Chrissy 0:00
Welcome to The Dogs of our lives. Podcast with me. Chrissy Messick, this is where traditional training transforms into true connection and understanding with our dogs. As a certified dog trainer, behavior consultant and interspecies communicator with a background in high level sports medicine, I bring a unique functional approach to understanding our dogs by integrating body, mind, heart and soul, join us for insights, stories and practical wisdom that will help you prevent problems before they start and build a deeper bond with your animal companion. Before we get into today's episode, let me ask you a question, how well do you actually know your dog? Why not take my quiz to find out? You can find the link in the show notes. Now let's dig in. Today, I talk with Dr Robert Falconer Taylor. He's been in the veterinary profession for over 30 years, and there's so many things that I could talk about that he's done. His current primary academic interests include companion animal, cognitive science and emotions, nutrition and its effects on behavior, applied neurophysiology, pharmacology and therapeutics and Companion Animal Behavior Therapy. We could talk about a million of those things, but what we did today was focus on pain and behavior in dogs, and how there's different types of pain that dogs can have and how it affects their behavior, with whether it's super subtle that we don't even notice or it's very obvious, and I think this is such an important conversation to have, because dog guardians and pet parents aren't even aware of this. So hopefully, after this episode, you'll look at your dog a little differently. Well, welcome, Dr Robert Falconer Taylor, thank you so much for being on here and just sharing your experiences and your wisdom. I appreciate that you just care so much about animals and their welfare. I'm excited to pick your brain.
Robert 1:53
That sounds good to me, that sounds good to me, it's like picking the remains of the tip of the Christmas turkey. Yeah, there's always something left.
Chrissy 2:01
Yeah! So I wanted to take a second just to say I met you through a common group that we're in, Andy's group, which is a wonderful group, and you were talking about pain in dogs and just everything that I was like, ah, we need to share this, you know, with everyone. And so I was like, let's get you on and let's get them on. And you were like, I'll, you know, I'll come on and talk. So thank you so much for being on here.
Robert 2:29
Yeah, you can't talk about these things too much. Chrissy, yeah, that's the thing. Because we, we tend to live in our in our own little echo boxes, and we think we're broadcasting out to a vast audience, but in actual fact, we're just scratching a tiny microcosm of society. And I think as much of these messages you can get out, social media is great, the trouble is, it gets buried. Yeah, you have all these influences and stuff which which feed all the feeds and make the money on the advertising. There's little voices like ours that tend to be stuck with a way down in the pecking order. So I think you have to keep repetition is the key, isn't it? You've got to keep pushing these things out wherever you can.
Chrissy 3:07
Yeah. And that's something that I have to get comfortable with, because I feel like I'm repeating myself all the time. But like you said, it just needs to be repeated so it gets out there, and not everybody hears the messages all the time?
Robert 3:21
Yeah, yeah. Well, with the thing is, we all live in our own kind of echo chambers, don't we? Yeah, we both live in Andy's group, but there are lots of people that we need to touch, particularly dog owners, who've never heard of Andy, who've never heard of us, and they will never be, they will never be directed on their social media platforms to those sort of areas, because it's not in their their feed. It's not in the in the in the supplier's interest, exactly.
Chrissy 3:44
Okay, so can you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you live, what you're doing currently, and the dogs in your life?
Robert 3:51
Well, let's start at the the end. I don't have any dogs now. I rehomed my last dogs over the lockdown because I had an injury my leg. The thing is, I had the prospect of quite a lot of rehabilitation, and all that sort of thing lined up. And of course, COVID came. So that never happened. So I never had any of that done. But I'm basically rescue so all the dogs I have are rescues. Anyway, I'm a trustee for Springer rescue Scotland. Shout out to Springer rescue Scotland. We rescued. I think it was three dogs a week last year, which is pretty good to 2024, in the kind of economic climate, three dogs a week, three Spaniels a week, which is pretty good going. I think 52 weeks of the year, or however many weeks there are. So I'm dealing with dogs all the time from that respect. And so I'm fine. I'm I don't own dogs. Now, I don't have dogs in that sense, but I'm still very much with dog. I've fostered them, if I need to, for a short period of time, that sort of connection, which I wasn't able to do when I had my own dogs, because then they got in the way of my own dogs, my own dogs, well, being welfare. So, funnily enough, it gives me kind of more freedom, if you like, that way. Yeah.
Chrissy 4:59
Yep, it definitely makes sense. And you know, Spaniels, they they require a certain lifestyle, right?
Robert 5:06
They do. They do, which is why I live in the ideal place, in the Highlands of Scotland, surrounded by mountains and water and sea. I'm looking out my window now it's dark.
Robert 5:17
There's a beautiful moon up there shining in a crisp sky, temperatures right down, snow on the ground, everything's I stop here now.
Chrissy 5:25
Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, beautiful place. One of these days I want to go out there and visit I. My heritage is somewhat Scottish and Irish and all that kind of stuff. So what are you currently doing right now with wise
Robert 5:40
I'm basically an independent freelance consultant. So I do a lot of projects like this. Most of my work is just gratis work, talking to welfare groups, talking to welfare people, but I kind of pay the rent if you like doing commercial work. I have contracts, or I'm a consultant for several different companies. And what I do is a lot of companies now are very much aware that animal welfare is important, and those that want to try and align their product and their ethos and their marketing strategy and also their support for end users in line with much more ethical welfare based approaches. Right? Surprising how, how many steps away from the actual owner and the animal, if you can go up the commercial chain, if you like, to still be able to influence the people up the chain that then influence people below them.
Chrissy 6:34
Basically, you're kind of a quality control of products in the animal welfare world. Can you give an example of, like, a couple of products or no? Can you? Can you not do that without naming companies?
Robert 6:47
I've been working with company which manufactures who has just gone into the market recently. They're a really old company that have been marketing yeast based products to the commercial animal market, the domestic animal market, sheep, goats, pigs and that sort of thing as animal feed. And a lot of animal feed, ruminants require an awful lot of vitamins in their artificial food that they're given, the concentrates they give them during winter and that sort of thing. So when, when there's not much grass around, and this company basically manufactures vitamins and supplements and that thing based on yeast. They also do a lot of yeast for the brewery industry, so beers and breads and whiskeys and anything, anything with yeast in it, you may even be eating food products with their things in it, if you ever come to Europe, because big European company, but they got into the probiotic and free Bartik market for animals, which includes horses, cats, dogs, rabbits and so on. So basically, I've been helping them with that side of the company. I have nothing to do with the livestock side. My my remit is with the companion animal side. And what I've done basically, is develop a lot of tools, which they then supply to their manufacturers. Because they're again, they're way up the chain. They have no direct contact with consumer and that information about welfare. How do you measure welfare? How do you measure happiness of a dog, for example? How can you measure it on a daily basis? So I've developed tools for basically, horses, cats and dogs, separate lots of tools that get passed on to the end user. So the end users that are using the products that end up being sold by the manufacturer, they're then given out as freebies to the owners of these animals. And what we have then is a system whereby they have support and feedback, but it's a tool where they can dial in just by observing the body language of their animals each day. They can then dial in an average kind of welfare state or mood state, if you like, am I feeling happy? Am I feeling unhappy over a period of time and what? What it shouldn't do, the one for dogs has been running for about four years now, is that it will identify animals that are perhaps a little bit low par. And I know this is one of the things you want to talk about, of owners intuition about not quite right, but can't put a finger on it. I help the owners identify that and ring an alarm bell for things start to get more serious, and the animal starts to go downhill, and then they start developing serious behavior problems. So if that, it's that sort of thing which which I do. So you know, they usually have a practical application, but I've also done a lot of things with developing much more humane and welfare based delivery products like leads and harnesses and things that they use around feeding toys, enrichment toys, and all those sort of things. So I've done that as well, this nutrition approach, where I've really been able to get into the nitty gritty of welfare and influence, almost, you know, from from the heavens above, almost, because you've got these big companies supplying these, these manufacturers who supply the wholesalers, who supply the retailers, and you end up with this product and this idea being filtered down to these end users and all these cats, dogs and horses around Europe, using the tool to actually measure the welfare.
Chrissy 10:01
Yeah, that's pretty amazing. I mean, believe in a holistic approach, looking at the body, mind, heart and soul of you know, the humans and the non humans, and having preventative tools. With my sports medicine background, it's all about prevention, looking at the nutrition, just all of the different systems, and so that's super important for people to have a tool to help them measure how their dog is feeling by you know, body language is one. I don't know what other tools you're talking about. Maybe we'll talk about it in a little bit, but yeah,
Robert 10:35
well, just, just, just subtle changes in behavior. Yeah, it's this whole thing. When I go on and on about trust your gut. Trust your intuition. You know your dogs really well. Chrissy, yeah, and you know, instantly, if they're 10 milliseconds later or earlier in getting up or doing something, or a little bit delayed, or you just have this feeling that something's not quite right. And you know, I think we are really good at picking up these very subtle, almost unconscious cues that the that we see in animals and with humans around us as well. You know, if you work with people, you know, when somebody's a bit odd, there's just something about behavior or a micro expression on the face, or it's almost like a sixth sense. And I think it's trusting that which is so important. So what this tool does is basically allow a dog parent to be able to objectively measure that, and they they put it on a chart, and they say, right, that's that. That's, that's a minor score. And basically the idea is, you want to, you want to score more pluses and zeros, which are no no change in observation, than negatives. And so the whole idea is you need to be looking to score at least twice as many positives, more ideally, than you ever score of negatives. If you get to a point where the negatives are catching up with a positive, that's a warning sign that something's not quite right. The people are using it. It does have helped them and give them confidence, maybe, to go and speak to their vet. That's very satisfying.
Chrissy 12:03
Yeah, that's amazing. An aspect of that is some people are really in tune with their dogs, and have a really good awareness of their dogs. And there are some people that are not, that do not have an awareness. And I think it's important to help people learn to teach them how to have awareness of their dog, like, I can be walking with my dog and she'll just look at me, and I'll be like, Okay, what's wrong?
Chrissy 12:33
And so we have, like, this little mini conversation, and it's like, oh, okay, something's in your foot.
Robert 12:39
Yes, yeah, yeah, there is a there is a dark side to this as well, Chrissy, and that's for people who over empathize with their dogs. And I'm sure you see it all the time. You then get anxious and start catastrophizing about your dog. And what does that do? The dog then picks that up, and the dog gets worried as well. Because, remember, it's a two way street that's really important, people forget that. It's not, it's not you the observer. 100% your dogs are observing you, too. So you need to be very mindful of your own behavior, yes. And if you're somebody who's always looking for something wrong, right, you need to be very careful with that. And I think that's something that we see a lot in the dog world, and maybe we'll talk about it more a little bit later, but worries me a little bit that we seem to have got into a state now within the dog world, which is following the pattern in the human world, where the normal stresses and strains of life are becoming over medicalized and pathologized. Fact is that we all, we all have stresses and strains every day. Life, isn't sweet. Thing is, if everything was absolutely sweet and we all lived, you know, beautiful hippie lives,
Robert 13:47
we wouldn't, we wouldn't know the difference between when things are good and when things are bad. You've got to have that contrast. And obviously the extreme ends up are not good. That's what we want to avoid. But of course, I'll be a little bit stressed now, because I'm talking to you and you're recording this, and my cortisol and my adrenaline is going to be up. I'm always stressed before I go onto a stage and talk live with people, because you don't want to screw it up. Particularly, haven't well prepared, and particularly when I started out doing that. But it's that stress that's actually got me through. Had I been, you know, Peace, man doesn't matter, really, then you don't, you know, give a good performance. And it's the same with dogs. You know, I think we need to be really careful not to over pathologize if they're a little bit anxious, or they get worried by something, or they get bothered by a dog in the park, they're not going to fall to bits. There is a tendency for some people to to smother their dogs a little bit too much, if that's the right word, and they want to surround them in cotton wool can avoid them ever having any stresses at all. And there's an interesting paper that was published today about human kids and the importance that they need to have a few bashes in life. They need to be able to experience risk, because without that, they don't build resilience. That's how you build resilience. You've got to have something to teach you, those lessons suddenly.
Robert 14:59
Societies beginning to realize that with kids. I mean, when I was a kid, I would like climb trees and fall off bicycles and fall out of trees and break things and scratch things and whack my head on things. And the thing is, that's, that's the only way you learn how to negotiate life, isn't it? You've got to have a few bashes. But if you've never had any experience of life, then you're not going to know how to deal with when, you are faced with some kind of challenge. So there's a really fine balance here. And I'm sure you find that with the dogs that you see as well.
Chrissy 15:28
Yeah, it's a combination of awareness of your own behaviors, awareness of a dog's behaviors, different species needs, and the helicopter mom or dad are the helicopter guardian, just a lot of things to look at. And, yeah, I have two kids, and we, you know, we give them space to make mistakes, you know, because, yeah, they, they need to build resilience. And there's a time where we have boundaries, because we don't want, we don't want any trauma happening.
Robert 16:01
But absolutely, of course, yeah, yeah, it's a safe space. The whole idea of parenting, whether, whether it's a, you know, a dog or a child, is giving them a safe space to basically live and experiment and act as a free agent. It can't be Molly coddling, particularly dogs all the time. And you know, all of us come across in our lives, dogs that have had previous trauma. We don't always get them as puppies. You know, particularly rescue. We see it all the time. I've been dealing with rescue, in rescue, one capacity or another, for about 25 years. And one of the big lessons I learned Chrissy when I was in veterinary practice, actually one of the first, one of the things I I believed, because that was my own experience, is that when you have a dog, that dog forms a really strong bond with you, and it's going to be really traumatic for that dog to be re homed to somebody else. And so a lot of the conversations I used to have in veterinary practice were people coming in and saying, Look, I really need to rehome my dog. And this was speaking as a vet, not a not a behaviorist, but they would come to the vet anyway, because back in the 80s and 90s, there weren't that many behaviors. And there would be come in and they would say, you know, I need to rehome my dog. Or my dog's got such and such an illness, I can't afford it, or I can't walk my dog anymore. Or I, you know, my dog's just not fitting with a family because we have a baby, their worry because they love their dogs, was that they were going to traumatize their dogs by not letting them go. And so often they would keep the dog, and so that's not good for the person or the family or the dog, either. And what I learned doing rescue is how quickly dogs will basically go from one family to another without any care at all. Obviously, they form attachments. They'll remember you. But there's something about the resilience of dog which we don't seem to find in people. Human children seem to form really strong somehow emotional attachments. The dogs, the emotional side of it, seems to be less thank God for them, because their their brains are less complicated. They haven't got such big cerebral cortices for all this rumination and worrying, dogs don't do, what if? What? What if this happened? What if that happened? They tend to, they tend to live for the trauma, which is actually a really good, good thing to be in. So providing they go from one family to another family, they will form bonds with that family really quickly. And you know, I see this all the time in our in our dogs up here at Springer, because they all go into foster care. First they go from from the original home into a foster home. They stay with the foster home for as long as they need to. Sometimes they have to go in from to one foster home, to another, to another, before we find them a home. And so, you know, their journey can be quite long, because we don't. We never re home dogs straight away. What we do is we like to have them in just to be able to assess them, let them settle in, understand what their needs are, and then find the right home for them. So there are dogs that have been sort of temporary, if you like, for want of a better word, in one or more families or quite some extended time, and then they go for their ever home, and it's almost like they don't look back. You re home them in there, and the new owners will phone up the day after, and the dogs have settled in as they've lived there all their lives. I
Chrissy 19:08
t's amazing. So you've worked in the veterinary profession for about 30 years, and you've done so much, can you just tell us a little bit about the moments that you look back on that really, I guess, affected your professional journey, and then, know, you're really passionate about the, I guess, the hidden effects of pain and discomfort. Those are two separate things. Let's just start with your journey and go from there.
Chrissy 19:31
of
Robert 19:31
It's one of these things that always comes back to childhood, isn't it? And I was lucky enough to be born and bred in Africa. So that was in East Africa and Kenya. So I lived among lots of animals anyway, because we're, you know, it was always possible to have big houses and lots and lots of land, and not just wildlife one ring in and out, but cats and dogs and gerbils and mice and birds and snakes and all those sort of things. So that had always been in my blood for various reasons. My mother also.
Robert 20:00
Bred dogs, she bred punks, and everyone would sort of pounds up in the air in horror. I think I Brachy phallic. But in those
Robert 20:07
days, they didn't have all these horrible genetic diseases. They're really lovely little dogs, but I'm very partial to punks my childhood, although it was idealistic in many ways. You know, most people give their hand to have a lifestyle like that, where you live right on the edge of a game park, you've got wildlife coming in and out. You need to be careful of snakes and those sort of things, Cobras and pop adders walking in the grounds. Leopards at night. Do you make sure the dogs are in so they get they don't get eaten? But the other side of that is that it was also a pretty dramatic childhood as well. There was quite a lot of trauma involved for me, and my solace was in with the pets you kind of naturally go to, the the animals that kind of don't judge you. I kind of set my sights for that would be my goal, somehow, to work with animals through a fairly torturous pathway. I eventually competed and got into university and then went into veterinary practice, and that's where I I kind of honed my skill. I guess just working with people and animals are going to be in a veterinary fashion. You really need to enjoy working with people as well to affect my people skills as well as my animal skills. It was back in the early 90s. I had a real problem with mental health. I had some kind of breakdown or something. I suffered basically like a switch, going psychotic, which I won't go into, might be genetic factors or something, but certainly past childhood trauma
Robert 21:36
come to the surface. And if you've ever suffered psychosis, your brain, basically, your sensory system takes over what you perceive, what you see, what you hear, what you smell. And so I was getting all these hallucinations, basically. And all of them were menacing, none of them were nice. All of them are, you know, really quite nasty and malevolent, like we're going to get you and, you know, we know where you live, and all this sort of thing. I could be walking in the street, and there could be somebody looking at a shop window, and to me, I could see their face articulate these words. I could almost hear and see them threatening faces and looking at me and this sort of thing. That's what psychosis is. And you tend to bury yourself away. I've never fully recovered from that. I still have optical hallucinations now, of things moving around, the thing is that I've learned, I've learned to deal with it, because I know now it's just a hallucination. It's just my brain playing tricks, and it kind of got me thinking as part of my healing, trying to understand what was actually going on. And that's really interested in in thinking about brains, rather than just medical things, thinking about psychology and psychiatry and the mental life as animal of animals, as well as their physical life. And I guess, to cut a long story short, that's how kind of that's what funneled me into thinking about behavior, because I could then start seeing the way that there were behavior changes in the dogs I was seeing coming in for routine things like spays or coughs or vaccinations where there was something not right with that animal in terms of their psychology rather than their physical health. And so I think it's marrying those two things together. What I see now is my route into animal behavior, although it came from somewhere fairly dark. What it did is give me personal experience or license to really understand what it feels like to have trauma if you've never had trauma, if you had an ideal lifestyle. And what really annoys me about the dog world now is that everyone is talking about trauma. Everything a dog has is trauma. And so they throw this word around trauma and PTSD and all these sort of things as if they're common, but they're not. They're quite rare. They're rare things. The problem is, I think it dilutes those words for the people who really are suffering those things. Now I'm not saying I have PTSD or trauma. I've had psychological trauma, but I have the after effects of being having trauma, but I don't have trauma now. It's made me stronger and made me more resilient. I think what I've done is turned it round on itself and used it as a learning and objective learning to try and understand what's going on inside a dog's mind. So that's basically what fascinates me about behavior in dogs.
Chrissy 24:18
That's what I love about doing these interviews, is like asking people this question and kind of reflecting on what challenges you've had and what have you learned from it, and where that has taken you. And so I just find it super interesting. You know, everybody has their own challenges, and if they learn from them and use it as a purpose or learning or a passion to help others. I think that's really neat, that you've been able to work through that, process it, and then use it in a way to help others, to kind of understand animals and humans as well non or non human animals.
Robert 24:56
Yeah, but it's not, it's not being something altruistic. I think. To right? I need to make that clear. It's been, it's basically guided my choices in what I do, yeah, and so I've always been somebody who would rather do, I'd rather do something I enjoy doing. Philosophy has always been, I have to have a reason for getting up on Monday morning, right? And routine clinical network. I lost that because it's the kind of same thing. And you see far too many people, you can never do much for them apart from deal with their medical needs. But the thing is that animals are like us, if you're if you're ill, or you've got some chronic disease or something that isn't just the medical thing. It's a psychological thing as well. So it was not being able to deal with that psychological side, which is what pushed me over into behavior. So it was, it was a choice I made not because I'm not because I wanted to help animals. It's because it's what I wanted to do. And if you, I'm sure you know what I mean, it's, it's something you then follow that, rather than follow the the medical side, which would have earned me a lot more money in the long run, right? But I wasn't interested in that. I wanted a reason to get up on Monday morning. And, you know, I get up with enthusiasm still on a Monday or every morning, I get up early, and I have a lot of lists of things I need to do, and I need to read and I need to write repair, so I still enjoy that. And so for me, that's been the reward, you know, it's been a really fantastic reward from that.
Chrissy 26:22
Yeah, I don't think of it as an altruistic thing. I feel like it. I think of it or feel it as an internal guidance system, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, you made intentional choices, you know, about what to do, not. A lot of people have a combination of the medical and the behavior psychology, you know. So that's a really nice combination to have,
Robert 26:45
yeah, well, it's been useful, and I've worked with a lot of psychiatrists as well. I was called in by then to talk about things like placebo effect, functional disease. You know, functional diseases, it used to be called psychosomatic, but there's a big controversy in medicine that rolls on, which is a, basically a war, if you like, between the neurologists and the medics and the psychiatrists, where the neurologists will look look for evidence of something. They'll do scans and they'll do blood tests and X rays and examinations and MRI and everything else, trying to find a lesion that causes, for example, somebody's pain, and they can't find anything. So what they says is nothing wrong with you. And the psychiatrist, on the other hand, say, Look, if somebody says they're in pain, they're in pain, whether you can find something or not. And so I've been entangled in that debate, and I think it's something we see within the veterinary profession as well, where things have to be medical. But what is missing is this recognition that actually dogs have psychiatric illness as well, just like we do. This is really what got me into the kind of pain thing, because we know how we feel when we suffer with pain. It really does affect you mentally. It's not just a physical thing to have somebody turn around and say, Well, no, there's nothing wrong with you, because we can't find a lesion. I'm not going to give you any medicine for that. And this is the thing that adult parent will experience when they go to the vet. The vet can't find anything. First examination they might do, imaging X rays or something, can't find anything. I'm not going to give you any medication, because it will give you the animal side effects, so the animal then goes away and suffers in silence. To me, that's completely unacceptable, right? And pain is something which affects everything else. This chronic, unmanaged pain, it affects the way you deal with anxiety. It affects the way you deal with stress. It dampens the way you can enjoy yourself. You know it's not that you're miserable all the time, but it puts a ceiling on the on your quality of life, if you like, your sense of well being and happiness, even though you may have moments when you appear to be really happy and full of joy. So an owner can throw a ball or throw a stick or something for a dog, and the dog will run off and chase it and bring it back and say, through it again, throw it again. That's not the same thing as as being happy, right? That's a really important point. Happiness is a mood state. Happiness is a long term thing that you have to have to earn almost you have to build on top of your resilience. All That Is, is an emotional state that you're feeling good that moment, but once that that moment has passed, you'll then go back to feeling crappy again, and that's that's the kind of hole that I've been trying to fill in. It's a hard task, that's for sure.
Chrissy 29:29
We'll talk about pain and behavior in a minute, in a second. But I wanted to ask you, have been any dogs specifically, that have influenced you personally, professionally, that stick out to you?
Robert 29:40
Yes, yeah, it's a springer manual rescue. I got, I didn't really want to be honest, because I was still in my recovery phase from this psychotic episode. Yeah, and I got this dog, and she turned out to be absolutely amazing. Oh, so she, she was my kind of rock, if you like, because it gave me some.
Robert 29:59
Something else to turn my attention to. This was when I was in that phase where I hadn't quite decided that my transition was going to be over from medicine to behavior, and she was quite a challenge. I hadn't had Spaniels before. I'd already had more placid dogs, like Labradors and those sort of things. So spaniel was a very different kettle of fish, and it's just her whole personality, her a very optimistic outlook on life, making sure her needs were met. And I had her for 11 years. She came up to Scotland with me. When I moved up here, I had her quietly put to sleep in 2011 she was old and she was arthritic. She had lived a good life. So I think she was one dog. I think that really kind of brought me through, and that's really what then got me into spring and rescue span up here.
Robert 30:50
I then went to them again, you know, I had to, I was a spaniel, but I was addicted. Then, you know, one, once you've had one, you've got to have the spring of spaniel. So that was my kind of transition, if you like, that. That was my baptism into spaniel world. But she was, she was a very special dog. She was just amazing. And she made a huge difference to my life, you know, accelerated my kind of turnaround, if you like, and, you know, kind of getting back into into normality. So you could think of her as a therapy dog, but I don't see her as that. It was a kind of partnership. She had a need, and I had a need. I didn't know I had that need that way.
Chrissy 31:25
Yeah. What was her name?
Robert 31:27
It was Maggie. Oh, I called her Maggie because she she was Maddie when she came to me with my psychotic episode, the idea of having a dog called Mad wasn't very good idea. You know, you think about symbols and signs and the idea of having a dog called Maddie, I remember that really clearly. I said, I can't have a dog called Maddie.
Robert 31:49
This can't be right. So I known to Maggie.
Chrissy 31:52
That's so interesting, because even the awareness of that and making the decision to change her name is almost like a symbol for changing your direction and your healing.
Robert 32:04
Could be, yeah, well, that'd be something which wasn't going to confuse her. There's no There's no point calling her honey or sometimes,
Chrissy 32:12
yeah,
Robert 32:13
recall already
Chrissy 32:17
my approach when working with dogs and humans is is addressing the root cause of behavior. And so it's, it's a, like you said, a functional, holistic approach. And this, you know, means understanding the emotions of the dog and how that can directly affect behavior. Can give us clues as to what's going on. And you have your book, I haven't read it yet, the EMRA intelligence, but can you talk about that a little bit?
Robert 32:43
Yeah, that's a book I wrote in collaboration with my then partner in center of applied petty ology, Professor Peter Neville, and also Val strong. So it was a collaborative thing. My route, education wise, into behavior was was through the center of applied petty ology in UK. And the reason I chose them is because they had already adopted a very emotion based approach to how they describe behavior. They were looking at how the dog feels and then how that motivates behavior. So for me, that made sense, because it gel directly into what I've described to you already about, you know, my transition thinking about how important mental life is. And remember this, this was 2002 this was a time where talking about emotions in animal science was a no no, you you're considered a Charlie charlatan, and you're kind of thrown out. And you wouldn't get any research projects. You wouldn't get papers published if you mentioned the word emotion in animals, the book was really a culmination of that hopes, I think enlightenment coming out of the dark ages. I think of being called pariahs within the within the old behavior world, because we, you know, we talked about emotions. We talk about emotions, that sort of thing. Many other behaviorists, you said, No, it's all behavior. It's all Skinner and Watson and Pavlov and all this sort of thing. We said, no, no, the motions come first. But then I came across Pang sets work, the original book he wrote, you know, yeah, Pang set I know of the name if you if you read the read the emra book. I'd also read the new version of it, written by my friend and colleague Karen Pienaar. She's, she's written an update which was published a couple of years ago, and that'll explain what it is, but basically in a nutshell, thanks. That described was a set of emotional systems. I'm not going to describe them all now, because we'll be here all night, but he described seven basic emotional systems, which included seeking, play, care, rage, fear, grief, which is basically loneliness as a group of of emotional states. Now we know from the scientific point of view, they don't exist, not as he described them, but then the time that he wrote those, or at least came up with them, was back in the 1980s and the 1990s before they had the research tools to actually explore that. But it makes a really.
Robert 35:00
Model that there is sense behind them and they are rooted in a much more complicated brain. And for me, they made a really, really good model of embreu, which was emotional systems. So we talked about pancep, seven emotional systems. M is mood state. So we talked about emotions, then we talked about mood and then we talked about reinforcement assessment, assessment, which is the RA, Mm, hmm, has basically now done what we should have done in the first place, and put mood before emotion, right? Because, as I've described already, if you're if you're feeling crappy and you're worried about things and you're anxious and you have a negative cognitive bias about life, your mood is going to be not good, and that's going to affect your emotions, not the other way around. So moods are robust things. Mood states are what we what we want to build. Emotional states are unreliable as measures of welfare, because you can, you can be really excited about something even when you're feeling really crappy, or when you when you've got chronic pain. So mood states are really important and that's why this other book, Karen's mirror book, which basically is mood state, first emotions, and then you bolt all the other things onto that, and then part of that assessment is looking at what the dog's needs are. So different dogs need different needs, as I learned, spaniel very different from habitable.
Robert 36:20
And we know as dog people how different, different kinds of dog breeds are, and how important it is for different kinds of people choose a dog that fits their lifestyle. There's no point having a spring, a spaniel, you know, a working bloodhound or something, if you're somebody who doesn't like to go out and you watch TV all day, boy dog that's going to sit on the sofa and not not do very much otherwise the welfare of that dog's going to be compromised.
Chrissy 36:43
So basically, it's based on that very practical approach, I guess, thinking about it in practical terms for the audience to just get a quick idea and correct me if I'm wrong. So mood states would be almost like your baseline in life. Yeah, yeah. Mood states would be your baseline in life, and then emotions change depending on the situation or what's going on.
Robert 37:06
Well, the way to look at it is that mood state doesn't exist by itself. Mood state is created by the average of all your emotional states over a period of time. That period of time might be a week, if you have really severe trauma. It might be a month, it might be a lifetime. Your past experiences basically the ups and downs of your day, ie, the idea where you can the quality of your life is good enough. So your emotion states tend to be all in the positive. You're relaxed when you're sleeping, you're you're feeling love, you don't feel frightened about things. You have the social contact you need with your you know, other dogs or your parents. You're not left alone for long periods of time, which is a negative one. You're not in pain. You want to avoid those. It doesn't mean you have to. You have to get rid of them all completely, which is the mistake you it's fine having some of those. The resilience is for having positive emotional states, a combination of different emotional states over a period of time, whatever that period of time is.
Speaker 1 38:06
So
Chrissy 38:06
So I believe, you know, there's a lot of under diagnosed dogs that are suffering in pain and discomfort. Can you talk a little bit about how that can affect behavior in dogs?
Robert 38:17
Behavior is product of emotion, isn't it? Yeah, what I try and get away from is the idea that you're always looking at behavior, oh, the dog has tried to bite the child. Oh, the dog has weed on the carpet. Those things arise because of how the dog feels.
Robert 38:33
And what we missed, which is what we talked about right at the beginning, is that, you know, as a vet, I saw that. I saw the physical things the dog was presenting with. The dogs, weed on the floor. The dog doesn't want to come in, whatever the owners are bought it in for the dogs off, offer food. Behind that is a is an emotional state, and behind that is a mood state. So what I've been trying to get across, which the medical profession, even the medical profession, have difficulty grappling with is when a human goes in and say, and says, you know, I've got pain, the doctor sees that as a medical problem. They see that as something they need to diagnose. Whether they do it by sending that patient off for imaging or some kind of tests they can do to test for that, or they can look and find a lesion of some sort, or they ask about limping, and those sort of things. What humans have that dogs don't have is verbal report. We can go to a doctor and say we feel crap, right? I hurt here. I It hurts here in the morning when I get up, if I try and stretch around and scratch my back, I get a really nasty pain there. I get pins and needles up here in my neck, dogs can't do that, no, so I think incumbent on veterinarians dealing with non verbal animals. Our job is even more important in relying on the pet parents testimony as part of that diagnosis, because we have to advocate for our pets. We have to be their voice and this.
Robert 40:00
Is what's missing in the vector profession. So many times I come across, and we all come across vets who will give the dog a physical examination, not find anything and sign them off as not in pain, right? Just because you can't, you can't prove a negative. This is the problem. Prove a positive because you got a result. But even with a test, a blood test or something like that, if you have a test that comes back negative, that doesn't categorically say you haven't got whatever it is they're testing for, right, all it does is say the test is negative, but there stood a chance to test might be wrong. It might be wrong, one in a million, so very unusual, but some tests are wrong. You know, one in 70, or one in 50, or one in 20. And I think when we're dealing with something like pain, we have to assume that a negative result is not a diagnosis. If you come back with a negative result and the animal is still showing that same non specific negative signs that the pet parent has picked up something wrong with that animal who you haven't seen, and it might not be something which is medical. You can do all the tests you like. It might not be medical. Nine times out of 10, the thing you can't diagnose with any lab tests or any X rays or anything else is going to be pain, unless you want to test something like a deep, very small cancer pain, but it's going to be painful in some way or uncomfortable. The other important word I like to emphasize is that when we when we talk about pain, it's not just pain, it's discomfort. I have pain in my ankles and my knees and my back and lots of other places. I can list them a big, long list. It's not always pain, a lot of it's just discomfort, right? I can feel discomfort now in my foot, under the desk. It's not pain, it's not what I call pain, but it's uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. Chronic uncomfortableness is as bad as chronic pain in many ways, because it's niggling away you the whole time, yeah, gnawing away at that mood state, and I think that's what we're missing. I come across so many vets who will not put an animal on a pain trial, yeah, pain trial not just, not just describe a little bit of Meloxicam or can't prevent or something, and say that's fine, put the animal on that for a week. Didn't make any difference. So I can categorically say the dog is not in pain. That's wrong. You cannot do you have to carry out a Comprehensive Pain test program using different beds for extended periods of time, like four to six weeks at least. The problem is that the vet group, profession also have the worry of of being sued by a client. So certainly vet students, when they come out of vet College, and I'm sure the same is in America, it's probably worse than America, because you're so litigation over there.
Robert 42:38
So they have a lecture from the for the legal people saying you have to be really careful, don't describe medicines which which you can't justify being prescribed, and that they take that as meaning. Don't give pain meds if you can't find any evidence of pain, right, right? But for me, lack of evidence, medical evidence, pain is not evidence of no pain, right? Makes sense? No, it definitely does. The verbal report for an animal, ie, you talking to your doctor, the dog's equivalent of that is just changing behavior. You know, we change behavior as well, but we tend we can verbalize, we can say, we can go and say, Look, I'm really sorry, but I really hurt here. I'm in agony in the morning when I wake up. Dog can't do that, yeah. So we're kind of stuck. That's why I think it's so important. I'm so passionate about this idea of of caregivers, their parents, being empowered to advocate for their dogs, being their dog's voice, but still, many, many people who feel that their knowledge isn't good enough to question what the vet is saying. That's where we're trying to get the message out there.
Chrissy 43:41
Yeah, yes, yeah, I agree. I mean, it's like thoughts, feelings, emotions, and then the behavior is the last thing, absolutely, behavior is the last thing we see training and behavior is a little bit all over the place. And I think we need to look at, you know, the body as one bunch of systems working together. I mean, I'm grateful for my sports medicine background, because I started out 20 years in sports medicine, and then I got into dog training, and I started with the, you know, ABA, like applied behavior analysis type stuff. It's not just behavior. There's other things that are going on here as well. You know, what? About the feelings? And then I have seen subtleties in dogs gait and their posture and their movement really subtle things that I'm like, I really think your dog's uncomfortable or in pain, and they're like, no, they're fine. And so I'm like, questioning myself, and then, like, no, actually, when I do some assessment type stuff and really get into it, you know, by touch, looking, asking the the Guardians questions. We really get to the root of what's going on. And so for me, I've had to really walk people through of like, no, your dog really is, you know, having some discomfort. And so we start with the Guardians, kind of educating.
Chrissy 45:00
About that, and then we have to talk with the veterinarian and really discuss that. I mean, I just had a client who has like, why don't you talk to your vet about getting some, you know, blood work to make sure you know the endocrine system's functioning well. And you know, even if something to think about. And she had to really talk with it was a young vet, and she had to really discuss this, yes, yes. And so it's a lot, there's like a lot of resistance to this.
Robert 45:28
Yeah, there is, yeah. I'm glad you brought physios up, because that's one thing I always recommend now, veterinarians are not trained to examine animals in that way, unless, unless you have an interest in orthopedics and urology, you don't go down that route because there are too many other things to to study. You can't, you can't be an expert at everything and veterinary stuff, yeah, you have. You need to specialize and concentrate on one thing. And the problem with physio, a physical examination of dogs, and physio and hydrotherapy and all those sort of things, is you actually need a lot of space and time to do it, yeah? And as we've already discussed, vets don't have that time, right? And so the first step is, I always say to an owner who has a dog where I'm battling with, we're trying to get them properly, paying assessed, is get a physio involved, because physios are brilliant at doing this. As you say, you know, I worship people like you, because you're, you're that kind of link. You're that kind of saving grace, which have the time to examine the dog physically in that way, and crop them up and look at gait, which is so important an animal which is stressed in a veterinary practice, it's going to be very restricted in their movements. Anyway. They're not, they're not going to show anything. You can't. You can't pick a dog up and take him out into a car park and run him up and down the car park simply Park times, and then say, Oh, he's fine, because he's stressed as hell. Yeah? So he's not going to be worrying about limping or anything like that. He's going to be so stressed the dog is just going to move and get the thing over and done with as soon as possible. You've got to have that dog looked at and assessed in a relaxed state. And only physios can do that.
Chrissy 47:00
Yeah. I mean, I went with a client to a rehab place, physical therapy place, and get, like, a full assessment, and that was two hours long. Absolutely, you know, certainly, I think you'll wear ahead of us over in the States, with, with using physios, using ancillary paramedics alongside what, what the veterinarians do. That's why I started this podcast, to get the real good information out there? Yeah, absolutely. You talked about this briefly, but kind of the last thing that I wanted to talk about is trusting, you know, my intuition is just getting a gut feeling, but then also getting curious about that feeling and then asking questions about it and getting validation with it. What does it look like for you?
Robert 47:40
My biochemistry lecturer when I when I was a vet, knowledge, one of his words of wisdom, which I remember well, is, never be ashamed or worried about how little you think you know this is in relation to biochemistry, because it's a bloody hard subject to study, and nobody really understood it very well. And his advice was, once we get out into the veterinary world is never worry about how little you think you know, because the people you're dealing with you know are going to know a hell of a lot less.
Robert 48:09
I think that same kind of philosophy can be reflected to vet parent, adult parent, because they're going to know far more about their animal in terms of their animals, micro changes in behavior, these really, really subtle signs, and know how to interpret those than any medical person you know, whatever their knowledge about medicine, these kind of things where it's much more subtle they need. They just need to have the confidence to rely on their intuitions. And, you know, I think people are getting better at doing that. If caregivers begin to understand that pain isn't a single thing, it's made up of different components. Yeah? Chronic pain, you forget. You can forget the original injury. If the pain is persisting, it's going to be in that bucket of other things. It's going to be emotional and it's going to be cognitive. So the only ones you need to worry about are the emotional and the cognitive. Yeah, and what the vet is seeing and perceiving is basically behavior if they've got a limp, and probably the aftermath of some kind of injury, but if they don't even see a limp, they don't even see that. It's a complicated thing. It's a complicated thing for human doctor to diagnose, and as I say, they rely the most reliable diagnostic tool is asking patients how they feel. It is a difficult one, I know, because I know you find it difficult. I do as well, and I've been trying all which I think the only way to do it through education, educating lots of different media. And I don't know if you saw over Christmas, I put out a series of 27 something, uh, myths, yeah, though, yeah. What that is, is a is a is a tool to do that. And I ran the same thing last year as well. And the interesting thing is, it was more popular this year than was last year. There's obviously reached a different audience. Because, as we started at the beginning, when you run those things on social media, only a tiny, tiny fraction of people see them, and even the ones that are shared get seen by a tiny, tiny fraction of people who are on there. And all you need to do is touch some of.
Robert 50:00
Who hasn't seen it before, who might be a friend of a friend of a friend? Yeah, maybe, maybe that a little tiny homeopathic dose of that might get out to a different group. You know, I need to live another 100 years. So
Robert 50:12
if you bang you on about this, but it's just trying to find different ways to do it. So, yeah, you know, like, it's frustrating, but I think, I think we're on the same page on this, and I think, you know, a lot of other animal advocates, is, what we're not doing is breaking out of that and breaking into audiences of people that we simply can't reach, right? And that's the difficulty, yeah, that's the challenge we face.
Chrissy 50:40
As you're talking about the different kinds of pain thinking like the sensory, the emotional, the cognitive and the behavioral. I'm literally thinking of one client that I've seen this progression with. It's so interesting because I'm like, oh, okay, that makes sense with what I was seeing, but I didn't know how to describe it. I didn't know how to put words to it. Yeah. So now, as you're saying it, I see each step, the sensory, the emotional, the cognitive, like just the subtle change and happiness to see me. She's usually super happy to see me all the time. Something's not quite right.
Robert 51:18
This is the thing. It could be doing the same thing, but if they're 10 milliseconds behind, you will recognize, because you you're so used to them, the timing of what they do, and just the slightest, slightest change in that timing, and it takes lots of practice and awareness of doing it. And so you know that sensory, emotional, cognitive and behavior, it's a little it's a progression, and I literally can see it with one of my clients.
Chrissy 51:44
So that's just interesting, and it's gonna it's just gonna take a lot of practice and repetition for people to hear it and process it and do it and see it again. It comes down to education. Yeah, is there anything that's weighing on your mind, or any nugget of wisdom that you want to share with our audience.
Robert 52:04
I guess it's a message to vets that they need to think about more empathic thinking. They need to remember that they've got one mouth and two ears, and they need to be used in that proportion rather than the other way around. Mm, hmm, because they usually have preconceived ideas about what's wrong with the pet even before they come into the room, because you can look back at the history, and certainly, if that particular pet parent has been seen another Vet, and that other vet has formed a conclusion that there's nothing there that sets them up to think the same thing that's a big problem that's yeasing or empathic listening. Apart from that, I think we need to think more broadly about how we communicate. That's the other important thing, actually, that we are all very comfortable in our in our various Facebook groups, talking to each other and reinforcing our own thinking. Yeah, and that's really easy. What we've got to do is somehow become like those old fashioned preachers, where you have such conviction in your own beliefs. Yeah, if you're comfortable for you to go and look beyond that, you tend to stay within your own group, with your own beliefs. I think we have the same thing here where, where we're battling against a lot of misunderstandings, and we tend to be preaching to ourselves. I'm talking to you now, and it's great, and I'm relaxed doing it, because I know you agree with what you know what I'm thinking, and vice versa, but it's quite difficult doing the same thing to somebody who has a completely opposite view. But the problem is that the casualty of that not reaching out to those who need it, is that there are lots of parents who are falling through the cracks, and they never get a chance to become involved with people like us because they become involved in some other religion, if you like. And I use religion in quotes religion or behavior. Humans are tribal. We like to belong to a tribe. You know, whatever you know, whatever we think, we like to belong to a tribe. And that's because we're very social people. We're very social animals. We're obligated socialites, um, we mingle with people who think like us, who believe like us, which is why we, you know, you and I, ended up talking to each other because we're in that same group. It's breaking out of that. Social media is a wonderful tool to do that. I don't know how to do it, right? It's made it worse, actually, in many ways, because it's giving people a platform become even more groupy. If you seem to have charisma, and you have, you know, gift of the gab, and speaking, a whole pile of stuff to get likes on Tiktok and Facebook. I don't know how to do that. And you know, we need more people like that on our side, so I don't know. Yeah, so that that's, that's my biggest frustration. It's not really words of wisdom, Chrissy, but it's, it's words of frustration and hope.
Chrissy 54:34
I think it is words of wisdom you have lots of you have lots of experience.
Robert 54:39
The word of wisdom maybe would be that we must not be too comfortable in our little groups.
Robert 54:44
Yeah. I mean, I think it's all about being curious, asking questions and having an open mind Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. If anyone would like to reach you, contact with you, talk with you. What's the best way that they can do that?
Robert 54:58
Just put my name in the internet. Name on Google, other other search engines are available because I'm there. I've got, I've got a website, petcpd.com, okay, if you put my name, I have such a unique it's not because I'm famous, it's because I've got an unusual name. If I was Robert Smith, nobody ever find me. Yeah, because my name is Falconer Taylor. There aren't any other Robert Falconer Taylors And you'll see, I'll come up in the top heads so they can look at your website. I'm easy to find, okay, that's why I hide up here in Northwest islands of Scotland. I'm easy to find on on the internet, but not easy to find job geographically, in person. Yeah.
Chrissy 55:35
All right. Well, thank you so much for being here.
Robert 55:38
No My pleasure. Chrissy,
Chrissy 55:39
thank you for joining us today. I hope you discovered a valuable nugget you can implement right away with your dog. If you enjoyed the episode, please follow, rate and share with fellow dog lovers who might benefit. Don't forget to take our How well do you know your dog quiz? You'll find the link in the show notes until next week. Happy tales.
