In this episode of K9 Conservationists, Kayla speaks with Liza Rader from Focus Dogs about arousal in working dogs.
Science Highlight: How do seasonal changes in adult wolf defecation patterns affect scat detection probabilities?
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Transcript (AI-Generated)
Kayla Fratt 00:09
Hello and welcome to the K9Conservationists podcast, where we are positively obsessed with conservation detection dogs. Join us every other week to discuss detection, training, canine welfare, conservation, biology and everything in between. I’m Kayla Fratt, one of the cofounders of K9Conservationists, where we train dogs to detect data for land managers, researchers, agencies and NGOs. Today I am super jazzed to be talking to Liza Rader all about arousal and working dogs working breeds. Liza is a Karen Pryor Academy certified training partner, a second generation Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever person and a specialist in high energy, high drive sporting breeds. So their training is full of wild child dogs, those with big feelings and challenging behaviors. They bring together extensive experience and generational knowledge and high drive gun dog breeding and husbandry with education in modern science based training practices. So I hope everyone just from that little intro can already tell why we’re so excited to be talking to Liza. Welcome to the podcast. We’re so excited to have you.
Liza Rader 01:07
Hi, thank you so much for having me.
Kayla Fratt 01:09
Yeah. All right. So as I’ve warned you beforehand, we are going to jump into a science highlight and then we’re going to talk all about arousal. So this week, I read the paper titled, “How do seasonal changes in adult wolf defecation patterns affect scat detection probabilities.” And this was published in BioOne in December 2022, so about a year ago, and it was written by Fabrice Roda, and a bunch of other authors who all deserve recognition, but I cannot read all of those French names unfortunately, mostly because there’s a lot of them, not just because they’re French. So from the abstract to quote, “Wolves are currently recolonizing their historic range in France, the collection of Scots is a widely used non invasive survey method to monitor wolf population size. However, seasonal changes in wolf Eagle the deposition patterns might affect the results of surveys. We used a detection dog and camera trapping to compare wolf scat detectability during winter and the nursing season, we collected 113 scats deposited by adult wolves at 29, marking sights on forest roads in the Sainte-Baume Regional Park, Provence, France. After parturition the mean number of adult were wolf scouts increased by 160% Inside the nursing territory, and decreased by 80% outside of it so to pause the quote for a moment basically that means that while the adult wolves were raising a nursing young puppies, the scats right inside of that nursing territory increased by 160%.” And then the ones that are further out kind of more on the edges of the territory decreased by 80%. To continue, “Around the time that the pups are born, changes in fecal deposition patterns of adults make it easier to find scats around the wolf den with an 87% probability per wolf marking site, and harder to find those scouts outside of the nursing territory with just an 11% probability there. During winter, the chance of finding scats is equal (38 to 40%, per wolf marking site) inside versus outside the nursing territory.” So we’re going to pause; basically, that means that during winter when they don’t have young puppies, you’ve got about an equal chance of finding scat at any given marking site. If I’m getting all of these stats, right, which I think I am. Back to the quote, “The combined use of a detection dog and camera traps allowed us to gather data on wolf defecation patterns non invasively. Detectability of adult wolf scats during the nursing season is highly variable compared to winter scat winter due to seasonal behavioral changes affecting scat location. We conclude that surveys to collect samples and estimate wolf population size should be conducted exclusively during winter to avoid sampling biases.” And then to move on to a quick later on in the article, they say “The use of a detection dog significantly improved wolf to genetic genetic monitoring, and deliver up to a 99.6 time saving relative to monitoring by human trained observers.” And they then cited that from Roda et al., 2020, “We calculated that during winter months, it was necessary to sample just 10 marking sites to reach a 99% probability of detecting both presence regardless of the location of the marking site outside or inside the wolf pack nursing territory. We calculated that during the nursing period of the sampling of 20 marking sites was necessary to obtain a 90% probability of detecting wolf presence outside the nursing territory. In the nursing territory, the sampling of only three marking sites was sufficient to obtain a 99.7% probability of detecting wolf presence when taking into account the potential overestimation of scat counts due to non-target species detected by the dog. The overall results were similar and the findings and conclusions of the study did not change. Capture heterogeneity, which is the difference in probabilities of finding scouts from different individuals, and its causes is an important consideration because it can lead to an underestimation of population size and capture-recapture models.”
Kayla Fratt 04:55
So there’s a lot there, but really, really cool stuff. I think, I encourage people to read this. It’s a relatively approachable paper. But there are some specific caveats that we want to make sure that people keep in mind, if they do go ahead and read this paper. So you know, as always, this is one dog team. So some of those probabilities of detection are going to vary from dog team to dog team. You know, that’s always something we’ve got to be thinking. And then I did notice, this is one wolf pack in a pretty specific area that has no motorized traffic throughout the territory. So there’s a good chance that with a larger wolf pack or different different prey species causing different changes in behavior from that wolf pack, you can end up with really different results. And, for example, my roommate here, Ellen, she studies wolves in the Katmai area up in Alaska, and these wolves are have a really heavily marine diet. So they’re actually packed really tightly into these super duper tiny territories, all along these inlets and just like gnaw on sea otters, versus, you know, you imagine, like the really typical, and they’re much smaller packs like seven individuals in most cases. versus you know, you can imagine some of these typical wolves in Yellowstone where they’re bison specialists, or you know, not just specialists, but bison, elk, mule deer, those packs can get up to like 20, or even like 30 individuals, much wider ranging. So it’d be really interesting to like, actually compare these results across different different wolf packs, because I bet it would be really different, but we don’t know.
Kayla Fratt 06:28
So to quote them, they brought up some of their own limitations. “Because systematic genetic analyses of scouts were not performed, we do not know if both sexes showed changes in fecal deposition patterns associated with the pups birth.” So basically, what that means is, you know, they don’t know if, if you were to do genetic analysis during the nursing season, you know, it might be reasonable to hypothesize that you’re getting more of the adult male out away from the dining area and more of the adult female closer to the dining area. So if you were doing analysis, you might conclude that there was only a male in the area when there’s actually a female at home with the babies. Then they also added quote, “Young wolves did not help the NEOWISE wolf pack provide food to the female as other wolf packs do. Hence, the defecation patterns may be different if one or more young wolves from a previous previous reproduction, help the breeding couple parenting the pups.” Which, I think that’s really important here as well, that’s relatively atypical for a wolf pack in my understanding, usually, you’ve got various non breeding sub adults and young adults around helping raise the puppies. So the fact that this is really just like a nuclear family like Mom, Dad, young of the year puppies, yeah, you would expect kind of an extreme result here.
Kayla Fratt 07:45
And then, to continue, I liked that they this paper that had a lot of good caveats on their own. So I didn’t have to come up with all of them. They were very even even headed about the limits of their own study. So they also said to quote, “Wolves in our study used forest roads and crossroads for set marking, but no surveys were conducted off road.” So during the winter, these wolves used main road main forest roads to travel fast and far across their home range at night, as revealed by camera traps wolves of the breeding pair strongly avoided the main forest roads during the nursing period, and selected secondary trails and forested areas, then they continued, “One must keep in mind that our sampling design should have taken into account off road scat deposits. Thus, it is evident that only a fraction of all the available feces had been collected, which could be a source of bias.” So lots of limiting factors here, but I think, you know, the big takeaway is if you want to be looking at a species that has really intense parenting behaviors, you may need to take that into account when you’re thinking about how you’re surviving. That would be the like, too long, didn’t read of that one. So, yeah. Anyway, Liza, do you have anything you wanted to comment on with that before we jump into arousal?
Liza Rader 08:58
So for anyone who’s not super familiar, like where I’m coming from with this, my education, background, not at all in the sciences, I’m almost entirely an arts and humanities background. And just the thing that strikes me listening to that is just how genuinely profound it is that a species who has co-evolved with us, like the species that has co-evolved with us, they have shaped our society, they’ve shaped who we are as humans, and we have fundamentally shaped them collaborating with us to work on a conservation project for their own ancestor. It is genuinely profound.
Kayla Fratt 09:40
Yeah, it is really, really cool. And yeah, gosh, yeah, I love this sort of stuff.
Kayla Fratt 09:51
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Kayla Fratt 10:53
Okay, so I think, let’s jump into these arousal dogs. This this conversation of arousal. So why don’t we start out with like, you know, as always, we got to have a working definition of arousal for this conversation. We talk about this sort of stuff a lot on the podcast, but you know, we’ve got to make sure we’re all on the same page. So do you have a definition you like?
Liza Rader 11:14
Yeah, it’s one of those things that can be infinitely complicated. But I think the most accessible and helpful definitions is the most simple, which is the level of nervous system activation in the body at any given moment. Yeah. And so when we talk about high arousal, we talked about dogs who tend to sort of live in the higher end of that spectrum, where they have the ability to go higher than others. My Duck Toller gets up in the morning, and he is stoked about life. Every single morning, he’s happy, he’s in a moderately high arousal every single morning when he wakes up in the morning. That is not the case for a lot of dogs. A lot of dogs are pretty pokey in the morning, right? So they’re all a little different. And it’s also really important to note that it’s all morally neutral. So we tend to talk about arousal or hyper arousal. There’s just arousal, it’s inappropriate for human usage. And that can be problematic for the dog when they try to live in our world.
Kayla Fratt 12:17
Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. I think. Yeah, there’s this part of me that’s like, whoa, like, they can be like, maladaptive for them or like, feel bad, right?
Liza Rader 12:26
Like, just, I mean, in the way that anything can be maladaptive, right? Like, you know, a person with an anxiety disorder has has maladaptive arousal issues. But at its core arousal as a concept is morally neutral whether or not it’s helpful, is it a different idea, but there’s definitely I think a push especially in the sort of the pet world to always be lowering, always be tampering like tamping down. He’s feeling that it’s, you know, there’s such thing as the dogs being too much. Yeah. I kind of have my comfortable with that. Yeah.
Kayla Fratt 13:02
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we were hinting at this before we push record and then I’m actually gonna save this thought, like, you know, I remember and I’ve talked about this before on the podcast when I first got Barley, and also today’s Barley’s 10th birthday. So everyone’s saying happy birthday quietly to yourself in the car. When I first got him, I had so many days of like, it being like, 11pm. And this dog is still like bringing me you know, like shoes, or like, I remember he brought me pieces of paper, like picked up, like flat pieces of paper to bring to me for fetch, and being like, 11pm just sitting on the floor and like crying being like, what have I done bringing this dog home, I love him so much. And I’ve no idea what I was doing. And I was working four 10s at the time at an animal shelter. So I was like, getting up and running him seven miles every morning before like a 7am shift. I like quit rock climbing because of him because I was like, I can’t go to the rock gym after work. And anyway, I like, thought I fixed all of that. Like I was just like, oh yeah, now that Barley is like a , seasoned, fine wine. That’s just not a problem we have any more, and again, this man has turned 10 years old today. And we have had a week. I mean, honestly, this whole term, like you know, I’m a first term PhD student, and I’m still kind of getting used to managing to high drive, high arousal, working dogs with all of that, and I am realizing that like, oh my god, both of my dogs could be labeled higher arousal, and I don’t think I would have said that to you a year ago when we were like living out of a van and we were like, huh, we like, their lifestyle just managed them so well and like it was all built so seamlessly into my lifestyle. I don’t think I would have told you. I don’t think I would have labeled my dog’s high arousal a year ago and like it’s, so situation dependent when I know is like something you think about a lot too.
Liza Rader 13:02
Yeah, it’s super, super environment specific and person specific, it gets very subjective. And that’s why, like, the, the, you know, critical theory student in me gets very uncomfortable when we start getting very prescriptive about what bucket are we putting the Border Collies in versus like, versus the show line Border Collie, like, it’s infinitely complicated. And of course, none of this is something that you can like, pour into a beaker and study. So it’s all descriptions of what we’re saying, We cannot ask the doc how they feel. And so we’re very much labeling what we’re seeing. But it’s also important to point out that, so arousal is different than drive, which is, like, talking about something that could just be like, an entire encyclopedia of everybody’s different theories with what drive is.
Kayla Fratt 15:03
Well, and one other that I had written down for us was energy level.
Liza Rader 15:45
Yeah, arousal, drive, energy level, all kind of different, they all feed off of each other, right? So that nervous system activation, if you don’t have the higher nervous system activation, the energy level, like at certain point, like the energy level and the nervous system activation are like kind of the same thing. But they’re really, really high energy who don’t get that high.
Kayla Fratt 16:28
Yeah, I’m trying to think if I know any dogs that I would call high energy, but not high arousal, because I know I know plenty that are high arousal, but not high drive. And I would say that like, when I’m meeting my dog’s needs really appropriately, I would not necessarily label them high arousal. But I don’t know if I know any dogs that are high energy, but not high arousal.
Liza Rader 16:56
I just like, like, I think of like, so years ago, I had Border Collies and they were they were working farm stock and their father was just one of those Border Collies that, just like there’s a million stories about right where he would like, you’d be like, you go get the sheep. And he’d be like, cool, and then just, you could just finish having breakfast and you just go do that. He was so level headed, and so steady. And you’d see like, his girlfriend was also lovely, beautiful little, much more of like a trialing kind of typical, stalky-starey Border Collie. And she was like, she had big feelings all the time. And she was like, moving and like, very kind of kinetic. And a lot of their kids were like that. And he was just like, steady. Stuff would happen. You’d be like, oh, yeah, cool, someone arrive, whatever. Could he work all day? Absolutely, like all day. But, you know, he didn’t have that extra like sparkplug going on, right?
Kayla Fratt 18:00
Yeah. Yeah, he wouldn’t be like that sparkly dog that you would pick out at like an agility trial and be like, where do you get that dog?
Liza Rader 18:09
And this is how we get ourselves into trouble because the dogs that are like really driven and actually, like, Sarah Stremming recently said, like, instead of drive, why don’t we just say tenacity.
Kayla Fratt 18:18
I love tenacity. That’s, that was one of the top words I like, wrote and circled when I was like writing out like, what am I looking for when I was finding young Niffler who is doing a very good job of pretending to be like a slug dog in the background right now.
Liza Rader 18:32
He’s like, just in case anyone is not noticing. I have not had activities today.
Kayla Fratt 18:38
I would like everyone to know that I’m doing a really good job of sleeping. And I’m going to roll over and just make sure you know.
Liza Rader 18:47
Everyone’s noticing that I’m doing good? Yeah, okay. So when I say drive. A clearer word for that is tenacity. Because we can go down the we can go down the rabbit hole of different drives and whatever. But let’s just say, let’s just say we’re gonna we’re gonna be talking about tenacity.
Kayla Fratt 19:05
It’s not on purpose; it’s like focused at something.
Liza Rader 19:10
It is that willingness and ability to push through adversity toget to what they want.
Kayla Fratt 19:14
Yeah, yeah.
Liza Rader 19:16
In its most simple terms. So. So there are certainly dogs who are very, very high energy and really high arousal and don’t have particular feelings about getting to go and do a thing and really won’t push through stuff. And then again, like I work with all these sporting dogs and pet homes, and the amount of times I’ve been like, well, I’ve heard you know, “They’re trying to steal my dish towel, so I put all the dish towels on the counter.” And I’m like, “Are they on the counter?” And they’re like, “Yeah, they were on the counter.”
Kayla Fratt 19:39
It was a good thought. You know, we tested it and we cannot reject it. You know, this is all part of the scientific method. Oh, no. Yeah. Well, and like I think we talk about this a lot in the working dog world where like, I think I’m gonna get myself in trouble with what I’m about to say, but I’m gonna say it anyway. Like, this is so common with malis where we get these maliss that like, yes have a ton of drive but aren’t necessarily like environmentally sound. But if you get them amped enough, and you like, tap into that arousal enough, they will walk through fire for what you’re asking them for. And I think sometimes that’s a good thing in the working dog world. Like, to be honest, like, that’s something we look for, it’s something we ask for, it’s something we kind of need. I think there’s like, a balance to be had there, kind of ethically for myself as far as like, making sure that my dog is genuinely comfortable and confident and actually has the skills to execute what I need. But yeah, I mean, like a arousal can certainly be part of that picture to get a dog to do something that like, they don’t have the confidence to do generally. And that that’s a tricky thing to think about, ethically, I think.
Liza Rader 20:14
It is, and it’s also just a, it’s an important thing to consider as a handler, because they do dumb shit. They do not make good choices when they are like, really, really over-aroused, and just like hyper focusing on what they want. And it can be very easy, especially in my experience, especially in the sporting breeds to mistake confidence and skill. And think that that’s what you’re working with. And actually what you have is arousal and drive. And you want both.
Kayla Fratt 21:37
Oh, well, yeah, you want like all four, ultimately. But two of them are things that you really have to build. And I would rather have a confident, skillful dog with no drive.
Liza Rader 21:48
Yes. Like, it’s the skill, and the ability that you’ve built over time, that keeps them from doing the things that end their career. Like, I just always, I always think of this I have like, my Duck Toller, Biscuit. Love him to bits. He’s a phenomenal dog. He’s a stellar little machine in the field. And he has got drive and arousal coming out of his ears, like he’s so much dog. And we’ve got one video of him doing a retrieve with it’s in some fairly high cover, on some marshy land, and the toy goes over a bunch of fallen logs. And I released him off the line, and he goes down the bank and he goes over the first log. And then is not looking where he’s going; you can see in the video, he’s looking where he’s going, not what he’s doing. And goes chest first into the next one you could hear the wind get knocked out of them. Like fully falls on his face, gets up, gets going, gets the bumper, comes back over. Good boy, good boy. He was sore. He was real sore. Like he was too amped to make good choices in that scenario. And he didn’t have the skill to use his body properly when he was that amped. You know, you live and learn. That’s how we learned he didn’t have the skill to do that. You know, these are situations that we can get into if we just rely on their excitement level and their tenacity to get to go do the thing.
Kayla Fratt 23:37
Yeah, yeah, and I think, you know, we’ve talked about this before on the show, but I think there is a lot of tendency in like the working dog world to look for these dogs that have such kind of, off the charts level of arousal and drive and energy, you know, we’re really often looking for all three of those being like up to the max. And then using that to not need to train the skills and the confidence. And like, sometimes that really bums me out and stresses me out for the people, for the dogs mostly. And then there is also a part of me that like, you know, like the Brene Brown part of my brain that is like, well, you know, the handlers only have so much skill and so much time in the day and like, these dogs do need a home. So it’s better that those sorts of dogs get, you know, adopted by XYZ organization and go into this job and like, you know, those dogs are probably happier there than they would be just about anywhere else. And like, I’m not going to indict the handlers for not being as big of a dog training nerd. As I am, you know, like both of those parts of my brain exist at the same time.
Liza Rader 24:54
There’s and like, I come out of the breeding role as well and, and there are very different conversate shins that we have about dogs that currently exist. And, and there’s different conversations as trainers. Breeding conversations are a whole other thing. They’re both dogs that don’t exist yet. And so that’s a whole other rabbit hole of like, what is the most ethical way to be producing dogs for whatever the niche is whatever that is? And, you know, how much are, what are the things that I’m willing the dogs that I produced to have to put up with? What do I think is ideal for their needs being met? How do I set them up for success with that, that’s different than, Oh, we’ve got this dog in a shelter, or we’ve got this dog who’s been, you know, been donated by someone or thought this dog that we’ve went and bought is just running hot. And we’re going to work with what we have, are making choices of handler and be like, I know, I don’t want to deal with XY and Z, I don’t want to deal with having to light a dog up, I don’t want to have to deal with working really hard for that motivation. Yeah, I am much more comfortable installing brakes. Yeah, I am way more comfortable installing brakes, and I am building motivation. That’s just my learning history. Right. And so that’s gonna inform the choices I make the dogs that I seek out.
Kayla Fratt 26:23
And I think for a lot of the stuff like that I do, like, I would rather have a touch too much dog. And I touched too little, you know, because like, I feel comfortable being like, Okay, I need to, you know, get up at six in the morning, you know, five in the morning and go for a seven mile run with my dog. Before I can go to to work. You know, I mean, at the time, I wasn’t a working dog person. So I don’t know what I was doing being so dedicated to that. But you know, good on me, I guess. I’d rather have to do that than have a dog that I’m like begging to work or having to make the call of like, I only have so much room and so much money. So if this dog can’t do the job, you know, he or she can’t stick?
Liza Rader 27:09
Yeah, and like again, so most of the dogs that I work with are these kinds of dogs who have found themselves in pet homes. And that is not true for most people. Right? Yeah. The problem with these guys is like you said, they’re the dog of the agility trial. You see, they’re like, they are they’re kind of like they’re sparkly. I always call it like the George Clooney effect. Like if you’ve ever met someone who’s met someone as famous, famous is like George Clooney, or like Angelina Jolie or something like that did like, oh my god, they were like the most amazing person I have ever met. Like, they will gush and gush. And a lot of these really high drive high arousal, they also tend to really smart, really intelligent, really, just like aware of stuff that a lot of dogs are not aware of.
Kayla Fratt 27:57
I have friends who are very like, I have friends who are like, I think that might be a person trapped in a dog’s body like he weirds me out. Because he’s just like to count get he’s got like, major clever girl vibes. Yeah, he’s, he, like, I get asked all the time where he’s from, which is hilarious, because he’s from a shelter in Denver. And then like, I did manage to track down his old owner and he was like, I got him at like a Walmart. Six weeks old in Texas, and I was like, alright, sometimes you get lucky. Who knows? That doesn’t tell us anything about breeding decisions.
Liza Rader 28:34
He’s just living his best life though.
Kayla Fratt 28:36
Yeah, but yeah, I mean, he’s got that sparkle and like, yeah, I I’ve experienced, like people having that, like, they get magnetized to him. Yeah, and it’s cool. But then there’s always this like conversation. Like Barley was with me at the FDSA camp this year. And I did most of my work with Niffler, and Niffler does not get that response out of people. Um, he’s beautiful and smart and like, does a good job. But he doesn’t have that same like. Yeah, but like that George Clooney effect. And, gosh, where’s it going with? I’m not just trying to brag about barley. I had a point but I’ve lost it.
Liza Rader 29:16
It’s his birthday, he should be bragged about.
Kayla Fratt 29:18
It is his birthday! Oh, yeah, it’s funny. Yeah, there was one other there was there’s probably more than one but there was there was a valley there that like every time that valley went up and works everyone came around and was like, Where is that from? There’s a couple other maladies there that were also nice, but like everyone was asking about the one.
Liza Rader 29:37
And so like, yeah, as a handler, like, regardless of what you are, what the niche is, you’re trying to fit with your dog if it’s you know, I want a dog who can go Canicross with me three times a week or if it’s a dog that we’re gonna go do wolf conservation with. It’s really a pick your poison. Yeah. There’s It’s very rare that you get the fit dog that just like slots into someone’s life absolutely perfectly. Yeah, I have one in my program right now. Like emailed his breeder. I was like, hey, so he’s in your breeding program. Right, right. Right, please.
Kayla Fratt 30:16
Yeah. Oh, wow, that’s yeah, I remember my point, when people come up and ask me about barley. I, the reason I brought up ftsa Is I think about this a little bit less when I’m in like ftsa land. For anyone who’s not like on the dog nerd side of things. This is a fenzi dog Sports Academy. So its major dog nerd people, like people who do dog sports and spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on dog sports routinely. I don’t worry about this as much when I’m talking to them. But like, I sometimes I go out and like train my dogs in public. And people will come up and ask. And, you know, it’s always like, yeah, I I know, he’s got that that George Clooney factor. But like, do you really want a dog like him? And you know, that’s not necessarily like, it’s kind of a dick conversation to have when someone’s just like complimenting you about your dog. So I’m not saying I like giving people a lecture every time they approach me in a park. But it is, you know, when friends tell me how much they love my dogs.
Liza Rader 31:21
Do you have any idea what goes into this?
Kayla Fratt 31:23
Do you want a dog sit them for a week and then decide if you truly want them!
Liza Rader 31:29
it’s hard. It’s hard, because they’re so lovely. And you want you want to talk them up?
Kayla Fratt 31:35
Yes. But yeah, you know, it is yeah, it’s all about fit. And yeah, and the sacrifices that you as the owner handler are willing to make, which I think kind of the point that you’re you’re moving towards as well.
Liza Rader 31:47
Yeah, like what are like there are things that I don’t want to deal with, like the way that border collies stress makes me angry. So I love other people’s watercolors like I adore Border Collies, I lived with two for many, many years. I adore them. Never again. I love the I love the Sporting Dog. Like I’m going to explode all over everything and flail and scream at stuff in bolt. Cool. I can deal with that. Like that does not stress me out. I’m like really having a tough one today that I was like, doing somersaults with, okay, cool. But that like, my toes and getting your personal space, like do not leave yourself as a person and accepting that you can accept everything.
Kayla Fratt 32:34
Were you hanging out with Niffler lately? Yeah, no, totally fair. And I yeah, I have the same like, I don’t like dogs that get vocal when they get really excited.
Liza Rader 32:45
Yeah, see the toller scream. They think screaming is funny. I’m like, really, really?
Kayla Fratt 32:52
Like, I like I have a lot of friends who have hounds and they’re like, I just love bacon. I’m like, What are you talking about? It’s the worst. Yeah, yeah. It’s knowing what you’re what you’re up for. Yeah, I mean, it’s funny too. I was recently dog sending a pair of Rough Collies, I think when we first met that’s I was still there and the that that owner also has a border collie. And that Border Collie is the sort of Border Collie that I think would turn me off of the breed. She’s lovely. She’s an excellent agility dog. But yeah, gunshot goes off 17 miles away, and she will bolt back to the car no matter where you are on a hike. So you can’t really take her hiking. She doesn’t. It’s you know, it’s classic Border Collie crap behavior. Like she doesn’t guard stuff like resource guardian, like a typical way. But she controls space, she gets concerned about everyone else’s decisions. If the other dogs are trying to go through doorways, she has to like, go in and it’s just like,
Liza Rader 33:57
Yeah, and the other thing again, so like going back to like picking your poison. And luckily for us, there’s like, hundreds of dogs that we can pick from and then all of the mixes. And so like I had a Rough Collie as well. He passed away in the spring. And I used to take him with a friend who’s an Aussie person when she was talking to people who were thinking about getting an Ozzy who take her love the Ask Ozzy and he would be like throw the ball throw the ball throw the ball throw the ball throw the ball like I don’t care who he wants with about like someone please entertain that. And I’d be standing there I’m this sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not getting his main braided by little girls. And I’m like, Oh, so you want to talk for the kids? Right? Whereas for me like I love them dearly. miss him greatly. He’s very boring. Yeah. I didn’t get to do a lot of the stuff that I would really want to do with him. A large part of that was his temperament.
Kayla Fratt 35:07
Yeah, right. Well, that’s to these two Rough Collies and Border Collie as much as I was just bragging on that border collie. If I had to take one of those three dogs, I would take her 100 times over, even though she is the sort of Border Collie that would turn me off of the breed for at least at least a while. Because yeah, the Rough Collies are boring.
Liza Rader 35:25
And yet, they’re one of the breeds that I recommend to most people, because I just think they’re so special.
Kayla Fratt 35:29
Because most people want a boring dog.
Liza Rader 35:31
Most people who who say they want a border collie actually want, or an Aussie, actually, or actually, even a German Shepherd, actually want a rough collie or a smooth collie.
Kayla Fratt 35:39
Yeah, yes. Yeah. Most, most people who think they want a Cocker need a Cavalier. And, gosh, we got to figure out how to make some of these breeds with fewer health issues. Because like, I wish I think 90% of people should have a Cavalier.
Liza Rader 35:53
Oh my God, yes, they are angles. They’re, like, genuinely angelic. I’ve adored every single one I had ever met.
Kayla Fratt 36:04
Yeah, I’ve never met a bad one. And you never see them in the shelter. And that’s not because that’s such a rare breed. It’s because they don’t go to shelters.
Kayla Fratt 36:13
Yeah, because the biggest problem behavior wise that they have is that they piddle when they meet people. Yeah, yeah.
Kayla Fratt 36:22
And there, but yeah, but then their hearts go out at like, six, or
Liza Rader 36:26
Their brain is the wrong size and et cetera. Yeah.
Kayla Fratt 36:31
Anyway. Gotta gotta get some Cavalier outcross projects up and going somewhere that’s functional dog collaboratives. That’s not we’re not here to, to do. We’re, we’re the wrong people that try to solve those problems. Because, I mean, yeah, so I think about this a little bit, cuz niffler was intact. And he was picking the litter and like, as the breeding prospect for the this program, from his litter. And it’s interesting, because it’s like, he’s so lovely. And I do think he could be really successful. I say, like, he would be really successful in kind of your typical endurance athlete home. Like, he wouldn’t be like, a good pet dog, period. But if you’re like a mountain biker, downhill skier, sort of household, he would be excellent at that he doesn’t have to be working the way that like barley would be. But can I still think a lot about like, does the dog or Does the world really need more dogs like that? Because the dog freaks like you and me keep creating these sorts of dogs.
Liza Rader 37:40
We buy them because they’re beautiful, and they’re magnetic, and they’re fun. And then they ruin our lives. To varying levels of bed, and whether or not we enjoy said ruining is sort of up to us.
Kayla Fratt 37:58
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And yeah, and then there’s, like, there’s just also so much privilege and like, when I think back to barley, you know, on one hand, he was my first dog, and I was I was a year out of undergrad. So I was like, 23. And, you know, I had all these things that like, on paper could kind of be working against me, but I also like, you know, and I did a good job. I was already a marathoner at that time, like I, you know, I just, I had all the flexibility in the world. I didn’t have kids, like, it was just like, I Yes, I chose to rise to the occasion in handling barley, but there was also just, you know, I I’m a very able bodied person and like, didn’t have Yeah, it wasn’t like trying to go to night school or like, take my kids to karate or whatever, like, I don’t think I could handle barley and kids. I genuinely don’t think I could.
Liza Rader 38:58
Yeah, no. My grandmother was a breeder for 36 years. And one of her little rules was no puppies to people who are gonna have kids the next few years or had anyone, any kids under the age of eight. Because she was she was one like, she was like, no one should be getting. It’s no fun for anyone.
Kayla Fratt 39:19
Especially not a toller!
Liza Rader 39:23
And, like for me like, again, as a trainer, when I’m most likely to recommend a rehoming situation is where the environment isn’t set up for the dog. So for example, you know, hunt, point retrieve breed in a downtown urban core, who has no access to space to move his body physically, without constant triggers. There’s only so much that can be helped that Yeah. And people can do doing everything right? And trying their best and care so so much. But if you don’t have the ability to get him out and get him running pretty much every day, success is going to be very limited because his care needs are so high.
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Yeah, one one of the things you talked about in the the lovely webinar you did, which remind us all of the name of it and where to find it.
Liza Rader 40:26
Yeah, the webinar is called Understanding Exercise. It is available, you can find it on my website or just through like the Instagram link and stuff like that. And is taking the idea of the dog needs more exercise, right, and actually breaking it down into like a usable, functional framework, so that we can talk to each other more clearly about what we’re doing for the dog. We can assess what’s going on and what’s working, what’s not. And then we can change things. I always think of it like the is like exercising with a scalpel. So like understanding what is the functional piece of what I’m doing and then being able to go do that. So like I was saying, before we started recording my past week has kind of exploded and it’s my dog’s on day like 14 I’ve just like really not getting enough to do he’s about ready to build a pipe bomb in my kitchen. And on very limited energy and time I was able to take him to the one spot. This is field we call it the coyote field, because it has one very angry coyote lifts, we try to avoid all the time. And it’s so it’s got a it’s got a ton of animal odor. It has got a lot of really natural grasses, so part of it is mowed. But most of it, it’s surrounded by Woods. There’s a little stream and stuff. And it’s far enough away. It’s in a big park, but it’s far enough away on the corner of the park that like basically nobody knows it exists. So like, you see, there’s me and there’s one person was German shepherds who I’m sure it’s a dog sport person because she’s got cool crates in her car. And we like see each other. And they’re like, Yeah, you see over there, and I’ll stay over here to never cross paths. And I’m able to like very precisely give him the thing that is gonna be most effective. Yeah. So he did some memory retrieves and then he sniffed all the animal odor for 20 minutes.
Kayla Fratt 42:23
Yeah.
Liza Rader 42:24
That’s all I had. That’s all the energy I had all the time ahead. And trying to find the most effective way to use the resources that we have to meet these really, really high needs.
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Yeah, what I love, you know, just going back to, to this idea of like, figuring out what they need, like physically and mentally and not just saying like, they need more exercise. Like after your webinar, I kind of sat down and I looked at like, Okay, what have my dogs gotten in the last week? And was like, oh, literally, all they’ve gotten for the last week is off leash trail runs, which I think are just high speed decompression walks, because they are like, you know, I’m running like a 10 minute mile. So the dogs are like they’re sprinting forward, and then like stopping and sniffing and like getting the corner and follow the little trails, and then sprinting again. So I think as far as like the only activity they get, it’s probably a pretty good one. And we wrote a thread for different parks. But it was like, Oh, we haven’t done any brain games. We haven’t done any software training at all, like we haven’t done anything to just like work their brains other than you know, again, like getting to follow animal trails and those sorts of things out in the woods. So I’ve been Yeah, like a sense watching your webinar. I’m not like okay, every morning for their breakfast we’re doing like some shaping or like, you know, Q discrimination or like something you know, either within like their physical therapy, so like barleys working on like doing like nice controlled sidesteps and stuff, which is nice, because it’s like, both good for his physical therapy and like, mentally really hard for him and niffler is working on holding like a really nice, precise freeze alert. And it’s like, okay, every morning for breakfast, like yes, this takes five minutes per dog. And that feels like a lot when I am like trying to make it to class on time. But like I can do that. And then I also I’m very excited about this I got a one of the extenders for a bike so that now I can bike shore with niffler cool. And it is it almost feels it feels spiritually similar to fetch. As far as like it is so high arousal it is so just like go go go like you’re just running fast. But, you know, I don’t think this is where and I’d love to like maybe pull on this thread a little bit like the the fetch discourse. I agree that like, you know if all you’re ever doing is going to park for fetch for an hour a day every day and that’s The only thing you’re getting your dog that’s probably problematic. But you know what, sometimes it is really nice to be able to just hook my dog up to a bike. And I can just sit there and tell him right and left for 15 minutes and then come home and like a his nails are trimmed. And be he’s done, you know, he’s done for the day, I’m like, I don’t I get the Brene Brown part of my brain is like, I don’t think people are being morally wrong for like relying on fetch or bike drawing or whatever it is. Ideally, occasionally, and part of like a comprehensive exercise plan. So what is what is your thought of the fetch discourse?
Liza Rader 45:36
Okay, so hilarious. So I am, you know, basically, I’m like, I’m like 95% opinions and like, I have like big feelings about politics, like, on and on. And my most controversial opinion, and the thing that I get yelled at on the internet, the most over is my fetch opinion, which is, so when I talk about fetch, so you’d understand, like I grew up with with retrievers who all did contests and working certificates and stuff like that. So it was very important for us to differentiate between such and retrieving. So when I say fetch, I mean, like a, what we used to use before jacket sticks were invented a tennis racket, or just throwing the ball or a jacket, and throwing the toy onto a surface of the animal can see while they run for it, they get it, they bring it back, they put it down, we do it again. So that repetitive back and forth fetch having had a lot of doctors and two Border Collies who were, like lived and died by fetch. And then having had experience of having a having a doctor who’s very, very closely related to those other doctors who is not allowed to play fetch, because his brain melts. And then also, like, I used to work in a rehab clinic, like my cerveza that is bad is like my little like, oh, there’s kind of there’s so many caveats around that, which is not a specific game of back and forth fetch, a really high risk for back injury, really high risk for shoulder injury, that kind of stuff. Again, you’re in retrievers this long, you hear Biscuit’s full littermate, shattered his tibia playing fetch, when he was 10 months old, we’ve had dogs who, like punctured their throat, we have dogs that have popped through their stomach like, really were injuries that make my blood curdle a little bit. And especially with like hurting and sporting breeds, like they see that arc of movement, and they get really excited, and they grab it and bring it back down. It just was over and over and over again. That does not mean that they don’t need times that they just like, go ham, and push their body really, really hard. And run really, really fast. It also does not mean that throwing things for the dog is bad. So like, I I really think that, like I work with almost exclusively hunt, point, retrieve breeds. So you’re setters and pointers and first hunting dogs. And they kind of break a lot of rules, like, they need to run. Yeah, it is a requirement of their care that they get time to just bomb in a natural environment and sprint. It is not decompressing for them. Yeah, it does put some wear and tear on their body. It is required for their brain to function properly, in my opinion.
Kayla Fratt 48:44
I mean, I think about that as against someone who like runs marathons. And like does, you know, my brain needs a lot of that. And yes, I have injuries and I my knees are probably going to hurt more at 50 than if I just walked. Yeah, instead. But I can’t and like I mean, I am the human equivalent of a border collie. Like my dad just sat me well, he didn’t sit me down because he’s in Wisconsin, and I’m in Oregon, but he just called me and was like, I’m just really worried about your schedule and the amount of activity that you have in your schedule and like I’m worried that you’re not focusing enough on your PhD. Like blah blah blah it’s like that it’s fine. I’m like getting A’s and everything and like I’m doing really well but like to someone whose brain doesn’t really work that way he was like quite alarming and our dogs like I think you and I traffic in.
Liza Rader 49:47
It can be disconcerting for us as guardians. It can also be really hard for trainers who aren’t used to working with them. For a variety of reasons, either. We might like what I see a lot is dogs who are coping with pain and chronic anxiety and chronic fear and chronic stress by sprinting. But you wouldn’t think that dogs would do pain by running really hard. They do. Some of them. Yeah, yeah. And then you gotta feel alive. Sometimes you just have to like, sprint until you bear can barely stand, and then you’ll feel better like I’ve apparently so biscuit tells me. No. Yeah. I also make sure that they’re getting a lot of time to decompress that I often have to go in and teach them how to do that. So I usually put them on a really long, long line and take them to a pretty boring field and like, teach them how to sniff stuff properly. Like, why would I do that? Like, well, because there’s tripe treats on the ground. First of all, come on, here. Yeah. And once we can get them in doing that, and then we can balance it. Like, I still want them to have a couple of opportunities a week to rip, because they have to expel that energy.
Kayla Fratt 51:05
Yeah, they have to learn how to do the other half, but then the need to do the thing.
Liza Rader 51:13
You’re never going to make a really, really lovely, well bred German Shorthaired Pointer into a bench line cocker spaniel. It is not possible. Yeah. That’s just that would just be witchcraft. Like, we cannot do that. Yeah, but I like to do a ton of retrieving with the dogs, by which I mean, like, active field training. Yeah, even for like dogs. Or I’m doing things like throwing the toy or even just sometimes I’ll do it with food. If I don’t like especially if I’ve got a handler who doesn’t have the time or inclination or skill to teach a really nice retrieve, I’ll just use food or meatball. Have them sit and mark them eat ball, throw the ball into the really high cover, turn around, walk them back 30 feet, have them find the mark again, and send them out to the meatball. Yeah, doing that three times gets you way further ahead than 10 minutes of back that back and forth. Because they get that explosive action, and then they get to bring their head down and sniff and search. And it were actually then teaching that sniffing and searching that they have such a hard time cooling their brain dumb enough to do.
Kayla Fratt 52:25
Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly I had like, yesterday was I think I had meetings starting at 7am. That went until 8pm. It was like one of those days, I was like eating every single meal, like during meetings, and I had like a half hour. So while my food was in the microwave, I like went out and hid to scout samples. And then after like, let them cook while I was eating, and then like let the owner disperse, and then went and grabbed each dog. And you know, then, as part of that, like for niffler I’m working on like actually giving him a pretty high energy reward for the first find, to simulate then building that endurance of needing to get back and searching for that second one. And using that as a way to like I didn’t have time to do an hour long search. So I tried to get him fatigued in between one and two. So that then he could go and do number two. And then after number two, I took him to the backyard where we have like a foot of oak leaves. And we practice like tug fetch discrimination, and throwing things into the leaves. So he was like, you know, bounding out and then having to like stop and sniff and like, getting all of that and you know, each dog got like, maybe 10 minutes, and it wasn’t enough.
Liza Rader 53:39
For sure, given the use of time, it’s an effective use. what it’s all about is understanding what is happening for the dog with each activity that we do. And then using the elements that we have available to us using all of those little tools in the toolkit as mindfully as possible to get the result that we want.
Kayla Fratt 54:03
Yeah, and like as Sarah Stremming, our Lord and Savior would say, you know, watching what you’re getting out of the dog after each of those activities because you know, I often it’s always funny to me hearing people talking about sniffing as a way to calm your dogs down. I’m like, yes?? It can be a calming activity, but like you can’t like my dogs get more amped about scent work and detection work and like Barley in particular his arousal is high while he is searching, very, very different from like moseying through the woods and checking out. Checking out other odors and for hunting dogs like also like checking out prey animal odors can be really, really arousing. So you really got to watch what you’re getting out of your dog in the moment. And afterwards like, are they coming home and taking a good nap? Or are they coming home and they’re still like pacing and whining and like.
Liza Rader 55:07
And also understanding the nuance. So like one of the things that just like, drives me up the wall about like dog training social media is just because of the nature of the algorithm that we all live and die by. And we want to get stuff that’s like punchy and clean. And there’s a real push to make information very, very digestible. easy for people to who don’t necessarily have an educational background, this kind of stuff, easy to kind of understand. And that works a lot of the time, but because I have this really specific niche, inevitably, what I get is dogs who are two and three. And we thought we were doing everything right. Yeah, and splitting interface. Sniffing is not sniffing. It’s not sniffing is not sniffing. And just because they don’t know what they like doing it, and they seem to get a lot out of it does not mean it’s good for them. And just because it works for most dogs does not mean it’s gonna work for them. Yeah. And it’s all in the little nuances of how so I get to take care of my friends. Just gorgeous little rez mutt Veda who is like anybody, we don’t know what she is. She’s, she’s, she’s a little rez dog from the Yukon. And she is hardcore girl in charge. She’s like this little spitzie, Border Collie-y, something. And she was basically feral when she came into rescue. And she definitely loves to hunt. And for me, when I’ve started walking her, like, I have nerve damage in my hand pulling me is not a thing that happens, because I sustained pulling out like at certain point the hands stop working. And then bad things happen like you. Right? Whereas like, the occasional tug, I’m fine with like at the end, it’s a pretty strong tug, but duration can’t handle Yeah. So I really had to teach her not to pull. So she’s got nine years of pulling history. We realized that the issue was not the pulling. Of course, that’s never the issue is never the pulling the issue is why we’re playing. And she was so overwhelmed by the environment because she just wanted to hiked and hunting. And so I’ve spent the last several months, you know, a couple times a week, really focusing on teaching her to eat food at all able to sniff and then disengage to be able to sniff and not hunt, right not be sniff but don’t critter. You can you see a squirrel we’re gonna watch the squirrel, but you can’t go and wind up trying to catch squirrel because you’re not going to catch this world. And then you’re just your minds gonna melt and nobody’s having a good time. And then if you hear noise, you’re gonna have a panic attack. So like you can’t. So we’ve been working really, really hard on this. And she now like I was walking the two dogs yesterday and I’ve got her on a flexi I got Biscuit on a long line. So I got this super high drive gun dog and I’ve got Veda, who’s just a heaping arousal machine. And they’re trotting along and they’re sniffing and they like stopped. I was like talking to someone on my phone and they’re like, hanging out and wandering around. That’s decompressing. Yeah, her in the woods being like critter critter critter critter critter critter critter critter, where, where, where where where!! Those are not the same thing, right. And that’s also not the same thing as when I throw a rabbit fur Lotus ball for her into the bushes. And she goes and gets it and rips it open and eats the food. All of these things are sniffing, searching hunting kind of behavior.
Kayla Fratt 58:59
Yeah. And then you could also do just like a scatter.
Liza Rader 59:03
Which we’ve done.
Kayla Fratt 59:04
Have her search for essential oil and you know, yeah, totally. Totally different.
Liza Rader 59:10
So yeah, sniffing is good, sniffing is calming, but more detail please!
Kayla Fratt 59:17
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So okay, so I wanted to go back to kind of this idea of living with these dogs and kind of managing arousal but like, lowercase managing, managing, like not, not upper. Could we talked a little bit about I think sometimes people who are dealing with dogs that are a little bit too much, again, whether that’s energy or drive or arousal or all three or two of the three you know, they want to create they want to do stationing games they want to like shape calmness and a there’s so much nuance particularly in that third one like I know so many people who have kind of successfully trained the dogs to fake The, you know, the dog was like, I will lie here and I will do a chin rest. And I, you know, like the dog looks that I was acting good actors. And that is so there’s so much nuance in there. And if you are not someone who is like a really big dog nerd, like getting past that is borderline impossible. So what can we do as owners handlers manage, you know, who are feeling overwhelmed by the dog? Or, you know, for talking to someone else? Who is feeling overwhelmed by their dog? What are some of the things that you think about as far as like, living and managing a life with these sorts of dogs beyond what we’ve already talked about?
Liza Rader 1:00:40
So there’s a couple there’s that there’s, there’s, I mean, there’s a million things that I could probably talk about this for, like a solid 16 hours straight. But there’s, there’s a sort of few like key points. The first one is like, it’s important for us as humans to establish our boundaries, then I say boundaries really specifically, because boundaries are about my behavior, not about anybody else’s behavior, right. So who’s like, I attention for me, is not available when I am sitting here at my desk on my laptop, because that is how I’m teaching, or I’m doing something like this. I’m not available. So if you told her scream at me, there’s a crate here for you that you can be in. If you jump on me, I’m just gonna stand up like, I have things that I will do to communicate that boundary to you. Like, I’m not available right now.
Kayla Fratt 1:01:30
Yeah, yeah, you just saw me have to mute myself until Niffler off because he was trying to crawl onto my chair with me
Liza Rader 1:01:37
Whereas like, perfect demo, I have a client who, whose GSP will curl up on her lap with her head on her shoulder the whole day that she’s working at her desk, and like, that works great for them more power to them, right. So yeah, boundaries are your own. And, you know, they’re about what I do, not about what the dog does. And that it not being about what the dog does is, is really, really important because our impulse as humans, is to get in there and control all of the things. Like, we want to control the dogs movement, we want to control how much noise they’re making, we want to put them in a crate, we want to put them on a leash, we want to put them in a down stay we want we just would like just stop. You’re stopping too much. You are too much. You’re exploding everywhere, be less, right? And we really want to like compress them. And you’ll see that like we shortened our leash. We talk talk more to them. We touch to them more when they’re starting to frustrate us.
Kayla Fratt 1:02:36
Yeah. Oh, the number of times I’ve like put my hands on Barley’s chest and be like, just stop, stop. Please.
Liza Rader 1:02:45
Yeah, we have all done it.
Kayla Fratt 1:02:47
I feel like I’m trying to hold somebody who’s having a panic attack. And you can’t tell them to calm down!
Liza Rader 1:02:55
It’s the exact same. But the amount of times I’ve said this, like, can you please just be less? Yeah, can there be less of you right now? Right? Yeah. So the problem with that, is that one of two things is going to happen. Actually one of three things one, it’s going to do nothing. That’s the least common thing is that it does absolutely nothing. Good. Oh, is that for whatever reason what we do is enough to absolutely terrify the dog. Really upset the dog. Yeah. And then they either will come into themselves, or the thing that I see the most working with the sporting dogs is they explode outwards.
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Right because you’re like compressing compressing compressing
Liza Rader 1:03:41
You’re making a pressure cooker. And then boom. And I was like started to jokingly call this like splody feelings because this is a very typical gun dog thing where like Border Collies as Sarah says will have like stalky, sticky bullshit like when they get are uncomfortable something they’re like I’m going to stare at it, I’m going to control it right and then the gundogs tend much towards like splody feelings which is like I’m going to come up and muzzle punch you in the face or I’m just going to sprint or I’m gonna do zoomies in your living room and knock over everything that you love. Or like like it’s just feeling’s exploding everywhere. So we very effectively make the problem worse when we try to get in there and control by limiting freedom limiting choices limiting movement and getting in there and having conflict with them. So then what do we do the thing that I say constantly to people when I’m working with them is embrace the chaos. They’re a lot. No, right not can you be less but oh, you’re a lot. Okay.
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Yeah, I do a lot of like sitting back and getting out of the way as like Niffler and the cat are like chasing each other, you know, like, on the couch off the couch under the couch on top of you Well,
Liza Rader 1:05:06
Yeah, if I’ve got Tollers just flailing in my living room, I’m not walking into my living room. Like, actually you guys like, because of because of my, my Rough Collie had a back injury. And so like, like, dog play was is not a lot of my house. We have a yard. I’m here. And so I had to go if I can’t go in and stop that, because I go in and stop that I am going to get more of it. Why don’t I go open the freezer wheere the cans are kept. Yeah. Right. All of a sudden, everyone’s like, hey, what’s happening in the living in the kitchen, and they’re gonna come dropping and now I’ve got an opportunity to give them a treat. Why don’t I take them up out with a big handful of kibble and toss a big handful of kibble into the living room. If with puppies who are starting to be just like overwhelming and too much what I start doing is clicking and treating for feet touching the ground. Yeah. And I tossed that food behind them. So they turn and get it, turn around and get it. And very quickly what I’ll get is a little Toller puppy laying down being like I’m awake. I’m fine. Yeah. Go to sleep. And then, and then you can start treating them for laying down. And then you can go honey, would you like a sweet potato treat now, but they’re like, maybe, instead of going, like, Dear God, you’re screaming and flailing and biting at me. I’m like, Oh, do you want to chase a kibble? Wow, you got it? That was so clever. Would you want to do it again?
Kayla Fratt 1:06:37
Yeah, one, I love that specific one. Because it’s like, okay, you have movement that needs to be expelled. So like we’re feeding you. And we’re engaging you in a pattern. And we’re doing all these things that are like, useful to ratchet arousal down while also meeting those movement needs. Like it’s just such a beautiful, simple little way to do both things at the same time.
Liza Rader 1:07:02
It works like it, works a treat, but it does take a certain amount of emotional regulation on our part, which is hard. Because there’s nothing that gets our arousal higher than just like puppy teeth sinking into your face, right? And so those would be immediate, like, what do we do in the immediate when the dog is just being like, way too much? Soften? Change the scenario, start reinforcing for the things you like they’re doing something you like, even if their feet are touching the ground. I like it when your feet touch the ground.
Kayla Fratt 1:07:32
Yeah, yeah, right. There, you’re taking a breath in between barking like, yeah.
Liza Rader 1:07:37
or just leaving, like sometimes you sometimes they’re so aroused, you can’t fix it. So like, I’ve got a dog right now in the program who if he gets to a certain level the instruction’s to leave the room, close it or let them burn out. We can’t fix it in the moment, because getting in there trying to fix it will make it worse. Yeah. And then, then we got to look at the broader picture. So we’ve got we talked about how all of these different elements of care that we have, like the amount of brain work that they’re getting the amount of time to like really stretch their body and like do the athlete thing, because they’re athletes. And another big part of that is rest. So a lot of these guys are bad at resting. And so a lot of the time, I have to teach them to sniff I have to teach them to rest. Real mad about this. Almost always, it really helps. Really making sure they’re sleeping enough. They’re resting like I try to give them like a full rest day, once a week. So they are actually physically preparing their muscle. They’re sleeping properly. And they were just doing calm chill stuff. And then balancing things over the course of a week. So if I, my dog needs eight hours of off leash exercise a week, that could happen twice a week, right? You could have four hours and then four hours. That actually, that actually works. Like, people do not believe me, that actually works.
Kayla Fratt 1:08:59
Yeah, you can do the weekend warrior thing if your weekend warrior thing is enough. Yes. Like, by enough I mean, I don’t want to pick on a specific sport. So I’m gonna list a couple. But if by weekend warrior, you mean dock diving or fly ball where you’re in a really, really high arousal environment and your dog gets 30 seconds over the course of a whole weekend. That is not the same thing as like what we’re talking about with like a four hour off leash hike.
Liza Rader 1:09:31
Yeah, so like, different. What I’m trying to do with everybody is is I do like a little like I do a little audit of basically like every single thing that dog does over a week. And then we take out everything that’s counterproductive and the things that are more helpful, and we try to figure out what is helping that dog specifically and what’s most accessible to the people and all that and then there are ways to arrange all of those little building blocks around their life better. Yeah, like biscuit has a litter mate, who is in a pet home. And they I say pet home, they hike a mountain and camp at the top. And then the next day hike back down. Like that’s very frequently that’s his weekend. Yeah. And during the week, he’s going for runs with mom and dad.
Kayla Fratt 1:10:18
I am like wondering, like, I’ve got a friend with a really nice Toller. And they do that and I think he’d be like, about the same age as biscuit. I’m like, do we know? Anyway? We’ll talk about that later. But yeah, exactly. I you know, yeah. Niffler has got one sibling in a SAR home, one sibling in a nosework home, two siblings in agility and one sibling in dock diving. dock diving, pseudo pet home. And that was all of those decisions were based on like, what the breeder thought the puppies were going to like doing from watching them and observing them until they were nine weeks old. And yeah, like they’re all at very different levels of need and being met. But it’s working out for all of them. Because they’ll have something.
Liza Rader 1:11:04
Yeah. And if you have like, if again, if you know, like, like, he needs the equivalent of hiking up and down a mountain every weekend. And like, but he’s also like, his weekdays are pretty normal pet dog life. Yeah. Right. But that works really well for him. And it’s really nice when things are sort of thought of as modular like that. Yeah, because stuff happens like you’re there’s going to be like, yesterday was the anniversary of the time that it snowed here. And everyone got stuck in the highway until three o’clock in the morning. Yeah, so think Northwest Everybody, please laugh at us. And if something like that happens, I you know, I’ve things that have happened to clients. Like if someone goes to the ER, there’s a minor natural disaster, the plumbing just completely falls apart in the house –
Kayla Fratt 1:11:56
My dogs and I are gearing up for a 30 hour drive to Wisconsin for Christmas, and then 30 hours back, that’s gonna be either two 15 hour driving days or three 10 hour driving days. And either way, they’re not getting much, especially when we’re in North Dakota and it’s 20 below with wind chill on our way back. We’re not gonna stop and do fun stuff. Yeah, so. So like, there’s not even like, even like sit-down-stand reps or like hard to do in the van, you can do it on the bed, and that it works. But well, I love the idea of thinking about this like as an athlete. For both as an athlete for myself, but also for my dogs like get you need these rest days, you need the variety, like, you know, for I’m training for a 50 Kilometer ski race right now. And the training plan I’m on rotates between, like this week is an anaerobic threshold Focus Week, and next week will be an aerobic endurance week, and the week after that is a rest week. And each week has at least one rest day. But, you know, like the amount that happens in between the duration and the intensity, it all varies between those three types of weeks. And like understanding that and how that moves me towards like my own physical goals is really helpful for thinking through my dogs. And honestly their physical goals. You know, when I got the bike during setup, someone commented they were like, you’re gonna make a super athlete there and I was like, a) do you think he’s not already, b) slightly offended, and that’s kind of the point. That’s fine with me. And I understand that is not necessarily fine for like your clientele.
Liza Rader 1:13:37
But didn’t like, you know, I looked at these dogs like one thing one dog, specifically a viszla who’s living in a very, very dense downtown core in a condo, never really getting off leash outside of like little postage stamp dog park and stuff like that. The dog was ripped. Because he is genetically designed to be enough to be right. Yes, he is one whether or not we would like him to be whether or not we are able to deal with that whether or not we thought we got you know, but we knew we were signing up for this. That is an athlete is designed to be look at his butt muscles.
Kayla Fratt 1:14:20
Yeah. And you know, going back to this idea of like the super athlete is what like I know from experience, again, trying to make my own body into an athletic body. I think people worry that going for a seven mile run every every other day with your dog is going to create a super athlete. If it works that way. muscularly I would be a super athlete personally. Like, unless you are deliberately increasing speed and doing interval workouts and strength training. And, you know, like, unless you’re being really deliberate about pushing your body like yes, you will acclimate to with like a new normal of like, I can run for miles every day, you know, forever at this point, and I have for like 15 years. That doesn’t mean that running a marathon is easy for me unless I like really intentionally work at it. So I don’t think like, that’s helpful if you are trying to get your dog to the point of being able to do the canine equivalent of a marathon. Or for keeping in mind, if you don’t want to get there. You’re not gonna accidentally do this, I promise.
Liza Rader 1:15:32
No. And the other thing is, so my, my absolute least favorite word for anything ever is active.
Kayla Fratt 1:15:42
Oh, okay, tell me more.
Liza Rader 1:15:43
So I like my my grandmother’s a breeder, I work with with some breeders, I interview a lot of puppy people. And I also always ask people in their initial console, why they got their dog or what they were hoping that their dog would be because it gives me a lot of insight about what their goals are, how, how heartbroken they are about their current situation. Like, it gives me a lot of insight into where they’re at and what they were thinking. And the word that I hear consistently. Like, most of the time is active, I’m active. We want an active dog. And I always ask the follow up question, which is, what does that mean?
Kayla Fratt 1:16:31
Yeah. Tell me more.
Liza Rader 1:16:32
I have never gotten the same response twice. So sometimes it does mean I want the canine athlete. I’m going to be running ultra marathons. And I want a buddy to help me do that. And then also, I really want to go upland game hunting. Yeah, sweet.
Kayla Fratt 1:16:53
Oh good, hunty/pointy dogs, that was a good choice.
Liza Rader 1:16:58
Sometimes it means I live and breathe dog agility. You couldn’t pay me to go for a hike.
Kayla Fratt 1:17:08
Hmm. Wow. Yeah. Uh huh.
Liza Rader 1:17:11
Sometimes it means I have a cabin that I go to for two weeks in the summer. And I go to the gym three times a week. And other than that, my exercise consists of walking five minutes to take the kids to school.
Kayla Fratt 1:17:27
Yes, we ran into this a lot.
Liza Rader 1:17:30
So people say I want, I’m active. So I need an active dog. And they don’t understand that human active and dog active are not the same thing. Right? So my Rough Collie up until he started having neurological symptoms, caused by, he had a really serious back injury. So even with the really serious life, limiting back injury, being a Rough Collie, having a heart defect, and having autoimmune issues that affected his ability to like build and maintain muscle mass. He would be perfectly happy when he was like, pretty, you know, doing stuff with me. He would do the same walks as the Tollers. He would totally hike that mountain with you. He would go for those really long off leash runs. They were optional. He would sleep for the rest of the day very happily. He’d sleep for the rest of the day. Yeah. But yeah, he can do those things with you. He was a great hiking buddy. He was lovely. He never got himself in any trouble ever.
Kayla Fratt 1:18:30
Yeah, he would be so perfect for that third home. Like, he probably wouldn’t make that agility person happy, and certainly wouldn’t make the gundog person happy he’s not doing hunting trials.
Liza Rader 1:18:39
He can do the thing, and here like so often use you’ll see like, you know, out on the trails or get really clearly Pacific Northwest is like beautiful walking trails, beautiful hiking trails, you will see like little bitty toy breeds out there just rocking it.
Kayla Fratt 1:18:52
Yeah, I have a friend who like a chiweenie sort of thing that he’d mountain bikes with and the dog rips like, little, cool dog.
Liza Rader 1:18:59
Chi- dog type mixes under rated, quote unquote active. Barring major physical constraints. Yes. Like, doxie legs. Like, like really problematic brachycephalic faces.
Kayla Fratt 1:19:19
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would worry about that third home taking home. Your average Frenchie. Yeah, but most other breeds are gonna be able to rise to most occasions. Yeah, we would do the same. Yeah, when I worked at the shelter, we would get people coming in. And I’ve worked at three different shelters, but I did adoptions the most or behavior consults for adoptions the most when I was at Denver Dumb Friend’s League. And yeah, we would ask we would do so if people said they were looking for an active dog, we would ask them what you did after work for the last week or what you did for the last couple of weekends. And sometimes Yeah, we would find those people who are like, well, you know, I ran up Mount Quandary last weekend and then for my rest day I went whitewater kayaking was like, Okay, my dog can’t come whitewater kayaking, but after Quandary, that’s fine.
Liza Rader 1:20:08
I guess I’m active.
Kayla Fratt 1:20:11
Like in Colorado, they’re like, I’m just not even like the fastest person in my group. So like, I’m probably going to take a Puggle home. Oh, actually, we got a, we’ve got a really a high arousal pittie that we’d really like to send with you. But and then other people, you know, who also really insist are active, you know, they’re they, they went to CrossFit. And then then their last weekend, well, the Broncos were playing. So, you know, just kind of did that, like, you know, yeah, you’ve got an active social life, and you’re tired. But none of those things are meeting the dog’s needs,
Liza Rader 1:20:43
Or the kids or the kids do a million sports. And so yeah, you are busy all day, every day.
Kayla Fratt 1:20:49
Yeah, exhausting. But like maybe that Chow mix is actually going to have that doctor that Chow mix can do the like occasional hikes that you want to do when those fit into your life, but like your collie, don’t need them.
Liza Rader 1:21:06
That’s when we encounter problems is when we, when there’s a fundamental need to do the thing. Yeah. And we don’t have the ability to meet that need. But the other thing is, like, it’s important to remember also that like, really, really high high tenacity, high drive high arousal dogs are like, they can be physically uncomfortable to share space with. And they can be genuinely kind of upsetting to train if you’re not really used to it. And a lot of the things that we are taught should work for dog training, do not. Yeah. And like, the way that I deal with like stuff like leash reactivity with my especially like the hunt portrays is not how I was taught to teach leash reactivity to pet dogs. So it’s not video, it’s very different. Because if I do it the first way, they’re like, Oh, sweet. You want me to stare at everything? I can stare at everything. I’m so good at staring at everything. Oh, my God, they see it. See the darkness? I see. It’s right there. Wow, that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted you actually cool, okay. And so it really requires like some creativity. It requires being like, comfortable working with the dog. As a full and complete being with thoughts and feelings and emotions and strong opinions. And a whole sensory of experiences is different than ours. It requires that at a much different level than my friend’s perfectly like sweet little loss of puppy. Yeah. Right. Yeah, it’s a whole different ballgame. And so when you’re stepping into that space to be a handler, whether it’s for, you know, higher level sport, or you want to do work with them, you kind of have to get really comfortable working in collaboration. And working at teaching really high level of skill, and being comfortable handling them doing things really fast and pushing themselves really hard. Yeah, and it can be really uncomfortable for us.
Kayla Fratt 1:21:19
Totally. I think we’re going to have to do a part 2, because I’m going to have to go soon, but I want to pull on a couple of those threads more. We didn’t even get to the skills and suppression and management the way I wanted to. I think we could both talk about this for 16 hours, so maybe we need spinoff podcast, I don’t have time for that. So anyway, I think it’s really important to acknolwedge this side of it being potentially upsetting to work with these kind of dogs, and one of the things I’ve been thinking about as Niffler has kind of come into his own, because he’s actually more even-keeled than Barley, and more thoughtful and more deliberate. And when he was a little younger and had more teenager emotions, I was really worried he wasn’t going to be enough for what I want, and And now that he has matured into a pushier and more focused adult, so he’s a little over three now. I’m realizing I think I like training him better than Barley. Because Barley, he is SO much dog. And trying to work through stuff with him is really hard. So when I was talking about the breakfast training I’ve been doing with them, Niffler is working on these beautiful freeze, nose target alerts. I cannot for the life of me train Barley to do that. I am not a good enough trainer to get Barley to do a freeze alert. Because as soon as I try to build duration, he’s flinging it, he’s shoving it, he’s whining, he’s backing up, he’s barking at me. Even if I’m trying to go from a second to 1.3 seconds, like I’m trying to split at a very small level, and I can’t. So, we’re just adjusting our expectations, in reality, because Barley has been doing this job for five years. He does not need that flashy social media perfect down stare alert. He finds the damn target and he stays with it, he is within a couple inches of it every time. No, his nose is not on it every time, but he’s doing puma and wolf for the rest of his career, I don’t need him to be pointing out a lizard scat that’s the size of a grain of rice. And if that’s something we needed, a) I could get help. I could talk to Ann McLune, maybe some other, like Robin Rubel, people who have worked with explosive dogs in particular. I would get help if I needed him to do that. But there’s a huge part of just being like, this is the dog that I have, he’s amazing at 97% of the work that I need done, and rather than driving both of us up the wall with these freeze alerts, I’m just letting it go.
Liza Rader 1:26:05
It’s it’s so interesting. It is like, you know, coming from a trigger, like, as anyone who is listening who’s done, like, who has worked in retrievers, or who is in like, the the field sports world will know. Just like in a group of dog trainers, you can just like, completely blow things up by being like, what is drive? The group of retriever people you can go like, so what’s better, like hunt tests or field trials? Like, oh, boy, oh, the arguments? Because by, right, so one of the things that I find startups, I have a really dear friend who has been in Tollers forever. And she’s like, she’s the ones people. She’s not a breeder. So most people don’t know who she is. But she knows everything about this breed everything they’ve had working retrievers her and her husband for decades. And I’m sitting with her at Nationals. And she looks at me and she goes, every single one of these dogs could go hunting tomorrow. Don’t tell any of the breeders, I said that. And it’s because the things that we require for a sport context are for some of the some of the jobs are beyond functional. Mm hmm. So like, for me, I’m kind of like, my dog cheats the water a little bit like he makes good life choices about conserving his energy. If he pops out of the water earlier, because it’s five degrees colder today than it was yesterday. I don’t want to be mad about that. Like, like, that’s generally kind of like Good Choices, choices. And so. But that is actually like a really, really big deal. If I care a lot about like high level field tests. Right? And you describe the difference between like, the two brains that you’re kind of working with this dog that is designed to thrive at this high level of work. And then he kind of clicks into that as an adult. And you’re like, Oh, you’re fun, right? Yeah. That I’ve seen it. So so many times really lovely working dogs and really lovely sport dogs. And that is not relied a lot relying on the arousal. Yeah, that is the brain being able to do the work. That’s the foundation skill. Because the other thing is that you were a better trader, right when he was a puppy, because you did it all before. So I thought he was my first copy skills. And he’s got ability and he’s got clarity of mind to really sink into those problems with you. And it’s so fun. It is.
Kayla Fratt 1:28:57
It is it’s so cool. And yeah, and I mean we talk about this all the time and like our online mentorship group with like these, you know, different levels of alerts or like different sorts of discrimination tasks or whatever like tough training tasks, someone in our group is digging into, you know, it’s Is this something you actually really need to do really need the dog to do this, like perfect? Sit stare alert right now. And like sometimes the answer is yes, totally. But one of the things I’m constantly reminding, like our mentor or mentees, it’s like, Hey, we’re not doing explosives. If your dog fidgets, they are not going to blow themselves up. You’re also not gonna be in court. Yes, that is the other thing we talk about. Overtime. We were just we’ve got a book club and we were reading I’m reading using detection dogs to monitor aquatic ecosystem health and protect aquatic resources. And the first chapter is written by someone who does a lot of water cadaver searches and talks Thinking about the way that water currents and airflow can interact to move sent to all of these different places. And you can get alerts or changes of behaviors, like, really far from where that body actually would be. You know, we’re listening, we’re, you know, reading this and thinking about like finding salamanders, or invasive mussels. And that wouldn’t be a problem if the dog is alerting, and we can’t find the salamander like, oh, okay, that’s tricky for what we do. But we’re not looking for someone’s missing kid. You know, like, if we can’t find something because of the way that the air or the water are interacting. It may be life and death. For those salamanders. It is important. I’m not downplaying what we’re doing. But it’s not someone’s kid.
Kayla Fratt 1:30:44
like, and yeah, if the dog has an unproductive alert, that, then we’re like trying to get a search warrant based off of that, or, you know, like we’re not trying to take, I mean, actually, I shouldn’t quite say that, because we’re not necessarily trying to do a search warrant. But sometimes we are then trying to like, get, like a lot of times, dogs are hard to like clear areas in compliance with like the Endangered Species Act for construction permits, or those sorts of things. So like, there are times where that still comes into play. But the point is, I am so sorry. We really do have to go actually have another meeting in 17 minutes. I’m still in my pajama pants. So this was so fun. Liza, remind us where to find people online. And I do think I will be emailing you to try to do a part two about this because I want to keep talking.
Liza Rader 1:31:31
So you can find me at Focus Dogs on Facebook, that is where I am most often found. And you can also find me at focusdogs.ca. If you want to talk to me, I would love to talk to you. You can email me please don’t send me Instagram DMs because they keep getting lost. But you can just email me anytime. I’m always happy to know about these guys. Yeah, okay.
Kayla Fratt 1:31:53
Excellent. Well, yeah, thank you so much, Liza, and for everyone at home. I hope you’re feeling inspired to get outside and be a canine conservationist in whatever way suits your passions and your skill set. As always, you can join our mentorship club and book club that we were just talking about over on Patreon at patreon.com/k9conservationists, you can join those for those. I think it’s the $10 month level gets you access to both of those. It specifies on Patreon. We also have all sorts of lovely Christmas gifts. I think this is coming out after Christmas, so irrelevant. But if you want to get to know a Martin Luther King Day present, you could you know, capitalism just buy stuff from us. It helps pay for dog things. And we’ll be back in two weeks. So again, Liza, thank you so much.
Liza Rader 1:32:36
It was great to talk to you! Bye!