Ivan Balabanov 및 Michael Ellis와의 대화

you just really have to be very present and, and knowing when that moment is because, uh, you can be prepared for some, or that's going to be a long session or sessions. And you're thinking that's going to take a while and the dog gets it in two reps or the other way around. So. Yeah, exactly. And I think, and it, I pay very close attention and to the dog's energetics during my, my motivation building phase, the point at which I'm playing with the dog and I'm creating, uh, reward systems, uh, for want of a better word. Um, and I know what they feel like when they're really invested and I pay very close attention to that as I work. So if I do a couple of reps that feel really invested and I push a little and I do an extra rep, even if they're showing, understand, if they're not fully showing understanding, um, and that rep feels, uh, significantly less invested, then I'll, I'll abandon at that point and come back at it to avoid that boredom. I'm really have become early in my career. I certainly did lots and lots of what I consider empty repetitions that at best didn't move the needle forward. Uh, and at worst actually created the boredom and the disconnection, uh, from, of over drilling. I think embedded in that question to the point about arousal. Um, currently I think in dog training, there's this like kind of vilification of arousal as all our behavior problems come from arousal and excited dogs or bad dogs, et cetera, et cetera. You, you have to have arousal to drive learning like it, the brain and the body need that. It's not that hard to channel it. That's exactly it. It's not, it's not arousal is bad. It's where you put the arousal. Right. Exactly. So that's essential to the teaching process. There was a lot into that question. One thing that I remember still from it was, uh, and kind of like where you were going with the motivation and, and, and, and kind of to double down there, you, you also look for what's the, the mental and physical endurance of the dog, right? Absolutely. So you don't lose it because of fatigue either way. Um, which comes to, it will affect motivation. It would just kind of start to crumble from the top down. Um, so, uh, that's always important knowing, knowing how much you can go. And the way you find out is by, I mean, you learn to feel a dog's energetics, but also you find out by experimenting. Like each new dog is a little bit different in their ability to sustain training in a committed way. The, their attention span for want of a better term, all those things are a little

different and you find the edges of it. Sometimes I push a little and recognize, oh, okay, we've gone too far. And that helps me plan the future sessions. Like when you work a dog that passed the point where they're a little too fatigued and they're a little mentally disconnected, you recognize that and you make note of that and you shift your future sessions to adjust to it. Yeah. Perfect. There, there is one more thing that just came to me that there was a, it was about, um, um, kind of as you teach behavior, when do you start to emphasize on speed versus precision and so on. And, and it is an interesting, good one. I, I always, I like to speed is, is at the end of, of my criteria. It's like, I, I need the dog to, if it's gonna, even if it's just a simple movement from A to B, I want it to be conscious how it's doing it. Right. Instead of just get there like a squirrel, but it didn't know how it, what happened to get there. And then it goes back to how motivation it is and how clear the behavior is. It will go into whatever the natural speed of the dog is to perform with the desire, with the motivation and sure we can delicately, intelligently can push a little over natural if we need to, at times, but this can be tricky because we tend to keep pushing and reaching the break point and then we have to return and we don't know if we can go back. Right. Oh, exactly. I think that I, I approach it exactly the same way. I'm much more conscious of awareness and understanding in the learning repetitions as, as opposed to speed. And then I want to infuse speed into it as we go forward at that dog's ability. So based on motivation, ideally based on increasing the value of motivation or the reward and maturity in the dog frequently takes care of that too. As they get more, as they grow, they get more motivated and the behaviors get faster. But you touched on something that I think is incredibly important, which is when it, and especially when it starts coming to pressure, right, people are trying to make more speed and behaviors than a dog is naturally capable of giving them. Because where's that line? That other dog can do it. Yeah. That other dog can do it. And so my dog should be able to, too. That's a slippery slope really fast. I don't like pressuring dogs for speed and behaviors. Um, when they're, when they're trying to comply, I mean, it's not sustainable. And if it's sustainable, it's not here in a healthy way. Right. Right. Right. And each, and different dogs have different capabilities on that front. They absolutely have

different processing speeds. Like there's a dog whose brain and body work quickly and reflexively. And those dogs do things quickly without a lot of extra work on my part. I'm doing what I would normally do. Right. They do the behavior quickly because that's their computer. That's the way they're, they're designed. Another dog needs a little, there's a lag where the, the, the command hits them, that hits the brain, it travels down the spine and it translates into behavior. And they're, they're not capable of instantaneous reactions and quite fried things. Right. The impressive one is always when you, it's like a border collie that has motivation to down, but you teach it to go down very slow. Right. That's cool. That's cool. Like, I'm not impressed with the border collie is motivated that those staples itself on the ground, you know, that that's what's going to happen. Right. That's true. You know, what's going to happen. But, but that's kind of just as, because we are saying that, you know, we don't care about speed. Sometimes speed just comes within it's unnatural for certain behavior or equal for that. Yeah. You know, yes. Uh, but anything that is more complex that the dog has to think through what exactly, how to navigate with it. I think, uh, uh, allowing them to know that they have time is a big, it's essential. Yeah. Yeah. And speeds, speed makes certain types of behaviors impossible. The dog's in too much of a hurry. Then something has to go. They're not, they end up saying five or six times that they are wrong to get one correct one, which is the opposite formula where you want to be. Right. And there was a follow on to that question, which was, do you see a rewarding effect in dogs learning to avoid correction? Meaning does punishment turn into a rewarding sensation after learning? I think it's, I think what's asking is after you've used punishment on a, on a behavior and the dog then avoids that punishment in the future are signals that they've avoided that punishment become reinforcing to them. And they absolutely do. Yeah. There's no doubt about it that once a dog knows a job and a task and they have, there have been consequences for them failing to do that task. And you signal them that, and they do the task appropriately after that. And you signal them that they did. There are reinforcing components of that. There's no doubt. And I think there's some research I would have to look back again, but I remember reading some, some research that neurobiologically behaves the same way.

Like same, same neural pathways are activated when they're active, getting a reward versus when they've avoided punishment in a clear way. So I think that it's even, even if you do negative punishment and positive punishment, it's still the same. It's the same punishment in the brain. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. There is a, I mean, it's a, I don't know exactly if I understand that correct. And what Michael already said, it's pretty much answers that if, if to add something probably would be like in a moment of punishment, the dog shouldn't feel rewarded or reinforced because you're stopping, right? Dressing. But in negative reinforcement, the moment there is the avoidance is immediate or the escape. So there is a reinforcement process, of course. So there is a little bit different how they emotionally feel when, is it the one and the other happening is different to them, but that's a good question. Okay. Let's go to the next one. It's interesting. It is interesting. Especially when we don't know where we're going. It's kind of like, what direction? Okay. We're going to shift gears radically. By the way, guys, we didn't go through the questions or anything. We're just getting a mess as we're hitting here right now. How do you guys think the removal of potential role in puppy rearing and human intervention with rewards to mate selection has an impact on the evolution of dogs, but especially Malinois as species behaviorally speaking, I mean, if we let them have complete free selection, select which Malinois mate they wanted to breed with themselves and then raise these puppies totally naturally, what do you think the dogs would be like? It's a very interesting question. I kind of, the last part of the question I understood really good. Yeah. Say the beginning part again. I kind of got lost a little bit in the beginning. Yeah. I agree. But they're saying that the, that the, is it mate or male? It's, uh, let me just double check. Okay. Yeah. So how do you guys think the removal of potential role in puppies rearing and human intervention with regards to mate selection has impacted the evolution of dogs, but specifically Malinois? Right. I like they wouldn't be Malinois anymore. Certainly. Like, so that's the short answer is I think that if you left dogs to their own devices in terms of choosing mates, you left them to their own devices in terms of rearing the puppies, like of course, what type of dog would come out would be suited to whatever environment would gradually become suited to whatever environment they had to live in.

But if you took us out of the equation and we stopped selecting for the things that we select for in working dogs, I think there would be a reversion to some kind of street dog type thing. Yeah. The reset of a generic dog kind of thing. Yeah. You'd go to the, whatever the basic dog is. Right. Right. Kind of. I agree. And it would be, it would be dependent on the, the environment that you're selecting them for. What are you, where are you being left on the street? Are they being cared for? Are they being trained still? All those things would. I mean, we kind of know something, I mean, like, you know, the, uh, it just came to me, the, the dog in the dogs in Chernobyl, you know, how they got the, they're still kind of, uh, the, the, the, it's interesting how they are, but, but there was a certain, I think, bunch of shepherds were dominantly there and, but yeah, that's interesting to see how, um, nature is. I mean, we have so much in, in that evolutionary ladder time and, and human interfering with selection. Oh yeah. It, it's, it's such a, like, like it's for sure it will, well, for sure. How do we know? Yeah. But I would think it will reward as well. You know, it will go to some basic generic dog that you can see in most places probably. And I think we, we, when we select dog Malinois, especially we're selecting for a series of variety of traits that are not adaptive in a natural dog. Right. Like they're adaptive to the tasks that we've created for them to do. And if we stop selecting them for those tasks, they're going to, that those things are going to go away. They're not natural behaviors. Right. Cause it's kind of like highly maintenance selection that we continue to keep emphasizing on. Otherwise probably it's gonna still be going to, to. Yeah. Cause there's so, so many traits that we know, like you certainly know as a breeder and I do that if you take your eye off them for even a little bit, they go away. Right. Like it does gripping behavior and that we are all obsessed with and sport dog stuff, right. How the dogs use their mouth. Right. If you stop paying attention to that as a part of the selection process, it will, it'll go away really quickly. You won't maintain these kind of very artificial gripping styles that we've created through selective breeding as one type of example. I think. Hmm. And then there was this question. Could you guys discuss errorless learning versus trial and error learning? Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, I don't know where I, I mean, where do I even start? I think everybody

knows our position on that one. Um, I, I'll, I'll really give you a straight, like something. If errorless learning was a thing, it will be, you, you will see at it at schools from, from first grade to university as the main way that you learn. And that's by no means anywhere. The case, um, is it used sometimes? Yes. Where is it used mostly? Uh, um, I would say it's predominantly used at schools with, uh, kids with mental disabilities because you don't want to put a pressure on, on somebody that is not capable and trial and error, like going way back to Thorndike and his laws of learning. It's it, nothing has changed in my opinion. I agree. I agree. I, but in that embedded in that, of course, is that we don't want to set up situations and with the dogs, we just leave the dogs to figure it out. Right. So it's not errorless learning. We set up training situations in which the dogs very likely to make the choice of behavior that we want them to do early on so that we can reinforce it. And then we give them some freedom to find the limits of that, right. To bump up against like, okay, do you understand it? And they'll make an error and we want to, they learn from those errors. It's essential to learn from those errors, but we're not going to set them up in the beginning and just say, Hey, just experiment until you figure out what I want you to do. They're not likely to figure that out. And we don't want them to give up. You build some persistence in dogs by setting them up to succeed as it were in early learning trials. There is a lot of motivation. Yeah. And, and it's sincerely trying to do the right thing, but it doesn't, it needs your help. And, and how we were just talking on a previous question. If you end up saying six times, no, you're wrong. And only one time, that's good one. Something has to change. That's not trial and error. That's error after error and just a little bit of success. That's not the recipe for anything. Right. Um, and on top of that, like I just, as I came back from that seminar, just this weekend, one of the things that I was talking about was very much this of, uh, you know how this, the, the trainers come with a problem and they really want to see what you do with that problem. And I want to see it also, but I want to see also what can we do good. Mm-hmm because that's my reset. If I need, like, I don't need to just go, okay, this is bad. Let's fix this. Like what, where are you good things? What can we do really good? Yeah. Yeah. Um, absolutely. That's a, that's a very good point. Like good problem solving.

Isn't necessarily about the problem. Right. In some cases. Conceptual. We've been talking about concepts. Yes. You and I, for the two days I'm here, probably we haven't stopped. Yep. Yeah. Because you find, I think that's, that's really interesting to say. What you find out what the dog does well, because that's going to be the fuel that's going to help us work through whatever the difficulty is as well. Right. That's the thing. So in most of our training reps, most of our training reps, the predominant number of training reps of whatever it is we're doing, the dog should be successful. Right. Which does not mean error-free for sure. We want them to make errors at some point. So they figure out, they really have a thorough understanding of a behavior. They bob it against that. But most of your training should be, the dog should be having success, enjoying themselves, doing what you want. And then when the problem arises, it's the anomaly in a sea of good stuff. Instead of we're focusing on the bad thing you do. And we're working on the bad thing and repeating the bad experiences. I think that happens. Even another one, like if you, if I say, well, show me some good stuff, like show me some good things. And even the, what the trainer things are good execution of proper execution of behaviors. And there's still serious holes all over the place. I would rather get there than start hitting my head in a wall with the biggest of the biggest worst problems that I have no chance to come across as a, hey, I have a better idea. It's like not going to happen there. Come back here. And, and yeah. Yeah. I, that there's something in there that I think most experienced dog trainers feel at a certain point that there's a tackling, um, a difficulty head on, isn't necessarily always the way of resolving it. Right. Right. Right. It's, you would kind of resolve it globally with your entire relationship with the dog, with their idea about what training and success is. And strangely enough, that kind of gets resolved almost on its own sometimes. It does. It does sometimes, not all, not all the time. Sometimes you have to come back, but there are absolutely times in which you didn't really address this directly, but you addressed all these things and magically that fixed it. So, right. We see it routinely. All right. So the next topic is they would like to know, or they'd be interested to know what you guys think about why people tend to not fully explore the dog's genetic predisposition. In many cases, people kind of stop halfway or they just don't even tap into it at all.

Yeah. So they're, they're asking basically like whatever this dog breeds. Yeah. This dog's genetic and they're not, they're not allowing the dog to express it. Correct. Or not even going into it in any shape, form or fashion. And they're asking why people do that. Yeah. Or what's your guys thoughts on not getting into or using that dog's genetic capabilities, uh, as opposed to, I guess, you know, exploring certain types of programs where these capabilities would be really well, well used. Um, I mean, obviously you guys both come from Mondio and Schutz and backgrounds. Um, and we're exploring a lot of genetic capabilities in those aspects, but outside of that, when these people have the different breeds, you know, kind of like, how did they land there and why are we not even tapping into that genetic ability? I, I'll, I'll just mention something with the, forget even Mondio, right? I mean, just playing with a dog, like you can, like I, it's constantly, uh, um, you know, mimicking how somebody plays. It's one thing. Satisfying. I, I really, I just put a post on this on, on my Facebook because I have this like Kimba's brother and Kimba the same. They naturally, the moment you let them out, they have to be here and you would push them out. They feel that I'm mad at them. Yeah. It's a rejection. Yeah. And it's very different than if I have Tarzan and I tell him, anybody come here and he come, you know, that he doesn't like it, but the one needs it, the other one, you know, it's innate versus I'm just doing it because I like it at the moment. The other one is like, I have to do that. Otherwise some good and, and finding places, how to utilize things like that. Even when you play, just playing ball with, uh, some pointer dog and you pause for a moment and you allow them to take consciously, may not do it, but they are doing it and it feels good. And then you resume the play and you're tapping into something that the dog is like, I like to play with him more than you. And I don't know why. Well, it's because I allow you to express your genetic. Yes. Right. Or, or the same with a border calling, you kind of, it's like, Hey, back up, come close back, whatever. Yeah. Yes. You can do it by force or you can really use the genetic makeup and the border calling. Now it's, he wants to chase the ball, but that whole stalking thing that you added just hits home. Yeah. Yeah. And so, so it's not only in, uh, I think utilizing genetics is it's a very, uh, misunderstood thing. Uh, and it has to be as a trainer, you always have to search for it. And

it's not even, I mean, just because you have a myline, right. Doesn't mean that they all have exactly the same, just as we said, some of those like that, some dogs do it, but it's not like a thing. It's not an obsession. I don't know. I think, I think he, that's super well said in that it's not necessarily in my mind about having the dog do what it was bred to do, but figuring out what that dog needs to do, right. What it's genetically wants to express. There are some Malinois that not letting them bite things is sort of unfair to them on some level. Right. There are others that are not like there could be a substitute for that. Chasing a Frisbee could be a substitute for one dog and not so much for another in a certain way. And I think it's ultimately about meeting the dog's needs, right. So that the dog can feel they have outlets for what are very natural impulses for them. I think too, too many dog owners these days get dogs and then don't want them to behave like dogs. Right. And especially working and hunting type breeds and things like that, we're very energetic and they're going to do a lot of, uh, they're going to give you a lot of behavior. And people say, I like that type of dog. I just don't want to doing all that stuff. Right. That's not right. That's not fair. That's a recipe for an unhappy dog and an unhappy owner ultimately as well. Right. So the idea that, but there are, there are, he's the, I think we're both of a like mind that play is something that's incredibly important to us. Right. And my, a significant portion of the relationships that I develop with dogs are around play and that play will look different, radically different sometimes based on what kind of dog it is and what they genetically are bringing to the table. Yeah. But that's, that's exactly the point. Like, that's exactly the point. Like I think a lot of trainers would go to, I see this person, this person doing this with that dog and my dog is the same. So I'm going to do that. And my dog's going to like it. And yes, my dog likes it, but they're doing it because they understand that the dog needs it and they have to offer it. If can they go without it? Sure. But when you're offering and when you satisfy genetic, uh, predisposition, you, you're tapping like, it's like, I like you and I don't know why. And it's so cool. And, and for a trainer, it's easy. You just stop looking at everybody, what they do or keep looking, keep getting ideas, but also stop and give opportunity because if you post anything, the dog's going to offer you what they want and you pay attention and see that can go anywhere.

If it can be usable. Right. Absolutely. And I, and another thing there is that I find if you find a way to meet those needs, what for the dog, whatever they are, and those needs for genetic expression, you get far fewer behavioral issues, right? Oh yeah. The dogs are, don't have to invent ways of using these impulses. And usually when they invent them on their own, they're not directed in a way that you want them to be directed. Right. Oh, sure. Yeah. It's significant numbers of dogs that are seriously problematic in a home that's not giving them outlets, simply showing them what to do with their genetics and they stop being problems. They're satisfied in their life. They're happy. Your relationship's improved. Everything's better. So, but I think we're all looking for, um, kind of recipes for training. I mean, that's what, what people go to dog training seminars and things for like, show me how you do this, right? What are the steps are, but, and give me the cheat sheet. Yes. And there are large concepts. There are ideas that you, you need to master along the way, but you need to be flexible and pay attention to the dog in front of you at the end of the day. And that, that when you were trying his, Ivan's comments to say that, you know, like stop watching the dog over there and how that dog plays and saying, okay, my dog should play like that. Maybe your dog should play like that. Maybe not, maybe not at all. We come into this all the time with whether you allow the dog to possess the toy when playing or not. Right. Like I prefer not if the dog supports that, if the dog finds bringing the toy directly back to me and re-engaging with me satisfying, that's the way I'm going to steer him. Cause that makes my training flow. It's nice and easy. Some other dog does not find that satisfying. And me trying to demand that of them starts to take the fun out of the whole game. And you let them possess a little bit in between and then come back and possess a little bit in between. And they're happy. Like a simple thing like that, that can make a big difference. And meet, like I, you recognize it playing with German Shepherds versus playing with Malinois frequently. Like there's just, they're, they want to, and there are, I hashtag not all German Shepherds, not all Malinois, but that there's that idea that, that just because I have this breed, it should behave like this. You've got to pay attention to the dog. All right. Well, I'll go to the next question, which was, um, interested in your thoughts on,

is it a good idea to use the dog's entire food allowance for training or whether to feed in a bowl and only use some of that food ration for training? What are your thoughts? We bought Tokadib rats. Here we go. Well, I can start off by saying, I don't care if you feed in a bowl or not, but you pour it on the ground. It doesn't matter. The bowl doesn't matter. No, uh, I, I, I, I'm, I'm relatively certain we're on a like mind that, uh, I, I'm not a fan of existential feeding. I'm not a fan of, of making dogs work exclusively for their food in general. Um, but I also would say that there are specific situations in which I'll, for a short period of time, I would ask a dog to do that. Like there's certain behavioral issues. There's certain types of dogs that I'm having a hard time making a connection with that I might for a very short period say, okay, you're eating from me. Right. But as a general training strategy, uh, I, I think it's problematic, right? From It's hugely problematic. Yeah. And, and sometimes people do it for few reasons. And, and one of the reasons comes to mind is they use that as a bonding opportunity. Those are social. They, they want to bond. It's not like, it's not like any time you get a dog, the dog is trying extremely hard, how to find a way, maybe doing shitty things, stupid things, but it's trying to get to do things with you. It's not that they are, I'm on my own and I hate you. And why did you bring me in this house? And now in stop going to feed them. So he can start to beg for food. And therefore, because you become a food dispenser. Now you have a bond. And I think bonding with the dog is a ridiculously simple thing. And you just need to be honest and take time and get them on a walk and let them sit on the couch with you and play ball. And it's done. Right. Um, yes. So that's one other one. It's not just for the behaviors, training and stuff, but the, the, but for, so the, the point at which I think that some of the, that food deprivation work can be good is just making some initial connections. Like I'm really having a hard time motivating this dog. Um, the dog is fine with me, likes me, et cetera. And there's a period where the dog doesn't play or whatever. I haven't constructed that. And I want to show you some things. And so for a very short period of time, I'm like, okay, you're going to eat. I grabbed your food bowl. I go, uh, this is what you're, we're eating and you're going to eat it doing some stuff, right? There's, but people take this and they continue on with it. And they're there. And you also have to recognize

that there are other conflicts. We, we both, I think, feel that play is a super important piece of the puzzle. And if you start doing existential feeding, it negatively impacts play. Right. Right. Right. Because you're hungry. Hungry dog wants food all the time. And so now if you've done that, you want to get them to play and they're like, no, no, no, no. Where's the food? We even see it in normal puppies with high food drive in the early stages of training. If I'm starting to do a fair amount of food work with them, then like if I do food work in my training room three days in a row with hungry puppies and I come in in the morning and I take my puppy in there and I try to play, there'll be puppies that are like, I'm not playing. Where's the food? Right. Like that kind of thing. And so frequently we have to be a little cautious about how it affects other things. But I mean, I, I think like any of the tools, it has a place, but it's become kind of the norm. The answer to a lot of better ways to, to, to, to work at. Yeah. And, and there is another danger, kind of a big, big fallout sometimes when as a trainer, you get so confident and so stubborn. That's like, okay, I'm, I'm trying to get him to do this behavior and he's not doing it. And therefore we stopped the session and you're not eating and we're going to go back tomorrow. And we face the behavior again. We tried again. It doesn't happen. Don't eat again. Could it be because you're failing to show what you want? Yeah. Could it be because genetically the dog has a big block that no matter how much you start in him, it's not going to go anywhere. Eventually, even if he does it, it will get some food and you're going to be pretty much back in the same square. Speaker 1 It's a dangerous way. And there is, in, in, we both really think that there is better ways, anything within reason, nobody can argue with, you know, but, Speaker 1 And we all use, we, we both use food and training for certain things, right? So there's no doubt that there's a point at which I'm going to use food to teach you something. And if I feel that you're not invested and I don't have another tool yet, right. To, to achieve the same result. Right. And this happens a lot for me with dogs that I'm developing a play relationship with, right? There's a little bit of time in that process. And so in that process, I may not be ready to say, Oh, I can confront this behavior with a toy at this point. And so I go, okay, I'm going to skip your meal tonight and tomorrow. Right. Yeah. Tomorrow we're going to come back at

this. Right. But I've seen very few dogs that have needed, that have benefited from only that. And the dogs that like shown you skip one meal and they're still not sure are two meals and they're still not showing like meaningful connection to the food, like going further down that path is, is not likely to suddenly turn that dog into the dog that you think you think you want. A week into that now, they're hungry enough that yes, they're doing it. But do you think that they're invested in the behavior or they're just thinking about surviving? Not sustainable. Yeah. It's not sustainable to motivate them going forward and that kind of thing. And you just got to find another way to motivate that dog at a certain point. Right. And if, if he, I mean, for those of you that use that kind of strategies, again, like if, if it didn't work today, think twice for tomorrow, can you change something so you can make the dog be successful instead of like relying just on the dog's hunger? It's not enough to solve a puzzle if you don't present the puzzle in a solvable way. Yeah. And that's where it spirals down to, to a very bad place. Yeah. And I think the, the other thing that I would say is that when I'm rearing a puppy, there sometimes are days when the puppies don't eat out of a food bowl, but that's just because I did so much stuff with them that day. Like they got food for going in their crate. Each time they went in their crate, I did three training sessions with them. I did a little puppy track or a little search game or whatever. So they ate plenty of food. Right. So much food that a puppy can eat. There's only so much they can eat. So yeah, you didn't get dinner in a bowl, right? That kind of thing. But it wasn't like I'm saying, Oh, no way. Like you don't get any food unless you, Right. Unless you work for it. It was basically just, I wound up using your daily calorie allowance while we were training. Really good one. I liked that that question came up because I always think to talk about this and very rarely comes to conversation. Yeah. Well, I'll add this then. Yeah. What does the food deprivation do for those who, let's say, for example, you need to bond with this dog. So don't feed it for X amount of days. And that way you should only be feeding it on a, on a certain occasions from you. But what happens to the dog neurologically in the body chemistry, when we go through removing food for training or bonding purposes, at what point is this a point of no return? Um, you guys kind of hit on it

when you said, um, is the dog really doing it for work or is the dog really doing it? Cause I just want to, I'm so hungry. I got to eat. So I'll do whatever it takes to eat. But there's this whole aspect physiologically that happens to not only dogs, but everything. When you deprive it of food, it's body chemistry changes and there's a, an effect to that. So yeah. So let you guys kind of expand upon that. I mean, I think there, there, there are effects, right? So the body goes into conservation, calorie conservation stuff. So it becomes unhealthy. The metabolism, like dogs that it's like trying to, like trying to starve yourself for, as a diet technique, right? It doesn't work. Like when you're not eating, like you reduce rations, you increase exercise. So there is a point at which when I'm using food that I'm going to feed the dog less than normal and increase their activity level. Right. And so that they're a little bit more motivated for food. But if you stop, stop feeding them for extended periods of time, their body that has a lot of mechanisms that says, I'm not getting the appropriate calories, throws the changes, the blood sugar and balance, like starts to get from here to satisfy that. But then that's empty the next moment. And then eventually it becomes empty. And then it comes down to ultimately energy, right? And you have to have good energy. You need good sleep, not just sleeping between two dogs barking at you and, and you, you know, think you're sleeping, but you never rest that, you know, not a healthy sleep. And you need food, like quality food. And you need food. And then you have energy. And then you can function. So I guess that's kind of the point of the question that you asked is, uh, um, it really can have a very, very serious consequences. And

those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those those And just like growing kids, they need more calories. They need appropriate nutrition. They're developing bones and tendons and muscle the whole nine yards. So it gets sketchy. Oh, yeah. Okay. So on to a different topic. This is going to come from my world, the detection dog world. So thoughts on how detection dog has trained or has changed over the years, just like how other aspects of training dogs have changed. So like obedience, dog sports and so forth. How have you guys viewed the change in the detection dog world? So I think that for a long time, the detection dog world didn't change a whole lot. Right. So most of the detection dog work, in my experience, in my during over the course of my career, has been driven by law enforcement and military training systems. Right. And civilian nose work is relatively new on the scene. There's now there's an explosion of different detection disciplines from conservation, detection, all kinds of stuff. So it's blown up. And that's in the last 20 years. Right. So for most of the history of detection, it didn't change very much. There wasn't a lot of innovation there. And there was one kind of big change from the active. So yeah, aggressive alerts. But the other that I also cannot think of much. No, it was it was basically a system of pairing.

Right. Rewards with odor directly pairing them together, teaching the dog to search for a reward. It's interesting. Well, the detection world, like sometimes I listen to podcasts and trainers and. And. And. I know they're trying hard, but. You know, feeding puppies and having some odor under the football doesn't mean zero. It doesn't translate. You know. It doesn't. I mean, and there's and there's people in. I was I had a conversation with Pat Nolan who tried this out. What he did was raspberry tea leaves with food and then tested how well the dogs later on, like eight months old, remembered that odor that he had paired at weeks old. And it was kind of hit or miss. You know, some dogs did. Some dogs didn't. And that kind of matched the research world, too, that said, sure, some dogs can remember, but your cost to benefit ratio or your benefit to loss ratio wasn't really that great. I would say for sure one of the biggest changes is the use of condition reinforcers markers in detection. I was about to say, like recently. That it is. Recently there's a lot. Yeah. Instead of the. Multiple choice, like a voice of communicating. You're going to be reinforced there. Being you can be reinforced away from it. This is once we started introducing the markers and signals overall in training back in the nineties when you and I were getting excited about it. And then what was his name that he kind of took from there into the detection work with the. Oh, gosh. With a lot of tennis balls. Oh, Randy here. Randy here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And kind of, you know, but even to today, this is a problem. This is a, there is a, a, a big fear and the fear comes from true lack of understanding how much it can, in my opinion, can detection, your, your detection work can improve. If the dog understands that, okay, you did your job and you no longer need to do it. Then you can like, I, I personally like to do something. And then you tell me, okay, you did a good job. Here is a hundred bucks versus like, which way those hundred bucks going to go? Are they going to kind of come this way or are they going to come this way? And I'm like doing my job, but I'm thinking about how I'm going to catch versus continuing to focus on my work. I think that that's a, that is a good way of looking at it. I think that, but I think those things, the delayed conditioning, the use of conditioned reinforcers and the concept of introducing variable reinforcement into, uh, deliberately into detection work instead of keeping dogs on continuous reinforcement. Yeah. What's your take when you work with, I mean, you, you, you're, you're deep in it.

I mean, so, uh, like you were mentioning, there has been so many years of what the industry calls direct reward, which means trying to trick the dog and reward the dog over the head or behind, staying the handler, staying behind the dog, tossing the toy in one way or another. Um, certain trainers have been very successful with their skill at how they deliver reward and don't use a marker. But a vast majority of detection dog teams, as I travel the world, those that stay kind of ingrained in, I have to pay it source, um, tend to have the same anticipatory problems that Ivan brought up, which was the dog gets so aroused. It finds odor, odor equals arousal, arousal. And now where and how is it? It can be flying to me. Is it like he said, coming to the left, coming to the right, do it, you know, whatever it is. And then we also see degradation of the behavior, the final response behavior, because they're so excited or so aroused because they know it's coming next. It's going to happen. Um, attention, the Pavlovian conditioning, attention in the body. There's like twitchiness because they're waiting for it to all kinds. But beyond that, like, so if you're training a bomb dog and you do, what are you doing? Direct reward in this out in the field, you're throwing a Kong at the bomb. Well, that means you're training, you're rewarding the dog differently in training than you are in the field or you're not rewarding your dog in the field. Correct. Which then of course you could absolutely expect a degradation of your behaviors in the finished product, right? You have to have a way of reinforcing your dog that you can then mimic on the job. Correct. At some point. So being able to mark and move the dog away from it to reinforce it to me is critical for real life detection of any kind. Yeah. Like you're not going to toss a reward at source on the street, right? You're just not going to do it. And many. If there's something there. Yeah. I was going to say many are fearful. There's like, you're not lobbing Kongs in there. No. You're just setting up a situation in which you're training and the finished product look different. And many are fearful. My training on trial doesn't look the same. Yeah. Well, many are fearful that if they rewarded on the actual deployment, what if I rewarded for something that wasn't the target odor? That's part of that fear. So added to that fear is I don't reward on actual searches because I can't confirm. So then the famous saying that is used all the time in detection world is trust your dog, except for when it's real. Except on the job.

And my thing of it, that is, was then when they say, well, you know, trust your dog, verify the training. Okay. Well, if I've done and back to the main point that both you guys are agreeing on is training in reality need to look much more similar than different. The closer you get to it. Yeah. There needs to be a good blending of these things. So therefore, to the point that everybody, whether you're concerned or not, that there's a odor there, a safety aspect like explosive, at least with the use of a condition reinforcer, the dog, here's this signal that could predict reward, but then goes into the next part of the question, which was variable reward schedules. You know, at what point in detection would you introduce a variable reward schedule? Now, currently most, I can't answer for everybody, but a lot of people kind of wait until later on to start introducing variable reward schedules. Some versions of variable reward schedules is I don't pay in reality, but I pay in training every day. And that's not variable reward. Right. But, you know, obviously, as we have spoke with our classes here at our schools together, we introduce variable reward schedules much sooner on in training. Like, and that's essential. We know it from obedience and everywhere else that if you are on continuous reinforcement for a long period of time, when you go to variable, you're going to prompt higher levels of frustration and things from the dog. And in detection, that creates all kinds of problems with your indication. A dog that's frustrated there is much more likely to start aggressively alerting. Like, they get frustrated and they toss out false alerts. There's all kinds of possibilities in that. So, introducing the concept that variable reinforcement is a part of the process earlier, just like you're trying to introduce blank searches earlier in the process. No, I mean, it's a simple animal learning. Yes. You know, it's like if you stay on continuous for that long and the dog now is accepting, that's how we do it. And you try then to go into a random schedule, you're basically changing the reinforcement schedule. But because of that long time of staying in continuous, the dog doesn't think, oh, we're changing to random. It's like, no, no, this is becoming extinction. Where is my toy? Or where is my food? Right. It's like that's burst of like disobedience and frustration because they don't. Yeah. So, you signed a contract and you're violating it now. Yeah. But you know what? With the, there is one other thing I want to have you to hear even actually you guys, because it's interesting to me.

And that's the legalities of, you know, being in anything to do with, you know, agencies that deal with legal issues. And they do. One of the things that always seems to come around as defense of why we don't use release is because if we let the dog work on its own, always on its own, then it shows that we are not influencing. And then somehow you, you can justify it better in court. But if you have a case, then the defending attorney can ruin the situation. I, I, I know what I say, but I'm curious because I know you deal with this. Yeah. I mean, so what you're bringing up is, yeah, handler bias. So everybody's afraid. I won't say everybody. There's a lot of camps that are afraid that if you presented or you worked a search a certain way and you were involved, did you potentially cue the dog? Right. Sure. And my thing is, well, you should be doing this in training frequently and you should be running single and doing double blind testing to verify whether or not this is, this phenomenon is occurring. Is the dog responding to your presentation or in training? Are you only presenting where odor's at? Are you failing to present in areas that are neutral that don't mean anything? So this is a very easy thing to address if you're doing it throughout your training. And I would, I would go further and say that it's easier to make an independent searching dog if you're using markers or signals because my, I don't have to be a certain proximity to deliver a reward at source. Right. So if I'm going to toss the reward at source, I have to be within a certain distance of the dog at all times. So that dog, I'm influencing them by proximity all the time. My dog and I have a 10 foot bubble or whatever, because I need to be within 10 feet of them when they find something every single time. Otherwise I can't deliver a reward there. But if I have that communication system where I can release the dog to me, I can be all the way across the room. I could be out in the hallway. Right. And I can, the dog can search totally independently of me. I can, and I can still reinforce them. Yeah. So I think the, the, the fact that you signaling it is making a dog dependent on you is actually likely making the dog less dependent on you, or if you use it appropriately in training. Correct. And, and the dog then starts working to find the stimulus in order to hear the signal. And by also, like you said, bringing up the value of control negatives, blank searches, and those blank searches also get reinforced. The dog is less likely to throw these false indications or nonproductive responses because

now they understand there's a correct option, even if odor is not present. Right. And that same thing can be reinforced to any number of levels. Right. You know, that's another thing that people will start to ask too is, oh, what, what I'll do is I'll pay really good on odor. But if it's a blank, I'll just give them a piece of food. And I said, you start going down that path. You've now created a very defined line between these two things. And the dog will say, well, then I don't want the food. I want the toy. So I'll keep searching. Right. And no, you can, your variable reward schedule applies for both finding odor and your negatives. And in that way, it's both can get high value. Both can get secondary, whatever, or even just reinforcement by play with you or social interaction. So it takes a bit for, you know, obviously, you know, I was down there with Dr. Stuart Hilliard at Lackland. And this was a lot of our conversations was one introducing blanks, even in their protocol box phases. And the very first time we did that to one of the dogs, it literally broke the dog's brain. The dog was like, went down the boxes. There was nothing there. And then we, you know, praise a dog and then put odor there. And the dog didn't even acknowledge when odor was there because the dog was like, holy cow, there was nothing here. And that was the first time it ever had zero. So then after that, it didn't even trust odor for that next repetition. So we just put the dog up, let the dog rest, came out the next day, did a find, you know, it was like box number one, two. So first box it went to, boom, got odor. Then did another rep where I moved it down. And then the third rep was zero. This time the dog acknowledged nothing's here. Fourth rep, put odor back in there and spot two, which is second box. Dog nailed it beautifully. It just had to acknowledge and realize that zero was an option. But when we made zero an option, the dog literally went, I don't even know what I'm doing anymore. Like, did odor not mean anything? Which would, of course, panic a lot of people. And then they would, they would bail on the training. Oh, for sure. Like, oh, we've got to go back to making sure there's odor there all the time. Yeah. Meanwhile, docs like this is the greatest thing. And I loved it too, because it allowed everybody to see the value of introducing that. And so, and then that's the common question that comes up is, okay, when do you introduce zero? When do you introduce variable reward? And as you guys know, this is our step two of training, which is the protocol where there's multiple items.

Set discrimination phase is when that happens. That's cool. So, yeah. All right. Let's go to another question. There's one other thing that I want to say. It may come up in other questions as well, but the use of markers and detection, but in general or signaling or conditioned reinforcers and however you want them. There's an other value that we've certainly realized in the obedience world of insulating your behaviors from like Pavlovian responses or conflicts with Pavlovian responses or anticipatory responses. And by that I mean is if my dog does a behavior and I throw a ball for it, my dog does a behavior and I throw a ball for it unsignaled, right? My dog's going to do a behavior and there's going to be a whole bunch of anticipatory behavior ready. There's automatic, there's Pavlovian tension in the body, which can affect their ability to do the behavior. Indications in detection are no different. A conflict comes. Yes. Because of understanding, not because of lack of understanding. Exactly right. Yeah. The straight up misbehavior of organisms. I was just going to say that. And I'm going to do an article on the misbehavior of detection dogs based on the misbehavior. It's beautiful. And we see it all the time. And if you're using markers, it allows you, the dog waits for the sound, then the release, defer, especially predatory rewards a little bit, a few second break, and then toss the reward or whatever. And now that behavior is protected from a lot of that anticipatory stuff or the Pavlovian conditioning. And that's giant. We see it in obedience and it's absolutely there in detection as well. Yep. Yeah. So the ball down, it's definitely giant. Yeah. Like it is a must understand if you don't like. Yep. So that leads me to Ivan. Please describe to people what you told us last night about how you help people with their condition reinforcers using markers and not telegraphing before they do it. So give us a little of your story and how you did that. This was brilliant. Yeah. Yeah. So I came up finally with, so I mean, just to put some picture in everybody's head, let's say you're making a dog to give you good picture, healing eye contact. And you just throw the ball, as Michael said, the moment you have that 100% devotion. And then you do it a few times and now the dog understands that he's not going to be prepared to grab the ball. And now there is a problem. There is a conflict. What do I do? Do I get ready for the ball? Do I keep watching? Because if I not keep watching, I'm not getting the ball.

But if I keep watching and the brain, little brain goes places simply because it's motivated and simply because it understands. Yep. It's a, to your saying, it's a picture of understanding. Right. And even if you, even if you say, well, but I'm going to use a release signal when that release signal is simultaneously in the order of classical order. Meaning the signal and the ball come at the same time. The release doesn't give you the information. Therefore, you're not prepared anyway. So you're just as bad as if you don't say that you are free. And so, yeah, we've tried and I, and Michael has done and everybody that understands that problem have done many things to try to help a handler. And it's very difficult. So, yeah, I have put electric collar on a person just so they don't. And when I put the electric collar, oddly enough, they're like, definitely not doing it. But then they're like, you know, like Mr. Roboto. And it's like, okay. So anyway, what I came up with, because like how you were, we were talking and so Michael's approach was, again, recognized the same problem. And it was like, okay, before you do that, take a couple of steps back. But it's still, there's those little hands are still moving. No. So I've been doing this now probably for the last couple of years. It's like, give the release, clap three times, and only then you're allowed to get the toy. And that's the break that they, but I had to get the hands busy. The first time I did it, it was like, wow, this is genius. I was like, just amazed. And then you see them, but it's so hard when you, when you're in this, you've, it is already a habit. And that habit can become very quickly. I have, it's like, okay. So, but yeah, that was funny. It's a very good one. Well, because obviously we're all talking about people constantly by a natural mentality as a human being want to get ready to reward their dog. They want to give them their thing. They're doing all their preparatory. It's all the intentions, no question. Exactly. So they can't help themselves, but reach or telegraph where the reward location is at. And that's why I love the idea of, like you said, occupying the hand. So give the release. So free, clap three times. And then you can grab it. We both were doing this years back to Wesleyan. No, hold your pants. Grab your pants. You know? It still wasn't. Yeah, yeah. People would still be like, I'm grabbing my pants. Grab your pants closer to my pocket. It's funny. But in that is, like embedded and all that is, of course, us trying to get a delay between the release and the production of the reward. Yeah.

Like you need a little delay there. So that's what the signaling behaviors prepare the dog to receive it. So the dog has to stop. Doesn't have to worry about where it's coming from. It's coming. Concentrate on the behavior. When you hear this release, then you can start worrying about where it's coming from. But if there's not enough delay, the dog is constantly worried about where it's coming from. Especially the higher motivated the dog, the anticipation levels through the roof. So the tiniest detail of such a big difference in training you will have. Yeah. It definitely was, you know, obviously I'll be using that with some of our students. No, Natalie and I are always trying to work on people with for, you know, not telegraphing or reaching for the reward. Plus you have a new secondary reinforcer built in. Correct. That's what I was laughing. The clapping. Yep. The dogs would be like, yes. So when people applaud your dog. The dog gets all jacked up. Right? All right. On to another question. This one's going to be an interesting one. Are there dogs with ADHD? I don't know. There are dogs that manifest like they have it. Right. Right. It's like you definitely can see dogs acting very different than the normal majority of dogs. But how do you diagnose that? And how do you put it in that category of ADHD or something else? Well, I think it doesn't really matter, like if they have the syndrome, like or not. And if whether it's exact same thing we see in human beings, they're definitely dogs that have a harder time concentrating. They're easily distracted. Right. They have energy and it's they're not persistent at tasks naturally. Right. They manifesting like I'm doing this for a second. Then I'm doing that for a second. I'm doing that for a second. And it's not like they go like I have I'm on a mission with a purpose kind of thing. And those dogs present challenges in training for most trainers, especially the ones that are go go trainers and not patient and not taking, you know, variable approaches to to see, you know, then then this can be a this can actually turn into a very sad story. Actually, now that I'm thinking because you can really like like I bet you some trainers and you just screwing with me and it's just oh yeah. And then they start bouncing going here. Exactly. And I'm going to just stop them without understanding. It can be. Yeah. But it's hard to know specifically ADHD. I don't even know how. How exactly gets diagnosed in humans, really. I don't either. So we're not going to be experts. Yeah. Yeah.

But I think like so the dogs that manifest as if they might have that, let's just say we have have a dog that has those difficulties in learning. Yeah. We both worked with tons of dogs like that over the years. And he's right. It's just patience and focus and incremental building of focus and concentration. Yeah. Right. You have to have the patience to show the dog that persisting on a task and maintaining focus on a specific task is what gets you to the things that you want. And I don't know of any dogs like that that were motivated. Right. That couldn't be taught to focus. And maybe there's dogs that do it more naturally and they have better natural concentration and better duration for their natural concentration, which we always it's lovely when you get that kind of dog. But those other dogs can can be taught it in most cases. Yeah. In my experience. Yeah. I mean, we've seen plenty of ADHD dogs with one trainer having five acting like that. And you know it's not because they had that definitely that is something to do with a trainer. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like I'm sitting, but I shouldn't be. It's like this panic lever. There's no clarity. It's like these eyes are just concern. Yeah. Good question. But really, the bottom line of this is, I think we all agree, take your time and make the best of what you have and be patient. And in some ways, we find that like if you are really into training, it should be interesting to you that your approach is not working right now and that you have to get creative. These are like I just got goosebumps just talking to myself because this is really the moments when I get interested about dog training. Yeah. You know, instead of getting frustrated and angry at the dog. Yes. You know. I would have to second that with wholeheartedly. Like that when you're presented with you're presented with a dog that doesn't respond to what you normally do. That's the point at which you should be going like, oh, cool. Right. Like, that's weird. All right. What do we do with this? Right. Yeah. Should get you excited. That's when. That's great. Natalia is like, you're still thinking about that dog. Oh, I tell the story. I tell. I don't know how many students have heard the story about you and I seminar you'd done. And I was there and I don't even remember when it was somewhere in Southern California in the time back in the day. And there was this what we would all consider a horrible dog for a work dog. Right. The dog was just a very not manifesting any of the traits that you wanted.

And but early in the process, that dog got in your head and you were like, I'm going to figure out what makes this dog satisfied. What makes this dog tick? And so everybody had paid for the seminar and whatever. And we're getting a working slot and they did their thing. And I brought that dog out like eight times or ten times because he kept going, get that dog again. And then two or three dogs ago, he's like, get that dog again. It was beautiful. I mean, it was in a way, but it was like I should have let go and do what I needed to do with everybody else. But I know. Yeah. But that's the thing. Like if you like anybody that is interested genuinely in training, when you struggle. It should make you think you shouldn't get angry because you. Like you cannot exhaust. There is always something else. A hundred percent. Yeah. I say it all the time that like if if if there were a recipe and you follow the recipe and you got a trained dog, I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't be dog training. I'd be doing something else for sure. There's no chance I'd still be doing this. Right. Like that's the beauty of it. Every single time you go through it, it's a little bit different. And sometimes it's a lot different, which is should be exciting to you. For sure. I mean, it's the beauty of the challenge and the failures to go through. It's the it's those things that challenge you and you kind of fail your way through it. Sometimes this didn't work. This didn't work. And I'm using failure as I went into with an expectation that this should be this easy or it should work this way. And it doesn't work out or I have trained something. I feel confident. And all of a sudden the dog does what a dog does and it doesn't work. It's not really baked in like you thought it was. And those things to me are the most like eye opening and help you grow as a trainer. Right. Sure. The old saying is calm seas don't make a good sailor. You know, so it's you need those challenges. You need those different things. You need lots of different dogs to show you things, because if you get comfortable, you know, a lot of people had watched me work Malinois for 25 years. And then now the past five years or so, I've been doing floppy ear dogs, Labrador Spaniels, things like that. And that came out of my desire to be challenged by something totally different. You know, I had gotten all right. Yeah, they're very different. And that part really excited me. And, you know, Natalie was had started her career and was, you know, had worked Gus, her Border Collie, McNabb, Mix, whatever he is. And then she had worked her other dogs as well.

But this was a whole new challenge for her. You know, so with the two of us, we're like, you know what, let's do this. And now we've turned into Spaniel people, which people were always shocked by that one. However, you are converting Natalie into a Malinois now. So there's now her next group. You can't hang around either one of us for very long. And not have a Malinois. Without winding up in your lap. Yep, absolutely. And you're not being forced. You're just manipulated on a different level. Little small seeds that just collect and start growing inside you. Yes. All right. So the next question is about leaking. How to deal with leaking dogs. Managing, reducing, vocalizing during obedience. Let's say in Mondioring or IGP. When the dog anticipates biting. Anytime this person practices obedience, she won't vocalize. But at the club, she whines or barks through the entire routine. I thought about maybe doing bite work and just focusing on obedience for a few weeks at the club. But also stopping the progression that she starts the noise. Like saying no or restarting the entire routine. And of course, she still won't get what she wants without whining. So does she skip bite work? Like how does she navigate that entire process? And how much of it basically is the context association to the location? Or the exercise? Or like you're talking about the anticipatory aspect of this thing is happening next? Well, all questions were good. This so far is probably the most interesting one for me. You know, because it leads to problems. What happens typically? A trainer, what do a trainer do? Like an average trainer? They'll go to correct that. We will think how to shut it off. This is where we say, well, we cap it. We put dominant color. We do like there's 100 ways to stop them from whining. It's very easy. But that's not the answer. The answer is why is he whining? Like if he was a person and he's talking instead of whining, is he telling you, I don't understand what the fuck you want from me? Or is he just so excited? He's like, oh my God, oh my God, I'm so excited that I'm like, there is quite a few different reasons for the vocalization too. And before we understand what's the nature of the dog, like you might, you know, people like you say somebody passed away. And they're like, oh my God, oh my God. You say somebody has a birthday. It's the exact same. Oh my God, oh my God. Right? And try to make him not say it. Right. Then they're going to be like, oh. Yeah. But a lot of times what I personally find is that's almost easier to recognize because if you pay attention to your dog,

you will see that that dog is the same in the house and in everyday life they're just talkative, right? Even when you pet them and scratch their butt. But the other ones are the ones that I think it's the dogs that suffer because they just lack clarity. And they're trying to tell you, I'm really trying. But you're not telling me. And it's never going well. And I know where it's going again. Ultimately, in the next minute or less, you will chop me up to some level. Mm-hmm. And I really don't understand why we focus on how to stop it instead of understand why is it happening so we can do something else about it, right? Or accept it even. So there's a point at which this manifests frequently in dogs that are doing high arousal activities. And to Ivan's point, you absolutely have to know where the vocalization is coming from, right? Is it frustration-based? Is it anxiety-based because of a lack of clarity, a lack of predictability in training? Is it involuntarily connected to excitement? And I say involuntarily because I think there are certain types of vocalizations in dogs that I label as involuntary. Unconsciously. Unconscious. Maybe unconscious is not the right word. They're not aware of it, right? Involuntary is probably not the right word. Unconscious. Unconscious. The dogs get excited, aroused, stimulated to a certain level, and these noises just come out of them. They're not going like, oh, I'm excited. I'm going to make noise. I'm going to tell people I'm excited. No. This is just the way this dog is wired, right? And with observation and training and day-to-day life, et cetera, and messing around with controlling arousal levels and things like that, you should be able to see what type you're dealing with. And so absolutely clarity solves it for a lot of dogs. Hey, if you're quiet and you get to hear good things happen for you, like good teaching and that kind of thing. If the dog is vocalizing out of frustration and it's something they're conscious of and you can tell them, hey, stop that, and they're quiet, and you reinforce them when they're quiet, it should go away quickly. But if you're there choking them out every five seconds and they're going back and whining again, then that's not it. Obviously, un-understanding isn't a part of it. And now we're starting to begin to talk about this unconscious vocalization that comes with excitement. So you either control the excitement level, you say, okay, we're going to reduce arousal. But for a lot of the tasks that we're doing, bite work and stuff like it, you can't reduce arousal level. The dog needs to be aroused to do the job, right?

My dock diving dog can't jump a long way if it's not aroused. My bite work dog is not going to fly down the field and drill that guy at full speed unless it's aroused. So it's tolerating some of it at a certain point. So for me, absolutely, if I get to a dog and I've looked at all those things and I think, okay, this dog, this dog, this is out of this dog's control, in a sense. In a sense, this dog is motivated by the work. They're very clear about their job. And they're going to squeak and whine and chirp sometimes in the work. Then I'm going to just accept it. And I think a lot of damage is done to dogs, continually trying to stop some little thing like that. And a dog that otherwise shows exceptional understanding of their work and does beautiful work. And we're saying like, oh, no, I'm going to lose a couple of points for that. And dogs are put under all kinds of abusive conditions in an attempt to stop that. And that's, it's not fair. Right. And so the diagnostic part to me is the most important. Right. Yeah. I mean, really, anytime that's like a, and that's, you know, when you, when you see handler and a dog and you see the dog constantly vocalizing, being whining, being barking, being anything, you know that something is going on and you need to really understand what it is instead of just let's shut it off. Like in the nineties, there is, well, not even way behind the nineties, there was very modern to talk about cupping. Right. It's like, okay, we make them crazy. Then we cup them. Then, you know, pressure cooker analogies and stuff. Right. And, and, but there is two, two ways to do that. And if there is no quality in your training and your dog is whining and barking and even trying to come at you because there is, it's just, and resort, resort, right. And you put the dominant dog or in whatever way you, you think you're capping it and basically you're not allowing it to make a sound instead of asking yourself, what can I do to bring clarity in the training? And that's just going to go away. Unless it's the situation that we described that you said, then you don't find it. Yep. Um, Another thing that I would say this connected to what we were talking about before about variable reinforcement is that a lot of people these days are staying on continuous reinforcement too long in certain contexts with high value rewards. And so when, as they get closer to the finishing work portion and they're starting to go onto a variable schedule, they waited too long and it creates huge frustration spikes in the dogs. Right. And then vocalization will come from that.

So dogs that were quiet while you were using continuous reinforcement are now getting noisy when you go to variable and that can be addressed earlier in the training process by introducing the concept of variable reinforcement earlier in the training process. So you don't get as much frustration when the dogs aren't getting reinforced every time they do a behavior. Right. Yeah. And I, I just came up with, I'm just, this is really something that it's of interest to me always. And, um, I mean, I mean, police dogs. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Step out, go and send in the dog and the dog starts to talk. Loses his mind. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it doesn't mean that you have to choke him off. You can train this. Mm-hmm. And it doesn't mean that you never have to say, come out and put your hand. You can so simply, it is so simple to train that, hey, I'm going to do that conversation and you're going to be quiet. But this is easy training. Mm-hmm. It is. It's actually caught on now. I would say the trend that it used to be when they would make the announcement and the dogs would lose their mind has actually. Announcement when you were doing bike. Well, that and tactfully, it became a very bad choice. Right. So, and then there was liability issues of the person saying, I didn't hear anything. All I heard was a dog barking. I didn't know it was a police dog. Right. So now a lot of tactics and procedures have changed to make sure that the announcement's made, the dog is quiet, and then announcements are made and acknowledged by other units that are around the building. Like they could hear it over there. So this, so this helped actually the need or necessity of liability. Better training. Training came from that. As long as they're still not using the system that he said, where they've built a whole bunch of value in this. They practiced it in training. No. I'm going to send the dog. Come out. I'm going to send the dog. Come out. I'm going to send the dog. Send the dog. Right. Yeah. And in training, instead of neutralizing the dogs for those signals from the beginning. Yeah. So that you didn't, then you're choking your dog out because you're, or zapping and frying your dog because your dog's not. It's that conflict by accident. Yeah. For something that you've created. Yeah. Right. So. But this is a super question. And anytime this happens, it's really these two parts. Is it really the emotional, natural, innate, you know, where I'm talkative? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. is that the dog that says, I'm trying, but I have no idea what you want. Like today you want this next minute you change it. Then you praise me for exactly the same thing.

And the next moment I am on the dominant color hand. Yeah. And then I try to bite you. And now I'm labeled as handler aggressive on top of, uh, it's just, uh, you know, being a little patient and also think, can you change something in training? That's always somehow doesn't come easy. It's like thinking always of the dog and, and, and thinking of everything as, as, uh, as some form of disobedience, right? Which is the other part of it, right? They're not trying to understand the dog's perspective there. Like this dog knows it shouldn't be doing that. Or like I told it to stop and it didn't stop. And all the stuff that comes with, like, you do what I say. There's a mentality sometimes around that, that we have to be careful of. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The next question should be interesting for your guys' point of view. So we hear the term opposition reflex a lot. Lots of examples are giving it. Is it truly a reflex or is it a better definition to call it opposition response? Interesting. Because a reflex would require by definition, it just happens where a lot of times with how many show opposition reflex is truly a response to the, the pullback or the thing that's moving forward and there's resistance to it. You know, when you look at it physiologically, is it truly? So response versus reflex. Yeah. Although they are both responses, but one can be a reflectory. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. I, like, I think we're, it's semantics at a certain point that it's, it, it, it doesn't matter that much. There are reflexive aspects to it because you can see it in a dog the same with you. If you were not attentive to something and somebody pushed against you, your body would tense. And it also depends what you're, are you pushed over a cliff? Yeah. Or are you just pushed right here on the. Yeah. But also if you don't know that it's coming and something shoves against you. Right. There's a natural, like, bracing of your body and leaning into that thing so you don't fall over, right? There's some rooted in, in, so there is a reflexive component to it. I don't know if there's truly a reflex. That's probably a question for. No, but that's a good, good one. That's a good analogy because the same thing, I mean, just how you, we never really consciously think how we are walking. The brain just makes it happen for us. Right. Yeah. And then when you get that, yes, you do. Yeah. There's a stiffening and a pushing. But sometimes when you, when it's not, when it's, uh, um, when, when you know that it's going to happen, then it's not coming to me. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and there is no real concern above. Then it goes away.

So maybe. Then it is more of a, okay, I'm just responding. Yep. Exactly. Yep. Yep. Well, I was going to say, use the detection analogy. So when sometimes a dog's indicating the handler will pull back on the dog, the dog will lean forward. And in some cases people use that as a, the dog, Oh, that's opposition reflex. That means there's an odor there. And it turns out later on, it's just a conditioned response. As soon as the dog indicates their dogs get used to pull. So they resist and they hold position and then reward comes flying in. It's how much that's, you know, no, I mean, we use the technique a lot. Yes. So many places, you know, and sometimes very successfully and sometimes really dumb stuff's happening when it's not, you know, but. Yeah. Yeah. There's lots of places where it's used. And I think it's probably maybe both. Maybe if it's surprising, it's reflexive. And if it's, if the dogs are aware of it, then it's a response and the response can be strengthened or it can be weakened or extinguished. Right. We could teach the dog when you feel the leash. I mean, go with it. This morning, how, how just working our dogs in ring, how many times we did that? Oh, we, we did each dog, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Numerous times. Yep. In the bite, in the guard, in the like, like it's really. You did it definitely on the, on the article. I was watching you on the article guard. Right. You know, you would pull back on, on her and purpose to get her to stay there. Yeah. But no, we did it when they're biting. We did it when she was guarding between the legs and to make her really, it's like, no, no, you cannot stop him. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to pull you out into that position. But there is so many other places. It just came to me that that's all we were doing this morning. A hundred percent. Yep. A hundred percent. And that would be responsive or reflexive. So I, those feel more like responses. I was going to say, that's how I feel. Because we've conditioned them. Yep. Right. So I'm pulled back, you back from something you want. If you put forward effort in, you get reinforced forward. So there's a response, but there are surprising things where dogs never had a leash on and you pull it and they just go, they just flinch back against it. There's some reflexive response to it there as well. And then there's learning involved because we're going to expect the dog potentially to differentiate between different signals in different places. So when I'm teaching you to slide over and touch my leg with the leash, I'm giving you a leash input and I don't want you to resist it at all. I want you to go with it.

And somewhere else, I'm going to use the leash on you. We use different collars and different positions and cueing systems to help the dog differentiate between them. But it's quite possible that I pull on you in one way and I want you to resist it. And I pull on you in another way and I want you to go with it. Right. And so that communication, which that says it's a response, right? And that I'm conditioned it and I need to make sure I keep those communication systems as clear as possible. I wouldn't want to do like opposition on a prong collar and then use the prong collar as a tool to teach you to move with me. That creates conflict. Right. The dog says, well, which one is it in those spots? Yeah. I bet we can have a full three day workshop on what you can do with leashes. Oh, yes. There you go. Just come to California. Michael and Ivan will be doing a... It will not be a joke. It will actually extremely of extreme value. Of course. Absolutely. One of the biggest things that we teach even detection is leash handling because of all the different complexities. Well, yeah. And not even to mention the fact of fading them out of the picture. Absolutely. So all these tools, how would the various ways in which we use them to help us construct behaviors and maintain behaviors? And then how do we work? How to prove them. Right. So. Absolutely. Okay. I will take you to another question. It's crazy how a little question can... Oh, yeah. It goes way more. How do you train obedience and then adding distractions, steps, corrections, et cetera? How do you go through this in the obedience phase of training? So. I'll give you kind of a nutshell version of it, right? Is I want to construct the behavior that I want away from distraction as much as possible, right? So that I have the dog's attention and focus and understanding. You know, I liken it to teaching a kindergartner to do something in front of a TV, right? Like I want as few distractions as possible. I'm constructing the behavior. Once I've built value in the behavior, I want to, in a controlled setting, introduce distractions. I don't want to use correction when I'm introducing new distractions to dogs in general. Novel distractions and corrections are a bad idea, right? In general, you make the dog uncomfortable with that. So when I first introduce distractions, then I help the dog. Like I remind them like, hey, don't attend to that. You know your job. I want to have control of the distractions. I want to be able to turn it off and on, control how intense it is, that kind of thing. There's some simple ways in which we do that.

And then as we go forward, it's possible that I determine that a dog really understands its job and there's a distraction that they're familiar with. It's not new. It's nothing novel to them. And they're disregarding a few of your ability to raise and lower criteria as you go, right? That's absolutely. Yeah. And then there may be consequences for not responding in the face of a distraction. If I determine you know your job and I'm not going to do damage to your worldview about that distraction, I'm not going to create avoidance to that situation. They're going to take the information I give them and apply it to the fact that they failed to do the behavior instead of the other thing. That's the nutshell version. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If I were to add something, I would just focus on, are we making any distinction between distraction and competing reinforcer? Mm-hmm. Because something can be distracting, but it's not necessarily competing with you. I think that's a super good point. And a lot of times we can show the dog what butterflies are and just the world. And it's really that is the world. There are things that can be, oh, what is that? Curiosity, right? Yeah. Yep. And I find that for the most part that in that sense of distraction, I am very less concerned because I know that my dogs want to play with me. They, you know, it's not that they see a bird flying for the first time. Now, if the bird flying is competing reinforcer. It's like, oh, I really want to chase the bird. Now we have to be smart and go the path that Michael's talking about. Yeah. But there is really, to me, there is the difference between just distraction. What's that? Versus like, oh, I want to. And no, no. This is going to compete with me. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. I think the biggest mistake that people make is they try to use distractions or competing motivators as a proofing thing so that they can correct their dogs for mistakes. Yeah. Right. I think that's a very common traditional mentality around distractions. I've built this behavior. Now let's go out and present some distractions or some competing motivators. So my dog will fail so I can correct my dog. Right. And I want to avoid that assiduously. Like I'm, I want to say like, hey, that's not for you to attend to. You know, this is what we're doing. And if I haven't built enough value in what we're doing, then I have no business putting the dog in that position. Right. Ultimately. Right. And so I look at those as a very controlled introduction so that the dog and stuff just happens. Like you're out training and. Right. Yeah. Life goes on.

Some weird noise goes by or bird flies over and you're like, whoa, what's that? I don't make any big deal about that kind of thing either. I agree with him 100% on that front. Right. Yeah. You want to go chase that rabbit. I may have to say, no, no, no, that's not. You're not doing that. Right. But. Then that leads to. That is the other extreme of that is the. That trainer that just is so scared. Yes. And he always goes in that corner, always in that vacuum jar of training. Good point. Because it looks good there. Mm hmm. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. Right. And then the longer you stay, the longer is going to look good there. And the harder. But the harder it will be to put it outside of those vacuum environments. Yeah. You have to, you know. Pretty soon. It's hard to like how soon. Right. Immediately. Pretty soon. How soon. As soon as you can. Right. As soon as you can get. That's exactly. It's the, it's the, uh, the distraction or environmental equivalent of staying on continuous reinforcement too long. Right. This idea that I only work in this one location or only work in places that are completely free of distraction until it's perfect. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. There's that idea too, that some people are like, they not even concerned with the fact that it looks good there, which makes them happy, of course. But then there's this idea that it has to be perfected before you introduce any kind of new difficulty. And so somebody will stay in isolation until the behaviors are completely finished or in their mind finished. And that's a problem. Like I can take an easier behavior or just an interaction with me and apply that to new environments. This is us going out and just playing with our dogs in new places. Right. I don't have to do obedience in new places. Right. Either the idea that, Hey, we work together, we collaborate in new locations. And if frequently, if I do that and the behaviors are being constructed somewhere relatively distraction free by the time I'm bringing him in those environments, I don't have any real issues. Yeah. Like the dog's just like, yeah, we've, I've been in lots of environments and I'm still collaborating with you there. Right. Same thing. Like, I mean, if we talk detection, you don't just put dogs in schools and churches only to search. You go there just because to go there. Like when you go tracking with a dog, you don't go in this tracking fields only to track. You go there to let him loose so he can explore and see what a gopher hole is. See what, uh, whatever. And that actually helps him now track or detect or do the, yeah. So it's not that. The novelty, the environment's gone. Right.

It hunts you. If you, if you don't let allow exploration, it's going to hunt you eventually. I think. Yeah. Yeah. It leads into what you guys talked about right into the next question, which was thoughts on punishment being personal or not personal. Uh-huh. Meaning the dog. I think I know. Yeah. Like, is it coming from you or is it God's hand? Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. I think that's what they're asking as well. What it is. Yeah. Uh, I think there are circumstances for both. Right. Most of the stuff connected to training. Uh, it's personal, meaning I'm signaling the dog. I'm not using unsignaled punishment on my dogs very often. Right. I mean, the vast majority of the punishment is signaled like, Hey, that was wrong. Here comes something. And that there's a variety of reasons for that. One. It marks the moment in time of the mistake. Two. It allows me frequently. There's a preparatory, just like a reward marker prepares the dog for accessing the reward. A punishment marker, uh, or a signal prepares the dog to receive the punishment and allows me to radically downregulate the intensity of the physical punishment that I use. And it also states if you like or don't like. Yes. What goes on. A hundred percent. Which is of utmost value. So, so the dog then of course knows it's me because I'm signaling it in some fashion. And I think in general, that's a part of our working relationship. I'm going to tell you when you're right. And I'm going to tell you when you're wrong. And that's all a part of both sides of the same coin. And it's a part of it. There are specific situations in which you like an electric fence is one such example, right? Like sometimes you're chewing a cable, maybe the cable bites them back. Yep. Or somebody using an e-collar on a dog for counter surfing or whatever. Like not, I'm not saying that that's the only solution to those problems, but they're like, there are places in which you want the dog to associate the correction with something in an environment. Rattlesnake avoidance is another one, right? Yeah. Yeah. There's, there are places in which the impersonality of the correction. And there are places in bite work sometimes when I don't want to be involved in IGP, for instance, where the dogs focus on the helper is very important. There are places sometimes where if I'm marking and moving, the dog can become a little bit likely to look at me if I'm moving up or things like that. And so there might be a place there specifically where I would transfer that to somebody else. But we do work through that. We work through it. We still work through it. Yeah.

It's like, no, you know that it's coming from me and you're going to be concerned for a little bit. But we will show you that you don't have to be concerned and clarity, right? Yeah. But I think the question, and I am speculating because it just, we cannot go and back and forth with whomever wrote the question. Yeah. It's about, I think there is that philosophy that if you hang back and bad stuff is happening and it's not associated with you, then you are ultimately a very good person consistently. And being that person is the dog either really don't likes you or it tries to eat you or something like this. You know, I think, I think the question is going in that direction and that's just not the case. Like, there is places, plenty of places in time when it's like, hey, don't do that. It's like, I'm telling you, don't do that. Yes. But if I try to tell you, don't do that, that, that, but I am not telling you, then imagine, imagine if I have to, then if he walks in this room, it's like the whole room is booby trapped. And sometimes he touches something, it's bad. And almost everything is like, okay, I cannot do nothing. And then there is me as the owner being very quiet. A lot. He has to figure it out now. And I would prefer that I say, Hey, it's not the time. Yeah. Maybe a sleeve here, or maybe it's a pizza on the table. It's like, don't know. I mean, what? And if it is about handler aggression, handler aggression. Aggression comes from lack of clarity comes of, of lack of relationship. Right. Otherwise, any other aggression, there is those that, you know, they can show handler aggression, but they also will nuke you in a hallway. When, if you decide to go to the bathroom at night, you know, and that's very different. But the ones that we call handler aggression, when it happens during training, when you ask him to do something and he says, I know where we're going and I'm going to try to stop that. And now we have this, that's all clarity. That's all like the dog showing. I'm, I'm lost. Like, I know that eventually we're going to get into a fight. Like I give this example often with, uh, like, let's say you and I are good in painting houses. And Cameron says, well, we have a house and five, 500,000 cash just to paint everything. And we paint that for two days. And he gives us 500 cash. And just because we don't know how to agree, how to split the money, we get into fights every time we get the money as the end result. Eventually we kind of, we are getting excited to go and paint houses, but we always know where we're going to end up. Right? We're going to end up in a fight. Yeah.

And that handler aggression in some ways is like, there is something that is. Needed some clarity. We come to an agreement ahead of time. Right. You decide. Like how about 250? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's exactly right. And I think that you, you hit on it. Part of the. I'm seriously overpaying for painting a house for 500,000. I'm just saying. We're, we're very good painters. Yeah, apparently. Extremely good painters. I think there's a relationship building component that is misunderstood. Like the idea that. Only good things. Can promote a good relationship. Only giving the dogs things they want and being nice to them, promote relationship. It's a collaborative process of learning that you're helping the dog through. You guys are working through this together. And so I'm giving you information that helps you understand the tasks and make your way to the things that you want. And we do these things together. And both sides of it. Contingent. Yeah. They're all contingent. They're all contingent. And they're clear. You have a place to put that information. Right. And when something is non-contingent and it's like, okay, I just got hit by the collar and chopped by the dominant collar. You're leaving it up them. And I don't know why. Yep. Yep. You're leaving up them to decide why. Why. And sometimes they, sometimes it works because the dog decided that it was what you wanted them to understand it to be. But there are lots of times where it doesn't. Right. Right. Where the dog does, goes, I don't know where to put that information. Like, I just thought I was doing something that I'm doing that I like doing. I'm excited out here. I'm doing this. And the dog has no place to put that information. And that creates all kinds of stress and anxiety. Yeah. And starts to disrupt it. Like that all, we talk about it all the time in, in classes and things like that, about this idea of stress levels. Um, when a human, the, the, the original studies were done with human beings and psychology students, right. Uh, perceived control of aversive experiences, right. This idea is that like they measure stress levels while you're being shocked. And if the shock is under your control or you perceive it's under your control versus with you perceive it's not under your control, the same physical input causes significantly higher stress levels. So we're all talking about clarity here. We're all talking about communicate, clarity of communication. And so signaling becomes such an important piece of that puzzle. And, and I'm helping the dog. It's part of our collaboration. I'm telling you when you're right in a very precise way.

I'm telling you when you're wrong in a very, so that you have a place to put that information. And then the dog starts to go, okay, cool. Now consequences don't have the same effect. Now, if I, if I do apply pressure to you, the dog goes, yeah, yeah, I know what to do with that information. So the same physical input creates less stress in the dog because they know what to do. They understood it. Right. Right. It's, it's, they have got a conceptual framework to hang that information on. And it's very sad to think that like, just like a lot of times this starts with the premise that he's here to just go against me. Right. He will never just cooperate because he wants to do something with me. He always going to look for a way to screw things over. Yep. Always. Isn't that what I'm, isn't that one of your pet peeves? Like it drives me mad. People just like the, like the, the, the attitude among dog trainers, like this dog's a dick. This dog's trying to get it over on me. This, like, it's one of the, my least favorite things in dog training. Like that idea. Like, no, he's not. Like it's you. He's not being what you want because you're not holding up your end of the bargain. Most of the time. The vast majority of people that say that. Yeah. Especially you've made your mind who he is. Yes. And you constantly look at him and treating him that way. Then you're getting opposition reflex. Wouldn't you? Yeah. Shocking. Right. Or response. Yes. Yes. Response. Absolutely true. Okay. So anyway, the short thing, I think we agree. Yeah. Like the. Mostly signaled. Yeah. Mostly personal. There is no, no, nothing superstitious, nothing and nothing. The dog's not going to hate you because you say, because you have rules and there are consequences for not following rules. This is, I mean, if that was the case, we imagine the world, like we would be just trying to kill each other instantly. Yeah. We, we talked to you and I, Michael talked about this in detection, giving the no signal when the dog was incorrectly responding to whatever, let's say a distracting or proofing odor. Yeah. And a lot of times people want to wait the dog out. Well, waiting the dog out looks a lot like a duration exercise. Yeah. True. So. Very true. And the dogs are like, come on. Yeah. Oh, saying no. Yeah. It's already a big conversation. Like sometimes I start, it's like, would you tell no to your dog? And then I'm not going to go there. Let's do the next one. Next, next one. There you go. Cheers. There you go. Okay. The next one is, should you activate the dog or should the dog activate you? Um, I know, I think I know what they're getting at. Right.

So, uh, I think in, in general, past the beginning stages of training, uh, then I want to activate the dog with some set of signals because I don't want my dog determining when the work starts and stops and things like that. Right. And I'm living with a working dog. And so I don't want you come in constantly trying to activate me, but there is some part of the early process where I've set up a circumstance in which the dog knows they can get me to do things with them. And I want to have them ask for it. And I want them to offer it and bring me to life in a sense when we're doing early handler focus exercise and things like that. So there's a point at which I'll respond to their overtures. But once I have reasonably good behavior, then I'm going to tell you when the bars open and when the bars close, I'm going to, I have different sets of signals that tell you what activities we're going to do. Cause I don't want my dog guessing about that. And I want this, I want to be able to have it focused on certain tasks and times, especially when you're dealing with high arousal activities that we want our dogs to do. I don't want my dog trying to solicit play for me in the living room 24 seven. Right. So it's important that I tell them when that's an appropriate activity. Right. That's how I approach it anyway. Sometimes there is a confusion with this. I think as well, the whole idea of activation kind of like destruction and competing reinforcer like activation and motivation. So like assuming that we have motivation already, I can give you the cue. I can give you the green light. Right. Let's go. That would be the activation. But if we're taking activation as some attempt to create motivation to do something, which sometimes can be looked at that way. Yes. And you're thinking of, okay, I'm kind of, you know, by almost forcing him to get motivated. Right. Right. Right. Right. That's going in a very strange rabbit hole. Right. I see what you're saying. Let's look more like that. We're teaching a dog to play, for instance, in the early stages. Sometimes I'm doing more work. Creating motivation. More work than the dog is hammer running and I'm jumping and taking. There's a lot of activity that I want to feather out and I want the dog to bring that activity at a certain point. So I want to do less and less and have them do more and more. Right. To the point where that dog's coming out asking me to do it. Right. In a sense, or activating me into the game. Right. That kind of thing. So I see what you're saying. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, I see it a lot.

This isn't so much to the handler, but in the bite work context, we want the, in certain types of training. They want the dog to activate the decoy. So the decoy constantly activating the dog. Yeah. Sure. Active versus reactive. Yeah. There is that thing too. There's that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not to the dog waiting. Well, if you're going to start acting out and make whip, then I'm going to respond to you versus me responding because, uh, not because you're, I have anything over the decoy. Yeah. Yeah. But, but that's interesting. Let, let's say you have a dog like in IGP, it's pretty common that thing where if you do a lot, then the dog is barking very nice and confident and deep. And if you don't, they start to question if they should, and they're changing. Right. Yeah. Um, and then it's like, do you do, or do you not do? And the thing is that even when you don't do, when you are passive instead of active, you're still saying, Hey, if I'm passive, that's, that's an activity. Right. So it's still your activation, it's just not like being active. Your activation is this instead of this. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. They're still, they still need some signal to go into that behavior. And the signal may be the person standing passively in the blind. The signal may be somebody running around. Or at least 30 seconds. Yes. And we want it to be the picture the dogs are actually going to be confronted with. Exactly. So we, of course, want to, if we're having to do things to activate the dog in the early stages, we would, of course, want to get rid of those. It's like the help in teaching a dog to play. Yes. I run a lot when I'm first teaching a dog to play. I don't want to have to run for the whole life of the dog when I'm playing with them. There's a point at which I can just toss the toy or present the toy and I don't need to run anymore. And that's, we want the same thing in the bodywork there. Yep. All right. Well, the next question, this is going to be, there's only three questions left. This is your guys' option to get into it or not. But this goes into the... I don't like it already. Make me concerned. This is the conversation about the medical, the use of pharmaceuticals for dogs. So you can say pass. You can say whatever you guys want. Well, let's talk about it. We'll talk about it. Okay. There you go. Let's do it. Let's get into it. I think I would think that we're also relatively like mind on this and that they have a place. There are cases in which they will help as part of a system of behavioral modification and they can disrupt certain cycles for short periods of time, which allow you to make progress.

But there should be a plan to eliminate them. There are all kinds of side effects and they're radically overused. So I want to try purely behavioral solutions to begin with, generally speaking. And if I'm running into difficulties where I think a pharmaceutical may help me get over a hump, block some responding long enough for me to develop other paths for the dog, what it depends on the problem, then they have a place. But they're just like in human medicine. I think right now they're strongly over-prescribed. Yes. They're a lazy way out. They deprive dogs of meaningful hives, the dogs that are on them long-term. The side effects long-term for most of them have not been studied on dogs and they're not, they're meant to be temporary things. And there's so many dogs out there now, even just like dogs that don't have behavioral issues. Dogs that are just like an excited adolescent dog. No question. And somebody's like, oh, my dog's like spastic. I need to put him on medication. So they're way, way, way overused. Yeah. And that comes to also, I think for, I mean, this is really, can open the door for so many different conversations. But again, like sometimes, just as you said, a young dog that maybe just needs a leash bop, that it's aversive, that it has to be aversive. Yeah. And somebody's unwilling to do that. Yes. And give it a try. Right. And then they will say, well, we tried everything. We got, we worked with this top trainer and this top trainer and this top trainer. Well, but did anybody tell them, dude, don't do that? No. No. Okay. So let's put them on psychotropics. Yeah. It's a, it's a big jump and it's not. And on top of that, we all know, like it doesn't matter being humans being what there's. Pharmacy's driven by the money. Mm-hmm. It's profit driven. There's no, no question about that. It would be very different if the veterinarian or the doctor is not getting nothing from, from, from this kind of, and. There's a big argument there about whether or not medicine of any kind should be for profit. Right. In my opinion. Right. But this is another large conversation. Oh, yeah. Humans or dogs. I mean, you look at. I also, I agree there are dogs that you can have a, a moment to use it so you can make a breakthrough. No question. Okay. Yeah. And I also would go that far that they are dogs that probably are so torn inside. Otherwise that should stay for the rest of them. Why? Agreed. But those are, but those are rare. Like they're extremely rare cases. Yes. I agree. Yeah. And I know, uh, uh, uh, you know, the, the people that have the rights to prescribe, they would argue that. Um, yeah.

And unfortunately we don't collaborate on something that is really important. It's a bummer. Yeah. It's really important because like how we were spent a lot of time talking to you about that Tina dog that I have. Yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. We stopped the psychotropics. took a totally different approach. I know she wasn't shocked daily for things. And here we are. So there are ways. And we know if with humans, there are ways, um, psychotropic medications to me are, you know, it should not, it should not be done so easily. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. And, and the, the people prescribing them, unfortunately don't have any education in general on the behavioral aspects of it. They're not out there actually teaching dogs. So they're prescribing generally speaking in isolation, not, not as part of a larger protocol. Right. And, and so that's what they've got in their toolbox ultimately. And so that's what they know. That's what they're going to do as opposed to like, okay, here are the behavioral solutions. Here's the ways to approach it from a training and management perspective. And here's how that fits into that. Right. And, and here's your plan for getting off of it, except in those very rare cases, the super rare dogs. Right. It should be a very temporary thing, but it's unfortunately not. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll, I'll wrap the two last two questions into one question. And that is, how do you guys view the future of the dog training industry? And then what advice would you give that next generation of dog trainers? I don't know about the future, but I, I do have an advice. I think you're going to like the advice because we, we're coming from the same place you and I. Yes. And, and my advice is like what has happened in the last year with social media. And it has promoted this influential kind of type of trainer that it's not a trainer, but it's busy. To, to learn marketing, to get likes and to get views. And that's very different than being a trainer. And once they create that, now they have people's attention and now they feel that they actually have to become trainers. So it's almost like backwards. The cart before the horse. I can say it better myself. Yeah. Like if you want to be a dog trainer, the first thing you need to do is learn how to be a dog trainer. And you're not going to like, and I'm just kind of going to sound like advertising our schools now, but you cannot learn dog training in four days and get some certificate and start teaching other people. Yeah. I would argue you can't get in four months.

Like so when students would come to the school and I, we had a five month long program. And they hear full time for five months. You, when you finish that, you're not, you're not, you're at the beginning of your exploration. If you came into there with no previous experience, like you just have the basics, which doesn't mean you couldn't help somebody on a small level, but you shouldn't be out. Like people would finish the thing and go out and say like, post, start a business, take out their Facebook ads. We handle all cases, aggression. And I'm like, like, what are you doing? Like there's confidence. Like confidence. Yeah. It's yeah. It's a, it's a process. You don't become expert at anything instantaneously. And I think it's easier than ever to get access to information now, which is there are benefits to that for sure. Oh yeah. That you can speed up your education to some degree, but the hands-on in your bones kind of experience that comes from doing it a bunch of times with a lot of different dogs. You can't speed that up. Like somebody can give you an idea, which can help prevent you from making a bunch of silly mistakes along the way. But then the, the, the, the true knowledge, like you, you know it in your body and you've seen it and felt it only comes with repetition experience. And people should do more of that before they start taking people's money and trying to do it professionally. Right. Right. I think certainly both of us traveled a path like that. We were passionate about training as a hobby. Granted it was different times. Yeah. They're very, granted very different times. Yeah. Very different times. And, and like one of the things the dog training industry has done is it's blown up. There, there are a bunch of dog trainers, like way more people are hiring dog trainers than ever would have been the past, you know, 30 years ago or 40 years ago. They're there. The average person didn't necessarily go hire a dog. Right. People might take a obedience class at the local obedience club or whatever it is, or they didn't, they tried to do it themselves or, you know, whatever it was. There were some people that would hire trainers if they had behavioral issues. Yeah. But now like, it's kind of common. You, everybody has a dog trainer, which is great. Like the idea that people are getting dogs and, and they're seeking help with their dogs. So that kind of explosion of dog training as an industry is, is relatively recent and there are more and more opportunities for people to be professional dog trainers. But there are a lot of professionals out there with very little real experience.

And that's a problem. Right. And they can get really popular on social media really fast. If you're flashy and you know how to manipulate that system, you can get a lot of people looking at you, which unfortunately doesn't necessarily mean you know what you're doing. Yeah. Which, yeah. You gotta get your hands dirty. Now that you're. We sound like old men. You ask the question. Kids that you stay. Right. Where the dog training goes. I think now, now that having said that, I think my guess is that there will be some source of a reset to where you can have so many influencer until eventually it's so flooded with people on the internet that you have to try to find somebody that actually can train dog that has proven that can do it. Yeah. And I think it will. It's like I say the same thing with, with the force free ideology. There will be a moment. It's just, you can go, you can say that the sun goes around the earth for so long until eventually we would want to send something somewhere and then we have to accept it. Yes. Um, so hopefully that's what happens. It's like the, and nothing wrong. You know, like I, as old as we are, I understand how addictive and how important to everybody's social media is. Oh, of course. And how you want the likes and how you, you know, it's, it's a problem on a whole different level, but to become, to, to call yourself a dog trainer, you have to be a dog trainer, not influencers. It's huge difference. Very huge difference. You have to have a body of work. Right. You know, and, and like you just said, we could say anything. I've trained thousands of dogs. It's not telling me nothing. No. Even if you train thousands, like even if you train 10,000 dogs, I want to see 10, how were they trained? What they look like. Yep. Yep. Not snippets in training on YouTube. Yep. In person, in front of you, you know, yes. Put it on the field, put it in reality. What's your results? What does it look like? And how, like, like Ivan just said, how repeatable is it? Right. You know, can you do it across different breeds? Can you do it across different disciplines? Yeah. Do your philosophies bleed into these different things? And the, the, the, the, the thing is that it, it, it, it takes so much of time and attention, uh, to become good at this, that if you're spending half your time, like filming and editing stuff and throwing it, three quarters of your time, 80% of your time. 80% of the time goes into trying, no. And watching everybody else's videos on there. That thing didn't come well. I need to do it again. I need to do it again. And then we start, what are we? Yeah. Okay. That's good enough.

Your energy's in the wrong place. Right. Right. So that all those, the tools that allow you to get in front of people, the tools that allow you to actually get access to information are also the tools that are eating up time that would be better spent. I can tell you firsthand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But we like, it's, it's inevitably, it is what it is. Like, so the world's changing a lot of ways that I'm not thrilled about. I believe there will be a change though. I really, the way our picture is, there's going to be a little more of this to where, to where the whole, uh, uh, people can't internet environment. It's going to be flooded with influencers that cannot train. Yeah. And, and then there will be the influencers that are actually trained dogs and have done really good things and now are teaching. And because now they're teaching, they are, you, you actually wouldn't even call them influencers at this point because the influencer is a very different. It's like, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm going to make everybody believe that I'm really good at it. Yes. Right. Yep. Look at me. Just attention. I'm grabbing. I have proof. I have followers. Yeah. Well, and that's, that's my proof. That's the goal for people. So monetize. I think eventually. Right. Right. It's monet. You have enough eyes on your stuff, regardless of whether it's good or not. And you're getting paid for that. Right. So the, that also brings in the desire to create controversy where there shouldn't be con, but there are some questions in there that were too many questions for us to answer, but questions in there about, uh, riffs in the dog training community and things like that. Some of those things are trumped up riffs because people know they'll get a whole bunch of attention. Yes. If I, if I say sport dog trainers versus pet dog trainers, or I say e-collars versus this thing, then there are deliberate people out there deliberately baiting those issues, not because they want to an understanding of those, not because they want to dialogue. None of that. They know the controversy will get a whole bunch of eyeballs on their stuff. And that that's monetized at a certain point. And as hard as it is to believe that actually happens, I think it happens just like in any other sphere, like you have boats that are making posts that are studying or, or, you know, and here we are fighting because it's artificially created for you to, to get into that argument. Oh yeah. The algorithms for the. It's a tough one. You know, it's like, you know, social media determine what gets in front of you. It's going to be controversial stuff on purpose.

Cause they know people pay attention to that more than they paid. Like I would something we've talked about a whole bunch about. Well, like the, the slow, the slow food movement, the, the, the Norwegians of the slow TV movement, right? We have a TV on and there's just caribou grazing in a field for like hours at a time or whatever it is like, we're getting away from the real life timelines of living in the natural world. Like when we're on our computers and our phones so much, all those things are in little snippets like that. And attention spans get altered by that. Like the stars are so close. And, and then if you see how things are really unfold in reality, really unfold in reality. When you're training a dog, it's, it's not dramatic. It's incremental. It's it's. It's, it's, and so people aren't, aren't watching the best training in a lot of cases, right? The best training is, I always say is, is undramatic. Like if people are provoking a lot of dramatic shit in their training, it's usually cause they're doing bad dog training. Right. And so you, you have a harder time getting people to settle in and watch the stuff that's actually most useful, most useful for an understanding of the way the process really works. But who knows? Hopefully we're optimistic that this will, it has like, I, I, this is, I, I, I tried not, I think I'm a, uh, generally an optimist, but like all, every time we adopt new technology, there's a tendency to focus on the positives and there's certainly plenty of positives. Yeah. Right. We can train with people remotely. I can talk to anybody anywhere in the world. Yeah. If I hear about somebody somewhere halfway around the world, that's good at something, I can go see what they're doing without flying there. Right. Yes. All that kind of stuff. The access to information is mind boggling and the freedom that comes with it. Like, so we were talking about, we could, these days we could go teach from the middle of the desert somewhere if we wanted. Right. Close to the stars. Right. And, and, uh, those places. And that that's, there's something lovely about that. There are also a whole bunch of pitfalls in there that we have to be aware of. And I think you're, I think maybe you're right. Maybe you're right. Maybe we run up against the end of that and people begin to realize this isn't helping us be better dog trainers or isn't helping more people get their dogs trained. And they'll go back to a more kind of analog version of it. To some degree, you got to learn training. And then because like right now, when you think of it, how does an average dog owner find a trainer?

They go and they, what do you look? You look, ratings, likes and followers, and that's the criteria right now. But eventually I think they've all going to kind of equal, no matter how much they try, they're going to kind of flatline it and all these. It will plateau. Right now. Now it's going to, okay, well, they all have 200,000 followers or 2 million followers, but this one also can train dogs. Yeah. Right. They'll have, they'll finally be the differentiating factor, which is they train dogs. Right. Back to how it all started. And I would just implore everybody not to look at any of that, that part of it. That doesn't have anything to do with it. Look at, look at the actual content, watch them train dogs. If you can in real time, see their dogs. Like all you, we talk about it all the time. Yeah. It's all you need to see. Like I go watch somebody for five minutes and know if they know what they're doing or not. Right. Two minutes. Yeah. I'm giving them the set of the doubt. But it doesn't take very long to recognize whether or not they have. But we have a night to look, to know what we look for. Yeah. You know, like this, I, I give this analogy sometimes with like how you would have in, in martial arts, some, some blue belt is going to show up somewhere knowing that there is no brown or black belt around and watch him talk and watch him show you things. And if you don't know nothing about it, you're like, Whoa, that's true. I'm so behind. I mean, you teach me, please. And just so happens that some actual expert in the art cup walks in and the conversation changes. But, but this is a problem. This is, I don't know how that can get resolved to where, how does somebody in like, like I have a, this Frenchie that's lunging at other dogs and I'm looking for a trainer. How do I know that you're not a blue belt? Right. How, what, how do we deal with that? That's the. And truth is now there's more business than there are like highly qualified trainers in my opinion. Right. So the people out there that, that really know what they're doing are busy as busy as they can really want to be like the, they don't need any more customers. Ultimately, most of them are overly busy. They're turning people away in a lot of cases. And so there's a whole pool of people there that are gonna, that are gonna get the next year down of trainers at best. Right. In a sense. I don't know what the solution to that is. Other than people get yourself educated out there. Like, I mean, yeah, like become, put your, put your emphasis on your craft instead of on, on your likes. Right. Right. Yeah. It's so much more fun.

If you're in, if you're in the dog training, that's what's about. Yeah. It should be fun. I, I, we should, I should, we should maybe enter that. It should be fun. You should be having a good time. This is, it's amazing. It's really cool. It's, I mean, you can see us. We're, we're still here. We're still just as crazy. And we, we both put bite suits and top dogs. Yeah. I was gonna say the whole first part of the day was you guys working your dogs together. Yeah. It was great. It was one of the best things to do is nobody around. Just you guys working your dogs, sharing their ideas. No, there are no short clips anywhere that you're gonna find of us training dogs. Yep. It's long form content. Yep. As they say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like Ivan started off writing a book, you know, that was how, one of the first ways I saw him. That was so hard. Yeah. Then, then after the book came videos, but the only way people got to find you or anybody like even you, Michael was, we either had to read about you or show up in person. Mm-hmm . You know, Michael got into the, the video part started growing very quickly. And then of course, Ivan, you did the same thing too, because that was the evolution of our communication for sharing knowledge. Yep. And then now that evolution has turned into social media. So instead of being these couple hour videos or reading a book for however long it takes you, it turns into how much can I give you in 30 seconds? Right. You know, and with, like you said, the algorithms making it, the max you can put is one minute. Then they're just throwing out these little, you know, sizzle reels. I refuse. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right, right. That was my point. That was my point. Because like, training all day today, it never crosses our mind that, oh, let's do one for Instagram and another one for TikTok. Not even a hint. I don't even where I put my phone. Not one second. We're not doing it. It takes you out of the moment. We're not doing it for that. Yeah. Like, no, you start focusing on that side. You are not anymore present to do dog training. No. That's just that. And like Michael said, it takes you out of it. It takes you out of the moment. Yeah. It's one of the things that appeals to me most about dog training, right? Is when you're really in it with the dog, though, everything else drops away. Right. Everything's gone. Like, there could be a hundred people standing around. You don't even know they're fucking there. Yeah. Like, it's so great. You're just you and the dog doing your thing connected. There's takes full attention. Right. Every bit of your attention to do it well.

And that, that interaction is lovely. It's just so awesome. Try it, people. Yeah. Try it, please. I mean, it's like they talked about. Walking with your phone like this while you're trying to do it. Yeah. Like that. It's not the same. No, it's not. You cannot be in that moment when you're doing that. No. And we, that's what we, you know, Michael and I had that conversation. We traveled before sneaking off on our own to go just do our dog stuff. Yeah. Simple stuff. You know, Ivan and I had the same conversation about what we did. You guys doing it yourselves today. It was, those are those special moments where, like you said, nothing else mattered in the world other than we were just enjoying the dogs, having fun, enjoying conversations about how, what we're going to do. How did we get there? What was the process? What did we want to accomplish? And, you know, that's even how we all first met was these kinds of conversations, these deeper things that motivated us to solve our dog world things and how do we get better. Questioning our own, you know, reaching out to each other to question, am I on the right track or am I crazy? How does this work? You know, I, I know, like you said, you know, when you and Dr. Hilliard have had those conversations, you made the joke, like, sometimes I even question classical conditioning after a while sitting around somebody like him. So many things. What you think is simple isn't necessarily, but I know in all of that to me is that being really good at any of this and dog training specifically requires your full presence and focus. Like if you're halfway there, you're, you're not doing a good job. You're not really paying attention to, and that's where you, you learn. Hold on, say that again. We make that clip. Yeah. Okay. Go ahead. There's our, there's our, there's our clip. Yeah. Right. That, that, that idea that, that that's what allows you to, to really understand the dog, to predict behavior before it happens. All that kind of stuff is a full presence and attention to detail. And I don't know how you do that and concentrate on what it looks like at the same time. And as sad as it is, there's a little bit of hypocrisy. We have to admit that we're recording this for, for all of the social media. I'm about to launch a membership service. Exactly. Promoted extensively through Instagram. But, but, but it started in a logical way, not backwards. That's the whole point that we're trying to make. There's a whole history that got us to this point. You're not becoming famous. And then trying to learn. And then, that's, that's really backwards. It cannot be more confusing. Yep.

And that's where like, we, you know, we joke around, we paid the dues to get to where we're at. We're not trying to create the attention through the social media concepts to get the, where we're at now. And I would, I would, uh, uh, quarrel with the paid dues. Like for me, it wasn't, I, it wasn't, that sounds like I, it was a, like a chore. Yeah. I see the context of what you're saying. I mean, there's a lot of time and energy that went into it, but it was something that I was passionate about. But it didn't come easy, did it? No, no. Exactly. So that's, that's kind of. But that was part of the joy of the whole thing. Sure. You're trying this, you're figuring it out. Like I see stuff over there. I don't know how to do that. I got to figure out how to do that. Yeah. I got a dog that I don't understand. Like I saw somebody do that with a dog. How do I figure out how to do that? A hundred percent. Super cool. And so there were lots of failures. There were things that were frustrating and all that, but the whole, the whole process was exciting and fun. Right. Oh, it's very, sometimes paying those dues is satisfying, you know, going through the life lessons. Like if you're a dog trainer, your reward is not even the, somebody paying you for training their dog is your reward is you having the opportunity to train another dog. Yes. Because that's what you do. That's what you like doing. Just like if you're a painter, you're painting not to sell first. Yeah. You're not thinking how much you're going to, if you're a true artist, you're not thinking how much you're going to sell it for your, your whole being is preoccupied with what you're doing without thinking of any profit at that. You cannot possibly do the same boat at the same time. No, it begins to mess you up. So you can train a dog and enjoy the dog training. We can train a dog and thinking how many likes you're going to get because of what just happened. Yep. And you, as you said, it's changes everything. And you'll begin to make decisions based on how you think it's going to be received instead of what is right in that moment. And that's the whole structure. We didn't even talk about it. Kind of like that. What was his name? The one that wrote the Punished by Rewards book, you know? Oh, who was that guy? Cohen, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. But, but the idea of giving kids something as a reinforcer for something that they naturally, genuinely enjoying to do. Right. And you take the fun out of the thing. It changes everything. It changes everything. It just, yes. Yeah.

You actually make them dislike what they're doing because now they want to just get paid. Yeah. And, and there is something to do with that when you, you know, like, yes, we train dogs because we enjoy first and foremost, the interaction between me and the dog. I don't think how much money I'm going to make of that dog. And I don't think which clip I'm going to use on Facebook and how I'm going to like, you can really enjoy dog training. It's crazy that we're having this conversation actually. It is. Like, what are we doing? Punished by Rewards is by Alfie Cohn. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. No, it's crazy. It's true. Anyway. Well, that would basically conclude this episode. And, you know, as we all know, it's, you guys getting together is a rare thing. And to be able to have, I was just going to say, this is something that should become less rare and more frequent. But so awesome to have you guys be able to take this opportunity to answer questions and, and engage with people who are equally motivated and excited to go down this journey working with dogs. And, you know, take these lessons that we've gone through ourselves and hopefully are willing to take these points of views and, and take them for what they're worth and what they work for them. But, you know, I know it's been a lot of fun for those that have been in here, you know, kind of being the flies on the walls and those that will watch this and listen to this. So thank you guys both for doing this. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to this episode, which is a special episode where we get to sit down and let two very well-known dog trainers talk about various topics within the dog training industry, Ivan Balabanov and Michael Ellis. So I am Cameron Ford. I'll be moderating, sending questions that came in and letting these two gentlemen discuss what they feel about the various questions. So our first question we will start with is what defines a good repetition in training? How many repetitions do we really need for learning? And what factors are the most influential in the learning process? Focus, arousal, errors, speed, reward schedule, and temperament and so on. So I'll let you guys go ahead and start. Okay, let's see if I remember. That was a long one. That was a good one, a solid one. I like to consider a good rep, personally, what I call an invested rep, meaning the dog is focused. So that's important that they're focused on the task and that they are sufficiently motivated for the goal so that the reinforcement is meaningful to them in an ideal world. I don't like empty repetitions. And so there are a lot of times in dog training, we get into this point where we think more repetitions better for learning. And you have a few repetitions where the dog's really invested and you have a whole bunch of them when they're kind of half-assed. They don't care significantly about the reinforcement. And they may be doing the behavior, but they're doing it in a sort of disconnected way. And I think that doesn't move learning forward very well. And I think if the repetitions are invested enough, we need a lot fewer than we think we do to actually, like I don't have a number, right? Yeah. But it's behavior dependent. I shouldn't have a number anyway. Yeah. It should be very just aware, staying present at the moment and waiting for the moment where the dog says, I got it. Is there more? And you either miss that moment because that's the right moment to move forward. Not when you decide, but when the dog, it's like, okay, I've got this. Anything else? Then it's very, it's perfect time. But if you keep the dog long enough because you think that you need the whatever number of reps, then boredom kicks in. Yep. And, and then you have to kind of break in because the brain is like, okay, there is nothing more to learn here. So even to try to add the new idea, suggestion, the next, it becomes problematic, I think. Yeah, they get stuck, I think, for sure. I think this is, this is as far as it goes. They're checked up. Yeah. So I think that's, that's, but there is no, no formula. I mean,

you just really have to be very present and, and knowing when that moment is because, uh, you can be prepared for some, or that's going to be a long session or sessions. And you're thinking that's going to take a while and the dog gets it in two reps or the other way around. So. Yeah, exactly. And I think, and it, I pay very close attention and to the dog's energetics during my, my motivation building phase, the point at which I'm playing with the dog and I'm creating, uh, reward systems, uh, for want of a better word. Um, and I know what they feel like when they're really invested and I pay very close attention to that as I work. So if I do a couple of reps that feel really invested and I push a little and I do an extra rep, even if they're showing, understand, if they're not fully showing understanding, um, and that rep feels, uh, significantly less invested, then I'll, I'll abandon at that point and come back at it to avoid that boredom. I'm really have become early in my career. I certainly did lots and lots of what I consider empty repetitions that at best didn't move the needle forward. Uh, and at worst actually created the boredom and the disconnection, uh, from, of over drilling. I think embedded in that question to the point about arousal. Um, currently I think in dog training, there's this like kind of vilification of arousal as all our behavior problems come from arousal and excited dogs or bad dogs, et cetera, et cetera. You, you have to have arousal to drive learning like it, the brain and the body need that. It's not that hard to channel it. That's exactly it. It's not, it's not arousal is bad. It's where you put the arousal. Right. Exactly. So that's essential to the teaching process. There was a lot into that question. One thing that I remember still from it was, uh, and kind of like where you were going with the motivation and, and, and, and kind of to double down there, you, you also look for what's the, the mental and physical endurance of the dog, right? Absolutely. So you don't lose it because of fatigue either way. Um, which comes to, it will affect motivation. It would just kind of start to crumble from the top down. Um, so, uh, that's always important knowing, knowing how much you can go. And the way you find out is by, I mean, you learn to feel a dog's energetics, but also you find out by experimenting. Like each new dog is a little bit different in their ability to sustain training in a committed way. The, their attention span for want of a better term, all those things are a little

different and you find the edges of it. Sometimes I push a little and recognize, oh, okay, we've gone too far. And that helps me plan the future sessions. Like when you work a dog that passed the point where they're a little too fatigued and they're a little mentally disconnected, you recognize that and you make note of that and you shift your future sessions to adjust to it. Yeah. Perfect. There, there is one more thing that just came to me that there was a, it was about, um, um, kind of as you teach behavior, when do you start to emphasize on speed versus precision and so on. And, and it is an interesting, good one. I, I always, I like to speed is, is at the end of, of my criteria. It's like, I, I need the dog to, if it's gonna, even if it's just a simple movement from A to B, I want it to be conscious how it's doing it. Right. Instead of just get there like a squirrel, but it didn't know how it, what happened to get there. And then it goes back to how motivation it is and how clear the behavior is. It will go into whatever the natural speed of the dog is to perform with the desire, with the motivation and sure we can delicately, intelligently can push a little over natural if we need to, at times, but this can be tricky because we tend to keep pushing and reaching the break point and then we have to return and we don't know if we can go back. Right. Oh, exactly. I think that I, I approach it exactly the same way. I'm much more conscious of awareness and understanding in the learning repetitions as, as opposed to speed. And then I want to infuse speed into it as we go forward at that dog's ability. So based on motivation, ideally based on increasing the value of motivation or the reward and maturity in the dog frequently takes care of that too. As they get more, as they grow, they get more motivated and the behaviors get faster. But you touched on something that I think is incredibly important, which is when it, and especially when it starts coming to pressure, right, people are trying to make more speed and behaviors than a dog is naturally capable of giving them. Because where's that line? That other dog can do it. Yeah. That other dog can do it. And so my dog should be able to, too. That's a slippery slope really fast. I don't like pressuring dogs for speed and behaviors. Um, when they're, when they're trying to comply, I mean, it's not sustainable. And if it's sustainable, it's not here in a healthy way. Right. Right. Right. And each, and different dogs have different capabilities on that front. They absolutely have

different processing speeds. Like there's a dog whose brain and body work quickly and reflexively. And those dogs do things quickly without a lot of extra work on my part. I'm doing what I would normally do. Right. They do the behavior quickly because that's their computer. That's the way they're, they're designed. Another dog needs a little, there's a lag where the, the, the command hits them, that hits the brain, it travels down the spine and it translates into behavior. And they're, they're not capable of instantaneous reactions and quite fried things. Right. The impressive one is always when you, it's like a border collie that has motivation to down, but you teach it to go down very slow. Right. That's cool. That's cool. Like, I'm not impressed with the border collie is motivated that those staples itself on the ground, you know, that that's what's going to happen. Right. That's true. You know, what's going to happen. But, but that's kind of just as, because we are saying that, you know, we don't care about speed. Sometimes speed just comes within it's unnatural for certain behavior or equal for that. Yeah. You know, yes. Uh, but anything that is more complex that the dog has to think through what exactly, how to navigate with it. I think, uh, uh, allowing them to know that they have time is a big, it's essential. Yeah. Yeah. And speeds, speed makes certain types of behaviors impossible. The dog's in too much of a hurry. Then something has to go. They're not, they end up saying five or six times that they are wrong to get one correct one, which is the opposite formula where you want to be. Right. And there was a follow on to that question, which was, do you see a rewarding effect in dogs learning to avoid correction? Meaning does punishment turn into a rewarding sensation after learning? I think it's, I think what's asking is after you've used punishment on a, on a behavior and the dog then avoids that punishment in the future are signals that they've avoided that punishment become reinforcing to them. And they absolutely do. Yeah. There's no doubt about it that once a dog knows a job and a task and they have, there have been consequences for them failing to do that task. And you signal them that, and they do the task appropriately after that. And you signal them that they did. There are reinforcing components of that. There's no doubt. And I think there's some research I would have to look back again, but I remember reading some, some research that neurobiologically behaves the same way.

Like same, same neural pathways are activated when they're active, getting a reward versus when they've avoided punishment in a clear way. So I think that it's even, even if you do negative punishment and positive punishment, it's still the same. It's the same punishment in the brain. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. There is a, I mean, it's a, I don't know exactly if I understand that correct. And what Michael already said, it's pretty much answers that if, if to add something probably would be like in a moment of punishment, the dog shouldn't feel rewarded or reinforced because you're stopping, right? Dressing. But in negative reinforcement, the moment there is the avoidance is immediate or the escape. So there is a reinforcement process, of course. So there is a little bit different how they emotionally feel when, is it the one and the other happening is different to them, but that's a good question. Okay. Let's go to the next one. It's interesting. It is interesting. Especially when we don't know where we're going. It's kind of like, what direction? Okay. We're going to shift gears radically. By the way, guys, we didn't go through the questions or anything. We're just getting a mess as we're hitting here right now. How do you guys think the removal of potential role in puppy rearing and human intervention with rewards to mate selection has an impact on the evolution of dogs, but especially Malinois as species behaviorally speaking, I mean, if we let them have complete free selection, select which Malinois mate they wanted to breed with themselves and then raise these puppies totally naturally, what do you think the dogs would be like? It's a very interesting question. I kind of, the last part of the question I understood really good. Yeah. Say the beginning part again. I kind of got lost a little bit in the beginning. Yeah. I agree. But they're saying that the, that the, is it mate or male? It's, uh, let me just double check. Okay. Yeah. So how do you guys think the removal of potential role in puppies rearing and human intervention with regards to mate selection has impacted the evolution of dogs, but specifically Malinois? Right. I like they wouldn't be Malinois anymore. Certainly. Like, so that's the short answer is I think that if you left dogs to their own devices in terms of choosing mates, you left them to their own devices in terms of rearing the puppies, like of course, what type of dog would come out would be suited to whatever environment would gradually become suited to whatever environment they had to live in.

But if you took us out of the equation and we stopped selecting for the things that we select for in working dogs, I think there would be a reversion to some kind of street dog type thing. Yeah. The reset of a generic dog kind of thing. Yeah. You'd go to the, whatever the basic dog is. Right. Right. Kind of. I agree. And it would be, it would be dependent on the, the environment that you're selecting them for. What are you, where are you being left on the street? Are they being cared for? Are they being trained still? All those things would. I mean, we kind of know something, I mean, like, you know, the, uh, it just came to me, the, the dog in the dogs in Chernobyl, you know, how they got the, they're still kind of, uh, the, the, the, it's interesting how they are, but, but there was a certain, I think, bunch of shepherds were dominantly there and, but yeah, that's interesting to see how, um, nature is. I mean, we have so much in, in that evolutionary ladder time and, and human interfering with selection. Oh yeah. It, it's, it's such a, like, like it's for sure it will, well, for sure. How do we know? Yeah. But I would think it will reward as well. You know, it will go to some basic generic dog that you can see in most places probably. And I think we, we, when we select dog Malinois, especially we're selecting for a series of variety of traits that are not adaptive in a natural dog. Right. Like they're adaptive to the tasks that we've created for them to do. And if we stop selecting them for those tasks, they're going to, that those things are going to go away. They're not natural behaviors. Right. Cause it's kind of like highly maintenance selection that we continue to keep emphasizing on. Otherwise probably it's gonna still be going to, to. Yeah. Cause there's so, so many traits that we know, like you certainly know as a breeder and I do that if you take your eye off them for even a little bit, they go away. Right. Like it does gripping behavior and that we are all obsessed with and sport dog stuff, right. How the dogs use their mouth. Right. If you stop paying attention to that as a part of the selection process, it will, it'll go away really quickly. You won't maintain these kind of very artificial gripping styles that we've created through selective breeding as one type of example. I think. Hmm. And then there was this question. Could you guys discuss errorless learning versus trial and error learning? Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, I don't know where I, I mean, where do I even start? I think everybody

knows our position on that one. Um, I, I'll, I'll really give you a straight, like something. If errorless learning was a thing, it will be, you, you will see at it at schools from, from first grade to university as the main way that you learn. And that's by no means anywhere. The case, um, is it used sometimes? Yes. Where is it used mostly? Uh, um, I would say it's predominantly used at schools with, uh, kids with mental disabilities because you don't want to put a pressure on, on somebody that is not capable and trial and error, like going way back to Thorndike and his laws of learning. It's it, nothing has changed in my opinion. I agree. I agree. I, but in that embedded in that, of course, is that we don't want to set up situations and with the dogs, we just leave the dogs to figure it out. Right. So it's not errorless learning. We set up training situations in which the dogs very likely to make the choice of behavior that we want them to do early on so that we can reinforce it. And then we give them some freedom to find the limits of that, right. To bump up against like, okay, do you understand it? And they'll make an error and we want to, they learn from those errors. It's essential to learn from those errors, but we're not going to set them up in the beginning and just say, Hey, just experiment until you figure out what I want you to do. They're not likely to figure that out. And we don't want them to give up. You build some persistence in dogs by setting them up to succeed as it were in early learning trials. There is a lot of motivation. Yeah. And, and it's sincerely trying to do the right thing, but it doesn't, it needs your help. And, and how we were just talking on a previous question. If you end up saying six times, no, you're wrong. And only one time, that's good one. Something has to change. That's not trial and error. That's error after error and just a little bit of success. That's not the recipe for anything. Right. Um, and on top of that, like I just, as I came back from that seminar, just this weekend, one of the things that I was talking about was very much this of, uh, you know how this, the, the trainers come with a problem and they really want to see what you do with that problem. And I want to see it also, but I want to see also what can we do good. Mm-hmm because that's my reset. If I need, like, I don't need to just go, okay, this is bad. Let's fix this. Like what, where are you good things? What can we do really good? Yeah. Yeah. Um, absolutely. That's a, that's a very good point. Like good problem solving.

Isn't necessarily about the problem. Right. In some cases. Conceptual. We've been talking about concepts. Yes. You and I, for the two days I'm here, probably we haven't stopped. Yep. Yeah. Because you find, I think that's, that's really interesting to say. What you find out what the dog does well, because that's going to be the fuel that's going to help us work through whatever the difficulty is as well. Right. That's the thing. So in most of our training reps, most of our training reps, the predominant number of training reps of whatever it is we're doing, the dog should be successful. Right. Which does not mean error-free for sure. We want them to make errors at some point. So they figure out, they really have a thorough understanding of a behavior. They bob it against that. But most of your training should be, the dog should be having success, enjoying themselves, doing what you want. And then when the problem arises, it's the anomaly in a sea of good stuff. Instead of we're focusing on the bad thing you do. And we're working on the bad thing and repeating the bad experiences. I think that happens. Even another one, like if you, if I say, well, show me some good stuff, like show me some good things. And even the, what the trainer things are good execution of proper execution of behaviors. And there's still serious holes all over the place. I would rather get there than start hitting my head in a wall with the biggest of the biggest worst problems that I have no chance to come across as a, hey, I have a better idea. It's like not going to happen there. Come back here. And, and yeah. Yeah. I, that there's something in there that I think most experienced dog trainers feel at a certain point that there's a tackling, um, a difficulty head on, isn't necessarily always the way of resolving it. Right. Right. Right. It's, you would kind of resolve it globally with your entire relationship with the dog, with their idea about what training and success is. And strangely enough, that kind of gets resolved almost on its own sometimes. It does. It does sometimes, not all, not all the time. Sometimes you have to come back, but there are absolutely times in which you didn't really address this directly, but you addressed all these things and magically that fixed it. So, right. We see it routinely. All right. So the next topic is they would like to know, or they'd be interested to know what you guys think about why people tend to not fully explore the dog's genetic predisposition. In many cases, people kind of stop halfway or they just don't even tap into it at all.

Yeah. So they're, they're asking basically like whatever this dog breeds. Yeah. This dog's genetic and they're not, they're not allowing the dog to express it. Correct. Or not even going into it in any shape, form or fashion. And they're asking why people do that. Yeah. Or what's your guys thoughts on not getting into or using that dog's genetic capabilities, uh, as opposed to, I guess, you know, exploring certain types of programs where these capabilities would be really well, well used. Um, I mean, obviously you guys both come from Mondio and Schutz and backgrounds. Um, and we're exploring a lot of genetic capabilities in those aspects, but outside of that, when these people have the different breeds, you know, kind of like, how did they land there and why are we not even tapping into that genetic ability? I, I'll, I'll just mention something with the, forget even Mondio, right? I mean, just playing with a dog, like you can, like I, it's constantly, uh, um, you know, mimicking how somebody plays. It's one thing. Satisfying. I, I really, I just put a post on this on, on my Facebook because I have this like Kimba's brother and Kimba the same. They naturally, the moment you let them out, they have to be here and you would push them out. They feel that I'm mad at them. Yeah. It's a rejection. Yeah. And it's very different than if I have Tarzan and I tell him, anybody come here and he come, you know, that he doesn't like it, but the one needs it, the other one, you know, it's innate versus I'm just doing it because I like it at the moment. The other one is like, I have to do that. Otherwise some good and, and finding places, how to utilize things like that. Even when you play, just playing ball with, uh, some pointer dog and you pause for a moment and you allow them to take consciously, may not do it, but they are doing it and it feels good. And then you resume the play and you're tapping into something that the dog is like, I like to play with him more than you. And I don't know why. Well, it's because I allow you to express your genetic. Yes. Right. Or, or the same with a border calling, you kind of, it's like, Hey, back up, come close back, whatever. Yeah. Yes. You can do it by force or you can really use the genetic makeup and the border calling. Now it's, he wants to chase the ball, but that whole stalking thing that you added just hits home. Yeah. Yeah. And so, so it's not only in, uh, I think utilizing genetics is it's a very, uh, misunderstood thing. Uh, and it has to be as a trainer, you always have to search for it. And

it's not even, I mean, just because you have a myline, right. Doesn't mean that they all have exactly the same, just as we said, some of those like that, some dogs do it, but it's not like a thing. It's not an obsession. I don't know. I think, I think he, that's super well said in that it's not necessarily in my mind about having the dog do what it was bred to do, but figuring out what that dog needs to do, right. What it's genetically wants to express. There are some Malinois that not letting them bite things is sort of unfair to them on some level. Right. There are others that are not like there could be a substitute for that. Chasing a Frisbee could be a substitute for one dog and not so much for another in a certain way. And I think it's ultimately about meeting the dog's needs, right. So that the dog can feel they have outlets for what are very natural impulses for them. I think too, too many dog owners these days get dogs and then don't want them to behave like dogs. Right. And especially working and hunting type breeds and things like that, we're very energetic and they're going to do a lot of, uh, they're going to give you a lot of behavior. And people say, I like that type of dog. I just don't want to doing all that stuff. Right. That's not right. That's not fair. That's a recipe for an unhappy dog and an unhappy owner ultimately as well. Right. So the idea that, but there are, there are, he's the, I think we're both of a like mind that play is something that's incredibly important to us. Right. And my, a significant portion of the relationships that I develop with dogs are around play and that play will look different, radically different sometimes based on what kind of dog it is and what they genetically are bringing to the table. Yeah. But that's, that's exactly the point. Like, that's exactly the point. Like I think a lot of trainers would go to, I see this person, this person doing this with that dog and my dog is the same. So I'm going to do that. And my dog's going to like it. And yes, my dog likes it, but they're doing it because they understand that the dog needs it and they have to offer it. If can they go without it? Sure. But when you're offering and when you satisfy genetic, uh, predisposition, you, you're tapping like, it's like, I like you and I don't know why. And it's so cool. And, and for a trainer, it's easy. You just stop looking at everybody, what they do or keep looking, keep getting ideas, but also stop and give opportunity because if you post anything, the dog's going to offer you what they want and you pay attention and see that can go anywhere.

If it can be usable. Right. Absolutely. And I, and another thing there is that I find if you find a way to meet those needs, what for the dog, whatever they are, and those needs for genetic expression, you get far fewer behavioral issues, right? Oh yeah. The dogs are, don't have to invent ways of using these impulses. And usually when they invent them on their own, they're not directed in a way that you want them to be directed. Right. Oh, sure. Yeah. It's significant numbers of dogs that are seriously problematic in a home that's not giving them outlets, simply showing them what to do with their genetics and they stop being problems. They're satisfied in their life. They're happy. Your relationship's improved. Everything's better. So, but I think we're all looking for, um, kind of recipes for training. I mean, that's what, what people go to dog training seminars and things for like, show me how you do this, right? What are the steps are, but, and give me the cheat sheet. Yes. And there are large concepts. There are ideas that you, you need to master along the way, but you need to be flexible and pay attention to the dog in front of you at the end of the day. And that, that when you were trying his, Ivan's comments to say that, you know, like stop watching the dog over there and how that dog plays and saying, okay, my dog should play like that. Maybe your dog should play like that. Maybe not, maybe not at all. We come into this all the time with whether you allow the dog to possess the toy when playing or not. Right. Like I prefer not if the dog supports that, if the dog finds bringing the toy directly back to me and re-engaging with me satisfying, that's the way I'm going to steer him. Cause that makes my training flow. It's nice and easy. Some other dog does not find that satisfying. And me trying to demand that of them starts to take the fun out of the whole game. And you let them possess a little bit in between and then come back and possess a little bit in between. And they're happy. Like a simple thing like that, that can make a big difference. And meet, like I, you recognize it playing with German Shepherds versus playing with Malinois frequently. Like there's just, they're, they want to, and there are, I hashtag not all German Shepherds, not all Malinois, but that there's that idea that, that just because I have this breed, it should behave like this. You've got to pay attention to the dog. All right. Well, I'll go to the next question, which was, um, interested in your thoughts on,

is it a good idea to use the dog's entire food allowance for training or whether to feed in a bowl and only use some of that food ration for training? What are your thoughts? We bought Tokadib rats. Here we go. Well, I can start off by saying, I don't care if you feed in a bowl or not, but you pour it on the ground. It doesn't matter. The bowl doesn't matter. No, uh, I, I, I, I'm, I'm relatively certain we're on a like mind that, uh, I, I'm not a fan of existential feeding. I'm not a fan of, of making dogs work exclusively for their food in general. Um, but I also would say that there are specific situations in which I'll, for a short period of time, I would ask a dog to do that. Like there's certain behavioral issues. There's certain types of dogs that I'm having a hard time making a connection with that I might for a very short period say, okay, you're eating from me. Right. But as a general training strategy, uh, I, I think it's problematic, right? From It's hugely problematic. Yeah. And, and sometimes people do it for few reasons. And, and one of the reasons comes to mind is they use that as a bonding opportunity. Those are social. They, they want to bond. It's not like, it's not like any time you get a dog, the dog is trying extremely hard, how to find a way, maybe doing shitty things, stupid things, but it's trying to get to do things with you. It's not that they are, I'm on my own and I hate you. And why did you bring me in this house? And now in stop going to feed them. So he can start to beg for food. And therefore, because you become a food dispenser. Now you have a bond. And I think bonding with the dog is a ridiculously simple thing. And you just need to be honest and take time and get them on a walk and let them sit on the couch with you and play ball. And it's done. Right. Um, yes. So that's one other one. It's not just for the behaviors, training and stuff, but the, the, but for, so the, the point at which I think that some of the, that food deprivation work can be good is just making some initial connections. Like I'm really having a hard time motivating this dog. Um, the dog is fine with me, likes me, et cetera. And there's a period where the dog doesn't play or whatever. I haven't constructed that. And I want to show you some things. And so for a very short period of time, I'm like, okay, you're going to eat. I grabbed your food bowl. I go, uh, this is what you're, we're eating and you're going to eat it doing some stuff, right? There's, but people take this and they continue on with it. And they're there. And you also have to recognize

that there are other conflicts. We, we both, I think, feel that play is a super important piece of the puzzle. And if you start doing existential feeding, it negatively impacts play. Right. Right. Right. Because you're hungry. Hungry dog wants food all the time. And so now if you've done that, you want to get them to play and they're like, no, no, no, no. Where's the food? We even see it in normal puppies with high food drive in the early stages of training. If I'm starting to do a fair amount of food work with them, then like if I do food work in my training room three days in a row with hungry puppies and I come in in the morning and I take my puppy in there and I try to play, there'll be puppies that are like, I'm not playing. Where's the food? Right. Like that kind of thing. And so frequently we have to be a little cautious about how it affects other things. But I mean, I, I think like any of the tools, it has a place, but it's become kind of the norm. The answer to a lot of better ways to, to, to, to work at. Yeah. And, and there is another danger, kind of a big, big fallout sometimes when as a trainer, you get so confident and so stubborn. That's like, okay, I'm, I'm trying to get him to do this behavior and he's not doing it. And therefore we stopped the session and you're not eating and we're going to go back tomorrow. And we face the behavior again. We tried again. It doesn't happen. Don't eat again. Could it be because you're failing to show what you want? Yeah. Could it be because genetically the dog has a big block that no matter how much you start in him, it's not going to go anywhere. Eventually, even if he does it, it will get some food and you're going to be pretty much back in the same square. Speaker 2 It's a dangerous way. And there is in, in, we both really think that there is better ways. Anything within reason, nobody can argue with, you know, but. Speaker 2 And we all use, we, we both use food and training for certain things, right? So there's no doubt. Yeah. That there's a point at which I'm going to use food to teach you something. And if I feel that you're not invested and I don't have another tool yet, right. To, to achieve the same result. Right. And this happens a lot for me with dogs that I'm developing a play relationship with, right. There's a little bit of time in that process. And so in that process, I may not be ready to say, oh, I can confront this behavior with a toy at this point. And so I go, okay, I'm going to skip your meal tonight and tomorrow. Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Tomorrow we're going to come back at this. Right. But I've seen very few dogs that have needed, that have benefited from only that. And the dogs that like shown you skip one meal and they're still not sure two meals and they're still not showing like meaningful connection to the food, like going further down that path is, is not likely to suddenly turn that dog into the dog that you think you think you want. A week into that now they're hungry enough that yes, they're doing it. But do you think that they're invested in the behavior or they're just thinking about surviving? Speaker 2 Yeah. It's not sustainable to motivate them going forward. Speaker 2 And that kind of thing. And you just got to find another way to motivate that dog at a certain point. Right. Speaker 2 And if you, I mean, for those of you that use that kind of strategies, again, like if, if it didn't work today, think twice for tomorrow. Can you change something so you can make the dog be successful instead of like relying just on the dog's hunger? It's not enough to solve a puzzle. If you don't present the puzzle in a solvable way. Yeah. And that's where it spirals down to, to a very bad place. Yeah. And I think the other thing that I would say is that when I'm rearing a puppy, there sometimes are days when the puppies don't eat out of a food bowl, but that's just because I did so much stuff with them that day. Like they got food for going in their crate. Each time they went in their crate, I did three training sessions with them. I did a little puppy track or a little search game or whatever. So they ate plenty of food. Speaker 2 Right. So much food that a puppy can eat. Speaker 2 There's only so much they can eat. So yeah, you didn't get dinner in a bowl, right? That kind of thing. But it wasn't like I'm saying, Oh, no way. Like you don't get any food unless you, unless you work for it. It was basically just, I wound up using your daily calorie allowance while we were training. Speaker 2 Really good one. I liked that that question came up because I always think to talk about this and very rarely comes to conversation. Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, I'll add this then. Yeah. What does the food deprivation do for those who, let's say, for example, you need to bond with this dog. So don't feed it for X amount of days. And that way you should only be feeding it on a, on a certain occasions from you. But what happens to the dog neurologically in the body chemistry, when we go through removing food for training or bonding purposes, at what point is this a point of no return? Um, you guys kind of hit on it

when you said, um, is the dog really doing it for work or is a dog really doing it? Cause I just want to, I'm so hungry. I got to eat. So I'll do whatever it takes to eat. But there's this whole aspect physiologically that happens to not only dogs, but everything. When you deprive it of food, it's body chemistry changes and there's a, an effect to that. So yeah. So let you guys kind of expand upon that. I mean, I think there, there, there are effects, right? So the body goes into conservation, calorie conservation stuff. So it becomes unhealthy. The metabolism, like dogs that it's like trying to, like trying to starve yourself for, as a diet technique, right? It doesn't work. Like when you're not eating, like you reduce rations, you increase exercise. So there is a point at which when I'm using food that I'm going to feed the dog less than normal and increase their activity level. Right. And so that they're a little bit more motivated for food. But if you stop, stop feeding them for extended periods of time, their body that has a lot of mechanisms that says, I'm not getting the appropriate calories, throws the changes, the blood sugar and balance, like starts to get from here to satisfy that. But then that's empty the next moment. And then eventually it becomes empty. And then it comes down to ultimately energy, right? And you have to have good energy. You need good sleep, not just sleeping between two dogs barking at you and, and you, you know, think you're sleeping, but you never rest that, you know, not a healthy sleep. And you need food, like quality food. And you need food. And then you have energy. And then you can function. So I guess that's kind of the point of the question that you asked is, uh, um, it really can have a very, very serious consequences. And not And just like growing kids, they need more calories. They need appropriate nutrition. They're developing bones and tendons and muscle the whole nine yards. So it gets sketchy. Oh, yeah. Okay. So on to a different topic. This is going to come from my world, the detection dog world. So thoughts on how detection dog has trained or has changed over the years, just like how other aspects of training dogs have changed. So like obedience, dog sports and so forth. How have you guys viewed the change in the detection dog world? So I think that for a long time, the detection dog world didn't change a whole lot. Right. So most of the detection dog work, in my experience, in my during over the course of my career, has been driven by law enforcement and military training systems. Right.

And civilian nose work is relatively new on the scene. There's now there's an explosion of different detection disciplines from conservation, detection, all kinds of stuff. So it's blown up. And that's in the last 20 years. Right. So for most of the history of detection, it didn't change very much. There wasn't a lot of innovation there. And there was one kind of big change from the active. So yeah, aggressive alerts. But the other that I also cannot think of much. No, it was it was basically a system of pairing. Right. Rewards with odor directly pairing them together, teaching the dog to search for a reward. It's interesting. Well, the detection world, like sometimes I listen to podcasts and trainers and. And. And. I know they're trying hard, but. You know, feeding puppies and having some odor under the football doesn't mean zero. It doesn't translate. You know. It doesn't. I mean, and there's and there's people in. I was I had a conversation with Pat Nolan who tried this out. What he did was raspberry tea leaves with food and then tested how well the dogs later on, like eight months old, remembered that odor that he had paired at weeks old. And it was kind of hit or miss. You know, some dogs did. Some dogs didn't. And that kind of matched the research world, too, that said, sure, some dogs can remember, but your cost to benefit ratio or your benefit to loss ratio wasn't really that great. I would say for sure one of the biggest changes is the use of condition reinforcers markers in detection. I was about to say, like recently. That it is. Recently there's a lot. Yeah. Instead of the. Multiple choice, like a voice of communicating. You're going to be reinforced there. Being you can be reinforced away from it. This is once we started introducing the markers and signals overall in training back in the nineties when you and I were getting excited about it. And then what was his name that he kind of took from there into the detection work with the. Oh, gosh. With a lot of tennis balls. Oh, Randy here. Randy here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And kind of, you know, but even to today, this is a problem. This is a, there is a, a, a big fear and the fear comes from true lack of understanding how much it can, in my opinion, can detection, your, your detection work can improve. If the dog understands that, okay, you did your job and you no longer need to do it. Then you can like, I, I personally like to do something. And then you tell me, okay, you did a good job. Here is a hundred bucks versus like, which way those hundred bucks going to go? Are they going to kind of come this way or are they going to come this way?

And I'm like doing my job, but I'm thinking about how I'm going to catch versus continuing to focus on my work. I think that that's a, that is a good way of looking at it. I think that, but I think those things, the delayed conditioning, the use of conditioned reinforcers and the concept of introducing variable reinforcement into, uh, deliberately into detection work instead of keeping dogs on continuous reinforcement. Yeah. What's your take when you work with, I mean, you, you, you're, you're deep in it. I mean, so, uh, like you were mentioning, there has been so many years of what the industry calls direct reward, which means trying to trick the dog and reward the dog over the head or behind, staying the handler, staying behind the dog, tossing the toy in one way or another. Um, certain trainers have been very successful with their skill at how they deliver reward and don't use a marker. But a vast majority of detection dog teams, as I travel the world, those that stay kind of ingrained in, I have to pay it source, um, tend to have the same anticipatory problems that Ivan brought up, which was the dog gets so aroused. It finds odor, odor equals arousal, arousal. And now where and how is it? It can be flying to me. Is it like he said, coming to the left, coming to the right, do it, you know, whatever it is. And then we also see degradation of the behavior, the final response behavior, because they're so excited or so aroused because they know it's coming next. It's going to happen. Um, attention, the Pavlovian conditioning, attention in the body. There's like twitchiness because they're waiting for it to all kinds. But beyond that, like, so if you're training a bomb dog and you do, what are you doing? Direct reward in this out in the field, you're throwing a Kong at the bomb. Well, that means you're training, you're rewarding the dog differently in training than you are in the field or you're not rewarding your dog in the field. Correct. Which then of course you could absolutely expect a degradation of your behaviors in the finished product, right? You have to have a way of reinforcing your dog that you can then mimic on the job. Correct. At some point. So being able to mark and move the dog away from it to reinforce it to me is critical for real life detection of any kind. Yeah. Like you're not going to toss a reward at source on the street, right? You're just not going to do it. And many. If there's something there. Yeah. I was going to say many are fearful. There's like, you're not lobbing Kongs in there. No.

You're just setting up a situation in which you're training and the finished product look different. And many are fearful. My training on trial doesn't look the same. Yeah. Well, many are fearful that if they rewarded on the actual deployment, what if I rewarded for something that wasn't the target odor? That's part of that fear. So added to that fear is I don't reward on actual searches because I can't confirm. So then the famous saying that is used all the time in detection world is trust your dog, except for when it's real. Except on the job. And my thing of it, that is, was then when they say, well, you know, trust your dog, verify the training. Okay. Well, if I've done and back to the main point that both you guys are agreeing on is training in reality need to look much more similar than different. The closer you get to it. Yeah. There needs to be a good blending of these things. So therefore, to the point that everybody, whether you're concerned or not, that there's a odor there, a safety aspect like explosive, at least with the use of a condition reinforcer, the dog, here's this signal that could predict reward, but then goes into the next part of the question, which was variable reward schedules. You know, at what point in detection would you introduce a variable reward schedule? Now, currently most, I can't answer for everybody, but a lot of people kind of wait until later on to start introducing variable reward schedules. Some versions of variable reward schedules is I don't pay in reality, but I pay in training every day. And that's not variable reward. Right. But, you know, obviously, as we have spoke with our classes here at our schools together, we introduce variable reward schedules much sooner on in training. Like, and that's essential. We know it from obedience and everywhere else that if you are on continuous reinforcement for a long period of time, when you go to variable, you're going to prompt higher levels of frustration and things from the dog. And in detection, that creates all kinds of problems with your indication. A dog that's frustrated there is much more likely to start aggressively alerting. Like, they get frustrated and they toss out false alerts. There's all kinds of possibilities in that. So, introducing the concept that variable reinforcement is a part of the process earlier, just like you're trying to introduce blank searches earlier in the process. No, I mean, it's a simple animal learning. Yes. You know, it's like if you stay on continuous for that long and the dog now is accepting, that's how we do it.

And you try then to go into a random schedule, you're basically changing the reinforcement schedule. But because of that long time of staying in continuous, the dog doesn't think, oh, we're changing to random. It's like, no, no, this is becoming extinction. Where is my toy? Or where is my food? Right. It's like that's burst of like disobedience and frustration because they don't. Yeah. So, you signed a contract and you're violating it now. Yeah. But you know what? With the, there is one other thing I want to have you to hear even actually you guys, because it's interesting to me. And that's the legalities of, you know, being in anything to do with, you know, agencies that deal with legal issues. And they do. One of the things that always seems to come around as defense of why we don't use release is because if we let the dog work on its own, always on its own, then it shows that we are not influencing. And then somehow you, you can justify it better in court. But if you have a case, then the defending attorney can ruin the situation. I, I, I know what I say, but I'm curious because I know you deal with this. Yeah. I mean, so what you're bringing up is, yeah, handler bias. So everybody's afraid. I won't say everybody. There's a lot of camps that are afraid that if you presented or you worked a search a certain way and you were involved, did you potentially cue the dog? Right. Sure. And my thing is, well, you should be doing this in training frequently and you should be running single and doing double blind testing to verify whether or not this is, this phenomenon is occurring. Is the dog responding to your presentation or in training? Are you only presenting where odor's at? Are you failing to present in areas that are neutral that don't mean anything? So this is a very easy thing to address if you're doing it throughout your training. And I would, I would go further and say that it's easier to make an independent searching dog if you're using markers or signals because my, I don't have to be a certain proximity to deliver a reward at source. Right. So if I'm going to toss the reward at source, I have to be within a certain distance of the dog at all times. So that dog, I'm influencing them by proximity all the time. My dog and I have a 10 foot bubble or whatever, because I need to be within 10 feet of them when they find something every single time. Otherwise I can't deliver a reward there. But if I have that communication system where I can release the dog to me, I can be all the way across the room. I could be out in the hallway. Right. And I can, the dog can search totally independently of me.

I can, and I can still reinforce them. Yeah. So I think the, the, the fact that you signaling it is making a dog dependent on you is actually likely making the dog less dependent on you, or if you use it appropriately in training. Correct. And, and the dog then starts working to find the stimulus in order to hear the signal. And by also, like you said, bringing up the value of control negatives, blank searches, and those blank searches also get reinforced. The dog is less likely to throw these false indications or nonproductive responses because now they understand there's a correct option, even if odor is not present. Right. And that same thing can be reinforced to any number of levels. Right. You know, that's another thing that people will start to ask too is, oh, what, what I'll do is I'll pay really good on odor. But if it's a blank, I'll just give them a piece of food. And I said, you start going down that path. You've now created a very defined line between these two things. And the dog will say, well, then I don't want the food. I want the toy. So I'll keep searching. Right. And no, you can, your variable reward schedule applies for both finding odor and your negatives. And in that way, it's both can get high value. Both can get secondary, whatever, or even just reinforcement by play with you or social interaction. So it takes a bit for, you know, obviously, you know, I was down there with Dr. Stuart Hilliard at Lackland. And this was a lot of our conversations was one introducing blanks, even in their protocol box phases. And the very first time we did that to one of the dogs, it literally broke the dog's brain. The dog was like, went down the boxes. There was nothing there. And then we, you know, praise a dog and then put odor there. And the dog didn't even acknowledge when odor was there because the dog was like, holy cow, there was nothing here. And that was the first time it ever had zero. So then after that, it didn't even trust odor for that next repetition. So we just put the dog up, let the dog rest, came out the next day, did a find, you know, it was like box number one, two. So first box it went to, boom, got odor. Then did another rep where I moved it down. And then the third rep was zero. This time the dog acknowledged nothing's here. Fourth rep, put odor back in there and spot two, which is second box. Dog nailed it beautifully. It just had to acknowledge and realize that zero was an option. But when we made zero an option, the dog literally went, I don't even know what I'm doing anymore. Like, did odor not mean anything? Which would, of course, panic a lot of people.

And then they would, they would bail on the training. Oh, for sure. Like, oh, we've got to go back to making sure there's odor there all the time. Yeah. Meanwhile, docs like this is the greatest thing. And I loved it too, because it allowed everybody to see the value of introducing that. And so, and then that's the common question that comes up is, okay, when do you introduce zero? When do you introduce variable reward? And as you guys know, this is our step two of training, which is the protocol where there's multiple items. Set discrimination phase is when that happens. That's cool. So, yeah. All right. Let's go to another question. There's one other thing that I want to say. It may come up in other questions as well, but the use of markers and detection, but in general or signaling or conditioned reinforcers and however you want them. There's an other value that we've certainly realized in the obedience world of insulating your behaviors from like Pavlovian responses or conflicts with Pavlovian responses or anticipatory responses. And by that I mean is if my dog does a behavior and I throw a ball for it, my dog does a behavior and I throw a ball for it unsignaled, right? My dog's going to do a behavior and there's going to be a whole bunch of anticipatory behavior ready. There's automatic, there's Pavlovian tension in the body, which can affect their ability to do the behavior. Indications in detection are no different. A conflict comes. Yes. Because of understanding, not because of lack of understanding. Exactly right. Yeah. The straight up misbehavior of organisms. I was just going to say that. And I'm going to do an article on the misbehavior of detection dogs based on the misbehavior. It's beautiful. And we see it all the time. And if you're using markers, it allows you, the dog waits for the sound, then the release, defer, especially predatory rewards a little bit, a few second break, and then toss the reward or whatever. And now that behavior is protected from a lot of that anticipatory stuff or the Pavlovian conditioning. And that's giant. We see it in obedience and it's absolutely there in detection as well. Yep. Yeah. So the ball down, it's definitely giant. Yeah. Like it is a must understand if you don't like. Yep. So that leads me to Ivan. Please describe to people what you told us last night about how you help people with their condition reinforcers using markers and not telegraphing before they do it. So give us a little of your story and how you did that. This was brilliant. Yeah. Yeah.

So I came up finally with, so I mean, just to put some picture in everybody's head, let's say you're making a dog to give you good picture, healing eye contact. And you just throw the ball, as Michael said, the moment you have that 100% devotion. And then you do it a few times and now the dog understands that he's not going to be prepared to grab the ball. And now there is a problem. There is a conflict. What do I do? Do I get ready for the ball? Do I keep watching? Because if I not keep watching, I'm not getting the ball. But if I keep watching and the brain, little brain goes places simply because it's motivated and simply because it understands. Yep. It's a, to your saying, it's a picture of understanding. Right. And even if you, even if you say, well, but I'm going to use a release signal when that release signal is simultaneously in the order of classical order. Meaning the signal and the ball come at the same time. The release doesn't give you the information. Therefore, you're not prepared anyway. So you're just as bad as if you don't say that you are free. And so, yeah, we've tried and I, and Michael has done and everybody that understands that problem have done many things to try to help a handler. And it's very difficult. I have put electric collar on a person just so they don't. And when I put the electric collar, oddly enough, they're like, definitely not doing it. But then they're like, you know, like Mr. Roboto. And it's like, okay. So anyway, what I came up with, because like how you were, we were talking and so Michael's approach was, again, recognized the same problem. And it was like, okay, before you do that, take a couple of steps back. But it's still, there's those little hands are still moving. You know? Reaching to your pocket. So I've been doing this now probably for the last couple of years. It's like, give the release, clap three times, and only then you're allowed to get the toy. And that's the break that they, but I had to get the hands busy. The first time I did it, it was like, wow, this is genius. I was like, just amazed. And then you see them, but it's so hard when you, when you're in this, you've, it is already a habit. And that habit can become very quickly. I have, it's like, okay. Ah. Yeah. So, but yeah, that was funny. It's a very good one. Well, because obviously we're all talking about people constantly by a natural mentality as a human being want to get ready to reward their dog. They want to give them their thing. They're doing all their preparatory behavior. It's all the intentions, no question. Exactly.

So they can't help themselves, but reach or telegraph where the reward location is at. And that's why I love the idea of, like you said, occupying the hands. So give the release. So free, clap three times. And then you can grab it. We both were doing this years back to Wesleyan. No, hold your pants. Grab your pants. You know? It still wasn't. Yeah, yeah. People would still be like, I'm grabbing my pants. Grab your pants closer to my pocket. It's funny. But embedded in all that is, of course, us trying to get a delay between the release and the production of the reward. Yeah. Like, you need a little delay there. So that's what the signaling behaviors prepare the dog to receive it. So the dog doesn't have to worry about where it's coming from. It's coming. Concentrate on the behavior. When you hear this release, then you can start worrying about where it's coming from. But if there's not enough delay, the dog is constantly worried about where it's coming from. Mm-hmm. Especially the higher motivated the dog, the anticipation levels through the roof. So the tiniest detail of such a big difference in training you will have. Yeah. It definitely was, you know, obviously I'll be using that with some of our students. No, Natalie and I are always trying to work on people with for, you know, not telegraphing or reaching for the reward. Plus you have a new secondary reinforcer built in. Correct. That's what I was laughing. The clapping. That's for sure. Yep. The dogs would be like, yes. So when people applaud your dog. It's just, yeah. It's all jacked up. Right? All right. On to another question. This one's going to be an interesting one. Are there dogs with ADHD? I don't know. There are dogs that manifest like they have it, right? Right. It's like you definitely can see dogs acting very different than the normal majority of dogs. But how do you diagnose that? And how do you put it in that category of ADHD or something else? Well, I think it doesn't really matter like if they have the syndrome like or not. And if whether it's exact same thing we see in human beings, they're definitely dogs that have a harder time concentrating. They're easily distracted. Right. They have energy and it's they're not persistent at tasks naturally. Right. They a lot manifesting like I'm doing this for a second. Then I'm doing that for a second. I'm doing that for a second. And it's not like they go like I have a I'm on a mission with a purpose kind of thing. And those dogs present challenges in training.

For most trainers, especially the ones that are go go trainers and not patient and not taking a, you know, variable approaches to to see, you know, then then this can be a. This can actually turn into a very sad story, actually, now that I'm thinking, because you can really like like I bet you some trainers are just screwing with me and it's just. Oh, yeah. And then they start bouncing going here. Exactly. And I'm going to just stop them without understanding. It can be. Yeah. But it's hard to know specifically ADHD. I don't even know how. How exactly gets diagnosed in humans, really. I don't either. So we're not going to be experts. Yeah. Yeah. But I think like so the dogs that manifest as if they might have that, let's just say we have have a dog that has those difficulties in learning. Yeah. We both worked with tons of dogs like that over the years. And he's right. It's just patience and focus and incremental building of focus and concentration. Yeah. Right. You have to have the patience to show the dog that persisting on a task and maintaining focus on a specific task is what gets you to the things that you want. And I don't know of any dogs like that that were motivated. Right. Right. That couldn't be taught to focus. And maybe there's dogs that do it more naturally and they have better natural concentration and better duration for their natural concentration, which we always it's lovely when you get that kind of dog. But those other dogs can can be taught it in most cases. Yeah. In my experience. I mean, we've seen plenty of ADHD dogs with one trainer having five acting like that. Yeah. And you know it's not because they had that definitely that is something to do with a trainer. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like I'm sitting, but I shouldn't be. It's like this panic lever. There's no clarity. It's like these eyes are just concerned. Yeah. Good question. But really, the bottom line of this is, I think we all agree, take your time and make the best of what you have and be patient. And in some ways, we find that like if you are really into training, it should be interesting to you that your approach is not working right now. And that you have to get creative. These are like I just got goosebumps just talking to myself because this is really the moments when I get interested about dog training. Yeah. You know, instead of getting frustrated and angry at the dog. Yes. You know. That's I would have to second that with wholeheartedly. Like that when you're presented with you're presented with a dog that doesn't respond to what you normally do. That's the point at which you should be going like, oh, cool.

Like, that's weird. All right. What do we do with this? Right. Yeah. Should get you excited. That's when. That's great. It's like you're still thinking about that dog. I tell the story. I tell. I don't know how many students have heard the story about you and I seminar you've done. And I was there and I don't even remember when it was somewhere in Southern California in the time back in the day. And there was this what we would all consider a horrible dog for a work dog. Right. The dog was just a very not manifesting any of the traits that you wanted. And but early in the process, that dog got in your head and you were like, I'm going to figure out what makes this dog satisfied. What makes this dog tick? And so everybody had paid for the seminar and whatever. And we're getting a working slot and they did their thing. And I brought that dog out like eight times or ten times because he kept going, get that dog again. And then two or three dogs ago, he's like, get that dog again. It was beautiful. Like, he's like, I mean, it was like I should have let go and do what I needed to do with everybody else. But I know. Yeah. But that's the thing. Like if you like anybody that is interested genuinely in in training, when you struggle. It should make you think you shouldn't get angry because you. Like you cannot exhaust. There is always something else. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. I say it all the time that like if if if there were a recipe and you follow the recipe and you got a trained dog, I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't be dog training. I'd be doing something else for sure. There's no chance I'd still be doing this. Right. Like that's the beauty of it. Every single time you go through it, it's a little bit different. And sometimes it's a lot different, which is should be exciting to you. I mean, it's the beauty of the challenge and the failures to go through. It's the it's those things that challenge you and you kind of fail your way through it. Sometimes this didn't work. This didn't work. And I'm using failure as I went into with an expectation that this should be this easy or it should work this way. And it doesn't work out or I have trained something. I feel confident. And all of a sudden the dog does what a dog does and it doesn't work. It's not really baked in like you thought it was. And those things to me are the most like eye opening and help you grow as a trainer. The old saying is calm seas don't make a good sailor, you know. So it's you need those challenges. You need those different things.

You need lots of different dogs to show you things, because if you get comfortable, you know, a lot of people had watched me work Malinois for 25 years. And then now the past five years or so, I've been doing floppy ear dogs, Labrador, Spaniels, things like that. And that came out of my desire to be challenged by something totally different. You know, I had gotten all right. Yeah, they're very different. And that part really excited me. And, you know, Natalie was had started her career and was, you know, had worked Gus, her Border Collie, McNabb, Mix, whatever he is. And then she had worked her other dogs as well. But this was a whole new challenge for her, you know. So with the two of us, we're like, you know what, let's do this. And now we've turned into Spaniel people, which people were always shocked by that one. However, you are converting Natalie into a Malinois now. So there's now her next group. You can't hang around either one of us for very long. And not have a Malinois. Without winding up in your lap. Yep, absolutely. And you're not being forced. You're just manipulated on a different level. Yes. Yes. Little small seeds that just collect and start growing inside you. Yes. All right. So the next question is about leaking. How to deal with leaking dogs? Managing, reducing, vocalizing during obedience. Let's say in Mondioring or IGP. IGP, when the dog anticipates biting. Anytime this person practices obedience, she won't vocalize. But at the club, she whines or barks through the entire routine. I thought about maybe doing bite work and just focusing on obedience for a few weeks at the club. But also stopping the progression that she starts the noise. Like saying no or restarting the entire routine. And of course, she still won't get what she wants without whining. So does she skip bite work? Like how does she navigate that entire process? And how much of it basically is the context association to the location? Or the exercise? Or like you were talking about, the anticipatory aspect of this thing is happening next? Wow. All questions were good. But this so far is probably the most interesting one for me. You know, because it leads to problems. What happens typically? A trainer, what do a trainer do? Like an average trainer. They'll go to correct that. We will think how to shut it off. This is where we say, well, we cap it. We put dominant color. We do like there's hundred ways to stop him from whining. It's very easy. But that's not the answer. The answer is why is he whining?

Like if he was a person and he's talking instead of whining, is he telling you, I don't understand what the fuck you want from me? Or is he just so excited? Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I'm so excited that I'm like. There is quite a few different reasons for vocalization, too. And before we understand what's the nature of the dog. Like, you know, people like you say somebody passed away. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You say somebody has a birthday. It's the exact same. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Right. And try to make him not say it. Right. Then they're going to be like. Oh. Yeah. But a lot of times what I personally find is that's almost easier to recognize because you if you pay attention to your dog, you will see that that dog is the same in the house. And in everyday life, they're just talkative. Right. Even when you pet them and scratch their butt. But the other ones are the ones that I think it's the those that suffer because they just lack clarity. And they're trying to tell you I have I'm really trying. But you're not. And it's never going well. And I know where it's going again. Ultimately, in the next minute or less, you will chop me up to some level. Mm-hmm. And. And I really don't understand why we focus on how to stop it instead of understand why is it happening so we can. Do something else about it. Right. Or accept it even. So there's a point at which. Or accept it. There's a point at which we're. This manifests frequently in dogs that are doing high arousal activities. And to Ivan's point, you absolutely have to know what where the vocalization is coming from. Right. Is it frustration based? Is it anxiety based because of a lack of clarity, a lack of predictability in training? Is it involuntarily connected to excitement? And I say involuntarily because I think there are certain types of vocalizations in dogs that I label as involuntary. Unconsciously. Unconscious. Maybe unconscious is not the right word. Unvoluntary. They're not aware of it. Right. Involuntary is probably not the right word. Unconscious. Unconscious. The dogs get excited, aroused, stimulated to a certain level. And these noises just come out of them. They're not like going like, oh, I'm excited. I'm going to make noise. I'm going to tell people I'm excited. No. This is just the way this dog is wired. Right. And with observation and training and day to day life, et cetera, and messing around with controlling arousal levels and things like that, you should be able to see what type you're dealing with. And so absolutely clarity solves it for a lot of dogs.

Hey, if you're quiet and you get to hear good things happen for you, like good teaching and that kind of thing. If the dog is vocalizing out of frustration and it's something they're conscious of and you can tell them, hey, stop that. And they're quiet and you reinforce them when they're quiet. It should go away quickly. But if you're there choking them out every five seconds and they're going back and whining again, then that's not it. But obviously, an understanding isn't a part of it. And now we're starting to begin to talk about this unconscious vocalization that comes with excitement. So you either control the excitement level. You say, OK, we're going to reduce arousal. But for a lot of the tasks that we're doing, bite work and stuff like that, you can't reduce arousal level. The dog needs to be aroused to do the job. Right. My dock diving dog can't jump a long way if it's not aroused. My bite work dog is not going to fly down the field and drill that guy at full speed unless it's aroused. So it's tolerating some of it at a certain point. So for me, absolutely. If I get to a dog and I've looked at all those things and I think, OK, this dog, this dog, this is out of this dog's control. In a sense, in a sense, this dog is motivated by the work. They're very clear about their job. And they're going to squeak and whine and chirp sometimes in the work. Then I'm going to just accept it. And I think a lot of damage is done to dogs continually trying to stop some little thing like that. And a dog that otherwise shows exceptional understanding of their work and does beautiful work. And we're saying like, oh, no, I'm going to lose a couple of points for that. And dogs are put under all kinds of abusive conditions in an attempt to stop that. And that's it's not fair. Right. And so the diagnostic part to me is the most important. Yeah. I mean, really, anytime that's like. And that's, you know, when you when you see handler and a dog and you see the dog constantly vocalizing, being whining, being barking, being anything. You know that something is going on and you need to really understand what it is instead of just let's shut it off. Like in the 90s, there is well, not even way behind the 90s. There was very modern to talk about cupping. Right. It's like, OK, we make him crazy. Then we cup him. Then, you know, pressure cooker analogies and stuff. Right. And but there is two ways to do that. And if there is no quality in your training and your dog is whining and barking and even trying to come at you because there is. It's just. And resort, resort, right. And you.

Put the dominant dog or in whatever way you think you are capping it. Basically, you're not allowing it to make a sound instead of asking yourself, what can I do? To bring clarity. In the training. And that's just going to go away unless it's the situation that we described that you said. Absolutely. Then you don't find it. Yep. Another thing that I would say is connected to what we were talking about before about variable reinforcement is that a lot of people these days are staying on continuous reinforcement too long in certain contexts with high value rewards. And so as they get closer to the finishing work portion and they're starting to go onto a variable schedule, they waited too long and it creates huge frustration spikes in the dogs. Right. And then vocalization will come from that. So dogs that were quiet while you were using continuous reinforcement are now getting noisy when you go to variable. And that can be addressed earlier in the training process by introducing the concept of variable reinforcement earlier in the training process. So you don't get as much frustration when the dogs aren't getting reinforced every time they do a behavior. Yeah. And I just came up with, I'm just, this is really something that it's of interest to me always. And I mean, I mean, police dogs. Step out, go and send in the dog and the dog starts to talk. Loses his mind. Yeah. Well, it doesn't mean that you have to chalk him off. You can train this. And it doesn't mean that you never have to say, come out and put your hand. You can so simply, it is so simple to train that, hey, I'm going to do that conversation and you're going to be quiet. But this is easy training. It is. It's actually caught on now. I would say the trend that it used to be when they would make the announcement and the dogs would lose their mind has actually. Well, that and tactfully, it became a very bad choice. So and then there was liability issues of the person saying, I didn't hear anything. All I heard was a dog barking. I didn't know it was a police dog. So now a lot of tactics and procedures have changed to make sure that the announcement's made, the dog is quiet. And then announcements are made and acknowledged by other units that are around the building. Like they can hear it over there. So this helped actually the need or necessity of liability. Better training. Training came from that. As long as they're still not using the system that he said where they've built a whole bunch of value in this. They practiced it in training. Come out, I'm going to send the dog. Come out, I'm going to send the dog.

Come out, I'm going to send the dog. Send the dog, right? And in training, instead of neutralizing the dogs for those signals from the beginning. Yeah. So that you didn't, then you're choking your dog out because you're zapping and frying your dog because your dog's not. It's that conflict by accident. Yeah. For something you've created. Yeah. Right. So. But this is a super question. And anytime this happens, it's really these two parts. Is it really the emotional, natural, innate, you know, where I'm talkative? Yeah. Or is it the dog that says, I'm trying, but I have no idea what you want. Like today you want this. Next minute you change it. Then you praise me for exactly the same thing. And the next moment I am on the dominant color hand. Yeah. And then I try to bite you. And now I'm labeled as handler aggressive on top of, uh, it's just, uh, you know, being a little patient and also think, can you change something in training? That's always somehow doesn't come easy. It's like thinking always of the dog and, and, and thinking of everything as, as, uh, as some form of disobedience. Right. Which is the other part of it. Right. They're not trying to understand the dog's perspective there. Yeah. Like this dog knows it shouldn't be doing that. Or like I told it to stop and it didn't stop. And all the stuff that comes with, like you do what I say. There's a mentality sometimes around that, that we have to be careful of. Yeah. The next question should be interesting for your guys' point of view. So we hear the term opposition reflex a lot. Lots of examples are giving it. Is it truly a reflex or is it a better definition to call it opposition response? Interesting. Because a reflex would require by definition, it just happens where a lot of times with how many show opposition reflex is truly a response to the, the pullback or the thing that's moving forward. And there's resistance to it. You know, when you look at it physiologically, is it truly? So response versus reflex. Yeah. Although, although they are both responses, but one can be a reflex. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. I like, I think we're, it's semantics at a certain point that it's, it doesn't matter that much. There are reflexive aspects to it because you can see it in a dog the same with you. If you were not attentive to something and somebody pushed against you, your body would tense. And it also depends on what you're, are you pushed over a cliff? Yeah. Or are you just pushed right here on the. Yeah. But also if you don't know that it's coming and something shoves against you. Right.

There's a natural like bracing of your body that and leaning into that thing. !! It's rooted in, and so there is a reflexive component to it. Well, there's truly a reflex that is probably a question for. No, but that's a good, good one. That's a good analogy because the same thing. I mean, just how you, we never really consciously think how we are walking. The brain just makes it happen for us. Right. Yeah. And then when you get that, yes, you do. Yeah. There's a stiffening and a pushing. But sometimes when you, when it's not, when it's, when you know that it's going to happen, the words are coming to me, right? Yeah. And there is no real concern of survival, right? Then it goes away. So maybe. Then it is more of a, okay, I'm just responding. Yep. Exactly. Yep. Yep. Well, I was going to say, use the detection analogy. So when sometimes a dog's indicating, the handler will pull back on the dog. The dog will lean forward. And in some cases, people use that as a, the dog, oh, that's opposition reflex. That means there's an odor there. And it turns out later on, it's just a conditioned response. As soon as the dog indicates, the dogs get used to pull. So they resist and they hold position. And then reward comes flying in. It's how much that's, you know. No, I mean, we use that technique. A lot. Yes. In so many places. So many things. Absolutely. And sometimes very successfully. And sometimes really dumb stuff's happening when it's not, you know. But, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's lots of places where it's used. And I think it's probably maybe both. Maybe if it's surprising, it's reflexive. And if it's, if the dogs are aware of it, then it's a response. And the response can be strengthened or it can be weakened or extinguished. Right. We could teach the dog when you feel the leash. I mean, go with it. Just this morning. How, how, just working our dogs in ring. Yeah. How many times we did that. Oh. With each dog, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Numerous times. Yep. In the bite. In the guard. In the, like, like, it's really. You did it definitely on the, on the article. I was watching you on the article guard. Right. You know, you would pull back on, on her on purpose to get her to stay there. Yeah. Yeah. But no, we did it when they're biting. We did it when she was guarding between the legs and to make her really, it's like, no, no, you cannot stop me. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to pull you out. To get into that position. But there is so many other places. It just came to me that that's all we were doing this morning. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yep. A hundred percent. And that would be responsive or reflexive.

Oh, so I, those feel more like responses. I was going to say that's how I feel. Because we've conditioned them. Yep. Right. So I'm pulled back, you back from something you want. If you put forward effort in. You get reinforced. Yeah. So there's a response. But there are surprising things where a dog never had a leash on and you pull it and they just go. Yeah. They just flinch back against it. There's some reflexive response to it there as well. And then there's learning involved because we're going to expect the dog potentially to differentiate between different signals in different places. So when I'm teaching you to slide over and touch my leg with the leash, I'm giving you a leash input. And I don't want you to resist it at all. I want you to go with it. And somewhere else, I'm going to use the leash on you. We use different collars and different positions and cueing systems to help the dog differentiate between them. But it's quite possible that I pull on you in one way and I want you to resist it and I pull on you in another way and I want you to go with it. Right. Right. And so that communication, which that says it's a response. Right. And that I'm conditioned it and I need to make sure I keep those communication systems as clear as possible. I wouldn't want to do like opposition on a prong collar and then use the prong collar as a tool to teach you to move with me. That creates conflict. Right. The dog says, well, which one is it in those spots? Yeah. I bet we can have a full three day workshop on what you can do with leashes. Oh, yes. There you go. Just come to California. Michael and Ivan will be doing a. It will not be a joke. It will actually extremely of extreme value. Of course. Absolutely. One of the biggest things that we teach even detection is leash handling because of all the different complexities. Well, yeah. And not even to mention the the the fact of fading them out of the. Absolutely. So all these tools is how would the various ways in which we use them to help us construct behaviors and maintain behaviors. And then how do we work? Yeah. How to prove them. Right. So absolutely. OK, I will take you to another question. It's crazy how a little question can. Oh, yeah. It goes way more. How do you train obedience and then adding distractions, steps, corrections, et cetera? How do you go through this in the obedience phase of training? So I'll give you a kind of a nutshell version of it. Right. Right. Is I want to construct the behavior that I want away from distraction as much as possible. Right. So that I have the dog's attention and focus and understanding.

You know, I liken it to teaching a kindergartner to do something in front of a TV. Right. Like I want as few distractions as possible. I'm constructing the behavior. Once I've built value in the behavior, I want to in a controlled setting, introduce distractions. I don't want to use correction when I'm introducing new distractions to dogs. In general, novel distractions and corrections are a bad idea. Right. In general, you make the dog uncomfortable with that. So when I first introduce distractions, then I help the dog. Like I remind them like, hey, don't attend to that. You know your job. I want to have control of the distraction. I want to be able to turn it off and on, control how intense it is, that kind of thing. There's some simple ways in which we do that. And then as we go forward, it's possible that I determine that a dog really understands its job. And there's a distraction that they're familiar with. It's not new. It's nothing novel to them. And they're disregarding a few of some kind of... It's kind of your ability to raise and lower criteria as you go, right? That's absolutely. And then there may be consequences for not responding in the face of a distraction. If I determine you know your job and I'm not going to do damage to your worldview about that distraction, I'm not going to create avoidance to that situation. They're going to take the information I give them and apply it to the fact that they failed to do the behavior instead of the other thing. That's the nutshell version, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If I were to add something, I would just focus on, are we making any distinction between distraction and competing reinforcer? Because something can be distracting, but it's not necessarily competing with you. I think that's a very... That's a super good point. And a lot of times we can show the dog what butterflies are and just the world. And it's really that is the world. There are things that can be, oh, what is that? Curiosity, right? Yeah. Yep. And I find that for the most part that in that sense of distraction, I am very less concerned because I know that my dogs want to play with me. You know, it's not that they see a bird flying for the first time. Now, if the bird flying is competing reinforcer... It's like, oh, I really want to chase the bird. Now we have to be smart and go the path that Michael's talking about. Yeah. But there is really, to me, there is the difference between... Something that's like, what's that? Just distraction. Versus like, oh, I want to... And no, no. This is going to compete with me. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed.

I think the biggest mistake that people make is they try to use distractions or competing motivators as a proofing thing so that they can correct their dogs for mistakes. Yeah, true. I think that's a very common traditional mentality around distractions. I've built this behavior. Now let's go out and present some distractions or some competing motivators so my dog will fail so I can correct my dog, right? And I want to avoid that assiduously. Like, I want to say like, hey, that's not for you to attend to. You know this is what we're doing. And if I haven't built enough value in what we're doing, then I have no business putting the dog in that position. Right. Right. And so I look at those as a very controlled introduction so that the dog... And stuff just happens. Like you're out training and... Right. Yeah. Life goes on. Some weird noise goes by or bird flies over and you're like, whoa, what's that? I don't make any big deal about that kind of thing either. I agree with him 100% on that front, right? Yeah. You want to go chase that rabbit? I may have to say, no, no, no. That's not... You're not doing that, right? But... Then that leads to... That is the other extreme of that is the trainer that just is so scared. Yes. And he always goes in that corner, always in that vacuum jar of training. Good point. Because it looks good there. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. And then the longer you stay, the longer it's going to look good there. And the harder it is. But the harder it will be to put it outside of those vacuum environments. Yeah. You have to, you know, pretty soon. It's hard to like how soon, right? Immediately. Pretty soon. How soon? As soon as you can. Try it. As soon as you can get... That's exactly... It's the distraction or environmental equivalent of staying on continuous reinforcement too long, right? This idea that I only work in this one location or I only work in places that are completely free of distraction until it's perfect. Yeah. Right? There's that idea too, that some people are like... They're not even concerned with the fact that it looks good there, which makes them happy, of course. But then there's this idea that it has to be perfected before you introduce any kind of new difficulty. And so somebody will stay in isolation until the behaviors are completely finished or in their mind finished. And that's a problem. Like I can take an easier behavior or just an interaction with me and apply that to new environments. This is us going out and just playing with our dogs in new places, right? Yeah. I don't have to do obedience in new places, right? Either.

The idea that, hey, we work together, we collaborate in new locations. And frequently if I do that and the behaviors are being constructed somewhere relatively distraction free, by the time I'm bringing them into those environments, I don't have any real issues. The dog's just like, yeah, I've been in lots of environments and I'm still collaborating with you there, right? Same thing. I mean, if we talk detection, you don't just put dogs in schools and churches only to search. You go there just because to go there. Like when you go tracking with a dog, you don't go in this tracking field only to track. You go there to let him loose so he can explore and see what a gopher hole is. See whatever. And that actually helps him now track or detect or do the, yeah. So it's not that. The novelty of the environment is gone. Right. It hunts you. If you don't allow exploration, it's going to hunt you eventually, I think. Yeah. Yeah. It leads into what you guys talked about right into the next question, which was thoughts on punishment being personal or not personal? Meaning the dog. I think I know. Yeah. It's like, is it coming from you or is it God's hand? Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. I think that's what it is. Yeah. I think there are circumstances for both. Right. Most of the stuff connected to training, it's personal, meaning I'm signaling the dog. I'm not using unsignaled punishment on my dogs very often. Right. The vast majority of the punishment is signaled like, hey, that was wrong. Here comes something. And that there's a variety of reasons for that. One, it marks the moment in time of the mistake. Two, it allows me frequently, there's a preparatory, just like a reward marker prepares the dog for accessing the reward. A punishment marker or a signal prepares the dog to receive the punishment and allows me to radically downregulate the intensity of the physical punishment that I use. And it also states if you like or don't like what goes on. A hundred percent. Which is of utmost value. So the dog then, of course, knows it's me because I'm signaling it in some fashion. And I think in general, that's a part of our working relationship. I'm going to tell you when you're right and I'm going to tell you when you're wrong. And that's all a part of both sides of the same coin. And it's a part of it. There are specific situations in which you like an electric fence is one such example. Right. Like sometimes you're chewing a cable. Maybe the cable bites them back. Bites them back. Yep. Or somebody using an e-collar on a dog for counter surfing or whatever. Like not saying that that's the only solution to those problems.

But like there are places in which you want the dog to associate the correction with something in the environment. Rattlesnake avoidance is another one. Right. Yeah. Yeah. There are places in which the impersonality of the correction. And there are places in bite work sometimes when I don't want to be involved. In IGP, for instance, where the dogs focus on the helper is very important. There are places sometimes where if I'm marking and moving, the dog can become a little bit likely to look at me if I'm moving up or things like that. And so there might be a place there specifically where I would transfer that to somebody else. We do work through that. We work through it. We still work through it. It's like, no, you know that it's coming from me. And you're going to be concerned for a little bit. But we will show you that you don't have to be concerned and clarity. Right. Yeah. But I think the question, and I am speculating because we cannot go back and forth with whomever wrote the question. Yeah. It's about, I think there is that philosophy that if you hang back and bad stuff is happening and it's not associated with you, then you are ultimately a very good person consistently. And being that person is the dog either really don't likes you or he tries to eat you or something like this. You know, I think the question is going in that direction. And that's just not the case. It's like there is places, plenty of places and time when it's like, hey, don't do that. It's like, I'm telling you, don't do that. Yes. But if I try to tell you, don't do that, that, that, but I am not telling you, then imagine imagine if I have to, then if he walks in this room, it's like the whole room is booby trapped. And sometimes he touches something. It's bad. And almost everything is like, okay, I cannot do nothing. And then there is me as the owner being very quiet. A lot. He has to figure it out now. And I would prefer that I say, hey, it's not the time. Yeah. Maybe a sleeve here, or maybe it's a pizza on the table. It's like, don't know. I mean, what? And if it is about handler aggression, handler aggression comes from lack of clarity. Comes of, of, for the most part. Or lack of relationship. Right. Yeah. Otherwise, any other aggression, there is those that, you know, they can show handler aggression, but they also will nuke you in a hallway when, if you decide to go to the bathroom at night. You're right. You know? Yeah. And that's very different. But the ones that we call handler aggression, when it happens during training, when you ask

him to do something, and he says, I know where we are going, and I'm going to try to stop that. And now we have this. That's all clarity. That's all, like, the dog showing. I'm, I'm lost. By lack of understanding. Like, I know that eventually we're going to get into a fight. Like, I give this example often with, like, let's say you and I are good in painting houses. And Cameron says, well, we have a house and five, 500,000 cash just to paint everything. And we paint that for two days. And he gives us 500 cash. And just because we don't know how to agree, how to split the money, we get into fights every time we get the money as the end result. Eventually, we kind of, we are getting excited to go and paint houses. But we always know where we're going to end up. Right? We're going to end up in a fight. Yeah. And that handler aggression, in some ways, is like there is something that is misunderstood. Needed some clarity. We come to an agreement ahead of time. Right. You decide. It's like, how about 250? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's exactly right. And I think that you hit on it. Part of the... I'm seriously overpaying for painting a house for 500,000. I'm just saying. We're very good painters. Yeah, apparently. Extremely good painters. I think there's a relationship building component that is misunderstood. Like the idea that only good things can promote a good relationship. Only giving the dogs things they want and being nice to them promote relationship. It's a collaborative process of learning that you're helping the dog through. You guys are working through this together. And so I'm giving you information that helps you understand the tasks and make your way to the things that you want. And we do these things together. And both sides of it. And contingent. Yeah. They're all contingent. They're all contingent. And they're clear. You have a place to put that information. Right? And when something is non-contingent and it's like, okay, I just got hit by the collar and chocked by the dominant collar. You're leaving it up to them. And I don't know why. Yep. Yep. You're leaving up them to decide why. Why? And sometimes they... Sometimes it works because the dog decided that it was what you wanted them to understand it to be. But there are lots of times where it doesn't. Right. Right. Where the dog goes, I don't know where to put that information. Like, I just thought I was doing something that I'm doing. I like doing. I'm excited out here. I'm doing this. And the dog has no place to put that information. And that creates all kinds of stress and anxiety and starts to disrupt it. Like, that all...

We talk about it all the time in classes and things like that about this idea of stress levels when a human... The original studies were done with human beings and psychology students, right? Perceived control of aversive experiences, right? This idea is that, like, they measure stress levels while you're being shocked. And if the shock is under your control or you perceive it's under your control versus with you, perceive it's not under your control, the same physical input causes significantly higher stress levels. So we're all talking about clarity here. We're all talking about clarity of communication. And so signaling becomes such an important piece of that puzzle. And I'm helping the dog. It's part of our collaboration. I'm telling you when you're right in a very precise way. I'm telling you when you're wrong so that you have a place to put that information. And then the dog starts to go, okay, cool. Now consequences don't have the same effect. Now if I do apply pressure to you, the dog goes, yeah, yeah, I know what to do with that information. So the same physical input creates less stress in the dog because they know what to do. They understood it, right? They have got a conceptual framework to hang that information on. And it's very sad to think that, like, just, like, a lot of times this starts with the premise that he's here to just go against me. Right. He will never just cooperate because he wants to do something with me. He's always going to look for a way to screw things over. Yep. Always. Isn't that one of your pet peeves? Like, it drives me mad. People just like that. Like, the attitude among dog trainers, like, this dog's a dick. This dog's trying to get it over on me. This, like, it's one of my least favorite things in dog training. That idea. Like, no, he's not. Like, it's you. He's not being what you want because you're not holding up your end of the bargain most of the time. The vast majority of people that say that. Yeah, especially you've made your mind who he is. Yes. And you constantly look at him and treating him that way. Then you're getting opposition reflex, wouldn't you? It's shocking, right? Or response. Yes, response. Absolutely true. Okay. So, anyway, the short thing, I think we agree. Yeah. Like, the... Mostly signaled. Yeah. Mostly personal. There's no... No... Nothing superstitious. Nothing and nothing... The dog's not going to hate you because you say... Because you have rules and there are consequences for not following rules. This is... I mean, if that was the case, we... Imagine the world. Like, we would be just trying to kill each other instantly. Yep. We talked...

Actually, you and I, Michael, talked about this in Detection. Giving the no signal when the dog was incorrectly responding to whatever, let's say, a distracting or proofing odor. Yeah. And a lot of times, people want to wait the dog out. Well, waiting the dog out looks a lot like a duration exercise. Yeah. True. Very true. It's going to create all kinds of frustration, too. Like, and the dogs are like, come on. Yeah. Oh, saying no... Yeah. Yeah. It's already a big conversation. Like, sometimes I start... It's like, would you tell no to your dog? And then... I'm not going to go there. Let's do the next one. Next one. There you go. Cheers. There you go. Okay. The next one is, should you activate the dog or should the dog activate you? I think I know what they're getting at, right? So, I think in general, past the beginning stages of training, then I want to activate the dog with some set of signals because I don't want my dog determining when the work starts and stops and things like that, right? And I'm living with a working dog, and so I don't want you coming constantly trying to activate me. But there is some part of the early process where I've set up a circumstance in which the dog knows they can get me to do things with them, and I want to have them ask for it. I want them to offer it and bring me to life, in a sense, when we're doing early handler focus exercise and things like that. So, there's a point at which I'll respond to their overtures. But once I have reasonably good behavior, then I'm going to tell you when the bar is open and when the bar is closed. I have different sets of signals that tell you what activities we're going to do because I don't want my dog guessing about that. And I want to be able to have it focused on certain tasks and times, especially when you're dealing with high arousal activities that we want our dogs to do. I don't want my dog trying to solicit play for me in the living room 24-7, right? So, it's important that I tell them when that's an appropriate activity. Right. That's how I approach it anyway. Sometimes there is a confusion with this, I think, as well. The whole idea of activation. Kind of like destruction and competing reinforcer. Like activation and motivation. So, like, assuming that we have motivation already, I can give you the cue. I can give you the green light. Right. Let's go. That would be the activation. But if we're thinking activation as some attempt to create motivation to do something. Oh, I see. Which sometimes can be looked at that way. Yes. And you're thinking of, okay, I'm kind of, you know, we're almost forcing him to get motivated.

Right, right, right, right. That's going in a very strange rabbit hole. Right. I see what you're saying. So, more like when we're teaching a dog to play, for instance, in the early stages, sometimes I'm doing more work. Creating motivation. More work than the dog is hammer running and I'm jumping and taking. Right. There's a lot of activity that I want to feather out. And I want the dog to bring that activity at a certain point. So, I want to do less and less and have them do more and more. Right. To the point where that dog's coming out asking me to do it. Right. In a sense, or activating me into the game. Right. That kind of thing. So, I see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, I see it a lot. This isn't so much to the handler, but in the bite work context, we want the, in certain types of training, they want the dog to activate the decoy. It's in the decoy constantly activating the dog. Yeah. Sure. Active versus reactive. There is that thing too. There's that. Yeah. Not to the dog waiting. Well, if you're going to start acting out and make whip, then I'm going to respond to you versus me responding because, not because you're. I have anything overtly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, but that's interesting. Let's say you have a dog, like in IGP, it's pretty common that thing where if you do a lot, then the dog is barking very nice and confident and deep. And if you don't, they start to question if they should, and they're changing. Right. Yeah. And then it's like, do you do or do you not do? And the thing is that even when you don't do, when you are passive instead of active, you're still saying, hey, if I'm passive, that's. That's an activity. Right. Right. So, so it's still your activation. Right. Right. Just not. Your activation is this. Exactly. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're still team. They still need some signal to go into that behavior and the signal, maybe the person standing passively in the blind, the signal. Right. Or at least 30 seasons. Yeah. Yes. And we want it to be the picture the dogs are actually going to be confronted with. Exactly. So we, of course, want to, if we're having to do things to activate the dog in the early stages, we, we would, of course, want to get rid of those. It's like the help in teaching a dog to play. Yes. I run a lot when I'm first teaching a dog to play. Right. I don't want to have to run for the whole life of the dog when I'm playing with them. There's a point at which I can just toss the toy. There is no need. Present the toy. And I don't need to run anymore. Yes. Yes. We want the same thing in the body work there. Yep. All right.

Well, the next question, this is going to be, there's only three questions left. This is your guys' option to get into it or not. But this goes into the. I don't like it already. Make me concerned. This is the conversation about the medical, the use of pharmaceuticals for dogs. So you can say pass. You can say whatever you guys want. Well, let's talk about it. We'll talk about it. Okay. There you go. Let's do it. Let's get into it. I think I would think that we're also relatively like mind on this and that they have a place. There are cases in which they will help as part of a system of behavioral modification and they can disrupt certain cycles for short periods of time, which allow you to make progress. But there should be a plan to eliminate them. There are all kinds of side effects and they're radically overused. So I want to try purely behavioral solutions to begin with, generally speaking. And if I'm running into difficulties where I think a pharmaceutical may help me get over a hump, block some responding long enough for me to develop other paths for the dog. It depends on the problem. Then they have a place. But they're just like in human medicine. I think right now they're strongly overprescribed. Yes. They're a lazy way out. They deprive dogs of meaningful hives to dogs that are on them long term. The side effects long term for most of them have not been studied on dogs and they're meant to be temporary things. And there's so many dogs out there now. Even just like dogs that don't have behavioral issues. Dogs that are just like an excited adolescent dog. No question. And somebody's like, oh, my dog's like spastic. I need to put him on medication. So they're way, way, way overused. Yeah, that comes to also, I think for, I mean, this is really can open the door for so many different conversation. But again, like sometimes, just as you said, a young dog that maybe just needs a leash bob, that it's aversive, that it has to be aversive. Yeah. And somebody is unwilling to do that. Yes. And give it a try. Right. And then they will say, well, we tried everything. We got, we worked with this top trainer and this top trainer and this top trainer. But did anybody tell them, dude, don't do that? No. Okay. So let's put them on psychotropics. Yeah. It's a big jump. And it's not. And on top of that, we all know, like it doesn't matter being humans, being what there is. Pharmacy is driven by the money. Mm-hmm. It's profit driven. There's no question about that. It would be very different if the veterinarian or the doctor is not getting nothing from this kind of.

And there's a big argument there about whether or not medicine of any kind should be for profit. Right. In my opinion. Right. But this is another large conversation. Oh, yeah. Humans or dogs. I mean, you look at that. I agree. There are those that you can have a moment to use it so you can make a breakthrough. No question. Okay. Yeah. And I also would go that far that they are dogs that probably are so torn inside otherwise that should stay for the rest of their life. Agreed. But those are few in farmed tree. But those are rare. Like they're extremely rare cases. Yes. I agree. Yeah. And I know, you know, the people that have the rights to prescribe, they would argue that. Yeah. And unfortunately, we don't collaborate on something that is really important. It's a bummer. Yeah, it is. But it's really important. Because like how we were spent a lot of time talking to you about that Tina dog that I have with OCD, right? Yes. Right. We stopped the psychotropics. Took a totally different approach. I know she wasn't shocked daily for things. And here we are. So there are ways. And we know with humans there are ways. Psychotropic medications to me are, you know, it should not be done so easily. Agreed. And readily. Agreed. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. And the people prescribing them, unfortunately, don't have any education in general on the behavioral aspects of it. They're not out there actually teaching dogs. So they're prescribing them, generally speaking, in isolation. Not as part of a larger protocol, right? And so that's what they've got in their toolbox, ultimately. And so that's what they know. That's what they're going to do as opposed to, okay, here are the behavioral solutions. Here's the ways to approach it from a training and management perspective. And here's how that fits into that. Right. And here's your plan for getting off of it. Except in those very rare cases. Right. The super rare dogs, right? It should be a very temporary thing. But it's unfortunately not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll wrap the last two questions into one question. And that is, how do you guys view the future of the dog training industry? And then what advice would you give that next generation of dog trainers? I don't know about the future, but I do have an advice. I think you're going to like the advice. Because we're coming from the same place, you and I. Yes. And my advice is like what has happened in the last year with social media. It has promoted this influential kind of type of trainer that it's not a trainer, but it's busy to learn marketing, to get likes and to get views. And that's very different than being a trainer.

And once they create that, now they have people's attention. And now they feel that they actually have to become trainers. So it's almost like backwards. The cart before the horse. I can say it better myself. Yeah. Like if you want to be a dog trainer, the first thing you need to do is learn how to be a dog trainer. And you're not going to like, and this is kind of going to sound like advertising our schools now. But you cannot learn dog training in four days and get some certificate and start teaching other people. I would argue you can't get in four months. Like when students would come to the school and we had a five-month-long program. And they're here full-time for five months. When you finish that, you're at the beginning of your exploration. If you came into there with no previous experience, like you just have the basics, which doesn't mean you couldn't help somebody on a small level. But you shouldn't be out. People would finish the thing and go out and say like, post, start a business, take out their Facebook ads. We handle all cases. Aggression. Like, what are you doing? Like, there's for sure. And with confidence. With confidence. With real confidence. Yeah. It's a process. You don't become expert at anything instantaneously. And I think it's easier than ever to get access to information now, which is there are benefits to that for sure. Oh, yeah. That you can speed up your education to some degree. But the hands-on, in-your-bones kind of experience that comes from doing it a bunch of times with a lot of different dogs, you can't speed that up. Like, somebody can give you an idea, which can help prevent you from making a bunch of silly mistakes along the way. But then the true knowledge, like you know it in your body and you've seen it and felt it, only comes with repetition experience. And people should do more of that before they start taking people's money and trying to do it professionally. Right? Right. I think certainly both of us traveled a path like that. We were passionate about training as a hobby before. Granted, it was different times. Yeah. Granted, it was very different times. Yeah. Very different times. And, like, one of the things the dog training industry has done is it's blown up. There are a bunch of dog trainers. Like, way more people are hiring dog trainers than ever would have been in the past. You know, 30 years ago or 40 years ago, the average person didn't necessarily go hire a dog trainer. Right. People might take an obedience class at the local obedience club or whatever it is. Or they tried to do it themselves or, you know, whatever it was.

There were some people that would hire trainers if they had behavioral issues. Yeah. But now, like, it's kind of common. You, everybody has a dog trainer, which is great. Like, the idea that people are getting dogs and are seeking help with their dogs. So that kind of explosion of dog training as an industry is relatively recent. And there are more and more opportunities for people to be professional dog trainers. But there are a lot of professionals out there with very little real experience. And that's a problem. Right. Right. And they can get really popular on social media really fast. If you're flashy and you know how to manipulate that system, you can get a lot of people looking at you, which unfortunately doesn't necessarily mean you know what you're doing. Yeah. You've got to get your hands dirty. We sound like old men. You've got to get kids these days. Right. Where the dog training goes. I think now that having said that, I think my guess is that there will be some sort of a reset to where you can have so many influencer. Until eventually it's so flooded with people on the internet that you have to try to find somebody that actually can train dog that has proven that can do it. Yeah. And I think it will. It just like I say the same thing with the force free ideology. There will be a moment. It's just you can go you can say that the sun goes around the earth for so long until eventually we would want to send something somewhere. Right. And then we have to accept it. Yes. So hopefully that's what happens. It's like the and nothing wrong. You know, like I as old as we are, I understand how addictive and how important to everybody social media is. Oh, of course. And how you want the likes and how you, you know, it's a problem on a whole different level. But to become, to call yourself a dog trainer, you have to be a dog trainer, not influencers. It's a huge difference. Very huge difference. You have to have a body of work. Right. You know, and like you just said, we could say anything. I've trained thousands of dogs. It's not telling me nothing. No. Even if you train thousands, like even if you train 10 thousands of dogs, I want to see 10. How were they trained? Yeah. What they look like. Yep. Yep. Not snippets in training on YouTube. Yep. In person, in front of you, you know. Yes. Put it on the field. Put it in reality. What's your results? What does it look like? And how, like, like Ivan just said, how repeatable is it? Right. You know, can you do it across different breeds? Can you do it across different disciplines? Is your philosophies bleed into these different things?

And the thing is that it, it, it takes so much of time and attention to become good at this. Right. That if you're spending half your time like filming and editing stuff. But it's more half the time. Yeah. Three quarters of your time. 80% of your time. 80% of the time goes into trying. No. And watching everybody else's little videos on there. I need to do it again. I need to do it again. And today's like a week. Yeah. OK. That's good enough. Your energy's in the wrong place. Right. Progress. Right. So that all those, the tools that allow you to get in front of people, the tools that allow you to actually get access to information are also the tools that are eating up time that would be better spent. I can tell you firsthand. Yeah. But we like it's, it's inevitably it is what it is. Like, so the world's changing a lot of ways that I'm not thrilled about. I believe there will be a change though. I really, the way I picture is, there's going to be a little more of this to where, to where the whole, uh, people can't internet environment is going to be flooded with influencers that cannot train. Yeah. Yeah. And, and then there will be the influencers that are actually trained dogs and have done really good things and now are teaching. And because now they're teaching, they are, you, you actually wouldn't even call them influencers at this point because the influencer is a very different. It's like, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm going to make everybody believe that I'm really good at it. Yes. Right. Yep. Look at me. Just attention. Um, grabbing. I have proof. I have followers. Yeah. Well, and that's, that's my proof. That's the goal for people to monetize. I think eventually. Right. Right. It's monetize enough, enough eyes on your stuff, regardless of whether it's good or not. And you're getting paid for that. Right. So the, that also brings in the desire to create controversy where there shouldn't be con, but there are some questions in there that were too many questions for us to answer, but questions in there about, uh, riffs in the dog training community and things like that. Some of those things are trumped up riffs because people know they'll get a whole bunch of attention. Yes. But if I, if I say sport dog trainers versus pet dog trainers, or I say e-collars versus this thing, then there are deliberate people out there deliberately baiting those issues, not because they want to, an understanding of those, not because they want to dialogue. None of that. They know the controversy will get a whole bunch of eyeballs on their stuff. And that that's monetized at a certain point. It's depressing.

And as hard as it is to believe that actually happens, I think it happens just like in any other sphere. Like you have boats that are making posts that are starting or, or, you know, and here we are fighting because it's artificially created for you to, to get into that argument. Oh yeah. The algorithms for the social media, determine what gets in front of you. It's going to be controversial stuff on purpose because they know people pay attention to that more than they pay it. Like I, it's something we've talked about a whole bunch about like the, the slow, the slow food movement, the, the, the Norwegians of the slow TV movement, right? Where they have a TV on and there's just caribou grazing in a field for like hours at a time or whatever it is. Like we're getting away from the real life timelines of living in the natural world. Like when we're on our computers and our phones so much, all those things are in little snippets like that. And attention spans get altered by that. Like the stars are so close. And, and then if you see how things are really unfold in reality, really unfold in reality when you're training a dog, it's, it's not dramatic. It's incremental. It's, it's, and so people aren't, aren't watching the best training in a lot of cases, right? The best training is, I always say is, is undramatic. Like if people are provoking a lot of dramatic shit in their training, it's usually because they're doing bad dog training. Right. And so you, you have a harder time getting people to settle in and watch the stuff that's actually most useful, most useful for an understanding of the way the process really works. But who knows? Hopefully we're optimistic that this will. It has like, I, I, this is, I, I, I tried not, I think I'm a generally an optimist, but like all, every time we adopt new technology, there's a tendency to focus on the positives and there's certainly plenty of positives. Yeah. Right. We can train with people remotely. I can talk to anybody anywhere in the world. Yeah. If I hear about somebody somewhere halfway around the world, that's good at something, I can go see what they're doing without flying there. Right. Yes. All that kind of stuff. The access to information is mind boggling and the freedom that comes with it. Like, so we were talking about, we could, these days we could go teach from the middle of the desert somewhere if we wanted. Right. Close to the stars. Right. Right. And those places. And that's, there's something lovely about that. There are also a whole bunch of pitfalls in there that we have to be aware of. And I think you're, I think maybe you're right.

Maybe you're right. Maybe we run up against the end of that and people begin to realize this isn't helping us be better dog trainers or isn't helping more people get their dogs trained. And they'll go back to a more kind of analog version of it to some degree. You got to learn training. Well, because like right now, when you think of it, how does an average dog owner find a trainer? They go and they, what do you look? You look ratings, likes and followers. And that's the criteria right now. But eventually I think they're all going to kind of equal, no matter how much they try, they're going to kind of flatline it. Yep. And all these influence are right now. Now it's going to, okay, well, they all have 200,000 followers or 2 million followers. But this one also can train dogs. Yeah. Right. They'll have, they'll finally be the differentiating factor, which is they train dogs. Right. Back to how it all started. And I would just implore everybody not to look at any of that, that part of it. That doesn't have anything to do with it. Look at, look at the actual content. Watch them train dogs, if you can, in real time. See their dogs. Like all you, we talk about it all the time. That's all you need to see. Like I can go watch somebody for five minutes and know if they know what they're doing or not. Right. Two minutes. Yeah. Two minutes. Yeah. I'm being, I'm giving them this end of the doubt. Yeah. It doesn't take very long to recognize whether or not they have. But we have a night to look, to know what we look for. Yeah. You know, like this, I give this analogy sometimes with like how you would have in martial arts, some blue belt is going to show up somewhere knowing that there is no brown or black belt around. And watch him talk and watch him show you things. And if you don't know nothing about it, you're like, whoa. That's true. I'm so behind. I mean, you teach me, please. And just so happens that some actual expert in the art cup walks in and the conversation changes. But, but this is a problem. This is, I don't know how that can get resolved to where, how does somebody in like, like I have a, this Frenchie that's lunging at other dogs and I'm looking for a trainer. How do I know that you're not a blue belt? Right. How, what, how do we deal with that? That's the. And truth is now there's more business than there are like highly qualified trainers in my opinion. Right. So the people out there that, that really know what they're doing are busy, as busy as they can really want to be. Like they don't need any more customers. Ultimately, most of them are overly busy. They're turning people away in a lot of cases.

And so there's a whole pool of people there that are going to, that are going to get the next year down of trainers at best. Right. In a sense. I don't know what the solution to that is other than people get yourself educated out there. Like, I mean, yeah, like become, put your, put your emphasis on your craft instead of on, on your likes. Right. Right. Yeah. It's so much more fun. If you're in, if you're in the dog training, that's what's about. Yeah. It should be fun. I should, I should, we should maybe enter that. It should be fun. You should be having a good time. This is, it's amazing. It's really cool. It's, I mean, you can see us. We're still here. We're still just as crazy. And we, we both put bite suits and top dogs. I was going to say the whole first part of the day was you guys working your dogs together. Yeah. It was great. Because it was one of the best things to do was nobody around. Just you guys working your dogs, sharing their ideas. There are no, there are no short clips anywhere that you're going to find of us training dogs. Yep. It's long form content. Yep. As they say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like Ivan started off writing a book. You know, that was how, one of the first ways I saw him. Jesus, that was so hard. Yeah. Then, then after the book came videos, but the only way people got to find you or anybody, like even you, Michael, was we either had to read about you or show up in person. You know, Michael got into the video part, started growing very quickly. And then, of course, Ivan, you did the same thing too, because that was the evolution of our communication for sharing knowledge. Yep. And then now that evolution has turned into social media. So instead of being these couple hour videos or reading a book for however long it takes you, it turns into how much can I give you in 30 seconds? You know, and with, like you said, the algorithms making it, the max you can put is one minute. Then they're just throwing out these little, you know, sizzle reels. I refuse. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right, right. That was my point. That was my point. Because, like, training all day today, it never crosses our mind that, oh, let's do one for Instagram and another one for TikTok. Not even a hint. Like, no. I don't even know where I put my phone. Not one second. We're not doing it. It takes you out of the moment. We're not doing it for that. Yeah, no. When you start focusing on that side, you are not anymore present to do dog training. No. That's just that. And like Michael said, it takes you out of it. It takes you out of the moment. Yeah.

It's one of the things that appeals to me most about dog training, right, is when you're really in it with the dog, everything else drops away. Right. Everything's gone. Like, there could be a hundred people standing around. You don't even know they're fucking there. Yeah. Like, it's so great. You're just you and the dog doing your thing connected. It takes full attention, every bit of your attention to do it well. And that interaction is lovely. It's just so awesome. Try it, people. Yeah. Try it, please. I mean, it's like we talked about. Walking with your phone like this while you're trying to do it. Yeah. Like, that. It's just not the same. Not the same. No. It's not. You cannot be in that moment when you're doing that. No. And that's what we, you know, Michael and I had that conversation. We traveled before sneaking off on our own to go just do our dog stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Simple stuff. You know, Ivan and I had the same conversation about what we did. You guys doing it yourselves today. It was those are those special moments where, like you said, nothing else mattered in the world other than we were just enjoying the dogs, having fun, enjoying conversations about how, what we're going to do. How did we get there? What was the process? What did we want to accomplish? And, you know, that's even how we all first met was these kind of conversations, these deeper things that motivated us to solve our dog world things. And how do we get better? Questioning our own, you know, reaching out to each other to question, am I on the right track? Am I crazy? How does this work? You know, I know, like you said, you know, when you and Dr. Hilliard have had those conversations, you made the joke like, sometimes I even question classical conditioning after a while sitting around somebody like him. So many things. What you think is simple isn't necessarily simple. But in all of that to me is that being really good at any of this and dog training specifically requires your full presence and focus. Like, if you're halfway there, you're not doing a good job. You're not really paying attention to. And that's where you learn. Say that again. We make that clip. Yeah. Okay. Go ahead. There's our clip. Yeah. Right. That idea that that's what allows you to to really understand the dog, to predict behavior before it happens. All that kind of stuff is a full presence and attention to detail. And I don't know how you do that and concentrate on what it looks like at the same time. And as sad as it is, there's a little bit of hypocrisy. We have to admit that we're recording this for all of the social media.

Not to launch a membership service. Exactly. Promoted extensively through Instagram. But it started in a logical way, not backwards. That's the whole point that we're trying to learn. There's a whole history that got us to this point. You're not becoming famous. And then trying to learn. And then. That's really backwards. It cannot be more confusing. Yep. And that's where, like, we joke around. We paid the dues to get to where we're at. We're not trying to create the attention through the social media concepts to get the. And I would. I would. Quarrel with the paid dues. Like, for me, it wasn't. It wasn't. That sounds like it was a like a chore. Yeah, I see the context. There's a lot of time and energy that went into it. But it was something that I was. But it didn't come easy, did it? No, no. Exactly. So that's kind of. But that was part of the joy of the whole thing. Sure. You're trying this. You're figuring it out. Like, I see stuff over there. I don't know how to do that. I got to figure out how to do that. Yeah. I got a dog that I don't understand. Like, I saw somebody do that with a dog. How do I figure out how to do that? A hundred percent. That's super cool. And so there were lots of failures. There were things that were frustrating and all that. But the whole process was exciting and fun. Oh, it's very. All of that. Yeah. Sometimes paying those dues is satisfying. You know, going through those life lessons. Like, if you're a dog trainer, your reward is not even somebody paying you for training their dog. Your reward is you having the opportunity to train another dog. Yes. Because that's what you do. That's what you like doing. Just like if you're a painter, you're painting not to sell first. Yeah. You're not thinking how much you're going to. If you're a true artist, you're not thinking how much you're going to sell it for. Your whole being is preoccupied with what you're doing without thinking of any profit. You cannot possibly do both at the same time. No, it begins to mess you up. So you can train a dog and enjoy the dog training. You can train a dog and thinking how many likes you're going to get because of what just happened. Yep. And you, as you said, it changes everything. And you'll begin to make decisions based on how you think it's going to be received instead of what is right in that moment. And that's the whole structure. We didn't even talk about it. Kind of like that. What was his name? The one that wrote the Punished by Rewards book. You know, Cohen, I don't know. But the idea of giving kids something as a reinforcer for something that they naturally, genuinely enjoying to do. Right.

And you take the fun out of the thing. It changes everything. It changes everything. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. You actually make them dislike what they're doing because now they want to just get paid. Yeah. And there is something to do with that when you, you know, like we train dogs because we enjoy first and foremost the interaction between me and the dog. I don't think how much money I'm going to make of that dog. And I don't think which clip I'm going to use on Facebook and how I'm going to like. You can really enjoy dog training. It's crazy that we're having this conversation actually. Punished by Rewards is by Alfie Cohn. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. No, it's crazy. It's true. Anyway. Well, that would basically conclude this episode. And, you know, as we all know, it's you guys getting together is a rare thing. And to be able to have, I was just going to say, this is something that should become less rare and more frequent. But so awesome to have you guys be able to take this opportunity to answer questions and engage with people who are equally motivated and excited to go down this journey working with dogs and, you know, take these lessons that we've gone through ourselves and hopefully are willing to take these points of views and take them for what they're worth and what they work for them. But, you know, I know it's been a lot of fun for those that have been in here, you know, kind of being the flies on the walls and those that will watch this and listen to this. So thank you. Goodbyes both for doing this. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.