Hello, and welcome to the Animal Training Academy Making Ripples podcast show. The show where we share the stories of the ripple making extraordinaires with behavior nerd superpowers who make up the Animal Training Academy membership. I'm your host and one of the happiness engineers at Animal Training Academy, Shelley Wood from Drop Your Jaws Dog Training in Cape Girardeau, Missouri in the United States. We're absolutely thrilled and grateful to have you here with us today.
Make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss a single episode. This show is brought to you on behalf of the Animal Training Academy membership. So if you like the conversations in these episodes, then we want to invite you to continue them with like-minded people in the ATA membership, which you can find out more about at www.atamember.com.
Within the membership, you can get access to twice monthly live web classes, the back catalog of previous web class replays, plus a huge library of videos and projects to help you problem solve your training challenges. And we're a sociable bunch with an exclusive private Facebook group and forums area. It's like a Netflix social media platform for animal behavior geeks. Today, we are excited to welcome Eileen Anderson to the show.
Eileen Anderson, she, her, writes about her life with dogs with a focus on training with positive reinforcement and has authored two books. Her book on canine cognitive dysfunction, Remember Me, won a Maxwell Award from the Dog Writers Association of America in 2017. She has written for Clean Run, Whole Dog Journal, the IAABC Journal, and Barks from the Guild. Her articles, training videos, and photos of dog body language have been incorporated into curricula worldwide.
Eileen has worked professionally as an academic editor, an orchestral and ensemble musician, a network and database administrator, a college math instructor, a bookkeeper, a grant writer, a social work caseworker, and a trainer of computer skills. She has long standing interest in making technology accessible to women, people with limited literacy skills, and other underserved populations. She holds master's degrees in both music performance and engineering science acoustics.
She has recently brought her expertise in music, sound, and acoustics to the dog training and behavior world. Welcome Eileen. Thank you for being here with us today. Shelly, thanks so much for having me. It's an honor to talk to you and talk to all ATA this way. Well, and it is an honor for me to talk to you and for all of us to get to listen to you and learn from you today. So thank you for taking time out of your day and joining us.
And I know a lot of our listeners are going to be familiar with you already from your wonderful blog, Eileen and Dogs, and from those books that you mentioned in your bio. But I'm guessing that like me, many of them probably won't have been as aware of the rest of your background, which is super interesting and diverse. And I love that it sounds like a way that you have, or I love that it sounds like you've found a way to weave all of these varied interests together in a really unique way.
Yeah. It took me a while. Well, share with us a little bit about that, if you would. Tell us a little bit about your story and how this all happened, including when and how you started working with animals and some of the work that you do today. Okay. I'm going to go back to 2006 because that's when kind of all the things started coming together. At that time, I was in graduate school.
I had finished my master's degree in engineering science and had done my qualifying exams for the doctoral program, and I was looking for a thesis topic. And I had a wonderful job working with underserved women, helping them access medical care. And I had one dog, Cricket, a rat terrier, and two cats. And they were not the focus of my life like my animals are now. It was 2006. We knew less. I particularly knew less. And I loved them. I cared for them.
But they were not so integral to my life then. They were about to be. So I was on a list serve at the university where I attended, because I also worked there for a while. And somebody posted a photo of a dog who was in the shelter in a small town close to me. And she's hard to describe. She's kind of the village dog type. She's about 30 pounds, brown, sable-ish, but a little longer coat than a lot of those dogs. And she was sitting behind the shelter bars with the saddest look on her face.
And all of us see those pictures all the time, including back then. Even then, I saw them all the time. But there was something about this dog, and she was not what I was looking for. I was open to getting another dog. I thought I'd get a little male rat terrier to be a companion to Cricket. But this dog just said, come get me. I should editorialize a little bit. I plan a lot better now these days when I'm adding a dog to my household. But remember, I didn't know what I didn't know.
So I went and got a 10-month -old dog who had been wandering the streets in this little town and named her Summer and brought her home. And she pretty quickly, at 10 months, started fighting with my rat terrier. Summer was almost 30 pounds. Cricket was 12 pounds. Cricket was 10 years old. I had no idea what to do, except I was used to terriers who kind of have these little spats. And so I knew it wasn't good because of the size disparity. But they never drew blood.
They were just kind of batting with each other. And so I thought, well, you know, I'll keep an eye on it. And then it turns out she chewed everything. Completely normal, right? She's 10 months old. All of the other adolescents I had adopted were the abnormal ones. They had not chewed. They had gotten along with each other. And so she was the first dog where these challenges came along. I had read about crating during the day.
So the first day I went back to work, I put her in a crate with a frozen Kong. I had read that much. And when I came back, she was standing in the crate in a puddle of drool. First, I thought she had urinated, but it was drool and she had not eaten the Kong. And I learned pretty quickly that that was a stress response. I was coping, but, you know, my life had really changed. I wasn't, you know, I was I didn't adopt her lightly, even though maybe I didn't plan very well for the rest of my life.
I was committed. But these things kept happening that I didn't know how to handle. And it kind of came to a head around Labor Day. This is I'd adopted her in July around Labor Day. I had her in my backyard. She and me and Cricket. And I have a four foot length chain link fence, not length height. And she saw something outside the fence. And she very deftly, with obvious experience, jumped the fence like she had definitely been doing that before I ever got her.
And I just sank into a depression because all of the normal things in my life weren't working anymore. I couldn't leave her in the yard. And I was one of those people had left my dogs in the yard during the day, could no longer do that. I could no longer go anywhere in the evenings because I needed to stay there and be there while she chewed things, had to run interference between her and my other dog. These seem like trivial problems to me now. Then you're shaking your head.
I like that support to me. They're like, oh, yeah, I could cope with that now. I couldn't then. I felt trapped and I fell into a clinical depression. And this was the second time in my life I'd had a major depression. So I knew it when it was happening. And I went to the doctor and I got severely depressed. And this went on for several months as I was trying to fix the problem that had started it all. And I was looking for help training.
Some were thinking if I could make her be obedient, the kind of thing that everybody thinks at first is a solution that I could fix this problem. So I had hung my hopes on obedience school and meds for me. I was seeing my doctor and trying out some meds because I was not not not mentally healthy. And at the time I broke a fifteen thousand dollar piece of equipment in my graduate studio. My professor was wonderful about it. That's when we finally talked about the fact that I was depressed.
He understood. I took a break. We fixed the equipment, but things were really bad. And I found a local dog training club. It turned out to be a balanced training club. And I thought this is the answer. It wasn't. But Summer really did enjoy doing things with me. Surprise, right? We did most of the training with food. You know, they brought in the corrections later, which that was a blessing. We weren't doing that from the beginning.
And she my relationship with her just blossomed, even though it was surrounded by this shadow of depression. And things moved very slowly. It seemed at the time. But by January, I was feeling better. I had gotten on a med that was helping and I had discovered the agility arm of the obedience school. And once we started doing agility, I she and I both just thought it was the most fabulous thing ever.
And as is, I think, typical of a lot of clubs, there was a lot less of the punitive side in the agility order. And so I noticed that there were two times during my whole, you know, 24 seven that I felt OK. One of them was when I was swimming and the other one was when I was at agility class. And I thought this is really interesting. So during those months, I was feeling better. I was adjusting to my new normal, which did not resemble my old normal at all.
And taking care of this young dog, she still did fight with my smaller dog. And I was learning better how to manage that. And I was on a bunch of Yahoo groups. Remember, this is 2006, 2007. I was on Clicker Solutions. I was on the early Control Unleashed group. I was on AOSP's Training Levels group. And that's where I was getting my best information. And I was still trying to find somewhere local where they trained like that. But I was learning more and more.
I did finally find an excellent local teacher and kind of left the corrections world behind gradually as one does. You know, you don't know how these things have crept into your behavior all the time. So, you know, of course, I wasn't doing collar pops or anything like that. But I was, you know, I had that muscle memory of doing some forced things. And they slid away as I learned more. And I started getting hooked on behavior science. Surprise.
I started getting a whole lot less interested in my graduate work, which was not good news on several fronts. Around that time, I met online Marge Rogers, who later became my co-author of our Puppy Socialization book. And she and I, she's a big part of my story, because she and I grew up together as trainers. We were kind of in the same place. We listened to the same people. We had the same approach. And we became friends in 2009.
And in 2007, sorry, 2012, she said to me, why don't you start a blog? You know, you have all these things to say. And you're a writer. And I said, I can't do that. I, I'm just reactive. You know, I see stuff I disagree with. I see, you know, somebody's wrong on the internet. I got to write something. That's no way to start a blog. She says, oh, yes, it is. You know, sure. Write what you think. So I don't have any credentials. I'm not anybody. She said, you're a writer, you know, start a blog.
And so I did. And I read all the how to start up a blog things and what you need to do. And you have to have 10 topics that you're ready to write on. And, you know, I had 35. And so I started my blog and was enjoying it right away. It was like my, my mental home where I could write about anything. I wanted to talk about anything I wanted to. I was in complete control. I hate to say it that way, but it was my home. And it's where I still go when I want to write.
You know, it's the most enjoyable place I go. And two months into that, that right, two months into that, I put out a video and a blog that was called does your dog really want to be petted? And it was about early consent testing because I had sat down with my one dog and she had solicited petting and she was so sweet. That was summer. And she was pushing her head into my hands and just looking all dreamy. And I took some quick video of it.
And I thought, I bet I could get the opposite of this because my other dog doesn't like to cuddle. And that was the little dog I'd gotten later named Zany. So I sat down and I swear part of the reason that video went viral was that I was wearing bright pink pants and I had a black dog. So the visuals were really good, but I tried to pet Zany. And Zany, of course, not only was she not real touchy, but she thought we were having a training session.
So these hands coming at her kept being like, what are you doing? So I got this great contrast and I made a video and it went viral. And a few days in, I got a message through my blog through the sidebar and it was very short. It read something like, bravo, great job. Could I use some of your footage in some of my presentations? We could do a trade, signed Susan Friedman. So that was the second beginning. And thank you, Susan forever.
And in the next month I was enrolled in LLA and what had been simmering came to a full boil. And soon after that, around that time, I quit graduate school because behavior science was just a whole lot more interesting. And I've kept up contact with Susan, of course. And I don't wanna keep talking about what happened since then. That is how I began. I began in 2006 with a splash into my life that had a lot of ramifications, good and bad.
And then I began again in 2012 when I really started getting to the good stuff. What a great story. What were you in graduate school for? The program is called Engineering Science. It's a funny program. It's the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the flagship University of Arkansas did not want them to have an engineering per se degree but they had kind of snuck this one in. It had been called Electronics and Instrumentation or Instrument Science.
And finally it was called Engineering Science. It was multidisciplinary. And my major professor was a mechanical engineer from MIT. And so that was my interest, the mechanical side. And acoustics is a subdiscipline in mechanical and engineering. And that was what my research was in. Okay, very cool. And I expect that I'm gonna ask you a little bit more about that later or that you may share about more about that later as well.
But that just, I mean, you had just mentioned quitting grad school at that time. And so that just popped into my head wanting to know what it was at that time. But I wanna just kind of back up a little bit and say thank you so much for everything that you shared, sharing the story of when you adopted your dog Summer and brought her home and all of the changes that that prompted, I guess in your life prompted would be the word maybe I was looking for there.
And yeah, as I'm hearing you say all of those things like couldn't leave her in the yard, problems with other dogs, couldn't really leave the house. Like those are really huge things when somebody brings another being into their life like a dog to be a companion with. I think we all have ideas of how that's gonna go and how it's gonna fit into our life. And when it prompts such necessary change from us that's outside of that picture of our ideal, I think that can be really, really hard.
And that there are lots of people who will relate to that struggle. So thank you for sharing about that. You're welcome. I felt literally trapped. Yeah. That's the depression trigger to me. You know, there's no way out of the situation cause I love the dog. Right. That's something else that really stood out to me when you shared this story as well. You know, that you sound, I haven't outgrown this. I still tend to just fly by the seat of my pants when adding a new dog to my family.
But I'm always like completely all in and committed when I do that. And I know how that can force me to have to bend some of my thoughts and ideas about how I'm gonna live with another animal. So I really appreciate coming, you know, hearing you say you were totally committed to this dog even though it was a little bit impulsive maybe when you adopted her. So it does make sense that you would feel trapped.
Yes. I also wanna mention, you know, since then I've learned a lot and I don't ever wanna criticize someone for rehoming a dog. Just so it's clear, there are situations absolutely when a dog can profit from a different home. And it's a huge big decision. I've never had to make it. I was thinking about making it then and I didn't. But in my situation, it was for the best that she stayed. Yeah. And I think that's a really good point too.
And I have the, from my perspective, I have the privilege of being a single individual who doesn't have small children in the home and who have for all of the various reasons in my life allow me to be that kind of all in committed for certain things that other individuals, family makeup might not allow for, you know. And even within mine, there are things that wouldn't work out where rehoming would have to be something to consider. So I'm glad that you brought that up.
So yeah, thank you for sharing all of that. What a great story and an interesting way that I think a lot of people will relate to getting involved in animal behavior science because of challenges with our own animals. And I love that you and Summer found agility together. And it sounds like that's something that brought you both great joy. What about today? Where are you today with your work with animals and how everything is fitting together with your background? That's a cool question.
I mentioned Marge Rogers earlier. We were growing up together as trainers and I'm well aware that many, many, many trainers begin their careers because they had a dog who was a challenge like I did. And Marge and I went, you know, we're following the same path, but she turned one way and became a professional trainer. And I decided that was just, I didn't have the right temperament for it. There were a number of reasons why around here it would be a challenge and I had the writing background.
And so I took the other turn, which was to write about it. And that's not to say that I don't train. I train all the time, every day. My priorities over the years have changed. But a lot of my life is writing and editing regarding behavior science rather than going around and demoing it or having clients and that kind of thing. But what my life looks like now is that I write, I do freelance editing, almost always for animal trainers because I know something of what they're talking about.
They like that. I used to call it fact checking, but I've met a real fact checker and I was like, no, mine was a much lower level than that. But I can catch things sometimes in the science if people want me to do that. Sometimes they don't. I have a writing mentorship through IAABC where we spend eight weeks meeting together, writing together, having, I do lots and lots of editing there. I train every day.
I have a new dog, has a 2021 and he has given a number of challenges that I think I'll talk about a little bit later. And the sound stuff started happening where I realized that there was a lot of misinformation out there about dogs and sound. Here we go again, right? Somebody's wrong on the internet. And that's what got me started writing about sound because I realized I quit that program and pretty much left it behind, but I still know more than the average person about acoustics.
And some of the basics will take you a long way. And so I started writing about things like how you can't put two blankets on a crate and expect the dog not to hear thunder. And I can scientifically explain why that's the case. And so I started doing webinars on that. I've given two webinars on that topic, three, three.
And my latest thing is ultrasound because there is a lot of fear about ultrasound in the dog community because we can't hear it and we're afraid something's bothering our dogs and we think it must be ultrasound. And I think in a few rare cases it is, but I got an ultrasound mic and I'm going to town recording everything I can and bringing it down to human hearing to search for nuisance ultrasound. And I'm not sure where all I'm going to go with that. I'd like to teach other people how to do it.
Because I have to do it in person, right? Somebody can't send me a recording because normal recording equipment doesn't include ultrasound. So I have to be onsite to help somebody, which limits that. But I hope to teach some other people how to do it. And that's kind of the list of what I do.
I'm coming out soon with a self-paced editing course, self-editing course, where people can learn what copy editors do and some basics that go beyond proofreading for improving their own polishing, their own writing. And that may be released by the time this podcast comes out. I'm not sure. And when is your mentorship through IAABC? When does that run? It's starting a week and a day from today. It's starting on the 12th and it runs eight weeks. So it'll be going through March.
Okay. So that one will have already started by the time this podcast has been released, I think. But you do that a few times a year, is that right? I do it twice a year. Yes, I'll do the next one in July. Okay, awesome. So people who are interested might be able to hop in on that July one with you then. Right. And they don't have to be an animal trainer. There are no prerequisites of that sort. They should come into it knowing there's gonna be a bunch of animal trainers in there.
But I've had people who were not animal trainers, who weren't part of the animal world at all, or were kind of groupies like I started out. I've edited science fiction in there, all sorts of things. It's really fun, actually. It sounds like a lot of fun. I wonder if you could share with us, I feel like a lot of people are gonna be really interested in the writing component.
And I wonder if you have thoughts on sort of top pieces of advice for somebody who's maybe wanting to develop a more regular writing practice, maybe wanting to start writing in the animal behavior-related field, if you have any thoughts or advice for those folks. Sure. I learned something really early giving the writing mentorship. I had designed the curriculum for people who had pieces of writing that they wanted to work on or clean up and had specific goals.
And a lot of those people came, but also a lot of people came who had a troubled relationship with writing. They were blocked. They were embarrassed. They had been overly criticized when they were young. It's like, how do we all survive regular elementary school anyway? It's so designed to smash down so many things. And that's not a criticism of teachers, but just the fog, the cultural fog of punishment.
Anyway, so many people came to the mentorship who they weren't bringing pieces of articles for me to work on. They were coming saying, help. And my advice, so it depends on what your goals are. But if your goal is to get unstuck with writing and you're stuck, just about the best thing you can do is called free writing. And there are several ways to do it, but it's what you wanna do. It's not Pavlov. It's not Skinner on our shoulders. In writing, it's the critic on the shoulder.
And while people try to write, that critic is yammering in their ear saying that's bad grammar. You don't know what you're talking about. You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong. And what you wanna do is anything you can do to dislodge that critic. And one of the ways to do that is to do what's called free writing, which you could call it stream of consciousness. It's like set a timer for five minutes and write for five minutes and do not stop.
And if that means you start writing, I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say. My mind's blank. That's what you're writing. You're still writing. It's fine. It doesn't have to flow. It doesn't have to anything. You just have to keep writing. And I'm making little gestures like I'm writing with a pen. I never write with a pen, I type. But anyway, free writing. Almost every mentorship, there's someone who's writing world changes. Because they do free writing for a couple of weeks.
And I've got one mentee who actually has written a book because of a free writing prompt that happened in the mentorship. So that's the advice I have for people who wanna get unstuck with writing. It's a whole different subject about breaking into the writing world and wanting to put good information out, assuming that you don't have any blockages. That's a whole nother set of challenges. And I don't know if you wanna go very far into that or not. It's probably not as crucial.
You can get pretty good advice on the internet about SEO and things like that. But if you can get dislodged, if you're stuck, if one person does that listening to this podcast, I'll be so proud. So when you give people a prompt, a free writing prompt, is that what you called it? Am I right? A free writing prompt.
When you give people a free writing prompt in your mentorship program, do you also suggest to them that maybe they set aside a certain amount of time every day at a certain time to do that? Or do you have thoughts or suggestions around developing the habit or practice in that way as well? My wonderful assistant in my mentorship, Natalie Bridger Watson, comes from a fiction background where people write as a discipline, like 2,000 words a day, 5,000 words a day, 300 words a day or time.
And I don't come from that tradition. That is really helpful to a lot of people. And so she kind of gives people information about that part, keeping a spreadsheet. I did, when I wrote my first book, I did keep a spreadsheet of how many words I wrote a day, because you can so, ding, there, I wrote 500 words. Or I researched an article or whatever. But there are ways to set things up and set goals to keep writing. And because I personally have not had that challenge, I just like to write.
That's not one of my strengths as a teacher. I kind of know the ropes, but I usually lean on Bridger for that part of it. Okay, well, I can't stop myself from asking one more writing related question. So I hope that's all right. How, and it's probably not a small one either, a quick and easy one, but make it as quick and easy as you would like to, or are able to. Boy, I'm interested. How do you think that social media has influenced writing? That's a big question.
And writing in the dog world in particular, or do you think it has? Oh yeah, it has. Oh yeah, I want to back up from that question because there's something that's tangentially related to that. And that is people, particularly in my age group, I hate to say it. And people in all age groups who have had certain training and have certain values love to critique those younger people, not using punctuation right, and using text conventions and not getting the grammar right.
And I want to say right now, I am not a grammar prescriptivist. People are writing. I think it's great. If you don't understand what they mean, you can ask them. But I find prescriptivism to be classist, racist, all of the isms right out there. And so my goal in writing and my hope for other people is to communicate. So that's my little speech on that.
Okay, given that, the changes I see in social media, writing now, one of them, I'm on several social media platforms, but let's take Facebook because I've just watched the dog world on there for many, many years now. The algorithms themselves have changed writing. And that's because Facebook downgrades links that go off the site.
And so when I post a blog post and put a link to my blog, I used to get many, many, many more engagement, more clicks, more visits to my blog than I do now because Facebook doesn't show it to people. And they want me to run ads. And I have my limits as far as, my blog is free and I want it to be free and I want there to be no contingencies about it, but paying for ads to get people to go there is a little much for me right now. But what Facebook favors is anything that stays on the site.
And that's why we see more and more memes and images and bite-sized pieces. And I think along with that, people's attention, including mine is shorter, but people who will write things that are shareable on Facebook in total, you know, will succeed more. And I basically hate that because the way my mind works is I want to explain something thoroughly. And I just rarely, rarely see that. There are geniuses out there who can do it. You know, there are pieces, one that I like is Family Paws.
They will put out a meme with one message on it that is memorable and that helps people write then. And I think that's probably helpful. But so many of what I see, there's people are trying to stuff too much information into too small a space because of the strictures that the social media platform has put on us. And I'm not even getting to the fights, you know. For years, I said, that's why I stayed on Facebook is so it gave me fodder for my blog.
And I try not to be as reactionary as I used to be, but reactionary is what gets clicks. You know, you can post, if you're just out in the open Facebook, I don't mean in the ATA group, but if you're out in the open world of Facebook and you post a short, lovely little training video, you'll get a couple of likes. And if you post a rant about another trainer, be they balanced, punitive, or one of your colleagues, you'll get a ton of engagement. That's partly human nature.
And it's partly, you know, the social media algorithms. So yeah, that's what I've seen change. Well, I think we could spend a whole lot of time talking about that. And I know that we want to talk about some other things as well. So thank you for answering that question.
And I loved your answer to it from the beginning part of what you discussed, which I wasn't even thinking about grammar and that sort of thing myself, but I appreciate you bringing that up and all of the isms that are inherent with that sort of grammar policing. Go ahead. I'd like to, yeah. One other thing about that is that anyone with the word editor after their name, everyone else expects that they're the guy with the big stick who's going to whack them.
And so, and I have an ad that I run that says I am not that guy. And I'm really not, you know, I want to help people communicate. I know the rules, you know, there's, I can't know all the rules, but I know the rules for good practices, you know, all that. And I help people follow the rules to the extent that they want them, you know. And I don't force any of that on people because I don't personally like it, but it's my job and I can do it.
Well, thank you for sharing all of that and for talking a little bit about social media and how that has just kind of influenced and shaped writing and how that algorithm itself does that as well. But like I said, we could spend a whole lot of time talking about this. So let's shift gears and shift back and talk about training again, I guess for a bit here and have you share with us about a training challenge that you've worked through and some of the things that you've learned from it.
I got my most recent adolescent in the very end of December, 2021. His name is Louis. He was said to be eight months old and I think he was. And so here, oh boy, I'm glad he wasn't the first one because summer was nothing compared to Louis. Louis brought a whole bunch of new challenges. He's a lovely, sweet, loving, affiliative guy and he didn't really know how to be a pet like a lot of young dogs do who weren't socialized and maybe didn't even grow up in a house. I don't know.
What I didn't know about him to get to one specific is that he had spent two months from the age of six months to eight months living in a cage in a vet's office. And that still has marks on his behavior. He has this huge reinforcement history and punishment history, but history from that time during very pivotal time during young dog's life.
So the first way that manifested, well, the first way, the very first way is that his way of getting attention was to follow people and grab their clothing and paw at them. Which absolutely, I know where that came from. That came from, he got his one five minute time out with people and he wanted attention and that worked. But the one that got me was that he was on veterinary office time and he woke up at 5.30 in the morning.
And so I knew that there was a protocol for teaching a dog to get up later in the morning. And I had actually, clear back in the clicker solutions days, I think I'd read about it and it made sense to me. And I had actually recommended it to other people. And I thought, well, it's time to put your money where your mouth is. You're gonna have to do this. But not only, getting up early is a drag when you're not used to getting up then. I have become more of a night owl. I typically get up 7.30 to 8
.30. The morning is my work time and my work time was gone and I had to fix it. And so I knew this was a, the solution of the problem was antecedent arrangement. No change in reinforcers that I am aware of. Didn't have to implement extinction exactly because he didn't have a bunch of habits yet of how to wake humans up. His schedule had been wait for the people to get to the clinic and let him out. And so in that way, I did have a clean slate even though he knew it was 5.30 in the morning.
So I wrote out the schedule and started getting up at 10 after five because what I needed to do was change the queue for getting up. The queue was no longer 5.30 a .m. The queue was gonna be Eileen putting on her shoes and I did it. It was so hard because I was tired all the time. I couldn't work. This was cutting more into my work day. It's probably the most, one of the most disciplined things I've ever done but I had to. And I wrote a schedule and I got
him to about 7.30. And then of course, that's not when I get up either. That's when I get up to work but that's not when dogs get up. So I had a further challenge of teaching him to separate Eileen gets up from dogs get up. And so like an alarm clock now is not a cue for dogs at all. Neither is my getting up to go to the bathroom. Neither is my taking a shower. Neither is my going to another part of the house and doing something. I can do all those things now because I separated.
I kept to my plan. And I made it so that my putting on my shoes is the start to the dog's day. And it took, I wish I'd written down how long it took. It probably took a month. And there was a period in there where I was kind of sneaking around where it's like, say he was ready to sleep till eight but I hadn't separated the cues yet.
So I would not even turn on my light but open my computer and not have any lights on and very silently, very quietly work for half an hour because that's part of what I wanted him to learn. You're going to be snoozing while I'm working. And I still, finally I think it's faded where I don't feel like I have to sneak around anymore. It's like, yeah, he's solid. He's going to stay in bed and he has graduated now. You know, nobody in our world wants to limit dog's choices in an extreme way.
I had to in that time so that later we could open things up. And Louis is now to the point where he can say at 7.30, oh gosh, you know, I really want to go out. And I'll say, okay. And we go out and come back and he goes back to bed. So he has more freedom now that we finally went through that. But that's some training that I'm really proud of because it took every bit of me to not cheat and not think, well, he's sleeping. So I think I'll just go ahead and work a little bit. I didn't do that.
I stuck to my schedule. Yeah, I would be really proud of that too. What a commitment and investment to do that on your part. And your other dogs, they already just sleep until you're done working anyway. Yeah, Clara, who passed away this last September, but I had had her since what year, 2011. And she came to me as a baby puppy. And so of course we had to go out and take her to the bathroom more often. But she learned my ways from the beginning. And that reminded me of something.
I have a blog post about this, the changing the time, the wake up time. And I want to emphasize this is for an adult dog or a dog who is accustomed to not having to go out all the time. It's not for a puppy. Absolutely not for a puppy. But Louis, bless his heart, had been basically without bathroom time for 12 hours at the age of eight months because of living in the vet's office. So that part, again, bless his heart, was not a problem for him.
But any dog that needs to go out, you can't do a schedule like this. You have to do it another way. And did I miss here or did you say that this took about a month? I think that's right. I think laying the, probably part one of getting from 5.30 to about 7.30 took about a month. And then was part two where he had to learn, you know, it's not just Eileen gets up at 7.30, but you don't. My dogs stay in bed till 11 now. And because that's my work time.
And of course, if they need to go out, we go out. But that probably took another month. I did write it down. Darn. That's okay. I was just, I was curious how long it took. And then you had mentioned it. And I thought, gosh, that seems really pretty quick, really. So it tells me that you did definitely stick to your plan, didn't you? I did, and I'm not good at schedules. I had to be for this one. This is one time, one time in my life I was. Awesome.
Well, we can link to hopefully we can link to that blog post you mentioned in the show notes of you changing the wake up time and how you did that with Lewis. And we are lucky enough in ATA to get to see Lewis and some of your in some of your posts from time to time. So thank you for sharing him with us there and here as well. Could you share with us now about a training situation that you are proud of and or that you found reinforcing? I haven't talked very much about my little dog Zaney.
She was the star of the I don't want to be petted video. She's a little black and tan miniature hound. She was a mix of Beagle and Jack Russell. Wonderful little dog who was sound phobic and who was diagnosed later in life clinically as sound phobic, generalized anxiety and panic disorder as she got older. Anyway, the sound sensitivity started not as bad like it often does and then got a whole lot worse. But I got this idea. She was scared.
So this was before she'd gotten into the full panic mode. I had gotten a new digital device and she was scared of beeps and whistles. She was not bothered by thunder, even firecrackers. She was fine, but beeps and whistles were her nightmare. And she would stay almost catatonic in fear after hearing some. I'm mixing up my timeline a little bit. The catatonia was a little bit later. But anyway, that's how bad it got.
So at the time of this training that I'm going to talk about, I got a new bathroom scale and it had a little beep. You know, all the digital ones do now had a little beep. And the first time Zaney heard it, she got upset. She was scared of the beep. And it was a quiet little beep, very fast, just kind of a little bit kind of noise.
And our standard hour, meaning the collective dog community that does things like desensitization and counter conditioning, our standard response to sound fork, sound conditioning is to, by way of making the stimulus less intense to make it quieter. And that comes from, I think, our experience with thunder and fireworks where part of what's scary is how loud it is. This little beep wasn't loud. And in my experience, making it quieter didn't help at all.
In fact, it made it, it seemed to make things worse. And I learned since then that dogs don't locate sounds as well as humans do. And so I think a lot of those little kind of beeps might be kind of disembodied for them. They don't know where it's coming from. That's me speculating. So I thought, what can I do rather than making this sound softer to start desensitization and counter conditioning? And I thought, change the pitch.
So I created a digital beep that was a lot lower and by golly, she wasn't scared of it. So I created a series of sounds using successive approximations from this lower pitched beep to the higher one. And I started our counter conditioning with the lower beep. Also, I speculated and I think I speculated right that part of what was scary about it was that it was so short because I had another device in my home that had almost the same pitch. It was my dishwasher.
I think a lot of these devices have the same sound card in them and they have the same pitch but it was a couple of seconds long and she wasn't really bothered by that. So I figured that into my algorithm as well for adjusting the sound. So I went from low pitch to higher pitch and I went from a longer beep to a shorter beep and I varied both of those things as I went up. I did the very cleanest counter conditioning I knew how to do. A lot was hanging on this.
I didn't wanna scare my dog and so I was very careful not to clue in ever that we were gonna have a sound exposure. I started bringing out the food. I didn't want the food to become a predictor. So for a week before we ever started sound exposures, I just brought out the food every day and didn't give the dogs any. So they learned this does not predict a sound coming. It doesn't predict anything for dogs because we don't get it.
And then the very first time I played a beep, Zanny got the food and I was very, very careful about I didn't wanna get reverse conditioning. I didn't wanna get into a rhythm of beep, treat, beep, treat where you can't tell what's predicting what. So I did just maybe one or two exposures a day, not every day.
And I went carefully up my little sound, my series of sounds that I created and I got back up to the scale and I was doing my digital equivalent of it, which was easy because I can create a digital sound that sounds like another digital sound and it did transfer over to the scale. I went from being able to play a beep on my computer to the scale and she was no longer scared of the scale.
I have some nice videos of her getting on the scale herself and weighing herself and wagging her tail and having a good time. And beeps of all sorts, of course, became recall cues because I was not really conscious at that time of deliberately catching the operant behavior that can follow this kind of thing. And so, I mean, anything that I would do just would trigger a reorientation to me. And so if she was in another room and I beeped something, she would come running, which was really cute.
And I could have planned something else if I had thought about it, but I wasn't advanced enough as a trainer, still not really to plan that well, but it became a recall cue and a predictor of great stuff for her. Do you have a blog post about this as well? I do. I have, it's a series of two because it kind of tells people how to do it. Okay, very cool. Hopefully we'll be able to link to that in the show notes as well.
I think this is really interesting and just very telling of your unique background and how that knowledge and skills that you have from engineering and acoustics and that work informs your work with your dogs. Now, I would not have ever thought of trying to lower the pitch. And in fact, I would have no idea how to lower the pitch.
And I wouldn't have thought, I don't think I would have thought, although it makes perfect sense, I also don't think I would have thought of lengthening the duration of the beep, working from a longer beep to a shorter one. Do I have that right? That that is what you did, started with a longer, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
I wanna mention one other thing and that is that I did come up with this idea on my own, but later I found there's at least one research paper and we can list that where that was what was varied in a counter conditioning and desensitization protocol is pitch. Very cool, yeah. And how do you change the pitch? With a piece of software called Audacity. It's free sound editing. You can also do it with video software, but you've got the video in the way, so to speak.
But yeah, Audacity is free software used by lots and lots of people at different levels. Professionals use it as well. There's lots and lots of things you can do with it, but yeah. Yeah, I'm familiar with Audacity to a very limited degree, but not to that degree. People use it in lots of sound editing. Yeah, very cool. And so tell us a little bit more.
I know, I think you shared about this at the beginning or I read about it in your bio maybe, but tell us a little bit more about the resources that you have created related to sound. You have some web classes and things. Is that right? I have three webinars, two of which are available for sale on my little store site, which we can link. I sell the two webinars. Right now I'm selling a combination of two of them. I may not be doing that at the time this podcast broadcasts.
I also sell my ebook for the Dog Dementia book on there. But yes, we can give the link for that. I have many, many blog posts. I and a couple on Whole Dog Journal and I have some pages on my blog where you can access all of those and we can put those in the show notes. And the webinars on sound, what are those again? Okay, one of them is called... Every time you do something with sound, you do a play on words.
And one of them is called Listen Up, an evidence-based assessment of sound-based items for dogs. I've got that a little bit wrong, but it's products. I analyze what's coming out of a lot of products and what their claims are. This includes aversive products where you blast the dog with ultrasound. It includes toys that include an ultrasound component or say that they do. And the ones I tested actually did.
It includes music, the claims made by the people who make so-called relaxation music, barrier methods, such as mutt muffs and how effective ear guards can be for say a dog that's afraid of thunder or fireworks. The whole thing about whether or not covering a crate can help, how to soundproof things. I'll tell you the bottom line for almost all of those is that anything we can do, do it yourself, cannot block thunder and fireworks from coming into dog's ears. It even comes through our skulls.
So it's like most of those products oversell their capability of helping. They can help somewhat, I think. But I know you didn't ask for that, but that's kind of the TLDR of a lot of the articles and a lot of the information I give out is that doesn't work. I'm sorry to say. I talk about masking, which is the one thing that helps the most. And that's setting up competing sounds, brown noise, white noise, ocean waves, things like that, and how to do that optimally.
So that's the one called listen up. The other one is called sound decisions, helping your dog cope in a noisy human world. And it is more for, it's still at a trainer level because I talk technically about desensitization, counter-conditioning and things like that. But it's more for dog owners and what you can and can't do in terms of protecting them from sound. And so there's a little overlap in those two, but that one is centered on what can you do that helps.
And the other one has products that are also perversive or for fun or other kinds of things. I think both of those sound really interesting and beneficial as well, like full of important information. So thank you for creating those. You're welcome. I have them priced very cheaply because I want that information to get out there. Okay. And are they, I think you said might be up, both of them might still be up. Are they offered on an ongoing basis or? They will be up. They will be up.
Right now I'm running a special where people can buy two of them for a lower price. And I don't know when, whether that will still be up or not. But they will absolutely be available and their regular price is very low. Okay. And they're regularly available. It's not like only at certain times of the year or anything like that. They're always available. You get at least a year access, but it'll probably be a lot longer than that. All right. Very cool.
Well, thank you so much Eileen for sharing everything that you have shared with us so far today. I'd like to give you a chance now if there is anything that I haven't asked you about yet or that we haven't spent quite as much time talking about as you had hoped to. Is there anything we've missed that you would like to share about now? I think we covered almost everything. I'm trying very hard to think of something. I do hope that people will look at the sound articles on my blog.
I'm putting out as much information as I can for free. And I am also available for freelance editing. I usually have not a waiting list, but I'm usually booked. But I do that specifically for dog trainers. I have low rates because I want to keep it accessible. And I make them as low as I can. I didn't mean to end on a sales note, but I wanted to mention that.
And I hope the self-editing course is out by the time this comes out because it's going to be a really nice help for a lot of dog trainers. And for people who wanted to reach out about help with editing or for people who just wanted to reach out, they have a question or find out what you have to offer, how can people get in touch with you? There's a contact page on my blog.
And I tell people to be persistent because I get so much spam, even though I have filters and honeypots and all this kind of stuff, I get a lot of junk there. But absolutely use that or send me a message on Facebook. Even if we're not friends, I'm pretty good about seeing those. I check for them. Those are the two best ways I think to reach me. And what is your blog website? It's EileenAndDogs.com. Okay. I was going to guess that that's what it was, but I didn't want to say if it wasn't.
So yeah, EileenAndDogs.com. That's going to be easy for folks to remember if they have not already been on your website and aren't familiar with it, I think. So thank you, Eileen. Thank you so much from myself, from everybody listening on behalf of ATA. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk with us and share just a little bit about the wonderful ripples that you are spreading in the world. I'm delighted to talk to you. It's an honor. Thank you so much for having me.
We do, of course, appreciate all of you tuning in as well. And if you have enjoyed this episode and are interested in carrying on the conversation about working with the animals in our lives in the most positive, most fun, and most choice -rich ways, then as mentioned at the start of this episode, the Animal Training Academy community is waiting for you.
Head on over to www.atamember.com and click on the membership button in the main menu to learn more about what members are describing as the Netflix social media platform for behavior geeks. That's it for this episode, though. Thank you so much for listening. You'll hear from us again soon.