E279: 크리스티나 스폴딩 & 이리스 블룸(Dr. Kristina Spaulding & Irith Bloom) - "스트레스와 자기 주도성: 더 회복력 있는 개 만들기"

So I'm really excited about getting started with our next dog with all of these things right off the bat available to me. So how did you both end up in the dog world? Okay. So I was always interested in animals and animal behavior. And I spent a lot of time thinking and wondering what animals were thinking and watching behavior. And I, at some point I found an essay that I had written when I was like seven years, not seven years old, but like in seventh grade or something. And it said that I wanted to grow up to rehabilitate aggressive dogs. So that's what I did. I mean, I went to college wanting to major in animal behavior, which you may know that that's actually very difficult to do. And so I was originally in zoology and I wasn't loving that as much. I mean, I was interested, but it wasn't quite as good of a fit as I wanted. And then I ended up switching to wildlife ecology and that was a better fit. And, you know, I was considering going into like conservation work or something. And I remember my biology TA one day asked me what I wanted to do. And I said, well, what I really want to do is train dogs, but I know that I can't make money at that. So instead I'm thinking about doing this. And he said, well, I don't know if you know, but there's a professor on campus that does that, that is an animal behaviorist and dog behaviorist and works with dogs. And that was Patricia McConnell. So I was able to get hooked up with her and I volunteered at her dog training school. And then I met with her on multiple occasions and attended some of her consults. And so then I decided at that point that I was going to, I wanted to become a certified applied animal behaviorist, which is what she is. And then I eventually went back to school and got my PhD for that. That's awesome. And for me, the path is in some ways similar and in some ways really different. So I've always, as a child, I always had animals around me. And when we had dogs, I was the one who was responsible for training the dogs because my parents were too busy basically to really take care of that. And this was an era when we really didn't have positive reinforcements. So I used all of the methods that today I advise against, but I will say looking back, I was always as gentle as I could possibly be within the context of doing things like using a choke chain. So, you know, I wasn't a particularly nasty, aversive, you know, punishment-based trainer. I was as gentle as I could possibly be, but that was the tools I had in my toolkit at the time. I rode horses. I had a snake.

I had gerbils, nowhere near the snake for the record, but I did have gerbils. I always had animals around me. And when I went to college, I majored in biology. And my sort of goal was to get into veterinary medicine. And I wound up, I was somewhere where there's a veterinary school, University of Pennsylvania. So I worked at the veterinary hospital at the University of Pennsylvania. That was one of the things I did to support myself in college. And as I did that, I realized that the way that I was interacting with animals in a veterinary context wasn't what I wanted to do because basically they were always sick and unhappy and they kind of, you know, were not happy about us approaching them and all of those kinds of things. And at the time, veterinary behavior was in its infancy. So I was not even, it was actually starting right there at Penn, but I wasn't aware of it and I didn't know. And so I wound up sort of taking this detour away from biology and away from animals. And then I got a dog who had a lot of problems. And as I went into trying, and I know so many people in the professional training world, this is how they got into it. As I tried to figure out what I could do to help him, and I very quickly realized that, you know, the stuff I had been doing in the past was not the right way to do things. I had sort of picked up a lot by then. I drilled down into behavior and behavior science. And then I went and started getting myself an education in dog training. And I'm a complete education glutton. We were actually talking the other day, Christina and I, about how I renewed my CCPDT credential with 271 CEUs one year. So that tells you like how addicted I am to this stuff. If I put together all of my CEUs in an organized fashion, I could probably have a master's degree at least. But that's just not the way my path went. And so at any rate, at the time that I got this dog, I was working as a professional translator, not doing anything animal related. And let's just say that I took this dog a really long way in a good sense from where he had started. And people kept asking me in the neighborhood, wow, your dog is behaving so well. Are you a professional? And I kind of finally decided to look into it. And that was when I started doing all that education. And now I teach people how to work with their dogs. I also work with people who have cats and parrots. And I even have a horse client right now, which is uber cool. Wow. And I also love teaching other trainers how to work effectively with the clients in their lives. Awesome.

So you both kind of touched a little bit on what I was going to ask you next. But maybe you'll go into a little bit more. I was going to ask, were you both always positive trainers? And I think we got a little bit of that in that answer. But maybe you'd each kind of share a little bit more about kind of your start in positive training, kind of how you progressed down that journey. Yeah. So I started, we got a puppy. And we had a dog when I was born. We'd always had a dog. But we got a new puppy when I was eight. She was a standard poodle. And we took her to training classes. And I don't know if I'm the one that asked to go to training classes or if my parents made that decision. But I was the one that trained her there. And this was in St. Louis. And I don't remember the name of the place. But I do think that they weren't, you know, this would have been in the 80s. So I think they were maybe less punishment based than some places. But they definitely, I remember there were leash corrections for sure. And so I trained her using those methods. And she was just one of those dogs that like just sort of trains themselves. Like, you know, she probably did maybe one or two classes. And I remember walking her off leash at our cabin in northern Wisconsin once. And a couple deer ran in front of us. And she took off after them. And I called her. And she came right back. And that is not to my credit. Like, I mean, I trained her, you know, but like not to that level. Like, that's just who she was. And but I remember at one point, we eventually moved to Minnesota. And I was training her. I remember training her in the backyard one day and looking at her and being like, she doesn't like this. And so I'm like, well, I'm just not going to train her. Um, but then we got a Sheltie and he was kind of my dog. He was really attached to me and couldn't care that much about anybody else. And I knew with him, I'm like, I can't use punishment with this dog. And so I just made a decision. I'm like, I'm not going to do it. And I don't know. I just I had I had all these things happen. I was just incredibly lucky. So somehow there was a trainer facility called Total Recall in Forest Lake, Minnesota, that they did largely positive reinforcement based training. And this was the early 90s. And so I trained him there for a while. And then we were involved in 4-H. And the advanced trainers at 4-H were positive reinforcement, which again, like, that doesn't even happen now where we are. So I just got very, very, very lucky. So and then, you know, it's like once once you see that that works, like, why would you ever go back to punishment?

So my professional career has always been positive reinforcement based. But I did have a short little, you know, I just like Irie was saying, like, I just did what I was told to do. I mean, I didn't know, you know, but I decided pretty quickly that not only well, that the dogs didn't like it, and therefore I didn't like it. Yeah. And for me, you know, it's really funny because my transition from using the aversive methods I had been originally taught to using purely, there's no such thing as purely positive, but focusing on positive reinforcement. reinforcement. I can't exactly pinpoint when that happened, because there was sort of a gradual process as I picked up more and more tools. But by the time I hit sort of the 2000s, I was seeking solutions that involved positive reinforcement for everything I encountered. Sometimes I didn't have that solution. Sometimes the information wasn't out there. And I didn't have the resources that it sounds like Christina was very lucky to have these resources very early. So sometimes I didn't have the resources. So I sort of fell back on other paths, if you will. But in time, I developed more and more skills. And I learned from more and more people and added a million things to my toolkit so that all those aversive tools are basically sitting like dusty and untended in the bottom of the toolbox, if you know what I mean. And what I love about it, I mean, you know, I rode horses for years. And obviously, we used aversive methods. Negative reinforcement is sort of the primary tool in the horse world. And today, what I love about using positive reinforcement, I think what actually got me to keep going down the path is that the relationship you have with the animals you're working with is so much richer. And it's so much more fun. And they express their personalities in a way that they don't when they're afraid that every next thing is going to lead to a leash pop or something else aversive. So that's sort of my comment is I think that probably what really kept me on the journey, maybe not what got me started, because I don't quite remember what that was. But what kept me on the journey was the wonderful relationship you wind up developing with the animals you work with, including human animals, by the way. I like that. So if I were to ask you each to kind of summarize your current training philosophy or kind of how you approach training these days, what would you say? So I'm a big nerd. And I mean, I really and again, like... Best start to an answer. Best start. I'm a big nerd. Very early on, just to give you an idea of how much of a nerd I am.

I think, again, it was around like third grade or so. I found out what a PhD was. And like, that was the best day of my life. I was like, you can go like after high school, you can go to more school and you can choose what you specialize in. And then you can specialize more. And so I decided very young that I was going to get a PhD. And so it just it took me a little while to sort of become clear enough on what my career path was going to be that I was ready to go back and choose what program I was going to go into. And so for me, the biggest I mean, I don't know if I would call it a training philosophy exactly. But, you know, for me, the biggest thing that informs my training is the science. And again, I'm very lucky because if I was much older, I wouldn't be able to rely that much on science to inform my training. You know, I mean, learning theory has been around for a very long time. But this explosion that we're getting in dog behavior research is really only from the last 10 years, and it's continuing to accelerate. And so that has allowed me to really inform what I do with the research. And I like to take a very holistic approach, where you're looking not just at learning theory, but at many other things that can be impacting behavior. So, you know, we're going to talk about stress today. That's a big one. And ethology, of course, and genetics, health, you know, all of those things interact and intersect with each other. And my PhD program was in human psychology. And so I'm trained academically, not at all clinically, but I'm trained academically in human mental health. And so that model is something that I apply very much to working with dogs and that I think is very applicable to working with dogs. And now I recently last year, well, actually, the beginning of this year, I stopped taking on private training clients. And now I just teach other trainers. And so now it's just all about bringing as much science as I can to working with other people and applying the same concepts to people. Like you said, I mean, all of these things, it's just to me, it's all the same. It's just whether you're a dog or a person or a cat or a horse, it's just especially when we're talking about mammals, it's just all the same. So first of all, I just have to say, Christina, I love that you were like, yes, I won a PhD when you were in third grade. I was such a dork. I kind of wanted to be a veterinarian then, but I feel like that's a little bit more of an ordinary child goal to be a veterinarian. So that is uber cool. And you definitely win the like nerd or geek or whatever the right word is award right now.

And I am very much a self-styled like geek or nerd or pick a word. I'm happy to apply it to myself, but I bow down. I am very impressed. So with that said about my training philosophy, in part, thanks to Christina, I do very much bear the science in mind. But what it boils down to for me is my goal is greater well-being for both the human animals and the non-human animals in a household. And that means that I'm going to apply positive reinforcement as much as I possibly can, use management when positive reinforcement isn't working, and think really hard about all the other factors that are affecting the stress levels of the various animals in the household. Because stress leads to a lot of the behavior that we humans don't love in companion animals. So, you know, it's very much a holistic approach where I ask people, you know, where is the dog sleeping? What's your household like? What do you feed your dog? When you go on a walk, what does the walk look like? And I want to gather as much information as possible so that I can find places to add enrichment, the importance of which has become even more obvious to me thanks to a lot that Christina has shared. You know, add to the enrichment, make a life where the dog can be a dog and the cat can be a cat and the horse can be a horse. And we're not just trying to scrunch them into a little human shape box, whatever that box is that we have for dogs. By the way, I will say editorially, cat people are way more at peace with cats being cats than dog people are with dogs being dogs. I'm not sure why that is. But my cat clients, it's always less of a struggle to get them to let the cat be a cat. Dog people are like, well, I don't like that he digs. Well, it's this unfortunate thing about dogs. This is ethologically a normal behavior for them. They do dig. So now let's figure out how we can get that digging to happen in a way that is less disturbing to the humans, you know? So that's sort of my philosophy. Use positive reinforcement. Do everything I can to engender a stronger bond because then the humans will work harder for that animal when their bond is really strong. And the animal will work, the non-human animal will work harder for the humans when the bond is really strong. So hopefully that made some kind of sense somewhere in there. No, I think that was good. And I love, you know, I think what you're doing, Erit, is so important because I had to make a choice, right? Because I'm sort of doing science full time now. And in order to do what I want to do with it, I have to immerse myself in that.

But, you know, we still need those people out there, right, that are working directly with the animals and informing themselves about the science. And I think Erit does a really fantastic job with that. And so, you know, I commend you and all of the people like you who are putting so much effort into bringing this in because there's certain aspects like what we're going to talk about today that really can transform what we're doing with animals if we understand what the research is saying. And I do think it's great that there's more and more people who are starting to geek out about the science. I think it's really fantastic. So speaking of kind of that, how did you two meet? How did you guys come to present together? Do you want to take that one, Erit? Sure, I'll take this one. So we were introduced by APDT is sort of the simplest way to put it. I am the, as our friend Joanne, who we also met in the same general time period, likes to say, I am the chair emeritus of the APDT Education Committee. And Joanne Recteen, who some of you may know, was my vice chair for a while or my co-chair. I don't know. We had like weird title issues, but whatever it was, she and I worked together on that. And Christina was one of our committee members, one of our hardest working and most amazing committee members, of course. And so we knew each other through like phone calls because that was how we used to do. Do you remember we used to do our education meetings on one of those conference lines? Without video. We didn't do them. So we would do these conference calls. And then we all came together at a couple of conferences. And when we met up in, I want to say it was Portland in like, I can't remember what year APDT was in Portland, 2017, 18, 19, somewhere around then. Joanne and Christina and I got talking and we were like, we should all do something together. And this is sort of, this is how this, I guess I can call it a partnership between us has emerged. And Joanne for a long time was also a big part of this, but she's retiring from this particular kind of work right now. And focusing on being a CSAT in case anyone needs separation anxiety help. Joanne Recteen, you can't go wrong. Awesome. That's so cool. And some of you guys have been working together then for quite a while. So yeah. Yeah. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. So I think it's. And in the process, I've also become like Christina's biggest fan. I'm a regular at her research bites seminars, which I recommend highly to everyone. I attend her long courses. I'm actually about to sign up for another one.

I'm often too busy to take as many of Christina's courses as I want, but I'm carving out time for the one she's starting in October. So. That's the best kind of friendship when you're everybody's everybody else's biggest fan. Yes. Yes. And I had E-REIT come in when I was still working with clients and helped me with a cat client. It wasn't. Well, I don't work with cats, but it was a dog and a cat situation that was a little more complex than I initially thought. And the normal things that I do weren't working. And so she came in and helped me work with that client who was a wonderful client. And so, yes. Yeah. Really lovely client. And so we've done a lot of different things together. Very exciting. So as I mentioned in the intro, one of those things is going to be presenting two webinars for us on the 28th. One on stress, the other on agency. So why are these such important concepts for trainers to understand? So I like to say that stress is everything. It's not. I know it's not literally everything, but it really is incredibly important. And I do think it impacts everything. I mean, even to the point where it changes gene expression. So it's, you know, stress impacts every part of the body and it impacts every aspect of behavior. And if we don't understand stress, then I don't think we can fully do our jobs of protecting animals and making sure that they have the best possible lives. And I think I'll let you talk a little bit more about this, Erit. But one of the most important things we can do to help animals cope with stress is promoting agency. And so those are the two big topics that we're going to be talking about at the webinars. Right. And Christina just gave a lovely sort of nutshell explanation of how important these two concepts are. So as I mentioned earlier, when I was talking about training philosophy, I think, stress is the source or let me rephrase this distress, by which I mean negative stress and sometimes just excessive excitement type stress are usually the source of all the issues that cause humans who live with animals who are not human to come to a trainer and say, I'm tearing my hair out. I can't stand it anymore if my cat does this or my parrot does that or my dog does this other thing. And almost invariably, those behaviors, when you sort of look down the path of where they are starting, it all starts with the animal is excessively stressed. They're experiencing too much stress one way or another. And then they have to find an outlet for that stress or their body would deteriorate even more, I expect.

And so they wind up finding these behaviors that give them an outlet for the stress, which often are not behaviors that we love. And often, as we will also be discussing, when an animal is under stress, they fall back on habitual behaviors or instinctive behaviors. The things that are the easiest to get to and the fastest to get to are what the animal will do in a stressful situation instead of the thoughtful behavior that we've been working on training them for the last three months. But they get under a certain level of stress and that all just falls apart. So reducing the overall level of stress that an animal experiences, whether it's a human animal or not, is really, really huge if we want to be getting productive behavior, behavior that leads to good outcomes. And agency is basically the sense that I can control what happens using my behavior. That's a really rough definition, but it covers the bases, I guess is what I'll say. And so when we can teach animals, again, whether they're human or not, I just want to keep stressing that a lot of this is true for humans too. As Christina pointed out, working in human psychology, it's all related. When we can reduce that, one way we can reduce that stress, excuse me, is by teaching them that their behavior can control their outcomes, that their behavior leads to things. They can change what happens in the environment around them using their behavior. And as animals learn that their behavior can control outcomes, they actually become less stressed. It's like this teeter-totter where the more agency we allow, the less stress an animal is likely to experience, basically. And unfortunately, the less agency we allow, the more stress they tend to get. Right. And just to add to that, to help people understand how important it is in human mental health, many or probably really most at this point of the mental health disorders are increasingly considered to be stress-induced disorders. So for sure, depression, anxiety, and PTSD, and probably many, many, many others are now categorized as stress-induced or stress-related disorders. And so stress causes very serious issues. And it's also linked to things like heart disease and diabetes and autoimmune disorders. I mean, it's really, really, really impactful. And that's why we talk about it so much. And the good news is that there are things we can do to help our animals cope better with stress. Okay. So there's a whole lot in there. Do you maybe want to go a little more into kind of how the two concepts overlap or intersect,

or at least kind of how they'll intersect as far as what you're talking about for the webinar? So agency, I mean, you already covered a lot of it, but there's lots of research that shows us that adding control is one of the things that influences how an animal is impacted by stress. So there is good stress. Not all stress is bad. And how an animal responds to stress is in large part impacted by how well they are at coping with stress. And one of the ways that we increase coping is by increasing agency. And then also, which we'll talk about, I think, we talk a little bit about enrichment and exercise. Yes, it is nodding, confirming. We've talked about this in so many contexts, I lose track sometimes. But those are, and also social support, those are all other ways that animals can cope with stress. And that we can reduce the likelihood of behavior issues and increase their well-being. Are there aspects of stress and agency that are often misunderstood? Are there misconceptions there that maybe you guys would want to overturn? I think that one of the things that's really misunderstood, I'm actually going to start with agency and then I'm going to go back to stress just to confuse our listeners. So one of the things that I think is misunderstood, and this is something that we see a lot when you get the arguments between people who are using more methods that are based more in the use of aversives versus people who are using positive reinforcement as their primary tool. What you'll often see is that we in the positive reinforcement community, for lack of a better term, get called something like treat slinging weenies. I've literally had that phrase thrown at me. By the way, I have been called a treat slinging weenie and I wear the badge with pride. But we also get told that positive training means no boundaries and no this and no that. And there's a difference between saying, I want to give the animal in my life more agency and saying, I'm going to let my animal run roughshod over my household and do whatever they want at any time. So I think there's a little bit of a misconception that if I allow my, let's just stick with dogs for the moment. If I allow my dog to feel like they have control over a situation, they're going to become a small dictator and take over the world, which is, you know, this sort of concept of you have to be the boss or your dog will be the boss. And it's much more nuanced than that. And if you think about any relationship you have with humans in your life, other than the ones that are truly hierarchical, because there are hierarchical relationships we have, most

of the time, neither of you really controls the other and you exchange control. So I think when we say, oh, I'd like to give, and maybe the FENZY audience is not going to view it this way. I'm just going to say that right now. I think when I say I'd like to give the dog more agency and more, you know, self-empowerment or whatever word you might associate with agency, people are like, oh my gosh, you want my dog to just be able to pee where he wants and bark at whoever he wants. And I can't control him. And you don't even want me to use a leash. And the reality is that I can give agency in a lot of ways that don't create any harm to me or to, you know, the general society. And still give that dog or whatever other animal we're dealing with a greater sense of agency without them then saying, well, now that we're on a walk, I'm going to run into the middle of the street because you told me I can take over the world. So that's sort of something that I think is a misconception is when we start talking about agency, people do that. It's sort of the catastrophizing. They go to the extreme and they assume that the extreme is what we're talking about. And we're really not just as most positive reinforcement trainers know that positive doesn't necessarily mean permissive. You can do whatever you want. There are still boundaries. We use management. We have other tools, but we're intervening in different ways. And we're trying to load the behaviors we like using positive reinforcement instead of punish behaviors we don't like using some kind of aversive. And I'm just going to come back to the stress question. The other misconception, the main misconception that I see with stress, and then I'm going to turn this over to Christina, is that stress is always bad. That's the biggest misconception, I would say. Christina, I know you're going to have notes. I actually don't have a whole lot to add. Those are the two answers that I would have given as well, particularly about agency. I mean, I think that's how people really, they don't understand. You know, they do think we're just talking about letting the dogs do whatever they want. And that's not what we're talking about. And, you know, the thing is, though, I think if we want to have a dog that's a pleasure to live with, one of the best ways to do that is to give them increased agency. And I think the assumption is that then they're just going to take over and they're going to do all these things and they're going to have all these problems. But in my experience, it really helps decrease problems because they're happier, right?

And so, you know, you need to know how to do it in a way that is beneficial, but it is really helpful to the people in the home or that are interacting with the dog in addition to the dogs themselves. And I think the only other thing that I would say about stress, and we already touched on this, so I'm not going to expand on it too much, but just I don't know that people understand how incredibly important it is and how huge of an impact that it can have on the animal and their behavior. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I think stress is underrated as a factor to consider when starting a behavior modification plan or honestly, any kind of training, even if you don't have a problem behavior, even if you're just training agility, you need to not, not to say that agility is a just thing, but even if you're training agility because you think it'll just be a fun thing to do with your dog, you do need to consider stress and stress levels and always have that in the back of your mind somewhere. Okay. So building on that stress topic for a second there, is it possible to create or teach increased resilience, right? To create a more optimistic dog? Is that, how does that kind of fit into this picture? So, you know, it's one of these things that I think, I think people think that behavior is set. You know, we have phrases like you can't teach an old dog new tricks. And, and I'm, I'm going to say one of the things we talk about in the presentations that we're going to be giving is habit. And sometimes it is very hard to change your behavior, but behavior is not immutable and neither is what I'm going to call mindset, although I'm not inside the mind of the dog. So resilience is like a, you know, mindset isn't even the right word, but it's a state of the brain where the brain is able to flex more easily. So instead of something horrible happened to me and now I'm going to be shut down and stressed for the next three days, which is certainly unfortunately true in some cases with some stressors. And for some animals, you can have an animal that says, whoa, that was a little weird, but they regain their balance more quickly. Some animals are indeed going to be born that way. And Lord knows in humans, you can see this. There are people that it just seems like nothing really phases them. They just stay more or less stable all the time. And then there are other people that, you know, the pizza delivery is late and they lose it. They're just completely stressed out about the pizza delivery being late. The good news to get back to the real question is that you can actually teach that skill, but

the way you teach it is sort of multifaceted. And one of the best ways to increase resiliency in your learner is through the use of proper enrichment. Because where resiliency comes from, this is not a scientific thing I'm about to say. This is sort of a concept in my head. If I know that I can have an impact in general, then the one time I don't have an impact on my environment through my behavior, I say, ah, that's one out of a hundred times and a hundred times I was successful. And so then my mindset, if you will, is that the next time it will probably be different. This is as opposed to an animal who says, I never get to have any control over anything. So when my behavior fails, obviously that's just the way it is. And then I'm not able to resiliently pop back because I'm not, I can't, I don't have a good baseline to pop back to almost. So because enrichment provides the animals we live with a lot of opportunities to practice having an effect on the environment, practice facing a challenge and then overcoming that challenge. They get all these repetitions that make it normal for them to say, not say, but make it normal for them to face a challenge and then overcome it. So the one time they face a challenge that they can't overcome or a challenge that's a little too big in some way, they can bounce back more quickly and say, that's okay. The next challenge will be better. And I, again, I have to emphasize, I can't be inside the mind of a nonverbal animal. I mean, who knows, maybe I can be inside the mind of a parrot if I can get them to talk to me about it, but a nonverbal animal, certainly I'm never going to know what they are thinking per se, but behaviorally what it looks like is dogs who have spent their life being faced with appropriate levels of challenge and getting through that challenge. And most of the time succeeding when they face a challenge where they don't succeed, they're like, ah, whatever, tomorrow is another day. Whereas an animal that has not had a lot of chances to face challenges and overcome those, when they're faced with a challenge that's too hard, they either give up or they retreat or they shut down. So this is all a very long way of saying, yes, we can absolutely create and teach greater resilience. I will say that there are all kinds of other factors other than what we do environmentally with the animal that will be involved in how much resilience we can teach. And some animals are going to be able to achieve greater gains than others. But basically every animal out there, except for those miraculous people who just take everything

in stride, no matter what, can probably improve their resilience. And that includes the animals that we live with in our homes. Yeah, that's a great answer. And I'll just add on to some of those things. I'm going to bring in the geeky science part of it. So Erit was talking about how if an animal has a long history of being able to have an impact on their environment and avoid these negative experiences or end them, that if they then have one, you know, experience where they don't have an impact, then it doesn't have this major sort of depressive effect on the animal. And no, we cannot get in their mind in the sense that we can't know what they're thinking or they're feeling. But we do have neuroscience research that does tell us what's happening in the brain in these instances. And so we know that when an animal experiences an aversive, that there's this sort of cascade of effects that ultimately ends in stimulating the amygdala, which is sort of the fear center of the brain. So that animal experiences fear, anxiety, and passivity. We also know that if an animal learns that they have control over that aversive stimulus, that another part of the brain turns on. This is the prefrontal cortex, which many people think of as the thinking part of the brain. And it actually inhibits that other network and prevents that or reduces that enhancement of fear and passive behavior. And, and this is the coolest part to me, that once that has started to happen, the brain starts to produce these new proteins that stick around and change the way the animal responds to stressors so that in the future, if they've had enough experience with control, when they are faced with an uncontrollable stressor, the brain will react as if that stressor is controllable, which means that the animal still isn't experiencing that fear and anxiety. So we actually have really good science, we have 50 years of science to back this up on this particular topic. And we also know that there are a lot of things that we can do to change optimism. So we know from human research, that mood is connected to how optimistic or pessimistic a person is. And just to define optimism for everybody, optimism means that when you're faced with uncertainty, you tend to anticipate reward. And pessimism means that when you're faced with uncertainty, you tend to anticipate punishment. And so animals that are in people, I should say that are in a more positive mood, tends to be more optimistic. And so what this suggests, and we do have research in other animals to back this up as well, that

if we can improve the general mood state of our animals, that that will make them more optimistic. And that should also be connected to their ability to cope with stress. So I could talk about this for a very long time. But those are those are a couple of the things that we know. And we also know that enrichment makes animals more optimistic. Such an interesting topic. I'm very excited about the webinar. But I do want to kind of bring things kind of wrap things up. So one kind of final question. And I would love if you could each maybe kind of leave us with a final thought or a final point or maybe kind of sum up some of the points that we've talked about to kind of bring it all home for everybody. So what I would just say is that stress matters. It's really, really important. It impacts all different aspects of an animal's life. And there is a lot that we can do to help them deal with stress better. And that actually gives us a lot of power to make their lives better. And I think a lot of responsibility to make sure that we are taking the steps that we need to take to make their lives better. And I'm going to jump in with what I'm hoping will be so brief that it will turn into like bumper stickers or something. So stress matters, which I just stole right from Christina there. Stress matters. And increasing agency is key. Those are sort of the takeaways for me. Pay attention to the level of stress that your animal is experiencing all the time. Just always have that somewhere in the back of your mind. And always be thinking about how you can increase agency. Awesome. All right. Thank you both so much for coming on the podcast. This was excellent. Thank you so much for having us. Yeah, this has been really fun. Thanks. Awesome. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. Thank you. Thank you.