E172: 마이클 시카시오(Michael Shikashio) - "자원 지키기, 공격성, 그리고 반응성"

So that should be launched hopefully in the end of July, early August, if I can get my stuff together and get it all edited and out there. That's awesome. Congrats. It's a big deal. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. So you mentioned the conference. I know it's scheduled for October 2 through 4. For those who kind of hadn't known about it before, are tickets still available? I know it's sold out before you decided to take it virtual. Yeah. So it was really a lot more popular than we thought it was going to be at first. So we actually sold out the entire conference. It was supposed to be the live conference in Providence, Rhode Island. We sold that out in 48 hours, all of those tickets. So we decided to, at that point, go to a bigger venue, which I think held like 500 people or something like that. And then, of course, the pandemic hit, which made us move online. So tickets are still available. People can get those through Joanne's website. It's called thelooseleashacademy.com. And there's an Aggression and Dogs conference page they can land on with all of the information. I'm really excited because it's got – I always wanted to do something focused kind of on aggression for a conference. And so I started looking around for speakers and wanted to pull in folks that I know were good, one of them being Denise Fenzi, of course, and getting her side of things from the dog sports and bite sports worlds. We've got someone from the neuroscience perspective, Dr. Kathy Murphy, who's a neuroscientist, among a bunch of other things. She's going to be giving a great keynote on the neurobiology and neuroscience related to aggression. We've got a veterinary behaviorist, Dr. Amy Pike, coming in to talk about meds. We've got Katina Jones. She's going to be looking at cats and aggression. Leslie McDevitt, who's also really awesome, going to be focusing. I think she's talking a little bit more on the dog-dog aggression stuff. And we've got the always interesting Jim Crosby as well. He's got his really gnarly dog bites. And if you guys saw his stuff at the Lemonade Conference, I'm sure you remember that. It's not something you want to have lunch and watch one of his webinars at the same time. So we have him coming in. Kim Brophy is going to be talking about ethology in dogs as well and how that relates to aggression. Dr. Laura Donaldson is also coming to give a great talk about cognition. And, of course, you've got to have Trish McMillan come along and talk about the shelter side of things. And I'll be maybe doing a talk or two. So it's going to be super exciting.

I really wanted to bring in something not just focused on one dynamic in aggression. I wanted to bring in all the different lenses for people who know about aggression and can kind of approach it from different angles. So, yeah, that's happening October 2nd to 4th this year. All live stream. And we're going to have lots of fun there, too, because we're going to have... The platforms we're looking at, they have, like, these cool chat rooms you can break out and you can schedule, like, one-to-one FaceTime meetings with other people in the conference. It's kind of like networking, the stuff we're missing right now. And we're going to have sponsors booths so people can, you know, just like you go to a trade hall at one of the conferences. We get all your swag and you come home with a bag full of dog toys stuffed in a Kong bag. Kind of the same thing. We're going to have a bunch of exhibitor booths there as well. So, like, a virtual exhibit hall where people can check out stuff. And the people that work for the company actually will be inside the booth at the virtual show. So really kind of cool options there. And we're going to have a cocktail party. So more on that to be announced. So for the conference, who should really be signing up? Is it for, you know, pet owners who have dogs that fall into some of these categories? Or is it for, you know, more professional trainers? Can you share a little more about that? It's geared towards really anybody that's into dog behavior. So we do have quite a few, what's the word, kind of like pet owner slash hobby folks coming to see the conference. We've gotten a lot of inquiries about that. But really anybody who wants to just learn more about dog behavior and dog aggression, I think it's suited for. So we have, of course, we have a lot of veterinarians and trainers and behavior consultants signing up. But really anybody can go to join. We have a lot of people that have problems with their own dogs asking about it. And I think there's something to be learned from much of the conference, even for a pet owner. I don't think anything's going to be really, you know, too jargony or too, you know, not for a pet owner kind of material. Except maybe Jim Crosby. Yeah, I don't know. I might kind of steer the pet owners away from his talk. But actually, he's not going to be showing, I don't think he's going to be showing anything really gory. He's actually going to be talking about assessments in one of the fight busts that he had worked in his time. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It should be PG, maybe. For TLC, we had the limited conference.

We had people pre kind of go through some of the presentations. And just to get them prepped, right? What the pre-scanner person watched his and was like, I think we need a warning on this. Yeah. So, we added warnings to the website for his graphic. Yes. Yes. It's definitely a need. It's just like the book that he's in also, Dog Bites. You've got to have those like splash with warnings all over. Trigger warnings, we call them. When Trish and I do our seminars, we have to get tons of trigger warnings for a lot of the stuff we show. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's the conference. What about the course? Do you want to just share a little more on that? Sure. So, I launched the Aggression and Dogs Master Course last year. So, it's almost at its one-year anniversary. And the reason why I launched it was I kind of felt that there was this – it was missing in the marketplace. There was nothing out there kind of working aggression cases from start to finish. So, that's why I started. I said, well, if it's not there, I might as well create it because it's needed. I had a lot of trainers. I had the smaller course through Dog Trainers Connection at one point. And it was sort of an outline of how to work aggression cases. But it really didn't get into the detail that I wanted to get into. So, I launched a much more in-depth course that's got 23 sort of modules on everything from assessing to the behavior change plans to medications. You know, Dr. Chris Pockle does that module for me. The ethology aspect of aggression, which Kim Brouffy did. And then even compassion fatigue. Jessica Dolce came in and did a compassion fatigue module because I think that's important, especially if you're working a lot of aggression cases for folks to have that ability to recognize and know what to do when that comes up. So, and then it's all self-paced. People can work on it at their own time. They have up to a year to complete it. And once they complete the modules, then they get the live group mentor sessions with me so people can jump into these. I do three times every other week. So, like three sessions at different time zones. So, I have folks in Australia that appreciate the 8 a.m. or the 8 p.m. time. And so, they get to pick and choose what times they want to go. But we work through cases together. And I have special guests come in too. I had Jessica Wheatcraft, who's a specialist in leash reactivity or, you know, dogs that have issues on leash come in and give a special talk last week. So, yeah, it's been great. I've got quite a few wonderful students now. And the community is really awesome.

I've got to say that the way the students all take care of each other and are nice to each other and cordial and professional. I, you know, I have a pretty large group now. And I never have to moderate anything, which is really, as you know, in the dog world, when you have, you know, any kind of Facebook groups, you've got to have like a team of moderators. I've never, you know, knocking on wood here, had to go in and moderate any conversations. They're just, they just, they're so nice to each other. And so, very, shout out to them. Shout out to the students. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. And it's specifically for trainers, right? Because I'm not sure. I think you said that at the beginning, but I wanted to. It is. Yeah. So, you know, I, the course assumes you have, you know how to get behavior on a dog. So, some base, because we talk about, you know, operant conditioning, classical conditioning. And I skip over the whole teaching the theory of that because you can get that in 800 other places online nowadays. So, I don't, I don't get into that. I talk about it, but I assume people know, understand those concepts and, you know, how to teach a dog to sit. And, you know, things like that before taking this course because it's really not something people should start out with at first. Yeah. In case it's not clear for people listening, it's obvious you've kind of made your name as an aggression expert kind of specifically, right? So, I was curious, kind of, at what point in your career did you decide that that was what you wanted to focus on? And, I mean, how did you get to where you are today? Because people think aggression, your name comes up, period. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. That's what I say. It's just, I kind of just started to really like it. I was taking a lot of, you know, like most trainers start out, I was taking everything. I started out with the basics and teaching foundational skills and then getting into more behavior issues. I was also fostering a lot of dogs at the time. And so, I wanted to really learn on how to help those dogs more. And I was seeing the common theme of dogs being facing euthanasia or rehoming or really having these terrible outcomes because of the lack of help out there, the lack of knowledge to help these dogs. Including myself, I was lacking the knowledge at the time. So, I kind of really just started seeking out. And that was the issue I was seeing a lot of, is aggression issues, you know.

So, dogs don't necessarily get rehomed if they're counter-surfing, but they do, or worse, if they're biting or displaying aggressive behavior towards people or other animals. So, it's really where I started focusing on. I just started learning and reading and, you know, shadowing everybody I could. I mean, I was pretty voracious about just learning as much as I could because I really wanted to not just kind of wing it, but I really wanted to know and practice it really well. So, that's kind of how I started doing that. And then I started realizing that if you specialize in something, you get better at it faster. So, if that's all you focus on, like if that's all you're reading about and listening to and that's all, that's basically anything with the word aggression on it, I was gobbling up and digesting and not paying attention to much of the other stuff. But you get better faster. And then you also start to see common themes. You start to almost kind of profile things in a way that you might not if you're jumping from like a puppy case to a separation anxiety case to an aggression case and back to a puppy case. If you do an aggression case after aggression case, you start to see common themes that you might not have if you were taking, again, a wide range of cases. And I think there's a benefit to that is it becomes really helpful for you as a good behavior consultant. You have to know how to take good history because especially with aggression, we don't need to see the behavior. We don't want to see the behavior most of the time. So, you know, I don't need to see a dog trying to bite my face off to get enough history that the dog likes to try to bite people's faces off. And so that's often what I can just focus on for is good behavior history taking. But then you get into the real, you know, specifics of the case that if you see the same patterns over and over, then you're going to be kind of in that zone and really being able to assess what's going on properly and giving the correct behavior change plans and management techniques for that particular case. So, yeah, specializing, you know, I think we'll see much more of that. And we're already seeing a lot of that, of course. You know, we have FTSA. We're seeing lots of people specializing in certain topics. And I think that's great because people will become much more knowledgeable about that particular topic much faster than if they were taking a wide range of cases. You said you focus on it. You get better at it faster.

But I think there's kind of another piece to that, right, which is if it's something you enjoy learning about, you're going to get better than if it's just something you enjoy doing, in which case you're not motivated to continue constantly improving, which I think is just an interesting. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's both knowing and doing kind of the art and science of things. And, yeah, it's been quite a journey, I can say, and the learning and just how much I've evolved, too. You know, I was talking to Matt Beisner. I interviewed him for my podcast. And we were talking about that as well, just how much we evolve as trainers because we both were, you know, came from a balanced training, so quote-unquote balanced training background using a lot of reversives. And, you know, it's not a light switch. It's a journey. And it takes time to make those changes. But it's amazing when you look back and see how you were, you know, 10 years ago. It's just it's such a difference. Yeah. Yeah. So you've done a number of webinars now for us here at FDSA kind of on different facets of aggression, right? So dogs who are dog aggressive, intra-household aggression, resource guarding, and then specifically one on resource guarding people. That is back on the calendar for July 16th. So it's coming back around since we had a bunch of people ask questions about it during the Lemonade Conference. When talking about aggression, why kind of break it out that way? Why are those categories? I think it helps us kind of put things into a context. So I know the ABA purists listening along don't like the, you know, constructs or labels or giving a behavior label sort of like, you know, fear aggression, maternal aggression, territorial aggression. That's those are constructs or labels. But I think they can be helpful for professionals when talking to each other. So if I'm presenting a topic, if I say, you know, stranger danger cases, it's a colloquial term for type of case, which will help them understand the topic. But then, you know, when you get into the details, of course, it's important to understand the antecedents and consequences and the setting events for those behaviors. Those are the things I focus on when I'm teaching. But from a marketing aspect, I mean, my website name is aggressivedog.com. I mean, that's the biggest label you can put on something. But it's, you know, people when they're searching for help, they use that term. So it makes sense from that aspect.

So for kind of putting them into those categories, I think it just helps people what to search for and what the topic is going to be focused on. When you kind of dig into those things, you know, what are we talking about in terms of similarities and differences? Are we breaking things down that way, just like you said, for like marketing purposes? Or are there actually kind of similarities and differences in terms of what causes those things or differences in the treatment? Yeah. So I think there's a lot of similarities, of course, with the underlying motivations for aggression, typically to make the bad thing go away. Right. If you use your teeth on something, it's usually not going to stick around. But underlying motivations can be based usually in fear. They can be, you know, the dog can perceive the stimulus as a threat. Sometimes it's not always that. Sometimes it's the dog is very competent about making something go away in the sense of it's not fear. Those cases are much more rare. But generally speaking, the underlying motivations, we treat the treatments very similar in many of the cases. So you'll see me using a lot of classical counter conditioning and desensitization, differential reinforcement of alternative behaviors as well. So basically, what do you want the dog to do instead when something shows up? The small subtleties and the changes we make is those things I was talking about. So let's talk about, you know, the owner guarding the webinar that's coming up soon. One of the things we have to differentiate is if it's resource guarding of the owner or truly protecting the owner. And there's subtle differences there. It looks very much the same. So the person, stranger approaching the owner when the dog is near the owner, the dog starts barking and lunging at that person. That looks very much like the dog's protecting the owner or is the dog resource guarding the owner? So resource guarding is when the dog doesn't want to lose possession of something of value. So we classically see that with like the food ball or the toys. But it could also be the person. So they don't want the person to be moved away or taken away because they find it valuable. So, so, and then you classically see that directed at other people in the home or friends that come over that the dog is generally fine with. And I put that in air quotes. Generally fine with and the person, you know, the spouse approaches the other spouse on the couch. And then the dog jumps off the couch and growls at them because they don't want to lose access to that person.

Because that other person might come over and get in between or, you know, basically the dog's losing access or possession. Just like if they lost possession of the food ball or toy. Now, so that's resource guarding. Protective or true protective aggression or when a dog is protecting their owner is when they feel the stimulus approaching is a threat to the safety of their owner. So they're protecting them. That's much more rare than resource guarding. We typically only see that with certain breeds of dogs. So we might see, you know, classic thousand malah from working lines doing that. It comes out naturally with some of those dogs. And I explain that, especially to clients that go out and get dogs that are from working lines from some of the working breeds like Malinois, Rattwaters, Dobermans, German Shepherds, Cone Corsos, and so on and so forth. And sometimes that behavior just comes out naturally. You don't have to train that into a dog just like you don't have to train a border collie to herd something or a lab to retrieve or fetch after something. It comes out naturally. And that's true protective behavior in some of those cases. So you don't see that in other breeds. You know, you don't see many Cavalier King Charles Spaniels displaying true protective aggression. And the funny thing is you hear that too. Some owners will sort of misdiagnose that and be like, all right, yeah, I think he's trying to protect me. Probably not. I think he's trying to protect himself from whatever is coming. So you can see like when we present the broad topic, we present that category that the differences in the treatment and the underlying motivations might be first assessing the true motivation and then working on the actual behavior issue. And so like, for instance, the subtleties in a resource garden case versus a true protective aggression cases. With dogs that are protecting their owners, typically there's no fear component. So when we have a dog that's fearful, we're usually addressing the – we're usually trying to change that association through counter conditioning. We want to end desensitization. We're trying to change the dog's perception of this thing isn't so bad. It's actually good when it comes near me. So that's classical counter conditioning we can do that with. With dogs that are truly protective, they're not scared. Some of these dogs are having a good old time doing their job. They're like, this is what my mommy and daddy did. This is what I'm going to do because that's what we do for a living. So there's really no fear component. They're having fun.

I mean, they're having a good old time protecting them because that's what they do. So you can't counter condition that. You're not changing an underlying emotional response with those particular dogs. It's like saying to a lab, hey, I'm going to give you cookies every time you fetch the ball so you become less afraid of the ball. The dog, the lab's not afraid of the ball. The dog's having a good old time doing what it was purpose-bred to do historically over many generations. So same thing with truly protective dogs. Same thing. So I go much more operant with those dogs, giving those dogs direction, putting things on stimulus control, making sure that dog understands what we expect for them, what we want them to do in that particular context. So much more cueing, much more operant behavior. Makes sense. And when you say kind of born with it, you know, obviously that's sort of like you made the comparison to herding it. It's the same thing, right, where like they're born with the instincts to do it, but they don't do it very well on their own. Exactly. For our purposes. That's right. So think about it. I mean, if you just let the dogs – so we're big. And the big buzzwords right now are empowerment, autonomy, choice, control. Yes, yes, yes. I love all those concepts. However, we have to be careful when we give too much choice and control. Well, because if we – again, if I've got a border collie and I've got a birthday party with kids outside, I just let the border collie just go and start choice. Go do what you want. You can herd the kids. You can sit here. But if I don't give the dog direction, it's just going to often – especially if it's a behavior that is, you know, again, instinctive or is part of their breed tendencies, then they're going to exhibit that. So especially when it comes to aggression, we don't want to just say, okay, yeah, what's your choice here? Are you going to sit nicely or are you going to protect me? Your choice. Go ahead. Do what you want. And that's where it can go a little bit sideways. But, again, those cases are rare. Again, most of the time we do want to give the dog plenty of choice, plenty of opportunity to act on their own environment so that you minimize the stress and, of course, the benefits of that. So to talk just a little bit more about the webinar, do you mind just talking a little bit more about kind of what you cover in the webinar itself? So this one – so I'm going to revamp the one that I gave the last time and add in what to do with dogs who guard their owner from other dogs. So that was a popular topic.

I was focusing a lot on the human side, so dogs that will guard or resource guard their owner or protect their owner from other humans, which is often a kind of easier element to work on because you can communicate with humans and tell them what to do more readily than you can some dogs. So I'll be covering the dog-to-dog owner guarding aspect, especially in the home. I'll focus on that. And, of course, talk about why dogs do that particular behavior and some of the training strategies or behavior change strategies that you can use for those kind of cases, both for dog-to-human and dog-to-dog, within the scope of an hour-long webinar, of course. But I want it to be a nice broad overview because I think there's a lot of common questions that people have with this type of behavior. And I think it's certainly treatable, and it's one of the ones that there's not a lot of information out there about how to work with this. So I'm glad I can run this back again. To kind of take a step back for a second, when we're talking about this type of resource guarding, what does that look like? What are we seeing? So with resource guarding behaviors, typically you think about when a dog resource guards their food bowl or a toy. What do we see for behaviors? Usually you see the head lower, the ears will pull back. Typically you see what's called an agonistic pucker, which is when the commissures of the C-shape of the mouth kind of pulls forward. So it's much more forward versus a long lip retraction. You'll see stiffening, growling often. So you'll see those kind of behaviors. With owner guarding, typically, and I'm speaking generally here, you can see all kinds of in-between variations because you have some dogs that are conflicted. So they're fearful and they're guarding. Or they're, you know, so there's lots of different variations. But classically, we'll see dogs that are protecting their owners, they'll position themselves in front of the owner. So they'll get in front of the owner. They'll put their shoulder right up against the owner's thigh. Or they'll stand straight spine, usually. So not much movement in the spine. And if it's owner guarding in the sense of protective behavior, their ears are forward, chest is forward, front legs are very stiff and straight. They also might be doing an agonistic pucker. They might be barking, usually in a staccato pattern, very staccato pattern. And leaning forward. So you'll see much more confident, you know, high tail flagging type of posturing with those dogs. So there's subtle differences.

But I don't want the listeners to think that's the only thing to look for because you, of course, want to get a good behavior history. And to ensure you really, because you could, when you have different motivations. Now, the toughest cases for me are the ones that the dog is under-socialized and fearful of people. But they also want to guard their owner. So there's two conflicting things there, in a sense. If the dog is, you know, sort of in a confident way guarding their owner, but they're also fearful of people, that's a lot to juggle. Because we have to, first of all, change how they feel about people in general. But then also teach them that you don't want them guarding their owner, especially, you know. So there's a lot to work with there. And now, here's the other thing. We were just talking about empowerment and choice and control. When we start using operant behaviors or cueing things, you know, sit, stay, down, stay, place, you know, those kind of operant behaviors. Which are nice, desirable replacement behaviors. You know, sitting is much better than biting. However, we're removing some of the dog's choice. And we're restricting their flight option. So they can't get away from the stimulus that they're afraid of. And we're asking them to sit and stay because we also don't want them protecting us. So we often have to first build up their confidence around people safely. And then work on the other side of the coin, which is the dog guarding the owner. So those are the tough cases because it requires a lot of patience and a lot of, you know, very careful management and safety, of course, in those cases. So I've got kind of one last question here, which is a question I've been asking everybody when they come on these days. So what is something that you have learned or maybe just been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? I will say I've really been connecting to the human element in terms of the cases I've had. Again, when you specialize, you get to see the same things over and over and over. So the dog side of stuff kind of gets, I don't want to call it boring, but straightforward. So anybody else who's listening along that focuses on like one type of dog sport or one particular niche, they're going to say, yeah, we repeat the same process over and over and over and over. And with subtle tweaks and sometimes you get some interesting cases and behavior from the dog side of the equation. But for me, I've done quite a few online consults over the last few months, you know, with the whole pandemic and getting consults.

I'm fortunate to get a lot of referrals from trainers all over the world who are either stuck on a case or they have a real tricky case. So I've gotten, you know, consults from as far as Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. And it's really interesting, the dynamic of the human side of the equation and how those differ, how it can be different from a cultural standpoint, how the relationships with the dogs differ and how society in their area views dogs and relationships and what they tolerate and what they don't. And then also when you're connecting with somebody, you know, by Zoom or, you know, you often don't see the dogs, you're just sitting there, you know, making this human connection. And with aggression cases, there's a lot of emotion involved. So I've been really seeing the subtleties in terms of the owner's emotions and what can impact those emotions, what variables in the case can really change how an owner feels. You know, classic one is the owner's perception of a dog bite. You know, dog bites are not, are certainly not critically in the terms of owner perception. For some owners, it is a very slight scratch on them can be devastating. You know, how dare my dog bite anybody? That's horrendous. And the injury is less than what they would get when they're peeling an apple, you know. And then on the other side of the equation, I have dogs killing other dogs or severely mauling people and people aren't taking it very seriously. So those are the things that, you know, you get to see more and more the more you really consult with clients and focus on the client rather than the dog. Because, you know, it's, I can admit sometimes when I'm doing, when I was doing in-person consults constantly, a lot of time you're worried about the dog, right? Because you got to focus on not getting bitten or making sure the dogs don't have a problem with each other if there's a dog-dog issue. So a lot of the focus is on the dog, but you don't get to, you don't get laser focused on the client. And so I think the human element and as well as just how much the stress of everything going on in the world right now is impacting clients or the owners and how their relationship is with other people in their family and with their dogs. Quite an increase in aggression cases directed at the owner that I've had over the last few months. And I think, again, it's due to, due to stress, due to increased exposure with the dog, meaning that the owner is just home and giving the chance, more chances for the dog to bite. You know, more chance of the dog being around resource, stress playing a role.

So really fascinating kind of look into human behavior over the last few months. So that's what I would say has been the biggest kind of change for me. That's kind of an interesting place to end, too, is just like both the importance of the human in the whole thing. Right. But also just kind of that reminder of like stressful for us. All this change is also stressful in the dogs. And now we've got two stressed out things, living beings in the same household. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the dogs can absolutely feed off of that. You know, without without talking about, you know, mystical concepts like energy or anything like that. I do, though, however, feel that dogs are very in tune to how we're feeling, how we're behaving and how we're interacting with others. They can certainly sense that and they can they can certainly have a profound impact on their own behavior. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Mike. This is great. It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. Music.