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In this episode of K9 Conservationists, Kayla speaks with Caden Cristopher about conservation, canine welfare, capitalism, and how we’re getting by.
Science Highlight: None
Links Mentioned in the Episode:
Where to find Caden: Fenzi | Podcast | Blog | Instagram | Facebook
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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 Tuesday to talk about detection training, canine welfare, conservation biology and everything in between. I’m Kayla fratt, one of three co founders of K9Conservationists, where we train dogs to detect data for researchers NGOs and agencies.
Kayla Fratt 00:28
Today’s student Shout Out is going to go to Jerianna. Jerianna first joined our learning crew over a year ago before she even had a working dog, and we worked together to select Echo, who’s been blowing me away as he learns to fit into her household and be a tortoise detection dog, jeriana has consistently impressed me with her ability to ask questions and follow through. She is so good about sending me homework like the day after we talk about it. She’s astute and detail oriented as a trainer, and often knows the answer before I remind her of what needs to happen. And I’ve just really loved watching her and echo grow as a team, and I’m so impressed with how far they’ve come.
Kayla Fratt 01:04
So today we’re talking to Caden Christopher, and we’re what are we talking about? We’re talking about, you know, being a mission oriented person in a really complicated world, and navigating wanting to make the world a better place, but not always being able to be we can’t be everywhere all at once, and we can’t do everything. So I think that’s the main theme today. Would you agree?
Caden Christopher 01:30
Yeah, I would agree. Yeah, yeah. Very well, put into a nutshell.
Kayla Fratt 01:36
Yeah, we try. So Caden, if people from my listenership. Um, don’t know who you are. Would you be able to go ahead and introduce yourself, and then I guess I can give myself a brief introduction for your listeners as well. Sounds good?
Caden Christopher 01:50
Um, I’m Kaden. I’m based in Mexico City. I train dogs for a living. That’s partly through fancy dog Sports Academy and partly through private students, online and in person here. Yeah, that’s my greatest source of joy and my passion. And currently I’m raising another puppies, and I mean, in heaven,
Kayla Fratt 02:16
Yeah, do you? Can you tell us a little bit about that two adult dogs you’ve got, and I guess which one of them has the puppies?
Caden Christopher 02:23
Yeah, I’ve got a border collie who just turned out to be a border called mix, because I finally got her embarked. What is she? She is 70 something percent Border Collie, and then, like, equal parts Aussie, and what they call super mud.
Kayla Fratt 02:43
Oh, okay, cool. Yeah.
Caden Christopher 02:46
I was just curious. I just took her in as a foster a little over a year ago, I think, yeah, a little over a year ago, and then fell in love with her and decided to keep her. And my other dog is game a Malinois, and she’s the mother of the puppies, yeah,
Kayla Fratt 03:04
yeah. And so we might hear some puppies squeaking in the background, but just enjoy, enjoy the ambiance of some, some happy, fast, grown, little, little nuggets.
Caden Christopher 03:16
Yeah, introduce yourself for my audience.
Kayla Fratt 03:19
Totally, yeah. My name is Kayla Fratt, and I am, let’s see, I am a PhD student at Oregon State University where I’m in the Wildlife Biology Program. Technically, the department is fisheries, wildlife and conservation, and I work with conservation detection dogs. So for my two PhD projects, I’m going to be going up to Alaska here in eight days, to use the dogs to find wolf scat and answer questions about diet and movement in this really cool Island archipelago. And then I’m also currently grant writing and fundraising to do a project down in El Salvador looking at the recolonization of Pumas down there and what that is doing to the miso carnivores, so like the ocelots and the jaguaronis and the terras and those smaller carnivores that are going to experience some competition and potentially predation from these Pumas as they’re coming back in. And I share my life with two Border Collies and a cat. So I’ve got barley, who’s my 10 year old Border Collie. He’s like my main working dog. He’s coming with me to Alaska. And niffler is my understudy dog. He’s also a Border Collie, and he’s actually currently in Wyoming, so a couple states over to the east of me now helping out on a wind farm project, along with my co founder, Rachel. And then we’ve got a cat, Norbert, that I found in a ditch, and his main job is working as a non consenting alarm clock, in that he’s consenting to being an alarm clock, but knows no one else is consenting to the experience. So, yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s a good time over
Caden Christopher 04:56
nice. Are, like I mentioned, you were looking into doing something in El Salvador, but I didn’t know it had comfortized To that extent already. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 05:06
yeah. We’re still, you know, as I said, we’re still grant writing. I’ve got one big grant, not it’s actually not even that much money, but it’s prestigious grant out that I’m hoping to hear about in the next couple months, and then another grant that’s due in a couple weeks. So that’s what I’m doing as soon as we’re done podcasting, and what I was doing up until the moment we hit record, basically, yeah, so yeah. And I know, you know, I guess when I, when I first reached out to you about this, this feeling that I was having lately, did you do you experience this feeling as well, of like you’re dedicating your life to something that you love and you feel really, is really important. Um, but do you ever feel like it’s not enough? Or have you managed to find more peace in that I have?
Caden Christopher 05:58
I constantly catch myself nodding at you and forget that my camera camera isn’t open. Yes, I actually, like, a couple years ago kind of had this. I read the uninhabitable Earth and had a crisis of like, Oh my God. What am I doing? Like, this is completely meaningless. I need to do bigger, more important things. And back then, I reached out to a friend of mine who is a climate activist and is very involved in climate advocacy and clean energy data and stuff like that, and asked like, what do I do? What do I do with this? And I had like, two ideas in my mind, because at that point I was like, I need to do something else. That’s not, like, I can’t, like, sit here and play with puppies while the girl is going to shit. And my friend. So I posed two ideas to him, and one was like, Do you think I should just change fields completely and see if I can somehow get involved in fighting the climate crisis? Or do you think I should just work more and like, funnel the money that I’m making into supporting projects that seem important to me? And he said, Well, I think if you’re, if you want to do this, your your involvement would be more important. Like, would mean more than the money. And the money thing is, like, it would mean working more, because I generally, um, anti capitalist, and I only work as much as I have to, yeah. So if I want to be able to donate a bunch of money, I would have to work more, right? Yeah. So then I was like, Okay, I’m trusting this friend’s opinion. I’m gonna look around what’s out there. And I also reached out to Susan Schneider, who you may know, she’s both into, like, heavily involved in the behavior world, and also in climate action, to ask, because we had met at a conference and connected there, like, a decade ago, yeah. And as for her opinion, or where I, with my relatively limited knowledge, could potentially fit in. She gave me a couple organizations, and I also found one at that point I was in I lived in Guatemala, still, and local organization, and yeah, like, I reached out to everyone, and the only organization that was interested in working with me was that local Guatemalan organization. Oh, they are a teal organization, which is pretty cool, which was the first time I heard that term. Have you heard that?
Kayla Fratt 08:50
No, no, I don’t know, very super flat hierarchy.
Caden Christopher 08:56
Cool, yeah. And it’s about empowering youth and sustainability and well empowering young members of marginalized communities to take sustainable action, both for their communities and maybe in the in a bigger sense as well, and very interactive, very looking at behavior change. And they were like, Oh, we could use someone who consults on how to change human behavior, so that our youth leaders can help, for example, change or inspire older members of their community to be more, move more into the direction of sustainable farming, for example, like even things like throwing things into a trash can rather than dropping them. And street stuff like that, yeah. And again, like, I mean, in theory, like, that’s like, that’s totally, like, I could totally come up with ideas for that those behavior is behavior,
Kayla Fratt 10:11
right? Yeah. I mean, and like, the trash example is such a good one. I remember we talked about this with the folks at action for Titas in Kenya, out in Samburu, one of the things that they were working on was there was a group of women that had kind of started organizing to do trash pickups after market day. And what they ended up kind of realizing was a huge part of the reason that they had to do these trash pickups after market day every every week was because there weren’t trash facilities available. There was nowhere to put the plastic that your food came wrapped in, or whatever. So, you know, they started working to actually get trash bins together so that everything could be collected and didn’t get blown away, and then then it could get disposed of properly, and out there, that generally means burying or burning it.
Caden Christopher 11:01
Yeah, you know. And that’s, and that’s a dog, you know,
Kayla Fratt 11:03
that’s like, if you’re as a dog trainer, you’re familiar with the idea of antecedent arrangement, like, if there is nowhere to put trash, some proportion of people are not going to put their own trash in their own pockets or in their own backpacks. And especially when you’re talking about, you know, a situation like a market, you know, there has to be a solution that sets people up for success. And that’s something that, as a dog trainer, we’re familiar with
Caden Christopher 11:29
exactly, and and this, like, this particular problem, is really easy to solve. It’s just you put up more trash cans, because we humans recognize trash cans as targets. And like, if you have, oh no, like, I’m thinking of a bag of dog poop, and you see a target, well, you’re gonna put the bag of dog poop into the target, but um, because here, like, when I walk the streets, they’re very few trash cans in my neighborhood and um, but everyone does pick up the the dog poop. They just, like, leave it at some random corner, in its in its bag, which is interesting to me, but if there were trash cans, they would throw it in anyways, like, I think in this case in Guatemala, because, like, we could argue that whether someone drops a bottle in the street or puts in a trash can really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but the sense in which that matters is that a lot of trash gets burned, also by individuals, and that can lead to an increased risk of forest fires that is all kinds of stuff being released into the atmosphere. So that’s why this has bigger implications than just having a neighborhood without lots of trash in the streets? Yeah,
Caden Christopher 12:46
so and then I I put together a presentation for this organization, and like I started with that, but I realized pretty quickly that for me to like, share high quality information in Spanish, I spent so many more hours on preparing these things than if I did them in English. Yeah? Like, I felt like that is really not that can’t be the best use of my time. Yeah, you guys, there must be someone who already speaks Spanish very fluently, especially these special, specialized terms that I wasn’t familiar with. So I’m like, looking it up, looking this up, putting it together, and like, everything’s taking me forever that would be just like, super fast if I did in a different language. So I moved away from that. And in the end, made my peace with what I’m doing, which is dedicating my life, or a great portion of my life, to something that brings me joy, which is working with dogs and people. And I think for me, one reason that I’ve been able to make my peace with it is that it’s not just playing with puppies, right? And it’s also not because, in the past, I used to tell myself, well, I’m like this quote, unquote therapist for this one person and their dog and their relationship, right? So I’m making a positive impact in this one person’s life. But actually what I’m doing and what I’m doing more and more, the older I get, the more radical I become. These days, they used to be radical when I went to the University of Vienna, and then I got mellower, and now I’m like, back into becoming more radicalized again. But, um, I use doc training basically as a Trojan horse for my political agenda.
Kayla Fratt 14:49
Yeah, uh huh, yeah. And I’ll say more about that. I like, I like, where this is going. I’m interested.
Caden Christopher 14:56
I mean, so like, the students I get are usually highly involved. Involved dog people who really want to give their dogs the best lives possible. And I, as a person, am easy to talk to, and I think I’ve figured out how to create spaces where people feel safe quickly. And part of that is myself being a little bit vulnerable as well inviting vulnerability from others, creating like I’m relatively fast at creating a basis of trust and and then I’ll start inserting little nuggets of anti capitalist language in in the things that I’m communicating, right? And like I might first do it chokingly And laugh about it, and then see if the person, quote, unquote, bites and having this other conversation that dog training was just an entry point to and while what they are paying for is dog training, what actually matters is everything else.
Kayla Fratt 16:03
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember noticing this way back when I was a baby dog trainer. I was like, you know, so like 2014 2015 when I was still in undergrad, studying dog training and bobbing around, and this was still at the phase where I hadn’t fully crystallized into like a positive reinforcement person. I was shadowing a schutzhund trainer who was decidedly balanced, if not even there’s not really a good word for like, I think that farther, more punitive end of balanced. That doesn’t sound really judgmental. And I just remember kind of at some point, starting to realize that it seemed like there was political alignment along with the training philosophies, and that the more and I started noticing this even more when I started going out and working with clients, that the more kind of like I was. I was in a military town, so a lot of like the military families that had a much more authoritarian kind of conservative structure to their household and their overall outlook on life were often more resistant or struggled more with the positive reinforcement approaches that I was suggesting and wanted to tend towards other training approaches. And then when I was talking to like the professors that hired me to work with their dogs, they you know, and obviously I’m broadly generalizing here, but like these really liberal professors, we’re much more apt to kind of understand and hop on to like, oh yeah. We’ve got to, like, set the learning environment up for success and and try to, you know, make sure that the dog doesn’t make mistakes at not trying to set up mistakes that can happen so that we can then correct them. Or, you know, whatever it is. And I it’s really interesting to me how I think a lot of the folks that I really enjoy spending time with in the dog training community are the people who see that really clearly and see dog training as an extension of their politics or a door to their politics. But not everyone sees that, and it’s not obvious to everyone, and not everyone is comfortable with it either.
Caden Christopher 18:21
Yeah, that’s a that’s a good point. I’ve totally also experienced that, um, when I, like, in Austria, when I was trying to get involved with shottung, that was a very right wing club, and I just, like, that didn’t work, like, I just didn’t fit in there, yeah? So like, Yeah, I’m happy with my students tend to be heavy on the positive reinforcement side. So even if they haven’t made any like political statements, or they’re still developing their political ideas, if you’re already convinced that you want to give your dog the gentlest possible training. It is actually a relatively small leap towards recognizing that humans should also be treated with kindness, and just as every dog would ideally have a good life, every human would ideally have a good life. And then we can start looking into, well, why is that not the case? What would have to change? Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 19:33
yeah. No, I agree. And I think for me, like dog training has been the thing that’s really brought me back home to Yeah, more some of these radical politics, because once you really, really internalize the idea of setting up for success and antecedent arrangement, and, like, wellness first, and these sorts of things. And I don’t mean wellness in, like, the white lady, woo, woo. Sense of like, you know, skin cream. Or Jade, whatever is, you know, I mean, like, like, you know, the Sarah strumming behavior alumnus of, like, exercise, enrichment, communication, nutrition, a sense of safety and security. Like, once you I feel like there was a period of time where I was really radical in high school, and then it went off to college, and I just got kind of politically disengaged. Was which is not the way that I think traditionally in the US, at least most people are more disengaged. And as high schoolers, maybe get radicalized and under in college, I went the other way. I was just totally sucked into the Outdoor Adventure World and kind of forgot about politics, and was very absorbed in my own life. And that’s fine as a 21 year old like, Yeah, I’m fine with the fact that my 21 year old self needed to do that, and sometimes I miss it for your 21 year old self, yeah, yeah. But, um, then I think as I got more and more into dog training and, like, really, really understanding these tenants of animal behavior and welfare and wellness and these things, that was what really brought me home to starting to realize that about other people. Because I think even as like my as I was a little bit of a radical in high school, you know, I was still in high school, I wasn’t necessarily seeing everything really clearly, and I think I still had a really, like, paternalistic view to a lot of things as well. As far as, like, like, definitely a lot of like, white savior vibes come from, like, if I, if I go back and, like, look at my Facebook posts or whatever, from like, 2020, 10 or whatever, it’s like, oh, wow, yeah, i My heart was in the right place. But I’ve grown a lot, and again, dog training has just been the venue for that in a way that I wouldn’t have expected.
Caden Christopher 21:46
Yeah, totally. It’s it keeps surprising me. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 21:51
Yeah, it’s interesting, for sure, I know. So one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot, so our here at Oregon State, we’ll do like a seminar speaker series for each department. So our department, fisheries, wildlife conservation, every week, we’ll bring in a guest speaker. They give a lecture on their research. And then, you know, students can sign up for lunches and one on one meetings and dinners with this person. It’s delightful. It’s great free food. And you know, it’s one of our graduation requirements as well. And one of our speakers last year was this researcher, Dr jingle Wu, who I believe, is now out of Arizona. And he is this little Japanese guy. He’s in his like, 60s, maybe 70s. He’s at the point in his career where he’s talking about, like, academic grandchildren, so like his students that have gone on to now become professors, and like their PhD students now, or his grandkids. And he gave this but half of his talk was completely incomprehensible to me, because I’m a first year PhD student, and I had no idea what he was talking about. I he was, he’s, like the father of landscape ecology, and I just didn’t understand most of what he was talking about on the scale that he was talking about, but the things that stood out to me in his con, in his talk, were also saying, you know, it the students that he is proudest of, that he has are the students who have now gone into politics and are taking what they’ve learned in science and learned in landscape ecology and learned in conservation, and are trying to exert political change. And I know I was really uncomfortable with that, because I was like, oh my god, I’m not going, I’m not here to get a science degree and then go into politics. I really hate, I really hate this, and I agree with what he was saying. And then the other thing he said that made me really uncomfortable, but I can’t stop thinking about again this. He gave this talk probably five or six months ago now, was he made this really impassioned point that basically, conservation has failed like we have spent the last however many decades studying the world around us to death, and we have so many papers on the diet of this species and the movement of that species, and we understand a lot about the natural world, and yes, there are still huge gaps. And like, stick with me on this one, because, like, I am obviously still dedicating my life to the ecology conservation side of things. But his point was that, and as we’ve been doing all of this, almost every single species on the planet has decreased in abundance. The populations are less healthy, and we have less natural area and less habitat for almost all of these species, and even the species that have rebounded, that maybe were in a worse situation in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, because we do have these amazing conservation stories of species that have been brought back from the brink, or maybe are still in the they’re still in dire straits, but they’re, they’re, they’re trending in the right direction. But I think his overall point really stuck with me and made me really uncomfortable. But I think is right that. There gets to be a point where you really we need these advocates who are able to turn the science into action, and maybe some of the funding dollars shouldn’t always be going towards, like trying to understand these complicated, super nuanced interactions between animals and plants and the environment or whatever, but actually focusing on, could we take that same money and that same effort to just get an area protected so that we have the opportunity to look at these animals again in 10 years? Yeah, and it’s just really stuck with me as something that I want to try to figure out how to incorporate into my career. And then, on the flip side, one of the things I found really interesting in my department here at Oregon State is stated, so we’re the Department of Fisheries, wildlife and conservation, and we are within the School of Agriculture. So to call someone an advocate in this department is an insult. You know, a lot of people are really focused on managing wildlife and managing forests. You know, people talk, and it’s kind of a joke, but kind of not about, you know, we’ve got tree farms here. And, you know, obviously we do to some degree have literal tree farms that are being harvested. But some of it is also we’re managing these forests that, yes, house all of these other animals. We’ve got the marbled murrelets and the spotted owls and all of this other stuff, but we’re also farming trees, and money grows on trees in Oregon, and it’s been a really interesting and uncomfortable fit for me as someone who does, I think, naturally, much more align with the conservationist advocate side of things. When
Caden Christopher 26:42
you say managing or management, that makes me think of management and dog training.
Kayla Fratt 26:46
Oh, yeah, yeah. And it’s a totally different thing here. Kind of tell me what you what exactly managing a forest, yeah. So managing a forest or managing like a wildlife species in this case is, I mean, I guess it. Well, we’ll have to see how related we think it is. As I explain, this is the idea of, okay, so we, we’ve got the state of Oregon, and we want, we want this many deer and this many elk and this many wolves and this many Pumas, because we believe that we have done the math and we’ve done the modeling, and that these numbers are going to interact appropriately in a way that we have enough deer and elk left over that people can have successful hunting seasons, but not so many that they’re overgrazing and competing with the cattle and making the ranchers mad. And then we need some wolves because, because the predator, people have succeeded in making the argument that that is part of a healthy ecosystem, but not too many wolves, because then again, they kill the cattle, or they kill too many deer, and then people lose their minds because they can’t have a successful deer hunt,
Caden Christopher 27:50
playing God over the state of ardem, correct? Yes,
Kayla Fratt 27:53
and, and that is like the North American model of wildlife management. And I have not yet taken, like a history class on this sort of thing. So I’m, I’m a little out of my depth, and if I am misrepresenting something, and you’re screaming at me right now, please just message me. I am. I’m thrilled to learn. I am, like, still pretty new to this, because, again, like, my undergraduate degree was in conservation, which is much more the idea of, like corridors and like minimum populations needed to, like, sustain things and evolutionary bottlenecks, and also just, you know, what’s the difference between a lemur and, you know, a squirrel? How do you tell the difference based on looking at a skull? I that was an exam I had once. But yeah, so here it’s much more. It’s much more focused on, like, yeah, the wildlife and forestry management side of things, so trying to figure out how to play God, to balance capital and human needs and the needs of wildlife. And again, it’s interesting to me how being an advocate in a lot in this space is a dirty word, and the bend is really heavily towards capital and human needs and some, and I think a lot of times, even capital over human needs.
Caden Christopher 29:07
So sustainability is not part of playing God.
Kayla Fratt 29:11
I mean, yeah, I mean, I don’t, I don’t want to, like, paint this too negatively, at least here at Oregon State, from what I’ve seen so far, sustainability, I think, is one of those words that would probably get argued about ad nauseam if I had three other people from my department in this room, sustainability, for whom and for which use because the Sustainability for maximizing the financial gain of a timber harna harvest while minimizing the harm to wildlife is not the same as sustainability for maximizing the success of wildlife.
Caden Christopher 29:53
Yes, that makes sense. So
Kayla Fratt 29:55
like I think there is, there is a lot of focus on sustainable forest. Management here. And I think there is something I admire about the pragmatism of okay, you know, we we live in a world where logging and paper products and wood products are are needed, so how do we balance that with wildlife needs? And are there ways to have sustainable timber harvests that minimize the damage, or reduce or mitigate the damage to wildlife or an endangered shrub or whatever it is, but it so, yeah, I don’t know. I lost my train of thought.
Caden Christopher 30:37
If you came in there to someone arguing, well, I’m looking, I’m managing this forest, and I’m looking for this kind of sustainability you just described. If you came in there with your advocate hat on, what would you tell this person?
Kayla Fratt 30:54
One of the one of the things that I have had a discussion with is, you know, do we really want to be managing our ecosystem in a way that we are more focused on whether or not hunters are getting deer tags than whether or not we have thriving predator populations. And you know, who is most important here and whose voices matter the most? I think that is the question that I find myself asking the most often is just kind of like raising my hand and being like, well, what like should we have someone here at the table whose job it is is to try to speak for the trees or speak for the wolves or speak for, you know, just like the little Lorax person in some of these these spaces, And you know, that tends to be well received. We have a lot of, like, healthy debates, but it does. I think most of the ultimate decisions still trend towards capital more than I personally would be comfortable with. I’m also not. I’m not actually in like, decision making room. So all of this for me is still very theoretical. I’m a first year PhD student. Nobody listens to me, and they shouldn’t, probably at this point. But hopefully, once I’m as I know more and continue advocating, hopefully that will matter,
Caden Christopher 32:11
yeah, like I like that idea, or that you expressed earlier, that we can either study like we can either be the documenters of the Apocalypse, or we can try to create spaces where, well, we can study, we can have longitudinal studies and the same animals will still be around in 10 years, or the same plans. That is actually, yeah, you’re right. Like, that would be a good place for the grant money to go, like, both ways, right? Because, yeah, yeah. I mean, ideally, of course, we want to do away with capitalism, so we also won’t have any grant money, and you won’t need it, right? Yeah, yeah. So, like, that’s the bigger goal.
Kayla Fratt 33:01
Yeah, and I think sometimes in the conservation advocate space, there is a nervousness around addressing capitalism for sure head on, and then also talking about the trade offs, and the very real trade offs that can occur on, I think, particularly like indigenous communities are have historically gotten hit really hard with conservation approaches. Because, you know, we we march in and, like John Muir is famous for this, like he thought that the Native Americans living in Yosemite were scourge who were ruining the, basically ruining the vibes of Yosemite, and that’s a really gross legacy that conservation, I don’t think, has appropriately grappled with. And the tendency has been for, I think some of the really gung ho advocates, and we see this in the positive reinforcement dog training community too. They’re so focused on the dog welfare, fair or saving x species, that they are upset at the question of what happens to the locals, and they get dismissive of it. And that is a really again, it’s it’s an ugly habit, and something that is really uncomfortable. And then, I think, then there are other people who have potentially rose tinted glasses that believe that maybe we can capitalize on conservation, you know, I think they’re, they’re people who really believe that, like tourism dollars and ecotourism is going to save the planet, um, or they believe that it is always possible to find a solution that supports indigenous communities and supports capital and keeps the wildlife safe and happy. And I think the reality lies somewhere else, that there are sometimes. Losers, yeah, and that doesn’t mean that’s a good thing, and it doesn’t mean it’s worthy. It’s still, I think we want to strive for that happy balance. But the reality is, with the population of human beings that we have on this planet, if we want to protect some wild spaces. That does mean there are places that people can’t hunt and people can’t go, or it needs to be heavily managed, and everywhere on the earth has someone who’s local there and like, God, I don’t know. I feel like I’m putting my foot in my mouth now over something that, like, I’m not much of an expert over but it is a really ugly, complicated, Hard series of questions about managing, yeah, how to, how to protect wildlife and trees and whatever around indigenous communities, and particularly, like as white people coming in and like, often putting either capital or wildlife over indigenous people. It’s just, it’s a really ugly history that is not actually in the past.
Caden Christopher 36:05
Oh yeah, I wasn’t aware of that history, that’s, I’m gonna have to go Google after
Kayla Fratt 36:11
Yeah, if you I just finished reading the book beloved beasts by Michelle. Her last name starts with n and has like a J and A k in it, and it’s kind of hard to pronounce, and I don’t have it in front of me, but yeah, the book is beloved beast, and it goes through a lot of this history, and I, like she, does a good job of also looking at, like, Kenya’s colonialist history and how, you know, like the Maasai and were totally pushed out of their Traditional grounds as part of, like these conservation efforts that then led to the Maasai. I believe it was the Maasai. Gosh. I hope I’m getting the tribe right. You know, then killed a rhino in retaliation. And like this approach can really, really backfire. And is it has really, really ugly colonialist roots that I think a lot of conservationists don’t want to look at. I know I don’t like looking at that sort of history that
Caden Christopher 37:08
is fairly important to look at it and learn from it. Yeah, because if
Kayla Fratt 37:11
you don’t know what it looks like in the 60s or the 1860s where it’s really obvious, then it’s going to be very, very hard to see that same rhetoric when it comes up today. But the more you can recognize those really obvious through lines that come again through reading like the last 150 years of conservation history, it makes it a lot easier to pick up on some of those dog whistles or similar lines of thinking in meetings that happen today.
Caden Christopher 37:41
Yeah. So to go back to the beginning of our presentation, how do you or how do you currently grapple with that, the fact that you’re, for example, now leaving for Alaska to do island hopping and collect wolf SCAP for a while, versus the fact that 10 years from now, maybe there won’t be any wolves left in that region, right?
Kayla Fratt 38:08
Yeah. I mean, I think the the little like stoic version of my, of my, my mantra that I’ve been talking myself through is that me going there and doing the best science that I can is a step like I think I I’m not the superhero in any story. I’m not the main character in any story. And I think one of the things I do struggle with, honestly, with this Alaska project, is the worry that it’s inconsequential. Wolves are studied to death and managed to death, and people have such strong opinions about them already, I honestly feel a little prematurely bummed that I don’t think it’s going to do much for conservation. But one of the beautiful things about at least right now being in my PhD is that I know I’m in school right now, I’m in training right now, and it’s okay if my, you know, my basically grown up science fair project doesn’t change the world yet, if it gives me the skills and the connections to take that elsewhere and have a more impactful project, I think I’m okay with that right now, and that’s part of why I’ve been fighting so hard to make sure that this El Salvador project happens when people, when I talk to people about my PhD, And I say, I tell them about the Alaska project, and then I say, and then I’m going to go to El Salvador and do Pumas. Like, almost everyone who’s done a PhD, or is even just a couple years into a PhD, is like, why are you doing two projects? You know, like, shouldn’t you just pick one and they’re probably. Right, but my argument, and like my belief right now, for why I’m continuing forward with the El Salvador project is because I I really strongly feel that there is a stronger possibility of impact in that project, and if nothing else, like us coming in there and helping with fundacionadoles El Salvador like they are inviting us to come, they have asked for us to come, and we are able to bring in grant money and support staff, and like the detection dogs that they never in a gajillion years were going to be able To afford, yeah, to have in country. And so, yeah, I think like I’m kind of constantly balancing all of those things, a little bit of despair over the wolf question, and just feeling like, okay, I guess I don’t really feel like this is going to do anything. And if anything, there’s a good chance that barley finds that the wolf population is higher than they previously thought, which will then lead to more wolf trapping and hunting than there was before which. You know, my job as a scientist, I guess, is to report that anyway, and even though I’m not stoked about it. But you know, thinking about it as like, it’s school, I’m I’m here to learn and to progress and take those skills forward into something that I really feel like could change the world, I guess, is okay right now?
Caden Christopher 41:26
Yeah, that’s a I think that’s the best possible attitude you could land on.
Kayla Fratt 41:32
I hope so. Thank you. Yeah, but yeah. I mean, it’s hard again, especially when you hear like jingle Wu talking about getting more involved in politics, and like, politics in the US is just so depressing and ugly right now. It just, you know, I’ve been going to the anti genocide protests every Saturday since October, and I guess not every Saturday I’ve missed some but, you know, you just kind of like, I’ve gotten cynical about it. It’s like, all right, I’m gonna put on my kefir and go out and scream into the void for an hour every Saturday, and then I come back and I go back to my grant writing, and it’s, it’s what I can do. There’s a part of me that every once in a while is like, I’m a wilderness first responder. Like, I should figure out if there’s a way that I can, like, fundraise and go do mutual aid somewhere and, like, be an aid worker somewhere that like, feels so much more pressing than like, learning about statistical modeling or whatever it is I’m currently doing. But I don’t know. I guess I haven’t, I haven’t decided that that is the crazy 180 my life is going to take at least right now.
Caden Christopher 42:47
Yeah, and you can still do that, yeah?
Kayla Fratt 42:49
I always, I always can’t quit and go be an aid worker.
Caden Christopher 42:56
Yeah, people in need of aid are in no short supply. And yeah, are we going to be more and more? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kayla Fratt 43:06
And, I mean, I do really appreciate as I’ve been I am, like, a very, I’m very baby into some of the more, like anarchist thoughts that I have been getting exposed to over the last couple years. Like I haven’t read the texts, I haven’t learned the things yet, but I do find the concept of mutual aid, it just as a starting point, really, really helpful and just like, Okay, can I focus on my community? And what are the small things that I can do in my community without ballooning it up and making it more complicated than it needs to be.
Caden Christopher 43:42
Like, yeah, like, I’m in the same position in that respect. And I think also I feel like, like an anarchist and mutual aid taken things also gives you permission to focus on what’s right in front of you, rather than spiral out, because the entire world is going to shift, and it’s overwhelming. Yeah, yeah,
Kayla Fratt 44:08
yeah. Like yesterday, on my way home from agility with barley, which is a thing I spend money on every week, and that money could be donated elsewhere, but we do agility, um, and every once in a while I spiral about that too. We’ve got lots of things to spiral about lately. Oh, yeah, yeah. But, you know, like, I stopped at the grocery store and I bought a couple packs of apple juice and some granola bars, because we’ve been ordering so much field supply lately that I was, like, I realized yesterday when my chewy box with barleys. Barleys food wasn’t brought all the way up to our porch. And I was like, Oh my God, I’ve just completely forgotten about the human being delivery workers that are carrying, like, multiple 80 pound packages that I’ve ordered over the last couple weeks up to my porch every single day, and like, I need to put out some snacks. For these people, you know, it’s, it’s not much. And like, hopefully they like apple juice. I don’t know. I was like, what are some shelf stable snacks that I can put out for delivery workers? I don’t know what I need. Um, but just thinking through things like that, and like, remembering these the ways that there are other people all around you that, like, you can just do little things to make their lives better. And like Margaret killjoy, who’s the host of cool people who did cool stuff, often talks about like beauty and art and poetry being important parts of like our wellness and our and resistance and like joy and you only have one life. And I guess I find those things really helpful to to keep in mind as well that, like, I don’t have to be changing the world. And every minute I can just get someone some apple juice, or, you know, whatever, like, take some pictures of flowers on my walk with barley. That’s okay too. It’s needed. It’s needed. It’s not just okay.
Caden Christopher 46:10
And also, I mean, it is true for myself. For example, I can go to a protest, but I can’t. I do not have the spoons to organize one totally and like recognizing things like that is, I believe, really important too, because if we push ourselves beyond our own limits all the time, we’ll burn out. And for me to like, part of my my balance is that I get to actually do a lot of things that bring you joy, that are, yeah, involve dogs are currently puppies. That is not changing the world, but it is recharging for me as a person. It is giving me both the energy and the memories that will propel me forward in other aspects, yeah, well, and
Kayla Fratt 47:03
I don’t think it’s I like, I have two opposing ideas right now, of you know, on one hand, things like the climate crisis and the many other biodiversity crisis and the ways that Those are impacting humans around the world and war. Those are really, real emergencies that like it’s, it’s okay to feel stressed out by those and to feel a strong need and want to do something. And that’s, that’s where I’ve come down on the protests for myself right now is like, I do this because it allows me to maybe occasionally skip some videos that come up on my social media feed that I find upsetting, because watching them doesn’t actually help anyone.
Caden Christopher 47:48
Like, yeah, the it’s just virtue signaling, if people read posts and blah, blah, yeah,
Kayla Fratt 47:53
yeah. And, you know, I still share some of the good infographics, but so like, on one hand, this is, there are a lot of really big emergencies that, like, we maybe kind of should, and I’m like, hesitant to use the word should, but I’m going to use it here be stressed about and be worried about, and, like, be doing stuff about. But I also don’t think that we want to make it a prerequisite for activism that we apply this, like hyper capitalist hustle culture to activism as well, like that is actually not the point either. Yeah, we want to live happy, beautiful, hard lives however we can. And some of that is going to be a struggle and fighting, and some of it should be going outside with your dog.
Caden Christopher 48:45
I agree, totally agree. And yeah, I’m also part of it is like, like, I know like, you don’t have like, nobody has to remind me that there are so many hugely stressful things happening, not to me personally, because I’m very privileged, but to a whole lot of people and other animals and but I feel like we can hold, like it is possible to hold that knowledge and at the same time still enjoy the Sunset, yeah, like, it’s not that’s the beauty of being a complex living being. Who’s that bad? Like our minds contain multitudes?
Kayla Fratt 49:33
Yeah, I’m not sure I’m terrible at remembering who said quotes Mark Twain. Just attribute everything to everything, to Mark Twain is the joke, yeah?
Caden Christopher 49:47
Like, it’s like, it’s even if we are, if you take a picture of a flower or you run agility, it’s not that you forget that. This is also the case. It’s not, it’s not possible to forget that. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 49:57
yeah, yeah. I mean. I think, to some degree, compartmentalization and finding places to be just one with your body and engrossed in things is really important. I know I’ve recently had the realization that all of the feeling that I chase with all of my recreation is the feeling of being so engrossed in something and that I literally can’t have my phone, yeah, involved. And whether that’s running agility with the dogs or the conservation dog, you know, handling stuff, or surfing or rock climbing or white water kayaking or mountain biking like I think like that feeling that I chase with a lot of my adventure sports is partially an anxiety response for me of I need to find these things to do with my body and my mind so that I have to stop thinking about what needs to be done. And part of that is a lot of, like, really intense, internalized hustle culture and part of the and then that combining with this anxiety about the place of the status of the world right now, and every once in a while, I just like, you know, remember, remember some genocide somewhere, or some struggle somewhere, and just feel like, nauseous about not being able to do anything about it, but also, like, I don’t know, so like, finding those ways to compartmentalize and be happy in my own head is also important so that, as you said, like, you can come back, yeah, and do something the next day or the next hour, or Whatever it is,
Caden Christopher 51:40
and you have, like, you need those times where you turn off your mind in order to be able to keep coming back, yeah? Otherwise, at some point you gonna jump off a cliff.
Kayla Fratt 51:49
Yeah, yeah. Like, I laugh, but yes, absolutely. And I know, like, it’s so cliche that surfing is what’s that that doesn’t help anyone?
Kayla Fratt 51:59
No, no, it sure doesn’t.
Caden Christopher 52:02
Your worries don’t help anyone as long as they’re in your head. So it makes more sense to do something, to shut them off for a little bit so that the next day you actually have energy to do something rather than just think something. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 52:14
I mean, and again, like, maybe, maybe we can bring this back to dogs. Like, that’s a huge component of successful dog training for any hard thing, you know, you’re not spending eight hours a day trying to drill your dog on that intensive obedience routine or the conservation dog stuff. We like a huge part of it is making sure that they’re rested and maybe some stretching and some massage, and that they get a good decompression walk, and they get to run around like idiots in the woods for a while? Exactly? Yeah, and that’s what allows them to go back to work. We were just during our we’re in our the midst of our conservation dog handler course right now, and one of our students during our live call this week asked how much time on average we’re spending training our dogs. And I was like, oh, half hour a day, four to five days a week. And half of you know, most of the students were like, Wait, that’s it. And I was like, yeah, like training, like planning the training sessions and coding the video afterwards might take longer, and it still feels like it somehow takes two hours out of my day. But when I watched the video back, you know, from unclipping the leash and telling the dog to search to clipping the leash and putting the dog away is 10 to 40 minutes on average.
Caden Christopher 53:31
Yeah, it’s all the best trainers don’t spend more time on this, on that? Yeah, yeah.
Kayla Fratt 53:37
The only reason it’s getting longer this week, is because we’re intentionally working on building up barleys and Dugan to get them ready for doing two hour searches. So like, by necessity, that means some of our training is going to have to go long. But that’s also, I think, when I say two hours of training for that particular sort of thing, it’s not the same thing as, like, drilling weave poles for two hours. Most of it is barley walking around in the woods, kind of passively sniffing. He’s not super actively sniffing at most of those points. And then occasionally he’ll hit odor, and he’ll go and he’ll take me to it, and then he gets to play. And then we start all over again. And it’s, it is intensive. They’re exhausted after that two hours. But it’s, it’s not, it’s not like super active training,
Caden Christopher 54:28
yeah, and it’s very, I mean, it’s also very, if you compare it with weave poles, like weave poles are something we humans made up, right? Using your nose to find something is not something you’ve made up, and running through the woods is not something made up. So, yeah, like that is that’s quite different
Kayla Fratt 54:47
in that respect. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it’s hopefully less hard on their bodies, yeah, you know, I think it kind of depends on your your dog’s tendencies, and what’s happening in the in the. Learn us at any given moment. But, you know, theoretically, like it, yeah, it’s, they’re on uneven, soft surfaces that’s really good for joints and stability and building their bodies up. And they’re, they’re happy, they’re like, they’re a good, happy, tired, like barley is also tired after we fly internationally, but it’s a different sort of tired when he’s come home from a good long day of searching. Oh,
Caden Christopher 55:30
yeah. I mean, my kind of tired when I after flying is also like, that’s not a good tired.
Kayla Fratt 55:37
No, no, no. That was another
Caden Christopher 55:38
thing that I speaking of that I like when I had that crisis after reading the uninhabitable earth a couple years ago, I was like, Well, I’m not gonna fly. I can’t fly again. I can’t, in good conscious fly again, like I did not fly for a few years. And then I realized, well, you know what? In the end, whether I fly or don’t fly does not change anything. And I still, I There are three people in Austria who I would like to see, yeah, every now and then. So, yeah,
Kayla Fratt 56:06
there’s not really a way to get to Austria without flying. Yeah. Like, realistically, yeah, you technically can. Yeah,
Caden Christopher 56:13
you technically can. It’s not realistic for me. I’ve given myself permission to fly again and not worry about that. And sometimes it’s got to come down,
Kayla Fratt 56:25
yeah, yeah. I know I’ve thought about this when, you know, yeah, like, I chose to drive a diesel vehicle to Panama and the Arctic Ocean. And, yeah, I think one of the things that I have found a little comforting, that, again, like baby activist me, when I was like 17, 1819, didn’t quite fully understand yet, was the degree to which these problems are systemic, and that can be really depressing and terrifying to just realize the degree to which Whether or not I recycle just doesn’t matter, yeah, um, but it also can be kind of freeing. I think there’s a balance in there. Like, there is, like, there’s this balance of like, you only live once, and you deserve to have a good life. But like, don’t, don’t be Sam bankman freed. Like, don’t tell yourself you’re doing Effective Altruism while all you’re doing is scamming people out of millions of dollars and living a life of luxury in the Bahamas. Like, yeah, I don’t think any of our listeners are doing if Sam bankman Fried listens to this podcast, I would love to know, but yeah, it sounds kind of like that’s what you’re talking about. Like we can be responsible, caring, global citizens, or whatever term you want to use, community members, without never allowing us to do never allowing ourselves to do anything nice or like, eat some chocolate or drink coffee or whatever. Even if you know that, like, Oh my God. Like, every time I eat a banana, I think about genocide, it’s just like, but you know what they’re they’re delicious. And every once in a while, I’m gonna get some bananas as part of
Caden Christopher 58:14
my groceries. Yeah, yeah. Because also, like, you not eating bananas, that’s really not, it doesn’t it doesn’t help. It doesn’t matter. Yeah. What matters is spreading the knowledge that these problems are systemic, and seeing if we can come across ways to, like, pull a little bit on that systemic issue, even if it’s just, like, disturbing it a little bit making, like, a little bit of a what is that a wave? Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 58:41
like, a ripple, a ripple, yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that’s what I tried to do in my interactions with my friends, or, like, what you were saying you do with your clients, you know, just dropping in a little bit of, like, an anti capitalist side comment and seeing how they react to that and maybe opening that door just a little bit, just just seeing if they want to take that step forward and ask, Oh, what do you what do you mean by that? Or like, oh, yeah, you know, it does seem like needing to work for a living is part of the problem
Caden Christopher 59:18
here, absolutely and and then, like, Okay, we have a conversation. And then they go, go on with their lives. But maybe for some of them, that sparks something, and they keep investigating or keep thinking, that’s what I hope, yeah,
Kayla Fratt 59:34
well, and I would imagine that’s what you know, how I have been really guided along this, like this thought process has been the podcast behind the bastards. Like I started listening to it when my ex and I were first driving to Panama. So this was back in 2017 we started listening to it together. And. It was honestly part of the fact the thing that led me to that breakup as well, because I started realizing that my partner, my boyfriend at the time, was very, very focused on accruing wealth and like hustle culture. And I started realizing that I wasn’t interested in that lifestyle the same way he was. And a huge part of that was just like casual side comments made on behind the bastards. And then over the seven or so years since then, that podcast has gotten, I think, more openly, you know, like anti central power systems. And once I liked and trusted that host enough, I started listening to other podcasts within their within their network, and that has what’s really, what’s really gotten me going on thinking about these things. And, you know, I’m sure that there were, I would imagine, I guess I can’t say, I’m sure, because I don’t know him, but I’m sure there were probably times that this host in, you know, back in 2016 2017 when it was just people talking about, you know, bad people in history. If I can imagine feeling like, what am I doing with my life? Am I really making the change that I want to see in this world? And like they have figured out how to do it, and they definitely, at least opened the door for me, and I’m sure for many, many, many other listeners, to kind of go back and examine some of those things. That was a very long explanation. I’m sorry,
Caden Christopher 1:01:30
I agree. Yeah, you become a multiplier of thoughts that may ripple and change things because they lead to actions,
Kayla Fratt 1:01:42
yeah, hopefully, yeah, yeah, hopefully, and yeah, and it’s okay if it doesn’t for everyone. Like, I also think one
Caden Christopher 1:01:48
for everyone, of course not like, we’re not, yeah, important enough to make that big a difference, but we can do what we can. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 1:01:56
yeah. And I think again, as I, as I get older, I get both more radical in my own politics, but also more understanding of other people. And I guess that’s kind of matured, and that’s what, to me, kind of feels like part of the part of the radicalization is understanding everyone else’s agency and where they’re coming from. And like my favorite word is sonner, which is the the understanding of everyone else’s life being as complex and three dimensional and rich as your own. Like sonner, sonder, s, O, N, D, E, R, I tried to figure out how to make that the name of my dog training business, and it just like, didn’t really such a good word. Yeah.
Caden Christopher 1:02:37
Yeah, yeah.
Kayla Fratt 1:02:41
And, you know, I’ve got friends who used to be more radical and are now focused on getting pregnant and having kids. And I think younger me would have struggled with that and felt like they’re abandoning the cause or whatever, but like they’re dedicating their lives towards building a family and being happy with that. And I’m not convinced that me being so much more stressed and focused on the things that I’m stressed and focused on is better for anyone, including the planet or me. Yeah, like I’m not, I’m not doubting myself, necessarily, but I guess like trying to extend that grace to people that again, I think a younger me would have struggled to see friends making that shift
Caden Christopher 1:03:26
Absolutely, yeah. Like, I’ve seen that too, and but like now I also I think of it. I was just, why was I thinking about this the other day? Oh, yeah, because of the because of how I’m socializing my puppies, right? I’m socializing them even though they haven’t had their first vaccine yet. And I was explaining on the the blog post I wrote on their third week of life, why, why this is important to me and also why I believe that someone choosing to do things in a very different way should be able to do so too, and that what I’m really feeling strongly about is not that things should be done my way, but that people get to do things their way, yeah. And in a way, that’s that, that sentiment, and I think there’s variation in human behavior and in the behavior of individuals, because there has to be, because otherwise the species wouldn’t get anywhere.
Kayla Fratt 1:04:36
Totally Yeah.
Caden Christopher 1:04:38
And that’s, in a way, part of that that some people go and have kids and other people like get stressed and worried about the burning forests and the rising sea levels,
Kayla Fratt 1:04:51
yeah, yeah, and the
Caden Christopher 1:04:54
genocide, and thank you for Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kayla Fratt 1:04:58
And some people do both. And some people. Also in between the two, and some people probably
Caden Christopher 1:05:04
do neither, sitting in a hammock on the Bahamas.
Kayla Fratt 1:05:13
I mean, I love cosplaying as a person every so often. I think that’s also really good for you. So okay, I think we should probably start wrapping up here. Is there anything I don’t know. Do you have takeaways? Do you have tips? Do you have other thoughts, questions?
Caden Christopher 1:05:32
I mean, my my tip would just be to only follow laws. That makes sense. I any sense at all that’s one small way that you can start undermining the system that is actually damaging
Kayla Fratt 1:05:56
yeah. I like that. I Yeah, yeah. I don’t know if I have anything quite that, quite that clear as a tip, I think, just figure out what feels good to you at this moment and feel try to feel okay pursuing what feels Good and doable to you right now. And if that’s protesting every single day and dropping everything else like, great. And if that’s throwing yourself into training for a can across event with your dog, also, great. Yeah.
Caden Christopher 1:06:36
One more thing. I was talking to Shui Branson the other day, and she reminded me of something that I think is really important. If you have too much or like, Get out or try to get out of the scarcity culture mindset. If you have too much of something, or more than you need, like apple juice, share it with your delivery person. There’s no reason to hoard stuff, including money. Yes, like, if I have more than I need right now and you have less than you need, I want to share it with you.
Kayla Fratt 1:07:11
Yeah, no, I really like that. Well, cada and where can people find you online? I know some people in from my podcast feed should figure out where your podcast feed is and
Caden Christopher 1:07:26
well, yeah, my my podcast is called our one wild and precious lives and our dogs. There’s a couple of podcasts with similar titles out there. Most of them don’t have dogs in the title, but Kayla just put it in the in your show notes. Yeah, I’ve got it. Otherwise, I’m a dog. Is a bunk between strangers on Instagram and Caden Christopher on Facebook without an H. And my website is adventure dogs anarchy.com, do I
Kayla Fratt 1:08:03
haven’t seen your new website. I’m gonna check that out. Yeah, and we’re, we’re collies without borders on Instagram, which is a name that I picked before I really started getting super anti border. I know. I’m really glad I’ve got it. Yeah, yeah, it was a, totally a play on, like, Border Collies that travel. And now I’m like, no, no, actually, screw international borders. They just do bad things. So yeah, that’s my Instagram is probably where you’re going to hear more of the conversations that are akin to this. And then, like, officially, professionally, I am at Canine conservationists for everything else. It’s the name of the podcast. It’s the website. You’ll find all of the stuff there. And that’s, you know, the more we talk about dogs in conservation there, and that’s about it. Yeah, no. Thank you so much for this conversation. I found this. It’s just one of the things I hate, I guess, about being in the sciences and maybe, and part of this is maybe also just being in a PhD program, is I just feel, oh my god. I feel so siloed right now, like it’s just, I miss having these sorts of com, you know, conversations. And thank you for being willing to share one with me, because it’s, it says they can be hard to find. You know, people are tired and don’t always want to have this sort of conversation.
Caden Christopher 1:09:27
Totally fair. Tiring now I’m yeah, that was an excellent way to spend a Tuesday morning. Thanks for and it’s nice to catch up as any as always. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 1:09:39
yeah, it was good to see you. Tell the puppies how much I love them.
Caden Christopher 1:09:43
I will. I’m really sad that my camera isn’t working. I can’t really, I know,
Kayla Fratt 1:09:46
well, I’m, you’re, you’re, the Instagram algorithm seems to have figured out that I am interested in your puppies. So whenever I open Instagram, I just see your puppies. So it’s great. So all right, everyone, I hope that your. Feeling inspired to get outside of me a K9Conservationist, in whatever way suits your passions and skill set. And when I say that, I really mean that, like all the stuff we talked about in this episode counts, so we’ll talk to you all later. Bye!