#166 - Your Dog is Not Symptom Spreadsheet

Do you ever feel like you and your dog are on the Hot Mess Express together? The challenges just keep coming: leash reactivity, resource guarding, body-handling sensitivities, gut issues, sleep disruption all at once, and that’s just the dog’s list. 🤣 

Your first instinct may be to make a nice, neat list and start checking off boxes. 

Leash reactivity = counterconditioning. Check. 

Resource guarding = trades. Check. 

But the list keeps growing, and growing, and growing, with no end or rest in sight.

In this episode, Emily and Tiffany break down why that one-to-one approach, playing whack-a-mole with symptoms, often leaves everyone on the team, pet, parent, and professional more overwhelmed and drained.

Emily and Tiffany walk through what it actually looks like to shift from playing the terribly unpleasant symptom whack-a-mole game to a systems-based approach that asks: “What do all these symptoms have in common?” 

TLDL (too long, didn’t listen): 

1️⃣ Most co-occurring behavior problems share a root — They're symptoms of the same underlying issues, not separate emergencies requiring separate plans.

2️⃣ Overwhelm is a framing problem — When everything feels urgent, nothing gets done. A systems lens makes progress sustainable for everyone involved.

3️⃣ Do the foundational work first, then see what's left — Stress management,  communication, and safe space skills often reduce multiple challenging behaviors without targeting them directly.

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

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Tiffany: Like you said, like, people don't see the, the plates that have been spinning and, like, the amount of work that you're doing to make sure that, like, physical, mental, emotional health needs are, are met. That's why a complicated training plan would never work out for us to try to do graduated exposure or, like whatever to like really do some capital T training around, "Well, maybe we could all be in the same room together." Yeah, but I've got this... This is what I have to do every day just to run my household. And I spent a lot of time feeling weird and guilty about that, but I'm over it.

[00:00:49] 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...

[00:00:59] Emily: ...and I'm Emily Strong...

[00:01:01] 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.

[00:01:21] Emily: You're expecting to work on one thing, and then as y'all start digging deeper, the list starts growing.

You thought you were gonna be working on leash reactivity, and then you're like, "Oh, and also resource guarding, and also my dog won't settle at night. And also, they destroy things when they're left alone. And also they bark at everything." And suddenly you're not solving a problem, you're triaging a disaster, right?

So if you've ever looked at your dog or your client's dog and you thought, "I don't even know where to start," this episode is for you.

So when a dog that you're working with or your client's dog presents multiple problems at once, treating each issue as a separate emergency and having a training plan for each issue separately is how you end up overwhelmed, over-planned, and under-effective.

And the reason for that is that most co-occurring problems actually share a root. They're all coming from the same place. They're all symptoms of the same underlying issue and unmet needs. And being able to see that is what separates reactive firefighting from a thoughtful, sustainable practice.

So today we're gonna talk about what happens when everything goes wrong at once. There's just a lot of dumpster fires happening, a lot of spinning plates in the air, just a whole lot of issues happening at the same time, and we're n- gonna talk about how to not try to fix all of it, but how to think about it differently so that you can actually move forward and see progress in a way that is sustainable and supportive for everybody involved.

The reason this matters is because overwhelm is At least one of the most common reasons, I think at least in my experience with my selection bias, it is the most common reason that training stalls, that clients can't follow through all the way to the end and reach their goals, that consultants feel insecure and unfulfilled, and that overwhelm can be a combination of burnout, which is having way too much to do and running yourself into the ground, and adherence fatigue, which is just having to keep track of all the things in your head that you're supposed to keep caring about.

So that, that is true for both pet parents and pros. It's not a motivation problem. It's not an ideological problem. It's not a work ethic problem. It's a framing problem. Because when we treat every symptom as its own emergency, we create plans that are exhausting and unsustainable and often unnecessary.

So let's make it easier for everybody involved. Let's make it more sustainable. Let's make it more effective. So by the end of this episode, you will have a new mental model for looking at multi-problem cases, one that makes the chaos of really with lots of moving parts feel less random and less, well, chaotic, and more workable.

When we're working with either the non-humans or our human clients and- One or more of the learners involved in that scenario presents with multiple problems.

Our sort of knee-jerk response to that is to make a list and start checking boxes, and that's understandable because that approach of like, "Oh, I've got a solution for every problem, and we're gonna systematically check them off and work on one at a time," it actually, it feels like you're being thorough and organized and responsible.

But often it's, it's not actually the move that's going to support anybody involved, including yourself. So the reason for that is that it assumes that each problem is independent and it kind of exists in a vacuum. And so, it, each problem needs its own solution, and that's, that's not how behavior works.

That's not how systems work in general, whether we're talking about individual learners or entire populations of learners or populations in an ecosystem, it's all interconnected, right? So, nothing exists in a vacuum, and that includes behavior issues. Everything is interrelated and interconnected. And Tiffany, I know you have very real and robust lived experience with this, so talk about what this has looked like for you living with Petey and helping Petey exist in the world.

[00:06:03] Tiffany: My name is Tiffany and my dog is a dumpster fire, chaos goblin. Yeah. Let me just tell you, I think the last time I was on the podcast we talked about, or one of the last times when Petey bit me this summer after being stung by a bunch of bees. I am still feeling repercussions from that incident because he's had like... Let's talk about poop. 

[00:06:29] Emily: Let's talk about poop. I'm, I'm here to talk about poop.

[00:06:31] Tiffany: You and I get to talk about it all the time because we talk to trainers and behavior professionals, but maybe the rest of the podcast audience isn't used to how often we have to think and talk about poop. But let's do it. He's had like loose stool and, and slash diarrhea for since like August or whenever that happened.

So I don't know if it just set off some kind of like cascade of, like, like a mast cell situation and upset his... Like, I don't, I don't, I haven't, I don't know what the reason is, but we've, we've been on the struggle bus. So we've been trying to get that under control because things like an upset tummy affects behavior. 

I'm grumpy when I have diarrhea,

and so is Petey. Luckily, honestly, his behavior's been pretty, pretty stable, so that's been all good. But then you think about things like it affecting other systems. If their poop isn't solid, then it affects their anal glands, and then he starts having problems with his anal glands, and here's a dog who's sensitive to, being touched and has to be sedated to go to the vet.

Then, how practical is it for him to go to the vet on a regular basis to get his anal glands taken care of? The answer is it's not. We went through that when he first came home. It took me, like, two years to get his poop solid. 

Turns out I've been thinking about Petey's poop for a long time. So yeah.

Bees. Poop. 

[00:08:00] Emily: yeah, I bet those of you who are listening did not know that you're gonna be listening to us talk about poop today, but I don't know what to say. You're w-

you're welcome, and also welcome to our lives where we spend a, a sh- an alarming amount of time thinking about and talking about poop precisely because it is so, inextricably intertwined with behavior.

Gut health and behavior, behavioral health are not separable. They, they are interdependent. And so, th- well, that is, that is one of many reasons that, that we spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about poop. But that's a really good example of how there's multiple things at play here. We have bee sting.

We're recovering from the emotional impact of multiple bee stings. We're recovering from the physical impact of multiple bee stings. We're recovering from the behavioral impact of multiple bee s- bee stings. And months later, that was summer. It is spring now, so we're, we're going on a year. You're still trying to stabilize his gut And sometimes that that is impacting his, his behavior as well.

I think a lot of times you don't see how much work you are... ha-have done for Petey and continue to do for Petey. It's not that you don't see that you've worked hard for him, but I think you don't realize exactly how many plates you have spinning because you've been doing it for so long and you do it so well that you, like, lose track of the plates, of the number of plates.

So we're going to... I'm gonna ask you to do this thought experiment live and on c- on, not camera, but live and on mic. Think about all of the different issues that you've had with Petey since you brought him home and try to just come up with a list, as comprehensive as possible when I'm putting you on the spot and you haven't had time to think about this of all of the issues that you've had with Petey.

If you can come up with a list, I think it would be helpful for people to see that even though that example was a good one because there were multiple systems involved and multiple symptoms showing up, that's also just the tip of the iceberg of all of the interrelated things that have been happening with Petey throughout his life.

And you are a good example of like what the end looks like. Not the end like the end of Petey's life, but the end of the process of building a plan to support him, and a lot of people who are at the beginning can't visualize what it would look like.

They're like, "Well, my animal has too many issues. There's no way that I could ever get to that point." But I think it's because they don't get to see all of the issues that Petey has had historically because they see you in maintenance phase. So give us your list.

[00:10:57] Tiffany: Yeah. It started with, like, why is this dog, like, jumping up and trying to bite people in the face? And then it moved on to, oh, sometimes he does that around resources, so there must be some kind of resource guarding thing. And then it was like, oh, getting his gear on is hard, so there must be some kind of, like, body handling situation.

And then it was, oh, he screams at any being that we see on a walk, and so then it was, like, reactivity.

And then it was, well, his... He poops, like, four or five times a day, and he doesn't eat that much food, and also it's pretty mushy. And oh look, he's dragging his butt. And oh, he barked out the door at the, the mail carrier, and stuff shot out of his butt, and it smells really bad.

So he's got anal gland issues. And then it was oh, he's got these, like, little itchy spots in between his toes, but it's hard to handle or do anything for him, so how am I going to treat whatever that is? By the way, we're still trying to get, like, the food thing under control to see if we can get his poop solid so that I can make sure I'm not taking him to the vet every four to six weeks to have his anal glands drained, because he tries to bite the vet.

Let's get him on some kind of, of anxiety med. And, like, this is how it went for a, a while.

[00:12:26] Emily: Yeah. Yeah. That is, that is what people don't see when they, when you talk about how you manage Petey and you take him on these adventure walks, and you have g- have your, compartmentalization of the house. You've got your whole routine or process for getting people in and out of the house.

People see that you have this system in place that works really well, and that Petey has a really good quality of life, and you and Big Man have a really good relationship with Petey, and they don't get to see where you started, which was, like, the literal definition of dumpster fire. Like, hot garbage mess seeping and oozing everywhere.

So, so I think that's, like ... Something that's really important to remember is that if, if you had worked with a behavior professional when you started out and they gave you a training plan for every single thing that you just mentioned, you wouldn't have Petey anymore probably. He may not be alive, you know what I mean?

Like, I don't know if you could... I don't, not, not you, Tiffany Holmes, but I don't know if a human could actually do a separate training plan for every single thing that you mentioned.

[00:13:41] Tiffany: Well, yeah, and the stuff that we manage, bandwidth. Am I right? So Yeah. Like you said, like, people don't see the, the plates that have been spinning and, like, the amount of work that you're doing to make sure that, like, physical, mental, emotional health needs are, are met. That's why a complicated training plan would never work out for us to try to do graduated exposure or, like whatever to like really do some capital T training around, "Well, maybe we could all be in the same room together." Yeah, but I've got this... This is what I have to do every day just to run my household. And I spent a lot of time feeling weird and guilty about that, but I'm over it.

[00:14:29] Emily: Yeah, well, and I will just say this as diplomatically as possible. I think a lot of the weird and guilty feelings that you felt were due to social pressure from people who had no business providing you with incorrect and unkind input. Your facial expression says it all. For those of you who can't see her face, she confirmed with her face.

Uh so, so, like, that's, that is part of the issue is that people w- one thing that behavior professionals have to remember is that people who are living with animals who have really complat... Nope, that's not a word. Let me try that again. Complex multi-symptom issues are not just existing in a vacuum either.

They're also part of a system that is not supporting them usually, that is usually harming them because they are getting a lot of unsolicited advice and critique that is first of all incorrect and inappropriate, and secondly completely cruel and unrealistic, right? So, that's another thing to remember is that we're not just giving somebody 16 training plans in a vacuum either.

Like, we're giving them 16 training plans in the context of enormous social pressure and guilt and exhaustion and all of those things, right? And that's not helpful. That's paralyzing. So it's really important to remember that when everything feels urgent and you have to do a separate thing for every urgent thing, nothing gets done.

People just shut down, right? People give up. The animal may or may not survive the situation. There's just a lot of repercussions that happen from treating each symptom like its own thing and giving them a capital T trai- training plan for each thing and, and not looking at the entire system and what is happening in the system, not just the spreadsheet of behavior problems, 

[00:16:33] Tiffany: Yeah. What do these, what do these people's lives look like?

' Cause they have, we have an entire life. Like, no offense, Peter, he just came down here. No offense, Peter, but I have a life outside of you also sometimes occasionally.

[00:16:47] Emily: He's like, "How very dare you?"

Yeah, yeah. What do their lives look like? What, what capacity do they have left over after just living their lives? That's the capacity you've got to work with. You don't have all of their capacity to work with. You have the capacity that is left over after they've done everything else in their life, and that's a really big deal.

It's a really big deal to be like, "You know what? I'm going to honor your reality, and I see that you have limited bandwidth. So let's, let's stop the hemorrhaging. Let's just focus on that right now. And then once we've stopped the hemorrhaging, we can see what next doable chunk we can work on, and, and, how it's going to affect the system as a whole, and what's gonna be the most impactful thing that will affect the system."

That is, that is just a much more helpful approach.

[00:17:43] Tiffany: Yeah. And I have a really good example of that. Like, in my own household, it turns out if he's not struggling and having a hard time and having big reactions inside of our house, because we put the people inside of the management, we put the people inside, inside of the gates in, in the living room. And we just manage that situation, and we don't have all of these outbursts. Peter and I were outside yesterday, and the dog next door, s- there's visual barriers, he cannot see the dog, but it's just across the alley, like it's not very far away. Dog next door was barking, and Petey kind of like tai- tail up, ears forward, calm and straightforward, like made like a little boof, and he shook off, and he went over to his his scrubbing wall, which is j- which is just a strip of really cheap like AstroTurf that we stapled to the fence, 'cause he likes to like rub on the fence. And he scrubbed on his wall, and he shook off again, and then that was that.

[00:18:53] Emily: He... look at Petey go with his stellar self-regulation skills, right?

That he's like, "Oh, that was stressful. I need to take care of my body.

I need to complete my stress response cycle." What a stellar dude. That's so impressive. I love that. And I think that, like, one thing that you do really well...

one of the many things that you do really well is understand, is being able to see how everything is interconnected, how it's all related, and and address the, the, the core part of it instead of trying to, like, just play Whac-A-Mole with the symptoms. And so what we're seeing with the outcomes of that is that Petey has that skill, that self-regulation skill, regardless of whether the stressor is a guarding issue, a reactivity issue I can't remember, the body handling issue, right?

He ha- he knows how to self-regulate, and that skill helps him with all of the different symptoms. Maybe not all of them, but m- many of the symptoms that we see superficially, and that is such a descriptive approach, a learner-first approach to behavior change instead of taking this pre-script of like, "Well, he's got guarding so I have to do this, and he's got reactivity so I have to do this, and he's got body handling so I have to do this."

And he might learn how to handle those, like, individual situations, may or may not, depending on the system at large, but that won't... That doesn't give him the, the ability to generalize the concept of, "If I am stressed, I need to complete my stress response cycle, and this is how I can do it in this space."

Because I guarantee you, I don't know because I've never met Petey in person, but if he had a stressful situation when you were on an adventure with him out in the yard and he didn't have a scrubbing wall available, he would have another way to complete that stress response cycle. If he was in your house, he would have another way to complete his stress response cycle.

So it's not just about generalizing the concept, it's about looking at the environment, assessing what you have available to you, and using what you have available to you to complete your stress response cycle. That is some next level skill that he never would've gotten if you had worked with somebody who had given you a separate training plan for every single symptom that he expressed, right?

[00:21:29] Tiffany: Right. And the, and the management comes into play too, where it's like we manage those situations where, like, we know it would be an over-the-top kind of, threshold moment. So like I said, we-- when big man and I are together in the living room, we've got, we've got the gate up and Petey is separated from us, and that is what enables him So like, he can go grab a toy.

He can, chew on something in his crate. He, we have a little runway of carpets on our bare floor where he can do zoomies, and he does that most nights. He's gotta work it out. But like, if we were all in the same room together, it would be, it, it would be, he would be over-threshold. He wouldn't be able to like have that same like amount of, he wouldn't have that same level of emotional intelligence.

[00:22:25] Emily: Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's definitely true. And I think that the take home point for behavior professionals who are listening to this and feeling like, " Oh God, I've been doing it wrong this whole time," I, I wanna just say right now, like, first of all, don't beat yourself up. If you're listening to this and you're like, "They're talking about me," don't beat yourself up about that because the urge to address everything thoroughly and to, and to help your client with everything that they're experiencing and suffering from, or the, the pet that you're working with directly that it shows that you care.

It shows that you want to help every aspect of their, of their behavioral health, not just the one thing that they hired you for, right? So it's not ... It does not mean that you are bad at your job. It means that our industry typically teaches a prescriptive approach where we learn formulas for each behavior, and you are doing exactly what you have been taught, and that is not a criticism of you as a professional.

That is a loving critique of our industry and how we think about and approach behavior change. And, and by the way, this is not just with non-humans. The human behavioral health world h- is also going on this journey. So we're all in it together. And, and also if, if you're hearing this and it feels like a personal attack, then that means that you have opportunities to experiment with what it would look like to look at it on a systemic level, look at the underlying stuff, and figure out what support Do, do my learners need in order to thrive instead of having a checklist of training plans that, that go along with each behavior issue that you're seeing, right?

So I had a client, one of my all-time favorite clients. We have become friends since we worked together. We keep in touch even though it's been years since we worked together. They adopted a dog named Xan, and Xan was a feral dog who wa- showed a lot of anxiety and fear responses to a lot of different things.

And they brought him home, and he had everything like reactivity, resource guarding, body handling, separation anxiety inter-dog, like household stuff when the other dog ... The other dog was a bit extra. And that was just way too much sensory stimulation for him, and so he would go after the Dalmatian when she was being extra, which was frequently. So just everything. And then they were working with a trainer who had given them, "For this, you do this. For this, you do this. For this, you do this."

And so they were doing the training plan, but they were overwhelmed by it. It wasn't really working 'cause a lot of times he was too stressed to be in the thinking/learning zone, so they were not having a lot of success with the sessions. And then Xan bit their five-year-old in the fa- in, in the ear. Like ear/face area.

so they got my information from someone and it was really heartbreaking to me because in the first session the, the dad told me and both of them were, understandably emotional and, and crying, teary-eyed. And the dad told me, "We don't wanna discuss euthanasia. If that's what you're going to recommend, we- we're not interested in that."

And I- it just like, it was like a gut punch. It felt so sad to me that that was what he thought I was going to recommend, that he thought that there were no other options and he didn't want that to be true. And I was like, "There are so many steps between where we are and making a euthanasia decision, and if you, if that's a decision that you come to after we've gone on the journey, I will support you in it, but I'm not going to recommend that because we've got lots of options available to us between now and then."

And I asked why what, like, what, what— I can't remember how I phrased the question, but in a sort of conversational, indirect, very soft way, I asked why he thought that that was going to be my recommendation, and his response was, "Well, we've been training, and we've been doing so much training, and none of it has worked."

And so his thought was because they've been doing so much training and so much work and it hasn't worked, it means that the dog is defective, is unfixable. And so then euthanasia would be the next outcome. And I, I was like, "Buddy, no. I am so sorry that you have been doing as much training as you have. And also, the reason that the training hasn't been working has nothing to do with Zan, and it has nothing to do with y'all.

It has to do with the fact that we're not looking at the, the th- the things that are connecting all of these symptoms. So we're, like, slapping Band-Aids on all of the symptoms instead of addressing the core issue." So we had management plans, we had enrichment plans, but we really focused on safe spaces and flight cues and stress response, cl- completing the stress response cycle, improving communication between the dogs and the humans so that the whole family communicated with each other better working through protected contact to build trust.

Like, we did have a lot of things to do, but we didn't do them all at the same time. We did them in a, a kind of scaffolding way where we focused on one or two things at a time, and we worked sustainably and systematically up to the, the end goal, right? And we didn't have any training plans that were just for one of the issues.

We had management plans. Well, that's not true. We did trades for the object guarding, but that was like one of the last things that we worked on, and in the meantime we had our chicken sandwich protocol management for the trade stuff. But for the most part, we didn't have separate training plans for each behavior issue.

We had, we did, created a more supportive environment, improved communication, and worked on the core issues, which were Zan had no idea how to communicate discomfort. He had no idea how to move away from stressors. He had no idea how to complete his stress response cycle. And when we focused on those things, everything else got better, right?

So, He is my poster child for, for what it- the difference between that, like, treat every symptom as its own thing versus a more holistic strategy.

And I wanna be clear that, like, what I just said worked for Xan is also not prescriptive. It's not going to be... It's not... What, what I'm not saying is, "You don't need all these different training plans for all these different behaviors.

You just need this one training plan that will treat everything." That's super not the message. There are some things that almost every learner needs, because most pets in our homes don't have these skills that they would have learned if they were wild animals who had been raised by their family group.

And those things are, like, how to communicate effectively within your social group how to r- regulate your stress, how to make decisions about what risks you do and do not wanna take. Those kinds of things, pretty, pretty universal. Most of the animals that we work with need those skills.

But the specific combination that Xan needed is not the magic o- one size fits all solution. Because we need to look at, like, yes, stress and arousal, that stress response cycle, common culprit across behavior issues that we see in, in pets.

Unmet needs can be a lot of different things. One of the things that I have learned about Miley is that when she gets thirsty, her response to being thirsty is that she gets really amped up, and she'll start mouthing really hard on me or on the sofa or on my partner. And I didn't... It took me, like, a couple two or three times of her doing that for me to realize that we didn't have...

Like, her water bowl had emptied and I hadn't noticed, because she was on tether and she was drinking the water while she was playing with Copper. Or, like- Her water bowl was in the office, and we'd been in the living room for a couple of hours and then I forgot that I'd closed the office door. Th- like, the, it's not like I'm out here depriving my dog of water, right?

But life would happen, and her response to that, like, her kind of panic, "I'm thirsty" response would be to, like, get really amped up and really mouthy. So when we talk about unmet needs, we're not always talking about big, severe, complicated issues.

Sometimes it's, like, literally make sure that your dog has more access to water. Check the water bowl every couple of hours to make sure it hasn't been emptied because we've got two dogs drinking from a puppy water bowl. Maybe get a bigger water bowl is, is the lesson I'm taking away from telling this story.

It can be, a, an insufficiently enriching environment. Does the environment give them enough opportunities to do the things that they enjoy doing that, that helps them to self-regulate and self-soothe? It could be medical issues, which can be somewhat straightforward and simple or really, really, really super complicated or everything in between those two.

It can be routine disruption. There are a lot of underlying kind of root cause type of... Like, I'm using root cause in quotations, right? But a lot of root cause stuff that, that happens, that can happen, and so you can't be prescriptive about what sort of root cause treatment looks like. But if you're paying attention to the root cause stuff, and you're focusing on that and, and building skills that support the underlying issues, then usually you don't have to do much, if any, training of the symptoms.

Sometimes you do, but what I tell, the way I tell clients is, "Let's do the low-hanging fruit first. Let's take care of the stuff that we know is contributing to y- the issues that you're experiencing, and then after we've taken care of that, let's see what's left over." And that's why with Xan, trades was one of the last things that we did because w- it was important for us to do the, the root, the underlying stuff first, and then we saw that he still had a hard time Relinquishing food and objects.

And that's very in line with all of the other desert dogs that had been caught and brought into pet homes. I- most of... And Brie was one of those desert feral dogs, and she also had really intense resource guarding, and that makes sense. It's a super adaptive behavior in the environment that they were raised in, because in the desert, resources are scarce, and if you don't protect them, you might not survive.

And so you gotta put, put all of your goods in Fort Knox and defend it with the strength of an army, right? And that... So when we took care of all of Zan's underlying stuff, the reason that trades was one of the capital T training things that we had to do at the end was because even after all of his needs were met, he still had that learning history of like, "Don't nobody take my stuff."

Right? And so that was the one thing that we had a training plan for the symptom, because turns out it wasn't actually the symptom of the underlying stuff. It was, it was just a perfectly reasonable, adaptable behavior in the context he came from, and it was no longer adaptive or helpful in his new context, so we just had to teach him new skills for the new context, right?

[00:34:37] Tiffany: Yes. Ask me about what training I've done for resource guarding for Petey.

[00:34:42] Emily: What training have you done for resource guarding?

[00:34:45] Tiffany: None, really. But we've done, safe space, flight cue, and, and and then, he's got like a suite of cues, like move, as in

pick your body up from where you are because you have a weird personal bubble. Move

your body. 

[00:35:05] Emily: I need you to relocate your person to another space.

[00:35:08] Tiffany: Right. You'll feel better. That's what I always tell him, like I can convince him. But like some of the, some of the behaviors around resource guarding, like, like if he hears something or sees somebody moving, like getting closer to whatever the thing is, maybe growling, stuff like that, I see an increase in that in times when other needs are not met, and that might include something like not not having normal stool.

It's an unmet need around, whatever his gut stuff is, or even something just like he's been cooped up around a lot because of the weather or whatever. But we have all of these skills around the, his, his, his need for personal space and his need for resources that like we can deal with them together

[00:36:09] Emily: Yeah. And I think you hit on something that is really important about that, is the togetherness of dealing with them, that you and Petey can work collaboratively as a team because you have excellent communication with each other, right? And that's not possible when you're taking a prescriptive approach, and you're doing something for the learner or to the learner instead of with the learner.

You're not listening to them if you're making decisions for them instead of making decisions with them, and you can't make decisions with them if you don't have really strong communication skills. 

[00:36:45] Tiffany: Yeah, I can give him a project to do and say, like, "Take it," which means put it in your mouth and, like, carry it somewhere, like in your bed, which is his crate, and he'll take it to his crate. And sometimes because there are humans moving around, the crate is not a good enough space, and so I'll see him do something like just lay his chin over it and he's not working on it, or maybe he'll growl, or maybe I'll see him stiffen, and I'll look at him and I'll say, " Take it to your room,"

which is upstairs, which is, like, away from everybody else, and sometimes that's all it takes.

And then I don't see the resource guarding behavior then because he's now just, like, upstairs working on the resource.

[00:37:27] Emily: Right. He doesn't need to guard it because he's in a safe space where he knows nobody's gonna try to take his stuff,

right? Yeah. That's, that's beautiful, and that's why it works so well and why you haven't needed a, like, capital T training plan for resource guarding, because you've eliminated the need for him to guard.

Like, he doesn't need to anymore 'cause he can just take the stuff that he values to his own room, and his room is a safe space where nobody's gonna steal his stuff, right? So I think when you see, like, a whole cluster of behaviors, the first question isn't like, "What do I tackle first?" Or like, "How much training can I get away with my, asking my client to do?"

It should be, "What are all of these things telling me about my animal's state and, like, what is going on with them?" Because what we saw with Pe- Petey's underlying stuff was gut issues- Lack of trust, slash history of unpredictability, no communication or poor communication anyway, and no ability to self-regulate.

No safe space. Okay, that's five things, but those five things are- were contributing to all of the stuff that he was dealing with, right?

Plus generalized anxiety. Plus generalized anxiety. Well, yes, and I think probably he would not have a... It... I don't know because I don't, I don't know anything about his lineage or, like, hi- his family's propensity towards anxiety.

 all of the things that I mentioned cause anxiety disorders, right? G- gut, chronic gut health causes anxiety disorders. A lack of safety and predictability causes anxiety disorders. The inability to communicate with your social group causes anxiety disorders. So, like, I'm not convinced that his anxiety disorders isn't actually a symptom of the stuff that I just said.

I could be wrong. He could have a family history of anxiety, but, like, whether or not he does all of that root stuff is those, those things cause anxiety disorders, right? I'm not even sure that it's disordered to have anxiety under those conditions. I think that's a really reasonable response to a garbage life experience, right?

[00:39:45] Tiffany: What a perfectly adaptable young man.

[00:39:48] Emily: What a perfectly adaptable hot mess because he, he came from a hot mess environment, so yeah, of course, he's a hot mess, right? He's a kind of a good poster child for doing the work that you did, which is instead of being like, "I have a plan for every symptom," you're like, "What are all of these things telling me about Petey's state, the state that he's in, and what can I do to support his state so that all the symptoms go away?"

Right? And like we ta- like, I briefly mentioned this, but I think it's worth repeating. The, the kind of underlying issues usually include some kind of chronic stress, some kind of unmet behavioral, emotional and/or physical needs, sleep, soc- safe social groups, physical outlets, cognitive outlets, all those things.

A history of unpredictability is a big one. A lot of learners who come from unpredictable environments have lots of different, weird, quirky issues as a result of- Of having no sense of safety or predictability in, in their lives, right? And then, yeah, medical stuff, medical, medical, medical. We gotta rule out medical.

A good episode to listen to to learn more about the intersection between medicine and behavior is episode forty-six with Dr. Mikayla Young.

Usually when you improve security, predictability, communication, and teach your learners how to complete their stress response cycle, multiple problems improve without directly addressing any of them.

And then you get to see what's left over, and then you only have to address what's left over after you've done that core work instead of trying to just tr- play Whac-A-Mole with all the symptoms, right? And that's, that is the value and the benefit of systems thinking instead of looking at everything in a vacuum as if none of it is interrelated.

It can be helpful for you to reframe your current experience while you are working on improving the experience. So if you think about it like the, the dog you're working with or the client you're working with, whoever is struggle busing, they're not doing a lot of things wrong right now.

You, as a behavior professional, aren't doing a lot of things wrong right now. None of you have failed at a lot of things. It just means that there's an underlying systemic issue that needs to be identified and addressed. And it's just a matter of figuring out what that is, and sometimes that takes time, and sometimes it takes trial and eval, and that's not a reflection on the behavior professional, the pet parent, or the pet.

It's just The reality, it's-- that is just how it works. Sometimes it takes trial and eval to figure out what the underlying issues actually are.

[00:42:47] Tiffany: Yes. So we've been working with the vet for Petey's poop situation, and by we, I mean me. And, and we trialed some stuff, and he had just, like, a really bizarre reaction to one of the meds. He had fecal incontinence in it. Sorry, that's embarrassing for him. But it was with a med that, like, that was not an expected thing at all. So we're still trying to get that under control. My point is that w- I said that in general, like, his, his behavior, he's been, like, more or less behaviorally stable throughout all this. He's been sensitive to my husband.

Like, if they're laying together, he'll go and he'll settle, and he'll, like, fall... they can, they can snug, they can fall asleep together. But if Big Man moves, Petey has been, like, jumping up and barking and, and, like, snarling and growling, which, like, i- is a thing that he has a history of doing, but it's been, like, even, I know one day Big Man was trying to just, like, scratch his nose or something, and

Petey's like, "Ruff," had to, had to stand up and do that. So I am hoping that once we nail down whatever has been, plaguing him with this gut issue, that I will see a decrease in that is what I am hoping.

[00:44:08] Emily: Yeah. That's a good thing to trial and eval, and also if you don't... if you fix the gut and you don't see that sensitivity to big man daring to touch his own nose,

then that doesn't mean that you're a failure, or PD's a lost cause, or this whole training nonsense doesn't work. It just means that you need to keep trial and evaling, val- trialing and evaling other potential contributing factors to PD's sudden sensitivities or recurring, reoccurring sensitivity, ' cause it's not like he didn't have it before, right?

[00:44:47] Tiffany: He's always been pretty, pretty sensitive to,

like, movement and stuff. It just, I know that when he physically feels better, that is less of a concern to him. It's less jarring for him, and, and I think that there's, like, a, a pain thing that we haven't quite nailed down yet either. And it's hard with a dog with behavior problems, like, on, on top of all of this because, figuring out the...

It makes figuring out the pieces harder.

[00:45:18] Emily: Yeah. Anytime there are multiple contributing factors, it makes it harder to identify them because it's hard to... Like, you eliminate one, and you're like, "Okay, but this thing is still happening. Is it still happening because the thing I eliminated had nothing to do with it or because it just had partially something to do with it, but not everything?"

So yeah, it's, it's sometimes it's not a super simple solution. Wow, that was alliterative. I enjoyed that alliteration. But it... Again, it's not a reflection on anybody involved. It's just a matter of finding w-what the contributing factors are. What are the underlying issues, and figure it out from there, right?

And obviously, sometimes it can be more complicated than pattern recognition because, like Tiffany just talked about how they've been working with Petey on a lot of things, and they've figured out a lot of problems, and then all of the sudden we've got a, this thing coming back, and it's not clear why it's coming back.

And so the, the sort of like pattern recognition component isn't necessarily helping her in this situation, right? But overall, the pattern recognition part and addressing the underlying issues has made enough other things manageable that when this one thing is reoccurring, it's easier to like hone in on it because you've cleaned out all the noise, right?

[00:46:49] Tiffany: I feel, I feel less overwhelmed by, like, when, when this stuff happens, I don't spiral on it the way that I used to when we were still like, figuring out just how to deal with life together. Like, now that we know how to deal with life together, we can just spiral on one thing at a time.

[00:47:09] Emily: So it's just, like, one thing that you have to worry about instead of the ten million things from before, right? On this journey of shifting away from a prescriptive symptom-based approach to this descriptive systems-based approach is looking for the patterns, like asking, like, "What's the common recurring themes here that I'm seeing, and can we address those things?"

Practice getting into the mindset of, " This is gonna be trial and eval. We're going to test this hypothesis that this might be the underlying issue."

Next week we're gonna go one level deeper because sometimes the real problem isn't the dog's behavior at all, we're gonna be talking about what happens when the plan is actually designed for your anxiety,

[00:47:57] 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.