E252: 에린 라인스(Erin Lynes) - "완벽하게 숙성된 나이: 노견과 함께 살아가기"

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sense for your specific dog i like that and i never thought about just kind of that piece before right that something as simple as treat delivery can really have an impact um based on what your dog's comfortable with and what kind of their current mobility looks like so in the webinar description specifically you mentioned that you are going to look at kind of the day-to-day lives of senior dogs and discuss those kind of small changes those little things that can improve safety and comfort um do you want to just elaborate on that a little more maybe share a couple more examples sure yeah i've got a whole section in the webinar about household adaptation so things we can do within our um our home and our daily lives to help make things a little bit easier and more comfortable for our adult dogs so i think the biggest example of this and probably the the one that i spend the most time on in the webinar is different ways to increase the traction so older dogs um especially as they do start to have mobility issues you often start to see a little bit of anxiety creeping in there too maybe slippery floors weren't a problem before and now they worry a little bit about them so increasing traction by putting down mats or directly addressing things that we can do with the dog's foot so keeping those nails trimmed really nicely keeping the fur on the bottom of their pads trimmed nicely and there's also things you can apply to their feet to help improve with traction too if maybe matting isn't an option where you can't possibly cover your whole house in in yoga mats yeah um so you kind of mentioned in there uh earlier that older dogs you know they're more prone to kind of those aches and those pains as they get a little bit older just like we are um so how can we be sure that we're really kind of taking that into account as we're planning our training and then actually you know doing training yeah so i think that one of the the best tips i can give on that is even when you're no longer training for sports if you're training your old dog for conditioning purposes or you're just playing games it really doesn't hurt to videotape once in a while because you're going to catch things from that alternate perspective that that show you your dog is maybe fatiguing a little earlier than you thought or maybe they're showing signs of discomfort that you didn't miss while you were in the heat of the moment in training so you're going to see um you're sometimes going to see signs really early in a session i was doing some conditioning with chester last night and while i was in it i was we were doing

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some down to stand motions which is a pretty basic exercise and i was like okay well he's he's struggling he forgets how to do this he poor little old man brain and then when i went back to look at the video what i really saw was he was already getting a little tired we'd already done a bunch of other things that day and he was fatiguing in three reps when normally he might be able to do six or seven reps without showing those signs so i'm just catching those things on video so that you can watch for them the next time you train and a lot of the time when we have young dogs in their prime those signs that we see are are pretty subtle and we train our eye to watch for um small movements maybe your dog just steps out of place you're like okay that's the sign i'm looking for and with our older dogs it's funny but they they can have really exaggerated motions to the point where you don't even see them as clues to fatigue anymore so if your dog just stands right up and you're like oh well he's i'm not motivating him properly or maybe i didn't have the treat in the right position he's just like i can't even make those small motions those clues are out of it right now i'm i'm a lot more tired than you think i am and their fine control over their body their motor control isn't really subtle anymore so watching for um things that you might think lead you to believe the dog doesn't understand what you're asking for or um is maybe there maybe you're thinking oh he's not motivated enough or that sort of thing those can actually be signs that there's a little bit of ouch factor happening a little bit of fatigue and you want to be a little bit more mindful of those in your older dog so um the other thing that i really look for is anything that i'm doing with my old team um i watch for how they're feeling the next day i don't want to see any store extra soreness or stiffness in their in their movement you know there's going to be a little bit in some of the dogs um based on just how their body has worn over the years but a lot of those things that we see um and think well it's just because of age those are things that are clues that we need to address them medically maybe maybe he's you know feeling a little bit of extra soreness in his shoulder because he actually hurt his shoulder it might not just be because he's old or maybe that exercise causes him to overdo it because there's something going on in his spine that is you know he's feeling it now when he wasn't feeling it a few weeks ago so i hope that answered your question a little bit yeah because you don't

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necessarily think about that how um body language might actually change and signs of fatigue and things like that might actually change as your dog gets to a different stage in their life it's almost like and certainly correct me if i i misinterpreted it but it's almost like if things seem to be getting worse as you go along instead of improving understanding that's a sign right yeah absolutely yeah for sure and sometimes they'll it's easy to think like kimber my my middle senior is she's a silly little thing and she's always been you know um a bit of a clown in the family and when i'm doing some exercises with her if she starts to get more frantic it would be easy to interpret that as oh you know she's really excited and she's having a fun time but in for her right now that's a sign of she's like i don't i don't get it or i can't do it so i have to really watch and make sure that i'm interpreting her language correctly because it's a little bit different now than what it used to be so i want to talk about the class for just a second um can you give us a little bit of a preview kind of some of the specific exercises you'll be working on um in the february class yeah for sure so how i'm breaking it down for the class um each week we're going to be um dividing the lectures into four sort of broad categories so there's going to be a little bit of a lecture discussion on some aspect of aging that might be interesting or provide information about your dog and for students in the class they're going to be able to start to use that information to watch their own dogs and look for signs that they maybe need more of something or less of something else um there's going to be a section on brain games that we can play to help keep the dogs mentally stimulated and having fun we want to definitely make sure that they've got something to look forward to and these are really simply uh simply fun and easy games that are a little bit different each week and with different variations so um like i mentioned earlier about my my old fella ruger who is not so awesome at taking treats off the floor anymore the games will have different options to sort of cater to different physical abilities and and you know um different levels of aging i guess you could say and then um each week we'll also talk about some sort of conditioning exercise and these are progressive as the weeks go on so as an example um we're going to be spending some time looking at posture and training a nice good square stand which seems really basic and simple

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but for dogs who are older they don't necessarily choose to stand with good posture on their own anymore sometimes they might be avoiding um sitting so we'll be looking at is that something that needs addressing from a medical standpoint or can we build strength by practicing a really uh sit with good form that sort of thing and then building up on those so that um the dogs who are able to progress through the exercises more easily will have something new to do each week and dogs who need more time to work on the the physical exercises in the early week can can keep working on those and we'll have all the steps broken down for them and then the last thing we'll be looking at each week is an aspect of husbandry so care activities cooperative care type of things that we can do that are fairly specific to senior dogs or maybe are more challenging because they're senior so um like we talked about earlier improving traction so there's a a week section on friendly foot care tactics and how we can um help our dogs feel better about having their feet handled how we can um look at maintaining the the fur and nails on their feet and even some of the other options for adding traction for them as well and uh you know all the steps that it takes to get them to be able to accept that sort of training so that's that's what we'll be looking at each week and breaking things down into those four sections so there's a little bit of something for everybody along the way awesome and then in the webinar you kind of mentioned in the description this idea of no two days the same um and it caught my eye so i wanted to have you explain what you meant by that sure yeah so i think it's pretty standard knowledge that older dogs like routine and tend to thrive on routine but it's also easy to like sort of get into a rut and um you know i feel like that um what's that movie called office space where they you know they go to work every day you fill up the same forms you put them in the boss's thing you go home you have dinner you go to sleep repeat the whole thing every day i think it's easy to get into that sort of rut with our older dogs because they do really like routine they really my older dogs want to be fed at like 6 59 every morning and they want to be in bed by 8 30 p.m and they're like they have these things that happen every day at the same time and they like that but with our no two days the same idea we're looking at ways that we can take that routine that helps them you know feel stable and secure but also inject these bits

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of variation so that there's something interesting to look forward to and so that they're not just doing the same four or five things every day repeat rinse repeat so for example if you normally take your dog for a walk at 9 a.m and they often you know they can tell the time those senior dogs are especially good at that so like 8 59 they're like let's get the leash let's go for a walk what about if some days you walk around your neighborhood to one direction the next day you walk around another direction some other time you can let the dog choose the path entirely or instead of going for just a walk look for obstacles in your neighborhood where you can do some sort of parkoury conditioning type exercises along the way so they're still getting their walk but it's a little bit different each time there's there's that little bit of variation and we can do that with almost every aspect of their daily routine so even with the feeding routine so yes 6 59 is when breakfast happens but it's maybe not this you're maybe not getting your your breakfast in a bowl today maybe you're getting it out of a slow feeder or a puzzle toy or i've frozen it into a kong for you that sort of thing maybe you're not you know it's a nice sunny day you're gonna keep have your breakfast on the lawn so there's a little bit of change within the routine and um that's what i mean by no tuesdays the same so just finding those ways to put a little bit of spice and variation without having to disrupt the dog's whole routine and i know even as for us as dog owners we have it's kind of handy to have patterns especially if you've got multiple dogs you get into a flow of how the day goes um and just finding ways within those patterns to to inject a little variety that's that's what all it's about and the more you get excited about it the more you can find creative ways to build into that i like that i like that a lot and i can see how that would be really helpful especially for an older dog to kind of get them that variety and that enrichment that uh that can be hard to do when you know maybe they're more limited in some of their other options exactly like what we've got older dogs who sleep a better part of the day than they're awake right so you got to make use of the time you have you can't necessarily just keep adding in extra activities if they're sleeping 21 hours a day so making those um tweaks and adjustments during the times that they already expect to have activity is really helpful yeah all right so for those who are listening who are kind of interested in either the webinar

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or the class can you just talk a little bit more about kind of what each one will include and you know kind of where the overlap is or isn't yeah so there is a little bit of overlap basically for the webinar we're going to be looking at um all the activities we can do through an enrichment lens so if we define enrichment as being able to meet the dog's needs in a way that allows them to do it um with species you know typical behavior so um when we look at things like exercise how can we make this the most dog-like exercise we can make it these feeding games what's what's a way to bring out their you know their natural foraging activities that sort of thing all of the webinar is sort of funneled through the lens of that enrichment uh and there's a lot to get through there's a lot of um i think kind of interesting topics that are captured in there and a few of them have time to go into a bit more of a deep dive so like i talked about um some aspects of husbandry care in the webinar um and i tried to pick out the ones that are the most important and easy for people to start doing right away so if you watch the webinar you're going to have um ideas on adjusting traction for your dog some foot care activities that you can get into right away you're going to have a um a pretty deep dive on starting to teach your dog a nice stand and adding some challenges so if your dog already has had a bit of a conditioning background and you want to progress that there's some ideas on how to progress that as well and then we're going to look at some fun games that have a lot of different variations that you can try as well so that you're getting a little bit of that training and mental stimulation stimulation in there as well and in the class uh we're obviously have a lot more time so we can go into things in a lot more detail we're going to be um focusing on how you can progress these different activities over time and really catering them to your inner individual dog's needs so it gives us a little bit more opportunity to um specifically look at okay well maybe your dog doesn't like nail trimming but what about using a scratch board or what about using a dremel or there's all these other different modifications we can make um when we have a little bit more time to talk about that so i i think that if you're on the fence go ahead and take the webinar and see if that is the you know the the vision you had for your older dog you'll kind of get an idea of um what sort of things that i'm hoping that you'll be

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able to accomplish with your older dog and the direction that we're going and if you like it you will find way more detail in the class a lot more um you know weekly challenges so that you can really start to dive into making that no two days the same happen for your dog and concrete ways in which to do it excellent all right so to kind of round things out one last question for you um if we were to kind of drill down the stuff we've been talking about today and it's like one key takeaway or one key piece of information you really want people uh to kind of walk away from this understanding um what would that be so aging and dogs is not just this continual downhill decline it can be really a really fun time in their life it can be a really great time to bond with your dog and there's all these different things that we can do from um different perspectives to help improve what they're already experiencing so your dog can actually get stronger as they get older they can have um better feelings and better habits in their husbandry training cooperative care your dog can learn new games and and um develop new interest as they get older so um try not to think of aging as something to worry about it something to really celebrate and and opens a whole new chapter up with your dog so that's that's what i would like people to see see how much fun it can be exactly yeah you never get a better dog than a really old dog so it's on their way there that's what you really you really want to have fun with that yeah at that point you've kind of worked out a communication communication system and you understand each other and yeah yeah they're just sassy enough when they get old that it's it's fun but manageable right all right well thank you so much for coming on the podcast erin thanks for having me latha this was fun to get to talk to you always and thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in we will be back next week with leslie mcdevitt to talk about her talk for this year's lemonade conference if you haven't already subscribed to our podcast and itunes or the podcast app of your choice they have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available today's show is brought to you by the fenzy dog sports academy special thanks to denise fenzy 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 so you Thank you.