70년 이상의 경력을 가진 두 명의 반려견 훈련 전문가가 말하는 강화

in his applied methodology and his innovation towards getting police dogs to find the bad guys, right? Mostly you're using nose work. Is it not that like, that's your side of your expertise? I know you're. Steve Brown That's, we, we have patrol dogs and their job is primarily tracking. That's their, that's our bread and butter, but we'll also use dogs to search buildings and open areas that we need to. They're two different sets of skills and we can talk more about the difference between them. If that's what the audience wants. They also do a handler protection and suspect control work. So they do aggression. And so you kind of have to have your feet in a couple of different worlds while you're dealing with this. Dr. So what made me say, you know what, I'm going to, I'm going to call up my friend, Steve was there. I put a post on Facebook recently talking about, it's not the treats you use in dog training. It's actually how you deliver them that really has impact on behavior. And so many people wrote on this, that the best trainers in the world don't use food. And I'm like, well, that was news to me. I know at the highest level of performance, when I'm competing at the world championships, when Steve's got his dog tracking down a suspect, we don't stop and give them cookies. We don't stop to give them a little game of tug that can happen after, but to get to that point where work carries so much value that it can carry on for a very long time without the need to reinforce to get to that level. Steve, do we need some level of food involvement or whatever that animal finds reinforcing? Steve McLaughlin Yeah. And I'll admit, I'm absolutely shameless in that I will use whatever works best for a dog. Dr. Absolutely. Steve McLaughlin I've got, you know, I can remember going to teach seminars and workshops. And of course, Murphy's Law comes in and you get some dog that just basically just stands there and looks at you like you got nothing. There's nothing you, there's nothing you have weird, weird old dude that is really going to make me do anything. And I'm going to enjoy watching you squirm in front of the audience. And, you know, you crawl in and it wasn't until I literally crawled on my belly and looked down at this tiny little dog that the dog said, okay, that's something new. I haven't done that. I'm interested. And once we got a little interest, then we could get some stuff. But I will, like I said, and that didn't involve food at that moment, it was about interaction. But for a lot of other dogs, you know, I've, I've just realized through

the years, the only thing I can do is let the dog tell me what they're willing to work for. Once I figure out what they're willing to work for, and I get one thing, then I can teach them, by the way, if you work for these other little things, then you can get the one thing. If you work for a couple of other little things to get the other little things, then you can get the one thing. And Steve, what are your couple of little things that you are like, do you have a list of these are the things that are going to make my job easier as a dog trainer, if I can get you interested in them? Well, food first, it gives me the ability to get a lot of repetitions in quickly. Because it's consumable, they want more, they work more. And you can build the build the want for the food, by putting by making food a token. So literally, we had a police dog that didn't want food. All he wanted was a fetch toy. And our fetch toys at those days were pieces of old fire hose training fire hose, that we could just, you know, throw them in. He, you know, he would sell his soul for his fire hose. But the trouble was getting it back, getting the tug, getting that thing back, because this is back before I understood the value of it being about the interaction with the person, it was about the object, getting it back became a challenge. And a lot of police officers in that point, they think it's all about the Kong, all about the ball, all about the rag, whatever it is. And it's not. If you, if you play your cards, right, it's about the interaction with you. And the tug, or the ball, or the Kong on a rope, or whatever it is, is just the vehicle for that interaction with you. Exactly. And so that's why, you know, I got to, by the way, thank you for that really awesome introduction. I don't deserve it all. And it's truly not the largest police canine unit. We got a bigger one, but we have the largest patrol force. But that being said, I'm going to say, although I've been doing this for 46 years, I probably only have 25 years experience. Because there's a big difference between 25 years of experience and one year of experience 25 times over. And, and if you keep on doing the same things the same way all the time, then you're not growing. And working with dogs- If you didn't write that one down, guys, that's a gem. Working with dogs is a, is a growth vehicle. If you want to, if you want to work on your personal growth, work with dogs. I know a lot of us don't do this, but the point is, is if you want to get the most out of it, you have to figure out how to meet them at their level. And they're really good

at telling you when you haven't. Mm-hmm. And, and I just want to underline and bold and, and make, put stars around, um, what Steve spoke about, you know, you may have a dog. It could be a rescue dog. It could be a dog that you finally have this awareness of this living, breathing creature that you really haven't done your best job for that you want to do better. You have to figure out what it is their number one is. And I know my very first dog that I ever trained, I trained a lot of other people's dogs before I trained my own. I came kind of a weird way into dog training. I, I, I started as a teenager doing a confirmation show handling with my sister who, who is big into dog shows back then. She's seven years older than me. And, and then I got, I went to university and got my BSc and I got involved with cows and horses. Those are, those are still two of my big loves cows and horses. I just love them. And before I came back into, into dog training. And so when I was involved with cows and horses, I made extra money training other people's dogs. And when I got my very first dog of my own back in 1988, when I was training somebody else's dog, when she was maybe a six month old puppy, I would be very, very conscientious about this is your time with me. And then this is the other dog's time with me. And then we'd have time together. And when we'd have time together, she started picking up rocks. And so I can bet you can imagine what's going to happen next. The rock picking up was out of the blue and probably just something different, like pay attention to me over here. And so the attention, I would be like, Oh my gosh, rocks are bad for your teeth. You get that out of your mouth right now. And 1988, I was not the same trainer that I am today. And lo and behold, that became her number one reward in life through until she lived to be almost just over 17. And it was always her number one reward was a rock. And I had to build from that to grow her, her value for food to grow her value for tug. Um, because you know, there's just so many important things that Steve said at the beginning of this, that, um, you can't just leave it with that one thing. And a lot of dogs, like you mentioned, the, a lot of police, police dogs, and certainly true of border collies, that the work is more important than the reward you're going to give them. And when you get to that point, if you don't do something about it, you're going to lose that dog. Because if you choose to want, if you want to train using reinforcement based techniques, and the dogs working is more important than anything you can

give them, then the only thing left is punishment. And you know how effective that can be when a dog's that high in that driven, it's just not so the more reinforcements, or the more reinforcers you have at your disposals, the better and to be aware of the things that are reinforcing your dog. So Steve and I have been sharing a list of things. And you know, there's obvious there's there's food and food I divide into treats that you use and your dog's meals. So that those people who say my dog has no value for food are more often than not Steve, those are the people whose dog have free choice feeding, or they put down their meal and the dog turns their nose up and then they put in some table scraps and some big gravy in there. And so it's the dog directing, directing all things good in my life come from what I decide is good. And it's, you know, it's just I think that the biggest challenge with reinforcement based training is figuring out where the reinforcement is happening for the dog. Um, that's probably, that's probably the hardest thing for people to get because we think of it in, we think of it in terms of reward. And we don't think of it as reinforcement. In other words, is the behavior getting stronger? You got a simple barometer. Does the behavior get stronger? Now, if you're in the clinical context, or pardon me, in the lab context, you're going to say, that's a measure of frequency, does it happen more often? But when you get out into real world fluency, I think there are other factors that we have to deal with. It's not just how often it happens, it's how hard it happens, what kind of intensity does the intensity go up on it? And does the duration go up? Maybe it's not something that involves frequency, maybe that rock is just picking up and holding it. And and just walking around with its mouth at all times. And what it was for sure. And so, you know, we have to realize that we deal with this in a much broader, with a much broader perspective than does the typical lab context. And so that's why the science sometimes is misleading for us. We start looking for things in too discrete a chunk. And I like to think of it as scientists are by definition reductionists. They are looking for the smallest little kernel of truth that they can find and adding it to a mosaic that will give you a bigger picture of reality. Whoa, my camera did do a weird thing. So, yeah, well, it was so, whoa, whoa. So it's gonna be like an old 70s Goularty movie. So, so then, then it's easy when you're sitting, nevermind. So shut up, I can handle this. Don't pay attention to him.

So you sleep better at night knowing the government gives me a gun. Okay. I'm all the way up here in Canada. I'm all good. Yeah. So yeah, you're safe. Don't worry about it. Um, but the, so with scientists being reductionists in nature, if you're a professional dog trainer, then you're an expansionist. You're looking for the thing that will work well for the broadest array of dogs or for your dog in the broadest array of contexts, not just in a lab context or something like that. And so we start looking for one size fits all solutions. Both, both ideological approaches to our daily work have their pros and cons. Everything in life is trade-offs. And the trade-off of her being a reductionist is we tend to look at things in, in the micro sense and don't actually see how the big picture fits together. And then when we try and make it expansive, all of a sudden things fall apart because, Ooh, we didn't consider intensity or duration. And, um, whereas for, you know, for example, a pigeon pecking a key in a, in a, in a Skinner box, intensity is baked into the definition. The intensity is sufficient to make the key actuate. For sure. In other words, if I peck the key, but it's not hard enough, and the thing does that, well, then daggone it, I'm going to peck it harder. Oh, that's it. So you, so intensity is built into it there. And duration is, you only need to do it long enough to hold that. What if they made a key that actually had a delay on it? In other words, it had to be actuated for half a second, three seconds, whatever they could shape duration as a part of it, but that didn't work for that. So the tendency to focus on frequency is built was because of the limitations of the tools they were working with at the time those machines were designed and it can go from there. And we look at this. And meanwhile, while all that's going on in the lab out in the real world, dog trainers are doing something completely different. And I think, and I would make the argument that really skilled dog trainers are some of the best behavior modifiers on the planet because you're dealing with two creatures at one time. You gotta, you gotta deal with the loop and at least two. You think in, in terms of the true, the true definition of reinforcement is what the animal will work for. And so with a chicken, they will work for their chicken feed. But when you're training dogs, you want to get that intensity because of the distractions that we're going to be faced with when we're going to be working those, those behaviors. So if we were teaching a dog to just come and sit beside us, we could probably just

use their kibble all day long if you fed kibble. But the truth is the, the greater the distractions, when you introduce things like other dogs in front of them or, or cars or rabbits and kangaroos for my students down in Australia, that there needs to be something that the reinforcement value helps to build more focus for you and less focus for distractions. And when you're working in a lab that maybe isn't something that needs to happen because it's just the intensity enough to push the button. That's, that's what they need. Yeah. It, and you need to find some way that essentially you become the game on sign that when, and then you get control over when your game on sign is on. Otherwise you're going to have a dog that's going to pester you forever. So teaching and off switch, but essentially this is the, this is the biggest battle I see most police, police canine handlers struggling with if it, you know, because there's a police canine community is very diverse in, but it also has some common strengths and common weaknesses. And one of them is they're so focused on the task that the dog has got to do, which is find, find bad guys and keep, keep people under control that, um, they miss the joy that comes from building a relationship with that dog where the dog really believes that it's about interaction with them. Um, I know a lot of guys who, and, and men and women as canine handlers who have developed relationships with their dogs and where they thought the bond was great. And the, that dog would actually do tremendous things for them and was driven for the work. But essentially that officer was nothing more than a chauffeur and a secretary. Drive me to the call, take the paper. I'll do the rest. Okay. Got it. I can do that. And that's, that's basically all the dog wanted to do, but they saw value in that person that, and, and they would put up with other stuff along the way. Once someone really understands the power of making this, what the dogs really think their day-to-day life is. And our, our police dogs, they think their day to day life is nothing but a series of the best hide and seek and tug of war games ever. And once you get that, then you realize you can take that in microcosm and you can do the little daily things that they need. And you know, so like I probably, a handler may get only one call in a month where he has to apply his or her dog. Maybe only one in a month. Sometimes it depends. Sometimes you're just running from call to call to call and other times it's really slow and you never know what's going

to happen. And you think about it, you have these times in between where you have this opportunity to go ahead and work on the things that you need for the job. But more importantly, work on the things that you need to keep that dog connected to you. And a lot of people tend to drop off of this. And I think the same thing is in the competition world. A lot of people will focus on the things for the competition. Like we get a lot of our dogs from Europe and they come with some pre-training. Now the dogs that come from Western Europe tend to be pre-trained for some form of competition. Uh, Schutzen now known as IGP, Ring Sport, K and PV, you name it. They have some kind of foundation for that. And the trouble is most of the people who train for those sports train for the context only. So they don't train for things outside of the ring. And so the dogs get into things that aren't like the ring and all of a sudden things get wobbly. That's just so important. I think in regardless of what sport you're training is that the layers of learning from the time you start out that training as a puppy. For me, I want to train to the highest level of competition for dog agility. But I want there to be a congruency from that very first thing that I teach you that you can become the most amazing family pet. And so that congruency stays through it. So no matter, you know, we're only competing for that portion of their life at that high level. And then they've got to be phenomenal family pets. And I've seen it also in dog sports in the sport of obedience, in the sport of dog agility, or fly ball, where people just train the sport skills, but their dogs, they have zero control at a park where there's a, you know, a swimming pool or any, any kind of low level distraction. So they, they, they compartmentalize their priorities for something that's only that much of your dog's life in the big span of things. It's crazy. Well, um, you, you've heard me say this before when I came to your place, that denies the fundamental fact that anytime you're with your dog, one of you is training the other. True story. And if you, and see, here's the thing is if at every moment you don't think, uh, as a trainer, if you aren't behaving as the trainer in that relationship, you are by default, the trainee, because they have it way easier. They just got to, excuse me, all the dog has to do is think of how do I get this hairless monkey to say good and give me stuff. Right. Whereas we, we have all sorts of other thoughts intrude on us. You know, when's COVID going to be over? How about lockdowns? I want to go

across the border. Um, who's going to be the next president of the United States? Oh my gosh, we've got all of these things. Did I lock the front door? Did I shut off the iron? Um, you know, how long is this temperature, uh, you know, is this heat wave going to last all those things in true, those little thoughts intrude on our presence with the dog in the moment. And they can tell the minute you break connection with the dog, dog says, got it. I'll entertain myself and off you go. Or you're going to ignore me. I'll make myself hard to ignore. Watch this. Mm-hmm. And that's when your downtime gets turned into the dogs on time. Yep. Yep. That's just crazy to try and live with an animal like that. I've got one that would go that way. Um, you know, he's, we've got this really cool, uh, cross between some sort of bully breed and a, and a boxer. I think there's maybe a Ridge back in there somewhere and he's a fun dog. Um, but, um, left to his own devices, he would constantly bring something to you and drop it at your feet and say, play with me, play with me now. I want you to tug with me and maybe throw something for me. I want you to hide something. You know, you have prehensile thumbs. Let's put you to work. Come on, come on, human, get to work. You're just sitting there at your computer. Come on now. Oh yeah. Watching TV. And all of a sudden there's a slimy bone and go, okay, no, we're not doing that. And at that point, okay, toy is not accessible. We take, we take it over. And you have to think like a trainer in that moment. Uh, because otherwise that dog will figure out, okay, this is my path to reinforcement. All I have to do is be sufficiently annoying. And you know, Steve, I see people at that point then say, okay, then I'm going to give you a stuffed Kong. I'm going to give you a topple. I'm going to give you a interactive game that you can play by yourself. And they're not recognizing the chain that has happened there. You sit down. All I have to do is annoy you. And you're going to give me some high value thing that I can do on my own. You know, it's the thing before the thing. This ties into where we started with this conversation. A lot of the things that we think are reinforcers, aren't reinforcers in and of themselves. It's what the dog does with those things. Food is eating. Balls can be chewing, retrieving, carrying, batting around with a paw. So it's activities are what are reinforcing. And you know, we have to think about this. We're building behaviors and then we're reinforcing with behaviors.

So once you, once you wrap your head around the idea that you're reinforcing with behaviors, not with things, even if that thing is concrete and you can say, this is a piece of liver or this is a ball. It is the behavior that dog does with it. That is the reinforcing aspect to it. And you have to re once you, once you fully understand that, then you realize, holy cow, there's so many other behaviors the dog can do that I can use to reinforce. Why don't I do that? And so all of a sudden now you realize, wow, just opening the door can be a reinforcing event for the dog because he gets to do the behavior of going through it. Right. And that's how you get dogs like on your side of the world that if you just focus on, I need this dog to bite for more duration or bite and hang on with the back teeth only or whatever it is, then you lose the power over the bite because suddenly that is the thing to the dog. The same with, um, you know, a very, uh, uh, intensely herding bred border collie that I use the chance for her to do an outrun the chance for her to chase an, another, another dog as a reinforcer for coming back immediately. When I call you on a very like quiet name call, I don't have to escalate my voice. I don't have to start threatening you. I just call you very lightly because all the value of that herding instinct has gotten put into things that I need you to do. I'm sure with Steve for, for your dogs that are that intense about biting, that would be the only way, like you would, you would have to arraign, uh, suspects with a dog attached to their leg. Otherwise, would you not? Well, it, it's all about developing surrogates and teaching the dog that this thing that you want to do, I'm going to reinforce you with something, something else. And you start to teach them in the beginning that this surrogate is the end all be all. Then once they find out that there's something more in this, you teach them. Yes, but it'll be more fun if you listen to me first and we do this other thing and then it gets better. And, and that's really hard for people to wrap their heads around because, um, it takes a lot of pre-planning. You have to have great communication with the people that are playing the bad guy and you have to think about, you know, what things actually mean to the dog. And, and that I know the behaviorists right now are all the radical skinnerians are all, what do you mean, what it means to the dog? I mean, means in terms of like, is this worth it? The dogs are constantly doing that equation in their head

all the time. What's in it for me now? Not, and, and dogs by their nature don't think, by the way, what's in it for me five years from now? I really need to develop a five-year plan. They don't think about, they don't even think about a five minute plan. I'm going to go ahead and tweak this camera a bit so that it's a little straighter there. Um, they, you know, so we have to teach them about the concept of delayed gratification and realize for us delayed gratification means putting money in the savings bank so that we can buy a house someday for them delayed gratification means letting go of this ball so that I can come over to you and get a treat. I'd really rather have the ball. Right. But if I come over and get the treat, so I'll loop back to their very first dog we started talking about who would not take treats. We literally made a token economy out of treats. So he got a treat and then he got his, he got his piece of fire hose and then we shaped it up two, four, six, eight, 10 treats to get the fire hose until eventually he would work for treats without getting the fire hose. But it took a, it took a while for him to fully embrace the idea that treats had value that he did for, for the treats developed value without being directly tied to the fire hose piece. You know, I've trained seven dogs to the highest level of dog agility, seven border collies, I think nine or 10 dogs. And I've only had one that I didn't have to do that with the border collies. Once they get into the intensity of the game of agility, they don't want to take food anymore. They may take tug, but they do not want to take food. And if they do take the food, they hold it in their mouth and then spit it out when you get, let them run again. So you, you, you have to, like you say, I've never heard that expression, but that's exactly what it is. Tokenizing food. Um, and then making sure they swallow it before you give them the permission to go and do another piece of equipment. And it takes time. It may take years, but there, there will come a point where they actually value the food as much as they do the opportunity to do that equipment. And, and you can, and you can, and once you get that point where you have a variety of reinforcers that can do that, you realize that the different things that we think are reinforcers also have different impact on the dog's arousal level. Like, so for example, when I'm teaching a dog to find articles, I prefer that a dog will find that thing and then lie down. Now, unlike Schutz and where they

want the dog lying down in the direction of the track, I don't care because I don't have a judge that's dinging me for fractions of point. I had, I need something that's functional. So most of our dogs will get that article and they will pivot around it and lie down with that thing between their feet, look at the handle, like say, pay me dummy. And if I want that dog to be stable at the article, we'll go ahead and pes them right there on the spot, walk up, give our marker and just pes them in that spot, keep them stable, collect the article. Okay. Let's go find them and continue on for the next one. Uh, if I want to get that dog aroused about what he did, like, wow, this is the best thing that ever happened to you in life. Then, then I will use, um, toy for reinforcement and Susan, you just disappeared on me. So I'm going to keep talking about this. So the, the idea that you can use reinforcers to manage arousal level on the dog is, is pretty powerful because what I need is a dog that can not only work with the arousal level that it has there, but we can also manipulate it, spin it up, get it up, excited about what it's about to do, but then pull it back. And then once the dog, because the other thing we have to teach the dog is how to pull themselves back. And it's, it's very tough because once they're up, they don't have as much executive function as a human being, they don't have the same forebrain that we do. And the forebrain is what gives human beings to pull themselves back, the ability to pull themselves back from arousal. And it's a skill has to be learned. You have to practice, you have to exercise that muscle, that, that part of the brain to do that. You can do the same thing with the dog, but realized within the limitations of the dog brain, it's going to be a little tougher. But once a, once a dog, you know, physically engages with a suspect, grabs that person, starts to pull them out of their hiding spot or stop them from an aggressive motion, they're in a state of arousal because there is an element of fight or flight that's built into that automatically it's combat. And these people will try to hurt the dog. And so the dog at that point says, all right, I'm in a life or death struggle. Lizard brain takes over, you know, the amygdala fires up, all of that stuff goes in. And now you have to be able to teach the dog to get through that. And sometimes you can't, sometimes the stuff that's going on, the fog of war, the combat in that moment, get through them. You have to wait to read, have find a way to reach

out, touch them and say, this is it. And, and it, and it can only be through extensive conditioning before you get them in that context. You have to get the reps in and teach them to pull themselves back. So you have to consciously go past, uh, like, all right, we'll talk about somebody in the agility world. Leslie McDevitt's controlled unleashed a beautiful program, all built around keeping the dogs from going over threshold. Much of it is about, don't keep the dogs from going to the point where they lose their brains. One of the things that we do is we would do the same thing, keep the dogs from losing, losing control of their own mind. But then also realize that sometimes they're going to be in a situation where they will have no, you know, it will happen to them because you don't control the variables. Right. And, and when, so you have to teach them how to pull themselves back. And that's more, that's more what I do, Steve, you know, I'll take a very, very simple behavior, like a jump that's got a setup so that their jump form can be beautiful. So not as just a straight vertical jump, it's, it's a jump that that's got helpers built into the performance of the jump to make it be beautiful. And we'll put a simple, you know, I'm saying the word jump in my retired agility dog is on. I'm great. When are we doing this? And so we put reinforcement into that form, that beautiful best skill form, recognizing that keeps bars up if you get that form. But I know a lot of dogs that are driven, the sport driven, sport bred dogs, they will go over threshold or at least creep right near that boundary. And then the form goes out the window. And so in training, I will put them in front of that, that setup and purposely put, crank them up and crank them up and crank them up. It's not about always being calm. First of all, you have to know the behavior really well while you're calm and all variables. And then I'm going to purposely crank you up so that you will be high and you may make a mistake. And I need you to learn how to be thoughtful and drive. And then I'll, before I end that session, I will bring you back to what it looked like when you were perfect. So if a perfect jump is a 10, when I, when a dog gets high, they might drop down to a two. But what I want is for them to drop down to a seven. I don't expect you to be an artist when you're jumping, when you're driven and so high, because that's when you're at your fastest. But when you're at your fastest, like chasing a squirrel, you might not care if the bars are going all over the place.

I need you. I don't, I don't expect the dog will ever care, but I want the dog to be able to be that high and still give me some quality of behavior. Right? So rather than artificially making them low and saying, this is, I mean, we do that to, to create understanding of this is the criteria of the behavior. But when you get fast and you get driven, here's how you, so it's a little bit different than control unleashed. It's, it's, it's more about deal with this and become thoughtful and drive. So, um, I borrow a lot of what we do for dealing with competition nerves and things like that from the shooting sports world, from a guy by the name of Saad Ayyub, who said, you know, who, who taught people how to survive gunfights. And one of the things that, um, he, he talks about is inoculation distress. And, um, sometimes you have to artificially in the training process, inject that stress, get them to that point so that you can get the animal back. It's, we're talking about the same thing. Right. And at the same time, the fundamentals of marksmanship never change. You have to do the same thing when you're under stress as you do when you're calm. And, and so the idea is to build enough repetitions in with proper form so that when you get into the situation, neuromuscular programming, muscle memory takes over and things happen. And so the mantra for us is slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. And so when you're doing this with agility, when you think about it, you're going to teach the mechanics, not at top speed, you're going to get it there. You get, and you, and then once that dog understands the mechanics, we've got it. So the same thing I do with tracking. One of the things that people say when we teach tracking, using spray on the ground and food on the ground and food spaced very close, literally in the beginning for a German Shepherd-sized dog, the treats are four inches apart. I'm not teaching tracking at that moment. I'm making classical associations between food and water and the human scent that's associated with them. But I'm also getting a biomechanical style of moving forward that's efficient. That once the dog understands that and can move forward and manage its own pace, once I see that the dog is managing its own pace, then I can go ahead and spread things out and start, you know, gradually shaping them forward to something that looks more like real tracking and they won't burn out. Because if there's something that wipes out a tracking dog, it's being frantic, overshooting turns, running around,

having to catch back up and just gassing themselves. Whereas if they maintain that biomechanically efficient movement style, everything gets better. Dr. To quote Brene Brown, clarity is kind. And when you are creating clarity in that way, then like a lot of times the franticness comes from the lack of confidence in what is correct. And when you create that what is correct as unconscious muscle memory, then the chance of that franticness is dropped dramatically, right? It's like there's a lot of people that are asking, well, how do we get the dogs to pull themselves back if they get in your threshold? But I think one of the important things that both you and I mentioned, Steve, is that the understanding of how to be correct and how to perform at this level of criteria has been, I hate to use the word, proofed, but it is there in so many different forms of distractions that when we add arousal to that, and the arousal is me giving off different smells because of my nerves at the world championships. How can I mimic that? I can't just like, how do you mimic a fugitive fighting the dog? It's super hard to mimic that. But what we can do is mimic, artificially create environmental distractions that create a level of highness that we can't get normally in our everyday training. And if the dog falls back to, oh, this is what I know. And here's the challenge is people train the dog to do agility and immediately put them in a competition where they get excited. They go over threshold, they make mistakes, and then they punish the bars as if the dog understands that the bars fell down and I know I was bad. That's not how it works because you didn't put in that foundation of this is how I am correct and a trillion different scenarios. This is how I am correct. And now we add more arousal and the how I get correct, it becomes less, a little foggier, but it becomes more clear. And then you put them in a competition. Okay. But it's a similar thing. So this is where the police officer's dilemma is. Because we can simulate. Police officers are pretty good about simulation. We do a lot of scenario based training. Right. And we actually do force on force training, where we put you up against somebody. You've got a gun with paint balls. They've got a gun with paint balls. You're going to feel the sting of that coming at you. All right. You're going to feel air soft. You know, you've got all this stuff. That's good. But at the end of the day, you know, you're not going to die. So even though you're stressed in that moment, the idea about doing force on force training is to give

you an inoculation to stress. So I'm going to go back to a guy I mentioned earlier, Masad Ayub, who wrote the book Stress Fire about teaching people how to survive gunfights. And one of the things that he recommends is, once you have the mechanics, you understand the basics of whatever it is you're trying to do, always have something on the line when you shoot. Always, you know, you go with somebody else and you're shooting for lunch. Low score buys. You always put a little stressor. So you're inoculating yourself the stress. Now, the reason I bring this up right now is you mentioned the thing about ring nerves. You can't replicate the emotional state you're in when you get into a ring. Because in training, you know, there's nothing to say. And believe me, ring nerves are a human phenomenon. Dogs don't have ring nerves. They just can read the discriminative stimuli that says, something's different here. And so when you train, once you've got the mechanics and you truly, and the trouble is a lot of people start doing this before they truly have the mechanics down and smooth and fluent. They haven't done enough slow, smooth, smooth, as fast repetitions to get it there. But once you get to that point, then put something on the line so that you feel a little stressed and your dog feels that you're stressed. And then you can survive that and you can perform in that state. The dog goes, oh, okay, this is kind of like what happens when we're doing that training like that. We use the line to practice how you compete. And that you want to not just say, you know, when I used to ride horses, I would say, I'm not going to train today. I'm just going to go hacking for a couple hours. Hello, it's an animal and it's learning you are training today. Right. Like you got to recognize no matter what you do, you are training your agility dog that you are always going to be moving at this pace. And then you get to a competition. Suddenly you want to run fast. That's not the same game, not the same game at all that you have to. And when you talk about creating more stress, I did this camp once, Steve, this was a lot of fun. I asked everybody when they came in because it was about preparing for competition. I asked them what their favorite kind of music was. And if they said country, then when their turn to run came up, I turned on the speakers very, very loud with my favorite rap music. If they said that they, you know, so what's your favorite, which one do you like the least? And then, so the first day I just played the one they hated the most

really loud when it was their turn. And then the next day it was their favorite and it was at a mellow. And then, so I was, I was giving them an opportunity to go back and be good. Um, but I actually had somebody who left that camp halfway. They hated it so much. So, so, and one time I turned on one for one of the runs I made everyone wear, I told them it's the middle of summer, bring your winter coat. I made them put on their winter coat. I turned on the heat in the building. It was so uncomfortable and then made them run as fast as they can with their dog. So it's a little things like that, just dress you. Right. And, and sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind when, when it comes to this and, and it, in that, um, the military's motto is train hard, fight easy. And I don't want to be fine. I'm just going to say train hard, perform easy. Right. And the idea is if it, and the concept of over-training, training to, uh, at levels of stress beyond what you expect to see in the operating environment so that when you get there, you're ready to go. So I'm going to borrow something from Dr. Robert Glover. And he wrote the, he, he came up with this concept, not about, um, not about dog training. He's the guy who wrote the book, No More Mr. Nice Guy, about guys dealing with some personal issues. And he talks about this level down here and from the hand and below, that is the, uh, comfort zone. And then up here and above is the stress zone. In between the two is the stretch zone. Right on. And your, your, your, your, so my job as a trainer, when I'm working with people and dogs is to find the edges of performance, to get them out of their comfort zone and working in the stress zone, in the stretch zone. Yeah. And then once we get them comfortable operating in the stretch zone, what happens is the stress zone starts to move up and you have, you have a higher operating range. And the way you get that is you actually go up to the stress stretch zone. You go up to the stress zone right there and you just put a toe over it and then you come back and then you put your other toe in and you come back. You put your right foot in, you shake it all about. And then you put your left foot in and you shake it all about. So you hokey pokey your way through the stress zone. And eventually what happens is it just goes up and up and up until, you've got to have a really cataclysmic event to get that animal to the point where it's limbic and that is not really in control of itself or that person. And, and, and when we're talking about the

two of us, there's separate behaviors that you have to do to prepare your animal. And then the separate behaviors you have to do to prepare yourself. Like I worked with a professional football player for a lot of years and he kept repeating slowest move that smoothest fast to me about my running mechanics that, you know, you can't try and run fast when you're running like crap, Susan, you've got to, first you've got to learn how to run efficiently. And so, and then we, we have to then focus on the animals. So then it's, you know, turning up the heat and putting on this loud music is excel, is accelerating that animal's arousal. You got to make sure that it's not making fearful it's not making them fearful. It is making them as excited. And then, and then they have to deal with the handler who's irritated. And, and so these little things, or we would do things where I would give you a three jumps and a right turn. But at the end of those three jumps, there would be a left turn. And when you got to jump number two, I would yell out left or right and tell you where you're going at that moment. Now that would never happen in agility, but it's making, it's just adding more stress. And there'd always be a, okay, you get to pick the music. If you get this one, right. Or you get, like you said, there's always going to be something on the line. One of the great competitors here in Canadian agility, he, he would never go to an event where there wasn't a, a toonie on the line. So Canadian $2 coin. If he was at the event and you were competing in the same class with him, you had to belly up with your toonies. That's just how you roll. There's always got to be something on the line. And you never say, even if you think his dog can beat you, no, you know what, your dog may not beat me today. My toonie is in. So, um, it's a, you know, okay. We've been talking about a lot of great things, Steven. I want to be respectful of your time, but I do want you to come back at some point. Cause I just love talking, um, dog training and behavior and, and human behavior. But I want to talk about what might not be an elephant in the room for everybody. But I just want to, I want to, I want to see where I'm a, I'm a person as a dog trainer. I'm, I try to look for congruency in my life that I want to train in a way that I believe is training is, is kind and compassionate to animals. Therefore, I, I look to times when human beings can trigger me and how can I respond, uh, with curiosity rather than being furious with them and, and that I can be kind and

be appreciative of looking at life from their point of view. And why would they say something like that to me on social media or whatever it is? So I want to talk about you, a reinforcement based dog trainer who is working in a law enforcement system that is about, uh, you know, penalizing and incarcerating. And, and is there, is there any part of you that goes, why can't we build more reinforcement in for the human beings that are making these mistakes? So, um, I think that there are, there are all sorts of attempts to do that right now. Dr. Tim Jackson- And unfortunately, uh, um, they, they didn't, the people that are designing this would benefit from reading rough love. Because, uh, they would then understand that positive is not permissive. Dr. Tim Jackson- Mm-hmm . Dr. Tim Jackson- That, um, actually, you know, setting up a structure in which reinforcement is available,

interactively interact interactively interact interactively interactively interact interactively interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact interact of homelessness or drug addiction or whatever off and make it easy. And unfortunately, there are too many approaches that aren't working. And so far, I've really been impressed with cities like Austin, Texas and some others that are setting up structured systems that really work well, that do this. And look, I've been a law enforcement officer of one flavor another for 46 years. And I've actually, I realized, I've been doing dogs earlier than that, because like you, when I was a kid and other kids were babysitting, I was walking dogs in New York City. And so I've been doing this since I was 12. And I didn't really put that together

until I had to do for the art and science of animal training, talk about my career. And I realized, wait a minute, this is where it started. But long story short, I have always lived with this conundrum for myself. Here I am, a positive reinforcement-based trainer, and I work for society's arm of negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment. You know, rarely are police called to give out reinforcers. And just to tell you, there are agencies that have tried. They have said, we're going to give people good driving tickets, that you do this, and then you can exchange it at Baskin and Robbins for ice cream cones. You can give somebody some flowers and do that stuff. And the image of police officers was so tied to the averses associated with what they do that people resented being stopped to get this thing that was perceived as a positive reinforcement. So guess what? The animal gets to decide what's reinforcing. The subject gets to decide what's reinforcing. You have to look at this. And for them, unfortunately, seeing the police officer not getting stopped by them as a reinforcer. Right. Because, and that's why a lot of people who say their dog works for praise alone, because so often that praise is symbolic of you're not getting punished. Yeah. And that's why the dogs look happy. Oh, thank God you're not going to beat me right now. Like that is why people say, look, that person and that person, their dog works only for praise. Because praise now is meaningful. It means you're not in trouble. And unfortunately that, you know, I think if for a program like that to be, to really work, the police officers would need to be pulling over cars and giving them something like a lottery ticket to a lottery that's, you know, worth $10,000 or something more meaningful than an ice cream cone. And sometimes a chance to earn something is- A lottery ticket with a chance to win millions is going to be irrelevant if the odds are low. Right. In other words- But like you said, if a dog has a history of that owner being unpredictable at best and predictably punishing at, you know, at worst, then any little tidbit you're going to throw the dog, they're going to be like, um, okay. You have to find a way to deliver it to them in such a way that whatever you're delivering to them outweighs the impact of the direct interaction and the interruption. And that's- And that- That's going to vary from individual to individual. And, you know, I guess my point is, um, you know, we have to understand. It doesn't matter whether you're left or right. It doesn't matter. Whatever. All government power derives from the point of a gun. Mm-hmm.

Whether- And if- Because the government will say, if you don't do this, we're going to fine you. And it's really administrative, but it's not- But it's not criminal. Except if you don't pay the fine, that's criminal. And then you can go to jail. And by the way, if you don't want to- If you don't- We'll send you a letter saying, report to jail. And if you don't show up, they will send the police to come find you. And if enough people object to that and the police can't handle it, they'll call in the military. It happens around the world, all over the place. At the end, we have to realize that that's- That's the paradigm we've been living in for millennia. And until we can- But certainly, in the United States, it's gone to such a level of escalation because the amount of incarceration in America compared to every other country in the world is astronomically unlevel, correct? Our incarceration rate is way higher than it should be. And I think that there should be- Like I said, there should be a structured approach to helping people figure out how they can change their behavior. It's going to be a really, really tough thing because like I said, so far, there have just been all sorts of things thrown at the wall. And we're hoping that something sticks. And the trouble is, I don't think the things that are getting results are getting sufficient attention. Like I say, some of the programs, some of the programs are, but they're not popular. There are countries, correct me if I'm wrong, and Scandinavian countries have had a great deal of success at using reinforcement in law enforcement. Have they not? In what regard? In that, in their pilot projects of using reinforcement to build a relationship with the community and rather than only being a force of punishment. And- So I need an example of what the Scandinavians are doing because the Scandinavian cops that I talk to, because I'm lucky, I get to go around the world and do this dog stuff and I get to talk to cops. Because one thing about it being a canine handler, if you show up at a canine facility, you're in and you can have conversations and we will- It's awesome. We will all talk about what we do. And I haven't gone any place yet where they don't have the same complaints and concerns that we have. They do see our incarceration rate as problematic. There is- And unfortunately, the incarceration rate is really, you know, slanted towards the BIPOC community and that's creating another problem, you know, that we have globally, not just in your country, but, you know, certainly in our country and beyond. But there's- And Steve, I appreciate you letting me, you know, question you. Yeah.

because I just think it's just so important. If we're seeking to train dogs this way, what an amazing world if we could seek to treat people this way. And my hallucination is that the young people that I need of today, they have a higher level of consciousness than those of us in our- I'll be 60 this summer. And that- I just think these young people that are looking to know, hey, I'm not- I don't want that quick fix for my dog. And I see that that level of compassion goes beyond just looking at animals. And I'm hoping that young people are going to come up with greater solutions to what that looks like in the future where, you know, we all know if we frustrate an animal enough, they're going to- they're going to come at us. And- and so maybe that's what is leading to the higher levels of incarceration. So I think we have to look at- look at this in a little- in terms of scale. We have to figure out, you know, because when we're training dogs, we're training dogs one-on-one. We got into that. Then we integrate them, you know, we work with them integrating them into small groups. But we have to figure out how do we- how do we- how do we treat people in a way that they feel validated, they feel reinforced, and that their behaviors are productive because where- where we run awry. When dogs left to their own devices, if humans didn't exist on this planet and dogs ran around, wouldn't be a problem. Where people get into problems, where they call a dog trainer into their lives, is when the dog doesn't mesh with what human expectations are. and- Sure. And yeah, you- rare- I mean, if you've ever done behavior work, when is the- last time you had someone walk into your office and saying, I want you to train my dog because I just want the best relationship with my dog. They- they don't say that. They walk in, they're saying, look, if you don't do something about this, this dog's going to the pound. Yep. Or worse. Because in some parts- in some parts of the world, the or worse happens in somebody's backyard. But- But you see- And we have to figure- That's where I just feel it's our job. And that's what drives me today to continue to do the work that I do. It's not- it's just that I see that an impact is being made. I'm going to give you an example. I have many friends. I belong to business groups. And so they'll have Facebook groups around the topic of their business. And they have to have all these rules. And then they have to have people that kick people out of their group routinely. And in our group, our free Facebook group has got 60,000 people in it. And we have a directive of kindness that treat people in this group the way you would like to train your dog.

And a lot of people- And we ask you to read this kindness code. A lot of people go, well, I'm out. Because I want to talk about how to use my shock collar. And I'm like, well, you can learn alternatives. And we stay here. We embrace anybody who wants to learn. However, in that group of 60,000 people that we have had for years and years and years, we rarely have to police anybody. Because of the mantra and the welcoming and the- We try to be non-judgmental. We're human beings. And I got to tell you, I too get triggered when yesterday somebody who worked for me said their BFF sent their puppy to somebody who claimed to be a police dog trainer. And the puppy got put on a shock collar for a month. And they got sent home. These people who had never trained a dog in their life got sent home with their 11-month-old lab puppy in a shock collar and said, you tell him to sit once and if he doesn't, you shock him. If he pulls on a leash, you shock him. If he sees another dog and he barks, you shock him. Like that kind of thing hurts my heart, but I can't be judgmental of the people who are following the direction of somebody they think are an authority. So let's approach this with curiosity. Absolutely. So why does your 60,000 person group remain so harmonious? We aren't harmonious. There definitely is people that are conflicted, but they are received by the group with compassion. And so- You're allowed to be heard. And so that is harmony. Right. That is harmony. It's not that everybody is going to sing the same thing. Absolutely not. You know, it's that you have created a culture in your group and culture has more of an effect on human behavior than the laws. And I am society's arm of law. All right. I'm part of the criminal justice system. But I'm a firm believer that culture has more of an impact on that. If we build cultures that are about allowing people the freedom to express their concerns and then having reasoned discussions about them and then moving forward based on mutual understanding and sometimes understanding, I don't see it. And you'll have people that will self-police on your group. As you said, we don't talk about this. They self-police and they go. Right. For sure. And the trouble is, the trouble is, that's one pocket. And now you have another pocket that are going to that trainer that you just described. And they will build a culture. Because unfortunately, we're a tribal species. Ever since we've been, as soon as we get a group of about 150 people, it tends to want to split. So even within your group of 60,000, I will bet you, there are smaller groups that tend to interact more with each other than with some of the other people.

It's just, that's the way we are. And we have to figure out not how to fight our tribalism, because I don't think we're going to get it out of our repertoire so easily, but how to go ahead and say, how can we take this tendency to break into groups and then harness it for the better? How are we going to be able to allow people to express themselves and work in a way that we can do this while presenting an example for them of what it's like to move forward with the approach that we see? And I don't see, I don't see any easy solutions anytime soon. You know, I believe there's a place for law enforcement in civil society. And I think law enforcement is, the law enforcement community right now is trying to figure out what that's going to look like moving forward because it's clear, particularly in the United States, that they want something different than what they've seen in the past. And I'm struggling with it here in my own agency right now. We live in a different society, you know, with the advent of social media and the advent of the algorithms that help create confirmation bias, that if you believe that people are bad, then Facebook streams will give you all the groups that you could ever want to support that way of believing. And so it's a challenging society to be a leader in and to be in law enforcement because people can see all those groups that say we need, you know, police authority is wrong or bad. And so, you know, I believe that the more pockets we talk about that are more tolerant, that still help enlighten people and bring them on to a better place. So like I said, that group that we have is our free group of people who are just wanting to look at how can I get the results? Because at the end of the day, like you said, people don't come to dog trainers because they want to not have a better relationship. They want an outcome. And so we all start with a struggle that leads us to an enlightening of, oh my gosh, this is so much fun when I have this kind of relationship, I can still get those outcomes that I want. And so then they move on to fine. And like, and one of the questions that I had, and Steve, we are getting really long. I know, I appreciate that. I'm cool. I'm sorry about it. How is it that people know? Like, you know, in any other sport, you know, you can get up to this level and say, okay, well, is it Federer or is it not Rafa Nadell? Or like, there's just a few people that we know are the top of the, you know, these guys know the most. But in dog training, you know, there are people like what qualifies as being the experts. And like, there are some people that cite, these people are police dog trainers. So they are the epitome of all knowledge in dog training.

First off, the cult of the expert is not unique to this. We've just gone through a year and a half of struggle over a virus in which everybody is trying to find experts. I mean, because we know we don't know everything about it, so we need an expert to tell us. And there are all sorts of other things. The cult of an expert has been around for a long time. And I'd rather, if I could say anything to people, don't find experts, find students. Find somebody who commits themselves to being a professional student of their business rather than being that. Someone who realizes, I don't know it all, I'll never know it all, but I will continually seek knowledge. And I submit that the culture in your 60,000 person group is there because those people are there for something more important than themselves in that moment. Whether it is commitment to the philosophy that you have, whether it's commitment to their individual dogs or their performance in the ring or something like that. But when we, when we are subject to nothing but the whim of the moment and what makes us feel good in the moment, they do this because you teach delayed gratification. You teach people that if you put in this work, if you do all the slow skills, the slow things, then you will have smoothness that will give you the ability to do this fast. you teach people, you know, because here's the trouble with positive reinforcement training and why people don't do it. Those people that go to the shock collar trainers, those people that go to, and I'm not going to label them because I've used a versus, I started out as a keelerite, you know, so, you know, believe me, I've been the spectrum. And the one thing I will say is that it's hard for people to get, but working in the positive reinforcement realm, when you are a positive reinforcement based trainer, that is your focus, it front loads your effort. Mm-hmm. If someone just wants to make a dog stop doing something annoying, they have all sorts of tools. They can get the annoying thing to stop pretty quickly. But unfortunately, that negatively reinforces the person pressing the button, jerking the leash, or throwing the, you know, shaking the can, throwing the chain, whatever, for doing that. Right. Because, you know, and this is the thing I have a hard time getting police administrators to understand. I believe that police canine is the most mentally demanding discipline in all of law enforcement. Because every other tool I've got in law enforcement, I could have a firearm, I could have any other thing and they're all inanimate objects. That as soon as I set it down, if I walk away and I come back to it, nobody's touched it, it is in the same condition which I left it. If I leave my dog alone

and I come back, that dog has changed. That dog has been interacting with the environment, the dog has learned, the dog will adapt its repertoire to what the environment has presented to it. So police canine handlers have no break during their day. I said it and I mean it when I say anytime you're with your dog, one of you is training the other. And it's not even with the dog. If you have influence over the dog at that moment, at that moment, if you can do something even from a distance that influences the dog or is perceivable to the dog, then learning is happening between you and the dog at that moment. And so police canine handlers don't have a break. Their minds have to be on all day long and that is the hardest lesson for me to get through to them. They think, well, this is training and this is operations. No. You don't even get a break between those two. And the same is true as our pet dog owners. They think that they're going to train their dog for 20 minutes on Tuesday night and they don't recognize that you have been training your dog since the moment you got up and even while your dog, you were asleep if your dog was left free to do whatever they want. That learning is ongoing and it's great that you focus and you do 20 minutes but really for it to be truly effective, it's got to be a part of your everyday life, of your way of going and that's when reinforcement-based training is really working well. And I challenge that it is, you can see results as quick as a shot caller and I'm just going to, I don't know when people are going to watch this but we, you know, we do have a master class on right now where I teach three games, Steve, and those three games produce results instantaneous, like mind-blowing results. I use a five-month-old cockapoo I use to demo these and I got this cockapoo, I had him for five hours, one afternoon and giving him breaks and bringing him out and giving him breaks. Maybe he had an hour and 20 minutes of total training time and he went from this frantic leg humping, oh my God, he was a leg humper, leg, he was crazy to a focused working dog who had amazing behaviors. So, you know, yes, I think that there is a lot of reinforcement value in pushing a button and seeing something stop but there's maybe even more in seeing something that you love, seeing that light bulb come on and you going, I didn't think this would be possible for my dog. Again, it's, there's, there's an immediacy to, to punishment though that is, that is hard to replicate in the person doing the punishment. So, you have to, you have to, you've learned to value seeing the incremental changes, seeing the process of shaping, shaping by definition is, you know, achieving behavior

through successive approximations and you have learned to value seeing that little bit, oh, I'm on the path and that gets you your dopamine hit and if we can get people thinking about that about their daily lives, everybody, if you can get people thinking about that about their daily lives, not just about their dog training but if you can start to value the daily hit and I'd say the first, the first question to this is be curious. Even when things don't go well for you, be curious. What just happened? What's going on here? And, and don't make a value judgment about it. Just look at the antecedents of the consequences. The behavior will take care of itself. And I'll add to that, even be curious when it's, when it is going well. Oh yeah, no, no, absolutely. Video your training. All outcomes are information. And you walk away and go, this was amazing. Look at why it was amazing and how you can replicate that amazingness in your next session. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's huge. And I'm going to, like I said, I don't know, we've only got, what day is it today? Saturday. I'm going to put this up because it might only be available for, for a couple of days. But if somebody is watching this in the next couple of days, those three games, they, they are manipulation of the environment to create astronomical change in behavior. So it isn't just a slight change. It's a severe manipulation of environment that gets the outcomes that I do, especially in games two and three. but that, and I believe, and I believe, Steve, that it's complete outside the box thinking that games two and three are. And I believe that me introducing this to the world, to giving the 60,000 people the opportunity that there is going to be, and I, you know, it may not be young people, but I just, I just, I celebrate and I want to champion those young people out there who, who look at this and go, well, I can think outside the box and then they get the next level, the next wave of, you know, the pushing the button makes it easy and makes it happen fast. But I, I just feel that if we change our approach and we stop doing, trying to, like what a lot of reinforcement based dog trainers do is they try to mimic punishment based dog training with some reinforcement. And that's not where we're going to get the astronomical, those massive leaps in understanding. It's when we go away from what traditionally has been taught in a linear fashion, we take it outside the box, we get innovative and we get these huge results. And, and that's why I'm, I just, I encourage young people to, to open their minds because they're, or what, they're going to be the champions for the dogs in the future. You and I, Steve, we only got another 50 years

or so to do this. And so we need to start, you know, getting the young people excited about carrying this on. So, we haven't even touched all these questions, Steve, we're going to have to do this again. Well, I'm looking forward to it. That would be a blast. And I'm going to encourage you to be curious and your group to be curious about what about the culture in your 60,000 people? what is there in that culture that is scalable? Can you take outside your culture? What is it, you know, that you've got there that allows for the things you've described to flourish? because if we can replicate that a little bit here, 60,000 people here, 60,000 people there, 10,000 here, 50,000, 100,000, 20 people, whatever. If you can replicate that, then I think you'll start to get some bleed over society as a whole. And that's, that's a pretty cool thing. Absolutely. So it might mean creating more and more groups of 60,000. That's brilliant. Steve, you are just such a treat. I thank you for spending time on your Saturday morning with me and with all of the people that are on this. I don't even know how many people are, I can't tell how many people are on this, but I'm sure my team knows. So, and I know there's going to be a lot more. There's 400 people watching right now. There's, and there's going to be so many more that are going to see this. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you, my friend. And let's do this again. You got it. I had a blast. I look forward to it. Take care. Steve. You too. Peace. Bye.