#154 - Dog Training Advice: Find What Works

You scroll.
One trainer says never let your dog look at the trigger.
Another says your dog has to look at the trigger.
Both sound confident. Both sound science-y. Now you’re more confused than when you started.

In this episode, Emily and Claire talk about why dog training advice feels like such a mess, and how “good” advice can still be the wrong advice when it’s ripped out of context and handed to every dog on the internet.

This is your reminder that there is no single right answer. The goal isn’t perfect protocol compliance. It’s figuring out what actually works for your dog, your brain, and your real life.

If dog training content has ever made you feel overwhelmed, guilty, or like you somehow missed the orientation… you’re not alone.

TLDL (too long, didn’t listen): 3 Key Takeaways 

1️⃣ Confident delivery does not equal correct advice – Someone sounding sure on the internet tells you nothing about whether their advice fits your dog, your skills, or your situation.

2️⃣ Context matters more than the technique – The same strategy can help one dog, stress out another, and quietly blow up a third. That doesn’t mean the tool is magic or trash. It means context is doing the heavy lifting.

3️⃣ Content made for the masses misses you as an individual – You don’t need to push through discomfort just because the internet says a protocol “should” work.

For the full episode show notes, including the resources mentioned in this episode, go here.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Allie: Welcome to Enrichment for the Real World, the podcast devoted to improving the quality of life of pets and their people through enrichment. We are your hosts, Allie Bender...

[00:00:30] Emily: ...and I'm Emily Strong...

[00:00:32] Allie: ...and we are here to challenge and expand your view of what enrichment is, what enrichment can be and what enrichment can do for you and the animals in your lives. Let's get started.

 Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Enrichment for the Real World, and I want to thank you for rating, reviewing, and subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts.

[00:00:53] Emily: You're scrolling through your feed on whatever social media app you hang out on, all of a sudden you stumble on some trainer giving advice and they're basically telling you, you're doing your dog all wrong. But then you scroll down and another trainer says the exact opposite, and then another trainer says the exact opposite.

And maybe this is especially devastating because the people whose advice is conflicting are both people that you really like and listen to a lot and follow. So you're like, ah, which one of my heroes do I listen to? Today we're diving into why training advice can be confusing, how to separate opinion from fact, from science, from evidence, and how to find guidance that actually works for you and your pet. If you've ever felt, I don't know, like overwhelmed, frustrated, worried, imposter syndrome, guilty, ashamed, any of those like gross negative emotions about making the wrong choice for your pet. This episode is for you. For pros this is just a reminder, a maybe not so gentle reminder, but a loving reminder nonetheless that our work as guides matters a whole lot, probably more than ever.

Now, as things are changing in our culture and our society. So by the end of this episode, you will learn how to spot reliable training advice. Avoid common pitfalls and see why joining a community of science-based and enrichment focused professionals Claire, do you wanna kick this off with your experience with Olivia when you were first starting out?

[00:02:34] Claire: When I first got Olivia, because I knew when we were adopting her that I wanted to be a trainer or somehow involved in the dog world, in the behavior sense, I tried to do all the things that I thought were quote unquote right.

I read, I remember reading. Patricia McConnell's puppy book for guidance to make sure me and my husband were on the exact same page about how potty training was gonna go. I took this was also to develop my dog trainer skills, but I took the Karen Pryor Foundations course. So I was like, not how to mark accurately and reinforce my dog for the things that I need her to do and the skills that I need to teach her.

And conversely, I remember taking her on her, one of her first walks, she came home and would get so mad that she wouldn't walk, and I would get so frustrated. And it's funny to me at this point, looking back, because of course, that's one of the first things we talk about with puppies when you take them out on leash or outside in general, is like, don't expect to walk.

Expect to stand there and then have to redirect them from eating something and then let them bark at this thing and it's just chaos and that's how it's supposed to be in the beginning. And I had no concept of that. And I remember reaching out to a couple or professionals that I knew with, big long paragraph emails that everybody's terrified to receive.

Asking a million questions and it was a lot. I went through like the puppy blues that everybody goes through of just feeling mass overwhelmed. She was my first my dog. So that was like a big turning point for me in being fully responsible for this little creature. And yeah, it was, you Google things online and there's 40 different answers.

And 10 different videos. Some of them are two minutes, some of them are 20 minutes, and you pick the two minute ones because you just wanna speed along and get everything done. And it's incredibly overwhelming to try to suss out what applies to me, what is applicable to my situation, because so much of the info out there is good information.

But what happens to happen is you have to know how to apply it to the right situations, to the right animals. And I tell clients a lot, especially when I get clients that clearly have a really great understanding of foundational like learning principles and have taught their dogs some really wonderful things and have been doing a wonderful job, but are getting a little stuck.

I usually say, you have the information, you just need me to help tell you what applies to you and what doesn't and what to do in this situation and what not to, because there's so much that you have looked up and taken in already. So, yeah, it's, it was a lot when I, when I first got her and there were a lot of things that I felt like I should do with her and that she should be able to do and needed to be a certain way.

I think even still, I have times where I have to be like, that's not gonna be Olivia's thing, and that's okay. She's a unique little lady. But I think overall having to get so much information and perspectives and then just work through it was probably the biggest learning experience for me or as to what was very applicable and realistic and what I needed to tweak or realize might not be our, our thing.

[00:05:56] Emily: Yeah, I think a really good point that you brought up is that a lot of the advice was. Not intrinsically bad advice, like it had the potential to be helpful not necessarily going to be advice that safe or appropriate to give everybody in every context. And, a lot of times things can even potentially be good, but there's not a lot of evidence behind them.

So people are trying things that they, that have a, a low probability of being effective, if it's something that's relatively risk-free. And the problem with that stuff is that you're then. Spending time and energy on something that may not work, which can increase caregiver burden, it can increase adherence, fatigue. So then by the time they finally get to something that could actually be effective, they're too worn out to actually do it. So even stuff like that, that's not evidence-based, it's not harmful necessarily, but it's also not evidence-based, can be problematic. Now that said, there are times when I have walked clients through using strategies like that. I don't know whether or not we'll have time to get into that in this episode, but there are reasons for going down that path. But the issue, like you said, is that when people present that stuff on the internet, like this is how you do it it can be really, really confusing and, and we're not just talking about. Bad advice because it's harmful, because it's abusive, because it's coercive or stressful. I see a lot of people on the internet giving advice that could potentially be great, but they don't know nearly enough about the context of their audience to be saying, this is the appropriate strategy for you across the board.

Right. And I think that's one of the most dangerous things about advice is not the advice that's like obviously bad or harmful or coercive. It's the stuff that sounds really great because sometimes it is really great. But if you're trying to apply this strategy in a prescriptive way to any person who has a behavior that looks like this without understanding the greater context of it. You can actually do a lot of harm, right?

[00:08:23] Claire: And I think one thing that is what you're saying as well that I think of is the order of things and how we implement things and where we start. What skills we start with management being a first ground level location before we start to move towards the harder things or, or things that need a lot more tentative care and observation and things of that nature.

Those are incredibly important in doing things out of order or jumping, skipping steps and things like that can be, can have quite the detriment too, safety wise and, and security wise.

[00:09:00] Emily: Yeah. Yeah. And obviously if you're doing. If you are following advice from the internet or from a trainer, that that involves things that are coercive or aversive, there is a higher risk of breaking your, the, the trust that you have with your pet, their welfare and wellbeing. there is behavior, there is a, a high risk for behavioral fallout of different kinds.

That's not to say that it always happens. Risk implies that it's not a hundred percent guarantee because nothing in life is a hundred percent guaranteed. But that, that stuff is, is true. And, and I think for our audience, more obvious, but when I see people on the internet who are like, somebody's like, oh, my dog has reactivity to other dogs, and they're like, do pattern games, do bat 2.0?

It's like, you don't know nearly enough. About the dog's history, the particular constellation of behaviors that are happening, the context in which they're happening, the capabilities, bandwidth, foundational skills that the, the client has. you don't know what the, the, the constraints of the client are, right?

So just like giving this prescriptive advice of like, do this protocol for this behavior can be really harmful and kind of an insidious way. Because if it is not the appropriate application in that context, you can still damage that, erode that trust, you can still compromise wellbeing. You can still get behavioral fallout from positive reinforcement base based methods that are misapplied. So this idea that if it's positive reinforcement, it's harmless. Is not true. And like I said before, even if the protocol works, quote unquote works on a specific scenario, that doesn't mean that you're actually addressing the larger picture, which can set the client up to be frustrated and be like, I tried positive reinforcement, it doesn't work, and then lash out at their dog.

And obviously we are not, we professionals are not responsible for our clients or our cons, content, consumers decisions, right? That's not the take home point of this. It's just important to be aware that casual, reckless advice that's prescriptive and, and blanketed is not. Risk free and from the pet parents side of it. just because something on the internet sounds like it's gonna be harmless and fun doesn't mean it's the right strategy for you and your dog in this moment in time, in this part, particular context and spending a lot of time trying a bunch of different things can be detrimental to both you and your dog.

I've had many, many clients come to me with dogs where they had only worked with positive reinforcement trainers, but they still had a lot of frustration, both them and their dog. They had a lot of poisoned cues. They had a lot of, like, they'd learned some bad habits. They were doing procedures in in which it was actually creating side effect behaviors that were not what we wanted.

 I mean, it's just something to be aware of, both from the pet parent side and from the client side that like just blanket advice on the internet is definitely a double-edged sword. It's helpful because it's accessible, but it's also pretty high risk. It's a pretty high risk right?

[00:12:40] Claire: I think one of the big things that comes up a lot when we see things like social media posts where someone says, my dog has reactivity, what do I do? And we see things like this where people just suggest, you know what? Like you were saying, specific protocols or things like that without knowing the context.

I think one of the biggest factors that makes me worry about interactions like that are the medical side of things, because as we talk with our clients about if there is a medical component to what we're doing, we can still make progress,

Very often we are not going to resolve this issue or get to a much better point with this issue until we address that medical issue and we can't know that from.

A Facebook post. I had someone where we kept looking into medical while we were doing behavior mod and we kept pushing it and we finally found out this dog had like a severe ear infection, had had it for some time, and once they treated that the behavior got infinitely better just from the treatment of the ear infection.

And that was not something that somebody was probably, if they said, oh, well my dog is having separation anxiety in her crate, what do I do? I doubt someone would have said, well, did you check if she has an ear infection? But we did because we worked together and we talked through all sides of, of the case.

The other thing that this makes me think of that was a big epiphany moment for me about the kind of one size fits all mindset when it comes to protocols was I had not that long before. Learned about, look at that. And so I was like, oh my God, this is revolutionizing my training. Like, every, this is in every training plan now, and I use it super frequently.

I love, I love look at that,

[00:14:26] Emily: Same. Yeah,

same. 

[00:14:27] Claire: there was a dog I was working with who had some reactivity. There was a lot of other stuff going on, and I kept using look at that. And I felt like he was, it wasn't helping. That is the,

the short version. And I remember at the time, I was in the, the Pet Harmony Mentorship program, which was the precursor to Pet Pro.

And there was a sheet that we were working on that was talking about prescriptive versus descriptive. And it specifically said it, it gave scenarios of, okay, you are doing, look at that with a dog and here's what you're seeing. And two different scenarios. One where it was clearly being successful and one where it wasn't.

And that was the first moment where I was like, oh. That just doesn't work for him. Like, that's not what he needs to help this issue. And I will always remember that moment of it being like a click in my brain of, of seeing what's in front of us and seeing the responses in the body language and adjusting from there, not, see with your eyes, not your ideas.

Classic, classic Emily. Strong quote.

[00:15:25] Emily: Yeah, I think your experience is super common. We, like, I, I would say probably most, I, I don't have any actual data to back this up because we don't keep, not like creepy about data collection at that level with our students in Pet Pro. But my, my gut feeling is that most of the people who come into Pet Pro, they, they've learned that prescriptive acro approach, they come from that background.

So when we're talking about cases in the forums or in a case support session or in office hour, the newbies are the ones who are like. Throwing suggestions out in chat, like, have you tried this? How about this? Can you do this? And I don't correct them. I let them go on their learning journey, right? I'm not gonna make this feel terrible for them.

Like they're doing something terrible. They are in the process of problem solving. They're learning. It's, it's beautiful to see people on that learning journey. So it's not something that I ever want to make anybody feel bad about. But we just let them go on that journey through the course of the mentorship program.

And we see as they start to learn more and become more proficient, instead of just throwing out suggestions, they start asking questions. And it's, that is my favorite thing. I get goosebumps every time I see somebody in Pet Pro instead of offering advice. Asking questions, asking more information, gathering questions, and that to me, it's just one of my favorite things.

Watching people learn how to do that. Right. And I think, I said this earlier, like for our audience, we don't have a lot of people who are like whips and throwing chains and alpha rolling totes appropriate. I think most people listening to this podcast see advice like that and they're like, well, that's outdated. Most people on who are listening to this podcast are aware of the abundant research showing how important it is to give learners agency to listen to them, to let them have a say in their own learning process to focus on consequences that build trust rather than erod it. I don't, I don't think we need to get on that soapbox in this episode, but I do think it's important to realize that everything has risk. There is nothing that is risk free. And so feeling safe give advice like that because it's positive reinforcement is. Is recognizing the ways in which harm can still happen using that approach. And again, from the pet parent side, it can feel really demoralizing if you have made that switch and you're like, I, I am aware now that dominance based methods are outdated.

I'm aware now that I don't have to hurt dogs to help them. I want positive reinforcement. And then you start looking for that advice on the internet and you still get conflicting advice like that can be really discouraging. So let's talk about how to evaluate training advice in a way that it's going to help you find the stuff that's most likely to work for you. I think the first question is. Is it science based? And that in and of itself is a kind of a loaded question. Because pseudoscience can have, can cite research papers. The reason pseudoscience is so is because they also cite research. And so it's not, that is not as simple a question as you think because you're like, well, if it's science-based, they'll have research to back it up.

And it's like, well, no, because pseudoscience also uses research. Right. That's part one is, is it science-based and what do we mean when we say that? The second question to ask is, is it safe for me and my dog? Because nothing is safe in all contexts. on Earth is a hundred percent guaranteed of safety. Also, nothing is a hundred percent guaranteed unsafe. I mean, Maybe not nothing. Maybe. Like you off a cliff in the Grand Canyon, I feel like that's close to a hundred percent percent guaranteed that things are gonna go pretty bad for you, right? But there's very little in this life that has a hundred GU percent guarantee of harm. And there's also very little in life that has a hundred percent guarantee of safety. So if you are seeing advice on the internet and you're like, I can imagine 12 different ways that that can go horribly wrong for me and my dog and our environment, with our skill levels, with my dog's specific behaviors, with their needs, with our respective health issues, then don't do it.

That advice is not for you. Right? And then. The next question is, is it individualized for me and my pet? Right? So it doesn't, like you're not looking on YouTube for something that's like you specific person. Like I'm not looking for videos on the internet. I don't look for training advice on the internet anyway.

But if I were to do that, I wouldn't be looking for something that's like, this video is specifically for Emily and Miley. Like that's not what I mean. what I mean is does the advice make sense for your pet's needs, your needs, your environment? The specific goals that you have ad advice can be great for somebody else in another context and be terrible for you in your context.

So a lot of times things that seem to be conflicting advice, it's because they're speaking to different contexts. It's not bad advice, it's just contextualized advice that doesn't apply to you and your pet. Right.

[00:21:13] Claire: Yeah. This, this has happened a few times for me now actually. But one of the. Popular pieces of advice that goes around, especially I think with newer trainers when you're first learning skills and, and how to implement them is like a, a watch queue and eye contact queue of some sort. And we see a lot of well-intentioned people being told for reactive dogs or dogs, even just dogs that are like enthusiastic when they see other, other dogs or people to tell them to, to look at you and to ignore, what they're seeing.

And then we reward them for that. And then we keep moving. And the problem we often encounter with that is that then when the dog does see something, we don't have time to ask them for that look yet. Or it's something really exciting, they have a meltdown 'cause they don't learn how to cope with actually seeing the things.

And so I'm actually going to like double cross this scenario because the popular advice that we used to get was teach a watch cue and have them watch you whenever you want them to focus and ignore other things.

Often I have found that. We actually need them to see other things. But I've also had a, a few subsets of dogs where being it was actually more upsetting to them than me giving them an alternative behavior to do.

They actually felt more comfortable and confident making eye contact with their person and keeping moving than doing something like a look at that protocol. And that actually kinda like flipped it on its head for me that I was like, oh, this isn't just because I learned this. Then thought, no, that's wrong.

You always need them to see the thing. And then came back around again to go actually for this dog, it works really well. This is beneficial to them. That was a, a great learning experience for me. And I've found too that that often works really well when a dog already has a really strong relationship with their pet parent.

They've done a lot of training together. I have one amazing golden retriever that I work with. I love him to death. And his parents are fantastic and they've done so much work with him even before I came to see them. And we actually found that that started to be helpful for him. We actually instituted a little bit of like, look at that and flight cues and then he would do some of that.

It would work well, and then you'd start to see him kind of like, okay, now I need guidance. And so then they would go back into working mode for just a little bit down the block and you could see him get excited and, and thrilled to engage with his pet parent like that. And then, if we needed it, we could go back to, to the lad and the flight queue again.

So it's, there's so much value in all the pieces. It's how you apply, knowing what situations need to apply and then knowing what to do. If you say, I think this is gonna work, and you see it and go, oh actually that didn't have the effect I expected. I need to reassess what part of this needs tweaking and am I already ruling out just by internal biases or experience things that I innately feel?

Aren't something I, I usually train or is applicable.

[00:24:07] Emily: yeah, yeah. I had a similar situation. I, I don't know why I said had in the past tense, I feel like this is a, enough thing, it like continues to happen. But a similar situation with hand targeting where, i, I feel like at least once a week we have a conversation in Pet Pro where we're talking about a case and what the plan is for that case. And somebody's, and whoever is, is bringing the case to the group is like, well, we're doing hand targeting. It's like, well, why? like, well, because everybody knows that hand targeting is a, a basic foundational behavior that's super useful that every dog needs to be able to do. It's like, okay, but how does that actually relate to our goals for this dog in this context, in this case? And it doesn't. Right. and another thing that I ha, I don't see this as often in Pet Pro, but we saw, Allie and I saw this a lot at the sanctuary that we used to work with, and I've seen it in shelters and in other contexts. People using hand targeting for things like getting anxious dogs to approach strangers getting, a dog to move past something that they're really worried about. It's not that, that is never a good approach in those contexts. It's that you have to be really, really aware all of the contributing factors because teaching dogs who are scared to be close to humans to hand target sets them up to bite after they target because they're like, oh my God, I'm too close to you.

Get away from me. And we've talked on the podcast about how Allie got bitten because the caregivers at the sanctuary taught a dog to come up to people for food. In that case, I don't think it was hand targeting 'cause the dog bit her leg. But you have to know whether or not that's a behavior that is actually going to improve the welfare and wellbeing of this dog. And, same thing, like yes, having a dog target to your hand and follow that target past something scary can be useful for some dogs in some contexts, but in other contexts, you're ignoring what the dog needs or what they care about, and you're not letting them process the stressor in the environment.

And so you're actually preventing them from accessing that really important skill of I can observe the environment, I can process what's happening, I can just be still and. Think about what's going on and realize that this isn't actually that big of a deal. It gives me time to, to decide what I need to do.

Do I need to check in with my guardian? Do I need to move away? Do I need to greet? so it's not that, that hand targeting to get them past a stressor is always a bad idea. It's that if you're using that all the time, you can actually be preventing that dog from learning the skills or practicing the skills that they, that they need, that they're asking for so that they can better handle those situations in the future.

Right.

[00:27:09] Claire: I think something that's really important that we know as professionals and can institute in our sessions and our lessons, but we have to remember that like an everyday pet parent. Or a friend of the family who says, I wanna come over and, and help your dog feel more comfortable around strangers. Like, I'm willing to be the Guinea pig, which God bless those people for, for willing, being willing to be there.

But we have to make sure they understand the safety aspect, right? So if I am, I just had a stranger danger dog that I was working with the other day, and, and she's done the, they have also done a lot of work. She has a lot of skills on board. So we're at the point where we're ready to start to like test, like can we go a little bit further, than, than we have in the past.

And I am comfortable being that person to test that with because I can read the body language. I know what to do if things start to go awry. And I also know, and this is the most important piece of, of why I brought this point up. I also know how to test it in the safest, calmest, lowest stress way possible before we start to make it more real life.

Right? I know the management I need to put in place. I know. Okay. Can we test that with the pet parent that they're a lot more comfortable with to see if we see any stressful body language before it's with me, where they don't know me as well. There's lots of things that we do to take safety precautions and because our job is to read body language and to read situations, we can see, okay, I see some stress, low stress coming out.

We're going to alter how we're doing this to make sure that your dog's comfortable. Or we might realize there's another skill we need to teach here before we start to add this back in. Or this is how many times we can try this before we say, I can see your dog is like, I have done enough brain work for today.

Thank you. And I, I would like to be done. Like there's so many things like that that are really important. And just seeing like a social media post or reading an article, you cannot possibly give everyone every single possible. Safety tip or outcome. And I think about that a lot. Whenever I post any social media content, I sometimes lose my mind a little bit making any sort of reel or post because I'm always like, oh, I need to put caveats just in case.

Or like, this doesn't apply to everybody all the time. If, if your dog is like this, we're like that. Because there's so, there's so much to know and to adjust in the moment with the learner in front of you. So that's another thing that I find gets missed a lot, is we don't know how to say what is the most low stress, easiest way we can try this first to see if this is gonna go the way we want it to before we implement a quote unquote protocol.

[00:29:46] Emily: Yeah, I, I definitely agree with that. And I think, I think our culture celebrates celebrity. And so we conflate what's popular with what's best practices or what's correct. And so like, I know a lot of people are like, well, I did this because like Milan is like a really well-known dog trainer. And, and he said it on tv. And I'm like, cool. It's a TV show. Like it's not real life. It's, I, I don't think it's entertaining at all, but it is designed to entertain some subsets of human, of humans, of which I am not a part. or like people are like, yeah, this video went viral. And so like, this trainer is really popular on the internet, like really trending. and so like, it has to be good advice and it's like, well, whether or not it is generally good advice is irrelevant because it's not good advice for you. So that's, I think part of this process is learning that it's doesn't have to be all or nothing. It's not a false dichotomy. It's not that advice is either good or bad. how high is the risk of that advice and also. How relevant is that advice to this particular situation? So something can work, quote unquote in that it makes an annoying behavior go away, or it gets a dog to quickly do a behavior that you want. But if it's not actually working for the dog, if it's not reducing harm, improving welfare and wellbeing, if it doesn't work for you, because it's not practical for you, if it's not really helping you reach your goals, it, it works in that it gets the dog to do a specific behavior, but it's not actually addressing the entire behavioral repertoire that you're concerned about. that that's all stuff to think about when you are looking at advice on the internet or when you're the person giving advice on the internet. Like I think one thing as content creators that we can do is. Either make our advice more broad and make it very clear that we don't know the context. So we need to be careful about, like, this isn't for everybody, this is just how I do this when it's necessary.

That would be cool if we got, as an industry into the habit of saying that, or if you're gonna be really specific, this is how I train this specific behavior, being like, these are some specific context in which I might find this behavior helpful. And and even still, even if you do that, that's still, it's still on the pet guardian to, out whether or not it applies to them.

Right. So I think, I wanna say like gold standard is actually just hiring a qualified enrichment focused behavior consultant, to help you. And also I recognize that that is not. Tenable for a lot of people. And the reason that YouTube dog trainers are so popular is because that information is more accessible to more people than a, a behavior consultant is.

Right? It costs money and also if you live in an area that doesn't have behavior consultants around then, it's not an option for you. Or if you don't have access to reliable internet, so you can't hire somebody virtually, it's not an option to you. So I'm saying all of this in the context of like Gold Standard would be hire somebody to work with you and your dog individually, but if that's not an option for you and you're looking on the internet for training advice, these are some things that I would think about. Sorry, go ahead. What were you gonna say, Claire?

[00:33:24] Claire: Yeah, I think there's a couple other things that I wanna add on to your prior point about seeing information, deciding whether that information is applicable to you and your situation. I get a lot of clients that will say, I was having this problem and I don't know if this was the right thing to do, but I did, insert something here.

And my reaction to that typically is. There isn't necessarily a right or wrong, there are just different ways to do it. So my follow up question, whether they have said that to me or in some cases where people will say something that I personally don't want to implement or use or I don't think is gonna be beneficial to the dog, but they've been using it, for example I spray the dog when he's barking out the window with a spray bottle.

My follow up question is, okay, and what do you see happen when you do that? And my goal is to get body language out of it and to get frequency of the behavior. Is this still occurring? Is it a bandaid situation or is this actually changing the behavior for you? And we talk a lot about in our consultant meetings and things like that when we find that clients are using a tool that we ne we don't necessarily.

Use or wouldn't recommend using and how we, the kind of our flow chart of how we decide if that is something we need to broach with them. Or it's something that we don't, and typically the criteria for that is, is it affecting the behavior that they have hired us to come in and assist 'em with? Is it affecting the dog's wellbeing in those contexts or is it not affecting those things?

And that can be hard sometimes to put your personal biases aside and, and try to really factually look at what you're seeing and ignore things that personally like might hurt your heart a little bit. But I think that ultimately has, has made me a better consultant. And I have had people who have said, well, I do this and I ask that follow up question of, and then, do you see the behavior continue?

What does your dog do in those moments? I've had some moments where. They have really gone like, oh, hey, yeah, I recognize why, that upsets my dog. Or that's not actually helping the behavior, or, or might be sending a mixed message. And I've also had some moments where I've been like, I've assumed that something was, was not gonna work or, or would, would not work well for that dog.

And then I either see it in action or they explain it to me and I go, okay, like if that, if that's what's working and it wasn't what I expected, I'm not gonna tell you to change that if it's not affecting welfare of you or the pet. And and it's, it's effective for you

[00:36:01] Emily: We've got bigger fish to fry than

nitpicking this thing that is both effective for what your goal is and also not harming the relationship between you and your dog. Like that is not a priority. And I think like I actually love asking those questions because a lot of people just keep doing something because they believe it's helpful, but by asking them like what happens, it helps. Them to realize on their own that like, if that was an actually effective strategy, by definition you wouldn't have to keep doing it. So what if we like shifted strategies so that you don't have to continue doing this anymore? like, maybe it does work. Maybe you legitimately are seeing a significant reduction in the behavior, but if you're also seeing your dog avoiding you, or you're seeing them act out in other ways, then that's something that we need to consider.

Do you wanna use a technique that's eroding the relationship between you and your dog? Are you seeing more furtive behavior? So when I worked with clients, this is not in any way scientific, I have no, I don't have any like academic literature to back this up, but what I found an effective way to help clients understand the impact that their were having on their dog is I would, I would de as describe it as wow, apparently. I'm just having a hard time saying words right now. Let me try that again. I would describe it as like, the categories I would use would be explosion, implosion, sublimation, or learned helplessness, which we now call helplessness. But I clients before I learned that thing. So I would say in the, in the explosion category, we're going to see an increase in aggression, like snapping at you, growling at you, body guarding their objects from you redirecting onto another, like somebody next to them, or a dog next to them.

That's like an external thing. For implosion, we're looking at things like the dog, cowering the dog immediately turning to themselves and doing kind of self-harm behaviors like excessive licking or grooming. Shutting down, like actually just curling up and going into a freeze state, something like that For sublimation, we're looking at your dog doing something else that seems unrelated, but is undesirable.

Like, are they hiding from you when they soil the carpet? Are they, stealing something furtively and chewing it away from you? did you just scold them and then they immediately went and peed on your shoes? Right? So I can't give you the response that I want to give you because I know I'm not allowed.

So I'm going to channel my frustration into some other behavior somewhere else like that. Iv, Behavior and then learned helplessness as. Do they just turn robotic and just do whatever you're asking them. But they're not wiggly, they're not smiling, they're not seeking engagement. They're just towing the line.

Right. And when I would ask those questions about like, what is the impact of what you're doing? First of all, for some reason that explosion, implosion, sublimation learned helplessness structure makes made a lot of sense to the clients that I worked with. But also it would help them to recognize that like, oh, maybe this strategy isn't as effective as I thought it was, because it might be, quote unquote working to immediately stop a behavior. these other things that I had just attributed to the dog, being a, a difficult dog, is actually a response to the strategy that I'm using. Right? And so asking those questions. Really helps us identify, is this a situation where the risk just isn't happening? They're getting away with a technique that's a little more coercive or aversive than we would recommend or are they actually seeing fallout from what they're doing and they just don't recognize the fallout because they're attributing it to the dog's internal character instead of understanding that it's a response to the dog's environment.

Right.

[00:40:03] Claire: And I think the last thing I would add to all of that too is that management is a valid solution. And not everything needs to be trained. Not everything needs to be a skill or behavior. And it always comes back to asking, or I would actually say, explaining to the client, sure, I have protocols that I can help teach you.

For how to get your dog to start bark, stop barking out the window. But it's going to be much more time intensive and involved than you're probably going to want. And you also could just put up the film on your windows and, and not have to deal with it nearly at the volume you're having to deal with it now.

So, or we talk about baby gates, we talk about all that stuff. I can teach your hub how to, how to have a, a spot that they really like hanging out when you're in the kitchen instead of, jumping up on the counters. Or that could be crate time with a Kong also. There's so many things that we can do to just make our lives easier.

We don't have to teach and have our dogs be these like spurt know every skill in the book.

 Preachers, we can have them just manage the situation to get the results they want with a lot less effort and stress on either side.

[00:41:19] Emily: yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think that really is a place where, clients can have agency in their own journey because they get to choose where they want to put their effort and where they want to just rearrange their environment. Right? So the, the baby gate example is a really good example. I've had clients who really care about the aesthetics of their home or the flow of their home. And so a baby gate wrecks. Their peace, right? Because it either impedes the flow of being able to move through the house, or it just doesn't work for their aesthetic desires. And so I'm like, okay, you don't have to use a baby gate, but the alternative is labor because then we have to do boundary training and you get to decide what you care about more. Do you d does, do you hate the baby gate that much? And also there are really fancy looking baby gates. I can show you this one on Chewy that's over $200. That looks like a really fancy, polished stairwell. like, do you want to deal with, do you wanna just like put up with something that is not your favorite thing because it's easier and it's cheaper?

Do you wanna spend extra money on a fancier version of that management? Or do you wanna spend time doing boundary training with your dog? And I will support you in whatever decision you make. This is your choice, but. Y but you have to choose what you're gonna, you either have to like lower your standards, the money, or spend the time like, but you get to choose and I will support you in whatever one of those you choose.

Right?

[00:42:55] Claire: It's, it's like that triangle where there's three options and like you only get two of these. Like we cannot have all three. Most of the time we do not get all three.

[00:43:03] Emily: yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So when, if you are a pet guardian who is trying to Decide if internet advice is good for you or appropriate for you. I would look at the following things I would look at. first of all, am I immediately seeing any red flags for how this would be difficult to implement in my environment, it seems like unsafe knowing my dog, my environment, and all of that.

So if, if there's any part of you that's like, oof, that could go really badly for me, obviously you can immediately rule that thing out, right? if it passes that test, the next thing I would look at is, is this a sustainable option for me? Well, is it something that I can actually implement or is this something that I feel like I would have to rearrange my schedule, put in some extra effort? Whatever, if it feels sustainable, proceed. The next thing I would look at is, does it actually help me reach my goal? And I think people who know me might be shocked that that's number three instead of number one. But I have learned for, for humans that if it's unsafe and unsustainable, it doesn't matter if it reaches your goal. So yeah, the goal is actually the third priority for me. does it actually reach your goal? Does it only reach a part of your goal? here's the thing, if it only reaches part of your goal, that might be okay If you can't find something that does the whole thing for you, like why do eight different procedures if you can do two to meet those eight goals?

Right? So. It might be great if it meets part of your goal. Or it might be just unnecessary redundant labor if there's a, a more sort of a across the board technique that you can find. But if it doesn't meet your goal at all, it's just that people say, if your dog has this behavior and it v and what they describe vaguely resembles what your dog is doing, they're like, then do this thing.

And you're like, but how is doing that thing going to help me with my goal? They're not, that's not for you. That's not the thing for you. I think the next thing to look at is, do I have the skills or the resources or both to actually implement this? if they're like, you just have to do this thing, and then it's like a really complex like training technique that you haven't practiced and you don't know, it's gonna be very hard for you to learn that on your own without the supervision of a behavior professional.

And a lot of people try to learn those things on their own and they end up accidentally developing bad habits because they don't have an an expert at their effort and giving them feedback on what they need to tweak. And it is so much harder to unlearn bad habits and learn it in a better way than it is to just start fresh. So if it, if they're expecting you to do something that you don't currently have the knowledge and skills to do pretty well, probably not the technique for you. By the time you get through all of that, then you can say, okay, this seems like it might work for me. It feels like it's gonna be safe.

There's a low risk involved. It feels sustainable. I can do it. It helps me reach my goals in, in part or in whole. It's asking me to do things that I know that I can do. Then you have to trial an eval. So try the thing and observe how your dog responds to it. If you see tension, if you see avoidance, if you see, like I said, any of the explosion, implosion, sublimation, learned helplessness, any of that stuff, probably a good sign that this is not working for your dog.

And if you had a behavior professional to help you, then maybe they could help you tweak that technique so that it did work for your dog. But in the absence of somebody who can help you do that troubleshooting, it's better just to try. else, right? Or if it's working and maybe your dog's not super enthusiastic about it, but they're doing it, try increasing the reinforcement value, whatever it is that you're offering to them, maybe offer them something that's a higher value. Try increasing your rate of reinforcement. Give them, reinforcement more often. If it's not something that the dog has to do, it's just something in the environment that your dog doesn't seem super thrilled about, can maybe try to tweak it based on, again, it's really hard to give this advice because it's a very blanket thing about a lot of different strategies. but try to figure out what it is about the thing that your dog is not thrilled about and address that. Either swap out something or, swap out the food that you're using or give them more food around the space. try to troubleshoot on your own as much as possible, but. And I have had clients who are like, I watched this video on the internet and I learned how to teach my dog the skill.

And look at us. Go, we're total bans at it. So I know that it, internet advice can actually work and be effective and helpful sometimes. So I don't ever wanna tell people don't use internet advice because the reality is sometimes that's the only training advice that some people have access to. But just learn how to be savvy in how you en engage with it. Right. Okay. Yeah. And I just wanna remind you that, there's nothing wrong with you. If you feel overwhelmed by all the opinions and the conflicting advice, if you feel frustrated and you're like, gosh, I wish these people would just get it together and, and be a little more consistent. If you feel like if watching all this stuff makes you feel like you're not a good enough dog parent because you're not doing all this fancy stuff with your dog like social media is designed to make people feel FOMO and inferior.

Like, that's like it's whole goal. so you are, there's nothing wrong with you. You're not defective. You are a, a great pet parent and I don't have to know you to know that because if you care that much that you're doing that internet research and you're concerned about not doing right by your dog, are ahead of the game, right?

So, you what you are, you are, you are fine. You are good enough. You are doing a great job. But yeah, just taking small informed steps and going through that process of like doing some critical thinking about the advice you're seeing on the internet, can really help you to, um, build your confidence in your decisions, both the decisions that you're making for yourself and for your pet. And also, like, when you learn how to observe the impact, the stakes lower the, the, it's, it's not as high stakes when you're like, well, I can just observe how my dog feels about this and listen to what they're telling me and then make adjustments. That feels a lot less scary than like, if I, if I make the wrong decision, I've ruined my dog.

Right? So just knowing that you get to do that trial and eval and make adjustments based on your dog's response can, can alleviate a lot of that pressure.

[00:49:58] Claire: This is a bit redundant on what you already said, but I do think it bears repeating that you don't need to feel embarrassed or guilty or shame when it comes to finding out that something that you thought was the right way to go, either didn't work out the way you wanted or didn't get the results that you were looking for, even maybe had a, a negative impact.

Like I have done that. I still do that on occasion where I do something that I, I think I'm moving in the right direction. It's like, oh, that was actually not helpful and might have actually been hurt our relationship temporarily or something like that. So, we all, we all gotta figure it out, not everybody is, is when you're looking at information online, you're not, if you're not a professional in this business, no one expects that you're going to be able to expertly piece out every, every little part of it.

So that's why we're here. You, if you need us.

[00:50:52] Emily: Yeah. Is, it is. So helpful to have somebody who does this for a living guide you, it's, and it's more efficient because we're gonna be better at helping you figure out the thing that's most likely to work. And, and knowing when to pivot earlier on in the process. We don't expect a lay person to have that knowledge, experience and skills.

So, yeah, if you, if you're able to work with a behavior professional, like I said, who is evidence-based, enrichment focused, all of that stuff it's, it's gonna make your, your life easier for sure.

[00:51:24] Claire: And it's okay to ask questions. It's okay to question us about why am I doing that, or I, I encourage my clients to voice their concerns to me if I give them something and they're worried about a fallout aspect or a safety concern. And I repeat that a lot, especially in my head, in my more, dangerous cases with bite risks and, and bite histories and things like that.

I tell them, you, you live with your dog. You know your dog better than me. If at any point any of these things makes you hesitate or you feel nervous, please communicate that. Don't continue on. Let me know and, and we'll figure what we need to modify to make sure everybody feels comfortable and safe and good about the plan.

[00:52:01] Emily: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. So, to recap everybody has an opinion. There are a million opinions online about how to train your dog. Some are more or less informed, some are more or less updated, some are more or less. general broad, good advice versus highly specific contextualized advice. and as such, not all advice is equal.

So, like I said, look for things that seem like they're gonna be safe for you and your pet. They're gonna be sustainable for you. They're going to reach your goals in, in part or in whole, and that your pet responds well to you will be much more likely to get where you wanna go that way. next time you see a training tip online, ask yourself, is this evidence-based?

Does it seem relevant and effective for my pet? And is it something sustainable that I could actually do on a regular basis? And if you're in doubt at all, reach out to a quality profi professional if you have those available to you. 

[00:53:03] Allie: I hope you enjoy today's episode and if there's someone in your life who also needs to hear this, be sure to text it to them right now. If you're a pet parent looking for more tips on enrichment, behavior modification, and finding harmony with your pet, you can find us on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Harmony training. If you're a behavior or training professional dedicated to enrichment for yourself, your clients, and their pets, check us out on TikTok and Instagram at Pet Harmony Pro.

As always, links to everything we discussed in this episode are in the show notes. Thank you to Ellen Yoakum for editing this episode and making us sound good. Our intro music is from Penguin Music on Pixa Bay. Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. That helps more pet lovers and professionals find us so they can bring enrichment into their world too.

Thank you for listening, and here's to harmony. 

[00:53:56] Emily: You are just experiencing what it's like to be a human with a pet in the 21st century. welcome to our HealthScape. I sincerely hope that this is actually just what's it called? I just blanked on it. Where they think that this reality isn't real.

It's just like a,

[00:54:11] Claire: Alternate timeline parallel universe.

[00:54:14] Emily: not a synthesis, not God, why can't I remember the word? My God, I, this is gonna annoy me now. We cannot proceed with this episode until I remember this word, because I'm so annoyed that I can't remember it. Simulation. I got it. I got it. Okay. It sure would be nice. I sincerely hope that this is all a simulation because living through these times is interesting.