에피소드 42: Dr. Michael Moyer

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fulfilling prophecy now we also have that compounded by owners who are doing the wrong things and they're trying to correct fear behaviors and that doesn't typically go very well uh when you're trying to overly restrain a dog who's already fearful generally that dog becomes you know escalates its reactivity so it's it's a big challenge um and for me it's it's trying to strike a balance between simply separating the dog from the owner which is often not good often the dog is better if we can get the owner a little calmer and i think it's also useful for an owner to see in in which sort of maneuvers the dog is awkward uh i think it's it's enlightening for them to realize that you know well we just brought him in for a nail trim well you say that as though it's it's pretty easy to do and when your dog's 110 pounds and is trying to you know flail uh there's not a lot you can do physically uh with a dog and that there is a reason why he's coming to the vet that they're not doing it themselves right and we every month we have somebody come in usually it's a new client because they don't know how how difficult their dog is and they say well we just wanted the nails trimmed and and and and we'll we'll typically do this kind of stuff in the room so they can they can experience what it takes to do it um and and and we have a rule that if it's going to take more than a muzzle and and one set of hands plus the owner we probably need more chemistry we probably need to do something different uh for for safety's sake for that dog what do you think what and i know that probably it's going to be another easy question to answer but just if you if you're to take a guess around the current uh across the country how how much do you think the percentage of veterinarians that are also understanding and are tactful and are making an effort to make that experience as pleasant as possible even though a lot of times it just cannot be but but i i go to you know i mean i've been i lived in different states i was in california i've been around but i was in kentucky i was in now in florida and and i go to different veterinarians but of course i have the experience i have some relationship and even then it's very difficult it's almost like um kind of like i don't want to put it in the same category because you guys going through insane amount of education uh uh for for what you have to do but in amongst dog trainers you know you have dog trainers that are dog trainers and then there is a different level of dog trainers

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that uh may do a little less but they know what they're doing and they accomplish more and and i guess the question again is with the overall picture would it be even possible to say where the veterinary practices are at the moment as far as being um how do they deal with with the problems we're discussing already well because there's been a lot of interest in particularly a a uh branded and trademarked uh program uh called uh fear free and and so that has gotten a lot of attention and people sign themselves and their staff members up to go through this certification process to learn what are essentially low stress handling techniques and and you know it's a packaged uh promoted uh profitable uh enterprise and if if if it's a way for a vet team to become better and more effective at handling these dogs and cats for that matter then great uh but i'm i i bristle a little bit because there is a profit you know baked into this thing and and there were a lot of people in the in the field of veterinary uh behavior who were uh advocating for low stress handling techniques before this became a a trademarked sold kind of cookie cutter certification i also secondarily chafe at certification where you know it's a one and done kind of thing um and there's really nobody watching how you do this stuff there's nobody really you know having a second opinion on on are you really applying what you became certified to do and so you i'm sure encounter that with with dog training where people get some sort of credential and they're in fact terrible but they somehow got a credential uh and because of that they now look less terrible uh to some people uh and so i chafe at certifications that that really don't come with any sort of quality assurance uh to follow them um but it's hard to know i think i think veterinarians have to have an interest in in just being more humane being more effective with their patients to really get interested in a low stress approach and not automatically assume a dog even though it it behaved poorly the last time sometimes they get better in fact i had a dog in today it came in as a quite young dog uh it was under six months and literally we could not touch this dog for its first exam this dog was like a moulinx flying around trying to bite you know just about i'm smiling but but i'm not smiling i i know how you know what these dogs when you yeah when you i mean it's it's it's funny when we're having a talk conversation outside the world but but when you have to get the to examine the dog and you and you have this kind of dog it's just not pleasant for anybody including

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the dog oh and yeah and the owner's horrified the owner has no idea because they've had this dog for a few weeks at home and the dog seems to be you know ticking all the boxes of cute small you know short-coated terrier mix the dog was in earlier today and uh to do anything noxious we routinely muzzle her because you know she is reactive but today she was absolutely fine she made no no uh evasive maneuvers when i took the muzzle off at the end of the vaccination she came up to me greeted me took treats from me was actually looking kind of friendly now i don't think i'd try to vaccinate or without the muzzle just because that's a terrible mistake if you think it's going to be safe and you decide not to use a very very benign tool like a muzzle and you're wrong that's a very big error uh the dog loses whoever gets bitten loses uh and then everybody's quite upset including the owner the owner justifiably gets horrified from that so but the dog has made a a quite amazing transformation and the owner does not do any deliberate training but we've been very careful to you know be safe with the dog not allow it to actually harm anybody and not to not to just brutally restrain it when it comes in we don't just you know throw it to the floor with a muzzle and do what we have to we bring it some on some sedatives so it's having a better experience and because the dog has now had a few visits where nothing really terrible happened the dog is kind of warming up to us as well yeah i think that's the i mean one of the keys and that probably is also very problematic because like you cannot sometimes i mean you have a busy clinic and and you you know that you need to take some time with each dog but then at the same time you have to keep things moving and uh so that must be difficult as well for for you know having a busy clinic sometimes right and it's you know there's there's a certain amount of we just have to get to an end point you know if it if it's a sick patient in particular and it needs you know it needs blood drawn you know it has to be done in a fairly expeditious way we don't have you know we can't have them come back for three weeks in a row to do happy visits just come in get a dog treat step on the scale leave by the back door without anything happening though we still encourage uh we have a handful of dogs over the years where they've been so challenging that we do have them do that um and we've got a dog right now happens to be a malinois and the dog is an incredibly reactive incredibly strong dog who does not have a job this is a dog who's a

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pet who really should be in a working dog environment this dog should really have something to do six to eight hours a day with a professional handler driving it instead the dog's expected to be you know this this fantastic looking beautiful and it is it's a it's a perfectly healthy uh beautiful dog but the dog is just you know a 10 out of 10 for reactivity this dog came in and did happy visits with my office manager for many months while it was a youngster and my my office manager could hand to treats and so forth uh but this dog without lots of meds on board with a lot without a cage muzzle already installed when it comes in the building this dog is dangerous uh this dog will definitely try to bite people uh because it's so stressed and again it doesn't have any sort of diversion it's not it's not out there doing stuff as it was designed to do right yeah and i mean fortunately we have the option or you have the option to tone it down what is what is typically uh um medication that that like like your goal to in cases like this what would you guys do so our goal is to make them slow enough that they can be safely uh handled in the in the uh the whatever we need to do yeah sometimes what we need to do is have them slow enough that they can be safely muzzled so we can give them intramuscular sedation to do things we have a handful of dogs that need intramuscular full you know they have to be knocked down just about full anesthesia to touch their feet and that's not a large number of dogs but it's it's a number of dogs and they need sedatives even to get that uh intramuscular injection on board uh safely and so our goal is to is to have them come in have the whatever we need to do happen safely uh and then have them recover fully and go out the door without feeling like they've been you know just brutally wrestled uh into place um i was at a conference probably 25 years ago and uh it was a pain management and sedation topic and uh the presenter uh said well how many of you people are still just if if the dog's being bad you just call in more technicians for additional restraint how many of you have have nail trims where it takes three technicians plus a muzzle to do it a number of people including myself raised hands he says if you took your child to a pediatrician's office and they were so frightened they shat on the table wouldn't you think some sort of sedative might be better a better approach could be done with with chemistry and so it was it was a neat way of phrasing it that

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it's again these are fearful encounters and and yeah you can physically restrain them but that doesn't really address the underlying you know absolute fear that they're they're coming in the door with and if you give them sedatives i think there is quite a bit less fear they're not nearly as reactive they can't quite escalate as much if you can give them sedation and then which sedative you use depends on lots of other things which have to do with the the medical history of the dog and sure and what seems to work in your practice and so forth but they're all more or less sedative tranquilizers uh sometimes with a little bit of anti-anxiety baked into them as well you are in uh um you're in pennsylvania right i am yeah just i because i don't think we we mentioned this how how was it um covet times how how did you guys how did it work for you what did you how did you work around that so we were incredibly lucky because i'm a solo practice and i've got uh i've got three exam rooms i've got a divided waiting room and we're our schedule is pretty uh uh clear and and we don't tend to stack people up in the waiting room to begin with and so we had a meeting all the all of the staff at my practice we had a discussion because everybody was going what they called a curbside owners would stay in the car yes the dog would be extricated separated from the owner taken into the building whatever happened happened and then all of the communication were either text or phone call or email afterwards but there was no physical face to face with a dog standing next to an owner and i can tell you that most dogs even if they're awkward most dogs don't do that much worse and many of them do better in the presence of an owner particularly if we if we allow the owner to calm down a little bit and if the owner realizes that we're you know we're not mad at the dog and and i never get mad at the dog because i realize the dog didn't wake up you know wanting to be awkward uh even though i might get frustrated i make sure that i clarify with the owner i'm not frustrated at the dog i'm frustrated that you know we have to change direction or regroup or whatever and make sure the owner isn't isn't thinking that we're you know we're upset at them or or or the dog it's it's just what it is it's it's awkward um and we have to professionally work around that so our practice never had to go curbside so we were lucky that we didn't really have to change very much about what we did we made sure that we never had two clients in the hallway or two clients in the waiting room and so we sometimes ask them to wait

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in the car until we had a room available um and we didn't have to really change all that much and we didn't lose the communication that many other practices were forced to lose because if you're a multi-doctor practice you could not do it the way we did it you would invariably have people stacking up in the waiting room and that was a no-no there was just no way that they could do it and so i get why people had to do it uh we were just fortunate that we were not forced to do it yeah that's that's for sure i even i know even like clinics that kept that way of of curbside even a little after the whole covet thing was already done uh somehow i guess either they were extra cautious or it was working out for them which i really candidly candidly some some veterinarians and some vet techs prefer not to have the face-to-face with the owner uh they're all about the dog or the cat but some of them some of them find the communication with the the owner to be a little bit vexing and um you know there are clients where i find it also vexing but the information that i glean from a careful history directly from the owner is is very important and and losing that or trying to substitute it with all of the indirect you know not face-to-face methods there's always there's always stuff lost no matter how you how careful you are no matter how thorough you try to be there's always a reduction in quality of information when it's not face-to-face yeah let's go back to the the fear-free uh um because it it's of course it's getting gaining popularity uh and as i'm saying it's getting popularity there is i i like people definitely are talking about it and people that own dogs it's like oh okay this clinic is fear-free and this one is not so which one do you go to right um i've been twice no i've been three times besides my my regular veterinarians that i have very long relationship with and i don't honestly i don't even know if they i should ask them to find out because i haven't really even paid attention if they've subscribed to that or no but the few places that i've went from from being a dog trainer i did not understand what the actual fear-free effort like what did we do when we met when we examined the dogs like where was the the difference besides the the the one veterinarian and actually i don't think it was even the doctor it was the technician came with a big bag of treats and almost gave half a bag just just like handful after handful to my dog that i i eventually had to say it's he he not gonna bite you anyway he's okay like we're gonna make him sick if he just eats this whole bag of just

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regardless of what they are you know but that's kind of my experience with it so i'm curious um how how familiar you are you said that that i and and that came as a surprise a little bit to me that there is actual certification in a process and and it's almost like a some kind of an enterprise like uh it's a business like it rolled out it rolled out some years ago uh and then it was promoted uh uh by an association that i i'm very fond of uh the american animal hospital association was part of the promotion of this fear-free certification and and none of it is a terrible idea it's not bad to become better at you know dog handling or or patient handling uh in your practice but what really bothered me was that it was promoted as uh a wedge certification where they would they would somehow take out advertisements or they would somehow get the media's attention they would say well if you don't go to a fear-free veterinarian you could your pet could be having a worse experience and again there's a lot of us who've been trying to learn how to handle dogs better for a very long time as as just part of our practice and we recognize that what we're doing is is scary we recognize that what we're doing is noxious and we're doing our level best to get better at it and less scary to these dogs and to have somebody come out and and more or less self-promote their uh their certification program their school from which they directly profit and their family members profit because they are part of this business enterprise uh and then to go advertise against people who are actually doing a pretty darn good job and and perhaps they had to learn as they as they you know they had to learn uh the hard way uh but there are other resources apart from fear free there are other low stress handling uh programs in fact there's a competing certification program um as well for low stress handling uh based on some other behaviorists work um and so but but you can get pieces of this and of course if you've been in practice for any length of time you can figure out uh pretty quickly what works and what doesn't in terms of making dogs more or less uh uh calm during during these noxious procedures and and then letting owners know what they can do uh to help with these kinds of things and sometimes the best that they can do is is teach the dog how to wear a cage muzzle and come in prepared so that we can do things safely and take it from there yeah this is interesting um um by the way i like low stress or or better than fear free because anybody going to a vet clinic or go

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or a person going to a hospital when there is something wrong with you you you're anxious you're you're a little bit scared of what's going on like and and fear free so it's a like i cannot help myself but make that parallel analogy with the the and they do come together the force-free dog training and the fear-free vet clinic uh environment to where sometimes uh in training uh force-free uh force-free clearly is not successful and there is other options that are successful and then what do we do do we where do we go from there and yeah it's an interesting one because um it kind of you really go i think they go hand in hand and they're excellent ideas um but again um how how much when we say it's fear free like what what are we really saying is that just a catch phrase um and yes we have good intentions and you understand but as as you were saying um a lot actually like you you were saying at least teach the dog how to do a muzzle but um um i just had a like you know with my school that we have the and and we are constantly having different cases of behavior problems and and so on and discussing as a group and and just a few days ago we had one that it's actually a graduate from the school with their own dog that's now seven months old and so he goes to the vet and he decides to buy the technician um and then the i think the dog sitter comes and decided to buy the dog sitter so it's in like a h thing and it's just something going on but anyway we had to talk about what can you do as an owner to help your dog and yourself when you go to a vet clinic and when we started to break it down there's actually a ton of cool things that you can do including teaching the dog how to be patient how to just if it's sitting or standing but just to be still for a moment that's that's already a big deal it's like hey and and and this is training this is a very easy training and most dog trainers regardless of what style in school they come from they can teach a dog in a very friendly way to just hold on just for a few seconds and then we can build from there let me lift your lip let me pull your eye let me flush you with the iphone let me poke your ear like all these things that are when when they happen for a first time inside the vet clinic on the metal table the dog is like what the hell is going on right and and all that as a game like literally as a some cool game can be done at home and to me this is if we're going to talk about low stress or fear free or you know just helping your dog there is a little bit of education that is missing that and i

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don't know if it's missing actually maybe maybe it's uh it's been like that's kind of what i was saying what is the the protocols of the fear free is it does it start in the clinic or because to me everything starts at home and you know silly silly things like this and even okay so lay down and and roll over on the side just hold on let me touch your feet okay get up get a treat or let's play ball for a moment taking the time in the same way as you would take the time to teach your dog to walk nicely on leash when you take him out you you really as an owner if you if you have some guidance and this is the question that i'm not sure if there is such protocols but most owners if they have some guidance how to they probably can can help their dogs help you to do your job and and and basically the the whole experience going to the clinic can be all around uh improved by 10 times at least what do you think well i think pardon me i do think the owner plays a huge role in in shaping behaviors and uh improving reactivity to certain things uh many of that many of those things could be conditioned at home uh but i think i think your world of dog training has has elevated you out of the masses and so the average pet owner is is who i see and the average pet owner is in love with the idea of a well-trained dog but is not willing to put in the time or the effort or doesn't have the right training mentor to guide them uh there are there's a very popular local local trainer in this area who will put a prong collar on a dachshund uh a mini dachshund uh as just every dog gets a prong collar and they have a very very you know 1960s police dog training uh style where everything is you know all correction you know you've got to show it who's boss that kind of thing um and there's no sort of play there's no sort of uh expectation that if you're working with young dogs who have a baked in play drive and a need to play and a need to have manic play that you've got to let these dogs burn it off before you can really start shaping that behavior you can't you can't shut down play in a very young dog um you've got to you've got to work with it and and that means you know when they're ready to train you've got to be available to start working with what they're letting you teach them but when they just want to play and go nuts you've got to kind of shape that and direct that and let it happen and so i think i think the casual typical dog owner is just not engaged in the process and i don't know how to engage them i i try to uh

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we try to encourage we have a humane trainer who who uses mostly positive techniques she's not overly heavy with corrections but she does correct uh she does you know understand that uh there needs to be at times a a humane correction of certain behaviors and so uh we like her we like that she's you know she's good a good communicator with clients but very few clients unless their dog is a problem very few clients take us up on that suggestion what drives people to seek a trainer is a dog bite that's when people start getting serious about training their dog is after it's bitten somebody and so we have a a subset of dog owners whose dogs are reactive and challenging particularly dog directed aggression and then people are bitten while they're trying to break up dog fights that's that's that's the biggest one that we see um in this area uh though we have we have some human directed aggression dogs as well but until they until they bite somebody they care about they don't typically take dog training very seriously yeah interesting yeah you're right you're right that's uh uh um um i i i i i do think from a high-end dog trainer point of view i guess you're you're very correct they have um um like would you what what does it take to say i i cannot accept that dog in the clinic like have you had times where it was like okay this is just really just a really dangerous situation and or or you would rely to the mets at that point and you take care of it has it has been a very long in fact i can't recall the last time that we thought a dog was so dangerous that we couldn't deal with it but i had a i had probably five or six years ago i had a um uh he was from another jurisdiction he was a police dog handler in another jurisdiction came into my local community and became a peace officer within the community not as a dog trainer or dog handler but just as a regular beat cop and he happened to have his own you know personal dog now two years old totally untrained highly reactive uh german shepherd and the dog was just dangerous the dog was you know big was in the you know absolutely as healthy as could be had no manners no training and was lunging trying to bite me as i stepped into the room and so this particular guy is is trying to you know brutally correct the dog with a prong collar repeatedly and i said no no we're we're gonna we're gonna send you home with with medications we'll come back we'll try to do this a different way and i had to walk past the dog in the hallway uh to get to my office and the dog bit my sleeve luckily it didn't get my arm but it got my sleeve

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and the dog just about strangled the owner just about strangled his own dog in the hallway and i said stop doing that please stop doing that just just leave and and he left and we fired him because he was just the wrong owner for that particular dog and we said we just cannot see you if this is the way you're going to treat this dog and he was indignant because he had 35 years experience um you know as a quote unquote police dog handler but it was the barbaric techniques that they used to use um and and i guess that made some dogs good apprehension dogs but i suspect it just made a lot of police officers you know repeatedly bitten by a dog that was you know psychotic the dog didn't know what to do uh it was sort of getting corrected for for reasons it could not understand yeah i i i i would agree with you it's it's actually as as as unfortunate as it is i think it's it's still uh very pronounced this this happens um and just lack of lack of training uh um it's a different how how the police departments who who who teaches where they have to learn from how much time they have then how much they really want to be a dog trainer because when you're in a canine unit you you know you have it as a job but at the same time unless you accept the fact that you are also becoming a dog trainer and you learn how to train dogs you you will end up with with similar situations um which is unfortunate well the notion the notion that you can train a dog and just hand the leash and that dog to somebody else and have it all work is just that's just insanity to me that somehow a dog can be prepared to do a complex job these dogs are not being asked to simply you know go forward and sit uh like a detection dog perhaps they're they're being asked to do incredible things and you're expecting the dog to make a lot of independent decisions about danger and and react to threats and to think that you can somehow train that dog and just hand it over to somebody else as the handler without having them deeply engaged you know with a with a training interest that just seems like it's doomed right every once in a while you see some very like nice like very very knowledgeable people amongst the the canine units and yeah it's difficult and also it's probably like every job um their levels and there is different what about the the spay and neuter how do you feel about those um i'm telling you this from going back to so i i worked in the early 90s at guide dogs in san rafael in california and then i worked in the san

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francisco spca and at both places and we had a very good understanding why we're doing this there was an actual real good reason why but everybody got spayed and neutered and and we were doing so many to where us the trainers would also assist the the doctor to to do it like i i felt like i could actually do it at some point myself i'm just doing so many at the time you know but from not even having the education that you do i know that there is an incredible amount of hormonal change that affects and my belief is that we were if if if we are doing something good that also has some other effects on the body and the mind and and everything else so how do you feel what is what do you think of spay neuter today so the evidence the evidence remains uh a bit unsettled because most of the studies that have uh that have been cited were not actually well structured they were not designed to answer the question they're attempting to answer and i don't know that we're ever going to get those studies because it would likely have to be done breed by breed by breed and it would have to be well controlled well set up to find out what is the optimum age from a health and behavior standpoint and they might be that might be two different studies because a healthy dog may not be behaviorally healthy there might be different different effects on behavior and health what i can tell you is that for male dogs the the downside of not being neutered the downside risk is quite a bit smaller than in the case of a female dog who is not spayed and who is also not bred so every time a female dog goes through an estrous cycle she gains an increase in a certain problem down the road so you're thinking more about cancerous problems yeah and so there are there are accumulating risks for each estrous cycle in which she is not pregnant because pregnancy is protective and so obviously if a dog is a breeding dog it's going to be bred and pregnant and that risk does not get as as great working dog environment it's complicated because dogs in estrous obviously might have to fall out of a training at least a group training environment for a while because they might be such a distraction to other intact male dogs etc etc and so it is incredibly convenient to spay and to castrate dogs by six months of age from a management standpoint is incredibly convenient and that's what we were taught to recommend and so that's what we recommended we recommended that with zero evidence that it had a health benefit to the dogs for female dogs it probably does have a health

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benefit whether it has an orthopedic health downside or a behavioral health downside is probably undetermined and i think it's going to be it's going to be if at all it's going to be years before we really tease that out um and so i i still recommend spay and castration for pet dogs obviously they're pet dogs they're not looking to breed them uh i i strongly recommend weight management because what a lot of pet dogs don't have is an observant owner in terms of how many calories the dog should eat the dog comes in excessively you know very high body condition uh when i look at the dogs that write your seminar and i look at the condition of those dogs i go almost all my clients would say those dogs are underweight skin and that they should they should probably feed that dog more and i look at those dogs going they looked so good they looked so athletic they looked so healthy uh but that's not what i see every day i see a lot of over conditioned dogs and so when you hear about the orthopedic downside risk for early spay and castration i don't think it has been controlled for obesity or at least over conditioning and so i think if you had um if you did this study i would want it to be done in a working dog population where handlers are highly attuned to what an athletic body condition should be and if you had spayed athletic malinois compared to intact uh athletic malinois and you followed them over time you might get an answer to that question but right now we don't have a we don't have a great answer uh for that question yeah female dogs have higher risk i think there's more benefit more upside than downside but we don't know about behavior we don't know about all of the subtle athletic changes increased risk for orthopedic disease by you know spay before uh a year or 16 or 18 months yeah that's kind of what the the bone structure and the density and so on that's kind of what um whatever it was like i don't know how many years it's few years back now uc davis did some study with the goldens and the and the shepherds and and again it's like this is the the the difficult part at least in canine any canine science it's like we make one study and we have 10 dogs and we come out with a conclusion and it's not replicated being being in the dog training side or in the veterinary side like like somehow it's very quick to okay that's what we found and even though the study clearly says well that's what we found but use caution because clearly this is a very small example and and so on but with a

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a little bit of time it gets blown up and becomes uh uh not even legit but it becomes the the no this is this is what it is all of a sudden it's like it becomes so strongly accepted dogma as it were yeah yeah and and to to the point that nobody even thinks to do another one that's that's the the interesting part it's like i mean this has there is quite a few studies on the dog training side of things to where they have big holes in the studies they have small samples they're done 30 years ago with with some idea what the outcome should be never been replicated but nobody ever even considers or just plays with the idea to let's let's redo this let's try it again and see what comes up not one time yeah the veterinary profession as as we are trained uh we are relatively unchallenging and so we accept these sorts of publications at face value without challenging them from a from a an evidence standpoint without challenging them from a from a statistical power standpoint we don't look at them and go well those were those were golden retrievers collected at a veterinary teaching hospital are those retrievers representative of dogs gen retrievers generally and in fact they aren't because dogs that present to a veterinary teaching hospital are a different sub population of dogs than dogs that i see or dogs that that uh a discount health clinic sees uh near me at the humane society and so there are different populations and what we publish in the veterinary literature are convenience samples we we publish what was convenient to collect we don't go out and we don't do the hard work of saying okay let's let's let's find out what a representative population of golden retrievers should look like even the golden retriever study was dog fancy it was it was high-end uh or at least you know people who considered themselves in the golden retriever fancy it was not all of the amish farmers who are producing huge numbers of golden retrievers uh it was not those golden retrievers so does that study represent the dogs that i see when two-thirds of the purebred dogs that are coming into my practice are coming through greenfield puppies out of lancaster county in pennsylvania um so i don't know and it's it's a it's a challenge because we don't have the we don't have the ability to recruit and do the kinds of uh statistical studies that they do in human medicine uh if if you put one of these studies in front of somebody at the new new england journal of medicine they would laugh at a study looking at 35 or 85 dogs

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they would go really 85 that's your that's what you want to publish on 85 individuals and 85 is in fact consider a incredibly big number right and so it's i think it's i think it's good to remain open-minded and i am i am more open-minded now about age of spay age of neuter and i get less worried about an owner who comes in and says well i might want to wait until she's two years of age i'll say i don't think that's cruel i don't think that's dangerous i i wish i had better data you know to to provide a a better opinion for you but uh you've made an informed decision to wait and i think that's fine uh my only uh you know very firm and and i i feel this because i i do the surgery is that i can tell you a spay on a four-month-old german shepherd is a hell of a lot easier it's a hell of a lot smaller surgery than a two-year-old german shepherd i promise you it's a lower complication rate from a from a surgical standpoint and when these people who publish to say that we should wait until they're two years of age particularly with retrievers who tend to be you know they tend to get fat quite easily and i'm i'm pretty sure the complication rate from the surgery balanced against the rare things they're worried about seeing an increase in i think the surgical complication rate will cancel out any theoretical benefit by waiting until they're two years of age in the average golden retriever just from a surgical standpoint have i done lots of two-year-old large breeds slightly overweight dogs i've done tons of them touch wood everything's gone well i'm happy to do them and i'm not going to argue with with a client and make them feel terrible if they want to wait that long for a male dog i honestly don't think there's any downside at all in waiting until it's two years of age i don't think there's any health risk or any health consequence to waiting until it's a bit older interesting points you're making very interesting points um but you're you're right now i mean that like even as a breeder my just just my logic is and i'm sure it's influences if influence just as you are saying from the trend that we are in right now it's like if if any puppy buyer would be like we are thinking to neuter and i'm like wait don't like why first of all what what is is something that the because like i now that i'm thinking a lot of times owners end up spaying or neutering because the dog is too active or he doesn't walk on leash and like like kind of the the reasons are really out there completely uh um having nothing to do like

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clearly nothing will improve by in the behavior or the training of the dog if it gets paid or yeah i don't take those parts out right parts are i don't take them out and and so i i am on the same boat as most of the dog owners i guess today to where it's like let's wait a little bit let's have that let's have that body develop and with males it's a little bit of a toss-up i guess and depending who has the dog like um of course once testosterone goes into a male body and the dog already has experienced it and even when we take it away it's not gonna be as effective in in like male to male aggression if that's something that we're concerned about but if it's done as you say at five months or or whatever early age where it didn't kick in it didn't run into the blood it didn't i am a male right it's that testosterone didn't get there yet then we have a different kind of dog but then it's very like i'm sure you can and it's not difficult to recognize a male that has been neutered and a male that it's not especially if they're done in an early age they just develop in a very specific different way like most of them there is something and i wouldn't say well they're more tall and skinny or they're more short and feather but there is something that in the overall picture you can you can see that it something is particularly for the large breed dogs there's there's quite a bit of testosterone influence on head shape and and obviously muscle gain testosterone is a huge influence on athleticism in dogs just like a dozen people um and interestingly uh early uh castration and early spay prolong uh bone growth so actually spaying them or castrating them early results in a slightly larger specimen uh there's slightly prolonged bone long bone growth but the difference between you know castration at six months and castration at 16 months the difference is so slight that there's probably more uh sibling variation within the litter than there is you know chemical or testosterone or you know whatever influence uh you know if you split the litters and spayed half early spayed half late castrated half early castrated half late there's probably more variation within those cohorts than there would be differences between the timing of the procedure uh but there are differences it does influence it and it might play a role in certain orthopedic injuries and so i'm open-minded enough to listen to that argument and say if you've got a high octane potential you know working breed dog or competition dog and you want to wait until it's 24 months of age to neuter it

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if at all i'm okay with that i don't think that's i don't think that's a a humane or a health issue in the negative uh i think it's an informed decision and i don't have a i don't have a scientific argument to stop you from making that decision at the moment it's almost very surprising that that we have kind of plateaued and and we're not doing more more research to that because it's so i mean isn't it the most common surgery in in vet clinics we were in vet school and in surgery they said spay between six and nine months and we wrote it down and if they tested us we answered that way and it wasn't until you know 15 or 20 years ago when i became re-engaged in the the uh the academic interest in shelter medicine which is very interested in doing pediatric you know eight week 12 week spays and castrations that i started looking at this from a from a an academic standpoint and discovered uh to my shock that what they had taught taught us while it sounded great it had no science underneath it was just something that somebody had to say in a lecture and we dutifully parroted it even though there was no science underneath it and that that again that's a that's a challenge within the veterinary field is that we have we have this blind belief in things that were taught to us that really had no basis in science and the difficulty is how do you create the science to answer the question you're asking is it better to spay at nine months or 36 months or to not spay at all and i think from my clinical experience i think if you're not going to breed the dog i think spay is healthier at some point and whether that point is 12 months or 24 months i'm not sure i can tell you from a technical standpoint it's easier for me as a surgeon at four or six months than it is at 24 months particularly if you let the dog get fat it becomes a very much more challenging procedure at 24 months than it than at six months of age nevertheless it can still safely be done at 24 months of age speaking of of weight management what what is your best advice to because sometimes people all of a sudden realize that they really have a super overweight dog and they they wouldn't do that to themselves but they would decide okay you're eating all of a sudden now half a cup and you're gonna drop the weight within two weeks i i i have to tell you it it is the it is the thing it is the conversation i struggle with the most in clinical practice is the i call it the fat pet conversation because it goes something like this i don't want to trivialize it but here's the

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conversation and i have this conversation at least five times a week yeah over conditioned pet in front of me owner the owner is you know engaged they're not absentee they're they're caring and i tell them for for perhaps the third year in a row that their pet is over conditioned and they say they they reply with but he or she only eats and then they tell me how little the dog eats or the cat and when i reply well that's still too much they're they're shocked that somehow this pet and they might have even cut the calories they might have cut the portion but they're somehow still horrified this pet who's acting hungry at home is is still over conditioned and i look at them and i say i'll bet the people on my 600 pound life are hungry all the time and they have an enabler bringing them food all the time because you don't get to be 800 pounds bedridden by yourself you need an enabler yeah and you're enabling your pet to become obese by not looking at it objectively and if you can't tell bring it by the office we'll put it on the scale we'll let reality check on the scale come in we'll let the front office gals look at the dog and say yeah yeah that dog's fat dog could eat less and if you're feeding it twice a day and it's and the amount that you're giving it is still you think ridiculously small feed it once a day dogs can eat every other day they fast beautifully they they are an amazing creature you could feed them literally every other day though that would break the hearts of most dog owners to do that this is me sorry to interrupt you but this is this is me and natalia my wife you know like sometimes and i but i do it very randomly just almost it becomes to the point where it's like like they can skip a meal today it's okay it's it's been 10 days or something it's it's really totally fine and it's actually there is benefits that they skip a meal and and then we have this little argument she just cannot not go give at least a little something you know right no i i this is this is this is this is the thing that's going to make me quit veterinary medicine at some point i'm going to have one more fat pet conversation and i'm just gonna say i'm done i just can't do this one more time um because the the first argument is well i'm already feeding this ridiculously small amount and then i say well you should feed even less um and it just you can see them trying to do the math on well how can i not actually do what the doctor's saying uh because the dog's acting hungry all the time i said of course they are you know unless you have one of these weird northern breed you know

1:01:12

uh dogs that that can go for days without eating and is incredibly fussy i've never owned one of those dogs but i have them as patients as well where they they you feed them and they walk up to the bowl and they're just not going to eat right now yeah perhaps um and i think that's weird but i think those dogs just never have the kinds of problems that we see particularly with retrievers uh we see so many obese retrievers um and we've had them over the years where they're so over conditioned that at a very early time point in their career they're having all the orthopedic disasters that shorten their career uh so they are literally because of the owner's inability to to cut the calories they're shortening the dog's career because of uh obesity and what would be the the any any specific protocol as far as how like how much time would you give to to like i have a i we just got a a female uh um you know two years old she just came back because the people couldn't have her anymore a malinois intact just like a i mean a square a coffee table like like literally like a regular patient of yours i don't think i've ever seen that in a malinois i know yeah so we it took probably now i would say i don't know we are maybe three weeks or four weeks and she is looking good there is a little more to to do but but it took us this long and i don't know if it like pushing it more or taking more time with with losing weight if it even matters so i think well dogs dogs are beautifully adapted to uh you know fasting so they can go for literally days without without their uh biology or their physiology trying to fall apart unlike cats cats cannot do that cats cannot fast for more than a very short period of time without starting to fall apart metabolically uh people are remarkably good at fasting as well so dogs and people can fast for long periods of time it turns out so with with an owner like yourself who who has an eye towards what the dog should look like and lots of experience with other dogs i think you could uh take a faster you know more aggressive you know uh dieting approach most of my pet owners are are hardly on board with the idea of calorie restriction to begin with and so so so i say you know it took them two years to get this big it can take them two years to get smaller we're not in a huge rush unless they've got serious orthopedic compromise where we are under the gun to try to get some weight off of them so they can start moving better and and so if they're a and and i have plenty of you know three to five year old they're perfectly healthy they don't have any orthopedic compromise

1:04:20

yet uh but they're significantly over conditioned we'll really try to get those dogs turned around with fewer calories and that and and i try to you know again i'm not trying to be you know cheeky about this but i'll say here are there are only three ways to feed a dog the same amount which does not seem to be working we could feed more which seems absurd right if the dog's over conditioned feeding the same amount isn't working feeding more is absurd therefore the only other remaining option is less right and and doesn't and and they'll tell me well how much should i feed and i'll i'll retort with well how much are you feeding and they'll tell me a bowl full or a handful or two hands full and i'll say does anybody in your house bake has anybody measured a quantity because a handful of bowl fold is not a quantity it's it's a hope or a wish or whatever but it's not it's not reproducible you've got to tell me how much you're actually feeding and if you tell me how much you're feeding i'll propose an alternative smaller amount but it's less it's always going to be less than what you're feeding now but the fasting is a very good one too like i i almost surprised that i didn't think of of adding a day of fasting on top of reducing the food and exercise and all that that that's very good one and we do and i want to run by you how that makes sense um like typically with the females that have puppies and it's time to separate them and win them off um one thing that we do is we fast uh um for a day or even two days depending what shape the female is just to kind of break that milk cycle and i don't know if it does much or no i don't know if it's something just a mythological thing that i know way back from from eastern europe but but i do it religiously every single time i will i'll i'll ivan i'll look that up to see if there is anything behind that but i can tell you that with with most nursing mammals they will consume muscle to keep making milk they'll they'll they'll burn muscle they'll convert body condition into milk at the expense of their own health so that's my that's my seat of the pants answer but it's when the time when the time when now the puppies are not there anymore to suck and and and convince her that she has to produce you know it's that break point where the puppies are now old enough gotcha so she is no longer nursing the exactly yeah so it's like this two days yeah yeah i'll i'll look into that i'll see if there's any repro work on that uh within my profession there are there are a number of repro specialists in the field and so i'll see if i can

1:07:29

find an opinion on that for you yeah because we breeders we do things because it's just how it's been done and and some things make sense and some things are like this a little bit mysterious does that really matter or does it you know let's talk about the psychotropic medications in the last 10 years i remember it was late 90s i went to cornell for like a summer camp on like aggression behavior in dogs and and there were quite a few of the now quite famous and it was just hitting the ground this whole uh uh like there was the most enormous amount of evidence how successful and how useful and and how we can do quite frankly there is dogs that are very quickly put on this kind of medications for no apparent reason like like like like to make it really obvious a young seven month old that's just active it's a seven month old whatever the breed you want just wants to have five minutes to run like crazy and then he's okay but he's okay but somewhere somehow he the dog ends up on on regular medication psychotropic medication and it's becoming very popular and i don't know how much how why why is it becoming so popular is it is it is it something that we don't know that uh veterinarians that are prescribing no i guess there is quite a few different reasons but what what do you think of psychotropic medications so there are dogs who have global anxiety dogs who who and and my threshold is does your dog need uh chemical restraint for events like fireworks or thunderstorms does your dog lose his mind for very particular discrete events or is your dog losing his mind 15 times a day every day for a million for things that you cannot control or or stop and so that's kind of a threshold for me for for psychotropic meds anti-anxiety medications we've had the question from from uh young puppy owners dogs that are perfectly normal they're just exuberant right and whose owners are not really providing a structured or or unstructured play environment for the dog to act like a puppy and so they live in a town home we're in a high density you know residential uh area maybe they don't have a dog park that they want to drive to but they're either frustrated that this dog is so active but they got a you know they got a square-headed terrier puppy and and they're concerned that it's so active and and we've we've had the conversation saying it's being a puppy you've got to find some kind of a play outlet for that kind of behavior get get the dog into a you know a group training environment a doggy daycare a puppy class

1:11:03

something where it can blow off some steam with some other dogs maybe wrestle with another dog two or three hours a day and then you you pick up the dog and it's a tired dog uh because that's a beautiful thing if you've got a you know a dog who's had a chance to to burn off that steam and is now in a better frame of mind as we've had those conversations where people have have had an unrealistic expectation of what a young dog is supposed to be doing we've had people re-home perfectly healthy playful puppies because they were too exuberant we've had them find another home for um which is not a bad thing right if if the if the original owner's expectation is is not willing to shift and align itself with the reality of what they got then i think it is a good thing sometimes that dog stays in our practice and we get to see it as it grows up and we go wow it's a perfectly normal healthy fun dog and then the original owner goes out and gets a new puppy because of course they still are in love with this this this fantasy of having a dog and so they go out and get another puppy and then they they they have another puppy experience whether it's the same or a slightly different one people sometimes think that veterinarians should counsel pet owners in what they should select as their next dog but that's not the way it happens what happens is somebody gets a dog has it for a couple of weeks and then calls us to set up an appointment for us to meet it for the first time nobody calls me in all of my years of doing this nobody has consulted me before they got a dog they always come to us a couple of weeks after they've already acquired after they've already fallen in love after the kids have fallen in love with the dog whether it's a good dog fit for them or a bad dog fit for them it's coming with two weeks of emotional attachment baked into it and i've had exactly three people in 34 years return a dog at my suggestion because the dog was just so reactive and so aggressive and was in a family with young children where i said let me tell you how i think this is going to end somebody you love who's under the age of five is going to get bitten on the face by this dog pretty sure it's going to happen might not happen today or next week but it will probably happen within the next six months and then you'll want to re-home the dog or you could take it back to the the breeder right now one was a brazilian fila and the dog was growling at me as i stepped in the room at eight weeks of age and the breed

1:13:40

standard is to not allow a stranger to touch it and so you know it's a tough breed it's not a dog that i recommend for i would ever recommend as a family dog for somebody who's got young kids and friends of their young kids that they like uh it's a it's not a an appropriate pet dog for the average novice dog owner maybe in the hands of a highly competent you know uh person who can direct that dog's behaviors maybe it could work but not not in the typical novice you know pet owning hands right and even even if five of them do okay the sixth one when it does not do okay it's a major problem it's a serious problem this is not a joke no more i mean we we joke about you know the chihuahua is not going to probably put me in the hospital but it's still unpleasant working with a really fear aggressive chihuahua but when you're talking about 150 180 pound or 200 pound plus dog that dog can clearly kill you yeah if things go badly what what is a like a protocol for vaccinations for puppies and and and then for later on for older dogs like i i hear and i'm not sure how valid this is and i don't even know like where i hear it of course the internet feeds you things but for example that there is a uh uh conversation going around that we don't need to vaccinate at least the you know for the dhlpp this kind of vaccination every year once once it goes through the early ages through the shots and then it stays much longer in the body and so on what what what what is the protocols you follow with the vaccinations i'm happy to report that there's quite a bit of data on this one i feel confident answering this and and i have a bit of uh experience and uh advanced interest in uh vaccines and immunology and so forth and there are there are uh remarkable exceptionally good vaccines in the world of veterinary medicine i mean they're so good that a single dose of a rabies vaccine at a dog over the age of 12 weeks will likely confer even several years of immunity after the first dose and that's a remarkable thing that could happen now we routinely boost that at a year of age and we know that that booster is good for at least three years if we use a labeled three-year product so vaccines can be given very infrequently for extremely good vaccines like distemper and parvo they're extremely effective vaccines the modern vaccine technology is extremely good uh going through the series as a puppy and for for distemper parvo it is a series until they get out past about 16 weeks of age we don't know if they're reacting reliably so we vaccinate them until they hit that that milestone at four four months of

1:16:54

age uh and then they're good for a year the booster at a year and let's stay with the puppies because again like as a breeder i'm a little selfish here so do you do you do let's say what six weeks and then you skip a week or or what would be a best practice excellent question so so the interval uh is recommended to be no less than two weeks but we don't want it to be so long as for whatever protection they they gained from the prior uh immunization so we don't want that to fade so much that they are at high risk and so typically we have a staggered protocol we'll in my office if i know a breeder we'll do six eight 12 and 16 so we'll have a two-week gap between the six and eight and then we'll have month gaps between you know the succeeding you know two uh the vaccine for rabies is is more regulated and so you cannot vaccinate under 12 weeks of age by there's no vaccine approved for a less than 12 week old dog and all of the vaccine failures for rabies have been in less than 12 week old individuals so there's probably some validity to that and there was a study recently published on post-exposure vaccination of dogs in texas where they had i think a handful of vaccine failures and they were all in pets under the age of 12 weeks who had been bitten by a known rabid animal they were they were vaccinated because they were bitten by a known rabid animal under the age of 12 weeks they nevertheless developed rabies despite the vaccine being given in pets over the age of 12 weeks the vaccine was protective in a in i want to say several hundred exposures and so we know the vaccine is extremely good at the right age and so for distemper parvo it's a series starting at about six weeks with a conscientious breeder who wants to get things you know started in the right way it's not the number of vaccines it's the timing of them if i don't see a dog until it's 12 weeks of age it's only going to get the 12 week in the 16 week it doesn't need a third or a fourth it just needs 12 and 16 weeks it's the age of immunization that matters not the number of the vaccines and that's that confuses a lot of people even within the profession they think that there's a you know a first second and third that have to be given and i even see people uh taking in adult dogs and they're vaccinating a dog at a year of age or two years or five years of age and they're saying well it should get a booster in a month right if you're using a good product there's no reason to have to boost an immunization in an adult dog if it has an immune system it responded to your vaccine

1:19:47

if you used a good product if the dog doesn't have an effective immune system and that does happen quite rarely where they're they're called non-responders you vaccinate them for parvo and they do not mount an immune response to parvovirus and so they can get parvovirus the street version of it because they can't mount an appropriate immune response but you can't do anything for those dogs there's no number of vaccines that you can give those non-responders that will make them respond it's it's it's a defect in their immune system and that's an incredibly rare you know that's that's not a thing that we encounter commonly enough to even think about but it does happen when they do studies of dogs when they look at testing vaccines and they look at vaccine titers they find when they're looking at thousands of dogs they find some number of non-responders we gave it a vaccine gave it appropriately gave it at the right age never mounted immune response to that vaccine and as you said they because like uh i mean you can get so many different brands of vaccinations and and you don't know where they're stored you don't know how how well they're taken care of and then you're thinking you're doing the right thing and and probably there is no no point of even giving the shot because it's uh uh toad or whatever happens to a vaccine that it doesn't it wasn't stored properly or it wasn't transported properly or and so on right and that's so for the for distemper parvo combination vaccines the the best vaccines are called modified live so it's a it's a it's an organism uh for the disease that has been grown in culture for enough generations that it has lost its ability to make you sick or to make your dog sick yet it's still a real virus and so by injecting a real they call them attenuated viruses so the vaccine is real it's live but it just can't cause the disease of distemper it can't cause the disease of parvo but what it does when it gets into the the young dog is it multiplies and so you give a small amount of a real virus it multiplies and the dog mounts a very large immune response to a real virus that protects it against the street virus which can cause disease right and so modified live vaccines are much more effective at stimulating immunity than killed viruses rabies is uniformly a killed virus because it's such a dangerous disease it's uniformly fatal in both you know dogs and people and so there's no no longer no longer any modified live viruses for rabies on the market and so killed virus killed vaccines

1:22:39

often require something else to make them more effective in the case of rabies they they do adjuvants they make them more stimulating to the body by adding extra things to make the body notice that you've injected them into the dog and it's adjuvants that may be more likely to cause reactions than the actual uh rabies protein that's in the vaccine so it may be the adjuvants that make dogs react in a bad way you know if they get a swollen face or whatever yeah though i can tell you that those things are quite rare with today's vaccines the vaccines that we use today are remarkably good across the board what about the lepto like i know some some malinois tend to have a reaction but at the same time if every time that we haven't had a a dog that had a lepto and when we decided that it has to do it it seems like there was always a booster like one and then whatever like within a month or or weeks or something and then they had to do another one is that uh still a legit way to do it or can we skip that booster with the lepto unfortunately for for the uh so the the the good vaccines rabies distemper parvo they're really awesome and you can probably get a single vaccine in a 16 week old puppy or older and get a great response but with bactarins with things like lepto lime uh bordetella although the the the nasal bordetella is live and you get a great response from a single dose of that one but for lepto and lime you need a priming dose and a booster dose you know three to four weeks later for flu it's unclear the flu vaccine is a killed vaccine but it's unclear how how good the vaccine is over time and so the the recommendation still is a priming dose of booster and then then yearly boosters after that uh for flu the two strains of flu that are out there um and so that's that's our recommendation in the office i can tell you that the lepto recommendations changed there was a an internal medicine group uh came out with a consensus document in november of 2023 and they shifted the recommendation from a risk-based recommendation that is the owner and the vet decide whether the dog is at risk for lepto or not they recommended the recommendation changed to all dogs over 12 weeks should be vaccinated for lepto period and the reason is we're terrible at estimating risk we're just we're terrible you could might as well toss a coin we're just very bad at estimating risk dogs who we think are at low risk can get it dogs we think they're at high risk may not get it the vaccines are so much better now than they were 20 years ago both in terms of reactivity fewer side

1:25:42

effects fewer bad reactions and they're so much better at protection against disease that they're now across the board saying every dog over 12 weeks should get lepto certainly in a temperate climate like florida every dog should get left yeah yeah yeah for sure interesting what about did you hear about the the recent uh travel regulations that they're coming with the like there is a yes like the puppy up to six years old or something probably it's probably two more podcasts sivan uh because it's it's incredibly uh stringent from the cdc yes jennifer's disease control and it's probably reaction to rabies a number of rabid dogs have been imported over the last several years from from high-risk countries they've come in likely with fraudulent vaccine histories so people faked vaccine certs it might might have fact uh faked health certs for that matter got them here dogs develop rabies obviously exposed you know adoptive or foster homes to rabies and it's a big deal rabies is a uniformly fatal virus in all species it's so so you think they're not overreacting so i i think it's a real problem but they've made some fairly significant changes that will affect lots of dog uh breeders uh people who show and and work dogs across particularly canadian border uh are going to be impacted by this in a big way and they've absolutely said no puppies can come in unless they're old enough to get a rabies vaccine yeah like i think it's six months old or something like that so it's significant changes it just got announced it was announced before anybody within aphus or usda really had a chance to weigh in on it so the people who actually issued these certificates for travel were not consulted before they were before the conditions were announced so it's a very fluid you know emerging situation but there's a ton of people in in canadian uh us border towns whose veterinarian is in canada they live in the us but their vet's in canada and they routinely go to canada to see their veterinarian and so you know it will be interesting to see how it ends up being either modified or adapted because canada is not our that was not the target the the canadian you know influx of dogs was not the target it was dogs coming from extremely high risk environments where rabies is abundant and vaccines are rare and that's a handful of countries but they made it a blanket uh approach instead of tailoring it to the risk you know what they should have done is said okay if you're coming from iran if you're coming from afghanistan those are

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high risk areas very little deployment of vaccine in the dog native dog populations high risk dogs a lot of interest in people in the u.s importing you know bringing these dogs to rescue them so we get the emotional connection but you're you're literally taking dogs from a you know a high risk population and then you're handing them into a foster community who may not have any idea what they're taking on so it's not so that there is still some might be some adjustments to it to be made it's not well because i can tell you that the usda and aphis and the people who who actually countersigned the certificates for import uh were not involved in the discussion and they were they they found out about it when it was announced yeah and so i think there's going to be there's going to be some back and forth and it may well be modified and particularly for canada i don't i don't think canada is is a giant risk to the us we have rabies canada has rabies mexico has rabies mexico has a larger unowned dog population you might legitimately argue maybe we tighten up the regs or the import export with with the mexican border i don't think canada is our problem yeah hopefully because that that's a i mean there's going to be ways there is always some ways but it's uh surprising how how this kind of legislations they just come out of nowhere and and without any discussion without it's just like okay this is what's going to happen so another thing that was happening was dogs from extremely high risk were already flagged and so health certificates were originating from iran that was getting a lot more attention and so there were rescue groups who were deliberately sending dogs to lower risk countries to get the certs written in the lower risk country so that it wasn't getting the attention so you know sometimes we are our own worst enemy when you know i get that the dog is the focus but rabies is not a trivial issue you you can't import rabid dogs drop them into a foster environment and particularly if that dog gets adopted and goes into the general you know ill-informed under-informed not expecting to have a rabid puppy community you know that can be an absolute disaster yeah no i i can see the point i guess it's unfortunate but i can see the point what is your favorite with just last last last question i'm just curious of of in your whole practice do you have something that it's kind of like a very pleasurable like part of the job that you you when you have a a dog or a cat or that you need to do something there is something that you really like enjoy more than than the rest

1:31:37

there's there's something extremely satisfying about surgery when you've got a surgical problem and you you do something positive for the dog by you know there's nothing more uh medical than surgery right i mean you're you're you're taking control of the patient's respiratory system it's cardiac system you're you're cutting something out you're putting it back together you're repairing a wound and then particularly if you've solved its problem if you've taken off a dangerous thing or you've solved a problem that way it's hard not to feel you know good about that kind of intervention um that doesn't happen as often as i would like it to sometimes you're taking stuff off and finding out that it's not 100 curative uh sometimes you're you're looking at a problem surgically and you're going this this is a tough one you know we may not have an intervention here but but that's probably the highest level of you know we directly did something that that benefited that patient but honestly if if a client comes in with their 20 pound overweight golden retriever at three years of age and they come back a year later and she's back on condition i think that's a pretty big win if an owner listened to us and got the dog back in shape i always give huge credit to owners for getting an over-conditioned dog back in shape because i know what the dog's doing when it goes on the diet i know it's bugging every single human in that household for food the whole time it's it's dieting and so i understand the the big brown eyes and the fact that that they're you know well the dog's acting hungry she must need more food like or not if she's you know if she's at a healthy body weight maybe she could skip a meal right the difficult question of course the opposite of it how how do you deal with with euthanasia like i i know when i worked at the spca in san francisco and it was a no kill which is another conversation that i don't want to go too far but the no kill situation was that we have to decide at the door is that dog coming in or is it not so if we say that it's not that means basically i'm saying that dog has to be put down it just you know it's a sketchy scam in a way that it's just incorrect to to get uh um donations and claim something that actually it's not like that well it's it's we didn't kill it it's not no kill it's we didn't kill it yes yes and but so i i had a very difficult time and somehow i i worked five years there and i i i cannot say that i got used to it but once i left like that was probably the the the most uh

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interesting feeling that i was like i do not need to make this decision no more and i mean it is the decision to you to me yes yes that's the hard part from from a care provider people are coming in with a sick pet typically who's got a problem and and maybe the diagnostic process is not within their their budget right so they've got a very sick pet and they can't do the thing that would tell us whether it's fixable or not and that's a reality of of my profession is that we we have diagnostics or we could send them for diagnostics but perhaps they can't afford the diagnostics or i can look at a pet and i can i can see it's incredibly rough condition and i can i can share with them that you know i've seen a hundred cats that came in looking just like this cat and i have not seen a single one of them do well and i don't know what your cat has he could have one of six or seven different things but he's got something bad and i doubt we can turn that around and i think the kindest thing you could think about is not making him look worse than he looks right now because he will only ever look worse and at some point you'll decide it's too late or we waited too long and it's sad to have to make the decision but it's even sadder to wait too long to make the decision because now your pet has had more anguish more suffering yeah until you came to grips with it so as the care provider i'm kind of off to the side trying to give perspective and trying to give them a framework that says you know if if i had a hundred cats who came in with this and 50 of them left okay i'd say pull out you know pull out the diagnostic cork let's do what we can you know let's let's get revved up to find out what the problem is but when i see it looking so bad that i've never seen one turn around from that condition i should share that with an owner yeah and is it wrong for them to head up to the multi-specialty you know hospital and maybe pull out all the stops and have a hurry up abdominal ultrasound and get a bunch of diagnostics under underway and then find out what it is it's not wrong to do that but they should have at least the benefit of my experience saying i haven't seen it turn around you ought to know that going into this and it's not wrong to say this is a kind decision right no it's beautiful sometimes it's really a beautiful decision and i wish that even with with in in all countries in the world this is a option for humans a whole nother level of complication with decision making but but from a you know from a medical

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perspective there are very few diseases that kill you humanely most of them kill you horribly right and and if you could choose a time to die before you're absolutely horrible that would be better right right i think one of the difficulties is we are often trained to not share that experience and and and and we are taught to say well it's not my pet it's not my decision it's your decision and yet we don't share the framework and my framework is i've seen i've seen a thousand pets like this i've seen a thousand of them have i seen one get better if i did i would share that and i would say it's one in a thousand but if i've seen none in a thousand i should share that i should say i haven't seen one turn around and you should know that if you want to pursue it i don't think you're cruel but you're going to need to you know get over and get those those diagnostics going because your pet is suffering right now and you can't you can't dither with this decision so as a dog trainer we also have this problem and i wasn't even thinking of this but now now it just popped into my brain because of some some serious aggression or whatever behavioral problems and and as a trainer hopefully as a trainer you do have the knowledge to make this kind of advice because they should not be taken lightly uh one way or the other um but right now we it's a i'm sure you you are familiar with the whole problem between the force free and the other trainers that do use some kind of verse 7 some kind of okay i will tell you no and if you don't listen i will give you a little pop and i'll make you listen because there are some rules that we need to all follow and and then you have the force free community that they're really losing their minds to where there is like commission statements that go against any uh laws on on planet earth to the you know like everything that is aversive is it's so bad and the dog can never fear fear anything and and and and then you end up with a dog that you can say well we tried everything and we went to the best trainers we went to the best animal behaviors it was on medication and everything and but we never really told him no don't do that stop biting on on like just don't do it and then you say well we've done enough we've we have exhausted all resources so therefore we should euthanize it when you clearly you know you didn't exhaust you just you did not want to go into a place where the your ideology your uh understanding of what is okay and not okay didn't allow you to do

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you don't have that in in in veterinary practices but in dog training it it is a serious problem because it really in a lot of ways the the forestry community and the people that train dogs the way i would this is one of the the hardest topics to where they can say well we tried and we know that it's not going to work and what you have not tried a very important thing just to tell that dog don't do it and if that was enough to show some consequence and see if that will work because in most cases that works um i don't know where i was going with that but it's just a it's a little different twist i guess we have in dog training um that that as a veterinary doctor you you you don't have that well thankfully we have less of that but but we still have behavior issues leading to euthanasia decisions and they're they're probably not probably they are absolutely the most heartbreaking decisions because these are often extremely healthy dogs they're often when they're good they're often the best dog this person has ever been with in terms of intelligence in terms of uh in some ways trainability and and your point about the the you know no corrections school is how do you stop a dog from jumping up without a correction you know if i stand on a leash in an exam room for about four minutes most young dogs will stop jumping up during the course of that exam and the owners are amazed it's like all i did was stand on the leash i didn't say anything i didn't i didn't do anything i wasn't mad i just stood on the leash and every time the dog jumped up at me he corrected himself at exactly the right time exactly the right place on on you know and humanely on the back of his neck where he's got four inches of dog meat you know there's nothing damaged by him jumping up and correcting himself and i i show owners that trick all the time how to keep your dog from jumping up on somebody but it means you've got to have a leash handy you've got to put the dog on the leash you've got to put your foot on the leash and you've got to do it consistently so the dog learns and i'll show them this and i will literally take them out to the reception area they'll stand in my hallway and the dog will start lunging up and down the hallway and the owner won't think to drop their foot on the leash and i'll come back out sometimes and i'll say put your foot on the leash and this won't happen the dog won't be dragging you down the hallway by your shoulder if you drop your foot on the leash and it's it's a correction it's punishment yeah but it's perfectly

1:43:35

appropriate for the dog yeah i think i think the training behavior side of this is is really tough because people get uh you know the dogs typically are biting humans and that's why they're involved with this to begin with that's why they're they're seeking a trainer and these dogs can be super great when they're on uh but in certain circumstances the owners don't have the right tools to safely control and contain them and they don't know what to do and if they're told well you should never punish you should never use corrections um and and you know if that works at all it seems to work over a much slower time horizon than corrections yeah and even if it works in some cases in some cases may not and then not not trying an alternative it's it's it doesn't make sense to me well i i followed your uh a couple of your your posts on that extremely reactive dog that you worked with where you were rejected by all the behaviorists because you used corrective techniques yeah but you said to them up front you said i will do whatever you tell me to do what i will do whatever you say and nobody would take you on as a client um because they had they had decided that you were cruel or you were you were inappropriate and instead they were willing to abandon treating a patient right um without trying to work with you and i found that startling and that's a true story unfortunately it's oh i know i know and and and i'm not entirely surprised because the the the emotional reactivity against correction in dog training is you know and and i understand why it's so easy to over correct i understand particularly with e-collars how easy it is to push the button when you're frustrated as a trainer and the difference between somebody who is a good trainer and who's a terrible trainer is the level of frustration because somebody who's good understands it's not the dog's fault it's a timing issue it's a command issue it's a clarity issue let's fix that let's work on that let's not be mad while we're training but you know that people get frustrated and they become terrible trainers yeah very true we just cannot be throwing the baby with the water that that's the the you know but who knows we'll see where that goes we you know it's it's interesting stuff but i i learned quite a few things talking to you and we have to do it again um i have some some other questions i just don't want to keep it too long but happy to do it ivan this was really really good um all the the stuff about the no the vaccinations the the like really

1:46:35

everything that we talked so um very very cool and give me the name again of the how did you say the the the fear-free the the other one was stress low stress handling techniques low stress handling techniques yeah low stress handling techniques yeah i don't know the fear-free i think it's more honest right yeah yeah so it's just zero stress yes but we can make it less stressful right and really as you said when you go into a hospital and and you might have some you know thing done or news given to you that's unpleasant it's not zero stress it's yes can we make this as as pleasant as it can be and i think that's that's a more honest way of approaching it beautiful michael thank you you're very welcome ivan thanks for the invite have a have fun in mexico i will do my best thank you i'll be watching some pictures i'll send some cool have a good time take care so so so Thank you.