Ep. 19 Transcript

Episode 19 Special Episode - unPACKing 2024 p. 1

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00:04
Welcome to Unpacked, an open-minded podcast taking a clinical, not political approach to helping pet parents around the world. I'm Sailor Jerry, certified dog trainer, virtual dog training revolutionary, owner of Tulsa Pack Athletics and creator of The Open-Minded Approach. And I'm Madison, her friend, certified dog trainer and behavior consultant. Together, we have nearly three decades of experience in behavioral dog training.

00:29
We've been working with real dogs and the humans who love them to create solutions to problematic behaviors that feel too big for them to tackle on their own. This is Unpacking 2024, a special two-part episode to close out the year and kick off season three. Jerry and I spent time reflecting on our personal clients from this year and each pulled two to unpack for each other and for you. These four cases are jam packed with valuable insights and

00:57
You just may see your own dog reflected back in one of our clients. If you are ready to learn from real behavior cases, settle in with us and unpack. Welcome to this very special episode of unpacked where Jerry and I are going to be doing things a little bit differently and unpacking some of our client cases from 2024. We found some great lessons working with these particular

01:24
human dog pairs and we're really excited to unpack these for one another and for all of you. I have no idea what cases that Jerry's brought and she really doesn't know about the cases that I've brought, so this is a great opportunity to hear us in real time puzzle through a case together. Well, I certainly am excited to do it this way. It's a little bit different for everybody. We dissect these cases so much. I think it's nice to do like a little mini dissection and just go...

01:53
Some of the highlights and some of the things that we thought were really good strategies or maybe background that we thought was useful in this case to connect those dots together for people. So I'm excited just like you are. It's going to feel a little bit rapid fire because we have four cases, whereas normally we're taking four episodes to work through one case. So it's going to be a little bit different. But the format that we're going to use, we decided ahead of time. First we're going to give a little introduction and then go through the case background.

02:23
and then talk about our approach and then the outcome. And I drew the, I guess it's, I don't know, I don't know if it's the short stick or not, but I get to go first. So the first case that we are going to be looking at is Mochi and I have a soft spot for any dog named after a food. Like give me a tortellini, give me a cannoli. I want a special- The tortellini's cute, yeah. Pierogi, I've had a pierogi.

02:51
But little Mochi is a mini Cavapoo. And when we started working together, he was just around two, which was much earlier this year, back in February. Now the key issue that Mochi's humans were dealing with was some resource guarding and feeling really unaligned and in some ways kind of uncomfortable with some of their past training experiences. So into the case background.

03:19
Mochi lives with Matt and Lauren and he's been with them most of his life ever since he was a puppy. They were seeing early signs of resource guarding. So around eight, nine months is when they first started seeing signs of that. But they thought maybe he was playing until one day he lunged at Matt and then it turned into a bite the next time. And by the time they came to me, they had both been bet and been through three different trainers. So trainer one

03:48
was, from what I can understand, just really overly corrective. I sometimes write down exact phrases during consults because it can help capture, like, not just the information, but the information behind the information. And I wrote down what they said. The context, yeah. So the exact words were, what this woman did to our puppy was cruel. That's how they felt from their trainer. And this is where I've said to you, Jeri, like, people come to us having been really hurt.

04:16
in their relationship with trainers and being like, they have a reason to be mistrustful. And so I try and think about this case and, and other clients like this who have just had a real breakdown in that professional trust. And so this told me that they cared a lot about using compassionate methods that they could feel good about, right? It's one of those ways I know someone is going to be a good fit for me is because they don't just care about the results. They care about how they get there and how they feel about getting there.

04:45
Um, so trainer two, they went to was positive reinforcement. And while they said it really helped strengthen the bond, they didn't really see the behavior change at all or get any better, but they did learn to communicate better, which was great. Now trainer three was a balanced e-collar trainer who they had done a ton of research on and vetted thoroughly. But again, in the end, the behavior didn't get any better and everyone just ended up like really frustrated and confused. All of them.

05:15
Um, so my approach, my core strategy, you know, they already had incredible management, which is so important with resource guarding. Their house was literally mochi proof, but what if someone was over or, you know, watching mochi for them, they wanted long-term change so that everybody in their life could feel safe. So we made some adjustments to the management, but honestly, not many. The way that I approach doing.

05:41
behavior modification for resource guarding is through emotional counter conditioning. So in addition to the management. So we created a little zone, we used a barrier rather than a kennel, although I have used kennels in some situations, but we used a barrier in this case, and we gave Mochi something of high value in that zone. And to start to help him kind of feel differently about people approaching him when he has awesome stuff, we created a pattern. You step forward.

06:08
You mark, you drop something awesome, you step back. It takes a lot of adjusting the values of both what he has in his space and what we're dropping and being consistent with this for a while. The amount of time of that depends on like the depth of the emotion and the amount of time that they've been rehearsing that resource guarding behavior. But over time, over weeks, it takes, we start to see a dog that is not on guard as much when they have something that they like.

06:37
and we strongly classically conditioned high value traits because Mochi is the type of dog that struggles more with what we call contraband than high value things that he's supposed to have, right? You know, it was less about the Kongs and the Chewies, although... It's the contraband and the paraphernalia. It's the contraband and the paraphernalia, unfortunately.

07:04
This is a very valuable wood chip that I found outside and I now have to guard it with my life, right? Here's a piece of paper that I found on the ground. So we definitely wanted a way to trade things away that are potentially dangerous because that's, you know, obviously one of the struggles there is that if you have a dog that has something that they don't want you to take from them, what are they going to do? They're going to swallow it, which is not always a safe thing. So we want them to enjoy giving things up. However, Mochi is very, very smart dog.

07:33
So he is a great example of a dog who we needed to be really careful about that with because he had the history of and would ritualize stealing things, stealing contraband, you'd be told, hey, bring it here and let's do a trade. Some dogs will make that connection. So we had to do something a little bit different, which involved

07:55
lengthening that behavior chain. So that way he wasn't engaging in guarding as like attention seeking, engagement seeking behavior. So it was a, we had to tow that line very, very carefully. That's interesting. Yeah. That's really interesting. I'm sure that was a lovely little dance. It always is. You know, I feel that way about resource guarding training. It's, it's absolutely a dance and we had to make some, you know, some changes along the way. And one thing I noticed right away with Mochi was how agitated he was.

08:24
when it was time to go outside. If Matt approached him with the leash, he would growl at him and they did not understand. So we took that as an immediate opportunity to start showing Mochi, all right, dude, we're paying attention. We're listening now, right? So instead of like, well, I don't care we're going outside because you have to go outside. It's okay, what's going on? Why don't you wanna go outside? Is it the harness? Is it the leash? Is it the doorways? Is it the environments? It was a good initial opportunity.

08:53
to dig in to Mochi's emotions and give Mochi that first moment of like, oh, they're listening. Like they're trying to figure this out finally. Because they really thought Mochi was mad at them and angry and lashing out. It was the act of getting leashed up. Oh, yeah. Some dogs don't care for that. They just don't care for it. No, it's, it's a period of...

09:20
Enzo doesn't like it either. He'll do it because I've conditioned it so well. But I can tell that he's purposely standing off over away from me because he just doesn't care to have a leash on. I mean, I get it. There's a lot. Yeah, there's a lot of reasons that that can be like being off putting process. But I think for us, it was a nut like on top of everything else also a good opportunity to start showing Mochi, you can decide.

09:45
when this like when you're ready, like you can have a say in some of this. This is something where you don't like it's not life or death for you to go outside right this very second. If we have to put the leash down and go out and try again in 20 minutes, we can do that, right? So it was it was a chance to repair the relationship a little bit and build up a new form of communication where Emoji knew that the other party was listening. So the outcome of this case is honestly, he made

10:15
more importantly, well, equally importantly, his humans felt really good about how they got there. They still have some other like reactive behaviors that they're dealing with, but I got a message from them a few weeks ago. They said, Hey, Madison, I hope you're doing well. I'm writing because Mochi has been doing fantastic. While he still has tendencies to resource guard his ability to disengage has been so much improved since our time working with you.

10:40
Treats are a lifeline and we notice he really does not like to be reactive with the leash as long as we get him to come to us. So that was the huge change in not just getting dressed on the leash, but I think in their relationship was we let him come to us. We let him tell us when he's ready for these things. It was all about communication. So Madison, looking back and thinking about the resource starting cases that you've had, what is...

11:07
What are one or two things that you feel consistently across the board that you are telling these people from the onset? Like what are some of the first things that you, I know you spoke about management and how important that is, but what is there something that you have noticed no matter what the situation, it's across the board, you could tell that to people that have resource starters. That they need to make a safe space for their dog, where their dog can have something and know it will never be taken.

11:37
And that can be a place to rebuild because other than when I've seen it in like very, very young puppies, which I have seen, this is the result of learning that they have a reason to feel that their possessions are threatened. Right. And now Mochi was a dog that was showing this at very, very, you know, a very, very young age. But the truth is, is that every time a puppy has something awesome and it gets snatched, they learn that their stuff is not safe.

12:05
and they're gonna respond in the only way that dogs know how. And resource availability is one of the biggest drivers of behavior, period. And this is a very ritualistically reinforcing but problematic behavior, right? Cause if a dog lunges at you and you back up, they're like, oh, okay, that's how I keep this safe. And things can escalate pretty quickly. So that's one of the first things is it's not just management in terms of trying to keep your dog from getting things that they shouldn't have.

12:33
It's also rearranging your life so that way you have clarity and giving them a space to enjoy and let their guard down. Because if they don't learn to let their guard down, then they're always going to be on guard. So you need to give them a place where they can really put their guard down and teach them to come away from things that they like. Yeah, I think that's some really good general advice. Resource guarding is such a widespread issue among dog owners. Another widespread issue.

13:03
separation anxiety. Oh, yeah. I have always a couple of clients on my roster at any given time that are there for separation anxiety. And a recent one that stuck out to me is Hallie and Teddy, and they live in San Francisco. And Teddy is what looks to be some kind of healer mix, maybe a little Aussie in there somewhere, indiscriminate little cattle dog mix.

13:33
Yep. He's very cute. But he had some pretty serious separation anxiety. I mean, Teddy would be what we classify as a stage five clinger. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So it wasn't just that he couldn't be left alone. It was when Halle and her partner were in the apartment, it was just like Teddy wanted to crawl under her skin. And so they came to me after having been also to a couple of different trainers.

14:03
and with mixed reports, very much like what you reported before. She had some concerns that the behavior was just getting worse. And she really was dedicated to helping Teddy with this problem. An interesting thing about Hallie is that she, I don't know exactly what her position is because I did not ask in detail, but she works in college athletics. And so it was...

14:31
uh, nice to train with her because I could use a lot of terms from like coaching and sports that really resonated with her. And she was a really, really fun client for me. You can also tell people who are, you can always tell people who are not new to training as a concept and showing up and being consistent and getting in your reps. That's exactly the kind of language that I used with her. And, um, thankfully it really resonated. So

14:59
I noticed pretty early on that separation anxiety, isolation anxiety was not little Ted words only problem. Little Ted word. The underlying problem to all of that was really that he was very, very insecure. And he needed a lot of confidence. And what happened with Teddy, um, unlike maybe some other dogs is that insecurity turned into anxiety that then precipitated into.

15:28
anxiety to be separated from you, you know, and some dogs will turn the other way. That insecurity turns outward and they're very reactive. But that really wasn't what I saw. I did notice though, when she was outside on walks, um, in some of the intake process, I thought, man, that dog doesn't really look very sure of himself. There was a lot of tip tap, tippy toe, and there was a lot of looking around, you know, he wouldn't get up on certain, you know, tables or walk over certain things on the ground.

15:58
So we actually spent a couple of weeks really trying to get him a little bit more comfortable outside because we needed to do so much heavy work inside. And there has to be a balance where he has to have peace somewhere. And so as we worked on outside, that became a little bit of a break time for them and they could go out and go on their walks and spend some time together. And then Teddy knew that

16:26
they were never going to be separated during that time. And that time was all about him. The approach to the separation anxiety was first, what I just mentioned, was making sure that the rest of his life was not in disastrous, like peril crisis dumpster fire, which it really wasn't. It was mostly just showing Hallie how to build a dog's confidence. Just from being on walks alone. Can you have him jump up on this? Can you have him walk over this? Can you sit and just.

16:56
obituate and look at the environment with him. Can he scatter out here? You know, just really building basic skills. And then we turned to once we had a pretty good handle on that, we turned to, okay, now let's talk about inside. And we started with our pre-departure cues because what was happening and is as is in many households, we're constantly doing stuff to get ready for the next thing that we're going to do. Oh, yeah. And our dogs pick up on that in ways that

17:24
you know, we are not even aware of. And so they become what I would say, overly sensitive to the things that bring on the leaving of the people. You know, the keys, the shoes, the purse, the putting the hat or the scarf on. My dog knows not even to barely get excited at all because he knows that I forgot six things inside the house. And until she gets to this particular stage of her pre-departure key,

17:54
There's no reason I should even get up off the couch because she's going to come back inside six times. They're really, really paying attention. They don't have anything else to pay attention to except us. So they pick up on those things. And I noticed that the more we spent time desensitizing each of those singular things that would happen, it was easier to move forward with the rest of what we were doing. So that was a background thing that I had Hallie do.

18:23
It was always work on your pre-departure cues, make it a habit. The next thing that we did was we started really heavily, positively associating the place bed and the crate. He would get up on her, like on her face almost, on the couch, there was just no healthy separation. So we started to make the places that we did want him to go very valuable to Teddy, and boy did he bite. He, no pun intended.

18:52
Uh, he really, really started what I would call self soothing, um, where he was figuring out that he didn't need to latch onto Hallie to satiate this need or feeling in him. He could go over and do the other behavior that we were asking, which was laying your crate or lay in your place bed. And we pretty quickly started to see that the duration was building and building just by then.

19:21
not asking him or making him be over there, but they would just get up and sprinkle a little food every once in a while. And over time, he could stay longer and longer and longer. So they are actually still with me. They take breaks and then they come back and we do a little bit more. And we are just starting again. We made it all the way up to where he has been at home alone for a couple of hours and he has not done any destructive behaviors.

19:49
He hasn't been screaming at the top of his lungs. So we're really just working on building the duration that he's in the crate now where he's actually comfortable. But she sends me the greatest little like wins and she actually sees them. You know, a lot of times clients, they don't know that they're looking at a small win. And so they'll just kind of skip right over it, but she sees them. She noticed one day that when they came home, Teddy asked to play with her.

20:17
he tried to initiate play where before he would never, it was just, he would cling. And then we got to the stage of, okay, he would go on his place bed. He would come, he would get some affection, and then he would go to the other end of the couch. So it started to really be very natural. And I think what they both are looking for, I don't think Teddy wants to be a stage five clinger. I think Teddy is uncomfortable. That's the only thing he knew how to do. So he's been doing really well outside too.

20:46
He looks really happy outside. We've been working on this one area that has this like little raised concrete that he really doesn't like. But he's gotten even better about that. He can come and be next to it, eat food next to it. And that may be the most he ever does and that's okay. But it's helped to build his confidence and let him know that he is capable of doing things. And I think that that is reflected on the work that we're doing on the inside. So they are very happy.

21:13
Like I said, they have been with me for repeat packages to keep seeing this thing through and I'm just really proud of them. Can you talk a little bit more about the self soothe and just kind of like ways in which you you saw that crop up with Teddy and ways in which you were able to kind of use that in I'm sure different areas? Yeah, I think we all have to think about ourselves in that situation and or maybe you have children people that are listening maybe have children.

21:43
For the rest of my life, I can't have my mom here holding me and patting my back. I would love that. We would all love to be sued by another all of the time, but we can't. That's just the reality of life. And we also know that people beings that are capable of either calming themselves down or hyping themselves up.

22:09
or any of the things that take place on the inside that nobody's helping you do it, you gotta figure it out on your own. That stuff is good for us. It's good for our spirit. It's good for our own like structure and discipline in life. Yeah, it's good for our brain. So I think what I saw with Teddy was again, you don't need to be under my skin. If you're feeling uncomfortable.

22:36
The answer is not to climb up under me and make me also feel uncomfortable. So let me show you what you can do when you're feeling like that. And then of course, reinforcing the bed and the crate. And it was just the cutest thing in the world to watch that dog go into his crate and lay down all on his own. And he's not being punished. Nobody makes him go there. No, she's never said, Teddy, get away from me and go to your crate. She's never said that to him.

23:03
It's only just been all his choice. And then we make his choice very attractive. We make the choice we want him to make very, very attractive. But self-soothing could look different, across the board for training. I think when we generally use that term, it's normally meant, can my dog figure out how to calm down and lay down on their own? Can they get to a spot where they can just be at peace and quiet and have stillness?

23:32
without me making them, without me, you know, doing something actively to make that happen. That's what I think of anyway. Yeah. Come back next month as we kick off season three with part two of this special episode.

23:50
Unpacked was created by Jerry Sheriff and Madison Simpson, edited and produced by Josh Wasta under the supervision of Straight Up Dog Talk, LLC and Emily Breslin. If you are enjoying this podcast, follow or subscribe to be sure you don't miss an episode and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Looking for more honest and relatable dog content? Check out our sister podcast, Straight Up Dog Talk. See you next time.