If you've found yourself thinking, "I'm gonna do that differently with the next puppy," or "Next time I'll do this perfectly," you're not alone. Join me, Kim, and Erin for a discussion on what they prioritize with future sports dogs, why there's always something they'd do differently "next time," and how they're tackling things right now.  

 Transcript

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 one of the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Kim Palermo and Erin Lynes about laying strong sports foundations with our puppies and adolescents. Hi, Kim and Erin. Welcome back to the podcast.

Kim Palermo: Hi, Melissa.

Erin Lynes: Hi, Melissa and Kim. Nice to see you both.

Melissa Breau: Excited to have you both here to start us out. You want to just take a moment and kind of remind everybody a little bit about who you are, who your dogs are, and maybe what you're working on with them. Kim, you want to start us out?

Kim Palermo: Yeah, sure. So I'm a professional dog trainer. I'm also a Certified Control Unleashed Instructor.

And, and I just became a certified ACE Practitioner. So that's Animal Centered Education. And I am the second one in the United States to be certified. Very excited. Thank you. So I have five dogs. My oldest is my miniature poodle, Walt. He's a little over 12 years old and he was the first puppy that I got specifically for sports. And we've done a number of things over the years.

Unfortunately, recently he was diagnosed with an aggressive of cancer. So right now we're implementing the Happiness Protocol, which means he gets to do all the things he loves. And I am just spoiling him immensely and he's feeling great right now, which is awesome. Then I've got an 8 year old male rough collie, Lincoln. We got him when he was about 2 years old. He's just kind of our family guy and hiking partner.

My husband has a golden retriever, Fern and and then I have two female rough collies, Jane and Sunday, and they were kind of the inspiration behind this curriculum in this class. Jane is, she just turned six years old and she has like what you would label kind of classic reactivity, what you would expect from a herding dog that is reactive. Learned a lot with her. And then I have Sunday, who is 15 months old.

Sunday came to live with me when she was a baby puppy. Not to keep, just to raise because she was very emotional. She kind of lacked some confidence. We felt that she could really benefit from me raising her and preparing her for a life with a family or someone else. And I did prepare her for a life with me. So I raised her to be very confident and I really enjoyed kind of, kind of what I focused on with her.

Right now I'm not focusing on any sports. I've dabbled in like every sport out there. But I'm really enjoying learning about behavior and you know, through my Free work, my ACE certification learning free work. I use my own dogs for that. So I've kind of just been like experimenting and training them, just kind of in those things like building confidence and such. Right now I am also actively showing Sunday in conformation, so right now that's my only sport. But we'll certainly be doing more things in the future together.

Melissa Breau: Very fun. Erin, what about you? Yeah, I'm a professional trainer as well. I'm a licensed family dog mediator as well as a Labrador breeder. And I own a dock diving and other dog sport training facility here in Quesnel, B.C. Canada. So I'm often busy doing all kinds of dog sports myself or helping in person students with their training.

Right now I've got a whole pile of Labradors and one beagle. So I'm not going to tell you about all my Labradors, but since my adolescent dog class is coming up, I'll tell you about the youngest ones. So Marshmallow is my youngest lab. She's eight months old and she is just as her name described. She's sweet and squishy and her future is wide open. So she's, she might go in any different sport direction.

I'm not sure yet, but right now she's showing a lot of interest in tracking and that sort of thing. We've been doing a little bit of shed antler work with her, so that might be where she starts. She's just a, just a delightful little creature and she's about the right age to start feeling adolescence. But she's acting more like a puppy right now. So a bit of a late bloomer perhaps then.

My next youngest dog is Ralph and Ralph is my special needs guy. He was born with a birth defect in his front leg, so he's, he's had a bit of a different upbringing than my other dogs because we weren't actually sure if he would grow up to do sport things or if how long he would even grow up at all because his defect was pretty serious. And we spent just a lot of time doing happy Ralph stuff and making sure he was healthy and comfortable and not in pain and all that kind of things.

But he just turned one year old last year and it was not last year, last month. I mean, and it was a big, big party and big milestone and we did new X rays and we realized that he's actually physically doing a lot of lot better than we expected. He's still got limitations, of course. So I don't foresee him doing a lot of competing or anything like that, but he is full on adolescent, and he's reminding me about why I created the adolescent dog course.

And he is really interested in doing stuff. Like, he's got a performance dog brain, so he's now doing a lot of. A lot of the skills that I might have normally taught puppies at a younger age and really thriving. So, like, I feel like he's kind of inspiring me to remind people that you don't necessarily need to start sport training really early if you've got a good relationship with your puppy and they're confident starting a little later can still work.

Because he's learning things so fast right now, it's been really fun working with them. There's punctuations of challenging things that come up because he's. He's feeling like an adolescent, and he's maybe a little more independent, and he's… His body is changing and his brain is changing, so he's doing a lot of things that need monitoring more than even a couple of months ago, but it's going well.

And then the next dog I will tell you about is the real inspiration between my adolescent course and that is Leroy the beagle. So when I got Leroy, everybody was shocked to find out about my new beagle puppy. And all of my friends came out of the woodwork with confessions that they, too, had once had a beagle. And, oh, my goodness, I better be prepared for what was coming because it was gonna be harder than a lab.

And at first I thought, oh, they're so silly. It's fine. Leroy is a superstar. He's so drivey. He loves me. He's very attentive. He can be off leash anywhere. He's basically like a little lab puppy in a spotted little beagle body. I don't know what they're talking about. And then he turned eight months old, and all the beagle behaviors came out. He discovered rabbits and other dogs and subtle environmental changes and big, big feelings about things.

And while he still loved cookies, he didn't necessarily automatically believed he needed to go through me to earn them anymore. So. So he was. It was actually really a really good trainer experience, I think, to have a dog who was a lot more challenging and who just had this really sudden, sudden change in his needs. So thank you, Leroy, for the education. He's three years old now, so we're.

We're coming out of that. And he's actually pretty delightful little guy and super social and lovable. And he's doing some dock diving and maybe do some Shed Adler training later this year. But those are my, those are my three younger dogs. And I think, though probably the ones you'll hear more about throughout the rest of the podcast and maybe throughout the class if anybody's joining in that later on.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. All right, so I mentioned kind of during the intro that I want to talk about building a strong foundation for sports with our young dogs. And so I want to start with kind of asking you guys about when you're bringing a new dog or puppy into your home. How do you kind of evaluate the dog that you now have in front of you? How do you decide, you know, the types of things that you're going to want to focus on in that early training? Erin, you want to go first?

Erin Lynes: Sure, yeah. So I think the first thing we want to do with a new dog or a new puppy in our household is build some comfort and build a rapport between the human and the puppy. So for me, I want to be that dog's safety, safe space. They're, they're steady Eddie. Wherever we go, I want them to realize that, like they can count on me.

And it takes a little bit of time to build that bond up. But once you're, once you're establishing some routines and some patterns in your day to day life and taking some of those games and things that you play out on the road, you see how your dog reacts in new environments. You kind of get a feel for what things interest them, what motivates them, what distracts them.

Those are usually not all those very different. The things that are the most motivating may also be the things that are the most distracting later on. But you're gonna see, you're gonna see what, what interests them. For example, Ralphie that I was telling you about, he loves climbing on things. Nobody ever taught him that. He was a handicapped little puppy that was supposed to take it easy. But he's always been his sort of his thing.

He's like, look, I'm a mountain coat mama. So any, any activities that we can do where he gets to, to put his feet on things or he's climbing on things, he, that's extra special fun for him. What you might also notice though, as your dog gets a little older and they're, you know, they're starting to feel more of their breed specific tendencies coming out. Not always first thing when they're a puppy, sometimes later in life you might see those emerging and you might find new interests coming out, too.

So I just. Part of my. The excitement that I get from getting a new dog or getting a new puppy is learning about them and what they like. And of course, I often have my own interests in dog sports that I like to train them for. And if I go about it right, I might be able to share those with them. But it's. It's really fun to see, like, what is this dog's natural talent and interest and how. How can I channel that into something that we both enjoy?

Melissa Breau: Kim? I love getting to know a puppy and, like, discovering who they are. And I love, like, going back at videos and, like, being like, oh, my God, I didn't even know you back then. You know, like, it's so fun. I kind of, you know, when I first bring a puppy home and I'm trying to evaluate, like, what I want to focus on with them, you know, I'll just try a few things.

So some very basic training just to see what their learning style is. Like with Sunday, when I brought her home, I handed her a treat, and she just sniffed it, and I put it on the ground. She ate it, and I was like, oh, so that's a thing about you. So figuring out, I'll lure them to do something, and then I'll put a verbal cue on a super easy skill just to kind of get a sense of, like, okay, how quickly do you pick up on a verbal cue?

And how does that learning, you know, process work for you? And how do you feel about luring? And do you, you know, worry about, you know, bribery at all, or are you just going to follow every treat no matter what? So I love kind of getting that sense of who they are. Once I understand how they learned, I focus a lot then on I kind of just essentially assume, like, okay, you might have big feelings, so I'm just going to help you with those.

So with me, I raise my puppy with control unleashed, and I raise them with free work. And that kind of just gives me a sense of, you know, continued sense of how they learn. But also I'm starting to support whoever they might be. And then I also like to figure out, like, how do you feel about toys? How do you feel about food? And do I need to build drive anywhere?

Do I need to lower arousal anywhere? You know, are you so foodie that we need to work on taking treats calmly? And so, yeah, I'll just play around with those things at first, and that's how I get a sense of who I have. And then we'll go from there.

Melissa Breau: At what point do you guys kind of consider a puppy has maybe stopped being a puppy and become an adolescent? And then how do you kind of think of the phase where like an adolescent then becomes an adult? How do you kind of think about this phases and how do you maybe tailor your training based on the age group that that canine now fits into? Kim, you want to start us off?

Kim Palermo: Yeah. So, I mean, it totally depends on the individual, right? Like, I think some of our puppies mature very quickly.

I had, at my training facility, I had this like, I don't know, three and a half month old cocker spaniel who's like lifting his leg and showing all these like adolescent type behaviors. And I'm like, oh my gosh, you're only a puppy. You're gonna, you know, you're, you're growing too fast. So it's really gonna depend on the individual. But I kind of look for those types of behaviors.

So like any sort of breed specific behaviors, if I start to see some sort of reactivity or something, that's when I'm, that's when I'm kind of understanding that my dog's moving out of puppyhood and into adolescence, you know. But I think it really, it's going to depend like Sunday, I think she went through like two or three weeks of like that adolescence where I'm like pulling my hair out and.

And then she like got better and I'm like, who are you? And you know, I'll play around with like to kind of get a sense of where my puppy is in their development. I'll start giving them a little bit more agency and see what they do with that. So are you going to make, you know, good decisions if I give you access to two rooms instead of one room, or are you going to chew the furniture, you know, and it's going to depend on the individual puppy.

But those kinds of things I find really help me figure out where they are with things. And then even like I tend to with a puppy creating a puppy, if my puppy has feelings, I might even just kind of ride that out and wait until they're a little bit older and then start creating them more. And I find that then they're okay with it. And that tells me that they're reaching that next step stage of development.

But I think we're always going to have spikes and we have to be mindful of that. So times when adolescence is like really adolescence and not just kind of adolescence and when I, and even fear periods, so I, I get very hesitant talking to my clients about fear periods because I think a lot of times they're used as an excuse. But I do see little spikes in fear with my puppies.

And I just. Those phases, I just ride out and I just give my puppy or my adolescent some time if I see a real spike in behavior. And then I'll just wait until they've got a brain again and then we'll start, start working on our stuff.

Erin Lynes: Yeah, so many good points there, Kim, that I totally agree with. There's such a big variation in like the timeline for different dogs reaching those life stages.

And even within the same breed, you can see different tendencies in, in different family lines. Like you mentioned the cocker spaniel who was lifting his leg. We had this lab puppy one time, we got him home, he was like nine weeks old and he started lifting his leg and he was also blowing his puppy coat in clumps. And I was like, this is not something that happens in a nine week old puppy from field lines.

What are you doing? And then like Little Ralph, he's 13 months old and he just lifted his leg for the first time yesterday and we all cheered for him. You did it. You're a big boy, Ralph. So there's signs like that, and some of them, maybe in boys more so than girls, tend to correspond with like puberty types signs, those sexual maturity type stuff, but not always because little marshmallow that I was telling you about earlier had her first heat cycle and she very much puppy brain still.

So it's very interesting how, how that can work in for, for compared to my other dogs. That's a very early first heat cycle, but later brain changing, I guess. So some of the signs that I look for to kind of, you know, see is this puppy tipping from puppy into adolescent puppy are things like increased independence. Maybe they're more aware of their environment or they have like different feelings about things that they notice in their environment.

We live in a rural area and on two sides of our property we have ranch land. And so every day from the time our puppies are little, they see the neighbor's cows and no big deal. Hi cows. They'll, you know, greet them at the fence line and stuff. But there's always this time. It's, it's really kind of cool. Sometime during that adolescent phase where they look and suddenly see those cows differently and they're like, wait, what is that?

Like, Ralph had his cow moment the other day and I was so proud of him because he looked over there and you could just say, you could like, see in his little eyes. He's like, are those the same things that were there yesterday? Like, he's just processing it. And he stood there so nicely. And then he came and he told me about it. And this, when we talk more about my class stuff, it's like it was a classic reporting behavior.

And I was like, yes, he's a teen boy. And he did it. He did it on his first try. But a lot of, a lot of our teenage dogs, like, the cow moment is classic because they'll bark. They've been seeing those cows every day for years. And it's, you know, that's the day they're gonna have a fuss about it. So city dogs may think have things that aren't cows.

Maybe it's the garbage truck, maybe it's like the mailman. It's, you know, the, the friendly neighbor that walks their cocker spaniel down the street every day. And then some one day it's like, why are you on my street? They notice those things. But another potential sign that your puppy is possibly tipping into adolescence would be changes in their social relationships. So between dogs in the same family, maybe between dogs that they encounter at classes or at the park, it might be changes, sort of changes in the social relationships with people a little bit.

But I think more often than not, it. You'll see things between dogs where maybe they're a little bit more flirty than they used to be. Maybe they're. Maybe their play advances are being rebuffed a little bit by older dogs in the family. There could be those sorts of things that you notice. We kind of talked about it already, like the emergence of breed specific behaviors. So the beagle yell, that was a big one in our family when that appeared, and he started yodeling at things that were interesting.

But we have, in this area, because it's a rural area, we see a lot of families that have livestock guardian dogs that they get as cute little puppies. And they are pretty adorable, awesome little cute baby puppies. And then about the time they hit eight months old, they become livestock guardian dogs. And it comes as a real shock to a lot of families because they start becoming suspicious of strangers.

They start being more alert and active at nighttime. You just. It's a very. It's very sudden when it turns on and it's. It kind of hurts the feelings of the people that love these dogs and have invested a lot into them, because they didn't. Maybe they thought that they were not going to get those behaviors. Maybe they weren't Aware that they could happen in that breed, but it's.

It's really a big sudden change. But to people who perhaps are more familiar with those breeds, they would have expected it and maybe been waiting to see those coming. And then another thing that I occasionally notice is an increase in energy. And it might express as increased energy, exercise needs, or it might be energy that's more arousal, intensity, type of energy. So I see this with Ralph right now.

He loves to go for walks, but in the last month or so, it's like, I love to go for walks. There's like, oh, my goodness, like, he's looking forward to that way more than he needs to. And once he's on his walk, his. The energy is the same, but it's. The expectation is, you know, we've got big feelings about a lot of things. So those are some of the signs that I look for where we're.

We're leaving cute puppy phase, and we're approaching slightly, potentially more challenging adolescent phase. How do you kind of tailor your training based on those things? Whether you have a dog that's more in the puppy phase or more in the adolescent phase? That's a good question. Adolescent phase. I'm a little bit more aware of how much time we spend investigating the environment, because one of the things I mention is how the feelings about sometimes familiar things change, but also how they're noticing new things.

And if I see that their arousal escalates the longer they investigate, maybe we don't investigate quite as much. Maybe we'll just try and stay under that tipping point a little bit and change activities more often. So when I'm in a formal training session, I rotate exercises pretty frequently, and I introduce a concept I call a pause button, where we take a little mental break between exercises, very short, just enough to settle things down a little bit, and then we get into another rotation with another exercise.

So sustained attention on any one exercise can be helpful if it's being productive, but it can also be unhelpful if it's causing arousal to escalate or if mental fatigue is setting in, or if. If the adolescent also has a tendency to kind of break off after a certain amount of time. I'd rather avoid that and keep the training segments a little shorter and keep things flowing a little better.

So changing that's probably my biggest strategy, I guess, as I change the frequency of how. What I'm doing and add those little pause breaks in there as well. Yeah, I agree completely. Once my dog reaches adolescence, my biggest focus is on keeping the arousal down. Um, so. And that's regardless of what we do. So if it's a formal training session or if it's even like, I'm walking through the backyard and you're now jumping up and biting at my arm, when you used to just be a cute little puppy that would follow me with a smile.

I'm going to change, you know, what I'm doing, how I'm walking across the yard right now. I'm going to walk more calmly or I'm going to have food with me or whatever it might be that I need to do for that dog. But my focus is gonna change in that I'm just gonna help them regulate their arousal and then help them also with their feelings about the environment.

So whereas the puppy, I'm kind of only focusing on building confidence once I have an adolescent, I'm looking more to have essentially, like, a conversation about the environment together. So rather than I'm gonna kind of just help build, build, build you now, I wanna really work on this together. You know, if you see a cow, can we talk about it? You know, if you've got cow feelings, tell me about it.

Let's work through this. What can I do to help you? And so that's what I'm gonna focus on during adolescence. And then the best is when, like, I mean, my colleagues tend to mature pretty later, I would say. I don't know. It depends on every individual, though. But my favorite is, like, that time when they're like three and a half or four years old, and all of a sudden you're like, oh, wait, you did learn it all.

You do understand, like, and you just see that, like, sudden maturity where all that hard work pays off. So, yeah, that's the best feeling. It kind of gets you by surprise sometimes, doesn't it? It does. Wow, you're doing it. You've been doing it for a while. Yeah, I know. It's crazy when it happens.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. Are there skills that, you know, you start with every time you have a new addition? You know, what do you kind of consider your important things to work on to build that strong foundation for a future sports dog? Kim?

Kim Palermo: It keeps changing. I mean, I've raised a lot of puppies at this point as an adult. And every time I'm like, okay, this is the puppy. This is the one. I'm gonna do everything perfect, and it's all gonna go right. And then all of a sudden, it's like, my next puppy.

I'm like, okay, I'm gonna fix this mistake I made and this mistake I made. And so I would say, like with Jane. So I got Jane about six years ago. I focused a lot on sports skills. I really wanted to do rally and obedience with her. And gosh, she had like beautiful pivot and nice position changes and everything and. But I never worked on her feelings about the world.

And then when she reached adolescence and I was like, oh, boy, I got, you know, I've got some trouble on my hands. That's when I started tackling that stuff. That's when I started learning control unleashed. And at that point, I really. My only foundations I had was actually a ton of focus on me because I built all those obedience skills which were beautiful, but she never took in the environment and.

And then it was almost like her band aid was to focus on me. And then she would become overwhelmed when she realized what was around her. So with Sunday, she has no pivot. And it's so sad because I think pivots are so pretty. And she actually doesn't even have a sit on cue. I'm actually saying that out loud to you guys right now. But I focused so much on confidence, building our relationship.

I've never worked so hard on a puppy with like my relationship with them. So it's just, it keeps changing. You know, it's, it's. I'll always teach like, I don't know, name game and, you know, a good stationing behavior and those kinds of things. But, you know, probably my next puppy, I'll be saying something else, but we'll see. Hopefully. Hopefully I've got it right this time.

Melissa Breau: What about you, Erin?

Erin Lynes: Well, I 100% agree on the changing every time, and I tend to raise puppies probably a lot more frequently than the average person. And it has changed so much over the years. And Kim, just like you, it's a lot less skill based than it used to be. Oh my goodness. I've had some puppies who could like precision heel at four months old, and it was very cool.

But I don't focus that hard on those hard skills so early anymore for the same reason as I'm focusing more on feelings. So the skills I do love to get in really early are like location specific marker cues so that we have a bit of a communication strategy going on. So some specific food marker cues and some toy play skills for the most part. However, because Ralph was not on the same schedule as my other puppies, he didn't, I didn't retrieve with him at all.

I didn't play any toy games with him at all. If he wanted to play with a toy, with a friend or himself. I let him, but I was just very nervous about how his body would hold up to things like that. So he didn't retrieve anything or play any toy skills until about a month ago. And you know how quickly he's learned all this stuff in the last month.

I am in shock and awe about how quickly he learned it anyway, even though he didn't learn that as his very first baby skills. But the things he does have probably a bit of a head start on because we wanted to work on his feelings, confidence building, being happy, being really responsive to when he was uncomfortable or tired or those sorts of things. So I think probably better than average.

I have a little bit better relationship because I was more aware of what he needed versus what I was looking for long term. And I kind of like that approach. So I think I'll probably do that again. But really with those feelings too. One of the things that I. That I've always taught my, my youngsters in recent years, maybe not always, but in recent years is, is the ability to settle without interaction.

So I call it the off switch. And it's like, you know what, Mom's busy, you're gonna do your own thing, and it's probably not gonna be that exciting right now. And just the ability to go from everything is exciting. We're doing all these fun things together, and then now we're doing nothing. And I have to pay the bills, my friend. And just watching the puppy figure that out is a very important thing.

I teach that to all my board and trained puppies. I teach that to my own puppies. Just being able to have that moment where you can relax a little bit and they can relax a little bit early on is a pretty good life skill to have as a baby. What, what roles do you guys. Well, what role do you guys think of, like for socialization. And you mentioned play in there. So play and other like less formal training.

Melissa Breau: How do you kind of think of that in your foundation work? I mean, it sounds like both of you kind of focus on it pretty heavily. Is that fair?

Erin Lynes: Yeah, I think so. I like when I look at my dog sports students or my own dog sport dogs, the things that cause struggles in the early, you know, when you're making your debut trial or you're getting out to your first fun matches are almost never the skills themselves.

They're not the sits or the stays or the heels or the jumps or the tunnels. It's the environment. Can you get to the start line? Can you work around other dogs. Can you handle all of, you know, the noise and the crowds and stuff? And those are all things that we can introduce to puppies and young dogs in a, like a socialization context with way less important skills on the line.

So like teaching them that, you know, the, the human is the safe, safe place. Giving them some games and strategies that you can start off in really easy environments and take to harder environments so that you can help them acclimate so you can judge how they're feeling in those environments and just being really aware of how, how the environment affects their ability to focus or feel safe or, or process cues even.

So I think it's huge. I don't know if it gets as much attention as it deserves, but if we think about socialization, not as much as, you know, puppies wrestling together, as much as feeling safe around a bunch of stimuli and eventually being able to ignore the ones that aren't relevant, I think that's big.

Kim Palermo: Yeah, I agree. You know, I'm going to have to plug another class or another instructor, but I did, I raised Sunday while learning about Amy Cook's playway.

And that alone made such a difference in just building our relationship together. And just so many me understanding who she is. You know, I know the playway is meant for, you know, more like therapeutically using play, but just the relationship building itself was huge for me. I also kind of use. I love hiking my dogs off leash. That's like, if I could choose anything to do with my dogs, that's what I would do.

And I actually think that is such a great way to socialize a puppy because you've got them, you know, in such a natural environment. And then if you work on, I don't specifically work on a recall. I just work on all these little engagement things throughout their, you know, throughout the day, not even when we're hiking. And then they just kind of build into themselves when we're hiking.

And so then I'm building this like off leash reliability which, you know, in two years when I want to go into a ring, I've. I've got that relationship built with my puppy. So I agree with Aaron that it's maybe not always looked at enough or considered enough when we're raising our sports dogs. But I think it's a wonderful way to prepare your puppy for whatever life you end up wanting.

And then I also, I like to do things like I travel a lot with my puppies and I have a very busy lifestyle and I want my puppies to enjoy that so whether it's doing sports or just like we go on vacation together, you know, or drive to fancy camp, whatever it might be, I want my puppy to be. That's a big part of their life too. And if the skills are the easy part to teach, it's the, you know, the, the sports skills or, you know, I say that so generally, I mean, not always, but, but it's the socialization I really think is huge for our puppies in, in building that preparation for whatever their life is going to end up leading to.

Melissa Breau: How do you, you know, kind of tailor your training to be age appropriate then for like a not yet adult dog? Kim?

Kim Palermo: So one thing I've been playing around with, with this is offering opt outs for my puppies and for my adolescent dogs from training sessions with the intentions of building some endurance where, you know, at some point in my dog's life, you know, I don't want them to opt out of training, right?

Or I don't want them to opt out when we're in the ring or whatever it might be. So I use free work for this. Free work. For those who aren't familiar with it, it's using essentially enrichment stations in a way that really helps our dogs emotionally and structurally. So they're set up in a way that is calming for the dog and physically comfortable. And I've been using free work as an option for my puppy or my adolescent dog to move out of training, a training session process or take a break and then come back into training.

You know, my intentions, I'm playing around with this a lot with Sunday would be that my adult dog would have the endurance and the motivation that I've built where they're not going to choose to opt out. And I think it's kind of building that agency that makes training more reinforcing. So this is something that I'd like to introduce in my class, my puppy class. And it's something that I have a lot of like, ideas about where I can go with this.

But I would say this is something I would introduce to a puppy, not necessarily to an adult dog, or I would take a different, different approach to it with an adult dog.

Melissa Breau: Erin?

Erin Lynes: So first of all, can I say that I just want to take Kim's puppy class because it sounds really fun and I love where you're going with it. And I think that your puppies should then go into my adolescent class when they're older, because I think it's going to fit together.

I don't know. We didn't plan that but that's awesome. It's very, it's, the concepts are very compatible. So just to kind of build on that and go in a slightly different, different direction. For the not yet adult dog. What I'm looking for big picture training, but not necessarily focused on specific training sessions in, you know, individually is I want to make sure that all my interactions with my young dog are not high arousal, high intensity interaction.

So it's possible if you've got a kind of a drivey youngster who loves to do things that you could train like nine times a day in different little sessions. Okay, now we're going to work on this. Now we're going to work on that. And even if you spread them out, if all of your interactions are like sporty, high arousal, high energy interactions, pretty soon you are a context cue for high interaction arousal, high arousal interactions.

And it, it's something that's going to become attached to you as the handler and that's probably not what you want. Long term adult dogs don't seem to have that same problem, but teen dogs are gonna be more likely to make that attachment. So when I have time and energy to do many sessions, I try to make sure that at least some of them are a lower or moderate arousal activity.

So we're still learning, we're still having fun, we're still building skills, but it's not going to always be high intensity stuff. Movement puzzles are amazing for that. And that's. I do use those a lot more with my teen dogs than I do probably for any other age group, other than maybe like my really ancient senior dogs. But I just love that they can get a rhythm going some.

It's also kind of an eye opening experience because you'll find that some youngsters get more agitated, more arousal the longer they go through a movement puzzle. Some of them get calmer and it's sort of soothing. So you can use the movement puzzle to assess what their sort of natural energy type is and then gauge the session length to, to be compatible. So one of my labs gets the more we go through a movement puzzle, the more excited he gets, the more animated he gets, he gets less precise.

He just gets like, oh, this is great. I know what to do. So, so I keep them really short for him with lots of breaks. But for Leroy the beagle, he actually seems to be kind of soothed by the back and forth motions in the movement puzzles and it's really good for him. So if we go a little bit longer, he goes from sort of crazy beagle into like sort of a tempered, delightful beagle version.

So, and I, I assume that people know what I'm talking about by movement puzzles. But in, if not essentially it's a two bowl game, two bowl pattern game. You're dropping a cookie in each bowl as they go back and forth. And over time you build up a series of obstacles between the two bowls. So they're maybe going through cavaletti poles or over fitness equipment or over other random obstacles.

So they're thinking about their foot placement, they're thinking about all the little obstacles along the way and choosing to sort of take the longer route that goes between these two bowls in order, you know, to get their cookie back and forth each time. But it's, it's a set pattern and they, they figure out how to move their bodies and how to regulate their brains a little bit for. So for me that's a really helpful exercise for that age group.

Melissa Breau: What about, you know, kind of when you see a dog getting overwhelmed? So what are some signs that a young dog, either puppy or adolescent, are becoming overwhelmed? And then how do you kind of handle that in the moment? Erin?

Erin Lynes: Okay, there are, there are different individual responses and it kind of could depend on where the overwhelm is coming from.

With my lab and beagle background, I'd say most of the overwhelm we tend to see is like just crazy over arousal. They might be way overexcited. So I always tend to answer from that perspective. But other breeds you might be, maybe herding breeds, you're more likely to see like a startle response or you know, maybe somebody's in a bit of a fear period and they're being overwhelmed by concern or worry.

But what I, what I look for in general is that escalating arousal and try to try to interrupt it before it becomes unproductive. So just as an example, a really silly, easy exercise is just letting your dog watch something that's interesting. Maybe you're out on a hike or a socialization outing or whatever and they're watching it and they're very interested. I'm watching their body language because if it stays loose and happy and they're just got a curiosity about them, they can keep watching it.

Everything is fine. If I start to see tenseness or like they're getting more fixated, I feel like that's funneling towards overwhelm. You might be starting to see over arousal from one direction or another. And I don't love that. So that's when I will interrupt that and I do it through training eventually they learn that when they're starting to feel that way, checking back in with their human is the appropriate response.

But if they don't have that skill yet, adding distance, turning away from the item, I don't let them keep continuing to fixate on something that is concerning or overexciting or that sort of thing.

Kim Palermo: So just really watching your dog's body language and having an alternate plan for if things aren't going well is my strategy to add on to what Erin says, because I agree that that fixation, you know, that's something that we really need to be mindful of.

I'm finding more and more that sniffing can be such a valuable tool and also a good judge of what, how our dog is feeling. I want to see my dog, you know, if I'm just envisioning like we're out for a hike or something, I want to see a lot of sniff sniffing and engaging with the environment through their nose rather than their eyes. And of course my dog is going to look at things, but I want them to then re-engage their nose from there.

And I think sniffing can kind of go in either direction, just like taking food could. Right. We could get like frantic sniffing and then maybe that's a concern that our dog is overwhelmed as well. But I do think that sniffing can be a good way to judge our dog's feelings. As a Control Unleashed instructor, I do use patterns to get a sense of how my dog's feeling. So if we're going to use the example of just say the up down pattern game, you know, I just place a treat down on the ground, my dog eats the treat.

When they look up at me, I would mark and then put a treat down again. And then it's just a pattern. So we're just going up and down. Dog eats, treat, looks up at me, looking up at me. So that eye contact at that orientation to my face is essentially a start button. It's a way for my dog to communicate. I'm comfortable with the environment, I'm ready for the next rep.

So the whole idea of a pattern is we're allowing our dog to take in the environment in the predictability of that pattern. So when I'm building these skills at home, I essentially get like this fluency baseline of this is how long it takes for my dog or my puppy to eat the treat and then look up at me. So that gives me good information. Because then when I start going out into the real world, if I see an increase in latency between eating the treat and looking up at me, then that's information to me that my puppy or my dog might be coming a little overwhelmed.

And now ideally I'm setting them up so that they can take in the environment, but then they give me eye contact again and they don't become overwhelmed. But if I see then all of a sudden a disconnection or my dog's scanning and they're really having a hard time giving me that eye contact, then that's information to me that it's an inappropriate situation for my puppy and I'm just going to remove them from that situation and then, you know, work on things at home, evaluate what it was that was too concerning for them and then build from there. But I do like to use that eye contact and how long it takes for them to give it to me as information on how they're feeling.

Melissa Breau: So you both have classes in June. We've kind of talked about them a little bit on and off throughout this that tie into this stuff. Kim on puppies, Erin on adolescents, can you guys just each take a second and tell us a little more about the class, what you're going to cover in that class? Maybe who should consider signing up if there is a cutoff on age in either direction? Can you ask yourself?

Kim Palermo: Yeah, sure. So I'm so excited for this class and this curriculum. I just love puppies and I love raising them. So now I get to like, you know, help raise a whole bunch of puppies, hopefully. So I would say, like, the two things I'm going to focus on the most are some, some control, unleash skills and then free work, but with a lot of other stuff in between.

So with Control Unleashed, I am going to teach a few of my favorite patterns for puppies. So these are patterns that I use when I raise a puppy that are really going to help that puppy build confidence, build a relationship with me, learn how to communicate with me. I'm also going to teach the look at that game for puppies and it's so much easier to teach. Look at that and also take a breath for a puppy who doesn't have big feelings yet about the world, as opposed to waiting until, you know, your 8, 9, 10 month old dog is starting to bark at cars.

So we'll work on those skills and then also some, we'll teach a start button like a chin rest and use that to teach voluntary sharing and requested approach training. So this is just a puppy's way to then communicate not just with you, but other people or animals in the environment. So with voluntary sharing, essentially we're teaching our puppy to share with others. And I did this with Sunday.

This was one of the first things I taught her because I've got four other dogs, well, and a cat who likes treats. So I wanted her to feel very comfortable with everyone getting, you know, food or treats or attention, whatever it might be. And so voluntary sharing kind of put her in control of that. It's so, I think it's so cool. I don't know. But. So we'll do that.

And then free work, I'm going to introduce free work, what it is, we're going to individualize it for the puppies because every puppy is going to handle it differently and going to require different kinds of stuff stations, different heights. I also use free work to teach low arousal snuffling and low arousal licking so that we can use those eating strategies as a way to bring our puppies down as opposed to, you know, just.

I see, often I see enrichment cause frustration or over arousal or whatever it might be. So we're going to kind of do that and then, and then we're going to put them both together, like use control unleashed with free work and vice versa to start getting our puppies out in the real world. And then I'm also just going to talk about or teach some things like, you know, socialization, using hikes, long line work, like that kind of thing, building a relationship with your puppy.

So all sorts of puppy things. I say that this is for puppies, ideally six months or younger. Certainly if the puppy is taking longer to develop into adolescence, a puppy that's a little bit older would benefit from this. So I think after hearing this podcast, someone might be able to decide if my class is more appropriate or Erin's or maybe both for your puppy. And then I also think it's a good library class to like if you're thinking about getting a puppy in a year or two, which we're all thinking about our next puppy. Right. I'm not the only one. So just sticking it in your library for, for when that happens could be a good use for it as well.

Melissa Breau: Erin, how about you?

Erin Lynes: Yes. So adolescence, there's. There's not a hard starting age on this, but if you're starting to see some potentially new behaviors similar to what we were talking about earlier, a little bit more independence, maybe a little more distractibility in the environment, bigger feelings, more arousal, a harder time settling.

Those are all possibly signs that you may be interested in this class, which is a really feelings focused curriculum. However, there are some skills in there as well, because not only do we want to be really aware of our dog's feelings and arousal level so that we can monitor them, we want to give them the skills to be able to handle those things as well. So a couple of concepts that will be covered in the class that were very effective and interesting for the, the students that took it when it ran last year are the interval brain training exercise where we use short bouts of working paired with a pause button strategy so that we're getting little mental breaks as we build intervals of training and gradually growing our teen dogs focus and stamina that way.

We use the movement puzzles to help get some low to moderate level arousal exercise for them and to gauge how they react to those pattern sequences. A big one was the reporting behavior, which is very similar to the look at that game. And it uses the dog's internal arousal state to eventually teach them that when they're starting to feel overwhelmed, looking back at their human and connecting that way is a good idea.

So it's super valuable for dogs who are any, any age when they're starting to become potentially fixated on things in the environment. Maybe it's a new behavior, maybe it's something you've been working on for a while. Like there's, there's a lot of applications to how we can teach them to notice things in the environment, but re-engage with you as the human rather than reacting to what they're seeing.

And then we have some arousal up and down games in there so that we can also work on bursts of excitement paired with being calm. Because almost all aspects of sport training has an element of that. We got to be waiting at the start line and then we got to get fired up, but we got to do our run and then we got to calm down again and now you're in the crate.

So if there's a lot of up and downs and we want our teen dogs to be able to go to class and go to trials and experience those things without becoming like chronically over aroused. Or on the flip side, sometimes what happens is they become hard to get up for the activities if they're, if they're like really good at settling and they're harder to get aroused for them.

So those are all sort of like internal concepts that are examined in this class. And then some of the more practical skills that I teach are maybe new for some dogs and they may be refreshers. So how the adolescent brain works is that as a dog is going into their teenage phase, their brain prunes off the little neural connections that aren't being actively used anymore. So you might have spent a lot of time training something as a puppy, but if it's not being routinely used and reinforced as their brain changes, like physically changes in adolescence, their little connection say, I'm not using that call or give cue anymore.

I don't need that. I don't need like loose leash walking. Meh. We're doing lots of off leash stuff. So you want to revisit some of the stuff that you've taught as puppies or teach it for the first time fresh. So a collar give. We play proximity games so that even though the world is exciting, it's still cool and fun to be around. The human. Leash on, leash off.

For the dogs who bolt when the leash goes off or maybe are reluctant to come back when they know the leash is going to come on, that's kind of a common adolescent complaint. Some impulse control exercises, because the brain at adolescence is not easily wired for that. We need to keep building that muscle. Some stationing. There's some greeting versus not greeting exercises again. During this phase of their lives, we're often going from little cute puppy greeting everybody and being socialized and building positive experiences to all of a sudden nobody on your walk is giving them love eyes anymore and Nobody wants that 55 pound dog jumping up at them anymore.

So we have to make sure that they're okay with not greeting as much as they are with greeting politely. And then another big skill set that comes up at this time of this age group is around threshold. So going through doorways politely like this is Ralph's bugaboo right now that we're working on because like excitement could be on the other side. It doesn't matter if he's in and going out or out or going in.

There's like, wow, like let's do it, let's do it fast. So we want to work on some of those threshold stuff too. So if there's people out there and they've got like older puppy, maybe they're in the neighborhood of a year old, maybe approaching 2. Maybe you've just got a dog, rescued a dog in that age group or you're not seeing any challenging behaviors, but a previous dog had some challenging teenage moments.

So you're inspired to get ahead of them. That's, that's who I would suggest consider this class because it's. We do have a lot of fun and it's. There's a lot of, a lot of different little exercises that you might just find one or two become really important to your day to day stuff. And, and just having those skills in your toolbox would be really helpful. Any final thoughts or key points you kind of want to leave folks with?

Melissa Breau: Erin?

Erin Lynes: So we often talk about how, you know, oh, the nightmare of the teenage dog, they're terrible, but it's really not like that. What it is is it's a roller coaster ride, right? You've got moments of like, yes, he did it. He's awesome. He's a grown up and we're doing all the fun things. He's got his big grown up body. We can do cool stuff. And then these little punctuation marks that remind you, oh, that brain, that teenage brain.

So just like, don't let those little moments get you down. We're gonna, we're gonna have a lot of fun. And it's the, the roller coaster does smooth out a lot faster than you think it will. We're, we've, we've got a plan for that. The first time they blow off that recall, man, it hurts the heart, doesn't it?

Melissa Breau: What about you, Kim? Any final thoughts or keep it points you want to leave books with?

Kim Palermo: I think the only thing I'd like to mention is I… So my class does qualify for six CEUs through CPDT and that's regardless of what level you take it at. You just have like a little quiz you have to complete if it's bronze or silver. And I do think this could be a good class for anyone who's like teaching puppy classes or working one on one with puppies because you're going to get a good foundation on control, unleash skills that I teach puppies and then also all that free work stuff and all the other, you know, fun things that I do with puppies. So that's just kind of a little added bonus to taking the class.

Melissa Breau: So. Yeah, awesome. Thank you both so much for coming on the podcast. This was fabulous. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Yeah. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

Today's show is brought to you by the 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.

 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!