26 NovEpisode 35 | How I used punishment to train my husband to cover his mouth when he yawns (Part 2)
In this episode, Annie offers a follow up to the previous episode, which featured a candid conversation with her husband about her ill-fated attempt to use punishment to keep him from showing her his uvula very time he yawned. Here, she points out some of the similarities and differences between using punishment with dogs and with humans. This episode touches on, among other things:
-The long shadow punishment can cast
-How language can offer clarification... or not
-The subjective nature of "bad" behavior
-Choosing appropriate punishers (and reinforcers)
-The issue with a "Nothing In Life Is Free" approach to training
-The importance of wisely selecting a training subject who isn't inclined to exhibit copious unwanted behaviors
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Transcript:
Annie:
Hello listeners. So last episode, if you heard it was a conversation with my husband, Jason, about an instance where I tried to change a behavior of his that I didn't like by using punishment and the episode was a conversation about this, this debacle, let's call it.
I got a bunch of questions about the whole thing. The specific behavior of course was that I was trying to get him to stop yawning with his mouth wide open. I was trying to train him to cover his mouth and the episode led to a lot of questions and I realized that it was sort of maybe like giving everybody a primary source without offering enough commentary and dissection about the whole thing. And I think that it's an anecdote that actually contains a lot of lessons that are applicable to all kinds of behavioral training, whether you're training a dog or your husband. Certainly it was a failed attempt. So might be helpful if you go back and listen to that episode before listening to this episode. The real meaty part starts about halfway through if you want to cut to the chase.
The first thing I wanted to point out in looking at the whole incident, which Jason refers to as a “yawngate” is really how arbitrary and silly it is that, of course, that this was the thing I decided I was going to try and train. That this was the behavior that I was going to try and punish.
So often with dogs, we're inclined to categorize behaviors as a good behavior or a bad behavior. But in the end, they're all just behaviors. And whether or not they're good or bad depends on who is making the judgment. Plenty of people would not be bothered at all by someone yawning without covering their mouths. And certainly working with dogs as trainers, we see all the time the things that are considered bad behaviors by one dog owner that someone else wouldn't mind at all.
For instance, lots of people don't want their dogs on their furniture and other people have no issue with their dogs going on their furniture. My dog barks at the doorbell and I have had people come over and comment on this as if it's an irony that I have a poorly behaved dog who barks at the doorbell when I am in fact a dog trainer. But it doesn't really bother me that he barks at the doorbell, especially because for much of our lives together, Amos and my life together, I was living alone and I didn't think it was such a bad thing to have this sort of a secondary alarm system of a tiny dog who barks in such a way that maybe he would make a intruders think I had a much larger dog. Of course, many generations of dogs were bred to alarm bark like that.
So I could go on and on with these kinds of examples. But the larger point, which I think is an important one is that different behaviors are going to be considered bad by different people. So what a behavior that I think warrants punishment might seem completely innocent to you and vice versa.
I also wanted to point out that, you know, part of the reason why in general, I don't like using punishment at all whether I'm working with my dogs or my employees or my friends or my family is because I'm not surrounded by a lot of behaviors I don't like. And, of course, to some extent that's good luck, but it's also by design. When we're working with dogs, especially, we have so much control over the parameters of their lives. You know, we set so many of the boundaries of their lives and I've talked about this a lot in previous episodes, that it's really possible to have a dog who just isn't inclined to do things you don't want him or her to do because those opportunities have never entered his or her realm of consideration. If your dog has never had the opportunity to jump up on the counter and take some delicious thing off of the counter, chances are that's not a behavior you are going to have to punish because it's not going to exist in the first place.
Now, of course, with people we don't have the luxury of so many controls, maybe a little bit more with, with children than with dealing with other adults. We don't control all the boundaries, all the parameters, all the inputs. But we do choose who we want to have in our lives. And I didn't choose to be married to Jason because of all the behaviors that he takes part in that I don't like. Of course,I decided I wanted to have him in my life because we have so many wonderful times together. And so many of the things that he does naturally are things that, at the very least, don't bother me.
And certainly that is something that really applies to having a dog to or selecting a dog. If you have a lifestyle where you need a dog who's going to be able to hang out in the apartment for most of the day and will be okay with just two or three walks a day, but you wind up with a dog that's been bred to be outside all the time or to, you know, herd sheep, you are going to be in a situation where you're going to be faced with a lot of behaviors, most likely, that you don't like, that are not necessarily bad behaviors, they're just innate to the kind of dog that you got. If you want a dog who's going to go trail running with you then you probably shouldn't be getting a Maltese unless you want to be faced with the behavior of a dog who's lagging behind you. And when you take a step back from it certainly seems like that would be a silly thing to punish.
But that sort of thing certainly happens all the time. I had one client who had a German Shepherd who peed and pooped most of the time in a small backyard area and only was taken out on maybe three or four walks a week. And the dog was constantly getting yelled at for trying to bolt out the front door whenever anyone opened the door. And I felt like this was sort of unfair to the dog. It was simply not the right situation for that dog who clearly needed to have more walks and more dedicated outside time or social time than his owner was able to provide for him. But the way it manifested itself was in a behavior lunging and trying to get out the door that his owners deemed bad and we're trying to get rid of, by using yelling as punishment, which in the end was not very effective.
Which brings me to another point, which is that so much of the time I think that when we're trying to use punishment, we actually are reinforcing a behavior because we're not doing something that a dog dislikes. And, you know, you can tell if your punishment is truly effective based on whether or not it's actually discouraging behavior. A lot of the time I think when we yell at dogs, they are encouraged, right? Any interaction with us, any attention from us, I believe, is thought of by the majority of dogs as a good thing. I think we give them way too much credit for understanding, like the different tones of our voice and the words that we're saying. Now, I wouldn't say this is directly applicable to my situation with Jason. I don't think that he actually liked when I put my finger in his mouth to try and get him to stop yawning, in fact, I know he didn't because he told me so, but he did mention and in the last podcast episode that there are situations in which it wouldn't really be so bad to have my finger in his mouth, which speaks to the point that so much of a punishment and so much of reinforcement depends on the context.
My dog, for example, loves to swim. And his favorite thing is to fetch a toy in water. So if we're at a pool or a lake or at the ocean, all he wants is for someone to throw him a toy that he can go and swim out to get and bring back. So in that situation, a toy or a ball or whatever is extremely,extremely reinforcing. But if I present him with that same toy when we're at home or even at the dog park, he won't look twice at it.
There are lots of dogs, for example,with whom you could use the presentation of a leash to reinforce a behavior, right? Like grab the leash, when you grab the leash it indicates to the dog that you're gonna go for a walk. So you could use the presentation of the leash to reinforce something like a nice sit at the door. But that very same leash when you're at the dog park and you bring it out and your dog sees it and has learned that usually that appears when it's time to leave. That same leash might not be usable as a reinforcer in that situation.
And you might remember from the last episode that the real apex of our argument happened when I put my finger in Jason's mouth when he yawned, when we were at a friend's house for dinner. And that really like put him over the edge and led to the big argument that ultimately, was punishing enough that it both discouraged my experiment and inadvertently has kept him from yawning with his mouth open. But I think that points out that, you know, the punishing factor of having my finger in his mouth was much more mild under circumstances where it was just the two of us and as soon as other people were around, it became much, much more punishing.
But there are other situations where as he said he might not be bothered at all by having my fingers in his mouth. He might even enjoy it. So not everything breaks down to simply being a carrot or a stick. You know, sometimes the carrot can turn into the stick and sometimes the stick can certainly be a carrot. And I point that out sometimes to my clients. That part of getting to know your dog, and I'm usually talking, fortunately, I'm talking in terms of selecting what you can use to reinforce behavior, but part of getting to know your dog is figuring out what the special cornucopia of rewards is in your dog's world. What is the stuff that your dog is really into? You need to figure out his or her currency.
And we do this with each other without even thinking about it, but part of being a good friend or a family member or whatever part of being a good gift giver certainly is knowing what the other person is going to be into. And,you know, I always say what makes us each special snowflakes is that no two people find the exact same grouping things reinforcing and, you know, of course, the example is that some people find being, you know, we're talking about carrots and sticks. Some people find being hit to be reinforcing. There are many industries out there indulging people for whom pain is reinforcing and,you know, and there are lots of things that are reinforcing to someone else that you might find completely punishing. I dunno, for me, like nothing could be worse than an afternoon having to watch football or even a Paw Patrol. But plenty, plenty of other human beings on this earth would like nothing more than watching either of those things.
Now, as much as I love drawing comparisons between training dogs and training people. And I do believe that whether or not we, we mean to, we're being trained all the time by our environment. We train near each other all the time, but while I see these kinds of parallels constantly, there are certainly major ways in which working with a person, trying to change a person's behavior, is very different than trying to change a dog's behavior and language is a huge part of that.
Now I bring that up because Jason and I were able to get over this episode, let's call it, because we were able to talk through it and also he absolutely understood what it was I was trying to do. He got that I was trying to punish this specific behavior that I had previously told him I didn't like. There were no great secrets here. There was no kind of major leap of understanding and that I was asking him to try and make. And that is very different than how things usually go, I believe, when we're trying to use punishment with dogs. With dogs, we too often assume that they absolutely understand what it is that we're trying to punish. And I'll talk about this a little bit more in a minute, but you know, we're always punishing a behavior, we're not trying to punish an individual. The definition of punishment is that it should be decreasing the likelihood of behavior is going to happen again. So when you're punishing a dog's behavior, too often we make the assumption that the dog knows that he or she did something wrong.
And you can witness this by just hanging out at the dog park and listening to people talk to their dogs where they say, you know, “Buster,how could you treat that other dog that way? That was no good. Bad dog. You shouldn't be a bully like that.” Right. And of course the dog's hearing “muah wa wah wah wa” and if the dog is even construing what you're saying, as, you know, gosh, I did anything wrong at all. And like I said, I think most of the time when we're talking to dogs they only think that we're giving them attention, which most dogs enjoy.
But you know, let's say you do something that clearly seems to be something that your dog dislikes. I don't know, you hit the dog or give the dog an electric shock or, not that I'm suggesting you doing things but, but let's say you do something that seems hard to believe that your dog would actually like. Well, even if you are delivering that punishment with very excellent timing, there's still always the very great chance that your dog is going to make the wrong association. So. you know, you think you've given your dog and electric shock because he was barking. But it happened to be at the same moment that the UPS man came to the door and your dog might think it has something to do with the UPS man approaching. And that's gonna lead to, you know, possible fear or aggression relating to the UPS Man. We see this kind of thing happening all the time.
I mentioned this in the recent episode I did on a greeting other dogs on the street. It's so important I think to aim to always have a leash that's as loose as possible when you're on the street, whether or not there are other dogs around, just because as soon as there's tension on the leash, whether you're purposefully tugging on the leash to try and discourage your dog from pulling let's say, or just because your dog happens to be pulling and you're on the other end of the leash and there's going to be tension for whatever the reason is.
Whenever your dog is feeling any kind of neck discomfort, which is going to be all the more, if he's wearing any kind of choke collar or prong collar for instance, he's libel to associate that pain with whatever is in front of him. And frequently I think that that's what leads to dogs who are aggressive with other dogs on a leash. They have the natural inclination, especially when they're very young and untrained to run up to greet another dog and they get ackk, you know, suddenly choked. And rather than making the association that pulling is bad or pulling towards another dog is bad or anything like that, they just end up making that association with the other dog. So other dogs must be bad news because they cause me to have a pain in my neck.
Now, if they could have a conversation about the situation, the way Jason and I can have a conversation about why I'm sticking my finger in his mouth when we're at a friend's house for dinner, things might be different, but we don't have that luxury of language.
Now. It's entirely possible that even with all of the explanation and discussion that surrounded this incident, this “yawngate” incident, it's entirely possible that Jason could have taken the whole thing and made bad associations with being around me just because it was so annoying and disturbing to have someone be putting his finger in his mouth even if he knew why it was happening. But you know, I think that in relationships, ideally we're always working to like stockpile good moments. We're always working to create good associations. I always talk about it, like you're putting money in the bank, you know, every good moment, you know, with your dog, every good association that your dog has with you, which should be happening all day, every day basically. And same thing with, with your spouse one would hope. You know, all of these things are deposits into this bank account that should be so large that if you ever have to make a withdrawal by using any kind of punishment, it should basically be so small as to be unnoticeable.
And, you know, we do use punishment with our dogs inadvertently. You know, sometimes we don't mean to, but we ended up punishing a behavior. Same thing with people we care about. But those moments should really amount to very little given the kind of huge amount of credit that we have in the bank. And certainly in my relationship with Jason where this was one of the biggest, biggest kerfuffles we've had. It certainly didn't do any great damage to our relationship thanks to the fact that I think we have a huge amount of credit in our joint bank account.
And like I was talking about a minute ago, you know, you're never punishing the individual when you're speaking about punishment in a technical way. The technical definition of punishment being that it should be discouraging a behavior and you can tell if punishment is working, if it is discouraging a behavior. If the behavior is happening less and less to the point of not happening at all. You're not punishing a person, you're punishing their behavior. It kind of goes back to the cliche thing that parents say, right? Like I don't dislike you. I just dislike the way you're behaving right now, which is smart.
And actually, to bring in another personal anecdote that doesn't have such a happy ending. The worst fight I ever had I think with my father with whom I had a really, really great relationship and we hardly ever argued, but we had a really big blowout argument over the fact that there were certain people in his family that I didn't want to invite to my wedding to Jason. And we were out for dinner when the subject came up and he blew up and he started yelling, “how dare you punish me, you're punishing me and you're an animal trainer and you're not supposed to be using punishment.”
And I thought, “gosh, I'm not trying to punish you at all.” There was really no specific behavior. I was trying to discourage his behavior or anyone else's behavior. I was just setting certain parameters in my own life that he didn't like. And it was a reminder in that moment to me of how easy it is to conflate punishment with just stuff happening that you don't like. And of course the world is full of things we might not necessarily like, but those aren't necessarily factors in the world that are conditioning our behavior. They're just factors in the world that you have to come to terms with or not. But you know, the sad part is I think that in the end the behavior that was punished was us going out for dinner together, which is something that we had done, you know, many thousands of times in my life.
And there was a lot of, a lot of credit in that bank account, I would say. But this particular incident was so awful. He, I remember, he grabbed me and started like shaking my arms in this sort of violent way. It wasn't like abusive, but it was absolutely the only time that he ever touched me in anything other than like a totally loving way in my life. And he was yelling. And anyway, the whole thing was just like so traumatic that it, I think made neither of us too keen on going out to dinner together anytime soon after. And sadly he died a few months later. So that was actually our last meal together. And it certainly, you know, an event that I think about a lot for a lot of reasons, but one of them is the frustration that he misunderstood what I was doing as, as something that was being done specifically to punish him, which represents like I'm saying a lack of understanding about punishment and how it works technically speaking because there was no specific behavior I was attempting to punish and I wasn't trying to just be, you know, cruel to him for no reason.
And also, you know, kind of relates to the misconception that's another frequent misconception that, you know, if you're a trainer who is mostly trying to use positive reinforcement that you are, you know, never allowed to do anything that anyone might dislike. But like I said, you know, you might end up finding that what's rewarding to someone is hitting them. And s opositive reinforcement is not necessarily, you know, you can't necessarily equate it with, you know, hearts, stars and flowers and good things all the time.
And likewise, punishment is not necessarily a big bad dirty thing, you know? I mean, again, in this instance, I don't think I was trying to use punishment, I think I was just setting certain boundaries, which he might not have liked, but I don't think that they constituted any kind of specific punishment of a behavior. But more than that, you know, I would, you'd be hard pressed to find a positive reinforcement trainer who doesn't sometimes use punishment. For example, you know, if a dog is jumping up, I might turn my back on the dog in order to discourage the behavior of jumping up. That's not a terrible,harsh thing to do. And there are certainly lots of other ways to make sure a dog doesn't start jumping up to begin with.
But whenever you're dealing with any living creature who's doing things all the time, there are inevitably going to be some behaviors that occur that you don't like. And you will probably at some point try to use some form of punishment to discourage those behaviors, alebitit, you know, it should always be as mild as possible and as effective as possible.
Which brings me to the last point I wanted to make about all of this, which is that I think the punishment I was using with Jason really wasn't that effective. And, you know, you might say that that was a poor training choice on my part. If I had screamed at the top of my lungs, every time he yawned with his mouth open or if I hit him every time he yawned up with his mouth open, you know, my training plan might've been more effective. I'm not saying that I regret not doing those things. I don't, but it speaks to the fact that a lot of the time when we use punishment in an effective way, we tend to go over the top and not only create generally bad associations, but also it can be kind of like, you know, killing a cockroach with a machete.
And the fallout of the use of punishment might end up creating more damage than the initial behavior was creating. I mean, if I slapped Jason every time he yawned with his mouth open or screamed at the top of my lungs, I have a feeling it would have probably changed his behavior faster. But I think it would have led to a lot more problems in our relationship then his yawning had ever caused to begin with. And that's definitely something that dog trainers see all the time, particularly when people are using extremely aversive things to try and train their dogs like shock collars. I have too often seen that the problems caused by those attempts to punish the dog using those kinds of painful techniques like a shock collar or prong collar end up causing more damage than whatever the initial annoying behavior was that the person was trying to curb.
So the very last thing I wanted to talk about is how I could have, or maybe could have or should perhaps, use positive reinforcement to solve this particular problem. And I did mention, in the last episode, both that, you know, the big fight that we had when I tried to put my finger in his mouth at our friend's house kind of did successfully punish the behavior, just because I think it was, it was so upsetting for us to have a fight like that. And I also did, you know, from the beginning, and I do continue to praise him and tell him how wonderful he is when he does cover his mouth when he yawns.
But after we posted that episode last week, I did say to him, you know, we kind of joked in the episode about like, you know, could I have used jelly beans or something like that to reward his behavior of him covering his mouth. Oh, you know, and I should mention that in this kind of situation, the best kind of positive reinforcement to use would be a schedule of intermittent reinforcement. I don't want him, you know, let's say I really was going to give him a jelly bean every time he covered his mouth. You know, I don't want him like yawning all the time, all day covering his mouth, all day long in order to get jelly beans from me. That's actually a problem that I've heard some people run into with their kids during potty training where the kid learns, gosh, every time I pee I got an M&M and then you have a kid who's, you know, going to the toilet 25 times a day. The smarter move would be if I gave him that jelly bean only on some sort of schedule of reinforcement, whether that was every fifth yawn or some random number of yawns that I maybe would change up each day.
Although even then I'm only ever really training him or would only ever really be training him to cover his mouth while yawning in front of me unless I could get everyone in his office and everyone in his family and all of his friends to play this game also. But anyway, I asked him what would truly be reinforcing enough to have changed this behavior using positive reinforcement. And he mentioned the two things that I think most people would say are most reinforcing to them, money and sex. Notice, I think a lot of people would probably say food and sleep too, but sleep can be a hard thing to control in someone else. And he knows I'm not a very good cook.
But in our relationship, you know, using either money or sex, would be problematic because first of all, we share our finances so the thrill of getting a hundred dollars for covering your mouth when you yawn is not so great when it's kind of your a hundred dollars you're getting to begin with. And as far as using sex, there are a couple problems there. First of all, if you're going to reward a behavior with your partner using sex, you probably are best off using some kind of marker, like with dogs, we use a clicker to indicate that reinforcement is on its way. You'd want some kind of a token system like that because it would be hard in most situations to offer up sex the very moment that your trainee does exactly whatever it is you want him or her to be doing. But also I think that I'm assuming that sex is reinforcing to the person whose behavior you're trying to change, I think it only really is gonna work if it's not already sort of a part of your, the equation of your relationship.
You know, this episode has been focusing on punishment, which would be getting rid of the behavior of open mouth yawning. But it's also really about encouraging a behavior, which is the behavior of covering his mouth when he yawns. And whenever you're trying to encourage behavior whenever you're trying to, a synonym for encourage in this context is reinforce a behavior. While you have one of two ways to do that, either you can reinforce using positive reinforcement, which is adding something to the equation in order to encourage the likelihood the behavior is going to happen again. Right? So giving him money every time he covers his mouth or on whatever schedule of reinforcement I would decide upon.
But you can also encourage the likelihood that a behavior is going to happen again by taking something away. And that's negative reinforcement. Negative being the taking something away part and a negative reinforcement is often a lot uglier than any kind of punishment. Waterboarding is a good example of negative reinforcement. You're taking someone's air away in order to encourage them to tell the truth. Usually when you're using negative reinforcement, it means you're taking something good and necessary or good or necessary away in order to encourage a behavior. An example of negative reinforcement and dog training would be that many dogs are trained to drop something because their ears are pinched and the trainer only stops pinching the dog's ear when the dog drops whatever he or she has in his or her mouth. There are also trainers who will continually shock a dog until the dog comes or until the dog sits or whatever and then stops the shocks and in that way is negatively reinforcing whatever the desired behavior is, whether it's “come” or “sit.”
So if intimacy wasn't already part of our marriage, then yeah, I guess I could sort of spring that on him in order to reinforce the covering mouth behavior, which would be an example of positive reinforcement. But given that it already exists and is something that's we both enjoy and that's, you know, on the offer all the time, I would have to be withholding it. And, you know, that would, in the end, be an unhappy scenario for both of us.
And, you know, I think it's worth mentioning that whenever someone tries to use negative reinforcement to get what they want or coercion saying, you know, you need to do this or else I am going to take this thing you want or need away from you, it doesn't particularly endear you to the person. Right? I mean, who the hell wants to be married to someone who says, if you don't cover your yawn, I'm not gonna sleep with you. Like, okay, well why would I want to sleep with that person anyway? And actually, you know, my father in this awful argument we had at our, at our last dinner together, said to me, “well, if you don't invite these people to your wedding, I'm not going to come.” And I should say he did end up coming to the wedding even though I didn't end up inviting them. But I remember thinking, “gosh, well, you know, you saying that to me doesn't particularly make me want to have you at our wedding.”
Anyway. So I think it's kinda interesting to note how negative reinforcement can actually punish the behavior of you wanting to be around the person who is trying to use it to manipulate your behavior.
Now of course, it is certainly possible to train a person or a dog by figuring out everything in their life that they want or need, and then figuring out how you can give them what they need or deprive them of what they need in order to get what you want. But it's certainly extreme to be thinking in those terms all the time. And it's not really the kind of person I want to be or the kind of a trainer I necessarily want to be. There are dog trainers who use this method of training called “nothing in life is free.” And behind this nothing in life is free approach is like the argument is that we control everything about our dogs lives and we certainly do control a lot more about our dogs lives than we do about, you know, each other's lives, which is one reason why I think dog training can be a lot easier and more fun than, than people training.
But you know, that we control where they sleep, what they eat, how they spend their time, what they do and that we should use the dog's access to all of the things that he needs and wants in his life in order to train behaviors that we want. And I think there are a lot of problems with this approach. There's a great book by, one of my dog training idols, Kathy Sdao and her book is called Plenty in Life is Free. And her argument really is that we can't control everything that a dog enjoys in life nor should we want to or need to, both because we can do a good enough job at collecting lots of behaviors we like by kind of like being smart architects of a dog's environment in order to encourage behaviors that we like and by making choices that are going to help them make choices that are, you know, we're going to deem good choices, but also because who the hell wants to be that controlling? Right?
There are lots of things that my dog enjoys that I enjoy too and I want us to take part in those things together. I don't need to parse every little bit of affection I give him an order to reinforce some specific behavior. If you're in any kind of loving relationship, whether it's with your dog or with your spouse, there should be freedom to enjoy life and to enjoy each other that isn't all focused on some perfect end behavior. That part of the reason why, you know, we love those that we love is that they're able to surprise us. And it's possible to create really good boundaries in which your dog or your spouse or whatever, whoever can partake in lots of excellent behaviors that are behaviors that you may never have expected or even wanted. But a good healthy relationship, even a relationship where one person might be more in control than the other, or one species might be more in control than the other should have that kind of freedom and, and flexibility. Anyway, highly suggest the book, Plenty in life is free by Kathy Sudeo, who maybe if I'm very lucky one day will agree to come on this podcast. I will link to the book in the show notes.
I hope that this has been a helpful commentary on last week's episode. I have admit I feel a little bit vulnerable. I don't normally get quite so personal in this podcast as I've gotten in the last two episodes. If you have any thoughts or comments, I would love to hear from you. You can reach me, at podcast@school for the dogs.com or at our Facebook group, which is facebook.com/groups/schoolforthedogs. Or if you're on Instagram we’re at School for the Dogs. If you send a direct message, I will do my best to reply.
Our Woof Shout Out this week goes to a person and that person is Gemma Maslen. She is our studio manager. She started out at School for the Dogs as a client and then we roped her into working for us and she has just been such a force of good at School for the Dogs. If you come by our new studio, which is at 92 East Seventh, just off of First Avenue, you will most likely see her sitting behind the desk. She is a shining, smiley presence who has done so much to just keep the business running seamlessly, especially during this transition time where we've been moving from one facility to another and have grown our quite a bit. And,you know, Kate and I are just so grateful for the wonderful people we have working for us. Every single person on our staff right now, I just feel tickled that they're giving us so much of their lives and their time because I think they're all just excellent human beings. But Gemma deserves a particular warm, fuzzy beam of light just because you can't meet her and not love her. She's just incredibly capable, lovable. And I could go on and on, but I'm sure if she's listening to this, she's blushing. So I'll stop.
And our Fun Dog Fact, a dog named Sinatra, a blue eyed Husky, just this week turned up in Florida in Tampa, 18 months after running away from his family in Brooklyn. Isn't that crazy? The dog is five and it's unclear how he got from Canarsie to Tampa, whether he walked or hitched a ride, we don't know. But there was a heartfelt reunion. I will link to more information in the show notes. But happy to hear that this Brooklyn family got their dog back after all this time.
Lastly, I am putting together a Q and A episode, so please do submit your questions and I will try to answer them. Again, you can reach me at podcasts@schoolforthedogs.com or Instagram or you can fill out the nifty form at Anniegrossman.com/ask.
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