Podcast (308)

In this episode Petra and I discuss the difference between attention and engagement. Join us for Petra's advice on preparing your dog for the competition ring. 

Looking to add some joy back into your training? Join Julie and I for a conversation about ways to use games to build connection, engagement, attention and... joy!  

 Have a dog that struggles to think clearly in or around the agility ring? Want to be proactive, so your dog can always keep his head? In this episode Bronagh and I talk about how to create that "thinking brain" even when exciting, overwhelming or intimidating things are happening around our dogs!

 Transcript

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today I have Bronnagh Daly here to talk about Control Unleashed for agility. Hi, Bronagh. Welcome back to the podcast.

Bronagh Daly: Hi, thanks for having me back.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. To start us off, do you want to just remind folks a little bit about you, a little bit about your dogs, maybe what you're working on? Yeah. So I have two dogs currently that are at like opposite stages of their agility careers. I have one, Razzle, who is essentially retired, and then I have Wild, who is nine months now. So he's learning some of the agility foundation stuff and having a great time with that.

And I am also myself a Control Unleashed instructor, and I've been doing agility since I was like 15 or 16 and then teaching it for, I don't know, some amount of years, not that many years, but some amount of years I can never remember.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Speaking of Control Unleashed, so I think people often, like, think about Control Unleashed kind of as a tool specifically for dogs that are reactive. Maybe. Can you talk a little bit about kind of your perspective on the wider range of dogs who might benefit from working through some of the program?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah. So that definitely is a faction of Control Unleashed that's definitely useful for reactive dogs, for sure. But I would say it's, you know, all of my large majority of the students that I work with in person who I do Control Unleashed for agility with, I would say they just have a lot of feelings about agility itself and not necessarily would fall into the category of reactive.

So I'd say it's really also just useful for dogs who can benefit from clarity and benefit from having a really good thinking brain and learning how to have a really good thinking brain while doing things that are exciting. Because a lot of the dogs who can benefit from this type of thing often just think agility is like really, really cool or, you know, or even like think parts of agility are cool, but other parts of it maybe are a little weird or something like that, or maybe are just young and excited and like, you know, aren't as adapt at thinking while doing fun things because, you know, we, that's a skill that we definitely have to teach dogs is how to think while also, you know, be happy and excited.

So I'd say all of those things Control Unleashed can be useful for kind of when it comes to sports as well. Just learning how to think and think well while doing your sports.

Melissa Breau: So you mentioned excited in there. And obviously reactions come from excitement or frustration or whatever. Are there other emotions that kind of you're thinking about when you say the big feelings piece?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, so I would say definitely dogs can also have like stressy feelings, for sure.

That can definitely be one. Or dogs who are kind of like overwhelmed potentially. Dogs who are just kind of sensitive in general to certain environments or maybe certain kind of aspects of learning. That's definitely a big one as well. So there can be kind of a range of feelings. Doesn't just have to be exciting. And there can even often I would find with dogs, if specifically in the agility context there can be kind of like a mix of feelings.

The dogs maybe like to do the thing. Hopefully they like to do the thing. That's why we're doing it. But they like to do the thing. But maybe there are certain aspects that they struggle with. Like a lot of people staring at them. Like that can be really weird. Or maybe other dogs who are really excited in their environment make them nervous or, you know, the environment itself is very stressful and overwhelming because people are running around and warming up their own dogs and yelling and being really excited and, you know, doing all kinds of things. So definitely there can be a large range of emotions in there, for sure.

Melissa Breau: What kinds of Control Unleashed games are we talking about? What do you like your agility dogs to know? Can you talk us through a couple of examples or an example or…

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, for sure. My absolute favorite game that I use a lot is the Super Bowls game. I like to use dots for. For it instead of bowls though.

So like an exercise dot type of thing. Just because it's a little easier to use just because people like stepping in bowls or dogs stepping in bowls and like rolling ankles makes me nervous. But so I tend to call it like the Dots Game colloquially, but it is definitely a Super Bowls game. That one I like to use a lot because I find that to be really flexible.

Whereas essentially, like the basis of it is kind of like the up down game where you put a piece of food on the thing and then they eat the food and then they look back to you and re-engage with you and then you repeat. Except it's on a dot, essentially. So I'll use the dot and you put the piece of food on the dot. They eat the food and then they look to you.

And essentially the reason why I like to use that is because it teaches a dog, first of all. Like, they go to a specific target, they eat some food, and then they learn how to engage with you again and also choose to engage with you. So that can work in a number of ways. A, they can tell you kind of like, hey, I'd like to keep going now.

So that's one way I find that to be really useful, because when you're working, you know, on certain distractions, like, for a specific example, I have some games that I'll do for dogs that have feelings about other dogs who are entering the ring as they're exiting the ring. And that can be really hard because, you know, some dogs maybe have feelings about, like, but this is my agility floor, and why do they get to come in?

Or maybe. Or, like, that dog looks really cool. I want to go chase that dog. Or that dog is staring at me, and that's really weird. And I don't like that. You know, a whole number of feelings can be in there. But whatever the feelings may be, I love to use the Dot Game to work on kind of both exiting the ring and then also being able to choose to kind of keep moving away and out of the ring while another dog is coming to the space.

So, you know, you can even add agility to that as well, because, you know, if we're all actually doing what we're supposed to be doing in trials, often we're supposed to be technically, like, coming in while our dogs are running and all of that. So also kind of sometimes integrate actually that into the agility. But essentially the basic is like that, you know, the dog who has the feelings is going down a line of dots, whether or not there's obstacles involved in that.

And each time they do the dot, they're choosing to connect back to their person, and they're saying, hey, I'm with you. I can keep going. So that we really give the dog the choice and kind of the ownership over the fact that they can say, yep, I'm good. I can move through this game. And at the same time, on the flip side, then you also know if your dog can't, because if they don't look to you and they say, nope, then you're like, okay, this is too hard.

We need to reinvent this game for you a little bit, or something like that. So that's probably my favorite one. I use that in a lot of my games, the Super Bowls. I also find it to be the most adaptable, so I use it in a ton of different ways, like, start Lines or end of run routines, all kinds of things, I find that to be useful. But then my other kind of two big ones that I use the most would probably be like the 1, 2, 3 game.

So 1, 2, 3, they look to you reward or a some sort of like mat or default behavior I find to be really useful too. So assuming that you kind of teach those games initially in like a lower stakes environment, not in the middle of the agility ring.

Melissa Breau: Right. How do you begin to introduce that agility context into that picture?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, so yes, 100%. You don't want to just be like, hey, here's these games, let's do it now while you're having a lot of feelings.

Because that's definitely not what we want to build into the games for sure. So I like to introduce them kind of first in just a really easy way. So whether it's kind of like, hey, we're going to, you know, do this game and maybe we'll include one jump in this or something, but it's the same game. Or maybe we'll just go, you know, to an environment that you know to be agility related and practice these games around that.

Or maybe we'll start to integrate it into like we're gonna do, you know, sits and then ascend around the wing or something like that. So it kind of depends on what game exactly. Say it's like mat work, for example. Mat work. We might, you know, start to integrate it as, hey, this is like our go, take a break type of thing. So we're gonna, you know, do like three repetitions of going around the backside.

Now we're gonna go run to our mat and we're gonna go relax on our mat. Okay, now we're going to go back and we're going to do like three repetitions of this. So you can start to kind of integrate it as like a reset like that. So I'd say it kind of depends if you're working on like outside of ring skills. Usually I like to add kind of the different variations of agility first.

So first like, hey, there's agility that exists now maybe you've done some of the agility. Okay, now maybe someone else has done some of the agility now or maybe in an environment that you know that agility exists, that you think is really cool and cooler than the other environment. You know, there's lots of ways to do it and lots of layers to do it. But I would say it probably depends on kind of like your exact goal for how you're going to use it with what skill? If that makes sense.

Melissa Breau: Yeah, yeah. So I know that you said, like, part of the goal here, right, Is trying to get the dog to be a little more thoughtful. So how does that part work? How do the games actually help our dogs learn to be more thoughtful, even though they, you know, are really excited or really anticipating the arousal, running the course or having some of those big feelings we were talking about earlier?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah. So bringing the Control Unleashed games into the agility, if you've worked on the Control Unleashed games outside of agility, I will caveat to that. That it really helps dogs learn kind of how to regulate themselves, I would say, is a big one. So those games in themselves are patterns, largely or based in patterns, or taught in patterns, or taught in relaxation and settling. And so when you bring those patterns where the dog understands kind of how to regulate themselves within the patterns, how to make choices within the patterns, then and finds those patterns kind of very soothing and predictable and bring then those predictable, soothing things into agility, you can then kind of layer those feelings into agility also.

Choice, kind of, as I was saying, is a big one. So when your dog can kind of like choose to look to you and choose to disengage, or choose to disengage from things, you know, distractions, or choose to engage with you, those can also be super, super powerful for a lot of dogs. So say, you know, start lines, for example, say they have a lot of feelings about start lines, putting them within a pattern, say, of like the Super Bowls, where we start to integrate start line behaviors into the super bowl pattern, can be really soothing for dogs.

And also it makes it really predictable, which often as start line, like, is not super predictable because, you know, weird things happen often or like, the human is distracted or, you know, whatever it might be. So bringing that in, you know, predictability, the structure, the calmer, thoughtful feelings, and then layering those into agility kind of slowly, you don't want to just be like, let's throw dots everywhere and just figure it out.

You know, when you do that as a human thoughtfully, then it can really help your dog to kind of carry over those good thoughts and feelings kind of into the agility environment.

Melissa BreauL Do you continue to, like, kind of play some of these games throughout your dog's agility career, or is it kind of like a get to a certain point and then you can kind of fade them out?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, I would say for sure in some ways. So it depends on, you know, say you've done your end of run routine and you've taught it through Control Unleashed games, and then it's fine and good, some even less that falls apart or something, then I probably wouldn't bring those back in if it did start to fall apart. Like for some reason, some dog rushes your dog at, you know, at the end of a run, and then your dog starts to look at the other dog instead of coming to you or going to target their leash at the end of the run because they're worried they're going to rush them.

What can be really nice is within that context, your dog already understands a structure. So then you can rebuild that behavior within the structure. So I'd say in one way that's super useful. So if anything ever happens where like something starts to fall apart or something weird happens, you can help your dog rebuild the confidence or rebuild the kind of their understanding in that way. But I would say in general, certain things like learning how to settle out on course or, you know, learning how to be settled around, agility in general, I would say those Control Unleashed games are definitely always kind of useful to revisit just to make sure we're retaining our good thinking brain.

Particularly as dogs get further and further into agility, they're like, I know how this works. I know all the things or potentially like, you're going, you're, you know, you're having fun and you're like, I want to go to bigger events, then there's a whole lot more feelings there. So I'd say, you know, in those respects, it's definitely helpful to keep those within kind of your repertoire. If somebody is actively competing now or they're attending classes maybe, and they want to kind of work through some of this stuff, do they need to stop like playing or attending class or, you know, competing in order to work on those things?

If it's like over arousal related, you know, are there contingencies there? Feel free to go into all of them. But, you know, if they want to work through this stuff, they need to stop doing other agility things, work on this and then come back to it. Or can they do them simultaneously? I would say it depends. So it's never a bad idea to stop rehearsing the problem that you're having essentially so that you can build back better skills and better feelings and better thinking brains.

So, you know, if it's like, hey, my dog gets super amped up and knocks a bunch of bars and then like comes over and bites, bites me, because they're, you know, having a lot of feelings they're like, no, we don't want to keep rehearsing that. Like, not ideal. We probably would like to just, you know, and maybe it's that your dog does that in trials, but in, you know, in classes, they're fine.

So there can be different layers of that as well. So it kind of depends on what. What we're working on. So for some dogs, it may be that they run really well, but then once they get to a trial, like they sniff and disengage and disappear, or, you know, at the end of the run, they kind of like don't know what to do and they go do laps around the ring because they're like, I don't want to leave.

This is not fun. So I'd say in those cases, then we probably want to step away from just the environments that those are happening in. But we don't have to step away completely. But if we're just kind of in general having a lot of feelings about agility and we kind of get there and we're just like worried about all the people staring at us in a class or in our lesson, or we're like running, you know, along the fence line while another dog runs agility.

Because we're like, I can't focus. There's no dog running agility or something like that. Then for sure, always useful kind of step. Take a step back, just essentially so we're not rehearsing those same things. And because the more we build in those behaviors to our performance, the more we tend to get those behaviors in our performance. So I am not someone who is like, my dog goes and visits people in the ring, like, okay, let's just keep going and keep letting it happen, and then your dog will figure it out.

That's not generally my philosophy. My philosophy is, okay, your dog is going to visit people in the ring. Okay, that's just information that your dog is telling us that they're having some feelings either about the people in the ring or about something else that's causing them to displace by visiting the people in the ring. And that's something we probably want to stop rehearsing just so it doesn't become, you know, a behavior pattern essentially where that person looks at them and laughs or smiles, and they're like, haha, go jump in your lap.

You know, we want to work on that so that we can build behavior patterns of just running agility and then come back to it. So I'd say it varies, but definitely if you're not sure if you should be taking a break. I think it's never a bad idea. So it sounds a little bit like if you have an existing undesired behavior, it might be a good idea to stop the situation where that's happening.

And if you're just doing it preemptively, maybe you keep playing or, you know, some of that kind of stuff. Yeah, exactly. And if it's, you know, and be very thoughtful, like, that's why I love having videos of what all runs and everything. Because then you can really tell, like, okay, you know, because it can be easy to be like, well, this only happens in trials. But then, you know, you're looking at your class and you're like, oh, is that actually my dog checking out?

But just in like a less pronounced way. So is it maybe actually also happening in classes? It's just not my dog running away and sniffing and then jumping on a person just looks different because the environment is a little less intense. So I think, you know, being honest with ourselves with that is also super helpful because then it does kind of, you know, the best for. It's best for us and for our dogs too. Because practicing, you know, those feelings for anyone isn't fun.

Melissa Breau: No, absolutely not. So in February, you have your new class, Fast and Focused, that's looking at Control Unleashed for agility. Can you share a little more about kind of what the class covers, who might be interested, any prereqs, that kind of thing?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, of course. Yeah. I'm very excited about this class. It's a very ambitious class. So we plan to cover a lot in this class.

The class covers essentially a couple different things. So it's going to cover kind of like skills outside of the ring. It's going to cover certain skills inside of the ring. We're not going to be learning how to. To weave or learning how to like, do a tunnel or, you know, anything like that. But we're going to be working either with kind of like existing things that are going on inside the ring already and related largely to like contact type behaviors, start line type behaviors, knocked bar type behaviors, and kind of if we're having feelings with those, or maybe our criteria isn't super clear.

It's going to be working around those and learning kind of ways to help our dogs think through those or ways to kind of work on distractions that might be causing problems there. It's going to be the start line, end of run. So kind of how to shape your run in a way that is Easy, predictable and you know, fun and not stressful for our dogs. And then also kind of like the general aspect of working, you know, in a trial environment.

So you know, the dogs and people and those kind of exciting or you know, stressful or nerve wracking or whatever it is, those feelings going on which, and that's, you know, honestly can be for the human or the dog, like controlling patterns can also be soothing for the human too because you know, the more tools that we have in our tool belt also when something happens can be also very, very helpful for us as well.

So as far as kind of prereqs or anything, I would say it's useful for dogs either who kind of are beginning their jelly careers and that can be like a very young dog who's not, you know, actually who's jumping 4 inches or 6 inches or something, or a dog who is just learning their content behavior or just learning their start lines, you know, and has not ever really fully sequenced.

So that's definitely appropriate. Or it's also very applicable for dogs who have been trialing for a while or even are just starting to trial or even they're just working in classes. You don't even have to be trialing and just wanting to be successful in classes and seminars and are seeing kind of some problems that are pre existing already. So you don't necessarily have to be doing full equipment to get a lot of stuff out of this class.

So if you are doing full equipment though, there's definitely a lot that we can do with that as well. So I'd say it's kind of like varied on who it can be appropriate for. But I would say the only like real prereq is that you don't have like a tiny little puppy who knows absolutely zero things about agility. We do want to have like some understanding of agility things for you to get something out of the class.

If you do have a puppy and you want to audit the class, then for sure you can get stuff out of that too as a feature. But just as far as like working spots, there wouldn't be a lot you could do if you had a tiny little puppy. But and then supplies it's largely flexible unless you want to work on kind of contact behaviors or jumping specifically. So I'd say that's the only one that space and or kind of equipment is less flexible with.

Just because if we're going to work on jumping, we need jumps and we need space to be able to work on jumping. So it's a usually like three or four jumps can suffice. You do want a little bit of space for that so your dog can practice. Because if we're working on knocked bars, we want space for our dogs to be able to actually, you know, jump as they would be jumping, you know, or.

And for contacts, you don't necessarily have to have like a full teeter, but you know, if you have like a contact board or like a mini teeter or you know, a Cato Board that is set up like a teeter or something like that, you know, whatever, you can work with that as well. But I would say those, that's kind of the main part that has the most kind of, I would say limitations that you might actually need more equipment. The other things are fairly flexible though, the other parts of class.

Melissa Breau: So I know you've broken the class into kind of different themes. Do you want to talk a little bit about those? Do students kind of need to pick one? How is this going to work?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, so the different themes are specifically, I like kind of vaguely said them, but more specifically they are working around other dogs and people.

Start lines and end of run routines is number two. Number three is criteria inside the ring. So that's our knocked bars, start lines. Broken criteria, like broken contact behaviors, mostly stopped behaviors because running contacts is a whole other enchilada. And then outside the ring skills. So that's basically kind of like from the car to the gate to the ring essentially skills basically. So each of those, there's going to be kind of like four themes essentially and there will be lectures for each of that theme by week.

So the first week is going to be mostly like making sure all of our skills are really strong, that we're going to be using class and adding distractions to those already so that, you know, our dogs have good thinking brains within those skills before we actually add agility to it, that we just have like other distractions that you'll find in agility but aren't agility itself. And then as we start to bring them to agility, we're going to have kind of lectures that are going to be broken up, not necessarily one per theme because the themes are often, you know, have different facets to them, but students can basically do whatever they want.

So students like say, you know, you just want to come in and work on end of run routines and start, you know, and start lines or something like that. And you're like, I'm going to just pick those two things. That's great. If you're like, I want to do Every single lecture. That's also great if you, you know, basically whatever you would like to do is great. So you can pick to do as many or as few of the themes as you want.

And you can also be like, you know what, I'm only gonna do this one jumping, you know, lecture because I think, you know, the soft turns that we're working on in this jumping lecture is going to be really useful for me. But I think every other jumping thing my dog understands, and that's, you know, the only time we knock bars is during, like a soft turn type thing.

But I'm not going to do anything else when jumping and I'm just going to work on other things. Like, that's also totally fine. So you can, like, pick like one thing out of a theme or something that's useful to you. So basically it's very flexible. A little bit of a choose your own adventure, but also some guidance there. Yeah, yeah, choose your own adventure, but with guidance. And I'm happy to guide anyway. If you're like, I don't know how to choose my own adventure, we can also do that together.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Any final thoughts or key points you want to leave folks with?

Bronagh Daly: Basically just that. I would say Control Unleashed for agility, I think can be very helpful for any dog. So I think that's just something that you highlighted a bit at the beginning, which I think is important because often we tend to think that Control Unleashed is just for reactive dogs.

So just for dogs who are barking and lunging at other dogs or people or something like that. But it's really just about thinking and about learning successfully and, you know, making the chaos of agility feel like much more predictable and easier kind of to accomplish for everybody. And the various aspects of trialing as well. So if you are thinking you want to trial with your dog or you're seeing issues with trialing, this is definitely a lot of these lectures are going to really, really help with those as well.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Bronagh.

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Julie Flannery to talk about how she gamifies her training for her dogs. If you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice, our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by BenSound.com the track featured here is called Buddy. Audio Editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.

 Credits

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called "Buddy." Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training! 

You may have seen her on TikTok or Instagram... this week the dog trainer known for sharing her videos on social media is making an appearance here on the FDSA podcast! If you aren't already following her, you'll want to by the time you finish listening.  

Today we brought together several of the presenters from our upcoming one day conference on nosework, Know the Nose! They share what they wish they'd known sooner about nosework, as well as how they tailor their training and handling to the dog in front of them. 

Karen and I talk about how she uses a settle behavior in her behavior work and what it means to have a harmonious household.  

Hear the story of what inspired Denise's popular circle method for loose leash walking, and join us for a discussion on goal setting as we head into the near year! 

In honor of our current sale, we're bringing back highlights from several previous conversations on choosing your sport puppies, dealing with adolescence, what it means to have a confident dog and what it means to have a high drive dog... and combining them for one final takeaway. 

Trying to decide if Nosework is worth a try? In this episode Julie and I talk about the benefits of nosework and how to adapt your handling to improve your nosework dog's performance. 

When running an agility course full speed there's a lot your dog has to process... so how do you make handling clear for your dog? Bronagh and I talk about handling clearly and training your dog to optimize that clarity. 

Ever wondered what it takes to train the show stopping tricks you see frisbee dogs and stunt dogs perform? In this episode Sara and I talk about training big moves — what to think about, how to break them down, and what you need to consider to keep both you and your dog safe. 

Need a strategy for getting reinforcement off your body? Wondering what other skills you should have on board before that first competition? In this episode Nancy and I talk about all of the pieces that go into preparing our dogs to perform their best.

Shaping: People either love it or hate it! Join Julie and I for a conversation on why it should be a tool in your training toolbox and how you can build your skills so you and your dog can become a talented shaping team.

As positive reinforcement trainers we often use food for everything! In this episode Irith and I talk about desensitization and counterconditioning... and why Irith actually prefers not using food for these cases unless we need to. 

Join us for a fantastic panel discussion with Dr. Amy Cook, Denise Fenzi, Kim Palermo, and Petra Ford on sports dogs, their big feelings, and how to help them thrive.  

What do we know about anxiety in our canine companions? Join us for a conversation about what causes anxiety and what we can do about it. 

What do we know about resilience and what it takes to build more of it in our dogs? Join Bobbie and I for a conversation on what factors we need to consider when it comes to our dogs and helping them deal with stress — and why that's SO important for our sports dogs. 

 Transcription

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau, and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today I have Bobbie Bhambree here with me to talk about resilience in dog training. Hi, Bobbie. Welcome to the podcast.

Bobbie Bhambree: Hi. I'm so happy to be here.

Melissa Breau: I'm super excited to chat a little bit to start us out. Do you want to just share a little bit about kind of who you are, maybe who your dogs are, little on your background?

Bobbie Bhambree: Absolutely. Well, I have to talk about my dogs first. I have six. I've always had a very large number of dogs, and the reason I'm talking about them first because they're so much a part of my background. I currently have three little terriers.

I call them the littles. And then we have three medium sized dogs that are the bigs terrier mixes, a pit bull, and then two Collie mixes. I'm currently competing and training in agility. That is my jam, my dog sport of choice with Funky, who's a border collie with it, mix and Drazen. He is a croatian sheepdog mixed with border collie, hence the name. His name is a Croatian name, and my husband named him because at the time he was our 7th dog.

So I said, of course you can name him because you allowed me to have seven dogs. He's named after a basketball player who played for the New Jersey Nets named Drausin Petrovich. I'm saying all this because everyone's like, where did this name come from? If you followed the basketball in the nineties, you knew about this guy. He was like, I think one of the first Europeans that were, that was drafted into the NBA at the time.

So he's a very important person to my husband, who was twelve years old at the time, that said, oh, my God, this guy's cool. So draws in. Yeah, and I'm a certified dog behavior consultant. I have been a dog trainer for maybe 23 years and really started to move towards behavior work for the last 15 years. And for the last six years, I've done it exclusively. I worked for a company called Behavior Vets, a veterinary behavior practice that also had behavior consultants working there.

And so I learned so much about the inner workings of the brain, the body, and how what's happening internally and what's happening externally really kind of work together and what can result when they're not working together symbiotically. And I have been doing agility for, gosh, it's got to be 20 years. And my passion is bringing behavior work to the dog sports world. So I have a lot of clients that call me not just because they might be struggling with a behavior issue in the ring, like maybe jumping up and biting their handler while running through the course or having struggling with arousal regulation, but I also get a lot of dog sports people calling me because maybe two dogs are not getting along in the house or one is fearful or things like that. So I love, I'm very passionate about working with the dog sports community specifically.

Melissa Breau: Very cool. So how did you originally get into the dog world? Was it the agility angle there?

Bobbie Bhambree: No, I was 22 years old and I got my first dog. I grew up with dogs, apparently. My mom said I used to watch, like, Marty Stouffer's wild America, like every weekend, apparently, or something. And I'd always watch National Geographic.

And, you know, to this day, on the weekends, if I'm not competing at an event, when I wake up in the morning, I don't turn on the news, I turn on like BBC's like planet Earth or whatever with David Attenborough. You know, he's like the commentator. I love nature. I love animals. And when I was 22, I got my first dog as an adult, my own dog, I mean, who's really an adult at 22?

I thought I was, fair enough. A little pit bull rescue named Claire. She was a lot of dog, and in retrospect, she really wasn't. But at the time, she felt like a lotta dog. Just didn't know what I was doing at all. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but working with her helped because she became reactive. She would get very frustrated on the leash. And so that helped me get into this world.

And my partner at the time also had a dog and he was doing a lot of work with him. And so we just fell into it, like dog walking and loving dogs, going to seminars and initially volunteering at the ASPCA. I happen to be wearing a sweatshirt of the ASPCA right now, then getting jobs there when they were just a little shelter organization in New York City compared to now, where they have a national, even global reach.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. Okay. So it sounds like maybe that's part of how you got into resilience and behavior work. Is that right?

Bobbie Bhambree: Yes. Yes. So much of it was shelter work initially and learning along the way, sometimes the hard way, how supporting mental and physical well being is more important than skills training. Because if the mental and physical well being is not taken care of. Learning skills is just not going to happen, not in an effective way. It's going to influence how they're learning. It's influencing what they're learning, what's associated with that experience. So, yes, resilience is a big part of that conversation.

Melissa Breau: Can you talk us through kind of how you define and think about resilience when we're talking about dog training and maybe why it's important that we're thinking about it, right? Why it's part of the picture?

Bobbie Bhambree: Yeah. So I'm very lucky to have a friend who's a neuroscientist. Her name is doctor Kathy Murphy. I think she's going to be doing something for you guys soon. And she and I have been friends for maybe 13 or 14 years. And early on, you know, she knew that. And she's also a veterinarian, DBM. So early on, we would have these conversations coming from two different perspectives about the dog world. And through these conversations, you know, she was learning more about the practical side of things because I am a practitioner and I was learning more about what was happening in the brain, what was happening in the body, and how the environment can impact behavior.

But there's so much more to it than just the environment. There's all these internal processes that we might be able to guess what's going on, but scientists can actually track what's going on because they're in a lab and they're doing these studies and they're doing the work. They have the equipment attached to the animals that they're researching these concepts on, these theories on. And so through these conversations, we started to look at resilience through a neurobiological lens.

And essentially what it is, is resilience is the ability to bounce back from stressors. It's a dynamic process. So you might be really resilient at one point in your life, and you might be, you might have low resilience at another point of your life because of a number of factors which I'll get into in a moment. So not only is it the ability to bounce back from stressful events, but it's also the ability to resist the negative impacts of stress.

And when I say stress, I don't necessarily mean like, oh, I have this deadline coming up and I'm really stressed about it because stress can also be a good thing. I spoke at the APDT conference and I was stressed before it, but I was also so excited. So stress is not necessarily a barometer of where you are emotionally it's just what we're looking at. It is where you are physically, physiologically.

Before I got married, the whole day I'm with my bridesmaids, and I'm really excited, and I just remember my entire body was, like, vibrating. I was so nervous, but I was so happy, right? So physiologically, my body was under a lot of stress and anticipating reading my vows in front of all these people that I love. It was my second marriage, so it was like a very big deal to have gone through the process of healing and then discovery and then meeting my now husband and then getting married for both of us.

We got married in our mid to late thirties. It was a very different experience. And I was so stressed all day long, and I was so happy all day long. But, my God, I had to take some time to, like, quietly sit or, like, take the dog, my dogs, for a walk around the grounds because I was so nervous. So stress is really what, it's a physiological process to get the body ready, more oxygen, more glucose, like, to prepare the body for the event that's coming up or the event in the moment, like, God forbid, a car accident.

Your adrenaline starts going so that you can do what you need to do to take care of yourself. So there's short term stress where in the moment, that car accident, or you have a deadline coming up for work, then you have medium stress. Like, maybe you're dealing with some work drama, or maybe you're dealing with, like, you're struggling with communication with your kid or something in this moment.

And then there's chronic stress. And the chronic stress in your body is really where breakdown happens, where injury, illness, disease starts to happen, where the stress is now impacting your ability to or whatever chronically, because your body is activated, all the stress hormones are activated, and staying active the entire time you're now, it's impacting how you're digesting your food, it's impacting your quality of sleep. It's impacting your mood, it's impacting so your cognitive function.

There's so many different things impacted by chronic stress. Now, chronic stress could be a result of external factors. Like, I was living with my husband, and I were living with his parents for a number of years, and we were supporting his dad and taking care of my mother in law, who had Alzheimer's. That's chronic stress, being a caregiver at that level, right? And then there's like, what are you doing for yourself in those situations to recover from that chronic stress?

My husband felt it more than I am, than I do. And he is just now. She passed away this past April. She was in a home for, like, three years, I think, a care facility. Four years. And so, yeah, four years, so. But only now is his body starting to recover from that, and he is working with professionals and the right people to support himself in that process.

But when you've got years of that kind of stress that your body's dealing with the whole time, stuff happens, like, your body breaks down and then. I know this is a very long explanation, but coming back to dogs now, even if at home, everything is really, like, lovely and relaxed, they have this really balanced quality of life. When you bring them to these events, their bodies have to become stressed, and that doesn't mean it's a bad thing.

A lot of, most of these dogs who compete in whatever sports they're in love what they do. They either inherently love it or they grow to love it. A lot of them love what they do. They get so excited when you arrive at the site, for example. But their bodies have to prepare for that event. So as a result, everything is activated to get into that optimal state of performance.

Now, if things are not done to support them in coming back down, they could potentially stay in that elevated state. Now, some dogs can naturally just do that. Some dogs have people who either are aware of this and support them coming down or just happen to live a lifestyle that supports them coming down. A really strong example of where you see a body that's activated into this kind of level of stress and not coming down is maybe operational work with dogs that do operational work, dogs in the military, these police dogs are at this high level of stress.

And the information is there, but it's not in these fields yet. It's not. A lot of people don't yet know. A lot of professionals don't yet know the value of supporting the body and completing that stress cycle so that they're not staying in that elevated stress, even though the dog might love the work. Does that make sense?

Melissa Breau: Yeah, I think that's such kind of an interesting way of thinking about it, too, with dog sports. And you're going to these events, especially if you're competing, like, every single weekend for months on end. Right? Like, thinking about the fact that your dog's body is going through that every single weekend, in addition to, like, the wear and tear of training, which I think people are becoming more aware of and kind of thinking about more intentionally so. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Ton of super interesting pieces in there.

Okay, so talk to me a little bit more about some of the sciencey bits you mentioned in there. You know, what do we kind of know from a science perspective? What do we maybe think about from a science perspective, what's out there maybe not true.

Bobbie Bhambree: Yeah. So that stress is all stress is bad. I think. I think people know now in mainstream culture that not all stress is bad.

When we're looking at stress in this conversation, we're looking specifically about how the body is responding to the environment or events in the environment or if it's a human being. Thoughts, some of our own thoughts, create that physiological response. Right. Like, I started my own business, and I was, like, really worried and stressed about it, and as a result, I've got this ugly cold sore. So I'm so glad we're doing this audio and not video.

Right. But this is just what happens with your body. So I think that the other thing is, and this might be a little bit controversial, but I'll say it anyway, is that it's more than operant. So the working through building resilience operantly works. Absolutely right. So, meaning there are exercises that you can do and skills that you can teach the dog to support building resilience. And it's not the only way.

You really have to look at what are you doing to support the body neurobiologically so that they are recovering from stress or basically, the stress response cycle is completing. So the stress response cycle is the HPA axis, hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal gland axis. The hypothalamus is in your brain pituitary. It's like the back right here. I'm pointing like you guys can see the back of your brain, back of your head.

Pituitary is just kind of below that, almost like in your neck, back, head area where it's meeting. And then the adrenals glands sit on top of the kidneys. Those three glands work together to activate to support the body, giving it the muscles, more oxygen, glucose, whatever, getting the brain to a place to be more sharp, more focused, everything needed to respond to the events in the environment. But if that activation system, sometimes it's genetics, epigenetics learning, like, it could be.

It's a whole range of things that can create or prevent the body from naturally completing that stress cycle or bringing them back down to baseline. And that's where you can develop, like, chronic disease or behavior issues. There's a lot of dogs, for example, that are just sort of naturally fearful that now they're living in an urban environment and they're never completing the stress cycle. Or you have dogs in a shelter environment, you know, being in that environment is so hard.

And maybe they're there for months and that's why you might see them take months for their baseline to lower, lower, lower, because it's been elevated for such a long period of time. So just by teaching skills, working operantly with some of these dogs is not enough to support them coming back down to their baseline. And the other thing is, that's very cool. That blew my mind is that your baseline, you can, through this work of really understanding resilience, you can lower your baseline more, more, more so that your ability to handle stressors improves.

You could be more resilient to stressors. I'm assuming that some of this is what led to the resilience rainbow. So can you talk about kind of what that is, where that idea came from? A little bit, yeah. So it's through these conversations I was having with Doctor Kathy Murphy, and we both happened to adopt dogs around, I think I had Marvel. He's my Jack Russell Yorkie mix. I was doing agility with him.

I got him in, I think, 2013. And then a couple of years later, she got, she rescued a Rottweiler from Romania. Because my friend lives in the UK, Kathy lives in the UK. And she and I were both discovering for different reasons that the way that we were training dogs or support doing behavior modification were not supporting these dogs. So Marvel got him at five months old from a shelter.

He looked like a tiny little red squirrel. He kind of still looks like now a bigger red squirrel. He's only seven and a half pounds. So you think, oh, not a whatever. It's like whatever. If he barks and charges and lunges and whatever, he's a tiny thing, but it's not okay for many reasons, right? It's just not okay across the board. He wasn't like that when I first got him.

And then as he got older, he just started to change. And I remember I was at a seminar, it was a three day seminar, and he was doing so well, but by day three, he was just barking and lunging at every single person and dog, and he wasn't doing that before. And it felt like something in his brain snapped, is how I was describing it to Kathy. And around the same time, she had rescued a dog from Romania, a rottweiler who was only about a year old or a little under a year old.

And she was beautiful and she looked like in the foster home, she was on a farm and like, looked really lovely with the chickens and the kittens. And all this, another dog walking around. She arrived at my friend's home. She lives in a kind of urbanization residential area at the time. And literally the dog was bouncing off the walls, terrified, shaking. And so we thought, okay, with her dog, she was like, well, this dog, clear.

She finally got to the place of she does not feel safe. Like, the first thing I have to do is help her feel safe before we do anything so her nervous system can calm down and actually process what's going on around her in a way that's more supportive. And for marvelous, I was like, how do I counter condition and desensitize the entire world? Like, how do I counter condition and desensitize an entire competition environment?

How do I do that? And that's where those questions really started to bring us into this thought process about resilience. And at the time I was calling it bandwidth, I'm like, Marvel only has so much bandwidth. 08:00 p.m. at night, he needs to go to bed. If I don't put him to bed, he's going to start growling and guarding the couch, not letting anyone near him, and fighting people.

Like, it was just at the time, like I said, I was living with my in laws, so I just called it bandwidth. I'm like, how do I preserve his bandwidth so that he can do the game that I love? And I was totally ready to say, okay, maybe we don't do agility. Maybe we just don't do it right. Like, if this doesn't get better or if you don't feel better, we don't do this.

But it wasn't happening just in that environment. It was happening everywhere. And it was, I think, in 2014, I read an article, a blog post that doctor Patricia McConnell wrote, and she used the word resilience. And then I was like, oh, my God, this is my dog. This is Marvel. Like, when I read the blog and I thought, well, I don't believe he had any trauma, because she was citing trauma research and for trauma research to build resilience for someone who's traumatized.

And this is human trauma research. You're looking to create support, mental and physical well being, safety and security agency and social support. Those are the four pillars to build resilience for someone who's gone through trauma. And when I shared this with Kathy, I was like, this is, we both were like, this is what my dog needs. Her Rottweiler. Safety and security. Social support wasn't even an option because the dog did not trust Kathy at the time, even though Kathy did nothing.

Right. So our dogs let us down these paths of exploring these conversations around resilience. And what does it look like physiologically so that they get to a place where how their brain is processing the environment is in a more supportive way versus a reactive way. Okay. So out of that came this concept. Right. So tell. Is there. Is there a short definition, I don't know, for kind of what the resilience rainbow is or kind of like, is there a.

I don't know. Yeah, I'll give you a short one. I know I keep going on it. No, it's okay. It's okay. Okay. It's interesting stuff. So, Kathy and I are very visual people, and when we came up with our seven domains, which are the four pillars for trauma research, first, which is mental, physical wellbeing, social support agencies, and safety and security, when we were looking at things, where I was looking at things as a practitioner, we added these other components, which was predictability, and that's where the practitioner trainer can really influence things.

Um, uh, decompression. Right. And I love Sarah Stremming, really coining that word decompression walks and bringing that into our industry in a bigger way. Uh, and. And using that intentionally. Right. Not just, oh, I'm hiking my dog today, and we're just hanging out. But actually, what I learned about the neurobiological benefits of those kinds of nature walks through from Kathy and the research that we did to create this framework.

And then so those three. And then completing the stress cycle. And where I got that is, I was reading in 2020, Amy and Emily Nagowski's book, completing the stress cycle burnout, and I thought, and this, you know, in 2020, we were dealing with the pandemic. So I thought, oh, my God, this is what I need to do for myself right now because we're all panicking about this pandemic.

And this is when the shutdown was in place. And I think I started reading it in the early summer when we were just starting to come out of the shutdown in America, but other parts of the world were just still in the shutdown, like Cathy UK was in for the rest of the year, essentially. And so I, my husband and I, we got, like, a peloton bike, and we were exercising and we were watching funny movies because laughing and all these things completely stress cycle.

So you're looking to get your HPA axis down to baseline again so that you have more of ability to deal with stressors in general. And there's a lot of different ways to do that. So those, through those seven domains, we just kept coming back to them. I'm sure there's others out there that support resilience conditioning, resilience building and, and such. Because it was seven, we thought, well, what's an easy way to remember?

And then we came up with the rainbow, and the rainbow, seven colors, seven domains, resilience, rainbow. It's fun to say. It's a memory aid. Yeah. So that's how we came up with it.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. Okay, so in there, one of the things you kind of mentioned, Washington kind of helping a learner acquire skills to process stressful experiences. Can you just talk a little more about that? Kind of what you mean by skills? Maybe an example.

Bobbie Bhambree: Yeah. So it's about coping strategies. A lot of it is. I'll point to the pattern games. I love Leslie McDevitt's pattern games, and she didn't know it at the time, and hopefully she does now because we've shared the neurobiology with her, but she didn't know that she was creating an ingenious set of games. I know she has a whole program, but I'm going to point, I'm going to stick with the pattern games.

So with the ability to create a pattern like experience, many things are happening for the dog. So it is a bit of a skill because they're learning to look at you and then move to a target, or if it's a Super Bowls game or whatever the game is, they're processing what's going on in the environment, but they're doing it in this rhythmic way. And anytime you're creating a pattern, like experience through movement, it actually can change brainwave frequencies to get them into a calmer state.

And it doesn't mean that they're relaxed. It just means it gets them into a brain state that creates an opportunity for optimal learning. It's something that has to be practiced over time. It can also support arousal regulation. Like, there's just so many things physiologically that are happening. When you play a pattern game, for example, there's things that you can do to create the experience of predictability. So in a lot of the behavior work I do, I teach a dog to target like a target stick, like a wand.

Right. And so if they see this target stick, it's predictable. It means one thing. No matter where we are in the world, no matter what we're doing now, if they're terrified in the middle of a ring and shutting down because the judge is there or whatever, the buzzer went off. Yeah, that's not going to work. Plus I can't bring a target stick into the ring. But it's a whole progressive process to get to the point where the dog's like, yeah, this is no big deal. So it actually helps them process what's going on in the environment without making whatever's going on in the environment the focus.

Melissa Breau: Very cool. Yeah. Okay, so you are doing a webinar for us on the 24th, specifically kind of on some of this stuff. Can you share a little bit more kind of on what you'll cover and maybe who should consider joining us?

Bobbie Bhambree: Yeah. If you are a dog trainer, a behavior consultant, a pet guardian, a competitor, a sport enthusiast, an instructor, a coach, this is for you.

Vet tech, veterinarian. Like, it's across the board. It's pretty, it's applicable to so many different things, but once you understand the concepts, you can apply it. We've had a lot of people apply this framework to other species, like horses. We've had people apply it to shelter dogs, like, and it's just been an amazing, it's been amazing to see them basically have more resilience in the shelter environment waiting for adoption.

So it's across the board. So the webinar. I'm going to go through the resilience framework, the seven domains, and give real world examples of how to utilize the domains and some of the exercises we suggest using or considering for each domain. I wish we had time. Maybe in the future we can do like a case study to show how. I've used the framework to apply to my cases when I work with them, whether it's a dog, sports, or a pet guardian. I mean, across the board, separation anxiety, phobias, aggression. Like it works for raising a puppy. I raised my youngest two dogs through this framework.

Melissa Breau: Very cool. Yeah. All right, so I think that gives folks, hopefully a little bit of an idea why they should join us in the 24th. Do you have any, you know, kind of final thoughts or maybe key points that you just want to kind of leave folks with?

Bobbie Bhambree: Oh, gosh, yeah, I don't. Let me think about that. Well, yeah, so resilience has been out there for a very long time. There's so much science about resilience, but what I want people, I hope, what I hope people will come to with this event is look, like, look at or consider what are the practical things that we could do to actually condition resilience and then support resilience once we've conditioned the resilience and then understanding how to put it into, you know, a schedule.

Like a lot of us dog sports people build a schedule around our sport, right? Taking care of the dog, rest days, conditioning days, training days, competing. You know, how much are they sleeping, what are they eating? Like? There's so much to it. And resilience can be a resilience. Support can be part of that conversation.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Bobbie. This has been fascinating.

Bobbie Bhambree: Yay. Thanks so much for having me.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy.

Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by Bensound.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.

 Credits

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called "Buddy." Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

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