Chrissy 0:00
Chris, welcome to The Dogs of our lives Podcast. I'm Chrissy Messick, your host and owner of the nature of animals. My dog training and behavior consulting business, get ready to hear journeys from challenging behaviors to heartwarming successes and everything in between. Our episodes will feature personal stories from clients, colleagues and professionals, all centered around our favorite animal companion, friends. Each episode, you'll gain insights and valuable tools from those that have walked the path that you are on with your dog. We'll discuss mindset shifts, growth, training, tips, lessons, learned and so much more. By the end of each episode, you'll feel inspired have a deeper understanding of your dog and walk away with actionable steps to improve both of your lives. Today I talk with Andrew Hale, who's from the UK. He's a certified animal and canine behaviorist and works exclusively with dogs that show reactive and aggressive behaviors. He speaks at conferences all over the world. In this episode, we take a deep dive into the internal world of dogs. We look at how their social emotional state can impact their behaviors. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoy talking with Andrew. Oh, okay, so welcome Andy, and thank you so much for being on my podcast. I'm very excited to have you here.
Andy 1:19
Thank you for having me
Chrissy 1:19
so I've just been kind of following you and learning from you, and I especially like the work you're doing on the social, emotional aspect of working with dogs. That's why I, you know, I thought you would be a good fit. We just want to plant seeds to, you know, change minds and educate people. And I love having conversations with people to do that. So that's how I kind of contacted you, and thankfully, you accepted to be on the show. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you live, what you're doing now, and the current family in your life
Andy 1:53
that's a lovely place to start. So I'll start with that. So I'm very lucky, very blessed, Chrissy, because I'm married to a wonderful man called Kieran. We've been married for 10 years. He's absolutely my kind of world. Really. We've got three dogs, Harley club on the end, Molly the one in the middle, and Arthur. He's my boy, really, my two colleagues, Milo, who came before him. God, they especially Milo. He was that first dog. He really looked at me and said, you know, everything you think you know about dogs, you can probably forget that I've got a really important story to tell you, and we're going to get on. You need to learn it. And then Arthur came along with his baggage too. So very humble, but yeah, there are three. And we're very lucky. We live down in Devon in the UK, and we live right on a beach, and it's just wonderful, just to kind of connect to nature. And I just love sitting down there. I'll go down there most mornings, regardless of the weather, actually. But it's nicer when it's sunny, right? But it is the UK. So we really treasure those days, for sure. And I just love, you know, the beach is different. Every day mother nature comes and she does her artwork for us. And sometimes the seas just, you feel like it, feel like you walk on it just looks like glass. Other days it's quite, you know, temptuous. So, yeah, so that's a bit about my kind of family life. I've got a human psychology background. I work with dogs now. I'm a behaviorist over here in the UK. I'm an expert advisor for cam canine arthritis management training with kids around dogs, which is a great organization made by Debbie lucken, looking at improving the relationship between dogs and kids, which is always great. And I'm the behavioral consultant for a product called pet remedy, which is a natural, calming product I really focus in on, yeah, on the emotional side of things, because that's always been my bag, really human or animal. There's been a lot of threads that connect through to the work I've done, regardless of which end of the lead. Really
Chrissy 3:34
awesome. I'm in Colorado, and so there's a little bit of water here, but not as much as where you have and I, you know, I really miss the water, because I grew up in California and Washington state, and so we have a place in like Tahoe, and so I just love the mountains and the waters. So lucky you to be living right on the water,
Andy 3:53
yeah, because I was actually born in the Midlands, here in the UK, so far away as you can get from any water, really. And but I came down here when I first went to uni, actually. So I was about 19, I think. And I've moved away several times over the years, lived in London, lived in other places. London was fabulous, but no see close by, and so I just kept coming back down here, and I feel I would really miss not being so close to the sea. Now, it's interesting, isn't it, and my husband as well, he feels the same. You know, he was born in Swansea in Wales, his Welsh, but where he was living in Swansea was right by the beautiful mumbles and the and the beach in my in Swansea. So, so he's a real water babe, for sure.
Chrissy 4:33
I'm 50% Welsh, by the
Andy 4:35
way. Oh, cool. So where about somewhere else is your family kind of come from? Gosh,
Chrissy 4:39
so I did a DNA thing, and I have to, I have to look at that, but I can't remember.
Andy 4:45
Well, that's good. Well, I'll let you know. So, yeah, we can, we can send you a celebratory thing at the different Welsh holidays. Nice.
Chrissy 4:54
Okay, so I wanted to ask you a little bit about your childhood growing up. What did you learn? About values, beliefs and how they shaped your thoughts, feelings and attitude toward animals and humans. Well,
Andy 5:06
there's two strands to this, so I've shared this before, because very relevant for me, part of my story growing up, because it's really helped to define a lot of my viewers. On behavior. I think I'll come on to that in a second, on dogs, though, my late grandfather, so all my grandparents had died. My mother had me quite late in life, and my sister was born 10 years before me. And then my mother was told she couldn't have any more children. So they presumed I wasn't they weren't going to have any. And then 10 years later, whatever had wronged itself righted itself enough for Andy to come along. First everybody's shock and bewilderment, and my other grandfather and my two grandmothers had passed away, and it was just my grandfather who lived with us when I was younger. So my parents were amazingly wonderful, loving people, and I had everything I wanted. Christy, I was really spoilt as a child. Part of that was, I think, compensatory, because I didn't see my parents much because they were working a lot to make that life. They're both very successful in their own fields, and so my so my grandfather had a nanny initially, and then my grandfather took over duties to look after little Andrew. And he had a very dated view of the world through secrecy, whether it was about women or anything else, really, I just have that generation and definitely of dogs. And he was quite heavily involved in gambling on dog racing, actually, but the dog I had when I was a young boy, Sam, He treated Him. It was very much the rolled up newspaper stuff. So I subjected to that. But luckily, my mother wouldn't have any of that, and used to have to correct her own father, and she was completely opposite. And actually, because my mother was my world, and I was a little mummy boy, for sure, it was quite interesting to see the two different approaches, and for me to feel very much associated with my mother's. And my mother had a great saying she used to say all the time, because I used to talk about things and whatever it was, stuff from school, whatever it is. And mom used to say, You know what? There are no absolutes but kindness. And that stuck with me, and I feel now, when we think about a lot of the discussions that go on in the dog world, there's no absolutes, but welfare really. So that's just a little bit about that. The other side of things for me, I was, this is going to get a little bit deep now, but a little bit heavy, perhaps, but it's important. It's important. I suffered sexualized abuse when I was a child by non family members. The thing there for me this and I share I I've shared this at when I've given talks on behavior, dog behavior, because it's very relevant. Before that and after that, nothing changed. Chrissy in my life, and parents are the same, school is the same, friends are the same. What changed after that was my perception of all those things, my relationship with all those things, and my behavior changed very noticeably. My school took a very punitive approach, because one minute I was toe the line, Andy doing everything, then I was just difficult, challenging, Andy getting into fights, getting into all sorts of stuff, finding it very hard to cope in class, having outbursts, getting a bit angry, bit violent. Actually, at times they escalated it up until I got game lecane, which was something we used to do here in the UK. Don't know if that happens in the States, but yes, we used to hit kids with sticks. How amazing is that? But guess what? This is the point my behavior changed so I didn't want to get hit by stick anymore. Punishment works because it just does. My parents took a different view, and they were they thought it was because of my age and them not spending enough time with me. And so my father, I remember vividly, really him, saying that they understand that they needed to kind of be around more, that they wanted more as a family, contingent on we love contingencies, don't we behaving? Yeah. So guess what? I behaved because I wanted their love. I wanted their peasants. The reason I share that is because the consequences in what we talk about, ABCs and antecedent behavior. Consequences. About consequences. Consequences worked on either end of that spectrum. You know, one more punitive, one less so. But the problem was, my behavior wasn't the problem for me. My trauma was the problem for me, my lack of safety problem for me, that developing brain was all over the shop. So the real consequence for me was my breakdown some 15 years later, and my drug addiction some 15 years later. You see, this is this is the reality. This is why I really am quite passionately about thinking about behavior differently. Because if and it probably would have been a teacher, maybe, who knows, but if a teacher, for example, had had real compassion and wanted to make a connection with me, to see beyond my behavior, and not bring up the behavior, and not put things contingent on the behavior, but to try and make a secure attachment with me. I might have shared what happened. You know, I don't know. Can't go back in time, but the consequences of that intrinsically. He might have been me not having a breakdown, and everything else that came along with it, and God knows what else you know. So this is the thing about us thinking about behavior. There's a lot of people who feel they've studied behavior, but actually they've studied more about how to make another behave. And there is a big difference there.
Chrissy 10:18
It's a superficial thing versus a deeper thing, yeah,
Andy 10:21
the intrinsic need over the extrinsic motivation and pressure a lack virtually everybody listening in will probably relate to some degree or another, because we're all conditioned, really, through this lens of the expectations around conforming and behaving. So most of us have heard the kind of most of us struggled when we were kids and when we were made to do things we didn't. We felt uncomfortable with we often with the with the kind of caveat and thing from the adults well that you've got to learn. There's a big difference between what we're taught and what we learn. And actually that's a really important construct to really bear in mind, because we might be taught a lesson, but what we learned intrinsically about feeling safe, being able to communicate need, feeling heard so often. You know, when I was working with in human therapies, a lot of people who are socially had social anxieties, social stress, I kind of can pinpoint back to, often, their formative kind of years in adolescence, where they were forced into social situations, often by well meaning people. Is a great saying, which is, the path to coercion is often laid with good intention. This is not a period of being deliberately horrible. They're like, No, you really must try, you know, come down and stay with the family. Or, you know, you must go to this thing. Very rarely do we then learn, oh, this is all okay, and I feel fine. What we learn to do is to mask better, not share so much, to feel we can't do things. And when you think about emotional safety, it's two bits about that, very important. One is feeling safe, to even feel, I can't say anything about that for dogs, but the second bit I can definitely feel that dogs have, which is feeling safe to communicate how you feel, and because if you don't feel safe to communicate, then you're not feeling emotionally safe, right? And we see this a lot with our colleagues in veterinary in rescue and shelters, if you have a culture where those above you are saying, Don't get involved, don't get connected, don't get emotional. Be professional. Point is, you're going to be all those things, but now you feel you can't talk about it, so they're created emotionally unsafe working environment. But I think it's important just to kind of frame my own story into why we have to think about behavior, because hopefully people will relate to a part of that for themselves when they felt that they also have their own behavior manipulated, if you like, without actually underlying needs being met. And that's important. Yeah, that's
Chrissy 12:47
so massively important. And you know, because when I'm working with dogs, or even, you know, my own dog, or my children, I have a 17 year old and a 14 year old, and when they're exhibiting certain behaviors, I go straight to, okay, what's going on underneath this behavior? The behavior is just a symptom. So I will literally just acknowledge their behavior and then ask, okay, what's what's really going on, you know? And so it's just a matter of digging deeper and asking questions, yeah, the internal world is massively important, and a behavior is just a symptom of how they're feeling. Yeah,
Andy 13:25
understand, I think we've got to move away from this notion that as kind of things underpinned the dog training and behavior world. But also, you know, these same discussions have been happening within human psychology for a long time. You know, my group's called Dog centered care based on the child centered care movement, if you like, when they were starting to think, well, actually, maybe the child has something they can teach us about their own versions of safety, not what we are telling them, this notion that just because you can change behavior, everything's okay, it's not right. Just because the dog behaves differently doesn't mean they're coping any better, necessarily, right? Could do putting punishment to one side if we keep micromanaging behaviors through reinforcement a lot, and we keep expecting outcomes through these things, where's the animal's ability to communicate something different, and especially if we're pairing up something really primary, like reinforcement, praise, love, whatever, at such an early age, same thing for us humans. Of course, it becomes difficult then to know well, are you behaving in a natural manner for you, or are you behaving because this is what you've got to do, right? And those layers become challenging. Then to unpick. I work most exclusively with with um reactivity and aggression. For better words, many of those dogs would be classed as dangerous, potentially. Why? Because I feel they haven't felt haven't been heard, they don't feel safe, and they're not getting relief for what they're trying to communicate. Relief is, is the most important word for me, the intrinsic. Relief that we seek when we have physical pain, emotional pain, social pain. The whole point of having these trickier emotions is not just to make us feel bad. It's supposed to be a call to arms. Really. It's like, you know, body saying the brain saying you don't want to feel like this, so seek relief for it to find a way of getting relief. Many dogs, they will give up their relief seeking. They kind of give into it. They're like, well, if I'm communicating and didn't work other dogs, their relief seeking is greater, and they will ramp up that communication until they might bite. Right?
Chrissy 15:31
I agree. I we need to. We need to start looking deeper with the humans and animals in our lives. I've learned a little bit about your personal life, and I wanted to ask if you'd be willing to share some of your experiences. You know, how that has influenced how you work with dogs? I mean, you, you kind of basically already talked about that. But is there anything else you want to share about that? I look
Andy 15:53
at things through the emotional experience lens, as I call it. You know, when you think about what you feel, how you respond to things, and how you think about things, and that's that emotional experience, how you experience things, you know, cognitively, emotionally, physically, and we all have an emotional experience. You have one, I have one, and your dog has one. What's happened historically, Chrissy, is this notion? Well, especially science, especially the sciencey side of dog training, didn't really want to go there regarding emotions. And I want to get all that, but we don't really know how a dog thinks and feels, so we need to just look at behavior. Does the behavior increase? Does the behavior decrease? And hence the falling into a lot of learning theory stuff, the quadrants and all that. But the point is, the second bit about the emotional experience is it's unique to us as individuals. So you and I can be in the same place at the same time, experiencing the same thing, but be affected by very differently. So I don't know how you think of theocracy, so should I ignore that and just make you do stuff based on my version of safety, on my version of what's appropriate? And we're all indoctrinated, if you like, into what kind of class from a psychological construct is the good bad continuum, this notion that behavior is good through to bad, and that we should reward the good and punish or ignore the bad, depends on which side of the fence you are, and that sounds so right that we don't even question it, but we want more of the good, don't we want less of the bad? That's pretty obvious, isn't it, until you ask a very simple but fundamental question about who's deciding what's good or bad. So if I've decided that your behavior is bad, that is going to be my main driving force to what I do, my main response to you, regardless of what your behavior represented to you regarding trying to cope, trying to find relief, trying to deal with the world, you know. So what I think we need to think about is a bit of a mindset shift, which has to equally be in about the individual finding their own way through this stuff. Chrissy, because it's complicated actually, when you when you unpack it, the old ways of training, which was quite task oriented, quite kind of training plan, a quite cookie cuttery, was kind of easier. I think we didn't have to go there. Then it's like, Okay, we'll do this, do that, and the double do this. And it's like very much outcome based, when you start thinking in these terms, you can't help but start thinking about your own lived experience and also how much it's important to turn up to the bear witness to others around you, the caregivers as well as the dogs. So it's all very connected for me. So I think, I think everything's an invitation, ultimately, and that's what I want to try and do with these kind of conversations. It's just like, let's just think about what this means for you. The person listening now is not about a destination, thinking about behavior in a fundamental difference, not just for our dog's sake, but to release us too, actually, from a lot of the chains that bind us. So, yeah, I think, I think that it's all very relevant for me when I first made the move over. So I mentioned about my breakdown, which is the mother of all breakdowns. Took me a long time to get over that, actually. And I was probably about three years in therapy, really unpacking it all, because my father sadly passed away during that process. And then I was caring for my mother at the time, and I thought, you know, I want to go back to that life. I want to look after my mother. And then one of my therapists brothers, actually, who he connected me to, because of the interest in this stuff, was involved in animal behavior. So it was great. I thought, this is interesting, yes. So I came into dogs and and did the usual dog stuff, and did the usual dog training stuff. And I didn't think about it at the time, because I was just doing it. I said, No dog training, you know, I was doing the positive stuff, because that made sense. But, but then it started to make me think, oh, this doesn't feel right. Something's not right here. And then I had, then Milo came along, who was like, telling me, hang on, this is no different for me. I've got a survival story that you need to listen to, right? And it was interesting. Chrissy, when I spoke to some people, this is what I told you 15 years ago, they were like, Well, Andy, it's not you're not working with humans anymore. It's dogs, you know, and blah, blah, blah and all that's very wonderful. And so I just quite suppressing Thomas. Sarah Fisher, the wonderful Sarah Fisher. Sarah was the one who I just get bumping into her. She's such a good dear friend now, and I adore her. But in the early days, we just kept bumping into each other, kind of, this is the good old days of in person, conferences or stuff. And I was, I was, yeah. Learning from others. I wasn't talking, obviously, but Sarah was I shared a few things with it. She said, Andy, you've got to talk about this stuff. You know, she gave me permission because that's how she felt. And that was that. And then, and then, I wrote a piece about five, no, about 10 years ago, I wrote my thesis for my diploma called Creating a dog centric approach, why we must stop trying to fix everything. And actually, luckily for me, my people who was doing my diploma was quite open and receptive to it, because it wasn't the norm. And then about four or five years after that, I did my Phantom of the operant article, which went a bit nuts, which actually got a lot of people loved it. Some people didn't. It was, you know, obviously even the titles a little bit kind of reel you in front of the opera squirrel
Chrissy 20:43
moment. So operant behavior, or operant learning, is when a dog's actions are influenced by their consequences. So for example, if I were to ask a dog to sit, and then right after they sat, they got a treat, then that would be reinforcing, and then they would be more likely to sit again in the future. Oh,
Andy 21:00
but actually it wasn't. A lot of people saw as me kind of having a go at training or opera and stuff. But it wasn't. It was it was a piece about compassion and empathy that's all so that's that side of things. So all those things come in. So we're meeting these amazing people and say Sarah was really instrumental for me and and all the observational things, if you're going to turn up, especially working with the dogs to truly allow them chance to tell their story, because I see behavior a little bit like painting a picture, I want them to paint their picture for me. I don't want to keep grabbing the brush off them, thinking I can paint it better for them. You have to really have a really good eye for observations. And that's what Sarah really taught me. She gave me that opportunity thing, right? I can actually learn from the dog first. Wow, because a lot of the other stuff is oh yeah, me, me, human, you dog, you must learn from me. But actually that, wow, we could learn from the dog first. That's cool, and that's what developed into my Learn support teacher mantra, really learn from the dog. Support what you've learned. And then if you're going to teach them anything, try and teach things that based on that learning, that you feel confident has some intrinsic value for them. Because most of the stuff we train dogs has very little intrinsic value for them. There's no wonder times of stress don't do them right. If you imagine the brain has lots of little doors in it, and we need as many doors to stay open to have a chance of being able to process things well, for sensory integration to work, well, all these kind of things, pain, trauma, stress, their big door closes, and the first doors are going to start closing are likely to be the doors I've got the trading behind, yeah, because that has very little value to the brain. For the dog, the doors are likely to stay open. They're the survivor. Doors, right, right? And it's explaining this to public so they know that their dog in those moments aren't being difficult, stubborn and disobedient, they just haven't got the doors open right now and they're focusing on something way more important for them, right? Yeah,
Chrissy 22:48
it's definitely, once again, looking at the internal, internal motivation. And so your path from, you know, human psychology and you know, human emotions, leading to working with dogs and dogs emotions and learning from Sarah Fisher and what other not necessarily certifications or, you know, degrees or anything, but what other learnings have been very important to you, from other people or programs, so
Andy 23:16
many influences over time, and sometimes it's structured Learning, sometimes it's just being in the presence of people. You know, I'm very lucky about dog center care platform, because I've done over 100 conversations like, you're you've had me on, I've had people come up, and I've learned more of them, and it's been amazing. I think, um, you know, Kim Brophy, you know, with her looking on, kind of mythology. Dr, Robert Fulton Taylor, who's been talking about this stuff for 20 or 30 years. So Robert, the very new neuroscientist, I suppose you could call him, real pioneer of thought, talking about emotions. He created the Mr. System and standing for emotion, mood reinforcement assessment. Recently, Karen Pania did Karen's emra, sorry, a mirror. Course, she's got her mirror books of M H E R A, M, H, E, R, O, which is amazing. So she's taken Robert's emra, and she's kind of reformulated it really, and thought, actually, maybe emotions should come after mood state. Maybe mood states most important. So mirror is mood state, hedonic, emotional reinforcement, assessment, king of things like Cora space, a lot of the panskep stuff, you know, Robert saplansky's book, behaved, by the way, is a bit in my Bible, I guess. But it's a heavy book, but it's a great book. Laura Donaldson, I've done a lot of workshops with Laura. I've done a lot of learning from her as well. Laura kind of pioneered the kind of slow thinking is life saving stuff, you know, looking at cognitive reappraisal for dogs. So, yeah, all these interact. This is trouble, because there's amazing people who are I'm going to be missing, I know, with my fuzzy brain, but and also those people who allowed these kind of conversations to start. So Victoria Stillwell, for example, when I started really pushing some of this stuff that I wanted to share, and nobody has the answer to anything, and nobody owns anything. As far as I'm concerned, the only thing. Unique for all of us is how we put it through our own filter, right? I know my handiness that I put out because that's the information, because we all learnt it from somewhere, and we make our own we join our own dots. You know, when I was invited to talk at some conferences in the early days, Chrissy and I wanted to talk about some of this stuff, it was amazing how I was being asked to redact some things, or maybe change the term, or not thing, or whatever, because they didn't quite want to go there, whereas Victoria, she was like, Yeah, do it right, go for it. And I've spoken at every conference since with Victoria, and I've kept pushing the envelope with the things I talk about. And she's, I just love the fact that she's able to adapt and and think about these things. And this isn't about not doing training. You know, this is not about being anti dog. Dog Training, for me, is neutral. It's not good or bad. It's what you do while you do it, how you do it, and ultimately, what the dog makes of it. That's the most important thing. The problem with dog training is for the general public, right? Because they have been convinced relatively recently, only over the last 20 or 30 years ago, that the most important thing is a well trained, obedient dog, right? They haven't been shown or taught necessarily about pain looks like, what stress looks like, and that kind of thing. And I think understanding dog this is another big influence for me, which is sindoor. Sindoor pangal, over in India did a big series, actually, in my dog center care group. I love sindels work her books, amazing dog knows what she's giving us. The richness of the observations from these dogs in India, the street dogs in India, is giving us a really a good reflection, I think, of who dogs are and what dogs need. Actually, all these things are really important. We have to call these things. And this is the point with all that we're knowing now, even the science is kind of catching up on stuff now. So we're learning more about trauma for dogs. We're learning more about social attachments and importance of secure attachments. We're learning about the role of pain. We're understanding that their physiology is pretty well the same as us, neurologically, very similar to us, a lot of the social processing social pain aspects, you know, the social pain hypothesis was first hypothesized based on studies on dogs. We've now had it proven with people like Matthew Lehman at UCLA, showing that social pain hurts like physical pain. If we now know all this stuff, Chrissy, we can't do the same, right? The move to positive reinforcement, for me, was moving on, right? It was how we do task, but nicer, right? This is about how we move forwards, right?
Chrissy 27:17
It's learning about the dog and letting the dog be the teacher. So speaking of that, your dogs in your cute little picture right there. I know you talked a little bit about it before, but what have they specifically taught you? Well, let's
Andy 27:30
just think about training for one minute, because with Arthur here, I did way too much training with him. Looking back, I don't think he particularly enjoyed it, but he just wanted to be with me. He just wanted to do stuff with me. You know, we couldn't do anything really, Harley, however, probably should do more with him, because he, you know, he came from a working lab background. He just loves it. He's like, eight now, nine. He came to us at 10 months old. Story about Harley, when Q and I got together, we take on rescues, right? I knew the mom and dad dog and they were gonna have puppies. And I said to Q, if we're gonna get a puppy, this is the time, because I know this. I know the mom and dad, they're amazing. So we're going to get this puppy, and then we decided to get married instead, we thought maybe it's not the right time. Anyway, following year, I get a call from a local rescue that I work with, saying, Can you do an emergency foster for this dog, which is hardly so we had him, I guess what? We ended up keeping him, but he was from the litter that we would have had, amazing, so the universe really wanted but anyway, i i This thing I taught him back in the day, when I used to do a lot more training than I do now, that he still remembers. Now he loves it. He loves it. He absolutely loves it. This is the point. It's not remember that no absolutes but welfare, no absolutes but kindness. It is that there are no absolutes. It's just thinking, what role should this have in this dog's life? And then, of course, Molly, well, she came to us a couple of years ago, came to us at 16 weeks, two homes already. We call her Molly Saurus because I know puppies, but she really liked her tooth, and she was just an absolute whirlwind. And normally you'd think, Okay, how are we going to address the biting, how are we going to address the kind of fizziness, how are we going to address the pulling? How are we going to address this? Instead, we step back and think, right, let's learn from her. Let's try and work out what it was. And for her, it was because she was so sensitive. She was just overwhelmed all the time, especially socially, Chrissy, especially socially. So my husband and I, the first couple of months, we had to back off. Yeah, she's so gorgeous, but we had to. But once we removed that social pressure for her, once we slowed things down, once we went things at her pace, a lot of the other stuff just melted away. Yep, those are the things that I've really learned from the training point of view, except from a training point of view, we didn't do any functional training with her at all in that first 12 months. And that doesn't mean she wasn't learning. She was learning all the time. Yeah, definitely didn't do the usual kind of sit down, come stay stuff. You know, after 12 months, we did a little bit more with her, but her brain could take it on board then. But she's a diva, so she's like, whatever, and it's the most naturally. I brought up a dog, and she's just amazing. I love her, and she's the most well regulated dog I've ever met, because when you think about what has she learned? What did we want to teach her? We wanted a teacher she had a voice, right? And that she had a big voice, and we. Listen to her. We were her return to safety, and we wanted to let her know that the three words that are really important when we think about supporting safety in another are processing engagements and exits, something I brought over from human psychologists. I did processing. How does this dog need to process the world? How much time do they need to process? Are they able to process well? Are they able to process efficiently? Why aren't they? If they're not able to process, it's very important processing. And then engagements. We want to all of us want to have some agency of how we engage with the world, and then if we do engage with something, physically, emotionally, socially, whatever we want to feel we can exit. Or if we don't want to engage, we want to feel we can exit. Trauma is firmly placed in having little agency over engagement and exit. You know, you found yourself in a situation didn't want to be in and you couldn't get away, right? Because, you know, without meaning to and not having chance to process the world very well, because they're just overwhelmed, or they expected to do training your stuff. How many of them have to put up with engagement they're not ready for? Yeah, and how many struggle without an exit. So it's no wonder that when that brain changes about 810, months, that we start seeing inverted commas, reactive behaviors, if that brain is already starting to predict engagement when it's not ready, right? So yes, that's what I wanted to teach her, really. She taught us a lot. I've got some great videos that people have probably seen on my YouTube channel and stuff of Molly show me how she needs to navigate the world. So they've taught us a lot. They just, they teach you so much. To me, oh my gosh, it's about being humble enough, I think just to let them do that.
Chrissy 31:27
Yep, I agree. One thing I see a lot is people saying that my dog just wants to please me. I disagree with that. I think the dog just wants to be with you. I think the dog just wants to be part of what you're doing, and if it's only intent contingent on if the dog does this, it looks like it's pleasing you, but that's the only way the dog knows how to engage with you. So for me, that's just my own perception and all that kind of stuff. To me, I like to think of it as, instead of your dog wants to please you. Your dog just wants to be with you and have companionship with you. That's really
Andy 32:05
powerful point. The biggest event, one of the biggest advances in human psychology, especially in relation to progressive child educational psychology and development, was attachment theory. Attachment theory is kind of on the sidelines and dismissed a little bit initially, but in the last 1015, years, it's really start to come into the mainstream, because it makes a lot of sense when we think about the hierarchy of needs. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and, of course, the wonderful Linda Michaels is hierarchy of dog needs. It's done in that kind of triangular thing that I've got it there, yeah, yep, right there. So it's not meant to be a structure thing. It's supposed to be more fluid, but social needs, which is here, really, for young children and dogs, it's here. Mm, hmm, because the biological needs and the emotional needs can't be met unless you have secure attachment, right? The dog go to the pet shop and get the food. The baby can't go and make its own food, right? When people are studying the brain, they think, okay, if we kind of make this activate, what does it do? That's what they kind of look at. But, and I can't, I'm really sorry I can't remember the name of the person, but I know this stuff was taken up by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA. Matthew Lieberman, his book, by the way, social is really well worth reading because it brings all this stuff together. But anyway, somebody at some point said, Actually, would it be interesting to see what happens if we're not activating anything in the brain? What's the brain's default position? And that was actually even the name the default network. And what it was actually was, if we're not thinking about task, if we're not thinking about, you know, motor, functional stuff, we're thinking about social relationships with others and our interpretation of self. And it's hardwired in us to have that and for us to seek safe, secure, social attachment, giving a talk in November at a conference, and I've called it, and it's a bite conference, you know, talking about dog bites, and I've called it Devil Dogs and monsters, to try and challenge some of the narratives around how we look at these things. It's easy to think, Oh, that's a Devil Dog, yeah, my dog would never be that dog, or that person in jail doing that horrible thing. They're monsters, right? Because that would never be me. But actually a huge study looking at men in prison in the US and in Europe who have committed quite violent crimes, who have had psychotherapies. Nearly 80% a lot of them identify with insecure attachments. Because if you think about it, if at a young age, you are reaching out to your social primary, social caregiver, right? And not getting the the feedback that is supportive or whatever, and they become insecure attachment, and especially if your own emotions and feelings are dismissed, and you have to create coping mechanism strategies that it's no wonder, then, that you can easily end up in a situation where you can do something to another and not feel it, not care about it. And in fact, I share this with you. My husband's an end of life house and a hospice and a local prison. They have their own hospitals in the prisons, but they had somebody who sent end of life and but they couldn't do sufficient symptom control. So this prison has to come to the hospice. So part of the hospice has been made into a de facto prison, you know, hand guard. Gods, you know, whatever else. And there's a friction then between the guards and the nursing staff, because the guards are like, when there's a prison, and the nurse is like, but we're here to care, yeah, so, you know, because the nature of this guy's offenses, but my husband, one of the few male nurses, did a lot of care for him, and at first this guy was really, wouldn't even give him eye contact, you know, with stiffen up or whatever. But as the days went on, softened and allowed him to do more. But this is the thing Christy and I really want to listen to this is powerful stuff. The day before he passed away, this guy said to my husband, I can't remember the last time somebody offered me care. Yep, wow, right. Yeah, it's not to take away whatever he's done. This is the problem because society, because of the fact that we need to feel socially safe, we are designed to be repulsed by those that will threaten our social makeup. So I get it. But if we truly move up forwards with how we deal with violent offenses, especially and also with dogs who end up biting and becoming dangerous. We have to understand the stories that got them there. If we are one off a rehab to some of these people and some of these dogs, we can't rehab every dog and every person will right, but definitely to try and avoid future manifestations of that right? So it's powerful. What you said is, for me, you've hit the nail on her, because the dog is designed to seek secure attachment, and that's why it's heartbreaking when caregivers are did a post in my group today, actually about this. Are being advised by professionals to use quite heavy aversives on a dog that's just trying to make a connection, right and seek your attachment,
Chrissy 36:35
a huge misunderstanding of what's going on right there. I love your dog centered care approach, talking about the physical, mental, social, emotional aspects of the dog, I have the same approach, but I also add in a little bit of soul, which is like a deeper connection as well. I mean, you talked about it a little bit, but how you're working with dogs has changed over the years, and kind of what direction you think dog training is going in.
Andy 37:01
I find dog training in the more traditional sense, a bit of a cul de sac, because we get stuck in there a little bit. And I call it the opera merry go round, right about just round and round about how best to do tasks and get the task done. When you come out there and you look at the all the multiple disciplines that are opening up to us now, you know, ethology, neurology, neurology, physiology, but also when we move away from being so planted in the objective, because the richness of the individual's lived experiences lies in the anecdotal and the subjective. You know, it's okay to have a study of one. It's okay because for that dog, that's all that matters. And I think when you start to have that mindset, it just opens up everything. Really invites you to stay humble. It allows you to kind of, you know, our job as professionals is to, is to obviously convert that subjective into the objective. You know, we have to evidence based stuff. You and I were talking off air about the importance of understanding pain and evidence facing that to other professionals, obviously we can't diagnose, but there's a beauty to this stuff, and we shouldn't fear it. I get a lot of people who contact who contact me through my dog center care platform, and these trainers who have done a lot of the operant stuff, and they hear this stuff and they feel it, and it's all a bit scary, though. Does that mean I have to stop doing this or stop doing that? And it's not about that, you know, the operant stuff, the training stuff, is an important part of our toolkit, but it should be a part of our toolkit. It shouldn't be the toolkit. We keep moving forward, and every dog we meet teaches us something new. We take that forward to the next dog and the next dog, and it's just a beautiful process, and it stops us from doing what has happened traditionally. Actually, a lot of professionals of end up doing the same thing for 20 years, right? Right? Tops that actually, because it's like, wow, I wish I could see this, that dog I saw last year. Now, because I've learned my business, and actually, the more you learn to say on my platform, these amazing people kind of talk to me. They're leaders in their field on all this stuff, you know, neurology, physiology, pain, social processing, whatever it is that they're they're specializing. It's overwhelming, Chrissy, because you think, My God, I know, but it's also exciting. And all we can do, really, is think, you know, I'm just going to learn as much as I can so I can bear witness to the story that this dog might present to me as best I can. And it's okay to get it wrong. I think we have to give ourselves grace. You know, my husband and I, you know, obviously we're close because we married, but always go together, but we are close, but I feel I know him well, and he knows me well, but I get it wrong with him sometimes, you know, I think I'm going to say the right thing to him, right or do the right thing, but it turns out not to be. So it's hard to we could. Just got to allow ourselves to to have a quality to our presence, and that's about slowing down. It's about putting a lot of our own biases and judgments the door learning how to do good observations. And that's where I think I'd like to see dog training going really and especially empowering the general public to have a better connection with their dog, and telling them about stress and body language and development stages ahead of them having to. Learn about sick come downstairs. Yeah, that would be the shift, I think that we need to look at, because that is truly about moving forwards. I think.
Chrissy 40:06
I mean, I just have a client who they just rescued a dog, and they're like, What should I start teaching first? I'm like, actually give your dog a few weeks to just get to know each other, decompress, hang out together. You don't have to teach them anything. Just be together and learn from them. What do they have to teach you? And I, I agree, I think a huge shift is teaching the general public, changing so many of the things that are ingrained in our head about dominance and alpha and all that kind of stuff, and really changing our approach of understanding the dog. I mean, I'm literally creating a course called The Science and soul of understanding your dog, and it just goes over basic information that the public can digest in an easy way, so they start to get an understanding. It's a good direction that that we are going in, and hopefully that it continues to go in. So I agree with that.
Andy 41:01
And, you know, I think it's deeper than working with dogs. It's we need to have rules. We need to have boundaries. You know, we need to have a rule of law. We need to have social cohesion. Those boundaries shouldn't be barriers to unmet need. And I think that's what we see in society. It's reflective most of us have experienced that many of us muddle through regardless. Some of us are more affected by the kind of expectations and judgments put on us by others at the expense of our own safety, emotional safety, social safety, and so many of us end up conforming when that's what happens and but there are some who really struggle with that stuff. There's many people in our society who are disenfranchised from learning. Little Johnny, who's in school today, that's an achievement for him, and it's an achievement because he didn't have breakfast this morning, he didn't sleep last night. He's traumatized by what goes on at home because he can't attain what is expected of him from a structured educational system. He is now disenfranchised from learning, and that will affect his behavior, and now he will be classed as difficult, disruptive. And, you know, and I think that's just one example that we can recognize. Many people who are processing the world in a different way are often excluded from things because they are perceived as being differently, and they and they struggle to conform to some of these. So I think these are just things for us to consider. And I, as I say, Everything's an invitation. It's a big topic, really. But I do think I'd like to think dog training is going the same way, or will go the same way as how we've treat children. We used to have member depressing. It wasn't that long ago. We used to have children should be seen and not heard, right? What a statement. Now, when you think about it, wow, because the bit that wasn't being heard, was that child's needs? Yeah, we've had women should be seen or not heard. Minorities should be seen. We've had dogs should be seen or not heard. So I'd like to see dog training on our side of things, the way that we can put clear blue water now between us. And you know, these rape debates have been going online. There's a big panel discussion recently about, let's all get around the table and stuff. And that's all fine, but those conversations are outdated. Chrissy, for me, that's the path tell them about how to task again, right? This is a care, care, care approach, where we care about the individual in front of us. And I like to think dog training will go in the same direction as the progressive side of child educational psychology and development, that child centered care approach, yeah, which has been hugely advantageous to kids. You know, even 1520, years ago, children, especially children with, with, you know, different learning styles. And you know, what were my classes, neuro divergence. Now we're often even with positive means made to conform, because you've got behave this way. And it's, it's adding more it was adding more trauma. And we know that because as adults, they they tell us that, they say that process has created more problems from here now, don't do that again. And Jerry Lee crawl, who's a clinical social worker in America, her statement is, you know, it's easy to confuse quiet and compliant, yeah, with calm and well regulated, right? Many kids ended up being quiet and compliant. Many dogs end up being quite uncompliant, right? What we want to try and do, which is support, truly calm and well regulated,
Chrissy 44:06
right? I guess so. For like, a practical example of this, like, a lot of times when I'm teaching loose leash walking, like, say, a dog to walk nicely on leash, where they're not pulling your shoulder out of the socket, one of the things we look at is, yeah, teach them how we would like them to walk, but we also look at their environment, like, why are they pulling so hard? Is there pain involved? Is there is it too stressful? Like you were talking about with your dog, Molly, there's a reason for the behavior. And so instead of just teaching the dog what we want it to do, this is what we're talking about, like the the care centered approach, looking deeper and asking, Okay, why are they pulling are they in pain? Is is it too stressful an environment? And so looking at the whole picture instead of just task, you know, like you were saying. So that's just like a practical example, because some people might not understand. What we're talking about, but it's looking beyond the behavior. I love that example,
Andy 45:04
because pulling is a big thing for me. You know, so many dogs who come to me, as well as the kind of reactivity of Russian stuff, the dog is pulling like a training they've done all the usual training stuff. And as you say, pulling is a directly related to nervous system elevation for me, for whatever reason that could be just excitement, who knows, but to and often it is things like pain. It's because their gait pattern needs to be kind maybe two and a half normal, because that's more comfortable for them. It can because they're triggered by the traffic. It could because they've got generalized anxiety. It's so many things. The trouble with a task orientated approach only is that, if the task can't be completed, somebody's to blame. Yeah, dog's not good enough. The owner's not doing it right, or even the trainer might think I can't do it well. In fact, for a lot of these dogs, you know, they can't, it's just really hard. So, but the general public, then, in the village hall, town hall, whatever the dog can do, loose leash, walk, great. But when they get outside, they can't. They doing all the stuff. They get frustrated. They can't do it. So we're failing them. But if they understand that, maybe it's because that is actually feedback, the pulling is also feedback from the dog that I can't regulate very well right now. It changes how you stuff. So it's a beautiful example, Chrissy, because it's, it's kind of like bread and butter stuff, isn't it loosely walking. It's really hard for some of these dogs to have a nervous system that can regulate enough to be able to just match the pace of the owner or anything else.
Chrissy 46:17
Yeah, exactly. Is there anything specific weighing on your mind that you feel like you need to share, or is there any nugget of wisdom that you want to share with our audience? I
Andy 46:26
just want to say to everybody, really, but especially trainers that might be listening in fellow professionals, because it's it feels like a bit of a tough time the last few years. I think social media is quite tough anyway, and all we can do, really, is cast our own light. We can't make others do or not do anything and everything is an invitation, ultimately. And I think we have to take some pressure off us. We have to think about what our purpose is. A lot of the time we get driven by our passion, but actually that's quite a fragile thing, passion. We have to convert that into what our purpose is and and think, What? What is my purpose even, even on the micro, yeah, what would be my purpose in responding to this post in this way? What would be my purpose in saying something, you know? Because if, if the purpose is to try and change somebody's mind, it probably won't, if the purpose is just to tell them to do one, then fair enough. But, but I think that's important. It's an invitation to try and improve awareness, that's all we got to try and find different ways to be big work. And I just want to touch on for caregivers who might have been listening to some of this stuff today or have been on their own journey, is one of the things that often comes along is the sense of guilt. This sense of guilt, same with professionals, of course, because when you when you learn, you know, I, I probably get about half a dozen people a month come through my dog center care, contact me through dog center care who are or have been aversive trainers. They've come across different things, and they've already felt that things weren't right, but they didn't necessarily listen to other positive trainers just telling them how to do tasks differently. But when they felt it differently, they've reached out and they felt guilt, actually, as they go through their process. I just wanted such a nice place to to kind of think about things at the end, because we all feel these emotions, and the key is to any of the emotions that we have, especially native ones. It's not it's not not having them. It's about changing our relationship with them. And guilt is a good one there, because if we allow it, guilt allows us to stay chained to the past. Because we, we feel that we I wish I hadn't used that tool, I wish and done that to the dog. I wish I hadn't have worked in that way. Well, we can't go back in time, so it can become really, kind of quite corrosive, really, if instead we think, do you know what? So, so especially with my clients, it's very tempting to say to them, when they tell me they feel guilty, to say, Oh, don't feel guilty. You shouldn't be seen. Don't feel anything to anybody, rather than don't feel guilty, I say to them that feeling you're having, recognize that as a really deep, visceral sense of learning. You've learned something very important, and use that to drive you moving forwards so that you can make those choices differently tomorrow and the day after and the day after, because that frees us from the past, and it drives us in a more positive way. So it's a more healthy way of looking at guilt, for sure. And I think a lot of these kind of feelings, we have a sense about how we change our relationship with them. Same with judgment. We were talking off air, you know, our brain is designed to judge. We can't not judge, but we can change our relationship with that judgment. It doesn't have to drive our response, right? And compassion is a good way to turn up anyway, regardless of how we might feel about another awesome
Chrissy 49:28
i love this conversation so much. And so if anybody wants to get in touch with you, Andy, what's the best way that they can get in touch with you, either trainer or, you know, human guardian, caregivers. Yeah, so
Andy 49:41
I've got my dog center care Facebook group, also my dog center care YouTube channel, where all those wonderful Facebook Lives that I have in there. I've been there for people to have a look at. I also do a support, mentoring, verging on counseling, I think, for safe space. And it's just there. It is a safe space to support. Colleagues through the emotional stuff that we do. You know my husband, I talked about him earlier. He gets supervision every month to do his job. Interestingly, most people would see working in hospices being right up there as a challenging job, but he said to me, Chrissy, he couldn't do our job, and we don't get supervision. No, is that safe space to offload talk about these things, to to recognize how important it is for us to be emotionally paired and resilient enough to do our work, and that's what I do through safe space. And you can learn more about safe space through my website, which is dog cc.org, Okay,
Chrissy 50:31
wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being on I loved talking with you. Well, thanks for having me. Oh, well, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it helps you look at dogs a little bit differently when they're acting a certain way, maybe thinking about what they're feeling on the inside and how that's impacting their behaviors. And we can actually all use this for the humans in our lives too. So if you want to go ahead and reach out to Andrew, I'm sure he'd love to talk with you, dogs truly are special beings and can change lives if we're open to what they have to teach us, this not only impacts you and your dog, but can also make a positive impact on the world. If you're finding value in this podcast, the best way to support us is by leaving a review up to five stars and sharing it with your family, friends and fellow dog lovers around the world. Lastly, I'd love to connect with you. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook at the nature of animals, and visit my [email protected] Until next time, be curious. Show compassion and have courage. You.
