<![CDATA[에피소드 32 - 좌절에서 집중으로: 더 스마트한 반려견 훈련에 대해 말하는 마이클 엘리스]]>

But they weren't bought into the whole process at all. Like, they're like, what are you doing to me? They had to figure it out kind of on the job. And it was stressful if it was done incorrectly and kind of adversarial even if it was done correctly. And the dog wasn't bought in and trying to figure out what it was supposed to do from you. And there was no kind of attention on you that made them pick up on a lot of the little details that we wanted them to. So I realized in that process relatively early on when we started doing especially a lot more reward-based training in the late 80s and early 90s, that it was a benefit if you spent some time just teaching the dog to pay attention to you before you tried to teach them skills. That way, they kind of bought into the whole training process. They said, ah, hey, this is fun. I'm enjoying this. You're giving me things that I like. The dog was focused. They were looking at you. They're watching you. They're waiting to see what's happening next. And it put them kind of in a perfect mindset to take on the information. And if you have a dog that's disengaged with you, you're, it's, I like, I like the example I use all the time. It's like if I were lecturing to a group of students and somebody staring out the window, daydreaming of going on vacation, right? They're not taking in the information that I'm giving them. And so I sort of applied that same theory to dogs. And so we kind of front load how we train with just teaching the dog to pay attention to us, what we call engagement, right? And the way we do that, there's a variety of ways we do it to manipulate the dog's motivation, certainly. A lot of times in the early stages, we're using food, but it doesn't have to be. I do it with toys as well. Play relationships is an important thing for us, but you can do it through play as well. But in a larger sense for all dogs, you can use food for most of the beginnings of this. And we simply start out by giving the dog some rewards, getting them connected to us, and giving rewards kind of rapidly for a short period of time, what we call a high rate of reinforcement, where the rewards come really quickly, so that the dog starts to get connected and they're anticipating another reward. And that puts them in the position to be manipulated relatively easily. And we're not kind of competing with the environment as much. The dog's tuning other things out, not paying attention to distractions or paying attention to us, and they learn more efficiently.

And in the beginning, you're starting in an environment with significantly less distractions, I would imagine, correct? Always, yeah. So when I start, typically we have the training lab, which is basically some place we can go that is free of distractions for the dog. It's safe for me to let the dog off a leash, so I'm not having to physically control them with a leash. One of the things that I want with my dogs is the leash is going to become a super important piece of the training puzzle as we move forward. But in the early stages of training, I would prefer that the dog kind of volunteer to work with me. And when I have a leash on the dog, I'm kind of restricting their movements. So a lot of times, we set up a space where there's no distractions. I can drop my leash or take the leash off the dog and just teach the dog that paying attention to us is fun, right? And you get things for being attentive to us. And then once we've got that, we can transfer that skill to new environments. And that makes, so the dogs are really bought into the process by the time we go someplace where there are distractions or we bring distractions into our training space. We do it both ways, right? Yep. And so with the engagement training or also known as charging or loading the marker, the primary goal is to get the dog invested, interested in the training, and then also getting them classically conditioned to the sound or the marker or the condition reinforcer that's going to predict the reward. Now, when you're doing this, is there a certain point when you look at the dog and you say, okay, this dog is on the path to being classically conditioned? Because we know it's a spectrum. It's not. They are or they're not. Yep. They can be more conditioned. And then you start introducing new things? Or do you randomly toss in or start training sessions with a brief exercise of engagement training just to get the dog into that mindset to learn, even if they are more advanced in the training? Yeah. So a couple of things that I would talk about here. One is the charging of our markers or what I call the building of our communication system, our conditioned reinforcers and conditioned punishers are happening sort of in tandem with the engagement work. You can do engagement work without using markers, right? But markers are high. Well, and we may get into talking about this, but they're very useful as we move forward through our training. And so those two things are kind of parallel processes. At the same time, I'm teaching you about engagement and paying attention to me.

I'm also teaching you what these sounds mean through the use of classical conditioning. And I don't really pay much attention to when the dog has a conditioned response to the marker, right? I'm just kind of going off the dog's energetics in a sense, meaning I'm bringing the dog out. The dog looks. I feed the dog a couple of times. The dog looks at me. I say, yes, I move and I feed them. And I feed them once or twice. And I stop again. And they look at me and I say, yes, I move. And we're just basically I'm simultaneously charging a marker or building a conditioned reinforcer there. My yes marker that's going to predict reward through Pavlovian classical conditioning. And I'm also rewarding the dog for looking at me and paying attention to me. And so those two things are happening. And if that's going well, the dog's really motivated and they're very connected and they're looking at me. I may start actually teaching them something sooner. I may start luring them a little bit or I might put out a foot target or a place bed and kind of get them up on it and feed them on that. So I can kind of multitask a little bit if the dog's really bought in. If the dog isn't so bought in, like they're meaning they'll take a reward and then they look around and they wander off and they kind of make their way back. You know, I like to measure engagement by how the dog behaves right after I give them a reward. Right. So if I give the dog a reward, what do they do right after that? Do they take the reward and they're right there going, come on, come on, come on, give me another one. Or do they go like look around, they check stuff out and kind of find their way back to me. If they check stuff out, that's kind of normal in the beginning. But that means they're not fully connected to me. They're not fully invested yet. And so one dog might take multiple sessions of just engagement and marker charging before I really worried about teaching them anything. And another dog in one or two sessions might be like, I'm into this. Let's go. And so I start giving them a little bit of something to do. And the more you do this, the more comfortable you get sort of multitasking. And in the beginning, I tell people like, don't worry. Don't get ahead of yourself. Don't worry too much about that. Just worry about getting the dog to pay attention to you. But as you get better, you're like, OK, I got the dog here. The dog's attentive. Let's let's do a little luring, too. Let's toss in a recall or whatever we're going to do. And we will start to build some behavior, too.

And talking about verbal markers, which is I've heard you say plenty of times it's the same as clicker training. We're just using our voice instead of a tool like a clicker. You train countless trainers and dog trainers within the sport world. What are some of the pitfalls that you've seen or some of the struggles that a new trainer experiences when trying to use a verbal marker within their training system? Yeah. So the classic mistakes are the mistakes of overshadowing and blocking where people are moving or delivering rewards simultaneously with the marker. That's a classic problem that people have. And so they think their dog is responding through Pavlovian conditioning to the marker. But really, it's being overshadowed by the physical movements. And overshadowing or blocking is for those that are unfamiliar. Simply, if I give the dog two inputs at the same time, whichever input is more relevant to the dog will overshadow or block the dog's responsiveness to the other. And so if I'm trying to make the dog attentive to a verbal cue that I might give, right? Yes is my marker that's going to predict reward. And I do it simultaneously with giving the reward. Then not only do I not get any Pavlovian conditioning or classical conditioning. Classical conditioning. The sound has to precede the reward. But also, my movements overshadow the verbal sound. Because dogs are less verbal than we are. They're not verbal at all, actually, right? So dogs are more attentive to physical prompts than they are to verbal prompts. And so that's one of the big mistakes that people make. The mechanics of it, right? And then the other thing that I see as people begin to understand them is one of the liberating things about a marker is that it allows me to defer the reward for sometimes extended periods of time, numbers of seconds, right? I can mark a behavior and reward the dog five or ten seconds later and still have that be effective, right? And so lots of people are in such a hurry to get the reward to the dog that they're constantly doing things like putting their hand in their pouch to get the treat out to be ready. They're standing in such a way that's telegraphing that a reward's coming to the dog. And that gets people in trouble as well, right? You want the dog's behavior to then produce the reward. And I don't have to be right there ready to give the reward once my dog understands that. But at the beginning, of course, I do. I have to say yes, and the reward has to follow relatively quickly on the heels of that while the dog's being conditioned.

But once they're conditioned, I don't have to be in a big rush to get the reward to them. I can mark, I can move, and then I can deliver the reward a number of seconds later. So that's the common mistakes are the overshadowing and blocking mistakes that people use, right? And then another common mistake is the fact that people are in too big a hurry to get the reward to the dog. So they're somehow physically telegraphing the dog that the reward is coming by manipulating, reaching for their pouch or something like that. And once the dog sees that movement, they're already thinking about the reward. So they're going to ignore the verbal marker, or even if they were using a clicker. Yeah, or it might actually impact the behavior, right, that I'm trying to teach. My dog's going to sit, and I start to do that, and my dog starts to tense up and lean forward in anticipation of the reward because they know it's coming now because I'm reaching for my pocket at the same as I'm getting ready to mark, right? And now, by the time I actually do mark and reward the dog, maybe they're not sitting the way I wanted. Maybe their butt came up off the ground, or maybe they scooted forward a little bit, or there's some other criteria that might be damaged by it as well. So that's one of the things in dog training that markers allow us to do is to really watch the criteria of what the dog's doing, what I'm trying to teach them to do, and then prevent anticipation of reward from damaging those behaviors. Because I don't have to be so fast with the reward. I can make sure you do it right. I can mark it, and then I can take a second to pay you. And by doing that, the reward itself doesn't start to damage the behavior that I'm trying to create, right? And that happens a lot for people. Sorry. Yeah, that's a good point. That's something that I think confuses a lot of new trainers in the beginning. Something I commonly ask new students of dog training is, if the dog, let's assume, is classically conditioned to the marker, and you mark a behavior, how long do you have to deliver the reward after marking that behavior before we lose the connection? And I've had lots of trainers say, oh, we have an extra second or 1.3 seconds I've heard often. I ask this to my dog training clients or my pet clients, and they'll say things like three seconds, two seconds, four seconds. What is your response to that? So I think you have to look at two separate situations here. When we're conditioning the marker, when we're teaching the animal what the conditioned reinforcer is, what this sound means,

then the reward should come close on the heels of it, right? As close as possible. Under two seconds for sure, right? And the closer to the sound it happens without being simultaneous, the better off you are during the conditioning part. After the dog's conditioned, meaning they understand this, and they're bought into training, and they've had potentially hundreds of pairings of this sound and the reward, right? So there's a very strong association at that point. Now, the amount of time that can elapse before the reward can be wildly dependent on what happens in that intervening space. So my dog could be a football field away, and I could tell my dog, yes, and he can get up, and he's got to come all the way over to me to get a reward. So the actual reward, the primary reward, he doesn't get maybe for five seconds or eight seconds. Who knows how long that is, right? He's still going to associate it with that behavior. So in application, as long as a bunch of other stuff doesn't happen in intervening space, and the dog is simply anticipating and trying to access the reward, that time period can be quite a bit longer. And we frequently begin to do this on purpose. I say, yes, I release my dog. I move, and I walk five steps over this way, and then I pause, and then I get the reward out and deliver it to the dog, right? And by delaying that reward, then the anticipation of that reward isn't affecting my behavior in the same way. And I got wildly dependent. If something else happens in between, and the dog breaks off attention and starts to pay attention to something else, then it'll become ineffective, right? They didn't get the reward. But assuming they stay connected, and they're sitting there staring at me like, where's my reward? Where's my reward? Where's my reward? Then quite a bit of time can elapse, right? And that's one of the things that's so powerful about markers. Like, there's a variety of things that are, of course, but it allows me to very precisely tell the dog, that right there, that's what I wanted to reward, right? But also, that ability to defer the primary reward is very powerful, and it allows me to remove rewards out of sight and things like that, right? And going back to what you're saying about overshadowing, another thing that I've learned from you studying your material is the concept of learned irrelevance. If someone is doing a lot of that pairing unintentional, where they're overshadowing the physical cue and the marker they're doing at the same time, could that impact that concept of learned irrelevance?

And how else is learned irrelevance something that a new trainer should be aware of when working within the world of dog training? How does it impact their training? Yeah, I would say that learned irrelevance doesn't have much to do with overshadowing and blocking. What learned irrelevance is, is dogs are constantly trying to figure out what's human beings too, for that matter, trying to figure out what things are meaningful to them. What things in your environment mean things, mean they're going to predict something that's meaningful to you, right? And for dogs, a lot of the stuff that comes out of our mouth is not meaningful to them in any way. We talk around dogs all the time, and 99% of it has nothing to do with them. So they very quickly learn to tune out a lot of that stuff because it's irrelevant, right? The example I use all the time is the reason your dog doesn't respond when your phone rings, doesn't do anything. Your dog ignores it. But if the doorbell rings, your dog jumps up and goes nuts, right? Well, the dog has learned that the doorbell predicts something that's going to happen, an action that's relevant to them, and your phone ringing doesn't predict anything relevant to them. So that gets moved to the ignore file, as it were, right? And so people that talk a lot at their dogs, from a dog training perspective, for new dog trainers and new owners and things like that, people that are constantly chatting at their dog and saying multiple things, a lot of that just goes out the window. And it makes the dog less attentive to the signals that come out of your mouth that you want them to attend to. So if you say their name a lot without following it up, or if you talk to them in big sentences all the time, or you repeat yourself repeatedly without making sure the animal makes a connection with that, pretty soon they're just like, yeah, lots of stuff comes out of your mouth, and none of it is meaningful to me. So then when you want them to attend to something, and you're trying to make meaning, they've already decided that everything that comes out of your mouth is irrelevant. And so there's a point at which kind of communicating with the dog, praising them, talking to them, you know, being excited and stuff can serve you. And then there's a point where too much coming out of your mouth devalues the things that come out of your mouth that you want the dog to actually attend to. And I would say that's a really common problem in dog training, and especially for companion dog owners all the time.

Lots of them have taught the dog to ignore their name, taught the dog to ignore no, all kinds of things like that, because they say it repeatedly without making a meaningful connection for the dog. And the dog goes, you don't have to pay attention to that. That sound doesn't mean anything. Yeah. And what's something that someone can do to try to combat that or prevent that from happening? What are some of the things that they should be aware of? So you want to set up your training sessions in the early stages, so that if you make a sound of any kind, if I give a verbal cue, a command, if I use a marker word, if I make a little noise to get my dog's attention, that I'm right away ready to reinforce it. And then I want to continue to reinforce it, right? If I were building a marker, and I went, yes, and didn't give him anything, and yes, and didn't give him anything, and yes, and didn't give him anything, pretty soon the dog's going to go like, that doesn't mean anything to me. I'll just ignore that sound. That has no value, right? And so everything that comes out of your mouth, you want to make sure you're ready to make a connection. So I'm either going to give a reward immediately afterwards to draw the dog's attention to that sound is something I should pay attention to, or I can give a consequence as well. I mean, how does no or a punisher have value to a dog? Because it's predicted a consequence for them. And if you say no to your dog a lot, and there's no consequence, it's just like people that tell their kids no over and over and over again, and don't do anything about it. And the kids just ignore them. It's the same deal with dogs, right? And so it's relatively simple, but it means preparing your training sessions. So in the early stages, you're ready to reinforce or enforce whatever comes out of your mouth to make sure that the dog's making the connections. And then don't, like you hear a lot of people when they're using markers, they'll mark, they'll say, good. And then when they're rewarding the dog, they keep chattering at the dog while they're rewarding the dog. So I said, yes, I released my dog. And then I'm feeding the dog and I'm like, oh, what a good boy. You're such a good dog. And I'm doing all this kind of chattering, right? Sometimes it's useful for me to be a little bit excited with the dog and help them. But a lot of times that just becomes kind of background noise. And people do that out of habit. They kind of talk at their dog a lot out of habit.

And that's just going to make the dog less attentive to the things that you want them to attend to coming out of your mouth. Very interesting. That is something that I tend to do after I mark a behavior and I'm entering a reward event. I do praise the dog like, oh, very good, very nice. And I try to tell my students that I try to use praise strategically in a different way in which I would use a marker where I'm pinpointing that moment in time. I'm working on precision. What are your thoughts on this? This is something that I teach my students where if I'm trying to get a dog to do something and they're working towards that goal. So let's say it's in the early stages and I'm trying to get the dog to really push into my hand while I'm luring the dog. I think to myself, this is a dog that's a little more less confident, let's say. And they start to move towards my hand and I move it away. What if the dog is assuming that perhaps I don't want them to take the reward? So when they start moving, I say, yeah, you got it. There you go. Good, good, good, good, good. And then I'll deliver the reward, encouraging them with that sort of vocal praise. Do you see any downsides to that? Or if that's done the right way, it can be very effective. Oh, I think if it's done the right way, it can be very effective. Like so I call this like cheerleading, praise, whatever you want to call it. The point where I'm getting in it with the dog and I'm giving them encouragement. My tone of voice changes. There's all those things. Dogs are responsive to that. They know when you're excited. They know when you're being encouraging. All those things are super useful. And so there's nothing inherently wrong with that. What happens is that people start to do it out of habit. So the act itself isn't problematic. Like if I think my dog needs a little help to make this connection or push, then heck yeah, get in there, do it, right? But then people get in these habits where they just do it every time for no reason. The dog's putting in all the effort on their own. And you're still there going blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, encouraging them. So then later when you don't, there's a chance that the dog thinks there's something wrong, right? And so any help you give a dog, dog training is full of help, right? We start out, dog doesn't know anything and I'm helping you make all these connections. And then there's a process of over time, slowly transferring the behaviors we've created to cues and reducing the amount of help till the dog's doing it on their own. I can say sit and you sit. I can say down and you down.

I can say come and you come. And they don't need me to do all the things that we did in the teaching phase to help the dog, right? And through that process. And so if you help when you don't need to, you can make the dog reliant on help. The help can become a part of the cueing system for the dog. And then the dog says, oh, you're not making the happy noises. So am I wrong? Maybe I'm not doing this right. Or maybe I shouldn't be doing, or maybe they don't come into the same kind of energy. They don't supply the energy themselves. They rely on you to kind of cheerlead them the whole time. And so by itself, it's not a problem. If you know you're doing it and you're doing it with deliberate intent at a specific spot, and then you have a plan to not do it when you don't need it. And we do that in dog training all the time. It's what we do with the leash. It's what we do with luring. It's what we do with all the ways in which we help dogs do things. And so praise or emotional support just fall into the same kind of category as far as I'm concerned. It would kind of fall under the process of fading, fading out those physical cues, fading out the praise. And if we take too long, and I think this is something that a lot of us run into, especially in the early stages of our dog training career, is staying with continuous reinforcement for too long and not making that switch to that variable or randomized sort of reinforcement schedule. That's absolutely the case. Also, I would add that it depends on what your goals for the dog are too, right? So for a competitive sport trainer, like eventually my dog has to do these long, elaborate routines with no feedback from me, no obvious overt feedback. My dog has to do things. I have to be very precise. I can't give a lot of body language help and things like that. So I have a picture that I'm training for. And everybody that's training a dog should have a picture that they're training for. If I'm training a companion dog, what's it going to look like when it's finished? And what do I want to be doing? And if I want my dog to be responding just to verbal cues with no body language or no additional encouragement, then that's a different training problem than if it's okay if I point at the ground when I say down, right? For somebody. And so kind of knowing your goals is also important in that process, right? That what would be a problem for a competition trainer who eventually wants their dog doing a variety of behaviors purely on verbal commands, right? Isn't necessarily a problem for a pet dog owner who just wants their dog to do it.

And if they have to give a little extra help when they're getting them to do it, what do they care, right? So if they have to do a little praise and encouragement or they have to bend over a little bit when they ask the dog to lay down, so what? The dog still does it and their relationship is good. So it's only a problem when you kind of are trying to build something, a picture, and you're not aware of how that's going to affect the finished picture for you. That makes perfect sense. Yeah. And a lot of my pet clients, they're completely fine pointing to the dog's bed or lifting up and they'll do it even instinctively. Even if you tell them like, oh, don't use the physical cue. We're trying to get beyond that. Just use the verbal command. They'll still naturally want to do that. But if someone is training for competition of obedience or higher level type obedience, what are some good indicators that someone could look for to know and understand when is a good time for the dog that's in front of them to transition from a continuous reinforcement schedule to that more variable or random reinforcement schedule? You want the dog invested in the training process. You want the behavior going well. You want the behavior going well, meaning the dog is doing it mechanically the way you want them to and with an energy that you like. Right. And but you want to introduce the concept sooner than later, meaning I can introduce the concept of intermittent reinforcement relatively early without doing lots of it, meaning I may still be on a very reward rich schedule. But I've introduced the concept that, hey, you don't get rewarded every time. And so what I'm looking for is the mechanics of the behavior. Am I pretty sure the dog's going to do the behavior and they're going to do it more or less the way I want them to do it? Their enthusiasm for the behavior for a sport trainer, like are they doing it with energy or is it still in that like I'm still figuring this out so I'm not moving quickly with energy because they're not fluent in it yet. And then and then it depends on the behavior. So if it's an easy behavior, I might be start adding intermittent reinforcement a little sooner. Right. If it's sit, my dog sits great. I might go to an intermittent schedule relatively quickly because my dog catches on to that behavior pretty quickly. They're doing it well mechanically. Great. And another behavior that's a little more complex may be on continuous reinforcement for a little bit longer. The general thing you want to watch for is if you stay on continuous reinforcement for

excessive amounts of time before you've introduced this concept of variable reinforcement, you get one of two problems. One is the behaviors erode faster when you try to switch them off of continuous reinforcement. If I went two years of rewarding every single behavior my dog did and then I started to not reward everyone, that dog's going to be bothered more by that and that behavior will drop off in performance more quickly. It'll go extinct. It'll fade more quickly. The other thing is for that's for one type of dog for another type of dog, their frustration levels come way up. Right. So one of the things that happens is if you build a really strong expectation of continuous reward and the dog doesn't get one, then they get really frustrated by that. And that frustration can manifest in ways we don't like barking, excessive arousal, other stuff like that. So if you start dealing with high drive dogs, the problem with being on continuous reinforcement for too long is a different problem than with a low or medium motivation dog. With a low or medium motivation dog, you actually disrupt those dogs' ability to persist in the behavior. With high drive dogs, they get crazy. They get more aroused and more frustrated. And that arousal and frustration can begin to negatively impact your behaviors if you're not careful. Like that's where your dog start to vocalize and do other stuff like that because they're so amped up. And speaking about, sorry, go ahead. No, it's just because, hey, we've signed a contract. I'm getting a reward every time. So when they don't get it, it's bothersome to them. Right. A lot more. So knowing. And so what you're saying is being able to get them to do the behavior, I'm assuming that's with some sort of physical cue if they're still needing that help. Are you waiting until the dog is starting to respond to the verbal command before you transition? Depends a little bit on the behavior. Sometimes I'm still in a medium help stage, I'd say. So with a sit, let's take it as an example, a sit or a target behavior like a place bed or a foot target. But generally speaking, they're doing it on the word by itself on the cue. I can say sit. My dog will sit without any physical assistance from me. Same with the target. But if it's something like folding back down, I may start to introduce the concept of variable reinforcement sometimes while I still may be giving a little bit of body language help or something like that. Right. I may not have completely eliminated all the help with that behavior because I have to

stay on little bits of help just to make sure that they maintain the mechanics of that behavior for longer. So I might be saying down and doing a little bit of forward action towards them at that point. And then I might do a rep where they did it and I didn't reward them. And when I rewarded the next one. So I could introduce the concept of intermittent reinforcement quite a bit sooner with the easy behaviors. And those easy behaviors are generally on verbal cue when I'm doing that by itself. Some of the more complex behaviors are the little more gymnastically difficult behaviors. I may still be giving a little bit of help. And is there a certain time window? So like with imprinting, for example, we have that time window. So some people say different times, but let's say roughly up to about four months, I think is what most people go with that first 16 weeks. Is there a time window for this switching of schedule when it comes to rewards? Is it like you better be doing it by year or is it really just quite dependent on the dog and where they are in the training? Quite dependent on the dog and where they are in the training. Right. So the dog has to be invested in the training. And so for some dogs at a year old, they're still not really bought in. Some dogs are slower maturing. They have less motivation. And so you're still working really hard just to keep them wanting to do stuff. Right. In that sense. And so intermittent rewards for those dogs, generally speaking, aren't valuable. Although I probably can pick out a behavior. That is easy enough for them that I could have put it on intermittent. So my personal dogs usually get their first unreinforced reps of things, you know, when they're adolescents, they're six months old, seven months old, something like that. You know, they've got some behaviors. They're starting to happen. You know, I get you on your foot target and then I don't reward you and I move on to another foot target. Right. I may have two foot targets out and I'm running you back and forth between them. Right. So I have you go to one and I reward you. Then I have to go to the next one and I don't reward you. And then I send you back to the first one. I reward you. So there was a rep where I didn't reward it. And it's pretty early in the training process, but it's a motivated dog that likes training and they're kind of focused. So let the dog kind of dictate. If you take a dog that's a little bit slow to mature or lacks motivation, then you're going to keep them on continuous reinforcement a little bit longer. Right.

But you also the introduction of variable reinforcement or intermittent reinforcement can actually bring up energy levels for some. So I generally advise people don't get caught in like a hard and fast rule. Like I always do this with this dog at this time. Experiment a little bit. Like it doesn't hurt you to try a rep or two without rewarding the dog and see how they behave afterwards. Right. And if they respond well, then great. Cool. Then just reward the next one and then skip one and then reward the next three in a row and then don't do it. You just kind of toss it in there. If they respond like they start to lose focus and lose energy and stuff like that, they're probably too soon for me because I can always go back. Right. I can always go back and put them back on continuous reinforcement. So I would encourage people to push a little bit to introduce the idea sooner than later, knowing that you can always go back to continuous if you need to. Right. That's a really great point. I've heard you talk about that in another one of your interviews where you encourage trainers to experiment a little bit and not be afraid of that. Someone who might be a little bit more cautious or afraid that they're going to do something that's going to cause a mistake within their training. What would be something that you would suggest for that when it comes to experimenting or trying new things? I think it's the only way I would say it's the only way you really get to. To feel what the training energetic should feel like. Right. There are guidelines in dog training. There's all these kind of general principles that we apply to a lot of a lot of different dogs, but it's not a recipe. And each dog's an individual. Each handler's a little bit of an individual. Their mechanics are slightly different. And so you guys are feeling each other out through the whole process, the dog and the owner. And one of the ways where you kind of find where things get unproductive and where things are more productive is by pushing up against the edges of those things. And it's kind of the only way to learn it. Right. So I just tell people like, hey, you're no way with one or two mistakes are you ruining your dog? Like it's not happening, especially with something like that, like not giving a reward or something like that. Like relax a little bit about this. You're not going to your dog's not going to be traumatized by one bad experience. Your dog's not going to be traumatized by not getting rewarded one time or two times or three times, really, ultimately.

So the only way you're going to get a good feel for what it should be like and where this individual dog's limits are is by messing around and bumping up against the edges of it. And that's where you really get to know a dog and you make a training plan based on that. And I always tell people you can push to move forward. And if it's too soon, you can always go back. But if you stay and you don't go forward, you hit this spot where the dog goes, okay, this is it. And then you try to add the next part of the progression of the dog's like, nope, figure this out. It's this. And getting stuck is maybe more problematic than pushing a little bit too much and having to backtrack because that's what dog training is. It's constantly a little forward, a little backward, a little forward, backward, a little forward. It goes like that all the time through the whole process. And so you just don't, don't, don't paralyze yourself with fear of making mistakes. It's going to be, I was going to say, yeah, when, when I heard you talking about that, that rang true for me because I think my history of being in the military and I was a machine gunner, but I was also a drill instructor training recruits to become Marines. I had this mentality where there's going to be a way just because I don't fully know at this moment, there's no reason why I can't try different things. And I've done that throughout my career, especially in the beginning. If I ran into an issue, I was like, okay, well, I'm going to try multiple different techniques. And that's something that I tell trainers that I mentor. I'd say, we learned so many different techniques so we can try to figure out to implement what's going to work best on this dog. And if we try our best to understand the science and how dogs learn and how they process information, then we can look at something and we can usually with our judgment tell whether or not, okay, this follows the science. Let's give it a shot. Let's see how this works with this dog. And if we get results, great. And like you said, if it doesn't seem to work, we can always go back in the training. And now I only have roughly 13 years of experience in dog training where you have over 40 years, I believe, of dog training in sport dogs, teaching new trainers and pet training. How have you seen training methods evolve? For example, what shifts have you observed from the old yank and crank or traditional style dog training to today's more reward-based approaches? And where do you see the next evolution in dog training? Yeah. So you look up and 40 years have gone by. It's crazy.

So I feel kind of lucky in that my career has straddled what dog training traditionally was, what we call, what you're calling yank and crank, the traditional, what we call escape and avoidance training type stuff where the dogs are learning new behaviors through negative reinforcement. And then those behaviors are held up with the use of positive punishment, right? Negative reinforcement and positive punishment. And so there were lots of physical manipulations in that world. And so I learned about dog training under that. And then I was around for the beginning of what I call the reward-based revolution. So in the late 80s and early 90s, dog trainers started to use rewards in a really meaningful way, right? And marine mammal trainers and things began to give seminars for dog trainers, people using clickers and rewards and that whole thing. And so, and then as that happens, there's a kind of a swing and people start to embrace that way of training. And now we have the kind of force-free movement where people are trying to train completely with the giving and withholding of rewards and not using any aversive control whatsoever, no training tools, physical manipulation, training tools, et cetera. And, and, and then there are people in the middle everywhere. And so that's been, I think, um, some of huge part of my education. The idea that there are things that I learned in the early days that are useful to me. I don't train that way anymore, but there are skills. And just because methodologies are old doesn't mean there wasn't something of value in them. Absolutely. Many, many, many thousands or millions of dogs were trained with those methodologies, right? And so there's things in there that are helpful and useful, even though we don't train completely that way. And then with the purely reward-based stuff, the people that are really trying to do everything with rewards, there's stuff of value there, but I don't think that's the whole story either. So somewhere in between these two worlds, borrowing the best of both of them is where the future of dog training lies. And I think as we get better, we be, and we get better science, we get better practice. We begin to play with the balance between these two kinds of approaches. So all four quadrants of operant conditioning, understanding manipulation through Pavlovian conditioning, understanding the emotional landscape of dogs. There's all this stuff that we have now. And I think the next 20 years are crazy exciting in that I'm hoping that we are kind of moving away from this debate of force-free versus total averse and control.

Like these are the two options. You have the traditional escape and avoidance people and you have force-free and those are the two camps. No, I think all the best dog training is happening somewhere in between there. It's the best for the dogs. It's the best for the handlers. The dogs have more rich lives and we get the best of the reward-based world and the best of what traditional dog training was. And I think we're just going to get better and better at navigating that. And we have a lot more stuff that universities now have in the past. Anytime we studied dogs in the scientific community, it was to understand people. Dogs were lab animals experiments. So all the early dog experiments weren't to understand dogs. They were understand greater behavioral principles that we could apply to human beings or physiologic. Like Pavlovian classical conditioning was discovered when they were studying digestive responses. They wanted to understand the human digestive service, but you can't like dissect human beings while they're still alive. So a lot of that was designed to give us information about humans or other principles in science not to understand dogs. Well, that's not the case anymore. Like universities have dog programs to study and understand dogs. Canine olfaction, the neurobiology lab at Harvard, like canine cognition at Duke. Now there are big departments of universities that are studying dogs to understand dogs and how their brains work and everything else. So we're going to have all this new science over the next couple of decades with a lot of trainers that have been able to play with both traditional methodologies and reward-based methodologies. And hopefully this leads us to the kind of sweet spot where we come up with the best of all of that and the best thing for the dog. So it's a super exciting time to be a dog trainer. Definitely, definitely an exciting time. And with the way dog training has evolved, we're learning from each other. And now with the internet and with YouTube and instructional videos out there, one of the things I tell my dog trainer students is what value we bring is not just the information that we have as dog trainers, but it's our frame of reference. Whereas someone who's a new pet owner, their frame of reference might be the family pet that they had growing up, but this is their very first dog. So even if they have the information, it's harder for them to look at the dog, to be able to read the dog's emotional state, to be able to understand if the dog is processing the

information where our frame of reference gives us that perspective that enhances our outlook on the training because we know it at a deeper level. And training dog trainers and doing so many seminars, you've probably done what, a thousand or so seminars? I mean, yeah, hundreds. Sure, many hundreds. If you count classes and seminars, traveling seminars, yeah, there's a lot. And I know you also spent a lot of time studying and learning how to teach, how to be a good instructor. And it's very clear that you've done that because in my opinion, you are the goat when it comes to training new trainers, teaching them what they need to know to become successful. Throughout that evolution, what have you noticed or how has your approach to teaching new trainers changed based on what you've seen as far as how students took the information? Did you adjust? Maybe I gave this too soon. I need to give this information a little bit later in someone's system. How has that evolved? Absolutely. All of those things that you just mentioned are true. So it's exactly like dog training in the sense that each student's a little bit different, right? And when you first start training dogs, you train a given dog and you figure out what to do with that dog. And then you're presented with a different dog and you're like, oh, everything I did with the last dog didn't necessarily work with this one. And so what I find is that once I started paying attention to teaching and things, you started to see different learning styles. You started to see, oh, I recognize people that are like this. They need a little more help with the mechanical end of it. And you can't over explain to them up front because it just bogs them down. And somebody else can't really take on the information you want to give them unless you can tell them why it works, right? And those two people, those two different learning styles, you learn to identify them. And so what you begin to do with your teaching is incorporate all of those things. You start to recognize, okay, there's going to be people, there's going to be physical skills that we just have to practice. And let's not talk about them too much first. Let's just practice the skill. Don't worry where it's going. Just focus on the mechanics. Because as soon as you start trying to explain too much, people get bogged down. And it's like trying to teach a dog too many things at the same time, like trying to not breaking your behaviors down in small pieces. The other thing that I realized in that process is that you cannot be too repetitive.

When you first start teaching people, you think like, okay, I said that already. If I say it again, people are going to think like, hey, you already said that. What are you, stupid? Like you told me that already. But that's not the case. Like you can tell people things over and over and over again. And it's necessary. Just like if I'm teaching a dog a new skill, repetition is the mother of learning, right? You have to do that. And it feels weird in the beginning to do that. But you recognize that, okay, I have to be clear. And I have to be repetitive. And just because I said it once doesn't mean everybody got that. So don't be afraid to say it again. And don't be afraid to say it again. And don't be afraid to say it again repeatedly in that sense. And then the other thing is that dog training is a physical discipline. Like there is no way around it. You are physically manipulating and interacting with a dog. You have to be able to move. You have to have physical timing. So what I've kind of done over the years is find ways to get people to be able to practice the physical skills that they're going to use without a dog, right? And so we start to take exercises and break them out. Like how could we teach people how to handle food without the dog present? How do we teach people how to lure without the dog present? What are you doing with your feet when you're playing with a dog? All these kinds of little things that we began to just kind of dissect and break down so that we could practice skills in isolation and then kind of bring them back into the hole. And I think that's one of the things that doesn't happen enough. And it's hard because it's time consuming. But when people are helping pet dog owners with their dogs, they don't get the repetitions that are necessary of a lot of the physical skills. Like they're only applying them kind of when they need them and they don't rehearse in the same way. And so anything we can do to get people to kind of rehearse those skills repeatedly. And so and I you're right. I realized early on in my seminar when I was giving seminars that dog training was a subject, but my job was a teacher of people. And I began to focus more on the people and less on the dogs. Once you kind of know dog training, know dog training, if you ever know it completely. But once you sort of get good at it, then the dog is kind of the easy part. You kind of know what buttons to push. But that's not your job. Your job is transferring that skill to somebody else. And that allowed me to shift my focus and pay more attention to the type of to the student and what that student needed.

And you have to be flexible. Like you can't have just one way of teaching. Like I'm a wordy teacher, but there's times where I have to check myself and go like, OK, we're not going to talk at all. We're just going to get up and do this and do it again. Don't let's not don't overthink it. Do it again. Like, let's don't overthink it. Let's just get the mechanical part. And some balance of those things makes for the best teaching. And you have a online membership platform now that people can go and they can sign up to. And I've been studying your dog training since I started back in 2012. My buddy who got me into dog training, he gifted me like three of your DVDs. So I've been studying you since I started back in 2012. And then as I studied more trainers, I started to realize how good of a teacher you also were. And I started to study how you teach. And I think one of the best compliments someone gave me, they said, you sound just like Michael Ellis. And I was like, oh, thank you. When I went to the Tom Rose school, I had a great time there. In the very beginning, the first two weeks, we did some PowerPoint type presentations where they go over dog body language, behavior issues. But then the entire rest of the professional master and I did their advanced master program. It was all hands on and it was pretty much all obedience. When I finished school, when I'm working with pet clients, of course, I had obedience issues, dog not listening to a command or staying in a stay. But then, of course, a lot of behavioral issues. And I wasn't really caught very much directly with behavioral issues. And people would say, oh, I think I need a behaviorist for this. And I would think to myself, well, if I can teach your dog to do what you want, doesn't that remove the behavior issues if you can communicate at that deep level? So I never spent too much time talking about it. And then I saw on your online membership course that you have one on behavioral issues. And in the very beginning, you said, and I this like right away, I perked it. I felt the same way where you said I used to not even have this as a part of the program because the principles of dog training apply. But then you started going into it and I mean, you know, the behavioral side just as much as any expert behavioralist, the way you were breaking down like aggression, for example, and how many different aggressive type issues. It's not like, oh, it's just aggression. There's so much evolved in that department of training.

Since you added the behavioral side of your course and teaching it specifically separate from the other obedience or training or retrieval sport work, what sort of feedback have you received from it? And has it helped the trainers that you've been teaching be more successful within their career after they complete your programs? Yeah, I think I think it's really important that you don't look at behavior behavior problems in isolation. Like it's a whole a whole dog issue. Right. And obedience is a part of it, like communication, relationship. All that stuff is a piece of the puzzle. So why to your point, why I resisted it in the beginning? Right. Was because we talked about behavioral issues mixed in with all the dog training stuff. And I was it was a reaction against this idea that you could just focus on the problem behavior and not all the rest of the stuff you're doing with your dog. Like how you're living with them, how much exercise they're getting, like what obedience skills they have. All of that stuff together is what allows us to tackle behavior problems. But I realized in that process that this is the way the rest of the world is going to talk about it. And if I don't say behavior mod, then they're going to say, oh, it's just obedience training. Even though we were talking about all the behavioral stuff in in our regular classes as well. So I did that. I think it's well received. And I think it's an opportunity. And I've taken it. It's an opportunity to talk to people because a lot of the the veterinary behaviors and the peer behaviorists don't actually do stuff with dogs. I think it's unfortunate. There's a whole bunch of professional behaviorists that don't on a day to day basis get dogs to do things. They come up with protocols for people to follow and not all the information they give is not necessarily invalid. But that's a really different perspective than someone's perspective that actually has to put their hands on dogs on a daily basis. Do the day to day work. That is dog training that's showing up every day and doing your stuff. And so I think the behavior mod has been well received. But for me, it's an opportunity to talk about how you can't treat behavioral issues in isolation. You have to understand the science of what's going on in the dog's head and recognize when you're running up against your you're employing employing the wrong tactic for a certain type of aggression, for instance. But you really have to look at the whole thing. And if if I got to talk to people about how the importance of obedience and behavior mod.

Yeah, my dog doing obedience doesn't necessarily directly solve that problem. But there's a shift in my dog's worldview. It gives me control. It gives me all kinds of additional tools to help me navigate those waters. And so I still don't like to talk like people go like, oh, I don't want to I don't want to go through all the obedience stuff. Just I just want to take your behavior mod class. And for a long time, I wouldn't let people now it's in the membership and people can take it however they want. But when I was running the school full time, you had to take other classes before you could take behavior mod. I wouldn't let you do it. You had to understand the obedience. You had to understand motivation. You had to understand electronic collar work. You had to understand all these things before you took that. Because I don't want somebody coming in and saying, like, I just want to be a behavior solve behavior problems. But I don't want to understand obedience. Like, no, no, no, no. Those things are married. You're like if you're going to do this well, you have to take into account all of those things. But, yeah, I cave to it. Like I still jokingly say sometimes it's just dog training, right? But it helps when you begin to kind of recognize the nuance of behavioral issues. I think it's great. And I've enjoyed listening to it very much. I mean, I listen to it anytime I'm doing anything. If I'm cleaning up after the kids, I'm doing the dishes. I'm just listening to Michael. Let's talk about dog training. And when I first got into dog training, I had some of that as well. But it wasn't directly related to the behavioral side of it. When I went to the Tom Rose School, it's structured based on, like, AKC obedience, IGP. There's some scent work. And when I was initially going through, I was like, oh, I don't care about the protection. I don't care about the scent work. I don't care. I just care about the obedience. But the more I started to study dog training as a whole and all the different categories that fall under dog training, I became a much better trainer. I started to understand the dogs at a deeper level. So then I could take something that I learned from one art of dog training and transfer it over to something else. And by doing that, having that deeper understanding, it gives us the ability to adjust better on the spot. Is that something you've noticed as well with students that you're working with when they have all these different levels of understanding of different categories of dog training? They become a dog trainer in every field. Absolutely.

And there's a perspective that is inherent in all the different disciplines. Like, so search dog trainers have a kind of general way of looking at things. You know, agility trainers have a general way of looking at things, right, based on the priorities of what they're teaching. You know, somebody that's dealing with companion dogs has one. The more you dip your toes in all those worlds, the more you get to merge those perspectives. And there's always something of value. You're running into a difficulty. And someone else's perspective will help you come at that difficulty from a different angle when the way you normally do it isn't working. Now you have these other perspectives to kind of shift your thinking a little bit, and it makes it easier to be flexible to give the dog what they need. So I recommend for everybody that's a dog trainer to dip your toes in as many different aspects of dog training as you can. That can be confusing in the beginning, right? You obviously have to commit yourself to certain paths well enough to kind of master the core skills of that way of approaching the training. But take in as many different perspectives as you can. That's what will wind up making you a very good dog trainer, somebody that's flexible and can recognize when maybe the way I traditionally do this isn't the best way, and I should come at it from a slightly different angle. And I want to point out something of how it is connected with the obedience and the behavioral side specifically. And it was something that you said in your program where I instantly realized that I was one of the people that you were talking about making a mistake. And it was the concept of counter conditioning where it's like, okay, someone has an issue, their dog is afraid, they have some fearful issues, and we start implementing counter conditioning. But they haven't even taken the time to develop some sort of play or something that's going to be valuable enough for the dog in order to be able to even implement that counter conditioning. Absolutely. And I was like, oh my gosh, I've been so guilty of that on many occasions. And so being aware of that. Yeah, so it's super important. And I know it's a problem because I've done it too. Like I went through the same thing. You're just assuming that because the dog's taking a reward that I'm getting counter conditioning effects, right? And that's not the case, right? With counter conditioning and counter for anybody that doesn't know, counter conditioning is simply classical conditioning with instead of a neutral stimulus, a fear inducing stimulus, right?

So classical conditioning, the typical definition of classical conditioning is a neutral stimulus predicting a meaningful stimulus begins to take on meaning. Well, counter conditioning is a fear inducing stimulus followed by a reward or something the dog finds meaningful, counter conditioning away their fear ultimately or anxiety in the dog. And so you thought, well, okay, my dog's afraid I give it a reward. My dog's afraid I give it a reward. But the value of the reward has to strongly outweigh the animal's anxiety to get counter conditioning effects. And there are animals that will take rewards without it moving the needle hardly at all in terms of their anxiety. And so that's when I realized you have to invest in building a reward that's going to compete with the level of anxiety. The more anxious the dog is, the more motivation you need to counter condition. The less anxious, the less valuable the rewards have to be to do the job for you. And that's where people fall down. There are lots of reward based behaviorists out there giving people protocols for conditioning dogs with anxiety and fear. But no discussion of what's an appropriate reward and is the reward actually achieving the result that we want. Because it isn't lots of times. There are many, many fearful dogs out there taking rewards without changing their mindset at all. They're eating out of a compulsion. But the reward is not valuable enough to actually make progress. And so I'm always motivation, motivation, motivation, right? Like we're constantly talking about developing rewards that the dogs are really invested in, that they care about. And that was part of what we were talking about in the beginning with classical conditioning, the engagement training. And I know you have been talking more about classical conditioning. I was listening to the interview that you did with Oscar Moore. And you said you've been doing way more research into it as far as being able to talk about it more within your courses or your program. What additional value have you seen from looking more into classical conditioning? Because I believe a lot of people possibly just assume it's, okay, we're using it for the markers and that's it. We get them classically conditioned to the sound, predicts the reward. Great. But you're saying it's way more evolved within dog training than what appears to be on the surface. Oh, God, yeah. So it's underpinning everything we do. It's constantly happening everywhere, right? If I go train in the same location every day, my dog has a Pavlovian response to that location, right?

If I'm wearing a certain vest when I train with my dog, and my dog has a Pavlovian response to that vest, right? There are all these things that are happening. You can't tease. You can't, like when we tend to talk about classical or Pavlovian conditioning and operant conditioning as separate entities. But they're always, both things are happening all the time. Anytime something's predicting something else repeatedly, dogs are making associations. And there are involuntary responses happening in the animal as a result of those. And sometimes those internal responses help us. Like if I go in the agility ring and practice every day, my dog is excited when he goes into the agility ring. That excitement is a Pavlovian or classically conditioned response. His arousal, he can't not be excited. That's conditioned. He shows up. He's like, oh, yay. And that internal feeling is totally involuntary and it's conditioned. And that's what makes him run fast. If he weren't excited, if he were all relaxed when he went into the agility ring, he's not going to run fast, right? And so maybe it helps us. Other places, it causes us all kinds of problems, right? The classic example I use in class all the time is if I went to the park every day and played ball with my dog every day, right? At the park. And then one day I said, you know what? When I go to the park today, I've never taught my dog a down stay. So I'm going to teach my dog a down stay. And I chose to do it at the park where I go to play ball with my dog every day. How's that going to go for me? It's possible my dog could learn to do a down stay, but I set myself up for a lot of difficulties because my dog's arousal is conditioned and he can't not feel that, right? And there's a lot. And so I became more and more interested in the places because in which conditioning like that is conflicting with what I'm trying to get a dog to do. Like an example we use, and we've begun to call this like Pavlovian interference, right? Where classical conditioning can conflict with some behavior I'm trying to teach. So a classic one is I teach my dog to sit, my dog sits, and I toss a ball as a reward, right? I sit, my dog sits, and I toss a ball as a reward, right? If I do that over and over again, my dog is going to have a Pavlovian response to the sit cue because the sit always predicts chasing a ball. And so now when I say sit, my dog's body tenses up like this, and he can't quite sit all the way. He's hovering his butt's off the ground. His legs are all tense, and now he's not sitting. He's sitting slowly or he's not sitting completely.

And I'm going, hey, you know how to sit. But no, that's a Pavlovian response that's conditioned that's incompatible with sitting. He can't sit because his body's preparing to chase. And that's all unconscious. It's totally involuntary. His body's preparing itself for, I know what comes next. After you say sit, I'm going to chase. And what do you do when you're getting ready to chase? You see a dog that's in predatory mode where they're getting ready to chase. They start to stalk and tense up, and then they go. That body tension, totally out of the dog's control. And so now I'm asking them to do something that a conditioning process that I created is in conflict with. And that's going to make it harder. So I start looking for all these places in training. And now I pay a lot more attention to what we do repetitively. Am I conditioning? Do I always go to some place and have it be an exciting place? Like, we can use this for our advantage, too. Like, in my living room, nothing exciting ever happens. I don't condition my dogs that exciting things are going to happen in the living room so they can relax. If there's a place where I want my dog to be able to be excited and relaxed, then I need to spend equal time. Sometimes we need to go to the training field and just hang out and do nothing. And sometimes we need to go and train, right? Otherwise, the dog will become conditioned and it might affect how they're going to function. And there's tons of these things. And Pavlovian responses are not subject to the laws and reinforcement and punishment. I can't punish them away, right? In a way. You can't. That dog that doesn't want to sit all the way because its body's tense, that's not going to respond well to correction. Because that's an involuntary association on their part. That's unconscious. And so it doesn't work that way. So I pay very close attention these days to all those places in my training. And it's made me look at the simple classical conditioning, like, very differently. I care a lot about it. I started to pay. Yeah, yeah. And I started to pay way more attention to it as well when I heard you talking about it. And something I've noticed where this is where I've been guilty of making a mistake is a dog would have a classically conditioned response. And I would try to use some sort of pressure, which would create more issues. And one of the common ones I've seen with a lot of my pet clients is the dog getting really excited when they go to grab the leash. And now they're having a hard time getting the dog to sit or relax to put on the leash.

If someone is struggling with a classically conditioned response that's involuntary and they're trying to simultaneously accomplish something else, like your sit example, what are some of the best strategies that they could implement to help resolve that issue? You've got to change the outcomes, right? So there's a variety of ways. It's easier to prevent from happening in the beginning than it is to fix it once it's happened, right? So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Like, so if you pay attention to the stuff in your training so it doesn't get to that point, it's always better. But that's not always the case in dog training. So now you have to break that association, whatever it was, right? So certainly for the dog with the sitting issue, like I'd stop doing any kind of thrown rewards for that dog for sitting, right? They would sit and I would wait for them to relax. I'd take a delay until they relax all the way into the sit. And then I'd walk over calmly and give them a piece of food in the sit kind of thing. And I would no more thrown rewards. And as that shifts, that's going to break. Classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning goes away too, right? So sit predicted this a lot of times. It's going to take time, but gradually that association will go away and the dog would be able to sit more fluently, right? But if I go back to throwing the ball again, it's going to come back in, right? And so the way we prevent it in the beginning is recognizing those things and then making sure that I mentioned before, one of the benefits of markers is the fact that I can delay reward, right? We do a lot of that because the further the reward is from the act of sitting, for example, like the less it affects it. Meaning if my dog sits and I throw a ball right away, my dog sits and I throw a ball right away, then what's going to happen if I do that repeatedly is very quickly Pavlovian process are going to recruit and that dog's going to have tension in his body right away. But if my dog sits, I wait a second after they sit, I say, yes, I let them out. They get up and then I wait five seconds and then I throw a ball for him. Now it's not coming right away. So now after I say yes, they start to get ready to chase, but they're not getting ready to chase when I said sit, for instance, right? So deferring the reward, changing the type of reward you're giving, breaking some of those patterns, right? We do it all the time. Anticipation is all rooted in Pavlovian processes, right?

If I had my dog sit and I threw a dumbbell and then sent my dog to get the dumbbell and I did that over and over again, right? As soon as I throw the dumbbell, your dog's body starts, he starts to rock. He starts to tense up his shoulders, have to lean forward. All that anticipation, that's just Pavlovian, right? So now we're much more careful about the patterns we create, how quickly we reward dogs after behaviors, how we reward them. Are they big, exciting, moving rewards? Are they calmer rewards? Are we rewarding the dog in place versus releasing? All those things help us navigate those waters. And thinking about how we want the dog to perform in this situation, as you said, could be a way of adjusting it. Like the climb command or the plate command, not having the dog do it in too much of an excited manner. Because then when you want the dog to go lay down, the dog's going to be standing at the edge of the bed, excited because he thinks you're going to play a game or do something like that. I wanted to jump real quick into seminars, since you've done a lot of seminars. What structure did you find to be the best when holding or hosting, let's say, a two-day seminar? You have the group come in, and I've watched some of your seminars that were on Learburg. And so you have some instructional portion in the beginning, and then you start working each dog. Is there a certain rotation that worked best or format that worked best that seemed to give the participants the most amount of value within your seminars? Yeah. So I think over the years, so the way I originally did them was it was mostly you went to seminars to work dogs. So early in my career, it was basically like dog work. I'd go to a club or whatever that was, and we'd work obedience with all the dogs, and we'd work protection with all the dogs or whatever it was going to be, right? And each person, as they got up, we'd watch what they were doing and give them advice. We'd talk about what we're doing and that kind of thing. And it was basically pure practical dog work, right? What I found was that you've got a lot of people showing up at these types of things with very different backgrounds and understanding. And so you were giving them advice, but they didn't really understand where the advice was coming from. So what I started to do was have a little mini lecture that I gave at the beginning of every seminar. Like it didn't matter if I was going to the same club. I'd been there 10 times. I would still give my little lecture. So anybody that was new or anybody else that came in would get the little lecture.

And it hit on some of the basic underlying principles of how I approach training. Like here's what markers are. Here's what, here's how dogs learn. Here's a basic classical and operant conditioning lecture. Here's like, here's what a leash work was. I bet I'd pick some basic core stuff that I thought everybody should know, but it was still dog work centric. Over the years, and once I started the school, and I've come to think that seminars like where you to problem solve and that kind of stuff are not so valuable. Like that's. You could just basically scratch the surface and you make you don't you're not sure that you the people have all the underlying skills and tools. And so now what I do is I tend to pick narrower topics for a seminar. So if I were going to do a two day seminar, I would want to kind of limit the number of topics I was talking about in that period of time. And then working dogs just on those type of things, whatever it is we're covering. And that tends to work best. Right. Some combination of talking, lecturing, demos and set and dog work is the best for that. But the. You narrowed the focus so that you had enough time to make sure that everybody was getting it. In a two day seminar with a bunch of different people with all different backgrounds and stuff. If you just go in to do dog work. A lot of it's going over some people's heads. People over. And then the people that aren't working dogs tend not to pay as much attention to the people that are. So like I've gone more to a seminar format where I lecture and then we demonstrate specific things and make sure everybody can ask questions about what we're demonstrating. And then the people that are working dogs get up and do those things under guided practice. That way, everybody that's there gets the information they need to kind of move forward through it. So it's evolved a lot over the years. And I like I I go and hang out with friends and train dogs. But I don't do just like a troubleshooting seminar anymore. Like, I don't think that's not the best way to solve those problems. And then there are certain certain subjects that don't lend themselves well to seminars very much. Right. To dog work seminars. Like. Is there any examples? Like reactivity is one. Right. So meaning because most people come to a reactivity workshop to work their reactive dog. Right. And that environment tends to be a terrible environment for reactive dogs. Right. Got a bunch of people. You're in a new place. Like there's all this stuff. That's not the ideal spot to work at that kind of dog. So I've been doing these reactive force.

Mickey and I have been doing these reactivity workshops recently. They're like a week long. And they're really about skill building. So each dog. We work a lot of dogs. But they're worked individually in a safe environment. So the handler gets all the mechanical skills they need to actually confront triggers down the road. And maybe by the end of the week, we're confronting really basic triggers. This is a five-day, all-day kind of seminar kind of thing. And maybe by the end of the week, we're confronting triggers a little bit. Right. But most of those seminars are set up like, hey, bring your dog out. Let's see what he does. If you know they walk another dog and then try to handle it on the job. That's a terrible way of kind of dealing with that. You need to give them all the information about what's going on with reactivity, how it starts, why it goes that way. What are the mechanical skills you're going to need to tackle it? Right. And how do you practice those in isolation? So we practice all the skills you're going to need when there's no triggers around and the dog feels safe and comfortable. And then we begin to transfer it to controlled settings. And then finally out to the streets. Right. So but you can't show all of that in a normal weekend long seminar. And there are lots of weekend seminars on reactivity and things. And that's not the perfect place to go work on it with a dog. You can give some people some information. So that's an example of something like that. That I like. If you have a long period of time, you can do a slow build. And even then in a week, we were pushing. Like if I had my druthers, everybody would have practiced the mechanical skills by themselves for at least a week. And then we would have done the next step. And then that whole what we do in five days could be five weeks. Right. And that's a perfect point. Yeah. And I think that having people understand that that's what dog training is. And in the seminar format, there's always a little bit of pressure to show progress in a really short period of time. And as a seminar giver, you have to be able to resist that. Because people are going to want to go on and go in there and say, like, I have this problem. And most of those problems are fixed by going back to basics, hitting your foundational skills, reconstructing. You're not going to come in and go, I have the magic bullet for that. Every once in a while, something's an easy fix and it makes you look really good. But like that is not what most of it is. And the expectation of that makes you do things you probably shouldn't do. Right.

When you should really just say, OK, what you need to do in your training is go back a step. Let's work on the pieces that led up to this. And then you're going to deal with this on its own timeline. Right. Avoid rushing it. And that's the reason why I said that's such a perfect example is because I can't tell you how many times someone signed up for an in-person training lesson or in-home training lesson. And their main issue is dealing with reactivity issues. And this is the first time I'm meeting them, first time I'm meeting their dog outside of a phone call or email. And I show up and they're standing outside. They have their dog and they're like, let's go on that walk. Right. We have a lot of work to do before we go on a walk. A lot of people that just don't have the experience in dog training, they think you just address the issue head on instead of looking at all the things that led up to that. And like you said in one of your interviews, or it might have been a class I was listening to, most trainers don't have issues with a dog being reactive because of the training that they do in the beginning and because of being proactive instead of simply reactive. And that could be a good lesson for people being proactive with your training, looking at certain situations and rehearsing it. If you want your dog not to react to the doorbell, it should probably be something that we practice. So we're ready to respond the moment that the dog has the issue. Exactly right. And that's the dog trainer's journey, right? So I say either the average dog owner or beginning dog trainers are reacting to the dog's reactions. The dog does something and they respond. The more experience you get, the more you're able to predict what a dog is going to do before they do it. And you begin to intervene ahead of time. You're preemptive in that process. And that's what experience gives you. That's very hard for beginners to do because they don't recognize the signs. They don't know what they're looking for. They don't know. But as you gain experience, that's part of the dog trainer's journey, right? And by dog trainer, I don't mean just professional dog trainers. Anybody that wants to train their pet well is beginning to kind of recognize and be able to predict your dog's behavior so that you're a step ahead of them instead of constantly reacting to the unwanted behaviors after they've already happened. And since leash reactivity is such a common issue, are there some golden nuggets that you can share on preventative measures or working through it?

I know it can be very complex, but something short and sweet that might provide some additional value. Yeah, so one of them right there is be preemptive, right? So that's the number one rule. Like once you know your dog has the propensity to react, right? Do something before they react. Don't wait until they're reacting. So give them something else to do in that process. The second thing is people walk their dogs around their neighborhoods way too much, right? Especially as puppies. A lot of reactivity issues are built by people saying like, hey, I got a new puppy and I want to go out and walk them around the neighborhood. Right? My puppy needs to go on its evening exercise walk or whatever that's going to be. And you're taking a young dog out into an uncontrolled environment before you have any skills with the dog. Dog has no behaviors. It has no obedience. It has no reason to pay attention to you yet. You haven't built value and rewards. So if you run into a difficulty, you're just doing whatever you can do to get out of it. You've got no tools in place to handle that situation. And so I think one of the issues is people taking puppies and adolescent dogs out into the environment, into environments they shouldn't be in at that age. And like long walks around the neighborhood and those sorts of things are those sorts of places. And so if people could front load their training, it doesn't mean you don't socialize the dog. You take them to specific places to expose them to certain things. But outside of that, you're skill building. And once my dog hits a certain age and has certain skills, it's much easier for me to enter those environments and then handle the situations appropriately as they go. But that's not what happens. Somebody takes their puppy out. Their puppy starts blowing up. Some dog charges a fence or somebody comes around the corner and spooks them. They have a bad experience. You've got no way of helping them because they're brand new to this whole thing. And that's how the problems get started. So, again, preventing them from getting started by not putting dogs in environments over their head. And then thinking about practicing the skills you would need to handle those situations away from those situations and practice them like you would any other skill. And then being preemptive. Try to be a step ahead of the dog as much as possible. Be aware of your environment. I appreciate that. And this has been such an insightful session. And with dog training, we always want to leave them wanting more. So where can they follow your work, Michael? Yeah.

So I have a website, michaelellisschool.com. And these days, I'm doing a few of these workshops and some seminars, a few seminars on the road, larger seminar things. But most of my energy right now is going into a membership service that I just launched last year. And I have, I'm a slow editor, but I have hours and hours and hours and hours of training footage. And as I get it edited, everything new I'm doing is going into the membership. So from this point forward, if I do seminars, they're being recorded. And once they get edited, they'll be dumped in. All my old classes that I have in footage will eventually be in there. So I'm hoping that over the next number of years that everything I do will be just a part of the membership. And I like it because it makes it a little more democratic in a sense. And like when I was running the school full time and we had our long-term training classes, we had, you know, trainers come for five months and train. That's expensive and not everybody can do that. And so I look now at this stage of my career and the later years of my career as the membership is kind of a way of providing access to a lot of the material that has been kind of difficult to access for people. Pretty reasonably priced for anybody that's interested in dog training can get to it. Yeah, the membership is quite exceptional. My only regret with it is that I wish I had gotten it sooner. Oh, thank you. That's very kind of you, Nate. Really appreciate it. I'll be sure to leave all the links for those in the description so people can just go down and click on those. Thanks again for coming out today, Mike Willis. It's greatly appreciated. And for everyone else, remember, train the mind, shape the behavior, and we'll see you next time. Thank you.