There are certain topics in the dog training world that feel almost taboo - among them is the topic of behavioral euthanasia. In this episode Deb and I have a frank but thoughtful conversation on evaluating the severity of a behavior issue and what factors go into that sort of decision. 

 Transcription

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Deb Jones about making hard choices when it comes to canine behavior problems. A short trigger warning here. Our conversation today will include some difficult topics, although as always, Deb handles them with thoughtful consideration, including rehoming and behavioral euthanasia.

It's absolutely okay to skip this episode if listening is not in your personal best interest. All right, with that on the table. Hi Deb. Welcome back to the podcast.

Deb Jones: Hi Melissa, thanks for having me. I always enjoy talking to you and I never thought I would have a trigger warning with a podcast or with anything, but things happen. One thing I'd like, I would like to say before we get started is I'm really thankful to FDSA to have the chance to bring attention to this topic because it's something that's not talked about often because it is a little bit controversial and it can be very traumatic for people. And also everything I say, my opinions, my experience doesn't reflect on anybody else but me.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Well, I'm happy to have you here, as always. It's always fun to talk to you too. Before we jump into the super serious stuff, do you want to just kind of remind folks a little bit about who you are, who your current crew are, maybe what you're working on with them?

Deb Jones: Sure, I am. I've been teaching and training for about 30 years now, which makes me sound incredibly old. So it's been a long time. I've been a professional trainer for quite a while and also I was a full time college professor for about 20 years in psychology. So I have a strong background in learning and behavior and that's part of what I focus on. And I'll be focusing on a little bit as we talk today.

I have. I live with two Shelties, Tigger, who is like nine now, and Pixel, who is about seven. It's hard to believe that they're that old. It feels like we just got them the other day. But what my mom said was true, that the older you get, the faster time goes by. And then I have my Koolie Wizard. And Wizard is now 4. I was thinking 3 for a long time, but he's actually 4.

It's hard to believe he was my last puppy. Wizard has been very busy with me making cooperative care videos. I've been working on my Cooperative Care Trainer Certificate program. And Wizard is the star. He's probably in 90% of them because he's so easy to do this with and he's so good at it. And then I realized, well, yeah, it's funny how the thing that you work on gets better and then that's the thing that you see results.

Strange how that happens. It is, isn't it? It is funny how that works. And as we were just talking about before the podcast, I keep a puppy in the back of my mind. There's a possibility. I think I'm almost ready for some somebody new to come into the household. So we'll see, see how that goes.

Melissa Breau: All right. So I do think listeners typically associate with kind of you with some of those other topics you mentioned, shaping cooperative care, that kind of stuff. So do you want to share the story of kind of what led you to become familiar with today's topic?

Deb Jones: Yeah, I will. It's an issue nobody wants to have ever. And especially as a professional trainer, to end up in a situation where you choose behavioral euthanasia for a dog is somewhere where I absolutely never thought I would find myself. I didn't think that was a thing that could possibly ever happen to me.

Yet it did. So it's been almost eight years now and I feel like I must be a very slow processor because I'm still processing it. I still feel like it's not done yet, but it's been eight years. Halo was a young border collie, he was three years old and he killed one of his housemates, Quest, who was a 10 year old Sheltie. So there was a pretty big size disparity between the two of them.

And it happened. You know how people say to dog trainers, oh, I didn't have any warning or it happened out of the blue. I felt like I was truly blindsided by it. And if somebody else said that to me, I would be thinking in the back of my mind. I bet there were signs that you missed. So of course that's immediately what I thought of myself. I've missed some major signs.

You don't go from living together comfortably to killing your housemate. That is not a normal progression of events in any world when you have dogs. So I was. But I was so blindsided by it, I did not see it coming. And that's really hard to admit when you're a professional trainer that something happened that you couldn't see. Of course, hindsight is 20/20. Of course I sat for days, weeks, months maybe, thinking back of every Interaction that these two dogs had, trying to see what I had missed, even looking at old videos of them together, just interacting and playing.

And there were little things, but they were not obvious things. And they would think things that could be explained in a number of ways. So it wasn't obvious to me, but obvious, clearly. I was really, really heartbroken about this happening. I had stepped out of the house for maybe five minutes and left the dogs all free. There were like six dogs in the house. And we always had six, even up to eight dogs at one point.

Never had an interpersonal problem between them. And they always got along fine. They didn't. They may not have been best friends, but they coexisted. And that was all I ever asked of my dogs, was just coexist with the others. So I went out, was cleaning up outside, walked back into the middle of Halo killing Quest. And it was probably the most traumatic thing I've ever seen in my life.

And I won't go into details other than we had to. I had to pull Halo away multiple times, wrestle him away from Quest. He was determined and it was stunning to me. It was something. This was not my dog. This was not the dog I lived with. But I got him away. I got him crated. We rushed Quest to the emergency vet, but there was too much damage, so we had to have him euthanized at the emergency vet.

And then I had a night. This was like a Sunday night. I had a night to think about it. But I knew almost immediately when I saw what I saw, I knew my choices were not, you know, I. I didn't have any other options that I felt like were reasonable ones in that situation. And so I took him to the vet the next morning. Thank God for my vet, because we got there, we just showed up at 8 o'clock in the morning and explained what happened.

And luckily we've got a long, a long relationship with her and she understood that we would not be asking this if it wasn't clearly incredibly serious and necessary. So we euthanized him that morning. So, yeah, terrible topic, Terrible thing to have happen to anybody. I do not wish this on my worst enemy. Not that I have worst enemies. It makes me sound like an evil villain of some sort. But I wouldn't wish this on anybody. It was. It was horrible from start to finish.

Melissa Breau: It's so terrible. I'm super sorry that you had to deal with it and had to make that choice, but why revisit? Why talk about it again? Now, you mentioned it's been eight years yeah, it's like I can't. Part of me is again, slow processing of the trauma. I still am not over it.

I still can't totally let it go. But the big thing for me is I see this topic come around regularly in the dog training world. It's like on a cycle that every six months or so, something big happens. A dog kills somebody, a dog maims somebody, a well known trainer ends up euthanizing a dog and gets slammed for it. So there it, it's still there. It's in the dog training world.

But we don't talk about it very clearly and logically. It's an emotional issue. I mean, you can probably hear how emotional I get just talking about it. But we need to, we need to bring it out because it's a thing, it happens. And to ignore it or to blame the person for having to euthanize a dog, that's not fair. That's not fair to anybody. And it's ignoring the bigger picture of what's really going on.

And what kind of. How can we think through the whole process of this and make sense of it and help people understand it? Because it's not only us as trainers, but clearly our students and our clients and our friends and our family people find themselves in this situation. So we should be able to help them understand what's going on. And the idea that people second guess you, people will tell you that you did everything wrong and people will hate you.

There are people who will hate me for the rest of my life because I did this and because I made that choice. And they don't understand everything that went into making that choice. So for me, deciding to finally put it all together in a webinar form, in addition to writing about it endlessly in blog posts, it helps me share a little bit about this whole process because it might seem like I made the decision very quickly, but I actually went through a lot of, kind of a framework of thinking about what the options are. And I wanted to share that with people.

What do you do if you happen to find yourself in this situation and it's not always going to end in behavioral euthanasia, there are a lot of other steps before you get there where you could resolve things or deal with things. So I want to talk, I wanted to talk about that as well.

Melissa Breau: For those who have a dog with some significant behavior issues, what are some of those factors? What do you kind of look at or what do you recommend that they consider?

Deb Jones: Yeah, I think first and always safety. Everybody has to stay physically safe. And it's not just the humans, it's also any other animals that this dog is going to be in contact with, if they're going to be in contact with other animals. So always thinking about that, thinking about quality of life and comfort, you know, people need, animals need quality of life as well as humans do.

And as trainers, I think we're really sensitive to that. We want our dogs to have a good life, we want them to have physical activity, we want them to have mental enrichment. I want them to have cognitive challenges to deal with every day because it's good for them, good for their brains. So can we provide all of that? And that's important to me. Then I think of management.

And management is huge and it's the first step in everything. Change the situation so that everybody can remain comfortable and safe. That's our job as humans. Our job is to manage it appropriately. And management is very difficult. It sounds simple. It's like, okay, I'll just keep these dogs separated. And anybody who's lived with multiple dogs knows, yeah, you'll try, you'll do your best, but you may or may not be able to maintain that.

And can you maintain management over the longer term if the other options aren't changing anything, aren't working out? But still, first thing gets get into a situation that you can manage safely before you go any further in terms of solutions or, you know, approaching ways that we might problem solve. So if we can do that, if you can do that. And there's a saying in dog training world, management always fails.

And sadly it's true, because we're human. And the more people you live with, for example, if you have kids in your household, they're going to leave a door open, they're going to leave a crate open, they're going to do something. And it's not their fault. They're human and it's even not our fault. I know adults who have managed dogs for years by keeping them separate. One day they just forget to close a door or to put up a gate.

Something happens. And so we also know that it's like management is necessary, but it's also not perfect. It could go on for a long time if you're very thoughtful and careful and you can control your environment, or it could fail very quickly. And so that's one of the things I would think about, because without management, we no longer have safety. And that's an issue for me. I want people to think about training, but people get desperate very quickly to find a quick solution.

And there are no quick fixes when you have serious behavior problems. I wish I could tell people there was. I wish I had the secret. I would share it because nobody wants to be in this situation. We want our dogs to be okay. We want them to be happy. We want them to have everything we can give them in terms of a good life. And I think sometimes in a desperate effort to fix things as quickly as possible, people go to types of training that maybe they would not necessarily do things that use more force or coercion or pain, even thinking I need to do this to fix the problem.

But sadly that usually only makes the problem worse. In the bigger picture, it might even look like it solves a problem short term, but the long term solution is not to go that route. It's never going to be the thing that fixes a problem. And I know this. Back to my psychology background, I know this, this is true. Everything I know about learning and conditioning tells me that using pressure and force and pain is not going to solve your problem as much as you want, even as much as you would hope or would want it to.

So that's just something else I want people to think about. And you're probably going to need help. You can't fix this on your own. We're not all trainers and, and I, you know, honestly, if it can happen to me and I feel like, I feel like I know a lot about dogs and I feel I've had a lot of experience with a lot of dogs and I trust my background and I trust my instincts and it happened to me.

So you can't fix it on your own. I mean, I did talk to other trainers that I respect and trust as well in making this decision because I didn't want, want to jump into something that I would regret forever later. But you can find help. There are good trainers out there. You may need to go to a veterinary behaviorist, which is what I recommend with really serious issues, especially if there may need to be some sort of drug treatment involved, at least even temporarily or long term.

And of course then we get to the bigger things, rehoming and euthanasia. Those kind of, to me are the two last things that I would look at and consider after I've gone through a lot of these other steps to try to manage and then address the problems that I see. Well, that was a lot of talking. I'd like to talk a little more about rehoming if we can.

I think a lot of the times people assume, you know, even if the dog isn't successful in Their home. Maybe it'll be successful if just they can find, you know, the right situation. Do you have advice on, like, when and how to think about if that's realistic for a specific dog? Yeah, I wish. I wish it was as useful as people hope it will be. But there's no mythical home in the country where your dog's going to be happy for the rest of their life.

And especially if you have a dog that could be dangerous, Placing them somewhere else is a very, very serious issue. There might be somebody out there who could manage this problem better than you. But do they have the relationship with your dog that you do you want to do everything? We want to do everything we can. Somebody who's new to the dog may or may not want to put in that kind of time and energy.

One of the issues that really pushed me in the direction of behavioral euthanasia was was that even if I place the dog somewhere else, even if I sent. If you got the dog from a shelter or breeder and you send them back, even if you do that, your legal and financial responsibility, should something happen in the future, they don't end just because you place the dog in a new setting or a new environment.

If you know that the dog could cause harm. And that's typically why we're placing them somewhere else, is because we know that they could cause harm. So if we do that, you could still be responsible. Somebody could come back and sue you for something that happened while the dog was not even in your household and was out of your control. And that, especially if your dog has a history, that can be a big deciding factor.

Now, on the other hand, if it's an issue where you're just not the right fit for a particular dog, and I did this once, I placed a dog who hated traveling, hated new things, and I worked with him thinking he would get over it, and he never did. He started to get worse. He didn't like the lifestyle we were leading at the time, where we were probably going to agility events three out of four weekends a month.

So I found a home with a retired couple who never went anywhere. So it wasn't an issue of danger. It was his comfort level and placing him there. He lived there very happily for the rest of his life, and they loved him dearly, and he was very spoiled dog who rarely left the house, and that's what he needed. So in that case, I mean, in those kinds of cases, yeah, I think rehoming can be great.

But if it's rehoming for a really really serious issue where you just, you know, you just wish somebody else could help you could help the dog and could deal with it. It often you find that there isn't a really good option for that. And so I would think carefully about rehoming and the kind of issues that you're having. It's not uncommon, I think, for people to feel like, you know, or to want to feel like that they have, you know, tried everything before they make hard choices.

Melissa Breau: Right, right. How can people kind of assess when they've done enough?

Deb Jones: That is such a, such a common question and such a good question. I hear this from people all the time, you know, that they don't feel like they did enough. And the thing is there's no, you know, there's no limit to how much you could do. We could keep trying things, you know, and sometimes we have to do it until the point where we just accept, I've given this all the time that I have, I've given this all the money that I have.

I put all my energy into this and I'm, it's not getting better. So there does come a point and people have to make that decision for themselves when they've done enough. I mean, there's no arbitrary measure of how much you have to do before you make a decision for euthanasia. But you do have to feel like none of these other options are solving the problem. And it doesn't look like it's going to get better.

And we're always, when you're living with, with a dog with serious behavior issues, you're almost always living like in a high stress state. Even when nothing is happening, you're waiting for that next thing. And so that's not really fair to make somebody or to have to live that way. That's not something that you should have to do because you ended up with a dog that has behavioral issues.

We should not have to give up our entire lives and our mental and physical well being for the well being of the dog. And this is one of the things I talk about in the webinar is determining the best interest of everybody. And we get to think about ourselves as well. It's not selfish to think about yourself. You probably have other, you know, animals to take care of.

You have a family, you have friends, you have a job. And nobody should feel like I have to give everything to this dog and to solving issues that maybe cannot be solved. So you get to decide there's always going to be some other thing to do. No matter how many things you're going to think back later and go, well, I didn't try that. Or somebody will very happily tell you, well, you didn't try that.

And that would have fixed it. It's like a miracle cure kind of thing. Probably not. There's probably not something out there. So I think it comes to the point of when is it reasonable for you in your particular situation at the time and circumstances change when what I couldn't do then, maybe I could do now, but we can't know that. So again, we're only human. We make decisions based on the moment and based on where we are in our lives.

So there's no everything because there's always something more. And that I think really makes people feel guilty. It's like, oh, if I just done this one last thing, it would have all turned out differently. Probably not, but we still feel guilty about it because you never know. So all of that said, you know, sometimes dogs are capable of some pretty dramatic change.

Melissa Breau: Can you weigh in on, you know, when a dog is likely to be able to make major changes and what factors would maybe lead you to believe that that would be possible?

Deb Jones: Yes, yes. And that's what we all want. We want the outcome where things change and they're better. Okay, so there, there are some things, I think, that go into this, that go into there being a good outcome or, you know, a reasonable outcome for people. But I think success in this situation depends on the humans changing more than the dog changing. This is going to be very human driven because we have to remember, dogs are dogs.

They do what they do. You know, their natures are very different from human natures and their tendencies are very different from human tendencies. Somebody tries to take my food from me, I don't bite them, but my dog will. And that's perfectly normal for dogs until it gets to an extreme, you know, so we, we have to remember that this is who they are, this is what they are.

So as a human, then can I meet their needs while avoiding putting anybody else in danger? If I can do that, then I can work on training and conditioning and I can work on. I think classical conditioning comes into play here much more than operant conditioning changing how the dog feels. Because if we're getting reactions, and I'm just talking in general here, could be any specific problem. We're getting reactions we don't want.

The dog is reacting in ways that we don't like. And classical conditioning can start to change those reactions to triggers, whether it's people or other animals or food or whatever it is. That the dog's having a reaction to that is leading to the problem. But classical conditioning is harder to do successfully than operant conditioning. We can change behaviors, but changing reactions, changing emotions, that's very different. And it's also often harder to maintain over time.

It's not as easy for people, even trainers, there's going to be probably lifetime maintenance on things. So I think if we accept that, if we know that, that will help us a lot to make some inroads into changing their ultimate behaviors. So I always think if I can keep everybody safe and happy while. And it looks like sometimes the problem isn't as bad as people think, sometimes people will panic over something that as a trainer we look at and go, oh, that's doable.

We can find ways to fix that. We don't have to jump to an extreme solution for a problem that, you know, we've seen success with. And it's for something like resource guarding, which I mentioned that often there's lots of good protocols that can be used and different ways to fix that with management and a little bit of conditioning work. So we might know that as trainers, the average person may not know or realize that that's a fairly fixable, doable problem.

So those, those are things. Sometimes people jump to the conclusion that it's a really bad thing and it might not be so knowing the difference there. And that's where getting professional help. And I talked in the webinar about finding professional help because I think that that is so crucial. When our emotions are so involved, it's very hard to think clearly and that, you know, again, personal experience on that.

I know how hard that is because in the moments, you know, in the day that surround that event with Halo and Quest, I couldn't think. I couldn't think at all. It was very, very hard to make good decisions and to make serious life altering decisions in a moment. So getting some help, getting somebody who you can talk it through with and sort of understanding that there's a process you can go through, there are steps you can go through that will help you come to better decisions with this.

Melissa Breau: For those who want the help, kind of thinking things through or who want to maybe better understand how to help somebody else, maybe think through some of this, these kinds of hard choices. The stuff we've been talking about. You are doing a webinar at FDSA. You mentioned it once or twice called Reality: What Can and Cannot Be Fixed. Do you want to tell us a little more about it?

Deb Jones: Sure. I feel like I just need to get all this stuff out. And so I think the webinar was a good way to get it all down on paper and to make it clear and to make some sense of it. So I have, like, a very clear framework where I walk through the steps. You have a dog that has behaviors that concern you, that you're very worried about.

What do you do? So it's sort of like a decision tree, but not exactly, but it sort of follows those lines of, here's, you know, here are all the things we would think about. Here's the path we would follow. Here are some of the options along the way. Here's how to find help if you need it. So I walk through a lot of those steps that lead us to the different decisions we might make or lead us to the different solutions that we might find.

And I think that just getting it all down in kind of a logical order and being able, for somebody who's thinking about the decision to look at that and to go through it for their own situation, I think that's going to be really helpful. But even for people who've already made the decision but aren't at peace with it, and that's pretty much everybody who's made the decision and is at peace with it.

But when you look at the options for what's happened to you, sometimes you see that you really did make the best choice that you could make at the time. And I sort of. I really want to give that to people that I want them to feel like they're not horrible for making this decision, because I think we always feel horrible for making that decision. And if you look at it objectively and you look at the options, all the reasonable options that there are out there in the dog world, sometimes it leads you to this decision whether you want it to or not. So I hope that by providing this as a resource, it's going to actually make people feel better rather than worse about, you know, the whole situation.

Melissa Breau: All right, any final thoughts or key points that you want to leave folks with?

Deb Jones: Oh, gosh. Okay. I think that the thing to say is. One of the things I want to say is that loving dogs, loving a dog isn't enough when you have serious issues to deal with.

I wish it was. We all wish it was. Because I think people love these dogs dearly, even when they feel forced, forced into making a decision like rehoming or behavioral euthanasia, it's not something they're choosing to do. And it's almost like it's not your choice. It's a choice that's been pushed on you. And so now what do you do? You didn't choose to go down this path, but now we find ourselves here also.

I think I would say again, we don't have to give up our whole lives for our dogs. I love dogs more than, you know, as much as anybody. I won't say more than anybody, but I love dogs as much as anybody. They've been in my, you know, they've been my career for over 30 years, as well as living with many, many of them. But we still have to think of the bigger picture when we just focus on that one animal that can lead us maybe to make not the best decisions.

So looking at the big picture, I think is really important. And the last thing is that sometimes letting them go is the right choice. Much as we don't want it to be that there are dogs who are, you know, otherwise going to live their lives in discomfort or isolation, I don't think that's a better choice. And that, again, all my personal opinion here, as I said at the beginning, but I think sometimes making that choice is we do it.

And I know it's why I did it, because I really thought it was best for the dog, not just best for me. And so I think that. That it can be the best decision, even though we don't want it to be the best decision.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. All right, well, thank you for coming on, Deb. Thank you for sharing your story and for providing this resource. I think it's a powerful thing.

Deb Jones: I think folks need it. Thank you. I'm glad I got a chance to talk about it and I hope it's helpful to people.

Melissa Breau: All right, well, thank you again and thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week this time with several of our presenters for the upcoming one day conference on matters of motivation. If you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have a next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free you by BenSound.com the track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.

 Credits

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called "Buddy." Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!