Decoding Dog Bites and Aggression: A Deep-Dive with Janice Bradley from the National Canine Research Council

Imagine a world where our understanding of dog bites and aggression is rooted more in fact than fear, and where we can coexist harmoniously with our canine companions, regardless of breed. Welcome to that world, as we navigate it with our guide for this episode, Janice Bradley, the eminent author and revered Director of Communications and Publications at the National Canine Research Council. Graced with her depth of knowledge and wealth of experience, we dissect the misconceptions shadowing dog bites, and unravel the truth underpinning aggressive dog behavior.

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ABOUT JANIS:

Janis Bradley is a science writer, specializing in the role of bias, particularly related to breed, in policy making regarding canine/human relationships, and serves as the Director of Communications and Publications at the National Canine Research Council. She has written a peer reviewed policy paper on dog bites, which contains a full literature review of the scientific papers on that topic. She has authored papers in peer reviewed journals on various related topics, most currently having collaborated with a veterinary epidemiologist on a series of studies reviewing the use of behavior evaluations administered to dogs living in shelters: “No better than flipping a coin: Reconsidering canine behavior evaluations in animal shelters,” “What is the evidence for reliability and validity of behavior evaluations for shelter dogs? A prequel to ‘No better than flipping a coin,’” and “Saving Normal: A new look at behavioral incompatibilities and dog relinquishment to shelters.” 

Additional peer reviewed publications include “Who is minding the bibliography? Daisy chaining, dropped leads, and other bad behavior using examples from the dog bite literature,” and “Defaming Rover: Error-Based Latent Rhetoric in the Medical Literature on Dog Bites.” All of this comes from an abiding interest in finding the very best information about the remarkable relationship between dogs and people. She maintains a research library for the National Canine Research Council for use by academics, dog professionals, media, and the public.

Janis first pursued a career as a college teacher, counselor, and administrator. Leaving academia in 2000, she took up her passion for the human-canine relationship professionally, teaching more than 400 aspiring professional dog trainers over a 10 year period at the San Francisco SPCA Academy for Dog Trainers, at that the time the first science based program of its kind, while maintaining a private behavior consultation practice.  She now lives in rural New York with her rescued Greyhound, Tommy.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Did you know that dogs bite, but balloons and slippers are more dangerous? In this episode, I have the pleasure of chatting with Janice Bradley, the author of the book. With this title, we not only discuss dog bites and the many misconceptions that often swirl around them, but take a historical deep dive into dog training in general. Janice has a wealth of knowledge and I'm sure you'll get some nice takeaways from this conversation. Janice is a science writer specializing in the role of bias, particularly related to breed, in policy making regarding canine human relationships, and serves as the director of communications and publications at the National Canine Research Council. She has written a peer reviewed policy paper on dog bites, which contains a full literature review of the scientific papers on that topic. She has also authored papers in peer reviewed journals on various related topics, most currently having collaborated with a veterinary epidemiologist on a series of studies reviewing the use of behavior evaluations administered to dogs living in shelters, titled no Better Than Flipping a Coin Reconsidering Canine Behavior Evaluations in Animal Shelters. She maintains a research library for the National Canine Research Council for use by academics, dog professionals, media and the public. Janice first pursued a career as a college teacher, counselor and administrator, leaving academia in 2000. She took up her passion for the human canine relationship professionally, teaching more than 400 aspiring dog trainers over a 10 year period at the San Francisco SPCA Academy for Dog Trainers At that time, the first science based program of its kind.

Speaker 1: 1:38

And if you are enjoying the buddy and the dog, you can support the podcast by going to aggressivedogcom, where there's a variety of resources to learn more about helping dogs with aggression issues, including the Uphubbing Aggression and 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 and 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. Hey everyone, welcome back to the bitey end of the dog. I am very excited for this week's episode. We have got a lot of different things we're going to talk about because I've got Janice Bradley here from the National Canine Research Council not only from the NCRC, but that's kind of how I learned about Janice and they're doing such wonderful work there. It's this wonderful think tank working against things like BSL and other major misconceptions, especially when it comes around dog bites and dog aggression. So I'm very, very, very excited for this episode. Welcome to the show, janice.

Speaker 2: 2:40

Thank you so much, Mike, for inviting me. After our last conversation, I've really been looking forward to having an opportunity to chat with you again and talk about things of mutual interest.

Speaker 1: 2:52

Yes, and that's the thing. We have so many things and I know we were chatting like what are we going to talk about? There's so many rabbit holes we want to go down. But of course, since this podcast is around aggression and dogs, I'd love to first kind of dive into your work and your background around dog bites. I'd love to learn about what got you interested in that in the first place, like researching dog bites and dog bites statistics and all your work at the NCRC.

Speaker 2: 3:15

Well, I mean, my interest actually predates my joining NCRC and goes way back to the time when I was teaching in the Academy for Dog Trainers at the San Francisco SPCA, and that was when I did my first deep dive into this area of research on dog bites, which seems like a strange thing, I think, to focus on, to research. I mean, there's certainly lots of more pleasant things to read about and talk about, particularly with regard to dogs. But what happened was, since I was in the position of teaching people who were aspiring to become professional dog trainers and we were giving them in their curriculum and we were definitely giving them instruction on how to work with dogs who, you know, bit people and growl and snarled and snapped at people and how to keep themselves safe and what was safe and what wasn't, and at the same time there was an absolutely horrific incident in San Francisco where a young woman she was a lacrosse coach at a local college was killed by two enormous dogs in the hallway of her own apartment. Her name was Diane Whipple. All of those events dog bite related fatalities are horrific. This one was, I think, in many ways particularly ghastly because of all of the background stuff around it. I mean you couldn't. If you'd written the scenario as a movie of the week for TV, nobody would have taken it, you know, because it would have seemed so, so bizarre.

Speaker 2: 4:55

And what happened in San Francisco at that time was that quite soon, I mean, there were multiple news stories about this every single day in the local media. It became headline news. If anybody's big dog barked at somebody over a fence, if you walked a dog 50 pounds or more down the street, people would cross the street. Any dog people would cross the street, you know, to keep their distance. I mean, people were absolutely terrified and this often happens when you have one of these horrific, very, very rare events. And there were many, many articles talking about dog bite epidemics, which was a phrase that had been revived from the 1980s, when it had first started appearing. Hadn't heard a lot about it, you know, in the interim. This was in 2001.

Speaker 2: 5:48

And so I really kind of felt like it was that I had an obligation to look into it and try and find out what was real. I and my colleagues and our students, part of our purview at the San Francisco SPCA at that time, part of our brief, was to see what we could do in terms of influencing behavior of dogs that were grouchy around people. You know how far you could take that. What could you do with that in a shelter? That was. That was part of what we were assigned to do and I really wanted to know if we were giving people reasonable advice, particularly the people that I worked with who you would expect would have been a, you know, at particularly high risk for injury since we were, you know, knowingly dealing with dogs who had conflicts and issues with people. So I started diving into the research and the ultimate outcome of that research was several years later I came out with a book called Dogs Bite, but Balloons and Slippers Are More Dangerous. So that gives you a bit of an idea of where the research led me.

Speaker 2: 6:58

The first place that it led me was to realizing that most of the research at that time and still to this day this is pretty much true the quality of the research was pretty poor, with very, very, very few exceptions. The epidemiological front, which is just everybody knows what epidemiology is now, since we've lived, you know, through our COVID pandemic nobody knew before, everybody knows now. The quality of that research, to my unschooled eye in this particular area, seemed extremely, just, incredible. It wasn't convincing. It was very, very unconvincing. It was almost unknown for anyone with any expertise about dog behavior whatsoever to be involved in any of the research. So it was being treated as if it were influenza or some other kind of injury modality, which didn't appear to me to be appropriate, since it's clearly so much more complicated than that, because it's not a one-sided event. It's about an interaction, you know, between at least two entities, often more, with all sorts of complexities, and so none of this seemed to be being addressed in that literature.

Speaker 2: 8:26

And I wanted to know, I really wanted to know, how scared we should be of dogs. You know, were we being cavalier with our students and not pressing them to be, you know, extremely, extremely wary of every dog that they encountered, found out that no, we were not being cavalier. Also found out that people tend to be extremely impressed. You know, sort of general public, people in general, that human brain tends to be extremely impressed by rare scary events and to read every new story about an event like that, and on this particular event there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stories, as if each story represented another event, because it's how human brains work, it's what we do. So that's how that book came about, which was an attempt at a critical thinking approach to what we knew, how concerned we should be and what we might do if we wanted to change the situation as it was Once I'd been through all this research. At the time, I really wanted to title the book Dogs Bite. Get Over it, but no one would let me.

Speaker 2: 9:48

I think the world may be ready for a title like that now, but it wasn't then.

Speaker 1: 9:54

I don't know. I think I liked it. I think I liked the original title because it really hammers the point. Oh, hearing you talk about it kind of gives me the chills because of just how much of an impact it had on my journey early on, you know. So I read that book, gosh. I don't want to put a date on it, but I've definitely read it a long time ago and influenced how much I teach my students and how I spread information about the awareness of dog bites and dispelling some of the hysteria that can happen when dog bites happen in the media. It made me think about when President Biden's German Shepherd bit somebody at the White House and all the interviews I was doing, all the interview requests, and everybody wanted to always sensationalize it.

Speaker 1: 10:32

You know the reporters tried to make something out of it like, oh my gosh dogs, so they got to kill somebody tomorrow. They tried to really push the sensationalist story that we see in the media when dog bites happen. But you know, again your book really helped to educate me around we don't need to share the same hysteria that we see in the media. It's just the, as you mentioned, it's like these rare incidents that cause so much attention, especially in a tragic case like Diane Whipples. But yeah, so kind of along the lines of this is I would love to hear more about, you know, the data that's out there, a lack of the data when we're looking at dog bite statistics and what influences that so broad question. But I would just love to hear your thoughts wrapped around that.

Speaker 2: 11:14

I've lost the name of who it was who said this.

Speaker 2: 11:17

It was somebody really prominent in behavior and I've lost it.

Speaker 2: 11:21

But there was one phrase that often comes to mind for me is that dog bite statistics aren't statistics at all, and to a great extent that's true.

Speaker 2: 11:31

It's very, very, very difficult to get a handle on this. The best source of information that we have about prevalence, about incidents, comes from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and they don't attempt to track the whole thing. But what they do track is dog bites that are presented for treatment in emergency departments all over the country, and they've been doing this with the same methodology, surveying the same kind of sample and analyzing and reporting their statistics in basically the same way for more than 20 years. And this is very, very, very it's rare. It's unique in dog bite tracking because as soon as you change who you sample or how you sample them, your ability to infer any kind of trend is completely out the window. You often see studies on dog bite incidents that are based on reports to public agencies like animal controls and police departments and those kinds of things, but it's not to put too fine a point on it generally garbage data. The reason that it's garbage data is that it's an attempt to is Tommy making too much noise there Usually?

Speaker 1: 12:56

he's not too bad. Barking dogs are always a good part of the podcast. Okay, usually they have sales a little.

Speaker 2: 13:07

But there are a number of difficulties. One of them is that all kinds of different things go into a person's decision on whether they're going to report a dog bite to some official agency. That's because the system was designed to track exposure to zoonotic disease, particularly rabies. That's what it was for, okay, and it's fantastically successful at that. Rabies transmitted from domestic dogs has been eradicated in the United States since 1975. There's not been a case of a human being contracting rabies from a domestic dog, while in the United States since 1975. There have been dogs that have contracted rabies and been identified. And there have been people who have gone to countries where the vaccination rates are not as nearly universal as they are here and have contracted rabies. And there are animals among the wild population that transmit rabies but not from a domestic dog. It's an incredibly successful system, but people know that's what it's for. So part of their decision in whether they're going to, say, report a dog bite injury is going to be related to whether or not they know the vaccination history of the dog. So if they know the dog's been vaccinated and it's a very slight injury, a lot of people are going to say why bother? But if the dog is one that they don't know, then they're going to say, maybe I need to go see about this. But every community has a different way of tracking these as different requirements. It just doesn't give you anything.

Speaker 2: 14:49

The CDC reporting doesn't give you everything, but what it does give you because the severity of an injury is not the only driver of whether a person seeks medical attention, and this is about people seeking medical attention specifically in emergency departments. It's not going to be every injurious dog bite, but what we can track from it is trends in dog bites that are presented for treatment at emergency departments, and this is a remarkable finding. The trend in this, in the United States at least, is remarkable because it's flat. It's been flat for 20 years, more than 20 years. So anybody who says to me that rates of dog bites are increasing or more dogs are injuring people, gets a response from me of show me the data.

Speaker 2: 15:42

The only source that has tracked dog bite injuries in the same way consistently over a long period of time shows no change. This is particularly remarkable because, when you think about how people live with dogs in the United States, do we think that it's changed over the last quarter century? I think we do. I think the dogs live in much closer proximity to human beings than they did 25 years ago. In the aggregate, many more people call their dogs members of their family, which usually means the dog lives in the house and sleeps on the furniture and with virtually any kind of injury that epidemiologists track. What you expect to see when there's more exposure is more injuries not with dogs and one possible conclusion from this is that, since we're giving them more opportunities to interact with us, to develop what the ethologists call social competence thank you, adam McClosie. A wonderful addition to literature to develop social competence with human beings. They're getting better and better and better at getting along with us.

Speaker 1: 16:57

So I'd love to pick your brain a little further here along those lines. In the last, let's say, three years, so pandemic dogs and the anecdotal notes from trainers and consultants is that they've seen a significant increase in dogs that are displaying what we classify as aggressive behaviors or fearful behaviors from, perhaps lack of socialization, perhaps restrictions on their freedom of movement in the environment. So not having that exposure or not being able to meet their enrichment and physical exercise needs. Anecdotally, a lot of trainers are saying we're seeing a huge increase in business for these particular types of cases and shelters are also in some places reporting an increase in dogs being returned or surrendered to those shelters or rescues because of the behavior issues. So what are your thoughts there? Wow, again, lack of data. But if we were to, that's about eight questions.

Speaker 2: 17:51

Yes, I mean, since we've had a long period of time where people didn't go out much. What you would expect that that would mean in terms of interaction between dogs and humans would be that it would result in more contact, people staying home more, so, people having more contact with their own dogs and dogs having less contact with people outside their own immediate inner circles. Nobody's looked at whether that's true. It's too bad that that hasn't been part of the sociological study that's gone on, but it seems almost certain that that's the case, that that would be the case in general with pet dogs, and so what you would expect to have happen then would be to have more dogs who are wary of unfamiliar people because they've had less exposure, so more worried about that, and it's very difficult to speculate about what effect that might have on conflicts between people and their own dogs. Most of the research that's out there it's the opposite of what you see in reported dog bites, by the way of any kind is that there's a higher incidence of dog bites to people that dogs live with, which makes sense because, after all, that's who they're around, so they have more opportunities. They have more opportunities to have conflicts of various kinds or to do scary things. So you would expect that you might see more of those kinds of incidents of people reporting incidents with their own dogs at home. But it could go the other way. It could just as well go the other way and say, OK, dogs got better and better and better at being with their own people, but could be struggling a bit with people outside their homes.

Speaker 2: 19:54

There's just no data on it and we don't want to conflate fear absolutely with aggression. Now, this is my opinion and there are opinions about this all over the map. To me, if you were to draw a Venn diagram, what we call aggression would fall entirely within the circle of what we call fear. But there's a lot of stuff that falls in the fear circle that doesn't result in dogs warning or biting. So I'm more and more convinced and I have yet to see any kind of analysis or study anywhere and I pretty much read it all. Heaven help me that convinces me that there's anything involved in growling, snarling, snapping and biting.

Speaker 2: 20:43

But self-defense I just think that's the whole story. It can be a circuitous form of self-defense based on events long past and things that we as humans know do not actually represent a physical threat to the dog, but that doesn't make any difference to the dog if the dog feels the need to defend himself or herself. But in terms of the effect of this kind of period of semi-isolation, nobody knows. Nobody knows, and it could be that there's been no change at all. But since people are stuck at home with their dogs, they're more likely to seek somebody to help them out with it if they have conflicts. I wish I could give you a better answer, but we just don't know. At some point we probably will have some data. So in another couple of years, for example, we'll know whether the CDC numbers have had a big spike. I'd be astonished if they did, but it could happen.

Speaker 1: 21:44

Does the CDC track the relationship with the dog and the victim? No, just the dog bite, for example.

Speaker 2: 21:50

Yes, yeah, they've really abandoned trying to do all that at pretty much the same time that they abandoned tracking dog bite-related fatalities, because they just don't work. It's too small a number to be able to say anything meaningful about in terms of annual epidemiological studies. You just can't do it.

Speaker 1: 22:12

So is nobody tracking dog bite-related fatalities at this point in terms of the numbers.

Speaker 2: 22:18

There's not official tracking, no, no, no, I mean National Canine Research Council tracks it, looks at it and looks at the numbers over those years.

Speaker 1: 22:29

Is it done through just media reports, or how does data get compiled there?

Speaker 2: 22:33

Usually the first piece of information is media reports and then those get tracked down and really investigated, and those investigations are the source of what is. I don't think there's any argument the gold standard study of dog bite-related fatalities, which was the one that Gary Petronic was the first author on in 2013. Because it was the first one that wasn't based on media reports per se, that it was based on in-depth analysis and investigation of every single incident that happened over a 10-year period and nobody had done this before.

Speaker 1: 23:12

So lots of other questions that are swirling around in my head right now. There's so many things.

Speaker 2: 23:18

We don't need to talk anymore about dogs killing people. The takeaway needs to be a dog's not going to kill you.

Speaker 1: 23:23

It's extremely rare, so go read the book.

Speaker 2: 23:27

Unless you have a much larger audience than I can possibly imagine.

Speaker 1: 23:32

Yeah, so yeah, dogs rarely kill people. There's the takeaway message there, so it's not something we have to necessarily worry about.

Speaker 1: 23:40

So, in terms of statistics and gathering data and information, obviously there's just such a there's so many limitations to it and I get a lot of questions, whether it's from if I'm doing a media interview or a podcast interview. There's questions about which dogs bite more, or what about spayed or neutered dogs or this particular breed of dog, and the answer is always there's just not a lot of data for this and that kind of segues into this topic of BSL and why it's not a good thing to have and all of the amazing work NCRC has done over the years to explain why BSL is not a good thing. So let's dive into that topic a little bit more.

Speaker 2: 24:17

I'll give you my own armchair sociologists sort of idea of why this comes about, because something like it has always been the case. There's always been a demonized dog, at least in the United States, going back quite literally hundreds of years, to even before breed meant what it means now. You know it was a much more casual kind of label. There's always been one, and it's fluctuated all over the map. The most bizarre one that I know of was spitz dogs being banned in New York in the late 1800s. Yes, yes, they were banned and people were encouraged to shoot them on site.

Speaker 1: 25:00

Yes, what was the reason for that, just real quickly? Why were they banned? What were they doing?

Speaker 2: 25:07

There doesn't really have to be a reason. Somebody didn't like them, or one bit somebody. One medium-sized fluffy white dog bit somebody and therefore, and there was all of this characterization of them as evil and malicious and people shouldn't be allowed to have them. And if you see one, you know, shoot it immediately. This was in New York in the 19th century and I think when you see that kind of, there's no other good name for it than scapegoating. When you see that kind of thing occurring repeatedly with a moving target, the only reasonable explanation is fear, displacement. So as a way for people to feel like, OK, I'm scared of this, because I've heard about scary things happening and therefore I will put my fear on this object, that's not part of my life and so I don't need to worry about it. And I think, with the pitbull label has been the one that's attached to this kind of scapegoating since the 1980s, which is particularly sticky, and I think it's probably been more sticky than some of the others, because it's a label that's so easy to apply to almost any dog, so nobody can tell you what it actually means or how you can tell if it's appropriate to call this dog a pitbull or not. So it's whatever anybody says it is. So that makes it very, very, very convenient as a way to displace a fear that was unwarranted in the first place.

Speaker 2: 26:46

And I think dog professionals have some culpability in this fear in the sense that we sometimes present any version of a dog saying cut that out as a slippery slope to being, you know, a dog that's going to severely, you know, hurt somebody. I actually one of the few times I've ever walked out of a presentation at a dog training conference in my life and I once heard a very well-known speaker presenting slides, pictures of dogs and talking about a particular case and I won't go into any details and being very pleased that this presenter had been able to talk this person into euthanizing this dog because the practitioner was able to convince the person that the dog was going to kill him. Nobody can ever predict that about any dog, ever, and so we can bear some responsibility if we try and present perfectly reasonable ways for dogs to say that bothers me, please cut it out as a slippery slope to. This dog is going to tear your throat out. No, he's not.

Speaker 2: 28:07

That's why your clients don't believe you when you try and tell them that you don't know how many dog trainers I've talked to who complain about their clients not taking them seriously. You know about their dire warnings about their dog that's growling or snarling and if they try and convince the client that the dog is going to hurt them, Very often the client doesn't believe them and most of the time the client is right. They've seen it happen 500 times and nothing bad has happened. Why in the world should they believe us when we say this is going to lead to some dire consequences? Much more productive to talk to them about this is clearly making your dog uncomfortable. Would you like to work on helping them feel more comfortable about this and telling them you know it could at some point escalate if the ways that he's trying to communicate with you don't seem to him to be working, it could escalate. I'm not saying it will Nobody can say that but it's something that you need to be aware of.

Speaker 1: 29:09

I got much more cooperation when I took an approach like that, definitely, definitely. And it's also and I remind my students as well that if you are taking a high percentage of cases where aggressive behavior has been noted, you are going to have a little bit of a skewed lens about what you might think might happen in a case, because you make an important point there, janice, is that we cannot predict future behavior. We can make educated guidelines for our clients to avoid anything in the future, right, but we can never predict that behavior. Yeah, no, no.

Speaker 2: 29:44

And you destroy your credibility if you do. And then, with regard to BSL, there are two scientific areas where there's been a huge amount of work done in the last couple of decades on canine behavior, and one of them is the flowering of ethological studies. But the other is looking at canine behavior genetically, which is a quite new field. I mean, I'm definitely old enough to remember when Janice has thought that there was nothing worth studying about dogs, and now it's a gold mine for behavioral genetics. But there have been findings all over the map about this, particularly with regard to breed, until recently, and so that's fueled, I think, a kind of a credibility of a debate that no longer has credibility, because we now have a gold standard study that has done what no other study has done before, and this was the study that came out of the Broad Institute last spring, almost a year ago now. Wow, yeah yeah, time definitely flies.

Speaker 2: 30:56

Incredibly important study, because it did two things that none of the genetic studies of canine behavior had ever done before. The first one was that they used the same sample of dogs to collect their behavioral data on. That they collected their genetic data on, and it comes as a shock to people to learn that this had not been done before. Many of the conclusions about genetics and breeds and behavior had been based on looking for genetic markers and then assuming that behavior as it was described in AKC standards represented the behavior of those dogs, which was a little bit shocking. But even the better ones would have say one group of dogs from a breed that they collected behavioral information on and another that they collected genetic information on.

Speaker 2: 31:51

The Broad study is the first one that did it all with both and that we're looking at the same dogs through both lenses, and it's the first one that didn't limit themselves to pedigreed dogs, to purebred dogs. So roughly half of the dogs in the study were mixed breed dogs, which represents the population in the United States. Their findings are just stunning. But one of the most stunning findings was that in what they termed agonistic behavior which was kind of their attempt to get away from all the baggage that's attached to the term aggression, among other things, among other reasons for choosing that term they found basically nothing to differentiate breeds. They didn't even find anything genetic, even on the bigger picture. So the most reasonable conclusion there is that from epigenetics to socialization, to environment is where self-defensive behaviors develop.

Speaker 1: 32:52

All right, so I'm going to dive a little deeper into this.

Speaker 2: 32:57

I knew you'd love that.

Speaker 1: 32:59

For anybody listening in. I did have Jessica Hackman on and one of the authors of the study, when we had a great chat with Kim Brophy too on the ethology side of it. That was last season, I think I had that episode, so go check that out. What is your answer to somebody that says all right, janice, so it's good evidence that why BSL or breed specific legislation is not a good thing, because each dog is going to be individual right and we have to look at the study of one, as Dr Susan Friedman would say. But what about then, janice? What about the ethological side of things?

Speaker 1: 33:31

Let's say we're talking about the predatory motor sequence, so the predatory motor pattern we see in dogs and what we've selected for as humans in our breeding of a particular dog, in the characteristics we might ask for or see. So if it's a, let's say, a Border Collie that sort of has the biting pattern or style, I should say rather, of using their front teeth to keep the flock in particular locations or not, maybe they don't use their teeth. Or cattle dog, for instance, that might use more the back teeth. And then we look at some bull breeds that might use more of a heart using the full mouth type of bite. So if we look at bite styles depending on the breed, how do you answer that question? When we start looking at some of the nuances of breed specific behaviors we've selected for in our breeding to get certain behaviors and you're a Greyhound fan, so you might want to use some of your Greyhounds as an example.

Speaker 2: 34:24

Okay. So a couple of answers there. One answer is show me the data. So I had an awful lot of things that I believed because of the conventional wisdom in among dog pros. Really, that led me down my own confirmation bias path and led me to selectively interpret behavior that I would see in the dogs of my clientele according to those biases. Without data you cannot know that. That is simply not all you're seeing. You just can't know. Maybe dogs with a certain skull shape are more likely to bite if they're biting in fear or self-defense using back molars. Maybe they're not. Maybe border collies are more likely to bite within sizes, maybe they're not. You've got to show me the data, because simply being in dogs, having observations about those kinds of behaviors, are too suspect without data, because the one that your mind absorbs and counts 25 times is the one that confirms what you expect to see, and the one that doesn't is the one that your brain says oh yeah, that's just the anomaly, and I certainly had a.

Speaker 2: 35:46

I wrote an article about this for the Bark Magazine Remember when it was back, when it was a glossy magazine a thousand years ago about this and about my own experience as a behavior consultant and of having an epiphany moment when I went and saw exactly the same behavior in a client who had a pedigreed blue healer and then went and saw the same thing, you know, a similar behavior in a client whose dog was a pedigreed lab, and both of the clients told me the same thing. Both of the clients told me I've had, you know, seven dogs of this breed, you know, and none of them has ever done this thing before. And what my brain did with that was with the client who had the healer, I said you got a healer, what did you expect? And with their trailer person, I said, yeah, this really is kind of strange, okay. And at some point a light bulb went off over my head and saying maybe I've got a filter here and started looking into that. And then I had always really loved the looks of Greyhounds. When I was writing the Dog's Byte book, my heart dog, who was a giant, wonderful mud-of-a-dog, died and I decided that when so I only had one dog, it's a strange, strange doby girl, that's another story. And so I promised myself that as a reward to myself for finishing the book, I would get a Greyhound, because I just I thought they were gorgeous and I have absolutely no problem with anybody deciding to choose a dog based on liking the way they look. I mean, heck, it's how we choose our partners most of the time. So you're free to do that as long as you don't read much else into it. And so I did that.

Speaker 2: 37:36

And first it was very difficult for me to adopt a Greyhound from the rescue because they found out who I was and they were afraid that I would try to train it. Now, this, now this showed how little they knew me, because the chances of my training my own dogs are very, very close to zero unless it's a quality of life issue. And to them at that time, training meant very coercive training and they didn't want to. They didn't want to send one of their dogs out to that. But when I finally talked them into it, I took my dog home.

Speaker 2: 38:12

I did normal stuff that I do with the dog that I live with. He was just a dog He'd had 136 races, so he was very, very, very keen to chase rapidly retreating little objects, and so I taught him to do a recall. I taught him a reliable recall in full chase after a jackrabbit at a big you know off-leash dog park. So people who complained to me about dogs who are keen to not being able to put recalls on dogs who are keen to chase don't get much sympathy from me. They just aren't willing to invest enough money in chicken livers as far as I can tell.

Speaker 2: 38:50

So so there was that, but eventually I became the go-to person for this rescue with dogs that were struggling or just to foster. So I had many, many, many, many many fosters through my household and there's lots and lots of folklore. Okay, just like with every other breed people who are into greyhounds, the first thing out of their mouth will be they're not like other dogs. I'm here to tell you they are. They're just dogs. Some of them are happy, some of them are sad, some of them are shy, some of them are active. I would say the only thing that I noticed anecdotally was a somewhat lower overall activity level, and of course, you know the things that are physically true about them they're not sturdy, okay, so they break their legs easily but that has nothing to do with behavior, except for the fact that they like to run 40 miles an hour, which is not good if your legs break

Speaker 2: 39:53

easily. So there's that. But they were just dogs. Some were growly around their food bowls, some weren't. Some were happy to be around cats, some of them wanted to chase cats. They were just dogs, and this is, by the way, a breed of dog that's had fantastically good PR in the United States.

Speaker 2: 40:14

Okay, so people tend to think about Greyhounds very sympathetically, and rightfully so. I mean, the Greyhound racing industry is perfectly hideous. It's indefensible the conditions under which those dogs live. But there are things that can be learned from it. For example, they live spectacularly socially impoverished lives. There may be one person taking care of 100 dogs. Okay, that's impoverished in terms of human socialization. I mean, imagine the effect on a human being who lived like that.

Speaker 2: 40:50

And yet you put them in a human home and almost all of them are normal pet dogs in a couple of weeks. The biggest challenge is teaching them what stairs are, because they've never seen them before. You might as well ask a normal dog to climb a tree. They have no freaking idea. And no, they are not unable to sit. They can sit just like any other dog, but nobody has ever reinforced them for it before.

Speaker 2: 41:25

That position has been met with supreme indifference by every human being they've ever met before. So why would they guess that as the answer to the puzzle of how to get the cookie? Yes, you can, but the United States, the attitude toward this breed of dog I'm circling back around here to breed biases is not the same all over the world. There are places in the world where I could not take my dog without putting a muzzle on him. There are places where I couldn't take him at all Because he is viewed in the way that pit bull is a meme in the United States. If you let him loose, he'll eat your small pets and small children, and people have those same kinds of feelings. It's not about the dogs. That's my sermon for the day.

Speaker 1: 42:21

I love it, so I'm going to take a quick moment to take a break and hear a word from our sponsors. We're going to jump back into this conversation when we return. Hey guys, thanks for tuning in and I hope you are enjoying this episode. I have a very special offer that I'm announcing just before the Aggression in Dogs conference this year. You've heard me talk about the Aggression in Dogs Master course on this podcast and, for a limited time, to celebrate the fourth annual Aggression in Dogs conference, I'm going to be launching a bundle offer that includes the course and all 19 webinars available on aggressivedogcom. Yes, that's all of the webinars. The webinars alone would typically cost more than $580 to purchase together, but I'm including them for free in this special bundle deal with the Aggression in Dogs Master course. Just some of the topics for the webinars include how to break up a dogfight, assessing canine posture and movement, the genetics of aggression, dog to cat aggression, dog to child, directed aggression, and treat and retreat with some of the most respected behavior pros in our field, including Suzanne Clodier, grisha Stewart, dr Amy Cook, dr Christina Spalding, laura Monaco-Tarelli, jen Shriock, trish McMillan and Dr Jessica Heckman, just to name a few. You're going to receive all 19 webinars, the Master course, live group, mentor sessions with me and access to the private Facebook group A value of over $2,700, all for just the price of the Master course, which is $495. There's only going to be 50 bundles available in this offer and I'm going to drop a link to the bundle in the show notes for this episode. The offer is going to expire on October 8th 2023, which is just one week after the conference, though the bundle typically sells out quickly, so please take advantage. If you are interested, head on over to the show notes for this episode in the podcast platform you are listening to and click on the Aggression in Dogs Master course and Expert Webinar Bundle link. I also want to take a moment to support Sinthor Pangal, who's going to be speaking at the Aggression in Dogs conference this year. Sinthor shared the story of an organization doing truly amazing work to help animals.

Speaker 1: 44:41

Charlie's Animal Rescue Center C-A-R-E, or CARE for short, is an animal shelter providing timely medical aid to injured and ill animals of the streets in Bangalore City. They aim to provide life-saving veterinary care on par with private veterinary setups, to all animals, irrespective of their ownership status. Care has a rescue helpline, animal ambulance services and a fully equipped veterinary trauma care unit. Care strives to provide dignity to animals who are old, blind, paraplegic and suffering from chronic diseases, and allow them to live out their lives at the shelter in a safe and peaceful environment. Care is home to many dogs, cats, rabbits, ducks, hens, pigs, skinny pigs, birds and even terrapins. No animal left behind is their main motto. Apart from rescue and shelter services, care also provides adoption services, humane education in schools, animal cruelty prevention and control, and volunteering opportunities. You have to check out their Instagram channel, where you can see all the wonderful work they are doing to care for and save dogs and animals in need. Their Instagram handle is charlesanimalrescuecenter and that center is spelled C-E-N-T-R-E, so it's charlesanimalrescuecentercom. You've got to check out that Instagram account. It's really wonderful work they're doing. Please consider donating to this wonderful cause. You can do that directly through their website at charles-carecom. That's charles-carecom. I'm going to be sure to drop a link in the show notes for both their Instagram and a way to donate.

Speaker 1: 46:28

All right, I'm back here with Janice Bradley. We have been chatting about a lot of different things and we kind of left off the conversation around breed specific legislation and or lack of breed specific behaviors, but I just wanted to dive just a little bit more into that and because I think we've unpacked, you know how each dog is very individual. We have to always look at the individual dog Dogs. Of course they're going to be physically shaped and be able to do certain behaviors more or less than some other breeds, for instance, like biting we mentioned, and running and things like that.

Speaker 1: 47:01

But what is your answer to, let's say, now somebody asked you that question, janice what about when you have, let's say we take a litter of Belgian Malinois and we have, like I'm just hanging off somebody's clothes at six weeks of age, seven weeks of age? Nobody's taught them to do this, they're already doing it automatically. Or we take a bunch of tennis balls, we throw it out into a field with a bunch of golden retrievers, they're all bringing those tennis balls back. But then if you take a bunch of great Pyrenees, they're not doing the same thing and nobody's done anything differently except just we've gotten these dogs as, let's say, that's the first human interaction ever. So how do you answer that, like when we talk about some behaviors in some breeds of dogs that humans might have selected for over many generations?

Speaker 2: 47:43

I gotta tell you I'm starting to feel really sorry for the poor Malinois. Everybody seems to want to throw the Malinois under the breast.

Speaker 1: 47:51

I love Malinois. I think the listeners know that.

Speaker 2: 47:56

There's no question that the likelihood of the expression of specific action patterns can be selected for. There is no question about that that you can increase the likelihood of specific action patterns by rigorously selecting for those particular action patterns. With regard to a pet dog population, though, that theoretical truth is mostly irrelevant. That kind of rigorous breeding is such a tiny, tiny, tiny segment of how dogs come to be conceived and hatched that it just isn't going to impact very many people and I think even there we overestimate it. Okay, I gotta go back to the greyhounds. Sorry, but this is. But remember, I told you my first greyhound had 136 races. Okay, I mean, he definitely liked to chase and I would occasionally let him chase a jackrabbit at a local big off-leashed area of like 40 acres. He never caught one. The other rabbits are much better at getting out of the way. The dogs never catch them. So I would say he was very, very keen to chase and that's one of basically two qualities that are Raising.

Speaker 2: 49:26

Greyhounds are an almost unique population in that they are rigorously selected for specific behavior. If they are not keen to chase, they do not reproduce, okay, they don't get to make babies, they are culled or, like my other two greyhounds, they go immediately into the pet population. And therein lies the rub, because the best estimates on the part of the people in that industry and who knows how reliable those estimates are, but the best estimates that they have is that they can only race about 75% of the dogs, in other words, only about 75% of the dogs that they breed, are into it. Okay, and so the rest they just get rid of. And this is a behavior that is already clearly extremely common across the species. I wouldn't be surprised if it's close to 75% across the species. I mean this should be a true evolutionary bottleneck. But that's as good as they can get it.

Speaker 2: 50:41

My last two greyhounds, I mean I am more interested in the bunnies who cross our path than they are. They like cats. I didn't teach them to be nice about cats. They just say oh hi, how are you? Okay, tommy tries to make friends with the geese, with the wild geese on the pond out in front of our house. The geese are not having it and it hurts his feelings, but he tries to make friends with the geese. It would not occur to him to chase them. So, even with rigorous selection, if you're already talking about something that's very common across the species.

Speaker 2: 51:15

It may have been pushed as far as it can go anyway. So people keep coming back to this. You know about what? About what they were bred for? A most of the individuals in our current populations were not now, and never were in their ancestry, bred for these things. Ray Coppinger was right about a number of things, and I'm sure he was right about that, even though he was only working at it theoretically at that time. He wasn't doing any kind of you know, statistical analysis. But he said you know, when you start breeding for appearance, which is what most purebred dog breeding is for, or if it's like puppy milk breeding, it's breeding for nothing at all. It's going to regress to the species normal, and so that's what you're going to expect, unless you're trying to increase the odds of a very specific action pattern by deliberately selecting a dog who is part of a very tightly closed gene pool that's been bred for that, and breeds are not that tightly closed.

Speaker 2: 52:17

There are no breeds that are that tightly closed, except for things like racing grounds, where that experiment has now been done. It's pretty much asked and answered.

Speaker 1: 52:25

Yeah, so all right, and I love all the takeaway from this now and it's a great way to you know it's something that it's much overstated. When we're looking at breeds and breed specific behaviors and what we think might be happening when we see a dog of a certain breed, it's much less likely than what we think, especially, I think again, trainers working with certain aggression cases or certain breeds that we see sometimes. But we have to remember that our lens could be skewed. It's really hard actually, as you were mentioning, it's hard to actually get those traits, even when we're selecting for it rigorously. So, yeah, yeah, lots of.

Speaker 2: 52:58

Breeders never expect to get a whole litter that expresses the traits that they're looking for, even when they're breeding for appearance, which is much, much simpler than breeding for behavior, for any kind of behavior. People in confirmation breeding will certainly tell you that it's a miracle if they get one dog out of a litter that actually meets their criteria, and breeding for morphology is a walk in the park compared to breeding for behavior, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 53:28

All right. So I'd love to shift gears now and I always do this with my guests that have been sort of in the game for a long time. And Janice, you've been in the dog training industry for quite some time, without saying how old either of us are, but we've both been doing this for a while. We see different changes and trends, but you are from the what I often refer to as sort of like the Silicon Valley of the dog training world. So the San Francisco SBCA something in the water there maybe, but lots, lots of incredibly brilliant minds have come out of that area and that city of San Francisco, and still do. I think many talented trainers are in the California area, san Francisco, san Diego area, and so let's get into that with a focus on aggression. I think so in terms of our work with aggression cases over the years, but we can talk in general training as well. But tell me about your background at the SF SPC again, like what did you start there doing and then how long ago was that?

Speaker 2: 54:25

It was. It was in 2000 that I started there, when Jane Dollison started the Academy for dog trainers and she brought me on because my previous career was in academe. So I mean she needed a teacher, teacher and somebody who could design curriculum and you know that kind of thing in addition to having dog skills. So that was, you know, a big piece of my role there and we taught there together for 10 years and so that was a period that had started, I would say, in the mid 90s, and in the mid 90s it kind of followed my own trajectory of interest in dog training of, I think, the first big wave of scientific application to the question of how to help people and dogs live together more comfortably.

Speaker 2: 55:17

Before that it had been, I think, mostly a folklorically based kind of profession with some stuff borrowed from ethology that wasn't about dogs, ethology that was about other species, that was probably misapplied to dogs and led to being, you know, justifications for various ways of interacting with dogs. So I think we were really, you know, kind of surfing that first wave of this big change of how to influence canine behavior and so bringing behaviorism into the mix. So we spent a lot of time talking about, you know quadrants and such, and you know pounding that into our students heads as a lens through which to view behavior and to influence behavior change, To look at behavior and to influence behavior.

Speaker 1: 56:14

And we're going back 20, 20 something years, right, and this that must have been.

Speaker 1: 56:18

We're going back like 20, it was a long time and it was also quite revolutionary when you think about it at that time, where the majority of training was either compulsion or even what we might label as balanced training, or very traditional is another word for it. So it must have been really interesting to experience that at that time and also the culture. This was before social media, of course, so I'm sure it was a little different how the information spread and how conversations took place, but you know it must have been really interesting for you to see that and experience that. You know here you are with Gene and you know, putting the school together where there probably wasn't a lot out there like it at the time right.

Speaker 2: 56:55

And I think we were the first I think we were the first that worked on this basis, and I was myself I think you've self identified as a crossover trainer. So we're the dog that I described as my heart dog. I actually knew both of his parents, so I can say for sure that his mother was a Rottweiler and his father was a German shepherd and, oddly, he looked exactly like what you would expect if you morphed those two breeds together, which doesn't happen very much with F1s, but it happened with him. And when he came to me in the early 90s he would yell at other dogs on leash quite, quite dramatically, and I searched for somebody to help me with this. And there were some trainers around we would probably call balance trainers now, but they used food and all of those people that I asked to help me with this had me walking around in circles in obedience classes and told me to kill my dog. Okay, the only trainer I could find who did not tell me to kill my dog was a trainer who was. He was a keeler style trainer. I don't know if anybody in your audience is gonna remember that, but I mean this was ferocious stuff. This was, you know, keeler plus shock and I did what he told me and I learned to do it very competently, even apprenticed with him for a while, because he was the only one who didn't tell me to kill my dog and I knew I wasn't gonna do that and I knew it was very challenging to take him out on a leash.

Speaker 2: 58:30

Now, eventually I learned, through a sort of a series of incidents and mishaps, that this particular dog his name was Willie, he was, you know what what many of us call our heart dog. You know, everybody's got a heart dog. He was my heart dog and he had the best dog dog social skills. Of any dog I have ever lived with, ever bar none. He could mediate disputes between dogs. If he came upon a dog fight once he was off leash and interacting with dogs, he would run full speed and just blast in between them, knock them both ass over tea kettle. They would get up and shake themselves off and say, well, okay, I guess we'll quit doing that. I guess we'll quit doing that. I guess we'll quit doing that.

Speaker 2: 59:15

I fed him to a long, long series of some of the nastiest bitches you will ever meet I use that term in the doggies, in the doggies sense until finally one day we went to and I, you know, abused him, as people who have a genius dog like this, you know, dog trainers who have a genius dog like this always do. Until one day we got to the gate of the dog park and I saw him look around and go, oh crap dogs. I said, okay, no more, only nice dogs, you only have to do nice dogs. So it turned out that he was fantastic and both of these groups were wrong about what they were telling me to do. I didn't need to do this horrible stuff to him and I certainly didn't need to kill him. But I kind of lost heart for the training stuff. I had done some obedience stuff that you can do, some the competitive obedience that you could do at the time with Mixed Breed Dogs, and I had done some of that and I'd been very keen but it was just depressing.

Speaker 2: 1:00:16

And then I happened upon, through a series of things, some information about clicker training and this dog, willie, was what we used to call in the trade a hard dog. He was tough as nails. He used to bite me in the butt when he got disgusted sometimes With being you know, with being, you know, jabbed with a prong collar just one too many times. He would nip me in the butt and it was all you could do was laugh. It was hilarious. And so I discovered clicker training and no one would ever have looked at him and said this is a shutdown. You know, miserable, spirit, destroyed dog, nobody ever would have thought that looking at him.

Speaker 2: 1:00:57

But I started clicker training with him and I didn't know what I was doing, so I started. I started with something really hard. I started with like a discrimination task where you had to learn the names of four objects. I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know what to start with. In two weeks he was a different dog and I never looked back. He just had a completely different attitude. So I had been doing that for a while and helping people casually and dealing with different dogs before I came to the academy and started teaching there.

Speaker 2: 1:01:28

So that went on for 10 years and we certified more than 400 trainers with a combination of behaviorism and classical conditioning. And the classical conditioning was what we used in working with fear and what we were definitely still at that time. You know calling aggression. So changing the dog's emotional state, emotional response to a particular stimulus, and I don't think anything about that has changed. And again, we produced 400 trainers who were able to frame what they were doing in that way and many of them have gone on to be, you know, very, very, very successful and it was extremely fulfilling. And I maintained a behavior consultation practice at the same time. You know, throughout all that time those are really, really powerful ways of looking at influencing behavior. So I knew a lot about the science of behaviorism and classical conditioning, so I'd read deeply there. I had read deeply in the dog bite literature, to the extent that it's conceivably possible that there isn't anybody who's actually read more dog bite studies than I have. Yeah, it would not surprise me if that's the case.

Speaker 1: 1:02:50

It's an ugly talent, but my own.

Speaker 2: 1:02:55

Not the kind of thing that.

Speaker 1: 1:02:57

It's a special kind of person that has to actually really be interested in that, and I'm right there with you, I get it, I get it.

Speaker 2: 1:03:05

It's a lesson on not trying to plan your life out too long, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:03:09

Like well, the rest of the American public on a Sunday is watching football. I'm diving into, like dog bite studies. I'm reading dog bite studies. Alrighty, then.

Speaker 2: 1:03:19

People do not find this easy to understand, but then pretty much unbeknownst to me. There was very little literature at the time about dog behavior and what there was was primarily from a veterinary behavior perspective. So it was about pathologizing behavior, and I don't mean like arbitrarily pathologizing behavior, but I mean, you know, looking at behavior that was considered in some way outside of the norm or even inconvenient to human beings and modifying that behavior. But in those early days, just before I came to the academy, there were two events Somebody should make a movie about this that took place at almost exactly the same time. And one was that Brian Hare was at Duke with Mike Tomasello who was studying primates and getting nowhere with an imitation behavior. And Brian blesses heart, you know, little grad student, you know and it says, well, I think my dog can do that. And Mike Tomasello, being the open-minded guy, said, well, let's concoct an experiment and see if he can. And so they did. And at the same time the guy is in Hungary, you know, okay, and Adam McClosie was a young guy there then he wasn't the head of the department there. We're saying you know, we're kind of tired of studying these fish. What if we look at dogs? How would we do that? And they went along the road to framing dog-human interactions in terms of. They took paradigms from human developmental psychology and started framing it in terms of social competence and that's been a revolution in the way that we think about how dogs experience the world and how they interact with us.

Speaker 2: 1:05:14

That is yet to find its appropriate home in the minds of people who want to help pet owners influence dog behavior and I think particularly I'm coming back around here particularly in the area of conflicts between dogs and people, of dogs feeling a need to defend themselves against people, however mistaken they may be in that perception that it has a huge potential to influence that kind of response in dogs. To capitalize on the work that's come out of that last it's 20 years now of ethological study of pet dogs, specifically of dogs living in human households, with people who volunteer to have scientists try stuff out on their dogs, try, you know, benign stuff out on their dogs, because people love to do stuff with their dogs and they love to have people tell them how smart their dogs are. And you know the whole research endeavor is a win-win for everybody. But we've yet to capitalize on it enough and some of that to my mind, having spent a whole career in academe is what you typically see in terms of different schools of thought in academe, which is competition.

Speaker 2: 1:06:38

No, they're wrong. You know, the behaviorists are wrong and the ethologists are right. Or the ethologists are wrong and the behaviorists are right? No, you're both right, you're both right. It's just a different lens for the same behavior, and the thing that I think that's important about ethology is that it's a lens through which the average person is gonna be more able to see yeah, whereas I mean, I've been a teacher pretty much all my life, but trying to teach an average pet owner something about quadrants is, I mean?

Speaker 1: 1:07:19

seriously, folks. I think a lot of us are guilty of that for sure.

Speaker 2: 1:07:25

I mean their eyes glaze over, they don't care. But teaching them that their dog is like their toddler, that's different, I think it's. That's really different.

Speaker 1: 1:07:39

Yeah, it's crucial.

Speaker 2: 1:07:40

Or even somebody else's toddler if they don't have one, and it's a sound paradigm.

Speaker 1: 1:07:46

Yeah, and it's so important for us to be effective trainers and consultants is to be great teachers right, and how we present information and so yeah, so you gave a nice history lesson there of kind of how over again, at least in the US how we've seen dog training evolve over the last few decades. So we went from traditional sort of killer based methods to the big splash that you guys made over in San Francisco looking at operant ABA approaches, moving away from the sort of not that you were there, but the radical behaviors look, of saying dogs are just blank slate, no emotions. And then we bring in the work of looking at emotions and to you were mentioning Dr McClosie's work and Brian Hare's work and cognition labs that are happening everywhere. And now we're seeing other sciences brought in neuroscience.

Speaker 1: 1:08:35

So I guess, to wrap up, what excites you now? Like, if you had to in terms of looking at this multi-disciplinary approach, bring in these different sciences. What's the newest one that you're kind of seeing? That's exciting you in the work you're seeing being brought into the dog training community, especially around aggression too. I know we've kind of taken a broad look at all behaviors. But if there's anything that's top of my view right now. What would it be?

Speaker 2: 1:09:01

It's really exciting for me to see the kinds of things that Claudia Fogasa does with using imitation to shortcut teaching particular behaviors. I'd really like to see that go the next step Because in the way that it's presented now it's really only accessible to people who are already keen about training. It doesn't look obviously applicable to the day-to-day lives of people with their pet dogs and I think it could. I really want to see somebody. If I were 20 years younger, if I were 10 years younger, I would probably try and take it on myself of applying that information, those kinds of learning and interaction with dogs, to pet dogs from puppyhood. I mean, ian Dunbar gave us one revolution in puppy training. He probably invented what we think of now as puppy classes and he certainly believes he did. I love Ian, so he published my book. But I think we're ready to start thinking about how we can apply those discoveries, those ethological discoveries, to how people interact with puppies from the beginning.

Speaker 2: 1:10:35

It can't be something that is only accessible in adult dogs. That's ridiculous. It cannot be. The only rational explanation that I can come up with for puppies not being transparently imitating. Things that people do constantly is that it gets extinguished because nobody pays any attention. It's like Greyhound's sitting. It gets extinguished because I'm sure when they're puppies they sit all the time as much as other puppies, but nobody pays any attention. Almost every other dog on the planet has some kind of reinforcement history for sitting, but nobody pays any attention to puppies imitating. I think it's the next frontier and it has the huge advantage of being intuitive for human beings because it's like children.

Speaker 1: 1:11:24

You just tied it all together beautifully there. So anybody who's not familiar with Claudia Fugaz's work is do as I do. It involves imitating and mimicry and social facilitation aspects to it too, but it's really fascinating stuff. Just to add on to what Jen is saying, you can give your puppies or even adult dogs learn to follow what you're doing in the behaviors you're exhibiting, or even, let's say it's a dog that's having a tough time learning how to increase distance from a stimulus, that, without displaying those agonistic or aggressive behaviors, we can teach them how to move away from that, because some dogs are really terrible about it. We can teach them, hey, we can actually follow, maybe move. Look at what I'm doing. If we create that relationship, then there's that relationship aspect to consider their emotions. It becomes much more broad than just like, hey, let's click and reinforce the behavior of moving away. Not that there's anything wrong with that, there's, of course, benefits to that. But it kind of reminds me. It takes me back to it.

Speaker 1: 1:12:22

I remember I was at a conference very positive reinforcement based conference and there was a demonstration on clicker training. One of the questions was if you had one thing to tell trainers to stop doing it, what would it be? And the presenter was like it would be a stop talking to your dogs. And it just hit me for saying it just saddened me so much. I'm like stop talking to our dogs. Why would I want to stop talking to my dogs?

Speaker 1: 1:12:44

But obviously it was in the context if you want to learn really good clicker training, mechanics in shaping and something like that. So I had it out of context in my mind when he said stop talking to your dogs. But obviously that's not meant to just completely stop talking to dogs. But it just comes back to this. I think it's something we don't think about enough in terms of how we work with our dogs, not just training, but our relationships and just how much of an impact we can make to not just the mechanics of things. It should be more about the relationship, the emotions. So, yeah, that's just, I think, a great way to wrap up the episode, but I'd love to give the listeners a chance to learn more about where they can find you and kind of what the work you're up to next is, janice.

Speaker 2: 1:13:27

I am at the National Canine Research Council, which is actually based in upstate New York, and we look at I was going to say we don't produce original research but we sort of do. We used to think we weren't going to but we've actually done some survey papers but we look at relationships between dogs and people and particularly with what happens when there are difficulties in those relationships and how people perceive those difficulties. I think we've come very strongly to the conclusion that you have to talk about it as a relationship.

Speaker 1: 1:14:10

You're past books. You cannot simply look at a dog and understand his behavior.

Speaker 2: 1:14:15

That's not how domestic dogs function. Their behavior is inextricably bound up with ours. So that's what we try and look at and how to help people think about having those relationships be as fulfilling and satisfying and peaceful as possible.

Speaker 1: 1:14:32

Excellent, and do you want to mention your past books that we were talking about during the show?

Speaker 2: 1:14:37

Oh, I wrote a popular book a long, long time ago called Dogs Bite. But Balloons and Slippers Are More Dangerous. It's still in print and is still pretty current, although there's been some research that has added to that. If you look at the National Canine Research Council website, you'll see various other position papers that I've authored about dog bites, some about the relationship between breeds and behavior and a lot of information about all kinds of research. We try to be kind of a source for media, for regular people, for researchers, on the scholarly research on how dogs interrelate with people, how dogs and people get along, don't get along, how they relate to people and why. Because it's a profoundly important connection in many, many cultures in the world, certainly in the United States, where almost half of us share our lives with dogs. So it's a huge connection and we want to help people think of that and see it as harmoniously and in as fulfilling a way as possible.

Speaker 1: 1:15:54

Excellent. Well, thank you for all the work you're doing there, as well as the rest of the team at NCRC. There's some brilliant folks contributing to that and it's I will second it's just such a wonderful resource for all of those topics you were just mentioning. So I will, of course, as usual for the listeners, link to those in the show notes. So you'll see those links in the show notes for this episode. Janice, thank you so much. It was wonderful talking with you and, as always, I've learned so much.

Speaker 2: 1:16:19

Absolute pleasure to have a chance to talk with you, Michael. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Speaker 1: 1:16:24

I love these conversations with amazing contributors to our industry. Janice certainly is one of those contributors, and I can't thank her enough for sharing her knowledge, as well as for all the work she's doing at the National Canine Research Council. And don't forget to head on over to aggressivedogcom for more information about helping dogs with aggression, from the Aggression in 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.