In this episode of K9 Conservationists, Kayla speaks with our long time patron Tayllor Pittman about selecting and preparing dogs to be demonstration dogs.
Science Highlight: Detection Distance and Environmental Factors in Conservation Detection Dog Surveys
Links Mentioned in the Episode:
Where to find Tayllor: Instagram | Facebook
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Transcript (AI-Generated)
Kayla Fratt
Hello and welcome to the K9 Conservationists podcast, where we’re positively obsessed with conservation detection dogs, Join us every week to discuss ecology, odor dynamics, dog behavior and everything in between. I’m your host, Kayla Fratt, and I’m one of the cofounders of K9 Conservationists, where we train dogs to detect data for researchers, agencies and NGOs. Today I am joined by one of our longest standing patrons of the podcast Tayllor Pittman. We are going to be talking about selecting raising training preparing dogs to be demonstration dogs. So welcome to podcast Tayllor, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and, you know, professionally your dogs, whatever it is you care to share with the audience?
Tayllor Pittman
Well, like Kayla said, my name is Taylor Pittman. I have been training dogs seriously with like the intent to learn since about 2015. So I was about 16 years old. Then I started out with four h dog competitions a fair because I live in a desert mountain town. And that’s all that was accessible to me. My poor first dog was a blue heeler, and she got to suffer through about every dog sport I could get books on. She tried a lot of different things, tricks, agility, obedience, we even took a run at nosework at one point and ended up dropping it. And currently, I have two dogs. I have Kepler in Canada. They’re both mini American shepherds. And they’re currently training hopefully for detection work next summer to do muscle detection on boats. And then the other big thing that I do in the dog community is I run our local four h dog program. And in case you don’t know what four h is, it is a organization based around getting kiddos involved in agriculture and stem and the arts. There’s kind of everything there. And I just do the dog portion of it. So I help reach out to kiddos and help them train their dogs.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, well, cool. And thanks so much for being on the show. And why why is it that you say that your healer suffered through things? Or is it just because you were a baby trainer? Or was she not interested in training? Or are you just being self deprecating?
Tayllor Pittman
self deprecation there, but she definitely sometimes I think back on stuff that I trained or I find like one off notes and I’m like, Oh, why? Why would you train that like my nose work to give you guys this is what I did. I took Q tips. I put essential oils on them. I threw them in a soap box, drilled holes in soap box and was like okay, go find the thing. And I like held it in front of her nose and I fed her a bunch of treats and I was like okay, go by find the thing. And then I got frustrated. I’m like, we’re gonna go drink tricks. So, rough there.
Kayla Fratt
Standard excited new trainer stuff. Yeah, okay. Well, so before we get into it, we are going to go over a research highlight. We have some new volunteers that have been helping us with our research highlights since I have not had enough time to keep up with everything else as well as read some of these papers. So today we’re reading a paper called detection distance and environmental factors in conservation detection dog surveys. This was published in the Journal of wildlife management in January 2011 by Sarah Reed, Alice a bit like Amy hurt and Wayne gates. So the study had two main objectives the first first, the author sought to determine how six environmental factors could affect the detection dog’s ability to locate a wildlife target odor, in this case, a carnivore scout. Specifically, they looked at temperature, wind speed, variability of wind direction, relative humidity, cumulative precipitation, and days since the last precipitation that was over five millimeters. Second, in order to better quantify the the total area searched by a dog, in a survey, the author’s estimated the probability of detecting target odor based on the distance of the dog from the odor.
Kayla Fratt
So, yeah, this was a really cool study, basically, between 2003 and 2005. They trained two dogs to assist in surveys for mammalian carnivores scouts in Northern California.
Kayla Fratt
Over time, they found that both dogs detected about 75% Over 75% of the scouts that were located within 10 meters of their transect. With the dogs detection rates decreasing with increasing distance of the scouts from the transect line, so to translate, if the scouts were less than 10 meters away from a transect, they, the the dogs found over 75% of them. And if as the dogs get further and further as the scouts get further and further away from the transect line, the lines that the dogs and the handlers are walking, then the dogs performance deteriorated a little bit. Among the environmental factors that they were looking at precipitation was the most important variable explaining variation in scat detection rates. And then what they kind of wrote out in the abstract is that precipitation likely degrades or removes cats from the landscapes over time. And the detection rates increase his Scott begins to accumulate a following the last substantial rain event of the year. And then one of the big notes that they had here is. So therefore, if you’re trying to use the number of Scots, and then a little bit of a little bit of math, to figure out how many animals are in an area, you need to take into account the last seasonal rainfall up particularly potentially in kind of these northern California climates that have really highly seasonal rain events. Because if you do your survey, say directly after a big rain, you may end up with deflated numbers of the population versus if you do your survey, after a pretty long drought, there’s a bunch of scouts that have accumulated your dog is going to be finding a whole bunch of them. And you may end up with inflated population estimates. As not, as always, but as is pretty common here. They only had two dogs in the study. So that’s always something to keep in mind. And you may also find, for example, if you were in a tropical rainforest, where it rains every single day, precipitation may not end up being your most influential factor. But in this particular case, it was. So Taylor, do you have any questions on that? Before we jump into your questions about demonstration docs?
Tayllor Pittman
No, it just sounds really cool. Um, I kind of want to.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, well, that’s, that’s the goal. Because I know, you know, we never really are able to get into enough of these papers on the show. I’m really trying to, you know, summarize, you know, years of work and research and statistics and everything in like a two minute overview. So I think we all should take the time to go ahead and read as many of these papers as we can. So well, let’s get into it. So I think, you know, we were talking before we hopped on as we’re, as we’re thinking about getting a dog who could do demonstrations for us, which we can talk about why that may or may not be important. But you know, I think step one is before we get the dog, step two is after we get the dog and then step three is as we’re kind of planning the planning the events, so why don’t we start out with any of the questions you’ve got as far as selecting a dog so before you have a dog in the home, what are you thinking about?
Tayllor Pittman
So before I have a dog in the home, I generally make a list. Sometimes it’s a spreadsheet, sometimes it’s just a text on my phone to myself, about qualities that make a good ambassador like things that I’m looking for in puppies. And what I’m going to do when I’m, if I’m looking for a puppy or if I’m looking for an adult dog. So, personally, like with Kenna and Kepler, when I got Kepler, first of all, y’all, he was a school project, he was a school expense. I luckily went to a program that allowed me my degrees in theater arts, and I was like, I want to do a class on training animals for performance on stage and they’re like, Okay, you’re on your own, but have fun, write us a report. So Kepler, when I went looking for him, I was looking for friendly dogs, a because my healer, not super friendly. So I wanted something that I could bring into the classroom to do demos with if I needed to for my class. And then also I was looking for dogs that I knew, were smart. And when I look for dogs, I’m looking for parents that try to outsmart their owners, and are having that kind of mentality of figuring it out before you are actually trying to teach them to figure it out. And luckily, I have a friend who ended up being a breeder, and I know her dogs really well. And I’ve watched him grow up from puppies, and they fit that degree. So I ended up with Kevlar. And I got to meet him when he was three weeks old, and got to hold him and do all this stuff with him. So I kind of kind of cheated with the bonding on that one. And then with Kenna, my goal with her was, again, I need you to be at least your parents to at least be neutral with strange dogs and strangers, and then I need a nose. So I found a breeder who had nosework dogs. And that’s how I ended up with her. So that’s what I was looking for. What do you look for Kayla?
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, so when thinking particularly about a dog for demonstrations, that’s, you know, so we’ll kind of set aside all of the stuff that makes a dog a good working dog, you know, we’ve got plenty of episodes on that, let’s just kind of assume you feel good about the dogs working ability, you’ve got the drive, the health, blah, blah, blah, all the good stuff that we’ve talked about all the time. So then I’m really looking for a dog who is not just friendly with strangers, but is consistently confident and outgoing. So it’s not that I’m looking for a dog who like wants to jump up and lick everyone or everything like I don’t need like an over enthusiastic reader as a demonstration dog. But I actually would prefer to have a dog who is neutral but extremely confident and stable versus a dog who is friendly, but can be a little bit unpredictable. So the shelter dogs in some ways, it’s almost easier to assess this with shelter dogs because you’re looking at an adult who’s in a really dynamic, stressful, fast changing environment. And if you see a dog who’s just like totally cool and copacetic in the shelter and is, you know, adjusting well to the chaos of shelter life, that’s actually a pretty good indicator in my My opinion with the big caveat of then you need to figure out and hopefully either you or your mentors or someone that you’re able to bring in can help you ensure that what you’re seeing is not a dog who is kind of shut down. Or I think there’s a lot of kind of shelter stress sort of behaviors that to a novice, I may look like a dog that is coping well. But I’m really talking about a dog who is like confident head up tail wags, and walks into every single room, every single person and is just like, Yeah, I’ve got this. And that’s really the sort of attitude that I would like to see in a good demo dog. And we’ll we’ll at some point kind of circle back in this episode and talk a little bit more about kind of the different ways that demonstrations can look, because there are ways to set up a demonstration to work with a dog who maybe isn’t as like rock solid as what I’m describing. So barley fits this category for me, he, when he was in the shelter, he was basically dropped off in the overnight kind of with a note that said he was friendly with dogs, people kids. And he came out of the overnight kennel, which is like a tube that they get put in one side, the door closes, and it can’t be opened again. And then the other side opens to the interior of the shelter. He was in that to overnight for, you know, probably eight to 10 hours he came out and immediately was like ready to go ready to hang with the shelter staff. They did his veterinary tax checks, they did his vaccinations, and then the evaluator knew I was looking for a dog and like reached out to me and then I went and met him less than an hour after he’d come out of the overnight kennel and he was like, Hey, you want to go play fetch, you know, like he totally good to go. So I pretty much knew immediately and he is that is born out with him. I’ve never had any question or hesitation about bringing him into like, elementary schools to, you know, all sorts of places, museums, he’s done back to back to back demos at some of these big places. And he’s been really good with that. And I think he’s a good contrast with niffler. So I picked niffler. And I picked his breeder and parents because both of his parents do performance dog stuff. So I kind of figured, okay, he’s got the genetics of parents who are able to work and engage with their handlers and greet people in situations like, you know, the halftime game for local sports, or for he actually his breeder, and his mom’s owner is pretty heavily involved in forage and as a lot of stuff with that. And, you know, so that has, he’s got the genetics for it. niffler has struggled a little bit more with proximity to strangers than I would like he is showing at this point now. So he’s almost two years old, he is able to like walk through a farmer’s market walk through big urban areas, he’s able to engage with me and work and train in these areas. He is not yet ready to go into like an elementary school, or a situation where there are more kind of unpredictable people or like kids who may like pop up out of nowhere and try to hang off his neck. And that’s okay. I’m hoping he’s going to be able to get to that point. But we’re really going at his pace and working and setting him up for success. So yeah, I think, overall, when looking for a demonstration dog, this is where I get a lot pickier, I think, than just looking for a good working dog. And I think this is where for me, I started having a harder time than if you’re potentially just searching for a dog who can do the work because there’s a lot of dogs with, you know, reactivity issues, or maybe dogs who hate kids or dogs or separation anxiety or like there’s a lot of behavior issues that are not incompatible with conservation detection dog work inherently, but are potentially incompatible with being a demonstration dog. So
Tayllor Pittman
right, well, part of the thing that I think about too, is like my place so like, yes, I want to do the conservation work. But I’m also heavily involved with all these kiddos. And luckily most of my kiddos are like all farm kids. So their approach to dogs is very snap my dog, don’t touch it unless you’re told to touch it, which is nice. And was helpful when I had my healer as a demo dog because it’s like guys, you really can’t touch this dog. She’s fine. Like she’s not going to attack you just don’t mess with her. But definitely having that ability to be touched randomly is very Yeah, exactly.
Kayla Fratt
And like barley, for example. It’s not a dog who enjoys being petted but will tolerate backoff Warren approach appropriately if, if a kid does something ridiculous and he he has proven over and over again, I’m gonna I’m not like using fourth graders as my test subjects here. I’m not like Well, let’s see if he bites like that is not at all what I’m saying. But barley is a really good example of a dog who you wouldn’t necessarily describe him as cuddly or even necessarily super affiliative with people but he’s incredibly tolerant and confident and like self assured jarred in these situations and that, again, it’s more important to me versus niffler. Once you’re in with him, and really at this point, it’s like 90% of people like he’s immediately like, hello, I love you so much please touch my bike, you know, but he’s a little bit less consistent and has a lot more of that kind of, hopefully young dog sort of stuff as far as like he’s just not. He’s not as confident he doesn’t walk into the place like he owns it. And barley absolutely does barley walks and, and it’s like, it’s not about what I can do for you. It’s what you can do for me. That really makes him a great demo dog. And once you pull out a toy in particular, then you know, everything else fades away for him. And he can work in literally any, any situation ever. And niffler is not quite there yet. But again, he’s 22 months old. So we’ll say
Tayllor Pittman
Kepler is still pretty young. He’s just turned two. So he’s 24 months. And he the summer because I take both my dogs to my summer job with me which is scorekeeping and supervising softball. So we sit there for three hours and watch softball, great, great way to place train your dogs. They know that when that bed comes out, that’s there chillin for the rest of the night. But I left him, I teach my dogs to ground tie in a way like you do with horses, where you just dropped the leash, and they’re supposed to stay there. And so I had him tied to my chair and one of the adults wasn’t a child, mind you, because I would have been more aware of the situation, ran up behind him with her arms behind her back and stomped really loud. And luckily, I was only five feet away. I don’t like abandoned my dogs, everybody, but he just kind of turned and looked at her like, what’s up, man? Do you need something? And then she just kind of walked on? Like, I don’t know what she was expecting from that particular interaction, but did prove that he could be trustworthy with at least some weird adults.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, yeah. And see, that’s the sort of situation that I don’t think niffler is quite ready for yet. And again, we’ll talk more about how I still anticipate being able to use him as a demo dog, even without, you know that necessarily like 120% like he can handle every single weird person ever. So yeah, what’s next?
Tayllor Pittman
Guess it’s when you get the dog now? Because that’s the only question.
Kayla Fratt
That makes sense.
Tayllor Pittman
So some of the questions I have are like skills that you train. And then in parentheses, I have normal and weird ones. So like, normal ones I think about are like, can you be in this environment and not be stressed out? Stuff like that?
Kayla Fratt
Yeah. So I think at a bare minimum, I like to kind of practice with demo dogs, ensuring that they can walk on a reasonable leash. I’m not necessarily saying loose leash, I hate teaching loose leash walking. It was something that even back when I was a professional dog trainer full time, it was just not my forte. So I just asked that they can behave somewhat civilized in a wide variety of environments, kind of navigating crowds. And I asked that they’re able to work in a wide variety of strange environments with strange noises and scents and sights and people and people watching them. And, at a, at a minimum, that’s really all I need. For a good demo dog, I need a dog, I can get into the venue, do a demo and to get out of the venue. Ideally, though, I like being able to station the dog at my feet while I’m talking. So back when I was at working dogs for conservation barley, and I did, I think three days in a row with three demos a day, at the California Science Center, la Science Center, I can’t remember which one it was it was in LA. And barley would kind of be stationing in on his mat while I gave our talk. And then he would get to come out and do the demonstration. And it was really nice for me that I didn’t have to have a crate, I didn’t have to cover the crate and put a fan on it and like ask someone to feed him constantly to keep him quiet. I could just have him lying quietly there and waiting until I was ready to kind of give the cue and bring him out to work. And the same when I’ve done presentations for like Dr. Erian. Gomez class at University of Montana. We try to go and talk to him, he teaches a really cool class called careers and wildlife. And we try to go and talk to those students every semester. So you know, kind of at a bare minimum, that’s it. And I think the asking dogs to search in that environment is actually a big ask that can be a little bit overlooked, where you’re like, oh my gosh, this is an operational search log. Of course, I can just go and do this in front of other people. But that’s not necessarily the case. If you haven’t practiced it, you don’t necessarily know. So like last winter, I actually did some practices where I asked friends or family, you know, groups of three to five people, ideally some people he knew to watch niffler and get him used to doing demonstrations in a really low stress environment. went. And particularly if you want to be able to do stuff that’s more engaging to the crowd. So with barley, I will do things like, I will have a giant lecture hall and I will hand a sample off to the professor or the teacher, I will ask them to collaborate with the students to hide it somewhere in the lecture hall and barley and I will leave and I’ve had them hide it inside of a student’s backpack under a student’s chair, you know, and they love that. And that makes it a better demo. But that is an additional layer of you know, not only does your dog know how to search, but is your dog really comfortable with ignoring students in that close of proximity? That’s not something I would do with no floor yet. But it’s fun. So then kind of going back any other skills that I think are necessary for demonstrations? Um, no, I really think that’s kind of it. I, I am definitely at a point as a trainer, where I like my dogs to be well mannered, I like them to be well behaved. I like them to kind of intuitively be able to figure out how to behave appropriately in a wide variety of situations. But I have not taught a lot of like fancy tricks or specific cues or anything that is really you have really all that specific to this.
Tayllor Pittman
Oh, I just had that conversation with my dad. He’s like your dog knows nothing. Referring to Cana, my baby dog was like four ish months old now. And I’m like, she knows how to search for food and grass. And she can settle if I sit down for long enough. Great, excellent. Good work.
Kayla Fratt
That’s exactly I mean, yeah, I am always a little I was just in Lincoln visiting a good friend, Lincoln, Nebraska. And we were we were out with the dogs. And he had been kind of raving all weekend about how well trained by dogs were. And he was like, Oh my gosh, because I had like, handed the leash off to him at some point and went into the van. And he was like, they just stood there perfectly still watching and waiting for you. Like they’re so ready and so cute into you. But then we’re walking. And it’s like neither one of them really walks nicely on leash anymore. And I’m always so embarrassed by it. But it’s also like, well, I don’t know, they’re, they’re on leash, like once a month right now. It’s just not a priority for us.
Tayllor Pittman
I definitely forgot to teach Keppler how to heal on a leash until he was six months old, because he was a pandemic, baby and all of his walks were off leash, and took them to a training class with a fellow trainer in town. And I was like, huh, I promise I know how to train dogs. Definitely forgot about loose leash walking.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, as I said, I kind of hate it. I kind of hate walking dogs I we run and we search I that, like, my dogs don’t really go on walks. So that’s just not part of my anyway, that’s, that’s
Tayllor Pittman
right. The other skill that I have to think about for my dogs, and something that might who don’t have at all is in for age, it’s really, really helpful to have a dog you can take that’s trained, and hand it to your newbie trainers. Because for each kiddos are like age seven to 16. So if you have like your T or six, seven to 18, I mean, that’s 16. If you have your teenagers great, you can tell them what to do, and they can figure it out. But when you have a seven year old you’re trying to teach to teach a dog to sit. And then their dog is 100 pound lab, who pulls on the leash like a freight train. And you have to sit there and hold them back. It’s kind of a mess. And unfortunately, my two, if I hand them to another person, they won’t like freak out. But they stand there and they look at me like where’s mom, you’re not my mom, I don’t want to listen to you. Luckily, I have a friend who has kiddos in for age and she comes to practice and she has dogs I can hand off to test stuff with. But it’s definitely like a skill set you have to teach is what I’m finding out. Yeah.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, that’s a great point. That’s not something I necessarily do a lot for demos, but for instruction Yes. I’ve what I’ve taught barley in particular, it actually haven’t tried yet with niffler. But I suspect will work well. Next time I see Rachel and Heather were We were planning on trying to pass our dogs around a little bit and see how it went. But I just have a specific training bag that means that they are going to search and they’re going to work. And with barley, I have been able to just hand that bag off to someone and that bag is God. Like he he will follow that back off the so like the first time back when I was at WT foresee I like handed handed the bag off to Dr. Richards. And she was like, Do you think he’s gonna work fine for me? And I was like, yeah, if you’ve got the bag, he’ll do it. And you know, same thing when I handed him to Melissa Steen. Same thing when I handed him to Rachel, you know, it’s, it’s been very, very consistent and really nice to just have this like magic fanny pack that he knows holds all of the goods sent werkstoffe And it’s, you know, as soon as I hand that off to someone that someone becomes his handler to him. And I haven’t tested that out yet to see if it’s going to work as well without additional training for niffler. But I suspect it will I think I think it’s a pretty good tactic.
Tayllor Pittman
I do like that idea. And I also just can See barely like staring like,
Kayla Fratt
oh, yeah, he’s so funny he’ll like literally like walk backwards on its hind legs trying to like be as close to the bag as possible, but also like not taking his eyes off. And it’s just like, like people will ask like, oh my god, did you teach him to do that I’m like, this is just, this is just barley
Tayllor Pittman
um, skills training. So the other one like specifically that I pulled out is like ignoring people or interacting with people, which we kind of talked about when I really started working with Kepler, I let him interact with people, I kind of swung that pendulum the other way. Because I was like, I need you to be able to just be around people. And if you want to interact with people, great, I’m just going to let you because my, again, my healer trauma from having a dog that’s not friendly is a thing. And I was like, I need you to be able to interact with strangers. So I don’t have to worry about you facing the consequences from that. Now, we are working on some distractibility around people. And so with Ken, I’m like, do what you want, but I prefer neutral. So we’re going to try to set you up to be neutral.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, no, that’s such a good point. And I think also what you’re saying is a great example of that kind of like pendulum swing we often get with our next dog where it’s like, from your healer, she was not friendly with people’s and with Kepler, maybe you went too far with the friendly thing. And then yeah, hopefully with Canada, we’ll be able to, like get that nice, middle. But one of the things that’s always so hard about that is that each dog is different. So we can adjust our training in a way that is different from our last dog. But because the new dog is also different, you know, we just don’t necessarily know. Yeah, personally, I would rather have again that like confident I own the place. I know my job I can do this dog that isn’t as friendly with people then have a dog who is super friendly, but distractible. And what I have basically done is and this is a combination of working with the venue and working with the dog. So I ideally have a, especially with kind of a newer demo dog, I have a really clear search area that we’re going to be able to work and demonstrate within and the people, the visitors, the guests, the the audience are not entering that area. So for a more distractible dog, a more sociable dog that hopefully will help. And then I have specific points and times where I will allow the audience to interact with the dog. And that is kind of on cue for the dog as well. So I like for niffler for his demonstrations. He likes going and parading his ball around getting his butt scratched by people. So we will do that after the search though he’s not allowed to do that during the search. But once he’s got the reward and same for barley, barley, his favorite thing in demos is to take the ball to everyone in the in the audience and ask each different person to throw it. But that is like an interaction, obviously, he can only do that behavior once he has finished the search and then has got the ball. And that’s the way I like doing it. I think you certainly could get by with a much friendlier dog and doing more of kind of like outreach sort of stuff. And you may just have to work a little bit to set up the venue in a way that keeps the dog from interacting with people if you don’t want them to in that moment. Or you could absolutely get by with a dog. When I first started doing demonstrations and outreach with barley, I was a little bit more cautious. Because I was just kind of still getting to know him. And this was back even before I was in the conservation dog world. And I wouldn’t let people pet him I wouldn’t let people interact with him. I wouldn’t let people throw the ball for him. And you know, one of the nice things about being in like a demonstration scenario is that you, you can generally kind of interact with people and give them instruction ahead of time in a way that actually in my experience works better than having a dog in like a coffee shop or something like that.
Tayllor Pittman
Right, exactly. So switching gears just a little bit. How do you prep yourself for my question specifically, is how to prep the human for people. But how do you prep yourself for your demos?
Kayla Fratt
Like how do I prepare myself to give public speeches or?
Tayllor Pittman
Yes, so this kind of came across. So my minor is in Communication Studies. I don’t have these problems. When I think of questions, questions that other people have kind of popped in my head and I know a lot of friends of mine are like how do you talk in front of 100 people and it’s like, well, practice and also just a lot of gumption.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, I also do not have this problem. I basically am a professional talker at this point. So but I did also, you know, it’s not that I was born with that, like I was a theater kid in elementary, middle high school, so that certainly helped. I also did some public speaking in high school go through, I think it was called forensics, which I’ve never quite figured out why that is the name for competitive public speaking, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. That’s probably what it was. And, yeah, you know, so I think the big thing is know your material, know your time limit, practice, practice, practice, it’s the one of the things that I have really found hard is, once you get flustered, or once you get kind of thrown off, you are more likely to then kind of continue having problems. Or, you know, again, like, if you kind of stumble over something, then you get flustered, and then you get worried, and then you shuffle your notes. And, you know, it can fall apart from there. So knowing your material really well, and practicing for that can be really helpful. And then also, you know, practicing for those moments where something goes wrong. Like, I think there’s also a lot of benefit to not, not just listening to podcasts about dogs, but also like I listened to a lot of, you know, like hidden brain and some of these other shows that do talk about performance and professional performance and those sorts of things. And like, there are these really cool stories, not necessarily in the public speaking world. But like Michael Phelps, when he beat the world record for the number of Olympic medals that had ever been attained by a single athlete, he actually did that with his goggles full of water, because he knew his strokes and his race so well, that when he launched off the starting blocks, and his goggles filled with water, he could just swim the race the same way anyway. And I think if you really want to get good at public speaking, we’re trying to think, in that realm. So what I find personally really helpful, I actually hate practicing with other people, I would rather just dive in and do the presentation live. So what I do, instead of practicing with friends and family, is I will record myself doing the presentation and then watch myself back. And that is less aversive to me for most people, I think it’s probably going to be the other way around. Most people would probably rather practice in front of friends, friends and family, and then get feedback versus watching video of yourself. But you know, both of those things can work.
Tayllor Pittman
Yeah, for. So my background is also in theater and recording yourself was like a requirement. And if you just put the screen so you can’t see it. And you just listen, it’s very helpful. But I’m also a very improv person, which is great in some ways, and not great and others. So I tend to when I look at speeches, and I drove my professors mad when I was getting my degree because they’re like, We need an outline. And it needs to be everything you’re going to say and I’m like, here’s four bullet points, and I’m gonna give a 30 minute speech on this. And about after the third one, they’re like, Okay, whatever, just do whatever you want. But I think that also having that improv background helps when things go wrong. Yeah, a lot for me, because I’m like, okay, cool. Pivot. What are we going to do now?
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, no, exactly. And I think like podcasting certainly has helped with that. And I think also, you know, one of the big benefits doing practice with other people, instead of doing video, is also practice having your friends ask dumb questions. And obviously, there’s no such thing as dumb questions, but particularly with kids, you can a lot of questions that just kind of throw you off, like, that seem kind of irrelevant. And that can like a particular I’ve noticed for a lot of scientists that really like, gets them off balance is, you know, you’ll give this like really beautiful, fancy presentation about the dogs. And then you’ll have like, an eight year old raise their hand and be like, I once had a dog that bla bla bla bla bla bla bla, has your dog ever died, you know, when you’re just like white? Like, I can’t even think of I know, I’ve gotten some really wild questions from kids that a lot of times, they’re just irrelevant, and you can just kind of like move through them, or they’re not even that they’re irrelevant, but they’re just like, you know, kids will raise their hand and ask like, what are your dogs eat? You know? And it’s like, oh, okay, yeah, sure. Let’s answer that question. That was not necessarily what I was thinking we were going to be talking about, but that’s fine. Or, you know. And then, like, adults will often ask questions, like, Can any breed do this job? Or like, what happens when the dog retires? Like, there’s a lot of standard questions that are good to be familiar with, and particularly some of the questions that are a little bit harder. You know, again, like what happens when the dogs were higher? How do you know when a dog is ready to retire? It’s good to practice answering that. And then if you’re going to be in more of a scientific or academic situation, then you also would, would probably want to practice some of the questions that may require knowing your material, really front and back really in and out. You know, someone’s going to ask, like, like, here’s an example from the course that we’re running right now. Someone messaged on our WhatsApp they were they were like, okay, so you said that there was X number of reps, it was 35 reps, but I’m counting up the number of false positives and false negatives in this. And it comes out to like 56, what’s, what gaps? And it actually took me a couple minutes of reading the text and kind of thinking back through my notes to be like, Oh, it was because in many of the repetitions, we had more than one false alert before we got to a true alert. So you would end up with, you know, 56 potential alerts, even in only 35 repetitions. But that’s the sort of thing that if you are giving a live talk, you want to be prepared for those sorts of nitpicky questions and not, not get thrown off by them. And then also be prepared to say, I don’t recall, I don’t know, let me get back to you. You know, those sorts of things. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Tayllor Pittman
Yeah, there’s definitely nothing wrong with being like, get back to you later.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah. Turns out, I don’t actually have every single data point memorized, I have, you know, just try to prepare as much as possible, but you’re never going to know all of it. And I think knowing your audience and preparing for the sorts of curveballs that a particular audience is most likely to throw at you is helpful, like, odds are if you’re presenting to a group of PhD colleges, they’re probably not gonna ask you what you eat, what you feed the dogs? Or have you ever had a dog die, or, you know, like these, like random curveball questions. But with kids, you know, definitely be prepared for that sort of thing.
Tayllor Pittman
Yes. Yes, for sure. So the other thing is kind of step three, which is after you get the dog, you’ve done the training, you’re prepared to go out and do your ambassador events. So it’s kind of a series of questions relating to each other. So like, different ways to set up Ambassador events? Do you do school groups? Do you reach out to places drew do dry runs, which we kind of talked about. And luckily, recently, within this last week, I work within a school district. So in education, I’m not a teacher, but I have teachers that I know they’re in the building. And a bunch of the science teachers have a science club and like a conservation club, and I’m like, Ooh, can I come do a talk? I was like, I’ll do it. And I will talk to your students. And this will be a great dry run for me to figure out what
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, yeah. So you know, a lot of my early experience came from teaching dog classes. So that was back even before I was in the conservation world. Then next step, when I was at working dogs for conservation, my first role with working dogs for conservation was as their communications and outreach coordinator. So it was literally my job and barleys job to like, they were like, Oh, we’ve got a demo, you guys are gonna go do it unless it was like a really high level donor, or kind of something where it was more specific, you know, than they’d send Megan Parker or even like the executive director out, but in most cases, it was barley and I so I didn’t necessarily have to try to do the outreach and find that the events as much I mean, I certainly did as part of my role, but it was a little bit different. Cuz I was also I was embedded in working dogs or conservation. Now with quinoa and conservationists, a lot of our recent demonstrations have come around through Skype, a scientist. So we are all listed on Skype, a scientist and we get matched with school groups every year. Last year, I had the pleasure of one of the three classrooms that I was matched with was in Colorado Springs while I was living in Denver. So I actually reached out to the teacher and was like, Hey, do you want parley? And I’d come down and do this live instead of over Skype? And she’s like, Oh, my gosh, of course. And I was like, Do you have other fourth grade classes? Like, do you want me to do it for all of the classes? And she was like, Yes, oh, my God. So violin, I got to do three or four classes all within the same school. So you know, I think Skype a scientist is a really good way to start out. It’s, it’s nice, because you just kind of sign up for it, you’ll get matched with two to four classrooms, I think. And it’s over Skype. So you don’t want necessarily do it live. And when I do it remotely, and I do do it over zoom or whatever, I will just kind of set up and practice. And this is a whole other can of worms that I don’t think we’ll have time for the doing these demos over over video. And that kind of requires, you know, knowing the boundaries of where your camera reaches and trying to keep the dog and set it up appropriately within that. And that is tricky, but can be done. And then when I am kind of communicating with venues once we’ve got somewhere in mind, so then a lot of so actually will go back. Some other ways that I find places to do demos is I will sometimes just literally post and you know, you get forage groups, school groups, whatever kind of reaching out and saying, oh my gosh, yeah, we’re within an hour of you. We’d love to have you and your dogs come by. And then, you know tabling given events, you know, pet fasts, those sorts of things. doing demonstrations at Outreach and fundraising events as well can be a good draw. So if you’re doing you know, the local coffee shop is donating $1 from every coffee shop shown or sold on a given day. You know, see if you can bring your dog by to do a demo. Those sorts of things and that there’s not really a great formula for that necessarily. Then once I have a venue kind of picked out kind of My next step personally, is usually figuring out okay, who’s the audience? What are they most interested in? So that I can tailor the bulk of my talk to them. And then the demonstration usually comes at the end. You know, kind of figuring out how long do they want the talk to be, again, who’s in the audience, because it’s eight year olds versus first year college students versus PhDs like vastly different conversations that you’re going to be having, or even like, I have different template conversation, presentations based on whether I’m presenting to ecologists or dog trainers, because the dog trainers and the ecologist definitely have different lenses that they’re most interested in. And then you know, sometimes you got a mixed group, but that’s fine. Like when I was at the LA Science Center, it was a different group every couple hours, and it was just whoever showed up at the museum. So it really could be kind of literally anyone in anything, which is fine, too. And then you’re then I’m starting to think about okay, what is the area that you guys have set up for us? How big is it? What’s the airflow? Like? Where are people seated? Are there going to be people who are scared of dogs are allergic to dogs, or, you know, how are we going to be interacting with them? When we did our presentation at De Macedo, when I was in Kenya, we did a presentation at a fancy Country Club in Nairobi, called the Macedo club. And when we were there, we actually went as far as practicing bringing the dogs to the venue, figuring out our route from the parking area to where the dogs would do their demo, figuring out the search area that was going to be well lit and visible for people from the from the country club. And, you know, then where the dogs could be stationed and stashed kind of in between everything. And that dry run was really, really helpful because the country club had never had dogs there before. Generally, dogs were not allowed there. And they didn’t have like an elevated stage or something set up. So we really had to figure out how to be creative with setting up an area and determining an area where the dogs could demonstrate effectively. And, you know, then figuring out who’s talking and who’s saying, well, it’s almost harder when you’ve got multiple people than if you’ve just got one because you might, you know, then you really have to make sure you’re smooth and know okay, if someone asks the question, who’s going to answer that question, who do we how do we know who’s going to step in and answer that question, because we had a couple of hiccups. Where someone asked a question that, you know, one of us stepped into answer and then someone else kind of stepped in to expand on it and that can look a little bit cluttered or unprofessional if, if not done really, really smoothly. Listen, you and your dog are already K9 conservationists by listening to this show. So go ahead and show it off. Join the club, check out our brand new merch store, which is located at k9conservationists.org/shop. It’s stocked with stickers and magnets and bags and shirts, we’re adding new designs all the time. If you’re an artist wanting to collaborate, just we split profits and are eager to hear from us reach out at [email protected]. We also offer all of our webinars on demand through our store. So you can check out our puppy raising webinar alerts and changes of behavior, introducing a target odor, as well as seeking sourcing and alerting. We’re also planning to add new webinars to this all the time. So if you’ve got a request for a webinar, or you’re a practitioner hoping to contribute a webinar, again, we’re going to split our profits with you and you can reach out to us on [email protected] Let’s keep the learning going. So that was a wide ranging answer. I think it answered all your questions and maybe went a little bit down a couple extra rabbit holes. So do you have any follow ups?
Tayllor Pittman
No, just you did answer everything things that I think about a lot to people that reach out to our four H group to do demos because we do get like people contact us is like recently this past summer our local library had a dog Palooza because that was their theme for the reading for the summer, which was great. I was excited about the reached out to a bunch of people. My first thought was, I have two kids that maybe have two dogs that can handle the general public being all up in their business. So I immediately had to be like, Okay, we gotta grab ring gates. We had massive signs printed out that said do not interact with the dogs. And then I had to prep my kiddos, which is a whole other can of prepping kiddos to do demonstrations for the general public. But it is something that I did definitely have to go in and be like, Okay, where are you putting us You can’t put us there because we got to be able to block off the general public from the dogs.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, so like when I was at the LA Science Center, it was interesting because a lot of the other dogs that were coming in for demonstrations because they kind of had like a rotating cast of characters coming through every couple couple days. Were police canines where they had and so that was actually really nice working with this venue because they were you know, they were totally prepared for me to be like no Nobody can touch the dog, nobody can look at the dog, nobody can interact with the dog in any way, shape or form. And, you know, that wasn’t, that wasn’t the case with barley at all, but it’s nice. And I think generally best to kind of err on the side of telling people in kids like no, don’t pet the dog at all, don’t interact with the dog at all. And then you can always loosen that later if the dog seems willing and interested and is actively consenting to that. And then the audience is interested. So like, when I was presenting to all those fourth graders last summer or last last fall, I guess, you know, it was very much so they were all prepped, they were actually prepped multiple times by their teachers in the days leading up to the presentation, reminded before I started talking, as I was kind of sitting there being introduced, and I reminded them again, because they’re fourth graders, and they need to be told several times and reminded it, you know, then there’s still there’s still kids with ADHD or developmental you know, whatever, I don’t know their medical histories, who, you know, you still have to kind of gently remind them or maybe place yourself between them and the dog. And this actually circling back to your question on queues. I have in the past, you know, use the fact that barley is able to do a carwash, which is what I call him coming in standing in between my knees. A lot of people will call it middle. You know, I haven’t had to use it in a demonstration yet that I can remember. But it’s something that yeah, if I did have a really pushy or rambunctious particularly kid, but who knows, maybe adult, it’s nice to kind of have a way to maneuver your dog like that. Yeah, yeah. And I think just kind of trying to prepare for that sort of stuff. Which is, which is tricky, because you just really don’t know one of the other. Again, when we were at the LA Science Center, one of our groups, you know, it just happened to be a group of like 20, developmentally, and physically disabled teens came through for one of our talks. And they were they were lovely. But you know, if your dog has never seen a motorized wheelchair before, or a wide variety of types of crutches and those sorts of things, you know, you do ideally want a demonstration dog who was really bombproof with that sort of stuff, because it’s if nothing else, it’s just rude and scary and not a good look for your dog to lose their crap over something like that. Even if, you know, it’s kind of a no harm, no foul sort of thing. And people generally are pretty understanding. But you know, you don’t want to put your dog in that situation. Right,
Tayllor Pittman
exactly. If you have small dogs like I do. So both my dogs are currently 20 foot pounds unless I am trying to working on training a pickup cue. Yeah, well, hopefully eventually look into jump into my arms cues. So that way I can just be like, no.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s, uh huh. Yeah, that’s a great additional point. And, yeah, really helpful. Because you know, stuff can get weird in demos. Yeah, I think there’s a lot to lots of reconsider here.
Tayllor Pittman
Yes. Well, this was so much fun. Yeah.
Kayla Fratt
Thank you so much. I think we’re gonna answer a couple other Patreon questions. Do you want to hang out for it? Or do you want to go and give to the rest of your evening?
Tayllor Pittman
I’m always happy to hang out. Cool. All right, well, I’m gonna just
Kayla Fratt
we’ll see how many of these we can get through in the next 15 minutes or so. So Jana, who is our our favorite Finnish patron asked a little bit about building grit in search dogs. So I think, you know, grit, to me is kind of a combination of confidence and persistence, the dog has the confidence that they know how to solve something and the persistence to stick through it. And I think this is, like many things, it’s a combination of an innate trait that your dog kind of has or doesn’t have, or has varying degrees of, it’s probably the better way to say it. And something that can be taught. So for example, you know, I think for our search dogs, grit generally is going to come into play with larger search areas, longer searches, more intricate odor cones, or kind of complicated sourcing problems, and kind of pushing through physically challenging terrain. So and we can let a pull all of those parts out and work on increasing our dog’s scale with each of those. So for example, we may need to work on improving the dog’s ability to kind of physical fitness so that they are comfortable doing these really challenging searches and running and climbing and sniffing they’ve got the diaphragm strength to sniff in really tough, intense environment. So you know, that’s part of it. If the dog isn’t physically capable of the task, then it’s not really a question of grit. Then are we building up their endurance again in that, in that field, In that lens, and then are we giving them appropriate breaks, because sometimes I think we get, we look at these things, and we think it’s a great problem or have, or a focus problem or motivation problem. And it’s literally just that the dog needs a break. Just like if you can think back to your high school calculus class class or your college calculus class. Sometimes after a really hard puzzle, you just need to give your brain a break. It’s not that you’re not motivated to take the class or that you’re lazy, or you don’t have the persistence, or you don’t have the grit. It’s just like, Okay, you just need to take five, then, you know, I think we can set up our training scenarios in a way so that the dog is having increased nose time, they’re really learning how to search longer and harder, and that they will find something if they just persist. I think we can also talk about, you know, going back to the all clear episode with Paul bunker and what to do, as we’re teaching the dogs, that there may not be something there. And then those deep accessible highs that we talked about a lot through. That’s kind of a Stacy Barnett thing, as far as teaching the dogs, how to push through brambles or cross streams, or, you know, scramble up rocks, you know, as long as it’s safe. So I kind of think of this great as like, I think we’ve got separate skill sets within that that we can we can play with and work on. Have anything to add or questions there.
Tayllor Pittman
I think I taught it accidentally when I was working with Kepler, because he would just get frustrated. Am I very much so a hands off, let the dog solve the problem kind of person. So I think inevitably, he ended up with that very big drive to get to things. But he almost has too much like I almost can’t pull him off of a puzzle. And like he wants his nose right next to the source.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, yeah, no, that’s, yeah, that’s a good one. And I think it’s probably a good problem to have. But I think the my fundamental thing with grit is kind of operationalize it. And I think if you can define what grit looks like to you in your search, you’ll actually be able to kind of pull out some different threads that you want to train specifically, because grit is like, I don’t know how to teach grit. But I do know how to teach stamina and endurance and physical fitness and confidence and persistence, even though confidence and persistence are also a little mushy here. But I feel like I know how to work on that in the context of a search. And I don’t necessarily know how to work on grit. But grit, to me is a combination of all of those things. So next step, Lily asks, she said, I’m currently thinking about our transition from building a search style into bringing from building a search style into bringing it into real life searches. So her question is about duration, empty searches, building grid, keeping up motivation in the field. So I think this actually ties in really well to Donna’s question as far as you know, let’s think about what your target odor is and how it’s going to behave. So I both mean, literally, like the physics and the odor dynamics of how your specific target odor is going to behave, because it’s going to be different based on whether it’s, you know, spotted lantern, fly egg mass, versus a plant versus bat, carcass versus scat, those are all going to behave differently. And then also thinking about the behavior of the target itself. So, you know, are you dealing with a carnivore that likes to poop in an elevated area? Are you dealing with plants that tend to grow on south facing slopes? Are you you know, thinking really, really in depth about how this odor is likely to present based on both the behavior of the target and the behavior, physical properties of it? And then how can we set up our searches in a way that mimic that and build up towards helping our dog understand the search pattern? And then let’s, let’s define our goals, you know, when you want your dog to be able to go out and search, do you want to be able to do 20 minutes on 20 minutes off? Do you want to be able to cover 20 acres? Do you want to be able to do a one mile transect? Like, what does your search actually look like? And maybe you don’t know yet? But let’s kind of come up with some, some checkboxes and if we know, okay, we want to be able to do a two kilometer transect. Okay, well, what can the dog do right now? And the dog can do a 10 minute search. Okay, a 10 minute search probably comes out to say a quarter mile, which oh, gosh, now I’m switching back and forth between kilometers and miles. You know, I don’t actually know I don’t know how to how far 10 minutes gets you but let’s test that then we can figure out that distance and then we can kind of create a stepwise plan to get your dog up to what it what you really need. And then I really like using distance, not area but distance as a what’s the word as a proxy for duration? So I’m not necessarily thinking okay, I really want to get a 20 minute searching on my dog or a 15 minute search or a 10 minute search. When I’m building duration, I think Okay, I’m gonna place the height of one block from my house, then I’m going to place it two blocks away, then I’m going to place it five blocks away. And try not to always make it harder, that’s kind of a bummer for your dog. But we can use distance as a proxy for duration. And then you’re just kind of searching in like a linear ish way. Or if you’re using a trail, kind of take it a given distance down a trail, and you can kind of more or less predict how your that is going to work out duration wise for your searches, blank searches or empty searches, really important to start layering those in, I think it’s important to kind of start sooner rather than later with that if at all possible. And also thinking through what proportion of your operational searches are going to be blank. Because if you’re going to have a really, really high proportion of your operational searches being blank, then you need to layer in more blank practice searches as well. Yeah, there’s so much to be said about blanks for now, we don’t have an episode on legs, but there is a great episode of the canines. Gosh, what is it? The canine detection collaborative podcast has a really good one. That’s called fill in the blank. So just go ahead and check that out for that particular one. Anything there? Taylor.
Tayllor Pittman
Yeah, so actually, the only other thing that I would add is, from my time working with you guys, and being in the Patreon is don’t panic when you mess up. That’s my biggest thing. Sometimes I sit hides. And because I’m not, I can guess pretty well, but sometimes I’m completely wrong. And, for example, Kepler, he actually ended up doing a 15 minute search in my garage, because I definitely like this will take him like, two minutes tops. And then he just kept searching, and I just kind of sat there and like, as long as he’s working, and he’s not getting too frustrated, we’re just gonna let it go. Now, the next day, he did our super easy search that I was 100% Sure, would be easy. But the biggest thing for me is not panicking when you do screw
Kayla Fratt
up. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so we’ve got two more that we’ll get into today. So they’re both also from Jana, and Lily. So we’ll just go back and forth between the two of them. So going back to Jana, she, she’s actually talking more about this kind of search pattern. So her goal right now is that they’re probably going to be having a dog looking for either flying squirrel or bat droppings. So they’ll likely be from a nest or roost at the base of a tree. So she’s asking the dog to learn how to search around an empty tree. And then at a moment, when he was searching nicely, she’s going to call him and move him to the next tree with for the target or that’s what she did in a video that she kind of sent over to us. Then she goes on to say in real searches, most or all search areas given like a small area around a tree are going to be empty. And she thinks that this is probably similar to the muscle searches. Barla and I did with boats where you’ve got kind of one boats probably empty, then we go to the next boat. I actually think that this is a really good situation to revisit that episode with Paul bunker, about all clears and kind of no go no go sorts of things, because I wouldn’t actually necessarily think of each tree as a search area. And I wouldn’t necessarily wait for the dog to search really nicely, I would allow the dog and potentially capture a behavior that lets the dog say, hey, there’s nothing here, because a tree like a boat is a small enough discreet enough search area. So I guess we are calling it a search area even though I just said I wouldn’t think of it as a search area that I think we really can actually have a good shot at letting the dog search it say nope, nothing here. And then we can move on. And we don’t necessarily have to have the dog searching really intensively when we allow them to move on because we could actually teach them to capture more of an all clear sort of behavior for each unit. For the boats. What we did is I always started at the trailer hitch of the boat and went clockwise around the boat. So we were searching on leash, we were searching really intensively I taught the dog like a check here sort of queue or in the case of the trained working dogs or conservation dogs I just worked with the check here cue they already had. And if they didn’t show any significant changes of behavior or any alerts at the end of the boat, we would walk back to the kennel as we were walking back to the kennel they would get a little bit of food or kind of a lower value reward. We didn’t have like a formal all clear but that was kind of how we did it. So I think Jana for you, you could do either. But I actually again, I would not worry too much about trying to make sure that you’re waiting for that moment when the dog is still searching beautifully to move on to the next tree. I would actually allow the dog to tell you hey, there’s nothing here and like you don’t have to try to get the dog to keep searching keep searching keep searching when there’s really nothing there and the dog knows there’s nothing there. If the dog knows there’s nothing there. I’m okay with them telling me that. Does that make sense?
Tayllor Pittman
Yeah, No, that totally made sense. Kepler’s actually kind of came about naturally. So we had issues with him mouthing things. So I ended up marking and he’d come back to me and now we have this like, hold still thing. But if he doesn’t find anything, he just kind of wanders back to me and is like, there’s nothing here can I have my food now? Because he’s his main reward is a ball, kind of like barley. And so feeding him food is like, okay, cool, good food, but I want that ball on a rope. So he’ll come back, get his food and then keep going. A lot of the times, though, he has been convinced that there could be heights on the top of little cars, he will straight up climb a car, if he has the opportunity to go check it out.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, yeah, that’s we always did boat searches with booties on the dogs front paws. Because of the potential to scratch people’s very expensive speed boats, as the dogs are considering climbing, so yeah, yeah, it’s yeah, it’s, uh, thinking through kind of how to clear these really small areas is fun. And I think, yeah, again, fundamentally, let’s probably just revisit that Paul bunker episode that’s getting a lot of airtime on this episode. Alright, so last question that we’ll go through today is also from Lily. So she is asking about building up being an operational in a particular search environment. As a new dog handler team, particularly in terms of distractions with smells and wildlife. She’s got a teenage Springer Spaniel and his dog, his nose is constantly filled with smells. As we expand the search area, sometimes different smells and scent trails take priority and disrupt the search. So yeah, this is something I really dealt with with niffler last summer, where he is kind of naturally a pretty tracky dog. And very much so if specially if he wasn’t finding enough fats, or if he was just really hot, and actually kind of at a point where the Frisbee had lost a little bit of its sparkle, because he was too hot and didn’t actually really want to play frisbee, he would get really tracky. So what I generally do, particularly with teenagers is and I think this is something I wish I’d done more of with niffler. And I’d had the upper, I didn’t really have the opportunity to last summer because of my own choices and mistakes that I made, was would be practicing in environment, if you’re going to add any other distractions or you’re in a new environment, dial down the difficulty on everything else that you can control. So make it simpler search, really blow their minds with reward, make it fast, make it quick, make it easy, then kind of again, kind of continue slowly turning those dials back up. Something again, niffler and I really struggled with with last summer was that he because we were operational when he was so young, I did not always have the opportunity to modulate that difficulty in a way that was really best for him and his long term training. So I think with teenagers generally, you know, take your time, control what you can to make it easy build up the salience and the reward of the find. And don’t worry too much about adding in those really big difficult things like the distractors, and the duration and new search environments and blah, blah, blah. Don’t worry about it too much right now, don’t rush it. If I see my dog, particularly again, this is niffler getting a little bit trackie. And he’s starting to kind of do his tracking behavior and his air scenting behavior look very different. I will interrupt him, if I need to, I will put him back on leash. And this summer, because I have two dogs. If he is showing me that he cannot focus on a given wind turbine, I will put him back in the car that is a little bit of negative punishment, but also mostly just kind of for data integrity. It’s just like, alright, if you can’t work right now I’m gonna put you away. And for him, the biggest thing is if his nose is to the ground, and he’s moving at a fast spate pace, he is probably tracking and not air scenting when he catches target odor, he lifts his nose and drops it as he gets really close and is sourcing but at that point, he’s moving slowly. So if his noses to the ground and he’s moving quickly, he’s tracking he’s cratering. He’s not doing what I want, and I will interrupt him. The other big thing that I will see if he’s kind of potentially not fully on on task is that he will not be moving. Generally what he’s supposed to be doing is moving perpendicular to the wind with me, and then upwind when he catches odor. So if he’s moving downwind, or kind of backtracking away from me, you’re kind of like, deviating from his normal search pattern, but also not looking like he’s sourcing odor. Then again, I will interrupt him and redirect him back to a search. And if I have to do that more than once or twice, I will just go and put him away. And then maybe take them out and give me give Have a really easy search in the same environment once barley is Don are kind of take him directly downwind of something barley has found just as a way to be like, hey, remember this like, this is what we’re doing. And yeah, I think the biggest thing for our teenage dogs is just to be patient particularly. Yeah, with spaniels. They’re Birdy, they’re distractible, teenagers. control what you can take it easy if you if it helps for you as a handler, take data, take notes, pay close attention and turn up those dials really, really slowly. And I find taking notes to be a really good way to know that I’m making progress, even when it feels slow. So I hope that helps.
Tayllor Pittman
I have a follow up question for you. So with Kepler, we have a start cue. So I kind of pulled this half from Sarah strumming. But he can sit like I know, he knows sit and he will sit 90% of the time. So if he can’t sit, and like I feed him for sitting, he doesn’t get his ball for sitting because I would just ramp them up too much. Then he’s not ready to work. Do you? Have you considered using that kind of start cue at all before?
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, yes. Yes. So yeah, niffler has been doing quite a bit of kind of start ready to work stuff. And yeah, also similarly, we’ve built off of some of Sarah strumming stuff. So for niffler has big problem. Last summer, it was both Katelyn Burt’s. This summer, it’s just cattle. He has graduated from his bird phase, thank goodness. And so this summer, what I’ve been doing is if we see cattle on the horizon, if they are really close, I will just get barley out. And I will just work barley because barley can literally like he this summer has worked in between sleeping cows, and just not better than not, he does not care. He’s perfect in every way. niffler not so much. And so with niffler, what I will do is I will kind of, basically I’m judging as soon as I’ve opened the trunk of the car, and I can see him in his crate. If his eyes are wide, his ears are fully pricked forward, and he’s kind of peering over my shoulder. I’ll feed him some treats for making eye contact with me if he’s able to. And then I will just search with barley. But if he’s kind of showing that he looks ready to come out of the vehicle, so if he’s kind of engaging with me, making a little bit of eye contact, I’m not hassling him, I’m not asking him to, I’m standing there and waiting to see if he offers it. Then I will open the door. And then the next step before we search is I put the rec specs goggles on. So if he then kind of moves his head into the rec spec goggles the way that he normally does, that’s another great sign. Sometimes he’s not able to do that. So I actually had a video that I think you probably saw on either the course or Patreon page, I can’t remember where he shared it. I didn’t put his goggles on for this. And this kind of circles back to Lily’s thing. His rec specs are still a little distracting for him. They’re still a little tricky. He’s, he’s not like 100% comfortable wearing them. He’s like 95% So when we’re working around cattle, I won’t put his rec specs on because that just makes it that much easier. So then I let him out of the vehicle. And I stand there I do not kill a search and I see if he can look at the cows and reengage with me. I will wait I do not cue him. I do not make kissy noises I do not call him. And usually he’ll kind of do this like he’ll like stare, stare, stare, stare stare usually his elbows are a little bit bent. That’s like a big sign for me that he’s thinking Hertie thoughts. For your Springer, it’ll probably be something different. But for the Border Collie. It’s usually like a frozen crouchie Slinky elbow bend thing, the elbow bend is like my big sign that he is not in a good that he’s thinking hurty thoughts. Then he’ll generally turn and look at me. And then I give a cue. And if he can respond to that cue, then I will give then if I have food, I give food. In the video that you saw Taylor he did. I did not have food with me. I forgot it that day. So I gave a couple of different well known cues and kind of watched his response to each one. So the first one you could and I’ll see if I can share this video. It has a wind turbine in it and we’re not supposed to share a video that has the turbine numbers in it. So we’ll see if I can figure out a way to edit it and we’ll get that ready to work sequence shareable somehow. But you can see he like he comes back but his eyes are wide, his ears are still swiveling. He’s like not with it with me even though he is complying with the cue. So then I give another cue and he responds with lower latency, he responds more quickly, and he’s a little bit more focused, but still not quite what I want. So then I give a third cue and that one is nice and snappy. Looks pretty good. But he still glances away from me after that cue back towards the cows. So I have one more cue that when he’s really enthusiastic and engaged and look Good, and then I give the cue to search. And then he he runs off in the video and he goes and he searches, he catches odor. And then it’s funny because the way that the wind was blowing the the odor, turning to look at the odor, or turning to move towards the odor, turn him back towards the cow, the cows and you see, like his brain, like, like totally glitch for a second where he’s like in odor, but then like he like he gets that elbow bend for a second. And then like there’s like this, this very long little pause. And then he goes back to sourcing and he alerts. And we throw a huge party for it. And that is something that like, I am now intentionally setting up scenarios like that with cattle at specific distances with the goal of getting him to the point where he can work closer and closer to cattle. And that’s kind of what I was describing for everyone earlier on where right now I’m kind of doing this naturalistically where I know if the cattle are closer than niffler can handle I’ll just work with barley. If they’re far enough away that niffler doesn’t care, then we just work with him. But in these kind of marginal ones that I definitely do, do that ready to work sort of protocol and and if he says no, if he’s not able to, I have a second dog, which is really nice. And like one of my biggest regrets last season with working with niffler is that I think in the future, if I ever work a dog as young as niffler, again, I will not do it in a way where I don’t have a backup dog. Because I think it was too much pressure for niffler. At times last summer, I did not have enough flexibility to really give teenage dog the time and space that he needed and the flexibility. And I’m planning a whole other episode about kind of lessons learned bid season musings that’s about that, but stay tuned.
Tayllor Pittman
Yeah, that’s about I use Kepler’s harness to see if I haven’t taped if I’ve taken too long of a break because the more enthusiastic he’s throwing himself into his harness, that means I can probably up the amount of training sessions that we do. middle ground, because we did take like a two to three week break when I went to get Canada and then I was sick or whatever. And then I got his harness out. And he knocked it out of my hand with how fast he slammed his head into it to go. He’s like, yes.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So okay, well, we’ve gone a little bit longer than I had anticipated. But I’m glad we got some of those questions taken care of. Taylor, do you have anything else that you wanted to add? Before we wrap up here?
Tayllor Pittman
I’m just that if you do have kiddos between the ages of seven and 18. Most of the forage programs are run out of your local state universities. And they’re called extension offices. So feel free to like check those out and get your kiddos involved. It’s a nice way to get them involved in dogs.
Kayla Fratt
Absolutely. I grew up in four h four h land we had. Actually it was funny. I was a member of three different forage groups. And it was they were amazing for me, we did. My favorite one was we added outdoor adventure leadership for each group. So we did like canoeing and whitewater kayaking, and rock climbing and that sort of stuff for forage, which is less traditional. And then yeah, I was in like a typical northern Wisconsin forage group. But it was funny because like everyone else had like hogs and cows and sheep and whatnot, because it was a really agricultural area. And like, my parents were like, No, we’re not getting livestock. So I had homing pigeons. And chickens and bunnies. But yeah, mostly, mostly poultry, because my parents were not interested in larger animals. So yeah, it’s a lot of fun. Yeah, a really good way to get kids involved. And they have some really good kind of like leadership development programs as well. I love forage. I
Tayllor Pittman
do too. I was at Rando dog kid in the pig group.
Kayla Fratt
Yeah, but I desperately wanted to do dog stuff. And I can’t remember. We didn’t have any dog leaders in my area. So even though I had this like lovely lab, and I desperately wanted to learn how to train dogs, I was, there was no financial leaders in my area. So maybe that’s the other plug. Become a forage leader. I don’t know. What does it take to do that?
Tayllor Pittman
You have to pass a background check. Just in general when you’re working with kids. Other than that most foreach dog programs are just run by volunteers. It’s helpful if you know how to train dogs. But if not, there’s manuals, and I know a lot of people reach out to local dog trainers to come in and talk to their kiddos. And then you go and train. We run a couple of workshops specifically for conformation training, because I am not a conformation trainer. And then during the entire workshop, I ask questions and then take that back to the kiddos. So just volunteer, really a lot of it is just getting started and being like yes, I will be in charge and I will set up meetings and it just kind of snowballs from there.
Kayla Fratt
How cool wow. Yeah, that’s a great call to action. Well, Taylor, thanks so much for being on the show. Thanks. for being on Patreon if folks at home want to be able to do fun episodes like this, they’re not a guaranteed or official part of Patreon. But if you’re part of Patreon for long enough and have enough good questions, it could happen for you too. So, Taylor, I guess last thing do you have any social media or anything that you want people to find you out? Or would you rather not?
Tayllor Pittman
Know? If you want to follow Kepler and Kana they’re at Adventures of Kepler and Kena. I know real original there. If you want to find our four H group to kind of see what’s up and see kind of the stuff we do where Montrose for each dog Council, and you can kind of see what our kiddos are up to at that point. They recently went to state fair, some of them and we have state fair agility and a couple weeks so you can come and tell them congratulations when they go and do their stuff and show off their skills.
Kayla Fratt
Oh, cute. Yeah, I just I just saw my Facebook memories that I I won a county fair grand champion with one of my chickens like 15 years ago now. So yeah, never got to go to state fair, that was too far away. Anyway, well, this has been K9 Conservationists. If you would like to join Patreon, you can find that at patreon.com/k9conservationists. If you would like to buy any of our really awesome new merch, we’ve got designs with the dogs on them and funny sayings and all sorts of good stuff that’s on at k9conservationists.org. There will be a transcript of this episode up there, and all sorts of other great information, free webinars, paid webinars. Everything you could ever dream of all at k9conservationists.org. Until next time!