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Imagine a world where the average dog is healthy – both physically and behaviorally, for the majority of their lives. Imagine a world where shelters aren’t overflowing with dogs because there are plenty of suitable homes for them. Imagine a world where it is the norm to live with a dog who goes through life without experiencing chronic behavior challenges. Where would these dogs come from?

We’d have to breed them. In this episode, I bring in Dr. Jessica Perry Hekman, a behavioral geneticist and one of the founders of the Functional Dog Collaborative, to discuss why this is one of the solutions to bettering the lives of dogs, and therefore, ours.

We discuss:

• What the Functional Dog Collaborative is
• Behavioral traits and how they get passed down
• Physical traits and how we can breed away from ones that aren’t serving dogs
• Are there really more dogs suffering from behavior challenges these days? We both chime in on this one.
• Environment vs genetics
• What influences a puppy’s development
• And so much more!

About Jessica Perry Hekman:

Jessica Perry Hekman, DVM, PhD, is a behavioral geneticist. She is one of the founders of the Functional Dog Collaborative, a non-profit which seeks to change the conversation around dog breeding in the dog loving community. She also teaches behavioral biology at the Virginia Tech online Masters program for Applied Animal Behavior and Welfare, works with Hecht Lab at Harvard, and offers webinars online and consults with breeders about genetic testing and breeding choices. Perry lives in Raymond, NH with her husband and two dogs.

Check out the Functional Dog Collaborative’s podcast and Facebook group.

Transcript

Jessica: 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 you’re a dog trainer looking to elevate the way that you work with reactive dogs and make a bigger impact in the lives of your clients, I want to invite you to join my next leash reactivity Mentorship for professionals starting this September 7th. In addition to going through my comprehensive course, you’ll also get to meet with me live every single week for 10 weeks, along with a cohort of other students where we’ll deep dive into all things leash reactivity.

You’ll also have the opportunity to get guidance on [00:01:00] your own cases. And I like to give my students a really personalized experience, which is why I cap registration to 15 spots. So be sure to register before it sells out. Check the show notes for the link, or head on over to jessica wheatcraft.com. Let’s get to the show.

So I have to be really honest with you all. I’m a bit nervous to put this podcast out today, and that’s because we’re going to talk about breeding dogs now. I started my career working with shelter dogs, and I have also worked with various rescue groups for over 20 years. All of my dogs have been adopted from shelters and rescues, and to be perfectly honest, I used to judge and also look down on people who got their dogs from breeders.

I would think things like, why would you go to a breeder to get a German Shepherd [00:02:00] when there are 10 of them sitting at the shelter right now? Adopt Don’t Shop was my ethos for over 15 years. And then things started to slowly shift my perspective.

For me, one of the things I could not ignore was the amount of clients that I had that were struggling with their dogs. It was the client whose dog was under socialized as a puppy, and as that dog matured. Had a very difficult time accepting new people and other dogs into their lives, which made their world really small.

And it was also my client with the French Bulldog who had so many health issues that it affected their quality of life and therefore also had a really big impact on their behavior. As a trainer and behavior consultant, I cannot undo a dog’s health issue and I can’t change how they were socialized as puppies.[00:03:00]

And so sometimes this means that training and behavior modification strategies can only go so far. So that led me to start thinking, why is this happening to dogs? How can we prevent this? And most of all, how can we do better by dogs? I began to wonder if the way we were breeding dogs actually held the solution.

And so I discovered the Functional Dog Collaborative in 2020. And in that group I began to listen to other people’s perspectives. And most of these people were breeders. And you know what? What they said made a lot of sense. So I was pretty thrilled when Dr. Jessica Perry Heckman agreed to come onto the show because as a behavioral geneticist, she has a wealth of knowledge that we can all learn from.

She poses a great question, which is where do dogs come from? [00:04:00] Because every dog came from somewhere, and if we stopped breeding all dogs, we wouldn’t have any left. So we need to breed dogs, but how do we do this when there’s a crisis in animal shelters across the country right now? While there isn’t a quick fix to any of this, this is a conversation that needs to be had.

Let’s dive in.

Perry I know that you’re the president of the Functional Dog Collaborative.

And for those who don’t know about that organization, I’m wondering if you could share how it formed and what its mission is.

Jessica Perry: Yeah, so it formed in 2020. It was my pandemic passion project where I had been thinking about it for a long time and I kept saying no to it. And then when we were all working from home, I suddenly had, I think I calculated like nine extra hours in the week ’cause I wasn’t commuting anymore.

And so I [00:05:00] was oh, surely I’ll just spend this time on that. Of course, I spend much more than nine hours so week on it now. But it was that I had seen, I saw a bunch of things coming together. One of the main motivators was that I had seen a lot of groups of people breeding dogs in some really interesting ways that I thought were.

Really insightful in how they were gonna be producing dogs that had lower risk of health issues and lower risk of behavioral issues. And I kind of wanted to pull all those people together so that they could interact with each other. And so one of the main things that happened was just starting a Facebook group and this is the functional breeding group and having people be able to talk about their different projects on it.

And it was amazing how even within the first year I was hearing from people that they had made these new connections and these new friends and were able to find people to it sounds so technical to say trade [00:06:00] breeding stock with, but you know, they were able to find people who were breeding dogs in similar ways and be able to collaborate with them and share dogs and really improve their breeding programs so that the mission we say is basically to.

Write a new narrative about dog breeding in which we really prioritize health and behavior. And that is not to say that dog breeders have not been prioritizing health and behavior they have, but a lot of them have. But there are boxes that I feel like people have really been stuck inside of and they’ve only been able to prioritize health and behavior sort of inside of those boxes.

And we’re looking at ways of getting them outside of the boxes basically.

Jessica: Yeah, and that might sound like a total foreign concept too, perhaps maybe the average pet parent that’s listening to this might not really know [00:07:00] about this whole world of dog breeding and might assume that every responsible breeder out there would be focusing on health and behaviorally sound dogs and.

I think for those of us that are dog professionals, I think we see something completely different with dogs. And this is why I really wanted to have you come on to talk about this today. For many professionals that I’ve talked to where they feel like they’re seeing an increase in dogs that are struggling with behavior challenges.

And I know for me personally, I have seen that, but. Then I think we always wanna be careful about wondering, well, maybe the reason why I see a lot of behavior challenges is in dogs is because I’m a behavior consultant by trade. And so people who have dogs with behavior challenges come to me. Whereas people who don’t have those challenges but their dogs [00:08:00] I might not, you know, ever come across them.

Right. And we have to be careful about any sort of biases that we have based on our own personal experience. But would you say that on, based on your professional experience, that you are seeing something similar? That there’s just more dogs in the world today that are struggling with our human life that we ask them to live in?

Jessica Perry: Yeah, that’s such a hard question. So. I don’t have a behavioral practice, so I don’t have my own eyes on it. The way I would answer that question would be looking at studies to see if people have gone out and formally collected data to measure, but no one’s been doing that, right? Like ideally we would have some study that said, you know, what percentage of dogs in 1990 had behavior problems?

And the problem there is that, how do you define what a problem is? We defined various behavior problems very differently in the nineties than we do [00:09:00] now. There’s even today still not really agreement on. What you know, what a lot of the different behavioral issues should be called or sort of how to categorize them.

I will say that I have talked to a lot of people like yourself who have reported that they are seeing more problems today and saying things like, you know, well, I used to run puppy classes 20 years ago, and the puppies would come in and be able to all just tumble around with each other. And now so many of them are scared already.

And it, it’s already a problem you’re already seeing problems with little puppies when they’re first coming in and, you know, and why is that, what’s changed? Is it how we’re producing dogs that’s changed? Is it our expectations of dogs? It’s a big open question that people just don’t know the answer to.

Jessica: Yeah, you make a great point that there have been a lot of changes. I think even just in the culture of dogs compared to even what you mentioned, like from 1990. Compared to [00:10:00] now, you know, that the world that we expect dogs to live in, a specifically pet dogs. And then I think especially in the United States, I think is a lot different than how it used to be in 1990 and what these dogs are exposed to and so forth.

So I think that’s a great point. And also that there aren’t necessarily studies about this, so how would we really know the numbers and so forth. But I think that what you had mentioned. With other trainers reporting these types of puppies in their puppy classes. That is also something that I have heard in and seen with my own eyes.

So I think that there is something to this, and I think that there’s a reason why an organization like the Functional Dog Collaborative has really struck a chord with so many people because I think a lot of us are realizing maybe. We’re getting it wrong. Maybe we’re not serving dogs the way that we should.

And when it [00:11:00] comes to producing dogs, I know that is a very emotionally charged topic for people who love dogs. Because on one end, we’ve got shelters that are completely overflowing right now, especially compared to 2020, right? During the pandemic, they emptied. And I think we were all hoping it was gonna stay that way, and it didn’t.

In fact, it came back. And I know that for my friends that are in working in shelters right now it’s completely overwhelming. And so we have that. But then at the same time, we are producing dogs for many other functions and purposes. And, you know, they do have to come from somewhere. So I’m wondering if.

We could talk just a little bit about that piece of why is it so important for an organization like the Functional Dog Collaborative to exist? Why can’t everybody just go to the shelter and just get a dog from there?

Jessica Perry: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways of answering [00:12:00] that. I think one way of answering it is that all dogs come from somewhere.

So, you know, even dogs who are in shelters, they didn’t appear in the shelter. They weren’t bred by the shelter. They appeared from somewhere. And so part of the FTCs goal is to have every dog, or as many dogs as possible, have come from the best possible beginnings. So if a dog. Ends up passing through a shelter.

The idea is that if they came from a really solid start, then they’ll handle the shelter experience better. They’ll be more resilient to that, you know, to what is a trauma, losing your home and having to pass through this scary place. And then hopefully finding a new home, there’ll be more resilient to that, that they will be less likely to enter the shelter in the first place due to being set up to have lower risk of health issues or behavioral issues.

So behavioral or health issues would be a large [00:13:00] reason why dogs do enter shelters, but it’s not the only reason. Yeah. So if a dog still enters a shelter having a really solid start in life should also help the dog not to decompensate in the shelter.

So you see a lot of dogs come in, they maybe didn’t have so many problems in their first home, but as they spend time in the shelter, they find it harder and harder to cope. So having a dog have a really solid personality, solid behavioral traits, solid start in life makes it easier for them to. To do well in the shelter, which makes it easier for the shelter to adopt them out.

What tends to happen with dogs who have behavioral issues in the shelter is that it’s harder and harder for shelters to find homes who are willing or able to deal with those dogs. And so all those dogs deserve all of the attention that the shelter gives them. If there are fewer of those dogs, it’s easier for the shelter to keep the population moving forward.

After a veterinary school, I did a shelter medicine [00:14:00] internship where we a year of really nerding out about how shelters work and how to help shelters work better and serve animals better. And one of the main things that we were really focused on is what’s called length of stay. And that is how many days the particular animal stays in the shelter.

It’s a really important metric because as you reduce the length of stay, so many other things improve. It’s easier on the animal, it’s easier on the shelter. It costs the shelter less to have the animal, the shorter the amount of time that the animal’s in the shelter. So that’s one of the goals is that as dogs are produced to be healthy and behaviorally resilient, that their length of stay were they, to end up in a shelter would be shorter, but.

I mean, there’s other answers to that. The more responsible breeders there are that are producing dogs, one of the definitions of a responsible breeder is someone who takes the dog back at any time in their life for any reason. And so the dog has a safety net and doesn’t have to end up in a [00:15:00] shelter if something happens, like their owner goes through a divorce or loses their home.

So shelters are seeing all kinds of dogs, but they are seeing more of the large mixed breed dogs. So the pity mixes, the shepherding mixes those are. Overrepresented in the shelters. Pure bred small dogs, young dogs, very healthy dogs, very friendly dogs. Those are the dogs that, while they do certainly pass through, shelters, tend to be much easier to adopt and they go out so fast.

Shelters often will use them as ways to pull people in to try to get them to look at the other dogs that are harder to adopt out. So there is a need for more of those kinds of dogs. You hear stories all the time about people, particularly in certain parts of the country, going to shelters, really needing a smaller dog because they live in a housing community that requires a dog under 35 pounds or under 25 pounds, and that type of dog is not available [00:16:00] in the shelter or they need a dog.

That’s gonna be less energetic and easier to manage because they’re older and they’re not able to go for an hour walk every day. Also can be harder to find in a shelter. So there’s different people with different needs. And then there’s just also the, that it’s better for dogs. They all come from somewhere and it’s better to focus on helping them at that stage of life rather than just sort of hoping for the best.

And I actually, when I talk about that sometimes what people hear is that I’m saying that we should not also be helping shelter dogs. And what I’m actually saying is that prevention, focusing early is very important. Helping shelter dogs is also very important. FTC is just filling a niche that hadn’t been filled before of really focusing on that prevention part.

There are a lot of groups that are also focusing on helping shelter dogs, and that’s really important and really great, and we are very supportive of that.

Jessica: Yes, absolutely. I [00:17:00] really love this world that you’re describing of having every dog that’s coming from a responsible breeder where if something were to happen to that dog where they could no longer stay in their home, where they would be able to go back to the breeder, that would be an amazing world.

And then if for some reason they couldn’t go back to the breeder, or they happened to wind up in a shelter, that behavior wise, they’re stable enough to handle that experience. Both, you know, just the environment in and of itself, but also that they would leave that shelter quickly because they would be really easy to get into another home.

And I don’t know anybody who loves dogs, who wouldn’t want that for dogs. And so I really appreciate that you. You know, are highlighting that because I know that is so much of the mission of the functional dog collaborative is highlighting that [00:18:00] about dogs and that we need to start coming up with ways to be able to produce more dogs that could live that kind of life.

Because at the end of the day, that would mean less dogs in shelters. That would mean less dogs that are having to get behaviorally euthanized. And that would mean also healthier dogs in the sense of, you know, behaviorally healthy, but also more physically healthy. And those were some things that I wanted to dive into a bit more.

When we’re talking about this idea of breeding for a dog, for example, who could handle a shelter stay? What exactly are we breeding for

Jessica Perry: your face? Yeah. So resilience is the term that everybody really likes rights. That’s in some sense. Almost the most important thing that you can breed for is the ability to cope with [00:19:00] difficulties and bounce back.

You know, there’s always gonna be difficult things in life for dogs, for humans, for everybody. That’s normal, but it’s how you handle it afterwards, right? Is it, do you really decompensate and have real difficulty coming back from it and develop behavioral traits that are maybe suboptimal? Like the dog who ends up in the shelter and starts developing stereotypical behavior where they’re circling all the time or starts becoming aggressive. Or are you able to sort of, you know, this is not a great time in my life, but you’re able to cope and still behave in a way that is helpful and appropriate for you and for those around you.

So resilience is really what you’re breeding for. Now, how do you breed for resilience? Obviously we’re not like testing dogs by putting them in shelters and seeing how they do, but I. It’s important to breed for things like dogs being really social with humans ends up [00:20:00] being an important trait that makes it easier for dogs to be resilient.

You know, looking at how even as a little puppy a dog is handling things like just a startling event that happens you know, how fearful a dog is of novel situations. All those kinds of things are definitely things that readers can and should be selecting towards the appropriate types of personalities.

Jessica: That makes a lot of sense When it comes to behavioral traits. These are things that you’re describing things resiliency. We’re describing things like having high sociability towards people and so forth, and that these are traits that we can select for. I’m wonder. For many of us, I know, even myself included, I think actually the vast majority of the population who would be listening to this is not a breeder who has been doing this for a long time and knows exactly how this process works.

And [00:21:00] I’m wondering if you could speak to that more about behavioral traits, how they get passed down. Because I also know that whenever you’re breeding two dogs, it’s never a guarantee that the puppy will be a certain way. I think it increases the likelihood that a puppy might be a certain way.

But I’m wondering if you could speak to that a bit more about how do these traits get passed down?

Jessica Perry: Yeah. So there’s basically two ways of thinking about, traits that animals have. There’s simple or mendelian traits, and then there’s complex traits. So the simple traits are the ones that we learned about.

When we learned about basic genetics in high school or college where Mendel grew, the peas and, you know, some of them were yellow and some of them were green and some of them were tall and some of them were short. And he was able to do that work because he was studying simple traits, which are traits that are controlled by just [00:22:00] one gene and not affected by the environment that the individual is in.

So for dogs we have things like coat color so like whether the dog is brown or black is controlled by one gene whether the dog is blonde or not is controlled by one gene. So those are very straightforward things to breed for. And we can do genetic tests and predict what we’re gonna get.

But behavioral traits are complex traits. So complex traits are controlled by many gene different genes, dozens hundreds. In the case of behavior, we honestly don’t know for behaviors whether they’re controlled by hundreds or even possibly thousands of genes. And they’re also very much controlled by the environment, so that with behaviors you have some genetic sort of predisposition or I really like the term risk, but then your environment is going to affect.

How you turn out. Just, a good way of thinking about it is it’s sort of roughly 50 50 genetics in environment. For a lot of these traits, it’s actually probably more environmentally [00:23:00] focused than that. So there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of stuff to unpack there. Right? There’s first of all also how then do you selectively breed for particular behavior traits?

Well, it’s hard. It’s not the same thing as breeding for coat color, where you can do a genetic test and say, if I breed this dog to that dog, then I know exactly what the range of coat colors will be in the puppies. But you can say that if you’re looking to breed a more sociable dog that really likes people, you can say if mom is pretty sociable and dad is pretty sociable, then the puppies are in general gonna be similar to mom and dad.

There might be some puppies that are a bit more or a bit less. But they’re all gonna be sort of similar if mom is really on one end of the range very sociable, and dad is very unsociable. Again, the puppies are probably gonna be in the middle, but you have the chances of some of them being very far on one end or the other end of the range.

When I say that in environment affects it. I mean, from the moment of conception. So while the [00:24:00] individual, the puppy is just a single cell there’s still an environment around there affecting how that cell develops. And as the brain is doing to develop in the uterus, it’s having different amounts of hormones, you know, stress hormones or reproductive hormones, different amounts of, you know, blood flow, bringing different amounts of nutrition.

They’re already interacting with their litter mates in the uterus. And then they’re interacting with their litter mates when they’re first born. They’re having stress hormones from mom’s milk, giving them information that is affecting how their brains develop. So there’s all kinds of stuff happening from very early on.

So one of the things that I know a lot of people feel is that when they get a puppy. They feel that they did all the right things, but the puppy still grows up to have some behavioral issue. They feel like therefore it must have been their fault. And I always like to emphasize it is not necessarily your fault.

In fact, it’s probably not your fault if you did all the right things. Dogs should be really hard to [00:25:00] break. Could it be that they had some amount of genetic risk that you didn’t know about? That’s very possible. Could it be that there was something going on in the uterus that pushed the puppy’s development in a certain direction?

Could the puppy have had an upsetting experience just with another litter mate that no one was aware of? Could they have had an upsetting experience during their socialization period? Like all these little things can affect bumping the puppies, developing personality in one direction or another.

So it’s just, it’s an extremely complex system. I like to compare it to a developing weather system, right? We can predict the weather a couple days in advance, but we can’t predict the weather months in advance. And with puppies, it’s the same thing where we’re trying to predict something months or years in advance.

That’s just that complex, chaotic, huge with all these different factors interacting. So environment is very important, but that does not mean that it’s your fault. I hope that answered your question.

Jessica: Yes, it does. The whole explanation I found to be very helpful, and [00:26:00] I’m also really glad that you brought up the person who got a puppy.

You know, it comes home at eight weeks and they’re doing everything right and they’re perfect. They’re perfect at

Jessica Perry: eight weeks. Right,

Jessica: exactly. And then they get older and then these things start coming out because I have many clients who have gone through that same experience. And since this podcast is on leash reactivity, and a lot of emotions that dogs tend to experience and feel while they’re on leash, which then contributes to their reactive behaviors, are things like fearfulness or impulsivity or even aggression.

And you were just describing how. Certainly there are traits such as, you know, human sociability that are passed down and one could very likely no. And assume that other traits such as fearfulness and aggression and so forth also get passed down. And I’m wondering if we could speak to [00:27:00] that a bit more.

Jessica Perry: Right. And this is exactly why we’re. We’re working to try to build up the percentage of breeders who really focus on both the genetics and the early socialization, right? So the genetics is important. When someone asks, is this behavior problem genetic? It’s always genetic and it’s always environment.

It’s always both. Behavior is always both. I mean, your brain relies on genetics to tell it how to function, right? But it also relies on environment to tell it what world it’s in and how to function. So it’s always both things, but genetics definitely sets you up, sort of pointed in a particular direction.

So that’s why it’s important to have breeders who are being really thoughtful about things like is our mom and dad both do they both have the personalities and the set of behaviors that we’re really looking for a good companion dog? Have they succeeded in living in homes and demonstrated that they are the kind of dog that we’re looking for that gives you a good [00:28:00] idea of what their genetics probably are, although it doesn’t tell you everything, right?

But then from the time that mom conceives were a good breeder is also managing that, making sure that she doesn’t have. Really stressful experiences, but at the same time, she’s not wrapped in cotton, right? She’s lead leading her usual life and still having enrichment and exercise, but definitely nothing super stressful.

And then managing the puppies from the time that they’re born really well, right? I have been talking with a friend of mine who has a litter that’s a week old right now, and it’s just been really interesting learning about all of the stuff that she does. Managing them from the moment that they’re born helping, making sure that mom’s taking, doing a good job, taking care of them.

By the way, she keeps reporting that, oh, you know, she’s such a good mom. She really loves them. That’s a really important trait. Not all mom dogs are. Interested in being moms. You don’t know until the first time that you breed them, but I think that’s something that is really important to take into account.

[00:29:00] If you breed a dog and she’s just not that interested in the puppies and doesn’t do a good job taking care of them, then that is a big piece of information to put into the decision bucket as you’re thinking about whether to breed her again. So my friend’s talking about how the mom spends a lot of time with the puppies.

The puppies are all huge because mom just loves nursing them. So that maternal care is really important. There’s a lot of research to back that up in dogs laboratory rodents in humans. And then the work that’s done early on. So my friend is also talking about how she actually hires what she calls a pup pair, which is the cutest term ever.

So, she and her wife are both dog behavior consultants and trainers. So they are very good at raising the puppies, but they have a third person so that there’s someone there. You know, the whole time that pu the puppies are awake. She says there’s someone basically following them around, making sure that they’re safe, but that they’re able to explore.

So it’s important for them to be using their bodies as soon as they’re moving around and [00:30:00] interacting with the world and learning that they can encounter obstacles and conquer the obstacles. But that there’s someone there to catch them so that if they’re going upstairs, they make sure they don’t fall down and hurt themselves or scare themselves, which is almost as bad at that stage.

Right. So all of that is super, super important. And so when you feel that you’re bringing home this eight week old and that they’re a blank slate, they are absolutely not a blank pl slate. Those first eight weeks are so, so important. And there’s a lot of research that has shown that genetics are very important.

Early environment before the animal comes home for the first time is also super, super important. And that’s something you can’t go back and change later.

Jessica: Yes, very true. And that could very likely cause and or contribute to a dog who does not receive that kind of care during that stage.

Maybe they were neglected. Maybe the mother dog was really stressed. Even perhaps this is a dog who wound up in a rescue. [00:31:00] You know, there’s a lot of pregnant dogs that wind up in rescue and then they give birth and rescue and then they’re in a foster home and then the puppies get all adopted out.

And that could also very much contribute to a puppy from that type of background. And even if it was done with the most care that they knew how to give the dog still might have contributed. Would you say to a dog who maybe then grew up to be more fearful or worried if They

Jessica Perry: didn’t for

Jessica: sure.

Jessica Perry: No, for sure. You know, when I was getting a new puppy eight years ago, and I ended up getting my English Shepherd Dashel. But I started out wanting to get a shelter puppy. I had just lost my golden retriever, so I was down to one dog, Jenny and Jenny was pretty fearful and I knew that any puppy that I brought home Jenny was gonna influence.

She was gonna teach the puppy that the world is scary. So I wanted a really resilient, confident puppy. So I figured maybe my [00:32:00] best bet was to find, a situation where a pregnant dog had come in and the puppies had been whelped in foster care so that there was, you know, that they had at least grown up in a home and that there was someone who’d had them for eight weeks and could give me some information about their personalities.

And so that I knew that they hadn’t been through anything super traumatic in the first eight weeks. And I had real trouble finding that I found this one litter where the puppies had, oh, they’d had such a bad flea infestation that they were actually anemic and had to go to the ICU.

And I was like, that is a big trauma for a puppy to spend that time before they’re eight weeks old and for days and in, in the ICU. So it was really hard for me to find a litter that I felt was going to produce puppies with low risk of being fearful. Not to say that of course.

Anything can happen anytime, right? And so hilariously, I also had a friend around then who she called me [00:33:00] up and said, you know, I hear, you know, some stuff about dogs and I’m thinking about adopting this puppy that we’re fostering. And and I was like, okay, tell me about the puppy. And she said, well, she was sort of out of an oops litter.

You know, they didn’t really mean to breed her. And then when the puppy was really little her mother attacked her. And she so they raised the puppy for her first few weeks without her mother or her siblings in a horse stall. And then when the puppy was about eight weeks old, the mom got at her again and attacked her again and really injured her.

And so she went and spent several weeks in the ICU and now she’s ready to go home. And I went and met the puppy and she was so underdeveloped for 12 weeks. She looked like a seven week old. And I said, oh my God, don’t get this puppy. You are a first time dog owner and I don’t know how this puppy’s gonna turn out.

This is a really dangerous situation. Of course, they kept the puppy and she turned out fabulously. She was resilient as all because all heck and gorgeous and athletic, and friendly and wonderful. So you just never know. [00:34:00] Like sometimes they have the worst possible start and they do really well, and sometimes they have the best possible start and they do really badly.

You can’t ever know for sure what you can do is set up the risk to be as low as possible. And so that’s how I advise people, particularly if you’re a first time dog owner. If you don’t have a lot of experience, if you really need a dog who’s definitely not gonna have a behavior problem I do advise to go to someone who has really put all that effort into raising the puppies really well.

If you have more experience and you’re able to really manage a dog that might turn out to have a problem, or you’re the kind of person who’s able to see the problem coming down the pike and headed off, then you are better set up to be able to manage a dog with higher risks. So, that said, again, I, I do strongly encourage people when it’s right for them to adopt from shelters and rescues.

So those dogs do need homes.

Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. [00:35:00] As do I. All of my dogs are rescues. I wouldn’t be opposed to getting a dog from a breeder. In fact, I had researched many different types of breeders when I was considering getting another dog. And I think that it can be both. I don’t think that it has to be breeder versus shelter or rescue, and I really wish that we could move away from those two completely opposing or seemingly seems opposing, but it’s really not.

And one of the things that I appreciate when you’re just using the term risk, because I think that’s a good way of thinking about this, that there’s a lower risk if we go one route and there could be a higher risk if we go another route. But like you said, there’s never going to be a guarantee either way.

And I suppose another way for us to think about this would be that. If somebody knew that they needed to have a dog that was really social with people [00:36:00] and dogs because they live downtown in a condo and all of their neighbors have dogs, and this would have to be a dog that could live in that kind of environment and also be comfortable in it and be happy in it and have, you know, good welfare living in an environment like that, then that individual would really want to have more information about the dog versus less information.

I think that’s another thing that’s coming in my mind when I’m thinking of this, is that if they were to seek out a breeder who specifically bred for those qualities, that they have more information there. Whereas if they went to. Getting a puppy from a neighbor and they didn’t really know who the father of the dog was because their dog just wound up pregnant.

Then they have less information. So we don’t really know. I think that’s maybe another way to, to think about this rather than it being right or wrong or this or that. More information, less [00:37:00] information. Lower risk. Higher risk. I like framing it in that way.

Jessica Perry: I have another friend who helps people find the right dogs for them, be it from a breeder or a rescue or a shelter.

And she talks about risk management basically, and risk minimization and just the understanding that there’s always gonna be some risk particularly like you and I are talking as if people could always go find the best breeder for them easily. And that’s not always, that’s not the case.

I mean, that’s one of the other reasons that I founded the FTC is that when people are looking for these kinds of breeders that we’re talking about, it can be very hard to find when that is gonna have puppies in the next year for the type of dog that you’re looking for.

And so my friend talks about, you know, risk management where it’s sort of, alright, well what’s the type of dog you wanna look for? So here are the sort of five options you can find that are that type of dog. So each of the options is gonna come with its own risk. So think about which risk you are most [00:38:00] willing to deal with if it turns out badly.

And I think that’s the way you sort of have to look at it, that there’s gonna be no, no perfect situation ever.

Yeah.

Jessica: Absolutely. I like that a lot. In terms of just framing it in that way. And yeah, because there’s so many.

People where, like we, we had already alluded to this where, you know, they did do everything right and yet the dogs still struggled with certain things. So that is going to happen. And it is just a matter of taking certain risks versus not taking others. And also, I really appreciated that you mentioned that there aren’t always going to be puppies available from these types of breeders because they aren’t mass producing these puppies.

From my experience and from what I’ve seen, these are very thoughtful breeders. They really take their time with this. Even raising a litter is a full-time job and these are people who have other jobs that they need to do. It’s a really [00:39:00] big commitment. So the people who are doing it in this way are really committed and it isn’t something where they are always going to have, you know, a litter available when somebody might be looking for one.

Jessica Perry: Yeah, we don’t know. ‘Cause there again hasn’t really been a study done. There’s a lot of different ways of breeding dogs, and we could say different types of breeders if we wanted to categorize people. And we don’t know how much of each type of breed there is. Right. And so you can, you could say that the type that we’re talking about.

It’s probably a very small percentage of the people out there breeding dogs. There’s probably a large percentage of people who are breeding dogs in their homes, which I think is, it’s important for a puppy to start out in a home. So that’s a good start. But who are maybe not doing everything that I would like to see them do, right.

Who are maybe not doing all of the socialization. They’re not hiring a p pair, but not that everybody has to hire a p pair, but maybe they’re not giving the puppy as much freedom to walk around and learn about how to use their body and how to encounter the world [00:40:00] as others do. Maybe they’re not being as careful with the health testing and such with the parents.

So that’s probably a large percentage. And there’s also gonna be a massive percentage of people who are really breeding large scale commercially. And that itself has a wide range, right? There’s probably fairly large number of commercial kennels that are not doing a terrible job. You wouldn’t be horrified if you were there, you know, the dogs are not living in excrement, but to my mind still not as, it’s just not the same as being raised in a home.

And the dogs who are producing the puppies are also not living in homes and having relationships with their very own human and getting to go out and do things with their human. But it’s not awful, but it’s not what we want. And then of course, it also goes down to what we all think of when we talk about a puppy mill of, you know, dogs being in really bad situations.

So there’s that whole range, and I think the middle is [00:41:00] probably the massive percentage of what’s going on out there. I think the really bad stuff is probably not. Super frequent, but it absolutely happens way more often than any of us want it to. And the really good stuff, also not super frequent and we would like it to happen a lot more.

And so when I talk about the FTCs mission, I talk about trying to move the needle, right? And sort of trying to change those percentages. I don’t think we need to make any more dogs than we’re making but I would like them, more of them, the larger percentage of them to come from the one end of the scale rather than the other.

Jessica: That’s a great point, and I think that makes perfect sense. Yeah. I’m wondering if we could talk a bit about the physical traits that get passed down because. Another really common contributor to behavioral challenges is physical conditions, specifically things that cause chronic pain or discomfort in dogs.

And that is something that I see in a really high number of my behavior cases is that there is almost [00:42:00] always some type of medical that comes along with the dog, whether it’s chronic GI issues, whether it is hip dysplasia from a very young age, whether it is just the way that they’re formed in the sense of, you know, their front feet are completely splayed out and they’re not straight.

And so we could assume that the joints could be uncomfortable for a dog’s legs who are shaped that way. There’s a lot of. Other ways that we’re breeding dogs to either look a certain way, but then behavior wise that is really suffering in terms of how this dog feels when they have that type of body that they’re living in.

And that is something that I couldn’t not bring this up with you because it is such a big contributor to behavioral challenges. So wondering if you could speak to that, because I think it just falls right [00:43:00] along what we’re talking about here, which is why it’s so important to also be looking to breed dogs who are physically sound or as sound as we can get them, because that is also really affecting their behavior and their quality of life.

Jessica Perry: Yeah. I love that you asked that. I feel like this connection between pain and problem behavior has been getting more and more attention really in the last two years. And it’s, yeah, it’s so important, right? Like the most behaviorally challenged dog I’ve ever lived with was extremely behaviorally challenged.

I always was very clear that he had some pretty serious GI problems, which I struggled with trying to fix. And as they would get better, his behavior would get better, but I was never able to fix them. And that connection was very clear to me the whole time. So I think we’ve been talking about a lot of cases where there’s not data, but there actually is very good data for this connection.

There’s some really interesting papers out there suggesting that this connection is pretty clear. So, [00:44:00] yes and just imagine living with chronic pain. It makes you cranky. So, yeah. There’s a couple of different reasons that a dog would be produced that would have chronic issues like that.

There’s whether we are trying to produce a dog that is well balanced and normally moderately shaped. I don’t know that everybody might be familiar with the term moderate, but we talk about extreme morphologies where if you sort of take a wolf or a coyote as being the fairly default look for a canid or a village dog, which would be the dogs that don’t actually have any European breed ancestry, but tend to be somewhere between 20 and 40 pounds.

And to have that dog shape with the normally length, legs and normal length of snout normal length of ear, normal length of tail. When you get too far out of that moderate shape, we [00:45:00] start saying that’s an extreme morphology. So that could be the very short legs or the very short muzzle or the very short, curly tail.

And all of those come with issues. So if you’re intentionally trying to do that, then you often are setting the dog up for problems. And a lot of the breeders who are breeding, again, when I was talking about breeding within a box, breeders who are breeding breeds that do have those extreme morphologies are breeding within a box.

And so the responsible ones are trying really hard to produce dogs that have that shape and yet do not have chronic pain or other chronic issues. But they are starting with a. Big burden of a shape. That itself is problematic. So many of them are trying very hard to get away from that without getting away from the shape.

And that is a push-pull situation that’s really hard to resolve. There’s also, of course, a situation where you’re breeding a dog that is a moderate [00:46:00] shape and, there are a lot of disorder tests that you can do ahead of time to try to figure out if you are likely to set the puppies up for higher low risk of having, for example, orthopedic problems, right?

So like hip problems or elbow problems. So you can do all those tests on the parents. So there’s a couple of ways that things can go wrong there, right? You could just not do the tests. So when I’m talking about that sort of middle class of breeder who’s, you know, they have their beloved pets who they really love and they have them have puppies sometimes either for fun or because it brings in some money, but maybe they’re not doing all of these tests because they’re challenging to find the vet to do with them and they’re quite expensive.

And they don’t really understand why they’re so important. So if you just don’t do the tests, then it’s a crapshoot and sometimes you do end up producing. Puppies that are more likely to have hip problems or elbow problems. And then there’s the people who do all the tests and think it through really carefully.

Sometimes they’re working in a breed that just has a very high proportion of these [00:47:00] problems. So like golden retrievers or Labrador retrievers and hip dysplasia just a big problem in that breed. And so, again, if you’re working within a breed, it can be hard to breed away from those problems because there’s just a limited set of options of which many have the problem.

And then sometimes you do absolutely everything right. And it just happens because again, all we can do is decrease the risk. We can never have guarantees.

Jessica: Yes. And what I’m hearing you say is there’s a lot of data about breeding for these physical characteristics, and I think the big difference between these physical characteristics and the behavioral.

Traits is that with the physical ones, there’s tests for them. So you mentioned breeders can do tests on their dog’s, hips, they can test the eyes. I’ve seen lots of different tests that breeders can do because it gives them more information [00:48:00] about the dog that they are breeding.

And then when they choose to breed it to another dog, and if that dog has also had all of the same tests, then they can make it a more informed decision about what is the likelihood that these puppies are going to potentially develop any one of these, for example, hip dysplasia. And I think you make a great point that there’s some people who just don’t know that all of these tests exists. I think there are also people who have a hard time accessing the tests for whatever reason. I know that’s also a big one. And I think that it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, that if somebody was looking for a dog and that they knew that they wanted something specific.

And if having a dog who had hip dysplasia at two years of age was something that they wanted to avoid, they could seek out a breeder who has done the testing and has gone down that path. So going back to that framework of less [00:49:00] information versus more information, that person would go into this having more information that this is a dog who would be less likely to have hip dysplasia.

Jessica Perry: Yeah, exactly. It’s really unfortunate that it’s not a guarantee, and in this world we have become conditioned to feel like there should be guarantees. Particularly if we’re spending as much money as we might spend on a puppy from a responsible breeder. But there aren’t guarantees, but you can have more information and have reduced risk.

So, yeah, there’s a lot of different ways you can ask those questions, right? You can do the tests, you can know the pedigree of the dogs and know that oh yeah their relatives have all lived into old age very comfortably. That would also be an important piece of information.

For some diseases you can test genetically, right? You can do a DNA test to know. And some of those tests only tell you about risk. Some of those tests actually do tell you, about black and white. Yes. The dog would actually have this problem or not have this problem. So, yeah, it’s a lot of information to collect.

It’s a [00:50:00] big job to, to try to make these pairings well.

Jessica: But abso yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. Is there something that you wish more people would know about the work that FDC is doing?

Jessica Perry: Oh, that’s a good question. I think, I just want to get the word out there that prevention is an important part of the whole dog welfare equation, right? It’s very easy to be focused on putting out the fire that’s in front of you. So actually, let me tell you one of my favorite public health stories. It sounds boring, but it’s a cute little parable of a guy going out for a walk. He’s walking along a river and he sees someone drowning.

And so he dives in and pulls the drowning person out and performs CPR, calls the ambulance, sends him off, says Phew, goes back to his walk, and there’s another person drowning in the river. So he does it all again. [00:51:00] And then a third person and at some point realizes he’s been too busy to stop and ask himself the question, why are there so many people drowning in this river?

Do I need to go upstream and see is there a place where the mud is slippery? Slippery and people are slipping in? Does there need to be a sign saying, caution? Does there need to be a guardrail? So the person diving in and pulling the drowning person out, I mean, maybe that’s the animal shelter.

Maybe it’s the rescue, maybe it’s the behavior consultant, right? Maybe it’s not even an animal that’s in a shelter, but it’s an animal that’s struggling in its home. And behavior consultants are frontline doing that really important work. And I. It’s very easy to focus on pulling the drowning person out of the water, and our society is pretty good at doing that.

Not to say that we’ve succeeded entirely. There are still drowning people, there are still dogs that need our help, but for me, I have always felt called to be the person who looks at the prevention. Who says, let’s take a step back and ask why so many people are in the [00:52:00] river. Why are there so many dogs in shelters?

Where are they coming from? Why is it so hard to move? Some of them, you know, the ideal length of stay in a shelter is two weeks. Why is it that so many dogs are there for months? What’s going wrong? There’s a lot of different ways of asking that question. One particular way of asking that question is, where do dogs come from?

How can we do a better job of having dogs come from a place where they will be less likely to contribute to the shelter population? That is a piece of a big puzzle. And so I think getting the word out to people that prevention is sexy. It’s it’s part of the puzzle. It’s something that we should all be thinking about.

It should not be the only piece, but it should not be entirely forgotten either. So I think that’s my end message really. I love it.

Jessica: And you know, that’s a message that. We’re not used to thinking about or even hearing. And I think that’s why it’s going to take [00:53:00] a bit for this type of thought process to really ripple through the dog world to a point where it starts to really pick up the traction that it needs.

Because I think for so long, for those of us who have been working with dogs, and especially for those of us who work in shelters or rescues, we are doing so much of just the damage control, the day-to-day that it’s often not thinking about this fantastic point that you’re bringing up is, well, where did these dogs come from to begin with?

And would it make more sense if we started to focus more of our efforts there so that way they didn’t end up in those situations and. I am really glad that you started this collaborative, and I think you did find, like you said, this niche that wasn’t being filled, that this really did need [00:54:00] to come about.

And I know that I have learned so much just from even being in the Facebook group. I’m a lurker. I don’t ever post in there. I just read what people write and I’ve learned so much. It’s really fascinating. But I think it’s also really inspiring to see how many people like really, truly love dogs, really want the best for dogs, and really want them to live their best lives.

Jessica Perry: People love dogs. Dogs are great. I really appreciate your having me on the podcast and giving me a chance to spread the message. So it’s an important message and so thank you so much for helping lift it up. That’s big.

Jessica: Ah, well I can’t thank you enough for being here and yes, I appreciate it so much.

So thank you. Thank you.

Hey listeners, I want to hear from you. If you have a suggestion for a topic or a guest, send me an [00:55:00] email at podcast@jessicawheatcraft.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. Be sure to check the show notes on how to do that.

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