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.
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 counter conditioning and desensitization. Hi Irith, welcome back to the podcast.
Irith Bloom: Hi, Melissa. It is wonderful to be back here. It's great to see you and it's great to be speaking to the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy audience. You're an awesome audience.
Melissa Breau: Well, we are certainly happy to have you. So let's just start out by just reminding listeners a little bit about who you are.
Irith Bloom: So I'm Irith Bloom. As you said, I have been working with animals in one way or another since the 1980s, which, yes, I'm old at this point.
I have a couple of different businesses. So one is my client and other professional facing training business, The Sophisticated Dog where I help people with problems that they have with actually not just dogs. I've worked with cats, parrots, horses, but with animals who live with them in some sort of, you know, regular fashion. And I have a team who actually does a lot of work with clients. I also do a lot of work with other professionals where I help them basically troubleshoot, case or learn about new things.
I do a lot of speaking and presenting and most recently, most excitedly, my dear friend Dr. Christina Spaulding and I have put together a program called Carefree Companion which is designed to help people teach the animals they live with greater stress resilience and emotional regulation skills. And we've just started our first cohort of professionals who are learning the method. So we're super excited over at Carefree Companion.
Melissa Breau: That's super exciting. That's fun. Good stuff. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you.
Irith Bloom: So I mentioned kind of in the intro, I wanted to talk about counter conditioning and desensitization today. So let's start with kind of the basics, right? What is counter conditioning? What is desensitization? How are they different?
Irith Bloom: All right, so I have to start by saying that in science, when you look at actual research, most of the time they are done together.
And so when people talk about progressive desensitization, there is often some other element. It's not always food that is done along with it. And that element is actually usually relaxation. So in the human realm, when we do desensitization, the way it usually works is you take a trigger. I hope I'm not going to trigger anyone too badly. I'll use an example of a snake because it's a really common trigger.
And what you would do is you would figure out how that trigger is most disturbing to the patient that you're working with, because this would be a therapist and a patient working together, typically. And you would then present the animal. I'm going to stop saying the word over and over in case it does trigger anyone. You would then present the animal in that context. So perhaps you're just looking at a photograph or even a sketch of the animal.
And what you've done in advance is you've taught the human relaxation skills. And so you show them whatever this trigger is, and then you ask them to take a deep breath or focus on their connection to the ground or whatever it is that they've learned as a relaxation technique. And then you slowly build up the level of exposure, having the person consciously relax at each level over and over.
And the idea there is that you're teaching them to relax in the presence of that trigger. So technically, there is no food, but there is a counter conditioning element. Because what their typical reaction would be would be to become anxious or agitated. And you are counter conditioning that. The emotion you're training is, or teaching, I should say, is relaxation, which is counter to being agitated. Right? It's kind of the opposite.
So when we talk about counter conditioning, we're really talking about changing emotion. And so most desensitization programs involving humans and most of the research on desensitization in one way or another incorporates counter conditioning. With that said, technically, what desensitization really means. To go way back to the beginning of the question here, what desensitization technically means is helping the animal lose that sensitization to whatever it is. So you've got something that triggers you for whatever reason you are sensitized to.
It could be a very logical reason, by the way. It doesn't have to be something illogical. And what we're teaching you is that it's not as big of a deal as your brain right now thinks it is. And in order to do that, whether you're using counter conditioning or not, you start at a very, very low level of triggering, as we just discussed. It might just be, you know, a little sketch.
Maybe it's just a squiggle on the page that represents that animal, and you build up from there to more and more difficult triggers that approximate the actual real situation that the animal is worried about. So that's desensitization. We start. Let's ignore the counter conditioning part of it. Let's just talk about what I casually call straight desensitization. This is not a scientific term. I just want to make it really clear.
This is an eat term. I just pulled it out of the air. It does not actually have a scientific meaning. So straight desensitization is we start at a level where you can handle the trigger quite easily, and we slowly build up to the more difficult levels with you being able to handle it throughout. Counter conditioning is what we're all really used to doing. Where to take sort of the most common example is Dr. Patricia McConnell's open bar, closed bar concept, where basically you say, I want to say, oh, it might be jean Donaldson. I apologize if I'm attributing this to the wrong person, but I want to say it's Dr. McConnell. Anyway, basically what you say is, here's the trigger. Let's say that the trigger go back to dog. Since we're here at Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, let's say the trigger is a bicyclist riding by.
And the way open bar, closed bar works is the second you see a bicyclist, you start feeding the dog. When the bicyclist disappears, you stop feeding the dog. So the bicyclist opens the bar and the disappearance of the bicyclist closes the bar. That is counter conditioning. And the idea there is that food creates positive emotions. The bicyclist was creating a negative emotion. And so we're flipping the emotion by basically saying, hey, when there's a bicycle, positive things are happening.
And counter conditioning has a ton of research behind it. There's a lot of evidence that it works. But as with so many things, the details really matter. And the other big problem with counter conditioning is that you can get a resurgence of the fear pretty easily. And what that means is you can train the animal, whether it's a human or a non human animal. You can train the animal to feel calmer about whatever it is.
With this sort of progressive, you know, I'm just going to keep feeding you, and we're just going to practice and practice and practice. But if you stop practicing or if they encounter that trigger in too difficult of a scenario, their fear or anxiety or whatever emotion exactly was coming up may come back. And that's spontaneous recovery. It's not a good thing. Spontaneous recovery of the fear is how this is sometimes referred to.
So when we do counter conditioning and desensitization, we have to be really aware of all of these other elements that are in play in order to help avoid that spontaneous. Recovery of the negative emotion. I'm trying to think if there's anything else I should say. So that's. Let me just re. Summarize. So desensitization is. I'm exposing, starting from a really, really easy level that the animal can definitely handle and working up to difficult levels.
Counter conditioning is as soon as that trigger appears, something good happens. Most commonly in the dog world, we use food. But it could also be you present a toy and you play with the dog. There's a lot of other ways we could do it, technically. And then when the thing disappears, that good thing goes away. So you're pairing. This is very. I'm about to repeat myself. I don't.
This is not as repetitive as I mean it to be. This is very classical. Classical conditioning is that you're pairing to stimuli. That's what classical conditioning is all about, saying that when A happens, B happens, those things get tied together in your brain. So you're saying scary thing appears, but then food appears. Scary thing appears, but then food appears. And the order of events is also really important in counter conditioning. But I'll get into that a little bit later. So hopefully that gives you all a general overview of what they are and how they're different.
Melissa Breau: So why would we want to use, like, straight desensitization, right? So why wouldn't we want to use, I guess, food in some situations? Is it simply a matter of, you know, when we can't use food for some reason? Or are there actually times when that's kind of the preference or preferable?
Irith Bloom: So for me, frankly, at this point, after doing a lot of work with both of these techniques, my preference is to leave the food or play or whatever positive stimulus you're adding out of it as often as possible. And that means when I don't have to use food. And I'll get into, like, when those times might be later on when I don't have to use food, I am not going to use it.
And the main reason for this is that food can actually mask the stress, both for us as handlers watching the animal and for the animal itself. The animal will often work through levels of stress that are actually not helpful to achieving our end goal because they're so driven by the food. So a concept that some people may be familiar with as I talk about this is this concept of being conflicted about what's going on with what's happening.
So there's something bad and there's something good happening at the same time. And the animal kind of has to decide which of these is more relevant to me? But in those situations, often that kind of icky feeling associated with whatever the negative piece of the picture is means that it's still bleeding into that thing that we're trying, you know, to that positive thing we're trying to use. The two start to bleed together a little.
You're still feeling icky. A typical example of this. I talk about this with people a lot because I have a lot of. I've worked with a lot of people both through Fenzi classes and through, you know, client work where they have an animal who's really anxious about strangers. And the perfect example of this is when you have a stranger hand your dog a treat and your dog really doesn't want to be touched and is really a little bit scared of the stranger.
You've got two conflicting motivations. On the one hand, they just want to stay away from that scary person because that person might pet them and they really don't want that. But on the other hand, they've got this juicy piece of chicken in their hand. And your dog is a Labrador retriever who will basically fly to the moon and back for chicken if needed. And so now they're not quite sure what to do.
And that conflict is not helping them resolve their anxiety. It's just creating more anxiety. Plus, the thing that I like to point out, just to wrap up the guest issue here, in case anybody's wondering why I never advise hand feeding from guests, I do not like hand feeding from guests. Once that piece of chicken is gone, all that's there is the guest. So we've gone from there was something positive in the environment to now the only thing is the super scary monster guest thing that will probably now pet me because they just.
Their hand just became free because they fed me the chicken and now their hand has nothing to do. So I'm not a fan of putting animals in this position where they have to kind of decide, do I want to do this or do I want to do that. And there's pressure from the positive stimulus from that food, from that play. That's pressure. I want them to be able to decide freely, am I feeling comfortable enough to get closer to the guest or the, you know, other dog or the bicycle or whatever it is, but the food is a little bit of coercion.
It puts pressure on them. So that's one reason I don't like to have food involved or play or whatever else it is, is because there's that element of coercion. And the other reason is that Often in the eagerness for food, the body language that signals to us that the animal is getting uncomfortable will be harder to spot or will just get lost in the shuffle because their body language about the food will sort of overwhelm it.
So for me as a handler, I'm watching my animal. I want to make sure that my desensitization is at the right level. I'm gesturing just so that everyone listening to the podcast can tell, like, Melissa's nodding her head as I'm gesturing, you know, But I want to make sure that I'm at the right level for them. I've got my hand up and putting a level, and what's happening is I'm.
That body language is being hidden from me because in their eagerness for the food, their food seeking behavior is hiding the. I'm a little anxious about this body language, and now I'm putting them into a more difficult scenario than they can actually handle. So all of those are reasons why I have moved more and more away from the use of counter conditioning in its various forms and more and more to the use of desensitization without all of those sort of crutches, which I think sometimes hide that we're pushing the animal too hard or put the animal into a conflicted emotional state, which then is slowing down our progress.
So if we're thinking about that, right, if we're trying to set up a situation where we're looking at straight sensitization, what do we need to be thinking about as we create that plan? You know, especially when it comes to, like, a training setup. Right. Like, I imagine there are a lot of pieces other than just, you know, no food gradually exposed. Yeah. And I mean, you know, it's.
It's one of those things, like, simple isn't easy, as they say, because basically what you just said, no food gradually exposed. That's it. Right. Sounds really simple. It doesn't make it easy. So the first thing I will say is, for the vast majority of triggers, distance or other kinds of intensity, you know, volume. Literally volume. If it's a sound, that intensity is the first thing you want to look at.
You want to be at the point where the animal is like, oh, this thing happened. I noticed it. They do need to notice it, because if they're not noticing it, then they're not learning that it's okay and that they can be safe in the presence of this thing, but they don't need to notice it and then have a strong reaction. And I actually want as mild of a noticing reaction as I can get.
So let's take sound because sound is actually a really easy one to fine tune. Since everybody these days has a cellular phone or a computer. Did you all know that they're actually called cellular phones, by the way? I'm so old. Anyway, so basically with sound what I'll do is I will record whatever the scary sound is. Let's take a very typical example. And I should also say, by the way, I keep saying scary, but it doesn't have to be scary.
It's triggering an emotion that is so strong that the animal has difficulty handling that emotion. It could be, oh my gosh, I'm so excited, I'm out of my mind excited. But either way, they're not comfortable and they're not thinking straight. They might be so joyful that they're kind of losing it. Or they might be so scared that they don't know what to do with themselves. Or they might just be even just a little scared.
All the negative emotions just a little bit is already too much. So let's take the doorbell. Some dogs are like, oh my gosh, there's somebody at the door. Woohoo. You know, Other dogs are, oh, there's somebody at the door. Bad things are going to happen next whichever way they react. I record that doorbell with the dog out of the way because otherwise they're going during my recording and my recording doesn't work as well.
And it's not very helpful. Some of you might even have a doorbell sound that's already built into your cell phone or your computer. You can use those. YouTube actually has literally hours of video of different types of sounds. Like there's a video out there that I found once for a client who had issues with garbage day and their animal. We there's like an eight hours of garbage trucks out there on YouTube.
I mean seriously, like the stuff you'll find on YouTube for this is great. So do use YouTube for sound desensitization. It's a really good tool. Just make sure you know the recording before you start using it. So let's imagine I've recorded my doorbell and I have a little ping pong sort of recording what I'm going to do. Because the first thing I need to do is get the dog used to the routine.
I'm going to hold up my phone, I'm going to very obviously push the button and I've got the volume turned down to zero and I'm going to see how the dog reacts because I need to make sure that the presence of the phone and me pushing a button isn't already going to trigger some kind of response. So hopefully the dog just says ho hum. The human's doing that stupid thing where they stare at the small box and ignore me and they don't really think about it.
Then I turn the volume up literally one notch and I do the same routine. And I wait until the moment where the dog looks at my phone. Hey, I heard a noise from your phone. That's the level where I'm going to keep playing for a little bit. And then at some point the dog's going to go ho hum, staring at the box again. This is just ordinary human behavior.
And what I would do next is then raise the volume one more notch. And what I want to see is, I've noticed it, but I'm not freaking out. If at some point I raise the volume to the point where the dog barks at the doorbell sound, then I've gone too far. I need to go back a couple steps and build up again. And if there's any way for me to make the volume changes even smaller, I'm going to try to do that.
I'm going to try to split it finer. But at each level, what I'm looking for is, yes, I've noticed it changing to ho hum. And then I can push to the next level. I'm also looking for stress signals if I see a stress signal. So the barking is an extreme stress signal, right? That and it doesn't have to be bad stress. It could be happy, but it's still barking, it's still stress.
So when I see that response, and that could just be that the dog looks away or the dog licks their lips to use to kind of stick to doggy body language here, they start blinking a lot, they yawn, suddenly they're itchy. All of these things are signs that maybe that sound is a little too stressful. So I'm going to either stay right where I am or go down a notch and then build up again more slowly.
And the idea is each time I'm just pushing very, very gently and allowing the animal to learn that the doorbell sounds and nothing bad happens. What I would eventually do, by the way, with sounds, just to give you all a preview of how I handle sounds, is you eventually wind up throwing that sound to a Bluetooth speaker and being more and more subtle about triggering the sound so that the animal doesn't know it's coming.
And that way they get used to hearing it here, there and everywhere. And they don't always associate. You push the button with the sound, and you can actually desensitize them ultimately to the real sound. But first you have to get them to the point where they can handle full volume coming from your phone. And then you gradually work up from zero volume again with the Bluetooth speaker in various places and so on.
So the reason I used sound as an example here is because it's such a clean example, because we have so much control over the sound. But in a lot of situations, what I'm going to be looking for when I want to do a desensitization setup is how far away can I be? So, for example, the last time that I did my desensitization and counter conditioning course, we had students who would find a park with like an empty baseball field.
And they would be sitting at one end of the baseball field and at the next baseball field over, there'd be something going on that was triggering to the dog. And they would just sit there and allow the dog to observe. And as the dog became more comfortable, they could slowly, everyone sort of brought their own little chairs. You know, they could slowly move closer and closer. And a lot of the students in that class actually had dogs who were over excited, not frightened, but overexcited by what was going on and by allowing them to just chill in the presence of that thing and see that nothing was happening and get to the point where they were like, you know, I don't have to stare at the kids playing baseball anymore or whatever it was then the dog was gradually learning.
I don't have to react to every single thing that happens over there. This is not that big of a deal. It does take a little bit of commitment, because if you're going to do this, then it's really, really helpful if you suspend exposure that you can't control. So in other words, like, while I'm training the doorbell, I would disconnect my doorbell while I'm training the baseball field. Let's imagine that it's just kids running around on the baseball field that over excites my dog.
While I'm training the baseball field, I'm not taking my dog to baseball games where I'm not controlling the distance. So those are a couple of examples of how you might set up. So how. Or maybe the better question is kind of which pieces of that are different if we're adding counter conditioning into that mix. So if we're looking at both counter conditioning and desensitization for a protocol. Right.
So first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to work desensitization as long as I can. I just want to point that out. What I'm, what I'm calling straight desensitization, which means no food. I'm not giving the dog a lot of input in any form. I'm allowing them to just be in the presence of that challenge. And the challenge is at a reasonable level. I'm going to stay there as long as I can.
In some cases there is, it's almost like there's a barrier you can't get through. Like there's a point where the really common example of this is dogs who want to greet and they're on, let's say a six foot leash, which is the law where I live. Not that everyone obeys it, but it is the law. There's that point when you get within about six feet of whatever it is when like you've, you just can't, you can no longer control the situation.
The other person might step into the space or your dog might just be like, hey, I've got the leash length. I'm going to go say hi to this person. Let's imagine they're really excited to greet the person. I know these dogs and you get, when you're 10ft away, they can just barely keep it together, their butts already wiggling. And when they're six feet away, they are at the end of the leash sticking their nose into that person's leg to say hi.
So for those situations, that's where I start adding the food. And in that case, I don't actually think about it so much as counter conditioning in the sense of I'm teaching you a new emotion. But I think of it as counter conditioning in the sense of I'm teaching you a new behavior. Some people call this operant counter conditioning as opposed to classical counter conditioning. And with this operant, I'm making quote marks that you all, of course, can't see.
With this operant counter conditioning, what I'm basically doing is I'm saying I know what behavior you want to do. You want to go bum rush the person because you're so excited to say hi, but I'm going to ask you to look back at me. And that's a really hard behavior right now. So I'm going to reinforce that with food. And that's when I'm introducing the food. So this is all perfect world, right?
Perfect world. I don't use any food until I get to the point where I need to do a little bit of that operant counter conditioning. And I'm teaching. Hey, check in with me. And then I will release you to go say hello. And then I deliberately cue the hello because I want that to be something that I can say yes to whenever possible. But then when I have to say no, I don't give the cue and we just move on.
Now, there's also scenarios where the fear or excitement just becomes too much and there really isn't a great operant counter option, I guess I'm going to call it. And in those situations, when I get to the point where it feels like the dog is stuck, I can't get through this distance or this intensity of the volume or whatever it is. Then I will start adding food, but I'll do it right back at the.
At the point where they're just getting to the point where they're too excited to work or too frightened to work or whatever it is. I'll be like, all right. Playing the doorbell, sound handing you food. Playing the doorbell, sound handing you food. Playing the doorbell, sound handing you food. And often what you'll get out of that is accidentally you get the behavior of, they heard the sound, they look at you, they heard the sound, they look at you, the sound becomes a signal to look at you because they know they're going to get food.
And then from there again, I wind up building this operant behavior that helps them deal with the scenario and is incompatible with them staring at the thing and barking at it because they're looking at me and getting food. In these situations, it sometimes feels to me a little bit more like I'm giving the dog a coping tool like I've given them. When you see the bicycle and the bicycle is three feet away, here's what you can do to help yourself cope with the situation.
Check in with me and I'm going to give you a generous number of treats until that bicyclist has whizzed by and we are okay. So instead of the dog sort of being hanging out there, like, I don't know what to do, here's the bicycle. I could handle it when it was six feet away, but now it's only three feet away. This is just too much for me. I'm saying, hey, let me give you something to put your brain to.
Let me give you a specific task to do. And so it's funny as I say this, like, I'm really no longer counter conditioning. I'm kind of training at that point. With that said, for dogs who are having a lot of trouble with desensitization or just Any animal who. I just can't get. I can't get the distance, I can't get the right volume, I can't get the right intensity.
I will start with open bar, closed bar type counter conditioning. The thing happens, you get your food. The thing happens, you get your food. The thing happens, you get your food, the thing stops, no more food. So that I can sort of get them to the point where they're coping at least a little at that first level. And then I try to drop the food out and see if we can move forward again without it.
So those are some of the ways that I would introduce the food back into the picture. This might be a really good point for me to talk about order of operations, though, so…
Melissa Breau: Go for it.
Irith Bloom: Yeah. So I just want to say, when you're doing classical conditioning, it is really important to pay attention to which stimulus happens first. And the stimulus is, you know, whatever the thing is, it could be an event, it could be an object.
So think of them all as events. But that's a side note. So, for example, let's keep using our bicyclist. Bicyclist appears, then food appears. So those are two events, right? Bicyclist appears, food appears. Food, hopefully, is a positive stimulus for the dog. I have to make sure that the dog saw the bicyclist before I pull out the food, because if I don't, I'm going to potentially make the dog dislike food.
And I'd like to talk a little bit about how that works. In classical conditioning, you have the first stimulus, the first thing that happens, followed by a second stimulus. The second thing that happens. Stimulus A is I see the bicycle. Stimulus B is I get food. Food is positive. And so what happens then? The bicycle, in our theoretical example here is negative. I have nothing against bicycles. Please don't, you know, flame me about bicycles.
But bicycle appears, then food appears. And so what happens? Because of the way our brains do learning, for as far as I know, this is all vertebrates. I'm not sure how far down into invertebrates this goes. But the way learning works in vertebrates is that we, when something happens after a first thing happened, we start to associate the two. So if every time a bicycle appears, I get a treat, what happens is when a bicycle appears, I start to anticipate the treat.
I'm like, oh, a treat is coming. Since a treat is positive, when I see a bicycle, I start to anticipate something positive. I have a positive emotional response. It's actually called a conditioned emotional response. But we don't need to get all geek speaky here, but in case anyone's wondering, this is the conditional emotional response, conditioned, conditioned emotional response that we're all looking for. So bicycle leads to treat.
Bicycle leads to treat. Bicycle basically becomes a predictor of a treat. Bicycle is a good thing because I like treats. However, if I don't make sure that the dog saw the bicycle first, then what happens is I pull out food and then a bicycle appears. So now let's step back and analyze that situation. I have the positive thing, food, and then the bicycle appears. That's a negative thing.
So now food is predicting bicycles. Food means a bicycle's going to show up. I don't like bicycles. So now the food is predicting a negative thing, and I'm going to start having a negative emotion about food. And this is why some of you out there may have had this experience where when you pull out food, one of two things happens. Either your dog is like, oh, I don't even want to get near that, or they start looking around for the scary thing.
Neither of those is the response we want. So when you're doing classical conditioning of this kind, this counter conditioning, you have to be extra, extra, extra careful to make sure that the animal is aware of whatever that trigger is before you start feeding or pull out the toy to play with them, or speak to them soothingly or pet them or whatever it is that you're going to do to try to help them feel better.
By the way, speaking soothingly and petting can be really effective for some dogs, not most, but some. So, you know, it depends very much on the scenario. If it's an easy scenario, it can be effective for most, but that's a side note. So you have to make sure that you're always seeing the animal, see the thing before you add that food, etc. Otherwise you run the risk of putting a negative association on the food.
And this is another reason that I like to avoid food, is because it is all too easy to accidentally, in the shuffle of the moment, wind up being backwards in the order of the two events. And when that happens, you're actually making the situation worse for yourself. Because that power of that positive thing that you were using, that food, or whatever it is, that power starts to get weakened. And ultimately it can even be flipped to a negative thing before we move on, just to dig into that just a little bit further, if that's okay.
Melissa Breau: Yeah.
Irith Bloom: Is it worth, if you are using counter conditioning, thinking about making sure that there are. You're kind of balancing out. So let's assume that you know at least one every 100 reps. You're gonna mess it up, right? Like occasionally you're just, you're gonna get your utter operations backwards.
You're gonna think the dog saw the thing, they didn't see the thing, that kind of thing. Is it worth also making sure you're spending time. Not all of your training time is dedicated to dealing with these feelings, essentially, right? So, like, your food also has lots of other. Lots of other things that it's predicting and your dog is anticipating and like to kind of dilute, you know, the learning history that may be of those reps, you know, kind of that.
Melissa Breau: And kind of to further complicate that. You know, I think especially for dogs that are. Have big feelings, big fear feelings about things, right? Like, maybe they become, okay, we're getting in the car, and now the car becomes the predictor of the scary. Like, so you, you just back chain it all the way up the chain. Can you just talk about that? Like, does it make sense to, if you're doing one of these plans, to also kind of think about what other pieces and making sure there are times when they happen that aren't related to your training of the scary thing?
Irith Bloom: Yes. So, okay, so let me start with sort of the first half of the question and then get into yes. It was a very big no. I mean, it's an amazing question. I'm so glad you brought it up, actually, because this is such an important thing. So classical conditioning is definitely something where the number of times you do something has a huge impact. So if the only times the dog is getting chicken are around the scary stimulus and you're likely to mess up the order of events on a regular basis, then there's a very good chance that that food that you're using, that you've set aside, that's special is going to get muddled and you're not necessarily going to see the effect you want.
So while the science suggests that having a very specific food is actually helpful, that's work that was done in laboratories. And lab work is different than real life work. In the lab, you can literally make sure that the scary stimulus always shows up before the food, it's a lot harder to do in real life. So while there is that data out there to support the idea of having one special food that you only use for this, I do not usually recommend that for situations where there's a scary thing, I do use it for emergency recalls.
But that's a side note. That's a whole different kind of training. So what I want to do, as Melissa just basically suggested in her question, because it's really such a smart question, what I want to do is I want to make sure that that food is happening in happy situations at least 99 times for every one time that there's a risk it's going to happen in an unhappy situation.
And I don't want to use a brand new food if there's any risk that I'm going to get my order of operations wrong. Because that first impressions are actually, scientifically speaking, incredibly important. If a bad thing happens the first time an animal encounters something, it is extremely hard to overcome that negative association. But if they've already gotten 99 examples of, let's say, you know, roast beef, they've had roast beef in 99 great scenarios, or they've just gotten roast beef for standing there and looking cute 99 times, and then there's one time when the roast beef is associated with something icky, they're a lot less likely to have a globally negative association happen.
So it is really important to think about what reinforce. It's not a reinforcer, technically, just for the record. So I'm going to stop that word before it comes out of my mouth. It's really important to think about what positive stimulus you are using and whether that has a nice deep history of being used in happy scenarios. So a good example of this and then I will try to remember the second half of the question.
Oh my gosh. A good example of this is if you're doing, for instance, cooperative care and you're going to take your animal into the vet, that should not be the first time that they see peanut butter in, you know, in the cooperative care context. If your vet uses peanut butter, which they may or may not, but you know, so you would want to make sure that they've been training with peanut butter so that that one time that you go to the vet after three months of training, the cooperative care task of a blood draw, or maybe six months or nine months, depending on how long it takes, or two years after all that training, you don't want to undermine some possible food tool by having some new food tool.
So you're going to want to. The fear free vets are great, they have lots of treats, but you should bring in the stuff that you've been working with so that when you've done this a hundred thousand times at home with peanut butter, you bring your peanut butter to the vet office. And when the vet office does it once, and there's an actual needle and an actual stick. Your dog doesn't say, oh, peanut butter is evil.
The one thing I will say about this is that there are some animals out there. I have met dogs like this and I have met other species of animals that are like this that it doesn't seem to matter how many times you have a positive association. One association that is negative enough will spoil the whole thing. If you have one of those animals, you need to be extra careful to build them up to whatever that negative situation is in a really, really gradual way.
It's like these. They're like, you tricked me once and now I don't trust this ever again. Usually if you've done a ton of work using that food or whatever it is, that doesn't happen. But I do occasionally meet dogs who are so sensitive that you just need one bad trial and they're like, I'm done. So do keep that in mind. If you have one of those animals in your care, you want to be extra, extra careful, take everything extra, extra, extra slow. And you might even need to think about if it's, say, a veterinary scenario, sedating them for the veterinary scenario instead of ruining all the good work you've done.
Melissa Breau: So the other half of that question was about when. Okay, now we're getting in the car and that's going to predict. We're going to train the scary thing. So, like the bleeding backwards into the things that kind of predict going to train. Can you talk a little bit about…
Irith Bloom: Yes. And I love that you just said bleeding backwards, because that's one of the phrases that I use. Counter conditioning, to me, class conditioning. Bleeds backwards. Whatever the last thing was that happened that bleeds backwards into the things before. So if I'm scared of the vet, let's keep going with the veterinary example. Yeah. And the only time I get in the car or the first time I got in the car, I got taken to the vet.
Then vet is scary. Vet parking lot is scary. I got to the vet parking lot in the car, Car is scary. I got put in my harness before I got in the car. Now the harness is scary. And it can go back and back and back, and it can also expand outwards to things that just happened to be. There was a bird flying by, and now birds are scary.
It's one of the big problems with classical conditioning in general is because we're so good at making associations, we often form them with things that weren't actually relevant. The bird flying by did not make the veterinarian happen, but the bird flying by happened when you put me in the car to take me to the vet. And I'm already nervous about the car because the car takes me to the vet.
And so now I'm nervous about the bird because I'm nervous about the car and on and on and on. So this kind of either backwards chaining, I really like the way you put that, the backwards chaining of the stimuli or this outward spread, it sort of bleeds outwards, is unfortunately very common for certain types of animals. And by types I mean personalities or whatever the right word for.
I always want to say canonality for dogs, but depending on their personality, they will be more prone to having associations form that aren't necessarily relevant. But now they're relevant to the animal. They weren't logically relevant, but logic has nothing to do with it. So this is again where you're going to try to limit how many things are happening because you want to limit what the potential new associations could be.
So if you know you've got an emergency scenario where your dog was just, goodness forbid, bitten by a rattlesnake, you want that dog to get as little input as possible while you are rushing them to the emergency vet. To the point where I would consider wrapping them in a towel, having them not be able to see very well, putting them in a dark part of the car so they can't look out the windows and spot things.
Let's just avoid creating those associations if we possibly can. If the association does get formed, then you're going to need to deal with it. Which means now instead of only having to counter, condition or desensitize to the car, now you're also counter conditioning or desensitizing to the bird or to the harness or to whatever else got associated. You're gonna need to work each of those pieces separately and then you start hooking them together.
So it's not that you can't improve things, but it is a lot of extra effort. So if we can avoid creating those associations, that's the best thing. Life is not perfect. Often those associations get formed and you're like, why is the dog afraid of the bedroom? If one of my students who may be listening to this is going to be like, hey, that's me. Why is the dog afraid of the bedroom?
I don't know why the dog is afraid of the bedroom. Some kind of weird association formed. Last thing I want to do is force the dog into that situation if I can possibly avoid it. And in fact, with the student, what happened was there was no pressure to go back into the bedroom. The person just kept going in and out normally. And then one day, through careful observation, the student realized that what was actually scary about the bedroom was a particular object in the bedroom.
She adjusted the way that object was presented and the dog said, oh, I can walk back into the bedroom. So interesting. Sometimes it is that simple. In this particular case, it was a mirror and she covered the mirror. And covering the mirror made everything okay. I mean, everything okay is a little bit of an overstatement, but it made things so much better. Yeah. And that was the first step in getting the dog to be okay walking back into the bedroom.
But the key was that there was no pressure. Which takes me back to the why I don't necessarily want to use food. Because if she had been trying to coax the dog into the bedroom using food, we would have had all that conflict. The dog might have stepped in because they're really excited about the food, but then they're in the presence of this fearful space and they're not enjoying themselves and the mirror's right there.
Oh, my gosh. Instead, by allowing the animal to cope with the situation in their own way, it was a dog. In this case, she was able to observe the dog looking at the mirror anxiously from outside the bedroom door and then figure out that the mirror was part of the picture. Or actually, I don't think it was even from outside the bedroom door. I think what happened was one time the dog decided to walk in and then acted funny around the mirror.
That's right. That was what it was. Acted funny around the mirror. And she was able to observe that because she wasn't pressuring the dog or coercing the dog in any way. So this all goes back again to that observe, figure out what's scary and then either desensitize or counter condition or put the two together and work on what you've spotted. But I have to say, it is worth speaking to your veterinarian about things like, we're coming to the vet office.
Are there medications that we could give in advance? I say this is a fear free certified practitioner. You know, that's it. There's nothing wrong with making it easier for the animal. There's nothing wrong with reducing the odds that a negative association will be formed. And a really good way to do that is to just have the animal on something that helps them feel calmer or feel or actually just sleep through the vet visit. And what specific things should be used, that's up to the vet. I do recommend anyone who's Interested, check out fearfreepets.com they have a lot of information about kind of thing.
Melissa Breau: Awesome. All right, so talk to me just a little bit about pacing. Right? So like, how do we know when the animal that we're working with is ready for that increasing of intensity? Right. And then, you know, is there a point where you just. We haven't reached that point yet. It's been a really long time. Maybe this isn't working. Maybe we need to abandon ship. Right?
Irith Bloom: Yeah, Great question. So the first part is, I usually judge by body language, I look for signs of stress. I want really, at worst, mild signs of stress. Like I said, I want noticing. And then maybe a tiny bit of stress is okay, but I don't want big stress.
Bearing in mind that different animals are going to express stress more like some dogs, they're like, I'm having stress and other dogs are very quiet about it. I'm having stress, I'm having stress. I'm not sure I want you to know about it, but I am having stress. And so you need to know the animal that's in front of you. But with that said, what I'm looking for is either a minimum of stress signals when there's an exposure or noticing without stress signals when there's an exposure.
And then what I'm looking for is for those stress signals to drop away and when they've fallen away. And like I said, this is what I mean by ho hum is you play the thing and they're like, I have heard this darned doorbell so many times. I am bored. Don't you have something better to do with your time? Come on, human, let's do something else. When they get to that sort of whatever, I'm not even noticing it.
That's when I increase the difficulty. And sometimes you can't be as stepwise as that. Sometimes the world is just going to throw stuff at you and you will see that the animal is having a stress response. But as long as they have that stress response and then they come back to being calm and the stress response is small. Small stress response and they come back to being calm in those situations, I don't sweat it.
If I slightly overexpose them, that's okay. They do need to be able to learn to cope if it gets a little bit more intense than they would ideally love. But I also don't want to keep throwing them in the deep end over and over because at some point they're going to drown. So the second part of the question when would I abandon ship? So, yeah, this is a.
This is an it depends question, which I know everyone hates the it depends answers, but can't avoid them. Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes it just is what it is. I think to some extent, you should always give the animal at least a few weeks to adjust to something and see how it's going. However, if you are practicing every day, you're practicing a couple times a day, think about not practicing every day.
Think about dropping out some of those practices and allowing their stress level to go back down in between practices. That's one thing. If you've already adjusted that you've been doing this for weeks and you're seeing almost no improvement or literally no improvement, that's when I tend to consult a veterinary behaviorist. Because something may just be. The stress levels for the dog may just be too hard. There may be something going on that is beyond what I can help with without any other intervention.
And the other thing to think about is whether uncontrolled exposures are happening over and over. So no matter how much you're working with bicycles because you've got a bicyclist friend, I actually do have a bicyclist friend who will bicycle around for you 50ft away, just over and over and over in a circle. If every time you take the dog for a walk, a bicycle whizzes by three feet away, you're going to be undermining that.
So that's a situation where you can't actually control. You have to take your dog on walks because, you know, you don't have a backyard or whatever it is. It's actually really common where I live. And yet they're getting exposed every time they leave the house. That's another time when I reach for a veterinary behaviorist's contact info and send the call out to them. So with my clients, because I've been doing this for so long, I have sort of a gut feeling.
We do a couple of sessions and I'm watching the dog's progress and I have a pretty good sense it's working. It's not working. We need more of an intervention. I will let them know and I will refer to a veterinary behaviorist. And I'm very lucky. I have two in my immediate area and I work with both of them regularly. That's awesome. I mean, it's nice to have two in your immediate area. That's not everywhere.
Melissa Breau: Yeah. All right. So I know you kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, but, you know, if you could, you know, It. So it sounds like it's not just the yucky feelings that all of this applies to. We can absolutely use it also for dogs who are just having big feelings, even if they're positive big feelings. Is that. Am I summarizing that okay?
Irith Bloom: Yes, absolutely. And the way, honestly the way I look at counter conditioning is I look at. I want calm. What I'm actually usually counter conditioning for is my goal with the desensitization or the counter conditioning or both is to achieve calm. There are some situations where I'm happy to be working towards joy, but joy can be too big of an emotion for some of these things. I don't want the dog to be so joyful that they're now chasing bicycles.
Look, it's a bicycle. I love bicycles. I have to go catch it, you know, because the closer I get to it, the more food I get. Woohoo. I'm not sure that's actually the response I want. So I'm usually aiming for calm. And calm is something that I can get from scared to calm or I can get from excited to calm. So I'm looking for that neutral. It's a slightly positive neutral middle state I guess is what I would call it. I'm not looking to get to an extreme of joy. I'm looking for. I see the thing. There it is. That's okay. Hey, I got to see a bicycle. And now we move on with our day.
Melissa Breau: So you've got a webinar coming up on the 21st at 6pm Pacific and then also a class on this stuff in December. Can you just talk briefly about each of them and maybe who might be interested in joining you for which?
Irith Bloom: All right, so first of all, I'm just going to say join me for both. Join me for both. But having said that, I'm getting better at this shameless self promotion thing. It's been something I'm working on, so I'm just giving myself a pat on the back for shameless self promotion. So the webinar is going to be really useful for first of all, anyone who's listened to this, you've already gotten a bunch of ideas, but you want to sort of operationalize this and see what it looks like.
I'll have some examples, some of which have been shared by my amazing Fenzi students who are just fantastic and very generous. And you'll get to see like what does desensitization actually look like? And when we add counter conditioning, how does that change the picture? Or do we need to add it? Or why did we add it. In this case, we'll discuss those things a little bit. If you want to really get deeply into this topic and start talking about things like conditioned relaxation to add to that desensitization piece, which is something that I do in the course, but that takes some preparation and some work.
The course will be a really good place for you to be. I will probably touch on that briefly in the webinar, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it because it does take a lot of prep work. So we'll be mostly in the webinar focusing on. Here are some examples of what it looks like. Here's when I would apply this tool versus that tool.
Just give you a little sense of how to move forward with this with examples. And in the course I'll obviously be helping any gold students actually work through these things with the animals in their care. I'm open, by the way, to any species. So if you don't have a dog but you want to work on this and you have some other kind of animal, I would love it.
Please come and join me. And in the class we will be talking more deeply about all of these topics and why I like to work the way I do like to the point where you're all going to get a little geeky about behavior. So I apologize if you don't want to get geeky about behavior.
Melissa Breau: Don't worry about it. There's no quizzes.
Irith Bloom: Yeah. So that's kind of the difference is the course is just going to go into it a lot more deeply.
You'll actually get to see cases in action even if you're just, you know, signing up for a bronze spot, which is totally fine. You'll get to see these cases moving forward and how we adjust and flow in real time. And you'll also get a much better look at how conditioned relaxation can be incorporated with nonverbal animals or the non human animals really in our care. Because nonverbal animals can be human too.
So that's kind of it's. It's really just an in depth thing. The course where the webinar is going to give you a nice overview with a few examples. Any final thoughts or key points maybe that you want to leave folks with as we wrap this up? Key point is, those of you who know me know that I am sort of obsessed with the topic of choice. Think about how you can set things up so that the animal is making a lot of decisions about how the exposure goes and how quickly, quickly you step things forward.
Watch for communication. Honor that communication. Let the animals make a lot of choices, because choice also makes the animal feel safer and more comfortable. And that's going to help you counteract whatever negative emotions or overexcited emotions might be happening. And finally, with that sort of said, aim for calm. When in doubt, a calm, relatively neutral, slightly positive state is a good place for an animal to be. I like that.
Melissa Breau: That's a good kind of reminder and a good level set right for the whole conversation just to remember that that's the goal. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Irith.
Irith Bloom: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. I hope to see a lot of people at the webinar and the course and do feel free to reach out to me with questions.
Awesome. All right, thank you again 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!