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

 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 Karen Deeds here with me to talk about the pieces that go into creating peace at home when you live with dogs. Hi Karen, welcome back to the podcast.

Karen Deeds: Well, hello Melissa. Good to be here.

Melissa Breau: Super excited to chat. Do you want to start us off by sharing a bit about you, your background and your pups for those who might not know you?

Karen Deeds: Sure. I'm originally from Kansas and I moved there as quickly or moved from there when I was about 25 and lived in Texas for about 40 years. And we've only been in Tennessee for a couple years.

It'll be two years this January, so we've kind of had to restart our entire business. My husband and I are both dog trainers and I'm a certified dog behavior consultant through the IAABC. So I primarily work with behavior problems, although I do love working with puppies to prevent problems. And right now we are living in the Millington, Tennessee area, which is a little bit north of Memphis, and we have five acres and we've got a pond going in for a sniff spot.

And eventually we're going to get our training studio built so that we can actually start doing some little classes and some private lessons out here. But meanwhile I do a lot of in homes online obviously through FDSA as well as I travel a lot lately doing some what I call immersion programs or even just seeing clients one on one. I've started a program called an immersion program where I spend anywhere from three to six days with a client, basically five to six hours per day.

Obviously we don't work the dogs all that time, but I've really gotten to know the client and that helps more than I anticipated it helping getting to know them and their routines because I'm pretty much living with them for half a day and I get to see what their life is like, so to speak, and what they really want their dog to be able to do and what their limitations are.

Anyway, it's been a lot of fun. We've worked through some pretty serious issues with my last immersion program and I'll be heading up to Connecticut, I think in March to work with somebody. So I'm really excited about that. But here at home I have my two dogs. I have a border collie mix named Dempsey. He's a lot of fun. He was pretty Much a semi feral dog. When I got him 5 years ago he lived in a 10 foot by 10 foot pen with pretty much no human contact for the first 10 months of his life.

So handling was an issue. It's a heck of a lot better now but I could certainly brush up on that. And then I have the Labrador Stoney who knows no strangers, dog or people and they are actually a really good pair together. What I have found out is when I use them for decoy work my border collie is actually much better because he really doesn't care about people or dogs.

He's very indifferent and that's better than a dog who is overly friendly to work with dogs that are dog reactive per se. So those are my two. I would love to have another lsd. A little snot dog. I miss mine. And one of these days I'm hoping maybe by the end of the year I'll have an addition to that. But we're dealing with some seniors around here so I'm gonna have to wait.

Wait my turn kinda sort of. I was thinking you might be just about due for a puppy. Yeah, part of me goes puppy. Do I really wanna do a puppy? And really, I mean I don't do competition stuff much anymore. Maybe I'd get it. But most of it is behavior stuff and just having a puppy, a little dog. I just love my littles. I've always loved littles. Long haired chihuahua is high on my list.

That's what I lost a couple years ago and I miss him dearly. So anyway, that's my home life so to speak is those two. But of course I have to deal with some of Bob's dogs. We've got two Mals and a Shih Tzu. Those are Bob's dogs. And we have a little shared Min pin Chihuahua who's 12 going on 13 or 14, I don't know, who only has one eye and he's kind of wobbly in the back end now so he's getting there. But anyway it's a lot of fun. We live with a lot of chaos which is why the harmony in the household class is pretty near and dear to me.

Melissa Breau: Speaking of that, when you think about that kind of a household that has at least one dog but maybe more dogs, what skills are we looking at or what do you kind of consider most important to keep kind of everyone happy and healthy?

Karen Deeds: A lot of it is going to. Gosh, that's a great question because it depends on the dogs, right? I have like my Labrador, he has very little needs, in all honesty, he could spend all day just lounging around, you know, hanging out with me, following me. And then the border collie's like, yeah, this is not what I want to do. I can't just sit here. We've got to go do something first.

So meeting the dog's needs first and foremost. What are your dog's needs that will help them to be able to do the hanging out in the house, which is normally what most people are after. And of course, personalities. I have to really watch my border collie because he would be a resource guarder, and I can't put him with the Malinois, who is also a resource guarder. It's just not going to work.

And in all honesty, could I work through that? Probably. Am I going to? Probably not. Management is my friend, and I'm not afraid of that. And I think that's a real big piece of that. Just managing the situation and not letting them practice is a huge part of changing the behavior. I use this analogy of you're not going to create sobriety when the alcoholic is already drunk, so you have to get the alcoholic out of the bar.

And a lot of that is about management. And that goes with pretty much any behavior modification program as far as I'm concerned, is don't let them practice the behavior that keeps that behavior alive. You know, practice makes perfect, as Bob Bailey would say, or perfect. Practice makes perfect. So it's, it's, it's a juggling event. Like I say, we have six dogs, and so there are rarely. There's never any time when there's all six dogs out in the house.

Never, ever. It just can't happen. I have to, I have to create and rotate. And granted, part of it is I don't have a big enough house or living room for. To accommodate, you know, four large breed dogs and two little dogs. I just don't have that kind of living room space if I want to have any kind of quality of life in my own living room. So.

But, so, but settling is certainly part of it. Like, you know, one of the things I have to have is my dogs need to understand the ones that need it. Go to your place and just chill and maybe here's your bone and this is where you chew your bone. So that could be part of the settling process. But a lot of it with the bigger dogs is I do need to have some verbal control, you know, so that I'm not just yelling and screaming, stop it.

Don't do that. Don't quit. That never works. Because no never teaches. So I do have to have a level of foundation on the dogs. Now, granted, my little dogs, they have no training whatsoever. None. None. Zippo. Nada. I mean, Holly, she's our little Shih Tzu. That's Bob's little dog. She goes to her little bed. It wasn't trained. It's just that she loves her little donut bed, right? That's all she does.

And that's where she. She hangs out her. And the little min pin, he jumps up on the loveseat and he curls up in his little, little pillow, and that's what he does. And the big dogs, those are the ones that I have to manage. And I have to, you know, you come out, you're being calm, all right? Now you can do some interaction, and if things start to get too elevated, boys, go to your place.

All right? All right. Now get up. You can do some more. But again, I have to make sure that those needs are satisfied before I even attempt that. So you mentioned settling in there. Let's talk about that just a little bit more. So how are you defining the word settle here? What does that look like? Or what does that skill kind of include? Well, there's. And I think there's a gazillion different processes out there for teaching it.

I mean, you know, Nicole has her own FOMO class, which is. Incorporates a lot of that do this behavior. And really, truly, first and foremost, it's a differential reinforcement behavior. It's a process. It's an alternative or an incompatible behavior to the things that we don't want. So that's probably first and foremost. But I also. The way I teach it, I'm hoping to create more of a physiological change by lowering the dog's blood pressure, their cortisol levels, their heart rate.

Because it's not an actively trained behavior to start with. It's, you know, I teach it with more calm behavior. It's not a go to it, Mark, get off feed. Go to it, Mark, get off feed. I don't teach it that way. The other thing I like to consider, it kind of becomes a duration skill. Can your dog do a settle for five minutes? Because if they can't do that for five minutes, they probably can't do a lot of other things for five minutes.

So that's something I have seen the benefit of just teaching your dog a duration skill. It means that their duration in other areas will improve. And I also use it kind of as a conduit for impulse control. In other words, the dogs want to do all the things. Right. You know, but can they do this behavior instead of that behavior? So it's that impulse control type thing as well.

That falls under the category of a differential reinforcement process. But it still implies that the dog has to go, oh, I want that, but I can't have that. And this is what I do to get that perhaps. So that's kind of what I. What I call my settle and what it consists of. So can you give us kind of an overview of how you teach it? I start out really slowly and I take a very specific.

And I start with a mat. I like mats that have little loops in it. A rubber backed bath mat is my friend. I want something that kind of has loops in it so that if you drop food in it, it kind of goes down inside the loops. I don't like the memory foam because food just bounces off of it. I don't like pieces of carpet unless it's shag carp.

I'm cheating a little bit by just. First thing I do is I put food on the mat. And because I use this a lot for behavior modification and not so much as calm behavior around the house. I mean, that's kind of an offshoot of teaching settle is to do this while I'm watching TV or on the computer or whatever. That's one aspect, but that's not normally the way I'm going to be presenting it, because I think there's enough people out there that teach that.

So what I'll be doing is working using it as a. In conjunction with behavior mod, so to speak. But I start out with, you know, the dog on a leash, because a lot of this is leash reactivity. This is one of the things I worked with my last immersion program. She even looked at her leash and her dog started jumping and spinning and biting her. And I'm going, oh, the leash has its own life.

And so we had to completely start with calm behavior without a leash because the leash was already too, too over exciting. So when I teach this, I try to start with a dog on leash so that I can actually change the emotional response of the leash itself. And if I can't, like I could with this dog, I had to teach the dog even to eat. We. She couldn't even put on her shoes.

If the dog saw her putting on her shoes, that meant we were going somewhere and the dog started to spiral up. So we actually had to start the process of seeding the mat. So I kind of held him away. She put food on a mat. We let him come in and we just kept dropping food until he would actually eat food on the mat. It took him a few repetitions for him to understand that it's okay for me to eat food.

In fact, we had to take the mat a long way away from the doorway because anything close to the doorway created that over arousal effect. So we stair stepped it. But normally what I do is I seed the mat. In other words, I put food on the mat, I go get the dog, I bring it in, the dog sees the food, I sit down, I keep dropping food.

It's almost the ignore me behavior that I'm trying to teach. This is not a focused on you behavior. This is a don't focus on me behavior. So I want the dog to just keep their head down and eat, eat, eat, eat, eat. I release them with an all done, which is a connection. If the dog is on leash, I'm not going to use what I would call my free dog release, which is woo hoo, we're done.

I want all done, calm release, come to me, get a cookie. So all done means okay, I can get up off a mat, but I don't get to run and play and do all those fun things. So once I create the connection between, oh my God, there's my mat. Let me take mom to it, because I know there's going to be food there. Then I start to generalize that I move the mat around the house so that it becomes about the mat and not about the position the mat was in.

Like not in front of your favorite chair in the living room. So I might take it to the bathroom or the bedroom or the living room and then eventually the porch or wherever. And once the dog is realizing it's about that spot and that has become a target, right then I start to take the dog over and I lure them into hopefully a rolled hip position and I feed again on the mat.

Very rarely does food come from my hand and I try not to drop food while the dog is looking at me. I want them either looking away from me or maybe still sniffing on the mat once I get to that process. Now I have kind of two cues for the mat, which would be the mat itself and me luring the dog so there comes a hand signal. But I also teach away from the mat work.

I will teach the concept of impulse control as well as I will teach a tactile cue of leash pressure so that the dog will. I can use leash pressure that has been trained. It's not a I'm going to jerk your neck down and make you lay down. And I have. There's rules about when I would use that. My border Collie. Absolutely. Dude, you can't go play with your ball.

You have to lay down. And he has been taught that follow the pressure of the leash. And it's just another cue, right? So I have tactile cue. I have a visual cue, I have the target cue. And then of course, I can add a verbal cue. Settle, hand signal, tactile cue, mat. It's all there together. Eventually I can get rid of one or two or three of those cues.

My border collie, settle. He can do a settle anywhere. Rolled hip on a verbal. Doesn't have to have a leash, doesn't have to have lure or the hand signal. Doesn't have to have the mat. But that's where I start. And then I progress to, okay, now I have to build a little bit of duration, and that's. Sometimes I will add in marker cues, but up until now, now I have not.

And again, it depends on the dog whether I add a marker cue or not. But if I do, I use a scatter marker cue. That is not scatter. It's called dinner. But it's multiple pieces of food on the mat. And it means stay in position. It's a lot like the room service cookie. It's room service, but you have to maintain the settled down, roll, hip roll position. And that is what I can then use in conjunction with the engage disengage process when I'm doing behavior mod work.

So the dog, maybe he's doing a settle and he looks at a distance and he sees the dog that I'm trying to counter condition, but he's got a lower arousal level because we've trained to settle. So his blood pressure is down, his cortisol is down, his heart rate is down, and he's already got a positive association with that mat. So I'm working with that instead of just taking the dog out into the raw.

And so now I have the dog that's going, I love this place. This is where all the good things happen. And oh, my, there's a dog over there. Dinner. And I feed the dog and he goes, oh, wow, there's another dog. And I got a dinner cue. Now, granted, I can't use dinner with a. With a smush nose face dog. Tried doing this with a Frenchie recently and he's like, yeah, I have to stand up up to eat things.

So I had to feed him differently. I just basically delivered food instead of on the mat from my hand at an angle. So that he could maintain the down position. So you do have to make some modifications, but in a nutshell, that's it. That's the overview.

Melissa Breau: So you are doing a webinar on all of this on the 23rd. Do you want to just share a little bit more about kind of what's going to go in the webinar and maybe who should consider joining us?

Karen Deeds: Yeah, I think anybody who has a dog that's a little over aroused would benefit because of the physiological changes. I also find dogs with anxiety, arousal and anxiety in my world come together a lot, but not necessarily. But dogs with anxiety, a lot of it is about I don't know what to do. And when we can teach a dog that has anxiety and give them structure and rules, it makes them go, oh thank God, not my job.

And that also falls into the harmony class as well. But you know, I say knowledge is power. Power creates confidence, confidence reduces anxiety. So if I have conditioned the settle behavior with an anxious dog and they go, oh my God, I know exactly what to do here. That takes a little bit of responsibility off of them. And that helps to reduce anxiety. And of course then there are border collies.

My impulsive border collie is like, I the things all the time. So I'm not using it to change behavior for fear at all. It's the impulsivity that he has. And so it applies that same structure and boundaries for a very different reason than the anxious dog. It's kind of like, oh, I want this. I can't have that until I'm allowed to have that. And you know, I think for some dogs that are not that anxious fearful type of dog, I think we'd probably call them pushy or assertive.

And I know those are labels and I know that's taboo, but that's the way my clients see their dogs. Right. And it's up to me to be able to help my clients the best. And I listened to a webinar recently, fdsa, talking about how, you know, the scientists. And I remember presenting up at ORCA at University of North Texas was Jesus Rosales Reyes at their ORCA group. And you know, I'm just, I'm not a college student and I don't have all these discriminative stimulus and UCSS and all that.

I don't know what that means. Anyway, we were, we were talking about, this is pre Covid. We were presenting about multiple marker system to their ORCA group, which is the organization for reinforcement contingency of animals. That's what that stands for. And that organization is who used to present the art and science of animal training conferences or some workshops, seminars for you through unt. I miss them greatly. But anyway, we were up there before COVID hit.

And so Bob and I and our little then apprentice Meta were presenting this concept to this group of people, which some of them were animal trainers, but most of them worked with kids. And one little gal asked me a question, and it was very technical. And I went, I think what you just asked me was. And I was right. I kind of fumbled through it. But what happened was Jesus kind of went, you know what?

He says, here we are, the scientists expecting you to learn our language, and what we really should be doing is learning your language. So. And I was talking to somebody just the other day. In fact, I did a podcast with Barbara Buckmire. I let her be in her summit, which is coming up soon too. And we were talking about that. And she says, you know what? She says, you need to speak to your students, to your clients, and stop trying to impress people.

And I went, you know what? That makes sense, because I really can't impress people anyway. I just do what I do. But anyway, so. And I have no idea why I got on that, that little kick, but I think it was about the fact that I use labels when I talk about my dogs that are assertive or pushy. I have one that's my border collie, for sure. And then I have my Labrador, who doesn't have any behavior problems, really, for the most part, he's kind of a wuss, which is great.

But for my clients who do have dogs that have, you know, issues, they're not pushy or assertive. They might be fearful or insecure. And so I think the process of settling can help both. And of course, just dogs that just don't know what else to do, maybe create a default behavior. It's just an appropriate behavior for them to do. So for me, I use settle a lot, but because I am primarily working with already existing behavior problems, you know, it normally falls more into the behavior mod category versus just a do this behavior.

So anyway, am I right in maybe guessing or assuming that settling is also kind of part of the skill set you look at for multi dog households to help promote kind of household harmony there? Absolutely. Multi dog households or households with multi kids with one dog, you know, the whole harmony in the household is not just about dog to dog stuff. It might be dog to kid, it might be dog to cat, it might be dog to parent.

Oh, my God. I worked with one of those recently on the, on online or virtually. That was fun. Not because part of it is, you know, how many people train their birds or their cats? Not many. I have been very fortunate that a couple of my students in my classes have got some amazing cat skills. Their cat's place they target. I'm like, oh my God, that's impressive. And of course we can all watch Laura Waudby and her cat and that's unbelievably amazing.

So the settle process is absolutely a part of that. But again, it goes a little bit deeper with the behavior mod processes. If we're already having conflict, of course management is key. Identifying the trigger areas. And a lot of times they can settle in the room together just fine. It's when one gets up that things go bad. So I have to work through that process. And so I apply.

Maybe I use the name game where we do some, you know, just some flat out counter conditioning and we add in changes in the other dog and it looks a lot like what Nicole teaches with her FOMO class. But normally I'm dealing with bigger feelings, so to speak, instead of oh, I want to go too. It's I want to kick your butt kind of sort of thing. So, you know, yes, settling is a big part of it.

It's not the only part of it, but that creating predictability is a big part of harmony in the household as well as again, the dogs that really need to know what to do, they benefit from that. It's the authoritative type of parenting or dog raising versus the authoritarian or the permissive type. I mean we've proven it in children that authoritative, which is basically giving them boundaries and then teaching them what we want them to do is the most successful.

And so I kind of take that and apply that to the dog world as well. What are some of the common problems that you know, crop up when we are talking about multi dog households? Maybe not an all out fight. Right. But just things that prevent those feelings of peacefulness or relaxed harmony. A lot of it is going to be geared around some sort of a resource, I think.

And of course food is the easy one. I mean, you know, our dogs never eat together and they've never eaten together. They all go into their crates. I've got two dogs that the only time they're in our crates is when they eat. And then I have one that doesn't. He doesn't even have a crate anymore. That's my Labrador. But the Littles, because they're littles, they go in crates for safety and all the other dogs do too.

They eat, dinner's done, we pull up the bowls, we give them another hour or so to digest and to chill, and it's done. I've never had a problem over food bowl guarding because I don't ever allow that to happen. But so that's one incident that I see a lot of people, you know, oh, my God, my dogs are fighting over dinner. I'm like, okay, well, you know, tell me what the setup is.

I'm like, well, you know, this one's over here on this side of the kitchen, and this one is two feet away. I'm like, well, maybe we make it six feet away. And they're like, oh, my God, that worked. It's so much better. It's like, wow, that's pretty common sense, right? So that's an easy one. The biggies are typically the high value chew resources. The bully sticks the bones and all that.

Again, I manage that if I need to, you know, because I have to. I had four dogs out the other day. Lab, Border Collie, the little, the little dogs, they all have their chew bones and they're all fine, fat, dumb and happy. Because my, those dogs will actually heed warnings, which I think warnings are perfectly appropriate. If the other dog will heed the warnings, we're probably pretty good.

The problem starts when one of them does a lip curl and the other one does, I don't care. I'm going to take that from you. That's when problems happen. So are there things I can do to change that? Of course we can do some counter conditioning, we can do some request approach training, which is Leslie McDevitt stuff. And we just add in the resource there resources. Another area of conflict is oftentimes small spaces, bathrooms, kitchens.

And kitchens also have food. So there's a double whammy there. Thresholds is a big issue. Playtime, going or even going for a walk. If you, you know, God forbid, if you have a dog that when you reach for that leash and they start bouncing and barking and spinning and jumping and you have another dog who goes, whoa, that barking, bouncing, spinning and jumping is little, a little concerning to me, we might have conflict right there.

So teaching that calmer behavior around whatever the trigger areas are is extremely important. And normally I see that in feeding, attention seeking, petting, just teaching your dog, okay, Fido one, you get a pet. Fido two, you get a pet. Fido three, you get a pet. And kitty four, you get a pet. So, you know, that's, that's again creating some predictability. So attention. Food bowl, chew toys, toys to play with outside.

There is no way in heaven's name I would play with the Malinois and the Border Collie with toys at the same time without first teaching them a nice station. Right. Have I done that? Nah, not gonna do it. Number one, Malinois. My husband's more, Polly's mine, but they're both high drive toy dogs. I'm just not going to do that again. Could I, if I wanted to? Absolutely. Look at Sarah Brewski.

Look what Sara Brueske does with her umpteen dogs, you know, and she even has them on cue. So it absolutely can be done. But thresholds tends to be probably a big issue and oftentimes I see intra housemate dog stuff crop up as dogs mature and oftentimes that's from pain. The amount of pain that is contributing to intra housemate dog aggression is very high. From my case, loads. They've been living together for six years and they've been fine and now all of a sudden they're snarking at each other and I'm like, okay, number one, get the vet.

Let's, you know, maybe we need to do a trial of getting them on some anti inflammatories, talk to your vet about some supplements, that kind of stuff and sometimes that helps immensely and they're, you know, wow, that was a medical issue, it wasn't a behavior issue. So that helps. But normally by the time I get called, get called in, they've already had 16,000 fights and we've been to the vet three times and by that time sometimes there's not a whole lot of hope.

It used to be that if your dogs had injured each other more than twice to the point of vet care, the chances of reintegrating them were slim. I don't know how accurate that is. It's not a bad rule to abide by, but I do think it's going to take a lot of work. If your dogs are already doing damage to each other, then that's, that's going to be a lot of crate rotate type situation.

You know, you can reduce the severity and the frequency but it's never going to go away. It's just not. Yeah, how much? So you're talking a little bit about management in there and you're talking a little bit about skills earlier. How kind of, where's that balance point or where's kind of that tipping point, like how much of what we need to think about in these types of situations is management stuff and how much of it's you know, really kind of teaching the animals involved some new things.

That's gonna honestly depend on the client or the human factor. Right. There are some people, like, think, thank the Lord that, oh, my God, you told me it's okay for me to, like, feed them separately and that I can actually give one more attention than the other or, you know, separate that attention. And they. All they have time to do is management. You know, they have three kids and two dogs that want to eat each other, and they, you know, they've realized they don't have time to train.

So a lot of that comes down to the person and what they want to do. I think having some basic skills. Name game is one, a sit, eye contact, hand target, and a settle. That's pretty much my criteria when I work with a behavior case. I love a hand touch. I love offered eye contact. I love an offered sit or even a cued sit, and I love a settle.

Give me those four things, and I'm pretty much good. I can work through a lot of other things. Chin rest would be on the list as an extra. In fact, I just came back from Texas, and I had my border collie with me, and I was staying at a friend's house who has a German Shepherd who is not overly great with other dogs. She's very anxious, and she's lovely with my Labrador, because he's a Labrador.

He's that kind of Labrador. He's very. You know, he's like, I love everybody, and there's no conflict and nothing and. But my border collie is like, what are we doing? What are we doing? What are we doing? And she's like, dude, chill out. That chaos is. I can't handle that. So she's trying to hurt him, and he's like, don't do that. So I'm having to. You know, when they were together, there was a lot of management.

You know, Dempsey settled. Velvet, go to your place. Because she has her nice little place, and because she's a dog I've trained before, and so I was able to get them calm. You know, outside, they're fine because they could move and run and chase, and he can get away from her, and she can get away from him, and all is good. And they can actually run around the pool and everything's fine.

But in the house is very different. And so what was starting to happen was I was starting to see both of them kind of start to come up, and Dempsey was getting a little bit, you know, like, he was just getting too much. So I just chinned him, you know, Dempsey here, Chin. Five seconds of calm breathing, all done. And he'd walk away, you know, and I would.

I was having to do. I was having to be the interrupter, right? I could see things start to escalate, and I'd go, okay, Dempsey here, chin. That would give Velvet a little bit of chance to settle down. Of course, Stoney was there too. He was just kind of an innocent bystander. And so I had to use that for him, right? Because it's a duration behavior that can calm them down.

The stillness in and of itself helped calm the other dog down. So those are my training skills. That's pretty much all I like to need to teach, are those foundation skills. That's what I teach. And it's just a balance of how much do I need to manage and how much do I need to train. Like I say, it's going to depend on the client and their situation. And that's why it's so fun working with these clients in their home, so to speak.

I see their life and how they can manage things versus doing something remotely or doing something, you know, even through video, I don't see the whole house. You know, like the gal I was with, I didn't realize until after day two that her dog had a doggie door that was taking him out to the backyard where he was allowed to go bark and harass the other dog. And I went, oh, well, that's something that's got to change because he would come in and he'd start spinning and barking and like, okay, we're going to have to stop that for a while.

And so again, that turned out to be just more of a management exercise. But knowing the situation is really helpful, and I spend a lot of time on that. Initially with my gold spots is I have to understand their environment, the people involved, their household, their yard, and of course, the dogs involved. So that's basically my first couple of days of class, is getting to know them and their situations.

Melissa Breau: So speaking of class, in February, you've got your new class, your Harmony in the Household class. Do you want to talk a little more about kind of the structure of the class, which you'll cover? Maybe? Who should consider signing up?

Karen Deeds: Oh, God. I started doing my syllabus or did my syllabus, and it's like, that's a lot. Oh, my God, there's a lot. Because it's not just about the intra housemate stuff.

I mean, yes, that's going to be a huge part of it. And there's going to be a lot of things that I will introduce that I might say, yeah, you don't have to worry about that because that's not your problem. But the next gold spot might be having a problem, not with intra housemate stuff, but maybe the dog is barking at them. I've been kind of corresponding with somebody who I think will probably end up taking the class and the dog is very frustrated and over aroused at thresholds and will kind of bark and back up and bark and back up and bark and back.

There's just a lot of conflict there. It's not about another dog at all. So what I do with that person may be very different than what I do with a person who has dog to dog stuff. So there's a lot of, you know, like I say, trying to figure out what, what the problem is. Whether it's location, whether it's attention, whether it's actual interaction, whether it's play, whether it's with people, whether it's with vacuum cleaners.

I have a client that I work with back in Texas. Her dog had serious fear of phobia, really of the trash trucks. And we have worked dramatically. In fact, she sent me a video of her dog outside when the trash truck could be heard and he wasn't running to the closet. Not only was he not running to the closet which had been his go to, but he was now granted, he wasn't like, oh, I love the trash truck.

He was like, there's a trash truck. I hear it. That I don't have to run. I'll just listen to it. That for that little dog is huge. So there's going to be applications there. Right. You know, what is the conflict? And I'm trying to keep this in the house because my reactive class is kind of outside the house, but it can also be inside the house. But this is specific to in the house.

And I also am going to be doing my resource gardening class in February, March, April. So I'm trying to be, you know, not deal with resource guarding issues in this particular class. So even though they're similar, there's enough differences so we can do two things. Yeah. So lots of different bits and pieces. Lots, lots. And I call it conflict. You know, anytime you have a situation in the house where things are not going as well as you want them to go, that's kind of what this class is about.

It's kind of like a dumpster of all sorts of things. And I know Denise, you know, you really need to tone it down. I just can't just can't pick one thing. And I could probably teach a class on settle. Absolutely. I could teach a whole six weeks on settle because it's going to take about six weeks to get a really good settle from my experience anyway. So I can do that.

Melissa Breau: We've covered a lot of ground. Any final thoughts or maybe key points you kind of want to leave folks with?

Karen Deeds: There's so much that FDSA is offering in February, especially in the behavioral realm, because that's, you know, my niche. But, you know, I think this will be kind of a compilation of things that you probably already know, which is always a lot of fun. Working with experienced FDSA students is because they already have a lot of this information, this knowledge, and so we can progress because now I can actually help them apply what they already know and the people that don't know it.

Well, then, heck, let's teach it, you know, and then, you know, maybe later on down the road we take it again and we can apply now the stuff that you've already trained. So this is a class that's going to be for beginners or those that are more advanced people that already have some of the tools in their toolbox and they just don't know how to put them in place or those that need those tools. So it's again, it's a dumpster of everything.

Melissa Breau: All right, well, thank you, Karen, so much for coming on the podcast and sharing a little bit about all this. It's always great to talk with you, Melissa. Absolutely. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with a panel from our upcoming one day conference on Nose Work. If you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast on 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 bendsound.com the track featured here is called Buddy Audio Editing fed 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!