This is a fascinating discussion that dives into everything from dogs to coyotes; from selective breeding to feral dog populations; from social facilitation to intentional thinking --- a jam packed episode! Join us for a compelling chat with my longtime friend and esteemed colleague, Ken McCort, a luminary in animal training since 1979. Together, we share our journeys through the early days of animal training and reminisce about unforgettable moments from conferences. Ken's illustrious career, notably his exceptional work with wolves and contributions to veterinary education, provides invaluable insights into the complex world of animal behavior.
About Ken:
Ken is a professional animal trainer and behavior consult that has been working with multiple species since 1979. With an education in psychology, ethology and neurobiology, he strives to understand animal behavior based on the niche that the animals live in. He looks at modification of unwanted behaviors and modification for desired behaviors using all three sciences.
As the receiver of the 2020 Association of Professional Dog Trainers Lifetime Achievement Award as well as many other international recognitions, he thrives to teach people the animal’s perspective. Having taught people and trained animals in many countries around the world, Ken strives to get other trainers and pet people to embrace science as the modality for change.
Learn more about options for help for dogs with aggression here:
AggressiveDog.com
Learn more about our annual Aggression in Dogs Conference here:
The Aggression in Dogs Conference
Subscribe to the bonus episodes available here:
The Bitey End of the Dog Bonus Episodes
Check out all of our webinars, courses, and educational content here:
Webinars, courses, and more!
This is a fascinating discussion that dives into everything from dogs to coyotes; from selective breeding to feral dog populations; from social facilitation to intentional thinking --- a jam packed episode! Join us for a compelling chat with my longtime friend and esteemed colleague, Ken McCort, a luminary in animal training since 1979. Together, we share our journeys through the early days of animal training and reminisce about unforgettable moments from conferences. Ken's illustrious career, notably his exceptional work with wolves and contributions to veterinary education, provides invaluable insights into the complex world of animal behavior.
About Ken:
Ken is a professional animal trainer and behavior consult that has been working with multiple species since 1979. With an education in psychology, ethology and neurobiology, he strives to understand animal behavior based on the niche that the animals live in. He looks at modification of unwanted behaviors and modification for desired behaviors using all three sciences.
As the receiver of the 2020 Association of Professional Dog Trainers Lifetime Achievement Award as well as many other international recognitions, he thrives to teach people the animal’s perspective. Having taught people and trained animals in many countries around the world, Ken strives to get other trainers and pet people to embrace science as the modality for change.
Learn more about options for help for dogs with aggression here:
AggressiveDog.com
Learn more about our annual Aggression in Dogs Conference here:
The Aggression in Dogs Conference
Subscribe to the bonus episodes available here:
The Bitey End of the Dog Bonus Episodes
Check out all of our webinars, courses, and educational content here:
Webinars, courses, and more!
In this episode I chat with a special friend and colleague who I've known since I just started out in training. Ken McCord is here to chat with me and one thing you guys might not know is that for me to stay organized, I usually send out a request for a biography when scheduling the podcast interviews so I can kind of include them in the show notes. Ken, being the super humble guy he is, sends me a bio with one sentence and it says professional animal trainer since 1987. I don't think that does him any justice at all. He's lectured at conferences and seminars around the world, trained multiple species, including wolves at Wolf Park, and taught at veterinary schools and conferences on the topic of animal behavior. Ken and I have had many fascinating conversations about aggression and I'm sure this episode will not disappoint.
Speaker 1:And if you are enjoying the buddy under the dog, you can support the podcast by going to aggressivedogcom, where there's a variety of resources to learn more about helping dogs with aggression issues, including the upcoming Aggression and Dogs Conference happening from October 11th to 13th 2024 in Scottsdale, arizona, with both in-person and online options. You can also learn more about the Aggression and Dogs Master Course, which is the most comprehensive course available anywhere in the world for learning how to work with and help dogs with aggression issues. I also have a wide variety of webinars, upcoming courses, videos and articles, all from the foremost experts in training and behavior. We are your one-stop shop for all things related to aggression in dogs. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Bitey End of the Dog. This week, I have none other than Ken McCourt with me. Welcome to the show, ken.
Speaker 2:Oh, glad to be here, mike. I was thrilled to get your invitation.
Speaker 1:tell you the truth this is really kind of an honor for me, because I want to go back and tell a story about some of our experiences. We've known each other for a long time going way back through the. Iwabc days, the Yahoo Group days, and one of my most cherished memories is one time I forget which conference. I think it was an APDT conference, but anyways, we were there and it was you and I, and we're like, let's go get dinner. And then Dr Simone Gadbois was also there.
Speaker 2:And okay let's go.
Speaker 1:And so we start walking and we ended up finding this kind of sushi place, but it turns out it was drag night on Halloween right, and it was also karaoke night. So it created this really interesting atmosphere. And then Ian Dunbar walks in, Remember that and he starts doing karaoke in the back. Yeah, but it was just you know.
Speaker 2:And I was just. You know, I think that was Memphis Tennessee, if it doesn't, that sounds right, I think it was yeah, yeah, those were fun times man.
Speaker 1:And I was just like this young kind of speak. I think I don't even remember if I was speaking at that conference yet, but I was like this newer kind of speak, kind of new to this whole conference thing, and it was just such an honor for me. I'm like sitting there in this atmosphere, listening to Dunbar in the background singing karaoke, but we're sitting at the table talking about neuroscience. I'm like what world am I in right now, seeing all these people in costumes, and here we are having a serious conversation about neuroscience. So anyways, I thought that was a really nice memory and it was, of course, an honor to speak to you guys, so it was a really nice memory, and it was, of course, an honor to speak to you guys.
Speaker 2:So yeah, Good times. Yeah, I got to see Simon this year in Kentucky at the APT. He was a closer. It was kind of cool because he lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is it takes a couple days by small plane to get out of where he is, Dahl University and into the United States. And when he showed up I was on, I was getting ready to talk and he came up and of course I came off the stage and we hugged each other and I said to him are you staying overnight Because he's the closer? And he said yeah, and I said I am too, and I went back to my room and renewed my room for another day because I knew that we would be hitting the bar and having food in good times, like we did, and it was and didn't miss a beat. But Simon is one of those brilliant scientists who absolutely understands, especially the olfactory system in dogs, and I learn more sitting around having brewskis and conversations. Sometimes I learn more from those than I do from the lecture itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. It's all the more reason to go to those in-person conferences. You just it's that those special moments make all the difference then.
Speaker 2:That networking to me is worth the price of admission. I mean, I often look at who the lineup of speakers are and what have you. But what it really comes down to is I like to grab people I know, and even some people I don't know, and get together for those social events whether it's lunch or dinner or whatever and just have an exchange of ideas, and that's sometimes a bigger thrill for me than the courses that they're teaching.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. It gives you the time to reminisce. And kind of speaking of reminiscing about things, let's reminisce about Ray Coppinger a little bit.
Speaker 1:Oh my, we were talking a little bit about before we started recording, ethology and the influences of Ray, especially in the dog training community, and one of the things that I often talk about is the predatory motor sequence when it comes to aggression and understanding that, oh yeah. So let's dive into that First, for maybe some new listeners or people that aren't quite familiar with the ethology lens. Can you just define what the predatory motor sequence is and kind of why it matters in aggression cases?
Speaker 2:and kind of why it matters in aggression cases. Well, ethology is kind of a dead science and I don't want to say that we don't use it anymore. What has happened to ethology is it's now broken up into behavioral ecology, neurobiology. You know there's a whole bunch of smaller groups that used to be under the umbrella of ethology, smaller groups that used to be under the umbrella of ethology.
Speaker 2:And ethology in general is a biological look at how the animal behaves and it has to do with motor patterns, intrinsic behaviors, which means they're born with them, and especially predation. It's a motor pattern and when you work with animals like wolves and coyotes and things like that, they have the whole sequence in their system. They have to practice it to get good at it, but they don't have to be taught how to do it. Okay, and what we've done with dogs is taught them to specialize. We've selected different behaviors in that motor sequence that were a benefit to humans, whether they were guarding our farms or helping us hunt or whatever. We learned how to isolate those. And somebody like Coppinger he was more of an evolutionary behaviorist because he was really interested in how it's evolved over time what a lot of trainers refer to as high drive dogs. That usually means that the motor pattern is so strong in that animal that it's internally rewarded dopamine usually okay and it's resistant to extinction. You know, and so you got to know as a trainer, can I modify that or can I substitute another behavior into the sequence or do I manage it? And the answer can be all three, depending on what you're dealing with. But if you're just saying as a trainer, well, he doesn't like animals that run, instead of saying he has chase and grab bite, which are motor patterns, then you're looking at it as an emotional event, and predation is not an emotional event. In fact, the animal's having fun at every sequence, so that's why they'll hunt at every sequence. So that's why they'll hunt even though they're not hungry, you know. That's why the animal. You can trigger those motor sequences in the animal by doing something like riding a bike or a skateboard down the sidewalk, you know. Or jog, you know. Just change your pace from a walk to a jog and boom, you see that intrinsic behavior come out. And if you're going to work with animals like that, you need to know whether it's something that you can modify through training, and a lot of times you can through training, and a lot of times you can. You can change the stimulus that produces the behavior. You can change the intensity of the behavior. Can you remove the behavior? Probably not. You have to deal with it, basically.
Speaker 2:So somebody like Hoppinger was one of those guys that could take that kind of information from the academic world and dumb it down for lack of a better term to make it understandable for people that work with animals one-on-one.
Speaker 2:I had the pleasure of traveling and lecturing with Ray for almost 20 years and I consider him a dear friend, and I was really upset when he passed away. But we also knew he was really sick. I just didn't realize how sick he was, but his brain was so smart, he was so good at not only understanding the science but remembering the details of it that I used to tell people that I thought he was an alien, that he had come down to earth to embarrass us or to teach us to understand concepts that are way beyond the grasp of most people. And so for me, you know, Ray was not just a friend, he was a mentor who really improved my skill sets as a trainer, because he got me to understand what I can and what I can't do with an animal, especially if you're talking about an intrinsic behavior, something they're born with yeah so, and I'll second that notion.
Speaker 1:I I mean, he was also such a brilliant presenter, but witty and funny too.
Speaker 2:I always enjoyed his talks.
Speaker 1:He's just so witty with his comments and responding.
Speaker 2:He would say things just to get a rise out of the audience. He said stuff that at lectures that I was at with him that I absolutely knew he didn't believe that but he wanted to see how it affected the people in the room. He invited challenges, he wanted people to challenge his ideas and I really admire that. You know he was a consummate scientist and true scientists don't agree with each other on very much. I mean, they really don't. You're always trying to refute the no hypothesis and trying to prove someone else is wrong.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:But you have to follow the scientific methodologies to do that. And when he started to look at some of the early studies, we did that compared wolves to dogs. There were a couple of papers written that I considered total nonsense and so did he, and so we went out to disprove them. One of them, one of those processes we blew away about five years of data at Wolf Park in three days. You know. We had 18 wolves. We ran them through the testing procedure 10 times each in one afternoon and absolutely destroyed the data that these other academics have put out. And they were so ticked off that they sent their own team to Wolf Park to test the wolves themselves because they thought we'd made it up or we somehow didn't follow the science.
Speaker 2:And we did. We filmed everything we did. The repetitions were clean. The way that we taught the animals was actually better at what we were measuring than what they were doing in the lab that produced that data that we argued with. It was fun, you know, but I really got to know Ray through that work and it was kind of cool because Clive Wynn was the guy that was interested in the study and his two graduate students are both professors who I knew as grad students and they're both brilliant and it was really kind of cool to watch the evolution of that science going on right in front of me. You know it was amazing, amazing.
Speaker 1:It's the nice delineation between people that are in the academia and science versus people on social media.
Speaker 2:Yes, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:You can argue, but there's no disrespect necessarily in the arguing Exactly, it's just the nice part of that Exactly. I'd love to jump back into that predatory motor sequence we were talking about, because I was actually just recently just re-watching one of Ray's talks at the SPARKS conference and he was talking about hypertrophy of the certain behaviors versus truncating certain behaviors or parts of that motor sequence, depending on the dog breed, right and why. You know, can you talk more about that kind of briefly, because I also want to pick your brain about what happens during that process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, hypertrophy means that it's exaggerated. Okay, it's hyper, okay. And so if you selectively breed for an exaggeration of a part of that sequence, the other parts of the sequence that adjoin it tend to be muted, they tend to fall off. We started to look at with it was that with some of the sequences, the next behavior in the sequence might be muted, but if we reinforce it it can bond to the previous behavior and become hypertrophied as the behavior itself. So let's say, if you have a terrier who has chase but no grab bite, that would be a herding dog okay, typically a header rather than a healer. And you start to reinforce the grab bite end of it. It can be exaggerated pretty quickly to where the animal will show you chase and grab bite even though you don't want the grab bite to occur. And I think that that's what some groups have done genetically with dogs, and my example for that would be a Belgian Malinois. Okay, malinois that I see have much more grab bite than any Belgian sheepdog or Belgian tavern that I see out there. And I think that the Belgian military specifically selectively bred those dogs for about 60 years now to have an exaggerated grab bite. And a lot of times when you train those guys, the reinforcer to get them to let go is to substitute something else to bite and grab. So a lot of times the handler isn't carrying treats, the animal doesn't want a treat, they wanted to do the grab. So a lot of times the handler isn't carrying treats, the animal doesn't want a treat, they wanted to do the grab bite so they may let go of the person let's say in the Michelin man suit that's taken the bite and redirect that energy onto something the handler is holding and they'll literally pick the dog up off the ground and sling them around in a circle and whatever, and that's a reinforcer for the dog. And so I think that we see that done purposely in the working dogs, like the Malinois, whereas with the more pet dogs, like the Belgian sheepdogs and the Belgian taverns, they didn't use them for that. So those guys tend to not have that hypertrophied grab bite behavior. You can teach them to chase, but a lot of times they'll nose prod the animal and not necessarily grab it.
Speaker 2:I had a Belgian sheepdog that had no grab bite at all. I mean, it had amazing chase sequence and really hard to call off a chase on anything. But if it actually caught up to what it was chasing, it would nose prod it, it wouldn't bite it. Okay, and I didn't want to bring that behavior out. If I brought it out especially as a young dog work with that nervous system so I can sharpen that neural pathway I probably could have ended up with an individual that had the hypertrophy grab bite in it. But why would I want to do that with a pet dog? And if I'm looking for a working dog, just go get a melon. Why reinvent the wheel?
Speaker 1:Right, right. So let's talk a little bit about when that becomes problematic. So we have people that select for those particular behaviors in working context, but then when it starts to enter the pet dog population, it can be difficult for maybe the average pet guardian to understand why their dog is biting at this level.
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 1:So let's break that down a little bit more, because that motor sequence happens right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when I'm dealing with clients and I never ran group training classes, I mean I did a couple times in my career but I hated them and I really didn't like doing it and I like working with problems and so the vast majority of referrals that I got for 30-some years of training were aggression cases, and the first thing I need to do is explain to the client what's the motivation. You know why is he doing that? And a lot of times what you would see is the dog developed a behavior without the owner maybe realizing that it was going there. You know, they go off to work, they leave the dog, who's sleeping on the couch, and the dog spends the entire day going from window to window chasing cars, birds, anything else that moves outside, and they don't realize it's a problem until the furniture is turned over, there's slobber all over the windows or somebody complains. So that wasn't a purposeful training of that behavior. That's what I like to call accidental reinforcement.
Speaker 2:The environment, the animal was left in an environment where that behavior out of probably boredom for the dog, that behavior became hypertrophied. Okay, and now we got to do what? Well, we need to take away the stimulus, you know, to try to cool that neural pathway down. And then we need to change the management of the animal when the owner's away, so it can't practice the behavior because you can come in there. I don't care what your training skills are, how good you are, if you leave and the owner lets the dog go back to that situation, they're just wasting money. I would tell people that didn't want to change the environment on that animal. I'd say, well, let's not waste my time and your money because there is no magic cure, there is no something I'm going to be able to do with your dog. That's going to permanently change how the animal gets stimulated from the environment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, off that topic, let's slide into our neuroscience lens and talk about what's happening that makes that behavior so reinforcing, and the dopamine that happens. And it's really not the, for instance, like in predation, it's not so much the actual consumption or the catching of the, let's say, the sheep, it is the act of it or the anticipation of it.
Speaker 2:Right, it's the whole. Chase them down and get them, yeah. And so again, if the animal's doing that for survival, okay, now it's true predation. But if the dog eats kibble dog food out of the dish from the owner, it's just more like mental masturbation for the dog. It's bored, it doesn't have anything else to do. It knows how to get a dopamine surge going and it does. Now, once you get that neural pathway heated up, it's going to really start generalizing. When it generalizes, the animal starts looking for stimulus in the environment to produce that chase behavior. So that's where the dog starts becoming hypervigilant. It's watching the windows, it's constantly moving around looking for the opportunity to release the behavior, because that's how it derives pleasure. So you know, and taking the dog for walks and some of the silly stuff that I see people doing with a dog like that. Now you're doing what? Now you're taking them out to a new environment where they can find different stimulus to produce the same behavior.
Speaker 1:In that regard of the satisfaction right for the dog or meeting that need. Let's talk about a couple of different potential scenarios. You have, let's say, a dog. That's very much into the eye of the sequence. So just eyeing but, they don't go through the full sequence. They kind of stop there. Maybe they're just like a pointer and just eyeing the actual thing.
Speaker 1:And then so let's say, we have a dog that does have the issue of taking off on the owner and they don't come back because they've gone to the next step of that sequence, versus we have, like, a dog that goes all the way to the bite, hold, shake part of the sequence and that's how you bridge your feet right. And so some of the newer techniques in working with dogs, with predation issues or issues with just chasing squirrels or whatever, is to allow for that satisfaction. Right, so you get the eye. Let's just say it's the dog that is just eyeing. We allow the dog to do that, but we stop it there, so they still get the dopamine hit, so to speak, versus the other dog where we can't actually, of course, allow them to go off leash and then chase and grab and bite and hold. So talk us through that you know if you kind of understand what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, in the case of they go to I and we allow that to occur, then you have to be able to teach the dog to ramp down to settle. You know what Karen overall used to teach relaxation exercises. A lot of times it was involved. You know breathing exercises for the dog and all you're trying to do is raise the oxygen level, get the animal to downregulate the dopamine, hopefully get some serotonin in the system and going in that direction in order to learn how to modulate the arousal. Because by the time most trainers see that dog, what the dog does is they can't modulate anymore. It's zero to 100. There's nothing in between. Okay, and if the animal can't modulate the arousal, you know you're going to have a heck of a time the owner, the trainer, everybody in getting the animal to modify the behavior. So a lot of those programs that are allowing the animal to get to a certain threshold, it's not about letting them just get to the threshold, it's about teaching them that once they get there they need to learn how to cool themselves down.
Speaker 2:You know, one of the drugs that's overproduced in a lot of places in the United States are SSRIs okay, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and there's several kinds on the market and what they do is they turn off when serotonin is in the synapse, when it's changed to dopamine or it's changed to adrenaline, which is norepinephrine when it's in the synapse. Anywhere else it's called adrenaline. Okay, the animal doesn't get rid of the serotonin. There's a little pump on the next neuron that draws the serotonin out so that another chemical can take over. And what those drugs do is they're designed to turn that little pump off so the animal can't take the serotonin out.
Speaker 2:Well, unless the animal can relax serotonin out. Well, unless the animal can relax, you're just feeding them a pill that's doing nothing because there isn't any serotonin in the synapse. The animal's jacked up. They're either adrenalized or they're off the charts in dopamine, something along those lines. So if you're giving an SSRI and the animal doesn't know how to relax, you're kind of wasting your money on a pharmaceutical end that will not necessarily change the animal's behavior. So you really have to if you're going to look at the neurobiology and especially if your veterinarian's going to go at a medication to try to help the animal out. There has to be a training program in there that gets the animal to downregulate how much adrenaline or how much norepinephrine they're producing. You have to look at the system reproducing. You have to look at the system. I like to tell my clients who have dogs that are way off the charts in arousal, who are already on SSRIs and they don't do anything. It's because the animal can't modulate, it can't relax, it's constantly looking for a stimulus to make it get aroused again.
Speaker 1:And you know we have a bunch of listeners right now saying, ken, that sounds great, but how do we do that, like, what's the way to help these animals?
Speaker 2:Well, there is a lot of relaxation exercises that you can train the dog to do. A lot of them have to do with laying down and chin resting and teaching the animal how to, you know, focus on. I typically start by teaching the dog to focus on a target you know and then to hold their nose or their paw or something to the target and then I start working on getting the dog to get into either a sit or a down position, because they have to start to relax or they're going to spring back up. And it's a process of trying to get the animal to learn how to modulate its arousal. And some dogs they like the arousal. They don't want to. You know you got some feisty little schnauzer or something he's like. I don't want to. This feels good. I don't want to stop doing that. You know you have to go with the matching law. You have to have a reinforcer that the animal finds is worth it to go through the energy to learn how to downregulate their arousal. You know I've seen a lot of creative ways that people do that, you know, with their animals and again it goes back to the skill of the trainer. You know, do you have a library of things you can do with the animal, or are you a one trick pony? I'm just going to teach them how to shallow breathe and I'm like, well, that might work, but probably not with some dogs that you're going to run into. Sometimes you get into dogs that are genetically wired to be that way. Lifestyle guarding dogs are like that. They're really, really mellow until they're aroused and then they don't bark and jump up and down and act stupid, they just go get you. They don't waste any energy getting to the grab bite, they go right to it. And so if you have somebody that has a dog like that and they bought it because it's white and it's fluffy and they didn't look at the fact that they're buying a working dog, there's a mile of difference between a pet Great Pyrenees and a working Great Pyrenees.
Speaker 2:I had a working Great Pyrenees. She was a wonderful, freaking dog. She bit the previous owner five times, five different incidences that required medical attention and he kept trying to dominate the animal. Stand over it, flip her on her back. Whatever. She's 105 pounds. Are you freaking crazy?
Speaker 2:So I brought her to my house. You know. I took her off a death row at a veterinary hospital. Okay, not where my wife worked. Okay, I took her off a death row, I brought her home and I taught her to back up off the food dish because she was guarding food. Okay, to back off the food dish in order to get food. And I found that when she was four feet away critical distance. When she was four feet away, her arousal level went down. So that took all of 15 minutes to change that behavior.
Speaker 2:Then I gave her a job. I taught her that I wanted her to watch the farm. I live on a farm. Okay, to watch the farm for animals that are a problem. I don't care about cars, I don't care about motorcycles, I don't care about birds, I don't want skunks, I don't want groundhogs, I don't want. And she was a happy dog. I had her for nine years. She never bit me or anybody while she was on the farm. She died an old fart and was absolutely thrilled that someone understood what she was doing. When I gave her a job, it was almost like she was saying thank God, finally somebody understands that I'm a working dog, I'm not a pet.
Speaker 2:And the guy wanted a great Pyrenees and when he wanted a pet, quality one, he's going to have to get on a waiting list and he's going to pay a couple thousand dollars if he can find one. You can go down to Amish country, which is literally 30 miles from my house, and they have working livestock guarding dogs, pyrenees, in their fields with their animals right now. And you want to buy one of those puppies? They'll sell them to you. They're $250. Okay, oh, you want to buy one of those puppies? They'll sell them to you. They're 250 dollars. Okay, oh, you want a pet dog? They don't even know what that is and as long as you got 250 dollars, they'll sell a dog to you.
Speaker 2:They don't care. You know he's your problem now, you know, and unfortunately, they're really, really cute, but you don't see those behaviors until their brain matures, which is around two and a half three years of age, right, right. Then it shows up.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And at that point the dog's no longer small and white and fluffy, it's now a big dog and they don't have any low-level threat behavior. You know, and Sasha was a great dog. I loved that dog. I really did. She was a great dog. I love that dog. I really did. She was a wonderful dog. But I really felt like once she realized that I gave her a job and I expect her to do it. She was a happy dog. Every day she would get up and when I'd let her out she'd patrol the perimeter and I told her she's allowed to watch anything that's out there that you don't think should be here, but you're only allowed to bark at animals. I don't care about people. And she got it. It was pretty easy.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, that's an excellent way to summarize everything we've been talking about, you know, and what we've selected for and behaviors as humans. So I'm going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors and we'll be right back because I want to talk about a different topic called intentional thinking, which maybe some listeners haven't heard of. But we're going to dive right in right after this break Sounds good. Hey, friends, it's me again and I hope you are enjoying this episode. Don't forget to join me for the fifth annual Aggression and Dogs Conference, either in person or online from Scottsdale, arizona, from October 11th to the 13th 2024. This year's lineup includes many incredible speakers, including Dr Clive Wynn, dr Jessica Heckman, emma Parsons, sarah Kallnice, laurie Lawless, carmeletta Ofterheide, jess Feliciano, dr Amy Cook and many more. Head on over to aggressivedogcom and click on the conference tab to learn more about the exciting agenda on everything from advanced concepts in dog body language to working with aggression in shelter environments, to genetic influences on behavior. Dr Amy Cook will be bringing her entertaining and energetic personality to the grand reception and cocktail party which, by the way, will be live streamed as well as in person, and, as usual, you'll find a wonderful, kind, caring and supportive community at the conference, both in person and online. I also want to take a moment to thank one of our wonderful sponsors this year Pets for Vets. Did you know that approximately 1 million shelter animals are euthanized in the US every year? At the same time, many of our country's veterans are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, anxiety and or depression. Pets for Vets founder and executive director, clarissa Black, created a solution for these problems by rescuing and training animals for veterans. Pets for Vets has a unique program model that customizes each match between a veteran and a shelter animal to create what is known as a super bond. Each animal is selected and trained specifically for each veteran, based on the nuanced relationship between animal behavior and human personality, to ensure a successful, reciprocal and enriched relationship. Pets for Vets has a positive reinforcement mentality at its core for animals, veterans and trainers. In addition to helping veterans and rescue animals, clarissa has created a generous opportunity for positive reinforcement trainers to join our organization. Trainers are able to participate anywhere in the US while receiving stipends, professional development opportunities and maintaining a flexible schedule. Pets for Vets is also seeking new partnerships with animal shelters and rescue groups from around the country. For more information, please visit petsforvetscom.
Speaker 1:All right, we're back here with Ken McCourt. We've been having some fascinating discussions around the predatory motor sequence and ethology and neuroscience, but now I'm going to shift gears, because years ago this is going back again. I think we're dating ourselves a little bit here in terms of how long we've been doing this work for, but I can't recall at least 10 years ago you were giving a talk on intentional thinking. I think it was an IABC conference and I just found it really fascinating, because we talk about communication and body language and observing the behavior of dogs, but we have all kinds of different opinions about how much they're thinking, how much they're intending to get you to do things. So this is maybe a foreign concept to some of the listeners. So can you just break down what intentional thinking means first, before we dive in?
Speaker 2:Well, intentional thinking actually came out of the philosophical fields. Philosophers and scientists that had a philosophical construct going on in their head were the ones that actually first started this. And now that we have imaging and we can actually see the electrical transmission going on in the animal's brain, we can now put numbers you know, real data to the concept. But intentional thinking has to do with wants and needs and there's levels. First level intentional thinking would be like I have wants and needs okay. I need food, I need to be warm, I would like to watch this television program, whatever Okay. The second level is that you know that I have those wants and needs and if you're the trainer, you can use those wants and needs as reinforcers Okay. The third level would be that I know that you know that I have these wants and needs Okay. And it keeps going up until five, six, seven layers Okay, there's an infinite number that you can get to, but most humans and most people that look at intentional thinking usually stop around five, because that would be probably a pretty high level of intentional thinking for a human. So it would be that I know that, you know that. I know that you know that I have once, and it goes back and forth like this. The way I used to explain it is that children human children develop intentional thinking at a third level somewhere between three and five years of age, and that's due to brain development. Okay, and so if I have two children and I'm going to test them for intentional thinking, I'm going to start with a three-year-old. I got a three-year-old and a five-year-'m going to start with a three-year-old. I got a three-year-old and a five-year-old. Okay, so a three-year-old. I'm going to take out a box and it says crayons on it and I'm going to shake the box and I'm going to look at the little girl and I'm going to say to her what do you think's in the box? Now she's going to say if she's ever played with crayons before, crayons okay, that's first-level intentional thinking. All right, if I dumped them out into my hand and they're birthday candles, they're not crayons. Okay, I put them back in the box and I shake them and I say to the three-year-old what do you think is in the box? And I say to the three-year-old what do you think is in the box? She's going to say birthday candles, because she knows that. I know that. She knows I changed them. Okay, so we're now at two.
Speaker 2:All right, if I said to her, if I showed the box to your mom, what does your mom think is going to be in the box? The three-year-old's going to say birthday candles, because she doesn't know that mom doesn't know that I changed them, okay. That's going to say, oh, mom's going to think there's crayons, because she knows that I know that I didn't change them, okay. And that's the shift where a child can number one, get a joke. They would understand I'm kidding, I don't think like that, okay. It also is a point where they can become. They can lie to me, they can deceive. If I ask a three-year-old do you think I'm fat?
Speaker 2:If she thinks you're fat, she's going to say yeah, okay, because you are okay, she's not going to be worried about it, it's going to hurt your feelings. The five-year-old might say well, no, I think you could lose a pound or two, but you look good, you know if she likes me and she wants. So there's a level of deception there. Not that she's lying to me, but she understands a little bit more about the world out there and how animals in the world perceive what's actually happening and what's about to happen. What those needs and wants are Okay. So when we take this to a dog, the example that I would use is that if you have two dogs and one dog can control resources from another dog, okay, and it's on the couch, and the lower ranking dog and I'm just going to use rank as a way to refer to the animal Dogs don't have rank order, but anyhow it has to do with resource control, all right. So if the other dog is on the floor and would like to get the couch, is on the floor and would like to get the couch, and it runs to the door and barks and the dog that controls resources gets off the couch to go to the door and the lower ranking dog now takes the couch, people would say to me well, that's, you fooled him. That's third level intentional thinking. And I would say, well, if there's never been anybody at the door and the dog's never seen the other dog go to the door and bark, I would go along with that. But more than likely the dog knows that when I go to the door and bark, the dog will get off the couch and do that. So there's a learning step in there where the dog has learned to trick the other dog into getting off the couch. But there's a learning sequence in there in order for the animal to get that done. So it's still second level intentional thinking. The animals just learn to be deceptive thinking. The animals just learn to be deceptive. Okay. But if there was no, the dog's never done this before, he's never barked at the door and he came up with that idea of how to trick the other dog into giving up the resource, then that would be third level intentional thinking, but I've never seen it Okay. So that always started a little bit of a discussion between people and usually when I gave that talk, my mailbox and my Facebook page would fill up with people that would absolutely insist that their dog can do third level intentional thinking and they would give me examples of how the dog would do it and for a while I used to sit down and explain to them the stages the dog probably went through to learn how to deceive or how to manipulate something in the environment to make that happen. But if it happens in a vacuum meaning the animal there's no prior learning, the animal just came up with that Then I would agree with it.
Speaker 2:Now that we can do, imaging and look at how the dog's brain works. Their brain locks up when we get to third. Humans can do five, six. If you work at it. You can go up higher than that. It's not necessary, by the way, to function in society to have five, six, seven, but you need to get to at least three or four. You need to know that if you go to work and earn some money, you might be able to amass enough to buy a car and that they're not just going to pay you for sitting at home and doing nothing. So there's things in the environment that we have to have at least third level intentional thinking to motivate us to go out there and do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I would love that's a great explanation, because it's a very difficult kind of concept to wrap your head around. Especially when you start first learning about it. Like what did Kent say? He knows that I don't know what.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of you got to actually really think about what you're saying there. And you know it has me thinking about other concepts. Common concepts or things we think about are constantly state in the dog training world, you know, like, for instance, a dog using signals to try to, like, get the other dog to calm down, or something like that. So can you talk more about that? You know, is that, do you think that's what's happening, or would that be implying a third level, intentional?
Speaker 2:Well, calming signals definitely are out there, but they're. They're actually. Most of them that I see are displacement behaviors. The animal is doing that because the animal's frustrated. They're not trying to necessarily tell the other animal to calm down, okay, but if these signals that they give out are somewhat universal to canids in general, so if the dog's lived with another dog in its household or in its life, in its household or in its life, it learns to read those signals.
Speaker 2:Now, for me, the vast majority of the clients that I see have really, really smart dogs, okay, and what the client doesn't like is that the dog is manipulating them rather than them manipulating the dog, and it's not just with aggression, with a lot of things. And when I was asked I had a conversation once with Susan Friedman about this I told her that for me, a really intelligent dog is a dog that pays attention to details and remembers them. So a dog that's not so bright, you can take them to a training program somewhere and they teach them to sit and lay down and whatever. And they teach them to generalize it do it in the house, do it in the car, do it at the park, do it with other dogs around, whatever. And and the dog says at some point I got it, whereas really smart dogs say what's your reinforcement history?
Speaker 2:Have you ever paid me for doing this. Is this a morning behavior or afternoon behavior? Does this only happen in the front seat but not the back seat of the car? Does it only happen with you and not with anybody else? And they pay attention to these little nuances within the environment. And not only do they recognize the little subtleties of what's going on, they remember it.
Speaker 2:Okay, and the treat for me at Wolf Park was getting to train with Twister and Willow, who are coyotes. Ok, I work with those two little buggers for 12 years. Ok, I always worked with them as a brace. They were always together. I didn't separate them. Ok, they were never on leash, never restrained. They could come and go as they wanted. I had to have permission to come into their enclosure if they didn't let strangers in.
Speaker 2:Okay, twister and Willow paid attention to every kind of little detail. I can remember specifically when I first started working with Twister with a target stick. He wanted to know can I touch the air in front of the target stick? Can I lick the target stick? Can I bite the target stick? Can I touch the shaft of the target stick rather than the end? And he went through this myriad of testing me to see exactly what I was reinforcing and I had to teach the person that was training with them besides me that you can't be wishy-washy about what that behavior is, because if you start reinforcing any variance of the behavior, he'll start throwing you more and more variations and it gets to the point where now the coyote's training you. You are no longer training the coyote, okay, and I can tell you in all the years that I work with those two, there were many times that I had to stop in the middle of the training session and go wait a minute. Who's training who? And I would realize pretty quickly that no, they're now training me, I am no longer training them. And that's not a bad thing and I don't even consider it an insult. It just means that in the training process I've lost control. Training process, I've lost control. You know they're now training me and they were very good at doing that, and I used to tell the trainers that came in down there. I said once you get good with the wolves, you that pays attention to the details and can remember them as well as wolves can, and I've seen some pretty bright dogs. Okay, now that's a different kind of cognitive ability.
Speaker 2:When we started to look at cognition in animals, we have what we like to refer to as a mental toolbox, and there are all these different things in the toolbox and so you want to know does the animal have that tool? And if they have it, how good is it tool? And if they have it, how good is it Okay? So, like, image permanence is one of them. Can they realize that if I hold my hand up and I put my fingers up against it, they're not going to come out? The other side? Okay, because this is a solid and this is a solid. Okay. And if I somehow did that and made it look like it came out, the wolf would look around like, hey, you know, you moved your hand, you're not putting it through there. So that's an aspect of image permanence. This is a solid, it's not going to change.
Speaker 2:Okay, magicians and people like that work at fooling humans with image permanence all the time. Okay, that's what the profession's about is fooling the human into thinking that somehow they can do something that you can't or physically shouldn't happen. You know, I'm going to. Saw this person in half. No, you're not Okay. So when we look at like dogs, do they have image permanence? Yeah, how good, pretty good. As good as the humans, I would say yes, okay. So when we look at this mental toolbox, intentional thinking is one of the tools in the box. Okay, and so do dogs have intentional thinking? Yes, how good. Second level Okay. Any better than that I haven't seen it. And now that we can image the brain while the animals awake, they lock up. They lock up just like humans do when we get to seven or eight, and this has me intentionally thinking about something is that what about the dogs?
Speaker 1:we use social facilitation sometimes, so I'll give you an example that might, and you can kind of talk me to where they're at in the cognition level. But there let's say you have a dog that's sort of fearful of people and you have another social dog, very social dog, in the home with people and the fearful dog tends to warm up faster, be more social with those people. Strangers come, let's say it's Uncle Bob coming over. So the social dog comes up to Uncle Bob and suddenly the dog that's more fearful is like oh, okay, my housemate says Uncle Bob's okay and then comes up to Uncle Bob because of seeing the behavior of the dog.
Speaker 1:Versus if that dog's just alone, the fearful dog, and Uncle Bob comes in, it just either darts away or behaves aggressively. So where does social facilitation fit into the picture of intentional thinking, or does it?
Speaker 2:Well, I don't think it has a lot to do with intentional thinking. I think it has to do with trusting the emotional state of the other animal. I do this with clients all the time that call me in to what they call a puppy and it's, you know, nine months, 10 months old, you know, and it's not social, and I'll tell them. Well, I got good news and bad news. I said the bad news is your dog's not social and the window of opportunity to do that is closed. It's not going to open again, I go. The good news is we can teach them coping skills. So that dog that's a social facilitator for the fearful dog, is helping the animal to cope emotionally with the environment. And it's very important that that dog never lies to the fearful dog. He's got to rely on him and that's what I teach clients that have fearful dogs. We can teach the dog to defer to you. Don't ever lie to him. Don't ever tell him it's okay and somebody does something nasty to you, you know, because the dog's going to say I can't trust you anymore and as a social facilitator, you're done, you know, you lied to him, all right. So I think it's really important, especially with fearful animals that if we're going to use that approach and it's a good one is that whoever or whatever the animal's relying on to read the environment, that that is a reliable read every time, every time. Okay, and so you know if people can do that. I've seen some pretty amazing stuff done with dogs that were really fearful, who actually look like when they're out in public, that they have confidence. But the only reason they have confidence is because they have a handler and maybe another dog and between the two of them the dog realizes that they'll let me know whether this is dangerous or not and they've never lied to me and that if I get you into a situation where the dog becomes concerned, I can use some training to tell you how to get out of the situation so that you can lose that fearful state. And when we do that, then the dog has the ability to start to modulate how much norepinephrine is being dumped into the system, because there is a way for the dog to learn to relax in an environment that they can't predict exactly what's going to happen. Okay, so that's where neuroscience and training would come together, because you can't go back and socialize that animal.
Speaker 2:Now, interesting thing, I was in Taiwan in November and the Taiwanese government are now looking at reducing their feral dog population and just to give you an idea, in the Taipei area alone there are 80,000 feral dogs. Wow, yes, okay, wow. And these guys actually think. When I got there, they actually thought that if they captured these dogs and put them in a shelter that somehow they would become social, and I spent the first couple of days I was there letting them know that that's not going to happen.
Speaker 2:Their ancient dog was called a Formosa dog. They don't exist anymore, but that was the original. The Aborigines that lived in Taiwan had Formosa dogs and they looked just like the primitive dogs of that area, something like a New Guinea singing dog, shiba Inu. You know the little prickier dogs with bushy tails that hang up over their ears. They were predominantly red, but not always.
Speaker 2:Well, now they got feral dogs that are 60, 70 pounds. You know that are on the streets and they don't go up to people. You can't pet them, okay, they're not dangerous, they're not going to go after you. But you can adopt them, castrate them, neuter them, whatever, okay, and let them live with humans in a shelter for a few weeks and adopt them out. It's not going to happen. Okay, so I spent some time with shelter trainers teaching them how to work with those dogs. Well, man, when I started watching how some of those dogs behaved, they were like Twister and Willow, man, I mean they are really freaking smart and extremely territorial, especially with each other, and for a mountainous jungle population, which Taiwan is, okay.
Speaker 2:I mean, taipei is a modern city and it's quite big and there's several cities like it around there, but when you're on the bullet train you're going through mountains of dense. It's almost rainforest, okay, not quite, but close, okay. You can't see the animals on the ground and those feral dogs live on the edge of those communities and only wander into where humans are at dawn and dusk. They're crepuscular, okay, to gather food, and so I ended up working with a couple shelters and then I went to China and look at the same thing, okay, and then when I came back to Taiwan, I actually hooked up with people that were working for the government to try to work with these dogs and they had an ultra modern kennel that was up in the mountains. It was really cool. It was all off the grid. You know solar panels, easy to clean. Way too many dogs in it compared to you know what it should be. But they took me into what they called the puppy building, okay, and I went through and looked at all the dogs and when I got out I looked at the guy and I said there ain't no puppies in that room. And he said what do you mean? They were small and young. I said they all have adult teeth. They're at least five months old. Okay, at least I don't have to touch them. All I got to do is look at their dentistry. You know those needles sharp. I said the window of opportunity. I said you can't socialize those guys. I said what you're going to need are some really good trainers to teach these dogs how to cope with humans. And then you got to find humans that are willing to take on that kind of a science project. And I even told him. I said look, feral dogs.
Speaker 2:Going back to Coppinger, you know evolutionary biologist. He used to tell people in his talks he knew more about feral dogs by far than he did domestic dogs. You know dogs that were owned, all right. And he used to start his conversations by saying there's somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion, with a B dogs on the planet. Right now there are algorithms and things on how to figure out population densities based on the temperature, the terrain, how many humans are there. There's some things that actually are pretty accurate. And he said there's somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dogs on the planet right now. Of that billion dogs, about 10% of them, 100 million live in people's homes, eat, kibble dog food and have a name. The other 900 million dogs on the planet are either village dogs or feral populations that people don't see, and Coppinger always felt like we need to keep that population there because, as humans, as geneticists, we suck.
Speaker 2:We've created more problems in purebred dogs than there are, you know, with the wild populations. You know hybrid vigor comes in and a couple things biological that makes them more conducive to humans. Okay, so I told them. I said my answer for them because they're an island, okay is to capture them, spay or neuter them and return them to where they were. Just to bring the numbers down, I says when you get down to a reasonable number and that's going to take 30, 50 years easily then you can think about sorting them out as to which ones can be kept as pets. But for the last 400 years at least that we know of, they were no pets.
Speaker 2:You know the Dutch took over Taiwan in the 1600s and they brought hounds with them that killed the deer on the island. They're called Sika deer. They're almost extinct. Till the deer on the island, they're called Sika deer, they're almost extinct. They're a small deer but they have a really soft pelt and they slaughtered these deers, using the dogs to find them, to send fur coats back to Europe. And somewhere in the late 1800s the Japanese took over and they introduced Inu means dog in Japanese, by the way Okay, akita Inus and Shiba Inus, and they crossbred them with these village dogs, okay. And then when World War II hit, the Japanese changed them out for German shepherd dogs and the Japanese changed them out for German shepherd dogs, and the Aborigines used these Formosa dogs to go after the German shepherds. And the Japanese invaders at that time tried to remove all of those dogs on the planet. They actually had a bounty on them that if you were a soldier, the more of those dogs you could shoot, the better. The more of those dogs you could shoot, the better. They didn't put a dent in the population because these dogs live off leash in the mountains with humans, okay.
Speaker 2:Then the Chinese took over and brought industry in and now there's more pet communities and things like that. So it's a relatively new concept to their culture. They like their dogs, they really do. It's a really nice culture.
Speaker 2:I really like the Taiwanese people a lot, but they're in their infancies about understanding behavior and I had to get them to stop walking these dogs. They would leash up five or six of them in a group and take them for a walk and the dogs were terrified to be walking on leash. In the city the streets are narrow and crowded and there's no place for the dogs to go and I actually brought up video and showed them how terrified the dogs are. I said stop doing that. They don't need to be walked when we study feral dog populations. They don't exercise. They usually don't travel more than 600 feet from their food source. I said leave them, be no-transcript, and what you're going to end up with is the dogs that could hide from human hunters are going to reproduce, and now you're going to have a super race of dogs that are good at hiding from humans.
Speaker 2:So, there's no answers to these, but as far as the motor pattern for chase, grab, bite, dissect and stuff it's intact, it's there, not a problem. Most of them are carrion eaters. They eat garbage, but they will hunt smaller animals, and I went out with one of the trainers that I worked with down there for about 20 years. Our name is Senna and she and I went to a fishing village at dusk. We got up there and sat in the parking lot and just waited for the sun to go down and we didn't see a dog anywhere until the sun went down and then there were no humans in the parking lot and I counted 45 dogs humans in the parking lot, and I counted 45 dogs just in that parking lot. Okay, where were they? They were hiding. What were they doing? They're picking up scraps, anything people left behind. Were they ferocious with each other? Yep, did I get out of the car? Nope, and it wasn't that I was afraid of them, it's they would run, they would run.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know. So those populations, we as trainers, I even told Sena I said you got trainers that want to really advance their skills there it is, there you go, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:Those guys are you better have some good chops? You go, yes, yeah, those guys, are you better have some good chops? And I did see some really, really outstandingly good trainers working down there. I said if you guys they're trying to form like an association down there of professional trainers which I admire them for doing that because they're all looking at the science of it I said you should make it a requirement to be in that organization with any credentials at all is that you've trained at least one of those dogs. Yeah, to accept you not the world, accept you and allow you to handle them yeah so I love it.
Speaker 1:I love it is. So.
Speaker 2:That's where the ethology, neuroscience, training, all comes together into a mass. And that's where I had to kind of sit back and tell them look, humans have never removed dogs from any environment, ever. Okay, they've always managed to come back somehow, you know. And how did they do it? We don't know, they're just really good at reproduction and they stay very close to human populations because we're their food source.
Speaker 1:Yeah, adaptable, for sure. Very much yeah, Ken this is, I think, a fabulous way to wrap up the episode and encompass everything we're talking about, but I do want I'm sure people are going to want to reach out and know more about where you're going to be at, so tell us more about what you're working on for this year.
Speaker 2:Well, what am I working on this year? I'm actually doing a lot of work on the farm. Now I'm not retired. I like to tell people I'm doing a lot of work on the farm. Now I'm not retired. I like to tell people I'm semi-retired. So if I'm invited to go out and speak and things like that, I'm all well, do it. I'm not taking on new clients unless there is something that really sparks an interest in me, or it's a referral from somebody that I've known for a while. Interest in me, or it's a referral from somebody that I've known for a while.
Speaker 2:I'm more interested in training the next generation of trainers to grab the science and to really utilize it in what's going on. As an aside with you, I gave a talk at a veterinary conference probably 20 years ago and we were talking about counter conditioning and I talked about giving the reinforcer right after the behavior that you like, that normally the animal was fearful and I got taken to task by a couple of veterinary behaviorists because that's not how the science works, and I thought to myself when they said that to me. I understand what's in the books, but I also understand what I've seen with animals. Okay, and David Premack was working on that, his whole thing about reinforcement and he didn't understand dopamine. They didn't even know what it was. But when you look at classical conditioning, the dopamine surge comes after the behavior and before the reinforcer shows up. And that's what David Premack was really looking at. He just didn't understand that it was dopamine, and so I'm one of those guys that I still think we humans, especially the people that are involved in training with fearful animals, they need to really dial in that kind of information because it's measurable.
Speaker 2:Now it's just that we have to address it and learn how to do it, and that's not to dismiss the earlier studies. It's just that they didn't have the tools to measure the things that we do now, and so my job now is to turn my farm into a wildlife sanctuary, which I'm doing. I've just sealed the land. When we bought this farm, there were 13 farms on this street plus ours, and now I'm the last one and they're all little gated communities with half a million dollar homes, which in my area is a big house with manicured lawns and what have you and we're on a flyway for Canada geese, for blue heron, for egrets and for bald eagles. In fact, I have an owl that lives in my barn and I have all of my lights on motion detectors and turn them off at night so the bird can hunt, and I'm fighting as hard as I can not to bring in streetlights and sidewalks and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:And I just got the land recognized by the state as a wildlife sanctuary, oh wow. And for the next hundred years nobody can cut it up and build houses on it.
Speaker 1:Wow, congratulations on that.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, well, that was what my wife wanted to do and that's what I'm doing. So I'm gonna hopefully go to Japan, taiwan, south Korea and China in the fall. So anybody that's in those areas, look for me. I'm going to probably go to APDT as a guest in the fall. Other than that, there's good conferences and good talks, including your work out there. You'll probably find me somewhere around those, because I'm not doing as much hands-on training as I used to, but I'm doing a lot more watching and teaching, which I'm thoroughly enjoying. I really like doing it.
Speaker 2:So I don't really have anything to plug because I don't have anything on my calendar right now. That's important, but if I do, most people can find it. I usually broadcast all that stuff through Facebook, which is about the only social media I do. I'm not too big on social media. The Chinese talks that I did are going to be on YouTube, so I will be putting the links out for those as they come up. They're in English, with Japanese dialogue or, excuse me, chinese dialogue on the bottom, so people that speak English will be able to understand what's going on. So that's kind of it.
Speaker 2:I am absolutely enjoying taking care of the farm. I mean I really love my animals and what we've done here. I've got donkeys. I love donkeys. I may be getting a few more donkeys and it depends, but that's it. If people are interested, get me through Facebook If they're looking to ask me to come someplace and talk. That's the way to do it, more than any other way. But I'm at the point now where I just kind of want to enjoy life and the fruits of my labors and my wife's labors through the years and just hopefully help the next generation to take the science to a higher level.
Speaker 1:Well, Ken, I certainly can say I appreciate you and all the contributions you've made to my career and I'm sure you're going to influence and continue to influence the next generation. So thanks so much for coming on the show and I hope to see you again in the future.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, mike, it's been a blast. I'd love to talk to you anytime, so if you want to do this again in the future, if there's a calling or whatever you know how to reach me, be happy to do it.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining in this fascinating conversation with Ken. I always learn something from him and I'm looking forward to seeing him again in the future. And don't forget to head on over to aggressivedogcom for more information about helping dogs with aggression From the Aggression in Dogs Master Course to webinars from world-renowned experts and even an annual conference. We have options for both pet pros and pet owners to learn more about aggression in dogs. We also have the Help for Dogs with Aggression bonus episodes that you can subscribe to. These are solo shows where I walk you through how to work with a variety of types of aggression, such as resource guarding, dog-to-dog aggression, territorial aggression, fear-based aggression and much, much, much more. You can find a link to subscribe in the show notes or by hitting the subscribe button if you're listening in on apple podcasts. Thanks for listening and stay well, my friends.
Speaker 2:Bye.