17 MayEpisode 52 | Why viral videos are bad for dogs, with Eileen Anderson

Pet videos fuel the Internet, but too often they perpetuate false ideas about dog behavior by misattributing a dog's intentions, or by falsely framing their actions. Why do we seek to anthropomorphize dog behaviors rather than celebrating all the behavioral commonalties that exist between us and them? Annie and the acclaimed, prolific blogger Eileen Anderson of EileenAndDogs.com, tackle this question together.

Subscribe: iTunes

Transcript:

Annie: Hey everyone, thank you for listening! I am excited to share this conversation with you. It’s with someone whose work I’ve admired for a long time. She’s a dog trainer and writer whose name is Eileen Anderson. I had a couple little issues with the recording, so I apologize for that in advance, but it’s not too bad. But before I share this conversation with you, I wanted to let you know that we are taking a little break with School For The Dogs Podcast. This episode is our 52nd episode which marks the end of what we’re going to call “Season 1”. When I started doing this podcast, I aimed to do one a week for a year. And I started in late March 2018, so it’s been a little over a year. I have missed a few weeks mostly because of some big life events – my dad died, I had a baby, and we moved School For The Dogs to a new studio during the last year. So for those reasons, I ended up skipping a few weeks. But now we have 52 episodes, which means if you’re just starting out you can listen to one episode a week for a full year.

The main reason why we are taking a break is because we are building an online course, which I’m really excited about, and I want to turn my attention fully to that for the next month or so. And after that, I will be back with new episodes. I’m hoping to do more Q&A episodes in the next season, so please share your questions with me. You can send them to me at anniegrossman.com/ask or you can leave a voicemail at 917-414-2625, or you can always shoot me a message on Instagram, we’re there at @schoolforthedogs. In the meantime, if you’d like to keep up with what’s going on at School For The Dogs, make sure you sign up for our newsletter. You can do that at schoolforthedogs.com/newsletter. And you can support us by shopping at our online store at storeforthedogs.com. And, of course, if you’ve been enjoying this podcast, certainly appreciate when you leave a 5 star rating on iTunes and write a review.

[Music]

Annie: Eileen, why don’t you introduce yourself to listeners who might not be familiar with you and your work?

Eileen: Okay. My name’s Eileen Anderson and I write the blog Eileen and Dogs. And I started that in 2012 after I got — I was turned on to dog training. And I didn’t take the fork in the road where I would become a dog trainer, but I took the fork where I would write about it instead.

Annie: You often talk about how you are an amateur and you’re not a dog trainer, and every time I’m reading that, I kind of want to jump in and say ”No, but you are a dog trainer!”

Eileen: [laughs]

Annie: I appreciate though that you come to everything with the eye of someone who’s excited to learn with like sort of an amateur eye, because I think people who read your writing relate to that, you know. That you're doing it as — that you’re discovering as you go and you are clear about that in a way that is just lovely and exciting.

Eileen: Thank you. You enjoy it and I have kind of a unique position because I can make mistakes in public without ruining my business name. And I think that’s really helpful for other people who are struggling or learning to see imperfect videos done by a very imperfect person.

Annie: Well, no dog trainer is perfect, but I think you're right in that you're not selling yourself as someone who is going to help you with your dog and take your money. You have some flexibility to be imperfect, and that is valuable in and of itself. Again, for people who aren't familiar with your writing, I think that what appeals to me about your work is that you're clearly, you know, a behavior nerd. You get excited about behavior in general and the science of behavior, not just how it can get you where you want to get with your dog, but I think that you have a view of behavior that takes a wider — I don’t know, behavior with a wider spectrum. Would you say that’s correct?

Eileen: I would, yes. And it’s something that just is absolutely fascinating to me in every appearance it makes, any kind of behavior, anybody’s. It’s just interesting to me.

Annie: Do you think that you were interested in behavior to that extent before you started down the path of training your dogs using positive reinforcement?

Eileen: I was — if I heard your question correctly, I was not interested in behavior before that. I didn't know anything about it. I had a problem dog — I shouldn’t call her that. When I had a dog with challenging behaviors, I got the bug, like a lot of people do, and that’s when I got just fascinated with the whole thing.

Annie: Tell me a little bit about your dog.

Eileen: Up until the time that I got Summer, I had just had easy dogs who kind of got along with each other and didn't do the kinds of things that bug people that many dogs naturally do. And one day, I saw an email with a picture of a dog at a local shelter and it was a shelter that did euthanize and it said she only has two days left. And I’m not all that impulsive a person, but when I saw that picture, I just thought that “That’s my dog!” And I went and I got her. And she was 10 months old, so she was a teenager. And she chewed things, and she dug, and she was moderately aggressive to my older, smaller dog, she jumped the fence, all of these. And I just loved her from the very beginning, but all of these was extremely stressful because I was looking at completely changing my life in order to live with her, and I didn't know how to do it. That's what set me down the road and I took a couple maybe wrong turns, but I found, you know, the positive reinforcement community and I found a wonderful trainer here in my town, and it was just like discovering a whole new world when it finally kind of fell in place for me. And now when I…

Annie: That’s what I feel about discovering training too. It was like I kind of landed on a new planet, and that helped everything make sense.

Eileen: Yeah, yeah.

Annie: You said you took some wrong turns, and I know you refer to yourself as a “crossover trainer.” First of all, you know, I don't know if everyone listening knows what that is, so I would love it if you could describe what a crossover trainer is. But also, you know, maybe you can talk about the training that you did before you came to, I guess what we'll call positive reinforcement training.

Eileen: Sure. I found a local obedience club. And I don't ever want to vilify people who are training in those ways because my belief is that they love their dogs too. I've seen it. You know, I witnessed it. But they do use methods like prong collars or shock collars that do hurt the dogs and do have fallout, and that I just wouldn't want to do to my dog if I had any other way to do it.

And that's how I felt about it then. I had read on the Internet about positive reinforcement training and read techniques, and read things to do. And then, I went to this club and there was a lot of use of food, there was a lot of positive reinforcement. But when that didn't work kind of just straight away, then the teaching methods worked with punishment, and I just thought “Well, I guess that was just a dream.” You know, I read about it on the Internet, but not everything you read on the Internet is true. And I did go ahead and I held out for two sessions, but finally I put a prong collar on Summer because everybody else's dog was standing really nicely and sedately in line and she was peering around, and looking, and trying to interact with things, and I thought “This is not how she is supposed to act.” So I did use a prong collar on her. And I did probably for a few weeks until just a really sad incident where I thought, I just — I can't do this. You know, I have to find a different way to do it.

Annie: What was the sad incident?

Eileen: It was a training exercise where the dog was set up to do the wrong thing.

Annie: And the dog meaning your dog?

Eileen: The dog was set up to fail where one of the teachers was going to wave food at it and we were supposed to jerk the dog away, and we would call that setting the dog up to fail. And so, I did it. And the first time, you know, I did what I was supposed to do and I jerked her away from the man who was waving food. And the second time when we went around, she got behind me and went on the other side of me, and I just thought, that's it. That was the thing that got to me. It's like she was now scared of that situation and I had done something to hurt her, but she was afraid of the man. And I just thought this is not what I want to be doing and I don't know what I can do, but this is not working for me and I don't want to hurt this extremely sensitive, lovely dog.

Annie: That’s so interesting. I think a lot of people can probably relate to that experience. I know that you’re very grateful to your dog now, you know, she might have started out seeming like a problem, but in the end, she brought you into this whole new way of seeing everything, right?

Eileen: Yeah, I’m smiling as you say that. She’s the dog that changed my life. I was a PhD student in an engineering program, and I walked away because I just had no passion for that, the studies, anymore. I wanted to learn about learning. And I walked away from that, and that was because of Summer.

Annie: And tell me a little about how you have trained as a trainer. Like I said, you know, every trainer comes to it from a different path, and you did the Susan Friedman Living & Learning with Animals course. Can you talk a little bit about that and what it is?

Eileen: Yes, it was wonderful. Susan Friedman has a course that’s for professional trainers, but she let me in. She actually approached me after she saw one of my videos, that we can talk about if you like, it’s kind of pertinent to what we’re working up to here. And we got a little correspondence going and she invited me to take the course. And that was just another stunning series of epiphanies in my life because it takes so long to kind of digest all of this but, you know, the learning theory stuff is not just for the dogs, it’s for us. And if someone knows a lot about it, they can teach humans too, and they can set up an environment where learning is fun and so interesting. And that's what LLA does, Living and Learning with Animals is what that stands for. And that whole environment is just nurturing of the learner in a way that I have never been around before. It’s just simply amazing.
Annie: I saw her speak at Clicker Expo. Well, I guess we should say who Susan Friedman is. Can you just say in a sentence who she is for someone who wouldn’t know?

Eileen: Dr. Susan Friedman is a retired professor from a university in Utah who has kind of crossed over from working in special education with humans to helping people with all sorts of animals, not just dogs and not just companion animals, but zoo animals and marine animals and birds. And she has published a lot of scholarly articles and set up some things that all trainers these days — I shouldn’t say all, but many, many trainers consult.

Annie: I spoke at Clicker Expo a couple of months ago and I was just so excited to see her and hear her. And one thing she talked about that I related to, and that doesn't relate to dogs, was how she thinks teenagers are far too quickly put on medication when they’re facing, when they're dealing with depression or anxiety rather than changing the environment. There's this, I guess you could call it a trend, to try and make the child conform to their environment rather than looking at how the environment can be adjusted. I really related to that because I found school just to be generally a punishing experience. You know, after 16 years in school, I didn't think learning was something that was anything I would be that interested in doing, because I thought you had to be sitting in a classroom if you were learning. Now, of course, I think, you know, learning’s happening all the time and we’re always becoming better learners, or at least, ideally, we’re always becoming better learners. But that’s in line with her — with the whole humane hierarchy, which is, you know, the gist of the humane hierarchy is that we should be changing the environment and using positive reinforcement-based techniques before anything else.

Let's talk about your most recent blog post. Now, you’ve written so many things that I’ve read and I thought “Oh, I want to talk to Eileen about this for the podcast!” Sometimes, the topics I feel like “Well, this is interesting to me as like a dog trainer and someone who is like super nerdy about this, but I know that not everybody who listens to this podcast is as geeky about these things.” I loved the post that you did a few months ago on the quadrants, not really the quadrants, which was about how we talk about the four quadrants of Operant Conditioning, but that we tend to ignore extinction as — that doesn't fit into the four quadrants.
That was one thing I was hoping to talk to you about, but then upon thinking about it, I thought well, as soon as you start saying, talking about using terms like Operant Conditioning, I worry that some people would be like – [sound], “That doesn’t apply to me!” But I thought that your most recent blog post was, you know, very understandable by — to anyone who’s ever — I thought your most recent blog post was, would be relatable to anyone who’s ever been on the Internet, because what you wrote was about how misleading so many videos of dogs can be, which, on the one hand, I don’t think anybody would be shocked to hear that, you know, things online might not always be true. But I thought that you made a larger point, which was interesting, about the problems that are caused by these — the kinds of videos that you talked about going viral. Can you talk a little about what inspired you to write this?

Eileen: Sure. It had been bothering me for a while. I just have an aversion to these things that are designed to manipulate the viewer, and a lot of these videos are designed to do exactly that. The video that finally put me over the edge was one of a bulldog who is basically scratching his butt on the carpet, but he’s doing it very rhythmically and he’s doing it in the presence of a guy who’s playing his guitar. And so, someone took that video and noticed the rhythmic movements of the dog. And took away the original soundtrack and put on a Nirvana song “Come As You Are,” and it looks like the dog is moving to the music.

And my sister is in a band and married to a guitarist and I checked everywhere from Sunday, you know, I was looking at the guy playing the guitar and I thought “He is not playing that music.” The fingers are not moving right. And I checked with them and they said “No, he’s certainly not. That’s been overlaid on there.” And people, it’s really hard to talk about the harm that these kinds of things can do because, I mean, in a way it’s just a cute video. Okay? So they have a bulldog who’s moving to music. But I believe that there’s harm when people portray dogs as doing something that probably, probably is not within their skillset. I won’t say it’s definitely not, but probably not. And because when we — how do I say this? Expand dogs’ skill sets in our minds, when they don’t live up to that is when they usually get punished. And in my journey of learning about dog behavior and behavior in general, you know, I’ve just seen that so often that we have these kinds of fantasies about these overly intellectualized things that we think dogs are doing. And then when they disappoint us, the dogs are the ones who suffer.

Annie: Well, part of what’s crazy about it is the kinds of videos that you point out in this post of dogs doing human-like things, whether it’s, yeah, tapping their butts to music, you know, and all kinds of things that dogs may do but don’t necessarily relate to the things that we think they relate to. It’s like, people are so hungry to see similarities between humans and dogs, but it’s like they’re looking in the wrong direction, because we have so much in common just because we are animals operating within the realm of the science of behavior. The things that we don’t have in common, I feel like I’m not saying it very clearly, but you know what I mean? It’s like, it feels like, “Well, what's the harm? It’s just a cute video.” But you could say that about, you know, “What’s the big deal about dog training at all?” You know? So what if you pop your dog’s collar? It’s not a big deal.

And I think a lot of people dismiss dog training in that way. It's not something people think very much about because they’re not thinking in terms of animal behavior. They’re thinking about dog training like “How can I get my dog to not pee on the couch?” Sometimes at School For The Dogs — not very often, but you know, occasionally at School For The Dogs where somebody will come in and say like “I don’t want to talk about what my dog eats or how my dog spends his time or, you know, whether I yell the word “no” at my dog, or whatever. I just want you to make my dog understand that he should pee outside.” Like I said, I feel like it doesn’t happen that much because I think that we have sort of a self-selecting group of clients. But I’ve been in the experience where I have to explain that it’s either you take the holistic approach or you don’t, you don’t even begin to solve the problem.

Eileen: That’s right.

Annie: So there is that one video that you mentioned. Do you have a guess as to what the dog was actually doing?

Eileen: I’m sorry, which one? The bulldog?

Annie: Yeah.

Eileen: I think he was probably just scratching his butt.

Annie: [laughs]

Eileen: It could’ve been some stereotypy where he had some kind of obsessive behavior. The dog was deaf. They even say that. While they’re saying that he’s rocking out to Nirvana. Yeah.

Annie: And the dog is deaf, huh?

Eileen: And I think he’s probably just scratching his butt in kind of an odd way. But, you know, he’s a bulldog. He does silly things.

Annie: Well, tell me about another one of those videos that was in the — that was in your post.

Eileen: There’s a whole genre of videos that have dogs rocking babies in cradles.

Annie: Right, right.

Eileen: And this is, I think, you know, as a trainer and behavior consultant, this is one that would probably kind of make your hair crawl a lot of the time because there’s some innate problems with having tiny, tiny babies with their faces right close to great, big dogs who are animals and can startle and, you know, bad things can happen when dogs and babies are pushed right up next to each other. But besides that, there is a “lie” — I’m using that term advisedly — inherent in these videos because we like to pretend that the dogs are rocking the human babies out of love and caring for them. But the evidence is to the contrary. Usually, the cradle is being rocked mechanically or with, you know, a little electric motor, and the dog is just propped up next to it. Sometimes the dog has been trained to kind of push on it, or sometimes the dog has just kind of been propped up there. But in no case — I mean, we can’t really see inside the dog’s mind, but they don’t really look like dogs that love their little baby brothers and are rocking the cradle with the knowledge in their mind that human babies like to be rocked. But that’s the myth that we’re being encouraged to believe.

Annie: And again, just to play devil’s advocate, somebody would say “Well, what’s the harm? What’s the harm?” And what would you say?

Eileen: I would say — and I have been practicing this one — of course with the dogs and babies right up next to each other, there’s obvious potential for harm. You probably could tell your listeners better than I about the statistics about dog bites with family dogs and little children, but there’s a risk when you have your dog up next to your baby in kind of a forced situation. It could be stressful. And not only that, even if you have the nicest — you know, most laid back, relaxed, do-anything dog in the world, you’re setting an example with these videos for the next person who wants to have a viral video of their dog rocking the cradle. And, you know, one of these next dogs is not going to be cool with it.

Annie: It’s also this like example of anthropomorphising dogs.

Eileen: Yes.

Annie: Like isn’t it enough that dogs really do do things to show that they love and care for each other, their puppies, or us?

Eileen: Exactly.

Annie: And it seems to me like these videos are not actually helping people see the ways in which dogs do show happiness and affection and care. Instead, it’s like projecting this overlay.

Eileen: Yes. You said it! That’s exactly right. It keeps us from noticing the real things that dogs do that are amazing. You know, showing affection and partnership and love for their humans.

Annie: It reminds me of another series of posts, I guess, that you did on “dog faming”.

Eileen: Yes!

Annie: Which I love because I hated that trend when — I feel like it’s kind died down but, you know, maybe six or seven years ago, there was so much of these pictures online of dog shaming, I guess it was called, where they have picture of dogs and then like a sign that says like “I ate a briefcase for dinner” or something bad, and it seemed to me like glorifying bad behaviors somehow. Like I couldn’t even think of like why — I mean, are there other situations where you put up photos of bad behavior in the hopes that other people are going to click “like”? Like I can’t think of any kind of analog situation. But more than that, it would seem like it was so much training sort of emphasizing the stuff that you don’t want to be emphasizing rather than looking at, you know, all the amazing things dogs do. And so, tell me how dog faming came about to you as an idea.

Eileen: Yeah. It was somebody else’s idea, but it was a response to the dog shaming thing. And, you know, my problem with the dog shaming is that I looked at a bunch of them before we talked tonight because I wanted to brush up on dog shaming, as terrible as that is. And I do think it’s kind of dying out. One of the main sites was not being updated so, yay! But the dogs are shown sitting next to whatever evidence of the “bad thing” that they did and wearing a little placard around their neck and usually looking kind of sheepish because they don’t like the placard around their neck and their person is making them sit there and take a picture. But these are all what a trainer or behavior consultant would call a management failure. These are not failures on dog’s parts when they’re doing natural dog behaviors like scavenging up the paper plate, you know, with the key lime pie that you left next to the TV. If you don’t want your dog to do that, you need to train them not to do that, or not leave the key lime pie down there.

Annie: Right. It’s like the wrong animal is wearing the sign around their neck.

Eileen: That’s right, that’s right. And it’s just so sad because dogs have to compromise so much to be able to live with us and we vilify them for doing natural doggy behaviors like scavenging or digging or tearing things up or the really sad ones where it looks like probably the dog has, you know, a clinical problem with separation anxiety or something and, you know, it’s still a joke picture.

Annie: I mean, I guess that’s why it relates to these videos because it’s like on the one hand we’re vilifying them for doing normal dog things in the human world that we’re forcing them to live in, and then on the other hand we’re celebrating them for doing things that look like human behaviors but that are actually in dog language, signs of possible distress.

Eileen: Oh, that’s great that you put those two things together. Yes!

Annie: You know, smiling, for example is an example of a behavior that dogs are not — you know, the kind of upturned corner smile that dogs do is not necessarily a sign of happiness in most dogs. It can be a sign of appeasement, stress, submission, but it’s easy to get a picture of that and then show like “Oh look, my dog is smiling!”

Eileen: Right. The piece that I wrote about a situation like that where people had adopted a puppy from a shelter and that puppy was doing a lot of appeasement, stressy, you know, fearful behaviors and it was pulling its little mouth cornered up, and it was an adorable puppy. And you can tell that the people saw that, took the video, and immediately sold it to one of the clickbait sites that does things like that. But I had kind of a realization about that, you know, it goes farther than having to explain that, “No, dogs really don’t usually do that, you know, to indicate happiness or a smile.” We know that because otherwise, why would the video go viral, if they’re doing that? Why would you pay somebody? If that were normal dog behavior, we’d see it everyday. It would not be remarkable. So I’m still pondering human nature about this whole thing.

Annie: Well, I guess it’s like this is a special dog who has this special ability to — yeah. No, you’re right. It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Although, I should say about that appealing smile, I know one dog in particular who does that all the time, and she does seem to do it in situations where I would think she would be happy. But I think she’s unusual. You know what I mean? Like I think there are dogs who show lots of submissive behaviors in situations where they also seem like they’re feeling good about the world. So it’s — I think that’s like a tricky one for us to comprehend as… But more than anything, I think what you’re saying is that it should be seen maybe as something interesting or not totally normal rather than being passed along.

I was thinking about — just going back to what we were saying about the dog faming thing — maybe we can like start a trend of having people wear signs around their necks that say like “I left the closet door open and now my shoes are all ruined” or something like that.

Eileen: Yeah. I think that people need to wear the signs.

Annie: Viral videos, maybe it was in that post about the smiling dog where you mentioned The Dodo and I was — it seemed like you might have some beef with The Dodo. I don’t know if you want to go there, but I'd be curious to hear because I’ve encountered some of the videos on the dodo here and there, but I haven't like formed strong opinions about them, but maybe I’m not as much of a scholar of it as you are. Tell me.

Eileen: I’m not, I can’t remember why I was so mad. I had probably just seen some very misleading ones and that just makes me mad. It makes me mad when people deliberately put videos together. It’s one thing being a dog? of ignorance, and I think the smiling shelter puppy, you know, was partly because the people believed that. But they also saw, you know, a viral video potential. But I do just get really annoyed when it’s just completely made up, because I understand, the thing is I understand, I don’t understand why but I had that feeling to like, here’s an example that’s not a dog but somebody was passing around a photo that supposedly came, what did come from a national park in Africa and it shows an elephant crossing the road accompanied by a female lion and the elephant appears to be carrying the lion cub in her trunk. And the caption is something about, you know, how wonderful these two species are helping each other and my heart just swells for a minute, thinking “Gosh, that’s so neat!” And then I thought, “Oh, but that’s not real.” and it turns out it was an April’s fools thing from 2016 or 2017, but I do understand this kind of romanticism we have about it, sort of, you know. But I also would love to see the truth.

Annie: Right, right, well I think a lot of it is not intentional lying that's happening, it's more of just a misunderstanding of animal behavior that to me, relates to so many problems frankly in the world. Maybe it was even in Susan Friedman’s panel at the Clicker Expo that we went to a few months ago. There was, someone asked a question about, the gist of it was like “Why haven't behaviors saved the world yet?” Something along those lines and I thought “Well gosh, you know, I’m sure if anybody walked in off the street and saw these dog trainer conferences, people wondering why we haven’t been able to save the world yet, it would seem like total, you know, total malarkey! Like “Who are these people and who are they talking about?” But you know, as someone who’s in it, as someone who has been exposed to this amazing, you know, how do I say it? Someone who’s been, you know, now for a decade or so in this world of learning about the science of behavior and who it applies all over the place and how, you know, we’re in it whether or not we want to be in it as much as we’re in, as much as we, you know, are in under the power of gravity. It makes sense to me that somebody would ask that question because I look around all the time at, you know, the government for example and see how inefficiently people are trying to control people, and how inefficiently the environment is being, you know, the right environments are not being created to create the behaviors that could help people be happier and the earth be healthier, etc.,etc.,etc. So like, in the one hand, yeah it’s just dog training or yeah, it’s just a video of a puppy smiling or a pumping his butt to the beat, but on the other hand like it has this threat that is so much, so much greater and I just, I wish there were, after I read your post, I wish there were viral videos that show how magical good training can be. But they just don't have the same traction. I mean there are certainly a lot of videos for instance of like freestyle dog dancing, right?

Eileen: Which is amazing training! Amazing!

Annie: Right. But I don’t know how often people look at those videos and think, you know, there’s some element there that could apply to something that i want to do with my dog be it teach my dog to go to his bed or, you know, not bark at the doorbell or something. It’s hard for me to say because like, I’m in the world but I’m guessing if you’re outside of it you probably don’t see, you know, a dog dancing to a disney song and immediately think like that’s something that has elements in it that can help me probably just think like “Oh, well that’s a special dog.”

Eileen: Yeah, yeah.

Annie: But then again, you know, you can find videos of bumble bees playing soccer and stuff, if you’re looking for that kind of thing.

Eileen: Right.

Annie: Gosh, what else would you like to touch on? There's my baby crying in the other room. Yeah, go ahead.

Eileen: I had really wanted to mention the first video that I ever did that went sort of viral. It went viral in the dog training world anyways and kind of outside of it. It’s not in the millions but it’s almost up to half a million now, and it was the video I made of “Does Your Dog Really Want to be Petted?” Which was a very simple premise and it was kind of a thrill where a video I never imagined it would be so popular. It happened because my lovely Summer was coming up to me on my back porch and soliciting petting and she was pushing her head into my hand and just had this beautiful blissed out look where I pet again and every time I’d stop she’d push into my hand some more and I got out my camera and I took footage of it and it was just lovely. So pretty. And I had been thinking about consent, probably been reading Jean Donaldson or something about that, about how to tell if a dog really likes something, because we make up these stories in our heads and we don’t always really know. But one way to tell is if they’ll keep coming back for more. And I thought I could get a contrasting video from my other dog who doesn’t particularly like to be petted, and I went and I did that and it was successful beyond my wildest dreams because while I had the camera on, I didn’t really see how many times she was going “Ew! Stop it.” Until I played it back in slow motion and I thought “Oh I thought it went ?” but I contrasted those two and it has reached the pet owning world which very much pleases me because why wouldn’t we want to notice whether our dogs really enjoy our ? or not

Annie: Yeah, absolutely.

Eileen: I would have to point out though that there’s about 150 thumbs down on that video and people do comment every one in a while that I’m just a total pushover and I’m not treating my dogs right and they’re just walking all over me because they should be petted when I want to pet them, dammit. And which is sad, it’s just really sad.

Annie: It’s just like a different way of seeing things, I guess. Though it’s hard to not feel righteous about it on this side.

Eileen: Right, yeah! On both sides actually. On the side of righteousness.

Annie: Yeah, yeah it’s true. Well thank you so much for having this conversation. I look forward to your next blogpost. What are you thinking about writing about next?

Eileen: Oh, well let’s see, I have one well this is so nerdy, I’m sorry. I have one on something called regression to maim? Which applies to dogs when we do some kind of intervention like give them a supplement because they might have, you know, sore joints. We do it at such a time when they’re really suffering and what happens if they get better, but probably they were going to get better anyway. I’m not saying this very well but it’s something that applies both to us and to dogs in terms of really observing whether something we’re doing is helping or not. That’s the gist of it. And I got a sample from my own life, did an intervention with a supplement and thought “Hey!You know, this is the perfect time because this is really acting up and golly gee, I got better but then I got worse again.” Anyway, it’s about being able to really tell whether something is ineffective intervention or not.

Annie: That sounds very nerdy but interesting!

Eileen: It is very nerdy, yeah

Annie: Well “Correlation Does Not Equal Causation” could be the name of this conversation to begin with and that seems like it relates to what you’re talking about.

Eileen: It does. It all relates and when I learned these things I’m just really pushed to show them, and some of them I just think are really important things for us all to know when we have dogs or if we’re just living in this world.

[outro]

You can learn more about Eileen Anderson and you can sign up for her newsletter at eileenanddogs.com. Our shout out today goes to Doris Day who dies this week. Doris Day might be best known as an actress but she was also the founder of the Doris Day Animal Foundation. She was a big dog lover, she was known as the dog catcher of Beverly Hills, dog catchers often have a bad reputation but she had nothing but a good reputation as far as people in the rescue industry are concerned. She was a big believer in fostering dogs, rescuing animals in need of homes, and finding them the right families for them. So, thank you Miss Day for all that you did for pets in this world.

Fun dog fact of the day is about Doris Day, she was the co-owner of a very pet-friendly hotel called the Cypress Inn located in Carmel, California. If she’s been there and you’ve brought your dogs there, let me know! I would love to see some photos. You can tag us at @schoolforthedogs on Instagram. That’s all, thanks again for listening. I will be back with you in a few weeks. And special thanks to Toast Garden who did this great ukulele version of “Time is On My Side” I will link to them in the show notes. Bye for now.