11 SepEpisode 76 | My family thinks I’m crazy: Dealing with those who don’t see the “whole” picture of holistic dog training
What does it mean to be a holistic dog trainer? To Annie, it means addressing issues using what we know about the science of behavior as it applies to both dogs and humans, and looking at the whole picture of a dog's life in order to address issues. One alternative approach involves narrowly focusing on getting rid of a problem using punishment, which can produce new unwanted behaviors which are then part of the whole picture, too. Sometimes, that whole picture contains people who don't see that they're part of the whole picture, and Annie has found this can be tricky terrain to navigate as a dog trainer ... especially when those people are family members. Annie opens up about how she has learned to keep quiet about all things relating to dogs when she is with certain people in her family, and attempts to take a holistic view of a problem behavior they've dealt with in different ways: barking.
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Transcript:
Annie:
I recorded this episode a few weeks ago, and then I kind of hesitated about whether or not I should post it because it has to do with my family. And it's tricky to talk about real live people, and I'm not eager to offend anyone or get into arguments. So after I recorded it, I thought, you know, let's just let this one sit for a few weeks so that I can think about whether or not I want to go there.
And I decided that the beauty of the podcast [laughs] as a medium is that you really have to show up and be interested in order to listen to a podcast at all. It takes some effort and it's kind of in a lot of cases on, at least this podcast is like a one-way conversation where I get to sit alone in a room and tell you what I think about something.
If you disagree with me, if you think I'm a jerk, you don't have to keep listening, and you never have to listen again. And if you have no interest in what I think about dog training, then you don't ever have to listen to begin with, and frankly, I think my family falls into that latter category.
So I've really learned to bite my tongue when anything about dogs comes up in conversation when I am with many people in my family, because it's just not worth having an argument. Even if it means suppressing my thoughts and feelings, it's worth it for the sake of having a relationship at all and maintaining some degree of peace.
But that doesn't mean I'm not going to have my own thoughts and feelings going on. And this isn't something that I have a few thoughts about. I have a lot of thoughts about it. I have a whole business devoted to a science-based approach to dog training, a behavior based approach to dog training. It's pretty much my entire life.
So I guess I decided I'm not going to suppress an entire part of my life all the time. And if the people mentioned, although unnamed, [laughs] in this episode are interested in what I think, they can listen to my one way side of a conversation whenever they please, and they're welcome to record their own podcasts on their points of view. I would actually be interested in hearing that.
Becoming a dog trainer really changed my worldview and it changed, I think, how I interact with people and who I am as a person. And there's a handful of people who are in my life, who I love and care about, who I think have really struggled with maybe what they see as like a new iteration of myself. You know, people who I've known my whole life for a lot of my life.
And that's been difficult. Part of what's difficult about it though, is I feel like some of the misunderstandings that I talk about on the show about dog training are at the heart of some of the misunderstandings –I see them as misunderstandings — that my family has about me. I shouldn't say all my family, some, some of my family.
For instance, and I think I've talked about this before on the podcast, but my dad. The last time I saw my dad — he died a few years ago — the last time I saw him was on my wedding day. And the penultimate time I saw him was about a month before that, when we went out to dinner and he asked me if I was inviting certain family members to my wedding, and I said, no.
Which, you know, to me felt like it's my event, and I know how I want to feel at that event, and I want to control my environment in order to try and feel a certain way, and I can control who's there to a great extent. There are people I do want there and people I would rather not have there, and it felt to me like it wasn't a moment where I needed to placate my dad at the expense of my own feelings and my own comfort on my own wedding day.
Anyway, he flipped out at me, and we were at a restaurant, and it was just yelling at me across the table. “You're punishing me! You're an animal trainer! You're not supposed to be punishing people! You shouldn't be using punishment!” And it was frustrating because, I'm like, Oh my God, this isn't what punishment is. I mean, it was frustrating because, you know, the last thing I wanted to do was be yelled at about this by my dad, especially like in public.
But it was not the moment to try and explain to him, you know, like, I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings, but I'm not trying to discourage some kind of specific behavior in you. I'm not using punishment on you. I'm not trying to train you to do anything. I'm just telling you my feelings about this particular topic. Anyway, it was frustrating to me that, like, embedded in his attack on me, it was like a misunderstanding of operant conditioning and the role of an animal trainer to begin with.
You know, I'm always saying on this podcast, we're all animals. We have to remember that we talk about humans and animals, but, guess what? We have a lot more in common with all the other animals on this earth than we don't have in common, and animals need to take care of themselves often first.
So I think I was doing everything I could to protect myself, take care of myself, and I think that's ultimately what a parent would want for their child. And I think, you know, my dad's gone now, so I can't talk to him about it. But I think he got that. I think in the end, he realized I was, you know, I was doing me, and he needed to get behind that.
He did say if I didn't invite these people to the wedding, he wasn't going to come to the wedding, which is a good example of using negative reinforcement to try and influence someone's behavior. But of course, I was like, well, I don't really like how you're behaving right now. So if you don't want to come to my wedding, I'll be sad because you are my dad. But then again, it doesn't feel good to be extending an invitation to someone who's strong arming me.
So anyway, if you are a member of my family and you do happen to be listening, I love you. And because I love you, I will keep keeping my mouth shut whenever the topic of dog behavior comes up and I'm there, which is surprisingly often. I wish everybody would just not have a dog, I think, in the family so that it wouldn't happen so much.
Like even at the rehearsal dinner for our wedding, I overheard one person in my family talking to another person in my family about how wonderful invisible fences are. And I just thought like really? Of all the topics in the world that could be discussed right here, right now, this, this is it? But it seems that the stuff just comes up all the time, somehow in my orbit, even when I'm not trying to be involved.
Anyway, I've learned that I should keep my mouth shut on this topic when I'm with my family, but I'm not going to stop thinking my thoughts. And if you want to hear my thoughts, there are a lot of podcast episodes I’ve recorded that you can listen to. This one is maybe a good start.
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I’d like to talk a little bit about the word “holistic” as it pertains to dog training, or at least as it pertains to dog training as we try to do dog training at School for the Dogs. I think if someone had told me about holistic dog anything in the period of time before I learned anything about dog training, I would have thought about a place that does Reiki or acupuncture. Things kind of like outside of Western veterinary medicine — that I am for.
Not things I really honestly have a lot of knowledge or opinion about. I might've thought, I guess, they talk about nutrition also, but a holistic behavioral approach to training, I think I might not have understood what that meant.
Now I have a very clear idea of what that means, and that means looking at the whole dog's life in terms of how it is shaping behavior or how it is causing anyone behavior. That means looking at a life that is more than about one behavior that may be a problem.
Dog training is not just about teaching a dog to do what you want the dog to do. It's also teaching the dog to be comfortable living in the human world, where we are asking them to deal with crazy stimuli all around us all the time. And we're asking them often to behave in ways that aren't necessarily natural to them in ways that might not jive with the behaviors that they've developed in order to be so valuable to humans.
We ask dogs to live in apartments, to be alone much of the day. I'm thinking about things our clients have needed, where we ask them to be okay with living with other animals, or living with children. We bred this species for millennia. They evolved in order to, we think, be good companions to us.
Part of their evolutionary success had to do with probably things that humans value. They were probably less likely to survive and procreate if they engaged in behaviors that we were not into. And what behaviors were useful to us? I mean, eating our garbage, alerting us to intruders, killing things for us.
There are a lot of behaviors that I don't think we can really predict how they would display themselves in a more wild situation. But I think that we can at least guess that there are a lot of behaviors that we don't like in dogs that are there because of the environments that we put them in.
Again, we're usually the ones putting the dogs in the environment. I don't think that dogs really have a lot of agency about what home they wind up in. And that means that we have to do a good job at making sure we're working to help our dogs feel good about whatever the environment is.
Frankly, sometimes we find that there's a dog who's in an environment where it's like the environment would have to be bent way too much in order to make the dog behave in ways that were acceptable. There are cases of dogs who really just cannot be alone, or really just can't be around small dogs or other dogs. These are all things that can be trained to a huge extent, but not every person is going to be able to do the training for whatever reason.
And if you're not going to put the work in to dealing with a problem behavior in what I think of that as a holistic way, looking at the dog's whole life, and you're not going to be able to manipulate the environment in such a way where the dog isn't going to be triggered to engage in these behaviors and you are not going to address the root cause, then you are not taking a holistic approach.
So I guess that's a little bit more about how I think about holistic now. And I thought about this because of this incident with my family this weekend. So otherwise — I guess, what's tricky about the word holistic is it's about the whole, so everything is in the whole, right?
But I guess I feel like my thought of holistic training is that it's like a Pac-Man size part of the whole, and then there's this like Pac-Man's mouth part of the hole that is like denying the existence of any outside factors of the environment of associations, and focusing narrowly, or perhaps not so narrowly, on a problem without consideration of methods and without consideration of fallout.
Now, I think, if you are in the Pac-Man's mouth part of how you deal with dogs, you are going to think the Pac-Man holistic part, the yellow part, is a totally separate thing. And I mean, I think my family thinks I'm in some kind of cult about this stuff. And maybe I am. Those who are in the black mouth part, in my experience, see themselves as like a separate thing.
The mouth is just like, I'm just a mouth. That's all there is. And the holistic approach is like the Pac-Man, who is like, no, the mouth is part of the whole, this is the whole picture. Like all of this is behavior. All of this is why you follow, this is science. And you're just operating in this black area.
Which might make sense cause you're still dealing with behavior and you're still dealing with science. It's just using approaches that are, like I said, more likely to cause unintended consequences and not address the larger issue.
So what happened this weekend was I was away with my family, and I'm pretty sure they don't listen to this podcast. I'm pretty sure because I think they think that I am like Looney Tunes about things relating to dogs in a lot of ways, and that I'm judgmental of their methods, which is true, I am. And it's pretty easy for me to click into getting righteous about this kind of thing, and I'm aware it can come off as sounding or seeming sanctimonious.
So I just don't say anything because I've been punished enough times for speaking my mind and not doing it in a way that was respectful enough of the people I was with. Because it feels, you know, it's an emotionally charged thing that at this point has to do with something that's so basic to who I am and who I want to be and who I try and be and who I want to be around.
Which is, I want to lead a life where I am offering those I take care of the ability to offer for their best behaviors, or offer behaviors I want, without me having to tell them what I want all the time. I want them making choices that are in line with the choices I want them to make.
And this extends to myself. Like, I feel like it's a constant practice and a constant effort. How can I manipulate my environment in order to up the chances that I'm going to engage in behaviors that I like and that others are going to like, and then I'm going to feel good about being where I am and doing what I'm doing.
How can I move towards a life where I'm feeling good about doing the things I'm doing, and the things I'm doing are being reinforced in a way that's adequate to keep those behaviors happening, and not live a life where I'm driven by coercion and by force. To me, that's like the best version of life for myself and for my dog and my daughter, the beings that I put in my home. It's something I'm trying to practice there always as well.
And then working within the environment that I've been able to manipulate for them as best as I can in order to make them feel comfortable in that environment. And then up my criteria, little by little. Shape better and better, and stronger and stronger behaviors, and not allow a lot of room for behaviors to happen in the wrong settings or at the wrong time. Also not allowing behaviors I don't want to be reinforced by myself or by the environment or by the very doing of it.
To me, that's all just being like on the good side of science and behavior. That's like the key to the good life. That's good dog training. That's just like being a good human being.
So part of what makes it emotional and difficult to handle with my family is that I can't not in my mind constantly be drawing parallels between how we treat our dogs and how we treat each other. But I am very aware that the human world is way more complicated and nuanced than the dog world. At least the dog world, as we humans can understand it.
This stuff is so ridiculously complicated. We engage in so many different behaviors and there are so many inputs and we have language, which is like, I think I can result in subtleties of behavior and interactions that are beyond anything in the dog world.
Although, of course, they have other ways of communicating that we will never be able to totally understand. Like I wish I knew what it was like just for one minute to have a dog's nose. Just be so curious what smell would communicate. Anyway, I digress.
The issue this weekend is that we went camping with my family, and they have a dog who spends a lot of time outside, loves being outside. They have a nice big property. They do use a shock collar, like an electric fence shock collar, which I have issues with for a lot of reasons.
But what I tend to think is misunderstood is my issues are not just about, we should respect animals and not cause them pain because quite frankly, I believe that. But I also know I'm a little bit of a hypocrite because I eat meat. And I'm sure that I consume meat that comes from animals who probably lived pretty terrible lives because of the way they were cared for and the way that they were brought to this world and all of it, all of it for our consumption.
Which, that hypocrisy bothers me. I feel like the fact that I eat meat and dairy, et cetera, that I'm not a vegan or like a super conscientious eater of where my food even comes from is like a problem of mine that I need to deal with.
But anyway, my point is, it's not about like the pain the animal is getting. I mean, I'm not pro pain. In my personal life, it's not what I want for the animals I'm taking care of. Like I said, it's not what I think of as good dog training or good parenting, or it's not like the good life for myself. But it's not the pain when I see it happening in other situations as much as it's the unintended possible consequences, the fallout.
So with an electric fence, there are multiple problems. I don't want to talk about all the problems of electric fences. I'm just going to talk about one of the problems, which is, you don't know what association your dog is necessarily making with the shock. It might be the boundary, but it might be the dog got shocked just as he was looking at a squirrel in the tree. Or the dog got shocked just as he was looking at the UPS man who was coming in.
Or that these things happen over and over, sometimes it's a squirrel and sometimes it's a UPS man. And maybe it also has to do with this white flag, or this area. But it’s not like there's only one behavior being reinforced or punished by one thing each time, especially in the life of a dog. I think there can be a lot of confusion because we don't know the connection that's happening each and every time it happens.
And this can lead not only to just a general state of stress — “I don't know what thing is going to cause this shock.” But it could also lead to behaviors being suppressed that have problematic consequences later. Often a dog is barking because he wants to put distance between himself and whatever is approaching. Like, “Hey, I'm loud and scary. Get away from me.” Right?
Probably part of the reason why little dogs, why they say, you know, his bark is bigger than his bite. Little dogs have evolved to be quite noisy, some of the time at least, because like, Hey, get away from me. I might be little, but if you can't see me, especially, you might think I'm a much bigger dog.
That might be some of the reason why dogs lift their legs really high when they pee, too. It's like, so that the dog who comes behind them is going to think they're a really, really big dog. They might never see the other dog, but might just make that impression from the dogs pee.
Anyway, barking is a way of stopping or discouraging interaction that could be dangerous or that that dog perceives as possibly dangerous. Well, actually let me come back to the barking thing in a second.
When we're talking about an electric fence, which is what I was saying my family uses, the barking might have something to do with it too, but I think often dogs then get aggressive about people or dogs or anything entering into the space where they have been shocked.
Even if the collar is off and the dog is not actually getting shocked, wearing the collar can sometimes still work for a dog. Because I think they've made the association that the collar could possibly create this feeling, that just wearing the collar, even when it isn't being triggered by anything can be enough of a deterrent. Like the collar is not giving them a shock anymore, but the collar is still working because it's a deterrent because of the pretty bad associations with it.
Anyway, I guess the bigger point is you can get rid of a behavior in this way, but what are the other associations that are happening? And those associations could lead to a dog biting someone coming into their home, which happened with my family's old dog, who was a great dog. He wasn't a bad animal in the least, and he was beloved.
But he lived outside a lot of the time, I mean, during the day, at least, and my family felt that it was more humane to let them have free roam with an electric fence than it would be to force him to live behind a fence. At least that's how I understood the argument. So I learned to not argue about it.
And when the dog did eventually bite someone coming to the house, which was a relatively rare thing, and I suggested my reason as to why this ended up happening, I was told I was wrong. That I couldn't prove it. Which I guess is true. Like I can't, I'm not gonna like get all Perry Mason about this, but like, I can't see it in any other way.
And the dog was a big dog. Also, you know, barking became an issue because he would bark at anything approaching. Probably because, like I was saying, he was like, Hey, stay away from me. I'm big and scary.
Anyway, they now have a different dog, and we all went camping this weekend and they brought the dog and tied the dog up. And the dog was barking at anyone that passed by, I guess really mostly at dogs that passed by. Honestly, I wasn't paying too much attention to what the specific trigger was. There was just a lot of barking, and I suspected it probably was just all the activity. It wasn't like just seeing a man in a hat or something like that. Like some dogs have very specific triggers.
This dog lives outside most of the time and is mostly off-leash outside and the house is pretty setback. So there's not a lot of cars coming and going. There's certainly not a lot of people coming and going, not a lot of other dogs. I mean, I think they occasionally bring her to like the dog park or maybe occasionally take her for a walk.
But I would say like probably 99% of the time she is in her own private yard off leash. But on this campsite, she was tied up, and there was just constant activity on us the whole time. Other dogs, kids on bikes, kids on scooters, cars, people, et cetera, et cetera.
So she would bark and then my family would yell no at her, and then she barked some more and then they'd yell no again. And then eventually she would stop barking and sometimes they would say, good girl.
So, I mean, if I had to go all Colombo here on guessing why this behavior was happening again, I can't prove it, but I would say probably because she isn't around all these stimuli all the time. They were possibly scary to her because they were unfamiliar, and barking was her best way to work at putting distance between herself and these things, especially cause she was on leash.
So she couldn't go approach, say the other dog to do what perhaps would be some kind of normal greeting. And she couldn't run away from the other dog because she was tied up. So her go to behavior was to bark just to let the other dog know, I'm big. You better stay away. And then this was met from vocalizations, from the human. Which I don't think were very meaningful one way or the other, because they didn't really seem to me like they resulted in her not barking anymore.
I mean, eventually she would stop barking, but maybe she would have just stopped barking anyway. And I also just guess that like the difference between like “No” and “good girl,” like dogs definitely do respond to tone, but I think we probably give them too much credit for understanding specific words, cadences in most situations, but maybe I'm wrong.
And then eventually someone put some kind of Sonic collar on her that made, I guess, a very high pitched noise when she barked. And that seemed like a much more effective punishment. So then she would just kind of growl and then stop. But there were a couple of problems here. One, at some point the battery of the thing wore out and so then had to be taken off so it could be recharged.
Then another problem, again, I'm guessing that the other dogs who are all around, including there was another one on our campsite, could all hear this sound too when she barked. And who knows what associations they were making with that sound, whether it had anything to do with her barking or not.
Just doesn't seem like it could lead to good things if it's really that bothersome to dogs to be exposing them all to this loud, annoying sound periodically when one of them barks. Likewise, it's possible that another dog barking could have caused her collar to go off, unless I'm really not understanding the technology. But anyway, several issues.
However, for me, the biggest issue was, again, I don't know the association that she was making with the sound and it was suppressing a behavior, this barking behavior, which was actually in my opinion, preferable to other things she could be doing. If she felt fearful, like trying to bite or attack. Fortunately she was on like a rather short leash, so there wasn't too much like biting or attacking she was going to do to any other dogs.
But I felt like it's possible that she could skip the barking, “get away from me” part of her stress sequence, and also maybe not even growl and just go towards snapping, trying to bite anything that she was feeling anxious about. Because that behavior had been not only punished, the barking behavior punished, but also the shock could have now been associated with any of the unusual things in her environment that she might've been perceiving as a threat.
And there were kids running around near her. And that stressed me out that possibility of her skipping the barking because that behavior had been punished and going straight towards any kind of attack due to a misguided association or redirecting onto something nearby, which is something dogs can do. Like a dog sees a skateboard across the street is stressed out about it and then goes and bites his owner's leg.
So anyway, that was my worry. And that was my read on the situation, which I kept to myself because I just know it's an argument that's not going to lead anywhere. And that at the end of the day, what they were doing did work. It did get rid of most of her barking behavior in a relatively short period of time, and it worked because of behavioral science. It just didn't really take into account the whole Pac-Man, and the possible downsides, rather instead focusing on the tip of the behavior rather than the root cause of the behavior.
And that's why that's not a holistic approach. It's part of the whole. But it's like if you have serious acne and you are treating the pimple and not the cause of the acne, right? I'm guessing that's what a holistic dermatologist would be, right? Looking at all the other things in your life that are causing this and not just focusing on one specific pimple. I totally did not mean to bust out with an acne analogy here.
So nothing happened, the dog didn't attack anybody. So their methods did the job. And as far as fallout, the dog is not in the situation that much. So the behaviors that she was engaging in, I think in her normal environment are non-issue. And you know, I was talking to my husband about it and he said, well, what would you suggest?
I thought, well, part of the reason I kept my mouth shut is because what I would suggest would be starting now on bringing the dog to a campsite next year. For this year, my suggestion probably would have been either don't bring the dog at all, or configure some kind of setup within the campsite where she is going to be visually blocked from seeing all these things that seem to be triggering her to bark and generally be stressed out.
And yes, ideally try and have her make good associations about all of these different things coming at her. But frankly, I don't think that campsite was the moment to be doing that kind of work. Partially because she's not a very food motivated dog, so like throwing hot dogs at her every time a skateboard goes by, I don't think it would have mattered much.
And you know, for that reason, dogs who are food motivated are often easier to train than dogs who aren’t food motivated. It's one reason that usually dogs are easier to train than cats. Dogs are less picky than cats. You can absolutely use reward-based training to train dogs who are not super food motivated, but it can be harder. And dealing with a dog who is getting exposed to a whole bunch of things all at once during one period of time, I think is like trial by fire.
My preference would be to acclimate the dog to some of the things, little by little, at a distance that she could handle. Maybe starting out, working somewhere where she's familiar and comfortable and with people she's comfortable with, and relaxed and happy. Introducing another dog walking by at 80 feet away, and then seeing how she does with that. Then you could either reward that by giving her food or play or touch, or by giving her the opportunity to run away from that dog.
I'm giving a very, very simple version of the kind of work that's done in something like our Sidewalk Psychos class. There are these methods of training that are BAT [Behavioral Adjustment Training], CAT [Constructional Aggression Treatment]. Different ways that you can get dogs behaving well, or at least not badly in the presence of other dogs, let's say, by introducing the other dog at a distance repeatedly.
And that is really hard, and I totally get that many people don't want to put their time and energy and money and effort into doing this kind of training. I feel like part of my mission is to try and show people that this kind of training can be fun and makes sense, and isn't necessarily hard, and can be very quick.
But it's still work, and you still have to want to show up to even start doing that job, and some people just aren't going to do that. The clients that we have that do this kind of work are really freaking special people. This is why we have such an amazing business. It's because we have clients who are doing this kind of thing.
We also have some clients who say, you know what, I can't do this, and therefore I shouldn't have this dog. Or therefore I need to somehow manipulate the environment in order to make sure that my dog doesn't have this problem, because I can't put in what might be months and months of training and time and effort and maybe money to get there.
To me, those are the people who are taking a holistic approach and deciding to use the least invasive, least coercive methods possible in order to give their dogs a good life.
But the truth is often it's not easy. I mean, training can be fun and it can be easy, but it can also, it can take a long time. Ideally that long time is filled with moments that are good, and are filled with rewards that make it all worthwhile. Whether that's seeing the improvement in your dog, or just the joy of working with your dog, even if you're working with your dog to address a problem.
I like to think our human students have good moments in classes that are addressing problems, not just classes that are meant to be fun and silly like tricks or whatever. And I think that's why clients come back over and over. Something like our Sidewalk Psychos class, we have clients who've taken that multiple times.
And I don't think, I mean, I could be wrong again, but I don't think it's because it's not working. I think it's because it is working. It's something constructive that the owner can do with the dog. It is part of a conditioning exercise to help continually condition the dog to feel good. To know what to do and how to behave in this world that we have plopped him into, which is largely a human world that wasn't constructed necessarily in a way that is meant to encourage the behaviors that we want.
And another thing about barking is that barking is not necessarily a bad behavior. Another approach I might've had to this was let the dog bark. Again, not a popular thing to suggest. So I didn't, but it's possible the people around us wouldn't have cared. I wouldn't have cared if the dog was barking, maybe it wouldn't have bothered others. I don't know. Maybe if she was just able to bark, she would have eventually lost interest.
I'm not saying that that is my preferred approach to deal with all barking cases. I'm not saying that at all. But I do think there are situations where barking might be the absolute normal and natural thing for the dog to do in that moment. And there are times where a preference that a human has for quiet might be at odds with that.
Or it might be a really good thing for us. My dog barks when the doorbell rings and it's something I've never really treated as a huge problem, because his bark is pretty big for a little guy. And especially when I was living alone in the middle of New York City, I didn't think it was the worst thing for people to think I had a guard dog.
You know, what's funny is my neighbor's dog barks. And my neighbor’s always saying to the dog, no barking, no barking. But especially when she's like by my door, I think, and I mean, if she really didn't want the dog to be barking, I think she would have found a more effective way of dealing with the barking by now, because this has been going on for many, many years.
I think it's more like she's worried about other people thinking she's not dealing with the barking. So she says to not bark to the dog so that other people don't think she's being disrespectful or being permissive or being a bad dog, or, I don't know.
Anyway, this is why I love dog training. It's not just a chance to think about the way dogs behave — it's also interesting to me to see other people thinking about how dogs behave. And I'm just really grateful to know so many dog owners who are living in that yellow part of the Pac-Man.
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Special thanks to my Tasmania-based friends, Lizzy for their recording of “Love is Strange.” You can find them at https://www.youtube.com/toastgarden.
Links:
Behavior Therapy Services at School for the Dogs – for barking, aggression, anxiety and other behavioral concerns
Related episodes and posts:
Episode 34 | How I used punishment to train my husband to cover his mouth when he yawns (Part 1)
Would you put a shock collar on a human you love?
How to deal with a dog who can’t handle skateboarders
