In this episode Irith and I talk about what anxiety looks like in dogs and what we can do to help our dogs feel safe and build confidence. Plus, I ask Irith to talk about what factors influence how long these behaviors take to work and what factors influence prognosis. 

 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 Irith Bloom here with me to talk about building confidence and calm for anxious dogs. Hi Irith, welcome back to the podcast!

Irith Bloom: Hi Melissa! It is a pleasure to be here, as always. I love speaking to the audience of this podcast. Such amazing people doing such amazing things with the animals that they live with. It's always a joy to connect in any way with this audience.

Melissa Breau: It's awesome to have you on. So to start us off, do you want to just remind folks a little bit about who you are and your canine crew?

Irith Bloom: So I am Irith Bloom. As you said, I'm in Los Angeles, California, where, no, the earthquake earlier this spring did not actually do any damage to us, fortunately. So that's always nice. But it was 100 degrees for the last few days, so there you go. I run a company called the Sophisticated Dog. I'm also involved in two other businesses. One is the Freakin Awesome Dog Project, and the other is called Carefree Companion and is a certification program that is going to launch in October for people who want to help humans and animals thrive and live lives where they cope better with stress.

It's really mostly focused on the animals, but I think we're going to wind up helping the people too, when we help the animals. And that'll be a certification program that starts in October. As I mentioned, I am faculty at Victoria Stilwell Academy. I am a regular instructor at Fenzi Academy. I love teaching. I'm going to be at the APDT conference. If anyone's there, please come say hello. And I think that's kind of it.

I handle whatever kind of behavior case you throw at me, and I will happily help you teach your puppy basics. But nobody seems to hire me for that anymore. It's crazy how that works. Yeah. And I am actually between dogs, which is good because we had this whole crazy remodel situation and I was so stressed out, I can't even imagine how one of the herding dogs that I usually live with would have handled the situation badly is actually what I imagined.

So I guess I can imagine. But, you know, hopefully there will be a dog in the office once we stop having workmen people in and out of our home every three days. So that's kind of where I am in Los Angeles feeling blessed that, you know, the heat has ended.

Melisssa Breau: I feel you there. We're just starting to get fall weather here in North Carolina, and it's lovely. I am enjoying these, like, mid 70 days quite a bit. So. All right, so we're talking about anxious dogs. As I mentioned in the intro, I'm hoping we can talk a bit about building confidence, a little bit about creating calm. Let's talk about the anxiety piece first, though. So when we say anxiety, what does that typically look like when we're talking about it in dogs?

Irith Bloom: Well, anxiety in dogs, like in people, can be expressed in a lot of different ways. Some people stress, or some animals, I should say, because humans were animals, too, right? Some animals stress up, some animals stress down. And what I mean by that is that some animals, when they're under stress, they become more frantic where other ones become more and more shut down. And so I have had clients come to me basically saying, oh, my dog is completely fine. And I walk into their home and I look at their dog and I think, your dog is not completely fine.

Your dog hates most of life, but they just are the type of dog who becomes more and more still when under stress. So they look calm and quiet. But what's actually happening is just still and quiet. And there's a big difference between calm and stillness. So the first thing I'll say is some dogs are just going to be still when they're anxious. This happens to basically, most species have the capability to go in either direction, and others, it's going to be an inability to settle.

So things you might see are that on the one extreme, and I'll just stick to dogs here, you'll have a dog who spends a lot of time in one spot, doesn't move around a lot, doesn't do a lot of exploring the environment, interacting with people, interacting with things, but tends to stay very still, especially if anything changes about the environment. And these might be dogs who retreat when people walk in.

They might also be the kind of dogs who move forward and then backwards and forwards and then backwards and then forwards and then backwards. When someone walks into the home and they can't seem to settle. The other extreme you'll get is the ones that something new happens and they just rev up, but it's not joyful, it's frantic. And both of those things can be expressions of anxiety. Now, I will say I'm mixing the terms anxiety and stress a little bit.

So I do want to clarify that anxiety has to do with the anticipation of bad stuff. Happening where technically, stress is about the physical experience. So if I've had a lot of stress in a certain context, what can happen is my brain has learned in this situation, like when a guest comes to visit, all these things happened that I, as a cat, let's say, find really scary. And so then when I hear the doorbell ring, I'm already in anxiety because I'm anticipating all of those scary things happening.

And they don't even have to happen for me to experience that anxiety. And they don't even have to happen for me to continue experiencing that anxiety until the person leaves. So anxiety can be a profound and difficult thing to contend with for the animal because they're basically constantly being put in a state of stress when there's actually no real cause for them to feel experience that much stress.

But the problem is their brain has made, and by real cause, I mean they're not actually under threat. No one's actually going to kill them. No one's actually going to do whatever it is that they're scared is going to happen, but it doesn't matter because they think it might. And for us humans, a good way to think about this is if you've ever had that sort of eerie feeling when you're about to walk, I don't know, down a dark alley.

I say this as a woman. I think women look at dark alleys a little differently, perhaps. But when you look at the dark alley, there's already a little, uh oh, could something bad happen? You're already hyper aware of all of your surroundings. You're peering into the shadows, trying to figure out what's happening. And then either you decide not to go down the alley, which is avoidance, which is completely fair, or you go through it, and perhaps you rush through it to get it over with as quickly as possible.

And then hopefully, once it's done, that experience is behind you. Nothing bad actually happened to you. But for whatever reason, you've learned that dark alleys are a source of potential danger and you experience all this anxiety despite there being no immediate danger in that situation. So that's really to sort of more specifically define what anxiety is about. But then what it might look like in the dog or cat or horse or whatever it is, is often either this kind of shutdown behavior, I'm just going to freeze and hope that nothing terrible happens to me, or this frantic behavior of I'm going to try to figure out where can I run to?

Where can I go? And often what you'll see with anxious dogs in particular around human visitors in particular. I see this a lot, is they go back and forth between I'm standing right next to you and barking at you and I've retreated to 15ft away and I'm staring at you and then I rush forward again, because they can't quite figure out what the safe path is. They don't quite know what the right tool is.

They're not necessarily thinking very clearly. So all of those are things that relate to that. Anxiety is the answer, then, to just focus on confidence? And if so, what can we really do to help anxious dogs improve their confidence to a point where it's helpful? Does that make sense?

Melissa Breau: Yes. Yes, it does.

Irith Bloom: So I'll say two things. I think one thing we need to do is increase the dog's ability to feel calmer in the scenario, which is not exactly the same as confidence. Feeling calm is on the way to confidence for many animals, and they can be intertwined and they may need to feel calm before they can feel confident, or they may need to feel confident before they feel calm, because it really does vary by the individual learner. So I do find for these kinds of dogs, they need to learn that they are safe and that they do have control, because anxiety has a lot to do with a perceived lack of control.

And that perceived control is agency. I know agency is a word that's being used a lot in the animal training community, which is great, but agency has to do with that animal's perception. So you can sit there and say, well, the dog could just walk away, but if they don't perceive that they can walk away, they have less agency in that situation, despite having some control over the situation.

So I'm just going to distinguish those two terms. Yeah, but so what we're really talking about when we're increasing confidence is, in part increasing that sense of control, that agency, the animal, doesn't necessarily have to have a good solution to get out of the situation. They just need to feel like a solution exists. And I'm confident that I've solved problems before. I can solve this problem, too. And that is really what builds confidence.

So that also helps an animal feel calmer, because then they don't feel under threat. And then these two things, like I said, it's sort of this funny little feedback loop, because the more anxious we are, the more difficult it is to think clearly. The more relaxed we are, the easier it is to think clearly. So as the animal gains confidence and begins to feel more relaxed, then they're able to solve more and more difficult problems, because their cognitive skills, their brain, their thinking is just working better. It really is about helping the animal learn that they have a lot more control than they think they do.

Melissa Breau: Interesting, I guess, to kind of dwell on that for a second. Right. Building confidence to the calmer dog. Can you just talk a little more about how we maybe know that they're becoming more confident? How we maybe know that it's calmness and not, you know, kind of that shutdown behavior you were describing initially?

Irith Bloom: Right. So some of it has to do with looking at the animal more globally. So not just how does the cat behave when a guest comes over, how does the parrot behave when there's a hawk circling outside your window? Because you live in the country somewhere, and that would be very unnerving for a parrot, by the way, if there were a hawk circling somewhere, do they say, oh, well, you know what, indoors, do they start making an alarm call?

What do they do? Not just in that scenario, though, but in other scenarios. So what I mean by this is the more anxious an animal is, the less likely they are to do a lot of normal behavior in other scenarios. And so one of the ways you're going to start seeing that confidence is improving is you're going to start seeing that the animal engages with their environment a different way.

So maybe it's still okay to be scared when there's a hawk circling. If you're a parrot, a pretty basic fear to be afraid of a potential predator. But maybe as the parrot gains confidence, you start to notice that they're interacting with more of the toys that you provide them with, or they're more pro social. And if they happen to be a bird who talks, maybe they're talking to strangers or talking.

I mean, by strangers, I mean visitors, assuming they're not just wandering around all, you never know. Or you know they're approaching. When someone is in your home and the animal is loose, they're choosing to approach and investigate a little more. So animals who are confident, this is a funny thing, because what I'm about to say can also go both ways. But animals who are confident will tend to explore more.

It's actually one of the ways that we look for confidence is how much exploration does an animal do? And there's a difference between I'm exploring because I'm looking for threats and I'm exploring because I'm curious about my environment. And there are body language differences that you would see. So they might move a little slower, they might spend a little more time on a specific thing, but it can go both ways so I can picture.

Let's take the dog who just walked into a new training space. A dog who's very confident might sort of make a lap of the room, figure out where everything is, and then stop and start sniffing individual stuff that really caught their attention. A dog who's very anxious, oh, my gosh, I'm in a new place. Might stick really close to their person, might choose not to explore the room as much.

When they do explore the room, they might be head on, a swivel, looking around. Is there anything approaching me from behind? What's going on? What's happening? And when they do go from thing to thing, you would see more potentially fearful body language. Well, I'm rushing over here, but I'm not up and confident where that curious dog is probably going to have a nice, relaxed mid or slightly high tail.

Their ears will tend to be up, but nothing, you know, aggressively forward. Curious. All of those things that we think of as fun, I'm enjoying, I'm curious, are the kinds of body language that we would look for as opposed to the, whoa, I don't know where the next thing is coming from, and maybe I'm moving really quickly and then stalling so that I can sniff this thing because I think it might be a threat.

And then I run away from that really fast. So there's a rhythm to the behavior, almost for lack of a better term, or a pattern of speed and body language that goes with it. It totally depends on the individual, though. So you really need to learn the animal you're watching, learn what that animal does. And by that animal, I don't even mean, like, species to species. I mean, my dog versus your dog. And Melissa has multiple dogs. I'm sure that they would all have different body language.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. One of them has a dock tail, the other does not. Even that alone gives us a lot of differences in body language. It does so, okay, so as we're kind of working on these skills. Right. Can you talk a little bit about the process or kind of how we work on progressing things? So kind of generalizing those skills to new environments and introducing them in new situations, what does that look like? Is it the same as, you know, generalizing your performance skills?

Irith Bloom: You know, it is and it isn't. It is in the sense that, and I do want to add one other thing that I look for. That to me says, confidence in a dog is the dog explores, and then they lie down and they're like, eh, I'm just here.

Let's see what interesting new thing happens? So that's the other thing that you might see in that confidence. So what I would be looking for, as I'm generalizing these skills is, I would say, first of all, let's get these skills really well expressed in a controlled environment where the animal feels safe. So what kind of things? Let's start with what kind of things I might do. I like to have animals solve puzzles because solving puzzles is confidence building.

And the key with solving puzzles is that you can't. I don't know if anyone here does Sudoku, but, you know, Sudoku comes in different levels. If you have never done Sudoku and someone gives you one of those sudoku puzzles where there's only like, twelve numbers scattered around the entire board, you're probably not going to succeed. On the other hand, if you've been doing Sudoku for, you know, years and someone gives you one of the little simple ones where there are 40 numbers, okay, I might be exaggerating.

I don't think there's actually room for 40, but let's say 23 numbers on the board, you'd be bored. So what we're looking for is finding a level of puzzle that challenges that animal just a little bit. It's not so easy that I'm like, ugh, yeah, I solved it, whatever. But it's also not so hard that the animal says, I'll never solve this. And if we can find that right level of puzzle for that environment, then what happens is the animal says, hey, look, I solved a puzzle.

I solved. And a puzzle doesn't necessarily need to be literally a physical thing. It could be a go, you know, figure out how to open this door as opposed to open a puzzle toy. So I want to make it clear that it could be. It could also be, how do I get the human to click for me when I'm in a shaping session and we're using a clicker?

That's a puzzle, right? So I want the animal to start being confident solving puzzles that are at their skill level, and then I want to start pushing that skill level a little bit up. Then I take similar puzzles and take them to the next environment. And now I kind of know, okay, so my dog's baseline was here, and we've done this, and now the dog is able to do these things.

So if I take this dog to a new environment and they're not able to do the, let's say, level, let's say we have a ten point scale. So I have my level five puzzles. Dog can't do them in that environment, but they can do my level one puzzles in that environment. So then I say, okay, let's build some confidence doing level one puzzles. Now, can you do a level two puzzle here?

Now, can you do a level three puzzle here? And we slowly build that up until we start to see the animals, like, throw the level ten at me. I am so ready for it. What you got? What you got, you know, and you can then move that from scenario to scenario, basically saying, can you play this puzzle game in this context? The other thing you can work on is, can you just hang and look around?

And this goes back to what I was saying about the confident animal. It's totally normal for an animal to walk into a new environment and say, gee, I wonder what's going on here, and I want to check out the environment. But if you think about it, unless you're you as a human, unless you're at someplace like an amusement park, most of the time, if you go over to someone's house, they give you, like, the little nickel tour.

Yeah, this is the living room. You can get a drink for yourself from the refrigerator or whatever it is that they tell you to do. And then you mostly sit on the couch. You're not frantically exploring their home. Like, is there some kind of, you know, boggart or whatever? Sorry. For anyone who hasn't read Harry Potter in the corner, you know, is like, is there something there?

No, that's not what you're doing. You're just hanging. So being able to just hang out requires a certain kind of sense of safety and confidence. So that's another thing you can do, is you can just say, all right, let's just practice hanging out at home. I'm not going to interact with you. I'm not going to give you anything to do. I'm just going to let you experience life as a gerbil or whatever it is you happen to be.

Now, I don't know that I'm actually going to take my poor gerbil outside, given the threats of the outside world. Let's imagine it's a rodent of unusual size. To get another pop culture reference in here, that's the Princess pride for anyone who's too young. So you've got your, like, four foot long rat. You take them for a–I mean, you could do this with a capybara. You take them for a walk, and then you just hang out on a park bench and let them watch everyone go by.

That alone is an experience of, hey, I'm in this space. Nothing terrible is happening to me. I can observe what's going on. I can be comfortable in my own skin. So those are a couple of different skills that you can take on the road fairly easily. And where this is similar to performance skills is that like everything we do in performance skills, you have to gradually change the difficulty, and the animal's going to guide you.

If you change the difficulty too fast, they're going to start failing. And if, you know, a failure here and there is actually not a bad thing. It's okay for animals to learn that they can fail and life doesn't end and life goes on. But if they keep failing over and over and over, that's going to start to SAP their confidence. And you're going to start if in a performance context, you might be building in mistakes that you really don't want to be building in.

So you would say to yourself, if you were doing, I don't know, obedience with a dog, and you wanted to move from your backyard to your practice yard to your agility yard, you would basically say, oh, maybe not agility. Well, I guess an agility yard would work, but I meant obedience ring. I just said the wrong thing. You might say, you know what? We went to an obedience trial.

It did not go well. We need to split this down more finely. How about next obedience trial? I'm not going to register. I'm just going to show up in one of my friend's cars and my dog and I are going to do obedience training 40ft away from where everything's set up or 400ft away from where everything's set up. And then you gradually move it closer. So in that sense, it's that same shaping.

Watch if the animal is successful or nothing. Adjust fine tune, slice as thinly as you need to, and you will get there. In that sense, it's similar, but in the sense that usually our actual sort of performance skills involve a lot of interaction with a person. When I'm looking at building confidence, one of the things I'm looking at building is confidence that would stay even if the humans not right next to the animal.

So I don't want this to be about, you look at me and I give you a cue, or you look at me and I give you a treat, or you look at the other thing and I give you a treat. I want it to be about, I'm here and I'm okay. Now. It's okay if they feel better with their human around, but I don't want it to be all about the interaction between you and the animal.

I want the animal to say, well, my person is here, so I feel safe, and now I'm going to go do my own thing. And hopefully we get to the point this will not happen with all animals, where the animal says, I feel safe even when my person is not here. That's going to vary a little bit. There are some animals that they really need that secure base that the human plays that role for them.

They're like, as long as I've got my rock, I can go 200 miles an hour, 400 miles away, because I know when I come back, you'll be here. Other animals are going to be like, bye. I can totally handle this on my own, which is great for those contexts. And none of this should mean that you can't also have a performance relationship. It's just about cues being part of that performance relationship. Even if the cue is, there are agility obstacles that can be a cue, too.

Melissa Breau: Can you talk just a little bit about when you might recommend folks consider a veterinary behaviorist to maybe talk about some meds? What role does that all play in this conversation?

Irith Bloom: Yeah, great question. Medication is something that I think a lot of people hesitate to reach for because they feel like it's a really extreme measure, or they feel like it's cheating, or, you know, taking the easy road, or they're afraid that the animal is going to turn into a zombie.

I've heard that from a lot of people that, oh, it's going to change the animal's personality. So the first thing I want to say is, one of the reasons why I personally am a huge proponent of working with a veterinary behaviorist, is that veterinary behaviorists pretty much all. I mean, I'm sure there's good and bad examples of everything in life, but most veterinary behaviorists are going to do a really excellent job of adjusting medication choices and doses so that the animal's personality doesn't fundamentally change, except that we get some of that anxiety off of it.

So that's the first thing I'll say, is, if you have a veterinary behaviorist in your area, even if you don't, because there are ones who do it remotely and will work with your vet for the prescription, save the money, book that appointment, even if it's six months from now, which it might be, they are experts in this, and I am obviously not. I'm not a veterinary professional. I have worked at veterinary hospitals, but that was a long time ago in another life, and even then, I was a technician, not a vet.

So the real nitty gritty of this needs to be done by an expert. And just like your general practitioner or what do they call them now, primary care physician for humans may not be an expert at psychiatric meds. Your general practitioner vet is not going to be an expert at these meds unless they have a particular interest, which some people do. So go to an expert. Now, having said that, I hope that that will help eliminate that fear about, oh, the dog's going to be completely sedated or the cat's going to lose all his personality or whatever else.

You know, the parrot is. I actually don't know if they use. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm like, do veterinary behaviorists? I've never had a parrot client on meds, so I just don't know. But, you know, hey, if your parrot has been prescribed meds by a veterinary behaviorist and she's doing well, then hooray, you know, so, but having said that, what I usually look for, and bear in mind that I've been doing this for a while, so I kind of have that, you know, what is it?

They call it 10,000 hours kind of ability where you just, you look and you kind of know. I look for either stalling in progress, that is a persistent stall or extremely slow progress. And in those cases, we stop and talk about whether medication might be helpful. So I am always going to try behavior modification for a little while, with one exception, which I'll talk about in just a second.

So I'm like making. Hang on. I'm literally making myself a note. So I don't forget to say this. So assuming that we've ruled out all of the medical issues with the dog, we know that the, you know, or the other animal, the animal is fundamentally healthy. We're going to start with behavior modification, and then we're going to assess are we making progress, and how fast is that progress?

And with some animals, the progress is so slow that the animal is not really getting the relief they need and the human is not getting the relief that they need. And those are situations where I might consider medication. I shouldn't even say might, where I often do consider medication. We have the discussion and then we go to an expert to figure out whether medication is the right choice and what medications are the right choice.

Now, the other situation where I might consult a veterinary behaviorist sort of as a fundamental situation, is a situation where we were making great progress and then we suddenly stalled and we can't seem to get past a certain point. So, you know, maybe this is a dog who's afraid of going out on the walks. I have these clients, and we're able to go down to the end of the driveway, but no matter how hard we try, we cannot get past that driveway without really big signs of stress.

In that case, I might say, well, look, hey, we made all this progress. I'm pretty confident that the client and the dog are doing the work they need to do. I'm pretty confident that we have a good plan, but we're not making progress. We're stuck. Let me get a veterinary behaviorist to look at this and say, hey, you know what? I would actually use a medication or whatever they might suggest in this scenario.

The one situation where I would say to a client, you know, I actually think we need to consult a veterinary behaviorist today, when it's the first day I've met them, is when there's what is sometimes called global anxiety. Global anxiety is something that you might see, for instance, in a female dog who used to be in puppy mills. I've had specific clients like this, which is why I use this example.

They've given birth to five or ten litters. In their much too short life. For five to ten litters, they're no longer producing the litters that the puppy mill wanted, and they get dumped, and then they wind up in someone's home. And often these dogs, they're. Socialization deficits are so profound that they barely move, and anything that happens makes them panic or shut down even more deeply. And there's nothing happening for these dogs.

These dogs have no reinforcement in their life. The world is essentially punishing. The only reinforcement they get is the negative reinforcement of nothing bad happened to me, which is not a very reinforcing life to live. So with animals that have global anxiety, I usually say to clients, by the time I get their questionnaire, I know what we're looking at. I usually say, here's the name of the veterinary behaviorist.

I want you to call them up and set up an appointment. In the meantime, we are going to meet, and we're going to see what progress we can make. However, your dog will probably need a little more help because she lived the first five years of her life in a box. So that's another situation where I think the meds can be particularly a good option to explore. Having said that, do bear in mind that a good veterinary behaviorist sometimes will say to you, we don't need medication.

We need a different behavior modification plan. And sometimes it really is just that extra pair of eyes lets you see something that you couldn't see or that the person you were working with, behavior consultant, trainer, whatever it was, wasn't seeing. What I don't want people to do is think of medication as some kind of panacea that will solve all of your problems, because even when you use meds, you must have a behavior modification plan that is going along with that.

The other thing that I'll say about medication in general, this is not so much about the sort of psychotropic medications that I've just been discussing, but medication in general. One of the things you do want to make sure is that the animal is healthy. If your animal is hiding in a corner because they have some kind of really bad chronic pain, no amount of behavior modification is going to change that pain.

So when you have an animal who is showing either high anxiety, lack of confidence, sort of this franticness shut down, first thing you want to make sure is that they are organically healthy, that there's nothing going on with them. That explains this, because I know if I have the flu, I'm pretty much going to stick to my bed, and that doesn't mean that I'm a depressed human. It just means I'm feeling really sick right now. So we want to rule that out because otherwise you're going to spend a lot of time and energy trying to solve a problem that you can't solve with behavior modification.

Melissa Breau: I think that all makes a lot of sense. And you kind of started that answer by talking about not making progress in kind of a timely fashion. So I want to kind of return to that for a second here. And I know going into this question, the answer is always, it depends. But can you talk a little bit, maybe, about what factors impact, how much improvement a team might expect to see and how long they might expect? Did it take to start seeing some of those improvements?

Irith Bloom: Yeah, and I think that's a great question, especially the way you phrased it with your it depends built in, because, you know, every animal is an individual, and it's not just every animal is an individual.

Let's face it. You know, if any of you have other people in your household, and whether you have, you know, one animal in your household or multiple animals in your household, each animal is going to have a different relationship with each human in that household and each other animal in that household. So it depends on a million factors in that sense, too. But having said that, having made that, it depends sort of really, really strong.

So it stands out in everyone's mind. A lot of it has to do with how long the problem has been going on. So I have this sort of rough rule of thumb in my head, which is if a dog has been practicing, say, overreacting on leash for two years, it could take us as long as two years to change that behavior. Depending on how well we can manage the environment and what different interventions we do, we could do it a lot faster with most dogs.

But if we don't really do the right stuff, you should at least start thinking, as long as this behavior has been going on, it will probably continue. And one of the sort of places where this comes in that messes with that a little bit is age. So if I have, let's say, a six year old dog who's been behaving aggressively to guests for the last six months, something's changed in the last six months.

And odds are I can figure that out and help the family resolve that issue a little faster. But if I have a six month old dog who is aggressing to visitors in the home, something a little bit deeper that animals entire, and they've been doing it their whole life. Since the puppy was eight weeks old, came home, they were already aggressive to visitors. Now I've got. I think of it as a percentage of the dog's life.

You know, I've got basically the dog's entire life, the dog has been aggressive. It doesn't matter that they're six months old. It means I have a little bit more of a potentially profound issue. But then the flip side is, they're six months old. Their brain is a little bit more flexible. Our brains are always flexible, but they're very flexible in youth and adolescence. So their brain's a little bit more flexible, and maybe I can make more progress if I intervene.

Now, this brings me back to the veterinary behaviorist conversation just to say, don't avoid medication just because it's a puppy. I have talked to multiple veterinary behaviorists about this. Intervene early with medication if there's an issue, because you're laying down brain pathways, and you want to make sure that those brain pathways get laid down as well as possible. Because some of the pathways that get laid down in youth and adolescence are extremely hard to change afterwards.

But that's a side note. So my sort of general rule for, like, the, it depends is how long has the problem been going on? How old is the animal? What percentage of their life is that? Start by looking at that. If the animal's been doing this their whole life, you are trying to teach them a whole new set of skills. But if the animal only started doing this at a certain period and maybe there was an incident, maybe someone robbed your home and then they became aggressive towards visitors, that's a completely understandable reaction.

But the animal has years of experience not being aggressive to visitors. So I might be able to hook back into that, and that's going to make things go a little bit faster. The other thing is, how well can you manage whatever the anxiety producing scenarios are? So like, could you have nobody come over except for practice visits for the next two months? You're going to do a lot better than if you keep having visitors every weekend for the next two months who stay for 8 hours while your dog is anxious for 8 hours.

You know, there's that management piece is a piece of it. And also, do you understand what the tasks are that you need to do, and are you willing to do those tasks over and over and over and over? Because these kinds of issues where there's a lot of anxiety, we have to be very consistent and very persistent to start seeing progress. And sometimes it can feel like nothing is happening.

And I find a lot of times in these cases, this again is where, like, my 10,000 hours eyes help. In a lot of these cases, the client will think no progress is being made, but I can see little incremental bits of progress. And then we get a month in or six weeks in or two months in, and it's almost like we hit a ledge and suddenly, woof, there's an improvement.

It might not be all the way to what we want, but there's this big jump. So for those dogs, I don't worry so much if our progress stalls because they may be sort of plateau plateau plateau jump. Plateau plateau plateau jump kind of cases. So in general, taking all of those factors, let's remember that all of those are there. In general, most anxiety situations that we're trying to help the animal deal with better.

If it's a pinpoint situation, there is one scenario. I know exactly what it is. Those can usually be resolved fairly quickly. Three months, six months. I wouldn't expect it to take much longer than that. If there's a lot of scenarios that are triggering anxiety, you need to be thinking, could this take a year? And I have had the occasional client. These are mostly the puppy mill ones where they reach out to me three years later and they're like, it's awesome.

She went and said hello to a guest. It took three years, but they got there. So just bear in mind that it can be a long road, depending on how profound the issue is. And then as for other factors that we have no control over, I'm just going to say, so we have control over how hard do we work. We have some control over how well we can manage the environment depending on the scenario, but we have no control over the early learning of the animal, and we have no control over the genetics and formative, the epigenetics of that animal.

So who were the animals parents? What traits got passed along? What did the animal experience before being born? Because you can actually experience stress before you are born. And animals who are born to stressed mothers will be more stressed. Unfortunately, their brains are predisposed to be more stressed. And what's really scary is, at least in rats, if the father is more stressed, even if the mother and the father are not kept in the same cage and the pups never meet the father, the pups will be more stressed because the father was more stressed.

So there's a lot of genetic factors that go into it, and we can't control that stuff. We can't control the genetics unless we're a breeder, I guess. We can't control the genetics, the epigenetics, or that early learning history that happened before we had the animal in our care. So, especially if you got an adult animal who came to you from a less than ideal background, sometimes it just takes longer.

But the good news, because I need to end on good news here. The good news is that if you can help that animal feel safe, you're going to start seeing progress. And that progress will tend to go in leaps and bounds. The more the animal feels safe. And that safety, that's that foundation for the confidence. Right. I'm okay. Then you start adding on those. Here. I am capable of solving puzzles that gives more confidence.

Well, I figured out my way out of this particular puzzling scenario. I can figure out my way out of the next one. And what we're really looking for is an animal whose agency, remember, that's the sense of control, is so high that even when they have zero control and there's no way to solve the problem, they're still confident they can solve the problem, because then they feel more comfortable even in a situation where they have no control.

Melissa Breau: All right, so part of the reason we're talking about all this stuff, right, is you've got a class coming up in the October term where you're going to dive into all of this. Do you want to share a little more about the class, kind of what you're hoping to cover, who might be interested in joining you?

Irith Bloom: Yes. So first of all, I want to welcome anyone who wants to come join me. Any species of animal. My last Fenzi class, I had a gold student with a horse and it was awesome on every level. I think that all the students learned from this gold student. We had so much fun. The horse was fabulous. I mean, everything about it was fantastic. So I'm just going to say, don't be afraid to come to me with a ferret or a gerbil or a parrot or whatever.

If I don't know the species very well, I will do the research. I need to be able to assist you. So, you know, because there are species I haven't had the chance to work with, I would love to get the chance to work with them. So bring them on. So with that said, we're going to be talking about all of the things we've just discussed. I feel like I gave sort of a general syllabus of what kind of things we're going to be talking about.

We're going to be talking about how to help animals gain confidence so they can relax. And relax so that they can gain confidence. We're going to talk about the differences between excitement, which can be a positive thing, a positive emotion, really, and stress, the differences between anxiety and stress and fear, which we kind of discussed a little bit here. We're going to talk about how to teach an animal to just be, which is a.

People talk about off switches. Like, my breed of choice is the English Shepherd. And one of the common descriptions of English Shepherds is a Border Collie with an off switch. Not always true, by the way, in either direction. Some Border Collies have off switches, some English Shepherds don't. But we're going to be looking for, how can we find that off switch? How can we say to the animal, you know what?

You can just chill and be right now, chilling and being is the only job I need you to do. And you don't have to do your, oh, my gosh, I'm a guarding breed, or I'm a herding breed or whatever trait has come through strongly in their genetics and therefore I must do my task. But just, no, just chill out. We're good. All is well. So we're going to look at exercises and routines that are going to help us build that confidence, support that relaxation, allow the animals to know they can just chill out and also empower them to come to us and say, I want to interact, or, hey, something's weird. Can you help me? And empower them to say, well, I know my human's sitting on the couch, so I'm going to go explore what's going on in this other room, even though before, I would not have left their side. It's those kinds of things that we're going to be working on.

Anyone who's, I'll just quickly say anyone who's taken my classes knows that I'm trying to think how I can say this politely about myself. There's probably no good way. So, first of all, I'm geeky. Be prepared for geekiness. You probably already heard it in the podcast if you didn't know me before. And also, I tend to get really fine detail oriented when there's an issue that's coming up, especially about body language.

Because most of the animals we live with, parrots are a notable exception. Most of the animals we live with cannot actually speak to us, cannot actually say, would you please let me do something? Now, even dogs who have those talking buttons, some dogs have mastered those better than others. So we need to learn how to read the animals, and that's something that I'm always really focused on. And my first week with students, I feel like I am learning about the body language of their animals so that I can better support their progress as they move forward. So be prepared for a lot of talk about body language, especially at the beginning.

Melissa Breau: Good stuff. Lots of good stuff. All right, any final thoughts or maybe key points you just kind of want to leave folks with?

Irith Bloom: Would love to leave a key point, which is if you give your animal the space to make decisions, the space to make mistakes with no really bad consequences. I mean, when you make a mistake, you don't get whatever it was you were trying to get, but nothing worse than that needs to happen.

Giving them that space to choose to engage or not to engage, to move closer or move away, to fail, but decide they're going to try again anyway, if we can just step back and let our animals make those choices, instead of helping them all the time, we will actually help them build their confidence. So I encourage you all in safe spaces, in safe ways, to give the animals you live with room to experience the world and learn about their own strengths, and therefore become more confident because they learn they can cope without you necessarily solving every problem or intervening every time.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Areet. This has been fantastic. Thank you. It's always such a pleasure. Thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Karen Dietz to talk about advanced techniques for dealing with reactivity related, but a little different. 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 tracks 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!