With the upcoming Focus & Engage one-day online conference only a few days away, join us for a preview of what you can expect, and an in depth conversation on acclimation, arousal, focus, and engagement.  

 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 I'll be talking to Denise Fenzi, Petra Ford and Karen Deeds about their topics for the upcoming Focus and Engage One Day Conference. Hi, all. Welcome back to the podcast.

All: Hi, everybody. Hey, guys. Hello.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. All right, so to start us out, can everybody just kind of remind us a little bit about kind of who you are, who your dogs are, maybe what you're working on with them. Karen, you want to go first?

Karen Deeds: Sure. I'm Karen Deeds. I'm a certified dog behavior consultant. I live in the Memphis, Tennessee area. I have a Border Collie and a Labrador and I really don't do much with them as far as sports stuff, but I do use them a lot for behavior work.

And I will be talking today about an approach called active acclimation that I have been using quite a bit for behavior cases. So I'm anxious to see how well it actually translates into sport dogs as well.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. Petra, you want to go next? Who am I? That's a deep question, Petra Ford. I'm a dog training addict. I have not recovered. I have three labs that I train while Zeal is retired.

He's almost 13, but he still loves to train. He's so adorable. And then I have Zayna, she's nine already, so I'm competing with her. And Zesty is five and I'm competing with him. And we're getting ready to go to our Nationals and this will be Zesty's first time. It'll be my first time doing two dogs, which will be quite a challenge. So we'll see how that goes.

Melissa Breau: Well, good luck. Denise?

Denise Fenzi: You'll nail it, I'm sure. I have three dogs. My little old man is Brito. He's 12 and he's just my buddy. And then there's Xen, he's three and a half now. And we've started competing in Mondio Ring and actually just I'm coming off two weeks of intensive training because Crystal's here. So we've had such a good time. Crystal Wing and her friend Nancy. And so fun to train intensively with people who think like you.

And then the young dog, the Border Collie, is like 15 months old and he is training for herding as a ranch dog for me and maybe for competition. We'll see. And he's actually looking pretty good in obedience. So I might do something with that as well.

Melissa Breau: Very fun. All right, so as I mentioned during the intro, we're here to talk about focus and engagement. So just to kind of get us started, how do you define or how do you describe a dog that is focused and engaged? And what's kind of the difference maybe between those two terms for you? Anyone want to go first?

Petra Ford: Sure. I'll start. Since no one else jumped in, I think, well, my dogs can be. Can appear to be focused on me, so they could be staring right at me and ignoring the environment, but that does not mean that dog is fully engaged. Zayna is a perfect example of that. She will sit beautifully in heel position, look up at me with her beautiful brown eyes, and her little nose is off to the left.

And I know when her nose is off to the left that I don't have her full engagement. So her focus is kind of split. Yeah, she's doing what she was taught, which is look at me, but she's still thinking of something else. So the dog can be focused on different things. It could be focused on the environment, it could be focused on internal things, but that does not necessarily mean they're engaged.

I feel like you need focus in order to get engagement, but focus in and of itself doesn't guarantee that you're going to have engagement. At least not in my sport, with my dogs.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough.

Denise Fenzi: So I would say with focus. I work with a lot of dogs that have focus, but they have focus on the wrong things. The squirrel in the environment, the other dog, the other person, the car.

Things that we don't want them to focus on. They're very focused on it because they want to watch what's going on. But like Petra said, it's not the kind of focus that's reusable. What I do need is to get them to engage with me around that type of focus. So it's not a matter of I want them to focus on me as much as I don't want them to focus on the other thing, which implies that I need them to engage with me so that they're not focused on the other thing.

Just sounds very convoluted. Basically, it. Sadly, it does make sense. Right. I want them to engage with me, and. But that doesn't necessarily mean I have to have the kind of focus that Petra does. I just need them not to focus on the other things. And to. To start, for starters, just to know that I exist. That would be a big plus for sure. So for me, engagement, I'm Assuming it's engagement with me, we could be out for a walk and my dog is engaged with me paying some kind of attention, interacting with me.

We could be playing, we could be working. It's definitely me focused. Where the focus is not. Focus is to the task. So the task may require focusing on me. Healing would be a good example because it's something we do together and you need to be closely aligned with what I'm doing. But a lot of what I do is like bite sports, and when my dog is being sent to bite and such, the correct focal point is not me, it's the activity in front of them.

In that case, the question is, can I teach you to focus correctly? It might be on the decoy with a little bit of an ear to me because I might ask for something different or it might be if you're doing search and rescue, then your focus really should be on finding the person. It's the task that I need. Whereas engagement is a me thing. And good engagement, lots of engagement with me makes it a lot easier to teach my dog to focus on other things because I'm directing where I want your focus.

So I want you to focus on finding the person. I don't want you to focus on the squirrel. And I think to get good focus on work, you need good engagement because you're the one who's going to direct that. That direction of focus. If the dog is focused on the task, would you then you would not. Would you say the dog is engaged with that task or no?

I would. Yeah. Okay. Just curious, but that they. They have an ear towards you so that they're still listening. There's. They're still waiting for affirmation or for further direction even though they're focused on a different task. And sometimes that's. That's all I get is, you know, that I have a dog that has an ear can actually respond to a simple cue like a marker cue or a name cue or.

Or recall cue. So I agree with you, Petra. It's kind of hard. You know, they're focusing on something else. I don't want them to engage with something that they're going to react negatively to. So I work more on engagement and focus towards me versus the task because for my behavior cases, it's not about that type of focus. It's very different from the sport dogs.

It carries over very nicely into how we. We get them to focus on the right thing, regardless of what that thing is. That also makes me think about deb Jones and I used to talk a lot about the difference between attention and focus. So in the old days, and maybe somewhat still today, the way you taught a dog to look at you was to correct them for looking away.

And so you. You could certainly teach a dog to orient itself, eyes and face towards you. But then, as Petra so nicely illustrated, the nose gives away where the brain actually is. And I do not even bother to teach my dogs to look at me. What I do is create paths of work that make it impossible not to look at me, because you won't be successful. You cannot heal with me if you're not looking at me.

It's just. It's close to impossible because of how I move. But looking at me isn't really the name of the game. So I don't have a word that says, hey, look at me. Right now. All I have is, we're going to heel. In order to do that, you need to look at me. And that's a little bit intentional because I don't really want the dog looking at me as a cued behavior.

I want it to be what we do when we're working, unless you are given an alternative. So if you're in heel position and you're looking forward, that's a problem. Because part of heeling is looking at me. But it's not like I say, look at my face or whatever, I don't even have it anymore. I used to. And I wonder how many people in life this makes me think of in obedience, when you're doing the I'm sorry, the hand signals.

How many dogs have looked right at their owners and the person's giving the signals and it is lights out, nobody home. And then they're like, I don't know why that happens. And sometimes I want to say to people, and probably do, or I'll say it right now if I haven't. It's really hard for me to help you because your dog has been taught to look at you. And I can't figure out what's upsetting them if you let your dog look.

Because my dogs will just look right at the scary dog behind them. And it's like, oh, now at least I know what I have to work on because you're looking at the problem. Whereas if I had taught my dog, no, you have to look at me, that actually washes out information that I want to have about where the challenge might lie. So I'm a pretty big fan of internally generated focus, that is desire via understanding the expectation of the exercise as opposed to externally forced focus, which may or may not reflect the dog's desire and kind of makes it hard for me to know what's going on.

And, yeah, it's that whole they're looking at you, but that doesn't mean they're engaged. Right. Like, my dog can be standing there in front of me, next to me, whatever, and all I have to do is look in my dog's eyes and I'm like, I know you're not with me here. I know you're not fully engaged in the task. So then I work on engagement first. First, because I know absent that, why even bother giving any additional cues?

It's not going to go well. So I like, address. Why are you struggling right now? Let me help you through that, and let me make sure you're engaged before, you know, I give you a cue. And I think that's where I know a lot of my students struggle with that. Like, they equate the dog looking at them with the dog being mentally fully engaged. And that's absolutely not, you know, necessarily true.

Right. Engagement is like a whole nother step. I teach my dogs to offer engagement, so if they're offering it, then everything else is no longer an issue for them. Right. And it's their choice. They're doing it when they can and when they're ready. And so there's no conflict there either. Yeah, I do the same. And actually, if my dog is looking at me and a stranger would say he's not attending to the environment, but the ears aren't right.

You know, to me, that's not engaged. The dog actually might be focused on me because there's an absence of focus externally, but I just know it's not going to go well. I can just look down and say something in there is not motivated or happy right now. And I understand you're focused on me, but I can just feel that the energy is not right here.

Melissa Breau: Do some dogs bring more to the table where focus and engagement are concerned? Or is it something that, you know, you kind of need to build regardless of the dog?

Petra Ford: I'd love to have the puppy that just comes innately focused and engaged on me out of the womb. I have yet to get one.

Karen Deeds: It goes back to, what do we want them to focus on? I want them to focus on not the scary thing, not the bad thing, not the moving thing, if that focus is going to lead to.

To some negative reaction. So I'm looking for them to be able to see that. And then, like Denise and Petra both said, is to Offer, offer engagement back to me. And I do find there are absolutely some dogs, border collies probably, that are very in tune with their people, but they're also very in tune with the environment. So you've got that split going on. I mean, I just, in my house alone, my Labrador, if I even wiggle in my chair, his eyes pop open and he's going, where you going?

Where you going? Where you going? Right. Can I be with you? So his is very natural. He should have been a competition dog. He wants to do things all the time. He's constantly staring at me. Whereas the border collar is like, yeah, but the cat. Did you not see the cat? The cat's over there. Why should I look at you? Because there's the cat. So. So his focus is a lot more torn than the Labradors for sure. So it's not always breed. It's, it's a lot of temperament in their genetics matter for sure, but just depends.

Denise Fenzi: Well, let me tell you, I got that dog. Yeah, I do. Ice is that dog. He's 14 or 15 months old, but it's not me he's focused on. It's work. It would not matter who was on the other side of the leash. I don't know if he likes me more than the next person really, but I'll tell you, I'm the person that brings the work.

If I bring herding, anybody could be out there with him. It does not matter if I'm doing obedience. He can walk. He did this. He walked into seminar. He's never been in a seminar for, honest to God, he probably didn't even leave his ranch. I got him at 8 months of age, pretty much stayed there or was in a truck going somewhere. But probably very limited environmental socialization.

Walks into my building with a seminar going on and works like a five year old seasoned dog, like I would say, gave three seconds to the environment and that was it. He is, he is focused on work. I'm just the bringer. Now, I will say that in the beginning it was really, really hard to work with him because he's, he's a complicated dog. He's very, very sensitive. So the way you introduce the idea of work, he has to understand it.

Obedience is not innate to him. He's not, you know, an obedience dog. But once he understood, oh, this is a form of work, and I go to some trouble to make it understandable. I've never had a dog that had this much natural focus on the activity. I've had Belgian girls who had lots and lots of natural focus on me to get to the reward. So their motivation was driven by the toy usually.

So it was, if I do this, then I get my toy Ice more than any dog I've ever had. And we're going back 40 years. It's the activity itself. It is going to be a walk in the park, getting rid of motivators. Because that's not why he's doing it. It's doing the thing. It's really cool. And if I may say so myself, I deserve this. I agree. I agree.

I agree. You do. I have worked so damn hard and like, Xen is very independent. And right now, Ice runs circles around Xen when it comes to focus. And that's okay. I love Xen, but I gotta work hard. And so now I got this dog and I'm like, I'm so glad Border Collies weren't my first breed. Because I would be insufferable. Like, I would be that person who's just like, well, why don't you just pat your side and ask him to come when you call him?

Like, I'd be that person. Right. I'm not that person because I've been through it. But it's really fun. It's really, really fun. Once you figure out the key to the dog. The key to the dog is challenging, but it is not a focus problem. There is an engagement problem with me. If he, if he gets it all muddled, he really struggles badly. But if he understands and if engaging with me is what is required at the moment, walk in the park.

Petra Ford: I think it sounds almost like, Melissa, when you were asking, like, is, you know, are some dogs better at focus? It almost sounds more like you get your. You have a better chance of getting good focus if your dog has some sort of motivation that you can manipulate. Right. So I have labs. They live for food. I'm sure I have an easier time getting focused than another dog that might not be food motivated or might not be innately task oriented like Ice. Because now how am I going to motivate this dog to want to focus on me?

Denise Fenzi: Yeah. And you know, like, if you think about a lab, if you're doing field work with your dog, you actually do have to ignore a lot of really interesting things out there. I mean, I understand that the bird is innately interesting. Right. They've been bred for that for a billion years. But there's other innately interesting things out there too.

So it still requires that the dog sort of pick one thing out from the noise and really focus. They got to go for hundreds of yards, not seeing any of the other stuff. So it's kind of, it's interesting to think about how a dog's breed, it's bad. Not breed so much, but lines, background, what it was bred for help or hinder. Because I know people with labs who are like, I can't trial outdoors in obedience because my dog looks up at the sky, sees a bird and it's over. I would not look forward to doing obedience around sheep, that's for sure.

Petra Ford: It has to do with training too, though. Like, I mean, in field trials, they're setting things up to make the dog fail, in essence, because it's a test. So at the end of the day, even though, yes, you do need a dog that has really good failure focus, but you still have to teach it not to get diverted or not to go off the line or there's so much teaching still involved that's not natural.

Like if there's a tiny little corner of water, like it's just faster to go around it. A dog will go around it. But no, in a field trial, they have to go through that little corner. That's all training. I mean, for sure, it would be almost impossible to do that with a dog that didn't have strong bird focus or the line or the genetics. But there's still an insane amount of, for lack of a better word, artificial training involved a lot.

Karen Deeds: And I'm working with a lot of dogs that don't have any of that. Right. I mean, these dogs barely have air drive for the most part. They have no desire to please people or because maybe they're so worried about things in their world, they don't have a way to engage with the human because they're worried about everything that's around them. And for those dogs, food, just, just creating food motivation for some is where I have to start is I have to have something that the dog wants.

And sometimes that's just, that's distance, you know, it's not just the work, although I love when I get reactive dogs that, that are, that love to work. I can replace the bad stuff with the good stuff. And that's kind of what I do with that active acclimation thing that we're going to talk about. But when I have a dog that brings nothing to the table, it's not like Ice, who just wants to work, or your labs were like, God, just give me food.

You know, when I'm working with a dog. In fact, I've got several in a couple of my online classes right now. It's really hard to get these dogs even to eat food. We're on week three, and I've got a couple of dogs that will barely take food from their owner. That's. And that's really hard stuff to work. That's very hard. It's really hard. Way hard. That's super hard.

And I know sometimes, I mean, we talk about premack and all, but it's easier to talk about it than to do it. Like in a practical, applied sense, it sounds great on paper, but I'm like, well, have you ever actually tried to do it? Because there's certain things it does very well, but damn, it's hard in an uncontrolled environment. Yeah, I mean, I can't let that dog chase a squirrel.

In fact, I had this conversation earlier this morning with somebody with a black mouth cur in an apartment building. Oh, geez. Well, that's gonna go well, right? Because he sees a squirrel, he's on a leash, and she's gonna go flying if he takes off. So. And I can't go, okay, well, let's just Premack it. We're gonna, you know, give me eye contact and you get to go chase the squirrel.

Well, there's not a fenced yard. Now we, we can. Can apply that concept in her mom's house where she's living for the next two weeks, but when she goes back to the apartment now, that's probably not going to work. I don't have that capability. Luckily, he's semi food motivated and probably even toy motivated. But as a reinforcer, those are all things that have to be taught, even to that dog.

Denise Fenzi: You got your work cut out for you, Karen.

Petra Ford: Yeah, you do.

Karen Deeds: I always do.

Denise Fenzi: You do. I'm glad you're out and about because this is the kind of realistic help that people need. What do you do when you're living in an apartment with a dog without food drive. And you got to get out the apartment door for your dog to pee four times a day. And it's, it's definitely a level of complexity that I did not deal with when I was doing behavior stuff because I was only doing behavior in relation to competition dog sports.

So the dog that's reactive. But actually if it's doing dog sports, it brought a lot of other things to the table. And so we had things to work with. Whereas what you're describing is kind of every trainers like, ay. Yeah, yeah. If they're being honest, if they're being open honest, like, wow. That's when that creativity really comes out because you have to have something. Yeah, it's much harder.

Melissa Breau: Much harder. So you guys were talking earlier about that dog who, you know, maybe they're standing at staring at their handler, but their nose is somewhere else. The lights just kind of aren't all on upstairs. What causes that? How do we avoid that? How do we, you know, work with that? Once we realize we have that, what do we. What do we do?

That's what my presentation is kind of about avoiding, actually.

Denise Fenzi: So, yeah, I am personally a really big fan of making sure that dogs are comfortable in the environment before I ask things of them. And I think that's something you better start. When they're young, I'm not saying you don't train them in public and work with them, but learning how much time your dog needs in different environments to feel safe and comfortable, I call that acclimation. I think that's so critically important, especially with the sensitive flower dogs, the dogs who are a little bit more prone to fear than curiosity.

Dogs that are curious, you got a little bit more options and range. But dogs that struggle like they're looking at you, but they're feeling unsafe. And the reason they're feeling unsafe is not because there's something unsafe in the environment, but because they haven't had enough time to look at it for themselves and determine that they're absolutely safe. I made a terrible mess. I won't tell the whole story, but with a dog many years ago where I hadn't really grasped any of this yet, and I didn't let her look around just because I kept her busy.

And she left to work, so that was not hard to do. But then I went to started to compete with her, and the wheels came off the bus because she didn't know how to function when I didn't have toys and food, because I had taught her to rely on those things under stress. And the solution for her and for so many dogs, has been teaching a structured approach to acclimation before work.

So it's not just free for all dog walks all over the place while you follow them on a loose leash, because if you do that, you might be there for eight hours. But it's a structured way of making sure that the dog feels safe and that once that path is set, then I build on that with several stages of teaching the dog to push me to start the work.

And I like that way of doing it because it teaches people like, you go through stage one, they get to do what they want. Stage two, the dog just checks in with you. You know, there's sort of these stages that they work through. And when I was teaching this as a class, I sort of found that the class was split. Half the people were pushing their dogs too hard, too fast, and the dogs were struggling to work because they weren't ready.

They were emotionally being dragged into spaces that they hadn't acclimated to and were struggling. And with those owners, I had to work so hard to just let your dog breathe, give your dog time. And then the other half of the class would be the opposite. They weren't asking anything of their dogs. Their dogs are just sort of strolling around, kind of doing whatever they want, and they have no idea what to do when the dog is checking in and out of work.

And so my presentation really is very much about handling both of those extremes. You can use the same path. You're just looking at it. It's as much handler generated as dog generated, because people tend towards one or the other. They're either of the, oh, my gosh, the poor thing looked away. He must be having troubles. Go be a dog. And it's like, that's not quite the answer. And then the other extreme is, you must never look away from me here.

Look how fun I am. And that's not really the answer. So anyway, there's my answer. I just gave a plug for my whole presentation.

Karen Deeds: Well, then I'm going to do the same thing, because I'm talking about a different approach to acclimation, which is a much more active approach. However, it still doesn't negate passive, what I call passive acclimation, which is like what you're saying, Denise, is to allow the dog to explore and sniff and feel safe and to do those things.

And then I'm not actually asking it. It's kind of like it's an intermediate step between the, you know, the. The lounge and look and to hang out and make sure you feel safe. And then focusing on me because I've added in or I use these little games. I've got four things that I will be talking about in my. About how I use a more active approach where I use really and truly.

It's almost like using props cues, visual cues, and verbal cues to stimulate. And I want to say it's stimulating dopamine. Whether it's the box, whether it's a mat, whether it's two bowls, or whether it's words. Those words have been conditioned. That box has been conditioned, that mat has been conditioned. Those two bowls set up in a specific context have been conditioned to start engagement within that game. And so that's where I'm.

I'm taking that process or those processes and I'm putting them out into public. I've got, you know, a lot of my pet dogs, of course, once they learn these, these games, and it's, It's a whole lot easier with the dog that's reactive versus shut down. The shutdown dogs are going to take a lot longer. They're going to take a lot more. Like Denise said, they're going to take a lot more to feel safe.

So I still have to give those the time to do the acclimation, the passive acclimation, before I could potentially start with a more active approach. And that could be one of the four things that I'll be talking about. So I think that in addition to acclimation, so I go through that process with my dogs, but. But I could still get that look, right? So then I have to ask myself, why?

Because in order to help my dog, I have to know, what is the root cause of your problem? The dog. It could be I could have made a handling error. I could be doing something that's confusing my dog. My dog. Maybe with some people, their error ratio is too high. So the dog's like, oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. Like, they're not confident, right. They're very unsure.

They don't know what to do to be right. My dog could be feeling pressure from, like, for example, gates or from a judge, a person behind them or a person approaching them. So all these things, I would not necessarily handle them the same way. Right. I would say, okay, what is the root cause now? How do I make my dog so comfortable around this problem so that the dog can now be fully engaged and not, for lack of a better word, distracted by whatever is bothering them?

So I think that's really important. I know a lot of people, if the dog's looking at them, they give the down signal. The dog doesn't down. It's like, naughty dog, you didn't down. I think it's way more complicated than that. Way more complicated. Dog training is so complicated. It's so complicated. I mean, we're always talking about, like this concept of nuance, but the thing. But it's the truth, right?

It's just all gets down to the. Well, it depends, you know? Yeah, it depends what. What happened. And, you know, one dog is going to do so much better with one route than the other, but endlessly fascinating. It is. It's very fascinating.

Melissa Breau: All right, so you guys talked a little bit about Acclimation in that last question, but can we. Can we maybe dive a little bit deeper into kind of how acclimation allows or creates a focus? Like, what did. What. How do those two pieces kind of tie together? Petra, go on.

Petra Ford: Me.

Karen Deeds: Denise and I already spilled our guts about acclimation. It's your turn.

Petra Ford: Well, I kind of feel like people, on some level, they want to communicate to dogs like humans, right? So they like to tell the dog whole sentences, why didn't you do that, buddy? You know that. And I'm like, stop talking.

Dogs don't talk like that. But on. On another level, they don't think of dogs like us at all. So when I walk into a store, it's not even a conscious thing. I look around. Everybody does. It's. It's just a natural reaction. You're. It's safety. You're looking to see where everything is. You're orienting yourself, and then you're moving on, right? Well, a dog's going to want to do the same thing, even more so because they don't even know why they're at the store.

And they don't know what's going on, right? And they're dogs, so they look at motion, they smell, they listen in order to be safe. So for me to take my dog somewhere, like a parking lot or a store or even somewhere easier but different for the dog. If I just start working that dog, my dog's going to be completely uncomfortable. My dog's to going. Not going to be able to give me focus.

So just like with me, I need to look around, you know, where is everything? Where is everybody? Are there people with dogs here? Are there not? Let me get the lay of the land. Now. I can concentrate on my training. My dog needs to do the same thing, right? So I need my dog to be able to look around and sniff and just kind of get oriented, you know, get the lay of the land, feel safe.

There's nothing going on here. And then my dogs will look at me and they'll go, okay, I'm ready. I can work now. And only then will I ask them to focus. And even then, if my dog starts but can't sustain it, okay, you just need a little more time. No problem. We can walk around a little bit more. So in a sense, like, they're not that different than us, but people just, like, don't think about that.

Like, I had this crazy experience. So I parked my car. So I was at a show. I got there, I had to lug all my equipment in So I parked my car, I brought my arms full, and I start walking into the building. And as I'm walking towards the door, I hear a car coming behind me. Now, I know that the parking lot is several feet behind me, so I know that I'm safe and this car is not going to hit me.

But I felt this overwhelming urge to look at the car, and I'm like, oh, this must be what, like, the dogs feel like. And then I'm like, don't look, don't look, don't look. And as soon as I stopped saying don't look, what did I do? I turned and I looked. Right? It's instinct. It's not I'm being a naughty dog. It's just instinct. So, of course, if I set my dog up for signals and my dog needs to look behind it to the left and to the right to make sure they're safe, knock yourself out.

Of course I'm gonna let you do that. That's okay. You know, it's ironic. Go ahead. I like you know what you're saying about how you do it. So think about this. You're in a dog training building with your dog, and somebody comes in the door, and you just briefly look up at the person and you go back to what you were doing. We do that all the time, but when our dog does it, we lose it, right?

So it's like, hey, you're supposed to be watching. It's like, wait, you just did the same thing. Or the person stops and has a little side conversation. And some people actually expect their dog to sit in heel position staring at them. I'm like, you can't even pay attention for five minutes. And now you're upset because after 20 minutes you're harassing your poor dog. Watch, watch. No sniff. Watch.

It's like, that's really unreasonable that you're taking mini breaks constantly over the hour. And then you're upset with your dog who's, like, just trying to, you know, a little mini break here and there. It's like, it's. It's. To me, if you're asking it of your dog, you need to ask it of yourself. If your dog is being asked to attend to you, you need to be given equal focus and engagement.

And if you can't, at the very least be sympathetic to the plight of the poor dog. That's what I tell all my students because I make them leave the house. And then they're always like, that was really hard. And I'm like, well, imagine how your dog feels. But It's a good experience for them because it really does. It makes them more aware of what we're asking and how challenging that is.

Melissa Breau: Do you want to weigh in, Karen?

Karen Deeds: And I think putting some predictability into that, past that point. So let's say you take your dog into a new situation, you let them do what I call passive acclimation. And then it's like, okay, now we do the work, but if we're training something new or even something that's more difficult, I like to go back to something that's really pretty simple.

Eating, Eating as a behavior is pretty simple for a lot of dogs. Not so much for every dog, but for some dogs. And so, you know, just the predictability of eating on cue can help the dog to feel more comfortable. And then you apply that to, okay, this is my mat. This is where I always feel good. And you let them look around while they're on their mat.

And then, you know, I play the two bowl game and it becomes another active. It's an activity that requires focus on the game, not necessarily engagement to you. I'm allowing the dogs to focus on something, whether it's the environment, but be engaged with me periodically. But when I start adding some of the games like the dopamine box or the, the two bowl game, I want that's going help the dogs to understand that we're here to do some focus work.

And at that point in time, once I've got a little bit of focus on two bowls or marker cues where I'm actually tossing a piece of food away and the dog immediately comes back and says, hey, I'm ready to do that thing again, then I know that I have a little bit of offered engagement and I have with the two bowls or even the mat, if I lay down a mat, my dog dives for it.

And I know that my dog is probably kind of ready to work, but then I can even use that predictable visual cue as part of the process to allow the dog to feel better about itself because it's very familiar. So you can go from that look and watch and smell and sniff and all that to go, okay, now are you ready to do a little bit of work?

And it might just be eating food and then it might be laying on your mat and looking around and then it might be the two bowl game or it might be the box. So those are, you know, kind of active processes that might help you do some stair stepping into, into work. You know, I like, I like that way of thinking about it. This weekend I was using cavaletti that way.

And it was basically, if you can't trot through six cavaletti and back, you can't focus well enough to do obedience. And to me, cavaletti is a throwaway behavior in the sense that I don't actually care if you do it poorly. So it doesn't matter that much to me. And when he could do that, I started putting a cookie on the ground for him to stare at while I walked away.

And again, it's a throwaway behavior, so it doesn't actually. There's no competition where he will be asked to do that. But boy did it give me information. And from the information, I learned that if he can do his cavaletti both directions, he actually is going to do all right, and then I can go into the next phase. And it was a little hard to do because the lessons were 15 minutes each.

And I was eating up half of my 15 minutes on these checking behaviors. But, you know, I see the force for the trees. If that's how I need to use my 15 minutes, that's how I need to use my 15 minutes. And it was a really good decision. We had by far and away the best work we've ever had in a seminar because his head was in the game.

And it's such a simple thing, like, can you walk through cavaletti and walk back? But for him, that takes a lot of mental concentration to get it right. And when he could do it, I had a dog.

Petra Ford: Yeah. I'm always encouraging people, standardize everything, make it predictable, right? So don't have, like, first of all, have a set warmup, right? Like a set kind of routine that you go through.

Do it all the time. And then please do the same thing. When you go to a show, don't do something completely different. People love to do that. And then the dog's like, I have no idea what's happening, happening here. Right? Just do it the same way. Do it the same way at home. I do it in my front yard. And then as I progress to different places, we kind of have a routine.

And sure, sometimes my dog won't get through the whole warmup, or they'll just get through step one or two, and that's okay. But it's. It's the same every time, and therefore it's predictable. So if I take my dogs to a new location, I start my acclimation. And then within a few, you know, real. After a while, when they're more seasoned, they're like, oh, yeah, got it. They look at Me.

We're doing that thing, right? I'm like, yeah, we're doing the thing. And they're like, okay. And then. And that's only because I'm 100% consistent and the same every single time I train, no matter where I am, all the time.

Melissa Breau: So let's throw another curveball into this. As you guys said, a lot of times, things depend. But how does arousal impact focus and engagement? How. How. How should we be factoring that into this conversation?

Petra Ford: All right, I'll start again. My God. This is what. This is what your topic is about at the conference. This is what my yes. Is about at the conference. I'm gonna put it right back again to we should think like a human, because our dogs are very similar to us, right? Like, I love when people's dog is. It's like, lying down, it's half asleep, it's looking off into space, sniffing the ground.

And they come over and they got tell the dog, get up and let's heal. And the dog's like, hello, I was just taking a nap, or I was just watching Netflix, or I was just sitting on the beach. And now you want me to go from that instantly to doing an activity that requires an enormous amount of concentration and focus, like a really complex behavior, right? And a dog's like, dude, I can't.

I, like, can't. And then people are like, oh, come on, dog. You know this. No, the dog literally can't do it. It's in too low of an arousal. At that moment, it needs to bring its arousal up. Just like, I would if, like, if it's the end of a long day and I've done a lot and I'm a little fried, and I'm like, all right, I'm going to give myself an hour to relax.

And then I'm like, oh, God, I have to do my homework. Like, I can't just pull the commuter computer over and do it. Like, I have to get up. I have to move around. I have to motivate myself. Okay, come on. You can do this now, and then I can do it. So I think it's the same with dogs. It's the same if their arousal is too low.

We need to bring their arousal to an optimal level so that they can then concentrate and focus and learn and be engaged. Same if the dog's overly aroused. If you're, like, a nervous wreck before you're giving a big presentation or you're super excited, you're watching, like, the super bowl. And then someone's, like, asks you a complex question. You're like, I can't deal with this right now. I can't focus on that.

So I always adjust my dog's arousal first before I do anything. I adjust their arousal. I make sure they're an optimal arousal because if they're not, I'm not even going to bother asking them to do anything because I know it's going to be problematic and then we're just going to go down a rabbit hole. And that's my fault. That's not the dog's fault.

Melissa Breau: Denise, Karen, either you want to add anything?

Karen Deeds: Arousal boy, when I'm working, of course, you know, behavior cases, I much prefer the over aroused dogs versus the under aroused dogs.

Or I should say the over aroused reactive dogs versus the over aroused shut down dogs. Because even the shutdown dogs are over aroused. They're not just sleep, they're like shut down. They're emotional. Just like the ones that are barky, lungey, spinny, whatever. And case in point, dog that I just had this morning, the one that likes to chase the squirrels, blackmouth cur thing, Guess what? He's very over aroused when he, when she's at the, at the door.

And so I tried doing a scatter. Not that he really knew the word yet, but I tried putting food on the ground. And he says, are you kidding? I can't eat food on the ground. There's a squirrel. And I'm like, okay, well maybe, maybe you can't eat that, but can you eat this from my hand? And he went, nope, can't do that either. I said, well, here, can you chase this?

And he went, you know what if I can't chase Mr. Squirrel and I can chase a cookie, Absolutely, I can do that. So I was able to take his high arousal state and somewhat put it under my control. And then so I did a few tosses and then he kind of went, oh, I kind of forgot about Mr. Squirrel because this is lots of, of fun. And now, oh, wow, you've got a cookie in your hand.

I can do that now. And, oh, now I can actually eat food off the ground. So I went from really highly aroused down to lower versus, you know, I'd like to start, you know, to make that jump from way high to right down to low to a scatter. But I'd say 50% of the time I can't. I have to actually meet them where they are and then bring them down that way before I actually have a dog that's able to, to be in that optimal arousal state.

And then that might be where I say, okay, now can you do some of these other skills? Can you now, you know, do the two bowl game or if I throw down a box, can you. Can you offer that behavior? And I'm looking for the same type of engagement that Petra is where I want the dog to go, hey, I want to do this thing. And my things tend to be a little bit different than your things.

Okay. I just want them. I want them just to not want to eat the other thing. That would be awesome. Such a start. Hi. Hi. Bar there. So what I like about the examples you guys gave is that there's a misunderstanding that arousal and stress are the same thing. And people tend to see high arousal as unhappy and stressed. It might be. I mean, if somebody tries to break into my house and I call the police and it all gets settled out, I'm going to be in high arousal, in a stressy arousal, unhappy.

But, you know, if the right team is winning the super bowl and if I actually cared about that, which I don't, but we'll just run with it, and then I'm all wound up because the super bowl is on. That's not. That's arousal, but it's not unhappy. If I win the lottery, I'm not unhappy. But I still can't give you my Social Security number. Right. Because all of these are happy arousal.

And I think we have inadvertently, in the dog world, we've made it seem like stress and arousal are the same. And so that gets us into the. Well, how do we calm dogs down? It's like, well, what is a life worth living if it's always bored? Like, I don't want to live a calm life. I want to live a happy, engaged life. But that must generate degrees of arousal.

Or like, you can't have true happy if you don't have arousal. It's true. You can't have real fear if you don't have arousal either. You've got to have it. But let's not wash out emotions like, I'm all for arousal. I love a happy up dog that really wants to push. It does come with challenges because it's very easy to tip over into the point where the dog is too high and now you're not really.

It becomes unfunctional. And then you can even have both kind of arousals at the same time. My own dog, we have massive issues with over arousal. One, I think, because he's addicted to work. So right there, that creates so much intensity around it. But the second is because the Environment overwhelms him. You know, there's a bunch of people out there, we're in a trial. He knows we're going to do bite work.

And where does one start and the other end? Like, which one is the happy emotion generated with arousal pushing, and which one is the stress because of the environment and the changes, you know, And I can't even really, really tease those apart, but I know they're both at play. I can tell by where his focus is. Is he focusing on me or is he focusing both? Like, I'm so excited.

I'm trying to look at you because I want to do the thing, but at the same time I have to look around because I don't know on what's going, going on out there. So again, you know, arousal, just like focus, just like all these things is complex and not good or bad, and it just is. And then what are we going to do with it for our circumstance?

Before I knew what it even was, which I learned from a behaviorist because they know way more than we do. Everything, the answer to everything was tug more. Right? And it didn't matter. So with my. One of my first dog who was. I apologize to this dog every day of my life. He was so adrenalized. How this dog did anything is a miracle. Judges would always look at me and go, I don't know how you held that dog together, because everything was tug more, tug more.

And for his whole career, he had a quote unquote problem that we try to fix. We said he has a distraction problem in heeling because his eyes are flicking every time I heel, and therefore I don't have his full attention now, mind you, he was a pretty good heeler, but whatever. The point being, we never resolved it. Then one day I'm in my yard with another dog, tugging, tugging, tugging, tugging, tugging, tugging.

Put the dog in heel position, start healing. And wouldn't you know it, dog's eyes are flicking just like Tyler's were. Hmm. Maybe it wasn't an attention problem. Turns out my dogs were so over adrenalized, they were, like struggling to concentrate and they were dipping into anxiety. And I think that's a huge problem in my sport. And a lot of other sports is like, I want a happily aroused dog, right?

I like to put my dogs a little bit on that edge. But a lot of dogs spill over and then they have anxiety, which is not comfortable, and then they're making all kinds of errors, be it lack of impulse control, you know, being twitchy, like not focusing the way they should. And then they get in trouble for that. And. But people see, they're like, oh, it's moving fast, and they really confuse the two, right?

And so I remember when the behaviors tried to get me to understand that my dog needed to be a little calmer. And I was like, but then my dog's gonna be sucky, and that's gonna look terrible. And bless her heart, yeah, she didn't give up on me, right? And I finally learned and understood it. And. And I talk about it all the time now because it's still, I think, widely under recognized in sport dogs.

That line between when your dog is happily aroused and when your dog has been kicked over into anxiety and arousal to where they have trouble functioning, then they're getting into trouble for that, which makes them more anxious and vocal, and the whole thing and the wheels come off and whatever just gets crazy. We would always get asked to evaluate dogs that are high drive and highly energetic. And we would get there and we would see this anxious energy versus a usable energy.

There really wasn't anything for us to use, so to speak. You know, there was nothing that the dog would focus on. The dog is, you know, spinning and barking and chasing a toy. But they. But there's nothing that's going to give me enough attention to apply to a job because we're looking for working dogs. And so a lot of people's perception about that arousal. Well, he's so overly aroused.

I said, yeah, but that's not a good thing. This is an anxious arousal versus a usable optimal arousal. And we always want to find that. That dog that can kind of teeter on that edge, right? That can go from. From optimal to a little above and back down. And, you know, you're applying a little bit of a break versus the accelerator. And we just. We just don't want them to get flooded, right?

We don't want them to go all the way over and spill over into over arousal that's not functional. I actually teach my dogs cues. This is. I. I still find this super fascinating.

Petra Ford: So I teach my dogs an up cue, right? Increase arousal. I teach my dog a come cue. And then I'm constantly adjusting the thermostat for the dog initially, right? So I'm like, okay, we're gonna heal.

So up cue till my dog's like, okay, let's go. And then just a touch of calm. All right, you're good. And this is the fascinating thing. So now I do this. Now. I learned it on a dog several dogs ago. He was my experiment I taught, I didn't. He was older, not probably five, six, maybe seven by the time I taught it to him. He learned to self regulate, which was super fascinating.

And all my dogs since then, I just thought, oh, that was him. Nope, I have dogs. Those personalities could not possibly be more polar opposites. And after a while, like, if I, you know, tug or reinforce my dog, put them into heel position and say, we're going to heal, my dog will go, hold on, give me a second, self adjust and then go, okay, I'm good now. I can work now.

Depending on what it is I'm asking them to do, right? If it's a retrieve, they might be like, yeah, good. I can hold myself in a stay long enough, I'm good to go. But if it's something that, where they're like, oh, this is going to be really, you know, I really need to focus on this. They may sneeze or yawn or do something to bring themselves down a little bit and then they're like, okay, yeah, it's pretty, pretty interesting.

Do you find that, Karen, that dogs learn how to, if you teach them that, they kind of learn. I think most of the dogs I'm working with, typically the thing that I get the most is either a yawn or a shake off. And it's almost like they get worked up. They get worked up, we help them come down a little bit. And then all of a sudden it's like, there's the big shake off.

And then they go, okay, now I feel better. What are we doing? And so that's when I'm like, okay, we just shook off. We probably have more of a dog now. And let's try that exercise again. Can your dog eat now? Can it do the skill now? Can it walk by this dog without losing its, its stuff? You know, and normally if I, I get that arousal and they, they do that adrenaline flush, because that's exactly what's happening, is they're adrenalized too.

And it's a matter of getting them to kind of flush out that adrenaline and sometimes that big stress yawn that's, that's vocal, that, that big yawn like that, that's normally. It almost comes with a head shake as well. That's normally when I go, okay, my dog's going to start feeling better now because it's kind of allowed itself to come down. I honestly haven't. Other than maybe duration exercises like chin rest, duration nose targets, or even a settle.

Asking for something like that to give the dog a opposite behavior might Be considered something that I would teach as kind of a calming cue. A duration, nose bridge, chin rest, nose target, something like that. Where the dog has to go. Yeah, that tends to help kind of set the stage for, okay, now I have a brain. Now we can do the thing.

Melissa Breau: All right, Denise, what do you want to say about arousal?

Denise Fenzi: I want to say that arousal is the bane of my existence. That's what I want to say. I knew, and I would also say that I went through it with a dog some odd years ago, and I didn't know what I was looking at. I didn't understand it, and I did succeed with that dog. It took a lot of time to understand and a lot of working through.

And I have often said over time, I wish I could do that dog over because she brought so much cool stuff to the table, and I thought I had mastered it. And now here I am with another dog who's also very cool, and I'm like, you know what? I didn't master this as well as I thought I did. And I'm not so sure if I had that first dog again, that it would have been all roses and smooth sailing.

Because I'm like, you know, once again, it gets down to this. Each dog is an individual, and the different pieces matter. Now, I do think I figured out with that first dog late in her career, how to help her and I got better. But it's just interesting that, you know, they say you get what you need. I kind of feel like I got another dog that was like her, but more.

Just more powerful. And I think we're getting better, but it's so far from straightforward, and the things that worked for her do not work for him. And so kind of the. All right, this is why I tell people, don't learn things one way. Learn them from as many people as you can. Because something that works for one dog and makes a lot of sense can be the best method in the world, but just not the right one for your team.

It could be you, it could be the dog, it could be both. And so stay open. Rather than it didn't work, I want you to think about, maybe it didn't work at this time. Maybe it doesn't work for this dog on this day. There's so many variables. Or maybe your dog is at a 10, and this would work great if you can get your dog to a six.

So maybe look at it again in a couple years. Maybe there are other techniques that are going to get you from a 10 to an 8. Learn things as many ways as you can and just keep your mind open. You haven't mastered it yet. Suck in as much information as you can about all of these topics. But arousal is an interesting one because it was not common to talk about it even five years ago.

I would actually give a lot of credit to FDSA for that one coming through. People like Amy Cook and the behavior folks for really bringing that topic front and center and helping us all understand better about the differences between drive and arousal and being able to look back on our own dogs and go, gee, I thought that was drive, that was actually arousal. Or I thought that was drive and it was anxiety.

And as we refine more, but again, it's a new topic. Understanding that arousal can be driven by happy things and unhappy things. And what works to modify with one dog is not going to work with the next dog. But, you know, just keep your mind open, keep learning, keep taking in information and you, you know, until you find a path that works or maybe won't work with, with the dog you have now because you're.

You haven't learned enough yet. Or maybe let's just all acknowledge that some dogs are going to be really, really challenging for whatever reason the combination of things they bring to the table. So an anxious, fearful dog with a lot of arousal that you want to do dog sports, you might get there, you might not. Because trying to tease apart the arousal from the anxiety from the drive, it's really hard and complicated.

So, you know, give yourself a little bit of a break, but keep your mind open and learning because just because you think you mastered it for one dog, you might get smacked down when the next dog comes along and it doesn't work so well. And that's why I love, I love working with all of you guys, all of the sport people, because I learned so much. I'm not a sport person anymore.

Used to a little bit. But I still learn from everybody here at FDSA and beyond and how it can apply to the dogs that I work with, which are behavior cases, some sport dogs, some not, or most not. But I look at that arousal and I've learned so much more about it and been able to apply all the different techniques that Denise was talking about. Every dog may be different.

Same thing with my dogs is, you know, what I use on this dog, I may not use on that dog. And that's why there has to be more of an integrated approach of, okay, this works for your dog, but it doesn't work for yours. So we're going to do this with your dog instead of this dog. And it's nice to have that information that's coming from the people that actually utilize arousal in a good way.

That would be the sport dog people at FDSA anyway, that are really encompassing and embracing the appropriate type of arousal versus the anxious arousal or the the under the stressed arousal, because that's arousal too. So I'm just very thankful to be able to learn from the sport dog people and apply it to the behavior world. Because, like Pedro was saying, she took the behavior stuff and applied it to her sport dog stuff.

So they're very symbiotic. Very, very much so.

Denise Fenzi: Quick, Karen, can I ask you a quick question? Sure. How many. How many times did you go to the Rally Nationals and compete?

Karen Deeds: Four. Oh, I don't know, I just dabbled.

Denise Fenzi: You did not. You did not just dabble. You trained your dog to a high level. You competed with your dog, and you are fluent in many of the conversations around dog sports, even if you are not currently choosing that well.

Karen Deeds: And I appreciate that. And I want to thank you for that. Four. Four Golden Nationals and four Rally Nationals. So, yeah, been there, done that, won a few ribbons. And I appreciate that, Denise. I really do. And I have to admit, the stuff that I take from sport dogs, I look at these, I look at. I watch Petra's dogs, and I watch Xen, and I go, oh, my God, that dog reminds me of this dog that I'm working with.

You know, I look at a dog like Xen and I go, I hope I don't get a dog like that as a pet dog. But guess what? I have a client with that dog. It's like, this is not a fearful dog. This is not a dog. It's a Bauceron. This is not a dog that takes things lightly. He is a very serious dog. Don't freaking touch him. He doesn't like that.

Doesn't like that even from his owner. So there has to be extreme obedience to deal with his behavior issues. It's not fear. I guarantee it's not. We gotta get Melissa to have us back to talk about. Is all reactivity your base. We gotta have that conversation because it's getting out there. Not everything is fear, and for some reason, we don't like that conversation. So, Melissa, make a note on that, that we need to have a conversation.

Melissa Breau: I just did. I just wrote it down.

Denise Fenzi: Yeah, I think it's an important topic because sometimes they're just. Just. Just a handful and they're not afraid. They're just. They're just. And a lot of them even.

Karen Deeds: And this may be out of the scope of this particular conversation, but some of them have learned to do behaviors because it started in fear. I can think of some big, shaggy dog that we worked with at.

At the ranch a couple weeks ago. You know, she. Hers may have started out as fear, but by God, she's doing the things because it's fun. She loves bouncing and barking at another dog. And then she turns around and mom and goes, hey, did you see that? Wasn't that fun? That was cool. Can we do it again? And I'm like, no, honey, we cannot do that again. So, no.

So, yeah, I mean, they can. It's called habit. She has developed a habit that we need to break. And I don't mean break by. With punishment by any means. It's just a matter of. Yep, we're not going to do that today. So, yeah, Whole other conversation.

Melissa Breau:I did. I wrote it down. I had it.

Denise Fenzi: Yeah, Melissa wrote that down as a question.

Petra Ford: Yeah. I also just want to say for sport people, they tend to be very pigeonholed, right. So if you have an obedience dog, you go to obedience instructors for help. And if you have an agility dog, you go to agility instructors for help. I had a dog that was not wired right, So I went to a behaviorist for that dog. And I didn't even bother bringing my other dog because my other dog did not have, quote, unquote, behavior issues. But that is the person that helped me, like, without that person's help, that my other dog, I don't even think would have gotten a notch, never mind winning a national, like.

And I learned, you know, I learned an enormous amount. And that taught me I should not limit myself. Right. So I will listen to something by just about anybody. I don't care if it's a behaviorist. I don't care if they did sport or they didn't do sport. I don't care if it's a freestyle person. I don't care if it's an agility person. I have learned things from all people from all different sports.

And some of the most important things are impactful. Things I've learned have been not been from quote, unquote obedience instructors. It's been from other areas. So when Denise is saying, like, get all this information, she means don't just get it from one source. Get it from as many different sources as possible, because they may just have a different perspective or a different nuance, or they're just maybe experts on reading a dog, right?

Like, I mean, it doesn't mean that just because I'm an obedience instructor, I can't watch a dog in agility and go, oh boy, that dog is like way over adrenalized, right?

So I think people just should just be really as open minded as possible and feel super fortunate that we have the Internet and we have mountains of information. Now, obviously it's not all good. It might not all be in line with what you're doing, but you can tweak it out.

And I've listened to podcasts and gone. I didn't really get anything out of that and I listened to some and gone, oh, that's a clever idea. How can I apply that to what I'm doing? So being open minded and not, you know, picking someone based on your sport or what ribbons or titles they've gotten does not mean, you know, necessarily that they're good or bad or you should not go to them for information.

Denise Fenzi: Get more fluent, especially if positive reinforcement is important to you. I had a lot of problems with my dog's Hold & Bark. He was coming in and biting, not barking. And I solved that by asking my friend, how do traditional trainers address this? And then I listened to what she said and I just reminded myself positive reinforcement is the same as traditional training just three seconds earlier. So I took the information, I asked myself, what's three seconds before they would have corrected the dog?

And I inserted my alternative and it solved my problem. Not overnight because it had been going on for a while, but just remember that if you have knowledge of traditional training, it really is the same. You just have to respond three seconds earlier with your intervention, which is appropriate for you. So instead of three seconds later. Correct. Three seconds back. Cookie. Right. It doesn't actually matter. Brilliant. I love that I steal it, but run with it, run with it.

Hey, it saved my butt. And I was struggling and sometimes just stepping out of the situation and saying, look, I don't have a culture to help me because so few of us are doing this. So tell me what the traditional trainer is doing. I don't know why I didn't think of that sooner. You think after 40 years my brain would engage a little more reliably, but it does not.

I still need outsiders to come in and hit me on the head and say, why don't you do this? We all need help. I need help all the time. So believe me. And I'm not embarrassed to ask for help. Oh, God, no. Somebody asked me the other day, said, well, would you reach out to a balanced trainer for help on something if you couldn't solve this. I said, I don't even get to the balance trainer.

I got lots of people I can ask. I said, every single week, I am reaching out for help for something I'm not loving, and I have lots of people to bounce off. I don't care who I'm getting the information from. I'm looking at the problem and I'm saying, who do I think is most able to help me with this situation? But I thought it was so funny that the person assumed I don't ask for help. I'm like, are you crazy? I can't get through a week without asking for help.

Melissa Breau: Yeah, I'd say it's one of my favorite parts of hosting the podcast is sometimes you're talking to somebody about something not related to a training problem you're currently facing, and all of a sudden out pops a solution that you wouldn't have thought about within your sport. But it really does help solve the problem.

All right, so I know we've kind of talked a little bit about your present, your individual presentations for the conference throughout, but do you mind each kind of giving us the couple second summary here of, you know, what you're talking about during the conference and maybe who specifically will benefit from attending your talk? Karen, you want to start us off?

Karen Deeds: Sure. I'm doing this thing called active acclimation, which is kind of an intermediate step, I think, for the most part, with your sport dogs, where you would allow them to do passive acclimation, which is the explore and sniff and look around or lay there, look around.

And I've applied a little bit more of an active approach because I'm actually taking advantage of dopamine, which is released anytime there is movement involved, as well as reinforcement or the access to rewards. And so the. The actual prop of a mat can immediately trigger that dopamine release. Same thing with the two bowls. Same thing with the box. The words, my. My marker cue words again, when I say the word scatter, my dog goes.

And my Labrador immediately sticks his nose to the ground. And my border collie kind of bounces up because he knows that, oh my God, I get five instead of just one. And if I say the word toss to my border collie, he's like, oh, my God, yes. Which direction? So I know has an emotional response carried with it. And so I'm going to use those. Those things to affect their emotions.

And I do this with, obviously, my behavior cases. I've got a couple of sport dogs. In fact, I'm heading out tomorrow for Nashville to work with a bunch of agility people. And I don't even do agility, but it's all behavior type stuff. Agility, barn hunt is a big issue or a big deal. I'm working with a lot of barn hunt dogs right now because guess what? Waiting in the blind is really hard for a lot of dogs.

It's a really big problem. And so I have to have that emotional mindset that's appropriate for them to be still in the blind versus, you know, waiting outside the ring for their timeframe. And if I can start to, to utilize a little bit more dopamine in the dog's brain, it's short term and then there, there's immediate short term and long term term dopamine that builds and I'm hoping to take the skills that I'm teaching and pass it on to you guys so that you can use it as a short term dopamine release that will carry you into the ring, so to speak, or on the walk.

And then over time it creates that long term dopamine so that when you show them that same picture, they go, oh yeah, I remember this. This is cool. I feel really good right now. So you that carry that stays with you. That's my thing.

Petra Ford: Mine is the, as I mentioned earlier, the impact of arousal on focus and engagement. So I talk about how to recognize when your dog is over aroused, when your dog is under aroused, and when your dog is in optimal arousal.

And then I give you a bunch of techniques that can help raise the dog's arousal and a bunch of techniques that can lower the dog's arousal. And then I also teach you how to teach your dog an up cue so that in very quickly, with just a couple cues, you can bring your dog's arousal up. And then I also have a come cue. And then very once it's fluent, you can very quickly bring your dog's arousal down, which is great because so I do this in training all the time.

But it's really helpful in the ring because if my dog starts to get a little nervous or my dog starts to get a little under aroused, I have tools where I can bring the arousal up as needed and I have tools where I can bring it down or help them just feel more calm. And I can do that very quickly. So it's very functional. Right. It doesn't take a lot of time.

So every time I move from one exercise to another, I utilize that. Every time I set my dog up before I say before I tell the judge I'm ready, I make sure my dog's arousal is right where I want it. Yeah, that's pretty much what mine's about.

Denise Fenzi: Mine's about a very structured and formal plan of preparing your dog for training or competition that starts with how you acclimate your dog to the environment and moves through very long routines without necessarily any reinforcement.

And it's 2.0, because I put a lot of energy on helping people how to understand what to do when the environment is no longer available for acclimation. So I've always talked about that, but there are absolutely circumstances like obedience, for example, you cannot go in the ring beforehand. So I talk about what to do when acclimation is not an option and also what to do if your dog fails.

So how do you handle that? Not in competition. By the time you get to competition, you got what you got, but how to train your dog such that if they struggle, what to do next, because they don't think we talk enough about handling failure. So I work that well into the presentation. It is a very dense presentation. There's a lot of information. You'll want to go back many times and sort of review the charts and squares and what I'm saying there. And it's definitely targeted towards the competition crew. Doesn't matter what sport.

Melissa Breau: Fantastic. All right, anybody have any final thoughts you kind of want to leave folks with? We covered a lot of ground.

Petra Fordl: We did.

Denise Fenzi: I just love hanging out with you people.

Karen Deeds: I do, too. I miss you. I love these.

Petra Ford: And I love the panels, the discussion panels when we do them.

Karen Deeds: I do, too.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. Awesome. All right, well, thank you all so much for joining us. I appreciate your time.

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 by 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!