E137: 캣 워런(Cat Warren) - "개가 아는 것"

He's rather good looking, too, for those who can't see him. He's a nice looking pup. I love Sable Shepherds, I have to say. Mm-hmm. So to take things back a little bit, how did you originally kind of get into dogs? So my family, I grew up in Oregon, and I think that my dad had hunting labs going back to when he was quite young. And we also had a host of female Irish setters. And when I got old enough, I did not want an Irish setter. What I wanted was an Irish wolfhound, because I was tiny, and I had really studied older dogs, and I'd been to dog shows, and that was the breed I'd fallen in love with. And so my parents got me a miniature dachshund. So it's the same thing. Yeah, really, really so totally similar in so many ways. So I named him Clancy. I think a little bit of a revenge, an Irish name for a German dog. And so Clancy was my first dog. And then I moved on to have a few English setters. And the moment I was out of the house, I started getting German Shepherds. And that's what I've had ever since. Once you found them, you fell in love, huh? Yes. Despite all their problems. Well, we'll definitely get into that. Before we go there, though, obviously, I've trained with you today. So I know that you work pretty hard to be a positive trainer. But have you kind of always been on that path? If not, what got you started there? So it is such a – no, I've not always been a positive trainer. And I don't – probably with prior dogs, I wouldn't have even known what you meant when you said that. And it's so funny because, you know, some of the early books that I read, I mean, I'm 63, what can I say? The Monks of New Skeet. Thank God I sort of didn't grow up on Cesar Millan. But I think that probably Jocko, the dog from the Czech Republic, was the first dog that I started trying to train in a positive way. And that was due to the influence of Lucy Newton, who teaches scent work sometimes for Finzi. And also, what kind of a dog Jocko was. He came over to be a law enforcement dog. He was 18, 17 months old when we got him. He definitely had an edge. I mean, some of that East German Shepherd can have, you know, sort of a real general – people call it reserve. But it was essentially suspicion about the world. And I truly believe that when I looked at him, I thought, this dog needs to learn to just utterly trust me. And I think to some degree I looked at him and thought, I have to treat him as I would a slightly feral animal. And that is, you know, with slow, kind, and treats. And then when I started with Lucy, she basically started to slowly inculcate me.

And by the time Rev came around, you know, July, a year and a – nearly a half ago, it was delightful that even though I still wasn't very good at it and was still struggling, I knew immediately that he was going to be trained in an R-positive way. To dive into that just a little bit more, you know, how would you describe your approach today? What are you doing or kind of how are you approaching that when you work on training with him? So I'm awkward. Because I am. Because I'm still learning. And, you know, you think about R-positive and think about all the things, you know, shaping and luring and timing and how you do cues. And in a way, my learning curve has been steep. I have had a lot of help, which has been so necessary. Because in a way, I think that when people talk about R-positive, there's – you don't have the assumption that, you know, it's a dance between you and the dog. And if it's an unfamiliar dance, you know, you sometimes aren't the most ideal partner. And – but it is really – I can see the difference that it makes with Rev. And I can see the trust. And I think that more than anything else, R-positive allowed me to slow down and be a little more observant, right? And think about what state of mind the dog was in, right? The are you ready to train is such an important question. And I don't think I'd ever considered it before these two dogs. Mm-hmm. I love that line about it being a dance and really having to think about it. And I also want to give credit where credit's due, Kat. Even in the time that I've known you, you've made huge leaps and bounds, both in your own training and just Rev in terms of what he's accomplished. So props for it's deserved. Well, thank you. He's helped train me too, right? You know, he's big. So there's this level at which it's like if there's not a ton of room for error. He's a nice big boy. And it's like you do – I don't want him leaping up and kissing everybody's nose. Right. So, yeah. What does he weigh now? You know, he actually is not all that far off of 85 pounds. So he's big for working line shepherd. Yeah. And he's a big boy. He's a big boy with big bones. Yep. Very pretty boy, but definitely a big boy. Yes. So we talked a little bit about your current duo, but your books are about solo. So I wanted to kind of take a step back. Can you share a little bit about solo? Sure. So – and it's funny because it sort of seems like yesterday and also seems a really long time ago. But solo came into my life and into my David's life in 2004. And he was a West German German Shepherd from a breeder where I had really researched what I sort of wanted in a dog.

And it was a big boy because I had a big boy because I had had an American German Shepherd who had had so many health problems that I had just sworn to myself that I was not going to go through the tragedy of some of those health problems another time. Of course, you can never insure yourself against that happening. But Solo was a singleton, so he was the only pup in his litter. And he came to us sort of like a pup who had an Exeter education, right? A little Ivy League education from his breeder who was absolutely wonderful. But the issue of him being a singleton really made his life difficult because he did not know dog language very well. And as a result, his reaction to other dogs and other pups was what we call aggression back then. And what I currently would call reactivity and probably a fair amount of fear just because he didn't speak the language. So he just could not get in and out of a situation gracefully with another dog. And, you know, from having looked at the book and talked to you, he really kind of, you know, obviously some singletons wind up just fine. But he really struggled with kind of all of the stigmas or the things that people say can happen. It sounds like he really kind of got dealt the worst hand as far as those things are concerned. Well, and, you know, I mean, Melissa, this is the kind of thing where, you know, ex plus facto. Had I been a more experienced trainer, could I have helped mitigate some of these things? Or made the learning curve a little shorter? And I'm sure that I could have. Because, you know, by the time he was truly an adult, he was capable of paying attention when there were other dogs around. But I would say he was never fully comfortable, right? It's just they weren't his people. I mean, people were his people. Right. So for those who haven't read the book, you went on to train Solo as a cadaver dog. So what led you down that path of all things? So that was serendipity is probably an odd term to use. But it really was serendipity that I knew a trainer whom I hadn't trained with for quite some time. My former shepherd, Zev, had been an obedience dog and was sort of mid through his AKC obedience titles when he got sick when he was just seven years old. And so I went to Nancy and said, what do I do? And I do remember because it was a hot July and he was four and a half months old and he was a little monster. And she, you know, he was loose in the yard and he was like bounding towards the cyclone fence where the kennel dogs were and bouncing up and growling and snarling. And of course, the other dogs would react.

And, you know, I was trying to lure him away. You know how well that works with liver treats. And that's when Nancy and I talked and she said, what do you want to do with this dog? And, you know, my response was, I don't, I just want him to not do what he's doing right now in front of you. That would be a really great start. But I didn't even know what a cadaver dog was. And she had had a couple of dogs. She'd had search and rescue dogs and a couple of dogs that were cadaver dogs. And she explained and also explained that, you know, one of the advantages with cadaver dogs is they sort of work separate sectors. And so it's not quite as big a deal to have a dog that is reactive with other dogs if he's kind of under control in his sector when he's searching. And that was very much, I mean, that was very much the case. So, you know, I went home and I immediately started reading about cadaver dogs. And, you know, it was the one thing Nancy told me not to do. And, of course, I did it. She said, you think too much. But I went home and started reading. And, you know, I found it fascinating. And that's what started me was here's this dog who has flunked out of a number of puppy classes. I mean, truly flunked out. And what are we going to do with him? He needed something, huh? Well, he needed something and I needed something, right? And he was a dog where my preliminary hopes were that I was just going to go back to the obedience ring. But that really was not going to happen at that stage with him. So I started training him with Nancy. Now, in the book, you were recounting quite some detail, kind of what that first training session with her was like. Can you share that story? I'd be most unhappy to. You know, it's so funny because I can remember it. And, you know, Nancy Hook is absolutely wonderful. And her methods of laying foundation, right? Are really sophisticated. And at the time, though, right, there wasn't – people were using things like concrete blocks where they would put the scent in one of the concrete blocks. Nancy used paint buckets, you know, plastic buckets from Home Depot. And laid them out in the yard. And I think people who do scent work are very sort of familiar with this or other versions of laying a foundation. And Nancy put her soon-to-be ex-husband's wisdom teeth in one of the buckets. And the rest of them were blanks. And then she explained how I was to take him and just run him down the buckets. And that, you know, if I would present a bucket that he should just dip his head in and then the next and then the next and it would be really smooth.

And then he'd hit the positive bucket. And at that moment, I would – if he paused, which he would, right, because dogs are so good at detecting anomaly. And those teeth would have been an anomaly. At that point, I was to quickly reward him. And it didn't go that way. So Zella was very excited and very rambunctious and on lead. And my timing was all off. And I had liver treats in my pouch. But trying to wrestle them out when he was jerking me from bucket to bucket. And, I mean, Nancy was just hissing at me. Reward him! Reward him! And he was yowling. And quite literally, he was a smart dog. And he figured out almost immediately that there would be a treat coming if he kept his head in the bucket with the teeth in it. And – but then I wasn't there fast enough. And he started yowling at me. It was like Nancy said, oh, you can use that as his alert. It's a nice spin for it, right? That's right. Take what they give you. I think I described it in the adult book as the funky chicken dance with a little leash bondage. And then I think in the kid's book that I just kept it at the funky chicken dance. I didn't have the leash bondage part. Fair enough. But he did have – he had me tied up. Yeah. So I'd imagine, you know, most of our listeners are dog people. Probably almost all of them are also dog sports people. But, you know, the idea of a working dog or a dog that's actually doing calls and things, that's a little bit different. So can you talk us through what maybe a typical call might look like for you in solo? You know, when you were working, how did it work? What was that like? So I had a somewhat unusual situation in that I was not working with a team per se. Most search and rescue folks and cadaver dog people are associated with a volunteer team or they're officers in a police department. I was actually training as a volunteer with a law enforcement agency. Actually, I was with a couple, with Durham Police Department, K-9 unit, and with Durham Sheriff. And I think that I trained for about a year before I got hooked up training with the Durham Police Department. I was really lucky. And the K-9 sergeant sort of allowed me in. And then once we were, Solo and I were certified, a standard call out would be word of mouth. So it would usually be a homicide detective or just a detective from this county or from another county. And it often went that I would get a call in the evening and I would look at my phone and it would say no caller ID. And so, you know, these days we know that it's a political call. Back then, if there was no caller ID, I knew that it was the police.

And they would explain the situation. And inevitably, it would be somebody who hadn't been heard from for four or five days. The police knew, for instance, that a boyfriend was a suspect or a drug dealer was a suspect or that this person was suicidal. In some cases, it was because of Alzheimer's or dementia. And then we would schedule when we would go out because oftentimes you have to have several police there. And ideally, you want more than one cadaver dog. There were a number of cases I worked where I was the only person with a cadaver dog, which isn't great, but it's inevitable. And then, you know, you go and you would meet usually at the police department offices and you would get maps and you would talk to them for a bit about where the search was and how they plan to run it. Or they would sometimes ask me how I would ideally run it and we kind of talk it through and then go out. And very often there would be several places, right? So that if it was, for instance, a suspected boyfriend, right, there would be an area behind the house. But then there also might be an area off a park where they used to sit and do drugs together. In some homicide cases, we would be searching along a highway, for instance, in the, you know, sort of in the ditches and back because it was believed that the person had been dumped out of the car. And so, you know, and so we would search these sectors. And we'd have to do it. I mean, dogs in sniffer mode and so many of your listeners already know this, but especially North Carolina. I mean, you during the summer, it can get pretty panty pretty quickly. And you want to work the dog and then cool them down and hydrate them and then go back out. And so there was, you know, so there was a lot of that. There were a lot of sort of 10-minute searches back into the car with the AC on, right, and then moving to another area and back out of the car. Solo almost always worked off lead unless we were in searching along a highway or if we were in a very urban area. You know, and we even did searches inside houses in some cases. And that was all off lead. Interesting. If I remember right, you mentioned that part of the reason the cadaver work also worked for you is there's a little bit more flexibility around scheduling than with a traditional, like, search and rescue situation, right? There is. And, you know, if you think about live search and rescue, right, where the victim is presumed to still be around, time is so of the essence, right? The three-year-old toddler who wanders off, right?

The person who has dementia or Alzheimer's where the caretaker realizes that they've been gone for four or five hours and it's the middle of the summer. And it's like that's where minutes matter. And, you know, I was teaching. And also I'm really aware of the fact that, you know, I started this work when I was 50. But being able to sort of dash out from NC State where I was teaching was just not going to happen. So, you know, the cadaver work, it is, I mean, the saying is the dead can wait. And that's true to some degree, right, is that sometimes we would wait a day and a half or so until we could get, you know, enough police officers together to do an effective search or get another dog, right? If we were working something that was, for instance, a clandestine burial because those are such difficult cases. I think you've also kind of mentioned that a lot of the times you'd be called out for search and you might not even find anything. So once you've kind of graduated at that point where you were working on real cases, you know, what are we looking at in terms of like training versus working? You know, what kind of training did you have to do to kind of keep things up so that it was still reinforcing for him? What did that look like? The thing is, I don't think you ever stop training, right? And probably to some degree, I trained as much when he was actually being deployed than I did when he was, you know, quote unquote, you know, training to get certified. Because searches are always different. They're always difficult. There are times when you, you know, you have to be honest with somebody, right? If your dog does not have a ton of experience in training on clandestine burials, you can't say, oh, yeah, I can take my dog out there, right? So there were always things for us to work on and to hone. And I think that, you know, Sola was such an easy dog in retrospect. I mean, I was so lucky. I doubt that another dog would have been as forgiving of my errors and also so quickly able to sort of generalize things so that he goes, oh, this problem is like that problem. And I was always sort of amazed, right? You know, one day he was out in the field and Nancy had put a cadaver high in one end of a drainage pipe and the other end of the drainage pipe was like 60 or 70 feet away. And he was out in the field and he ran and he sniffed the drainage pipe on one end. And darn it if he didn't go and run to the other end. I didn't even see that there was another end of the drainage pipe. And he checked that. And then he came back to the original end and said, no, it's stronger here.

And once he started doing something like that, I watched him on several searches. And if he had one end and he thought he was getting a little set, he would always go say, let me see if there's another end here that I can check out first. That's pretty impressive. It is. It is. And, you know, not, let's face it. I mean, not, not all dogs have that kind of ability. I mean, Jocko was going to be a super cadaver dog. I had him certified and before he started having seizures. But not in a million years would Jocko have sort of intellectualized a problem. And Jocko's idea of searching was, I'm going to go out here and I'm going to run back and forth really hard and really fast. And it's going to be out there. Right? Uh-huh. And it's true. Right? I mean, you work hard enough, long enough. And if you're a hunting dog and you're quartering back and forth, yeah, you'll, you know, it's an approach. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So different dogs are different and have different strengths and weaknesses. But that's interesting that he was able to problem solve quite that effectively. That's really brilliant. Yeah. Yeah, he was a smart dog. When writing the book, you know, it's clear that you did a lot more than just share your story, right? You obviously did quite a bit of research, including kind of delving into the science. I'd love to kind of dig into that just a little bit. When we're talking about, you know, finding a dead body, what is it that dogs are actually detecting or actually looking for? So there's the short answer and then there's a longer answer and then there's a really long answer. Okay. So the short answer is we don't actually know what it is that the dogs are detecting. Okay. We're rewarding them on sort of a range of sense, right? So people who have disaster dogs don't actually want to train on blood because in a disaster there's going to be blood everywhere. But you can train a dog on everything from fresh blood to ancient bones. And as when the dogs are being properly exposed to those things, they'll say, hey, I found it, right? The idea is, do we know what sort of the volatile organic compounds are that are saying to the dog, this is something I'll get rewarded for? And the answer to that is there are some theories. One forensic anthropologist who's done a lot of work and has identified like 480 different volatile organic compounds, those things that go sort of up in the air so that the dog's nose can capture it, right? I mean, he basically says that humans are a messy pile of pollution.

And it may be that some of the things that make humans different, for instance, from a dead deer are all the chemicals that we ingest during our lifetime, right? So this is the longer answer, you know, and it also, that answer of it depends on what the dog's been trained on, right? And it's why it's so important that people get into such rancorous arguments about, you know, you shouldn't train on this because it doesn't represent the full spectrum. And this is not really proper to train on. And please don't train on this or that. You know, the long answer is it would be good for us to know what it is that lights the dog's brain up when it is smelling something that is human remains and it says, I've found it. Because then we could actually do a better job of creating what we call pseudosense, right? That are good mimickers of human remains. Right now, it really is ideal that you train on human remains and a nice range of them. So what we do know is that well-trained catowder dogs can find human remains and they can find them consistently if the handler is good and if conditions are right. So to me, it's a really interesting scientific question, but I'm not, I don't tear my hair out thinking about, God, we've got to know what those compounds are, like tomorrow. Right. So. Yeah, I thought it was interesting because, you know, getting to hear you kind of talk in person about some of this stuff and, you know, through the book, you've mentioned, you know, teeth. You've mentioned somebody who had surgery and had a piece of their rib removed and you wound up using that for testing. You know, it sounds like there are lots of different ways that you kind of get your hands on those materials for training, right? Yes. I just thought that was so interesting to hear where some of those different things came from. Well, you know, we have very, I think, liberal laws here in North Carolina. And I've had long discussions with people at the medical examiner's office about, you know, you have to be clear about what is legal to have in your possession and what's not. And different states have really different regulations. I was lucky that I had access to a forensic research farm. They're colloquially known as body farms up in Western Carolina and where people have donated their bodies to science. And the researchers put them out in the woods and allow them to decay in various scenarios. And they have a cadaver dog program. So the cadaver dogs can learn a great deal with that.

But that said, it's also true that because I trained with police, there was more than one occasion that Mike Baker, the canine sergeant, would call and say, we've just found someone and the area has been completely processed in terms of, you know, crime scene investigators have been there and gone. And, and, and, and you want to come out with me. Too explicit. That's a little explicit. No, I think that was interesting. It's a little bit, a little detailed, but I think it was interesting. It was respectful. You, you dealt with that well. Yes. And I, you know, actually I was always, I have to say that it, it does, it does matter to me. This is always, this is always somebody's family or friend or it, you know, and I was, I was frankly, always incredibly appreciative. Of having that material to train solo. And always having the sense that I was actually lucky to have access to those training materials. To take it back to research for a minute, you included quite a bit, at least in the, the Young Readers edition about kind of dogs and their historic relationship with death. And I thought that was kind of interesting because I definitely didn't know that. So can you share a little bit about that? Yeah, I'd love to, I'd love to. This is like dogs, dogs eat dead people. That's just to summarize that whole area. Actually, I think that one of the things that we know about when we look at ancient religions is that almost every ancient religion has canids playing some role. And whether those are jackals or dogs or mixes or coyotes, right? The fact is, is that early civilizations often used taking a body out into the desert and leaving them there knowing that scavengers would come and take care of them. And so, so we have figures like Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead. And everybody's familiar with that sort of beautiful canid with the big ears. And I mean, it looks like a nice little black melon want to me. Some researchers think that's actually a golden wolf. Be that as it may, Anubis was protector of the tombs. And he was protector of the tombs because he wasn't afraid of dead bodies. Clearly, he wasn't afraid of dead bodies because people had seen the wolves or the jackals or whatever they were eating dead bodies. And so, you look at that and then the Zoroastrians who had really close relationships with dogs. They had herding dogs and house dogs. But they had a ceremony called sackeded, which means seen by the dog.

And quite literally for their ceremonies, they would choose a dog that looked and it would have, it would be a two-color dog. So, it was probably a kind of herding dog, right, by color, maybe like a Canaan dog. And the dog would be led up to the body. And usually, they left little pieces of bread on the body. And, of course, that was pretty tempting for the dog to just eat the bread. But that scared away the corpse demon, right? So, the scene by the dog was really necessary before the person was finally laid to rest. And it was an elaborate ceremony. And I sort of love, it's really evocative, right, that the dog's gaze drives the demons away. I still kind of feel that way. Yeah, that just by kind of sitting there and looking at the body, that had a power in and of itself, huh? Exactly. Exactly. Did you discover anything that you found really surprising or particularly interesting in your research, even if it, you know, didn't make it into the book? You know, there's a lot that I was surprised by where I decided it wasn't sort of part of the central function of the book. And, you know, one of those, I think I do in a couple of chapters talk about things like false alerts or false positives or handlers who move from being delusional into being criminal in their actions, right? So, I think that even though I started out skeptical, I think that what surprised me is that how really, really good the good dogs and handlers were, right, where it just blew my mind. But then it will also surprise me where there were dogs and handlers that were just bloody awful and shouldn't be out there, right, because of the responsibility, right? And I didn't, there's no point in writing a book where you're spending your whole time saying that. But I think it's also really important because I see so much sort of magical thinking about dogs and how perfect they are and how amazing their noses are. And the fact is, is that all of that and sports dogs, people, I mean, we'll, everybody who's listening already knows this, right, is that you have to have a really good handler and you have to have a really good dog. And, and you know how when conditions change just a little bit, right, things can go awry, right? And the same is true in doing search work, right? It's, it's that nightmare of, I searched downwind and I should have been searching upwind, right? So, in a way, it was that finding how beautiful it is when everything comes together nicely. And also realizing that that's, that's a, that's a beautiful and not entirely common thing.

That it takes a real kind of an honesty with yourself about your dog skills and your own skills and kind of some self-awareness to really achieve that. And maybe it's not quite as common. Yes, yes, yes. And I will say one of the things that actually delighted me so much, and I think sort of delights and surprises anthropologists, is that these dogs properly trained are very good at alerting on bones that are between like 800 and 1400 years old. And the fact, yeah, and the fact is, is that when we talk about volatile organic compounds, that's the scent that goes up into the error column. The fact is, is there, there's nothing coming. Those bones have, there's no decay happening in those bones anymore. It can't be detected with a machine. So that beautiful mystery is what is it that the dog is detecting that it can find something that has what we would say little to perhaps no scent. And yet, and yet they do. It's impressive. It's a miracle. It's not a miracle. It's just, it's just that we don't know yet. Right. That living beings are actually ahead of science in this. Isn't that nice? And isn't it nice that you have a really beautiful, as some people call them, biological tool that you can use because it works and you don't absolutely have to know exactly why it works. Right. Right. So I mentioned in the intro, the Young Readers Edition is now out. I got to come see you talk a little bit about it at a local bookstore this weekend. And what age group is it really written for? Can you share a little bit about what kind of kid might be interested in the book? So I wrote the book for 8 to 12-year-olds. I had a really, I think, sophisticated and astute editor because I really wanted to make sure I didn't condescend to kids, right? Kids can be pretty sophisticated. So it's written for 8 to 12-year-olds. But it's a chapter book. I've got like 130 illustrations and photos in it to kind of hopefully make it pop along. But kids who are interested in science, kids who are obviously who love dogs or animals, and I think even kids who like a kind of mystery or adventure. I mean, I remember when I was growing up, I loved Encyclopedia Brown. It's like it's sort of solve the mystery. And so I hope that those are the kids that are drawn to it. And because I think that it's dogs, well, as I explained, they're sort of like these furry science labs. It's that if the kids who are interested in learning about the natural world, very often the dog is the thing that's closest to giving them access to observing and appreciating all the things that are exciting about the natural world.

I imagine it's available in all of the kind of expected places, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, that kind of thing. Yeah. And, you know, independent bookstores, too. I was I think that it does have a cute cover. I mean, thank goodness they put a little German Shepherd puppy on the cover. But, yes, obviously, if you go online, it's pretty easy to find. Awesome. So we're coming up on the end here. And I have three questions I usually ask everybody their first time on. So I wanted to kind of work through those. The first one here is what is the dog related accomplishment that you're proudest of? So this is going to sound really odd because I was very proud of the work that Solo and I did together. I feel that the dog related accomplishment I'm proudest of is having Rev love and trust and like us. And I think that it is. And you and I talked at the beginning about how our positive has sort of changed my approach and how I do things. And the degree to which I so wanted to have like the perfect cadaver dog and the idea of saying, you know what, I need to listen and look and not rush with this dog. And the degree to which we grok each other, right? That learning how to understand and appreciate him and fully falling in love with him, even though he is so different from Solo, I think is an accomplishment for me because it's really unlike me. Right? Usually there's a goal and it's like I'll do it by hook or by crook and I want the dog to come along for the ride. And it doesn't work that way. You've really taken the time with him to honor his part in the process. Yes. And not and not to worry. Right. And to feel like, you know what, we'll do something together. And it's fun. And I'm learning with him. What is the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Oh, you know, it's a short answer and a long answer. I think training advice comes along when you need it. Right. Right. And I know, you know, Amy Cook's, you know, every time you train your dog, you're teaching them how to feel is a very good piece of training advice. But I've also been listening to Sarah streaming and having her talk about this relationship. Right. And the relationship she has with her four year old Boricali and the degree to which it's just enjoying what you're doing. Enjoying the training, not worrying how long it takes or where your dog's at in the process. And when are we going to be able to do thus and such? And I think that that's a big piece of advice. But the it's not love the one you're with quite. But there's something about enjoy the one you're with. Mm hmm. I like that. Last one here.

Who is somebody else in the dog world that you look up to? So everybody says, because I have listened to time or two year podcast. Everybody. Right. Everybody has a number of names. I'll just talk about a very early name. And that's Patricia McConnell. Because Patricia. Her book, The Other End of the Leash, which came out a couple of years before I got solo, was one of those books where I read it. I actually think I was somewhere. On a bus, believe it or not. But I still remember, I mean, you know, a bus drive, like a several hour trip on a bus, which who does that anymore? But I but I remember how much reading it changed me and kind of opened my eyes. And I and I think that Patricia has her contribution to the field of a positive dog training has just been huge over the last couple of decades. I absolutely agree with you. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Kat. This has been great. Oh, thank you for having me, Melissa. It's really a pleasure. And I have to say I'm honored. Aw. Aw. Yeah. To be part of the Finzi world. Yeah. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week. I'll actually be interviewing Denise Finzi and Shade Whitesell. And we're going to talk about the parts of training, handling and competing with our sport dogs that they feel are kind of often overlooked. So 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 Finzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Finzi 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. Today's show is brought to you by the Finzi logo. Thank you.