Annie & her dog, Amos.
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Elise Mac Adam and Annie first met in 2002 when Annie wrote up Elise's engagement announcement for her column in The New York Observer. Both of them were terrier lovers, writers, and native Manhattanites: They became fast friends. When Annie and Kate first started School For The Dogs in 2011 and running classes out of Annie's Manhattan living room, Elise and her dogs were among their first clients. Elise, her sons, and her husband, have worked with half a dozen of School For The Dogs trainers over the last decade, with three of their dogs. She has, overall, clocked more sessions than any other single client. Eventually, she had to make the difficult decision to rehome one of her terriers. She and Annie discuss how rehoming a dog can feel like both a success and failure at the same time, and the silver lining of this difficult experience: It led her to decide to enroll in the School For The Dogs Professional Course.
Apply to the School For The Dogs Professional Course here. Next cohort begins August 31.
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Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media at the University of Alabama, is the author of the forthcoming book The Internet Is For Cats: How Animal Images Shape Our Digital Lives. Her research has largely involved looking at how people share and consume photos of animals on the Internet. She and Annie discuss a variety of topics relating to social media pets. Maddox offers an academic take on why people create Instagram accounts for their pets, are drawn to stories about Ukrainian rescue cats, and more. What does Youtube have to say about the practice of tying puppies to train tracks so that someone can post a video of their rescue? Why do some brands prefer to work with pet influencers over human ones? Are we living in a new era of anthropomorphizing our pets in a non-private arena, or is this just a new iteration of an age-old practice? And: Is it possible to breed an NFT cat? Maddox addresses these questions, and more.
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Karen Pryor turns ninety on May 14th! Annie is celebrating today and... plotting continued celebrations on this podcast in the coming year.
If you're a Karen Pryor fan, join the celebration! If you're not, you'll enjoy learning why she is so worthy of it. In this episode, Annie interviews BF Skinner Foundation president Dr. Julie Vargas, about the importance of this incredible scientist, writer and entrepreneur who, over the last thirty years, has done more than probably anyone else alive to help show people how we can use operant conditioning and secondary reinforcers to train dogs with rewards: aka, clicker training.
When her husband bought Sea Life Park in the 1960s, Pryor was tasked with training the dolphins to perform. She got her hands on a paper written by students who were working in BF Skinner's Harvard lab, and it outlined the basics of operant conditioning and how to use a secondary reinforcer, like a whistle, to pinpoint the moment a desired behavior occurred. It further described how to then use successive approximations to shape the behavior using reinforcement. She took what she had learned about dolphins and wrote a book about about using positive reinforcement in everyday life: Don't Shoot The Dog!, then started doing seminars on how to use a clicker with dogs in the 1990s. In the 2000s, she started running Clicker Expo, a conference which brings the worlds best positive-reinforcement trainers together several times a year, and began training dog trainers through her Karen Pryor Academy.
Follow us on Instagram, @schoolforthedogs, where we are giving away her book Reaching The Animal Mind and a signed clicker this weekend.
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Before she became a dog trainer, Jenny Efimova was working human trauma survivors for a living. Her job involved being empathetic and meeting people where they were. It wasn't immediately obvious to her that a lot of the lessons she'd learned at work could be applied to someone in her home who was suffering: Her dog. Her young rescue, Larkin, was increasingly afraid to go out on walks in her neighborhood. The first professionals she worked with told her she was the issue: She wasn't “confident” enough with her puppy, and he thought he was the boss. It didn't feel right to her, and the suggested methods didn't work. In fact, they felt like they were making matters worse. Then she started working with a trainer who explained how to use positive reinforcement in training, and it was a behavioral game changer for her and her dog Larkin. This led her to become a certified dog trainer herself, through the Karen Pryor Academy. Today she trains online and in Brookline, MA.
Annie and Jenny discuss the challenges that come with cultural expectations of how both dogs and dog owners should behave. They confront the popular idea that if you are not a stern leader with your dog, you are spoiling them, and consider whether there has been any cultural shift in changing the conversation about what it means to be a compassionate dog owner. They also discuss how interspecies relationships and examining our expectations of our pets can help us learn to be more humane and compassionate in general.
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In his work as a set designer, Saturday Night Life staffer Ken MacLeod had seen many well-trained dogs, and had even done commercial work with his own Jack Russell, Mac. But then he got a dog named Scooter and he realized that every dog has different needs. This realization led him to decide he wanted to become a certified dog trainer. Today, he splits his time: Part of every month, he can be found building sets for SNL, and the rest of the time, he is training out of his Hoboken, NJ-based studio, My Positive Pup. He talks to Annie about getting certified, the emotional nature of working with dog owners, behavior lessons learned learned on the ski slopes, and how the old saying "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar" can be true for both people and dogs.
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Oftentimes, the toughest thing about training dogs is dealing with people. Strangers out in public, however well-intentioned, can be major obstacles to a fruitful training session, further complicating things in what is most likely already a high-pressure environment for your dog. Annie feels for dogs who are basically bullied (often unintentionally) by strangers, or even their own owners, during interspecies greetings.
If people who love dogs so often make them uncomfortable without meaning to, is it fair to judge people by how they relate to their dogs? Maybe not. Annie reads aloud from an article that she wrote for the Boston Globe about how animal welfare is relative and not absolute. (Stay until the end for a rather shocking bit of trivia about a certain genocidal dictator).
Episode includes a special Earth Day offer: a coupon code (good this weekend only) for 20% off the REVOL crate by Diggs.
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Annie discusses the docu-series ‘Bad Vegan,’ which is about a restaurateur on her block who was conned out of millions of dollars by a narcissistic sociopath who claimed he could make her dog immortal. The story leads her to think about how genius manipulators use coercion, punishment and classical conditioning in order to get the behaviors they want from their victims. While many of their techniques do not constitute “good” dog training, we can draw parallels between how they create positive associations in others to make themselves appear trustworthy. Can we do the same to build our dogs’ confidence? Also: Should we trust our pets to be good judges of character in potential partners? Annie offers her answer.
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Did you know that The Dog Whisperer and Jada Pinkett Smiths are longtime best friends? Two weeks ago, Will Smith calmly and confidently sauntered up on to the stage of the Oscars and slapped someone who said something he didn't like. His vibe and techniques struck Annie as a bit Dog Whisper-y. Maybe that's because she was aware that Cesar Millan, aka The Dog Whisperer, was supposedly made famous in part early on because of his connection to a small handful of movie stars, among them, the Smiths. Annie unearths some old Red Table Talk recordings of The Dog Whisperer revealing his origin story to Jada and her mother. She also reads from a 7-year-old Cesars Way blog post where Jada talks about how the dog training lessons she learned from Cesar has helped her marriage.
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Annie interviews Katya Lidsky, a writer, podcaster and frequent dog fosterer who lives in Austin, TX. She recently started a podcast called The Animal That Changed You, and interviewed Annie about an animal that changed her (head over and check out the episode!).
Katya, who refers to herself as a "soft core" animal activist, tells Annie about loving and losing a dog who helped her heal from her longtime struggle with an eating disorder. In her dog Ophelia's final days, Katya wrote her love letters daily. Annie lends her some advice on introducing a foster dog to her current dog, and the two discuss their thoughts on how vegetarianism relates to being a dog lover -- Katya doesn't eat meat, but Annie does and... has complicated feelings about that fact.
That point in their conversation moved Annie to share a section from the 2010 book by Jonathan Safran Foer Eating Animals: The Case For Eating Dogs.
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Annie recently received an email from a producer who had a request: Were there any School For The Dogs students who were big men with tiny dogs? Or people who had big dogs who wouldn't mind their dogs being humorously mocked on Youtube?
The request came via Douglas Widick, a Brooklynite who had recently brought his young Scottie, Skye, in for playtimes at School For The Dogs. A musical comedian, he'd written a song and was casting its music video. The song's title was "Big Man, Tiny Dog."
Annie called Doug to talk about the origin of a song that pitches woo to the Yorkiepoos of the world while also poking fun at men who seem to use big dogs as accessories to accentuate their own toughness. Their fun conversation touches on everything from being inspired by the Notorious BIG, swimming with dolphins, Dorothy's poor dog training abilities in The Wizard of Oz, dog-fostering tourism in Hawaii, and the joy of using a hands-free leash.
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