Tracey McLennan joins me for a conversation on how her software background has informed her approach to dog training and led to her framework for smarter, faster, training progress. 

 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 Tracey McLennan about her framework for smarter, faster training progress. Hi, Tracy, welcome back to the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me.

Tracey McLennan: Delighted to be here. Super excited to have you back. To start us off, do you want to just remind everybody a little bit about kind of who you are, who your dogs are, maybe what you work on? Yep, I am Tracy and I really specialize in working with dogs with high prey drive. Thus all I do, I run an online membership, the High Prey Drive Club, which teaches people everything they need to know to get their dog's prey drive under control.

It is a little bit of an obsession of mine and when I say a little bit, I have been living with dogs with a high prey drive for well over 20 years now. Two of them. It was accidental. The first one, it was very accidental. Specifically chose this breed because they shouldn't have a high prey drive. Anyway, that didn't work out quite the way I wanted it to.

And so the first two high prey drive dogs I had were accidental. The last two are absolutely not accidental. So I've currently got two working cocker spaniels. They are a breed who are entirely designed to have a strong interest in prey. They are meant to find birds and sometimes rabbits and make them move out of the way so that they can be shot and sometimes they retrieve as well.

So they are dogs who are meant to have a prey drive. So they weren't accidental. I got those on purpose, knowing what I was getting into. And so I've got a whole load of qualifications. I've got a degree, a master's degree in philosophy. An undergraduate. I don't know why it's called a master's. It's an undergrad degree in philosophy. I've got a bachelor's degree in dog training and behavior and a postgraduate master's degree in applied animal behavior and training.

I have published research in the field of predatory behaviour in dogs and I sometimes peer review for one of the academic journals as well if there's new research coming up because there's not all that much in the field and the. I don't have all that many peer reviewers, so sometimes they will contact me and ask me. I suspect they try not to because it's more normal for peer reviewers to be people working within academia, which I do not do.

So I think they only come to me if they really can't find a peer reviewer. But I have done a little bit of peer reviewing for the journal as well, so I'm like, really heavily involved. And just to take it a little bit further, now that I've got gundog breeds, I've been learning about gundog training. My previous dogs weren't gundog breeds, so I couldn't. We've started to do some spaniel working tests, partly because it's very interesting to me and partly because it's a way of helping me deal with the leftover trauma from one of my dogs.

He used to put his nose down on scent and he would disappear and sometimes be lost for hours. And he. Although we did resolve that, and although he could put his nose down and not get lost, I still find it quite traumatizing to like, look out over a massive expanse of ground and think, and I dog could get lost here. And so spaniel working tests all take part.

In the UK, the working tests are there's no live shooting, the dogs retrieve toys, gundog dummies, and nothing gets shot. So it's like quite a good introduction auction for somebody like me, where I am just standing where they hold them and looking out over the ground. I often am like, oh, you could so lose your dog here. This just looks awful to me. Everybody laughs at me.

But anyway, that's a big part of the reason why I am, why I'm getting involved in that sport. So it's been great so far and we've done a couple of tests. The season's over now for this year, but gave me lots of great information for what to. What to work on for next year. So, yeah, awesome. So, as you mentioned, you're most well known definitely for your work with dogs with excessive prey drive.

So when you're looking at a problematic behavior driven by something that's that innate, just kind of like genetically built into the dog, how do you even break that down? What factors are you looking at? So I've got a framework which pretty much covers it for every dog. So I would start off by. By observing the dog because you've got to understand what that individual dog wants to do.

They're all slightly different. Even dogs of the same breed will be slightly different. So with my spaniels, they're closely related. One, the older ones, the ant of the younger ones, they're closely related, came from the same breeder, spent their first eight weeks of the same house and are closely related. But one, the older one's much more sinful focused than, than the younger one. He would, he's more interested in what he can see and he will, he's, he is still a working red spaniel.

He is interested in what he can smell, just not quite as much as my older spaniel. So even with, even with dogs within the same breeds that have had very similar upbringings and are closely related, you get differences. So the first thing is to look at observing what the dog actually wants to do. What are they doing, what is it that they hope to do? If they could, you know, if, if you didn't interfere at all, what would they, what's the likelihood that they would do?

Then I would look at management because reducing risk to the dog, to the person, to the wildlife is really important. So management is, that's how you do that. And then we would look at giving the dogs outlets because it's innate behavior. You can't just not, you can't just stop it. You can't take it out of the dog in the same way as if I said to you, well, I don't want my dogs to prefer cheese.

I want my dogs to train for kibble everywhere. And I, most reward based dog trainers would just like see, well, you can't have that. Your dogs always, most dogs will prefer cheese over kibble. The vast majority, there will be a, there's a few that much prefer kibble, but most of them are going to go for cheese. And most of the time we just accept that and we say, well if, if we need a really good reward, we'll use cheese.

And if we don't need such a good reward, we'll use kibble. But with prey drive, often what people want to do is get rid of it and you can't do that. So, so there is work to be done to find suitable outlets for the dogs that are safe, as safe as possible for everybody involved. And that's like really important because otherwise what you find is a bit like hunger.

If you don't feed your dog, their hunger goes through the roof. If you don't give your dog an outlet for their prey drive, their interest in pre will tend to get higher, not lower. So that's, that's the third thing that I would do. The fourth thing is to look at teaching self control. Dogs that can control themselves have a much easier time being around prey than dogs that can.

So teaching them self control is important. Fifth thing is trained behaviors, not mass. I don't, I don't believe you need masses of trained behaviors to deal with prey drive. An emergency stop, a turn, a come in this direction rather than keep going in that direction and a recall or I don't think you need more than that. There's plenty you can do but for day to day life you don't need to train more than those three.

And the last thing that I always help people work on is their mindset. Because like almost always, people did not intend to get a dog with a high prey drive, even if the dog, even often if the dog has been selectively bred to have a strong interest in pre. It's common in my experience for people not to put that like, not to necessarily have understood how that's going to impact on their walks.

And, and so, so it's common. People who come to work with me typically are people who are struggling with their dog's prey drive. So we do some mindset work because it's not like, it's not like some behavior issues where if you like help the dog resolve their emotional state, the problem disappears on its own. For some things, prey drives don't like that. It's never going to disappear. So there's a, there's an element of this is the dog you have.

And mindset work really helps people to view that more positively rather than seeing it as a burden to that. Those are the things that I work on with everybody really.

Melissa Breau: So how do you go from that then to building out an actual training plan?

Tracey McLennan: So before I got into dog training, in fact before I ever had dogs, I worked in IT as a developer. So I had a job as a developer for 22 years.

And then when I got made redundant and I started my dog training business, I kept that work on. I wrote my own website and online learning platform just because I was interested. I loved my job. I didn't get made redundant for a lot. Like I wasn't happy to be made redundant. I was really unhappy about it. I loved my job and I decided that if I was going to work in dog training, I was going to keep that work in my life.

So I kind of designed my business to allow me to do that, which has been great. So I've been, I have been working as a developer since 1997. That was when I started my job and that predated me having dogs. So for me, building out a plan to be an individual thing for almost everything, even for things like dog sports where what you train is prescribed by the rules of the sport, the plan still got to be individual because you have to think about where you are at the moment, you and your dog, where are you right now?

What training is your dog already got? What do they know? What are they worried by? What sorts of environments are they happy in? All of that happens. So I would take into account all of that and almost go into it like an IT project life cycle. So start with the what are you hoping to get? Where are you now and what do you need to do to get to where you want to be?

Do the training, do the build, so do the training of the dog. Then start to add in like things like distractions, you know, distance, duration, those sorts of things. But they then will show you like where your training is not working very well and then you can go into that whole debugging cycle that anybody that has ever worked in it is very familiar with before you get and hopefully catch as many of the holes in your training as possible before you do something like go into the world or take your dog to a trial.

Because those will show more, those will sure show more holes in your training for sure. Any live environment or test type environment will show you more holes in your training. So I treat it like, I treat it like that, like an IT build and that's always worked for me. My first dog, he did have a high prey drive but he also for a while was very aggressive towards other dogs because I didn't know anything about dogs and I didn't.

I knew a few dog trainers and I was in contact with a few people on the Internet pre first social media days on the old fashioned forums. I was in touch with a few people there when his problem started. What I found was that people that I met in the street or in the park would say to me, you need to make that dog understand that what he's doing barking and lunging other dogs, that's not acceptable.

You need to do something to make him stop doing that. And I kept on saying I don't look, but the problem is he doesn't like other dogs. I don't understand how scaring him into not making a noise is going to feel fix that. And they would say to me, well it won't but nothing will ever fix that. I was like, I don't understand why not? And I didn't know anything about dogs, I don't understand why not.

I used to like dogs, then something bad happened to him and now he doesn't like dogs. But I can't. I help him get over that concern that he has. So it made no sense to me and the dog trainers I knew Were had some great advice from dog trainers, but it was all about management. It was all about how to keep things safe, which is important. He was a great big bull breed dog and that was, that was important.

But everybody's advice was, you will never fix this. Just keep him away from other dogs for the rest of his life. And again, I was like, I don't understand how people can know that if somebody, if I was presented with a problem at work and I said to the users, yeah, well, that's a really big problem to fix. So we're not going to bother just like, I don't know, come up with a workaround and hire a bunch of extra people to maintain the workaround, but we're just not going to bother fixing that because that's hard.

That would have just been unacceptable to me. That's just, that was, that would be unacceptable in that job. Completely unacceptable unless there was a very good reason for it. And like, occasionally that sort of thing would come up, but it would, you'd reach that decision after a lot of work, not like just off the top of your head. So that was kind of what got me started down that road because I just started like that.

Well, I'll just treat it like it's a work problem then. If I can't find people to be sensible to help me in what I consider to be sensible fashion, I am going to treat this like a work problem. And that's what I did. Now that that dog did get completely over his problem with other dogs and he became. Today he is still, he died in 2012. Today he is still the best dog I've had with other dogs.

None of the others have even come close to how good he was with other dogs. And you know, there was a lot of, I did get a lot of support, I did a lot of learning to help me implement the various parts of my plan because I just, I didn't have the knowledge to do what I needed to do. But I, but what I did have was the knowledge that just because something's difficult doesn't mean that it's impossible.

And you can't just like give up at the first hurdle and decide up front that something's impossible. And that was because I had, because of the job I had, it just wasn't acceptable to like, say, you know, that's too hard. We're not, we're not going to touch that. Just, just carry on dealing with whatever that problem is, you know. And I worked in financial services and in the UK that's quite heavily regulated.

So there are financial implications for companies as well. If they don't resolve their IT problems, they get fined by the regulator because, you know, it's not considered acceptable to, like, some. Some IT problems would con people out of money inadvertently. But like, for some of the IT problems we dealt with, people then weren't getting the money that they should. So it was important that, like, folks were fixed.

So that was. That was where I started. And that's still what I would do. I just. I treat it all like. Well, it's almost like a puzzle. And I see problems. A puzzle. And so is resolving issues with dogs. They're more emotional because you care about your dog so much. But that's what I would do. I'd build out the plan based on, where are we now? Where do we need to be?

And start from there. So how do you. When you take something like that, especially for a big problem like working with a dog who has more prey drive maybe, than is ideal, how are you measuring success? How do you kind of figure out that things are working? So success, again, is really individual. So I work with some people where what they want to work on is the dog's behavior on leash.

The dog's just hard to manage in some places on leash. See if there are squirrels around or something, and the dog just like, really starts barking and lunging. It's very hard to manage. And the person just. They only want to work on that. That's what they're there for. So we'll come up with a plan based on that. And the success of that plan depends on is the dog's behavior improving when they're on a lease and there are squirrels around?

Other people don't want to work on that. Other people want to work on. Well, I, you know, I love to go hiking with my dog, and I want to be hiking on trails going long distances. I would prefer the dog to be off leash because I don't like. Some of the trails are quite technical. I don't want to be handling. Handling a leash ideally, but this dog is a dog who may just take off after something.

And in some. Because it's. Because I work online and it's an international business. There are some people who are saying, well, it's really not safe. Some of the wildlife out here is a risk to my dogs. I don't want them. I don't want them taking off even for a short period of time. I don't want them to be out of sight at all in case they encounter some sort of dangerous wildlife.

So then that's a whole different measure of success. The management with those dogs is different because of the risk involved. Do you know, the success of that training, like, depends on lots of different factors. So maybe it's, you know, perhaps we find a way to make walking on a leash more comfortable for places where it just really isn't going to be safe for the dog to be off leash.

Perhaps a person learns to judge more easily when it's safe to have the dog off leash and on leash, and then they do that, they switch around. So the success of it really depends on each person on the goal, what the person's hoping to get out of it, and where they are now really measuring success depends on that. Just like it does. Just like it always doesn't work.

Depends. You know, when I measure success at my website, for each development I do, it depends what I'm trying to do with it, how I would measure success. Yeah, yeah. What about when things just feel like they keep going sideways? Like you have a plan, you're trying to follow the plan. Maybe things go great in practice, but then like you said, you have the dog out on leash and suddenly, you know, it all goes, you know, the wrong way.

Yesterday it was fine, and now today it's like you've never trained the dog. So this is, again, this is part of that practice of that's quite a normal thing to happen when you're training dogs where one day it's all going brilliantly, everything's fantastic, the next day you feel like you can't, you know, you feel like you've never seen a dog before and you've certainly never trained one before.

So to me, that's just a normal part of making those sorts of changes in life is you almost go round a kind of iterative circle of, okay, well, that was a problem. And why might that have been a problem? What, what was different between yesterday and today? That might have meant that yesterday went really well and today went really, really badly. And then what can I do to make tomorrow more like yesterday and less like today?

So it's that whole process of, rather than seeing that was just an awful disaster. I'm going to give this up because it's clearly not working, is to. To develop that way of looking at it, as in that went wrong. And that's useful information to have because it's the same with, like, almost any sort of training that you do. You're going to live through that sort of roller coaster of now it's going really, really well.

And I can see how brilliant this is going to be? Oh, now, now it's not working at all. And in my experience, what often happens with people because of, like, the way our brains work, it's common to hold on to the bad times. That, like, that's why I'm doing spaniel training with my spaniels, is because of my tendency to hold on to those few times that my dog got lost, which were far fewer than the times he didn't get lost.

But. But because of the way our brains work, you hold on to the bad times much, much more than you do the good times. So sometimes when I start working with somebody and they say, well, I have this problem, my dog will always do aches. And then I might say, right, so for the next week, every time your dog does the thing, I want you to come into my forums and I want you to describe the situation when it happened.

Don't worry about filming it. Just describe where you were, what happened, what was the weather like, you know, where had you been. Just describe as much detail as you can. And often when I ask people to do that, they'll come back and they'll tell me a story about a time it happened in the past, or they'll show me a video and say, well, it almost happened here, but it didn't.

Or. And I'll say, well, that's great, that's great. But for the next week, if you could just describe every time it happens. And what often comes up is, whatever the thing that always happens when you start looking for it, it's not, you know, it just doesn't happen as often as you think. And so that sort of developing that resilience to see that it's not happening all the time and to work through, keep working through each iteration of the problem until eventually you get through it all together.

And factors like, well, the difference between yesterday and today was yesterday the wind was blowing the deer scent away from us and so my dog could concentrate on what I was asking them to do. And today the wind was blowing the deer scent into my dog's face, and so they couldn't concentrate on anything apart from the deer scent. So as you go through, eventually the wind direction shouldn't produce quite as many distractions for the dogs, if that makes sense.

Melissa Breau: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So we've obviously been talking about it kind of in the context of the thing that you do most of your stuff with, but, you know, if we were to take that approach and kind of try and apply it to other types of training, other things that we want to do with our dogs. How do you. How do you do that? How do you take that framework and build it out with a different type of training problem?

Tracey McLennan: So, yeah, I. So what you do is. It's in my, you know, in my head. It's just the same for everything, Whether it's a problem, whether I want to teach the dog to, I don't know, sit or be able to, like, do a retrieve, even if they can smell a deer nearby or whatever it is. Then I would say, what can you do? What can we do right now?

What have we already got? What do I know? What does the dog already know? What have we already got under our belts? And what. Where are we aiming to get to? You know, if you're teaching sit, where are you. Where do you need the dog to sit? Just at home. Is this just. You sit in the kitchen when I'm making dinner and you don't move from your spot while I make dinner?

Is that the only time this dog needs to sit or do they need to do something like. I have a. I have a process for getting down hills with my younger cocker on leash because he's very excitable and he finds it hard to walk next to me if there's a lot of wildlife scent. So we have a set strategy where he sits and waits and I walk down.

Then I call him next to me and he sits and waits, and then I walk down a little bit and then I call it. And that's easier for him. It's easier to control himself if he can sit still. So we take it in turns to go down steep slopes so that he doesn't pull me when I'm walking and my footing's uneven? It's just to stop me getting dragged off my feet on uneven footing when I'm going down a hill.

So do you need the dog to sit in circumstances like that where there are massive distractions around, the arousal is through the roof and you still need them to. What. What is. What does sit look like for you? So that's that I'd start there. What can we do already? What do we need this behavior to look like? Ideally? Where are we aiming at? Or do I need to get this dog?

Does the dog need to sit in an obedience competition and there'll be, like, a bunch of other dogs all sitting around them? Do they need to be able to do a set stay when I walk away from them and there's a bunch of strange dogs all around them? Is that what they need? Is that where I'm going to. With this set behavior that I'm training. So I'd start there and then look at the stages, break it down, work out how you're getting from here to here, do the training and then expect that whenever you start to add something new in, like, say your dog just needs to sit in the kitchen while you're getting dinner.

So say you need to add something new and they've got the set. Brilliant. But you reach for their bowl to get out of the cupboard and instantly that changes things. Dogs back up, feet up on the worktop. Where is my dinner? So then you need to look at. Right, so, okay, that. Now that doesn't work. I need to train myself a little bit more with that distraction of reaching up into the cupboard.

The dog understands how to sit, but they don't understand that you need to still sit when you get the dog, when you get the food to pull down. And just working through each stage like that until you get from where you are now to where you want to be and. And then expect that there's maintenance involved in that. You know, it's like, just because you've trained it once and it's working now, and it's consistently working now, things will come along that will, like, break your training.

So just like with any system, it's like. It's like with any system when you make your nice, fancy new website and it all looks amazing, then, I don't know, you'll need to upgrade your. You'll need to upgrade the platform that it sits on in some way, because there'll be changes made to cope with potential, you know, security threats. You'll need to do changes to cope with all of that.

And it's the same with dog training. Things will come along to disrupt anything you've trained your dog to do. Sometimes things that you do yourself will break your training. Like, I routinely, routinely undo some of my training because take my dogs, particularly the older one, the younger ones, a little bit too young to have too much free reign in the woods where I live. But with my older spaniel, I routinely take her into the woods where there's lots of wildlife, and I say to her, off you go and run around.

And so sometimes she'll encounter birds and deer when, you know, she's just running freely. The deal is, she's not. Like, if she was going to chase them for five miles, get and lost, that I would not be just saying to her, off you go. But she is quite well trained enough now that she will just come back when she encounters something and so that's fine. But she's not ever close enough.

She's not as close as she would need to be if I was to take her to a working test. So like routinely I have to redo my training like repeatedly over and over again because what I do in our spare time and does it. I take my dog into environments where there's birds and wildlife and I say to her, off you go, just have a good time and run around and enjoy yourself.

And when we're doing tests, she needs to stay very close to me and she ideally needs to search in a, in a quite a defined pattern. But that's okay. I just redo the training all the time. It's not like, it's not a massive. It's not the problem that I was led to believe, believe it would be if you break your training. I find that I just, I just redo it.

I'm sure it would be easier if I never let her run freely, but then, you know, that would be. She likes running freely and I like her enjoying herself and I do think it's good for her stress levels to be able to run freely. So, so I, so I let her with, you know, with safety parameters in place. So yeah, that same. Yeah, that's how you take it and apply it.

Melissa Breau: What about, you know, kind of thinking through like it all sounds really simple, right. But a lot of people still manage to get stuck kind of in that trial and error and their trying to get something trained and they're playing with something and it doesn't work and they're playing with something and it doesn't work and you know what I mean? So why do you think so many people kind of get stuck in that system instead?

Tracey McLennan: Yeah. Do you know ever when I read your question, I was like, that is a great question. I am fully convinced that the reason people get stuck in that. Well, I've tried this and it didn't work and I've tried this and it didn't work and I can't make any progress at all. So I think there are a few things that go on. One thing that sometimes happens is they just don't have enough extra input to help them think of something new to do.

Because like when I'm saying oh yeah, well and I just think of the next thing and then I do that, that's like, I've got a lot of experience. I've got a lot of experience of problem solving. I've been doing that for a long, long time now. So that's relatively easy for me to do now. But when I, when I was younger and I was still learning all of that, then what I would do at work when I got stuck was I'd go and I'd ask somebody else and I'd say, well, I've been doing this and now I'm stuck, I don't know what else to do.

And they would go, oh yeah, well, have you tried this? And this and this? And so I'd go away and I'd try the things that they said and usually one of those things would work. And similarly, when I started out with dogs, I kind of knew what I wanted to do, but I didn't have the skills yet to do it. So I remember, I remember this so clearly.

When my first dog was really aggressive towards other dogs, I went to this in person. Well, they were all in person workshops then because this technology didn't exist. Everything was an in person workshop. So I went to this workshop and the morning of it was about calming signals. And I literally stood and watched this morning. Women with my arms folded like, what a load of rubbish. My dog does none of that.

And she talked about calming signals. My dog doesn't do any of that. He just sees a dog and immediately launches himself at it. Because that was my perception of what he did. But then I went home after the workshop and the next time I was out walking and it was really stressful because she'd let. There were dogs in the room that were loose together. And at that time my dog was so aggressive that I was like, I couldn't stand to see dogs greet each other because all I could think about was a fight breaking out.

So I was really stressed for a lot of him turning away a lot of the time because I was expecting there to be bloodshed during this workshop and there wasn't. So that's actually quite rare. But I didn't know that. So anyway, I watched her just dismissed completely every word that she said. But when I went home and I started looking at my dog on walks, I realized that in fact he was doing a lot of the things that he.

She said they would do. And then that gave me. That gave me new ideas. So then when I noticed that if he saw a dog in the distance, he'd put his nose down and start sniffing in a bush. Then I went, right, brilliant. I'm going to encourage that by throwing biscuits in the bush to encourage him to do more of that so that he does less of the launching himself at them.

That really changed things for me and I did meet randomly, met the speaker years and years and years later. Heel work to music competition because I did that for a wee while with that aggressive dog. And I had a younger one who was a little bit better and competed in that sport for a little while. And I met the woman who also competed in it, and she didn't.

Obviously she wouldn't remember me, but I remembered her and I went over to her and I said, I owe you a massive apology. And I told you told her what I had. I told her that I'd been there and I told her what I thought. And I said to her, but I realized you were right. You realized how right you were. So sometimes what you need is more input.

You just don't have the knowledge to do the problem solving. So you just need to get more input from somebody or from somewhere or get a new idea. So sometimes it's about ideas, but sometimes, and I would say more commonly, it's not about ideas, sometimes it is that when people make a change and things go wrong, because whenever you change something, no matter what you're training, whenever you change something, like the getting the football out the cupboard, whenever you make a change, then your training will at least suffer a little bit.

It might not fall apart entirely, but it will suddenly not be as good as it was. And for an awful lot of people, that experience is so awful that it causes them to give up and almost they get stuck. It's not so much like they do get stuck in this. They'll say, well, I've tried that and it didn't work. And I tried that and it didn't work, and I tried that and it didn't work.

But I think what is often happening is they're not trying it for enough to work through until it does work. They're trying it for quite a short period of time. And it's not like that people are deliberately just giving up. It's that they don't realize that there's a process to go through. And they don't realize always that it's normal for things to fall apart. People like, in my experience, people do not necessarily realize that.

And then even if they do, they're so emotionally involved because we all are so emotionally involved in what our dogs do. That pushing through it feels awful because I'm constantly saying to my clients, right now, we need to move on. Yet that's going brilliantly. That's so. Yes, look at that. That's so impressive. Let's move on. And sometimes it takes quite a lot of encouragement for people to move on.

And it's just because when you move on, it doesn't work as well and that feels horrible. So I think that's where people get stuck as much as they just need. You just need to somehow generate a new idea. The force you're. That does happen and it happens more. The less experience you've got, the more that I'm completely stuck and I don't know how to generate a new idea.

That happens more often. But also the feeling of being stuck is sometimes it's just a feeling you're not stuck at all. You're not stuck at all. It's just that you feel stuck. But feeling stuck causes people to give up and then see, well, this is just too hard. I can't get past this problem, whatever the problem is, you know, whether it's something to do with the dog's behavior or whether it's a training problem, you know, like, I'm working through with my older spaniel.

She's little, she's little for a cocker. She's only just less than 8 kilos. And in spaniel working test, they have to retrieve a 1lb gundog dummy, which is quite a big thing for her to put in her mouth. Them pick up, she has to lift them right in the middle or they cause her head to twist. The weight makes her head twist to the side. She has to open her mouth.

They're not comfortable, basically. They're just not that comfortable for her to carry and she doesn't like them all that much. So we've been working through her tendency when I send her and there's a big dummy to just run away and hunt for a wee while to make herself feel better because it's hard. We've been working through that and I'm quite confident that she'll learn to. You lift those up, she'll learn to enjoy them.

And I'm confident because I've worked through many training problems with a bunch of dogs, you know, over a period of 20 years, and I know she's physically capable of doing it. If she wasn't, you know, if she was like a two kilo dog, I probably wouldn't like be doing this. But she's, she can lift it. It's just, it's, it's like a little bit difficult for her and because of that she gets frustrated and she gives up.

But I'm confident we can work through it. But I am confident because I've got that experience of, well, this is an issue to work through. And we'll try a bunch of different things, and when we run out of ideas, I'll go and ask somebody else and they will come up with something. They'll help me come up with something else, and then we'll try that. But I do feel like no matter what you're training, you come up against these puzzles and that's how to look at them is, well, this is a puzzle rather than this is a disaster.

And it's not possible for my dog. And we will never. Because it always feels like you'll never get there at the start. I remember writing my website to begin with, and there were multiple times over the course of doing that where I like said, I'm never going to get this working. This is not possible. Why did I decide to do it this way? That was so stupid. But then with each of those problems, I would go away for a wee while was I still had a job at the time, so I'd go to work or whatever, I'd go to bed or whatever, and then the next day I'd get up and I might have had another idea.

And then I would try the new thing. Same with dog. It's exactly the same with dog training. And the way to get through the this is impossible. My dog can never learn. This is to keep generating ideas and keep working through it. Because almost always they can. Almost always they can get through it for sure. There are some dogs. There are some dogs, and there are some situations where you're never going to get there.

It's just, it isn't a possibility for that dog for sure. But I think that people believe they're in that situation more often than they actually are. Almost always you can make good progress. So, yeah, that's a good kind of thing for people to sit with. Right. That a lot of the times, even when we think we're facing something impossible, if you keep chipping away at it, a lot of times you can make a lot more progress than you anticipated.

Melissa Breau: All right, so part of the reason we're talking about all of this is because you're going to do a webinar for us on July 19th called Train like a Tester. But can you talk just a little bit more about kind of what you're going to cover in the webinar and maybe who should consider joining us?

Tracey McLennan: Absolutely. I am going to talk about. I'm going to cover what an IT development life cycle looks like and why dog training, dogs for sports as well as for behavior change fits so well into that Structure.

Why it's a really good structure to follow for dog training as well. I'm going to talk about creating a no blame culture because that's really important. With this sort of work. I'm going to go into risk assessment because one of the real blockers for people is concerned about risk, about what happens when things go wrong. So I'm going to go over a way to come up with a fairly objective risk assessment.

I see fairly objective because there's always, there's always some subjectivity in assessing risk. But to make it as objective as possible, I've got a really nice way of doing that based on it work as well. Because that's like. Because you know, in bigger projects you, you would literally create a document called E risk log. That is somebody's job to usually the project manager's job to manage. That's like.

Because it's important because there always is risk when you make a change and when you don't as well. So I'm going to talk through how to create that sort of risk assessment for whatever, whatever people are training their dogs to do, whether it's for a sport or for a behavior change that they're hoping to work on. And then I will talk about the process of debugging. Debugging when things go wrong.

How do you sort that out? Because it's a normal part of making any sort of a change is like no matter how good your plan is, because everybody, like people, really like to make an elaborate training plan. And the thing about an elaborate training plan is as soon as your elaborate training plan comes into contact with a live dog, it will instantly become clear to you why there are a bunch of holes in your training plan.

Instantly it becomes clear. And it's the same thing with it. We do a lot. You know, ideally you do lots of planning up front, but as soon as you sit down and start with the process of making the change the plan. Yes, you immediately, almost immediately have to adjust the plan on every dog training project and every IT project I've ever worked on. We have never ended it with having just followed the plan as it was laid out in that step by step way and it's all worked perfectly.

That never happens for any for it or dog training. So I'm going to talk about the process of debugging. How do you go through that debugging process with your dog training so that you can get out of the. Well, I've tried this and it didn't work. And I've tried this and it didn't work and I've tried this and it didn't work scenario so that you can start to like, see the progress and understand when you're trying something and it's working.

And when you're trying something and it's really not working, you need to find something else to try. So that is going to be. That's what the webinar is about. So who should sign up? Anybody who is. Anybody that's experienced that sort of frustration in their dog training, whether it's been for a sport or like for a behavior change. Anybody that's experienced that this is impossible feeling, because that's what this sort of.

That is what the webinar is about addressing is getting out of the this is impossible to. Oh, no, actually, let's keep going and see if it's impossible. Because the only way to tell really, at the beginning of that sort of journey, the only way to tell if something is actually impossible is to keep. Is to do it. And see, like when my mom asked me about her after her hip replacement operation, well, I want to know if doing the physiotherapy exercises will give me back the mobility that I've lost.

That's what she said to me. And I said, well, I don't know, but the only way to find out is to do the physiotherapy exercises and see what happens if you don't do them. Like, if you want certainty, don't do them and you won't get back your mobility. In fact, it will get worse. That's what if you want certainty, that's the certainty that you can have. But if you are interested in getting mobility back, which Mum very much is interested in, you just have to do the exercises.

There's no guarantee, there's no guarantee that you'll get exactly to where you want to be, but you could get much closer than you currently are. So same with dog training, same with IT development. It's the same with all of it. You have to, you have to almost trust the process of going round those repeated loops of debugging and then trying again and then getting back to planning and then trying again.

You have to go through those loops enough times, times to be able to tell if, like, how close you can get or to reach a point where you're like, well, this is, this is good enough. I'm close enough now it's time to stop. Because there's always that point where you know you're not obliged to, even if you said it out, say, this is my aim. At the beginning, at any point, everybody's perfectly at liberty to say, do you know what?

Change my mind. The end goal has changed now. And now I want to do something different because that happens all the time. I've worked on many an IT project where you were halfway through it and the people at the top said, oh, no, actually, we've changed our minds. We want to do something different. I feel like lost count of the number of times that's happened, that happened in my IT career.

I don't know if I've ever done it to myself. I've changed my mind halfway through. I feel like I'm better at. Because I am the only one making the decisions. I feel like I'm better at consistently starting a project to make a change to my system and then finishing it. But there's no competing. I've got. I've got no competing. Like other people who are sticking their own, I just decide and then do it.

But it's in a bigger organization. There's a whole lot of. There's way more people involved. Yeah. So I would say it's for anybody who has experienced that impossible, this is not possible feeling when they're training their dog. This webinar will definitely help to give ideas for getting out of that.

Melissa Breau: Any final thoughts or maybe key points you kind of want to leave folks with?

Tracey McLennan: Well, my main key point with dog training is that difficult is not the same thing as impossible.

That's my main takeaway, because people, it's too easy to be told that things are not possible, that it's too hard, that you know there's no point in even starting because you will never get there. And that's. That has just not been my experience with any of my dogs at all. Even the ones where people were flat out telling me that what I wanted to do was impossible, which has happened more than once.

It's not like some of it was difficult for sure, but that's not difficult. It's not the same thing as impossible. So that's the main takeaway.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Tracy. This has been fantastic. I have loved speaking to you again. It's been absolutely lovely, and thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week, this time with several presenters from our upcoming Focus and Engage conference.

If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes, 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!