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The notion of pet dogs being captive dogs is sure to stir up some emotions. But the truth is, the lifestyle of your average pet dog in the U.S. has changed dramatically over the past few decades, and this hasn’t been a long enough time for our dogs to adjust. Could this help explain why there are so many dogs with behavior challenges these days?

In this episode, I bring in Kim Brophey FDM, CDBC, CPDT-KA to discuss how our modern lifestyles aren’t matching up to the needs of our dogs.

We talk about:

• How the restrictions we’ve placed on dogs over the past few decades have taken away much of their autonomy
• How the environments we ask dogs to live greatly influence their behavior
• How restrictions such as leashes, fences, crates, etc contribute to reactive behavior
• What we can do to support dogs in our modern world
• And more!

About Kim:

Kim Brophey is an applied ethologist and accomplished behavior consultant and trainer who has been working with dogs and their families for over 25 years. Her L.E.G.S.® model of integrated canine science has been embraced internationally as her book- Meet Your Dog, and market-disrupting Applied Ethology Family Dog Mediation® Course and The Dog’s Truth documentary continue to catalyze a worldwide initiative to welcome in a “welfare-first” approach to our canine relationships and professional work.

For Pet Parents

Need Help With Your Reactive Dog? 1:1 Coaching with Jessica

For Dog Professionals:

Elevate Your Work with Reactive Dogs

Transcript

Jessica: [00:00:00] I am Jessica Wheatcraft, and this is Rethinking Reactivity, A podcast designed to educate, empower, and equip the modern handler of reactive dogs. Whether you have a reactive dog or you help people with their reactive dogs, you’re in the right place. If I were to tell you that your pet dog is a captive animal, how would that make you feel?

Jessica: I want you to sit and think about this question for a minute. Most listeners may feel offended by this notion, and that’s okay, because when I first heard it, I recoiled a bit too. It is hard to think about our pet dogs as being anything but our pets who are destined to share their lives with us humans.

Jessica: We often have a romantic vision about the history of dogs and how they evolved to [00:01:00] become such a big part of our human lives, but our lives, and therefore the lives of dogs have changed drastically over the past few decades, and in my personal opinion, those changes have not been kind to dogs. It seems they are struggling more and more to fit into today’s society.

Jessica: And the amount of dogs who display reactivity are simply a symptom of a lifestyle that we have not prepared them for. I can’t think of anyone better to help us navigate this topic than Kim Brophy. Kim is an applied pathologist and accomplished behavior consultant who has been working with dogs and their families for over 25 years with an emphasis on a welfare first approach to our canine relationships and professional work.

Jessica: Let’s dive in. Kim, welcome to the show. [00:02:00] I am thrilled to have you here today. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I’m happy to be here with you. Awesome. So you’re an applied ethologist, and for those who don’t know what that means, could you describe your background? Sure. So

Kim: ethology is the study of animal behavior in a natural environment.

Kim: So biological origin of behavior and applied ethology is the study of animals that are living under some type of direct human control. So animals usually are living in captivity, but it can also apply to the animals that are both captive and domesticated. So it could be that animals are living in zoos.

Kim: So they’re captive, but a wild species. Or it could be that they are actually a domesticated species like our pet dogs that are living in captive conditions. I’m sure we’ll come back to that, but even the thought of our dogs are captive can be like a little alarming, but we’ll circle back to that. And yeah, I have an undergraduate degree in hope to be pursuing my master’s this next year in that same [00:03:00] subject.

Kim: And that’s been my niche for the last like 25 years since I started out with that particular specialization in the applied relationship between human and animal behavior from that like historical and biological. Origin angle and then got really into dog behavior. From that perspective, going back to the beginning of my career and have continued to self-educate.

Kim: At the time, two masters weren’t available. Uh, undergraduates weren’t available in that field. Even at that time, I was just fortunate to be at a school that had an integrative studies program where you could designate a title underneath that umbrella in order to look at that kind of special topic of those questions of what happens when our species cross paths, when us humans are the ones that have control in that dynamic of the relationship.

Kim: But yeah, so I’m trying to continue to bring that back into our field now and make sure that it is increasingly part of the conversation as the constraints of captivity have been closing in on our [00:04:00] goals for the last decade or so.

Jessica: I can see how someone who would be listening to this and hears the word captivity, and then they think about that with their dog and.

Jessica: How they might take offense to that, truly because that would suggest that we as humans are putting dogs in positions that are less than ideal for them. Gosh. I mean, that word could be really loaded, right? Depending on how a person takes it. And I wanna unpack that a little bit more because I really would love listeners who.

Jessica: Have not yet heard this perspective, to really think more about how that actually is the case with our pet dogs nowadays.

Kim: I think it’s been something that’s snuck up on our psyche and I think it’s one of the reasons that we don’t really think about dogs as being captive historically, humans and dogs having lived together for like 10 to 40,000 years, we lived [00:05:00] symbiotically in this relationship, especially for the bulk of that up until kind of modern history where we were benefiting from each other in, in our relationship with our shared species.

Kim: In that dogs were able to have more access to resources and we were able to better hone in on things we needed for our own survival in terms of hunting and territorial defense, and ultimately things like moving livestock and stuff like that as well. Even barment eradication. Dogs have lived with humans for a really long time, and so you’ll even hear some modern dog professionals say that, well, a dog’s ecological niche.

Kim: Is with people. So like how can you say that they’re captive? Like they’re not out of their element, like other captive animals when you take them and you put them into a zoo, right? They’ve always been with people. So their niche is there. And the part that’s so critical that we don’t think about, because of course that’s true, dogs have cova with people for this whole period of time, is that what they’ve lost is the autonomy.

Kim: And most of us aren’t old [00:06:00] enough to know that’s happened in the course of like our lifetime, right? Like my grandparents and most of the generations, well, all the generations really preceding that. Other than like certain context where dogs might have been kept under some type of constraints and then let out to do particular tasks and functions.

Kim: By and large dogs were off leash. And then were family pets. So they came back at the end of the day after being dogs, doing their dog things all day, right? Following all of those instincts and natural behaviors, they would then come back and be with us. And so we didn’t have the level of behavior problems then even just when I was growing up in Atlanta in a major city, all the dogs were running loose in the city at that time.

Kim: And it’s fascinating because we do have some modern day kind of things we can compare it to to help us understand a little bit better. So 80% of the dogs in the world now are free roaming, and those of us who’ve grown up in places like the United States can have a hard time conceptualizing that. We think of them as strays.

Kim: [00:07:00] Yeah. But they actually in their ecological niche, the way dogs have lived for most of that 10 to 40,000 years in and around human settlements and. Then even in places like the UK and in many European countries, the level of captivity that those dogs have is much lower. So I was just talking with my good friend, Justine Shermans.

Kim: She was here in the States and then she just moved back to the UK where she’s from, her dog, his behavior. And interesting enough, some reactivity that he had has gone to zero since he’s been in the uk because of the environment and the lifestyle there. When everyone walks their dogs, all the dogs are off leash.

Kim: And it’s a game changing kind of element. The more freedom, the more autonomy that they have to follow those natural behaviors, those motivations, those impulses that they have. And what we don’t realize is that in all of our good intentions for keeping our dogs safe and being responsible pet owners who aren’t letting their dogs run loose and things like that.

Kim: What’s happened is that we’ve [00:08:00] stripped more and more of that freedom from them in just the last few decades. Like it’s very recent that this has happened and what we’ve seen is a tremendous rise in behavior problems that has gone in tandem with the increasing constraints that we’ve had on our dogs.

Kim: So our kind of normal ways of keeping them these days are often a rotation between crates, houses, leashes, and if they’re lucky, fenced areas, right? And so it, it’s a lot of restriction of their natural sweets of behaviors, which is the very much the definition of captivity. So even though they’ve long been considered a population of animals that we should be looking at with animal welfare science models, we haven’t applied it to the pet dog population as of yet.

Kim: And that’s why we’re trying to encourage that process to move along so that we can evolve with the science that we have and extend that to dogs as well.

Jessica: Thank you for explaining that. I can relate to [00:09:00] Justine and being in the UK and the differences in cultures surrounding dogs and how we live with them.

Jessica: I am from Germany and so when I visit my family in Germany and I walk around the city and see the dogs and such that are there, there are a lot more. Open spaces in between the cities, which I always thought was really interesting. So specifically in my mom’s city that she’s living in, they have apartments and they have houses, but then right next to those, you have big open fields, and then you even have this really big park that’s in the center and with just lots of open spaces.

Jessica: And I don’t really see reactive dogs when I go there. I do see some, so I’m not gonna say that I don’t see it at all. But it’s a lot more commonplace for A, the dogs to either be off leash or B, to just casually interact with the dog that’s approaching and then move on. So it’s less of a big event to see and or interact with other dogs.

Jessica: Mm-hmm. And I’ve [00:10:00] always found that to be really fascinating to see what I see there. And then of course, what I see with my clients.

Kim: Right. And I think there’s these other factors that have led us to believe that it’s couldn’t possibly be that reactivity would have any roots and captivity constraints, therefore, like welfare problems, right?

Kim: We think of it like the dog is supposed to be obedient, and if we just train them, then you know, everything will go well. And we’ve, especially in the United States, adopted a highly behaviorism, stylized model of looking at animal behavior in general. So we’ve had this idea like, well, they’re blank slates, and then we just mold them into what we want by training them and everything will be perfect if we just have the right combination of training experiences.

Kim: So I think historically that’s been a, an interesting kind of factor in our bias. And then I also spend a lot of time thinking just about how successful the marketing has been in the United States, right? Because they, there’s a lot more money to be made [00:11:00] in the idea that like. Well, we have to buy all these products and services for our dog to be good.

Kim: Right? And so that’s been an effective message is that like, this is your pet dog and your pet dog just needs all of this wonderful luxury and all these products and services, and then they’ll be great. There’s a lot of money to be made there, right? So dogs have become a whole market sector of being a consumer, really.

Kim: Right. Our little four-legged consumers, and of course we’re ripe to be suffered into buying all kinds of things. ’cause we love our dogs so much and we wanna help them, especially if they’re struggling with behaviors, when really a lot of the problems we’re having problems, like the prevalence of reactivity are so rooted in things that if we changed our way of living with them and the provisions that they had in their life, it would supersede a lot of the development of those behavior problems that we’re seeing so much of.

Jessica: Yeah. I’m curious because you mentioned one thing, so you mentioned you saw a. Greater increase in the [00:12:00] restrictions that we place on dogs, especially over the last decade. And I know that you’ve been working with dogs for 25 years, and I’ve been in the industry for about 18 years. I’ve seen a lot of changes just within my career.

Jessica: And I’m curious, what are some of the big changes that you’ve seen that you just didn’t see it when you first started out working with dogs?

Kim: Activity is at the top of the list for sure. Absolutely explosive, highly emotional, unmanageable kinds of behaviors on leash for a variety of reasons. Sound sensitivity, separation related issues, all of which get labeled as like a pathology of separation anxiety when a lot of that is actually rooted again in changes in our lifestyle, right?

Kim: Like we’re not. Home as much as we were a couple decades ago. Most of the time both parents are working. It wasn’t true when I was growing up, right? And so even things like that, like the amount of time dogs are spending in crates, right, has increased tremendously or just in confined [00:13:00] small spaces and or alone.

Kim: So is it a pathology when abnormal conditions create those behaviors or are those natural consequences to unnatural conditions, right? So I’m always trying to trace our questions back to more ultimate causes and like from an, that’s an ethology model, this man Tyberg and Tyberg, and four questions. He’s looking at things through proximate and ultimate kind of levels.

Kim: And without getting into a bunch of super nerdy weeds about all of that stuff, essentially proximate is like how we’re used to looking at dog behavior now. Like what happened right before the behavior that made the dog do it, or even what happened last week, or even what happened in this dog’s life.

Kim: That made this behavior problem develop or what have you. And in an ultimate kind of a perspective, looking at things evolutionarily, it gives us that kind of context to think about, well, if the animal is a social animal with natural social suites of behaviors that would normally from that evolutionary timeline, even [00:14:00] artificial selection with humans, breeding dogs included in all of that.

Kim: And what does that history look like if dogs have been with humans or other animals and not isolated living alone for all that period of time and now their environment is such that they aren’t with other people or animals for the majority of the day. Then that is what’s called evolutionary mismatch.

Kim: And so essentially the animal has this struggle, this dissonance, think of it like a square peg in a round hole or a key that doesn’t fit the lock. And then we get separation anxiety that develops, and then we go out over the behavior plan and medications and everything. But the truth is they’re really having this fundamental problem with the life that they’re living with the environmental conditions of what we are doing in the 21st century.

Kim: And that’s not to make any one of us feel bad, we’ve all been told that’s normal and it’s fine and any dog should be able to roll with it. But it’s really not realistic for them. And it’s the reason I think that they’re [00:15:00] having the welfare rug pulled out from them in so many ways. That’s showing up as behavior problems.

Jessica: Yes. There’s two things that have come up for me as I was listening to you. One of them is the expectations that we have for our dogs. That’s one big thing that I’ve seen change over my career, and I think one of the biggest things as it relates to reactivity is this expectation of we should be able to take our dogs.

Jessica: Out and expose them to environments that we certainly don’t necessarily prepare them for. And I’ll give some examples. Having lived and trained in San Diego for almost 20 years, things like bringing your dog to the brewery was very common. Or North Park, that’s one neighborhood that I had a lot of clients in.

Jessica: ’cause it was a really dense neighborhood with a ton of other dogs. Mm-hmm. And there are some single family homes, duplexes, some apartment complexes and [00:16:00] so forth. And so asking dogs to live in those types of environments. And I’m wondering if we could dive into that a little bit more, because I just wonder if people, before they get a dog, I.

Jessica: If they were to really think more about the environment that you were asking this dog to live in and how that really doesn’t line up with them in terms of what they need and also in regards to having good welfare in their lives and how I think that could just coincides and overlaps with, okay, we have these expectations of dogs and there’s also this shift in this more of a cultural norm to have dogs live in apartments, especially dogs need a lot of free space to move in that it’s okay to have a dog like that in an apartment and just take them out on [00:17:00] leash as long as you walk them.

Jessica: It’s okay. So I wanna dive into that, and I know that there’s gonna be some listeners that are probably going to take some offense to this, and I completely empathize with them because. Back in the day before I really understood these things, I too would’ve taken offense. But now that I know better, I think more about the environment that I ask my dogs to live in because I know how impactful that is on their behavior.

Kim: Yeah, I mean, I love that you’re bringing all this up and it is sticky, and I think both of you and I are very sympathetic to the positions that so many pet families are in. They didn’t know, honestly, and like they, they didn’t have a sense of what those needs were or weren’t and how their environment could provide for them or not, and what that would look like.

Kim: You’re right that the expectations have been something that have has changed the most, right? I mean, we’ve become way more indoor in our lifestyles, right? Bloody cell phones weren’t even out when I graduated [00:18:00] college. I mean, that’s just mind bending to think about. So through the course of my career, everything we think about is like modern world conditions has just been on the fast track, right?

Kim: And that’s changed our behavior and our activities in really seriously meaningful ways and. We wanna be able to have our dogs with us. We see things on social media and television or when we’re out in public and we see another dog with somebody, we’re like, oh my gosh, that seems so fun. Right? Like, ’cause it is, it’s really fun to have a dog.

Kim: You can take places that enjoys that and, and so I get why it’s alluring. And I think too, just to touch really briefly get on the marketing from the pet industry perspective, I think one of the reasons that we have had the wolf pulled over our eyes collectively as far as dogs and what their needs are is if you’re in the pet industry, you have to have people getting dogs in order to sell the products that the dogs need, right?

Kim: So there’s been this kind of messaging that’s just a little Pollyanna about dogs that they only need this and then [00:19:00] everything will be fine. And so the public, even if they really wanted to know for the longest time, like where do you go to find out, where would you have gone? To get really great information about dogs’ needs, you’d find articles more on like their biological needs and taking care of them medically.

Kim: Very basic exercise kind of suggestions, things like that. Diet. But not a lot in terms of like needs. And I do think part of that is we have a cognitive dissonance about dogs in general the same way we do about ourselves. We don’t think of them as animals. We don’t think of ourselves as animals, dogs.

Kim: We’ve put in this place where they’re almost in limbo between the natural world and the human world. They aren’t given the same kinds of considerations we would necessarily give to other people, right? We don’t think that they could possibly have feelings or cognition, anything like our own. But they’re also not like the all the other animals, and they want this life with us, right?

Kim: And so they’re privileged to have all of this luxury, but these. These situations like [00:20:00] apartments, I mean, it’s such a great example. We tend to have non dog friendly housing and then dog friendly housing, which means you get a bottleneck of a lot of dogs in the dog friendly housing areas. Mm-hmm. And it’s like walking the gauntlet is how my clients used to describe it when they’re like leaving their apartment and have to walk by all the other doors and then have their head on a swivel looking for where all these other dogs are coming from.

Kim: And the fact that they can’t navigate that based on kind of instinctual responses because of things like leashes can make it a a lot more loaded. For everybody. Right? And a lot more frustrating and scary and things like that. I also think too, that the well-intentioned homogenization of the various dog breeds, which was very much something that was initially discussed because we didn’t want people judging dogs as vicious based on their breed.

Kim: But we ended up really throwing out the baby with the bath water in those great intentions and essentially telling [00:21:00] the American public that any type of dog was well suited to any kind of environment, which is a fundamentally kind of erroneous. Presumption, right? Because we’ve done so much artificial selection, we have so much genetic variation because of all the different selective pressure throughout history to get dogs to do all these really amazing things that now we don’t have available for them to do anymore.

Kim: But they still carry all of those natural impulses for those kinds of suites of behavior, much of which are very. High intensity work ethic work drive suites of behaviors that were helpful for our ancestors, for getting by and surviving, but do really poorly in condo living. And I think that’s one of the kinds of, I, I’m sitting here looking at a graphic that I have for a, a slide from a talk I’m giving this year, and it’s a model that was introduced by Frazier in 1997 that just talks about for listeners, I’m giving you a visual of two circles, like a Venn diagram, [00:22:00] but a.

Kim: Simple Venn diagram of just two circles where they overlap in the middle. And one is the genetics of the animal and what they carry as internally, the problems they’re prepared to solve, right? So they’ve evolved to solve certain kinds of problems in their environment. And then the other one is the environment they find themselves in.

Kim: And so in captivity, you tend to have this problem with the dissonance between those two circles, like minimal overlap, where the animal is prepared genetically to solve the problems they’re actually facing in their conditions. And what you get on both sides of those circles, there’s two different kinds of problems.

Kim: One is the animal’s prepared to solve all kinds of problems they don’t get the chance to solve. And that creates a lot of frustration, for example. And then the other one is, well, there’s all these problems. I don’t know how to solve. That creates a lot of distress and overwhelm and confusion. And our dogs are very much in that predicament of that evolutionary mismatch.

Kim: And I think that’s for me where that checking our [00:23:00] expectations that you’re talking about like really needs to start is recognizing that this is a common problem in captivity. There’s not a huge mystery, frankly, about what’s going on for our dogs because we see this phenomenon happen for other captive species.

Kim: And the behavior is actually for other captive animals. How we know how they’re doing in as far as their welfare, right? And so the behavior that we’re getting from our dogs should be sending off a lot of alarm bells for us as their keepers. Whether we think of ourselves that way or not, we’re also their family members.

Kim: It’s definitely complicated by our co-evolution ’cause they’re not a wild animal. We’ve got right in our living room, but still they don’t have the autonomy to go solve those problems. They’re themselves. And I think training, regardless of how someone approaches it. Oftentimes adds a lot of pressure to the dogs.

Kim: If we’re looking at it from like an obedience perspective and we’re saying, well, I don’t care what breed a dog you were and what type of work you were intended to do and what kinds of conditions you were designed [00:24:00] to live in and what have you. I’m gonna take you every day to the breweries, and then I’m gonna have you created for 12 hours a day, and then I’m gonna have a bunch of people over for a dinner party, and I expect impeccable behavior in all of these conditions.

Kim: End of conversation. It’s not realistic and it’s not fair. And frankly, the dogs will be a lot better served if we start looking at like, how do we create environments for the dogs that we have, the different kinds of dogs we have, both in our homes, in our yards, in our businesses, and in our communities, as well as how can we breed for the world that we have today?

Jessica: Oh gosh. Okay. You mentioned so many great things in there, and so I wanna go back to a few of those.

Kim: Sure.

Jessica: I’m wondering if you could speak just a little bit more to that specifically for the people out there who happened to live in more urban spaces and how there’s dogs that are going to just simply struggle more in those environments.

Jessica: But then there are also [00:25:00] dogs who do okay in those environments. There are people who are listening to this who have dogs who are genuinely pretty darn happy with their lives. Even city dogs, they, they’ve got great lives because they’re adapted to it. And I’m wondering if you could speak just a little bit more to that.

Jessica: What are the types of dogs that would do well in an environment like that? What are types of dogs that maybe aren’t going to do so well in an environment like that?

Kim: Yeah, no, it’s a great question and it is one of those accidental injuries, right? Because it was so well intentioned and I think had we really understood the animal welfare model is needing to be applied to our pet dog population better.

Kim: At that time, we might’ve caught it, right, because it’s not so much that like you train dogs differently depending on their breed and stuff like that, right? It’s that they have different needs. And also different natural behaviors that we might expect to see. And then if we expect to see them, then we’re not like, oh my gosh, why is he doing that?

Kim: We’re like, well, that perfectly within the [00:26:00] wheelhouse of what would be normal behavior, safe for a border collie or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And to answer your question about which breeds or groups do better in urban environments, I mean the border CO’s a great poster child for often not right?

Kim: Like oftentimes herding dogs because they were developed to work a really long hours, they, they have an incredible work ethic and talk about just endurance, right? For a physical stamina and mental stamina that most of us just don’t. Have the time for a full-time job and a dog. And a lot of her neck dogs are very much that.

Kim: Additionally, there’s these things called releasers or releasing stimuli, and nature would be things that would indicate to the animal that it’s an opportunity to employ a certain natural behavior. My analogy for it is something in the environment is clicking the mouse onto an icon for a program on your computer that just sits there till you click it, but then you click it, it opens up, and it runs this whole program automatically.

Kim: But you never think about it ’cause it’s just sitting there on your desktop, not doing anything. So there’s things in the environment that [00:27:00] are releasers or releasing stimuli. So for herding dogs, originally, that would be the movement of the stock so that you can respond to sudden environmental contrast and the movements of these other animals, particularly fast movement.

Kim: And so we can all think about modern environments. And we can think, well, there’s no sheep. But then there’s these wonderful things called accidental releasing stimuli, or accidental releasers, which emulate the real thing or the original thing I should say. So it may be that the bicyclists, the skateboards, hoverboards, buses, cars, any number of things like that for herding dogs can elicit that kind of hurting response of chasing, lunging, barking, snapping.

Kim: In addition, because they were wired for those changes in the environment and that. Sensitivity to it. They can have a really difficult time just with the load of environmental stimuli in large cities and just get overwhelmed in those conditions. They also are the type of dog that’s meant to be a wingman like you’re Robin to your Batman type of situation, right?

Kim: So they’re also dogs that are gonna [00:28:00] suffer a lot more if you’re working crazy, long hours coming home and then going back to a restaurant for a date or a party or a business meeting. Just sitting at home doing nothing is not gonna be great for them either, even if you’re just trying to protect them from all those environmental stimulus.

Kim: So that’s a group that I think has become a poster child in our industry for dogs that are struggling a lot in the 21st century. Interestingly enough, a lot of terriers for all of their excitability. Since they were developed in urban environments throughout history because they were largely developed to deal with like rock populations and infestations and things like that.

Kim: So there’s some kind of like more rural types of breeds of terriers, but then there’s a lot of like urbany types of breeds of terriers historically that helped eradicate all kinds of rodent infestations from those urban places. And so they’ve been rolling with that level of stimuli and bustling activity more so than some other breeds.

Kim: That’s one of the genetic groups that informs pit bulls, right? You’ve got terriers and guardians under the hood of that kind of [00:29:00] phenotype for that group of dogs and. They do better in urban environments than a lot of other groups of dogs. Pities can do absolutely fabulous in the cities, but some of them have a lot more excitability, high arousal tendencies that can also really struggle in those environments as well.

Kim: So some of them seem, again, to do fabulous and others seem to struggle. Just really depends and toy breeds. But the companion breeds that were developed specifically for indoor environments also, they can get a lot more a uh, activity and exercise in indoor environments bred for companionship. They can do better in urban environments as well, but again, might really struggle with your long working hours and things of that nature.

Kim: The less domesticated breeds too, like the natural group of dogs, so things like huskies and Akitas and stuff like that, they can really struggle as well as some of the older livestock guardian dogs that tend to do very poorly in urban environments. We’re seeing a rise in popularity with livestock guardian dogs and rare.

Kim: Livestock [00:30:00] guardian dogs being adopted into pet conditions. And these are dogs that are developed in some cases to be wandering 30, 40 acres, that they’re patrolling independently without people making their own decisions about how to manage potential threats to the flocks. And so they tend to really suffer.

Kim: And therefore we tend to really struggle with them when they’re in small indoor environments without that autonomy and not knowing where to put that kind of protective, cautious suite of behaviors to defend home and social members. And I think the expectations piece, I mean, as I’m thinking about this and just going through a bunch of the different genetic groups, I’m thinking part of the problem with that, it’s all how you raise them thing is that if you’ve been around a type of dog that has been bred for.

Kim: High levels of tolerance of human behavior, bid ability, cooperating with people, things like that. And like golden retrievers, a good poster child for that. And then you go and you get an Akita or a Malis or [00:31:00] a Doberman or a great nees thinking, well, it’s just all how you raise ’em. So I’m just gonna raise ’em exactly like I did my golden retriever.

Kim: You might really be in for some interesting surprises because they can have very different ideas about the world. Relationships with humans being amenable to our instructions. Even things like physical restraint, like a lot of the less domesticated breeds can really struggle with that. And if someone goes to put your a Keita in a neck hold in a veterinary hospital to do a blood draw and they take offense and become aggressive, I would consider that a.

Kim: Pretty understandable response from a breed like an aita. And if we saw that in a golden retriever, we might be like, oh, like that’s alarming. Not to say that it wouldn’t still be potentially totally justifiable and understandable in that case as well, but we get away with a lot more with certain breeds of dogs that have been bred for complacency.

Kim: And then if we extend that kind of high level of expectations to all breeds of dogs, it just increases the likelihood that we’re gonna have some kind of conflict. [00:32:00]

Jessica: Yeah. As you mentioned, the Akita, my mind flashed back to, I worked with several Shiva e News and what was a major problem handling or putting harnesses on the dogs.

Jessica: Yes. And them snapping and not feeling comfortable with it, but I viewed that behavior as different than Golden that would behave in that manner. Not to say that we wouldn’t take the snapping seriously because we did, but it just became. Almost just like a ritual for them. I will actually have to give my clients a lot of credit.

Jessica: They weren’t really that threatened by their she inu when they would behave that way. They felt like they still had a pretty good relationship with the dog and they just knew that they were uncomfortable with it. But I think if that was another breed of dog, as you said, then I think a lot of other people would really be raising the alarm bells.

Jessica: Certainly as behavior consultants, we don’t want people to be putting themselves in situations where their dog might injure them. So of course we’re not saying that we’re encouraging, encouraging [00:33:00] behavior, but certainly coming from a place of just really of understanding why would a dog like that be more inclined to behave that way, I think is really the point that we’re trying to make.

Jessica: Yeah. And then you think about for a breed of dog that wasn’t developed for those kind of indoor environments, wasn’t as genetically domesticated to be as tolerant of human behavior at the level that some breeds like Goldens or Cavalier King Charles or what have you have been bred for. It’s, yes, it’s about things like putting on that harness, but then it just rides with you out the door and you go out in the world and this animal who’s less domesticated, their frustration is gonna be much higher with the fact that you still are controlling their every move, right?

Jessica: On a leash to some extent. And it’s to to treat them all as if all of those needs are the same, right? Is really gonna get us in a lot of trouble. One of the ironies is with the herding dog group, is I think maybe even more than the [00:34:00] gun dog group in some way. They need guidance, instructions, direction, and they thrive off of like, tell me what I should be doing next, because we absolutely bred them to be that dialed into the shepherd.

Jessica: And so part of their needs is us giving them lots of instructions, which is ironic, but if you carried that same approach over to that Akita, like it is not part of their needs for you to give them instructions in any way, shape, or form, and they will let you know that. Right. Another kind of thing that makes me think of is to go back to that circle, those two circles.

Jessica: You’ve got the gap of the animal biologically, the problems they’re prepared to solve, and then you’ve got the environmental conditions they find themselves in with just usually the small bit of overlap in captivity, right? Where it’s things are jiving naturally. One of the functions of training it for any captive animal.

Jessica: Interesting enough is to help bridge that gap between those two things to be like, let me show you how to do this. So for instance, say you have a wild tiger that’s living in a zoo, and you have to move it from one enclosure to another, [00:35:00] and you have to somehow be able to put some kind of a pattern in place.

Jessica: So that’s a safe thing for the handlers and for the animal that’s gonna involve training. Or if we need to be able to do some type of a medical procedure on an animal in captivity, that’s not in their genetic wheelhouse of understanding already, but those are environmental conditions they will find themselves in.

Jessica: So we need to do training to help bridge that gap for that animal. So I like to remind people that the function of training for captive animals is to help them navigate these conditions that are feeling not natural for them and challenging for them. Yeah, as opposed to the function of training being to make us look good and make the dog obey our every command.

Jessica: Like I don’t know where that kind of concept got in our minds, but all of us have subconsciously absorbed it. And to some extent or another, I had clients almost embarrassingly sharing with me that like he doesn’t always follow my commands. And it’s like, neither do I always follow [00:36:00] people’s commands. And it’s almost a relief to tell people, your dog isn’t bad and you’re not a bad trainer because your dog doesn’t say how high when you say John, right?

Jessica: It’s more that we need to understand what is our role as their responsible keeper in this environment to make sure all those needs are met, realizing we are also part of that social environment, but how do we really meet those needs, and then when do we need to bring that training in to help them or us out to make things easier to navigate?

Jessica: But recognizing the first thing we have to do is really understand that animal in front of us and their phenotype. So as for my legs program, that’s the learning, the training part, but it’s also their environment, their genetics, and then those internal conditions like their sex, age, health and things like that.

Jessica: And all that creates a picture of the animal that needs our care, right? That we’re responsible for providing for. And I would just love to see the whole pet industry move the conversation in a direction of what does it look like if we [00:37:00] focus on meeting needs and provisions instead of dog training first?

Jessica: Mm-hmm. Not the training doesn’t matter, it’s just turning it over so that we’ve shifted the priorities.

Jessica: Yeah, I love that. So then on that note, how do you rethink reactivity?

Kim: So for me, reactivity, if we’re thinking of it in kind of the pop definition of dogs on a leash, lunging, barking, things like that, for me it is a complete product of captivity.

Kim: And one of the things that I’ve noticed is that the less overall measure of captivity dogs have, the more amenable they are to being on a leash. And their behavior on leash is just, it’s not loaded. And if we think about if a dog is going from long periods of time, indoors, long periods of time, further confined and crates, and that means they don’t have what’s called the affordances for [00:38:00] those natural behaviors, for foraging, for social behaviors, for hazard avoidance behaviors, to go investigate a potential threat of a sound or something you smelled or what have you.

Kim: They don’t get the opportunity to do any of those natural behaviors most of the time in their home when they step out that door. It’s like a coiled spring or a loaded gun. There’s just all of this, quite literally like kinetic energy, but also the potential energy of all of those behavioral suites. And then you have all these potential releasers out in the environment that are going to arouse the dog into social behavior or foraging behavior, or hazard avoidance behavior.

Kim: And they’re stuck on that leash and it’s confusing, it’s overwhelming, it’s maddening. And then they rehearse it. And then I’ve joked lately, I feel like leash reactivity is also a bit contagious because dogs, the signals they’re throwing to each other. When one dog is experiencing that, like, oh my gosh, I’m finally out here.

Kim: There’s a dog, or Oh, and there’s a cat and maybe I should hunt the cat. Or [00:39:00] maybe sun counts are my favorite. Small quick joke, just because they were bred to bay, right? When they see their game or smell their game and they’re on the track. So just walking out the front door and seeing the neighbors with their other pets and things like that walking around can sometimes turn into that like, but that’s their natural behavior we brought them for.

Kim: But I think that when dogs start throwing all those signals at each other and they can’t do the movements and the natural signals, they would do safe. When we’re watching free roaming populations of dogs in India or Mexico or Argentina or any place like that that still does have free roaming populations, there’s so many beautiful nuances to their behavior with each other and how they move through space.

Kim: And it’s not how we’re moving through space when we’re walking down the street. And then the higher our expectations get going back to your expectations point too, even if it’s training and not physical restriction, we’re still inhibiting all of those natural expressions and suites of behaviors, and so I would encourage [00:40:00] everyone to rethink reactivity as a product of captivity.

Jessica: No, I love that. Love that. Well, we have so many dogs that are reactive, that are going to live in the same environment that they’re in. We certainly can’t have our clients move as being the solution sometimes. I mean, it is an option or a potential solution, but not an option for, I would say the vast majority of people.

Jessica: People who have reactive dogs and they are living in environments that don’t suit their dogs, and we’re driving home such this message of your dog having more autonomy and meeting their individual needs and so forth. What are some ways that they could begin to do that?

Kim: This is where our industry is right now, and so the true short answer is we’re figuring that out.

Kim: As an industry right now, I think there’s a lot [00:41:00] of, we don’t know yet, and we’re trying to break certain molds. So in the meantime, one of my top recommendations while we’re starting to figure out what those provisions in our communities, like our resources, that we can start developing as professionals, right?

Kim: People like you and I come up with new service models of things that we can make available for people that live in a certain city or something that they can utilize for very targeted foraging behaviors or social opportunities, things like that. The easiest push button thing right now is sniff spots, and I hope there’s gonna be a lot more of them and a lot more along those lines.

Kim: And so for those who don’t know, sniff spots are basically like Airbnb for fenced. Most of them are fenced, some are not. But it indicates either way, spaces where you can take your dog to just dog in nature. Yeah. Doing whatever they’d like to do. And the bigger the fence sniff spot, probably the better.

Kim: Just knowing that’s a secure fenced area, you can see that people have left reviews about whether that they found the fence safe and secure. So the more reviews [00:42:00] it’s got, the more confidence you can have in it. But the idea being you don’t go there to throw the ball like you do in your own backyard. You go there to step back and let your dog just be a dog.

Kim: So foraging behaviors in any kind of capacity can have opportunities there in sniff spots. They can be hunting small little animals, following tracks of other dogs that were there, things like that. And. Of course if you do have a border call you, they’ll want you to participate with them. Like we were talking a minute ago.

Kim: Those hurting dogs, they’ll want you to be a little bit more involved, but I think we’re scared to not tell our dogs what to do all the time. So I would encourage people to find opportunities for you to step back from micromanaging your dog and give them chances to just be in their bodies. Out in the world, be the animals that they are and what we’re working on right now are trying to come up with easy things that people could do in their own porches, backyards in even inside their homes.

Kim: I mean, [00:43:00] people are aware of a lot of the new kind of enrichment ideas that we have, which is very much along these lines, but I would suggest that puzzle toys and snuffle mats and treat dispensers are just scraping the surface of the kinds of things we actually need to be doing. And the, if you can get outside, it’s gonna be a lot more bang for your buck than just being in the house.

Kim: But scent work, nose work is one really fabulous low barrier to entry thing that we can do. Even things like man trailing, and there’s fun videos and stuff online for how to get dogs involved in that stuff. Mm-hmm. That can be really helpful also. Rather than the dog park model of the mosh pit with dogs of various ages and mostly young ones, Uhhuh going in who don’t know each other and what can be a competitive arena type atmosphere.

Kim: Thinking, how can I develop friendships for my dogs? How can I find companions that they have a natural chemistry with, and try to create more opportunities for them to [00:44:00] experience a relationship with their own kind and to nurture that the same way we would want our own friendships nurtured.

Jessica: I love how you mentioned that.

Jessica: I don’t mean to cut you off, but I, that is one thing that I will recommend to my clients as well, that they maintain these dog friendships, that you make a point to see that same dog and. To help certain people understand that if their dog meets another dog for the first time, it doesn’t mean that they are instantly gonna hit it off.

Jessica: Sometimes that might be the case, but just like friendships with people, sometimes that’s just gonna grow more with time. Mm-hmm. And so if you happen to come across a dog and maybe their response is more neutral at first, that’s okay. I would still encourage it, especially if this is somebody that lives close to you or it’s a good friend of yours.

Jessica: Because I’ve seen a lot of dogs that just need more time to either feel more comfortable with other dogs or for certain sides of them to really come out where they might be more inclined to want to engage in play if that’s something that they enjoy. It’s not always [00:45:00] fireworks the moment that two dogs meet, it can.

Jessica: Really take some time. And so that whole notion of having friendships and that dogs get to see those consistent beings in their life, I think is so important. And I think it also lends to a sense of community as well. If you have a friend that lives in your neighborhood or in your community, or visits the same park as you, I’ve experienced that with my own dogs where they’d have certain friends and it’s really joyful to see them see their friend at the park and go running over and get to go see hi and hang out with them.

Jessica: And it’s just, it’s so nice to be able to give them that.

Kim: Well, it gives them purpose. And I think that’s another kind of thread, like a really important concept that I think we need to weave through all of this. So for in nature, for every animal, every species, every organism, there’s no such thing as a life without purpose.

Kim: ’cause you need that purpose to survive. Yeah, you have to forage, you have to have some type of reproductive behavior. And then if you’re a social [00:46:00] animal that kind of bridges reproductive slash social suites of behaviors that have to be purposeful, you have to have some type of hazard avoidance and management behaviors to keep yourself safe.

Kim: And what happens for animals in captivity is oftentimes they don’t have purpose anymore. ’cause they don’t have to do any of those things, which at first glance, that’s the easy life. That’s what we’ve been told. Right? Yes. I don’t have to worry about any of that stuff. But what we actually are seeing in our own species as well as dogs, is that it’s a mental health crisis.

Kim: Yeah. And so when they don’t have. Purpose, like someplace to put it that they can feel competent in really, they’ve gotten good at this type of foraging or they’ve gotten, they have successful relationships or they are effectively keeping them and they’re social members safe, or they don’t get that sense of fulfillment and they [00:47:00] end up with that evolutionary mismatch.

Kim: It can be what’s called an allostatic load, and I know that’s a nerdy phrase for people, but what it basically means is when you get those signals in life that would make you think, oh, it’s time to forage, or, oh, it’s time to socialize or deal with this hazard, and you can’t follow through effectively on those signals, then you don’t really complete that cycle that gets you back to homeostasis.

Kim: Yeah, and interestingly enough, there’s a new kind of concept that even things like chronic pain. They’re looking at it in captive species and humans are the result of not having to get back on the horse, so to speak, after an acute injury or illness or something like that. So that essentially what in nature, it would be like, okay, so you have these signals that tell you go rest, lick your wounds, heal.

Kim: But then there’s this point at which it’s like, all right, I’m well enough. I need to get back out there and forage and do all [00:48:00] of the other behaviors that I need to do to survive. And when we don’t have to do it. Then what happens is all of that signaling can get distorted and we get stuck in a pain cycle.

Kim: Whereas if we were instead getting back out there, we would start having new signals and then the pain signal would start to diminish. And so it’s really mind boggling to think about all of these different kinds of repercussions that can happen when we’ve just interrupted these natural mechanisms and checks and balances that are there in nature.

Kim: And I think for both our species benefit, it would be wise to think about whether that’s a friendship, whether that’s scent work, whether that’s, I don’t know that everyone’s said for a long time give a dog a job, but yes, it’s a catchy thing to say, but it speaks to they need meaning in their lives, just like we need in our lives.

Jessica: Yes, they do. They do. Yeah. That’s really beautifully said. [00:49:00] I wanna go back to this sniff spot because that is my number one recommendation as well. And one thing that I don’t find is talked about very often is what to do when you’re with your dog at a sniff spot. And I know you brought up, hey, border colleagues might really want you to participate more, right?

Jessica: Because that’s. What they are bred for. They want to be working with their person. And then there’s other times where I go to sniff spots with a client, for example, and their dog is wandering around and they feel offended that their dog is now not coming anywhere near them. Or they think they have to call their dog to really be with them, or then they are wanting to pick up some of the toys that are there.

Jessica: There’s usually sniff spots, have some balls or things around, and then they pick up a toy. Well, they’re not doing anything, they’re just over there sniffing. I need to have them do something and I try to help them understand your dog [00:50:00] is doing something. And the more that you can observe your dog in, we’ll call it in nature, right?

Jessica: Depending on what kind of sniff spot this is. But one of my favorite things to do is to observe my dogs when they’re not getting any input from me to see what do they choose to do. If I’m not giving them any input at all, and all my dogs are different, but a lot of times it is the sniffing and the foraging, like what you are describing.

Jessica: And that might even be something as simple as they’re wanting to see the rabbit poop that’s on the ground. But there’s a lot of people who have dogs that, oh no, they can’t sniff the rabbit poop. Or my dogs, one of ’em, loves to either roll in some sort of animal poop or there’s dead animal on the scene, or worms he loves, worms, wants to roll in it.

Jessica: And I think when I had my very first dog, if she were to do something like that, I would’ve been like, oh my gosh, no, don’t do that. And now I actually encourage my dogs to do it. Certainly if they’re rolling in dead animals, that’s a little gross. ’cause they have to bathe them afterwards. But essentially, [00:51:00] I don’t stop them.

Jessica: Okay, you’re gonna go rolling the worm. All right. Go for it. And so I wanted to bring that up in regards to the sniff thought because I. We recommend this, and this does seem to be the best solution right now in terms of giving dogs free access to spaces to move their bodies and do things. But it doesn’t mean that you should be constantly playing with your dog or training with your dog in that spot.

Jessica: It’s more about allowing them to have that free movement and do whatever it is that they wanna do. And I think your dog is gonna come tell you what they want to do too. Especially if they want you to interact with them, they’re gonna come up to you, right? And if your dog is wandering around and ignoring you, they don’t really wanna interact with you in that moment.

Jessica: And that’s okay. That’s the whole idea of giving them this autonomy because the rest of the time they do have to do whatever it is that you are wanting them to do. They do have to interact with you in some way. Um, so I dunno if you have any other thoughts to speak on that, but those are some things that came to mind as that topic came up.

Kim: Yeah. No, you’re so right. And again, it goes back to that conditioning we have about who a [00:52:00] pet dog is and what we’re supposed to do with them and what their needs are and what we should be, the end all, be all to them when that shouldn’t be actually be the case. Right? Yes. We should be hugely important to them as a social member, but it would be like taking your kid to the beach and expecting them to wanna sit there and play Legos with you under the umbrella.

Kim: I mean, right. They’re at the beach. It’s like I could wander around and just look at the all the shells, or I don’t know about you guys, but at the ripe old age of 47, I can still just sit in the sand for hours and just feel it running through my fingers and listen to the waves. They’re reconnecting with their bodies and their minds and their instincts in a way that is giving them the opportunity for that homeostatic function that they so rarely are able to give to themselves.

Kim: And it’s really important to bring in and remind everyone that from a welfare science perspective, the agency. To engage in those natural behaviors is critical. It’s not about, well, I am having EU [00:53:00] forage by putting the treats in the snuffle mat and then showing you where they are, or whatever. It’s not about that.

Kim: It’s about the animal having the impetus or the motivation, the inspiration to do something, and then being able to self-serve the experience. And we don’t experience the world the way our dogs do. Their brains being dominated by the olfactory cortex. They see in a way through smell, right? So the way that we’ve experienced our world, predominantly through sight, they do through smell.

Kim: So it’s just a cornucopia of amazing sensory signals to them. To go to a sniff spot where there’s potentially been a lot of wild animals and then other dogs, and they’re just absorbing things that you can’t even possibly fathom. None of us can, you know, and we can’t share that with them. I mean, in the same way that they can.

Kim: I would say if you feel anxious. About what your dog is doing, and you yourself have a hard time totally disconnected. You can quietly follow them behind [00:54:00] and just observe them as and just let them do their thing and just follow and observe, see what they’re doing. And then if you see that they get into something, like they really get into following a track and they’re just going a million miles an hour following something, you can be like, what do you smell?

Kim: Oh, do you smell something? Oh, that’s neat. So just encouraging that but without meddling in it or interrupting it. And if you see that they’re eating something. I mean, chances are it’s fine in a sniff spot, right? I mean, they don’t make sniff spots in toxic dump yards and things like that, that I know of anyway.

Kim: And I have yet to hear of a dog ingesting something in a sniff spot that’s gonna be a problem for them. And that is something even I’ve seen with my clients, they’ve really struggled with over the years. People don’t want their dogs to pick up anything outside. I, I don’t know. When we got to a point, when we started collectively as an industry telling people not to let dogs pick up sticks and leaves and pine cones and things like that, and thinking that they would just choke on them, but their [00:55:00] dogs, their hands, or their mouths, and they wanna explore things and.

Kim: Pick up things. Most dogs, even if they pick it up and chew on it, won’t swallow it. And actually we can create a situation where dogs become resource guarders or they can develop true pica where they swallow things they should not be swallowing. Because we’ve basically set it so valuable by diving for their mouth every time they pick it up, that we’ve created an abnormal behavior out of what originally was a very normal behavior of just exploring with their mouth.

Kim: And I think sometimes we do have to remember it’s not a toddler. If they put the stick in their mouth, it doesn’t mean they’re, it’s a bad thing and they’re gonna choke on it. It’s a dog. It’s okay. Yeah. I think it’s also in that way, a really good exercise and learning who our dogs actually are. Yeah.

Kim: ’cause sometimes we’re seeing them through our lens of the pet role that they fill in our lives, and we actually don’t know very much about them.

Jessica: Very true. Well, Kim, I’ve loved this conversation. I feel like I could talk to you for hours about this. [00:56:00] It’s so fascinating, and you bring a much different perspective than I think a lot of people either in the dog industry and certainly the pet dog world are familiar with, and I’m very excited about the things that you’re bringing to the table and the information that you’re sharing, and certainly your work with other dog professionals, because then that work gets carried down to our clients, which then therefore gets carried down to the dogs, which is why we’re all here to begin with.

Jessica: That’s because we love dogs. We want them to live their best lives. Yeah. Yeah. So I just wanna thank you for all of the fantastic work that you’re doing in the world, and. There’s certainly a lot of things culture wise and just the way that we live our lives and the way our communities are set up that aren’t necessarily serving dogs at this very moment.

Jessica: But I do feel like there is a cultural shift happening, and I personally am excited to see, gosh, what are the next five to 10 years gonna be for other, yeah,

Kim: I think it’s gonna be right. Yeah. [00:57:00] Frankly, it’s happened faster than I thought, but five or so years ago, no one would even accept that these were worthwhile questions to ask on any kind of a scale that was getting any momentum.

Kim: And we’re already at a place where we’re like, okay, we’re right. We’re seeing the problem for what it is, and we’re accepting a little bit more on an industry level, especially in the behavior world, that we are getting this captivity phenomenon of this evolutionary mismatch and realizing we have to meet those needs.

Kim: And now we’re at that beginning of. What does that look like? Instead of traditional dog parks, what if we had one of my ideas as one way trails in every city where people then don’t cross paths. I mean, just something that simple. So we could all have our dogs on long lines, all going in one direction and not have to be holding our breath when we see another dog coming down the trail towards us.

Kim: ’cause it’s so hard for so many people and dogs so reimagining and giving ourselves the freedom to frankly not know right now. ’cause there’s gonna be some trial and error while we figure out what’s really working. And I hope that there’s gonna be a [00:58:00] lot of new products, services, and resources for all of us in the years to come as we put this together.

Jessica: Same. All right. Thank you so much, Kim. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. Hey, listeners, I want to hear from you. If you have a suggestion for a topic or a guest, send me an email at podcast@jessicawitchcraft.com. Or if you have a question about reactive dogs that you’d like me to answer on the show, you can leave me a voice message.

Jessica: Be sure to check the show notes on how to do that. If you found this podcast helpful and you want to support the show, there’s a few ways that you can do so. First, be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts, and if you’re feeling extra awesome, you can also leave me a five star review.

Jessica: Thanks for being here, and I’