The Tim Ferriss Show - #200: Susan Garrett -- Master Dog (and Human) Trainer

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Starting point is 00:03:09 another edition, another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers from all different trades, all different specialties, entertainment, military, sports, you name it. This episode is by request. Thousands of you have been asking for an episode on dog training, and I would expand that to human training. How do you condition other people or yourself to do what it is you want them or you yourself to do? This episode features Susan Garrett, who is an incredible, not only dog trainer, but competitor. She has a bachelor's of science in animal science. She's one of the most consistently successful competitors in the sport of dog agility for now more than two decades. She's been on the podium of world and national

Starting point is 00:03:56 champion. Let me try English again, championship events more than 50 times winning those events, a total of 38 times. She was of great help to me when I first adopted Molly, my own pup, and her book Shaping Success was voted or selected as the 2005 Dog Training and Behavior Book of the Year. She is a champ both for her competitive track record, but also in her ability to convey concrete tips and recommendations for, for instance, the most critical games and exercises to play with your dog. The three types of reinforcement, how to use crates properly, what you should do in the first 24 hours of say, adopting a puppy. And we talk about just about every facet of dog training.

Starting point is 00:04:49 And really the way you should think of this is behavioral modification and conditioning. So this applies to chickens. It applies to maybe irritating in-laws, the cat that won't stop sleeping on your kitchen table. I think I borrowed that from Don't Shoot the Dog. But it's all the same thing. So there are principles in this that you can take away even if if you have no interest in training dog, having a dog or dogs in general. So let me then allow Susan to do the talking. You can find her on the Facebook and she has a very active page, lots of great pics and videos. And that is very simply facebook.com forward slash Susan Garrett, G-A-R-R-E-T-T, Susan Garrett Dog Agility. So facebook.com forward slash Susan Garrett Dog Agility, say hi to her.

Starting point is 00:05:31 And I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Susan, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tim. Really happy to be here. I have wanted to get you on the show for quite a while now. After our first conversation, I knew that we would eventually meet again with recorded audio because my audience has been asking me for an episode on dog training and so on for ages since I got Molly. And you and I spoke very, very early on in that process for me, right when I was,

Starting point is 00:06:07 not, I wouldn't say flatlining, but kind of before I hockey-sticked in my training education. And so I could think of no better person to have on. And part of what appealed to me was the fact that you have an objective and verifiable record. And what I mean by that, and for those people who are wondering how I seek out experts, part of it is finding people who can be evaluated objectively. It's not their opinion. It's not someone else's qualitative opinion. Now, I'm just going to read a little bit of your bio. I won't go into a ton of it, but you're one of the most consistently successful competitors in the sport of dog agility over the past, I guess, at least two decades. You've been on the podium of world national championship events more than 50 times,

Starting point is 00:06:57 winning those events a total of 38 times. I was hoping perhaps we could start since most folks, well, I shouldn't say most, but many folks are not familiar with dog sports. What is dog agility? What does that sport look like? Most people would have seen it, but maybe didn't know what it was. We used to have an event on ESPN a lot every year. So it's a sport where the dogs go over the jumps and through the tunnels and they weave in and out of the poles. And it's a really fast, fast sport.

Starting point is 00:07:32 It's, it's really gotten to a place where it's, you know, it's tough to keep up unless you're really great shape as a handler, but it's a lot of fun for both dog and handler. And what are some of the ways in which that is scored? How, how is that scored? And I think we talked at one point, maybe you and I talked about this false starts. Is that a big part of the, or is that a piece of the equation? Not, not in, in agility. It definitely is in flyball, which is another sport. I actually won world championships in as well before I really got heavily involved in, in agility. Agility is scored. Think of it like a like if you watch a horse jumping competition at the Olympics. Time is number one, but it has to be time with a clean round. So there isn't style

Starting point is 00:08:11 points. It's just getting around over all the obstacles as fast as you can without having a fault. And what separates a good handler from a great handler? Let's just say for now, talking about the sport component. Well, like any sport, the number one thing that separates us is the mental game. And once you put that aside, it would be the handler's ability to train their dog, or, and you can put an and or, the handler's ability to outrun their dog. And most of my competition are in their mid-20s and at the world championship level. So they are able to outrun their dog. In my mid-50s, I am not able to outrun any dog.

Starting point is 00:09:02 So I rely more on the dog training aspect of it to be successful. And what would you say differentiates your approach to training compared to others? For those people who have maybe only seen a handful of like network TV shows with celebrity dog trainers and so on? I train, you know, I train dogs very much the way they, they train Marine mammals or, you know, exotic animals. It's, it's a reinforcement based program. Think of it like a killer whale. You can't get in the tank and, and correct them and, you know, beat the crap out of them when they're wrong. Right. Can't hit it with a rolled up newspaper. Exactly. So it's, it's choice based dog training and,

Starting point is 00:09:45 and with the focus on reinforcement, it's, um, it's incredibly successful. And that's why, you know, when I raise a dog, my focus is to have a phenomenal family pet first. And then I know that lays the foundation to be a world champion later. And, and it's all done through, you know, being intentional and purposeful with what I want and, and creating basically the dog of my dreams every time I get a new puppy. And, uh, when you say choice-based, what does that mean? Choice-based training? There's basically, you know, if I, if I was going to lump training into three categories, there would be punishment based, which is more traditional because in the military, that's the way animals were often trained with, you know, you're the master and they will do it. They're told and there's really no very little reinforcement. It's the absence of punishment dogs that allows them to still have this great bond with us in spite of what went on with punishment based training and still goes on because it's it's certainly not gone.

Starting point is 00:10:50 And then there's reinforcement based training where people put a cookie on the dog's nose and lure them to do to get what they want from them. And and that certainly is a step up from punishment in that you're you're creating a relationship of fun and trust. Uh, it has its limitations on its success. Once that lure is gone. And, and then what we do is, is a different from that because we definitely use food and toys and, and anything the dog loves as a reinforcement, but it's only after the dog has made a choice. So they make a choice and the, you know, it's, it's like consequence. Basically, you know, I come from a family of nine kids and so, and I never ever heard my parents raise their voice. So how you have success with that, and this is really how I trained my first dog is I just

Starting point is 00:11:37 modeled my mother. And if we were upstairs watching Disney and it was, you know, five to six and they called us for supper, they didn't yell and stamp their feet and, you know, carry on. They would give us a chance to make a choice. Are you coming for supper? And if you if you choose not to come down for supper, then she would go into the basement, unscrew the fuse for the TV, and there'd be no TV for the rest of the night and for the next 24 hours. So you have the choice to either do as you're asked or not. And you live by the consequences of that choice. And that's pretty much, you know, how we raise the dogs. You create an environment rich in reinforcement so that the correct choice when you

Starting point is 00:12:14 want them to make is the one they end up wanting to make. But if they choose something that isn't what you want, the environment controls the consequences so that you don't have to punish them or beat them up with a rolled up newspaper. And what would be a good example of that in dog training? I mean, and the story of the TV brings to mind a video I watched of you actually, I believe it was helping to train a woman's dog with leave it and covering the food. I think you were covering the food with your hand. Could you explain if that's a good example? I don't know if it is, but could you explain how that works? Yeah, that's one of our foundational games. So we have four games. We tell people, you know, you can rock it with your dog if you get these

Starting point is 00:13:00 four games in. And the first one is the one you described. It's called It's Your Choice. And I've created my own word and it's just one word, it's your choice. And we want the dogs to know you're in control of all the good things that happen in your life. And it's just a response cost of me closing my hand around the food. So, you know, you get a handful of really attractive treats. And depending on the dog's food drive, like if it was, you know, a sight hound dog that doesn't have a ton of food drive, I might get like, you know, the top level value food, I could get steak and cheese and put that in my hand. And if it was a chow hound, you know, like a Labrador, they just love food or a Sheltie, you could put kibble in your hand. And the dog's gonna like paw and bite and bark and go crazy

Starting point is 00:13:45 they're gonna be on a leash so that they don't have access to just go find something else to do but as soon as they stop all that you open your hand it's your choice so your choice was to stop unwanted behavior and my choice was to open my hand and then the dog says hey party on i'm gonna dive into the food well i didn't like that choice. So I'm going to close my hand. And this goes back and forth like a tennis match until the dog's choice is just to sit back and stare at the hand when it's open. And then I pick up a cookie and I feed them. And that's the first communication that's clear to that dog.

Starting point is 00:14:19 I am in control of the good things in my life because if I do what this person wants, good things happen. And that's the premise for absolutely everything we do, whether, you know, I have students who train animals at the Toronto Zoo, and it's exactly the same premise that you control access to the reinforcement, and then you reward good choices by giving access to reinforcement and the thing is with dog owners they don't realize you know when we think about reinforcement they think well i gotta go cut up some cheese because i'm training my dog but there's really you know there's there's three really big reinforcements for our dogs it's the food is obvious toys you throw a ball or a frisbee that's obvious but it's the hidden, the ones that aren't so obvious that are the ones that get people into trouble. So the it's permission to do things. So if you're going to

Starting point is 00:15:11 the park and your dog's pulling you on a leash and, and they're chasing a squirrel and you're, and you're like, okay, I got to get rid of this. I'm going to take the leash off. So, and the dog gets this massive reward of getting to chase a squirrel. But what you've just done with the permission you you've rewarded what? The behavior you don't want. Exactly. Pulling on a leash. So that goes on all day long.

Starting point is 00:15:32 And it's when you have an awakening to where's, we tell our students, where's the value? Where's the value for the dog right now? And if you have an unwanted behavior, like pulling on leash, you've got to say, okay, here's what I want. Let's just get clear. This is be real intentional about this is what I want. This is what it's going to look like. This is what I've got. So what's between there is a gap of what I have to train. And the first thing to identify is where's the value for the dog, because dogs, they just do what's reinforcing and you just identify where that reinforcement is and start to control it in a way that you give them permission for what they want.

Starting point is 00:16:10 So when we go back to that dog pulling on a leash, you might stand still until the dog came in beside you and then praise them so that they connect. Oh, my action gave me the access to be free and chase. So you make that connection that all the value comes through you and you become part of the process instead of the dog and the squirrel being the only two people in the process or two animals in the process. And, you know, this is, it's been a little bit since I was digging really deep in a lot of these videos, which were fantastic. But is that, do you call, I think in this particular case, the sort of common heel position, like the dog to your left, the reward zone, is that the right term? Right, exactly. Reinforcement zone or reward zone. And if that's what you think of it, that all good things in life happen right there. And again, pulling on leash is such a pain in the butt for so

Starting point is 00:17:06 many people, but they don't realize that the dog's just seeking a position where we've built a lot of value for because we give our dogs their dinner and we bend down and put it in front of us. We give them a cookie. They might be, you know, standing in front of us or even jumping on us. We give them a cookie. We're sitting on the, on the sofa and we go to pat the dog. They're in front of us. And if you become more intentional about all the good things you deliver happen from the reinforcement zone from your side, bam, you have a dog that wants to seek out that position. And you mentioned a couple of things that I want to underscore just because my fans have been asking me for my personal experience. And I want you to feel free to

Starting point is 00:17:44 jump in and be like, you know what? You made a mistake there doing X for this reason. But there are a few things that I think are worth underscoring. So when I was working on, at one point, for instance, recall. So for people who don't know that term, getting your dog to come is the easiest way to think of it, I suppose. But just doing different types of recall and practice at different distances and different durations and with more distractions, et cetera. But at one point, I remember I was getting very frustrated, which doesn't help matters, as you know, but because Molly just wasn't responding, wasn't responding. And I met with this trainer and she looked at my treat bag and she goes, what is this? And I go, it's her favorite kibble.

Starting point is 00:18:25 She goes, she said, dude, it's a crowded bar. You got a tip of 20s. And so I went and I got these much higher end, you know, origin, fancy treats and a meat like problem solved. It was not a train. It was it was not a technique issue. It was an incentive issue. And so that was embarrassingly obvious in retrospect. So I wanted to mention that. And then you talked about the three sort of reinforcers, food, toys, and then this permission, right? And I think one guy who came up when I was polling my audience for folks to pay attention to in the dog training world was Ian Dunbar. And I don't know, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on him, but he talks quite a lot about life rewards, I think is the way he

Starting point is 00:19:19 puts it, but non-food based rewards. And I don't know where I got this from. Maybe it was from you, maybe it was from elsewhere, but I remember being told early on that I could have sit equal, please. And I was like, okay, well then let me practice having Molly say sit before every type of feeding, sit before any type of exit through a door so that I can go out first and then bring her through the doorway. And just treating sit like please and then granting that permission has worked out spectacularly well. It's really been fantastic. The other thing that I'd be curious to hear about from you or to hear you elaborate on are kind of prerequisite skills that help all of the other skills. So you mentioned it's your choice. And one variation of that that I found

Starting point is 00:20:13 really helpful, and I think it's a similar concept, but you could correct me, is training Molly to give me, when in doubt, give me eye contact. And I did that with a clicker which we'll talk about but i would basically hold up a treat right in front of her nose when she was sitting down and then move it out to the side she would look at it and then eventually glance back at me and i would click and give her the treat and over time training her to do that so that i could release her out of a out of a given position say getting out of of a car or something like that. She would always check in with her eyes. And it's been hugely valuable, not to mention cute. And what are some of the other, you mentioned critical games or prerequisite skills that help

Starting point is 00:21:00 all of the other types of training? They're all games of where the dog can see that their choices leads to great reinforcement. So, you know, it's your choice for, for those of us in the sport world, you know, what you described with having the dog look at your face, that's something that we want the dog to look at work. So it might be a spot on my body rather than my face, because I'm running agility and I have a dog who's drawn to want to look at my face. It would get complicated because I'd be tripping over the dog. So, so it, but it's, you know, for, for the expectations of a pet owner, there's no problem in that at all, because you you're building value for a place on your body

Starting point is 00:21:41 rather than a value value for scanning the horizon for something. Right. Um, so, so it starts with that choice game and we get to a point where when we're training a dog, we want the ultimate goal of dog training is the value of what the dog wants. Most of all goes through you. So there is in the end, there is nothing more valuable than you. So if, if, if you start with the hand opening clothes and then you put the cookies on the floor, then you can put like bowls of food on the floor and be training your dog. And they wouldn't even think to go and look at the food on the floor because they know that they have to work to earn that. And that's what you want, you know, to be at.

Starting point is 00:22:18 And it really takes no time at all if you're consistent with your expectations. And we move from there to crate games which is really the foundation of everything we do and and it it doesn't matter if you if you never wanted to do a sport with your dog if i never stepped into any ring again crate games is is the bomb for me because um it you know it sounds like it's just getting a dog to like their crate, but it's not. It's a model for so many things. And it's giving the dog a comfort zone. If you're going to visit friends or family, you can bring that crate along. And today, they've got so many phenomenal pop-up crates that are soft-sided that are really convenient.

Starting point is 00:22:58 I actually throw one in my luggage when I travel. Do you have any favorite brands or models of the pop-ups? I have so many of them. I'll get back to you on that one, Tim. Okay. We'll do. There is one that I really like when I'm going to Europe because it's so convenient, but I honestly have to make sure that they still make it before I give it to them. No problem. I'll put it in the show notes, guys. You can check that afterwards. So I interrupted you though. Yeah. Crate Games, I'd love for you to elaborate on because this was a huge epiphany for me because I grew up are loving, but really confused the whole time. So the crate, Molly was the first pup that I had a chance to raise using a crate and it just changed everything.

Starting point is 00:23:56 So I'd love for you to elaborate on why that's so helpful and so important. Well, first of all, dogs are den animals and you're creating a spot for them. Anytime you want to chill, this is your spot. No one's going to come and bother you in there. So they're comfortable in there because basically, you know, it's our responsibility. Number one, to keep our dogs safe at all costs. And number two, as pet owners, their next job is to build confidence in that dog. And I'd like to elaborate more on how when we fail them in that it often leads to aggression. We'll go into that later. But so crate games, we can do both. We give them a place of safety. And every time, think of a kid

Starting point is 00:24:38 who's learning a new skill, the better they get, the more confident they feel and the more they want to learn. And that's exactly what happens with crate games, because rather than, let's say you're trying to teach your dog to sit in a traditional school, they may tell you, you know, either use corrections or food to get the dog into that position. And then if the dog moves, you have to go back with your collar and leash and reposition the dog and keep telling them, you know, no stay or whatever it is you do. But with crate games, all you do is you watch the dog and you, you go to give them a cookie. And if, as you open the door, they get out of their sit, you just close the door. So there it's goes back to the fuse being unscrewed when we didn't make

Starting point is 00:25:15 the right choice with the TV, that if the dog moved, the door just got closed. There was no yanking or pushing or yelling from, from us. It, I, you don't even have to say anything. You just have to close the door until eventually you can open that door and the dog stays in a sit and you can feed them and then you grow that to be so many things like you said sitting as soon as i put my hand on the front door all five of my dogs boom they just go into a sit because they know good things will happen if i do that and and and the touching of the door just becomes the cue to do the behavior. There's no need, you know, people think cues and dogs are verbal sit, but cues can be obviously signals, but they can just be any kind of emotion like touching the door. That means, oh, yeah, this is a good thing that's going to happen next. So crate games is, you know, it's just so much so many many things to, to, um, to your dog and you can

Starting point is 00:26:06 grow layers of understanding from there. So if it's, um, I don't want my dog to jump on my guests when they come in the house, bam, you, you, you, and you don't want a big crate in your living room. Once the dog understands, they don't come out. When you touch the door, you can then throw cookies and toys in front of the crate. And I've seen you do this with Molly, right, Tim? Yeah. Yeah. And then, and Molly won't, will stay. And then you can reward them in the permission back to that big reinforcement, the permission to get out and chase the toys or the ball or the cookie that's on the floor that that's what builds value for the dog wanting to stay there. And then you just replace your crate with a nice dog bed, which I think my husband always gives me the gears because we have five dogs and about 40 dog beds around this house.

Starting point is 00:26:51 You can do it. Good for your cross training in gymnastics, I guess. I totally have an issue with, I see a nice dog bed and I have to, I brought two home from Spain when I was at the world championships last month. Oops. Anyway, I digress. So now you have a nice looking dog bed in your living room and then someone knocks on the door, you just touch the door and the dog goes flying into their dog bed and you can open the door. Your guests don't get jumped on. You can talk to the UPS guy, get your delivery, close the door, and then you throw your dog a handful of cookies because they're doing good things. So crate games is just the start where you put foundational layers for good choices and you keep growing it from there and keep moving on. So that was the second

Starting point is 00:27:33 game. The third one you've already made mention of, and that's restraint recalls, and you can't do those enough. You just, you know, I'm sorry, what was the name of the second exercise? The third one, or the second was crate games. The third one was restraint recalls. So, and when I was single, this was an awesome way to meet people. You'd go to the park and say, could you just hold my puppy while I run away? And I'm going to, so you get somebody to hold your puppy by the collar or the shoulders. You move out five feet, call the puppy's name and take off running.

Starting point is 00:28:03 The dog chases you because dogs are prey animals and they love that chase. So we're, we're putting their name with, we're pairing their name with the condition to run as fast as they can towards us. And eventually you make that distance bigger. And eventually you don't run. You just stand still until they get partway to you. And then you start running because we want to bleed off the big trigger of you running for them to come running. And, you know, because I don't always want to run when I call my dog's name, but if you build this in at first, you create a,

Starting point is 00:28:34 like a knee jerk reaction that I hear my name, I run. And now I might be just standing at the front door and they're still going to run because of all these restraint recalls that we've done. It's fun. You know what? You get a little exercise in there and the dog just love it. And you can do it in your backyard. If you're by yourself, if you're really stuck, you just wrap your leash around a pole and you kind of move out a little bit and throw the leash when you call the dog's name and start running. And if you're a fast runner, it's a no brainer. Yeah. That's what I ended up doing since there are no women in San Francisco, hence Man Francisco. Oops, oops, hashtag moving accident.

Starting point is 00:29:13 But the device that I didn't, of course, as a dog naive person or training naive person at the time, is I didn't realize you could get a training leash that's 30 feet long or 40 feet long. Or what is it called? A lead maybe? I don't know. I remember the exact. A lead or leash, either one. Yeah. So I had a 30 foot and I could just wrap it, like you said, wrap it around. I wrapped it around the kind of leg of a fixed bench in the park and it worked out fantastically. It was perfect. That's great. You just want to make sure it's not one of those retractable ones. Yeah. Not retractable, just a gigantic lasso that I have to carry around. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:55 So restraint recalls. And then what's number four? The fourth one is the collar grab game, where anytime you're going to give your dog a cookie around the house, anytime you grab the collar first and the dog, before you get the, you know, you have the cookie in your hand, grab the collar and give the cookie. So at the end of restraint recall, if you're going to give your dog a cookie, the first thing you do is grab the collar and then give the cookie. And we want to classically condition like Pavlov ring the bell, the dog would salivate. We want to condition in the dog. When I reach for your collar, good things are happening. And we want to do this for two reasons. Number one, if there's danger at any time and you're not yourself and

Starting point is 00:30:36 you're frantic and you want to lunge for your dog, you want your dog to not be afraid, but say, hey, this is that game we play every day, all day. It's awesome. I just give them my collar. And number two, if you don't make a habit of that, your dogs, the most brilliant things about dogs and the way that evolution has built them is that they are far better at predicting events than we are. So they can predict reinforcement and they can predict what they decide is punishment. So let's

Starting point is 00:31:05 say you're late for work and your dog's in the backyard and you go to reach for them. They're going to dance about two feet outside of your reach. And that's, and that happens most when you're in the biggest hurry. But if you've put in the value of the collar grab, as soon as your hand goes out, it just switches, it turns a switch in them. And Oh yeah, that's my game where I put your, my, my, my collar in your hand and the things happen to me. So it's a game that it doesn't take any time at all to play. You know, if you have a dog, a 10 year old dog, you could start it today. And just anytime you have a cookie or something, the dog really values, just grab the collar and give it to them and just make sure though that you don't have the food motioning towards them before you grab the collar because it's just like that pavlov spell thing

Starting point is 00:31:52 you know pavlov did the experiment where he rang the bell and presented the food but when he tried it in reverse and presented the food and rang the bell didn't work so he with every breed of dog he found that within 25 repetitions ring the bell didn't work. So he, with, with every breed of dog, he found that within 25 repetitions, ring the bell, present the food. He got an expected response from any dog, but when he did it reverse after 200 repetitions, dogs didn't even care. So really important that, you know, once they see the food, all bets are off and you're not conditioning anything. So don't move your hand with the food until you've got that collar. Then you move your hand in. That's a really simple, simple, yet incredibly powerful game. And when you really need it, you're going to say, wow, thanks, Tim Ferriss,

Starting point is 00:32:33 that chick you had on that show. She taught me something that really worked. Well, yeah. This is going to be a very dense and actionable episode. So I'm stoked. And I'm taking all these notes for things that I want to continue to practice with Molly. Also, the restraint recalls is call once. Because I remember we were trading, I think it was text at the time. And at some point I asked you a question because I was going through a bunch of your different exercises and games.

Starting point is 00:33:07 And you said in the early days, you can work on more than one at a time. For example, no problem doing collar grab. It's your choice and call once on the same session. If you can do three to four sessions a day of four to five minutes in length, you'll be golden. And I think the, we'll come back to the training session length, but is call once a relative of restraint recalls or is it a variation? It's actually a combination of restraint recalls and the collar grab. So you, it's just a shorter distance and it's a more intensive, you know, you can do it by yourself, but it's best if you have, especially if you have kids, this is something, you know, you want to bring your kids into the training of your dog. And so you just get a little semi semicircle and everybody's got a cookie

Starting point is 00:33:45 in their hand and somebody calls the dog's name. And when the dog's head turns, they grab the collar and give them the cookie. Then the next person calls the dog's name, grab the collar, give the cookie. And the dog is learning to give you that head whip response when they hear their name. And you're also building in the, the grab of the collar. It's, it's an awesome little thing to do with, again, you can do it by yourself and I would just keep the dog on leash, call the name, grab the cookie, grab the collar, sorry. Um, but it's brilliant if you've got, if you want to, you know, maybe a spouse that really doesn't want to be involved with a dog. Well, this is a way that they can see, um, something happening, which is really cool. And it makes, and it helps them to become more

Starting point is 00:34:23 of a part of that dog's life. And it helps the dog, um, listen, you know, respond a little bit better to that other person in the home. And, uh, you, you mentioned earlier with the restraint recalls, uh, using the running initially, and then removing the running. And there's a progression in this training. Is that an example of what you would call shaping behavior? Or is there perhaps a different example that we'd use to explain this concept of shaping behavior? Yeah. Everything we do is something, regardless of it. And the underlying thing I tell people is it's, it's all behavior, whether we're doing it with people or we're doing it with dogs and we're just shaping their behavior

Starting point is 00:35:12 to have a better outcome for them. So whatever it is we're doing, when you're allowing the dog to make a choice, then you're shaping. So that's how I would define what's shaping. It's the dog makes a choice and they get a positive outcome. Um, when it could be a negative outcome too, you can shape them away from something as well, but we don't go there, but it's the same thing. So that's really what shaping is. And so what we're doing with, when, with our restraint recalls, when we're, uh, what we're doing is we're taking the reliance of the prey instinct away and we're working on the dogs just responding to their name. And some people like to say the word

Starting point is 00:35:51 come instead of their dog's name. I encourage them to pick one or the other word and make it a magic word. So again, if you've got kids in the house and you want them to be involved with this, you've got to tell the kids, they've got to have the magic key in order to be allowed to say the dog's name. So anywhere around the house, they're not allowed to use the dog's name because that's how the dogs just learn to tune it out. Right. They hear their name a hundred times and then they don't respond. If you want a dog to respond to their name, every time you say it again with the kids, tell them, you know, here's the treat bowl and you get a cookie and then you wait until the dog's not paying attention to you, say their name and then you can give them a cookie. But that's the magic key is the cookie. And if you don't have a key, you can't say the name. And I tell them to give them another word like pop, pop, pop. You can call the dog pop, pop, pop unless you have the magic cookie.

Starting point is 00:36:42 And so, you know, that that's, what works to help build that behavior. And so when we get to the restraint recall, the dog's got an understanding of what the name is and they're starting to chase you, but you might build up to maybe 30 or 40 feet that you're away. And you just delay a little bit. You call the name, you wait until the dogs may be taking two strides and then you run and then eventually you just ping pong that distance you're you're unpredictable the dog really doesn't know when you're going to run so their their first response is always to chase because they want to catch you up let that go back into that prey drive and you mentioned for instance i think what is a at least a key component for people who view themselves as busy,

Starting point is 00:37:26 which is the collar grab as one example, doesn't take any additional time. It's, it's something that you have the opportunity to do in the course of doing things you're already obligated to do, right? It is, it is extremely easy. And I mentioned earlier that you'd recommended, you know, in an ideal world, three to four sessions of four to five minutes length, as opposed to trying to do a marathon 60. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. So I had along the same lines, thinking of things you're already doing, try using the time you're already going to allocate to your dog more intelligently. I recall at one point I had to take a trip. I came back, this was pretty early on in having Molly and Molly stayed with my girlfriend at the time. And I came back. I was working with a local trainer who was great on Long Island. And I came back and it felt like Molly didn't even know me. It was really interesting. She was no longer my dog is how I felt. And I was really worried about this.

Starting point is 00:38:36 I was like, oh my God, I think I've lost Molly. She doesn't know who I am. And I talked to the trainer. She said, you know what you should try is feeding her by hand. Feed her her meals by hand. And I was like, huh, okay. Well, yeah, I'll give it a shot. And so I started at the time.

Starting point is 00:38:52 I still use this. And I don't know if you have any recommendations here related to food. But I was using Stella and Chewy's. I tend to use the freeze-dried patties. I tend to use the lamb or the rabbit. It's a little easier to break up. And so I started walking. I would take her outside and walk with her, and I would keep her in the reward zone and feed her this kind of mush by hand.

Starting point is 00:39:16 And it was just incredible because it's like roughly the same amount of time. It really didn't take very long. I was able to develop two things. A, the bond between me and Molly, we just skyrocketed. I mean, it was really, and the trainer was effectively said, he or she who feeds the dogs is the dog's closest friend. I was like, okay, so I'm going to feed by hand and also made huge strides forward in getting her to come to that heel position, which was fantastic. So anyway, just a side note in something that really didn't take very much time at all. The other combination that really helped me related to the crate and permission was just

Starting point is 00:40:01 like you said, the dog sits, you open. If the dog stands up before being cued, you shut the door, right? And you can train that behavior. What I did from the very beginning with Molly is I would open up the crate, use my hand to get her to, just as a kind of a stay hand signal to sit until, and I would have the food sort of in front of her and wait for her to make eye contact and gradually increase the duration of that eye contact and then give her permission to, to eat the food. And before long, I mean, really within the span of probably a week was able to, to stop using the hand signal because she knew she had to be seated.

Starting point is 00:40:41 And then I could just use a release word to get her to eat the food that I found extremely helpful and still find helpful. So we still practice that. A couple of things though, that you said, Tim, that I just want to point out. Number one, what happened with you and Molly, when you came back was a great example of a transfer of value. And, and you made a comment a comment that he who feeds the dog gets the respect and the response of the dog, which isn't the case because I never feed our dogs for, you know, John and I have been together for 20 years and he's the only one who ever feeds them.

Starting point is 00:41:17 And they don't give him the time of day. And the reason is, is there's no transfer value. He does nothing. They don't have to do anything to get that food. Right. They, they, uh, they, you know, they can run around and be goofballs and the food still comes. So there. And that's the magic. That's how you get the transfer of value is that it isn't just here's your food and don't you love me? It's, you know, you're, you don't give it away for free. You've got to make great value of, I think there's some old folklore. Your mother might've told you about that. It's the same holds true. It's, it's, it's gotta be earned. and that's when the magic starts happening that's how you start to build a relationship and you know and it goes again

Starting point is 00:42:11 with with any animal look at a kid if kid who has absolutely everything and it doesn't you know they they don't necessarily want to go out and play catch with you versus the the kid who has virtually nothing and really really appreciates the opportunity to come out and play catch with you versus the kid who has virtually nothing and really, really appreciates the opportunity to come out and play catch with you because it's value through you that helps create a better bond. And it's the same with dogs value coming through you that you don't just have, a lot of people's homes, when I used to go and do one-on-one in people's homes, the number one mistake they would make is that the food was always on the floor. So the food, it never had any association with you whatsoever. The dog

Starting point is 00:42:48 didn't have to work for it. They didn't really need you at all. So that's a biggie. Yeah. That's a, that's a super key point. I've never had food left out ever. And so it's, it's an event. I mean, it's, and there's an exchange every time we do it. There's always an exchange. It's because dog training with people is, I mean, dog training should be intentional, but most often it's either accidental or reactionary. And so it's accidental in that the dog learns how to tip over the garbage and get stuff out, or it's reactionary in that you see something like the puppy chewing on the slipper or the puppy, you know, pee on the floor, the puppy, it's a reaction.

Starting point is 00:43:30 And that's, and if you are intentional, which you have been really good with Tim being very intentional about what you want the outcome to be, then you don't tend to have the same problems. And, you know, I tell people in the the whatever, 30 years I've owned a dog, I've never had one chew a slipper or chew furniture, or it just doesn't happen because I'm so intentional about what I want when I'm raising them. So let's, let's talk about that and dig into it a little bit, because I think it's, it's super important. And I'd love to hear you elaborate on it. The sort of do's and don'ts of say, getting a puppy or rescue dog. I adopted Molly out on Long Island. How to go about it, common mistakes, because I remember reading up on,

Starting point is 00:44:15 there was a, I think it was a PDF from Ian Dunbar. It's kind of before you get a puppy and then right after getting a puppy. And one of the points I took away, and I think it was from his stuff, was your best bet is to not give the puppy an opportunity to make a mistake. It's a lot harder to correct the behavior than to simply prevent it in the first place. So bring Molly home. Guess what? No shoes on the floor anywhere for her to chew on. This is just, the temptations are not there. But it's the same with us, right? Like I recently started,

Starting point is 00:44:54 I was going to do this kettlebell challenge. I don't know if you've heard about this 10,000 swing kettlebell challenge. That's a lot. No, I know about kettlebells, but 10,000 reps. So there's this challenge going around and I'm not going to do the 10,000. I might get to 10,000, but they want you to do 10,000 in 28 days, which is not going to happen. But I thought I'm going to do, I started with 100 swings a day and I'm going to go to 200 swings a day. But I decided, you know what?

Starting point is 00:45:15 I want to, I think I've got pretty good form, but I videoed myself, looked at my form, checked it out. And then I posted it in a Facebook group that I belong to. It's a kettlebell Facebook group. Did like, can you give me any input on my form? Because before you start, you know, you want to make sure you're doing it right. Because if you do 10,000 repetitions of something that you're going to be, you know, creating bad form. And it's the same with your puppy. You bring that, we get, we all get one chance to make a first impression with our dogs. When we first bring

Starting point is 00:45:42 them home, whether it's a puppy or a rescue dog, you get one chance to make that first impression. And if they come in and go, wow, no rules, I'm here at Disneyland, let's go, then you're in trouble because they learn to have bad form and they keep having bad form. And it's more difficult to correct bad form than it is to start with good form right from the beginning. And I see that as the number one problem with people with dog training is there's this mismatch of expectations with the people. And in my own, my parents, when we had our family dog, you kind of touched on it with your family dog. They're almost feral because we just expect that they're going to do what we say. And, you know, it's crazy because there was never any actual reinforcement put into what we wanted. It's just like, dude, what's wrong with you?

Starting point is 00:46:27 Don't you understand English? Well, no, they don't. So people expect so much and they haven't really prepared the dogs. I say this to all my students. I've been saying this for 25 years. Our dogs are a reflection of our ability to train. So if there's areas that your dog isn't brilliant at, if your dog doesn't bring the toy back, if they don't come when they're called, when they're maybe 50 feet away chasing a deer, then that shows they're just a reflection and

Starting point is 00:46:57 they're trying to help us be better dog trainers. And you either take that information or you ignore it. And I've got on my YouTube page, I've got this video called the journey. It's probably one of my, it's got like 300,000 hits on it. And it's all about, yeah. And it's all about that, that our dogs are here to teach us. And if you don't open your eyes to that, you're going to miss these lessons. And chances are your next dog is going to try and teach you the same lessons. It's, it's not a coincidence. And so our dogs just reflect what we're good at. And you, and you look at that and go, okay, well, I'm going to, I'm going to fix this. You have a dog that, you know, goes to the bathroom on the floor all the time. Then it's reflecting to you that you haven't made it clear that there shouldn't be options

Starting point is 00:47:37 here. And, um, so when, when people get a new dog, I tell people the first 24 hours is critical. And I'm intending to put this on our website. There's a free download of what you should be preparing for the first 24 hours. But, you know, the obvious things is you should get a crate and you should get really good quality dog food and educate, education, you know. And again, be intentional, find out what dog training resonates with your core beliefs, with how you want your animal to be raised. And, and, you know, somebody was telling me yesterday, somebody I really respected was saying how, you know, he was getting his friend's dog. He was training it by scaring it. And I'm like, dude, do you do that to a four-year-old

Starting point is 00:48:21 kid? Like, is that really how you want an animal to respond to you and to be terrified of you? So there's just some things that you should be prepared with. A really good quality chewy for the dog, something that, you know, when they, if they did happen to chew on something you didn't want them to chew on, you would just replace it with what you do want them to chew, you know, and a toy, tug toy. So these are just all the things you should be preparing. Education being the number one thing and a crate, I would say, would be number two. And then for the first 24 hours, you know, I'll just go through if you want, Tim, I'll go through what I do when I get a new puppy.

Starting point is 00:48:57 Sure. The first 24 hours. So, you know, the first thing I do is I play, I play tug with them. So I get a nice, long, fluffy tug and I create the first game of choice right there. So I'll tug, and then I'll pull it out of their mouth, and I'll put it a few inches away from them, and they dive on it, and they tug, and I pull it out of their mouth, and I put it maybe a little further, and they dive on it. And I'll do that a few times.

Starting point is 00:49:18 And then the next time, I won't put it down. I'll put it up against my body. And they'll bounce at my body, and they'll bite at my body. And as soon as they stop bouncing or biting, then I put it back down and tell them they can get it. And so we're building an interaction of choice, right? From the first moment they come into my home. And so we get that puppy played out, you know, obviously give them a drink of water, put them in their crate, let them sleep. And you go back between playing, feeding, and sleeping before whatever sessions you have. And we touched on, you know,

Starting point is 00:49:45 three to five minutes and, and then maybe two hours before you're going to go to bed, you would have your last one of these sessions and then they would get another drink and then they wouldn't get access to water again. And one of the important things that, um, you know, I have never had a puppy wake me up in the middle of the night past the first night. And some of them don't even do it that first night, but it just never happens. And I talked to people who they have seven and eight month old puppies still waking them up in the middle of the night. And so, you know, this, this protocol that I have for the first 24 hours, you know, it, it really works well. One of the things that I do is I take a chair from our kitchen and I put the crate on the chair

Starting point is 00:50:21 and I put the crate right beside my face on the bed. So I'm sleeping and my breath is blowing into that puppy's crate. You can even get these toys that create a heartbeat like the mother's heartbeat. And I think those are great, too, if you wanted to go that route and put it right in the crate with the puppy. If the puppy wakes me up, this is the only time when a puppy tells me I need to go potty outside that I don't make any kind of interaction with them. So I opened the crate. There's no crate games. I just lift them out. I put the leash, I actually clipped the leash right around their collar. And I don't care if you have a fenced in backyard, put the leash on the puppy and I take the puppy out. They do

Starting point is 00:51:01 their business. I say nothing to them. I pick them back up on my arms, take the puppy out they do their business i say nothing to them i pick them back up on my arms take the leash off put them back in the crate so the mistake people make is they go oh the puppy's really energetic at two in the morning so i'll just do a little bit to tire him out oh hell no reinforcement builds behavior and if you're telling the puppy a play session at 2 a.m happens every night you're gonna get woke up at 2 a.m every night every night. You're going to get woke up at 2 a.m. every night. So any other time when I take that puppy outside, it's always on a leash so that I can help to create, you know what, I don't want you to pee in my garden. I'd like you to pee in the back corner where the trees are. That's where your potty area and your dog's going to just, you're going to be able to clean up the

Starting point is 00:51:40 same place all the time because the dogs grow up learning this is where they want me to do my business so they're always on a leash and the other thing about always on a leash is let's say you end up going to a hotel which I do if your dog hasn't been raised to do their business on a leash they're not going to do their business on a leash and so you're going to be walking up and down in this hotel on that little strip of grass out in front, trying to get them to pee. And they're not going to, because you haven't conditioned it from the time they were babies. So when you take them out, always you're quiet until they start doing their business. And I'm personally, I like to give that a name. Have you done that, Tim, with Molly? Give it a name when they do their business?

Starting point is 00:52:22 Tim Cynova Yeah. I said, yeah, potty was my, was my, was my, was my go-to. Yep. So, and it's good because if you, again, are taking a puppy to visit family or friends, you want them to, uh, you know, empty their bladder before they go into this house. So if you condition a word and it's, again, it's just like Pavlov, you wait until they start peeing. And then you just say that word really quietly in a way that doesn't disturb them. Right. So it's potty. It's you to say potty, potty, potty.

Starting point is 00:52:51 And you start to condition that word with an act of releasing their bladder. And it's they get reinforcement because it feels better because they've released their bladder. But if you want to give them a little cookie for peeing outside after that's cool, too. But on leash in an area you want them to to do their business in and you just get into this routine of potting on leash and playing and feeding and then you have a puppy that has you know we have a one time to make our first impression and our first impression is all good things come through you and um you know and when

Starting point is 00:53:22 i and i don't i i have this rule don't wake the mama at night mama likes to sleep don't be waking a mama at night and i and i don't i just don't get woke up so it's awesome for me i'm not cranky in the morning because my puppy woke me up and certainly if you know if they are sick that's fine they have explosive diarrhea they they can wake me up and i will always get out with get up with a dog who wants to get out, but I won't interact with them in any way. And that's a biggie that you not make that reinforcement. Don't be reinforcing it. So I also, with the potty, just a couple of notes on this because I've had a lot of fans ask me about potty training, which went very well with Molly.

Starting point is 00:54:00 She's probably like many dogs and many humans, good at some things, not great at others. I take full accountability. But the potty training went very well. And this, I think, is also a good area in which to explain the downsides of negative reinforcement or yelling at your dog, putting its head in a mess if it goes to the bathroom in the house. But suffice to say i i used a clicker also uh and i think we can we can actually maybe just give a brief explanation of what that is remember you once described it to me as an audio scalpel which i thought was a really cool way to look at it uh so i would say potty while she was going potty. And then as soon as she finished,

Starting point is 00:54:46 because I didn't want to interrupt her, as soon as she finished, like the millisecond she was done, click and then treat. And I became obsessed with clickers for many different things. Can you explain to people what a clicker is? And I was introduced to it, I think, first through, I want to say karen prior and don't shoot the dog which which i really enjoyed also background in training dolphins and marine mammals can you explain to people what a clicker is and what they are good for and what they're not good for so it is a a marker in in the marine mammal world, we call it a bridge. So a bridge between marking what we really like and when we can get that reward to the dog. So in a perfect world,

Starting point is 00:55:34 when a dog did something we wanted, we could magically make food appear right in front of their face, but that isn't possible. So we need to bridge for the dog between the time of when they did something amazing and when we we can get that food to their face. And I know a friend, a good friend of mine, Greg Louganis, who's won gold medals at the Olympics. He said they have used it for divers as well to mark when they're in their spin that that was okay your arms were in the right spot boom so the diver can hear and start to know you know get that feedback because it's really difficult to point to pinpoint so it's exactly the same thing as if you were you know clicking a dolphin for doing a spin in midair it's like that's the time that i like it so just a just a quick interruption i apologize for those people who don't know Greg Luganis' second act.

Starting point is 00:56:27 He's a competitive dog trainer, right? He is a handler. And that's how we met. Greg was a student of mine for many, many years. And now we're great friends and he's an awesome guy. And he still helps with US diving too. So it's really cool. So he brings his, what he knows about dog training and brings it into the diving world. So, so a clicker is awesome, but it is a conditioned

Starting point is 00:56:51 reinforcer. It's telling the dog, it's a promissory note that something is going to happen. That's amazing. And there's a lot of different things you can use. Like you can, if you have a pen click, you can use the top of a pen clicking. You can even use a word. Yes is the word that I use most often. The difference between a clicker and the word yes is yes can be judgmental. So it's not necessarily the best thing. Meaning it's not as consistent, you mean? Right. Because you can say, if the dog did something amazing, might say yes and if the dog you were like um it was okay yeah yeah yes so where clicker is a clicker and it doesn't have any judgment and it's just marking that was good you're going to get a reward and when i but i still use the word yes but yes isn't

Starting point is 00:57:39 always followed up with food a clicker is always followed up with a toy or something the dog really has high, high value for. And, um, and a clicker basically it's using a classical conditioning. So it goes back to ring a bell, present the food. Instead of ringing a bell, we are clicking a clicker and, and it's best for behaviors that are really, um, that you can, you want to isolate a small slice of a behavior. So for example, a recall. It's harder to click for a recall, unless you're going to click the moment they give you the head turn.

Starting point is 00:58:13 But you don't want to just click that moment in time, or it becomes like musical chairs, where the dog turns, but they don't move, because they're waiting, the music might stop here, because you always clicked right here. And so, you know, a, a clicker, as I said to you is a scalpel and there, you know, there's some great tools that sometimes you need a scalpel. Like if I'm teaching my dog to, to wave, put their hand, their paw up above their, their ear, then I would use a clicker for that because I want the height of how high can you reach that paw? I'll click that.

Starting point is 00:58:46 And sometimes, you know, if you, I use the example, if you're going to have brain surgery, you, you, you want your, your surgeon to use a laser and that's what a clicker is. It's really pinpoints, but you wouldn't want that surgeon to use a melon baller. And sometimes a melon baller will do for us. And that is the word yes. So there are times where you can just mark, yeah, that you're, yes, that was good. Thanks for bringing that ball back. Yes. Good dog. Other times you really want something that gets the message across super clearly that this is a slice of the behavior that I love. And that's when you do use a clicker. And, uh, how do you feel about using a clicker directionally? And what I mean by that is if a dog does something partially correctly, for instance, you're trying to get your dog to roll over, but they only do it a quarter of the way. Would you click to encourage them

Starting point is 00:59:45 to continue in that role? Or is that something that you would only reserve for the completed action? No, I would definitely use it for part, to start create a behavior, I would do parts of it for sure. And oftentimes I wouldn't, like, I don't use the cookie as a lure, but I would, and not that I would have a problem with anybody doing it at all. But if you, a lot of the times, like let's say you were getting your dog to spin in a circle, you know, similar to rolling around, but if they started turning one and they started going partway and you click that, they're likely going to carry on the rest of the way to get the cookie, right? And so you're actually clicking, you're marking, that's what I like. And then they're coming around to get the cookie. So it finishes the spin and you get the

Starting point is 01:00:33 spin a lot faster by using that clicker instead of just, you know, luring the spin all the way around. Same with if you were wanting to teach your dog to back up, we're going to get some good party tricks from people here. You could take like a piece of kibble on your kitchen floor. That's the best combination for teaching the dog to back up. And, you know, you would wait that the dog makes shifts or wait backwards. You would throw the cookie between the front paws. And then the dog would look down for the cookie and you could click that. And then guess what?

Starting point is 01:01:02 They're going to look down for another cookie and you click that. And now you're clicking them for backing up and they, you just wait till they back up even further. And you just keep rolling the cookie. We call it, call that about placement of reinforcement is just so powerful when you're trying to shape behaviors. It's, you know, the, we want the behavior to be associated, the reinforcement be associated with what the dog is doing. Therefore, if, for example, if you're trying to teach your dog to lay down and they lay down and you click them and you gave them a cookie when they got up, they would still learn to lay down. But the placement of reinforcement is such that it delays that learning. It would take you longer. And if you've got the cookie in while they're in the down, that would be much better.

Starting point is 01:01:40 Right. And this actually relates to what I'd mentioned earlier about potty training and why punishment can backfire because you have, and I'd love to hear you elaborate on this, but just based on my understanding, for instance, with Molly, I grew up in a house where it's like the dog went to the bathroom. It wouldn't be like shove the dog's face in the poo or anything like that, but it'd be like bad dog, bad dog, right? And then put the dog out. The dog would have this shameful look and then hopefully they learned something and of course they didn't learn anything um oh i mean eventually they ended up going to the bathroom outside because they just preferred to be outside but the the point being uh as it was explained to me you know if number one you're probably not going to catch the dog in the act

Starting point is 01:02:23 so there's going to be a temporal dislocation, right? There'll be, the dog may not put causality together. And number one, number two, if you just terrify your dog, they're just going to find a nice, quiet, secret corner to go to the bathroom in. And on top of that, you know, we were talking about getting a dog to back up the benefit of the positive reinforcement. And you can see this. It's amazing to watch Molly, who's really the first dog I've trained ever to offer behaviors, right? You want the dog to try to figure out the puzzle. And so sometimes when Molly knows I want something and she lights up,

Starting point is 01:03:02 she enjoys training and she'll try seven different things. It's like, no, we're not doing paw. No, we're not doing spin. No, no, no. And she'll slowly try to figure it out and to do something. You want your dog to do that so that you can then reward when the dog does the right thing, right? Or does something approximating the right thing in moving in the right direction.

Starting point is 01:03:20 If you terrify your dog, they're just going to opt out, right? I mean, they just, they don't offer the behaviors and then you have nothing to reward. So it becomes a lot harder to use a bridge or a marker to use any type of conditioning, classical or operant conditioning, to connect the dots for the dog. And I remember reading this somewhere. I think it was a police trainer actually, who said, I don't have anything against negative reinforcement or punishment. If it were the most effective, I just haven't found it to be the most effective. And so the argument was not so much a moral one in that case, although you could make that argument, it was a practical one. And I don't know if you have anything else you'd like to add to that.

Starting point is 01:04:07 Since you brought up police officers, I have this great analogy with punishment and reinforcement. And it's the punishment of being pulled over to get a speeding ticket, which I'm sure you've never had a speeding ticket and you're just far too nice a guy. But those of us who've actually had speeding tickets, that's a punishment, right? It's a little bit of cash out of the wallet. And, and I don't know how it works in the States, but we get these demerit points. And if you get too many, you have to go in and get an interview and the whole nine yards. So it's a punishment, but it's, it's an insignificant people wondering you're in Canada, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm in Canada. And so, um, does it so does it change the targeted behavior?

Starting point is 01:04:47 The targeted behavior is we don't want you to speed again. Well, clearly it doesn't because there are some of us who do speed again. But punishment, all punishment has fallout. And the fallout is it changes a different part of the behavior unrelated to the targeted one. So the fallout of getting a speeding ticket is anytime you see a parked car on the side of the road, what do you do? You immediately assume it's an unmarked police car and you take your foot off the gas. Even if you're not speeding, you have a visceral response of this is the fallout of the punishment that I've earned. And if a police officer pulls in behind you and you're driving in the city, even if you're not doing anything wrong, you know, what are your emotions? You know, you get a little tense, you get your perfect driver's ed 10 o'clock and two o'clock

Starting point is 01:05:33 positioning on the wheel and you check your, and you just start driving by donut shops and hopes that the police officer will go somewhere else. And you're, you just, it's not a comfortable feeling. Right. And, and then, and then if you take that, so, so, so punishment, you know, can't alter behavior, but punishment can suppress it. So what it does is when you know there's a police officer there, you will not speed. And that's the same with punishing a dog for getting on the couch or getting in the garbage or pooing in the wrong spot. You've suppressed that behavior to the point where they won't do it when you're around, or they'll come when they know you can get them. But when you're outside of your arm's reach,

Starting point is 01:06:15 they won't because punishment has suppressed the behavior of them being naughty when you can catch them, but not when you can't. So punishment, in order for punishment to work, it has to be catastrophic. It has to be life altering. So I use the example of, let's say you're speeding and you get pulled over and you try to explain to the police officer, you try to get out of that ticket. Oh, I was listening to the music and it was really cool. And they go, well, you were, you know, you're going 10 kilometers over the speed limit. So you um, you have to be punished and they open the back of your car and they take out your dog and they shoot and kill your dog. So it's catastrophic.

Starting point is 01:06:52 And, um, if you, if you ever, like once you got out of prison for killing the police officer, you know, you've got to think, would you ever drive again because of this punishment? Like, would you, and if you had to drive for work, would you drive with a dog in the car? And if you had to drive like the dog to the vets, would you speed? There's just no way you would speed. You'd probably go like 10 kilometers an hour down the road because you would be terrified. And you'd probably be sobbing the whole way because you're driving with a dog in the car and you don't want to get in trouble. And then what if a police officer pulls up beside you or behind you? And now you would just be enraged and you'd probably break into this historic hysterical.

Starting point is 01:07:34 You know, it would just be catastrophic. Punishment has catastrophic fallout. Mild punishment has mild fallout, but neither of them fix the targeted behavior. Now, let's say if you're driving and you're driving the speed limit, a police officer pulls you over, the lights go on and they go, hey, we noticed you're on the speed limit and we're honoring model citizens this week and here's $2,000. And they get back in their car and you go, wow, okay. And then a week or two later, you get pulled over again. Hey, you notice you stopped at a full stop at that stop sign. Here, $400 in your pocket.

Starting point is 01:08:10 And this goes on and you get a couple more rewards. And then do you speed again? If you knew you had to be at work at nine and it takes you 15 minutes to get there, you don't leave at 10 to nine anymore. You leave it like at 7.30. So you can, you know, tour around the streets and look for police officers to show them how good you are. And if a police officer pulled in behind you, then would you get all verklempt and, and, you know, have this visceral? No, you'd be like, dude, Hey, it's me. Like you'd have this amazing response to seeing a police officer near you. And that's what reinforcement does for our dogs. And that's the difference between it being effective and it not being effective. And that's why I tell people, no matter what it is you're trying to create, reinforcement is the answer.

Starting point is 01:08:57 And if you have a problem that you can't fix, it's because there's some incidental reinforcement out of your control that's either happening in the environment where the dog is, you know, you're asking them to come and they don't come and they end up catching a jackrabbit instead, massive kudos for them, big time reinforcement, right? So, you know, the reinforcement is there when the dog isn't doing what you want them to do. It's just out of your control and you have to, you know, bring that back in, which is why it's always better to do it right the first time and have a plan. But it doesn't matter how old the dog is. You know, they all can't teach a dog new tricks. That's crap.

Starting point is 01:09:32 You absolutely can start with a dog of any age. We had the oldest we've ever had in our class is 17. Somebody from Jersey brought their 17 year old dog up to learn how to how to shape. And it was awesome. And they absolutely can do it. No, this is a great story. And I want to tie it into perhaps a question that some people listening might ask, which is, okay, Ferris, well, if you're not chastising your dog for taking a dump on your kitchen floor, what the hell are you doing? And number one is coming back

Starting point is 01:10:03 to, and feel free to interject at any point here but number one is just like i removed the shoes uh so that my dog my puppy at the time wouldn't chew on the shoes and develop that as an incentive right a a reinforcer uh she was very confined in the beginning number one we used i used a crate all the time. And I think a lot of people suffer. They want to be extremely nice in their minds in the short term, and they sacrifice a lot of potential long-term rewards for the dog and for the family by not using, say, a crate early on. So number one, Molly was spending a lot of time in the crate, but she was also, when she was outside of the crate, always within eyesight and in, say, one room. She was not allowed to wander the house. And the times that I did find her, say, peeing on the floor, and it happened a few times, I would a bad teacher in the sense that I'm giving her a million and one opportunities to make a mistake. I just did not give her that many

Starting point is 01:11:30 opportunities. And I don't know if this is an accurate rule of thumb, but someone had told me, a puppy can hold his or her bladder for about an hour for every month of age. I don't know if that's true or not, but I just kept that in mind. So I was like, okay, I'm going to take her out every three hours, every four hours, every five, whatever it might be. And that is when she knows it's time to pee because I've rewarded her and trained her to do that. And the other thing I did was very early on, and this took some finagling because I really wasn't experienced with any kind of shaping or clicker use at that point. But I bought bells that hung from the door so that

Starting point is 01:12:14 she could paw or nose the bell and teach me that or tell me that it was time to go outside. And I just began that process by every time we were going to go outside on the three hour mark or the four hour or the five hour, I would tap it myself and then open the door. And eventually she totally got it and started nudging it herself. And that was, that was a happy day. And you could, you could have even just shaped that behavior as a separate behavior, teaching them to paw at the bell, you know, that, and, and, and, and, and do continue to do what you did, like ring the bell before you, before you went out. And, and I mean, it would just would have been a fun game. There's, um, there's a, um, I don't remember

Starting point is 01:12:56 when it was, it was in San Diego zoo. There was a, um, a drill and it had, and it was like, it's one drills are, I guess, like one of the most endangered species on the world. You know, the ones with the big long canine teeth, the big three inch teeth. Oh yeah. The mandrill baboons. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And, um, it had diabetes, but it was the only male in the San Diego zoo. And one of the, you know, I think like a handful of males left in the world and it wasn't a diabetes that was genetic. So they wanted to, you know, give it these insulin shots. And, um, it got to the point like they're powerful animals. So they would use a crowd gate to get them in a corner and give them a needle every day. Right. Well, it's, it's a big creature and a tiny little

Starting point is 01:13:37 needle, but it was, you're trying to force me to do something. So it got to the point where he was injuring some of the zoo staff. And I think if you look up Gary Priest, I think was the trainer that I heard, you know, that worked through this process when I was at a workshop. Mentros are scary, scary baboons. Strong. Strong. Really scary. did was he created a um like a chute a tube a metal tube attached it to the to the to the baboons um crate cage shaped him to put his arm through the tube for treats and then they put a rod at the end of the of the of the tube and so he would put his arm through the tube and hang on to that

Starting point is 01:14:20 rod and that flexed his arm so when they they wanted to take blood, they could take blood and they could give in a matter of weeks, you know, they have this baboon who's loving the game of giving blood and getting his insulin every day. So, you know, you can, you can shape anything. It saved a baboon's life and, um, probably a couple of zoo workers lives too. Shaping behavior is, is, is, it's just far more cooperative. And the other thing about it is it, it creates far more opportunities for the dog because when punishment doesn't work, which it won't long-term you end up, that dog ends up living a life of restriction. So they don't get to go off leash at the park. Uh, they don't get to have freedom of running, you know, living in the house. Um, and you know, when, when, by the time, if you do what you did and have the dog in a, in a crate,

Starting point is 01:15:14 the puppy in a crate or the dog, when you first get them. And then what we do is we also, we call it the gated community. So you can get an X pen. They're called x-pens a lot of the confirmation show dog people use them they're they're like a little um three or four foot high uh pen that you can put up in your kitchen and when you're supervising the dog but you say you're cooking supper so you're supervising but not really you can throw a couple toys in there and you're cooking supper and you can watch and then if you have to leave the room or go outside then the puppy can go back in the crate so they're still in a, in a smaller area. So they don't have access and people think, Oh, I want them to be my family pet. Well, when you have a baby, you keep them in a playpen. You don't like let them crawl all over

Starting point is 01:15:55 the house. You don't let them play with the silverware. Exactly. And it's about when the baby can make good decisions for themselves then you don't have to confine them to so much and it's exactly the same for our dogs right you you set them up to make good choices and that gives them the opportunity to earn a life without restriction and by not doing that that dog doesn't live as full of life and you are sentenced to management for the rest of that dog's life when you you go outside, you have to put the garbage on the, on the counter. Cause the dog might get into the garbage and you, you can't leave any, um, you know, food around or they'll rip into the food and they, you know, so it's a life of management. You, you have to make sure the

Starting point is 01:16:37 latch is on the gate in the backyard. Cause the dog, once they get out, they're gone down the street. And, and so life of management management for you which is a ton more work which leads to a life of complete restriction for that dog which is sad because you know what they deserve to have as much joy in their life as they can get because they're awesome totally and i get asked by some of my friends for instance because from their vantage point and this is not me saying this is true, across the board, because you have a different benchmark as someone who's a professional, trains competition dogs, and so on. But a lot of my friends who have basically had the types of dogs that I did

Starting point is 01:17:18 growing up, animals who live in your house. And maybe they sit and they probably don't go to the bathroom in the house anymore. But besides that, like all bets are off. So they see Molly and they're like, oh my God, that's the best trained dog I've ever seen. Because you can do some fun stuff. Like I can have her go from heel and like through my legs and do a little spin around and kind of, you know, rotate different directions and she'll follow the heel and all this kind of stuff, the decorative stuff. Right. And I just said, and I'd be curious to hear your opinion on this, but I said, you know, if I look back at what I did, it, all it took was about three months, maybe even less of doing two or three very short, like five to 10 minute sessions a day.

Starting point is 01:18:02 That's it. That's all it. And doing the stuff that doesn't take any extra time. Sit for please. Anytime Molly wants something to go out of the door, if it's especially for anything safety related, right? So she doesn't go charging out of a car or something. I always go through doors first, right? That was one of the protocols. And it's like, well, you're going to do that many times a day. And that's just in the course of your day. But it was maybe two, three sessions a day. And I really feel like if you get it right in the first three months, you're kind of set. I mean, you can't just slack off, but it's amazing. I guess my shameful confession is, I'm not doing a ton of training with Molly anymore, but because I just set aside and guess what people like you probably do need a couple of

Starting point is 01:18:50 five to 10 minute breaks yourself anyway. Uh, it was not that hard. And if people, if you can't afford to put in that time, you probably shouldn't get a dog, right? I mean, it's, uh, and, uh, that's, that's, uh's, that's been my experience. I wanted to ask a couple of questions. So the first is one of the things that I experimented with, and ultimately the room was small enough that I could keep an eye on or without it, but instead of using an X pen, which is a gated community you talked about, which a lot of people seem to have used very, very successfully. I experimented with tethering. So using a, say a short leash or some people use these, I'm supposed to chords of sorts to keep your dog attached to you as you walk around the house or whatever. What is your opinion of that approach? Not a fan because it's removing choice. And I love to give the dogs choice. So, you know, it's a difference between trying to create the bond because you become accustomed to being with me all the time or creating that bond because they're inspired to want to be beside you all the time. And, and, you know, so that's the reason that I, I'm not, but a fan of

Starting point is 01:20:05 that. Um, and the other thing is I, you know what, I go to the bathroom, five dogs want to go to the bathroom with me. My dogs follow me everywhere. And so that, that relationship and that kind of, uh, you know, phenomenal bond is there with all of my dogs. And even like I have a 17 year old and I have a one and a half year old and it doesn't matter. It's still very, very strong. And the other thing I move so much, like it would, it would just, they'd be underfoot all the time. So, you know, the, the big reason though, for me is it comes back to, I want to train my dog in an environment based with choice so that they have the choice to just hang out, um, with in their, their ex pen. And then I'll do things like I have, I'll have my ex-pen in my office and it's, there's a flight of stairs to go into the kitchen. And so I'll walk into,

Starting point is 01:20:50 you know, take them, I'll walk the puppy down into the kitchen and I get to a dog bed. And this is, this would be like a, you know, a three month old puppy. And I'll just stand there by the dog bed and I'll wait. And the puppy will offer to go in. I'll throw cookies as, and I'll keep throwing cookies as I'm making my way across the kitchen to get my water. And then I'll throw, throw cookies all the way back and then I'll give them a release word permission to leave and come with me again.

Starting point is 01:21:13 So it's like, those are all choices that lead up to this phenomenal relationship that I have with my dog, that it's not because you have to, it's because you want to. And, you know, anytime we have a choice in life, do we hear the alarm get off go off at monday morning at nine o'clock and you have to

Starting point is 01:21:31 go to work and suddenly you go like i think i have a sore throat it might have a sore throat but if the alarm goes off at 6 30 in the morning because you have a hockey game on saturday morning boom you're out of bed done because one is you have to, and one is you want to, and I want to inspire my dogs to always want to, no matter what it is. And so I get dogs, like even my terriers, if they could be out chasing a squirrel, they might be within a mouthful of catching them. And I'll just say, we're going this way and boom, they'll stop on a dime and come back because they've always had those choices in life. and those choices have been layered so that they always want to do what I want. And a couple of other things that I'd love to get your take on. I feel like I found these things useful, but I'd like to get your take because I don't want to recommend them, but they seem to be useful for you.

Starting point is 01:22:19 So one was not so much variable reinforcement schedule that we could get into that, but that might be a rabbit hole that is round two on the podcast. Yeah, exactly. But I did do, particularly with recall practice, jackpotting, right? So like once or twice a day, just randomly, instead of getting one treat, it'd be like, boom, you're getting 10 treats or whatever it might be. And do you feel like that is a valuable practice at points or how? It's something that I will do, but it is, science has proven it has zero value in training. And sometimes it will actually hurt your training, but you know what? It makes me feel good. And so even though I know that I will still do it. Like if my dog does

Starting point is 01:23:11 something exceptionally well, Oh hell I'm all in it's, you know what? I'm jackpotting that, but here's, here's what the science has proven. So there's a couple by the name of Bob and Marion Bailey. And they were, um, my mentors, Marion passed away and Bob's still an awesome friend. He just turned 80 today, actually. And they made a living. Instead of being scientists who were in a laboratory and playing with dolphins, their livelihood was based on training animals for the armed forces for espionage. I remember this. Yeah. Like pigeons and cats. Every 1,500 different species of animals they trained. Phenomenal. We could do a whole podcast talking about this.

Starting point is 01:23:53 What was the last name of the couple again? Bailey. And actually, Marion Bailey, she was a graduate student of B.F. Skinner. And so- Yes, the Skinner box. Yeah., yeah, phenomenal work that they did. And so they're, you know, they're, they're putting food on the table was dependent upon getting the science right. And so many of the people that we would talk about as being, you know, founders and really having big influence in, in animal training were teaching at a university. These two

Starting point is 01:24:26 were in the trenches taking notes, like they, their livelihood, they had to do this right. And so like their research is phenomenal on all different aspects of training. And so they found that it actually absolutely did no value. And they tried it with all different animals, had no value in training. And there was another woman, I don't know if she ever finished her PhD, but she was doing a PhD on jackpotting and dogs. And what she found, and you may find this if you play around with this one, Tim, that it increases the variability of response.

Starting point is 01:24:59 So let's say you were trying to teach your dog to back up and you do what I did as suggested and you throw the cookie between their legs and you click for that and you click for that. And then all of a sudden you get like two or three really good steps and you jackpot that. Well, what you will find is the dog won't go right back to backing up. They'll start throwing waving and, and,

Starting point is 01:25:17 and it creates an over arousal state with a dog. And so they won't go back to the thinking state of offering you the same behavior, knowing all that. I still do it, but I just, I get excited. And I, so I, you know, it's, it's more for me than it is for the dog and whatever. And Bob Bailey, I'm looking at some notes. I took a lot of notes the first time we got on the phone and I really still want to do this. He does the chicken training classes, chicken camps. Now, can you explain why this is important? And I think there's a quote that I read,

Starting point is 01:25:51 I'm blanking on this, there's another trainer, they said, unless you've had to train a chicken, you shouldn't be allowed to have a child. Yeah, that's true. I can't remember who said that, but that is definitely, I have heard that quote. Chicken camp is something that Bob and Marion started up many years ago. And I went through some of their early programs when they were teaching. And it was amazing just to listen to Marion lecture. She was, so it was, you know, you did, it was five days and you did a little bit of training and a little bit of lecture. And they picked the chicken because they're a phenomenal model of behavior. They're super easy to train. And you can see responses immediately, immediately.

Starting point is 01:26:34 Like it's very black and white with chickens. And there's no emotional attachment. And you use a little measuring cup to deliver the reinforcements. Just boom, boom. And it covers so many things it covers the mechanics of of training and you just think about training in a completely different way once you've been through chicken camp and i was actually talking to bob just two days ago he told me because he he is he stopped doing the chicken camps he's going to be doing a cruise very soon

Starting point is 01:27:02 and um and where he's going to be talking doing lectures and then he's going to be doing a cruise very soon and, um, and where he's going to be talking, doing lectures, and then he's going to open up another chicken camp. He, he pretty much retired, but he does work with, uh, the armed, one of the armed forces in one of the Scandinavian company countries now. So fascinating, fascinating guy. He was up at our place for three weeks this summer and just, you know, he would just have anybody on my team, just, you know, he would just have anybody on my team just, you know, God smack because listening to his stories about what they were able to do with, you know, whether it be, you know, training a sea lion to swim under the U.S. ships, looking for a diver that might want to be putting explosives on the bottom of a ship. And the sea lions would be swimming with a leg clamp. And if there's any diver in the water, that sea lion, they could swim faster than the divers and they would have a leg clamp on the diver

Starting point is 01:27:50 and the diver would be up on the deck. Like just little things that amazing, amazing things that they trained cats to go through airports. And back in the 50s, 60s, they had this project where they had, the cats had a cochlear implant. And they would control where the cats would go with high-frequency noises. And when there was a conversation they wanted to listen to, they would get the cats turn right, turn left, sit, stay.

Starting point is 01:28:15 And it would transmit this conversation. And it was just amazing, amazing stories of they caught a cat to turn out lights. Hold on. I'll let you finish that. And I have a question, uh, about what, well, actually the question is why, why has this not been made into a Hollywood movie yet? But wait, they trained, they trained cockroaches to do what? A cockroach to turn out a light. So the thought was if they needed somebody to go into a room that needed to be dark, they would put the cockroach in and it turned out i think actually marion did that as a part of her phd if i'm not mistaken but um

Starting point is 01:28:50 amazing amazing big cockroach uh that's terrifying he has a video you can grab tim it's called patient like the chipmunks and it and it's got a documentation of some of their experiments. All right. Patient like the chipmunks. Uh, and the question about the, uh, the chicken training is that, is it most valuable because you can't, because the chickens do not respond to negative reinforcement. It just doesn't work. Like you, You can't do anything. They'll fly away. You are at the mercy of pure behavior. You can observe behavior. And if you get your mechanics wrong, you'll have a chicken in your face because if you are good about getting the food in and getting the food out, they will shape your behavior. And it's basically like dog behavior, but it's intensified. So with dogs, they'll do the same thing, but it might take you a month to figure out what's

Starting point is 01:29:48 going on. I always tell people with any relationship with two animals, one is a trainer, one is a trainee. And with a chicken, they will be your trainee in a heartbeat if you're not quick about what you're doing. A trainer. They'll be your trainer, you mean? They'll be your trainer.

Starting point is 01:30:04 They'll train you to put the'll be your trainer. They'll train you to, you know, put the cookies, the food out faster for them. Like they, their, their responses will shape you. And it's the same with the dogs. You know, one of us is a trainer and one of us is the trainee. And if you aren't intentional about what you want, then you'll get a dog. People say, oh, my dog is stupid or stubborn or, and it. And it's not. Your dog's just brilliant. And they actually have trained you in the way that they wanted. I mean, it was not like they're conniving and thinking up at night, looking at a book on what they can train you to do.

Starting point is 01:30:32 But they recognize patterns of reinforcement so fast that they will get what they want. And then what you see is, oh, this dog is stubborn. Oh, hell no. This dog has figured out that they can shape you. And always one person's a trainer and one person training. Let me give you an example. Um, when John and I, uh, first, uh, moved in together, one of my Jack Russell's had this routine that didn't bother me, but I drove him nuts. So when you're starting to feed dinner, she would run up your back, making terrier noises as you were putting out the food, right? Sounds a little unnerving.

Starting point is 01:31:13 I didn't even think about it. And so when John took over feeding the food, the dogs, it drove him crazy. He didn't want this terrier running up his back and making all these monkey noises. So I thought I'm a clever person. I don't want to have to go back to doing that chore. So I have to stop this behavior in the dog. So I just shaped her. She was a little, you know, 10 pound dog. I shaped her to jump up on a kitchen chair whenever anyone went in the kitchen to either prepare human food or prepare dog food. And so that was her gig. You went in the kitchen, you could go in the kitchen, it was fine. But if you started preparing food, she'd jump on a chair. And at the time we lived in this house with a pine floor. And so the floorboards were a little uneven. And so anytime I was cutting

Starting point is 01:31:55 carrots or whatever, I'd throw her a cookie over on the chair. And, but if I was in a hurry and I didn't notice it, what she would do is she would walk around on the chair until she found the uneven spot. And then she'd go back and forth and rattle it. And that would make me notice that she was there. Oh, what a good girl. And I tore her cookies and it took me months and months before I figured out I'm being shaped. But I mean, I still did it for the rest of her life because it cracked me up that she was so freaking smart. But dogs are brilliant at figuring out patterns of reinforcement. And, you know, you'll just look at finding your own dogs. They will they will pick up. And that's why when you pick up a set of car keys, if a dog loves to go for a ride, they're the first ones at the door. And if they don't like the car, they'll

Starting point is 01:32:41 be the first ones in the back bedroom hiding. So they just are brilliant at figuring out those patterns and going, how can I get the pattern I want faster? And the chickens are like the intense version of that. It's a lot of fun. Chicken camp's awesome. I really wanted to chicken camp. So a couple more. things that I was told that, again, could be complete placebo effect, but some of which I think was helpful in the beginning, and I'd love to get your take, your BS meter on some of this. So I read at one point, and I think this was, again, a canine officer in the police force

Starting point is 01:33:21 somewhere, and he said, if the dog cannot perform the behavior in 20 locations, the dog doesn't know the behavior. It was something along those lines. And the point being, if you haven't trained it in different contexts, and what it seemed to me was different surfaces in particular for Molly as a puppy, don't expect it to work. I mean, you have to really practice the behaviors that are most important. And I guess for me, I was trying to focus on not necessarily paw and things like that, but the behaviors that could save her life, right? The things that you really want, like a remote sit-stay or recall the leave it, these types of things where you don't want your dog licking antifreeze or whatever it might be. How do you think about, I guess,

Starting point is 01:34:15 failure proofing behaviors to the extent possible? One thing that another kind of heuristic that I found helpful to think about were the three Ds. And I mentioned it earlier in passing, but having a simple behavior, but then ratcheting up the distance you are from the dog, the duration of fill in the blank, and then the number of distractions, right? As you can kind of take them from white belt level to black belt in a given behavior. Exactly. How do you think about failure proofing some of the most important behaviors? Absolutely. And the 3Ds, they are the ones that are going to build the brilliance. The thing is, what we do is we make sure that we introduce all of those things in crate

Starting point is 01:35:01 games where you can control what the dog's doing. So any distractions you're going to use for your recall, any distractions you're going to use, you know, at the distance away, the duration, you could all do that in a crate where you can just close the door and it doesn't affect your relationship with your dog. And then once they've got that, it's almost like, you know, they've got the first set of inoculations against distractions. Right. And then when you take them out to the real world to do that, you're just building in that second set so that you are really getting a killer immunity for the dog against

Starting point is 01:35:33 any distractions that they may come in contact with. How would you, you're talking about shaping and being shaped as a trainer. So we, we, why did Tim Ferriss stop using the bell on the door? I'll tell you why. And you can probably guess. So Molly, bright pup that she is, figures out pretty quickly, oh, wait a second. If I kick this bell, I get to go outside. So she started kicking it all the time because she didn't have to pee. She was bored as hell watching me do whatever boring stuff I was doing in the house and she wanted to get outside. So she started kicking it all the time because she didn't have to pee. She was bored as hell watching me do whatever boring stuff I was doing in the house and she wanted to get outside. So I was not sure how to correct it. And so at that point, I was like, all right, you know what?

Starting point is 01:36:15 The only solution that I can see in front of me, and I'm probably missing something, was to remove the bell. And she was old enough at that point that I was like, all right, she's not going to pee all over the house. But what would you do in a situation like that? Cause this type of thing I imagine happens, can happen with all sorts of things, all sorts of behaviors. Absolutely. Yeah. So it's recognizing that you're being shaped first of all. And so what I would do is I would make sure that the first bell ring, the dog gets to go out because, you know, maybe she does genuinely have to do something. And then you come back in the second bell ring, the dog gets to go out because, you know, maybe she does genuinely have to do something. And then you come back in the second bell ring, she goes out on a leash. And if

Starting point is 01:36:51 nothing's done, she goes in a crate. So it's like you ask permission, but I'm confused because you didn't do what I expected. So then you must've been asking permission to go in your crate. I can put you in your crate. That's cool. Like, you know, I was confused what that bell ring was for. And so she would learn bell ring. And I have some action out there. That's cool. Bell ring. I don't get some action out there. I get a consequence that I really didn't wasn't expecting. And so, you know, because it's all going back to reinforcement and, and I'm going to decrease your access to reinforcement, or I'm going to allow the reinforcement to carry on. You know, I had a student once who had a German shepherd and a Jack Russell. And she said that the Jack Russell was a really, she wasn't, she was really energetic dog, but was running really slow and agility. And so I watched her and she had pretty good skills.

Starting point is 01:37:40 But I said, tell me about your life around the house. And she said, well, she's a picky eater. So I put the food on top of the German shepherd's crate so she can jump up there. And when she jumps up there, when she's there, we know she's hungry. So we put it down, she gets a mouthful and then we put it back up on the shelf so the German shepherd can get it. And when she wants us to play ball, she barks at the ball in the kitchen sink and we run outside and we play ball. And then, you know, if she's hungry, she goes back up on the crate. And I'm like, no wonder she runs slow and agility, because that's the only time in her life that you actually try to tell her what to do. So you have to really just have an awareness of how it's all rolling out.

Starting point is 01:38:22 Dogs are brilliant at figuring out patterns of reinforcement and they'll run with them. As you found out. As I found out and continue to find out. Now, you gave me a piece of advice early on that was very helpful to me. But it seems like there is, as with anything, a right and a wrong way to do it. And these are some notes that I took down. Susan focuses on arousal state of dog to get them used to responding in high arousal states. Now that's kind of part two. The part one, which was what immediately helped me was before all training, do some

Starting point is 01:38:57 tugging or running to get their heart rates up. And this was kind of a real phase shift in my training. I mean, an inflection point where things really improved, much like the, hey, dude, it's a crowded bar. You got to use 20s, not singles. I would take Molly from inside where she's laying down for hours at a time. And I'd be like, okay, time to train. Let's do training. And it would be productive, but it wasn't hyperproductive until I started adding in even just a minute of playing around, getting a run and getting a heart rate up. So what is the right way to do that? And what are common mistakes that people make? It really depends on the dog. You have a dog, Molly is a

Starting point is 01:39:39 dog that likes the rough play and bouncing around. You might have like a, you know, a smaller dog that doesn't get into that kind of play. But the most important thing is you've got to get the heart rate up. Think of it, you know, the typical arousal curve of sport, when they're at the low end of arousal, they notice, you know, as an athlete or a dog, you notice, you know, insignificant things in your environment. So if you're stepping in the ring to compete, uh, and you're in a low state of arousal, then you're going to notice the crowd. You're going to notice people waving to you're going to, and you're not going to have your, your head in the game. You won't be in the zone. You'll do a terrible job. And the same with the dogs. If they're in a low state of arousal, then they're going to notice, Oh, look, there's a fly.

Starting point is 01:40:19 Well, there's something to sniff there's and there, and you're, you might get some work, but it won't be productive. And so if you can get them into that higher state of arousal and the changing the physiology is the easiest way to to create that and with a with a dog that maybe doesn't like to tug you can you know do a recall where they chase you for a cookie you can do things like rolling a cookie across the floor or hiding a cookie in the couch cushion so that they have to get engaged and find it. You know, you can get them to find it. So you're getting them into a more hyper aware state where the distractions don't notice them. So when you're in the zone, when I step to the ring at the World Championships and they say my name, I don't even notice that the speakers are on because I'm just focused on my task.

Starting point is 01:41:01 And the same is true when my dog's training with me. If there's other dogs in the area, it doesn't matter what's going on. They are completely in the zone with me. And that's what we're doing when we're, we're tugging or, or getting them moving around first. How much is too much? And the reason I ask, and I guess my second question is, is there a way to calm your dog down if they're redlining? And, and, uh, so I'll give you a very specific example. So Molly, unfortunately, she lacerated her foot on, I think, a piece of glass. So she was stitched up for a while. We didn't do any real training. And she seemed to be in a more easily distracted state after a bunch of kind of lethargicgic sitting around we went to a friend's

Starting point is 01:41:45 house there were tons of people around new environment uh big pool in the backyard molly loves pools a bunch of kids petting her playing with her and like a crotchety old dog that just wanted to kill everything that was super yappy and just like you distracting to me uh and doubly distracting to molly and people ordering pizza and cooking meat. There's just everything going on. And basic obedience, no problem. Sit down, remote, stay, whatever. That was all fine. But my buddy had seen her do some pretty dramatic stuff, at least in his mind, and he wanted to see it. So I was like, okay, sure, no problem. So I go to do some of the fancier stuff and you could just see the beach ball. You could just see like the computer frozen. And she was just like getting

Starting point is 01:42:33 it 80% right, but not quite figuring it out because the dog was freaking out. Everything's going nuts. In a situation like that, do you just kind of pack it in and say, hey, live to fight another day? Or are there things that you can do to get your dog to calm down? You know, failure is a great, great teacher. And it's awesome to get a failure and then say, how are we going to work through this? Because then it makes the dog more resistant to that failure the next time. So, you know, depending on that, if she was a super young puppy, you might just say, let's pack it in. Assuming she's a reasonable age, think of it like a dartboard with the heat zone being right in the middle.

Starting point is 01:43:13 She's in the middle of all this activity. All that you would do is, say, back away 10 feet and ask for the same behavior. You're getting away from the heat zone to a less intense distraction area. Then if it doesn't work there, back away another 10 feet. You might go from the backyard to the front yard where it's climbing. And then you would start with simple behaviors that she can respond to. And then, and then when you get the response you want in the front yard, go back to the backyard and then work your way. I wouldn't go right to the heat zone, but I would say, okay, we've had some success here. We're going to break it off here. And then the next time, you know, you do this a couple of times, she's going to learn, oh, I respond anytime, all the time. And that, you know, failure is never a bad thing. It's, it's just what you take

Starting point is 01:43:52 from that failure and how you can respond to it. So, uh, I want to be respectful of your time. And I think there's a chance we may end up doing around two on this. Cause I love talking about this stuff. The, and I, and I always learn so much when we're jamming. But you started a story before we hit record that I want to hear, which was your vacation to Ireland. Tell me about what happened. Because I said, no, no, no, stop. I want to talk about this during the podcast and I don't want to hear it twice. So let's jump into it. My husband is from Britain and we were going for a vacation, quote unquote, because I was lecturing over in Britain. I said, look, let's go to, he's always wanted to go to Ireland. I said, we'll go to Ireland, have a non-doggy vacation. It will be lots of fun.

Starting point is 01:44:38 And I said, I'll order, we'll get a B&B in Dublin because I'm vegan and it's easier to get good food in a big city. And he said, no, I don't want to be in a big city. So I'm like, okay. So I found a, you know, it was on a, in a farm, a beautiful, they raised organic beef and 200 acres. And he said, yeah, that sounds perfect. So we pull in and there's 13 dogs. So much for the dog free vacation. He pulled, he looks at me, he said, did you know this? And I, and he loves dogs. He just wanted a vacation for you. I said, I had no idea because it wasn't in the advertisement. I showed him the advertisement. So they had, um, 12, uh, field springers and 11 field springers of border collie and a great Dane. And they, as soon as you get out of the car, they all jump on you. And of course I, it's just awesome. And they're so very sweet couple. They're all apologetic. Oh, they're terrible. They jump on us. And, and I said, um, listen, I just,

Starting point is 01:45:29 I just happened to have some like camera equipment with me, uh, equipment with me is if you don't mind, uh, if I video this, I can fix it for you tomorrow. And she's like, fix it tomorrow. Like, did you hear what she said? Fix it tomorrow. And I explained who I was and that I could do this. So, um, the next next day we went out we did a shoot and we fixed we fixed it and I explained again it's about reinforcement and knowing if you you anytime you have a behavior you look at what do I want I'd like people to I'd like my dogs to greet people when they when they see them and um what do I have I've got hooligans that jump all over. Well, where's the value? Cause there's reinforcement there somewhere. And so the value is these dogs are incredible

Starting point is 01:46:12 social creatures and they love to greet people. And so let's change that value. So what I did was I came out with, um, you know, we'd gone out for supper to a really nice restaurant. John ordered a nice steak. I took half of it off so that I could use it for the dogs the next day. And, um, he's loving this. So then I, um, I go out there and, um, before they can jump on me, I just reward them for not jumping on me. I take the two, the two ones that are the real culprits and I just reward and reward for not jumping on me. And then, um, they get the idea that they, that, well, you know, there's going to be food on the ground. And so I wait till they sit and then I reward that. And then I want a failure because the greatest lessons happen through failure. So then I get them all excited. What good dogs are, so they jump on me. And when they jumped

Starting point is 01:46:57 on me, I just turned my back because what they were seeking was that social attention and I didn't give it to them. And then when they got off of me, I turned around again and I did this two or three times until they made that connection. I've had lots of really good steak for sitting and I got a back turn for not sitting. And so then I couldn't get them to jump on me. And I said, you know, this is, they're not going to jump on me anymore while I'm here. And if you just do this with a couple of friends and a couple of visitors, you're going to create a new pattern for these dogs and, and they're not going to jump on people anymore. So, you know, it's, it's, it's all about being, uh, present and purposeful with what, what you want from your dogs and, and really anybody can train. It's not, you don't, you don't

Starting point is 01:47:39 have to be a professional dog trainer. You just have to have to seek out what you want. And the thing is, most people try to train from the world of don't, don't jump on me, don't bite, don't bark, don't dogs don't understand don't because don't is a concept. They understand do they understand behavior. So what you have to do is look at what you don't want, and create a behavior that you do want, so that the dog can be right, and you're setting them up for reinforcement. And that makes for a much better relationship for you and your dog and anybody else that comes in contact with your dog. And it's also very transferable to everything else, right? I mean, we're talking about not just a rat in a Skinner box. We're not just talking about a dog in an X-pen or a dog in the backyard. We're talking about, as you said, 1,500 different species, including human beings.

Starting point is 01:48:29 So operant and classical conditioning, we are not exempt from those rules. And if you look at, say, for instance, I interviewed a gent named Jason Niemer, who's the co-founder of AcroYoga. If you look at partner acrobatics, one of the core rules is don't tell the person what you don't want. Give them a simple command, which is more of what you do want. And if you're going to coach someone effectively and perform at a high level or even an effective level in that type of environment with a lot of variables, the rules are the same. And I love it.

Starting point is 01:49:07 I love talking about this stuff. And the thing is, if you are a person that looks for what's good in your dog and you're trying to create ways to set them up for success, you become a person who looks for all that's good in life. And it, it changes you, you know, it makes you a better coworker, a better spouse, a better parent, a better, because you're always looking for, how can I set this up for, for success? How can I create an environment that's reinforcement reinforcing? And, you know, it's all the same. If whatever I'm, I'm, you know, sometimes I get asked to give marketing lectures and it's, I just take out the word dog and put in the word business and we run to the races and do the same thing, right?

Starting point is 01:49:48 It's, it's the same thing. And, uh, so I would love to wrap up with a couple of questions that I know people are going to want to ask, and then we'll talk about where people can find more about you and everything you're up to. So question number one is related to tools to bring home with your dog or get before you adopt a dog. Now the recommendations that came up the most for me when I pulled my audience way back in the day were get a crate, number one, with a partition, right? So you can make it larger as they get larger, but not give them too much space in the beginning. Second, get a Kong. Third, get a nature's miracle for when they do something on the floor so they don't go

Starting point is 01:50:40 back to the same spot, which is something I learned the hard way and it really does work and get a clicker. Those were in effect, I would say, and I may be omitting something, but those were kind of the big four that come to mind. Do you have anything to add to those or anything else that you would consider? The obvious, the obvious, uh, a leash and collar. And I like a buckle leash, not a, not a pinch collar, not a chain collar, a buckle leash to, you know, and, and if you need, if you have a really exuberant, say you're getting a rescue dog, I like a head halter and gentle leaders brand that I really like to use. The head halter is super, super,. You said it was called Gentle Leader?

Starting point is 01:51:27 Gentle Leader is the one that I like to use. And really good quality dog food. What type of dog food? Yeah, might that be? I like to feed raw. So, you know, the Chewy and Stella and Chewy is a phenomenal brand. That's when I'm in the States, that's what I buy. And really high, good quality, you know, $20 bill treats. You need to have some lower value treats too, Tim, because you don't always want to tip with 20 or there's an

Starting point is 01:51:51 expectation that you're the guy with the 20. So when you're at home and it's a less distracting environment and you're not asking for a lot, you might use low value, like cut up carrots or mix that in with some high value rewards. So those are- What type of rewards do you use? What, what, uh, any particular brands or types of foods?

Starting point is 01:52:09 I use all kinds of different things. I like to mix it up from low value, um, like origin, just origin kibble, um, like super good quality stuff that, um,

Starting point is 01:52:21 that's my lower value. And I might, you know, pinch some of John's rose beef because i said there's no meat in my household but um so i'll mix i'll mix that up and and carrots right raw carrots are another really good one especially if a little dog that might put weight on really fast so you want to be really conscious of that because they the calories are they add up fast when you're training a training a dog especially if it's a rescue dog that's already full grown they're not really growing um so and crate games so that's a video that's that we have

Starting point is 01:52:49 that's going to help people help people with the understanding of the crate and i also have a um a step-by-step on it's your choice uh an e-book that they can they can get from us and and the way they would get that is to go to, um, dogs that listen and forward slash Tim dogs that listen.com forward slash Tim. And you can get that there. That's something that's within our, we have a $500 course that we keep that within, but we're taking it out for people who are listening to this podcast. Perfect. Yeah. And I'll put that in the show notes as well. It's just a few more and then we can both, well, at least speak for myself, get a bite to eat. So the question of trainers. So you said very early on, you're finding a method of training that resonates with you. Who are some of the trainers or thinkers in this world who you respect very highly and who are the types of people you could name specific people if you want that you would recommend staying away from?

Starting point is 01:53:50 Well, you know, the, um, the trainers you for, for myself personally, Bob and Marion Bailey are really the people that I've learned from. And Bob still does have some, uh for people. I'm really a big fan of learning online. And when I remember when I first looked into this 10, it was probably six or seven years ago, people told me, oh, it's a mechanical skill. People can't learn it online. But here's the thing. When you are learning something in a classroom, you have the distraction of all the other dogs and the people and the environment. And it is the worst place for a dog to learn something the absolute worst, um, because the environment is so out of your control. And if the instructor tells you to do something, you've got to try to remember that or write it down when you get to

Starting point is 01:54:40 your, you know, back into the car. But when you're learning online, you can look at a video, you can pause it, you can try it, you can go you can replay it over and over again so i'm a big fan of that there's a ton of stuff you can get online for free and and the thing that i advise people to stay away from uh anything anything that a person tells you that you must be the boss of your dog they must you know that's old school. Training should not be physically punishing or mentally intimidating to your dog. And if it is, then you're doing it the wrong way. And there is absolutely,

Starting point is 01:55:15 you can have the most phenomenal success. I don't care if you're trying to create a hunting dog that can work 200 meters away from you with birds nearby. It doesn't matter what you're trying to train. You can train it in a way that's creating a better relationship with your dog. Full stop. It just doesn't matter what it is. I love it. And are there any other places people can find you online or I was going to say elsewhere. I'm not sure. Don't give out your home address or your email. People have made that mistake on the podcast before. Any other places online where

Starting point is 01:55:49 people can learn more about you? My blog has got a ton of free resources and that's susangarrettdogagility.com. But the articles that are in there, you know, there may be 30% of them are related to dog agility. It's just really good dog training. And you can Google me or on YouTube or on Facebook. Susan Garrett Dog Agility might be our business page. And there's lots of good stuff that we post there. So I'm all about giving people free. There's tons of great, valuable content on any of our sites.

Starting point is 01:56:24 Dogs that listen.com is a place that I, I suggest to people that go to and because you know, that's my goal in life is to help dog owners better understand their dogs and help dogs to have the most joy in the best life possible. So that's what I'm out for. And I'm happy to say that we're changing the world one dog at a time here. And, and, uh, I'm happy to say that we're changing the world one dog at a time here. And, and I thank you, Tim, for giving us this opportunity to share that information with the world. My pleasure. I think it's, uh, it's also changing the world one human at a time. Uh, and I think these are extremely, not only useful, but fascinating principles to explore because

Starting point is 01:57:05 you start to learn about not just dog training, but behavioral modification. If you are a smoker and you know it's bad for you, you know it's going to give you lung cancer or potentially kill you eventually, why don't you stop if you want? This is a puzzle that is not that dissimilar from dog training at all. I mean, there are common cores. You want to lose weight, but you can't stop eating Oreo cookies. Well, maybe it's kind of like these shoes in the house

Starting point is 01:57:31 where you allow the dog to develop bad behavior. Probably have to get those out of the house. I mean- Just keep asking yourself the same thing with the dogs. Where's the value? Where is the reinforcement coming from for the behavior that I want to change? Exactly. And it doesn't matter what it is you're changing. And it's 24 hours a day. the value? Where is the reinforcement coming from for the behavior that I want to change?

Starting point is 01:57:50 And it doesn't matter what it is you're changing. And it's 24 hours a day. We've got to be considering that with our dogs. It's not just we're training for five minutes and then let them run and be hooligans for the rest. It's where's the value coming for all the behaviors that they're starting to develop? Exactly. Well, this has been a blast, Susan. I really appreciate it. And thank you for taking the time, of course. My pleasure, Tim. As per usual, you can find the show notes for this episode and every other episode at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out. And as always, and until next time, thank you for listening and be nice to your dog for God's sake and train intelligently. Thanks for listening, guys.

Starting point is 01:58:40 Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include

Starting point is 01:59:16 favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #200: Susan Garrett -- Master Dog (and Human) Trainer

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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #200: Susan Garrett -- Master Dog (and Human) Trainer

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.