Something You Should Know - How Do You Create Happiness? & Why Dogs Behave the Way They Do

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

UPGRADE TO SYSK PREMIUM! To unlock ad-free listening to over 1,000 episodes plus receive exclusive weekly bonus content, go to ⁠⁠⁠ https://SYSKPremium.com⁠ “Happy Birthday to You” might seem like a simple song, but its history is anything but. It has generated millions of dollars in royalties and been at the center of a wild legal saga. In this opening segment, you'll hear the fascinating backstory of one of the world’s most famous tunes — and learn about its current legal status. https://www.wipo.int/web/wipo-magazine/articles/in-the-courts-court-confirms-legal-status-of-happy-birthday-to-you-55581 Is happiness just a fleeting feeling — or something deeper and more lasting? In this enlightening segment, I speak with Arthur C. Brooks, professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, columnist at The Atlantic, and author of The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life (https://amzn.to/44VUbvm). He shares powerful insights into what happiness really is and how you can create more of it in your life — starting today. Why do dogs behave the way they do — and why don’t they always listen, even when they seem to know better? Acclaimed dog behaviorist and trainer Louise Glazebrook joins me to explain how dogs think, how to train them more effectively, and how to break frustrating habits. She’s the author of The Book Your Dog Wishes You Would Read: How to Raise the Happiest Dog (https://amzn.to/4fCwFax) — and she’s full of practical advice for every dog owner. If you don’t crack your knuckles, it might be hard to understand why others love it so much. Is it just a habit — or is there real pleasure (or danger) in the pop? In this segment, we explore what science says about why people crack their knuckles and whether it’s actually harmful. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/22/AR2009022201783.html PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! SHOPIFY: Shopify is the commerce platform for millions of businesses around the world! To start selling today, sign up for your $1 per month trial at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! QUINCE: Keep it classic and cool with long lasting staples from Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! HERS: Whether you want to lose weight, grow thicker, fuller hair, or find relief for anxiety, Hers has you covered. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://forhers.com/something⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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with 98% of them saying they'd gladly recommend it to their friends and family. For a limited time, you can get 15% off on your entire first order at happy mammoth.com. Just use the code happy me, H-A-P-P-Y-M-E at checkout. That's code happy me at happy mammoth.com for 15% off your entire first. order. Today on something you should know, the interesting legal story of the song, Happy Birthday to You. Then we explore the science of happiness. Happiness, it seems, has three ingredients. It's enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning. We want to have a sense

of enjoyment about our lives. We want to take satisfaction in our activities and accomplishments, and we want to know the why of our existence. That's the journey and an adventure of a lifetime. Also, why do people crack their knuckles? And is it harmful to do it? And a leading expert with some advice for every dog owner. If every single person in the world learnt that if their dog turns their head away from them or gets up and walks away, that you do not follow,

we would dramatically reduce our dog bite incidents across the world. All this today on Something You Should Know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and, of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods,

The Longest Shortest Time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at Longest Shortestime.com. Something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You should know with Mike Carruthers. You know, for being such a simple song, happy birthday to you sure has a complicated story. Hi, and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know. Happy Birthday to You was originally composed in 1893 as Good Morning to All by Patty Smith Hill,

a kindergarten teacher and principal in Louisville, Kentucky, and her older sister, Mildred. She was a pianist and composer. After the song cropped up in the 1931 Broadway musical The Bandwagon, the family took legal action. In 1934 and 35, a publishing company published and copyrighted all six versions of Happy Birthday to You, crediting Mildred and Patty as the authors. And since then, the song has been through many legal battles over who owns it. At one point, the song ended up being owned by the Warner Music Group and was taking in about $2 million a year in royalties.

Just as an example, while directing the movie Hoop Dreams and, in 1994, filmmaker Steve James sheld out $5,000 to use that song in his movie. For many years, the reason restaurants often sang something other than happy birthday to you is because it would constitute a public performance, and the restaurant would be subject to paying royalties for doing that. However, as of 2015, following a judge's ruling, happy birthday to you is now in the public domain. Anyone can use it, anyone can sing it for free. And that is something you should know.

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So check out the details at sysk Premium.com. The link is also in the show notes. That's SYSK Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive content. If you had to name a topic that comes up a lot in podcasts or books or anywhere, really, it's happiness. People seem to be in pursuit of their own personal happiness in a big way. We've certainly discussed it before on this podcast with some of the leading names in happiness. And today we're going to take a look at the topic through a different lens.

It's the lens of Arthur Brooks. Arthur is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. He's a columnist at the Atlantic and one of the top experts on the science of happiness. He's author of a book called The Happiness Files, Insights on Work and Life. Hi, Arthur, welcome to something you should know. Hi, Mike. Great to be with you. So you might assume that there is all this information and books and seminars and things about happiness because it's something people want and they must struggle with it because if it was easy to obtain,

people wouldn't need all this help. So why are people struggling with happiness? Well, it's funny. They struggle with it because it's what they want and it's what they can't get naturally in their ordinary life. It's a weird thing that the thing that people most want seems to be the most inaccessible thing. You'd think it'd be something, a problem we would have solved and are now selling on the internet or providing by the government. And yet it still seems to be the biggest, most elusive mystery in life. And I wonder, though, if people understand what it is because maybe what they're seeking isn't really happiness or maybe what they think is happiness is really something more like pleasure and not happiness. Like what is what is it to you?

Yeah. Well, the truth is you're exactly right that the reason it's such a frustrating journey for so many people is because they they truly don't understand happiness. When I ask most people, including my students at Harvard, what is it that you think you're here in class? of study. I do this in the first day of class, obviously. They always talk about, well, you know, I can't quite define it, but I know when I feel it. Or it's how I feel when I'm with the people that I love or something like that. And I say beautiful, beautiful, poetic, wrong. Happiness isn't a feeling. It isn't. Feelings are evidence of happiness. Kind of like the smell of your turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner. If you're looking for the feeling

of happiness, you're just going to be going through the rest of your life, hoping for the best. and that's what most people are actually doing. There's several mistakes that they make about happiness, but that's the fundamental one. That's actually where it starts. So I go to the sort of the drawing board at the very beginning of my classes and my lectures to say, okay, if it's not a feeling, what is it? And the answer is, well, kind of like you define your Thanksgiving turkey, your dinner,

which is not the smell of the turkey, but a combination of macronutrients, protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And happiness works the same way. It's a very tangible combination of three things in people's lives. It's enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning. These are the three elements of it. We want to have a sense of enjoyment about our lives. We want to take satisfaction in our activities and accomplishments.

And we want to know the why of our existence, the meaning of our lives. And each one of those things is a different pursuit. It takes different skills and we're in different places. And that's the journey and an adventure of a lifetime. Is it a rock solid thing in the sense that, that can you be happy and still be going through difficulties, through grief, through trouble, and still be happy? Or must you resolve that to get back to happiness?

That's a great question because that's the second big mistake that people make. They think that they have to eradicate the negative parts of their lives to actually be happy. And the mistake that they're making is thinking that happiness and unhappiness are opposites and mutually exclusive. Kind of like light and dark can't coexist. If there's dark in the room, it means it's not light. And they think that if there's unhappiness in my life, it means there's no happiness. And that's exactly wrong. One of the ways that I teach this is by I teach a lot of neuroscience in my class.

And one of the things that we know is that that emotions associated with happiness and unhappiness are produced literally in different parts of the brain because all emotions are an alert system that there's something around you that either should be avoided or should be approached. It's either a threat or an opportunity. Negative emotions that make you feel unhappy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear. These are things that say there's a threat and joy and interest and these positive emotions. They say there's an opportunity. You should go, you should go get it, is what they say. And the result of it is that you need both. Both are really, really important. Unhappy feelings and happy feelings are both extremely critical for leading a good life. And they

coexist. But here's where it gets complicated, Mike. It turns out that for you to get to be excellent at happiness, to get happier over the course of your life, you need to get extremely comfortable with unhappiness. For enjoyment, for example, you have to pass on a lot of pleasures to actually be governing your own sense of enjoyment. For satisfaction, you need to defer your gratifications, delay feeling good right now. And for meaning, of course, you need to pass through all kinds of negative experiences so you can know the meaning of your life. And here's the weird thing that people come to understand once they really, really get good at happiness. It encompasses it, it covers, it requires a whole lot of suffering. For you to get

happier, you have to learn how to be unhappy along the way. Is that kind of like you have to be hungry to enjoy a good meal kind of thing? That's like a lot of things in life. And that's a good analogy, to be sure, you won't enjoy your dinner unless you're hungry. And that's one of the ways that we actually teach one of these lessons, specifically about satisfaction to our kids. You know, when you're a parent, which most of the people listening to us are or will be at some point. And let's say that you're, you know, you pick your kid up from little league practice and you're driving home at 4.30 in the afternoon. You drive by the dairy queen. The kid starts whining. I want an ice cream. We won the game. Let's get an ice cream.

and you say no and they say why because they're smart and you say because you're going to spoil your dinner so they say so what and then you lie at this point you lie to your kid you say that's not good for you to spoil your dinner that way that might be true but that's not the main reason what you want is for them to enjoy their dinner and the only way they're going to enjoy the dinner is that they get to dinner hungry and there in you're not just worried about their their satisfaction of their enjoyment you want them to learn a life lesson that when they delay their gratifications and they suffer a little bit, life is sweeter along the way. You're teaching them to suffer so that life will be better. And that's just one of the great secrets to life. You don't have to go out

in search of suffering, by the way. It will find you. The question is, what do you do when it does find you? Do you bear up under it? Do you learn from it? Do you grow from it? Or you just try to eliminate it and run away from it? That's the wrong strategy. And it leads to a whole lot of misery. Is happiness, though? Is happiness the result of something? Or is happiness in and of itself a worthy goal? Or it's these other three things that you must do. And then when you do them well, when you achieve that, happiness just knocks at the front door. Well, it's a good question because you do need to decompose happiness and have as a strategy, things in your life that will bring you a greater enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. That's how you can you can

understand what your objectives actually are to say, today I'm going to go pursue happiness. That's just too big. That's just too diffuse, as a matter of fact. But on the other hand, if you say, I'm going to manage my pleasure so they don't manage me, that's a question of enjoyment. I'm going to defer my gratifications and set my sights on bigger things that I'm going to find satisfying. And I'm going to go in search of the meaning of life today. And there's a whole bunch of ways to do that. That's what I write about a lot. Then happiness will find you because you've decomposed it into its component parts and pursued the right things. And so, give me some examples of that because when you when you seek enjoyment or you seek the meaning of life

I you know I just going to go have breakfast I don't it seems too lofty for me no I understand so let's take the hardest one of all which is the meaning of life and I have a lot of data we've all seen whether we have data or not that there's been an explosion of mood disorders especially among adults under 35 and mood disorders means depression and anxiety so sadness and and and unfocused fear have really gone through the roof, multiples at, you know, two or three times the level of what it was by about 2005. And everybody's asking why. What's going on? What's going on? And people say it's because of too much social media, because tech is eating our brains or because, you know, parents don't raise their kids right or because the kids are a bunch of,

you know, delicate flowers or something. No, no, no, no. These are not the explanations. The explanation is that it's gotten harder and harder to find the meaning of life. I have done a lot of research on this particular topic. And it turns that you don't just say, go find the meaning of life. You're right, Mike. You're like, I'm just going to have breakfast. I got it. It turns out that people used to do certain things that gave them a big sense of life's

meaning that they're not doing anymore. It's really important. And by the way, the way that you do this research is super interesting. So the depression and anxiety explosions, we call that a psychogenic epidemic, which is a source of huge, huge misery that's not biological in origin. That's a psychogenic epidemic. And when you see any kind of epidemic, biological or psychological, the first thing you look at is people who are not suffering from it and see how they're different.

Well, when we're talking about this explosion, what you find is that there's a minority of young adults that are almost seemingly immune from these mood disorders. And the reason is because they're doing literally six things that bring them a sense of meaning every day. These are the people who are more likely to have, you know, deep friendships with whom they have like very, very, very profound philosophical conversations, which most people don't do anymore because they're distracted by devices. These are people who are more likely to actually be falling in love and taking risks for falling in love and not using dating apps. These are people who are more likely to say that they're searching for their calling in their work, not just a paycheck. These are people who tend to be more religious or at least more philosophical than other people. They're looking

for something transcendent. These are people who have a lot of beauty in their lives, moral beauty, natural beauty, artistic beauty, which is largely bereft of many people's lives when they're working indoors all day long. And last but not least, these are the people who are not afraid to suffer. They're not, they don't believe the, you know, the, in the therapy industrial complex that tells young people today that suffering means that something's wrong with you, that if you're sad, it means you're broken. We need to eliminate your suffering. They say, no, that's, man, that's part of being fully alive. So young people that are immune from this problem, they do those six things.

We're exploring the science of happiness with Arthur C. Brooks, who is a Harvard professor and author of the book, The Happiness Files. Hi, I'm Adam Gidwitz, host of Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmist. On every episode, we tell a grim fairy tale. Not the cute, sweet versions of the fairy tales that your children have heard so many times. No, we tell the real grim fairy tales. They're funny. They're weird.

Sometimes they're a little bit scary. But don't worry, we rate every episode Grim, Grimmer, or Grimmist, so you, your child, your family can choose the episode that's the right level of scary for you. Tune in to Grim, Grimmer, Grimmist, and our new season, available now. Hey, everyone, join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa DeMontz, for Don't Blame Me, but Am I Wrong. Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. And Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice.

Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. So, Arthur, it seems to me that satisfaction and enjoyment are very episodic, that I can feel a sense of satisfaction today, tomorrow it could be all gone because something happened and I'm not feeling satisfied at all. So it isn't like my life is satisfying, my days might be, or my episodes might be, but I don't think of myself as a satisfied individual. It depends on, it goes from person to person, and even from culture to culture, as a matter of fact, you know, all of those worldwide happiness surveys that they look at the happiest countries, they're basically nonsense, by the way, because people answer the happiness questions in different ways. And case in point is that when I go to the Nordic countries that I would score on top of these happiness indices, the reason that they say, yeah, I'm really happy is because they believe that they're very contented, that they have a strong sense of ongoing satisfaction. Now, the reason that they're

reason, Mike, that you don't feel that way. It feels more episodic to you is because, well, I'm just going to guess that your grandparents or great grandparents were immigrants. And one of the things that we know from the research is that people who come from immigrant stock, I don't know, where the Carruthers family from. Scotland. That makes sense? Yeah, Scotland. There you go. Of course. I should have done that. They came here because they were not contented people. And they have discontented kids and discontented grandkids, which makes you really successful. Like, You know, you could have done something conventional, but like, no, I think I'm going to start a really popular podcast. That's an odd thing to do.

Contented people don't do weird stuff like that. So the truth of the matter is that we're all different with respect to how easy it is to maintain a sense of the satisfaction. One point, however, that's worth pointing out for everybody, whether you're a person with a burr under his saddle or you're somebody who just like, who really likes that comfy couch. And that is that satisfaction is more enduring and more efficiently attained. not when we do what people typically do, which is I'll be satisfied when I have more. And if I have more and more and more sooner or later, I'm going to have enough. Because that's wrong when it comes to money and power and pleasure and fame, particularly. The answer is when you can learn how to want less, then satisfaction can be yours more, no matter who you are.

Real satisfaction is all the things that you have divided by all the things that you want, halves divided by wants. the secret to more enduring satisfaction for all people is managing the denominator by wanting less as opposed to having more. Even people who are happy, don't they fall below the line sometimes? I mean, it's not something you achieve and who now I'm happy. Yeah, for sure. And your happiness does fluctuate.

What fluctuates even more is your unhappiness. And so you'll find people who are in general very happy people who have episodes of extreme unhappiness because that's normal that's that's how we're evolved we're evolved to feel kind of mild happiness and intense unhappiness that's the reason that the brooks and the caruthers of the world they exist today because their ancestors were able to pass on their genes the reason that your ancestors passed on your genes is because that intense unhappiness when there was a major threat they got their attention they didn't get eaten by a leopard as a result of that so they've passed on the tendency for people to feel intensely unhappy from time to time even if they're

otherwise extremely happy people. This is one of the things that I, I always talk about with my students. Look, as a matter of fact, we have a test on the intensity of your happiness and your unhappiness. And I find that a lot of very unhappy people have also intense periods of unhappiness. And I say, good. That means you're fully alive, man. That means you're really experiencing life. That means you're not kind of a, I don't know. You're somebody who's really, really, really in it. And it's good to be alive and it's normal to feel an intense unhappiness no matter how happy you are. Do you think when you work with people, is it your sense that, well, first of all, that unhappy people know they're unhappy or this is just life and other people are a big

disappointment, but that this is just the way it is? Or do they really admit, yeah, my life is miserable and I'm unhappy? They know. Unhappy people. people know. I mean, the people who don't know are the happy people because they're not thinking about it very much. And I'm talking about happier and unhappier. There's no such thing as a happy person because everybody has negative emotions and everybody has negative experiences, which once again is an ordinary part of life. But people who are unhappier, they're very aware of it. When people are suffering from, for example, anxiety and depression, they know. There's nobody who goes through life and it's like, oh, slaps their forehead and say, ah, for the past 30 years,

I've been miserably clinically depressed, even if they can't put a word on it. They know that other people are better than me, man. I mean, other people are enjoying their days. They're getting enjoyment from life. They're taking satisfaction and pleasure from their accomplishments. They have a sense of their purpose. And I don't, and I don't know why. And that's an alarm system, that there's something that you need to correct in your life.

And that's healthy and that's good. And, you know, one of the reasons that people take my class is that they're probably a little bit below average happiness. The happiest people don't take my happiness science class at Harvard. And I wouldn't do research on it if I were so far above average myself. On the contrary, I've traditionally been below average happiness. And bang, man, I knew it. That's why I became a researcher in the whole field. But if I'm one of those people who is below the norm, if somebody comes to you and says, all right, so, yeah, I sense that. I sense I'm not happy. And I've heard all this stuff that you've said, but what do I do right now? What do I do

today and tomorrow to move from where I am and at least move a little bit towards where you want me to go? So what I would recommend to any listener listening to us right now is pay attention to four things. Put your time and energy into four accounts every day. Number one, we'll call it faith. It also includes philosophy. And that means practicing something bigger than yourself. One of the greatest sources of miseries thinking about yourself all the time. Second is pay more attention to family relationships. Many people have let those things wither idiotically, in many cases, because of politics. You need, your brain needs, by the way, the neuropeptides called oxytocin and vasopressin in your brain, need your family relationships. Third is your friendships, more and

more people, especially successful people. They have a lot of deal friends, but not that many real friends. Think about the people who are useless and you just love. It takes time to cultivate a relationship, but that will bring true joy. Call and old friends. Go out with somebody that you actually just like for no reason. And last but not least is thinking about what you're trying to do in your work by serving other people. This helps you to transcend your individual's psychodrama that try to earn your success by working harder and succeeding, becoming more excellent. And these are the things to do every day. The four the four areas to work on

today to raise your happiness or your faith, your family, your friendship, and serving other people through your work. Great answer. Great answer. You must come across, because I come across them all the time. I know people who are very unhappy,

seemingly unhappy, miserable people. And I sometimes think, I don't think they would want to be happy. Like they wallow in it Like, if you made everything perfect for them, they wouldn't know what to do. Like, what am I going to complain about now? Yeah.

So there are a lot of people who compulsively do things that are bad for them because in the short term, it gives them a sense of relief. So complaining is a classic example of this. Unhappy people complain all the time constantly, as a matter of fact. And this is actually what alienates them from friends and family because it's not that fun to be around whiners and people who are complaining constantly. It's sort of entertaining for a minute, but then it just becomes so negative that people don't actually like that. But they're complaining is what gives them a sense of power because when you complain, you get other people's attention. And they want other people's attention. They want other people's sympathy.

When you say, my boss is a jerk, people say, oh, I'm so sorry. And that's actually kind of what you need. The problem is it's a very short-term strategy. So I'll explain to anybody who's engaging in unhappy behavior, anybody who's listening to us right now, who's a chronic complainer, the right strategy is to think about what you want in the long term, start thinking about the relationships that you want to cultivate. When you complain, when you behave unhappily, because you want more attention, you get unhappier.

It's like alcohol. It's like compulsively drinking alcohol. It gives you momentary relief from your anxiety. And then it gives you more anxiety in the long run. The same thing is true about negativity and negative behavior. Many people act as if they don't want to be happier, they do. Everybody wants to be happier, but they don't know how to get out of the vortex of complaining and unhappiness.

And so when this mechanism is explained to them, they can actually start changing their behavior. Well, you've really given people something to think about because, as you say, everybody would like to be happier. I mean, even happy people probably wouldn't mind being happier. And this is like a blueprint to get there. I've been talking with Arthur C. Brooks. He is a professor at Harvard Business School.

and he's author of the book, The Happiness Files, Insights on Work and Life. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Arthur, thank you so much for coming. That's great. I appreciate it, Mike. Book Club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday.

Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine. and it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to book your next eye exam. Iexams provided by independent optometrists. TD Bank knows that running a small business is a journey,

from startup to growing and managing your business. That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website to provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs. No matter the stage of business, you're in. Visit td.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with a TD small business banking account manager. You know what I find interesting is that so many people own and love their dogs, yet we're often baffled by them. Some of their behavior puzzles us. We don't know why they do some of the things they do. And for most of us, most of us dog owners,

we haven't really been educated about what dogs want or need. We learn from experience or what other people tell us, and we have the best of intentions, but we don't always really know what to do. Well, here to help is Louise Glazebrook. She's a well-known dog behaviorist and dog trainer in the UK, and she's author of a book called The Book Your Dog Wishes You Would Read, How to Raise the Happiest Dog. Hi, Louise, welcome to something you should know.

Thank you. Nice to be here. So I would like to start because I know a lot of advice is very specific to breeds and the age of the dog and all of that. But I would like to start with some really important general purpose advice for dogs that dog owners, that you think dog owners need to hear. Yeah. Don't use a ball lobber. So I don't know if you know what I mean. I mean by, you know, the sticks that you buy and you put the ball on the end and you throw it really far. for your dog to chase. Don't use those. Because. They create so many issues on so many levels. So when we use those ball lobbers, they're obviously a man-made design.

Dogs didn't design those. We designed those because we wanted to throw something further to wear our dogs out more. But what tends to happen is that what we do is we create a dog that runs really, really, really, really fast to chase something. And then that ball obviously has to come down and land. When it lands, it stops very abruptly, which means that what we then do is we create gigantic problems on the dog's shoulders, on the dog's hips, on the dog's skeletal system, on their muscular system, which means that later in life we have dogs that end up with creciate ligament problems. We have hip splacia. We have lots of other issues going on. We also find that with those kind of games where we are increasing speed, where we are making them run, that for many

breeds, it can increase their adrenaline, it can increase their cortisol, it can make them, it can make everything go very fast, which means it's then very difficult for them to calm down, which means that the whole nervous system is on alert and is heightened. But you're not suggesting that you not play ball with your dog. I mean, I've had dogs in my life that if they couldn't play ball, they would have no reason to live. Some dogs really love a ball so there must be an option so for example if your dog loves the ball and they love to go after it then a really easy change is that when you throw that ball you throw it into the long grass and they go into the long grass and they use their nose to search for it because that's what dogs

are incredible at doing they've got brilliant noses we've literally designed them to do this and that one change will save so many problems for your dog later on it will make them calmer at home. What's another piece of advice that most dog owners probably don't know that would be really good to know? If every single person in the world learnt that if their dog turns their head away from them or gets up and walks away, that you do not follow, and that applies to children to, we would dramatically reduce our dog bite incidents across the world,

because that head turn is the first what I call green light signal that a dog can give to let you know they either don't want it, they don't feel comfortable or they feel uncertain in that situation. And if we as humans respected that and backed away or walked off, we would find that dogs don't need to escalate their behavior to keep us away from them. And that for me is one of the most important things that we can teach adults and children that live with dogs. I know you have very strong feelings about dog parks. Dog parks are something that I would really stay clear of if you can. They condense dogs into an area where they have very little space. They can't escape interactions and lots of owners will stand and chat and not really keep an eye on what their dog is doing and going through. And what we tend to find as puppies is that,

as owners, we want our dogs to be social. So we take them up to meet people. We have them on the lead and we take them up to meet dogs. And we say, hi, can my dog say hi to your dog? And it all is very cute and Disney-like. But the reality is, if we want our dogs to simply walk past another dog in the street, to ignore another dog and not to be obsessed with them or to react against them, we have to teach that. So what we should actually be teaching is that when our dog sees another dog is that we do what I call the treat and trail, which is where you walk backwards and you are literally treating your dog as they follow you for walking past another dog or going past something that they weren't sure about. So that what you're teaching your dog in the long term is that

when they see a dog, they don't go over to it. They don't need to run into it. They don't need to react to it because what you have taught them is that you are going to just simply walk them past it and they are going to be rewarded heavily for doing that. And so that becomes your dog's expectation when they see another dog. And if we taught our dogs that, we would drastically reduce our dog's needs to react to other dogs on lead because they would know and feel safe and secure that you were going to get them past it and reward them and that no dog coming into them or no interaction was going to cause them stress or make them feel fearful.

I sense that people have this belief that a dog is a dog. And yeah, there's different breeds, but you can pretty much mold a dog any way you want. But I've come to know, just from my experience with dogs, dogs are different. Dogs are as different from each other as people are different from each other. And if you're getting a dog, you really have to know what kind of dog you're getting, meaning what are their inclinations and their behaviors typically? I think if you want a happy life with a dog, then definitely. I think it's like anything, you've got the opportunity to choose a member of your family.

So why would you not take that seriously? Because we all know with family members that we end up with and things that can go on, it can sometimes be difficult. Whereas if you have the opportunity to choose a family member, you can really sit down and think about your life. You can think about what do I actually want to spend my time doing? What are the bits that I love? Whereas that's literally the opposite of what lots of people do. And then they have challenges and then they can struggle and then they can find dog ownership difficult.

Whereas if we had those really frank conversations, we would have owners with happy dogs living happy lives together. What about people though who already have a dog or they get a dog but they didn't go through a real vetting process where they chose the dog. It was just the dog at the pound they thought was cute and now they have a dog. So the dog's already here. Now what do we do? So what we then need to do is look at what does my dog need to be a happy dog? And again, it's going to vary depending on each of our dogs. And I think one of the things that's really important is that as owners or someone who's thinking about getting a dog is understanding that every dog is different in the same way that you and I are different and every human is

different. And understanding that once we have that dog, it's really thinking about the exercise that we give, the games that we play, the training that we do, how can we make it fun? How can we make sure that my dog wants to hang out with me? I don't believe in systems where we are, you know, I hate the word command, telling your dog a command. I live with my dogs in a way that is they are my companion. They are a family member. It seems like people bring their dog home and it comes to the house and they make sure it doesn't, you know, pee in the house and all. But most people don't get into rigorous training. They just have a companion dog to go on walks and play with and that kind of thing. But, you know, they're not, they're not going to enter it

into a competition. No, but you've got to think about things like, so I agree with you. All of my clients are companion dog owners. That's my, that's that they're the people that I work with. They all want a best friend. They all want a family member. They all want a dog to be at home with. But the way that we go about things.

So when we're looking at how we train, for example, recall, so getting your dog to want to come back to you when you call them or to listen to a cue when you, say their recall word, whatever it is that you're aiming for. What we have to think about is imagine that your puppy is running towards you and they're so excited to see you because they think that you're amazing. And then they come into you and you're saying you're waving a finger at them saying sit. And then you're telling them to wait. And then you don't give them the treat straight away. And then you're telling them to get down because they're really excited because they can see or smell the tree. What's going to happen the next time is that your puppy is

going to lose motivation because they were really excited to see you and they were really excited to be with you. But when they came into you, you then put all of these barriers to learn in. And so your puppy will slowly start to realize it's kind of not worth listening or I don't need to go back at this point or when I do go back, what they promised me didn't happen. And so it's not that people are necessarily being intentionally making it difficult or making it unenjoyable, but we have this idea that to train a dog needs to be done with, you know, telling them to do something. And actually my version is we don't have to tell them. We can observe what they're doing. We can use it and capture it so that if my dog's running towards me

and they're so excited to see me and I know that they're going to jump up, then I would crouch down and reward them from the ground so that they don't need to jump up, but they still get rewarded for coming into me and I can then think about right they're going to jump up so that's something that I need to work on instead of them running in jumping up, me pushing them down and kind of spoiling that moment. Jumping up is a problem I think a lot of people have with their dog people come over and the dog jumps on them or the dog jumps on the owner every time they come home and you try to say no, you put them down, you say no and it doesn't seem to work. So again it goes back to why is the dog jumping up? So I think if we approach everything of what does the dog get

from it, so there can be lots of factors. We can have dogs that jump up because they're scared. So we can have dogs that jump up because genuinely they're excited. We can have dogs that jump up because children have taught them to by holding toys up high, by keeping treats out of their reach. So they have to try and jump and reach them. We can have dogs that actually have gastropane and will jump up frequently because it stretches the gut and it can help relieve the pain. So there's lots of reasons why dogs can jump up. And so it's often a reason why when people are trying something that's not working, it's because they haven't looked at why they're jumping up.

It's just looking at the symptom, but not what's going on underneath that. Well, how would you ever know? I mean, how would you know whether your dog has stomach problems and that's why he's jumping when it seems like every time you come home, jumps doesn't seem to have much to do with his stomach it has to do with he's excited and he jumps up if we're looking at something like a gut problem a gastro problem there would be other precursors to that so if our dog was really frantic if we had a dog that was chewing on their paws a lot if we had a dog that was kind of air snapping with their mouth if we had a dog that was doing

a lot of lip licking those can all be precursors that actually something in the gastro area isn't working, which is causing other behaviours. I think one of the other things that we have to focus on is that dogs can't talk. There is no ability to reason. There is no ability to go through options. So our job as a human is to learn about dog behavior and start to understand why is something being, why is something happening? Why is something being done? What's going on for that dog? So when we're looking at jumping up, yes, it might be excited. and that might be the only reason, but we do also have to rule out other reasons to make sure that we're not then asking unrealistic things of that dog. So it's not always as simple as

my dog is doing this one thing. I just need to change this. How do I do it? There is often another pathway that we need to take. What about barking? I mean, that's a thing that seems to be very difficult to break, that a dog that barks a lot for no seeming. no apparent reason or barks when people come over or barks when the car goes by and it's very annoying how do you address that well again it depends on breed so if you for example if you've chosen to go out and get a dachshund that are designed to bark we bred them to bark they're designed to go downholes fine things bark and alert us when they're there so you're never going to get quiet dachshund so again it comes back to why did you choose that breed

Was it suitable for your lifestyle and are those breed traits the things that you want your dog to do? Because if, for example, a dog that barks and is vocal is not something on your kind of tick list, then we should really not be going out and seeking breeds that that is on their list of characteristics because you're not going to change that. The second thing is that we have to look at the reason why they're barking. So if, for example, we have a dog that is, I don't know, barking at everything that goes past the house, the reason that tends to happen is usually because there is a problem with pain. And there is something that we need to figure out because that dog is not functioning well.

And they're not resting well and they're not sleeping well. And they tend to be on high alert, which means that their threshold to exist in every, day life goes down and so they will become more reactive to other outdoor noises, people, dogs, whatever it is. So rather like if you are feeling ill, if you are in pain, your tolerance levels go down and the same is true of our dogs. But we as humans often don't see that because what we just see is barking and it being really annoying and it's really loud or it's interrupting or whatever it is.

There does seem to be, and has been for some time, this trend of treating the dog like a member of the family, spoiling it, you know, dressing it up, buying it a bed that, you know, looks like a human bed, and, you know, making it like a child, is that fine? Or does it, does it confuse the dog? What does that do? I guess it depends on what level owners are doing it. So I am an advocate for dogs being part of your family. My dogs are part of my family. I think that that still means that my dogs have boundaries. My dogs are treated with respect. In the same way that with my children, you know, there are behaviours that I don't want them to speak to me rudely. I don't want them to shout at me. There are things that we work on and we talk about and I put the

same level of effort into the dogs that I live with to teach them things and how I want them to live in my family. I think that the lines become very blurred when we don't make it clear for our dogs. So dogs tend to thrive when they understand what's going to happen or what's expected or what might happen now. It becomes really blurry when that keeps changing or one owner does one thing, someone else does something else, someone else does something else. One person lets them on the couch, someone else doesn't let them on the couch. It becomes very confusing. So I think with all of these things, I'm not necessarily worried what their bed looks like. I don't really care whether, I mean, dressing up, yes, I do have an issue with, dogs don't need to be dressed up,

most of them don't need to wear coats. But I think fundamentally what I do care about and what I do put an emphasis on is that you are understanding that your dog is a dog. What does your dog need? What is going to help them thrive? What is going to make them happy? Rather than thinking about as a human, I have this dog and I got it for me and I got it for this reason and these lines are blurred. We do need to think about if we've chosen to bring a dog into our home, it is our job to do that research to figure it out and make sure that what we are giving and doing for them is actually what they need to be happy. What about when people maybe after a few years of owning a dog decide, you know, this isn't working. The dog needs to be trained better. Can you teach an old

dog new tricks or by then, you know, patterns are set and it's probably too late? No. I mean, dog, Pitt, I got when he was seven. He's now 12. And I would say he has changed so much within that time. There's been so many things that we've worked on and things that he came with. And with any dog, of course some things might be ingrained. Of course some things might be a way of doing things. But we can still make changes. We can still teach different ways. We can create different routes. We can create different pathways. There is always that option that something can change when we work on it in the way that's going to suit the dog. Well, having been a dog owner pretty much all my life, I've heard some things today that I have not heard before or haven't thought much about, and I appreciate

you sharing it. Louise Glazebrook has been my guest. The name of her book is The Book Your Dog wishes you would read, How to Raise the Happiest Dog. There's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes and Louise, thank you so much. Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure. I imagine you know someone, or maybe it's you, who cracks their knuckles. Children are the most active knuckle crackers. To them, it sounds cool, it feels good, and many of them like the attention that it gets. Adolescents tend to crack more than their knuckles. They find cracking their neck or their back also feels good. But is there a danger to over-cracking?

Well, experts pretty much agree that cracking does not lead to arthritis or result in any serious damage, but it can become a habit. But it can become a habit, and overzealous cracking can injure the ligaments that support the joints. An avid knuckle-cracker could end up with a looser grip because it can loosen the tendons that attach muscle to the bone. It can also cost you friends, because a lot of people find the noise of cracking incredibly irritating to listen to.

And that is something you should know. Now that you've listened to this episode, I would appreciate it if you'd leave your comments. You can leave a rating and review on whatever podcast app you listen to this on. We read them. We appreciate them. And I thank you for doing that. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, it's Hilary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on right now in the world of reproductive health, and we're covering it all.

Birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy, menopause, consent, sperm, so many stories about sperm. And, of course, the joys and absurdities of raising kids of all ages. If you're new to the show, check out an episode called The Staircase. It's a personal story of mine about trying to get my kids school to teach sex ed. Spoiler, I get it to happen, but not at all in the way that I wanted. We also talk to plenty of non-parents, so you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at longest shortest time.com.

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There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney theme games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched and cooler temperatures. You got this. No, I didn't. Don't believe that.

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