11 DecEpisode 104 | Dog training with Mary Poppins, Professor Harold Hill and Little Orphan Annie
During the dark days of 2020, Annie has been self-medicating. Her drug of choice? Watching clips from old movie musicals she loved as a kid. It turns out that there are a lot of lessons about behavior in these films, and storylines that unwittingly relate to dog training. In this episode, Annie gives a dog-trainer’s-eye-view analysis of Mary Poppins, The Music Man, and the movie Annie.
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Mentioned in this episode:
Animals Make Us Human by Temple Grandin
Transcript:
[Intro and music]
Annie:
So there's something that I think probably a lot of people who know me well, probably don't even know about me, which is that I love old movie musicals. I grew up with a small skyscraper of VHS tapes balanced atop the TV of Judy Garland movies, Fred Astaire movies, Gene Kelly, Robert Preston. I would watch these movies — I’m trying to think of some of them, 42nd street, GiGi, The Music Man, The Sound of Music, the Easter Parade, Oklahoma.
I would just watch these movies over and over. And so much of them I feel like are deeply ingrained in me. And really it sort of informed my early view of what the world was like, which is maybe why adulthood has actually been something of a disappointment. Like it turns out if you're an unmarried woman in your thirties who loves books, that doesn't mean that Robert Preston is going to come serenade you in the library while everyone does a choreographed jig around you.
I think I kind of put my love of movie musicals aside for many years, you know, occasionally maybe going to one if there was something at the Film Forum. But the existence of YouTube has really made it possible for me to occasionally dive in for an hour or two and watch some old favorite clips. It's like a drug. It just makes me so happy to see people singing and dancing and these old movies.
And during these gray months of 2020, I have started watching some of my favorite old musicals with my daughter, who's almost two. We have Disney Plus, which is a treasure trove. And I've made her some YouTube playlists that we work through of my favorite scenes from old musicals. And of course I can't help myself from finding little dog training lessons and dog life parallels in, in my old favorite movies.
So I thought I would share a few songs today and tell you how I've been thinking about them as it relates to dog stuff. I don't think there are any majorly important dog training lessons in what I'm about to share, but maybe it will just be a little bit of fun to share my thought process with you. And of course, to share these joyous, joyous movie moments.
I am going to post the full videos in our brand new app, which you should definitely check out. You can get there at schoolforthedogs.com/community. There is a section there specifically about the podcast and that is where I'm going to post the videos.
So, first one that I want to share with you is from Mary Poppins. Mary Poppins was based on the PL Travers books and of course starred Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke. Two of my all time favorites, both of whom are still alive, fortunately. Julie Andrews, this was the first time she played an amazing babysitter. The second time being in the Sound of Music, which came a few years later.
My daughter really likes the goat herd puppet scene in The Sound of Music. And every time I see that scene, I think how did Maria learn to be such a master puppeteer at the convent? And what is she doing wasting her time with these kids when she has this amazing ability to choreograph, the world's most exciting children's puppet show about a goat ever.
But she's actually not in the first clip I want to play for you from Mary Poppins from 1964. If you're unfamiliar with the story, this is from the beginning of the movie when Jane and Michael Banks have chased off yet another nanny. Their father decides that they're kind of ditzy mother is clearly no good at finding babysitters. So he's going to take on the task himself. And basically what he's looking for is a dog trainer whose specialty is using punishment and coercion.
[Mary Poppins song plays]
Annie:
‘A ghastly mess!’ Now his kids come in and they outline what a good dog trainer would be like. Just picture a little golden retriever puppy speaking these next lines.
[Mary Poppins excerpt plays]
Annie:
So Jane and Michael end up getting a nanny who is pretty much exactly what they ordered up, and she is indeed a wonderful dog trainer, but for kids. And watching these musicals, I noticed how there are manipulative characters in a lot of them. I mean, maybe you could say this is true of most any kind of story. But very often there is a charismatic character who wants something and figures out a clever way to arrange the environment and select rewards and discourage or encourage certain behaviors in order to get what they want.
The two other musicals I want to talk about are about two different sorts of master manipulators. But anyway, Mary Poppins. And one of the first things she does is get the kids to clean their room using positive reinforcement. And some magic, which unfortunately is not a tool that most dog trainers have at their disposal.
She sings a song, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. Now at first glance it kind of doesn't make a lot of sense. Like why is she singing about medicine and sugar? What does this have to do with kids cleaning up a room?
Oh my God, I'm such a nerd. I can't believe I think this deeply about this stuff. But if I had known in college that there are people who go on to like get their PhDs writing about movie musicals and watching movie movie musicals and talking about the lyrics of the songs, I would definitely have done that with my life. But I'm doing this instead and it's great.
So she sings a song about helping the medicine go down with a spoonful of sugar. And I guess what that boils down to is she saying, if you do something difficult, but then you're rewarded for doing that thing, it makes the whole thing a lot more fun. And that is a positive reinforcement training part of it in a nutshell.
But then of course the kids aren't actually doing any hard work in the song. They're just snapping their fingers, and this magically makes their toys go back in the toy box and picks their clothes up off the floor. So it all breaks down a little bit for me there. But her general message is that things that are hard can actually be fun. You can find the fun. And I am always saying to my dog training clients that dog training should be a constant game for a dog.
It's possible using good dog training to get your dog excited about training in such a way that they're going to feel like all of it is just one big game. But why don’t I let Julie Andrews’ Mary Poppins explain
[Spoonful of Sugar plays]
So I've also spotted some interesting dog training concepts in The Music Man. Also a film from the 1960s a few years before Mary Poppins, based on the Meredith Wilson stage play. It stars Robert Preston playing master manipulator, professor Harold Hill, a lovable con man.
It's 1912, and he is a traveling salesman going from town to town, organizing boys bands, marching bands. This is like the John Philip Sousa era. And he gets deposits from families for band outfits and instruments. And then he skips town. Of course, all of that changes when he gets to River City, Iowa, where he falls in love with Mary, the librarian who he seduces in a song and dance routine in the library, which is not to be missed.
But the song I want to play you is from the early part of the movie when he has just gotten to town and is trying to figure out how to get people interested in buying what he has to sell. There's two things I want to talk about in this song. I think I'll talk about the first one and then I'll play you the song. And then I'll talk about the second one.
The first is that it's a good example of how you can create a secondary or conditioned punisher. Usually in the training we do, we are helping people think about how to create a conditioned or secondary reinforcer. But you can also create a conditioned or secondary or tertiary Punisher. And basically what that is, is creating an association between something inherently meaningful and something previously neutral.
Money is an example of a secondary reinforcer or conditioned reinforcer, you can use those phrases interchangeably. Because a dollar bill itself has no meaning, but because it is so reliably linked to food and shelter and so many other basic needs that we have, you're not born wanting money, but you're born wanting plenty of things that money can obtain. So eventually money itself becomes meaningful.
And the other direction, if you're beat up repeatedly with a wooden spoon, a wooden spoon which previously had been an object that meant very little, could become a secondary or conditioned punisher.
Lots of examples of this, unfortunately in dog training. But it's why in many cases, someone can just lift their hand without actually hitting a dog and a dog will run away and get scared because they've learned to associate the position of the hand that happens prior to getting hit with getting hit. So the hand in that position has become a secondary punisher.
Anyway, in this song, he turns a pool table into a secondary punisher by cleverly linking it to the townspeople's biggest unconditioned fears. So in this scene, Oh my God, I love this. I love, I love this stuff so much. I'm so excited to play this song for you. It's ridiculous. In the scene, Robert Preston is sitting on a park bench with Buddy Hackett, his pal, who knows what he's up to. And he's saying, can you help me figure out some kind of common enemy? Like what do people around here really hate?
And right behind them, where they are on their park bench, there is a billiard hall.
[Excerpt from Music Man plays]
Annie:
I love this stuff so much. It's crazy. I feel like I'm like baring open my soul and sharing this with you. Like a jewel box of things I love. And God, I love the music man. So he does a brilliant job of teaching people to fear pool tables. The pool table, a secondary Punisher. But this is also a song I think, about work to eat toys. The selling of which of course is one of my businesses. Although I will not skip town after taking your money. Also have no plans to serenade the local librarian.
He is getting people scared about the pool table, because he's saying that the kids are going to, I don't have to explain it. You just heard the whole song, but you know, basically we need to keep kids busy after school doing something constructive, is the line of his argument. And what could be more wholesome than having them March in a boys band.
I have actually often likened work to eat toys to afterschool programs for kids. So much of afterschool programming isn't about what the kid is learning. The parents aren't concerned specifically that the kid learned piano or ping pong or chess. It's just, they need to be doing something that's going to keep them occupied and engaged. Something that will burn some of their excess energy while they're in a safe space.
And if they are playing ping pong or chess or piano in an afterschool program, they're not also going to be out on the street doing drugs. They're not, to quote professor Harold Hill, out there reading captain Billy's whizzbang afterschool, and drinking beer from the bottle.
With puppies in particular, we do this with dogs of all ages, but puppies in particular, we put them in a boys band afterschool program in order to make sure that they're not going to start selling drugs on the street. I don't feed a dog his food in a work to eat toy because it's particularly important to me that he learn how to solve that particular puzzle, or that he learn how to get faster at getting his food out of it.
My goal is to just have him use up some of the time and energy that might otherwise go towards ripping up the carpet or peeing on the couch. And that afterschool program can be housed in a crate, which is going to make it even less likely that that the dog is gonna get up to no good. If I'm not supervising every single second.
Again, that's a lot of what afterschool programs are about making sure your kid is safe in the moments when you're not there to take care of them. You know, who else loves The Music Man is a huge Jackman, who was going to be in the music man on Broadway, but then the Coronavirus happened. And in the app, I'm going to post the video of Hugh Jackman and LL cool J together, singing a really awesome version of the opening scene from The Music Man.
I could do this all day. And maybe if anyone out there is enjoying this, maybe I will do some more dog trainer dissections of musicals in the future. But I just wanted to talk about one last one today, which is Annie, a movie I was of course obsessed with as a little kid.
I grew up in Soho and there, there used to be all these loading platforms. These raised metal areas outside of doors, kind of like big stage-like stoops. And I used to run up onto those as if they were a stage, and according to my parents saying “Tomowwow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow.”
Annie is about a little girl living in an orphanage. It's 1933, and Annie is a great manipulator, but she's only a manipulator in as much as any young adorable thing can activate any animals primal need to care, to take care.
If you're a dog nerd, Temple Grandin's book Animals Make Us Human should be on your dog shelf, yourdog bookshelf, or shelves. Or maybe your dog is a shelf. It was in that book that I first learned about the work of Dr. Jaak Panskep, who was an Estonian neuroscientist who identified primal emotions, play, panic, grief, fear, rage, seeking, lust, and care.
Funny story about the book Animals Make Us Human. That's one of the first books I read when I decided I was going to switch careers. I think it was right as I started Karen Pryor Academy. And I had a copy that I'd gotten from the library and that I left it at my friend's parents' house in Madrid. And it was like a whole comedy of errors, trying to get them to mail me back with his library book. And I eventually just paid the fine.
Then I finally got the book back and I was like, what do you do in this situation? Do you bring the book back to the library? Is my payment of the fine payment for the book? I kept the book. And so my copy of Animals Make Us Human is actually an old library book.
So Annie, who was literally based on a cartoon character manipulates everybody simply because she's so darn cute and sweet at the start of the movie. She's living in an orphanage, which is described in a way that reminds me a little bit of what it must be like to be a dog in a city shelter.
[Hard Knock Life from Annie plays]
Annie:
Then of course, Annie is fostered. She is temporarily adopted by Daddy Warbucks, who is trying to improve his public image. He hits upon the idea of having an adorable orphan in his home for the holidays. Which you could say is a use of classical conditioning, trying to change people's emotions by having them create a new association with him. Associate me with this adorable child.
He wants a boy, but ends up getting a girl, this adorable redheaded, Annie, and this little puppy is very thrilled with her new home, even if it's only temporary,
[Annie excerpt plays]
Annie:
If this isn’t a movie about a foster fail, I don't know what it is. Thank you for traveling down this road with me. I hope it was half as much fun for you as it was for me. If you have a favorite movie in which you can find a dog training lesson, or something that explains operant or classical conditioning, I'd love to know about it.
You can come tell me about it in the app. You can get there at schoolforthedogs.com/community. And I will posting all of the videos I played here as well. And I'm just going to let the rest of this song play out in case you know a rescue dog who was living a lush life these days. I hope this makes you think of that dog.
