Sexier Than A Squirrel: Dog Training That Gets Real Life Results
In Sexier Than a Squirrel, the Official AbsoluteDogs Podcast, join us here at Absolute Dogs as we talk training your dog, transforming your dog training struggles and getting real-life results through GAMES!
Sexier Than A Squirrel: Dog Training That Gets Real Life Results
Building The Resilient Dog: Why It Matters More Than You Think
What makes some dogs able to handle anything life throws at them while others crumble under pressure? The answer lies in resilience – that magical quality that transforms anxious, reactive dogs into confident companions who can accompany you anywhere.
Lauren Langman and special guest Amanda dive deep into how to build rock-solid resilience in dogs of all ages. They share personal stories of their most bomb-proof dogs – from Tokyo the unflappable Border Collie who could sleep through chaos to Salty the adventurous Labrador who sailed boats and rode gondolas without a care in the world. These weren't just lucky genetic accidents but the result of deliberate, thoughtful training and lifestyle choices.
The conversation unpacks the fascinating "stress bucket" concept – a model for understanding how dogs process and manage stressors. You'll discover the five critical components that build resilience: optimism, thinking in arousal, arousal control, calmness, and disengagement. Each component can be developed through specific games and management strategies that transform how your dog perceives and responds to the world around them.
Perhaps most eye-opening is the discussion of "rehearsal" – how what we allow our dogs to practice becomes their default behavior. Whether it's a Border Collie working sheep, a spaniel flushing birds, or a terrier hunting vermin – understanding your training goals before allowing certain behaviors to be rehearsed can make all the difference in creating the companion you want. The hosts emphasize that resilience training isn't just for puppies. Even rescue dogs and older canines can develop these skills through patient, consistent work.
Ready to create a dog who can truly share your adventures? This episode provides the roadmap to an enriched life for both you and your canine companion. As Amanda beautifully summarizes: "Resilience leads to an enriched life for your dog."
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Welcome to the Absolute Dog Sex in a Squirrel podcast. I'm Lauren Langman. I'm one of the world's leading dog trainers and it's my mission to help owners become their dog's top priority. In each episode, you'll discover how to gain trust and communicate with your dog like never before, creating unbreakable bonds that make you the most exciting part of their world. So we're talking resilience. We're talking resilience for puppies, resilience for adult dogs, resilience all round, and I know that this is always going to be a good thing for dogs. I'm joined by the wonderful Amanda today. Amanda, what are we thinking? Where are we going? Where are we heading with resilience?
Speaker 2:Resilience is like the most critical foundation for any dog. I've had the great fortune of having what I regard as the most resilient dog in the world, right Salty dog, my Labrador Retriever, and this is a dog who I could literally take anywhere. He was a sailor, he was a traveler, he was he. He went up and down gondolas Like this dog was unbelievable. He could have been a service dog, he he was like bomb proof.
Speaker 2:I have a fantastic photograph out there somewhere of my boat which had been pulled out. It's sitting there on the hard on the ground being worked on, with a ladder at the back end, a great, huge travel-ish lift which is moved I used to move like really huge boats and he's sitting there in his crate, fast asleep, upside down. I mean, if that's not resilience, I don't know what is. So, um, as you know, I do um volunteer work with uh, with the uh the Response Team, and I help to train their team on working with dogs specifically, and so for me, disaster preparedness is a massive thing, and that's a massive topic that we can talk about later. But at the core of this is how do we build a resilient dog? And I mean, you have some amazingly resilient dogs.
Speaker 1:And for me, thinking about, about resilience, listening to you there, I mean, tokyo was a salty dog for me. I could take him anywhere and he would just like collapse and sleep. And you might be thinking, hey boy, we're at a dog show, like come on. Or you'd be like we're in the office and he just was like therapy on legs, like I would watch him and I'd be like mesmerized by his ability to just flop on his back and sleep anywhere and he just had the most resilient temperament to so many things, like dog growling at him.
Speaker 1:I remember staying in a. I love staying in these things. It's part of my adventuring, like dreams, like these little huts where you're like against lots of other little huts but you can't really see them, like yurts and huts and things. And I remember staying in this little hut, like tiny little hut, and he was always a pleasure to take in anywhere with you because he was always appropriate. And I think that's the important thing. It's not that it's appropriate, resilience as well, like it's done so appropriately in so many different ways, like you watch and it's just so appropriate.
Speaker 1:And he, this dog, came flying from nowhere and hit the glass and I remember him just like he shot up and he just went back to sleep again. Perfect, wow, what the hell just happened. Perfect, yeah, fuck you, you moron, okay, I'm going back to sleep. And it was like why did you make me for that? And I love appropriate resilience, I really love appropriate like it was just really appropriate. Like he he was, everything about him was like alert, something's going to get wrong here. Okay, no, just some crazy ass terrier that's just not behaving in the way I was expecting and it was just brilliant how he just went again probably my terrier, because I've had the advantage of having a really resilient dog and having a dog who's not resilient.
Speaker 1:And when you do both, you really do understand the extremes right, Like you understand how different it is.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And, of course, now I'm building the spaniel and he's you know, he's got some like he's a working cocker spaniel. That's the very definition of insanity, right? So going through this process of building him up to be that resilient dog, it's been a brilliant opportunity for me to really, really dive down and take a look at those basic fundamental skills that we want to get into our dogs as early as possible. I mean, this is ideal for puppies, like really important for puppies. But even if you have an older dog, like a rescue dog, these can still be put into them, we can still train them and again we can say we've trained them or we've played games, and playing the games shifts our attitude, which makes the whole thing fun. So it's really important and helpful for people to maintain that really good, positive attitude whenever you're training, because resilience is based on a positive emotion, and so when we build it that way, as soon as our dogs make decisions, we want that done in a way that triggers that positive, relaxed attitude like Tokyo had. And so the foundation of all this is what we call bucket work right the stress bucket and Games Club has an excellent description of all of this. You can find all of these games in the amazing Games Club and you know there's many different approaches that you can take within that. The beautiful thing about games is there's more than one game to build a skill.
Speaker 2:And so when we take a look at the stress bucket and just a quick, quick overview of what the stress bucket is every dog has a bucket. The stress bucket is used as a model to describe how dogs deal with stress as it comes into their lives. You have a bucket of a certain size. That size is determined by your dog's ability to think in arousal. What goes into that bucket is based on your dog's perception of what's going on around them and what stresses them, so that's based on optimism. Now, every bucket has a hole, so it drains slowly, and that's their ability to arousal up and arousal down, so they can get their energy high and they can bring that energy down in a graduated manner, kind of like a dimmer switch. And then, of course, how do you empty the bucket?
Speaker 2:Calmness, and so we all know that if we've had a stressful event, the best thing, the best solution, is for us to have a hot bath, take a nap, do something that's calming for us, and that's really a foundation. Calming skills sounds so complicated. How do you train your dog to calm down? Well, again, in Games Club there's so many games that will help us to develop that skill.
Speaker 2:The basic one, the foundation of it all, is boundary games. Boundary games teaches our dogs a safe place to go, where they can decompress, and safe is critical. This has to be guarded. So no kids get in there, no other dogs get in there. Your dog has a place where they can let it all down, let their hair down and relax, right. And so with each of these concepts, with the optimism, thinking and arousal, arousal up, arousal down and calm, come a set of games. Now there's one more concept which is really, really critical here and Tokyo obviously had it in spades and that is the ability to disengage, and that's related to optimism in many ways. So our dogs will see something like that dog that comes smacking at them, but then they can sort of go not so important and then settle back down again.
Speaker 1:And I was thinking when I was thinking about disengagement. The other thing that I think comes in massively here is is rehearsal. Oh yes, rehearsal is one of the things I realized with Tokyo and of all of my dogs I think I mean Skittles similarly like. She's very good, but because she's very busy, spaniel fast she doesn't have his lollipy colliness, so sometimes she attracts dogs accidentally even though she's not really trying to engage them, but her body movement is just fast, so they get. They're interested in her, which I prefer they weren't, but I think she would prefer they weren't. But they are interested in her because she's busy.
Speaker 1:But with him I think that he'd had. If he'd been exposed a lot as a young dog to lots of other dogs, I think he would have been like the village flirt exposed a lot as a young dog to lots of other dogs. I think he would have been like the village flirt. I think he would have been all over everyone rolling on his back and engaging with everyone and struggling to leave because he was so soppy. Yeah, I actually feel like rehearsal was also really important and impactful for him because he never really learned to become that character, so his character was like cool hand, luke. I always think of him like he'd always be there doing his job, diligently, getting on with it, but he was never trying to get involved in like the gossip or the. He was always able to just carry on doing his job effectively and and professionally very professional.
Speaker 2:He'd never got in those like funny little conversations at the side, or he wasn't that dog no, and you are right, 100% like rehearsal is massive, and that's one of those really important key things that gets forgotten about in the dog training world is you can train your dog all of these things to do, but if they're still running out and chasing birds or, you know, barking at the dog next door, you're not going to make a lot of progress, lot of progress. Now here's an interesting thing for you. I have a bird dog, you know, working carcass spaniel, and he's been trained for gundog work, so I want him to chase birds. So that makes for a really interesting thing, because when we are creative, we can actually utilize those things as a reward system. Now, if I had a dog that I did not want to do gun dog work with, I would not be allowing that to be rehearsed.
Speaker 1:I think that's such a big thing. So I'm going to say the same with sheep dogs. If I wasn't going to allow Nell to work sheep, I don't want to switch the light on, and once you switch the light on, that light ain't switching off right. Like you can't say you used to work sheep and now you don't. Now will always be a sheep dog, she will always be a sheep dog. So when I took her on as an adult dog, I knew that I would have to meet those needs of those sheep on her. Like she's the package, like she doesn't come without sheep and I personally don't feel it's fair to her to own her without working her on sheep, because I'm missing part of her life. And at the same time, when I get my next border collie puppy, I will not teach them to work sheep unless I intend for them to be a sheepdog.
Speaker 2:I think that's really important and and this is one of the big mistakes that we often make like um, we got Murphy the terrier as vermin control because of where we lived. We needed someone to get the squirrels, the rats and the mice out from underneath the house and he was brilliant. But then we moved to suburbia and, guess what? He's a dog without a job. So there happens to be an interesting sport out there called barn hunt, and so we became North Island barn hunt and he did really well in it. But you know, again, coming back to resilience, you know we need to think about what our goals are with this dog in terms of what we allow them to rehearse. I mean again.
Speaker 2:You know brilliant comment.
Speaker 1:What our goals are and then align it with what we allow them to rehearse, because I think so many people allow them to rehearse everything and then retract and go oh my God, my goals and my alignment are wrong, like I've allowed them to rehearse the wrong things. They've done it so late. And when you think about and I know we've got to get back to track of where we are, but when you think about, I think it's really interesting. Often people come to me with their agility dog but their agility dog's more bothered about playing with other their other dogs or, um, doing something that they've rehearsed a long time, and then they bring them to do agility and expect them to just suddenly, like switch a light on but they've built such a strong relationship with other dogs or having movement or doing other things.
Speaker 2:Actually doing agility isn't really on their agenda and I think that's really interesting and that's one of the biggest problems with a lot of the puppy classes where they end up having, you know, all the puppies playing together in a pile. You know we could have a whole discussion on its own on rehearsal, and I think we should. I mean, let's do that Like rehearsal and breeds, because there's a huge relationship with that. So, with Tokyo, what would you say were the number one things that you did to help build that resilience in him?
Speaker 1:I think resilience in him Very, very, very much was relationship, so advocated for him at every level. So didn't ever let him lose trust in any situation. So again comes back to rehearsal. I think the biggest games that I played were often confidence and noise related games, knowing that he was a border collie and I didn't think that he was a particularly sensitive border collie. And then as he went through adolescence he was more sensitive and when he came through adolescence he was amazing. Like he was so bomb-proof and yet going into adolescence I was like my Lord, you're quite the baby. Like he was really at points like a marshmallow would be how I describe him. Like he'd be hard to like get off the ground like he was. He was sort of gooey and yet he was just such a fantastic dog to work with resilience, uh, as he, as he grew up. But I think, yeah, noise games, noise box, knock him over. Um, any level of DMT game, lots of games with saucepans and cupboards and loads of cardboard chaos and, as my good friend Dave, or our good friend Dave would say, concrete chaos.
Speaker 1:I did a lot of lifestyling with Tokyo and doing life with him. So whatever I did, I tried to include him where appropriate, but at an appropriate level. So huge amounts of scatter feeding. He wasn't a very foodie dog for the first probably eight weeks of his life and very quickly he became very foodie because that is how he earned his food. So it's a ball eight weeks to really get on board, but within eight weeks he was really on board and he went from like this floppy puppy to this like cool, like funky adult who was really really just cool. I can't describe anything but cool. What I loved most about him is he didn't take offense easily and yet he emotionally got most situations Like he read the dogs that didn't need him. He read the dogs that maybe did need him. Like he was very, very emotionally intelligent as a dog.
Speaker 2:So let me ask you two questions. One is and this is a really common one I find out there out there in sort of puppy class land, letting him make his own decisions. At what point did you let him start to make his own decisions?
Speaker 1:I had him on a line as a pup, like a puppy line from the absolute dog store, the thin one and so I used to try wherever possible to drop his lead and see what his choices were. And because he wasn't a spaniel, he was a collie, so he's a little bit, I find I found him a little bit slower than the spaniels. I actually found him quite frustrating as a puppy because I'd be like gosh, you're slow like and he wasn't, he was just slow compared to like a skittle, like skittles, headbutted you giving you a nose bleed and two black eyes before you even thought about training her. Like she's so quick and in your face, um, you haven't got your food out, you haven't got your bag ready, and she's barking and backing up from you and like let's go, let's go, let's go, lady. Uh, whereas he was always a little bit steadier. But the interesting thing he was he was never steady in training. Once you asked him to do anything explosive, he was very explosive. But yeah, I think, I think I allowed him, where I possibly could, to be, off lead a lot, but I also gave him huge opportunity for reinforcement. So I would say I started to see him making the correct decisions and then gave him more to make, and that was probably around six months, but with the caveat that I didn't allow him to rehearse the wrong thing.
Speaker 1:So one thing that he did, for example, is he growled quite often at my dad. I think my dad was often quite loud and quite a big presence and quite a big guy, and or at least he was at first. With Tokyo, my dad dropped weight quite quickly as he got more poorly and a bit older. But when Tokyo really first knew my dad, he was quite a big guy and Tokyo would growl at him. So rather than Tokyo having to be in the position where he was going to growl at him, I would put Tokyo away. When my dad came in, my dad would be sat at a seat and I'd give him a cup of tea or whatever you're going to give him normally a cup of tea and a biscuit, and he'd hover and and then I'd let Tokyo in so that Tokyo saw him already stationary rather than him approaching Tokyo, and that then always worked.
Speaker 1:So again, a level of like how you're going to allow them to rehearse that situation and a level of giving them an opportunity to be resilient when that person's stationary rather than that person walking into their situation. Those would be the same. I saw him maybe not resilient or as in not confident probably. Uh, so he wasn't necessarily confident when a new person would walk in on him, but he really was. By the time he was a year and this was interesting because in the past I'd had a dog that was reactive to people and poppy and um and dogs, but she got worse with exposure, whereas tokyo I set up the exposure to be better and he got with the exposure yeah, and that's that's the difference between sensitization and desensitization.
Speaker 2:and that's one of those examples of the right setup. And you know antecedents if you're into applied behavioral analysis or you know doing too much, so going overboard, and that's why it's so important that we be very aware of our dog's behaviors and those little nuances, you know that little ear flick or that little squint of the eye, that little ear flick or that little squint of the eye. You mentioned lifestyling and I'm going to ask you about that. But I just want to quickly say, with lifestyling, lifestyling is one of those things which is the little bit, little bit, little bit in the day to day life. And this is the amazing example of Salty versus Murphy.
Speaker 2:Now, salty was my 100% resilient Labrador retriever. Came with me everywhere when I was working at the university. I'd smuggle him in, he'd sleep under my desk until the janitor caught us, but he would go everywhere and everything was positive. Number one thing was he had solid crates and he could calm down. Now Murphy. On the other hand, jack Russell Terrier mix three quarters Jack Russell Terrier. Now Murphy. On the other hand, jack Russell Terrier mix three quarters Jack Russell Terrier. I think the rest is Dash Hound, but anyways, sensitive dog got sensitized. Totally the opposite. I tried to bring him everywhere but I was not as aware of when he was getting stressed as I was with salty dog, just by the condition of life, and that's where you can see things go sideways, because he became a pessimistic, very dog dog, reactive dog. So lifestyling to me is that little bit that you do every day, but with the awareness of your dog's stress level, how their bucket is filled, and management of the situation. What would you say in terms of lifestyling? What is lifestyling for you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And I was talking to Linda, who I know you get on really well with and I think is a fantastic trainer. I feel very grateful to have her in my life and she's got a new poodle puppy. Oh my god, really funny as well. He's called Bobble or Bob, and so I said to her I hope he's coming with you everywhere. And she was like, absolutely, and he is, but what she's not doing is putting him out with like a group of dogs and expecting him to fend for himself, but what she is doing is taking him with her and he can hear the other dogs from the other side of the car and she's got the radio playing and he's getting on with it. And I think there's a lot of that for me, that they are maybe the other side of bars or the other side of the car, or sat in the front seat or with the car stationary, of course, or they are watching at a distance or they are, say, I'm going to. I'll give you a great example.
Speaker 1:I was recording an audio book and so what I did was I took my young dog with me, popped her in the next to the recording studio room and then I went and recorded next door. I knew that she'd be safe there. I knew there were no other dogs, no other people, only the people that we were recording with. Nothing was going to go wrong for her. But she's kind of doing life Like that is what our life is.
Speaker 1:Our life is going from recording studio to recording studio, or our life is going from competition to competition, whereas there are some people who won't take their dog with them because they're only a puppy, so they'll let them stay in the warm, so they're just a puppy actually. No, this is your adult dog in a year. Let's get them used to this lifestyle now. So me like taking the puppy with me to a competition, but not necessarily pulling them out and taking them all around the rings, but taking them with me, getting them out for a wee break, putting them back in again, taking them out again, putting them back in again. So actually they're experiencing what their lifestyle is going to be before it's fully occupied, but also not allowing it to go wrong too much either.
Speaker 2:And this is absolutely critical. So you know, this morning again, no-transcript. The whole disaster preparedness thing is often people don't want to leave their dogs in cars or they don't want to create them for very long. Harley will create for four hours, no problem. When I drove down to Oregon last year it was a 10 hour drive and so he was crated, let out for a wee, crated again. Not a peep out of him, and when he was down there he was fantastic.
Speaker 2:It's all that building it up. So we must not allow ourselves to be worried about what other people think. We need to have that goal, that powerful. Why on, why do we have this dog? How do we want to build this dog? And if you're not too sure, go back to the beginning of this podcast, listen to the stress bucket. Because, regardless of what you want to do, you want to build those five skills. You want to build optimism, calm thinking and arousal arousal up, arousal down and disengagement, because those five concepts are what are going to build that rock solid dog that you can take anywhere with you in life.
Speaker 1:And for me, whilst it can take a little while to get with this program and get everything on board or even to start a dog, what I really love with this, Amanda and I don't know if you found this too this pays dividends later on. This is like compounding interest. This is like over and over and over. It's like an investment in the rest of your life with this dog, and what you allow them to rehearse and what you build in these stages just comes back on you again and again and again, in such a beautiful way.
Speaker 2:I'm going to give you an example that I'm living right now. I've got two dogs. I have one who has very little resilience. If I go away, I have to either hire someone to stay at the house or I found a kennel I know a lot of people don't like kennels but a kennel that he does well in but I can't take him with me. He can't come with me everywhere because he stresses too easily. I can't take him with me. He can't come with me everywhere because he stresses too easily.
Speaker 2:Harley, on the other hand, can go anywhere with me. He's solid and in fact, in October, we're actually going out to the interior to chase some birds around, and, shall we say, an undisciplined way, because when you do gun dog work, especially if you're doing testing, which is what we do do it's very formal and you have to have complete control of your dog. In this scenario, it's basically letting the dogs be themselves, and so he's going to get to go around and flush birds and we're going to be in a totally different environment. It's going to be something very different for him, and so I need to build him up now.
Speaker 1:It's so much fun. You're excited for your adventure. I can feel your excitement.
Speaker 2:Your adventure is so exciting and I'm so excited for him though, because you know, I originally, as you know, when I got him because I thank you very much for helping to organize that whole thing um, you know, I thought you know I'd do agility and I discovered I'm the one who can't do agility because I my knees are not so great anymore and my background is largely obedience. Anyways, and to top things off, I'm not a competitor, and I found this out way back when, when I used to train horses, I loved training them. I did not like competing. Same thing when I was doing obedience trialing.
Speaker 2:So, you know, we found a niche that we love and I discovered that he had a real knack for the whole gundog thing when I went out spontaneously with a real knack for the whole gundog thing, when I went out spontaneously with a group of people who were trying to form a spaniel group here on the island of Vancouver, ireland, and I watched him and I'm going, wow, he doesn't need me, like he already knew what to do and so that's his thing yeah, I'm guessing that I love about all of this is that resilience and all of these skills that you've taught him enable him to have a better life and enable him to have a life where he can go to all of these places and can do all of these things.
Speaker 1:And I suppose it's a lovely way to end this podcast. Guys teach resilience. Listen to Amanda, listen to the Games Club. Head over to the Games Club. If you haven't already, go get yourself a membership. It is the best space you can be. I know that it's going to help it, right well with resilience.
Speaker 2:I want everyone to remember if you have a resilient dog, your dog and you have an enriched life and it's so true.
Speaker 1:It's true at every level, because you are going to allow your dog more freedom. The more resilient they are, the more you're able to work with them effectively in this space. So let's leave it on that. You know what that's gorgeous, amanda? Say it once more. The enriched life. Tell us once more the enriched life.
Speaker 2:Resilience leads to an enriched life for your dog.