What is Applied Behavior Science? Learning Theory? Why bother, if folks have been training dogs for more than 10,000 years? Irith and I get into all that and more in this episode on the science of behavior change!

 Transcription

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Funzi 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 Irith Bloom about the science of dog training and what you need to know to call yourself a behavior geek. Hi, Irith, welcome back to the podcast.

Irith Bloom: Hi, Melissa. It is such a pleasure to be here. Always with you and with the amazing FDSA audience.

Melissa Breau: Fantastic. I'm super glad to have you here and I think it's going to be a fun chat. So, to start us out, do you want to just kind of remind everybody a little bit about you?

Irith Bloom: Well, I'm a behavior consultant and trainer, certified behavior consultant and trainer. I'm based in Los Angeles.

But these days, more than client work, I'm doing a lot of teaching online in various venues. I work with a lot of my fellow professionals. So I'm FDSA faculty. I'm faculty at Victoria Stillwell Academy, and along with my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Christina Spalding, we run a program for animal professionals called Carefree Companion. And somewhere in all of that, I also manage to be generally geeky and try to keep up on the most interesting research that comes up. So that's kind of me in a nutshell.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. So let's dive into that geeky bit. So, applied behavior science. What do we mean when we add that word applied to the front of that? Why is it important?

Irith Bloom: All right, well, so behavior science, a lot of it happens in the lab and we're looking at people working with captive animals who have very limited and organized lives. Like I remember years ago, if anyone doesn't know, Bob Bailey is a person who trained literally tens of thousands of different species of.

Or maybe it wasn't tens of thousands of species, but certainly tens of thousands of animals and thousands of species of animals. But all the animals he worked with were generally in some kind of captive program. They were working like for the US Military, or they were animals who were being used in the film industry and were kept in a very organized sort of home. And I remember he once talked about a technique for fixing what are called poisoned cues.

I won't go down that rabbit hole right now, but I'll just say there's this thing called a poisoned cue and it creates problems. And someone asked him how to fix it and he described this great way to fix a poisoned cue. The only issue was that it involved the animal being essentially in a cage or crate or something for all of the hours of the day, except for the time when you pulled it out and did the training on the poisoned cue.

And I thought, well, that's not how my life runs. I'm not going to crate my dog for 23 hours a day just so that I can fix this poisoned cue. I need something that will actually work for me in the real world. And so what we learn from the science, what we learn from the research, what we see in the learning theory, which I know we'll go into a little bit more later on in this podcast, but what we see in the learning theory, it's all really, really important to understand and to know, and it doesn't necessarily give us a straight line to what we need to do in real life.

So the behavior science is great. I adore it. I breathe it every day. I channel it when I'm thinking about how to solve problems. And if I'm actually going to solve those problems, I have to figure out a practical way to take that concept and apply it. That's going to work for an animal who's probably not actually in a crate 23 hours a day.

Melissa Breau: Okay, so I'm going to play a little bit of the role of the skeptic here. I hope that's. Hope that's okay. So people have been training dogs for thousands of years. I went and kind of looked it up, and we believe they dogs have been domesticated for well over 10,000 years now. So why do we need to know this stuff? Why is it worth it to learn about the science piece of behavior change?

Irith Bloom: Well, first of all, I have to say it is really amazing to think about everything we've managed to do with dogs without understanding how learning works.

The problem is that in the absence of understanding how learning works best and how to form the most positive bonds between us and dogs, we've wound up, and I say we, meaning humans, we've wound up falling into a lot of methods that are force based and have elements of threat as well as actual violence. Because if you don't occasionally do violence, then the threat of violence isn't very effective, if you know what I mean.

So I'm not saying that everyone always trained every dog that way. I think just as in anything else, I'm sure there's been a range of people dating back even 10,000 years who collaborated more with dogs rather than forcing them into things. But what normally happens when we don't know how to engage with some new species is that we try to figure out how we can control it and force it to do the thing we want it to do, instead of trying to teach it what we want to do and then having it do that thing because it's worth it to the animal.

So this is all sort of a roundabout way of saying, in the absence of an understanding of behavior science, we're going to tend to fall back on force, we're going to tend to fall back on very straight line. Let's just prevent anything. But the one thing we want to have happen, which means a lot of management, a lot of punishment, and that does not promote a positive relationship between you and the animal.

The miraculous thing about dogs is that even when we're actually kind of nasty to them, they often bond with us anyway. So it's been easy, I think, for people over the decades, over the centuries, over the millennia, to assume that it's okay. But just because the animal is like, well, you feed me and you're the only thing I know, and therefore I will continue to come back to you even though you're doing horrible things to me some of the time when I do come back to you, even though that happens, I don't think that's the best practice.

So I would never say that you can't train a lot of things using punishment based methods. You can train a lot of things using punishment based methods, but what you can't do is form the kind of bond where the animal wants to take the next step ahead of you to figure out, hey, what is it the human wants? I'm going to anticipate, I'm going to try this thing.

And that's where the real joy of collaborating comes in. So for me, the reason that it's so important to think about the science behind behavior change is because I look at my interactions with non human animals. Anyone? Any non human animal. The crows I run by on my runs, horses that I get the great pleasure of meeting, parrots that I get the great pleasure of meeting, cats, dogs, whatever I want them to be like, she's cool, she's all right.

And understanding behavior change and the science behind it helps me create that. Which then means if I'm in a position where I suddenly need that animal to trust me, or I'm doing something that is maybe not fun for them, they'll give me the benefit of the doubt instead of saying, oh, I knew she was awful all along and perhaps never speaking to me again, so to speak. Yeah. So assuming we're all now persuaded, talk to me, talk to me a Little bit. I'm not sure how persuasive that was, but we'll hope.

Melissa Breau: Talk to me a little bit, though, about what pieces of behavior science tend to be most useful, say, for the average, whatever. We're going to take that word to mean dog handler or trainer to know.

Irith Bloom: So the key things to understand, in my opinion, the key things to understand are the real fundamentals of how learning works.

And the crazy thing is we all think of learning as happening through associations, but that's not always how it works. It's important to understand that that's not always how it works. And when we say learning happens through associations, which I think a lot of people listening to this podcast, that will be pretty firmly in their mind. That is true. But there's more than one way to learn by association.

And if we only pay attention to one side of the learning by association, or we forget about what's called non associative learning, we'll often find that we're having problems that we can't explain. And so where I see this a lot is operant conditioning or Skinnerian conditioning, or, you know, if you want to go back, it's actually Watson. But anyway, all that is something that we all tend to focus on.

I get the behavior I want, I reinforce that. And especially with this audience, I know we're really focused on reinforcement, and that's great. And when you look at things in an operant conditioning lens, if the behavior is increasing or maintaining, we're reinforcing it. Yay, great. But then suddenly something falls apart and you can't figure out why suddenly the behavior that was working in this context is not working in that context, or it was working in this other context.

And then, and often what's happening in those situations is there's another kind of learning that's interfering with the operant conditioning that we're working on because we're so in this lens of antecedent behavior consequence. I give the cue, the dog sits, I feed a treat. Yay. We're all set that we lose sight of other things that can be happening, like the emotions the animal is feeling or things that are happening in the surrounding area.

Whether the behavior is thoughtful or not thoughtful, all of these things become involved. So the fundamentals of learning are very important. It is more complex than most of us think about day to day, unless you're geeky like me, because it's all I think about day to day. Understanding the signals in your animal's environment and that you are not the only signal in the environment and how those different signals work is really helpful.

Understanding arousal and how that influences both learning and performance. And then I sort of touched on this earlier, but understanding when your animal is just on autopilot versus they're thoughtful, and the autopilot versus thoughtful is the. Do I enter the weave poles the right way? Do I go to the obstacle? I don't know why agility is what's in my head right now. Do I go to the correct obstacle?

That is where that habitual versus thoughtful, like, am I thinking about it or am I just on autopilot? That's where that gets really, really important. And so if. If your dog keeps going to the wrong obstacle, you've got some kind of problem in that thoughtful versus not so thoughtful behavior realm, for example. But if you don't know that, you might just think, well, I just need to practice each obstacle more.

But your actual problem is that the animal's in the wrong state of mind to follow the signals that you're giving. Those are the kinds of things that I think are really helpful.

Melissa Breau: You said something in there, and if it's okay, I want to dive just a little deeper into some of it. So you. You talked about thoughtful versus autopilot, and I feel like when I hear those two things, then I'm like, okay, but what about fluency?

Right? So, like, if you have an animal that understands a behavior well enough to put it on autopilot, that's obviously not what you're meaning when we say something like fluency. But I feel like those. All these phrases feel very intermingled. Can you pull them apart a little bit?

Irith Bloom: I can definitely try. So it's a really, really great question because I think there's more than one kind of fluency.

So there's fluency as in, when you tell me to sit, I will sit, regardless of whether I see that there's a treat in the environment, and regardless of whether I'm in the kitchen or the living room or, as Virginia Dare would have it, in a stream. She has this. She's. She's got these great, like, images of her. She basically said, if your dog's really fluent at sit, they should sit down.

When they're crossing a stream, if you ask them to sit. And she has these pictures of her dog sitting in the middle of a stream because she's amazing, and she really, really proofs her behavior, and she trains to fluency. To get that, you really do have to be at the point where the animal is just a little bit on autopilot. They're just a little bit like they. You say sit, and they sit, and they don't really think about it too much.

And at the same time, I think there's an element of. Of if you're Virginia Dare's dog, that you have learned that when she says sit, you're going to get reinforced everywhere no matter what. And so there is that moment of choice. If it's a brand new situation and they're a little bit puzzled, there's that moment of choice, that moment of thought where they say, it's wet, but whatever.

I kind of like the water. And they sit down in the water. So when we talk about fluency, I think as handlers, we are not very precise with what we mean. So if I'm talking about fluency, as in I say the cue and the cue happens, period, I may be pretty strongly into the autopilot habit side of things, but if I'm talking about fluency, as in my dog knows, I'm just going to stick with agility because I know the names of the obstacles.

So my dog is really good at all the obstacles in agility. And when I point out which obstacle to do next, they always go to the correct obstacle. That's a different kind of fluency, because if they were on autopilot or in habitual mode, every habit is a whole picture. You see, the picture kind of all has to be the same for a habit to happen. And we're in a million different agility rings, and the jump might be over here or over there, and the tunnel might be a different color.

Maybe there's all kinds of things that might change. If I'm relying only on habit, then the animal's not necessarily going to go to the right place. They're just going to say, oh, every time after we do the tunnel, we do a jump, and they'll just pick a random jump. They won't think about it. They'll just go to the next jump. So that kind of fluency is this thoughtful.

I'm in the flow. I know to look to you for the cue, and then when you give me the cue, I'm so in the flow that I know exactly what to do with that cue. So you say weave poles, and I know which way to enter them, and I know to make sure that I don't pop out of them. And then when I finish the weave poles, I'm still conscious enough to look to see where you're going to send me next.

And all of that is flowing. That's like a flow fluency. I almost feel like fluency flow. What an interesting coincidence. So I really think that when we talk about fluency, we are not always precise. Does that mean the cue is always going to happen or does that mean the animal is truly paying attention and the cue is going to happen, but they're thoughtful enough to direct it in the right direction, so to speak.

I would love to hear what someone else has to say about this though, because I think it's a great. Like this is a panel discussion waiting to happen. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so with all of that in mind, all those pieces and all the bits we've been talking about about behavior science, how do you approach building out a training plan? So I'm going to harken back to Bob Bailey again for a second because he's quite an expert.

I remember going to a Bob Bailey talk once. If you ever get a chance to hear Bob Bailey speak, by the way, he really is very interesting to listen to. He has great stories. Stories. So I went to a Bob Bailey talk once and somebody said something about how do you build a training plan? And Bob Bailey's response was something along the lines of, you look at where you are, you look at what your goal is and you figure out how to get from the start to the end, basically.

And it's one of those. That's absolutely true. That's 100% true. That is really 100% true. The devil is in the details, as they say. So for me, I do start by figuring out the goal. I need to know if it's my personal dog. What do I want him to learn? I want him to learn to spin to the left and spin to the right. I have to come up with two different cues for that.

I have to make sure that I remember which cue is which. How am I going to do that? What is the behavior going to look like? How fast does the spin need to be? I think about all of those little pieces of the puzzle. Like do I care if he ambles his way around? Do I want him to basically flip the little spin? Or is it okay because he's 60 pounds and kind of long?

If it takes him a little bit longer than it does when you teach this to a 20 pound dog. For him to actually get around all of these things I'm going to think about, that's my goal. Then I'm going to look at where I am. Where am I? Okay. My dog is pretty good at shaping. He's very eager to do training. Great. He gets a little overexcited and then stops paying attention to what I'm saying.

There goes that, that autopilot to my detriment. What am I going to do to reduce that problem? That challenge of him being overly excited and then not being able to pay attention while teaching him this spin? And I start looking at all of the, like, here's where I am, here's where I want to go. Here are all my challenges that I'm likely to face. And I start putting, putting all of it together.

I'm going to use this kind of food. I'm going to practice in this location because I know it's a not too arousing of a location. I'm not going to wear food on me or I am going to wear food on me, depending on the dog. I'm going to start my shaping with this shaping plan in my head. But then if he shows me that he has a much better shaping plan in his head, I'm going to stop, regroup and shift to what he wants to do.

I have all of that stuff planned out and all of it bears in mind things like, where's his arousal level, how cognitive is he being? Is he, you know, does he have some kind of physical issue that's going to make spinning easier to one side than the other? Am I teaching him to spin in both directions? Because I want to balance out his musculature, which actually is why I do teach spin in both directions, by the way.

In general, I think it's good for animals to be able to bend both ways, assuming there's no medical issue. So all of those things are going to go into the plan. And then of course, the other thing about the plans is they're always. It's an iterative process. You go back and forth, you say, here's my plan. Oops, hit a speed bump. Stop, regroup, think about it. Let's see if we can get past that speed bump.

Oops, hit a different speed bump. Stop, regroup, think about it. And then sometimes you just sail through. You had like this 20 step training plan. It took you five steps and you're done. So you have to be ready to flex with what the animal gives you. And I will also say, in case it's not obvious from all the things I've said, never be afraid to just stop the session, scatter some food on the ground for your dog, step away and think, because that's a lot better than making a mistake.

And then you're both confused and you're both frustrated. And now we're not thinking well, either of us. Yeah. And always better to stop before you've gotten 15 reps in the wrong direction then. Yes, yes. That's the hardest thing. This is not about training plans. This is just a general thing for us as humans. The hardest thing, I think, for all of us. This is me, everybody I know, basically, and every Fenzi student I've had the pleasure of working with, they're always like, I know I should have stopped before X at some point in what they're talking about.

And I've gotten. I'm so conservative now. I'm like, five reps. I'm done. Walk away, walk away. You know, I just, when in doubt, stop sooner. I would much rather have the dog be like, why did we stop? I was loving that. And then be eager to come back the next day. Time. Yeah. All right, so I want to talk. We mentioned earlier, kind of tease that we're going to talk about learning theory.

So let's do that. Why is it a theory? How does understanding it help our training? So the first thing I want to do is clarify that I'm using the term theory. When you say learning theory, you are using the term theory in the scientific meaning, not the day to day meaning. This is kind of. I'm going to. I'm going to hearken back for a second to a slightly different word that I think people are more familiar with this difference.

The word punishment when I'm talking to my neighbor is very different from the word punishment when I'm talking about learning science. Learning science has a very specific definition for punishment. It means when you apply this thing, this punisher, the behavior reduces in frequency. That is very different from what most people mean when they say, I punished my child for, you know, I don't know, for drawing in pencil on my.

Oh, I hope it's pencil. Drawing in pen on my walls. You know, that's a very. Are you actually paying attention to whether they draw in pen on your walls the next time or not? Maybe not. Maybe the punisher doesn't. Whatever you did might not change their behavior. Scientifically speaking, punishment has a really specific meaning. Theory in science does not mean, oh, I've come up with this idea and I think it's an interesting idea which is kind of how we use it in everyday language.

What it actually means is a very well substantiated explanation of something that happens in the world, the natural world. And it's based on data that has been repeatedly confirmed both through observation and experimentation, where we have such a robust set of data that we can say this is how it works. So we call it a theory, but it's actually an explanation for how something works. That is saying we have all this information behind us and we know how this works.

So in physics, you talk about things like the theory of gravity. Gravity is not a theoretical thing, it's a real thing. The theory of gravity explains how gravity works. It doesn't mean that gravity is not real, that we're using the word theory around it. So learning theory sounds like, oh, maybe we're making some guesses. But what it actually is is with over at this point, well over 100 years of science, we can be pretty definitive about some of the ways that learning works.

That doesn't mean that we're not always learning more. And in fact, we are learning more. Especially with all the advances in brain science in the last couple of decades, we're learning more and more. But that doesn't change that what Pavlov noticed 120 some years ago is still true today and has been verified. And why can't I think of the word replicated? Verified and replicated probably hundreds of thousands of times.

So that's what a theory is. It actually is all that replicated data. And we say, based on all this data, this is how it works. So how does it help us improve our training? Okay, yes, sorry, I got so down the rabbit hole of what theory is that's good. So it helps us improve our training because often when something strange is happening, when something isn't working the way we expect it based on.

I've, you know, we've been living with dogs for 10,000 years, and this is, these are the things we know about them. You know, they like food, they dislike shock, they're, you know, all of these. There are things that we know about them, and yet this dog is defying expectations in those situations. Often if you delve into the learning theory a little more deeply, you will find there's this piece, there's this other piece that's either having an influence or is missing or something is going on.

And so I thought I was doing everything right, but it turns out that there's this whole other aspect of what's going on for my animal, in their brain, literally in their brain, that is interfering with my goal. And I wouldn't know to look for it if I didn't understand first. Like, first I look at it and I say, okay, well, how are my consequences looking? My consequences are looking right, so maybe my operant stuff isn't the problem.

Wait, how about my cueing Is my cueing working? Maybe it's not the consequences. Maybe it's the antecedents. No, my cueing. I've had a third party look and say that my cueing is clean. Why is the behavior falling apart? Something else must be going on. And then I'm going to turn to other parts of learning theory. Is there something emotional going on? Is there an arousal issue that's going on?

Is there a misbehavior? And I am using this in a Bob Bailey way, where there's an instinctive behavior that's interfering with the animal's ability to learn something new. They have some beautiful examples of that with raccoons. So there's all kinds of things that could be happening. And the great news is, with well over 100 years of learning science, it's probably been published in some research somewhere, and we have that tool available to us to then say, well, know, this technique works 98% of the time for the 2% where it's not. What are the little things we need to be looking for?

Melissa Breau: All right, so a big part of why we're talking about all of this is because you're doing a new class in August on behavior change. Is it specifically on changing problematic behaviors, or does it really apply to kind of any training as long as students are interested in learning more about how to approach things from that scientific perspective?

Irith Bloom: So I think that this would be of great benefit to anyone who really wants to sort of be able to look under the hood of the behavior that they're getting. Like, the difference between getting in the car, turning your key, and then taking it to a mechanic if things break down, and being able to actually pop the hood, which is almost impossible on modern cars, by the way, because of the way they're designed.

But if you had a car in the 70s, you could pop the hood and you could pretty much tell what was wrong with it. You know, if you. I mean, if you had the knowledge, which, fortunately, my father was into that stuff, so I had the knowledge. Can't do it with my current car, but I like to be able to pop the hood and say, what's going on?

And sometimes I may still need a mechanic, sometimes I may still need an outside expert. But if you're the kind of person who wants to be able to figuratively pop the hood on the training that you're doing with your dog, whether it's behavior training or sports training, I think the class is going to be really interesting for you and will give you tools that you didn't even realize you didn't have, if that sort of makes sense.

So now I will say I'm not a sports person. I know enough to speak dangerously about agility, but not enough to, you know, compete in it at a high level or anything like that. I don't. I haven't done obedience in so long that all the rules have changed. I'm not really a sports person. So if you come to me and you say, I really want to do this name term of art in obedience that I've never heard of, I'm going to need you to describe to me what it is.

But I should be able to help you understand what's going on in the background. And if you're having trouble teaching that, where could the trouble be coming in? And then I still recommend talk to someone who's an expert in obedience for the best practices for how to do your obedience. But if you're interested in obedience and why is it that my heel is falling apart, we can definitely talk about that.

If you're, you know, trying to figure out why the dog won't go to the weave poles, we can talk about that. I may not be able to teach you how to get a dog to go through the weave poles the fastest way. That's not my subspecialty, so to speak. But the principles are going to apply. And if you're having behavior issues, like I just saw a post on the alumni group with someone who was talking about nail trims and their dog and having trouble with nail trims.

And of course, the amazing Deb Jones piped right up and gave some suggestions, which I'm sure will all be amazing. But when you're having an issue like that, a lot of times it's because what you think you're doing in terms of classical conditioning isn't quite what you're actually doing. And those little details of is the arousal level too high while I'm doing my classical conditioning can make all the difference between I'm going to get a nail trim in a year or I'm never going to get a nail trim or I'm going to get a nail trim, if you're lucky, in a month, you know, but some dogs, it will take a year, and it is what it is. So, yeah. So behavior or sports people, I would love to have all of you.

Melissa Breau: And then one of the specific items that you mention in your description is that you're going to talk about how habits and routines are both useful and sometimes maybe not so useful. Can you go into that just a little more for me.

Irith Bloom: Yes. And it's interesting because I think this goes back to that fluency autopilot discussion.

So habits are great for when you know, the animal is being thrown into the like roiling ocean of the world and you need them to remember how to sit on cue. That is a, that's a great place to have those habits and those routines. And I know that there's a lot of routines out there to help animals cope with, to help dogs specifically cope with stressors in their environment.

And I think that for many dogs those are incredibly useful, incredibly helpful. And at the same time I also see a subset of dogs where the routine itself becomes a source of stress. And what you see is as the routine is starting, there's all this anticipation and stress that comes with it. And they seem to be frantic as they're going through the routine that's supposed to help them calm down.

I think that in those situations, just based on total anecdotal observation of a variety of different training teams, you know, people with their dogs, I think a lot of times what's happening is the animal gets so laser focused. They have what one really excellent trainer named Steve Martin, not the Steve Martin who plays banjo and is on television, but a different Steve Martin. He says they get tunnel vision.

They can't see anything but the routine. And so when that happens, they're not learning anything new, they're practicing the routine, which can be great by the way, if you have a loose dog running towards you and your dog is really not good. With other dogs dogs, tunnel vision may be just what you need to survive that situation with nobody getting hurt. But in the long term, if they have an issue with other dogs and they always have tunnel vision around the dogs, they're never going to learn how to cope.

When there are other dogs there, the routine is the only coping skill they will have. And if that routine then starts to become something where they start to get over aroused for whatever reason and arousal got too built into the routine some way or other, then you're really stuck. You're like, this is the one tool they have and it's not working well. So I have actually found that sometimes routines get in the way of learning.

And since for me I'm all about stress, coping, stress resilience, that's like my choice agency. Stress, coping, stress resilience, those are my obsessions. So if I see that a routine is getting in the way of learning coping skills, then to me that routine is not helping me advance. It might not be doing any harm, but it's definitely not helping me advance in some situations. So that's where the habit and routine can actually get in the way to get back to what the question was.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. Yeah. All right. So obviously that sounds fascinating in and of itself, but can you share a little more just kind of about the class, maybe what else you plan to cover, who might be interested kind of beyond what we already said about, you know, behavior geeks?

Irith Bloom: Yeah. So, I mean, one thing I want to say is new class, which means, and I said this in the description, all of you, all of y' alls are gonna help me figure out what needs to be in the class to some extent.

I have an outline, but I may add little details, shift things around, change the order in response to what I'm seeing happening in the gold teams in the class. And this is something that I always do when I have a new class. I'm constantly recording new lectures because I'm constantly sort of adjusting around what I'm actually seeing. With that said, my tentative plan includes associative learning, which includes operant conditioning and classical conditioning, non associative learning, arousal, and the impact that arousal has on learning and performance, agency and the way that science is starting to look at agency and how that interacts with enrichment and how that interacts with coping skills.

Now we're back to coping skills again. Different types of signals in the environment, which includes cues, but also includes what I'm going to call commands and also includes stuff that's not coming from the handler at all and how to be aware of and use those signals well. And basically the goal of the class will be. I'm sure I'm missing a topic in what I just said, but the goal of the class will be for you as students to be able to take all of that and put it together in the way that helps optimize your training.

Whether you're dealing with a sloppy sit or serious aggression, this will help you find a path that's going to optimize your progress, speed learning, and help you avoid pitfalls and errors that are just going to create frustration for you and slow things down.

Melissa Breau: Excellent. It sounds like it's going to be a very dense but interesting class.

Irith Bloom: So, yeah, I think it will be really dense. So be prepared. And those of you who have seen my geeky lectures before, because they're out there, even in the classes that don't say they're geeky, you're going to expect a lot of that is basically what to say. So if you if you don't like figuring out the why behind things, this is not the class for you, because that will be my focus.

Melissa Breau: Excellent. Any final thoughts or maybe key points you want to share with folks? Leave listeners with no.

Irith Bloom: I mean, I really like anyone who wants to geek out. Anyone who wants to understand what's going on backward, that back, you know, back behind the scenes, so to speak, under the hood. Anyone who wants to be able to create their own training plan and understand why that's a good plan and troubleshoot it when the plan falls apart. Anyone like that is welcome in the class.

I would love to have you all. I would love to have people who are going to actually say, well, why does it work that way? In response to some of the lectures. I'm not a neuroscientist, but if it makes you feel any better, even neuroscience is not entirely sure why some of these things work the way they do. And every new research study in neuroscience is like, oh, wait, no, maybe that wasn't the brain structure that's most important in this.

So I would love to geek out about all of that. And I'm hoping that I'm going to attract a group of people to this class who will be in that super geeky mode. And I'm also really excited to help you all move forward with your goals. And then after this class is over, be able to say two months from now when another issue comes up. Oh, I know exactly what to do because I learned it in the Getting Geeky class.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. It is really such a pleasure. And thanks to everyone out there in the FDSA world, both staff wise and student wise. You're all amazing. Aw. Well, thanks and thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Nancy Little to talk about weave pole training. Speaking of agility skills, if you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

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

 Credits

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

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!