E407: 데니스 펜지, 크리스탈 윙, 제인 아던(Denise Fenzi, Crystal Wing, & Jane Ardern)의 동기부여 이야기

which is just um finding and flushing pheasants and we do a little bit of picking up as well which is the retrieving aspect of that and i work on two pheasant shoots through the season awesome all right so let's start with kind of the basics for our topic for today so how do you define motivation and then maybe what does it look like for you and your dogs crystal you want to go first sure thanks uh so motivation i think it's like the spark that makes your dog want to show up it's their reason for playing the game i also believe it's not binary like it's not um always motivated but it just there's always motivation but it's not always just for what you want there's motivation for what they want as well that may not align with what you want there's um the idea of intention and desire and the problem that i have with that is that it sounds like drive but it's not interchangeable with drive because like you'll say maybe high prey drive and that's just their natural inclination like they want to chase or they want to hunt or they want to stalk and motivation is different it's the reason they choose to do that it's it's what's happening in the moment um i think it's shaped by the context uh by how you reinforce your reinforcement history and what they currently need i started asking myself today because uh you gave this question to me earlier and i was like you know can drive be there without motivation and i think that's when i really started to understand the difference was that drive can exist without motivation and the motivation is what's activating the drive and it's only if the right conditions are existing and i ended up chatting with my um physical therapist for my dog and we were kind of chatting and i'm like okay okay listen to this what do you think what do you think i was like what about read because i like to make acronyms that's just what i do and so my here's my thing for read i think that motivation is about the reinforcement the engagement the arousal and the drive like those are the pieces that create motivation now the relationship and the agency i kind of think those already baked in the engagement and the reinforcement so that's why i kind of like they're in there the the piece i guess it's kind of missing is environment but maybe it's read so i when i'm thinking about it it's just um the best way for me to define it i guess is motivation is the why now for the drive i think that's how i can best put it into just a couple words um because the drive is that potential that biological urgency and energy and motivation is the the how what

when that releases it at the right time and in the right direction that we want it to happen so when we create the conditions yeah we're with the that drive wants to come out and we channel it into the behavior that's rewarding damn that was a really good answer crystal i'm three sentences behind everything you're saying because i'm like oh that's yeah that's true whoa i gotta catch up i gotta catch up that was a great we could just stop wow well i had a three-hour drive to think about it wow but i kind of want to do a redo on my webinar because now there's things i want to change about it yeah i'm not even going to answer this question because i like her answer so much better than anything i could come up with change your thoughts um i think just for me it's like i look at motivation as the dog generally it's the dog having a desire to achieve some kind of goal and it might be simply that it's looking to gain a reinforcer or potentially that it might be seeking out opportunities to perform innate behaviors such as prey drive and so on um i think with mine i always think what's interesting is when i compare spaniels to liambergers is there's definitely a genetic element to motivation there with those with those dogs and i definitely had a eventual accepting of my breed limitations you know i think it's interesting that all three of us do working events i didn't realize that until now so spaniels innately hunt and belgians innately bite and portacollis innately herd which is just an interesting factor when you think about motivation because when you're talking about for the task at hand like i don't think motivation for your birds for your dogs to engage with birds is um you know a lot of that's in there isn't it but then when you want them to engage with you on a nice walk where they're not pulling and such that's an interesting thing to think about how motivation can when it's targeted towards what the dog wants when we're all on the same page it's such a different event than when we're not necessarily on the same page at that time because what the dog's innate desire to do isn't necessarily in line with what we have in mind anyway random side thought as i kind of contemplated that we all because i performance events are things that i think as long as you can find anything that motivates your dog you can channel it towards the event whereas when i think about work i think about a very specific sort of motivation that's um largely inside the dog like i'm not saying i couldn't get my border collie to flesh birds and fetch them i think i could but it would take me about a hundred times longer

and it would never it would never look graceful just like if you tried to teach your spaniel to round up the sheep i imagine if you put a lot of time you probably could um but it's so hard right so you've got that motivation which just flows out from inside the dog the drive as crystal was talking about and then you have the motivation which we often think about in the world of performance which is something that just give me anything toy drive food drive love a play give me something and i can tie it to if you do this then i'll do that and when i think about motivation too sorry about that um go for it i'm always kind of imagining like there's motivation and then there's real motivation and for me that real motivation that's the joy side of it the conversation side of it so i think sometimes when i'm talking about motivation i'm not thinking about just the speed you know because i've seen fast but stressed and it's not um just the obedience because i've seen some really checked out obedience so i think that's something too that we all feel that way i would say so as we're talking about it today i think that's part of it is we're thinking about that joyful motivation that connection um that that next level that passion so denise said she was going on a sidetrack but actually it's almost as if she read the next question so um how much is motivation you know innate versus how much is it something you can or have to you know teach or build or create kind of in your dog uh jane had you down to go first but if anybody else wants to skip the line we can um so i do think genetics play a part in um the in in a specific dog we have dogs that i would say are motivated to work with a handler and i think when we select for breed specific traits like persistence for example and not quitting then that often gives us a dog who you would class as easier to motivate because it's easier to to maintain um the training and build training stamina with those dogs um i think there are some dogs that will um you can challenge when you're training because they're easy to motivate and then there are dogs where we have to we might have to do less reps we might have to change criteria so i do think there's there's an element of looking at the dog's individual kind of motivation there and our ability to motivate that dog denise i absolutely think there's a genetic component to motivation it drives me crazy when people do not acknowledge genetic realities because i think it puts people in a really crappy spot well if you just did this that and the other then your dog would look like this other dog over here

and you know having had a lot of dogs over the year that's just not what i've seen but i've also seen plenty of people take a dog that i believe innately has plenty of motivation and then choices they make lower it in the moment so what crystal said about a dog having drive but not motivation that's not that unusual so you have a dog that has plenty of drive and desire and forward but the way the dog is being handled the way the dog is presented with problems demotivates the dog the expectations are not reasonable and it's not that the dog doesn't want to play the game or i mean if you just want to use an extreme case let's talk about prey drive one way people extinguish prey drive is extreme punishment right so the dog's prey drive is such that it's dangerous so maybe they they're afraid the dog's going to run away get hit by a car or whatever and so they come in and they use a an e-caller at a very high level the dog's drive is always still there but that's sort of a classic example of a dog with tons of innate drive tons of motivation that because of choices made by the handler intentional choices in this instance you can remove the motivation to do the thing and i mean obviously i certainly hope none of us are doing that and being and then be surprised when the dog doesn't do the thing we want but if you look at the extreme i think it helps us set the more middle ground so you have a sensitive dog who very much wants to play your games very much likes your toys your food your things and yet you present them in a way that over time suck the motivation right out of that dog and i that's kind of a common thing and for sure in terms of this conference is really really relevant because i think it's fair to say that if a person knew they were doing that they wouldn't do that i mean if you if you want to do performance in your dog then if you had known you were the reason the dog was not wanting to work then you would change your ways so even minor punishers deep sigh when the dog doesn't get it right for some dogs is enough to take them it's not a lack of desire it's that you've done things to their motivation inadvertently that have pulled them out of the game kristal the things that i share in my webinar there's an mit study and they were giving problem solving tasks like really complicated ones to participants these are humans not dogs and they offered them thirty dollars and if they got the answer correct when they offered them three hundred dollars then it was which group would get the the problem the fastest and the most accurate and the group that they offered the thirty dollars to did a better job

and so going to the idea of crushing motivation when you're putting too much pressure on that's when you start to crush and the idea that you can take a dog that has this great intrinsic motivation to do the thing and then if you reward them with the thing they already intrinsically like to do you can also crush their motivation so there's so many different ways that this can play out without even realizing it like you may think i'm going to give them the three hundred dollars you know but it's overpowering it's kind of they call it a distraction effect but i looked other places and i couldn't find that um so i don't know you know but there's just some i really found that interesting and i think part of that too is about um being innate or taught my dog yukon i tried everything with him i mean we just went through the gamut of things because he's a dutch shepherd he's young you know not now he's older now but i mean we tried weight pull we tried agility we tried it was just his nose was always the i'll say air quotes problem he was very motivated to sniff and so finally i gave into that and said okay let's try some sniffing stuff and guess what he was really good at that so you have to kind of give in to who they are um and kind of find their their why and then build games around that i also think about the kids at school and something that denise said um we can be that teacher or that counselor there are so many kids as an art teacher that will come in and they're like i'm no good at art you know i'm the worst at it and i'll have another kid that's really not very good at all but his art teacher at some point put a piece into a show and then they think they're the greatest you know and so it's their their value of how they see themselves can also be a strong motivator to that and us as teachers can really create that or destroy that but we have to give them the experiences and respond to those experiences to find what truly motivates them because i'll tell you with radish she loves to sniff i didn't have to build that that's that's innate but i absolutely taught her that sniffing with me in this certain context it's the best game in the whole world and that's built motivation and that's layered onto that innate drive so if we're thinking about all of this and how it pertains to like a young dog or even a puppy um how do you kind of think about shaping that and maybe i don't know if we want to say building motivation if we want to say maintaining motivation because we were talking about how much of it can be innate um but how do you how do you kind of think about it and how do you kind of build it into what you're doing

with a young dog or a young puppy where you really want it to kind of grow and and blossom right denise i did a whole presentation on that what a coincidence what a coincidence that i'll be presenting that i think the the most important thing is teaching the puppy that you're a fun and interesting person if you can get that and that there's a lot of directions that that you know it that covers everything it covers socialization it covers training it covers your house you know day-to-day life if at the end of all of that you convince your youngster that you are a fun and interesting person you are way ahead of the game crystal i thought you're going to go longer but i guess since that's your presentations come and watch crystal i know i can't wait i'm excited so when i think about building it i think about that i'm not just shaping behaviors but i'm shaping a belief system and i'm always saying that about my dogs i want them to believe that training is a party that they never want to miss and we do that through building all the associations not only am i awesome but you are an awesome little powerhouse of amazing confidence i want to build such a little superhero that they think they can just conquer the world and i'm the amazing wizard that makes all the cool stuff happen so that's i think the best way that i can think about shaping this and i do that a lot through curiosity and play i'm asking my dog questions all the time because i think that's the foundation of finding what intrinsically motivates them i mean this goes back to when i was in grad or in my graduate program and my master's paper was about intrinsic motivation like that's how much this has been a passion for me because i knew walking into the classroom if i could figure out what makes kids tick that i would have it you know like then i could actually teach them things and it's just it's been this thing that's transferred through all of my dog training in my entire life and some of the things you can do i think one of the things you said was specifically so i would say thoughtful sessions so keep it small keep it short let them be winners and i always like the example of build the appetite don't stuff them full i mean i love chocolate cake but there's only so much i can have so i tried it hawaiian rolls are the same thing like i'll eat a whole package and all of a sudden they're gone and it's like oh that was a mistake so keep building that appetite and we've been doing an entire series of podcasts on cannon detection collaborative about consistency and i'm so passionate about that right now so building that novelty and consistency in a balance

it doesn't mean that it's always the same there's flexibility within that and so i can go off at a tirade but i won't so i guess when i'm starting a puppy it's not all ob focused it's what lights your fire where are we going to go so i want to meet my dog see who they are and then let's start making our path together jane yeah i think very similar to crystal i think when i'm working with a young dog for me it's very much about building a mindset and focusing on the dog's emotional state as well so how does the dog feel about learning how does the dog feel about training i want to help dogs believe that it's worth persisting so for me it's very much about criteria setting i don't tend to focus on behavioral goals when i'm working with a young dog i'm going to have things i need to train but it's very much about building that relationship and helping the young dog learn to learn and learn to be a good learner and i think that's all about the criteria you set the reinforcers that you're using and also looking at what naturally motivates the dog as well and as crystal said like when i've had a litter of puppies i've said to the puppy owners you know you can take your puppy away and do agility you know obedience or whatever you want but i advise that they all do scent work early on because i know that the dogs are going to be good at that and that they're going to find that reinforcing so for me the foundations are very much about if you want a dog who's motivated to interact and engage and work with you and we have to kind of really look at what they innately find reinforcing as whatever breed they are so you guys have talked about this a little bit already but you know i think a lot of the times we're talking about motivation people kind of think reinforcers right so they think motivation they think toys motivation or food motivation i know we've talked a lot about kind of things the dogs naturally have kind of innate motivation for but what about things like sports where maybe you know an obedience exercise isn't innately motivating necessarily how do you transfer the love for those things that the dog is naturally motivated about to the work or sports that you do with your dog how do you get some of those controlled behaviors around the sheep or around the birds or what have you i think crystal do you want to start us out for this one sure one word purpose i think it's really cool to build purpose so maybe this isn't exactly answer so i'll give you two examples so when i first started i know i keep talking a lot tell me to shop them too much when i first started training rad for human remains she was all about the toy

so that's what i used and we used it a lot in the beginning and that built the motivator and it built the motivation but over time you know she would start searching harder when i added challenges and i would start adding more and more complex challenges deeper hides tricky puzzles i'd create odor pools and keep building these lessons and that's when i knew that the work was starting to matter to her and it's not just because it earned that reward but because it had meaning and that's when i knew that motivation had transferred so that's that's kind of what i think about when you ask that question motivation for the reinforcer that's that's just the beginning and i don't know if you guys get this too but i'll get people to say well i can't use that in trial well of course not i'm not asking you to like this is the beginning this is how we start so the food and the toys those are tools so i use the reinforcers to show them that the work is the way to get what they want and that's where the transfer begins so i'm also really focused on making the work a game it has to be fun for both of us for because if i'm checked out that's half the battle like i have to be in this and having fun and that's that's going to build the momentum so if my dog you know so like okay radish loves to tug if you want to tug then pre-mac do this to get that i talk a lot about that my little webinar thing i think about um how okay so your reinforcer two you can kind of pair it with the rhythm of the work do you know what i mean it's like the the way it flows it kind of goes back to don't compete your reinforcers with what they already love to do and i think that's where the art of training comes in and that's the part that i love so much go figure the art of training so um i guess that's where i feel like i'm not explaining what you asked specifically because like agility and scent work and detection the bite sports the game is the reinforcer and so you're using the reinforcement there to amplify it and not replace it so if your dog um i'm trying to give another example that would be against so i'll let you guys do that one the answer is more what melissa asked i'm going with the ones that already are reinforcing in themselves fair enough jane uh yeah so i think uh again when i'm working with with the spaniels i'm always looking at what is naturally what motivates my dog naturally and one of the big things with spaniels if we look at their job in in this in simplicity is is it involves movement and stillness so they're either moving or they're still and the stillness is is not innately reinforcing for the for the spaniel but the movement is so i will pre-mac i will use pre-mac

so when i'm training yes i'm using my toys and i'm using my food but what i'm also doing is is i'm being mindful about what is reinforcing for the dog so for example teaching the stop whistle the stop whistle for a spaniel i would say is naturally it's a punisher because every time you blow the stop whistle you're stopping your dog from doing something that the dog is innately motivated to do um so it's very important to me for through reinforcement that that we have to kind of try and really kind of counter condition and build the stop into part of the process of the of everything else so using pre-mac to pair that up so it just becomes a part of the sequence and it doesn't feel like a punisher for the dog um i remember another example my liamberger i did when i was at college um i did hillwood's music freestyle for my advanced dog training with my liamberger decided i was up for the challenge um and for her she really liked to do behaviors that were close to me so she liked to heal position and contact behaviors and she actually didn't like the distance behaviors and i had to build a three and a half minute routine with a liamberger with no food and no toys on me at the time so one of the things i did was my whole routine was based around whenever i asked her to do a distance behavior i always made sure that i followed it in the routine with something that i knew she found reinforcing which enabled me to maintain and keep the motivation through the duration of that Denise so i tend to think about behaviors where you have to put in the stop and behaviors where you have to put in the go so in general working behaviors dog on sheep dog on birds dog doing protection the go is in the dog your job is the stop and so both Jane and Crystal sort of got to the heart of that because if you want to go first you have to stop with your spaniel or in the case of my border collie his motivation is is there's a huge element of movement but there's also an element of control so i ask him to stop when he's in a place where stopping will create control so you put the sheep in a corner and then you ask him to stop that's gratifying to him reinforcing because otherwise he'd want to be moving so you can sort of pair the things that are harder with things that are either easier or sort of naturally allow the dog to be successful so he's got him in the corner lie down for me now and he's like oh i was kind of thinking about that anyway but once they start moving let him up so that's for things where the go is in the dog when the go is not in the dog like there's no real heel you know drive for most dog no teeter drive for most dog where you have to pair things i really try to get let's call it motivation to the point of habit so the dog

has just had so much fun doing the things with me for so long that the only way they know to feel when they're in the situation is happy and that's about learning your dog really well in the training process and maybe even unconsciously applying things that matter to them anyway so the border collie likes to use his brain and the belgian likes to solve problems the border collie does not like to solve problems matter of fact the border collie swear to god absolutely cannot do shaping with that dog it makes him miserable he's like just tell me what you want he cannot stand the indecision he does not want to guess he wants me to tell him show me what you want and my god i'll do it till the cows come home oh that's a good expression for him huh like the sheep come home and so for him motivation is actually directive i teach him what i want in tiny pieces so he doesn't really know he's learning and he's happy but the belgian so crystal brought up the idea of challenge today i was doing position changes in the back of an atv and when i would ask him to put his chin down it caused him to lose contact with me because he couldn't see me over the edge now first of all this makes a really cute social media video so if you haven't seen it go look at it it's super cute but what i observed which you don't see in the video because that was another part was that at first it was hard i had to help him understand how to do that and then i noticed his tail was wagging really fast and that's oh my god i get it i know what you want i understand i can do this and it was just it kind of warmed my heart you know it's just like look at him loving the little challenges whereas the border collie doesn't have any interest in making a mistake and learning a new thing the border collie wants to know how to do things and i was just kind of like i had a moment thinking about how recognizing your dog and who your dog is and constantly re-evaluating the plan the art of training over the science the art is experience how many billions of dogs have you looked at and what have you learned from each one to allow you to recognize that you better stop shaping with this dog or you're going to literally shut this dog down forever this dog will not want to work with you anymore because he doesn't want to guess and that's fine it's a 90% of dogs love shaping yay good run with it but sort of recognizing the motivation of the individual that's what gets you to habit because the dog is always getting it in a way that works for that dog the thing I want to add to that is I feel like we also have motivation for dogs that we like to train in different ways because I've always been inspired by the problem solving dog and the shaping dog and Radish has now challenged me very much on

that because that is not really who she is so that's that's been a huge a huge twist in my brain currently is all right how can I rethink this and how can I work differently to motivate you in a different way so when Denise talks about ice I'm always my ears are wide open because I'm like all right this is who I have too so thank you yeah but Crystal how much time have I cried in my porridge to you over that dog like I had to keep him on a long line because he just ran off and I'm not used to that you know my dogs don't do that I had to train him on a long line which I hate because it's always wrapped up around my ankles and I'm gonna get hurt it I hate long lines now you know so I just want to get that line off that dog but I can't take the line off the dog because if I added any stress the tiniest amount in the in the most roundabout way in his training he was out he was gone he's just like I can't be here with you because you're stressing me out and I was pretty upset I mean I was like I don't know if I can train this dog I mean he's got some really weird weird little sensitivities but you know that's why you have friends you call people up and you say I'm gonna shoot myself if I don't get my you know help help and you look at videos together and then your friend says maybe you did that too much and you got a little carried away there and you would that have happened and then you you reevaluate and I think that's where the curiosity and the the communication with others really helps but man it's a challenge I'm struggling and that's where that's where you have to have people to talk to you you've got to call up and talk to you no matter how long you've been doing this game I watch your progress with ice and then I watch my progress with rad and I'm like come on now like the next conversation and you've got it figured out and I'm still like all right then we're we're kind of just keep trudging along and I love that we all have our own kind of timelines and our own journeys and that's that's also reassuring to me Jane do you have somebody you can cry to and when things are rough and you're not getting your way it's usually they just my other half poor thing poor thing that's all right glad they're there for you if you need a phone a friend I'm here for you so we've talked a whole bunch about I think Denise put it as stop and go right like the things you kind of need to put into the picture so how do you handle it when motivation goes wrong you know when you have the motivation to bite but you don't want the dog to bite all the time or whatever piece it is that that kind of goat can go wrong when it goes wrong and I would love to hear stories of how things have gone wrong Jane do you want to start us off yeah so I

I've got an example of my first cocker she was well I would say she was at the time my view was that if we went anywhere near water she was obsessed with going into water especially doing water retrieves and she literally if we got anywhere near some water she literally couldn't function and she couldn't take food off me she wouldn't play with toys she was just completely focused on on just wanting to go into the water and what I ended up doing with her was recognizing that my food and my toy reinforcers were not working in that environment I did reduce down my criteria for her but I ended up just doing some simple behaviors and allowing her to have that reinforcer so allowing her to go into the water and we actually ended up with like beautiful competitive heel work off this dog when we were near water when we were near water she had like the best heel work you've ever seen from a spaniel but I ended up I just I just utilized the environment and the reinforcers that were there which I can what I do a lot of now early on and I do kind of cover a bit of this in my webinar is I incorporate eating food into this all my sequences so it becomes a part and parcel so literally with a young dog I'll go you sit I throw the dummy out you eat a piece of food you go get the retrieve and that has enabled me that I don't get a dog who goes I can't take food because food has become a part of the sequences of what we're doing when we're training so I've found using that more recently it really really helps you avoid those types of things because we we see that with spaniels all the time I get people who just say my spaniel won't take food outside I can't train it yeah yeah Denise it's actually exactly what I've been working on with Zen for the past six weeks or so I took toys out of training and it's like food is on the menu it's like but I don't want the food that's fine that's what's on the menu you can work for nothing that's fine too or you could opt out he's never done that so now eat and now even when I brought the toy back which is still quite rare but you still need to eat it's a behavior you don't come out of the car and work until you show me you can eat and in the beginning that that meant minutes of waiting at the car and it was a really good decision and I would say now we've gone from eating as a behavior that gets him what he wants to I think maybe he actually tastes some of those pieces of food going down up until now like if I didn't pay attention he was just storing them on his tongue and then seriously I could see them all just lining up there and now he swallows and I think he might even be liking them because now it looks like he's even looking to me like he wants a piece of food which is just sort of an interesting kind of thing I knew I should have done this a long time ago but I'm

such a toy trainer I love my toys so much that I have a hard time motivating myself to use the food and the training but anyway that was the story that gosh what was the original question I got stuck with Jane's response just how do you handle when motivation kind of goes wrong oh yeah so I really suggest that people learn to read their dogs well because you don't ever want to get to the point of a dog quitting and actually I was just talking to Elaine about that today with sheep herding because in sheep herding I am not a positive reinforcement trainer in the traditional sense of the word and what that means is I have to protect those sheep those sheep have the right to a peaceful existence and the own that's my line in the sand shenanigans happen when you're training a young dog I accept that but if you show me shenanigans you grab a sheep and you don't let go I'm going to come down on you pretty hard and that's because that sheep needs to be at peace and you can do better so when I was talking to Elaine about it I said I have a very simple line in the sand if my dog is afraid of me something's very wrong and I never use pain I'm not going to hurt you but I am going to tell you that is 100% unacceptable and I will get between you and the sheep and I will push you away from those sheep I will physically drive well he's 50 feet away anyway but I will move into your space I will push you back that's not okay that's not okay that's not okay but what I said to Elaine is but if I ever saw any inkling that he was thinking about quitting something went really really wrong and I don't even think that's ever crossed his mind in any way shape or form and that piece is important people need to look at their dogs and know what what is the ear carriage what is the tail carriage what what behaviors does your dog show you that suggests they might be having slightly less fun and then you better do some thinking because if your dog ever just truly walks away and opts out of training which is what the border collie was doing and I couldn't I was like how can that possibly have caused you to opt out of training I didn't do anything except ask you to do something twice instead of once but you you just have to honor the dog if you see something happening and you have learned that if you ask for two retrieves instead of one the dog's gonna opt out you just really really really need to be rethinking what you're doing because that'll kill motivation so fast because you're ruining your habit and if habit is everything habit is getting the dog to the point where they simply work out of habit and joy out of joyful habit every time you do something that makes the dog rethink that you're gonna have a problem Krista I'm thinking about your question when you said genetics and how they're

playing into their choices and motivation gone wrong one of the stories that comes to mind and I think it ties back into the very first thing about drive and motivation my old dog Quinn he was my heart dog IGP three like he was amazing strong grips and so I don't know why I loved playing this game with him so much but it's the blanket game and you've probably played it before where if you like pop your hand up under the blanket like your hands under the blanket you just kind of poke the blanket up and then they go to bite where your hand was and it's kind of like whack-a-mole and then your hand pops the little blanket in another spot and we would play this game and it was like our favorite game and he would really get into it and so that might be one of those the idea that so drive is his prey drive to bite the little hand that pops up and then the motivation was that I created the environment with a little whack-a-mole that brought that drive out so that's my way of kind of tying that back in from the beginning and the time that it went wrong was he really got a hold of my hand one time and just crunch broke two fingers oh my god yeah because I just got I let the arousal get a little too high right and he would never ever want to hurt me that was not that dog you know and when he realized what had happened he was like oh you know and I have a pretty high pain tolerance so I just kind of played it off but it was just one of those moments where I thought that was dumb wing I say that a lot to myself but that was that one was a oof my other story I think I've shared this one on other podcasts but Yukon my Dutch shepherd you know they're they're bred for agility right for confident problem solving dogs and that's awesome if you want to do detection and protection sports I got him for protection sports but he just liked to chase butterflies instead but what happened was his motivation showed up as climbing on anything that he could so he would scale fences he would leap onto sheds and yes he would get on my roof so the drive was amazing but the application was absolutely chaotic and he wasn't being bad he was just motivated without a job that's that's the way I saw him so my thing is I never want to shut him down I just need to redirect it I got to channel that because he loved to be high like he always wants to be like climbing a tree and so I started giving him climbing games with structure we do search stuff and he would love to find stuff that's elevated so let's do that so the motivation didn't just go away I just tried to give it a purpose so when I think about these guys they don't come with breaks and so what I'm constantly doing is I look to the behavior they're doing and I say what

need is trying to get met that's always the question I ask that to myself every day at school with all these kids you know when they're doing something I'm like what need you've got something that's happening and I need to figure out what it is that you need and let's put this in a different angle so like crittering with radish I just need to go hiking more so when she started you know seeking out and chasing deer during a search I'm like got it I'm not giving you enough you know off-leash hiking to actually go kind of express and get some of this out of your system if they're too into a behavior I missed a step there's something that I missed so if they got too much go I didn't build enough of that stop you know so it's constantly I'm just asking those questions so try not to squish the fire instead build the fire pit and I kind of talk about that in my webinar if you don't watch it at least watch the last like five minutes that's my favorite part of the webinar I have this really precious moment of my best friend and her dog and I will forever treasure that she shared that little moment with me to put in my webinar because it is all about the fire in the fireplace and so you if you watch it you'll get it and so you got to let me know what you think but so with that I just say create boundaries create rituals and celebrate the individual but don't make a spoiled brat that's not what I'm saying fair enough speaking of the presentations I think everybody kind of mentioned it in passing but what are you each presenting and can you share a little bit kind of about the presentation itself just give people kind of a sample of what you'll be talking about Denise so I'm doing pre engagement strategies when I talk about engagement I'm not using it in the dictionary sense of the word of engagement I'm it's actually a pattern I take dogs through so there's a bunch of steps and it's to help dogs learn to focus and move forward and work when I talk about pre engagement strategies I'm talking about the things that happened before I'm worried about teaching the dog a formal engagement path like things that the dog does to show me they're ready to work I'm talking about how I set the stage and I think it's called staged to engage so it's basically from the time I bring a dog home until I do anything particularly formal I'm training the whole time but it's a different kind of training at that point it's just more learning to learn some of the things Jane talked about earlier but so what is my socialization path how do I handle it when the dog is nervous or scared where do I bring them where don't I bring them how do I handle like other people wanting to interact with my dog and spoiler alert I

don't care if people play with my dog thinking about how to learn the dog how to motivate the dog and get myself a nice solid foundation and understanding the dog so that I can make good choices when I go forward Crystal mine's more than the cookie co-creating motivation it's really similar it sounds like to Denise's I wish that mine had a little bit more practical because I did end up talking a lot about about you as the handler and how you can respond instead of react so I think that's an important piece of it and if you don't use pre-mec pre-mec is going to use you that was one of my favorite lines that Jen's ever told me and I was like that stuck like that was it right there I talk about how pressure divides attention and presence multiplies it and a lot about curiosity Jane? Mine is called too hot too cold or just right and it's covering troubleshooting in reinforcement I do a lot about troubleshooting with food reinforcement because that tends to be the big one people have problems with and really kind of how to build more of a variable toolbox of reinforcers to work with the dog I cover using pre-mec in my food with things that are reinforcing for the dog so kind of traditionally people always told you to pair the good pair food to make things good for the dog but sometimes the food's not good enough so it's about what you can you pair with the food to make the food more of a valuable reinforcer and there's a few training exercises in there and really just looking at them from a motivational point of view as opposed to achieving behaviours. I'll tell you what I'm most excited about now is that we get to do a panel discussion together too. That's going to be so exciting. I'm having such a nice time chatting with you two. I know let's keep going now. I know. We get to do it at the conference. All right. So I do want to give you guys each a chance to maybe share some final thoughts or key points stuff that you kind of want to leave listeners with or that you're excited to talk more about during the conference. Whatever. Crystal you get to go first. I feel like I've said a lot. I am. I'm really looking forward to the panel discussions and listening to what all the presenters have to say. That's so exciting for me. So I'm hoping that people enjoy my little corner of the webinar and looking forward to what you guys have to say. Awesome. Jane? Yeah, I'm excited as well. I think it's a really key thing at the moment for a lot of dog trainers with regards to motivation. So I think it's a really good topic and quite timely as well with a lot of problems I especially see with people. So I'm pretty excited about the whole thing. And yeah, listening to the

webinars, panel discussions. Yeah. Denise? So I'm thinking about more experienced trainers first. I just want to speak to them specifically. I, because I have a young dog in a new sport to me, herding, I am now attending clinics and such. And sometimes I spend a fair amount of money. And I have learned over the years, if I come home with one exceptionally actionable item, it's very unusual I get more than three. Not because I don't hear more than three interesting things, but my brain can only hold three things. And then I'm basically done for the day. When I go into, as an experienced trainer, when I go into something, I'm really happy to get three ideas that are workable. And one epiphany is awesome. So I'll take one or the other. And motivation is so critical. It is so key to training that even if you feel pretty good about where you're at, your skills, your training. I want you to think about that because if you go through this whole day with the presentations on offer, you're going to pick up those three things. And that's really, that's where advanced trainers have an opportunity to move forward. It's, it's sorting and listening and knowing a lot of it and then going, wait, wait, what? Back that one up and taking the time to work with it. That is, especially if you're feeling a little flat with your training or you kind of feel like you've been doing this for a while and you're not learning new things. First of all, recalibrate. Don't expect eight hours of new material. Actually be grateful for it because when you get a bunch of new material like that, it's not even fun. It's overwhelming. But go in and really strive for one to three things that change how you think and then see what you can do with those. Awesome. I love that about the presentations too because I feel like we've geared it toward the highly motivated dog and we've also geared it toward the dog that needs motivation. So, I mean, it's the whole gamut and for the new trainer and the advanced, like how cool is that? Yeah. And the nice thing is they're recorded. So, if somebody gets their three things and then you can come back six months later and watch it again, you'll probably get three different things. Absolutely. Your brain is ready for a different set of information. Super. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you all so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you all. Thank you, Melissa. Thanks so much. Absolutely. My pleasure. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Don't miss it. 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 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. o