🎙️도그 스포츠와 훈련의 숨겨진 도전 과제들 | 피처링: 데니스 펜지 | 독 트레이닝 바이트 에피소드 24

And I think the way that you ration through things and puzzle them out loud for the world to hear has been, I think, transformative for a lot of people's understanding of really complex topics. So I'm just so excited to hear more from you and continue to learn from you. Thank you. Well, my first question is going to be about the dogs, the personal dogs in your life. I know you have dozens, hundreds of dogs in your life, you know, any given moment, but the personal dogs in your life right now. I have two. I have a little dog named Brito and he is 11 years old. I actually had an interesting experience about that. Somebody was commenting on something and mentioned my senior dog and I had no idea what they were talking about. Like I literally was like, what an odd comment. And then I realized, oh, wait, I do have a senior dog, but I just don't think about him like that at all. He's just, he's my little buddy. And he's still ready to go. Yeah. Like what, why would you call him? Like when I think of a senior dog and think of Rekha, a dog I lost seven years ago that I was very attached to and the process of her becoming a senior dog. And it was a hard thing, you know, because, but I was thinking of my little doddering old lady who kind of wandered around the house doing anything she wanted. And so I'm like, I don't have a senior dog, but I guess, I guess it's a number as well as a bay. Anyway, he's my little, he's about 10 pounds. He's a terrier mix. I picked up at a seminar for no good reason at all. And he's just cute and adorable. And I like doing stuff with him and people are asking for more on him. So I've been showing him a little bit more in training. And then I have my big dog. That's Zen. He's the one most people would be familiar with. So I call him my little dog and my big dog. And he is the dog I'm actively training for dog sport. At this time, I am targeting a sport called Mondio Ring. It is a protection sport and it's quite complex. I have, I have relatively limited experience with this particular protection sport. And that is why I like it because it's hard. There's a lot of learning going on and a lot of fixing, you know, as I go along. So I like dogs. You're learning right along with Zen on this one. Indeed. I was driving up today to where I am thinking, if only I had known, like I only had known the three major issues I've had with him in the last, you know, period of time. If only I had known, because I would have set some foundation skills early on in the process and probably maybe would have prevented them. But I mean, isn't that the story of life, right? Woulda, coulda, shoulda.

If only I had known. That's just the phrase, right? If only I had known. Did you do any other sports with Zen before you got into this current iteration of protection? Yeah, I did fly ball with him. Okay. I thought I had seen that. Yep. So he was fully trained for fly ball and I took him out of fly ball after watching an event where I realized that unlike all the other dogs who were aware of what was going on around them, like they were aware of the other dogs. And let's say a dog bobbled its ball and ended up in the other lane. I was watching how the other dogs accommodated that sort of error. And it struck me that my dog does not accommodate that. He would go over the top of these dogs and he's twice the size of most of the dogs in the sport. And I just, I watched and I thought, and I thought, and I thought, and I talked to my team. And I just said that I felt that it doesn't actually matter whose fault it is. It doesn't matter if my dog's ball went into somebody else's lane or somebody else. It doesn't matter why or how, but what I realized is that if the wrong dog ended up in front of him, he could go over the top of it in a way that the dog might never recover. And I just, I just decided I didn't feel good about continuing with him under that circumstance. And I'm not shutting the door to the future because he's also a young dog. Right. And I made that decision about, I don't know, six or eight months ago when he probably just turned two. And, you know, maybe when he's four, he'll have more ability. He's still very much in that, in that growing up mentally. Absolutely. But right now he's a bulldozer and I don't want my dog to be a risk to somebody else's dog. So at this time he is not doing fly ball. That makes a ton of sense to me. Yeah. But it seems like it's a really reasoned decision, at least for the time being. And like you said, you can always reevaluate, but when you have a dog that is that singularly focused, it can be, it can be difficult. It serves you well in the protection sports. You want a dog that's that singularly focused. That will block out everything else. Yeah. Yeah. You really do have to pick the sport for the dog and the dog for the sport. And both sides really matter. Like there's no point in pursuing a sport that your dog doesn't enjoy, but, oh, he loved to do it. But there's always big picture. And you've heard me say this a hundred times. It's the dog, the handler in the community. Like you always look at all of those things. Society matters. And in this case, society is other people and their dogs who have the right to feel safe. Yeah.

And my dog matters, but he's far from abandoned. He's doing other things that I matter. And I had other things I could do. So it just felt like the right decision at that time. Did you know that sport is like the thing I know the least about sport dog training? I just, it's just not my world in a big way. So every time you're talking about, you know, these things, I'm a lot of times I'm taking in new information. I'm like, oh, this is interesting. This is, this is so different from my day-to-day experience of dog training where I'm just working very, very differently. I like to share what I do so that other people can learn things. You don't even have to do anything with that. I just think random information in the world is a good thing. I like knowing things about things. Even if it's something I will never do, I like knowing things about things. In the same way. And so I like to share whatever I'm doing because somebody out there is interested, even though they will never do it. They just like to know things about things. And then sometimes maybe it makes the life puzzle make more sense when you know a lot of things about a lot of things. Then after time, you start to make connections. The connections. Exactly. And that's where we are. You know, nothing that we say has is, is brand new. None of this information is brand new at this point. It's all being recycled. But when our unique life experiences and these different connections that we can draw in parallels from different worlds, that's where we find new things. That's where we can get really creative. A whole different part of the brain. I hear that because I, I try to train as gently as I can. And sometimes I'm in dog sports where there's very little culture of that. And so there's a lot of time spent trying to make connections about other things I know and things I know about whatever sport I'm currently playing with and trying to move forward. And it can be, it can be very difficult because it's not that the application is necessarily new as much as recognizing how you can take something from somewhere else and bring it in. And that's, it can be quite challenging. Yeah. But I think that you are a pro at that. And I think that, you know, it's all about human communication. When we boil down a lot of what we do, it's about communicating better with people to help them understand their dogs better. So I am excited to hear your story. What is the story that you have for the dog people out there today? I have so many stories. This question tortured me. I bet. Because I, I mean, I could go on.

Some of them have a theme and I did pick one from within the theme. Others have different themes, but in terms of general, a good general story, I have selected this story many, many years ago. I worked at a, it's now called IGP. It's a protection sport. I worked at an IGP club doing private lessons for obedience. And I had this man and he had a young Doberman. And I worked with that dog from the time it was young until it was older. And it was not a working bread dog. So what that means is that there were certain qualities that didn't bring to the table. So it's just a harder road. My very first IGP three dog was not a working bread dog. But I still succeeded with him. But I recognize how hard it can be. There's all kinds of things you just can't take for granted. Yeah. So I worked with this man and this dog and the first level of the sport, you have to get what's called a BH, which is a temperament test with a significant obedience portion. It's not, it's not a walk in the park. And so he did that. We worked together and we did that. The second level is the actual entry level to the protection sport. And it involves a second level of obedience. And in this obedience, you have a retreat. And I do a motivational retreat. So this event took place, if I had the ballpark, I would say 25 years ago. I don't train with force. And at that time with this person, I had already made that transition. Now with my own dogs, I stopped using compulsion way before I stopped using with other people's dogs because I didn't need it. It wasn't a philosophical thing at all. I just didn't need it. But with other people's dogs, it was easier to use some compulsion. And by the time I got to this guy, I wasn't doing that anymore. I was pretty much, I will work with you and we're going to solve these problems with positive reinforcement. And I was pretty consistently able to get there. So we're trying to teach this dog the retrieve and something is happening, which is unusual. And that's that one day we're making good progress and everybody's happy. And then the next day, for reasons that are beyond me, the dog won't engage, won't stay motivated. It was a very, very difficult process. How old was the dog at this point? I'm sorry? How old was the dog at this point? He was two years of age. Okay. And the owner was a little bit on the temperamental side. So what I mean is he didn't necessarily show a lot of anger, but I felt the anger. Yeah. And when that happens, I assume the dog feels it. Oh, if we feel it, we know the dog is feeling it. Yeah. Absolutely. There's pressure all around, right?

As the trainer of the human, I feel pressure to solve the problem. I'm sure the dog feels a degree of pressure. And after several months, he said to me that he wanted to move to the forest retreat because this was frustrating and it was all legitimate. And I looked at the situation and I said, you know, I've, I've done what I know how to do. And I don't know why I can't get the consistency on this dog. And I am at a place in my life where I'm not comfortable doing that anymore. I understand forest retrieve and I, but I don't, I don't want to be a part of that. And I don't fault your decision. It's not my dog. It's not my life, but I can't guide you through that process. Yeah. And so I said, if you go in that, if you decide to go in that direction, I think it would be better if you don't work with me for a period of time, because depending on how it goes, I've seen some really unfortunate things come from a forest retriever. The dog really became stressed about training in general. I said, it'd be better if you just didn't work with me for a period of time and then come back if you want to, when it's where you want it to be, because I don't want the dog to associate any of that with me. And he thought about that. He said, that's fine. And then several days later, I got an email from him and he said, I want to tell you that my dog went in for a checkup at the vet and the blood work was wrong, was off. And so they pursued it a little further and they found out that the dog had stomach cancer. It's a two-year-old dog. And the dog was dead within months. The dog was gone. I don't even think he made it to two and a half. And it hit me really hard because that never crossed my mind. You know, the dog, when he looked fine, looked fine. And when the dog didn't look fine, I had no reason to think the dog was sick. Nothing about the dog's behavior. It looked like avoidance of not wanting to work. And I see that plenty. And that could be anything. That could be anything. It could be anything. And most of us make certain assumptions. Like we look at the age of the dog. If the dog is vomiting, then you say, oh, something's wrong. If the dog has diarrhea, oh, something is wrong. And a couple of things came from that event for me. One was looking back into my own past at many, many examples where I had thought a dog was blowing me off and came down on that dog in various ways. There was one dog when I was, I was just, I've been doing this forever. At a dog when I was 13 years old, it was a shelter who started peeing in the house. And I was so angry. And I really started to correct her. Well, she had bladder stones.

And you know, I didn't understand when I was a kid what that meant, but I understand what it means now. And bladder stones are exceptionally painful. So that poor dog, she's already suffering. And then she has me on top of that, right? And this Doberman, I didn't do anything, but not only was the dog dealing with the pain of the cancer, but it didn't happen, but was really at risk of now going through an entire program of compulsion around this retrieve for nothing, for nothing, for dog sport. And since that time, the story I'm telling you, if I ask in a room, in a seminar of people, if I tell the story and I say, of the people in this room, how many have had something happen where you thought it was one thing? And you later learned that it was a medical or a pain thing. And if I'm in a room with people who have been around any length of time at all, practically the entire room will raise their hand. I'll raise mine. Absolutely. And here's the thing. Here's how it divides out. There are times when I have been in that and I'm so sorry for the choices I've made. And there are times I have been in that and I can say, I am so grateful that I was at a point in my career where I was making different decisions. And so I didn't take what was bad and make it a bit of a horrific situation. I walked away. I can't count the number of times I've asked my dog to do something that I thought was simple. The dog refused. I go on the house frustrated. And later on, I see the dog has a foxtail in its foot or bloody pad. It goes on and on, you know, dogs. It, you know, the common wisdom is, well, before you're going to come down on the dog, go to the vet and get a clean bill of health. But it doesn't actually work that way because most pain is not observable. So if I have a migraine headache and I can't speak and you take me to a doctor, you can't see that form of pain, even though it can be quite severe. And not only that, if I have a migraine headache and I'm working, I'm presenting, I'm teaching, you will not know it. I will go right over the top of it because I have to, because it's my job to go over the top of it. And I'll just have a tremendous ability to mask pain and discomfort. They do it all day without us noticing. And so the idea that you can ever get a clean bill of health is it's actually, it's human obnoxious. It is this thing that we know, we can know all the things and we can never know all the things. And to, to have the humility to recognize that you can never be inside of another being. You can never really know what they think, what they feel.

You can only guess and especially around matters of pain. It bothers me that people say, well, you need to get a clean bill of health before you proceed because most elements of pain, unless you're going to start doing CAT scans, MRIs, right. And other such things, the information is not knowable. And there's plenty of people in this planet who are telling their doctors, I'm having these terrible pains. And the doctor still can't find it, the source. It's just, it becomes their life. It becomes chronic pain. And brain scans are incredibly expensive. And it's not practical to do a brain scan of a dog. Every time you have a behavioral question or concern. I mean, we can't even do it with people. And so it concerns me that there's a bit of a common wisdom about go to the vet before you start being, I hate to say it, but mean things to your dog. Like, you know what, what I took from that event, because I had already kind of crossed over. What I took from that day event was one more episode of recognizing how we can't know what we don't know. And if we had known the amount of time you spend in your life saying, if I had known, if I had known, I wouldn't have done whatever it is. Some of those things we can start to assume that because it's unknowable, we really, if your philosophy of life is to be kind, then we can go back to that. Mm-hmm. And even if that means, let's just say the dog had nothing wrong with it. Let's just say that dog didn't have anything wrong and lived to 20. And let's say that person had chosen not to go forward with force. Well, okay. So what? So the dog wasn't really well suited to the sport you picked. It didn't have enough natural focus. It didn't have enough natural drive. Yeah. That dog did not lose out for your choice to remain kind. Now you might have lost out because there was something you really wanted to do. And this gets to the heart of, I see the world in shades of gray. And I try very hard not to tell other people how they should make decisions. Maybe this person had spent their whole life wanting a dog for this sport. Yeah. And so I'm not going to tell them that they are obligated to walk away if their dog won't do it a certain way. Maybe the dog has one weird thing it really doesn't like, but it loves, loves, loves, loves all the rest of the thing that comes with the path. Yeah. I'm not in a place to tell other people. But what I am going to say is there's often information that is missing. And if you had that information, it would change your direction. And I think the ability and willingness to be open to the fact that there is always

missing information in every scenario that involves another living being because we are not inside their body. And if you can somehow hold that piece, because I think that's the most important piece, that degree of humility, that it's a choice that we can acknowledge the unknowable. And if it is your life velocity to be kind, and it is mine, and that doesn't mean I'm always kind. I screw this up all the time, but I'm trying. I'm trying. We're all trying. We're trying to do better and to let things go. All those things, right? But to remember, if I am unkind to you, it's likely there are things in your past that I don't know about. And if I knew about them, there are things I would not have done, would not have said, corners I would not have backed you into. Because if I had known those things, I would have realized that my choice is unkind. I was in an unpleasant conversation not too long ago, and somebody sent me a private note saying, why do people do things like this? And I don't remember what words she used, but she basically said, what a mean-spirited person. And my response was, probably it's just a person who's hurting really badly. And I don't relish the fact that I may well have made things worse for them by engaging in that conversation. And sometimes I engage in those conversations because I think there's some other greater good. There's some other audience I'm trying to reach. There's some reason. But I never feel good about harm done to an individual because I don't know why they are the way they are now. All I know is that their life must be very hard based on how they present themselves, based on how angry they appear to be, based on how much really exceptional need for others to think the way they do. There has to be a reason. And they were not born that way, raised up in a normal fashion and just hate everybody. That just seems not likely to me. And so there's unknowables. And so knowing that, I'll still make whatever choices I make because life is complex. And I might choose to, frankly, make things worse for that person inadvertently. But at least being aware of it prevents me from feeling good about it. I don't feel good about it. I feel sad. You know, that sometimes life involves really hard trade-offs. And in the dog world, because dogs especially, because they're not verbal, I think we can really make better decisions around training that won't haunt us down the road if we just remember that there's much we will never know, cannot know. It sounds like it's a big shift of the Lima approach of when you encounter a roadblock and things stop working like they were.

Instead of kind of ratcheting up, you are getting more curious instead and trying to come at it from a different little side way instead of climbing up that ladder, if you will. Always if you can. Always if you can. I mean, I do think it's helpful if people have a line in the sand. I do have a line in the sand for my own dogs. I've got no qualms about telling my dog, knock that shit off. Like I really, it doesn't bother me at all. My dogs clearly just look at me and say, you really don't want me to do that. I really don't. I think it's incredibly healthy communication to be able to communicate to your dog. I would rather you not do that. Yep. I don't. I don't do anything that's hands-on. I don't grab. I don't do anything that I would say I believe causes anything from physical comfort to pain. In that whole spectrum, I keep my hands off my dog. So the exception would be, obviously, if my dog is running into the street, I'm going to grab whatever body part I can get a hold of. So I'm not counting that. But with my own dogs, I really, my hands are off. And on the verbal scale, while I will absolutely yell at my dogs, I am conscious of that there would be a line where I would think the dog might become afraid. And I don't cross that line. And it would be different for my small dog than my big dog just because they're so different in their sensitivity. It would take an awful lot to scare my big dog, but not so much my little dog. So those are my lines in the sand. Up to that point, I reserve the right to make choices that my dogs might not prefer because of the society handler dog triad. All the different interests. Yeah. We have so many different stakeholders. I can't always stop what I'm doing to accommodate what my dog wants at that moment. And so sometimes enough is what I'm going to say when they're bothering me for attention to go outside. They're barking, whatever. I'm going to tell them, you just need to stop right now. You just need to stop. This isn't we're not having this conversation. Yeah. And I don't think that hurts them. And I don't think they're afraid of me. So, well, frankly, I know I don't hurt them and I know they're not afraid of me. And those conversations are tough because they're super individual. And I totally recognize that what one person would say is you could have stopped that meeting for three seconds to give the dog the thing. And then somebody else probably doesn't want to be bothered barely at all. And that's that's just all normal. Like everybody trying to get along society, dogs, people. But it's an awareness anyway. Yeah, I totally agree.

So, Denise, is there anything else that you would like the listeners out there to know about you or what you do or things that you're working on right now? Well, I'll tell you what I'm working on, even though it's going to be like, what? Because I just think it's it's a window into one way of problem solving. The traditional route of problem solving in the positive reinforcement sphere is to break things smaller. So you're trying to explain to your dog that you want it to sit. And so you hold a cookie up over its head and its butt hits the ground and you give it the cookie. And then you come up with this dog that you hold your hand over its head and it does everything. But sit, it twirls. It's funny, actually. I just put something in my stories today about trying to teach my dog to roll over. It's so funny. I call him over. And the first thing he does is just flattens me because I'm sitting on the floor. And he's like, oh, so he just sits. So I put that in my stories. And then the second thing is I realized I can't get this dog to roll over for his life just using a cookie. And then I remember, oh, oh, all I have to do is ask him if he wants a belly rub and flop over. That's all I had to do. But anyway, so let's say you're trying to teach your dog to sit and you you can't. The dog did everything. But in the traditional plus our world, what we would do is ask, how can we make this smaller? Approximations. Exactly. What happens if I pull my hand up and just give the dog the cookie for raising it? How about if I pull my hand up and the dog even shifts its weight back? Like there's all these things. Those are called splits. And some dogs, you teach them to sit in one great big lump. And in other dogs, you teach it over 10 splits. And that's fine. It's whatever works. But sometimes you run into a problem that splits aren't going to work. You literally have to come up with a completely different way of doing it. So rather than a lure with your hand in the air, you teach the dog to get on a platform and then you start making the platform really tiny. And the only way the dog can get on is by sitting. So that would be an example of not splitting, rethinking it all together and just coming in from a new direction. So with my dog, I'm struggling with getting him to release objects, outing objects with one command, one cue. He's fine with me. But the problem is I need him to do it for other people. So if you come over and play ball with my dog, I need him to do it for you. Because in the protection world, he's going to be working against a decoy. And I need him to let go of the decoy.

He's not going to be biting me. He's going to be biting the decoy. And that's where things are getting a little exciting. Because he's like, I don't want to let go of the decoy. And he doesn't care enough when the decoy wants him to do something. So I'm working to split that down. And the way I'm doing it is I introduced a new foundation skill, which is kick. And it just means I'm going to kick the ball on the ground. And he loves this game. My God, he loves this game. So the basic thing is he's biting. You say out, kick. And it's just automatic out and then kick the toy. So the first thing I was thinking about, I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation with you, as I was driving up here today, I so wish I had taught that as a foundation skill two years ago. So I had taught the kick game. The second thing I so wish is over the last two years that I had been reinforcing all of these outs 90% of the time with something highly motivating to him, like kicking an object. I did reinforce it a lot. But when I say a lot, that a lot went down much too fast. So, you know, the last six months, maybe 30% of the time I'm reinforcing the release with another opportunity. And it should have been more like 80% because I know this dog's character. And for him, letting go of objects is just really painful. You know, it's like me holding a hundred dollar bill in my hand and you just keep taking them. Like, it's like, how about I give you a hundred dollars and you get right. Right. For my hundred. What do I get? So, you know, just a bit of a sadness and a reminder that when you're doing a dog sport where there's minimal culture around how you do it. So the way I do it is without a correction. Most people just add a correction and that's how they do it. That lack of culture to help me make good decisions every day. I'm a little sad for the lack of culture. I'm also happy for it because it's forcing me to be a better trainer every single day because I don't have culture. I don't have a culture around me telling me how to solve my problems. And so fortunately, I have a couple of good friends to help me, but they're not on my shoulder every training session. You know, sitting with me saying, you know, if you keep down that path, things are going to get ugly. And like I had one of those people with me for a month. I was so fortunate and cleaned up my training a lot because having somebody else watching your training is just hugely beneficial. Somebody's good who understands how your brain works. And now she's back home in St. Louis. This is Crystal Wing.

And I was training my dog the other day and just feeling sad and frustrated because I didn't like what I was seeing. And I sent her a video and we had a wonderful conversation. I'm sort of sort of back on track. But that's what I'm working on is cleaning up sort of three key areas where I think I just made some poor foundation choices. I, you know, approach things one way rather than another. And I'm a little sorry for that, but I'm also committed to solving them. But just the thing that's on my mind is the awareness that when you do things differently within a sphere, you have no culture when things get hard. And that makes it really, really difficult to succeed, especially when you run into challenges because splitting things finer doesn't necessarily work. It depends on the problem, on the dog, on the reason for the complexity. And when the complexity is that the dog prefers what they want to what you want, splitting often doesn't solve the problem because the dog still, for my dog, holding onto an object and not letting go actually is more value than the other things I can offer. And it's a tricky thing. And it does have a solution, but the solution would have been a lot easier if I had done it right in the first place. So that's kind of what's in my brain. But lest anybody think I'm going to put my head in the bucket over it, I would also say that when I have these kind of experiences, the opportunity for growth and problem solving is enormous. If you always do things perfectly from the start, then when you encounter a group of people who are new to your way of thinking, you have nothing to offer them. You can't go into a seminar and tell people, well, we're all going to start over as if your dog were eight weeks old. That's not going to work. Right. There's a huge value in being a problem solver and coming in with the experience of making a lot of errors. It's actually something I think traditionally I've done very, very well because I am a crossover trainer. And so I did have to relearn a lot of things. I actually think it puts me in a really valuable spot to the community because there's a good chance I've made that mistake. And there's a good chance that other people who work with me have made that mistake. And I might have some ideas for you that will get you out of your mess without saying you have to start from ground zero. There are absolutely better trainers out there than I am. And there's just no question in my mind.

They do a better job from the start foundation wise, but they're not necessarily, they don't necessarily bring in the problem solving because they didn't run into the problems. The master at creating problems. The good news is it has helped me learn to solve some of them. So there's always a silver lining in there. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. You can find Denise on Instagram at Denise underscore Fensi and on her website, the Fensi Dog Sport Academy, both of which will be linked in the show notes. Thanks for joining us in the world of dog training bites, where every challenge brings a lesson worth sinking our teeth into. See you next time. Dog training bites was created, produced and edited by Madison Simpson. You can connect with me on Instagram at dog training bites. That's B Y T E S and at freed by training. For information on today's guest and resources for help with your dog or dog training education, visit www.dogtrainingbites.stream. Looking for more? Listen to my other show, Unpacked, a clinical dog training podcast co-hosted by Sailor Jerry, the dog trainer and produced by Straight Up Dog Talk, LLC.