Living with multiple dogs means managing multiple personalities, and like any home with multiple personalities, there will be times when there are disagreements. In this episode, Christina Young and Melissa Breau talk about how to prevent conflict between dogs in your home, the early signs of tension people tend to miss, the difference between management and structure, and how to teach your dogs to actively move away from situations that might escalate.

Transcription

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Christina Young and we're talking about teaching the dogs in your home skills to help everyone get along, including how to actually move away from conflict.

Hi Christina. Welcome to the podcast.

Christina Young: Hi. Thanks. I'm excited to be here.

Melissa Breau: Super excited to have you to start us out. Do you want to just share a little bit about your own dogs, maybe what you're working on with them?

Christina Young: Sure. I have. I'm in a kind of in a weird spot for myself. For the first time in over 20 years, I only have two dogs and I'm not actually training them.

23 specific. I have trained them in the past for disc and nosework and tracking and rally and all the things. But my two dogs that I currently have are. One is a 11 year old Spitz. He was a little rescue. I've had him now for 10 years and he's a great little dog and he's a great farm dog and a great hiking buddy. He is 11. And then I have my border collie who was my main sport dog, but she's got some pretty significant physical ailments right now.

That means she can't do much. So we're just keeping her happy, doing the things that she can physically do and just training tricks and stuff to keep them kind of mentally engaged and just to kind of keep the training as part of our lives. But nothing specific for the two of them.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough. So how did you originally kind of get into dog training and then more specifically behavior work?

Christina Young: Well, almost 30 years ago now I was doing rescue a breed rescue for the little Spitz. I really liked them and they're. I found that they were a really misunderstood breed and you know, they don't necessarily fall into the same training that the average Labrador German shepherd would do at the time. And I found that they just needed something different than the typical training classes. And then they were great dogs.

So I started breed rescue and then I started taking only the ones that weren't airport like adoptable. And then from there I'm like, oh, how do I help these dogs? Back in the day it was Yahoo groups was the way to go, the only thing to access things or your library. And I just started taking, reading everything I could and taking every class I could find and learning how to help these dogs.

And then eventually I got into, you know, high drive sport dogs. So I had a house full of rescues plus high drive sport dogs. And they didn't always mesh right. So learning how to integrate them and how we get everybody living happily together. And then when I started my company, I thought I would be doing mostly sport training, but people are like, actually sports are cool. Well, can you help me with that? That's how I kind of ended up here.

Melissa Breau: Can you share a little bit about kind of your general approach to dealing with dog dog issues in the home?

Christina Young: In the home with dogs are living together or spending a lot of time together. I like to always start from a place of safety. So we put some management in place. We put things in place so that every being in the home, whether it's the humans, the dogs, other dogs, cats, everybody in the home should feel safe.

That's always step one. We want to make sure that we're starting from this place where everybody can just breathe and have their needs met at the same time. And then we start building on skills for our dogs, teaching them self control or confidence building or regulating arousal, whatever it is those particular dogs need help with in order to integrate with the other dogs. We teach them now that kind of separate from the group dynamics, we're going to teach them how to move away from things that they're interested in.

So for instance, if you have a ball crazy Labrador, if you have a gall in your hand, can your dog still walk away and go to a station or bask his stick? Can they still respond to cues and move away from them ball even if they're really excited about it and without creating any icky kind of feelings in our dogs or frustration or anxiety in our dogs while we do it.

Once they have all of those skills kind of put together, we add arousal and then we look for safe ways to start integrating the dogs to put it all back together. This wasn't really one of the questions that's never been in advance, but just kind of thinking about that for a second, you know, do you find that these are skills that most people with multiple dogs should be working on, or are these kind of things that you look at, there's a problem and now we're gonna fix it kind of thing.

I love being proactive when we can. And because I know that I'm likely to bring home dogs with big feelings, any dog who comes into my home is going to learn these skills proactively because sometimes if we wait until it's already a problem, those dogs have a damaged relationship and we might not be able to get them back to being good friends. We might only be able to get them to the point where they're considerate roommates.

And if we can be proactive, we're much more likely to preserve the relationship between the dogs and of course keep everyone safe. So I personally prefer if everyone would do it properly, proactively train them all these skills. But I understand that often people have had dogs in a certain way and done things in their home in a certain way for their whole lives. And it might be, might seem odd for me to say, oh, we need to train these skills when. When they haven't needed them before.

Melissa Breau: Yeah, it sounds like it'd be then even appropriate if somebody, you know, has their first dog and is looking at getting their second sports dog or something like that, that these might still be skills they want to consider when dogs are kind of struggling with tension or conflict at home. You know, what are some of those early signs that maybe people tend to miss that there may be something going on here we should pay attention to?

Christina Young: Well, there's the big signs, obviously, if they're, pardon me, if they're having out and out brawls or anyone's getting hurt, you know, those are pretty obvious. But the other signs to look for would be and if they're changing habits. So one dog maybe used to sleep in the living room on the couch or in a certain dog bed, and now they're sleeping in a corner or table or maybe in her bedroom and they're maybe don't feel safe resting in places where they felt safe resting before.

And any changes in habits. So her dog used to maybe pick away at their food and now they're inhaling it. Or maybe they used to inhale their food and now they're walking away from it. The sleep and eating habits are two things that I look for in the home. And then of course, if our dog is suddenly developing my glacial activity outside, that could be as a result of stress inside the home. And now they just don't have any. Anything left to deal with things out outside.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. How do you, I mean, you know, some, sometimes dogs do have conversations in the home. So how do you differentiate between like some of that normal dog to dog disagreement type stuff and like when it's becoming a problem or is it always a problem or are we just like a little too quick to sweep things under the rug?

Christina Young: You tell me. I think there is absolutely normal communication that might look unpleasant to humans because dogs can growl and snark and do things, but you actually use the perfect word when you ask the question is because it should look like a conversation. It should look like, oh hey, can I chew on that bone with you? And the other dog says no. And the first dog goes, oh, okay then and wanders off.

And no big, big blow up about it. It's just a conversation like hey, do you want to play with me? By you know, like they're jumping and chewing in the legs and the other dog says, hey, no, I don't, leave me alone. And the first dog buggers off. Those are healthy communications. If one dog says no and the other dog doesn't listen to that, that's a problem. If one dog is now actively seeking out the first, the puppy or the new dog and, and creating, you know, aggressive behaviors or seeking them out, those are big problems.

Make sure it looks like a conversation about whether they should play or whether they should share spaces or, you know, those types of things. I think dog dog issues are probably way more common than people realize. I think a lot of times, especially in the sports world where people have lots of high drive dogs. Yeah, crate and rotates more common and dog dog issues are more common than people maybe are public about or talk about.

And so, you know, maybe why is that? Why do these issues often kind of develop in households with dogs that we generally think about as well trained dogs with lots of training, you know, that have a lot of time and work put into them and things like that and perform at a high level? Well, dogs with big feelings, we like the big feelings dogs so that they love running fast and, and love the ball and love fighting things or love fighting the rat or whatever sport we're training them for.

We want dogs with big feelings about that so they do well at them. But those big feelings transfer not just out at a training class or competition. Those big feelings are in the dog period. And they can transfer to inside the house too, to share spaces, to maybe a dog that spins at the door when they're excited can be overwhelming. So when we're big feelings dogs, there's lots of things in day to day life that those big feelings can be attached to as well.

And a lot of these dogs that would bred more horse sports that were working, they aren't the same temperament or they aren't same genetics. Even in my opinion, as dogs that were bred to be family pets from the 80s and 90s, the neighbor's dog was a great pet and had puppies with the other neighbor's dog who was also a great pet. Right. The dogs that we breed for working and for sports, they often need a lot more structure at home in order to be polite housemates, in order to not get overwhelmed with things, in order to know how to navigate expecting scenarios.

And if we have a home maybe that hasn't has had like an airflow like that, that more low key temperament. And now they have these dogs, they, they might not know that the dogs need that structure. And then we put five of them in one house. You know, it's just so many more areas where things can go sideways. Yeah, yeah. I kind of, I don't remember who, where I heard this analogy, but the idea of like if you took like multiple high drive people and shove them on a house together, you'll probably have some conflict too. It's like, yeah, yeah. If anybody's ever been in an involuntary roommate situation, you know.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. So why is it that conflicts at home often feel so much more stressful for owners than you know, other behavior challenges like, you know, reactivity or whatever that only happen outside the home. When you're fighting at home or when you're worried that they might fight at home, you're worried that someone might get hurt at home.

It affects every waking minute and sometimes while you're sleeping too. It affects 24/7 your life, your ability to walk through a door, maybe eat a meal. It affects whether or not you can go on vacation, who's going to take care of your dogs to keep them safe. Right. And it can be something that affects all aspects of your life. It stops you from going out for dinner or it stops you from having friends over.

It can affect everything. And that is why we start when we start training that place of safety, that management place where we start from, the humans are included in that too. We want everyone to feel safe. We want everyone to be optimistic and positive and breathing rather than stress to the max and filled with cortisol and living on, walking on typical surround their house. But really start place where we can all go into the training with, with a good mindset.

Melissa Breau: You, you mentioned kind of structure earlier and I was thinking, you know, structure or management, are they the same thing? Are they different things? You know, how important is management in these cases and how do you, you know, how do you look at it as part of the training rather than, you know, things aren't working and so it's a sign of failure, right?

Christina Young: Yeah. So it really depends on the individual home because every home is different.

When someone comes to me with intra household aggression, like it might be that they have seven dogs and two of them are snarking at each other. Or they might have two dogs who literally want to, you know, unalive each other. And it can be giant spectrum of what it looks like. So management is when we put things in place to make sure sticky things aren't going to happen.

And it's really important that if that's needed, that it's increased. If it's needed to prevent rehearsal of fighting or aggression, then we have that in place. For instance, if we know the dogs will fight over balls, management is we don't have any balls down right now. Or if we know the dogs will fight upon seeing each other, we might put some management in place so that I'm not a big fan of crate and rotate, but stuck grading them and you know, barriers up so that we they can exist in the home without seeing each other and without feeling those icky emotions.

So management can be really important and part of it might be create and rotate. I just try to get us out of that as quickly as possible for the dog's well being. But that management just sets us up so the dogs and the people can learn. And then if we have a mistake, if we have an altercation, we did some training when it didn't go the way we planned, we have that safe spot to go back to so everyone can breathe and reset.

That's a really important part. That's kind of the foundation that training sits on. Are there? Oh, sorry, go ahead. You asked if there's a difference between management and structure. That's what I meant by management, like take the balls away. If they just fight over balls. Structure for me might mean more like before we go through doorways, we ask everyone to sit. Before I give everyone a treat, can everyone sit or go to their beds or have some processes around high arousal times in the day.

Speaking of high arousal times, are there particular situations, you know, food resting spots, people, transitions that tend to increase tension and are there some, you know, kind of simple environmental changes that maybe somebody can put in place that reduce tension fairly quickly? Yeah, yeah, absolutely there. Anytime the dogs become aroused or excited, those are likely spots where we're going to have issues. And it might not be the same for all dogs.

Some dogs might be totally fine together when their people come home from work, for instance. And other dogs, that might be a time when we're likely to have bites. So if the dogs are fighting, when people come home, we would maybe have them separated. One in one room, one in another room, or sometimes Just a baby gate so the dogs can't get to the actual front door. Those things can cut that piece right out until we're able to train it.

Or if, when we start to get their dinner ready, perhaps that's when the dogs get super excited and underfoot and likely to scrap. Well, let's put everybody on their beds or maybe in the crate or in another room. Let's put everybody in like a, a control position before we both start getting their meal ready. Poof. Right. We can, we can quickly fix those issues just by putting a few pieces in.

In place. One of the concepts that I know that you teach, cause you did a webinar for us and some other stuff is teaching or training dogs to like move away instead of escalating. So I'm kind of curious why that's such a powerful skill and if you could talk about it a little bit. Sure. I love this because if you constantly have to watch to tell your dog, hey, I need you to come away from that situation.

You're constantly having to keep an eye on things so that you can step in and tell them how to navigate that scenario. That's going to be exhausting and sometimes you're going to miss it. Right. So it's much more valuable is a whole life skill if the dog can just go, oh, this is icky. I'm going to go over there. Or sometimes we like them to become a tattletale, like, hey, mom, did you see this?

So the dog moves away from that. That situation and comes and lets their person know that something uncomfortable is happening. And when we empower dogs like that, it's amazing how much confidence that they can value have about other harder situations in their lives. When we empower them to take control of their own bodies in those scenarios, it actually really helps them be better problem solvers and more confident in the big picture.

Melissa Breau: How do you begin to teach a dog to disengage and create space when things feel tense? It feels like such a. Like just even thinking about the idea of that, it just feels like such a complex, complex training problem. Yes. And most of us, we want to start with that tension. We want to start there, like. But the training happens away from the tension. So the physiological responses in our bodies when we feel excitement or anxiety or frustration or anger are really similar.

We have, you know, increased respirations, we have increased heart rate. Are pupils diolate? Those are all very similar reactions to either being exciting or afraid or angry, whatever feeling is going on for our dogs. So when we can find something that our dog likes, and we can train this skill away from the other dogs. So, for instance, if you have a ball dog or if you have a food dog, we would use what it is that your dog likes, and we would teach them how to move away from that thing in order to get the thing.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Yeah.

Christina Young: Does that answer your question?

Melissa Breau: Yeah, I mean, I think so. I definitely understand why that's kind of the foundation. Right. To. To move away from it. Is there anything you kind of add to that that you think would be helpful for people to think about when it comes to that?

Christina Young: So if you're taking them from a. I mean, I certainly can understand how it'd be valuable to teach them to move away from a thing they want.

But I guess for me, the tricky part would come in when it's time to, like, add the cue of feeling tense or negative emotion. Like, how do you make that leap from Gotcha. So when we have the skill in place with the dog doing it with. With their own thing or with their own treasure, we start adding arousal to that situation. And when we feel confident that the dog can do this on their own, then we'll put them safely back into the group scenario and we'll start adding with safeties in place.

If needed, we'll start adding arousal into those situations intentionally. So we're not going to wait until the dogs are angry with each other. We're going to add in arousal in there between them. Can one have a ball while the other works on their skill? Can one do something? Maybe, if common thing for little dogs is they like to spin when they're excited. Can we cue our little dog to spin and give our dog that was reacting to that their job to do? Right. So we would gradually put it into the situation with the other dogs, not wait until they're already super angry.

Melissa Breau: That makes a lot of sense. So part of the reason we're talking about all this. Right. Is because you're going to offer a new class fighting at Teach Dogs to Move Away from Conflict over at FDSA. So do you want to talk a little bit about the class itself, maybe who might want to sign up and kind of what you're planning to cover?

Christina Young: Sure. I think anybody who has dogs in the home that have big feelings would benefit from these skills. And anyone that's thinking about bringing home another dog, you can train your dogs proactively so that the introduction for your next dog goes very smoothly. Anybody who likes working with multiple dogs. So step one, it's a three week course and the first week we're going to really work on figuring out that place of safety.

And if the dogs have some history of angst between them, we're going to look at ways that we can improve improves their relationship outside of the scenarios that they where they're fighting or where they're upset with each other. And then individually, the dogs will start those move away skills. We'll work on the individual that individually adding arousal and look at how we're going to put that back together in a safe way in week three.

We're going to apply all of those skills to integrating the dogs back together together in areas that might have a little bit of tension. So the baby steps. Yeah, baby steps. We'll start 1, 2, 3 and give you a good path of where we're going forward with them. How to go forward.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and being our second video guest, which is a big deal. Super happy to have you here.

Christina Young: Thank you. It's been fantastic chatting with you. Likewise, and thanks to all of our listeners and our viewers for tuning in. We'll be back next week, this time with Alex Woodroffe to talk about the benefits of nosework for senior dogs. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice, or go ahead and hit subscribe over there on YouTube to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone or to receive a notification as soon as the next episode becomes available.

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Tiffany Spencey for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by BenSound.com the track featured here is called Buddy Audio Editing Write 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!