E59: 에일린 앤더슨(Eileen Anderson) - "반려견의 요구 충족시키기"

But it's been quite a challenge for me. I had to make her a safe space where she couldn't fall down because literally she couldn't walk at first. That's so scary. It was really scary. It scared me to death. I thought she had died. I thought I had seen her pass away. But as those kind of accidents go, ours was pretty lucky. And my other dog is Clara. She's an All-American. She's bigger. She's about 44 pounds. And she is the one that I found as a feral puppy. And I'll talk about her now and then through the podcast. But she has come so far. Right now, we're working on just widening her world more. We have another friend's house that we get to go to now. She's met another dog. She's liking another person. And actually, because of all the work I've done with her, she is a lot more stable in many new situations than lots of, quote unquote, normal dogs. It's just such a gas to have a dog who's resilient. But that's what I'm doing with Clara right now. That's awesome. So I mentioned kind of the degrees in music and engineering science. So how did you end up in dog training? Obviously, you didn't start out there. My career has been kind of all over the place. I was working first as an editor at a university and then at my current job, which is a social services job, helping women find health care for breast problems. And I was all but dissertation in engineering science. I had passed my qualifying exams and was going on to be an engineer in acoustics. And I got a dog who was a challenge for me. And like everybody else, I got into dog training because I got the difficult dog. And that dog was Summer. That was in 2006. And she was more than I was prepared to take care of. She chewed everything. She bullied my younger dog, my smaller dog. Sorry. She jumped the fence. She was just basically a busy teenage dog. And right now I think back and it's like, you know, her problems were nothing. But at the time, they were huge for me. So bad that I got depressed because it was changing my life so much to have this dog whom I loved. I loved her pretty much right away. But, you know, every time I turned around, there was a new problem. And so I looked for help in the usual ways. You know, I got on the Internet. I found a local obedience club and went through kind of the usual things there. And somewhere along the line, of course, I got a good teacher. But along the line, I got hooked. And actually, dog training made me quit graduate school because I realized this is a lot more interesting than active noise control to me. You kind of mentioned you started out, you know, just kind of finding a club.

What got you started as a positive trainer? I started at the very beginning as a positive trainer. I want to be, you know, I would read about it on the Internet. I thought that's what I want to do. But when you're on your own and you don't have any coaching and you're going by kind of and this was in the earlier days of the Internet and there weren't as many good instructions out there. So you try something and it's kind of in a vacuum like, you know, be a tree. You know, when your dog pulls when they're when they're walking on leash, you know, stand still and they'll stop doing that. And I did that for months and it didn't work because I didn't have the other half of it, which was reinforce them for walking by your side. So I kind of figured, well, you know, this positive training stuff sounds good, but it's not really practical. And maybe my dog's not very smart. I did go to those things. We think, you know, I did go to a balanced obedience club. I'm still a member there. People there adore their dogs and we get along just fine. I've seen a lot of good changes there while I've gone there. But I knew that, you know, collar pops were not something that I wanted to do, but I could not find other ways to, for instance, get summer to keep from wandering off into the wild blue yonder mentally whenever we were together and for physically, you know, wandering off whenever she had a chance. And so I did go that direction. I did the collar pops. I did a prong collar for a while. And then I found the agility part of the club. And that's a familiar story. I'm sure to a lot of people as well. They were more positive, not completely, but more positive. And through them, I found my current trainer, who is Lisa Mantle of Roland, Arkansas, who was trained by Bob and Marion Bailey. Bob Bailey lives here in Arkansas, by the way. And that's when I really started to get it. And Lisa is a great teacher. And that's pretty much when I turned the corner. I think you mentioned some exciting news related to your experiences there. Do you want to share? Yes, I am writing another book. I'm writing Summer's story. Summer, I sadly lost her last summer at only the age of 11. I thought she was going to live a much longer time. She was very healthy. But she got hemangiosarcoma. And after, you know, some misdiagnosis of back pain for about a month, we got the news. And by the time they did do exploratory surgery, but it was too far gone. And I did have to euthanize her. And I wasn't ready for that at all. Nobody ever is, but I didn't have any lead time on it. But she was my crossover dog.

You know, she went through all of this with me patiently as I learned how to do things and how to treat her better. And she was a lovely soul. And I'm writing a book about that. It's the story of Summer and me. And also, I'm threading into it how I came to change my training ways. And I'm trying to do it in a non-preachy way. Um, I'm writing two pet owners in the book. And, you know, recently I saw an op-ed in, I think it was the New York Times, somebody who just wrote a nice little piece about her old dog. And there were the hallmarks of someone who didn't know a lot about training. You know, there were humorous moments about how they had to chase the dog down and force the pills down his throat. And it took all this. And it wasn't mentioned as any kind of mess, you know, morality thing. It was just part of the story. And I want our positive training stories to be part of the story, too. You know, not as a preachy thing necessarily, although I can preach with the best of them. But as just part of the story. Incidental. This is this is how we did things. And I am feeling like that would be a very, very persuasive way to write the book. Also, I just want to write the book because I loved my dog. But I'm hoping that will be another way just to kind of get the message out in a very incidental way that there's nothing abnormal about this. This is how I trained my dog. And this is how we learned to get along. When when are you thinking it's going to be available? Do you know yet? And, you know, is there anything more you kind of want to share into how you're planning to talk about that crossing over experience? I'm aiming for 2019, which probably means 2020. I'm I'm telling the story of our lives together. And that is my crossover story. And of course, I can pull from blogs, which helped me kind of get a timeline there. I can you know, it's hard to remember what happened when. But I will be incorporating some of the blogs. I've written many blogs about her over the years. But again, I want to tell the story. I don't want to have villains. I do want to have heroes. And I want to talk about how my mind changed as things went along, how my perspective changed, because I changed my whole life. You know, having an epiphany about positive reinforcement really does filter through your whole life once you get it. And I hope I can tell that story in a very casual and again, non-preachy way and make it interesting for people. Now, you mentioned that this is going to be another book. It's not your first book. I do want to talk about that first book a little bit.

Can you share a little bit about Remember Me, Loving and Caring for a Dog with Canine Cognitive Dysfunction? What is canine cognitive dysfunction first, I guess? And then how do you talk about it in the book? Canine cognitive dysfunction is a term for mental and behavioral decline that's associated with changes in the brains of aging dogs. It's not just normal aging. You know, we all lose some of our marbles as we age, but this is abnormal aging. It's a neurological condition and it has behavioral symptoms. It's way underdiagnosed and it's undertreated. In the book, I tell the story of my little dog, Cricket. She was a rat terrier and she lived to be probably 17, could have been even older because she was a middle-aged dog when I got her from a rescue. And she got canine cognitive dysfunction and she had it for at least a year before I identified what was wrong. I didn't know what to tell my vet and her first symptom was anxiety. And so I just thought she was getting nervous. I didn't realize that that could be a symptom of CCD. And so the book is the story of Cricket and how things went for her and for me. And the message of the book is, you know, that there is help out there and that we need to know about this disease so dogs can get diagnosed sooner. There's no cure, but there are drugs that can ameliorate the symptoms. There are drugs that can help the dogs and the people have an easier life. And there's so many ways you can enrich the dog's life. They can still have a good life. So if you could tell people just one thing about canine cognitive dysfunction, what would it be? What do you wish people really knew about that? I'm going to cheat and I'm going to say two. Okay. One is talk to your vet. Um, I am not a veterinarian. You know, I can't diagnose your dog. There's lists all over the internet now of symptoms. I certainly have one, but you can read all the symptoms, but you cannot diagnose your dog. You need to talk to your vet many times about this and get educated. And, um, if you're worried at all about your dog, talk about a diagnosis. And the second thing is just from my heart. You know, if your dog is diagnosed with canine cognitive dysfunction, your dog's life is not over. Like I was saying, there are many ways to enrich your dog's life. And if we can get over our own preconceptions, you know, you know, see the dog standing in the corner and go, oh, poor thing. Well, sometimes, yes, you know, some of their symptoms are pathetic and uncomfortable for them and need some intervention. But lots of the things they do, I think they're just in la-la land.

And they don't know what you know about what they used to be able to do. So that's my little lecture on that is, you know, don't give up on your dog. Don't think they're miserable unless you have good evidence that they are. Because some of this is just unfamiliar to us. They do odd things. And odd doesn't necessarily mean that the dog is unhappy. But you need to learn about that. And, again, talk to your vet about all of it. That was more than one thing. I'm sorry. That's okay. Sometimes the best things are the more than one thing, right? Right. So to move kind of from the books to your site for a little bit, and for listeners, I will make sure to include links to both of Eileen's sites in the show notes. For listeners who haven't been to your site or aren't familiar with it, can you just share a little bit about the topics you usually write about? I write about training dogs. I write about learning theory. And the thing that I am able to do that lots of professional trainers am not is I write about my mistakes a lot. I show things that I've tried that don't work. And I show things that I've tried that do work. But on my site, you get to see videos of dogs who've never learned a behavior before and me trying to train them with the best intentions and with a lot of information. But with gaps in my understanding, you can see a typical person training their dog and making mistakes. And you can learn from my mistakes. I talk about dog body language a lot, too. You know, having all the different dogs I've had, I have great footage of the interesting things they do with each other and with us. You know, body language is a whole other part of what we need to learn about when we're trying to train our dogs well. But, you know, I take a scientific approach to the training. But I show a human trying to do it. Fair enough. You kind of mentioned the scientific piece there. And I think one of the things that I like best about your work is that you really do approach things pretty scientifically. A while ago, you wrote a post kind of asking the question, when is citing a research study not enough? And I'd love to talk about that a little bit. So when is citing a research study not enough? At least if we want to be right about the facts and kind of present ideas that are actually backed up by research. Okay. One research study is almost never enough. And usually when we want a research study, it's because we want to win an argument these days. Or we want to know something, you know, for a fact. You know, let's get to the bottom of this. Let's figure it out.

The problem is that we need to look at the bulk of the literature. You know, one brand new study, if it's the first on a certain topic, you know, that's just the beginning of the research. And you can't flap that around and say, hey, I've proved it now. You have to look at the bulk of the research. And one example I like to give is that some topics don't have studies because they are so basic that they are in textbooks. One good example of that is that people will come along and say, I need a research study that proves that you can't reinforce fear. Okay. Well, as far as I know, there isn't one per se, and there's not one with dogs. And the reason is that that information is implicit and explicit in textbooks and review papers. To answer that question, all you need to know about, all you need to know about, you need to know about the difference between operant behavior and respondent behavior. You need to know about how emotions work. And you need to know about the sympathetic nervous system response. And if you put all that together, which is in any psychology book, pretty much, you know, you might have to crack a biology book for some of it. But you can see why they didn't have to do a study to show that, you know, that emotions are operant behaviors and you don't reinforce them. You can reinforce behaviors that come around them. But that's an example of it. You know, people want one study for something, and it's either something that's so basic that you could just open a book and find out, or it's something that's so new that we might have one study that shows it, but we need for five or ten more to come in. So I always tell people, you know, look for the review study. Look for the one that summarizes the research, because that's going to do the work of assessing whether the study is any good. Because I don't know about you, but I don't have a psychology degree. I do have a graduate degree. I have two of them. So I'm familiar with research, but I don't have the basis, the basic knowledge to really assess a study. So I have to go to the people who can help. And that's the people who write the review articles and the people who write the textbooks. I think that's great advice and kind of a good thing for people to remember, especially in this day and age. Like you said, we tend to want to win an argument instead of thinking, wait a minute, let's make sure we have our facts straight. Great. So the example you mentioned in the post was, you know, kind of a post you wrote about errorless learning. And I was hoping you'd be willing to maybe share that story for listeners.

You are. And this is an example of making a mistake. And it was Susan Friedman who told me a couple of years back when I was cringing about making public mistakes. And she said, that's like science. You know, science gets it wrong and then somebody comes along and gets a little better and you get a little closer. You know, you're shaping the knowledge. So there's no shame in it, even though it really feels like there is. I took exception to the term errorless learning because I read the work of Herb Terrace, who did kind of the famous work. I think it was in the 60s with pigeons where they did thousands and thousands of repetitions of pigeons pecking on a lit disc. And it had, I think, a green light on it. And the errorless part was that they made it super easy to peck on that disc. And then they were teaching them also not to peck on a red disc. So, you know, at first the other disc was way far away. Then when they did light it up, they lit it very dimly. In other words, they kept that green disc very attractive and just kind of snuck in the other one. And in thousands of repetitions, when this was done gradually, some of the pigeons had less than one percent error rate, which all of us should aspire to. Well, I just took kind of exception to that because, you know, they were in completely controlled lab environment. You know, the pigeons were starving. You know, they always take them down to a low body weight. So they're wanting to work. They controlled many, many more variables than we ever can. And it just didn't seem like something we could really emulate. And even the term to me, I nitpick words a lot, but it was not errorless. You know, they had a one percent error rate. So you can't call that errorless. So I wrote a little kind of a ranting article about that and I snorted snorted around about it. And I had a friend, you know, she could have done this through the public comments, but she didn't. I have a friend whose parents were Ph.D. students under Skinner. So she's one of the few people in the world who grew up as a human in a positive reinforcement environment. And she said, you know, Eileen, that's not quite right. Herb Terrace, you know, his experiments, yes, they were famous, but he was not the first one to talk about errorless learning. And you kind of got it wrong. And she educated me. And it turns out that Skinner, back in the 1930s, was talking about errorless learning and errorless teaching. Because, of course, to him, if the student made an error, it's really a mistake of the teacher. And it was, you know, some of us have read about it since then.

It was kind of the same principle, but of providing a path for the learner where the easiest path to go is to the behavior you want with the fewest number of errors possible. And he had had an argument with Thorndike, who said you have to make errors to learn. And Skinner said, no, you don't. And Skinner kind of won that one. But, you know, we think of Skinner as just this dry, cold guy. But he was, you know, passionate about teaching and learning. And he was trying to be as humane as possible and make an easy path for the learner. And there's nothing bad about that, you know, in my opinion. There's nothing bad. And so I wrote part two. And I left part one up. I was tempted to get rid of it. But I left part one up and I just put a note at the top said, if you read this, you know, there are mistakes in here. So please read part two or just read part two instead. Fair enough. I think it's awesome that you were willing to leave that up. I think that that really says something about kind of your willingness to be transparent about all of this. And like you said, you kind of feel like you can show those errors and show those mistakes where a trainer may not feel comfortable with that. So I think that's fantastic. Thank you. That's something I try to do for the community, even though even for me, it's pretty hard sometimes. So how do you try to keep up to date with the latest information? How do you try to make sure that you're conducting good research on this stuff when you're writing? One thing I learned in my science degree is, you know, you don't just read the paper. You know, your job is then to go through all the footnotes and read all the footnotes and then get on Google Scholar and look at who has cited the paper later. Because, I mean, if you looked up a paper in 1975 for why do humans get ulcers, that paper would say from stress and acidic foods. And if you don't look later in the literature, you won't find out that, whoops, actually it's from an infection, which they discovered in 1981 or 82. So you have to look before the research piece that you're reading and after it. And what I do personally, I set up some Google alerts, both from standard Google and Google Scholar. And there are a couple topics. One of them is dementia in dogs and the other one is sound sensitivity and sound capabilities of dogs. And I get alerts whenever anything new is published. And most of it is crap. But it's I get the good stuff, too. I get things from Google Scholar when there's a new paper, for instance, on dog dementia, which one did come out this year. And that's pretty much how I try to keep up.

I try to keep focused because there's way too much for anybody to learn these days. But I use the tools that are out there and I try to be thorough in terms of looking. Also looking at who is arguing against this. You know, that's the hard part, especially when you get attached to something. You don't want to read about why it's wrong. But I try to do that, too. That's awesome. So to shift gears a little bit, you've also written quite a bit on your site about Clara. And you mentioned earlier that she was a feral dog and you have done a ton of socialization work with her. Do you mind just sharing a little bit about your approach there? How you've gone about that? I would love to. And I have to credit my teacher, Lisa Mantle, with whom I could not have done this without her. She's had a lot of experience with feral and other very challenged dogs. She actually says that Clara is one of the most challenging ones she has had. And when Clara came to me, she was between eight and ten weeks old and her socialization window was in the act of shutting, like probably that very night. And she was scared of me and avoidant. And I didn't think I was going to be able to catch her. She was slinking away and acting like a wild animal. But when I opened my front door, a little cricket, the rat terrier, was barking inside. And Clara pricked up her ears and slunk by me like I wasn't there and came into my house and sat down next to cricket in her crate. And so it was the other dog that got Clara into the house. And within the evening, she decided I was OK. And part of that was because of spray cheese, which she still thinks is manna from heaven. But I assumed, silly me, that since I had gotten in, everybody would get in. You know, now she likes people. Look, she thinks I'm great. She's sitting in my lap. She's flirting with me. She's jumping up and down, you know. And so the next day I took her somewhere and I had her in the crate in the car. And I said, look, I've got this puppy. And opened the door and Clara went, errrr. The little tiny puppy growling in the crate. I thought, oh, dear. I've got more of a problem here than I thought. Anyway, back to getting to socialization. You know, it was technically not socialization at some point because she was past that window. And there's a terminology dispute about this. And I'm trying to placate the people who say it's not socialization after they're, you know, a certain age. We were doing desensitization, counter conditioning and habituation. But we start we started with people 100 feet away. You know, that's how well just fearful of people.

And we had to start very far away. We did very, very careful exposures. And this was over the course of months and years. And we did a lot of it at a shopping mall, which sounds crazy. But it was just the layout of the place was such that we really could go 100 feet away and there wouldn't be anybody to bother us. But it was extremely gradual. And every appearance of a person, whether they were 50 feet away or later on, you know, walking by on the sidewalk, was paired with something awesome, which, you know, spray cheese or something else she loved. McDonald's chicken sandwiches were also very popular. But it was just very gradual. And my teacher was very good at, you know, when we hit a bump in the road or get to a plateau, you know, sometimes we could work through it. Sometimes we just take a different approach. And she has good intuitions about that. And one day she said, let's just take her. Let's just take her down the sidewalk in the mall. And by golly, she was fine. She could walk throngs of people. As long as, you know, there's things she doesn't like. You know, if someone walks up to her and says, oh, a puppy and stares at her, you know, she's going to chuff at them. But people walking by, people brushing against her, you know, sudden changes in environment, wheelchairs, anything that, you know, might bother a lot of dogs. She is great with and she has come such a very long way. But it was all very gradual. And it was done through desensitization, counter conditioning and habituation. So just to give people a little bit of idea, when you say very gradual, how old is she now? How long have you guys been working on this stuff? She is six. The point where we could walk her around in the mall was about two years after we started. But she was happy. You know, it wasn't this, okay, she's all right walking around. She was great. Right, right. I always think it's interesting to ask for the timeline a little bit there just because it helps people kind of understand how much work goes into it sometimes. But also there's a light at the end of the tunnel. That's right. That's right. And thinking back, you know, a lot of people have had harder situations than we have. But we did have a pretty hard one. And she basically was like a wild animal. I didn't see her as a fearful dog. You know, she wasn't congenitively startling or fearful. She was just different. You know, she was like a wild animal and had that natural distrust of humans. So I don't know about other people necessarily.

But I really find that I personally struggle with what feels like two conflicting pieces of advice out there when it comes to socialization or even kind of the stuff you're talking about, right? The idea that option one, bring your puppy lots of places, you know, but don't overface them. Make sure it's all positive, but bring them all the places you go. And the second is, okay, never bring your puppy places unless you're absolutely sure you can just get up and leave if it's too much for them. So I was kind of curious how you handled determining what to expose Clara to, what she's ready for, what is likely to still even today maybe be too much for her. That's a really great question. With her, I mean, of course, we had to take mostly the second method. You know, that was being careful that we had a way to get out. She was not a puppy that I could lug around everywhere and expose her to. I mean, I think there can be value in that as long as you can protect the puppy from people who do the wrong stuff, which, I mean, any reactive dog group will tell about those people who are going to do stuff to your dog if they get any chance. But today I feel like I need to be just be careful and watch her. But, you know, for instance, even without really working on veterinary visits, she's good at veterinary visits now just because of the general work we've done. And there's sometimes, you know, you have to take your dog to the vet and she does really well. And I feel like I could take her to a new place with people and walk around and she would she would do fine. I would just watch for situations where people would be too assertive towards her. It's so it's not so much the environment. It's not environmental changes. It's not crowds. It's that person who zeroes in and says, oh, what a beautiful dog. Can I pet her while you're running away? Right. We're getting to the end here. And I like to have these three questions. I typically try to ask everybody the first time they're on the show. So I'd love to kind of work through those. The first one is what is the dog related accomplishment that you're proudest of? It is that I use classical conditioning to prevent Clara from picking up on Summer's barking. Summer was a reactive dog and she barked regularly at things that went by the house, particularly delivery trucks and things that were hard for me to control. I mean, you can't control those. And I wasn't always home. So she had some untreated reactivity. And I did not want Clara, the baby puppy, to pick up on that. She had enough problems.

And so from the very beginning, very consistently, when Summer would bark, wherever she was, I would give Clara a magnificent treat. Usually, again, spray cheese. Didn't matter what the dogs were doing, what was happening. So I did a classical pairing of Summer barks, wonderful treats fall from the sky. And lots of the things I think up on my own don't work out really well because I can't see down the line well enough to see, you know, the end ramifications. But that one worked out great. I have a dog who, when she hears another dog bark, looks at me eagerly instead of running to go bark with them. And, you know, just considering that she had so many other challenges, I didn't want her to have that challenge. And she literally, I have a video of her literally drooling when she heard Summer bark. And so I can prove, yes, I had the Pavlovian Association there. Other dog barking means yummy stuff is coming my way. And I'm really proud of doing that. It has paid off in so many ways. That's awesome. And that's a fantastic idea. So the other question, and usually this is one of my favorite questions of the podcast, is what's the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Watch the dog. And I can say that in two ways. One of them is, you know, learn about dog body language. I posted a blog just yesterday, I think it was two days ago, about accidentally using punishing things because you're following a protocol and trying to do everything right. And you don't notice that, you know, you're snapping your hand in the dog's face or something like that. They really don't like. So watch the dog. Make sure that what you're doing is okay. Even when you're concentrating on your mechanics and following the directions that you've read, you know, from your teacher. So that's one way. And also, I do agility. And so many times when I made an error, it's like my teacher would say, you weren't watching your dog. And of course, there's times we have to take our eyes off them. But watch the dog. That's my mantra. Excellent. It's nice and concise and easy to remember, too, which is a plus. So last question here. Who is somebody else in the dog world that you look up to? My friend Marge Rogers. Marge and I kind of grew up together in the dog training online world. And we started our journeys together. Marge became a professional trainer and I became a writer. But Marge, you know, before there was ever a Fenzie Academy and people, you know, sharing these wonderful ideas of how to be humane to dogs in competition.

Before there was ever that, you know, Marge trained her dogs way over fluency before she ever competed them. She's also fantastic at using multiple reinforcers. Just as a matter of course, any dog that goes to her is going to end up being able to switch back and forth, you know, between a plate of food and a tug toy. And they can tug when the food's on the ground and they can eat food even if they love to have a ball. They will get, you know, not only multiple reinforcers, but the ability to respond to the trainer to transfer back and forth between those reinforcers. She's just fantastic of that. She helps me with all my problems. She can usually give a one line response to whatever stupid thing I'm doing. And not only that, she's humble. She's always learning. She's one of the most humble people I know. And I just love her training. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I think this has been fantastic. You are welcome. It is my pleasure. I mean, I love to talk about this stuff and I am very honored to be on the FENZY podcast. Well, thank you. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Kathy Sadow to talk about everything from training dolphins to dog training. It should be a pretty deep dive on behavior. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the FENZY dog sports academy. Special thanks to Denise FENZY for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. We'll see you soon. Thank you.