E162: 샤론 캐럴(Sharon Carroll) - "말과 함께하는 긍정 훈련"

So we're currently working on the UD training, and so he's got most of that sorted, not ready to compete yet. And we're also fiddling around a little bit with some scent work and also some trick dog work. And then the baby of the family is just a 10-month-old standard poodle, so he's just lots of fun doing mostly whatever he wants and just starting to work on foundation work. Awesome. So I mentioned that you kind of started in horses and the main tradition to dogs, but what kind of originally got you into this world? Sure. I think like most people, I started with pet dogs. I had this obsession with training them to do lots of things. And then I moved from there into competing in confirmation and obedience with dogs. And then I made a big transition to horses. I decided to leave my job and go and work with an international rider. And from there, I went and rode the Spanish dancing stallions in performing shows. And then after that, I went to start my own riding school and spent years and years teaching and riding. Have you always been a positive trainer? If not, you know, kind of what got you started down that track? Yeah, I haven't always been a positive trainer, sadly. I think anyone who probably started in obedience over 30 years ago didn't start as a positive trainer. There certainly was not much influence at that time. And I guess what got me started really was in my university work, in the postgraduate work, I was working with zoo species. And that was when the big steep change was happening to a lot of changes in management and a lot of changes in training of the zoo species. And that's where I really learned about the positive benefits of positive reinforcement training and also the implications of not doing it that way. And I think that's really what got me started on that path. I'm curious, what zoo species were you working with? All sorts. Zoo species and wildlife. So we covered a lot of different areas. If I kind of asked you to describe your philosophy now, how would you do that? Sure. I guess there's two key things I'm always trying to be. I'm trying to be effective and I'm trying to be kind. And I think if I keep looking at those two things all the time, I think that's really important. I think if you're just trying to be effective and you don't worry about the kind part, you can certainly go down some pretty dark paths. But equally, I think if you don't worry about the effective part, it's not just that you're not achieving what you want, but as soon as you're not being effective, you know that something's going wrong with the training itself. If you're not

progressing, then something's happening. Either you're not setting that environment up well enough for that animal to perform the task, or you're not explaining the task well enough to the animal. And so I guess if you're not being effective, then you're also risking some frustration for the animal, which is less than ideal. And then I guess if I'm looking at training philosophy, there's probably two things I'm trying not to be always. And one would be I'm trying not to be a lazy trainer. And to my mind, that's just when you're just trying to get the result really fast and with less effort and to the detriment of the animal. And the other thing I'm trying not to be is an ignorant trainer, which is just not keeping on looking for all the new ways that are happening and all the new ways that people are doing things. So that would be part of my training philosophy. So I know that kind of these days, there are, you know, quite a few positive dog trainers, and they're starting to apply those same principles to training with their horses. Most people probably hear that and are like, okay, that's a good thing, right? But my understanding is there's also some downsides to this. So can you kind of talk us through that? Yeah, I think overall, it's a great thing. And it should be happening. We should be looking to do anything we can to be kinder to horses as just like we do with other species. But we are seeing a lot of accidents, we're seeing a lot of people getting hurt, trying to do this, mainly associated with those behaviours that are associated with frustration on the part of the animal. And also, not taking into people not taking into account the horse's previous learning experiences. So horses tend to come to us with a lot of learning experience on board. Horses are bought and sold a lot more than dogs are. And so they come with a background. And if that animal has had a history of punishment-based training, for example, and then we turn up and go, no, well, we're never going to punish you. And we have treats and everything's great. The animal doesn't necessarily understand that. And we're not just standing there pausing, waiting for the animal to give you the behaviour. Those animals can get really stressed because they're just pausing, waiting for punishment. They think they're not working out what you want and they're worried punishment's going to follow. And so those animals can get quite stressed. And then you can also see behaviours that you don't want that can be dangerous. So can you get into that just a little bit more? What are some of the dangers that crop up for

handlers? And are there options kind of for better managing those risks? Yeah, absolutely. Look, horses just by their sheer size can be dangerous. And so you've got an animal that's 10 to 100 times bigger than the average dog. And they can bite, they can kick, they can strike, they can trample you. They tend to go to aggression in a different way or in a quicker way than dogs will. So, you know, there's a definite risk of injury just because of the types of frustration behaviours you see in horses compared to dogs. And also a little bit to do with the valence. So in dogs, we see dogs that have maybe a very optimistic view and their frustration behaviours might just be excitement based. But with horses, we tend to see more the negative valence. So the horses that are a little fearful, a little anxious, and then going down the road of those frustration behaviours coming from that valence, and that's a little more dangerous. And I think in order to answer your question about what are the things we can do to manage those risks, protected contact is one that people don't often think about as being an option with horses. But certainly with any large dangerous animal other than horses, we tend to think of that option. So in a zoo setting, trainers primarily are using protected contact. So often you will hear that argument that, well, if a zoo animal can be taught through positive only training, then horses can be too. But there's that little bit of a sort of thing you have to remember that you do also have to survive and you're in that same space as that animal. And so taking that out of the equation and just putting that person in a protected contact setting, at least initially in the training phase, is quite doable. And a lot of people don't think about doing that. But also not just teaching straightaway things like hand targeting or things that are getting the horse to be close to you and follow you and be in close contact with you, but maybe teaching things like a target that's on a wall. Just taking that animal initially to doing those skills, not targeted at you, can help that if they get frustrated, they don't swing a front leg at you or they don't lunge and bite at you. They're not in that same sort of space. Also, I think spending a lot of time working on desensitizing and counter conditioning, we're very aware with dogs, we wouldn't be trying to get them to perform an actual exercise or actual activity if they were so over aroused that they were leaping around and barking and lunging at the end of the lead. But people

actually do that with horses. The horses are naturally, they're neophobics, they're naturally scared of new things. And so they'll take them into a new place and the horse is very nervous and it's very tense. And then they try to get the animal to perform tasks. And you're like, hang on, this animal just needs some desensitizing first. So focusing on that desensitizing and counter conditioning, just like we do with the dogs, doing the same thing with the horses, remembering that they're often coming from that fearful place as opposed to most people aren't dealing with fearful dogs. There's lots of fearful dogs out there, but the average trainer isn't dealing with a fearful dog, whereas the average horse owner probably is. And also, I think sometimes just remembering that although our goal is positive only reinforcement based training, we should remember that sometimes when we're training that horse, sometimes we're just surviving. So it's no use actually getting trampled, just going, well, I don't want to put my hands up and block the horse because that would be horrible and that would be aversive. You do have to remember you've got to survive in there as well. Now, if that's happening a lot, you need to look at your training strategy. Are you setting it up well? Is the horse in a mental frame of mind to do that task? Are you explaining it well enough? But at that moment in time, it's just management. It would be the same as if the dog was suddenly going to jump off the back deck. We don't go, oh, we can't yell no and we can't grab his collar. We just save the dog at that moment. It's not part of our training. It's just saving the dog. And it's the same with the horses. Sometimes you're just saving yourself for that moment. So just remembering that, that it's not a bad thing to just block that horse or to say, hey, no, back up a bit. Give me some space. That's not a bad thing. It's not part of the training. It's just part of the surviving. And people need to sort of remember that. So you mentioned particular contact in there. I just want to talk about that for a second in case people can't kind of picture what that looks like with a horse. So can you just kind of describe kind of the setup that you're talking about there? Yeah. Look, a lot of horses are in a stall. So a lot of horses are automatically inside, you know, a box that has a door that you can reach over. You can go in and set up a target square on the inside of that door and then shut that door and then stay on the other side of that

door and then be rewarding over the door so that if the horse does get frustrated and remember that dogs that get frustrated, you know, they can go down the path of becoming quiet and just showing some displacement behaviors and things like that. Or they can start barking at you and those sort of things. But horses almost always will go down the route of biting, striking, getting annoyed, rather than just, you know, shutting down and becoming emotionally quiet at that point. You can certainly produce learned helplessness, but that's a different setting. So remembering that if these horses get frustrated, they're possibly going to target you. You're the person with the food. So just setting up initially that door between you and them or having them on the other side of a fence just until you're really familiar with that animal and you've built that relationship with that animal and you know what its behaviors are going to be when it gets frustrated. And then sure enough, we might go in with the animal. As somebody who's kind of worked with both horses and dogs, I kind of want to dive into that a little bit. So how is training a horse different from training a dog? You've talked about it a little bit, but I'd like to talk about it a little bit more. And then, you know, we kind of hear this saying that all animals are animals and behavior science is behavior science. So I kind of want to dig into that a little bit too. You know, how is that maybe oversimplifying the issue when we're talking about dogs versus horses? Sure. Well, I think the first thing to think about is that we tend to think of these four quadrants as some sort of training method, but of course they're not. It's about learning. It actually happens with or without us. Of course, we can utilize our knowledge of those four quadrants to achieve our training goals, but that's happening all the time. And so those four boxes are not as clear as what a lot of people think they are. And quite often things flow a little bit from one box into another box. And so those things, for example, with the horse might occur naturally when a fly lands on the horse's leg. So the fly lands on its leg, it starts walking around. It's quite annoying for the horse. And eventually the horse is going to stamp its leg and the fly moves away. And that's negative reinforcement. Now there's nothing painful. There's nothing fear inducing. But what happened was it was irritating. It was annoying. And then the stomp of the foot got rid of it. That's negative reinforcement. And so I think that negative reinforcement is a common

method in the horse industry. And horses do tend to respond well to it. They're a herd animal. They're an animal that do put pressure on each other, spatial pressure on each other. It's part of what they do. So they're used to moving away from pressure. And so negative reinforcement isn't that foreign a concept to a horse. I think where we need to remember, what we need to remember at this point is that negative reinforcement, I think a lot of people confuse with punishment because it involves an aversive. And I think the other thing to remember is that it doesn't have to be a really bad aversive. It can just be something that's a little bit annoying and the animal moves away and you take that pressure off or you take that irritation off. And that's all negative reinforcement is. Now negative reinforcement can slide into some pretty ugly territories because if we were to put both our legs on the horse and ask the squeeze with our legs, ask the horse to go forward, when we squeeze with our legs, if the horse then walks forward and we take our legs off, that is exactly negative reinforcement. But if we squeeze with our legs and the horse doesn't move, so we have to squeeze harder and then we squeeze harder again. Then we start kicking harder and harder. Then we start hitting. Well, now we're actually positively punishing the horse for standing still. And so it's pretty quickly a slope that can get messy. And so I think, yeah, that's an important thing to remember with training all animals is that those four boxes are not as defined as a lot of people think. And then I think coming back to the difference between dogs and horses, there's a lot of differences. I mean, one's a prey species, one's a predator. Problem solving is inherent to all animals, but certainly problem solving for dogs. It's really, really important. You know, for horses, they don't have to hunt their food. It's grass. It grows on the ground. They don't have to learn how to track it. They don't have to learn, you know, how to capture it. There's nothing really tricky about it. So they don't have that same desire to do some of the things that dogs have that desire to do. And one of the most important things for horses is that horses primarily love being left alone. They love peace. That's why negative reinforcement works so well for them. So when a horse has done something really well, we often just stop. We just stop and let that animal rest for a moment before we do anything else. We might even put that horse back in its box. We

might go, that's, and you've done so amazing. We're going to put you back away for a little while and just leave you in peace. Now, if we did that with a dog and we went, you did so amazing. We're going to pop you in your crate and leave you in there for 15 minutes. It's going to be very reinforcing for the dog. It's going to be reinforcing for the horse, but not reinforcing for the dog. So whenever you're working with different species, it's so important that you know what's going to motivate that species. Because if you don't know what the motivators are for that species, your positive reinforcement is not going to be effective. And so I think that's a couple of key differences really between working with dogs and horses. How popular is positive training in the horse world these days? Can you just kind of share a little bit, you know, for those people who aren't involved in that world, what that looks like today? Sure. Unfortunately, it's not super popular. Horses traditionally have been trained with a lot of positive punishment, with a lot of negative reinforcement, and with a lot of flooding. So for people who aren't familiar with flooding, flooding is like this horrendously extreme end of desensitization where you really aren't giving the animal an option at all. So with a young foal, for example, they may lay that animal down, they may tie its legs together, they might put it in a position where it definitely cannot escape, it cannot avoid, and then they will just cover that animal with whatever they want, cover sacks, you know, rub it all over with bags and sacks. They might introduce clippers to that animal, they might just pat it all over, they'll do a whole heap of things to that animal. But the animal is not able to avoid that. It's not able to escape, it can't fight, it can't flee. And so that's what flooding is. Now, flooding is a very common technique in horses, where they're restrained, not just as false as adults, they're restrained, or their ability to fight or flee is taken away from them. And then they're made to endure whatever they're scared of. And the result, unfortunately, is there's a lot of learned helplessness in horses. There's also a lot of behavioral issues where horses do eventually try and fight back and people get injured and horses get put down or get sent to sale yards, or just get rehomed over and over again, because they're performing behaviors that in fairness to them, make a lot of sense. But for the humans, they're dangerous and unwanted behaviors. And so it's better than it used to be. I think certainly we're seeing less

positive punishment and more use of well thought out negative reinforcement. We're not seeing a lot of positive reinforcement. We're seeing a lot less nasty negative reinforcement, meaning we're seeing just subtle, annoying techniques as opposed to techniques that were quite brutal in the past. Some sports have made massive inroads. And, you know, those Olympic sports are under a lot of scrutiny. Some sports haven't, you will still actually see blood on horses at competitions in some sports, just from spurs and just from bits. Unfortunately, even in magazines, even in just common discussions in the horse industry, you will still mainly hear of horses talked of as being difficult or stubborn or problem horses. Very rare do the owners or riders or trainers consider it could possibly have anything to do with their input. They mainly think it's the horse that's doing all these horrible things. So it's a little disappointing, but it certainly is the case that there's still a lot of traditional style training happening in horses, even in the developed world. And certainly where there's still very much working animals, you know, there's even worse treatment often. We've seen a slight shift and there's certainly some people making some big pushes for positive reinforcement. I guess the main thing there is I'd like to see people be really honest about the training techniques that they're using. And I'm not trying to be controversial there. What I'm saying is things like liberty work, which has become very popular over recent times. Liberty work does not equal positive reinforcement training. I think to a lot of people that are less familiar with that sector, they probably see this animal that doesn't have, you know, a lead attached to it. It doesn't have, you know, a bridle or a bit or, you know, it's got no equipment. And the animal yet is still working alongside this person in the open. And they're led to believe that it must be because the animal wants to be there. But I would point out that compulsion based training doesn't necessarily rely on there actually being control, but more that the animal believes there's control. And so a lot of the times, if you look at the behaviours of those liberty horses, you will see a lot of signs that the animal is actually quite stressed and the actual, the animal's not very comfortable and not very quite, quite, quite happy. And so I think we need to try and just make sure that people realise that just because the animal's at liberty doesn't mean that the animal is undergoing positive only training.

And yeah, I think that's a key thing. But there certainly are people, even in the competition sector, that are trying really hard to make inroads into introducing positive reinforcement to establish movements in horses, but also to improve movements in horses. And that's really exciting to see. You kind of mentioned this idea early on about horses have learning history often when you start working with them. And then you mentioned just now kind of a lot of the times there are, you know, they kind of have this learned helplessness. So, I mean, it totally makes sense to me then that, yes, when they first start to realise they have choice, they might, their choices may not be the choices you want them to make because they're anticipating pain, right? Like that totally makes sense to me. And I just kind of wanted to call that out. And then you mentioned liberty training and maybe it's just me, but I'm not familiar with it. So can you just kind of explain a little bit about what it is? Sure. Because horses tend to be seen, you know, with a rider on their back with, you know, some sort of lead attached to the horse's mouth, be it a bridle with a bit in the horse's mouth or whether it's just a halter around the horse. That's sort of the more traditional sort of thing that we think of when we think of someone riding a horse. And when they're on the ground, same thing, people are used to seeing the horse attached to the rider via a lead or a set of reins. In the liberty work, it's specifically an animal that basically has no equipment on it. It's in an open space with no equipment. Now, that animal sometimes is following, is just following the person. Sometimes it's performing a whole range of tricks or performance performances. And I think it's just that idea of seeing a horse with no equipment, just in the open with the ability to run off to the other corner and stand in the other corner. It makes people believe that that's what the animal would do if it wanted to. What I'm saying is that that animal sometimes has undergone some fairly tough training to explain to the animal that that's actually not an option and it shouldn't think about doing that. And so a little bit like a shock collar on a dog where we see that there's no lead attached and the dog's still walking alongside in a busy shopping centre, for example. And that's still compelled to do that because it doesn't believe it has an option. And it's even though there's no lead there. And that's the same thing, pretty much exactly, that happens in the liberty sector.

Okay. So I want to switch gears a little bit here and talk about actual training. So how does some of the different things that we do train horses to do, how do those things differ? So when we're talking about training competition behaviours, for example, versus tricks or something like cooperative care, do they require different thought processes or different methods or techniques or, you know, how are those things similar and different? Sure. I think that this is completely my opinion. And, you know, I'm very prepared to eat my words in years to come, because I've certainly had to in the dog world. Because, you know, I started training with dogs in an environment where there was no one doing anything but mainly punishment based training. So I know that I probably at that time believed there was no better way. And now I certainly know there is. And so I'm prepared to say that I might be saying this again, in a few years time that I was wrong. And that's okay. But at the moment, my opinion would be that we can use positive only for tricks. I think we can use positive only for cooperative care. I think we can use positive only for basic riding. So if I want to be able to just get on my horse and walk, trot and canter around, take it to the beach, have it with no equipment on it. I think all of those things are very achievable, providing you're prepared to put the time and effort in using positive only. I think in competition at the moment, this is my opinion, in dressage as an example, because that's the sport I know the most about. I think it's going to be difficult because we're not allowed to use our voice. So there's no voice commands possible. And when we're on the horse's back, there's no visual hand signals that we can give to the horse. We have to keep our hands very close together and very low down. We have to keep our legs just quite still on the horse's side. And so really what we're left with is our two seat bones, our two legs and our two hands to communicate all of the different things that we need them to do. And that's sort of a lot of different paces, even within the paces, there's different paces and then lots of different tricks. And so I think in order to do that, we're still a little bit left with squeeze with your legs, horse goes forward, take the leg off, place your right leg on, horse moves to the left, you take your leg off. Now, whether you want to call that a tactile cue, not negative reinforcement training, that's where the water's become quite muddy. Because if you're

prepared to call that a tactile cue, then maybe we can completely do it with positive reinforcement only. But I would think that somewhere in that training of that movement, you are applying some pressure with that leg. And I would say at that point, it's negative reinforcement. And this is where it gets very complicated because a lot of people without even realizing it in multiple animals, will use negative reinforcement combined with positive reinforcement and believe that they're using positive reinforcement. So for example, if a dog was, if I wanted a dog to back up, I can teach it to target back to a mat and then treat it. And that's positive reinforcement. But if I was to step into that dog's space and sort of somewhat use spatial pressure to push the dog backwards, then I'm using negative reinforcement. Now, the fact that I then give the dog a treat afterwards, I may think that I'm using just positive reinforcement. But in actual fact, what I've done is I've applied spatial pressure. And when the dog stepped backwards, I stopped applying that spatial pressure. And hence, it was negative reinforcement that actually got the animal to go backwards. And then we can add to that, you know, a treat. But we are combining things. We're not doing just one thing. And that's where the confusion comes with the dressage horses, for example. I know there are a few people that are desperate to produce high-end horses all the way from the bottom to the top with positive only. And I think some of them are just maybe a little bit being elastic on the fact that when they're applying that pressure, they may be considering it just a tactile cue, as opposed to believing that's part of what's making the animal do what it's doing. It's like you were saying earlier, those quadrants can be awful muddy. And sometimes even that may or may not be the best way to even think about it, right? It goes back to the way you're describing your philosophy about kind and effective rather than, you know, calling it. Yeah, I think if we could absolutely get rid of the quadrant idea, that would just, I would think that would be the most amazing thing. Because people just want to live in that one quadrant and not appreciate that. For example, with horses, I mean, there's a lot of studies that have shown, and there's just a recent one, actually just not that long ago that someone was showing me the results for. And unfortunately, you know, it's not showing what people want it to show. And that is that, you know, people want it to show that these horses are doing so much better

on positive reinforcement training. But in actual fact, when you look at the end result, there's always one or more of the horses in the positive reinforcement group that hasn't actually made it to the end criteria. So it's not as effective. That's okay. But then when you look at the kindness part, in actual fact, you sometimes see that the markers they're using to assess the stress levels of the horses don't even completely indicate that the horse was more comfortable in the positive only sector. And this is possibly in this case, just to do with those, those particular horses may have had a lot of experience in negative reinforcement training. So they really understood it. And when the new task was shown to them using negative reinforcement, they went, I've got that, I fully understand that. And away they go and they learn a new task. Whereas the positive reinforcement aspect to it, they were like, why are you doing this? I don't understand. I'm a little confused. Now it could be that had those same animals, those same horses been consistently exposed to that, there may be a very different outcome. But yeah, I think it's important to remember that whilst we look at those four quadrants, we really probably should be just looking at how happy was the animal during the training? How keen did the animal seem to be to come back and train again? Did we see any signs that the animal was not enjoying it? Were we at any time using any painful or fear inducing stimuli? And certainly for me, that's absolutely a territory I don't go into if, you know, I'm not interested in things that induce pain or things that are fear inducing for the animal. So I'm certainly not saying we should be entering those sort of quadrants. But in terms of for horses, negative reinforcement does seem to be something that providing it's used with an aversive that's very subtle, something that's just a little bit annoying, but not something that's painful or fear inducing, then I don't think we should be so terrified of entering that sector. You know, I totally kind of agree with you that sometimes the quadrants are more messy than than they're worth. And it certainly seems like they they lead to a lot of division amongst trainers rather than really helping clarify things. Often they just lead to arguments. But yeah, we don't have to get into that today. So are there areas where you feel like positive reinforcement could really have a big impact in the horse training world that maybe a lot of trainers are overlooking or that we should really seriously consider how we can apply positive training to kind of work

on those things? Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely a few key areas. And I think one thing would be those regular tasks that are performed for horses. So the farriers come and trim their feet or put their shoes on. Clipping is often performed on horses. And yet time and time again, I see people using sedation because it's quick and easy. And I think that would be a nice place to take that time to train the animal to do the desensitizing work so that the animal is genuinely comfortable there. Because one of the things we know is that the sedations that are commonly handed out for people to use on horses have no anti-anxiety component. They are just sedations, non-selective sedatives. And so what you've potentially got is an animal that's getting no anti-anxiety part. It's actually not enjoying the process, but it's not able to react. And so you really got it getting like a flooding type principle. And that can be happening over and over again, because they're doing that every time the animal's clipped or every time the farrier comes or every time the vet comes. And I think that would be just the number one thing is if we really looked at tasks that need to be performed regularly, whether it's using oral paste on a horse, whether it's injecting a horse, clipping, doing farrier type work, and really getting those horses genuinely comfortable, not just scared into standing still, but actually comfortable about standing still. There are prime times that people use positive punishment because what happens is the farrier gets annoyed, they're frustrated, they're trying to get to the next job, this horse is moving around, and then they yank on the horse's head or they smack the horse in the ribs. They're like, stand up, because they're just trying to get their job done. The owners kind of need to put that work in for their own horse's sake, because we know that psychological trauma is cumulative. And why would we be wanting to expose our horses over and over again when we could be avoiding that? So in veterinary visits, definitely, you know, we'd love to keep the vets safer, we'd love to keep the farriers safer. And horses, when they're scared, they're big animals, they're very reactive, they can do a lot of damage really quickly. So there's really only two options, either someone gets hurt or the animal gets restrained. And when the animal's restrained, and then still undergoing a process that's not enjoying, we're leading to potential psychological trauma. And if we can avoid it, it would be fantastic.

Teaching cooperative care would be the best thing we could do to avoid having to restrain horses, to have them enjoy the processes, or at least be comfortable with the processes that are happening on a regular basis. All right, so we're getting to the end here. And I've got three questions I usually ask people kind of at the end of their first interview. So I'd like to kind of walk through those. The first one is what's the training related accomplishment that you're proudest of? Well, I've only just come back to obedience competing. So I'm actually hoping the best is yet to come. But I think at the moment, probably because it's my latest pet project. But probably at the moment, it would be my work with teaching dogs to communicate through symbols. So I actually have a project on the go, where we actually train the dogs to be able to identify the symbols and be able to identify the consequence that's going to happen as a result of touching that symbol. And so this way, we can actually put a whole group of symbols on a wall. And the dog can say, hey, I'd like to play tug or hey, I'd like to go for a walk now. Or, you know, whatever, you know, I'd like my jacket on, I'd like my jacket off. There was actually an amazing study done with horses proving that horses could actually totally determine what they'd like to have done based on their thermal comfort, whether they'd like their rug on or whether they'd like it off or that they'd like to remain as is. So it was based on that work. And then there's also a no sign. So if you put up a heap of signs, and the dog doesn't like any of them, it actually can say, no, I don't want to do any of those things, and still get rewarded for saying no. And so yeah, that's, I think that's gives people the opportunity to have a two way communication with their dogs that they maybe haven't really had before. And lots of people that are working on that are getting really excited about watching their dogs tell them what they like to do. And so yeah, I think that's probably at the moment, my journey related accomplishment that I'm proudest of. That's pretty neat. Yeah. So my next one here is what's the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Okay, well that, you know, it's actually based in show jumping. So I'll tell you it from the show jumping perspective. It was said to me, you're always better off jumping a jump that's 30 centimeters too low, 30 times too many than jumping one jump too high once. And the honest truth is that's so important for all animals. I use that in every animal. So I've probably heard

that 25 years ago. I use it all the time because, you know, yes, you're trying to progress. Yes, you're wanting to move forward. But you have to make sure that you're always better off just doing that task one extra time, a few extra times, really making sure the animal's confident before you move up, rather than going that next step up, shattering their confidence in some way, and then having to repair a heap of work. So, you know, taking your time, just if it means you're going a bit slower and you repeat that same task quite a few times before you move on to the harder task, that's fine. I'd rather do that and protect the animal's confidence than go up a little too quick and shatter their confidence and then have to deal with the problem. And the last one here, who's somebody else in the training world that you look up to? Well, I think if I had to look across all species, because I've spent a lot of time across lots of species, for his amazing problem solving abilities, it would have to be Ken Ramirez. However, I would say if I was looking at just being broader on my answer, I'd say that I genuinely look up to any person who has been effective and successful as a trainer using one technique and then decided to change techniques purely to be kinder to the animal. Because I think if you're changing techniques because you just want to be more successful, you want to have a better outcome, that's pretty normal. That's what we're all doing as trainers all the time. But when you're already successful and you're already effective and you decide to make that really tough decision to challenge yourself to then try and produce animals to that same level or better using a completely different approach purely because you're trying to look at the animal's perspective, I think I look up to anyone that does that. I think that's an amazing effort to do that. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Sharon. Yep. Thank you. It's been great. I've been enjoying chatting to you. Yeah, lots of fun. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Executive Director of the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants, IAABC, Margie Alonzo. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice. They'll 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 Line. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. Thank you. Thank you.