The Bitey End of the Dog
A podcast dedicated to helping dogs with aggression issues. Michael Shikashio CDBC chats with experts from around the world on the topic of aggression in dogs!
The Bitey End of the Dog
From Training to Welfare: A Shift in Thinking with Kim Brophey
What if many dog behavior problems aren't actually problems at all, but symptoms of unmet welfare needs? In this thought-provoking conversation with applied ethologist Kim Brophey, we explore how the LEGS model (Learning, Environment, Genetics, Self) has evolved to reshape our understanding of canine behavior and welfare in modern environments.
Kim explains why behavioral diversity serves as both a critical welfare need and a powerful measurement tool. When dogs can express a wide range of natural behaviors, from foraging and exploration to appropriate hazard management...with agency and autonomy, they thrive. Yet in today's captive environments, many dogs lack these opportunities, leading to what we label as "problem behaviors."
The discussion takes us deep into the five domains model of animal welfare and how it applies to our companion dogs. While we've generally excelled at meeting biological needs like nutrition and health, we've significantly neglected the fourth domain of behavioral interactions and the natural living needs that are fundamental to a dog's wellbeing. This creates a mismatch between a dog's genetic design and the environment they actually live in.
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In the season finale of the Bitey End of the Dog, I have the pleasure of chatting with my good friend, kim Brophy about the evolution of the legs model and how it's shaping our understanding of dog behavior and welfare. We explore how many behavior problems are actually symptoms of unmet needs and why a more holistic approach is essential in today's world. We also discuss the importance of behavioral diversity as a welfare indicator, the role of secure attachment in the human-animal bond and the ethical challenges of modern breeding practices. And ultimately, we reflect on how dogs help reconnect us with nature and with ourselves. Kim is an applied ethologist and accomplished behavior consultant and trainer who has been working with dogs and their families for over 25 years. Her legs model of integrated canine science has been embraced internationally as her book Meet your Dog and market Disrupting Applied Ethology, family Dog Mediation Course and the Dog's Truth Documentary continue to catalyze a worldwide initiative to welcome in a welfare-first approach to our canine relationships and professional work.
Speaker 1:And before we jump into today's episode, a quick heads up If you're looking to learn more about helping dogs with aggression issues, head over to AggressiveDogcom, because we've got something for everyone. For pet pros, there's the Aggression in Dogs Master Course, which is the most comprehensive course available on aggression anywhere in the world, packed with expert insights and CEUs For dog guardians. Check out Real Life Solutions, a practical course for everyday challenges like leash reactivity and dog-to-dog aggression. And if you want full access to expert webinars, live mentor sessions and exclusive discounts, the Ultimate Access membership is just $29.95 a month. You'll also find info on the 2025 Aggression to Dogs Conference happening in Charlotte this September. That can all be found at aggressivedogcom. Check it out.
Speaker 1:After the show. Hey everyone, welcome to this season finale of the Bitey End of the Dog. I'm here with my good friend, kim Brophy. Kim's been on the show a couple times. We've done a lot over the years together, so I'm really excited to jump into this episode. We're going to dive into what she's been up to now and what's top of mind for her. So welcome to the show, kim.
Speaker 2:Thanks, mike, it's really fun to be back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's great to have you here and I want to jump into one of the first episodes we had. We were talking about legs, the legs model, so learning, environment, genetic, self, which was groundbreaking to the industry, and it's evolved a little bit and some of your thoughts have evolved, I should say, since then. So let's talk about what you've been up to these days and how it's developed over the last few years and your mindset around it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you know it's interesting because legs was kind of born out of my frustration, over the course of a decade or more, of feeling like we were misunderstanding dog behavior problems, right. So in that misunderstanding of what we were looking at, kind of going about our interventions in a way that wasn't necessarily going to get to the root of whatever was going on for that dog. So a lot of that has been just us appreciating that bigger picture and being able to contextualize behavior in that ultimate framework like we would for any other captive species, right, we've been busy swallowing some bitter pills for the last three years and trying to kind of like smooth that experience of swallowing that reality that like, oh my gosh, like our dog's lives have really changed in the last few decades and they are increasingly captive and you know they are having behavior problems as a result of that, and so how can we understand a given dog and what's going on for them? By breaking down those legs and understanding the whole picture of their phenotype, right. So that's where things were at and, frankly, before we put all of that out, it felt like the industry had been really uncomfortable really even looking at that, you know, and so I'm quite positively encouraged by the progress we've made in just the last few years in terms of people acknowledging that this is a problem, acknowledging that behavior problems can be symptoms of welfare problems and we need to do a better job meeting needs.
Speaker 2:So one of the fair criticisms, in a sense, but also it's just a matter of timing and evolution that we've had of you know, our platform has been like well, you know, it's so problem focused.
Speaker 2:They're talking about, like these are all problems that we're having, because dogs are having these problems and we need to understand the predicament for what it is and break it down.
Speaker 2:But but what do we do about it?
Speaker 2:Right, and from the very first moment that I put the legs course out, I kind of invited to all of the students I need your help figuring out what we do about this.
Speaker 2:I'm going to be painting a picture of these problems that dogs are having and I don't have all the answers yet, right, and so I need you, industry, to contribute to this conversation. And so that's very much happened and people have shown up in spades to throw their hat in the ring and be part of this collective collaboration, this very much grassroots movement to do better for dogs and figure out what that looks like. And so at this point, we're actually ready to go to the next step in the industry and become much more practical about what it looks like to apply modern animal welfare models and science to the benefit of our pet dogs. And so that's what I've been working on for 2025 and presenting at all of these major conferences to invite the industry into the nuts and bolts of that, so that we can start changing what it looks like for pets in homes, in our businesses and in our communities in order to meet their needs better in a concrete way, based on that animal welfare science.
Speaker 1:So let's talk more about that. The welfare let's define that first of all, just for the audience, how do you define that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know, welfare is definitely something that, depending on what field you're looking at, you'll get different definitions if you just throw that into Google. But from the animal welfare science perspective we can understand that as the five freedoms having evolved into the five domains. It's basically the same thing just with a lot more important nuance and understanding. But essentially, you know, we have these kind of biological functioning domains of welfare. So there's considered these three orientations at this point, biological functioning being the first. We've done a pretty good job with pet dogs and loving homes with that. So that's their nutrition, the physical comfort of their environment, not so much what it affords them behaviorally, but just like it's a safe, appropriate kind of environment for them and then their health, right. So those are the biological functioning kinds of elements of the five domains and that's one orientation. Then we have the natural living or the behavioral interactions element. So there's that orientation of like, what is the animal able to do in terms of interactions with the environment, other animals, people, and how does that then give them the opportunity to follow through on those inborn kind of highly motivated behaviors for foraging, hazard avoidance, reproductive and social behaviors? Right, how can they be who they are in the environment.
Speaker 2:So that fourth domain is really the natural living orientation. That's where we're frankly failing the most. And what's really wonderful with the kind of updated five domains model that wasn't so much available in the five freedoms model, although it was referenced, is the idea that all of those things of biological functioning and natural living that populates the mental state or the affective state of the animal, which is the fifth domain, and so, even though I think it's on our radar to be concerned with the affective state and I think for any conscientious professional like that's something that we're all working towards we haven't really appreciated what that means in terms of, particularly, again, that natural living, that fourth domain of behavioral interactions. We haven't been populating it based on the animal's phenotype, like they do for other captive species. And so welfare is this basically it's the effective state, is the animal's welfare state. But what's under the hood of that is all that biological functioning and natural living.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about how we measure that more so, because I think that's one of the topics that come up how do you know?
Speaker 2:How do?
Speaker 1:you operationalize that? How do we know what the animal might be feeling from an effective state? Or you know what type of behaviors are we looking for, so help us tie some of that together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so, and actually that's it's interesting, because the source, origin of the three orientations in the perspective of animal welfare science was based on that very question, right, so it's like there was a group of individuals that said, well, we know they have good welfare based on biological functioning, right, so as long as they're healthy and they're well fed, they are comfortable in their environment physically, well, then we know they have good welfare. And there's people like, well, do we really know that? What about the affective state, what about the emotions? And then people say, yeah, but how do we know how the animal's feeling? How can we ask them, how about just measuring cortisol, things like that? Is that really telling us enough? Not necessarily right. And then, with the natural living, there was definitely some idea that, like, we can get more information about, you know, how the animal's welfare is based on whether they're doing this behavior or not doing this behavior, etc. But then the focus was really for a while on stereotypical behavior or absence of stereotypical behavior, when we were looking, you know, at that for evidence and so what it's evolved into and what's kind of been relatively recent and somewhat groundbreaking in my opinion, because it's it's a wonderful way for us to appreciate this objectively and kind of accomplish. What you're suggesting we very much need is some kind of something we can sink our teeth into, so to speak, about how to work with this and know if our work is being effective. Is that fourth domain of behavioral interactions? It is both meant to be something we have to meet the needs of as a domain, meant to be something we have to meet the needs of as a domain, and it is also an indice of welfare, and so that became a starting point.
Speaker 2:Like behavior is how we know. It's the evidence of whether all of these other things are functioning cohesively and, furthermore, it's diversity of behavior that will tell us about that animal's welfare state. So, for any given species, there are all of these suites basically ethograms right that are populated specifically for that species, with their foraging behaviors and all the subcomponent emergent motor pattern pieces of all of those behaviors that then get chained together into sequences. You have all of these suites of foraging, hazard avoidance, reproductive, social behaviors that are unique to that particular species, and so when we are looking at an animal that would be in nature, you would see a high level of behavioral diversity, out of necessity, where they would be employing diverse dynamic suites and variations of those behavior, you'd have some evenness across the board. As long as that animal's welfare was good in nature, you're not going to see excessively high representations of one or two specific behaviors that are starting to become a little neurotic, things like that.
Speaker 2:Both because you have natural selection going on, that's selecting against that on the genetic level, and then you have a natural selection happening for those animals in real time the ones that are adapting better, they're going to stay, you know, alive and in the gene pool, the ones that are going to be selected against, and so it's meant to constantly have that best interest of the organism in mind through that process of natural selection.
Speaker 2:So for us, when we're looking at animals in captivity, we want to be able to look at how closely does the environment that this animal is living in now mirror their original or natural environment, the ideal environment for them, so that we have this overlap between that animal's genetic preparedness to solve problems and the problems they're actually facing in captivity, which means they'll be employing all those diverse suites of behavior in order to solve problems and the problems they're actually facing in captivity, which means they'll be employing all those diverse suites of behavior in order to solve those problems in their environment, and it's meant to be done with agency, with autonomy.
Speaker 2:That's how we know right about that diversity of behavior. So it's not how many tricks can I teach my dog, that's diversity of behavior. It's what do they do of their own volition in regards to those suites of behavior and how, how rich is it and how evenly is it distributed? And so that's going to really kind of change the math for us, as we have to look at our own work and say, okay, so what is this dog's diversity of behavior like when I meet them and I start working with them, and what is it like three months after I've put these interventions in place? Have I improved that diversity of behavior or not?
Speaker 1:Let's use an example so we can think what this looks like in application. So let's use this Cavapoo I'm staying with you. So for the listeners, my best friend's Cavapoo staying with us for a week, which is he's away on vacation, so he's, let's just say, vocal and is hyper-vigilant and if we were to put a label on it very much listening all the time for whatever's happening in the world, and we live in a pretty quiet neighborhood but he's letting us know anytime a leaf rustles outside or anything like that. So when we talk about behavioral diversity, so what would I be looking for in terms of you haven't been to my home yet, but picture, you know, like typical suburban home and we've got this dog staying with us. We have another dog, our own dog, and a cat in the environment as well.
Speaker 1:My 18 year old son lives here as well. So talk us through that Like, give us some examples of what you would be thinking, what you'd be looking for. Or let's say you're my consultant and you're like hey, mike, let's see what's going on here. And we want to reduce this sort of hyper-visual and barking at everything sort of anxious. If I was to describe and effective state would be sort of frustrated, kind of fearful of some things, but not really overtly.
Speaker 2:Again, painting a little just like a client would A little character picture here, yep, and so if we're thinking about, you know, first of all we have a toy breed, so they're going to be a little bit more inherently suited to an indoor environment than some other breeds.
Speaker 2:Ideally we would populate the legs. We won't go down a rabbit hole with that. Now It'll take too much time for the sake of this example. Now it'll take too much time for the sake of this example, but we would populate the legs of that dog, you know, get a good learning history, look at their original intended environment, their current environment, how well those things are matching what's going on in their current environment as far as excitability, things that might be, you know, facilitating this or or preventing improvement. Looking at the genetics, looking at the internal conditions of the dog's sex, age, health, things like that, individual personality, etc. And so we would be populating it from that. And then we would be looking at, like, the diversity of behavior. Essentially, you know, we are developing a list which actually by the time this podcast episode comes out should be ready anyway of kinds of examples of behaviors that the professional could go through and check off like is this dog exhibiting this behavior, you know? And so a list of kind of like components of motor behaviors related to foraging, hazard avoidance and management. It's not necessarily a bad thing, hazard management and see like, okay, so what are we seeing with this? Right now? I would wager that when you first did that assessment and you go through and you're looking at like how much diversity of behavior you're getting, you're going to be getting excessive representation of things like hazard avoidance, alert, barking right Like reacting to potential threats in the environment and things like that. So we'd like to see that become more even or diminished. Not that any of it is a problem, but we want to see other behaviors start to take up more space in the scope of that dog's diversity of behavior range. So we'd want to be seeing more foraging behaviors.
Speaker 2:And again, right now, of course, this is on people's radar with enrichment and we're trying to provide things like puzzle feeders and you know puzzle toys and treat dispensers and licky mats and different enrichment activities and doors and all that. And that's wonderful for an enrichment activities indoors and all that and that's wonderful. But one of the things that we've been missing is the fact that the provisions that we're giving them need to be something they can self-serve. So it's. Then we're immediately looking at the indoor environment and maybe even the outdoor environment that this dog routinely has access to, where they can self-serve a nice variety of different kinds of foraging behaviors. Right, foraging is a lot more than just, like you know, sniffing for something and eating it. So, while things like sniffaris and chewing on bones are technically, of course, in that foraging category, also things like digging, you know, things like foot stabs, things like chasing, things like tracking, like foot stabs, things like chasing, things like tracking, things like rooting or rummaging or pulling, you know, there's just so many pieces of those behaviors when we just look at something like a category like foraging, and we want to see as many different kinds of them as we possibly can, and we want it to be something again that the dog can self-serve. So when they feel the motivation to engage in those behaviors, something in the environment is afforded to them, it's provided for them that gives them the chance to do that. And so that's where we have so much work in front of us as an industry, because we can have these lists of all of these behaviors that ideally we want to see represented in our dogs, to know their welfare is optimized.
Speaker 2:But quite frankly, this is the problem between our dog's genetic design and modern environments. We have to to make our lives and their lives easier, honestly, get them out of the house. We've got to get them out in nature more. I took my dogs to a 15-acre fenced sniff spot recently. Absolutely remarkable and what just was so striking. I recorded most of the whole thing because I was just so intrigued just watching them.
Speaker 2:All of the things that we need to be able to afford for dogs in a wonderfully enriched natural environment that you didn't have to design Like.
Speaker 2:They're afforded for them, they're provided for them. They can engage in any number of those suites of behaviors. They have the right signals in the environment, like a scent of a mouse in the tall grass in the field that they can track down and they can do a little digging and rooting and foot stabbing and bright, like the environment invites it, it evokes it, and the more that they're engaging in those behaviors, the more diminished those kinds of neurotic, excessive, frustrated, disoriented sweets of behaviors are going to become. And it's a total mental shift for us, right as professionals. Instead of modifying just the evidence of whatever those unmet needs or the dysfunction is really looking at what we can do for that particular dog in your house while you're working in your fence yard. If you have it in your community, if you've got places, you can go for those hikes, sniff spots, et cetera and, frankly, putting a little more on our shoulders as their caretakers to get creative and motivated about designing these kinds of resources in our communities.
Speaker 1:And another thought that I had was to determine so you mentioned the types of, when we say, behavioral diversity. It could be things like barking and alert barking, you know. So things that are in a negative, balanced effective state versus things that are in a we could argue would be a positive, balanced effective state, like sniffing, foraging, chasing, would you say. That's true, like that's what you're looking for is more behavioral diversity in the positive effective states.
Speaker 2:Yes, and also I think that we have maybe oversimplified the suite of behaviors related to hazard avoidance as necessarily negative.
Speaker 2:So, for instance, like alert barking isn't necessarily a negative effective state as a matter of fact, being able to respond appropriately to potential hazards by investigating the source of them, right, potentially, especially for certain breeds of dogs like we've talked about in the past, say guardian breeds that were particularly developed to step up to the plate, having opportunities to investigate the source of that potential threat, and to potentially step up to that plate in order to draw some kind of boundary, protect a territory.
Speaker 2:That isn't necessarily a negative balance.
Speaker 2:We've talked a lot about how highly reinforcing a lot of those behaviors can be, and so there's some wonderful examples that David Malour, who developed the five domains as the updated five freedoms model, gives about kind of like how you would break it down in terms of what would be positive and what would be negative, what would be detrimental or not, and, frankly, what tips the scale most profoundly isn't whether or not the animal has a moment of facing adversity, for example, or even being a little fearful in response to hearing something, seeing something, experiencing something.
Speaker 2:It's that they have the tools in their toolbox as the animal that they are with the legs, that they have to respond to it in a way that resolves that disruption, that allostatic state that arises because of that event in the environment, so that they can return to homeostasis. So it's that like functional hey, I've got the tools to solve that problem. Whereas what happens in captivity that's so troublesome and really does create that negative balance, is that kind of like the helplessness or the frustration or the confusion where I don't know what to do to solve this problem. I don't have anything available to me to autonomously navigate these conditions.
Speaker 1:Now, how do you navigate the conversational questions that probably would come up here? It's like, okay, how do you know when you're pushing things too much by allowing the animal to problem solve? So you're out with the dog like Chewy and we're saying, okay, this is great, because now he's sniffing more, or maybe he's more interested in exploring the environment versus before. He's just so hyper-visually he couldn't focus on even sniffing, so to speak. But at the same time you're like all right, there's a biker going by and there's something he's going to bark at. So that whole threshold conversation comes up and like, oh, we've got to really isolate the dogs to protect them from going over threshold, experiencing these stressors and sort of what we've seen happen in some parts of the industry, where it's like forming a bubble around the dog which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Speaker 1:It's just that I'm assuming that you might get questions about okay, stress resiliency is a big hot topic these days. And what about hazard avoidance? Where do we allow the dog to experience that and figure things out, versus where we have to step in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's a great question and these are the kinds of things that, as we look at practical application of this, we're going to run into. So, for instance, if we look at how can we provide experiences for the dog in cases where it's available to them to solve their own problems, in a way where they can experience that bounce back right, they can employ whatever natural mechanisms they have in order to get them back to homeostasis when they face something that's scary. So I'll use my sniff spot example yesterday as a wonderful kind of example of what we could give our dogs as routine experiences. So they're facing a little adversity, but it's not the bike situation which I'll get to in just a second. So she, for instance, heard LGDs, livestock guardian dogs on the other side of the pond where we were in the sniff spot. They had goats over there and chickens and guineas and cows and all this and of course, as soon as they see us on the other side of the pond, they're barking. She doesn't know that there's a fence there. She doesn't know that they're not going to come running around the field and attack her. So, as a hazard avoidance response of noticing and alerting to that, I'm able to give her information and start showing and demonstrating in this very safe, controlled environment that, like I have information, I can let you know that that is not something that's dangerous to you, and then you can experiment with your own behavior. If you want to come close to me, you can. If you want to step up to it and investigate it a little bit more and maybe, like, move towards the location of the sound, you can.
Speaker 2:Same thing happened with. She looked over the dock and the pond and she saw her reflection and she thought there was a dog that looked, I guess, just like her, that was coming out from under the dock. So she stepped back and growled right. But then she went around and she wanted to investigate it and look under the dock. And I'm talking to her and giving her information about all that. So the pieces I want to draw attention to there are the natural environment gives them the ability to practice and develop that resilience and that response to hazard avoidance in a way that makes sense to them and it's easier, it's a much lower hanging fruit for them to start building that muscle and so giving also, in addition to that, the information. So we're starting to introduce our social currency and how we can be helpful and we can say I know that that's not a threat, that's just a dog. You know what that means and I can say that you're safe and you can understand what that means so that when we go into that human situation with the bicycle we also have built up a little bit of predictability and your reliance on me and that secure attachment that I have information and I'm going to you know, keep you safe.
Speaker 2:But then to answer that second question about the bike, this is one of the really interesting things that happens for any species in captivity, so not just dogs.
Speaker 2:One of the primary functions and I just heard Ken Ramirez speak on this again at the Assistance Dogs International Conference last week and I love that he brings this into the training conversation repeatedly through KPA and all of his work One of the primary functions for any animal in captivity of training is to bridge that gap between the animal's genetic preparedness to solve the problems in their world and the environment they actually find themselves in, because that's where they're lacking.
Speaker 2:They need a hand, they need us to build the bridge. So I would not say put a dog in modern conditions that they are not prepared to solve the problems in and just let them figure it out with agency. So I love that you bring this up, because these are the kinds of distinctions of the weeds we're going to get into that are really going to be important so that we can say we have to optimize the experiences they have where it's appropriate to give them all that agency. But then when they're in a human set of conditions that they do not have the aptitude and natural proficiency to navigate that we're there giving them information, teaching them skills, teaching them habits and predictability, reinforcing the right responses to things right. That's where training is not only helpful, it's necessary and part of any good welfare program.
Speaker 1:And thinking through this and taking a step back, you mentioned the attachment and the relationship. So obviously in much of this discussion we're assuming there is a relationship between the animal and the handler or the person working with them. Talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 1:And because now we're talking about a lot of things that are hard to measure, hard to like track data on Be like okay, what does it look like? What do we know if the dog is really saying okay, I need some help here, avoiding this hazard, or I can figure it out on my own. So there's a lot of nuances. Some help here, avoiding this hazard, or I can figure it out on my own. So there's a lot of nuances. I think that you know for somebody maybe they're just starting out with their first dog it's going to be a lot of things to juggle right.
Speaker 1:The training mechanics, the getting building the relationship with their dog, recognizing when their dog's behavior is diverse, and all these things we're talking about. Where do you start? Or kind of help us wrap our heads around that part of the conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's interesting because, in part of my own quest to answer that question for myself about how critical is the relationship and the secure attachment relative to our kind of historical transactional model in the dog training industry right, because I was kind of brought up in the field at a time when we were really pushing transactions and mechanical skills as being kind of like where it's at and this isn't a criticism against any one of us that have employed all of that we all have as trainers exactly right, like so things like look at me right or shaping check-ins I mean this is what I did throughout my career. Right, like so things like look at me right or shaping check-ins I mean this is what I did throughout my career. Right, like, we taught all of these behaviors that we create reinforcement criteria for or, in some cases, punishment criteria for, depending on you know what your approach is to these things, and we're trying to shape the connection right Through the application of learning principles. And so, with my last three dogs Casey being for those who you know, don't know about the story she was my heart dog that challenged me and said I don't care about anything in your tool bag. You're going to have to work way harder than that lady these transactions aren't going to do squat for me and she challenged me right to throw away the skills that I developed in that tool bag to figure out what that meant for her. And so I kind of went back to where I'd started in the beginning of my career before I kind of adopted all of those skills and kind of habits, if you will, as a trainer to think about like what is that relationship, what does that actually mean? And so I've been grateful for having people come into the industry, people like Marlene O'Neill-Libergege I know she'll be speaking at the Aggression in Dogs Conference this year who bring in the understanding from the human psychology profession and field and sciences about what secure attachment is and what that looks like. And it doesn't require transactions in the way that we're used to it, right.
Speaker 2:And so long story short, in employing that kind of a model with my dogs being my, you know, short, and employing that kind of a model with my dogs being my you know, three time experiment here with Casey Monk and now Early and doing very little training. So, for instance, I haven't really trained a formal recall, I haven't trained to heal, I haven't trained to check in. I haven't free shaped eye contact, any of that stuff. And in the last year here I have an intact one and a half year old Great Pyrenees, who are textbook wanderers, independent you know, do their own thing, not compliant by definition for those who've worked with a lot of them. And so in this 15 acre sniff spot yesterday it's the largest place I've taken her she didn't know that it's fenced right so she could have at any point, just been like see ya. So without giving any kinds of commands, instructions, directions, shaping, using any kind of criteria for reinforcement, punishment, etc. No tools, nothing. She stayed with me and followed my movements for the whole hour. We were there without me having to ask for it.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying everybody just needs to do this with all their clients' dogs. What I'm trying to do is answer your question to the extent of. I think that we've gotten so into the transactional model that we forget that dogs naturally want to bond socially. We humans are part of that history, so it does complicate it for most other captive species where, for most captive species, we are not and never will be part of their actual social group. Right, with very few exceptions if an animal imprints on someone during their critical period, things like that. But by and large, that's not going to happen, whereas we are part of that social group and I think we miss a lot of opportunities to build up our social currency with our dogs, to demonstrate to them we are someone worth following, listening to, you know, connecting with, keeping track of, so that, like, we don't have to artificially manufacture that in the same way, we think about having a relationship with each other in this world, right, I don't need to shape my friends to hang out with me, right, and to like, I hope, I hope not anyway, I hope they want to be around me and that we have these natural, organic connections.
Speaker 2:I will say I am not blind to the fact that that's not going to happen for a lot of our clients dogs, which is why, again, we as trainers come in and we bridge that gap between that dog social environment and the genetics of what they need socially, because their family, in fact, might not be able to give it to them.
Speaker 2:So part of what I'm also inviting the industry to look at and I'm so excited that some people are already doing it is to redesign service models that, instead of trying to get a client to become someone they're not going to be or turn the social environment into something it will never be. Knowing the dog's lacking in their needs, how can we be that person? How can we pick up a group of dogs every morning, spend six hours with them, fill all of these various needs, including those social needs for secure attachment, and bring home a tired, satisfied dog at the end of the day, you know who truly has great welfare and frankly, that sounds a lot more fun than just working with like 10 clients in a row, like hanging out with dogs and meeting their needs and socially bonding with them. But so that's a very long answer to your question. But I think the secure attachment is very important, but I'm also realistic enough to know that it often doesn't happen and we have to be able to accomplish things in different ways.
Speaker 1:I'm loving how this conversation is going and I want to dive into the future of the industry as well, as you know the models you were just talking about but we're going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors and we'll be right back. Thanks for tuning in. I've got something really special just for podcast listeners. To celebrate the sixth annual Aggression and Dogs conference, I'm offering a limited time bundle deal that includes the Aggression and Dogs master course plus over 30 expert-led webinars on topics like how to break up a dog fight, dog to child directed aggression, fear-based aggression, dog to cat issues, genetics and behavior resource guarding, dog to dog aggression and so much more. You'll learn from some of the most respected experts in our field, including Suzanne Clothier, dr Christina Spaulding, grisha Stewart, laura Monaco, torelli, trish McMillan and Dr Tim Lewis, just to name a few. You'll also get access to live group mentor sessions with me and join a Facebook community over 2,000 professionals all working with aggression cases. The total value of this bundle is over $3,000, but you get everything the full master course, 30 plus webinars, live mentorship and community access for just $595. Only 50 bundles are available and this offer expires on October 31st 2025, or when they sell out. Whichever comes first. Just head to the show notes and click on the link for the Aggression in Dogs Master Course and Webinar Bundle to grab your spot.
Speaker 1:All right, we're back here with Kim Brophy and we're going to dive into the future of our industry, kind of based on what you're talking about there. You had mentioned, you know, a model of imagine just bringing the dogs to that 15-acre sniff spot and giving them their needs or meeting those needs and all the things we've been talking about. So you know when you think about behavior and so many of the behavior issues let's talk about, maybe compulsive behaviors, right? So I've just had Dr Hagar Hazer, who's a veterinary behaviorist, and we were talking a little bit about compulsive behaviors and the treatment for that. You and I have talked about it. You just don't see those compulsive behaviors out in nature because it just doesn't make sense. So part of that treatment, we've always learned that enrichment is a big buzz term for working with compulsive behaviors and really avoiding stereotypies and things like that. So that whole let's get out to that 15-acre place seems like a perfect treatment for lack of a better term, of something that can be a compulsive behavior. So talk more about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so compulsive behaviors, it's really interesting. So Temple Grandin has opened my eyes to this tremendously over the years reading her work, because not only is Temple Grandin an animal scientist, but she's also an individual, as most of your listeners would know, who herself is autistic and has been highly successful in being able to help shed light on the animal experience based on her experience being on the spectrum. She's talked about how, for instance, like we've looked at stereotypical behavior or compulsive behavior as something to be modified right, so it's bad and she talks about the fact that, while it's evidence of some type of potential welfare problem, in many cases it can also be highly adaptive to those individuals when they don't have other mechanisms in order to meet those welfare needs. Think, instead of pathology, drugs and a behavior plan. I think it's important that we step back and we're curious and we say okay, so this is definitely representation of a lower diversity score, because we're getting excessive behavior in this one category, whether that's spinning tail, chasing, pacing, self injurious behaviors, whatever that behavior may be and we want to think about what is that unmet need, or series of unmet needs, based on what we talked about at the beginning of the podcast here about, like the five domains and all of that and kind of try to break that down, do things like try to provide for many more opportunities to get that overlap between that dog's genetics and their environment by taking them to places like those 15 acres right? And I do recognize, by the way, that like cause.
Speaker 2:People bring this to my attention a lot like hey, you live in New York city, you don't have sniff spots around you. I mean, I had to drive an hour yesterday and so I'm just going to say I think we can do better on doing the harder things and getting creative about it. I also think we could reinvent our business models so that in our facilities we have this stuff built in right, so we have like this kind of a space on our property for our facility as opposed to just a warehouse building. But so I think that when we see those behaviors again and we treat in the best way we possibly can, as much as we can at home to minimize it, so giving as many affordances as we can for that diversity of behavior in the home environment or the yard environment, but then again rethinking as professionals what we can for that diversity of behavior in the home environment or the yard environment, but then again rethinking as professionals what we can do in our communities or with our businesses in order to deliver the experience that, frankly, most people are too busy, too overwhelmed to provide on a reliable basis. And I've talked to a couple students lately that have shifted their entire business models in this direction and they love it because they have a much smaller number of highly committed clients who are invested in their dog having this experience and, frankly, they're relieved from having to be able to provide for it themselves.
Speaker 2:We also have talked about that there's going to be some social obstacles here, because that would be a higher cost service that we would be providing. If we're taking a dog for six or eight hours a day or something like that, right to go fulfill their needs for somebody, we may be able to make the money we need to stay afloat with a much smaller number of clients. But what about the clients where? That's a problem? So I think it's important, while we're thinking about this, that we build in things like scholarship slots for our programs, you know, so that people have access to getting their dogs, even if they have lower income, into these kinds of new service models of enriched to where we're going in and we're really designing affordances in the smaller sniff spots particularly that give many more possibilities than just, like you know, half an acre of grass that other dogs have peed on you know, for dogs to be engaging in those behaviors and ideally targeting those kinds of experiences we're giving based on the stereotypical behavior we're seeing.
Speaker 2:So if we're getting, you know, a stereotypical behavior that's rooted in foraging, I'd say that dog needs more foraging experience, right?
Speaker 2:If we're getting a stereotypical behavior, say golden retrievers and late granulomas, things like that, so we've got some self injurious behavior that very well could have some kind of an underlying social unmet need in there, because we know that goes back years ago to the beginning of my degree that I did in college. A woman named Linda Nebbies was involved in animal therapy research and science and started publishing this stuff decades ago about how when we nurture another it's the same event in our body physiologically as when we ourselves are being nurtured. So you take a breed like a golden retriever that's developed for such high sociability with other people and animals, right, and those dogs, when left alone for our normal work days, are going to be at a higher risk of feeling that social deficit because of that historical selective pressure for sociability. And so the lit granuloma behavior can be something that self-injurious behavior develops because they're trying to meet their own needs and feel connected and nurtured. So for that dog we may design very different kinds of experiences, socially kind of directed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's super interesting to think about it that way. Okay, I want to expand on this but I'm going to come back to it because I want to talk about it's a podcast on aggression. So when we think about aggressive behaviors, and when I'm saying the barking, lurching, growling, biting behaviors, but the function of increasing distance from or eliminating a threatening stimulus or protecting a resource, kind of those type of aggressive behaviors, would you say that they're always a function of something missing in those domains or something related to the domains with the welfare concern or not always Aggression in general? Yeah, just aggressive behaviors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, not always. Okay, yeah, not always yeah, because a lot of it is our poor dogs. So artificial selection, right, our breeding. Let me just contextualize this for a second. So in nature, nature selects for what works and is adaptive in the best interest of the organism period and the species period and the ecosystem period, but it's in the best interest of the players, okay. So when something's not working it gets selected against and it won't continue to show up with any kind of prevalence, you know. Up with any kind of prevalence, you know, in that population. So enter humans.
Speaker 2:Humans selected for what we wanted, whether or not it was in the best interest of the dogs. So we selected for behaviors that were functional, for things that would help our survival and, frankly, we selected against a lot of the rules of thumb for, like adaptability in animals, economy of behavior, for instance, self-preservation. There's some breeds that exemplify a complete contradiction to both of those rules in nature, you know, you take something like a terrier that'll go down into a badger hole and risk life and limb with complete perseverance, you know, because that's what we've selected them to do, risking all self-preservation, not regarding any economy of behavior, right, and we can see that this is part of the additional complexity with our dogs is that we've bred them for all these behaviors that they've now inherited in the case of many of these specific specialized working types of dogs, and now we don't want the behaviors, but the dogs have inherited them, which, if we were looking at other captive species of animals, that would mean that we would want to provide an outlet of expression for that natural behavior and the animal's highly motivated to perform it, which means by definition in animal welfare science we're supposed to provide for an outlet for expression of that behavior if they are highly motivated to perform it. But it's much more complicated with pet dogs because a lot of the behaviors they're highly motivated to perform are not in their own interest to be engaging in at that level and I had a good conversation with Sarah Strumming recently on her podcast about this, because we were talking about how her experience everyone knows that she's an expert with herding dogs and particularly border collies she's really asserting they need to have opportunities, yes, to do this high intensity partnership work with their human handlers, but, frankly, herding dogs for their own mental health need to dog more and herding dog less, because it is we've created dopamine junkies.
Speaker 2:We've created dogs that exhibit certain quote unquote aggressive behaviors. At least that's how we experience it. Maybe that's a herding dog trying to control the movements in their environment, which then includes, like ankle biting, biting bikers, joggers, people on skateboards, etc. It's definitely quote unquote aggression, but it's really a misplaced behavior that we selected into that type of dog. Then again, you're getting that dysfunction between the animal as an organism as a key to the lock of their environment, and so that's why we're getting this friction.
Speaker 2:And so in those cases like I think, we really have to get very discerning, recognizing dogs are presenting a problem for this well-established model because of the level of artificial selection involved in all of these different phenotypes, and so we're going to have to be able to split hairs and use critical thinking and say you know, so they may be aggressive just because we've bred them to be aggressive in that capacity, and it's maybe just showing up in a way we now find unacceptable in the modern age. How can we provide for some sufficient version of expression for what we bred that animal for, so that they feel like they are fulfilling some sense of purpose? If we've bred them to fulfill a sense of purpose, some of these dogs really desperately need it. So what can that look like? In a way that's safe, acceptable, appropriate and not actually increasing mental health problems for the dogs by making them more neurotic and intense? It's messy.
Speaker 1:Hmm, I have a lot of thoughts in my head and I'm trying to distill them down into the next question, but you know it has me thinking. So we've talked a lot, you and I, in the past, about we're seeing all of these symptoms sort of rooted in all of this, that we've been talking about meeting the needs, what we've selected for the legs model, and you think about the human healthcare industry, right, so we see it revolves around treating the symptoms.
Speaker 1:It's not that we don't look at the causes, but much of the problems we face are because of some things we do as humans.
Speaker 1:Just like with the dogs that are living with us, that are causing these issues, and we're always just looking at treating the symptoms. Especially the dog training industry is very much a symptom treatment type of approach and it makes me think about my son. You know so my son is, he's 18. Some of the listeners might not know I have two boys, but I have one, my younger one's 18. And he is really super into being healthy, which is not something that was common when I was growing up. I know that I mean we maybe did some sports worked out, we knew a little bit about health, avoid smoking, that kind of stuff. But I mean this younger generation and I see it with some of his friends too they're very much into being very healthy to avoid the stuff that they're seeing.
Speaker 1:you know some of the things that they know they can avoid health issues from. Obviously, smoking, drinking, those are the big ones. But you know he watches what he eats, he's very health conscious, he exercises, but not to the point of obsession. They also recognize that these things can become obsessive, especially in a younger generation. It's fascinating to me just how knowledgeable the youth are from talking with each other, absorbing some things on social media and also having to learn how to filter what's you know possibly damaging and what's positive information as well.
Speaker 1:So it just has me thinking about the dog training industry, think about dogs in general and everything we've been focusing on and something like you had mentioned. Yeah, let's get a place where dogs can exhibit these natural behaviors, so sniff spots and things like that. But it also has me all wondering that's somewhat of a treatment plan for a much more bigger issue, a systemic issue in how we own dogs. So long-winded question there, right? Yeah, just thinking off the top of my head here. But what do we need to be thinking about as humans in general, with how we're bringing dogs into this world and how we can work on tackling some of these behavior issues?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that and it kind of brings it back full circle to where I'm really. I've got my sights set in the long term. So the One Health and One Welfare models which have been introduced in recent years and are increasingly getting more attention on an international scale recognize the intrinsic connection between all of our species. So when one of us isn't doing so well and we're closely connected to other species, then it's going to bleed over and affect others, right, we're not in silos. And so, in light of all of that, it ties in so much with, frankly, the cornerstone of my original research, starting from when I was in college and the books I was reading when I started to work on the writing of my own book, meet your Dog, looking at my son who at the time had entered the school system and some of what seemed like the ridiculous expectations and the poor environmental affordances for a five-year-old boy who was entering all of those new constraints, and how much he wasn't afforded and how that quote showed up as behavior problems, right. And so I've been thinking about and talking about this in this direction for a long time, with, frankly, us looking at dogs as kind of a canary in the coal mine, like they're a bit of an indicator species for us, if we really want to look at it that way, because they are living in our lives, in our homes and our environments with us and when they are struggling as much as they're struggling, we and those around us probably are having a little bit of a hard time too. And with all of the emerging data about the deteriorating mental health of our population, particularly our children, our youth, we really need to look at what has gotten away from us in the modern world in terms of the lives we're living, because a lot of our ailments are the result of us not having our five domains met, particularly again in that fourth domain with natural living, and people like Gabor Mate or Richard Louv have been talking about this for some time, you know, talking about nature deficit disorder, nature therapy for his treatments for depression and anxiety, things like that. We don't realize, or maybe we don't remember, that our entire nervous systems are perceptions of the signals in the environment.
Speaker 2:The behavioral responses we have for foraging, hazard avoidance, reproductive and social are stifled and inhibited and unmet to the point that it causes all kinds of dysfunction for us. Great example is over shopping, overspending, overeating, over drinking all of that right. So what that is is that is a great example of the dysfunction between our design as a species and an organism in the environment we're in now. The way we've been designed as hunters and gatherers historically was made for a world that wasn't a world of plenty, and I can order it on Grubhub or Amazon or you know, like DoorDash, and I can have me a biscuit from Bojangles in five minutes at the front door. And so we're not engaging in the behaviors that are respectively involved for what was that foraging? And we're not also doing the dynamic things that would be involved as a social species. So we would have been doing that socially with others. We would have been, as part of that suite of foraging behavior, processing those resources that we acquired together and making things, mending things you know like.
Speaker 2:So all of these things that are kind of under the hood of who we are. We're alone in our houses, sedentary, sterile environments, on these computers, not doing those things, and then we wonder why we feel so bad. You know, because we're trying to get our own modified versions frankly, probably stereotypies in a lot of senses, right, doom scrolling or whatever where we're like we're getting our dopamine in different ways, like a dog might be adapting by getting their dopamine met through engaging in a stereotypical behavior, but the big picture writing on the wall is that we have a world that is increasingly developing in a direction that we are not and our dogs are not well adapted to. And so, in the case of humans, we know that the environmental evolution has outpaced our biological evolution, and so we can either slow down the pace of the development and hope that our biology can catch up a little bit, but there's all kinds of other obstacles to our own natural selection for a variety of reasons. With modern medicine, etc.
Speaker 2:With our dogs, frankly, we have an opportunity to use the same thing that caused the problem to help them out of the problem through artificial selection for dogs that are coping well in the modern world.
Speaker 2:So people like Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods his wife they're working at the Duke Canine Cognition Center. They've been working with the service dog assistance dog community in their breeding programs. There's been a few papers recently, or articles I should say, that have been published about their opinion that we potentially could be in a new wave of dog evolution based on breeding for the world. We have, based on these service dog models and having just presented at the Assistance Dogs International Conference looking at the dogs that are developed for that particular work, they have to be selecting these dogs to be able to cope better in modern conditions, because otherwise they won't be successful as service dogs, and so that provides a new opportunity for us to have discussions on the whole suite of solutions of breeding for the world we have, so that we don't have this dysfunction, and that's a huge part of the conversation we need to be having.
Speaker 1:Well, let's have more of that conversation. Where do we go from here then, with a perfect world that you could design for how we bring dogs into our lives? Because there's lots of voices in this equation. Right now we have, you know, the shelters overfilling, puppy mills, still existing backyard stuff going on. I mean, there's a lot of voices in this and there's a lot of money. Frankly, yeah.
Speaker 1:So in a perfect world, what is it going to look like? So we can say Mike and Kim are going to be out of jobs because we don't have problem behaviors anymore?
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, as much as it's unpopular. I think that we have to play the long game on breeding for the world that we have now and will have in five years, 10 years, starting now with the gene pool, being very intentional about selecting dogs, even if they're not part of assistance dog programs. Sue Sternberg has been saying this for years and I couldn't agree with her more the dogs that are coping really well. If we have the opportunity to keep those genes in the gene pool, we should. We need projects like what Jessica Heckman is doing with the Functional Dog Collaborative and Carolyn Kelly is doing with the Companion Dog Project, that are developing dogs for the particular context that we are preparing to provide for them and doing that with the dog's interest in mind. Right, so that we're not accidentally Frankensteining more dogs that are going to be maladaptive because we're experimenting with dangerous suites of genes that are already a little neurotic. Right, like I would personally like to see the values of our selection for the dogs that we're breeding being things like resilience at the top of the list, right, dogs that just are highly sociable, really low resource guarding, like Sue always says, high level of resiliency and low level of sensitivity and all of these modern environmental conditions, things like that, and I know that that's very disrupting to the narrative that we have about adopt, don't shop, which it's not that I disagree with that, but the reality is breeders are breeding, breeders are breeding. Breeders are gonna keep breeding. So we need to inform what they're breeding rather than say never get a dog from a breeder, it's gonna happen.
Speaker 2:No-transcript homes, because the restrictions necessary to manage them with some of these very severe and dangerous behavior problems are going to be counterproductive to our aims of providing that kind of agency, again, something like sniff spots.
Speaker 2:Really well-designed sniff spots, however, can be a really important intervention for those dogs, because if we've got sniff spots, they don't have to go to the dog park, they can have that private, secure area for an hour and we can work that into their regular provisions. So we have to think about what do we have on the table in the gene pool now and how can we address all of these different sub pockets of needs for those dogs and then keep dogs out of shelters, hopefully by shifting this model towards treating the disease, not the symptoms, right, because we have a cycle of dogs coming into shelters and then going back out and failing in homes and coming back again because we're not giving people the information they need on how to provide for the complete welfare of those dogs. So it's a complicated, there's lots of pieces but, like you know, I think we have to address it from a few different directions.
Speaker 1:Yes, I 100% agree, and there's so many directions we need to address it from. And it has me thinking about, let's say again, in a perfect world, we have, you know, the Kim Brophy breeding program and we have, like perfect genetics. You know, in terms of behavior, we're looking for that, breeding dogs that are just going to adapt really well to our modern society, our high rise apartments in New York City, that kind of thing. But thinking through this long-term, let's say we get that goal. We have all these beautiful dogs, but, ethically speaking, where are we going with this when we think about for the thousands and thousands of years dogs have been with us and the amount of freedom they've had and what they've been able to experience? Yes, we could breed for a dog that can live in an apartment in New York City, get very little sunlight, hang out with somebody while they're gaming all day and seem to be okay. But, you know, is that what we really want to envision for dogs?
Speaker 2:You know I'm immediately thinking about like Orwell and 1984 and like Brave New World. I mean like I don't like it. You know, if I'm totally honest with you, I don't like it and I think at some point we have to stop and say are we just doing this for us and have we robbed this animal of their integrity accidentally? Because even through that artificial selection we're hijacking the biology of the animal. We are right, we're creating what we want again, and if we do that with the thought of doing it for their welfare, I think that's an improvement from where we are right now.
Speaker 2:But traveling to these other countries, as I know you do as well, and seeing dogs in their natural environments and seeing how incredibly adaptive and functional it is and what a wonderful life it is for an animal to just fill their ecological niche In the simplest of ways, it actually should be a birthright right. That's literally how our planet works is. Organisms are born as the individual genotype, then complicated by the phenotype interacting with their experience in the environment as an individual. But they're born into a niche in which they fit most of the time, and if they're not, they won't survive. And then we've solved that problem in that manner.
Speaker 2:And so when I think of it that way and I'm just observing nature and I'm realizing that we've got a structure, an orchestra of elements, the way that nature is supposed to work, and we have offended it, we have disrupted it. We are now living in a new epoch called the Anthropocene, where it is literally defined by the human effect on the planet and, sadly, I don't think it's going to stop right. This is something that, in the middle of the night, I wake up and I wonder whether all of my work is for naught and everything we're doing is for naught, because we just continue in this direction, blind, it seems, and uncaring to the consequences. As humans, we just can't stop ourselves with doing more and modifying more and building more and just erasing nature's systems. And so at a certain point, I think what's going to happen because nature has checks and balances is we're just going to get bopped off and we'll find we don't get to play in the sandbox anymore.
Speaker 2:And then it'll start over in some new epoch that we can't even fathom. This is all very sad to think about, but I think the reality of the situation is that's where we're at. That's the moment in history guys Like and it's not conspiracy theorists to just call a spade a spade. At this point, we're in trouble, and I think that's one of the things that's so valuable about our dogs. If there's a hope in hell of us saving ourselves and our planet, I think the dogs invite us to appreciate it, because they are at our feet. They're the bridge to that natural world when we forget it exists. They're an animal in our living room inviting us back out into nature to remember our own birthright, just whether or not we take them up on it.
Speaker 1:I think that's an amazing way to wrap up the show. I do want to give the listeners a chance, though, to hear what you're up to next. You are speaking at the Aggression in Dogs Conference, as well as a few other conferences this year, so tell people where they can find you and what you're up to next.
Speaker 2:Of course I'll be at Aggression in Dogs and I'll also be at APDT in November in Richmond and, for those folks who are listening in Australia, I'll be virtually presenting at the APDT Australia conference in October as well.
Speaker 2:But I'm going to be continuing to collaborate with members of our community. I still invite people to take the comprehensive legs course, because if you don't understand the legs of the dogs you're working with and are able to kind of acknowledge and comprehend who they are and the diversity that we have in these dogs and its modern population right now, applying the five domains model and measuring that diversity of behavior is going to be much trickier to be able to implement, and there's amazing collaborations that are happening within that as well as throughout the industry. I mean I'm just seeing wonderful new things developing as we're shifting our focus and having a new paradigm, and so I just would invite people to continue to show up, get involved, take up your component of what is a grassroots movement that we all can be involved in, so they can check us out at familydogmediationcom and see what we're up to as that continues to be updated.
Speaker 1:Amazing Kim. Thank you so much for coming on the show again. It was a great conversation and I'm looking forward to seeing you at the conference.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks you too, Mike.
Speaker 1:It's always an absolute pleasure to chat with Kim and explore how the legs model is transforming the way we understand dog behavior and welfare. Kim's passion and clarity make even the most complex topics feel approachable and deeply relevant to anyone living or working with dogs. And if you're ready to go deeper into understanding and helping dogs with aggression, visit aggressivedogcom. Whether you're a professional or a dedicated dog guardian, you'll find everything from the Aggression and Dogs Master Course, which is the most comprehensive program of its kind, to expert-led webinars, informative articles and the Aggression and Dogs Conference happening from September 26th through 28th 2025 in Charlotte, north Carolina, with both in-person and virtual options. And don't forget to check out our Help for Dogs with Aggression bonus episodes, which are solo shows where I walk you through real world strategies for issues like resource guarding, fear-based aggression, territorial behavior and more. Just hit, subscribe or head to the show notes for more info. Thanks for listening in and, as always, my friends.