E87: 제시카 헤크만(Jessica Hekman, DVM, PhD.) - 유전자에 기반하여 개 선택하기

So there are, I think, lots of good reasons to have you on. But before we get into some of the professional stuff, I was hoping as somebody who has one dog kind of that was a rescue and one that you got from a breeder, if you'd talk a little bit kind of about that piece. So with Jenny, my understanding is you adopted a dog. You kind of knew there was some serious stuff going on there. You'd have to work on it from a training perspective. Can you talk a little bit about where she was when you brought her home, where she is now? What kind of work you put in to get her there? Yeah, sure. Jenny definitely has a long and interesting story. I just finished up my master's. I was going back to finish up veterinary school. I was a third year vet student. And I had a lovely, behaviorally, very healthy golden retriever named Jack, who I adored. And I wanted to get a second dog. And so I was looking around at shelters. And a really close friend of mine was doing her shelter medicine internship and came across this dog. And I later found out she was actually joking when she emailed me to say, there's this dog, maybe you want her? Because she was sort of like, this dog's crazy. Clearly, you wouldn't want this dog. Right? Which I didn't. I got the mail and I was like, oh, that sounds great. And afterwards, she was like, I don't know what you were thinking. I like to say she comes from an oops litter, except for it was sort of a, the dogs do that sometimes litter. I think they had, it was from a farm that was in rural upstate New York, outside of Ithaca. I think they had some number of dogs that they just knew were going to have litter sometimes. So not so much of an oops litter as a like, oh yeah, you know, that happens. And at some point, animal control came to that farm and said, you have nine dogs and that's too many and you need to give some up. And so they took the two 10 month old puppies from their most recent litter, I gather, and took them in to Tompkins County Humane Society and said, here, you guys can have these and that'll get us back down to seven dogs and everyone will be happy. And apparently the owner was surprised to discover that these two dogs were super shy. They hadn't noticed anything behaviorally wrong with the dogs. But due to the fact, I think that the dogs had never, ever been off their farm at all. And I don't believe any socialization had been done with them at all. Then, you know, the dogs had sort of thought that their whole world was this little farm. And when they came into the shelter and discovered the world was much larger than that, they were horrified.

The woman, there was a woman working at the shelter at the time as a behavior consultant, had a master's in behavior and she referred to them as toxically cute. They were these ridiculously sort of looked like identical twins, a girl and boy, cream colored, so cute, 10 months old. And she said they just had people lining up to adopt them, but they knew that they were going to be behaviorally, really challenging. So they gave these two dogs to a pair of guys who tried really hard with them, but apparently just didn't so much have the dog skills necessary. And did some stuff that, you know, we know is not the best way to convince a shy dog to like you, such as luring them close with canned cheese and then trying to pet them when they had lured them close, which then taught the dogs that cheese was terrifying, for example. So after a month or so of that, the dogs were not warming up to them at all. And so Jenny came back into the shelter, but they kept her, she was fostered by this behavior, this behavior consultant. And that was when I found out about her. And shortly after I took her, her brother came back and moved in and took her spot with the behavior consultant. So they wanted to place her with me because I had this dog who was going to be a really good influence on her and teach her that people were not scary. When I first met her, I couldn't make eye contact with her because she would just tremble. And basically she's not aggressive at all. She just entirely shuts down. So she'll huddle in a corner and shake. So I couldn't make eye contact with her because she would completely decompensate when I made eye contact with her. I couldn't touch her. When we drove out, we were living in Massachusetts. My then boyfriend and I drove out to Ithaca to pick her up, to meet her and decide that we wanted her and pick her up. And her foster mom had to lift her into the car for us because she would pee whenever we touched her. And then we got home and getting her out of the car, she peed. And she lived for the first few weeks on her dog bed. And I kept a harness with a one foot long tab on her at all times. And when it was time to go outside, I would crawl on the floor backwards, not making eye contact with her to attach a leash to the tab so I didn't have to touch her and take her outside. And after a few days of this, I was going through this ritual of crawling backwards towards her. And she stood up and very clearly said, no, I understand. I understand the situation. I can take it from here. And just you don't have to put that thing on me. It's horrifying. So we went down outside out together.

And I had this big, safely fenced yard, but it was almost half an acre. And I remember just thinking, am I ever going to get this dog back inside? I was like, well, let's just see what happens. So I let her out. And she did her business and came back in. And that's very Jenny, being terrified of the world, but really wanting to make her way in it and thinking outside the box to try to figure out what's going to happen. She did not let my husband touch her, then boyfriend touch her for about the first six months that we had her. It took a week before I could touch her. First time I ever had a stranger in the house after I got her. She hid in a corner, pooped and sat in it. So that was lovely. Yeah, it took her weeks to stop submission urinating. I still remember the first night that I had, we were sleeping in the bed. And so she was on her dog bed at the other end of the room, didn't want to sleep in the bed with us, but was willing to be in the room with us. And I had given her a pig's ear. And whenever I gave her food, she would just like, she'd tuck it under her chest and be like, I'll eat this later when no one can see me and it's safe. And I remember like midnight after we'd been in bed for a couple of hours and it was dark, she felt safe enough when I could hear her start to crunch on the pig ear. And I remember just lying there in the dark, smiling to myself and thinking like, oh, she's doing better. So what did I do with her? So she came to me on fluoxetine, which is a behavioral medication that is effective in a lot of dogs, but it is the sort of the one behavioral medication that general practice veterinarians tend to feel comfortable with. And it was a general practice veterinarian who had prescribed it. So I took her to a veterinary behaviorist. I was a vet student at the time. So I had a friend who was doing her behavior residency and I had Jenny go meet with her and she prescribed a different medication that she thought would be more appropriate for Jenny's particular issues. And she has done very well on that. She has continued to improve. So I've had her for nine years now. Our gotcha day anniversary is coming up on New Year's day this year. She's just continued to improve. At first, it was really, really hard. And when we let her outside, she'd have trouble coming back in if there had been a stranger in the house over the last few hours. If I was out and my husband let her out, sometimes she wouldn't come back in and he'd call and say, can't get her in. And I'd say, you have to leave the door open and walk outside and get behind her. So she'll go in.

And he'd say, but it's January in New England. Can't you come home? I'd say, no, I'm on clinics in Vetsicle. They won't let me leave for another 12 hours. So it was really hard. She gradually started being able to make friends. I needed to have someone who could come let her out to pee when I was working these 15-hour days. And so I had to pay this dog walker to come about five or six times while I was there and pay her to come get to know Jenny. And then she was able to start coming. And Jenny was able to warm up to her. So that was really nice. When I finished vet school a year and a half later and I moved down to Florida for my internship, had to drive the dogs down there. Jenny hadn't ever really taken a long car trip before or really been off the property all that much. We'd been to the vet a couple of times, but I really was minimizing it because it was so traumatic for her. So we drove down to Florida to sort of a five-day drive because we took it slow. And she didn't pee for the first 48 hours. So that was terrifying. But she eventually did. She just continued to improve and to change. And so while we were in Florida, she got to the point where instead of huddling in a corner and shaking, when people came over, she would rue, which is not the behavior that I was aiming for in the end, but was actually showed that she was feeling more confident. When we then moved to Illinois for my PhD, I still remember the very first day that she was willing to go to sleep in the middle of the floor, just stretched out laterally in the middle of the floor. She'd always slept on couches before. I had never seen her sleep in the middle of the floor. When I first got her, she wouldn't go into the kitchen. She'd run through the kitchen really fast. And now she's comfortable in any room of the house. While we were in Urbana, there was a lovely, really big dog park, really nice one is dog park to go. And I was able to go at off hours when there weren't many other dogs there. And she was able to do that and be off leash and make dog friends and eventually even make human friends. She even had some human friends that she really liked there. Now we're back in Massachusetts. She's able to hike off leash with us in the forest. She is able to go to her chiropractor. She has chiropractic problems probably from being so tense all the time. And she's able to handle that and not completely decompensate. And when people come over, she now understands that while she thinks that all people are axe murderers, some of them do come with cheese, of which she is no longer scared. And so when people come over, she's nervous at first.

They toss her some cheese and then she's now actually at the point where she'll sit and make cute faces at people to get cheese, which is really nice. Recently, the huge thing recently was I have a dog walker come now for her and Dash. And I tell the dog walker, I'll let them both out to pee. That'll be fine. But only take Dash for the walk. Jenny won't go for a walk with you. And I got this text message from the dog walker saying, I asked Dash if he wanted to go for a walk. And Jenny was really excited about it too. Can I take her? And I was like, sure, just be prepared to go home if she freaks out. But she didn't. And I got these great photographs of her on the walk, really happy. So she's made massive progress. She's a really different dog than she used to be. So a lot of behavior modification, a lot of management, and a lot of time, and a lot of her trying as well. She really likes people. And she really likes being near people. She's just scared of them. And I think she's really made an effort because of that. And if she wasn't so people social, I don't think she would have overcome everything as well as she has. But she just continues to improve. And I thought she'd plateau after a couple of years, but she has not. Nine years. And she can still continue. She's better this year than she was last year. It's amazing. Yeah, she's a fabulous little dog. Now, on kind of the flip side of that, right? With Dash, you did all your homework. And I know you originally kind of had some hopes to do agility with him. But now you're not really so sure that's the path he'll take you down. Are you willing to talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So when I got Jenny, I was interested in fearful dogs. And I got her sort of as that project. And then when I got Dash, I was just like, I want a dog that'll be fun. And I want to learn about what it's like to raise a puppy. And I was interested in socialization as part of my job and my research. But I also just really wanted to do dog sports and agility in particular. So I went to a breeder who did agility and nose work and some other stuff with her dogs and got Dash. And she said, you know, he's a very confident puppy. And he's just going to be ideal for agility. And he did start out that way. And he then started around six months of age to have some fearfulness and to have off and on lameness. And I, you know, I'm a veterinarian. And I am not afraid to take him to specialists. And I took him to a bunch of specialists trying to figure out what was up with the lameness. And it took a year to find someone who could diagnose him. It was a complex problem.

And so when he was a year and a half old, we finally figured out that he had a tiny little chipped bone in his right elbow. And because he'd been on it for so long now that the elbow was really painful and his shoulder was showing changes as well because he'd been compensating. And so, you know, and I'd been doing agility foundations and early levels of agility, not jumping full height. And I'd been doing this and hiking him. You know, he'd been running in the woods and we were doing parkour. So he was doing all this stuff with this broken bone, basically. Um, the vet said it's probably was similar to walking with rocks in your shoes, clearly more and less painful at different times. And he had also pretty clearly learned that when other dogs approached him, if they bumped into him, it was going to hurt. So he had learned to warn other dogs off proactively. And so when we finally had the surgery, got his elbow repaired, the elbow injury, by the way, pretty clearly a traumatic injury. I know the day that it happened, he was five months, five and a half months. Uh, running in the woods and there was ice and snow and he came up lame that evening and, and it just, it kept coming and going ever since then. And so it was probably that he had what the, the orthopedist called jump down injury, probably jumped off of something, uh, too high that he shouldn't have and chipped that bone. Had the surgery was a six month recovery. And then he is fully recovered. So technically I could go back to agility. There's a couple of things stopping me. One is that given that he had this issue in that leg, it means that he's going to develop arthritis earlier than he would have otherwise. And the rehab that I was working with put it to me as, you know, you may only have so many jumps in him and he's going to be doing some jumping on his own, you know, into and out of the car and on and off the bed. So maybe you could conserve the amount of jumps you're asking him to do so that you put off the arthritis as long as possible. And that sounds reasonable to me. The other thing is that he had really learned to be very slow and cautious and agility. And I think a lot of that was that it hurt and also that I'm a green handler. And so we're doing some stuff that he can learn to really enjoy. So we're doing nose work right now, which he thinks is fabulous. It's very low pressure. Um, there's none of my expectations. There's none of anything hurting. And so possibly we'll go back to agility at a later point. Certainly not anything that I would push him really hard to do a lot of jumping.

But, um, yeah, so that's sort of how that how I got redirected with him down into a slightly different road than I had originally imagined. So personal experiences kind of aside for a moment, you also kind of deal heavily in all of this stuff professionally. Can you just share a little bit about how kind of your day job ties in? Yeah. So my career, you know, I had been a computer programmer for 12 years or something like that and decided I really wanted to learn about what causes dogs to have different personalities and to behave differently. Why some are shy and some are aggressive and some are really friendly. Um, what's, what's different in their brains. And it turned out that the best tools that we have right now for getting at that kind of thing in pet dogs is genetics, because you can look at a dog's genetics without having to actually cut their head open and get at their brains. It's a better way of doing things than, you know, the other alternatives involved laboratory animals. So I am, as you said, currently working at a research institute that the institute actually focuses mostly on human health. And the group that I'm working with, we use dogs as models for humans, uh, to study how genetics interacts with behavior and how it interacts with diseases like cancer to try to understand more, not just about dogs, but also about humans. And, and that's great. That's how we get our funding, uh, saying that this is applicable to human health. I'm obviously in it because I care about dogs. I figure there's plenty of other people looking at human health. I'm really more interested in the canine health, but, uh, that's sort of the, the focus of the lab as a whole. So what we do, uh, anyone who's interested in learning more about that can go to darwinsarc.org and check it out. The main project lets people come sign up their dogs, answer a whole slew of questions about their dog's behavior, and then get a kit to have a sample their dog's DNA, which we do just through saliva. So it's very easy. And then we run analyses and hopefully find fascinating things, although the project is young so far. So we don't, we have not solved all the questions of behavioral genetics quite yet. Quite yet. What can we know? What, what do we know about a dog based on their genetics? What kind of traits does research, uh, actually show us come hardwired? Yeah. So a lot of it is still up in the air and, and a lot of people are surprised to find out how much we don't know.

We do know that things like retrieving and herding and pointing, things that you see that are definite differences between breeds and things that we know that people really selectively bred for, those definitely can come hardwired. And so you can see dogs offering retrieving behavior or herding behavior without having been trained to do it, which I think is crazy. Like how do you program in the DNA that a dog really likes putting things in their mouth and bringing it back to you? Or that they really like collecting sheep into a little circle? I think that's just insane. And we don't know what it is that, that does that exactly. We have some initial ideas, but we don't know what genes are that do that. So we know that that can be more or less hardwired. Although as a lot of, you know, already, it certainly is not the case that every single Labrador retriever is interested in retrieving. So even though a particular breed may have most, most or many or most dogs in it be hardwired for one particular skill like that, it doesn't mean that every dog in the breed will be that way. So there's still, when it comes to personality, there's still just a lot of differences between dogs. Every dog is really an individual, even though a breed may have some tendencies. So the kinds of stuff that we're looking at with the Darwin's Ark project is, well, what I'm personally interested in is personality. And so I would say that personality are traits that change only very slowly over time, that tend to be fairly static over time. They can change, but slowly. So Jenny's example is, I definitely say she has a shy personality, but that she has become less shy over time, but it has taken a lot of work. One initial question that we're looking at based just on the surveys, not even on genetics, has been, are there different personalities per dog breed? Because we know that we feel like most golden retrievers are friendlier than most, say, German shepherds, which are more aloof, and that kind of question. And the initial work that was done by the last person who had my job suggested that that's not actually the case. He wasn't able to see any personality differences between breeds, which I, it was, it's interesting. It has occasioned a lot of debate in the lab because I, I was sort of like that shocking. And I think we have to question whether we're approaching this the right way because I'm convinced there are personality differences between breeds.

And my boss, Eleanor Carlson, who's the head of the lab said, well, you know, remember a hundred years ago, we told ourselves there were these differences between humans with different skin color. And we used to really honestly believe that based on someone's skin color, we could make some assumptions about their IQ. And we now know that that was really wrong, at least genetically it was wrong. You know, people with different skin color tended to get different levels of education, but that there were no real genetic differences in things like IQ or personality. And fair enough, although I would respond that we have not been selectively breeding groups, populations of humans for particular personality traits, and we have been selectively breeding dogs for different personality traits. So I am in the middle of working on trying to dig into that data right now and see what I can see. One of the first approaches that I took, Labradors are a really great example for us because they are the most popular dog in America. And so we have a lot of examples of them. And they're also kind of behavioral freaks because they have really low risk of being fearful of things and tend very much to be sort of friendly and outgoing. So they're sort of behavioral outliers, and there's also a zillion of them. So I looked to see what questions in the questionnaire labs scored really different from other breeds of the same size on. And unsurprisingly, one of the questions was, does your dog like bringing things to you? And labs, statistically, very significantly were much more likely to want to bring things to you. Whether you want to call that a personality trait or not, I don't know. But it was a good place to start. And again, very interesting, not all labs wanted to bring things to you, but they were much more likely to want to than other dogs. And so we're starting to try to do an analysis of if all these mixed breed dogs that we have, if they have more Labrador in their ancestry, are they more likely to enjoy retrieving? So that's one of the things that we're working on right now. Kind of digging into this stuff a little bit more, I think a lot of the time people will have their kind of perfect puppy, right? And something goes wrong, the dog becomes reactive or obsessive or, you know, something. And then they decide, okay, it must be genetic. So is that true? Is that the case? Is there evidence to the contrary? I would say that any behavior or, you know, ongoing behavior or personality trait is genetic. They're all genetic.

So the puppy being perfect was genetic and the puppy not being perfect was genetic because it's all about how genetics interact with environment. And so what I caution people against is imagining that there's this pre-programmed switch in the dog's brain that's programmed genetically that says around six months, this dog is going to become fearful and there's nothing you can do to stop it. And I don't think that's true. At least not in our pet dogs. I mean, we talk about some laboratory populations where we're really selectively breeding animals. There was a study with fearful pointers where they were really, really heavily selecting four super fearful dogs. And those dogs were just never going to be normal. There's the tame fox study that I used to work on where they have for many, many decades been selectively breeding some foxes to be very tame and some to be very aggressive. And that's all they breed for, right? They don't breed for anything else. But in our pet dog populations, we're breeding for a lot of things. You just don't see that genetics is going to force an animal to be a certain way in the sense of there sort of being a switch that, okay, well, the behavior appeared around six or eight months and I don't know what caused it and therefore it's genetic. I would say that genetics causes risk. And so genetically an animal may be at increased risk of developing fearfulness, for example. And that risk is going to interact with the animal's environment. So there may have been something, you know, if you didn't see the cause, it wasn't, you know, if you see the cause, you sort of know what's going on. Well, he was just a puppy and some dog came out of nowhere and bowled him over and bit him. And so, of course, he was traumatized by that and now he's fearful of other dogs. You know what happened there. But sometimes, I think Dash is a fabulous example of I didn't know what was going on with him. I was very lucky to get to figure out what was going on with him, but I started seeing this reactivity to other dogs. It was never terrible, but it was a real change from how he had been when he was younger. And I wasn't able to perceive that he was in pain and that was why it was. And it can be much more subtle than that. And it can be this stuff that goes on in the environment that sets dogs up to develop in certain ways can happen while the dog is still in the uterus. It can happen while the dog, you know, super important stuff happens during that first eight weeks while the dog is with the breeder. And again, stuff that we don't necessarily have control over.

It could be interactions with the other litter mates. You know, it could be this is the smallest dog in the litter and the biggest dog in the litter bullied him. And that's how it turned out. Not the fault of the breeder. Not the fault of the owner. But also not a genetic switch. But perhaps that dog was genetically at risk of becoming fearful and that experience made him or her more fearful. So I also feel like we don't fully understand. Always it's hard for us to grasp quite how complex this concept of environment is. And so, you know, you might say to yourself, well, Jessica's two dogs are both in the same environment. Dash and Jenny, they're both living in her house. So it's the same environment. But I would point out that their perception of what environment they're in differs from each other. So there's been a lot of research in humans where we look into how different siblings growing up in the same household basically perceive very different environments. Certainly if there are different ages. So, you know, one had been an only child for a while and also maybe was being raised by parents who didn't make quite as much money early on. And then parents started making more money and at the same time also had another child. So now the second child experiences a very different environment. They are not an only child. Parents are much more affluent now because they're older. Maybe they're being raised in a house instead of an apartment. So they have very different environments. Even twins who you really think, well, they're born at the same time. But they can have very different environments as well based just on their interactions with each other where one starts being the bossy one. One starts being the more submissive one. They can have different friends in school and different interactions with that environment. And I think it's really the same for our dogs that we just don't realize what tiny little differences there are that they have this whole world that they perceive that we don't. So, yeah. So I think the answer is there isn't a genetic switch to make a dog be one way or another. There's only risk. And so it's all this complex interaction that gets us there. So I hope that answers that question. Yeah, absolutely. And you started to talk a little bit in there about how early life experiences can really have a big impact on adult personality, right? Can you talk a little bit about some of the research or the science? I know you shared some interesting stuff kind of when you did the webinar. I know you're planning on including some good stuff in your class. Yeah, yeah.

I actually talk a lot about the socialization period in my class on the biology of building a great performance dog. And that's not yet on the schedule to come back, but I definitely will be offering it again. I am super lucky right now to be working in the same laboratory as Dr. Catherine Lord, who's also a postdoc, working in Carlson Lab. And she is the expert on dog socialization. She did her PhD looking at differences in timing in dog versus wolf socialization. And she has amazing insights. So one of the reasons I love my job so much is I can just go hang out with my friend Catherine and ask her questions about socialization. And she will hold forth and I will learn so much. So that has been amazing to add on to in addition to all the reading that I had done on my own because socialization is super, super interesting. And one of the things that she really emphasizes is how important that first eight weeks is, how much is going on at that time, and how you have these puppies need to interact with their environment very early on and try to learn what's normal and expected in their world. And so puppies and other mammals are born without a strong fear response. Just, you know, whatever I'm interacting with for those early weeks, you know, puppies start leaving the nest sort of around three or four weeks. They don't actually start really being afraid of things until somewhere between five and eight weeks, depending on the breed. And so they have between sort of somewhere between one and four weeks in which they're interacting with the world without any fearfulness and just being really set up to make good associations with everything that they see. The idea being that they would be carefully under their mother's care at that time and that then by eight weeks, they're starting to venture out farther and then it starts being really useful for them to be afraid of things because at that point, there might actually be predators and dangers that they need to be able to run away from. And so that means that that really important time before they're afraid of things when they're set up to make these good associations is happening while they're at their breeders. And that's before you get their hands on your hands on them, which is one of the reasons why when I was looking at breeders, I looked into finding someone who had done a whole lot of work with the puppies, giving them a lot of enrichment and taking them off site. Right. One of the things that happened with Jenny was she had never left her farm until she was 10 months old.

So with Dash, you know, someone who takes the puppies out for exploratory trips, field trips, and, you know, does early scent stimulation and all that kind of stuff is really important to do early on. Although I think we also sometimes discount how much interesting stuff is also going on with puppies in the uterus. And there's been a lot of work on that with laboratory rodents. And it turns out actually that puppies start having different experiences from their litter mates, even in the uterus. So they're getting based on where they are relative to the bitch's blood supply. They can get fewer or more of her stress hormones or fewer or more nutrients just based on how the blood supply goes from one end of the uterus to the other. And if there's a bunch of puppies, it may be a bit depleted of both stress hormones and nutrients by the time it gets to the puppies at the far end. Interesting. Yeah. A lot of interesting stuff there that we don't fully understand how that sets dogs up for issues later on. But we do believe that it does. That's really kind of neat. It's very different than what some people necessarily think about, right? Yeah. We think about how important it is to socialize puppies when we bring them home. And for sure it is. I'm not discounting that. It is super important. But there's a lot that goes on before that first eight weeks that is also really important. I think we've got into this a little bit already. But kind of thinking about our audience, if you have somebody who's evaluating an adult dog, they're not entirely sure where that dog came from. Are there things about that dog's personality when they meet them that they should consider fixed? I mean, how flexible is that when you're talking about an adult dog? Yeah. And of course, because all dogs are individuals, it's different for every dog. So it's really hard to know when you start working with a dog how far they're going to get. And I love using Jenny as an example. When I got her, I had no idea, right? I had been doing rescue work before, and I had known through the rescue there had been some dogs who would come in super shy, and they sort of made these magical turnarounds in a month or so when they realized they were in a new home that was safe. So she could have just turned around immediately. She didn't. And so then after you've had the dog for a year, the question is sort of like, well, how far can she go? And at the time, I figured, well, she's never going to be a normal dog. I had pretty much given up on being able to take her for walks around the block even.

I thought, you know, I'll make sure to have houses with big yards. She can exercise in the yard at home. I will minimize trips to the vet and get home visits for her. And that was as far as I thought she was going to go for a long time. And she has just continued to improve, and that was surprising. And it really was powerful to me to see how far some dogs can go. On the other hand, so I don't consider personality really completely fixed. But it's also about how hard you want to work on it. And Jenny, obviously, it was really a welfare issue for her. She was terrified of the world. And it was really important to me to make her just feel more comfortable in her own skin. And that was also I had taken her on, knowing that was going to be a project and a learning experience for me that I really wanted to work on. So in terms of sports, there's this question of if you get a dog who's wrong for a particular sport, as it turns out. You know, like I got Dash really wanting to do agility, and it turns out it may not be the best sport for him. Now, could I get him to where he was competing successfully in agility and was really enjoying it? I probably could. If I put in the kind of time working just on that, that I put in with Jenny, I'm sure that I could get him to where he relaxed more and figured it wasn't going to hurt so much and, you know, improve my own handling skills so that he was more confident. I think I could get him much farther than I have so far. But is it worth it? It's not a welfare issue for him. He doesn't miss agility. He loves nose work. He loves parkour. So I'm focusing on that stuff. So there's this tradeoff definitely of how much effort do you want to put into it and are you doing it for yourself or are you doing it for the dog? So assuming that most of our audience is probably trying to determine whether or not a dog is suitable for sports, they're evaluating an adult dog most likely. You know, kind of from that angle, you know, what things would you look at? What things would you consider? Well, for sure, it's going to be easiest in an adult dog to evaluate how good their structure is, whether they are the right size and shape and conformation for the sport that you're interested in, and whether they're medically healthy. Assessing behavioral health is going to be another important thing. Depending on where they're coming from, it can be harder to tell behavioral health. So if a dog has been in a shelter for months and is really shut down, it can be hard to tell if when you bring them into your house, they're going to open up.

And then some dogs, of course, the opposite, that you have them in the shelter and they stress up. And so they become really jumpy mouthy crazy. And it's hard to know if once you start working with them, they'll be able to have more self-control or not. It would be very rare to find a dog coming out of a situation where they'd been in a shelter for some period of time where they really appeared behaviorally healthy. And it's hard to know how easy it's going to be to turn them around. Definitely looking to see if the dog has an interest in humans is going to be super important. And that, for me, I really think was Jenny's saving grace for this, that she was really, really interested in humans and wanted to be around humans. Obviously, Jenny is not the kind of dog that any of you, I think, would go and pick up as a sports prospect. I don't think he's ever going to be able to compete. I mean, she's 10 now, right? So I'm not looking at her being able to ever really be a competition dog, although I am actually hoping to put some parkour titles on her because we can do that at home just on video. But for a dog who has their act a little bit more together than Jenny did, making sure that the dog is interested in people. If you go into the room and the dog is just not interested in you, they should want to check out the new environment first. That's fine. But if after they've had a couple minutes to sniff around, they should also want to come and check in with you. And if the dog is just not interested in interacting with you, that is a major warning sign for me that that's going to be a difficult dog to work with. It's also ideal, obviously, to try to assess right away whether the dog has some interest in toys and in food. But again, all of it can change when you bring the dog home. And it's too bad that there's no way to 100% guarantee that you're going to get a dog that is really good at the sport that you're interested in. It's something that upsets everybody. We'd all really like to have the guarantee that before we commit and tell the dog that they're going to be our dog for the rest of their lives and we're going to take care of them and we become emotionally attached to them, we'd like to know that they're going to be a good partner for the sport that we want as well. And there's just not a way to 100% tell about that, unfortunately. Either route that you go, right, whether it be getting an adult dog that somebody else has had or whether it be getting a puppy from a breeder, you can minimize your risks. But there's always going to be some risks.

Certainly, when you get a dog as an adult, you should try to take advantage of all the opportunities that you have to get information about how that dog was in its previous environment. So definitely, if you're getting a dog from a shelter, I would ask them, are there staff members who like this dog, who know this dog, who've worked with this dog? A lot of shelters will even have training classes that they do just for enrichment with their dogs and they'll be able to tell you some stuff about how the dog has responded to that. But even failing that, if you ask around, you'll often find people who clean the cows will say, oh, I love this dog. She really got to know me. She's always so glad to see me. That's useful information. Or she barks and she seems really nervous of me and was unable to warm up to me even though I try to offer her treats. That would be useful information too. If you go the rescue route and a dog has been in somebody's home for a couple of weeks, that's fabulous. That is just a goldmine of information. And so hopefully you all know this already, but definitely sit down with those people and just grill them for whatever they can tell you about that dog. Right. So as trainers, I think we kind of know that behavior modification works, right? But what does the science really say about how that and genetics kind of interact? I mean, you mentioned, Ken, you've done so much work with Jenny and I'd love to just hear kind of the other side of that, the research and that piece of it. Yeah. I mean, there's basically, as I said, there's just no guarantee. And biology is really complicated. And it's really early days yet too of figuring out how we're going to be able to use genetics to predict anything. What we're looking at right now actually is working with some groups who breed dogs for guide dog work and assistance dog work. And they manage populations of dogs and we're trying to get to where an initial goal for us is to try to find some markers in the DNA that will help us say, you know, dogs with this marker tend to do better on this trait. You know, whatever trait it is they're interested in. They're interested in things like, you know, not afraid of thunderstorms and not afraid of walking on unstable surfaces. And, you know, how easily stressed out is the dog? So we'd like to be able to give them some genetic tests for stuff like that with the understanding that these genetic tests are useful for a population of dogs. And there's always going to be this interaction with the environment.

And so even if you have genetic tests like that, you still, you know, that's to help you decide which dogs to breed and to try to make some selections among the litter. You know, are these going to be the ones that are better going to be guide dogs? Or these maybe would be more useful going off and doing some kind of tracking work or something like that. But it's still very much never going to be a black and white. Yes, he passed. You know, genetically he's going to be a guide dog. We're pretty much never, at least with the current state of the technology, not going to be able to say things like that. And it makes it even harder when you're asking about individuals. Right. So those groups working with populations, what we really like as sports people would be to be able to say, I don't care about the whole population of dogs. I just want one for me that'll do my sport. Right. And genetics is just always going to be really hard. So at this point, we don't even have any sort of tests that we can do. But even when we start getting to where we're going to be able to do them, it'll only give you a hint. It'll only be a small piece of information to put into the rest of the picture and try to figure out what's going on with that dog. So to kind of bring it back to what you said initially, it's really about genetics may put a dog more or less at risk for particular behavioral traits. But there's really quite a bit of flexibility within that. Yeah. And remembering that genetics isn't a switch. It's all about risk and whether a dog is higher, more sensitive to our environment maybe and more at risk for developing some problem. But I think one thing I didn't really say enough earlier in this conversation, though, is that if you are raising a dog from a puppy and the dog does end up developing a shy personality and you've done everything right, I do want to emphasize that it does not mean that it's your fault. Right. It doesn't it doesn't mean that the dog has some switch determining that it was going to be shy. But it just means that there's a lot going on that you may not be able to see. And it definitely means you shouldn't give up and say this is this is just genetic. It can't be changed. It probably can be changed. You aren't going to know going in where you can end up. Right. So I didn't know going in with Jenny where I was going to end up. And she's much less shy than I ever thought she'd get to be. I didn't know with Dash going in where I was going to end up. I hoped I'd end up in agility. I ended up in nose work. You know, in both cases, I'm really happy with where I ended up.

They are fabulous dogs and I love them so much. So sort of working with your dog, I guess, and not giving up, but also being open to different paths is the answer. Right. OK, so for those interested, where do they go to learn more? Well, I definitely mentioned Darwin's Darwin's arc dot org. So that's where the my work project is. And I mentioned that we were working with guide dogs and assistance dogs currently. And we are hoping to start expanding into sports dogs soon. I'm definitely going to make so much noise about that on the alumni. And I'll probably call you up, Melissa, and see if we can do another podcast just talking about that. But it doesn't hurt to get signed up now and be prepared for when that happens. I am also teaching a class pretty much about all of this stuff in December. It's a class about the genetics of dog behavior. And with the help of some very creative people on the alumni list, I decided to call it the melting pot. The melting pot genes, environment and personality. And so it's about it's very much about genetics, but it's also about how it's not just genetics. It's also environment. So that's going to be in December. I think it should be on the schedule. And I'll make sure that it definitely is by the time this podcast goes live. Also, I am very active on both Twitter and Facebook. And I tweet and message on Facebook a lot of different stories about dog science. So it's some of the stuff that I've written. But more often, I just find stuff out there and share it. And so people who want to know more about this stuff, following me both on Twitter and on Facebook is a good way to do it. Twitter is at DogZombieBlog. And Facebook is Facebook.com slash DogZombieBlog. Or in either case, if you just search for Jessica Heckman or go to DogZombie.com, in all those cases, you'll get links to those things. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Jessica. This was great. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week, this time with Linda Case to talk about dog nutrition. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast on 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 Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie 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. Music. Thank you.