E248: 제인 아던(Jane Ardern) - "흥분도가 높은 반려견 훈련하기"

sparked my interest just in dog behavior and dog training. And yeah, it kind of went from there. Right. Then after him, I had Liam burgers and I had Liam burgers for 20 years and I used to show them. And again, I just got more and more into training dogs and understanding behavior. And I always say to people after, after 20 years of trying to motivate Liam burgers, I just got a cock a spaniel instead. That is quite the switch from Liam burgers. It was, it was a huge shock. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a long time in the dog world. When you first got started, were you a positive trainer? Do you consider yourself one now? Kind of what got you started down that path? So, so when I took my St. Bernard Cross Rottweiler to my very first training class, it was actually a positive training class. And when I say positive, as positive as, as you kind of got back then, they were using food and treats. And there was quite a lot of luring, but there was also some modeling, but yeah, it was, it was pretty positive. And I always remember the experience because he was really grabby and mouthy and he was also like really jowly and drooly. And we were in, yeah, and we were in a freezing cold church hall. And I just remember that I was using the food and trying to lure him and he was grabbing my hands and slobbering on them and they were freezing and they were sore from his teeth catching me. And I remember that I asked the assistant trainer for some help. And I actually said to her, I said, I don't want to use treats because he was hurting my hands. And she took him off me and she struggled to really kind of change anything. And she just gave him me back. So I left that lesson and never went back. Not really because, I suppose, because of the training, but just because I had an unpleasant experience. So I ended up going to the library and I bought, I got a book out of the library. It was like the only dog training book in there. And it was by a guy called John Holmes and it was just called the obedient dog. So I popped down to the pet shop and I got myself a choke chain as recommended in the book. And yeah, off I went and trained my dog. I then moved on to training with an ex-police dog handler. So really interesting that I could have been a positive trainer from day one. But I didn't. I went down the traditional route originally and that worked for me at the time. And really just the more and more that I learned, the more and more I just started to change what I do. I was never very good at punishing dogs. It really was quite sat uncomfortable with me.

And I always kind of felt that I just wasn't very good at dog training. But actually, as I progressed, I learned that I just wasn't very good at punishing animals. What a big takeaway that is, right? Like it's totally possible for the right environment to still feel like a poor fit just because it didn't meet your needs at the time. And it was made so aversive for you as the trainer, as the human trainer. Um, yeah, absolutely. And, and one of the things I really focus on now is, is making sure that, you know, it's not just about the dog. It's, it's a team and it's really important that the dog has a positive experience and it's really important that the handler has a positive experience as well. And that's kind of really, as I got into dog training, it really kind of drove me into just being very aware and making an effort that, you know, the teaching people, understanding how to communicate and support and help people is so important. If you want to get your dog training method across to people. Which ties in really nicely with what I was going to ask you next, which is, you know, what is your current training philosophy? How would you kind of describe how you approach training these days? So I'm classed as, I would say I'm classed as the positive reinforcement trainer. Um, I'm not too keen on the force free from probably from a semantics point of view. Um, and for, for me, the way I look at training is, is I would say I'm a positive trainer. Um, but for me, it's not about treats and clickers and toys. For me, it's really about the, the journey, the experience and the learning journey that the dog has on an emotional level should be as positive as possible. And really that we can support dogs to have mostly positive experiences through their life. A lot of that is about coping strategies. Um, so yeah, really, um, for me, it's, it's that the learning journey that the dog has is, is as positive as possible. I like that. And I like that you kind of brought out that phrase coping strategies, because I can see how it's very possible to be, you know, positive in terms of using only food and only clickers. But if you don't give the dog those other pieces, ultimately the experience overall for the dog may not actually be all that pleasant, right? Is that kind of what you're getting at? Yeah, I, I, I see, um, I see a lot of dogs who are positively trained and they kind of, um, they're, they're often getting clicks and treats, but sometimes they're, there's too much pressure on them. The criteria is too high and you see that they're actually finding learning a frustrating

experience, even though they're getting treats and so on. So for me, it's really about kind of looking at the whole dog and making sure that the, the experience they have when learning is fair, um, and supportive to that individual dog's needs as well. And you wrote the book, I mean, quite literally on training high drive dogs. So, um, I want to, I want to kind of talk about that a little bit. So can you share a little bit about the book? You know, what led you to write it, kind of how that fits in all the stuff we're talking about? Yes. So, um, obviously from moving on to Liam burgers and into cocker spaniels, I was starting to experience working with dogs with like high drive dogs, working with dogs with, um, high prey drive as well. So my first cocker had quite an intense prey drive, um, and we had to work through quite a few issues. My Liam burger, my last Liam burger I had was actually a sheep chaser and I'd worked through that as well. And I was like, I'm going to do a lot of work with her using positive reinforcement training. So kind of that was where I was just growing as a trainer. Um, and I was asked, I was approached by the publishing company and asked to write a book. Um, and originally they asked me to write a book on motivation. And I was kind of like, well, my dogs now are kind of motivated about everything all the time. Um, so we had a discussion. I was doing a course at the time called controlling crazy canines, which was about mostly impulse control and prey drive as well. Uh, so we kind of made an agreement that I would write the book around those things. Cause that was I, what I was working with. Um, I was quite dubious at first because I'm dyslexic on whether I would be able to write a book, but I thought let's just go for it. That's awesome. So you kind of based it on what you were focusing on with your clients at that point. Is that kind of what I'm hearing? With my own dogs, but also, um, also with my clients, I was just attracting people that were kind of having those kinds of problems. Um, and I do always like, um, even when I'm doing kind of courses and workshops is I, I do like to kind of speak just from my personal experiences and how I've kind of lived and breathed and experienced problems and resolved them. Um, and really just trying to keep it real. So the book is very much about my experiences with my dogs, um, and what they've taught me and what I've learned. Mm-hmm. And just so folks, uh, have it, do you want to kind of share the full title here so that people can go over to Amazon and look it up? Yes. So it's mission control, how to train the high drive dog.

And I think, you know, kind of as dog sports people, which is, you know, most of our audience kind of fits into that bucket. We all kind of love this idea of having a dog that's high drive when it comes to training. Right. But sometimes, especially with our first one, we maybe don't take that step back and think about the potentially difficult aspects of having a high drive dog. Um, you, you kind of mentioned in, you know, some of what you said previously, like the thing about working on, uh, frustration and impulse control and some of that. Can you, can you talk to that a little bit more? Like what some of the difficult aspects are that maybe come with the high drive dog? Yeah. So I've, so in my experience, when I got pickles, who was my first cocker spaniel, um, she was quite strongly field trial bred and she was actually quite a good dog. She was great to train because she was always busy. She always wanted to do things. She always wanted to learn. Um, and I have, after having Liam burgers, this was really exciting, but what I didn't do was install an off switch. Um, cause I'd never had to do that with Liam burgers. It was never an issue. Um, and so I ended up with this little dog who was just like wanting to do things all the time. So I struggled with her being able to settle, to switch off. And I, even as a professional trainer, like I'd never experienced like the intensity that when she got into a high state of arousal and like would lose the plot, I'd never experienced that before. Um, and I actually ended up going to a traditional trainer and we had a conversation about what I would and wouldn't do with my dog. And I said to him, but I need some help. I need someone who understands these dogs that can help and support me. Um, and, and he supported me really well. And he was great because, you know, I said to him, you know, I don't want you to get hold of my dog. I don't want you to do anything horrible to my dog. Um, and we worked together. We had lots of conversations and we worked through a lot of the problems, which was great. Um, and I think for me with those dogs is, is it always reminds me, I used to show my Liam burgers and like when you go to a dog show, especially like in the open dog class, like one dog would just walk in the ring and everybody's eyes would be drawn to this dog. And they just had what's called ring presence. And I always remember that those were the dogs that won those, the dogs that they just drew attention to themselves. You know, they probably had like more testosterone than the other dogs in the ring.

Um, a little bit like a stallion and these like successful dogs, they were just a nightmare to live with. Like when you took them home, they were just like, like really hard work because even they would, they just had that presence and they were usually full on and drivey. And for me, you know, I kind of think like when we talk about a high drive dog, I kind of think, yeah, they're kind of like a stallion where, you know, when they're doing their thing, they're absolutely fabulous. If you can get a handle on them, but they can actually be challenging other aspects. Um, I find with the Spaniels that, um, they are bred to be intense. They're bred to be persistent. They're bred to not quit. They're bred to work through pain. So all those things, especially in pet homes, and I work a lot with working dogs in pet homes, and is those desirable traits of a working dog can really create a lot of problems for people who don't understand them and don't understand why they behave like they behave. And often what I would class as a desirable trait are often seen as undesirable traits. Because if you've got a puppy that's misbehaving and you've got genetic persistence and, um, a dog that's genetically designed to not quit and work through pain, that's going to create problems when they're doing the wrong thing as opposed to the right thing. Absolutely. So I can totally see that, right? So how do you work around that or work with that? Or, you know, how do you kind of approach training a dog that's like that using positive reinforcement techniques to kind of minimize some of those hard things and kind of maximize the good parts and help them learn how to kind of fit into our world and maybe still meet their needs? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So, so I think it's about understanding what those traits are and why they're there, why, why they've been, the dog has been genetically selected to have those specific traits, what their purpose is, and really working on channeling them in the right direction. And that's usually lots of really shaping behavior because that stuff's kind of just in the dog already. So it's down to us to shape that in the right direction. And for me, I think with these dogs, a lot of what we're doing is we're not just training behavior is we're really, if, if we want to have a partnership with the dog, get the dog on the right track, then for me, it's very much about, we're kind of teaching a cognitive skill. It's really about wiring the brain so it processes in the right way. So it's not just about the dog, you know, must learn a behavior and then follow an instruction

and be obedient. I think, you know, what we do with these dogs or certainly what I do with, with my, my working dogs is I'm developing cognitive skills and that takes time. What an interesting way of thinking about it. I kind of love that. The fact that you're thinking about it as how you want to wire their brain rather than, you know, what specific behaviors do they need to kind of have installed? I'd imagine, like you said, some of that varies by breed, right? But do you think that kind of holds true regardless of whether we're talking about like a purpose bred, like gundog or like a melon wall, like, are there commonalities there? Are there things that are just totally different? You know, how does breed kind of play into all this? So I think different breeds are bred to do different jobs. So there's different behavioral traits, you know, collies are very visual, gundogs are very scent driven, and you're always going to get the exception to the rule and variations on that. But you can get a good idea of, you know, if you take a spaniel into an environment, the environment's going to trigger probably scent type behavior patterns, where the dog's head's going to be down on the ground, where if you have a herding breed, for example, they're going to be scanning, visually scanning the environment. So you've got different traits, but again, they all have certain traits. They're all designed to kind of grow those behaviors as they mature. And for me, I think in all dogs, really, you know, they kind of just come with these traits and the environment switches on these genes, and then the dog just behaves impulsively based upon its genetics. And then what we're really doing is teaching impulse control, which is a cognitive skill, where we're trying to kind of harness and teach the animal how to manage itself, how to control its impulses, how to manage its own emotions. And we know in humans, they've done MRI scanning. So like when people learn to be mindful, when they learn to stop and think and not react, we know in humans that that causes eventually the brain to rewire. And I think they reckon it takes about two years of practice before you can be less impulsive. Interesting. Okay. I'm not super familiar with that research, like the idea of like humans rewiring the brains. It's super interesting. There's like a period of time there. It'd be really fascinating to do a study with dogs on, you know, that type of thing. Yeah, definitely. I think I always think it would be fascinating to see, you know, to MRI scan a dog that's been

trained in impulse control and then a dog that hasn't and actually see what is their differences, what are the differences, does the brain function differently? They've done MRI scanning. They did some MRI scanning on a monk who meditated and reached enlightenment. And the MRI scanning actually shown that his brain was actually when he was meditating, his brain was actually like functioning at perfection and everything was working exactly right. So kind of the science says that enlightenment actually is a thing. How cool is that? Yeah. That's really, really neat. So to kind of pull it back to dogs, you're going to kind of zoom in on some of that stuff for us next week in your webinar, right? Because you're talking about relaxation versus anticipation. So do you want to just talk a little bit about kind of what the webinar will cover? And so people can kind of get a sense of what you'll be talking about. Yeah. So when I did my previous webinar, I think there was quite a few questions on me talking about teaching different release cues for the dogs. So that's kind of where this came from. So, again, I always think when people are training, they often, you know, release cues are kind of a cool and popular thing that people do. But for me, the webinar really is delving into the emotional state and being aware of when we release animals from, when we release dogs from specific behaviors about reinforcement and association and whether we're actually creating relax. If we want relaxation, are we creating relaxation or are we creating anticipation? So really understanding where reinforcement should sit if we want relaxation and where reinforcement should sit if we want anticipation. And just giving the dog some clarity around behaviors we train and how we release them so we create the right associations. So really the webinar is looking into the difference between a working dog ready for action, doing waiting but ready for action and a dog relaxing because a lot of the working dogs struggle with the relaxation aspect in life. In life, yeah. So like the difference kind of between like a start line stay for agility and like a go to your mat and lay there while we eat dinner type of thing. Is that kind of? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So it's really kind of delving into the detail of how I train that with my dogs. And also looking a little bit into shaping behavior, capturing and rewarding. So the dog has options because, again, I think, you know, especially with a young dog, you can't kind of just go, hey, relax. And they can just like change their neurochemistry and fall asleep.

You know, most humans with a bigger prefrontal cortex can't switch off and fall asleep. And we kind of expect our dogs to have this amazing capability, which we can't even do ourselves sometimes. So it's really, again, about delving into that and actually understanding what our expectation is for especially young maturing dogs and what their capability actually is. That'll be fascinating because I'm really looking forward to sitting through it with you next week. I'm going to be raising a service dog puppy and it's going to be a lab. And I'm sure there's going to be some of that that I would like to work on with a new puppy from the beginning. So all sorts of fun stuff. Kind of thinking about that, who should sign up or who might really be kind of a good fit for the webinar? Who was it kind of directed at as you created it? Everybody, really, because it's for me, the kind of teaching, you know, it kind of varies from, you know, if we think about anticipation for a pet dog could be just sitting and waiting before it's going through a doorway versus taking the dog to the pub and you wanting it to relax. And moving right across to your sport dogs. So working gun dogs. For me, when I have my dogs sat waiting to be sent for a retrieve or sat waiting to be cast out to hunt is no different really than a dog waiting in the start line of agility because they're actually waiting to do a job. And for me, if you have frustration or over arousal in that anticipatory behavior, then normally the performance is poor. So for me, everything is about can your dog manage itself while it's waiting to do something exciting? Awesome. Is there anything else you want to kind of share about the webinar or like let people know kind of in advance? Yes. And just really that there's some videos in there, but some so it's quite heavily practical stuff, starting off with a little bit of theory and then moving on to practical. So there's some training, practical training exercises in there on teaching settle and also teaching an anticipatory stay as well. Awesome. All right. So to kind of round out everything you've been talking about, because we have kind of covered a lot of ground. If we were to kind of drill everything down into like one key piece of information or one key takeaway that you really want people to kind of walk away from listening to this with, what would that be? My big thing is really getting people to understand that they're teaching the dog a skill often rather than behaviors, especially when you have dogs who are excitable in high arousal.

So for me, it's not just about having a behavior and popping it on cue. It's about the skill for the animal to be able to perform those behaviors and for them to be reliable. That's a great note to kind of end on. Thank you so much, Jane. This is awesome. I'm so glad you've come on the podcast. All right. Thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in and we will 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.