have clients, you know if clients aren't, you know, say, following the plan perfectly, that's okay. Like maybe they don't have the physical or mental energy to be following the plan perfectly. So like, what can we change so that we can make it better both for them and the dog? Now, because we don't have infinite time to talk about things, we don't have infinite energy to talk about them, we have to kind of reduce somewhere. So kind of choosing where we reduce things down can be life saving.

Speaker 1: 54:40

Very good way to wrap it up and talk about our finite resources and when we can give resources and when we need to take some away, as in terms of our conversations. I think it's a great message to wrap things up. So, brian, thank you so much. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about everything you're talking about or seek out your help?

Speaker 2: 54:59

So I'm very active on Facebook. You can shoot me a message at my Facebook page. Brian Fleming and I also have a blog, chaosandcaninessubstackcom, that you can find me right now. Find me writing blog things at.

Speaker 1: 55:13

Wonderful and, as usual, guys. I will link to that into the show notes. Brian, thank you so much for coming on. It was a delightful and nerdy conversation, which I love, so thanks again, Thank you. I really enjoyed this conversation with Brian and geeking out on all things like chaos theory and reductionism. It's always a pleasure hearing from trainers who bring different ways of looking at behavior in dogs and seeing our industry continuing to grow as a result.

Speaker 1: 55:42

And don't forget to head on over to aggressivedogcom for more information about helping dogs with aggression from the aggression and dogs master course to webinars from world renowned experts and even an annual conference. We have options for both pet pros and pet owners to learn more about aggression in dogs. We also have the help for dogs with aggression bonus episodes that you can subscribe to. These are solo shows where I walk you through how to work with a variety of types of aggression, such as resource guarding, dog-to-dog aggression, territorial aggression, fear based aggression and much, much more. You can find a link to subscribe in the show notes or by hitting the subscribe button if you're listening in on Apple podcasts. Thanks for listening in and stay well, my friends.