시즌 2. 에피소드 16: 행동 안락사 - 출연: 마이클 엘리스 & 데니스 펜지 - DTP

How are you doing, Denise? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for jumping on. And how are you doing, Michael? Doing well as well, and thank you. I appreciate you guys thinking of us. Yeah. Oh, 100%. Like all the time. You show up in our YouTube feeds, so it doesn't matter. I was talking about all the Leoburg stuff that I've been seeing lately. It's good. Yeah. Yeah. They're busy. Yeah. Yeah. How are you guys? It's been a while. We've, you know, for people listening, we've had you guys, each of you on the show. We've never had you together, so we're super excited. But just how have you been? What's new? Denise? Oh, how have I been? Well, you guys just mentioned that Leoburg is getting busy, and I'm sort of enjoying not getting busy. I'm sort of trying to find ways to spend more time out walking my dog and less time actually working for a living. And to some extent, I have some privilege to be able to do that a little bit. At the same time, I do have some ideas, some opportunities that I'm contemplating in the business world, but mostly I'm just walking my dog. I do have a nice young dog now, 14 months old, and he gives me tremendous pleasure. He's just such a fun dog. He certainly has his moments. He's not an easy dog, but it's so much fun to have him. And so interesting time to have this conversation about things like behavioral euthanasia when I'm here with a dog who brings so much to me. And I know other people's dogs, frankly, bring them a lot of misery. And it's terrible and sad, but there's a lot of contrast. So it's a little bit on my mind. Right, right. Yeah. How about you, Mike? It's funny that hitting me at a point of transition as well. I'm doing well, but trying to do exactly what Denise is trying to do, which is a little less working and a little more of following my passion projects and time with my own dogs and some of the other things in life that I'd like to do. I've been talking about writing a book for 20 years, so I'm trying to carve out some time to make that happen. And there's a variety of things like that. So putting the brakes on something that you've been doing full speed ahead for 25 years is not an easy thing. Slowing the whole thing down, and there's a lot of decisions. So we're kind of in a transition. I've taken a sabbatical for the rest of this year from teaching so that we can kind of decide what we're going to do with our facility. And I'm moving some content online and beginning to try to organize what a slower life would look like a little bit. A slower life? What's that? I feel that. What is that? We don't get that for another 20 years.

What is that? Exactly. Well, Michael, I'll just give you a heads up. It looks good. I've been slowing down for about six to nine months. I made some decisions at my school, which gave me a lot more freedom. And damn, it's really nice. I look forward to joining you. We can have a glass of wine because we live relatively close to each other. Absolutely. And we can just enjoy that time. I'd love that. That sounds fantastic. I got a glimpse of it during lockdown. And I was like, that was sort of one of the drivers. I know it's a cliche at this point, but absolutely like a forced pause. I was like, oh, wow, I forgot there's a lot of other things in life. Yeah, this is nice. Grinding away at work all the time. So 70 hours a week. Do you guys have any idea how awesome it would be for like a dog training Corona commercial where you guys just kind of cling and just sit back and relax? Just clink. So in any case, Brent and I had been discussing this topic for a long time, and we were trying to figure out the best, most thorough way to give this topic the weight you deserve. So I figure what better way to start than with a simple baseline description. You guys let me know if there's anything to add or take away. Okay. So when we're discussing behavioral euthanasia, what we mean is a dog that an owner or a trainer, you know, somebody who's working at a, excuse me, a shelter or rescue, make the decision to have the dog put down strictly for behavioral reasons, not health related reasons, et cetera. Okay. That's it in a nutshell, as far as I'm concerned, for sure. And when we dive into this sort of thing, we notice that there are usually when people come to this decision, they've come to the conclusion that there's this series of reasons, series of criteria that need to be met. And we wanted to talk a bit about what some of those criteria are. In my experience, it's something along the lines of quality of life for the dog versus the owner, money, time. You know, maybe sometimes it's a matter of this dog could thrive in another family, but how realistic is it that we find another family? And when we talk about rescue, then we get into the realm of everybody knows those dogs that could thrive if they were just living with a trainer or in the shelter, et cetera. Well, sometimes not even then. Right. But I'm saying, but there are dogs that would thrive, except how many potential dogs that could be adopted out and maybe have an easier time are we going to displace because we're holding onto one for years? Yeah. This isn't such a deep thing. Where do we start? You know, where do we start?

I actually really appreciate how you summed that up. And the way I think about it is it's not all about the dog. It's not all about the family. And it's not all about society. Everybody has rights. People hear me say this all the time. And one of the challenges, I can tell you two stories I heard this week around this issue. In one case, the dog was biting people in the family. It was a very experienced home. I'm going to mention that it's a force free home because I know some people find this relevant. The dog was sent back to the breeder after a couple of years. It is now in a balanced training home. And I know that is, again, relevant to some people. And the way the dog lives is in a crate. And so the dog it's not that the dog never gets out. And so the person who decided to send the dog back basically was talking about how it was impacting her quality of life. The management, the fear of failure of management, the inability to have people come into her home. How it was impacting her other dogs who could no longer just be loose in the house. And at the end of our conversation, since we were just having this on the side, you know, her question to herself was, did she do the right thing? Because the dog is alive and has now been alive for a couple more years. But has the dog benefited in this new circumstance where it can be alive in a crate? And that gets down to what is quality of life and when do we decide that that's not quality of life? Because I know you talk about putting dogs to sleep not for health reasons. To me, mental health, in the human world, people don't commit suicide because of physical pain. They commit suicide because of mental pain. And I can't undervalue how important it is not to be suffering in your own mind. Right? Some dogs are put to sleep because they're suffering in their own mind. Their anxiety is so bad. Their fear is so great. Their whole lives are a panic attack. And other dogs, it's not that at all. It's just that they have certain behaviors and beliefs about their rights and their right to bite if they don't want this to happen. Now it's not so much that they're suffering mentally. Everybody else is. And sometimes it's so complicated. And then the second story I heard this week was a person who got the dog. And again, I'm going to tell that because it seems to matter to people. Came from a balanced situation. Went into this person's home and the dog was hugely problematic and the separation anxiety was off the charts. So the dog can't be left alone and is biting people. Keeps this dog for several years. Works with the dog for several years.

Gets the aggression under control. The dog is now very manageable in most cases, but they cannot make inroads on the separation anxiety. That means he has never left his house in all the years he's had this dog, which has had an enormous impact on his quality of life. So he's doing this last ditch effort to reach out. There's got to be, does CBD oil work? Does this, how about holistic? How about crystals? It's at the point where it's desperation and nobody's even talking about behavioral euthanasia. As I'm following these threads and thinking about it, all I can think is, my God, this person is giving up years of their life to try to accommodate this situation. And the dog is fine as long as he does nothing except for accommodate the dog. And it's just, this is painful for me on so many levels to even be aware of these situations, which are actually, I think, pretty common. Oh, yeah, for sure. I would agree 100% that there's, there are way more of these types of situations where people are constructing their lives around, around their dog's issues than we would possibly imagine. I think for me, this treads on a larger idea that kind of permeates everything I'm thinking about in dog training. I like to consider myself an idealist and a pragmatist, right? And we want to lump people into one category. Oh, you're an idealist. You're talking about the perfect situation, the possibilities, where can we push training to make it better, all those things. And we all want to have an ideal out there that we're kind of striving for. And then there's the nuts and bolts, like make practical decisions on a day-to-day basis. And when we start talking about euthanasia, that's like the flagship of that discussion, right? We can talk about it with all kinds of training techniques and everything else. Like I have an ideal way of kind of approaching dog training in general, and I would love to hold myself as close to that standard as possible, right? But then you have to recognize that there's a lot of external factors, and you need to make decisions that are pragmatic. And those can boil down to all the things we've talked about, quality of life for humans, dogs, economics, et cetera, general resources for the dog community, all things that you've already said. I think it's a really individual decision because there's people who don't mind managing at a certain level, which would be completely onerous for someone else. Someone else with a different lifestyle and things like that, they just can't. It causes them huge amounts of anxiety.

And we in the dog training community have a tendency to be insanely judgy. Let's face it, the dog trainers are judgy, right? And so if somebody makes a decision, there's going to be 10,000 people out there ready to say like, oh, they could have done this, they could have done that. But really it winds up boiling down to a personal decision. And you're the only person that knows when your life or your idea of the dog's life are impacted badly. For I come up through a working dog kind of background, and the tradition in working dogs was dogs didn't live in crates primarily, but dogs lived in kennels, right? And so when I came up, the general idea around bite sport dogs certainly was that those dogs would live in a kennel. They couldn't be house dogs. They couldn't do any of that. They'd come out and work. I met a lot of those dogs who I didn't consider well-adjusted or unhappy, right? But if you look at that and you had a dog potentially, maybe we factor in the fact that if you had a dog that was living a different life, and then that had to be put in that life versus a dog that grows up in that paradigm, like that may be more damaging to their quality of life than if it was something that's all they knew and they were still getting the enrichment and things like that. They're really complicated questions that way. And I think it's important that we give people the – remove our judgment enough and support people's personal decisions when it comes to this stuff as well, right? I think – The kind of thing that I would tolerate in one of my dogs, like I've had dogs that had to be managed for their entire life. One of my favorite dogs of all time would definitely bite people, like 100%. I love that dog. One of my dogs, right? She's a huge thing. She'll bite you. She'll know you. And so it was something that I was totally willing to put up with, and I was willing to put her up when we had a party and those kinds of things. That was not too much for me. But for somebody else, that would be horrible for them. That's just a bad situation. Right. You guys, as you both were speaking, I had written down some questions and a statement, and I just wanted to start with a statement. Michael Ellis was talking about the – I don't know why I'm saying your last name. Sorry. Michael Ellis was talking about how important it is to be idealistic and pragmatic. Yeah. And I think another thing you said just now was the ability – because it's a skill, I feel, to remove judgment. And I feel like that skill comes – like you earn it with experience because you know the ins and outs of either side.

And you know there is no easy answer. Yeah. So the statement I wanted to make was the two of you, I think when Brent and I were discussing and aiming high, we're like, do you think we can get Denise and Michael on together? You know, the reason we really wanted you guys on was because you guys have the ability to give trainers who listen to this kind of stuff permission to be both idealistic and pragmatic. And they respect your word and will listen. And that, I think, is very important. And so with that in mind, one of the questions I have for you, both of you, is what advice would you give a newer, younger trainer on how they can minimize the weight of that judgment? How have you guys navigated that? Because you're both super successful, so I know you've had pushback. I think it's a tough question. I would say, as a beginning trainer, focus much more on what you're doing and kind of the focus of your quality of your work and not so much paying attention to the noise that's out there in general. This is one of the, and I've gone on many rants over this, and one of the downsides of social media, right? So the way we're getting information to people at this point in time is incredible in that more people in more places have access to information than ever before. A lot of great information is right at your fingertips, stuff that took years and years and years for people to get access to. It's there. The downside is, as Denise said earlier and we all said, there's a discussion happening in public, kind of. And it's not really a discussion. There's a comment. And if you pay attention to what everybody out there is saying about you or your choices or what they're saying over other people, it can be paralyzing, right? There were points very early in the advent of the internet where I went on discussion forums and things like that and would post. And people would ask a question and I'd get in there and answer the question. And I realized super quickly that that format, and I think most of the stuff that's happening on social media and places like this, their goal is not to have the question really answered or to spawn a very nuanced discussion. Just to be provocative, yeah. It's provocative on purpose. It's want to get as many people looking at it as possible. People are attracted to disagreement and the vitriol. And you really have to shelter yourself from that. And for a younger generation that are growing up with this as an integral part of their life, I'm actually concerned, right? That how do they, that community of people whose opinion can affect your ability to function is huge.

And if you pay attention to that, you're going to be in trouble. So find some people that you respect, that you think do good work, and pay attention to their opinion, and tune out the rest of the noise while you're learning, right? And don't pay attention to it. If you have to turn it off, turn it off. Because you're not going to be able to rise above that in a lot of cases. And it'll really bring you down. Make it very hard for you to do your job. And I love that, Michael. The one thing I would add is not every thought that enters your head needs to come out your mouth. I love these zingers you have. The problem with being young, and I don't mean young age rise, I mean new, is that you actually think your thoughts have a lot of weight. And that's not bad. But the problem with expressing them is if you do it publicly, you just committed to it. And it takes a bigger person in six months to back away from the statement than it does to not having given it in the first place. There's a lot to be said for listening. Just sit back and listen and allow for the fact that over the course of your life, if your life is anything like mine, you will say, I said I would never. I can't count how many times in my life I've said I would never and fill in the blank. And I've done pretty much every single thing I have ever said I would never do. And I don't say never that much anymore. And I don't say always that much anymore. I usually say, well, you know, it depends. Give me more information. What are the script? I can't look at a five-second clip. I don't have any context. I need so much more. I think if we would just slow down. And I mean, I'm always amazed at the things I learn about myself on social media. I mean, truly, like people tell me all kinds of things about what I believe that I'm like, wow, that's a good thing I read this because I didn't even know that. That kind of willingness for people to grab the first thought that comes in their head, spew it, get behind it, and dig in. I think psychologically, once you've done that to yourself, it's actually very hard for you to stay open and just listen. It's also incredibly unkind. Because if somebody is in the midst of making a decision about euthanasia, they're hurting badly. And if there are 19 supportive comments and one asshole just has to come in there who knows nothing about the situation with the you shoulda, coulda, woulda, whatever they have to say, it's so damaging. It's so painful. It's not pro-social behavior. We need to do better even if that dog could have been maybe helped in a different circumstance because I don't live their life.

I don't live their circumstance. It's not for me to decide. And so all I can do is either shut up or support them. I think those are my two choices. Yeah. Especially on a big stage like social media. What is it? I think it's Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or whoever said you have two ears and one mouth. Yep. Yeah. I thought you were going to go with the whole it's easy to say what you're against. It's more difficult to decide what you're for. Right. Absolutely. And Denise hit on something that's spot on in there. And it takes a huge amount. And trainers that have been training for a long time potentially have developed the ability to say they're wrong publicly. Right? And we hope that everybody gets to the point where you can say like, yeah, I screw up all the time. It's like there's no avoiding that. And I used to believe this. And now I believe something else. And being able to say that. But for a beginner trainer, it's really easy to paint yourself into a corner. You've allied yourself with an idea or a methodology and you've advocated it for hard publicly. And you give yourself very little wiggle room. And it makes you start to look like, oh, I'm walking something back. And then the dialogue around it. And so people then start pushing ideas that they don't necessarily, they're not fully on board anymore because they hitched their wagon to that train in the beginning. And it's problematic. And so that's for sure. And there's the, Denise also touched on the ideal versus real thing. There may be a training methodology or a home or a situation in which a dog can thrive. Could even like a dog with a, we would be considering euthanasia could actually thrive. But do the people that are making those decisions have access to that? Right. Right? And are you, in an attempt to find that, are you going to make the situation worse? Which happens lots of times when we hit situations where people are considering behavioral euthanasia. And I see dogs like this all the time. You get a history on the dog and they're on their fourth or fifth trainer. And people have done all kinds of messed up stuff to the dog at that point. Right? And so what? Now the right situation may exist out there, but how does this person get that dog into that situation? And it's one more time trip through the ringer for the dog too. Right? And there's a point at which enough's enough. But where is it? Because I know that there's a lot of this. It's very popular in the bounce community if a dog is euthanized to say, if you brought in a bounce community trainer, you would have solved this problem. Besides the fact that you actually don't know that.

The thing I want to sort of talk about is the unhealthiness of making it about community. There are very good force free trainers and there are very good balance trainers. And in my opinion, the question is the quality of the trainer you got in the door, not their primary philosophy. Because a really good trainer from any camp is going to be able to help a dog. Now help, my personal belief is that genetics is huge. I put genetics as king. My personal opinion is you move the dial, you don't change the dog. So if a dog is a 10 in aggression, you can bring it to an 8. But that's the best you're going to do. If the dog is a 1, you can bring it to a 3. That's my belief. You get to move two notches in each direction, give or take. Yeah. It is not about the training philosophy. It is about the quality of the person doing the training. How well can they do it? Do they understand the difference between a behavior and suppression and an emotion-driven event? Do they understand the role of management? Are they able to communicate adequately to the person who's going to keep that dog? This is management and these are the ramifications in your situation of management failure. And can you live with that six months from now when you forget your dog has a problem? Because you haven't seen it for six months, but that didn't make it go away. Yeah. And all of these, this kind of the war of, well, if it had been my dog or my neighbor or this person. It's so not helpful to dogs or to community or to training. It's just not helpful. Well, we could, I could agree completely on the genetics part of it, right? So it's a huge part of, of all of our training. There's no doubt about it. And, and I think the essence of the dog will be the essence of the dog at the end of the day. I do believe that you can, especially starting with puppies and adolescents, you can have a bigger impact on the scale. Meaning that if you recognize some of those things earlier, you have a larger chance of making a bigger change in the dog. Are you going to turn it into, are you going to turn a malinois that wants to bite everything into a golden retriever? No. No. Right. But can you move the needle more? Absolutely. Absolutely. And then I think there's a discussion and it's a whole can of worms about management is huge. I would say like, I'm going to make t-shirts, you know, two t-shirts. One says it depends on the dog and the other one says management is king, right? Love it. I'd buy it. I'd buy it. Key in terms of preventing behavior problems from getting started. Yeah. It's going to be key in addressing them.

If you have any hope of addressing them, once you start down that path and it's, and as dog trainers, everyone knows, that's the hardest thing to sell to people. They don't want to change their day-to-day life with the dog. They don't like managing dogs. They most, the average person gets a dog to just be with them and do stuff and hang out in their house and be loose when the friends are over and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And so it's a, it's a hard sell, but it's a huge piece of the puzzle. And then the final thing of the training, the quality of the trainers is again, everything as well. But what you wind up doing with certain dogs, in my opinion, is you gain controls over them. And so for me, an always a question, an integral question, a personal question for me is when we're talking about balance training and the use of pressure and training and holding dogs accountable and using aversives and those sorts of things. It's, can I do that so that the dog goes through some short-term stress and difficulty, but I gain enough control then to manage that dog in a way that gives them more freedoms going forward? Or is it an ongoing thing that I'm having to watch them and ride them all the time? And those are really different things. Like, and I think there's a possibility sometimes when we start talking about these that I can gain control and the short-term cost is some stress to the dog for sure. On the other side of it, I've expanded our relationship. So I still have to manage the dog. I don't eliminate that, but I am able to give that dog a fuller life as a result of it. And I don't have to continue to do that to them over and over again. And that might, for me personally, that's a choice that I'm willing to make. If it feels like it's going to be an ongoing thing, if it feels like I don't really move the needle and management by itself would do the same thing, like I can't expand their world enough to give them more opportunities to have a fuller life, then now you are coming down on the other side. And that's a problem a lot of dog trainers get in, right? So like I started in the shelter and the rescue world and, you know, you take that dog that that client can't handle and then you hold on to that dog and you try your best to train that dog. And because you have timing and skills and can read body language, you can expand that dog's quality of life a little bit more. But I have many friends and it's happened to me where, you know, at some point that that dog, you start conforming everything around that dog as a dog trainer, right?

And it starts messing up your workflow. It starts messing up your business. It starts messing up your personal life. And I think kind of touching based on that point, like that afflicts dog trainers specifically, right? And it's, that was ultimately one of the biggest reasons we were doing this episode is because of this conversation we had in Colorado, right? Talking about these, you know, we're always, as dog trainers, we're trying to think, so what is the solution? Is it one variable? Is it the management? Is it the training? Is it the genetics? And I guess what I really would like to pull from you guys for educational purposes is at least our best guesses on some way of guiding the regular trainer of when is the balancing act getting too difficult? Like what are some things that we need some help with? So one thing, you know, we'll start with management, which is what we were talking about earlier. You know, I've had many clients that, as to your point, that they're like, if I can't have the dog on the couch with me or inside the house, then there's going to be a problem. But then I've also had clients that I say, you know what, build the dog run on the side of the house. And anytime guests come over, put the dog in the dog run and they go, amazing. And the dog lives a really happy life for the next, with their family, gets to live up to, you know, 12, 14 years. And nothing wrong with that. But then I've had similar situations where they go, you're saying the dog won't be in the house with my family and my friends? No. And they have a huge problem with that. And I guess what would you say is the, is that just a people issue? You know, is that a mentality issue, a dog culture issue? It's a dog trainer problem because dog trainers have, have suggested on social media that we actually train dogs and then just change things. Like you taught the dog to recall for the rest of the life, the dog recalls. You taught the dog to stay. And any dog trainer who is being honest knows that's not even remotely how it actually works. I, if I had my way, I would stop even talking about dog training and I would talk about living with a dog and what that means. How do we live with dogs and get along? And then that makes, what are the options in between, you know? Right. Like how do you live with your cat? Well, somehow you figured it out. People don't talk about training their cat. They talk about living with the cat. 99% of your clients, I guarantee you this. If you could honestly look at what they do one year from now, they did not train their dog. They did not. They do not maintain training.

They do not want to maintain training. You train dogs because you're a dog trainer. Your pet clients just want to love their dog. And that's a little bit of reality we need to sort of internalize. We can tell people all these things. But if you're giving people, it's like you go to the doctor, you have diabetes. And he says, simple, simple. 1,200 calories a day. Get rid of the carbs and the sugar. Exercise four times a week. And use your sunscreen every two hours. That's wonderful. And you know it won't happen. You know the compliance isn't there. And yet the dog world has not internalized the fact that dog trainers consistently give advice and information that is absolutely not realistic, especially in the behavior. Like, I don't know why it's such a shameful thing to tell people, this dog can't be in the house when your guests come in. To me, that's just, I mean, I would say the majority of dogs I have had are not good pets. And I assume management as how I live with my dogs because I choose to have dogs that require attention and management. My dogs are never with people in my house if I'm not here. I put them away. And I'm super comfortable with that. I think they have a wonderful life. But if we don't talk about management as being the primary foundation of how people live with dogs, I think we are giving a false impression to people about what is behavior change. And what has actually changed or what is us changing. Because dog trainers, the skills we bring to the table, have nothing in common. Like, I was hanging out with a pet dog person the other day, which I don't do very much. And I was sort of shocked and appalled at just how bad it is. So lovely people, smart and everything, zero skills because why would they have those skills? They're not dog trainers. Fortunately, the dog they have in their house, it's not going to be a problem. It's just this, it's just a good dog. It's just a nice pet dog. It's perfect. We, I think, completely overestimate what people can and will do and want to do. And we don't listen well enough to hear them saying, but I don't want to live that way. I can't live that way. I don't have time to live that way. I got, you know, I've got family and, and even on social media, I don't see nearly enough conversation that stop with the flashy training and let's get realistic. I saw one trainer. I think we would all agree if you saw it. I'm not going to name it. My God, it was terrible. It was two dogs that can't live together. And he was making them drink water together. And I'm not sure exactly what this was proving, but I was thinking even if he could, because

you know, stuff happened before that video camera started. There's just no question, right? So things happened. And then we got this 10 minute clip. Oh my God, look, they're like best friends. And now what happens is what that dog is going to go back into its home. And then what? Even if that trainer said to this person, okay, before you do this, you got to put an e-collar on both dogs. You have to remind them. And then you bring the water out. What's the point? Where are you going? The person who put the dog with this trainer wants these dogs to get along in life, not to come out on e-collars. He's that the family's not a trainer. And so the implication when you watch this on social media is that these dogs could actually be left loose together and become friends. That's not realistic. And any trainer who's being honest knows that even if the person wanted to be that good, they're not. And they're going to be practicing on real dogs. Why not just talk about management? Look, these two dogs cannot be loose together. You might want to rehome. If they're nice dogs, you could rehome one. I support you 100%. I will help you with that process. There's nothing to be ashamed of. It's okay. You have a right to have a happy life and to have dogs that can get along. That alone gives so much relief to people. It's kind behavior. And it recognizes the reality that animals do come with a temperament and certain expectations are not reasonable. Yeah. I almost guarantee if you look closely at the video too, the dogs wouldn't, and paid attention to body language, they wouldn't look like friends. They would look like dogs that are being compelled to be next to each other. And they know that they don't have another option if the aggression isn't an option there. And there's going to be some signs of avoidance and other things mixed in there. And you're managing that. You're managing it with pressure. Still, same thing. You're winding up doing the same thing. I think to Brent's question, though, the idea is where is the tipping point? It's wildly different for everybody else. If you're talking about the average pet home versus a dog trainer or somebody that's even intrigued by dog training. So I've certainly had pet clients over the years who really got excited about dog training. That's not why they came into it. They came into it because they had an idea of they needed their dog to listen. They know it's important, yada, yada, yada, whatever. They had some issue. And then they get really excited about it. So they're willing to do more. And they're willing to think about it more.

And they don't look at that as emotionally onerous, whereas somebody else is just like, ah, that's not why I have a dog. My friend and good dog trainer, Lindsay Summer, who has worked with us for years and now has her gig over here, her whole mission right now is to breed the perfect pet dog. Like, she's honestly at a spot, because we've now talked about genetics and management. Genetics plays a big role. And there's all kinds of people getting dogs based on an idea of a dog that are wholly unsuitable to their lifestyle. And so her goal is to make dogs that you can make mistakes and they're going to be okay. They're not going to bite somebody. They're not going to start a dog fight. They're not going to tear everything up if they're out of the crate. If you come home and they got out of the crate and they're going to be laying in your living room, not de-stuffing your sofa. Like, and there are genetic packages. It doesn't mean they don't need any guidance, but there's a certain type of genetic package where that's way easier. And that's what most people need. I have six Malinois in my house right now. My two male dogs, they're not together. Like, I have two adult male dogs, a five-year-old male dog and an eight-year-old male dog. And can I have them near each other? Absolutely. Can I make them lay down next to each other? Sure. Can I have them out on a hike together? Absolutely. Are they loose together when I'm not around? Absolutely not. Do I choose not to have them out together so I don't have to watch it all the time? Absolutely. Will they fight? These are what I consider well-adjusted dogs. You know, they're not overtly aggressive, but there's competition between them. You have intact females and intact male dogs. There's all kinds of stuff happening there, right? And I accept that. It's not a big deal. It's no issue for me in my life, right? But for someone else, that'd be horrible. Why would they have two dogs that they have to watch that much or wouldn't let out at certain times together and all that kind of thing? They wouldn't do it. And I think the big difference is, and I think we always hear this with dog trainers. It's like, I got five dogs. I got six dogs. I got this. I got these many dogs because we're willing to take on that challenge because we have the read. We understand. We understand the nature of things, right? A little bit better than the average dog owner. And so when you understand, oh, when I have this dominant dog and I have this type of breed and then, you know, if there's a bone or they fight over the squirrel, like you can predict

and do that cost risk analysis and you make a management decision based on that, right? Well, and the buy-in is already there. Like, you know, because people can know this stuff. A lot of people see a trainer and they give the information like Denise was saying, but that doesn't mean they're going to do it. You can tell somebody with diabetes what to do. That doesn't mean they're going to do it. The dog trainer, this is their work. It says, you know, 100% of my clients do less than 50% of what I tell them to do. That was from, so like, so, you know, but the buy-in is already there. It's like saying, oh, my personal trainer is in amazing shape. It's like, well, no shit. This is what they've chosen to do with their life. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Like we know that they 100% believe that this works and they abide by it. So they reap the benefit of it. Right. Denise, I wanted to ask you. Go ahead. A little bit of a related topic. Back when I was a youngster, there were a lot of dogs. There were a lot of dogs. There wasn't a lot of spay and neuter. And so if you went to the shelter, an enormous number of dogs were euthanized for no reason at all. So if a dog walked in there and just looked crosswise at anybody, that one was first up. It was put to sleep. Yeah. Nowadays, we almost have a dog shortage in many parts of the country. And we have a different philosophy about making, like, for example, dogs with bite histories were never adopted out 30 years ago. Now it's very normal to adopt out dogs that have some pretty serious issues. I mean, we could disagree about what's serious to you or me or whatever. But at root, the ability to just go get a dog doesn't seem to be what it used to be. So there's a lot more fixing going on. And I actually think Lindsay's on the right track because I think we have a terrible lack of just pet dogs that get along. Lack of appropriate dogs. I think you're exactly right. Lab mixes. We need lab mixes. Lots of them. And a little smaller. Can I give this, what you guys are talking about, just context of a question just to kind of set us off? Because I actually wrote this down like three minutes ago for you guys. Do dog trainers have the obligation or even the right to help curate genetics? I think they have an obligation to be in the conversation for sure, right? Because in dog training, there's this idea that if you're good enough, you can turn something into something that it's not. That you can fix any dog, right? Which is a complete pipe dream. We've already hashed out the amount of genetics. It's just not true, right?

And because that's sort of out there even amongst trainers, the general population certainly doesn't recognize the role of genetics in their success. And people are attracted to dogs for all kinds of things. The way they look or some ideal of what this dog did in the real world that has nothing to do with living their life with them. And so an upfront discussion of genetics, helping identify breeders and places where they're trying to produce a dog that's suitable for the environments they're going into, right? It is absolutely essential. We have to be a part of that conversation. And it comes also down to what comes up in this is resource allocation, right? So what's happened now with the switch and rescue, the rescue organizations and things like that that are very active, it's a noble idea. Like we all want to, you know, take it, look after the least fortunate, the ones that like, that had the rotten time. Like I want to save a dog from a bad situation. But really they gobble up a disproportionate amount of resources that now can't be generated. They take homes, they take good homes when they find them that could have been homes for other well-adjusted dogs. And so there are well-adjusted dogs being euthanized for practical purposes, like to this point before, while huge amounts of resources are being expended on dogs that are never going to be fully functioning members of society or even a good pet for someone at that point. And most of the dogs that I've worked with that at some point, even if I worked for them a year or two years, that eventually had to be euthanized, they were rescue dogs. They were dogs that already had some type of behavioral issue, were able to manage it and again develop better control over the dog. But at the end of the day, there's – at the end of the day, yeah, it just sucks. Well, they say you can't beat nature, right? Yeah. Like my question essentially is, is there – other than the obvious, the short-term, the dogs today that don't have a space in this rescue because it's being taken by a rubber band dog who's been rehomed seven times and brought back seven times. But longer term, like two, three generations from now, is that directly correlating to the hindrance of dogs moving forward? Well, I think there's a few pieces to that. One is, as Michael said, if you used up a good home on a difficult dog, you may have done even more than that. They may never get another dog. So if you've lived 10 years with a dog who ran your life, when that dog is gone, you might be like, yeah, never, ever again.

So when you have a lot of bad experiences or when kids are raised in homes with dogs that are so difficult that they grow up and say, I'm not going to have a dog. Dogs are insane. I think those are an impact. I do think trainers might feel uncomfortable talking about the it's not all in how you raise them because almost by definition, your job as a dog trainer is to teach people how to train the dog to be the way you want. And at the same time, some people, I think, struggle to hold, like Michael and I have no trouble saying genetics is powerful. Training is great. Like we can hold both those things in our head. That's not a contradiction. And I think it's not all in how you raise them. We all know that. But there's still a lot of that out there. But I think sometimes a trainer feels like it takes away from what they've accomplished if they admit that genetics really does that. That's a really interesting point. Yeah. That's a really interesting point. You want to look amazing, right? Yeah. And so, you know, my young dog, he looks amazing. He has amazing genetics. I can say that because I've been around long enough to know that that doesn't take away from me. But I think maybe for somebody else, they feel that it takes away from them if they just admit that I think he was born. We've got a really good dog. Like I didn't have to. I got a little 10-pound terrier here. Let me tell you, if I teach that dog to sit, damn it, I taught that dog to sit. It was not genetic. I'll work my butt off. The amount of effort is so radically different. But I think you have to get to that place over time to recognize that nothing is being taken away from you as a trainer to admit that genetics is a huge force. And I actually find it freeing to admit that genetics is a force. Now, I find that in the working dog world, this is sort of taken for granted. If you send your dog to a bird dog trainer and the dog doesn't do the thing, they don't say it's a training problem. They say this dog can't do the work. They send it back. If you go to an IGP club and your dog is just not showing the talent and it's 18 months old, they say this dog can't do it. Send the dog back. But that is not the case in the population as a whole. The idea that the dog brings it to the table, it starts to be, well, you raised it wrong. You socialized it wrong. There are too many dogs out there that are very poorly socialized that turn out just fine to be saying, well, you did this wrong. You did that. It's yes, you matter. Of course you matter. But not as much as I think pet people think you matter. We'd all like to matter more, for sure.

I say all the time, like my old dog, Pi, it was cheating. Like, for sure. Like, there's a dog that's just like, okay, he did that. Great. What's next? Okay. Pi was in your tug video. Awesome. Make you look really good. Yeah. Okay, Michael, you won't remember this. I met Pi when he was about 10 weeks old. You brought him out to the Alameda Schutzen Club. He had been returned to you, if I'm getting it right, and you were saying, I'm going to keep him. Yeah, well, I picked him up. It was a litter that we whelped with a cone in Arizona, and I went and tested all the puppies to play with him, and I wasn't keeping one. I'm like, I'll just hold on to you until I decide where you're going to go. And about a week after I had him, I'm like, oh, you're not going anywhere. I think that's about when I saw you with him out of the club. For some reason, it stuck with me because he was such a cool puppy. And that kind of thing happens, but we also have to be careful that I'm a genetics fanatic, right? It's huge. If you've hung around dogs long enough, so much of it is genetics, not just the aggression and other things like that, but little things like personal mannerisms, like the sound of their voice and whether they tilt their head a certain way and how dogs play. Genetics can be right down to really small traits. So I'm a huge proponent for taking this into consideration in all of our decisions. That said, we also don't want to use it as an excuse not to do the work, right? And so in working dogs, to Denise's point before, absolutely. Working dog people have no problem saying this dog's not good enough to do the work, right? So much so that they're willing to say that with eight-week-old puppies and stuff like that before they've done anything, before they've given the dog any kind of opportunity, right? And we have to be careful not to use genetics purely as an excuse. We can say, like, hey, it's playing a factor here. It's going to help steer how I work with this dog. But I still have to try to work with the dog because I'm still surprised to this day. I have a dog I think you're going to be a savage when you grow up. They're not. I have a dog that I think is going to be all sweet and loving. It's all happy and submissive when it's little. And it gets mean later. And all those sorts of things are there. And so no matter how long you do this, you're going to be surprised. You're going to think, ah, I didn't see that in this dog. I didn't think this dog was going to change as much as they did from this age to this age. And so you have to be open while not discounting the role of genetics.

So this reminds me of kind of this thing that I deal with a lot working with shelter and rescue dogs, right? So, you know, on average, the average rescue dog is between 10 months to a year and a half, right? And we have this adolescent age where we have these adolescent dogs who have people thought that they were going to grow out of it. And the dogs never grew out of it. And then they end up surrendering the dog, right? So now we have these adolescent dogs who have typically what I just referred to as unresolved puppy issues, things that they never learned through puppy development, never learned patience, impulse control, how to cooperate with authority figures. Like they never learned those things. And, you know, with a majority of rescue dogs, if I can run them through a system where they can learn these things and they can learn these skills and they learn these habits, a lot of them are able to adapt to regular society, right? And in kind of what you were talking about, I guess, what is, what would be some of these genetic things? Like, let's say I run the dog through these protocols. I train the dog. I teach the dog certain concepts. And once I've put the dog through the system, as you mentioned, you can't tell just based super young on genetics. When we're looking at, all right, what are some genetic traits that would probably make not the best pet? So just let's, if we can. Resource guarding is number one. Okay. Dogs that have strong genetic resource guarding is always a bad thing for an average pet dog because people are not going to manage as much as they need to, right? And resource guarding is one of those things that there's a, like with most forms of aggression, there's a genetic component and there's a learned component. Like, have they been put in situations? Have they tried these, these coping strategies? Have they worked for them? All that kind of stuff. But the initial triggers are genetic. And I think I realized how genetic resource guarding was the first time we had a litter 20 years ago. And I've bred a fair number of dogs over the years. And most of our dogs don't have what I would call committed resource guarding. The bloodlines that we've kept, they're not really big resource guarders. They'll all try it out as a strategy as young dogs. If they really want something and somebody's pestering them, they'll snark at them. But they're not the kind of dog that's, like, really guarding their stuff. But I made an outcross breeding to this dog I brought in from France to make police dogs.

And he was a great police dog and a good working dog, but he had fairly strong resource guarding. You know, you got within six feet of his bowl and he's growling at you, especially if you didn't have a relationship with him, right? And so I made a breeding. There were 11 puppies. All 11 puppies were severe resource guarders. Like, eight weeks old. Like, not a little bit. You put down a food bowl, they're like... Over the top of it, snarling, covering it up. They would leave a resource and come three feet at you and bite you in the leg and run back and jump on it. Whoa. At eight weeks old. Like, nutty. And a significant portion of them grew up to be... They'll just grow out of it, right? ...good working dogs. They were managed for life. The people that had them recognized it. They knew how to work with them. They knew how to live with them in such a way. And those dogs went on and were relatively successful working dogs. But that was a huge eye-opening thing for me. That was a point in my journey where I was like, whoa. This is way more genetic than we think it is. And when people talk about resource guarding, if you see that in a dog and it's committed, like, that is a bad thing to have in the average family. Because people drop food on the ground. They leave stuff out they're not supposed to. That kind of stuff. It requires a significant amount of management. So that's high on the list, certainly, for sure. Cool. What else? I think for me it would be low threshold for aggression as a general concept. So I'm not getting my way and my solution is to bite. But there's a test they do in shelters where they use a hand. Yeah, yeah. And they reach in. The person, I talked to somebody who knows a lot about that test and is involved. And she said, people think that the purpose of that test is to test for resource guarding. And she said, that is not where we find it has value. What it tells us is dogs that are willing to go to aggression under stress. And she said, her experience is dogs that fail that, it's not the resource guarding. What they discover is those dogs also, if you step on them when they're asleep, they come up angry. If somebody looks at them the wrong way, their natural response to stress, she said, they have separation anxiety. They have all sorts of other things that you're like, what's the relationship between this hand test and separation anxiety? She said, I don't know. But what we know is that dogs that fail that test, they may or may not have resource guarding, but they sure have problems with a low threshold for aggression.

And because she is working in the shelter world, she says, these dogs, when you place them in homes, you have problems. Even if it's something like the dog has separation anxiety. And I was kind of fascinated by that, that concept that you could have a low threshold for something as generic as fear or aggression. It's just the dog easily, their natural response to novelty, fear, or aggression is very different than that 90% of middle dogs whose natural response is, give me a second to think about it. It's like a fuse test. Like how long is your fuse, right? Well, I'm sure you guys have seen those studies. I heard about these from Dr. Clive Wynn at ASU. I don't know if he was the one himself who conducted these, but I heard them from him. Whenever we are looking into dogs, like pet dogs, not like genetic drive, like high drive working dogs, people's pet dogs that may have lower tolerances to things or a quicker response to seek conflict instead of like running away or anything else that they do. That there have even been studies to suggest that there are some dogs that legitimately have like a larger amygdala, you know, and are just genetically more capable, let's say, of the sensation of stress and fear than another dog is on a chemical level, on a real physical level. Sure. And typically speaking, those dogs in those studies, naturally, were resource guarders, were high anxiety dogs and what have you. And that's why I was asking you guys, do we as trainers, you know, should we be a bit more upfront about, you know, like the point you made, Denise, of like, even if this dog, even if you can manage this dog, is it going to hurt your perception of dogs in the future? Are dogs as an overall going to be hurt because you go through the, you know, through the 10, 12 years dealing with a high stress dog like this? I think that's an important question. Like, there's no doubt. For a portion of our community that's definitely damaging their idea of dogs and where dogs fit in society and their willingness to go through it again, there's no doubt that that's the case for sure. Now, there are trainers spawned from all of this. As running a school for dog trainers, I mean, how many dog trainers do I know now who got into it because they had a problem dog? They got some difficult dog and they needed help and then they got attracted to the whole process and were interested in it. So one person, it can negatively impact their willingness to engage with dogs in the future. And somebody else, it gets them all excited and makes them want to get into it. So I suppose it could cut either way.

Yeah, I've had students who come and they're like, you know, I'm not a dog trainer. I'm like, oh, no, actually, you are a dog trainer. You don't know that yet. You are a dog trainer. Even if you don't become a professional dog trainer, I have spent enough time talking to you. You are. You've got the heart of a dog trainer. You're fascinated by dogs. And it's just a matter of you deciding what direction you take that. And I swear to God, I have 100% success rate. So if I told somebody that, they either ended up becoming a professional dog trainer or a serious hobbyist. Because just the way they feel and see. They're geeks about it. Like we're geeks about it. They love that. They're fascinated by it. You know, I love to see those people. But I also know a fairly high percentage of people who have given up the prime years of their lives to their dog. And therefore don't have family because they had a dog that they couldn't have dates. They couldn't have people in. I think that's a bit of a tragedy when somebody in those formative years. So they went to the shelter when they were 22 or 23 years old. They got this dog and they kept it until they were 36 or 37. And you know what? They may well have given up some enormous parts of life. Maybe having partners, having children, making these decisions around a dog. And I hate to see anybody find themselves in a situation where their dog is so complex. And they feel obligated or even don't feel obligated as much as they simply can't do it. To euthanize a dog that's sitting in front of you. I have a hard time euthanizing a 15-year-old dog who can barely get up and is stumbling around. I struggle terribly with those decisions. And that dog is obviously, nobody would fault me, you know. Now you're talking about a dog whose tail is wagging, eye is bright, 90% of the time is absolutely normal. They can't do it. And I feel so much for these people. And then to make matters worse, some of them after 10 years, their management fails. And then there's some terrible, one dog literally took off her daughter's face. These terrible things happen and they've managed, they've done the right things. Or I know one person killed two other dogs in their home because the dog got out of its crate and rotate. And there's just, these are tragedies. And that's how I see them. Not as a, you should have done this. No, that's a tragedy. It's a terrible thing that has happened. Yeah. And anybody that says they're able to have a dog for life with no mistakes is, they're fooling them. Right, right? Everybody makes mistakes. A door's left open. It's not this, you know.

So those things happen, right? And somebody, there will be lapses. And so that's part of the equation too. Like how severe is it and how catastrophic is a mistake? Like you can have a dog that has issues and a mistake will set you back. But the dog, it's not going to be something catastrophic. Your dog's not going to kill another dog. Your dog's not going to severely maim somebody. That's a different ball of whack. Yeah, your angry Yorkie and your angry Melanois are not in the same way. They're not the same thing. Right, they're not the same thing. Right. Well, I tell people that all the time too, is even if the smaller dog is exhibiting similar behavior, just at the end of the day, if we're being pragmatic, just the capability isn't there. Yeah. So as much as it is the same, it isn't. Right? Yeah, 100%. A question that I have for you guys. I remember watching the conversation that you had, Denise, with Nino Dauert. And a question that I have is, what are your guys' thoughts on certain European breed restrictions? Oh, you mean like pit bulls and such? Like pit bulls and such? The whole thing? Yeah. Yeah, or just that idea as a concept. Or maybe tighter, not necessarily breed-based, but maybe tighter genetic threshold for dogs that are allowed to be adopted out and sold. I'm kind of crazy wary about it. Like part of me likes the idea that there should be some screening process in place for deciding what dogs can go to what places. And maybe you need to demonstrate some level of kind of understanding of what you're getting into and some skill set if you're going to get a certain kind of dog. That all makes sense to me, like somebody getting a driver's license. That said, the implementation of it is ridiculous. And almost impossible. Who's going to be making those decisions? How are you going to do it? And blanket breed bans are not it, right? Right, right. Definitely not the way of approaching it. Although I understand the idea behind it. It's trying to put a sort of simplified solution on a very complicated problem, right? Right, right. And unless you say, hey, you need to take a dog safety and training class to understand, to get a dog of a certain type, like you would to get a firearm or drive a car, which we're not going to do, right? Like that's impractical. Then breed bans are a way of trying to fill that hole. I think every breed that winds up on a band list, you could go out and find thousands of members of that breed that are completely fine, of course. Right. Right. And so there's a lot of harm done from that, right? But I'm sensitive to the idea behind it. Yeah, it's an impossible.

It gets back to this whole shades of gray thing, right? So also, what is a bully breed? What does that mean? What is the mix? There's so much complexity. So on the one hand, I believe in genetics. And I believe that certain breeds are just way more likely than other breeds to have certain kind of issues. I think that's just a fact. And we need to put that out there. Having said that, the implementation is the piece that really gets me. So at best, I would say, wait till the dog does the thing. I mean, the dog shows a behavior that's a problem. Okay, there it is right there. And then if you want to do it that way, it doesn't actually matter what breed it is. It really comes down to the individual. So if you want to have a rule that says if a dog bites someone and it's reported, then you have this set of things. You can do that. But even from there, you know, what is a dog bite? I mean, hell, just because of virtue of the games I play with my dogs, I get bitten all the time. There's no intent behind that. I've only been bitten with intent, I think, twice or three times. It's not that common because I try not to be in those situations. Those aren't the same. You know, life is complicated. You know, the shades of gray are so complicated. And that's I tend to fall on the side of education. I just really, really try to educate people. These are the things you want to know about dog behavior. These are heads up. And something that got said earlier, I don't remember the exact context. You don't want dogs practicing bad behaviors. And that's a big deal. However, you want to like talking about resource guarding. I would not say that my dog's a resource guarder, but he did have his asshole face. And part of that meant he took over the couch and he said nobody else is going to be on the couch. And that was the day I said, actually, you're right. And you're the one who's not going to be on the couch. Because I saw it and it was just sort of a, no, what? You don't let him practice those problem behaviors. Don't let him practice. So education, like teaching. And now he's allowed on the couch again because he got past that. But education, a lot of that is teaching people. When you see certain things, little signs, like, you know, don't wait until the dog is launching and like preventing anybody from coming in the room. The first time you saw that dog hard stare, you were growling because it was on the couch is the day. Now that's when the trainer needs to come into the picture. That's the day you start saying, okay, great.

You don't have to be screaming and yelling and throwing the dog off the couch and beating him or whatever it is people do. You just teach him where he goes, not where you go. And the problem just solved itself. Or you crate the dog at that time, whatever you want to do. But the lack of practicing problem behaviors is a big deal. So if a dog does do things in society that are problematic, even a straight education approach, not a blaming, oh, my God, you let your dog bite your child. Just a, all right. So here we had the thing. We had a thing. We don't want to keep having this thing. So what are we going to do right now early on so that the dog doesn't develop these habits and may well come out the other side just fine as an adult. Once you just, you're a little bit of structure, a little bit of boundaries and making sure that, you know, it's, it's working in a way or like even just some dogs, I think have what I call genetic reactivity. You know it early. It's intense. They, they come out fighting at a hundred yards. They see a dog and they're, they're howling, you know, other dogs, I think are in that middle zone. They could go either way. So kind of a basic thing is none of my dogs look at other dogs for more than two seconds. I just think that's a good general rule of thumb. You don't need to be when you're a teenager going through life, looking at other dogs. You just don't, you can look. And if the dog's not looking back, you're welcome to look as long as you want. But as soon as that dog's facing you, you need to get on doing something else now. So those kind of middly dogs, the, the, they can go either way. Yep. Those dogs, that's just education. Like there should be a general rule in society. You really shouldn't have your dog just standing there staring at other dogs. Like it's just, I'm not saying anything's going to happen, but there's no need for that. You don't let little kids do that. No, we don't. You don't let little kids stare at the homeless guy. You know? Right. Just. Don't stare at the cripple. Yeah. It's not good manners. And people do it. It's interesting now that you bring it up because people do it assuming that they're doing the right thing. Mm-hmm. Well, I, I just, my dog's curious. I'm just letting my dog be a dog. I'm letting him have fun. I'm letting him explore. I'm letting him. And develop frustration on a harness. But other than that. Yeah. This is, so this is something in my own community. I have to spend a lot of time talking about and educating the difference between looking and staring. These are not the same.

There's also loading, which is a word we don't use in the force free community, but use it a lot in the bounce community. And I think that word has a lot of value. As soon as I see my dog doing that forward thing, mouth closed, ears goes up, something needs to happen. Mm-hmm. Because we're not looking, we're not gathering information anymore. We're actually making decisions. Yep. Or even just something as simple as what do you want the dog doing? Yep. Sitting is, staring is not a behavior that I, I count. Do something once you start into that, that direction. But these are, to me, are matters of education. They're broad-based. Mm-hmm. Telling people simple things. What do you do when you notice your dog kind of getting up on its toes and pulling? Well, let's talk about interrupting it. Let's talk about what you can do. Mm-hmm. Good genetic, generic education about basic dog behavior has nothing to do with how you train. Yep. It just has to do with some basic things that, like in society, we say please and thank you. Mm-hmm. We teach our children that. It's just kind of a good thing to do. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Don't have a lot of conversation around it. Dogs can learn kind of across the board just some basic things about dog behavior. I don't even know if they're dog training as much as, well, let's call it management. Yeah. So if you take your dog into a difficult space, you do certain management things and they might include a certain amount of space from other people and dogs. Not approaching in unexpected ways. Not running up on another person or dog. The little things like that would be fantastic if we just had that broad base of education going on. There should, I've been saying for years, there should be a basic course in the schools. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, like a version of a health class or whatever else it is. Mm-hmm. Like half the homes in the country have dogs in them. Mm-hmm. Like you can't go through life without encountering dogs. You can't go to the park. That'd be amazing. Right. Like a basic understanding. They're so ubiquitous in our lives. They're permeated. You can't dodge them even if you want to. It's not. And they seem to be trending upward as it is. Yeah. So a little bit of understanding of the basic ways they behave. How to live with dogs. And what Denise said is interesting to me because we are very similar on this front. Like we're constantly talking about redirecting, right? Where's the dog's focus? What's that focus look like? What level of energy and that kind of thing. And I've noticed, back to the discussion of genetics, that if you know certain genetic packages,

like I know certain bloodlines of certain breeds that I'm very interested in, and they will go through phases, and you can begin to identify them when people say, oh, these dogs have a fear period. So I know certain bloodlines that will have a reactive period from four to eight months in there somewhere, and they'll want to woof at everything that they see. And you don't really have to do anything special. It goes away. But how do you differentiate between that and a dog that continues to rehearse that? It's going to get worse, and now you're going to have a problem, and you've contributed to the problem by letting them practice the unwanted behavior, right? And so we come up with these kind of blanket solutions. And the safest one is always don't let them practice the behavior because you don't know. You let one dog stare for a little bit, they get tired of it, and they give up. And they go, okay, that's not interesting to me. Another dog is doing exactly what Denise says is loading. And if you do that, they're going to build more and more and more, and then they're off a cliff, and then it's much harder to stop once it's gone. And the genetic component to the addictive nature of these behaviors, like we've actually selected dogs deliberately to get addicted with certain kinds of activities. I like to say good working dogs have an addictive personality, right? They are obsessive. And it doesn't take them very long to get really stimulated by something. And once they buy in, they're in. It's not like a little bit. There are dogs that gradually ramp up over time. And there's other dogs that's like you flipped a switch. And if they flip the switch on the wrong thing, oh, man, that is a much harder problem than had you not let that happen. And if you live with that kind of dog a lot, you get very obsessive about early experiences and management, setting up things, because you're not sure which type of dog you're going to have. And people think, wow, that is a really labor-intensive early rearing system. God, you're controlling everything. You're paying attention to everything. Well, if you have that kind of dog coming through your life, an unsuitable dog for pet dogs, basically. And increasingly, we're seeing them in companion homes. When Denise and I both keep a breed that they shouldn't be in most people's homes. They really shouldn't. Can I get Denise's? And when we started, you never saw a Malinois rescue or a shelter, ever. You do now. They're overflowing now. The rescues can't take anymore. They're everywhere you look.

I go out around our neighborhood, and I see four just on my drive, in people's yards, running the fences, going berserk at stuff that's going by. I'm like, how did that happen? That's happened in the last 20 years, 25 years, right? Can we get Denise's thoughts? And then we're going to go and take a very brief commercial break, please. Yeah, something you said, Michael. The difference between the lines I worked with, I knew what was kind of normal. So behaviors like they would take the puppy to the vet, and the vet would be like, holy shit, you've got to send this dog back. I'm like, no. The dog is fine. It's just that's how my puppies are at that age. So I have the advantage with my own dogs where I can look at them. It's not just what I see in front of me. It's what I know of their parents and their relatives. I don't have that sometimes, or many people don't have that with random dogs. So people are like, three, four, five months, do you think this is a problem? And I look at it, and I really don't know because I know how I'm going to handle it. And really, it's about the same. You know, it's don't let the dog rehearse it. Let's figure out, you know. But in terms of whether or not I want to try to treat it. So some dogs, I really think you just need to grow them through adolescence and keep them out of mischief, and you'll be fine on the other side. Other dogs are not going to grow through adolescence. It's avoiding the issue isn't going to make it go away on the other side. And I find that a really interesting thing to think about and talk about and to try to ferret out the pieces that might give us clues when we don't have information on the genetic package about what might. Because I definitely err on the side of looking at dogs and going, yeah, that looks pretty normal to me. And other dog trainers are looking at me like I've grown a third head. And I'm like, why don't Belgians just do stuff like that? Is that a problem? Like, I think resource guarding in a young Belgian is kind of normal. Like, I don't think it's that odd if I reach my hand into a bowl if somebody tries to nail me. I just don't do that anymore. And then I do things that won't happen. And then it kind of came to my attention that other pet dog trainers see things that I think are kind of normal as being truly abnormal. But I don't know how we ferret that information out when we don't have the genetic information. Yeah. By talking about it and acknowledging the complexity of it. And then when you don't know, err on the side of managing it.

What would some of those traits or those behaviors be that you're like, oh, they think it's bad, but I think it's normal? That's a great question to ask right after this commercial break. Right after this commercial break. Have you looked into dog training lately? Because these days, it can be so confusing. There's just so many methods out there for dog trainers and owners who, frankly, just want to do what's right for their dogs. It would be nice if there was just something out there where you could learn about the best methods from real dog trainers who genuinely know what works. And who believe in honest and open conversation with trainers from around the globe. If that sounds like you, then the Dog Trainers Podcast is just what you're looking for. Come and listen to Brent and Mariano as they educate you about all the different methods and tools you can use today. With absolutely no bias, just straight up information that can make you the best dog trainer you can be. Plus, you'll get the inside scoop from world-renowned trainers and so much more. Dog Trainers Podcast is a podcast created by dog trainers, for dog trainers, and anyone who's ever fallen in love with man's best friend. If all this sounds good to you, then check us out today by searching Dog Trainers Podcast on your favorite podcast streaming platform. We'll see you there. Hey guys, thank you so much for listening to Dog Trainers Podcast. You know what's a great way to support this podcast? By becoming a sponsor today. With sponsoring the podcast, you'll be helping us make this show the best it can be and so much more. From hosting more local events, traveling throughout the country, and connecting with trainers from around the world. Ultimately getting you, the listener, more of the content that you love. For more information, please contact us at dogtrainerspodcast at gmail.com. Or visit our Instagram page at dogtrainerspodcast. Thank you, guys, and now back to the show. Okay, guys, thank you so much. Again, this is an interview with Michael Ellis and Denise Fenzi. We're talking behavioral euthanasia, and I want to dive right back in. So just before the break, Denise was making an excellent point about how trainers who work with a typical breed of dog have this sort of point of reference. You know how the parents were. Or you know how this breed, in a nutshell, tends to operate, even though sometimes it may catch other animal professionals off guard, like a vet, like a groomer. And they may see these things as extremely odd. But to you, it's just another male being a puppy is an eight-month-old.

So my statement that I wanted to get your guys' thoughts on is I was talking to a professor at ASU, Dr. Clive Wynn. He made this fascinating point that when trainers, pet dog trainers, who don't usually have a long genetic history of a dog in order to assess behaviors and how serious the dog may be, because we don't know until we know. Like Denise was saying, right, let the dog do the thing. The function of training, of typical dog training, sits and downs and this and that, because I feel most people overvalue teaching a dog how to lay down. And they think it solves problems in and of itself. The real function and the real value of training commands is it serves as a sort of a funnel. Because when you make circumstances or make expectations similar, then the differences highlight themselves. Like teaching kids how to be polite. If every single kid in your household is taught, say please and thank you, say may I please have another taco, I want one more. Once they are all held to one universal standard, you can see who's more shy. You can see who's more confident. And what's really fascinating, you can see how the more complex inner workings then take place. Like for example, I was really shy as a kid. My older cousin wasn't. If we went to go get tacos in Mexico and you kind of ask for one at a time there, it's not like you order like five. And at the end, you like count up how many papers because they all come in a paper and then that's how you pay. So I would order, you know, three off the bat and then I'd get one more, one more. And if he's not there, if it was me and my dad, I would have no choice but to go and ask because my dad would insist, hey, ask him, you know. If my cousin was there, I would make him ask for me. So it's fascinating how the situation, the social group that you're in does affect your behavior. And with dogs, it's sort of a similar thing, I feel like. So when you're talking training, sits and downs and everything else, functional obedience commands, I personally find, and I try to make this point to my clients, this is a sort of a catalyst to see where is your dog, who is your dog, so that we can assess accordingly. Sure. Absolutely. And I think also the bigger thing is that it changes your relationship with your dog. It doesn't matter what the behavior is specifically. We tend to get hung up on those specific behaviors. It's the idea that you and the dog are doing something together collaboratively. The dog's looking to you for some kind of direction.

The dog learns basic sorts of impulse control, check before you do stuff, that what I say, what comes out of my mouth, because there's stuff coming out of my mouth all the time, what stuff coming out of my mouth has value, all those sorts of things. And you're right, it's a language for communicating. And you could, like, I virtually never give my dogs obedience commands around the house. You just, you don't need to. Like, you don't have to. But that structure and that language and that way of interacting and communicating with each other has been constructed in other places, so you don't have to there. With companion dog trainers, owners, they rarely have any value to their dog in that way. Their dog doesn't look to them for direction. Their dog doesn't look to them for permission. Their dog is on its own in that thing. So how can just getting them to start to do obedience, even if the obedience behaviors themselves have very little to do with how the dog ultimately behaves, it switches gears and that dog begins to look at you as something that has some value and something that they should pay some attention to. And that changes things that way, too. That's interesting, because I've noticed with almost all of my dogs, there will come a day where I've noticed that the dog is about to do something and stops and looks at me. And it could be somebody comes to the door and the dog is just looking to say, how do we feel about the situation? Like I can see them asking, checking so that I can tell them, this is how we feel about the situation. And they don't do that when they're eight weeks old. When they're small, you know, three months away, they just do what they do. And then a time comes that they they recognize that you matter in a fundamental way, that you have information that they may not have. And that must be a huge relief to a dog to realize they don't have to go it alone, because most pet dogs do go it alone because the owners don't really add value in a timely fashion. So the dog doesn't ask or doesn't look. I'm sure some do, but many don't. And I value that day when I see that my dog checks to see what the answer is to this question rather than filling in their own blanks. And it is something that to me is a heads up. If you're working with a dog a lot over time and it's not getting there, it doesn't seem to recognize that it can use you as a leader to make its life easier.

So the same amount of energy and time that you're putting into dog a versus dog B dog a you start noticing a gradual change as the dog more and more brings you into their world and uses you and dog B you find yourself working so hard. And yet it's just not using you as a resource. It's doing its own thing. It's often making bad decisions. So you spend a lot of time putting out fires rather than just building that relationship because a good basic relationship. And I know you're talking about obedience things that we do. To me, it's anything you do with the dog. It could be tricks in the house. It could just be playing being silly. And people play in all 100 different ways. I see people. Sometimes you drive down the street and somebody's in a schoolyard and running with their dog back and forth. It makes me very happy when I see this. The silly, you know, those are the things that I think give that dog value. It could be obedience for sure. It's just something that creates a situation where the dog starts to recognize you have value and you are on their team. Because I even see it with my dogs among themselves. I'll notice that you'll have a certain number of dogs in a space and something happens. And the younger ones will look to one of the other dogs to see how do we feel about this situation. So they clearly want that. They clearly want to have feedback and a community behind them. And, you know, looking back like, are we coming this way? Right? We're not doing that. And I think we can build that and develop that. And that is training and time with the dog. And I'm all about dogs doing doggy, exploring, sniffing things. I love those things. But those do not really develop that relationship type based thing. And what's very cool is that if you get that basic relationship type thing in place, then when you do take your dog out to do what I say is doggy things, your doggy does doggy things and then checks in with you without any training, without any asking. It becomes very simple. Or my dog the other day was running, running, running, running, running. He's way away from me, 100 yards. He sees another dog and he just stops and he looks at me. What are we doing right now? And I said, we're going to just go this way a little ways. And that is, I think, a huge value of training. Plus, helping people see how amazing their dogs are because dogs are amazing. So when people train their dogs and teach them things, however you want to do that, whatever you want to do, I think it makes us see our dogs differently. Like, there's way more in here than you thought was in here. So, wow, that's amazing.

You know, that's a really fascinating point, actually, because I notice one big problem people – one big misunderstanding people have is people tend to think that dogs are way less intelligent than they are. Well, I think it goes – yeah, I think it goes both ways. I think we think dogs are dumb and smart at the same time. So, like, that's why, like, the average dog owner is so happy about the paw thing, you know, like giving paw. And then we forget that dogs could be, like, people's eyes, you know, and can save lives and, like, do all these other things. The whole thing is, like, intellect is one thing. The ability, the capability to learn new things is insane in a dog. And to want to do – It's the emotion versus behavior. Right, exactly. So, they attribute emotions to the dog, which are out of control. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right. And then they de-emphasize behavior, whereas it's the reverse. Their emotional capacity is about a two-and-a-half-year-old. Not so great, pretty impulsive. But their capacity to learn behaviors and work their butts off is unbelievable. And their capacity to want to do it with us, with another species, is unparalleled. There's no other creature on Earth that tries as hard to figure us out and to work with us as dogs. There's nothing. Like, it's remarkable, no matter what. That's why so many different methodologies can get you there, right? Yeah, because they're willing to interpret everything. There are not that many different methodologies if you're dealing with training tigers, right? Yeah. Like, you're staying in some fairly narrow things. But dogs, because they, for whatever reason, their social systems fit ours, and we've selected them for now hundreds of years to be companions with us, they try exceedingly hard to figure us out. But back to what Denise was talking about in terms of training, I've come to have these really kind of elaborate conversations about walking with your dog these days. Because so many people walk their dog as their primary interaction with the dog. People are working. They come home. They take their dog out for a walk. They walk around the neighborhoods and things like that. And we're having all these battles with reactivity and things like that, right? And for me and for lots of trainers, a dog walk is what Denise described. It's enrichment. It's blow off steam. It's sniff stuff. It's check out the world kind of thing. That's how I walk with my dogs. But that's because my relationship with my dog have tons of structure away from that. We're training all the time.

Like, I've controlled their environment very specifically as the dog grows up. So a walk or a hike is a freedom thing for the dog. For the average person, they haven't constructed that basic relationship. They don't have structure in their dog's life. And so the walk is the only place to have it. So you have these people out trying to train on a walk. On the walk. Which is not an ideal thing. But it's the one point where you have a client and you have their undivided attention. You're not battling with other stuff. You and the dog are out for a walk. So stop at every curve. Make your dog sit. Make your dog do these other things that are happening there that should, in my opinion, be happening somewhere else. And then we wouldn't have all the issues you have out there. But people putting dogs out there before they should, like, when they don't have that relationship and the dog starts to focus externally and they're trying to reel it back in, the behavioral problems all start there. Yeah, I always make an analogy. I'm sorry, go ahead. My young dog has never been for a neighborhood walk. I can't. I'm trying to remember the last time I went for a walk in a neighborhood. And yet I trust him 100% to be out in open space, loose, free, doing doggy things. I think walking through the neighborhood is incredibly difficult. I mean, there's so much stuff. Plus, there's nothing interesting happening. Plus, he can't be free. So it ends up being this great big fight about, well, don't pull on the leash, but then you want to do this and then you have to walk my pace. I think a neighborhood walk is a very challenging thing for a lot of dogs. Yeah, I don't do it until my dogs are a year and a half old or two. Yeah. It's funny. When Brent and I went to St. Louis and we had spoken with J. Jack Larry Crone and Joel Silverman. And I think it was J. Jack who really, he has a funny way of adding life to words. And he made it make sense just how crazy when you really think about it. Like a dog is supposed to go out and just understand for some reason, they just are supposed to know already why they have to be attached to this piece of rope that's like a few feet long. And they can't do the things that they want to do. And we think it's weird when the dog doesn't get it. It is kind of fascinating when you look at it like that. Oh, yeah. And you're walking through unpredictable environments. Right. And very unnatural. All the cohabitation. Extremely unnatural. You have to be walking everything. You have to be on top of it because you're going to be surprised and you don't know.

Like we talk all the time about constructing attitudes about the world based on putting a dog in a situation that we can predict what's going to happen or we can expose them to something in a controlled way. A walk is the definition of an uncontrolled environment. You know, you come around the corner and somebody left their gate open and their dog comes running out into the street. Somebody, like, you don't know what's happening out there. And so that's advanced training. Like if we were training obedience, we'd say, don't put in the heavy distractions until you have the behavior constructed. Well, they're trying to construct them in that environment. It's wild. And that just became part of dog culture, right? A good dog owner walks their dog. And it just because it was either there or the backyard, right? And that kind of was the only way the dog got out of the thing. And to your point, it's like nowadays, like it's not a new thing, but like, you know, you definitely made like the video, like the power of playing tug and all that other stuff. So like play started becoming, even though it was already part of the sport world, like as far as teaching play, like I'll ask clients, I'll go, what's your intention when you play with your dog? And they go, to tire him out. And I go, and I'm like, that's kind of fucked up. Like, you don't want to have fun. You don't want to enjoy yourself. You don't want to go do anything. Like, you don't want to enjoy the dog. He said, like, if I were to play catch with my son, I'm not doing it to tire him out. I'm doing it so he gets better at catching. I'm doing it so we bond because I'm his dad and I want to teach him a skill, you know? That may be a byproduct, but it's definitely not. Yeah, he'll get tired for sure. Yeah. But it's just, it's interesting. And so some people have this dog culture in their head and they check these boxes. Like, okay, got good food, got good medication, sweet. And I walk the dog, so I'm a good dog owner. But as soon as we introduce concepts of play to the layman, they're just like, I never thought about it like that. And some of them aren't comfortable with throwing that play or throwing enrichment or throwing stuff into it. And it's, how did this happen? How did this happen? Because I think, you know, dog trainers are here with all this knowledge and all these options and all this spectrum of how things could be, right? And then dog owners are kind of stuck to whatever they were raised with or, you know, their ideals, their beliefs, what they see on the Disney Channel, et cetera, right? So how do we bridge, like...

I haven't thought about this, though. Yeah. So it wasn't that long ago that we just let dogs out the front door in the morning. So we didn't provide enrichment. The dogs took care of that themselves. So when I grew up, for sure, there were dogs all over the neighborhood. I never see dogs loose in my neighborhood. Now, it's very... If you do, you pick it up and you take it home. So the norm was that dogs got free or you lived in different environments. So now we have to provide for our dogs because they can't provide for themselves. And so somewhere, you know, in the old days, maybe if your dog spent all day doing its thing and then at night you went for a walk with the dog, that would have been a very different situation. Because now you actually are doing it with your dog. You are going for a walk. And as you just pointed out, you're not playing with your dog because it's your duty. You're doing it because, you know, I'm going to bring the dog along and then I'm going to tie it in front of the grocery store and I'm going to get my groceries. I did that when I was young. Please don't tar me. Like, somebody's going to hear that just play. How dare you? You're like, we knew it. It wasn't that weird. Like, you just tied them to the door and then you got your stuff. And most of the time it worked out okay. Sometimes it didn't. But anyway, that was life. We lived very differently. And we structure so much. And also, we also, again, getting back to the basic topic, when things do go wrong. Oh, see? See? You should know. You should know. What were you thinking taking your dog for a walk in your own neighborhood with corners where bad dogs can come around and attack your dog's athlete? Like, yeah, I didn't know. I got it wrong. And so we're a little afraid too. Yeah. Because we don't want to make those bad decisions. But we are responsible for making our dog's lives interesting in a completely different way than we were when we tossed him out the front door. Right. For sure. That's absolutely true. We live with dogs completely differently than when I was a kid too. It's 20, 30 years different. There's no doubt about it. I mean, it's... Just dogs in urban areas, people, our dogs are going with them everywhere. You know, like, dogs weren't sitting with people at coffee shops and stuff when I was a kid. Like, now people are taking their dogs everywhere in a way that they didn't before. And Denise is right. There were lots of people that, dog's a dog, you know? Throw him in the backyard. Or, oh, look, he got out of the backyard and went over to the neighbor's yard and played with their dogs.

Or did whatever the heck they did. There was that kind of lack of controlled thing. But we also weren't taking dogs into all the environments we're taking them into now. Right? Right. The urban dog thing is wild now. That people that would have had kids and be raising a family and their dog would be in the yard or living in the city and they're not deferring kids. And they have dogs and they're out with their dog walking. When I was in New York, like, 50% of the New Yorkers have dogs and they're all apartment dwellers. Yep. Like, you are walking out in that world. But that wasn't always the case. How much of behavioral incongruencies do you see? Like, you know, I'm trying to take this genetic dog and make him live this particular life and it doesn't fit, you know? How much of that adds to a lot of the behavioral problems that we deal with? Because in my mind, like, I always see, like, a spectrum of possibilities. Right? Like, oh, the dog could be an urban dog. But that takes a certain temperament. Right? I think you're on mute, Denise, if you were saying something. You're muted, Denise. Yeah. I actually think it's huge. Yeah. I think there are some fantastic dogs out there simply in the wrong home. A hundred percent. I think it's a common reality. You should have gotten a Labrador. Yeah. And I don't think it's wrong that you want to go to the dog park. I'm okay with it. I get it. And it's fine. It's a social thing. You drink your wine. Everybody's happy. But you shouldn't have gotten a cattle dog. Yeah. Right? And you didn't know. And you thought all dogs love to play with all dogs. And he loved to play with dogs when he was a puppy. And so it just seemed, I would actually say it's the majority of unhappiness in homes is that the wrong person got the wrong dog. I agree. A hundred percent. That's everything. It's the match is more important than the individual dog or individual person. Yeah. Like it's getting the right dogs in the right spaces. Because in my brain, like if I were to just create categories, like you have your urban dog who needs a certain genetic temperament. Right? Who low threshold or high threshold to stress and things like that. Right? Who is not going to even choose aggression as a potential coping mechanism. Right? And then you might have like just a house pet. Dog never leaves the house. You know? Or the property. And then you might have a dog who's a guard dog who kicks it in the dog run. You know? Like I grew up with five dogs in the backyard and they live to double digits. All of them. You know? Happy and dusty. But they were happy.

So I guess there's just so many different degrees of dog ownership. Like is it, do we educate people on temperaments? Like teaching them, like don't fit, don't try and fit, like manage their expectations. Take a square peg into a round hole. I said to someone legitimately yesterday that this dog, and I enjoyed the heck out of this dog. Super high drive. Like sweet. No, no, no sort of aggressive or even, even very competitive. I mean in a more confrontational type of competitive, um, very competitive. Like the dog loved to tug, but the dog was just, and it was a cattle dog by the way. It was nipping mom, not angrily, but nipping mom out of play when she would play with her daughter. Her daughter's like a small toddler and she'd like swing her in a circle. Like, you know, like parents do. And so I'm thinking tug toy, tug toy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My initial thought is don't swing your daughter in front of your dog. Like that's where my brain goes. And I told her exactly because she had trained a previous dog. Like the owner herself knew a lot about like training, you know, she was all about tool, this tool, that tool, you know, and, and she knew a lot. So I was just talking with the dog and I think they were pissed because they were like, we paid this for this, you know, cause I'm sitting here playing with their dog, but I'm trying to make, make it make sense to them why this is as important as it is. And I, and I made the comment to them. I was like, man, this dog is fun. Like he'd, he'd be a great dog in like Montana and a ranch somewhere, you know? Yeah. But he's just a very sweet, very high driven, extremely intelligent, energetic little cattle dog, you know? And it's hard to knock the dog for, for being how he is. I would differentiate though, between dogs that have a mental problem. Yes. And dogs that are temperament. And right now I think there's a lot of dogs out there. Mental health issues. That have mental health issues. Anxiety is not helpful to any dog in any circumstance. It's not fun. Right. Right. Um, that kind of basic reactivity where the dog is so unable to regulate and it's perpetually walking from window to window, barking and angry that to me, there's no good home for that dog because the dog is suffering, which is different from a dog that really it's a perfectly happy dog. It just needs its needs met. And I think it, maybe it's helpful to think in terms of those two buckets of mentally healthy and stable and adaptable behavior versus mentally unhealthy and harmful. And there's really no place where that dog's.

And am I, am I incorrect in thinking the only way you figure that out is by running the dog through some training protocols to like, see, is this getting better? Is this getting worse? I think so. You know what I mean? Because that's the big thing is as most all dog trainers listening to this, it's like, we, it's hard to assess until we've tried our best to develop fundamentals, fundamental skills. And then we can reassess and be like, oh, it's going to work. Well, and a baseline, an observable baseline. It's like, it's like any other scientific, you know, experimentation. It's like, well, we have to, we have to do this and see if the outcome is the same or different. Because the big fear is like being that novice dog trainer who goes, actually, you know, I listened to that dog trainers podcast and Denise said, Fenzie said low threshold for aggression. And this 10 week old puppy has, you know what I mean? Like that's our biggest fear as, as people coming up with this. So like, if I run the dog through development, if I allow the dog to mature, if I have the ability and then we assess, okay, this dog's a little off or this dog is, you know, what, what's in a nutshell, you guys, I think, I think the, the benefit, the advantage is I've always been of the, of the thought process that sport trainers, competition trainers have always been way ahead of the curb in, in all kinds, like even in just play, people have been, people in the sport world are like, yeah, it plays new to pet obedience. Oh, you know, but in all understandings of genetics, of different breeding, of, of the importance of how to properly raise a pup, even to test dogs temperaments in order to see if they can even do this stuff in the first place, let alone dog training in a nutshell, teaching behaviors. I mean, who does that better than someone who has to do really meticulous things that are highly scrutinized by a judge because of, you know, 10 other dogs are doing the exact same thing. So I think with that in mind, that in my opinion is what pet dogs, pet dog trainers rather don't necessarily have is one sort of unified set of expectations. Now the problem is I don't, I don't want, I don't say that too literally. I don't want people to think if your dog can sit and lay down and basically pass like an AKC good citizen test, then it's automatically a safe or smart dog to hold on to. I just think that a sort of baseline system of standards like this serves as the beginning of the test, not the end. Now that the dog can do this, can do this, can do this.

How difficult was it for the manager, for the handler to manage to get it done? Or how much did the dog even enjoy this? What's the likelihood that the owners can do this long-term considering the human error and everything else? That's what I mean by training is a sort of a funnel. It's a baseline and you test the different outcomes. And the more experienced trainers get, the more they start to put two and two together. Like, oh, you know, this dog's struggling a little more than maybe they should. And that's why we were ultimately asking you guys, where is that line? Or is that, you know, or does it depend on, you know, at what point is a dog struggling enough? How do we manage that situation? I'd be weary. Right. Exactly. I think you hit on a couple of interesting things there. One is absolutely this idea that we would love to be able to test a dog up front, go through some battery of tests that's going to tell me if this dog's going to have a behavioral problem or it's going to be suitable for a given environment. And dog trainers, working dog trainers, service dog breeding programs, all of them have worked very hard to try to come up with a universal test. My personal experience over the years is that the test has to be putting the dog through some process, that you have to see how the dog's going to respond. A test at a given point is a snapshot in time. And if you're relying on that to predict behavior long term, you'll be right sometimes and you'll be wrong a whole bunch too, right? And really, if I'm evaluating a dog for protection work, I can't say in one session if the dog's suitable. You have to put the dog through the process a little bit and dogs that looked unsuitable switch gears and really progress rapidly and beautifully. Dogs that looked really good sort of plateau and don't get any better or even drop off in some fashion. And so those kind of obvious predictability things are hard, really hard for us to get. And so I think you're right. We have to put the dog through some part of process before you make this decision. And if we're talking about euthanasia, wouldn't it be great to have a predictive test where you could say, this dog, no matter what we do, is going to be a behavior issue and we can just euthanize it now and not put all this resource and energy and time into it? It's not possible. You have to put them through until you run up it. And where the cutting line is, is the gray place that we've all been talking about. Yeah. It's the whole situation. It's not just the dog. It's the whole situation. Yeah.

And especially with a puppy, because I tell people my order of selection is pedigree, parents, puppy. So if I can know, if I can only know one thing, you give me a whole litter, you can pick anything you want, but you're not going to know anything about it. You're not going to know breed versus only the pedigree, only the parents. I put the most weight on the pedigree. And then I look at the parents and I would rather take any random puppy from a litter where I have that information than pick any puppy when I don't have information. Because I just find, I mean, even an eight-week-old Maltese puppy will play tug. That doesn't mean it's going to grow up to be a protection dog, right? So I just put a lot of weight that way. I mean, I've met some Malteses that try to protect the shit out of the house. Well, it's a great tug. But in terms of these unknowns, which makes things so much more complicated, I mean, there are certain things that would have been huge red flags in my own breeding program if I saw them at eight weeks, just because I kind of knew what my dogs were like. And there were also puppies that I knew they would be fine, even though they showed behaviors that an outsider would have been concerned. Maybe fearful, a little slow to warm up, a little unsure about new people. Maybe they failed their temperament test miserably because they don't like strangers. If your dog doesn't like strangers and you do a temperament test that has a stranger come in, you actually don't see how the dog would be with a grounded source. But if the owner does the temperament test, you actually would see how the dog performs when it's comfortable with a person. And that's important information for me. So when I did temperament tests, I did them myself. And then I did a stranger test separately because I felt I got better information. But when you're talking about some random eight week old puppy from the shelter, but then the other issue is how much time does a person involve itself? And, you know, putting a dog down after six months or a year of hard work and training and putting your heart in it is crappy. And, you know, I don't know how long you go. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that was something that I dealt with just recently last month. Dog I trained for a year and a half. Dog had severe leash reactivity at four months of age. Then at eight months of age, it turned into controlling the UPS guy and all this other stuff. And then the dog bit his first person at nine months. And then it just started, you know, I love the hell out of this dog. Did I meet this dog at the park? Kevin. Yeah. You met Kevin. Wow. Wow. Yeah.

And that's the other thing you're touching on it. There are, I've, all of us that have been training for any length of time have encountered dogs that were not going to be safe or suitable or have a good life with where they were. And you could have taken the dog yourself and done the things that were needed for that dog. You could structure their life and have the management pieces in place. You could do the training and that dog would be. But you don't want, you like, you don't want the dog either. Like the dog's not like, so the people that can handle or have the skills and the lifestyle to handle those dogs, they already have their own dogs. They're full. Like those don't grow on trees. So that's the practicality of it. Is there a theoretical home out there that the dog could succeed in? Sure. There's a theoretical home. Are you actually going to find it? Is there going to be easy to get this dog that's got no skills and behavioral issues? Are you going to get the dog into that home? No, you're not likely to. So there's just a purely practical decision at that point. You also said something earlier, Michael, about also what is the dog's history. So let's say you have an eight-week-old puppy that's always lived in a crate kennel situation, come out to work, gone back to a crate kennel. It's all it knows. Yes. When you're talking about somebody's pet dog who has lived as an integrated member of the house, and now at two years of age, it's quite a problem. And so clearly it can't stay in a family situation. But then you really have to ask yourself about quality of life. Are you now going to take that dog who's lived as a pet and just to keep it alive? Are you going to put it in a crate kennel situation so that you can say you didn't euthanize? I know everybody has their own opinions about quality of life. I talked to a friend of mine who believes in sanctuary. I do not believe in sanctuary. So sanctuary are these places where dogs go and they cannot be around people and dogs. I don't see the point of staying alive until you die. I don't think that's the purpose of living. Living isn't waiting to die. That's like prison. You know, life sentences. Well, it's exactly what it is, yeah? So I fall very heavily on the quality of life side of this equation. And I'm not a big fan of keeping dogs alive so that you can say you did it. If it means that they're going to live in a way which, in their mind, they have a reference point, is so radically different from what they might have had. And I do think that maybe we don't talk about that side as much, that what did it know? And now what does it know?

Important point. It matters. It matters. No, that's huge. You're right. Quality of life is the ultimate measuring stick. Like, and that's going to mean different things for different people. And we have to be okay with that, right? What I say it all the time, like the dogs that I keep in my house would be a disaster for most people to have them. And to me, I can't imagine anything better. And there are things that my dogs do that I find charming, that somebody else would find totally annoying and destructive to their life, right? And that doesn't bother me at all. And so everybody's going to have that to some degree. And so what's the background you're holding it against? And this is the point where we were talking before about not putting your idea of what a perfect relationship on a dog and person is on them, projecting that, our judgment on that stuff. You have to make that choice yourself, personally. Can I ask you guys, since we started talking a bit about rescue and no-kill options and things like this, I'm sure you guys have come across, actually, I know you guys have come across this at some point. Sometimes rescues are no-kill because it's either important for a nonprofit to keep a certain image with the public or because sometimes it's a matter of funding. What are your guys' thoughts on that? It drives me insane. It's one of the things that aggravates me. It's just like somebody allying themselves with a specific training methodology just because they know they can sell it. So they know if they say this, they're going to get more donations and they can be sort of picky about what dogs they let in. So, and then the people that are doing the hard work, the county shelters and things like that, where they have to take your dogs because they're a community service, they're the ones taking the brunt of all of this. They're the ones having to make the decisions about what dogs are euthanized. And it's happening somewhere. You're just not doing it. You're kicking the can down the road and it drives me nuts. I can't stand it. And these poor people burn out. How many county shelter or ex-county shelter people have you guys met that just could only do it for like six months. And after putting X many dogs and cats down, they're done. That's depressing. I actually know of two situations. One is running a very large county shelter, which is mostly no kill. And another is running a more private organization. And they have dogs they need to put to sleep, but they cannot. Because if they do, there are people in the environment, in the society, who will, honest

to God, terrorize these people, call them all night, call the police, make up stories. Look, once a dog- I think those people should adopt the dogs. Exactly. And then get back to us. Oh my God, poor Fluffy. Yeah. And they whitewash the truth. And then the press likes this because it's exhausting. It's scary to me how much a 1% militant population can terrorize good people into making bad decisions because they are so understandably afraid of the ramifications. Or in one case, they rely extremely heavily on environmental, the donations from the community. The community is very vested in the, oh my goodness, poor Fluffy, we should save them all. And they have the money. So the shelter needs the money from these people. So it's not that they don't want to do the right thing, but they can't afford to lose their funding completely, have it wiped out. And in the other case that I'm thinking of, it's actually because the militants will literally terrorize them and totally twist everything out of proportion. To me, it's a tragedy. It is. And that these tiny numbers of people who have no information can stir people up into such a stew and using social media and all, that they create something that absolutely is not the reality of the situation. And if 99% of the population knew what the truth was, like the reason that dog was being euthanized, they'd all be like, yeah, it's a no brainer. Yeah. It's very sad. And I think it's incredibly harmful. And I don't know anybody in those situations that wants to do it. But that's the other thing. Right. Like, we're doing the hard work of making the final decisions. We're the ones that are actually having to execute it. But nobody wants to. I don't know a single person that would work in any of those environments that they're like, yay, we get to put a bunch of dogs down. Oh, yeah. But that's the way it gets treated to some degree. Like, oh, yeah, you chose to do this because you wanted to. Yeah. It's like, no, the position had to be filled. Yeah. And it's fascinating to see people build their boogeymen around it. Like, everybody's heard of the, like, balance trainer who's extremely, like, I'm not talking, like, acceptable training, normal, you know, methodology. We're talking about people who, like you talked about in the beginning, the dog lives in a crate, lives in just an inhumane system. And everybody's also heard about the, you know, the force-free trainer who believes. In death before discomfort. I'd rather, yeah, I'd immediately recommend the dog get put down. And, you know, like, everybody's heard of both of those things, right? Yeah.

And it is fascinating to see how people kind of use those as reasons to justify their own thoughts on the, you know, oh, well, this rescue, they don't even let trainers do whatever. So, of course, they're putting, you know, and they kind of come up with their own justification as to why these people have to make these tough decisions. I wanted to get your guys' thoughts on people in the rescue world in a nutshell, like you were talking about right now, Denise, sometimes can be very, like, emotional and erratic in that way. Now, I understand you're talking not about the people in the rescue, but people who were just in the rescue world. I think it's a mess. I don't, I mean, I don't even know where to start with that conversation. There is so much people's personal traumas and their lives that gets brought into this picture. And my God, they would have put me to sleep as a child if I had been this. There's, there's so much in there, so much unhealthiness in there. There are so many fantastic people who opt out after a year because they're like, this, these people are crazy. And it's not that rescue is bad. And it's, there are so many good things that come from it, but I actually avoid the entire, the entire thing because I get so overwhelmed by the amount of emotional responsiveness to everything. And, you know, if I say I like red, I'm not saying I don't like blue. And yet there is a lot of that in those communities. So, um, I, I actually avoid, that's my solution is just to pretend like it doesn't exist. And I, I'm sure that's not the healthiest thing. And I will certainly talk about it, but I, I get overwhelmed by the largeness of the problem and the number of directions where it, it falls apart. Yeah. I agree completely. And it's, it's, you can sympathize with the spark that starts the whole thing that gets somebody thinking that way. It's the same. Like whether it's PETA or animal rights stuff and things like that, I'm sensitive to the, the, the, whatever it is in society and our way of being that sparks people's desire to step in and do that stuff. Like I'm, I don't want to kill anything. Like I move black widows around my house. I don't, I don't kill shit. Relocate snakes. And I, I, I think the natural world's incredible and all, every living creature in it has value down to the bacteria and everything else about it. And they're interconnected. And so when we see bad things happening to dogs and dogs that have bad things and environmental issues in the same way, I understand the impulse to do something about that or feel like you are, but it's always a radically oversimplified solution.

So much so that it's detrimental. It's so oversimplified. It's so black and white that it actually is harm causing because you can't acknowledge the complexity. This is a whole, a whole level of complexity and you have to take each individual case on its face and you have to be willing to say that there's a point at which this dog needs to be put down or we would like, that's a bridge too far, but it's, it's, it's the black and white oversimplification of everything. And we were dealing with it in every aspect. A dog in rescue doesn't yet have a home. And I think this is incredibly important to internalize until someone loves that dog and wants to commit. You are in a completely different place from a dog who is looking for a home because now you are suggesting that dog to somebody else. So you better be sure that person wants what you are subjecting them to. And that requires honesty at a level that's a little bit missing in some of the, uh, placement, you know, Oh, by the way, he's bitten 18 people, right? As an afterthought after the dog's been in the home a week. So honesty has to be front and center. And I think we always need to remember that dogs without homes should not be given the same degree of consideration for strictly pragmatic reasons as dogs inside of a home where they have an advocate who is committed 100% to making it better. Absolutely. Agreed. Would you say a lot of these policies, uh, not policy again, it's not as it's more of a mindset, right? So, you know, we hear the cliche, like I like dogs more than people, right? Especially in the animal industry and the vet industry and any animal industry. Right. But there's kind of, uh, I wrote these notes down and it said, you know, love, the love of dogs super like is, uh, overrides, uh, the love for people, the love for self. Right. And that's how people will end up putting themselves in a situation where they're going to suffer for extended periods of time or they're going to allow other people to suffer. And it always brings me back to your quote, um, Denise, where you're like, these people have like community has rights, you have rights, your dog has rights. And it, and it's, it, it, it's a balancing, it's a balancing act. And it's hard for people who are in it to change their mindset. You know what I mean? And, and one thing I've learned is I've learned to love people significantly more through my career. Like, you know, you go from being like, I was this insecure 18 year old dog trainer who was just like, fuck everybody. You guys don't understand. I'm here to save dogs.

And then you were like, but I love human beings and I love, and I love families and I love children and I love, and I love the, or maybe these people just aren't as careless as I thought they were. Yeah. Yeah. Not only do I love people, I prioritize people over dogs. And so I'm just going to put that right out there and say it. I value human beings over dogs. We do not euthanize old people, even though I think we've all probably had some experiences now in life where we wonder horrible things. Well, you know, I'm telling you, you deal with the seriously demented person and you start thinking about how we let dogs go peacefully. No, I lost three of my grandparents this year to dementia. Exactly. And you know about suffering and I do prioritize people over dogs. And if I was in a place where decisions were being made, I would probably be clear about that in that situation. Yeah. I think you have to come down. I feel about dogs and people the same. I love them individually and I dislike them collectively. I can get on board with that. As soon as you try taking the whole into consideration, suddenly there's all kinds of complexity and difficulties and human beings are awful collectively and generally speaking, trying really hard and varying degrees of lovely on an individual basis if you really take the time to do it. And dogs are very similar. Right. That's the kind of thing that the average person, they say, oh, I love dogs. Like, I so love dogs. I want to pet every dog they see. But the people that are really into dogs, they don't do that. Yeah. You're not interested. I'm not interested in touching your dog if I don't know your dog in that sense. If the dog and I have a dialogue and develop an individual relationship, then absolutely. Yeah. But that just blanket kind of way of being there. And I think that it's important that we, that's why the relationship in the home, to Denise's point about a dog that's in a home, in a relationship, is a different question than this abstract dog out here that we don't have that relationship with. Because that changes everything. Right. It changes how we perceive it. It changes the commitment to the process. It changes the value of that creature to some degree. Yeah. Maybe it shouldn't. Yeah. But it does. Right. So you guys brought up right in the beginning, which I think is great. And I want to maybe see if we can close on this question. You brought up being an idealistic, but also pragmatic. Right. And another way that I would interpret it would be being hopeful, like having hope, but at the same time being realistic. Right.

And, you know, I can agree that all four of us here on this podcast, we're not negative Nancy's. Well, you know, like we're not pessimistic people. We want the best. We want to, how do we spread hope? How do we teach trainers to stay hopeful? Stay working hard. Stay on tasks. Just keep improving every day. But at the same time, to stay anchored into reality and not get caught up in the bullshit. I think it's a, it's a dog training to me is the, it's 100% process driven. Like if you are concerned what accolades or feedback you're getting from the environment outside of that, what people are saying and whether people think you're good or bad or any of that kind of stuff. And if you're very particularly goal oriented, that I would say, I want this dog to be this and I want to get there. And I want the finished product as soon as possible. If you don't like the day to day part of getting up and interacting in it, then it's not the thing for you. That's where you live in this. And so anybody that's interested in dog training, to me, in order to not get burned out and to be able to handle these really difficult questions and the fact that people aren't necessarily going to take your advice or they're not going to follow through or they're going to make mistakes or they'll totally disregard it. They'll say bad things about you afterwards or without, without knowledge. Then you have to focus on the process. You have to focus. And if you like getting up every day and having that interaction with the dog, if you like the repetitive kind of nature of that, then focus on that. That's what it's all about. You'll do good work and the other stuff will take care of itself. But if you let that noise in and you particularly think like you get the complex, like I'm going to control this, I'm going to turn it, then I'm going to get to this goal by this amount of time, then you're going to be unhappy and it's going to be a difficult road for you. Boy, I'm glad Michael went first because I was like, oh no. I actually really like the way you presented that. And I think that maybe applies to people who own difficult dogs as well. When you realize that I love working with my dogs is quite literally the highlight of my day. And when people say to me, well, what do you do when you're not motivated? I'm like, no, you don't understand. Getting out of bed is about training my dog. Like that is what drives me. It is what I love. And really it's even true when my dog's challenging me. It doesn't mean that all my days are good. Everybody has a head in the bucket day.

But on balance, I feel like training dogs brings joy and movement forward. And I guess if you get to the point as a dog owner or as a trainer where you're in process with this dog and you realize that you aren't having joy anymore, owning a dog is supposed to be a joyful event. When you realize that you cannot enjoy this dog, you cannot move forward in process and stay wanting to do this over the long run, unless you got a carrot, because that carrot may never happen. If you can't stay in process and you're trying and you realize that the dog is actually sucking you down rather than allowing it, because I see people on social media who love the process with their dogs. They've been doing it for years. They are progressing. And for them, that process brings enough good that I think it makes it good and they can stay in the game and they can love the dog. But I think when you realize that without a goal, something out there that you're actually harming yourself, your life, you're worse off, then I think that's maybe a good time to at least start really sitting down and having conversations with your family, your trainer, your friends, and recognizing that, as Michael said, I'm sure Michael and I know this in spades. If you spend too much energy worrying about what other people are telling you you think or you do or who you are, you will not succeed in this industry. You have got to have an anchor. You have to have a direction. You have to believe in yourself. You have to go forward. Believe you're doing the right thing. Eat it because you're going to make mistakes. Own it that you're going to screw things up on occasion. Apologize. Keep going. If you start getting to a point where your errors cause you to second guess yourself, you stop speaking, you stop adding value to your community. The moment you only say what everybody else says because you don't want to get shit is the moment you've actually stopped adding value. So you're going to have to find a way, dig inside of yourself to say, what do I care about? And then have the adultness to be able to say, I made a mistake when you made a mistake. And just stay there and ignore the, because the noise is going to come. The noise is always going to come from the outside. You're just going to have to find a way not to hear the noise. I love that response because it ties in what you're saying now with what Michael was saying right in the beginning about addiction or obsession, personality traits that dogs may have, but obviously people have them too. And I just wanted to give you guys my favorite, the favorite definition of an addiction that I've

ever heard was from an ex-addict. And it was when you do something to the point to that it no longer serves you, it's no longer good for you, but you continue anyway, that's an addiction. Interesting. Yeah. It's true. And well, I guess that like the biological mechanism, well, gosh, we could, this is not a wrapping up conversation. Well, let's get into neuroscience real quick. Not a whole part of wrapping up, but you just started to. Michael brings out a book like, you know, it's funny. Oh, yeah. It's, it's, uh, it, to the last thing that Denise said too, immediately gets me thinking that there's a, the importance of being able to tune out the noise. Don't pay attention to the people that are criticizing you. Don't pay too much attention to the people that are saying fabulous things about you either. Like that's not healthy for you either. It's good. You want to feel like you have worth, but you can get too connected to that idea as well. But while doing that, you also have to stay open to new information and the fact that you may be wrong. So how do you tread this tight rope or walk this tight rope of, uh, self-belief and a commitment and not being shaken just because somebody says something bad while still being able to take on board appropriate criticism that can help you move forward. And I'm not saying I, I have an answer to this, but that you're, you're asking for a lot of conflicting things that, that like, don't listen to these people, but there's going to be somebody out there that has an important criticism of what you're doing. And you have to be able to take that on board and you have to be able to sort that one out from the nonsense, the people that the haters or whatever you want to call it, the people that are just there to, to make a comment or they're, they're projecting. They don't know anything about what you're talking about. Right. And it's a hard thing to do. That would be, I think that would be like your community, like who you surround yourself with. Your community is essential. You know, who you, who you surround yourself with, are you surrounding yourself with negative, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to turn this into a self-help podcast. Well, people that, people whose opinions you respect. Exactly. And, and we got. Make, make that one matter to you. Yeah. We got, we are so privileged as hosts of this podcast to even know people like you guys. And so like to be able to sit here and have conversations with you guys, bounce ideas, you know, off of, off of you and make us smarter, make our audience smarter. And just, uh, we're very thankful.

So thank you guys so much for just being on this podcast and, and help, helping us unpack this really tough subject. Thank you. We hope this was helpful for a lot of people. Cool. So appreciate being here. Thank you all. Thank you so much. Actually, if you guys are going to do that thing where you guys have wine, maybe invite us to one of them. We'd love to. I've been trying to see Michael once or twice. And then I realize you guys are really close. Maybe we'll go and see you guys soon. Telling you Corona commercial. Yeah. Corona. Four beers clanging on the beach. Cool guys. Well, we want to thank you guys so much for joining us. This is episode 17. Our behavior euthanasia, our behavioral euthanasia episode. Uh, we want to thank our special guests, Michael Ellis and Denise Fenzi for joining us. Um, again, my name is Brent Labrada. That guy is Mariano Alvarez and we will see you guys on the next episode. Peace. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you guys. Thank you for listening to the dog trainers podcast, a podcast created by dog trainers for dog trainers, or anyone who's ever fallen in love with man's best friend. We really hope that you enjoyed this episode and can't wait to be back with you guys. Be sure to follow us at dog trainers podcast on Tik TOK, Instagram, and YouTube. And don't forget to punch the hell out of that subscribe button and leave us a review. Remember guys, this is your podcast. You're the best listeners in the world, and we'll see you next time.