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!