The Bitey End of the Dog
A podcast dedicated to helping dogs with aggression issues. Michael Shikashio CDBC chats with experts from around the world on the topic of aggression in dogs!
The Bitey End of the Dog
Redefining Dog Aggression with Dr. Daniel Mills
In the season finale of The Bitey End of the Dog, we sit down with Dr. Daniel Mills, a leading authority in clinical animal behavior, to unearth the complexities of canine aggression. Dr. Mills challenges the conventional wisdom that labels dogs as aggressive, advocating instead for an objective observation of their behaviors.
Our journey continues with an exploration of the emotional lives of dogs, guided by the influential work of Jaak Panksepp. We discuss how miscategorizing aggression can lead to misunderstandings and ineffective solutions. Dr. Mills emphasizes the importance of distinguishing context, motivation, and emotion to address behavioral issues effectively. We also touch on the broader impact of training techniques, revealing how addressing emotional states like frustration can resolve a multitude of behavior problems!
About Daniel:
"I am a RCVS, European and ASAB recognised specialist in clinical animal behaviour, as such I have been developing and exploring new interventions for behaviour problems, such as: The use of semiochemicals to control the emotional reaction of animals (pheromonatherapy) The use of mirrors to control stereotypic weaving in horses Psychometric profiling of animal behaviour Over the last 25 years, I have led the development of what has become known as the "Psychobiological approach" to clinical animal behaviour at Lincoln. This synthesises contemporary behavioural biology and psychology with neuroscience to develop a systematic scientific approach to the assessment of problem behaviour in animals. I still consult at the University Animal Behaviour Clinic (https://animalbehaviourclinic.lincoln.ac.uk/) I have a strong research interest in the comparative psychology underpinning problem behaviour, particularly emotionality and how this contributes to individual differences. This links both my applied and fundamental research, for example by examining how we and non-human animals recognise and respond to the emotional state of another More recently I have had opportunities to scientifically explore my interests in the potential value of our relationships with animals. My research in this area focuses on the benefits from pet keeping using a multidisciplinary approach, for example collaborations with biologists, health care professionals, psychologists, lawyers and economists. Recent projects include: The effect of pet dogs on human health and well-being Investigations into animal emotion Semiochemical signals in the dog Improving performance in scent detection dogs External influences on human decision makign that impact animal welfare In 2022 I was listed by Stanford University in their data base of the top 1% of cited scientists globally. In addition to accepting students on funded projects (generally advertised on th
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In the season finale of the Bitey End of the Dog, I have the honor of chatting with none other than Dr Danny Mills. Danny is someone I could talk to for hours and hours and we have a more free-flowing conversation in this episode on everything from the definition of aggression in his mind to the emotions of dogs to effective neuroscience. He truly is someone with a lifetime of insight and experience and I'm sure you're going to enjoy this episode. Danny is an RCVS, european and ASAP recognized specialist in clinical animal behavior and has been developing and exploring new interventions for behavior problems, such as the use of semiochemicals to control the emotional reactions of animals. Over the last 25 years, he has led the development of what has become known as the psychobiological approach to clinical animal behavior at Lincoln. This synthesizes contemporary behavioral biology and psychology with neuroscience to develop a systematic scientific approach to the assessment of problem behavior in animals. He also consults at the University Animal Behavior Clinic.
Speaker 1:In 2022, he was listed by Stanford University in their database of the top 1% of sighted scientists globally, and if you are enjoying the bitey end of 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.
Speaker 1: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 really 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 we have a guest that I've been trying to get in touch with for a long time. I think it'd be easier to get hold of the Beatles than it is for me to get hold of Daniel Mills. Dr Daniel Mills is here to join us and I'm really excited to jump right into this conversation. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you for the invite. Sorry if I'm harder to get hold of than people who are dead. Not a good start, is it?
Speaker 1:Well, you're obviously in high demand and I appreciate you taking the time. I know how busy you are. I was reviewing some of the papers that you've written and didn't realize just how many you've had. I mean hundreds of papers and studies that you've done, which is just amazing and so important to us as trainers and folks like me that are practitioners in the field to be able to extrapolate the science that you're able to research and find out for the rest of us. So thank you for the work you're doing. Let's start off really quickly. I have had a lot of different guests on the show with different lenses of science, coming from different backgrounds, and I kind of like to ask the question how do you define aggression? If you had an elevator pitch, somebody's asking like Daniel, how do you define aggression? What would it?
Speaker 2:be so, perhaps controversially. I don't think of aggression as a behavior.
Speaker 1:There we go that got you straight away, didn't it?
Speaker 2:of behavior. There we go. That got you straight away, didn't it? To me, aggression is somebody's interpretation of behavior, because it's basically somebody reporting that they think that harm is going to happen from what they're observing. Whether or not that's the case is another matter, and that's one of the big problems with studying aggression. I think that people often think it's a behavior, but when we've looked at the literature and the way that people do the research, sometimes they don't define it and for some people aggression means a bite, other people it means a growl. If you're playing with a dog and he happens to catch his tooth on you and draws blood, people say, well, that's aggressive, well, it can be.
Speaker 2:So I've actually made a large chunk of my career out of looking how we use words and trying to just get some standardization into it, because we often make the assumption that when somebody uses a term, they're using it in the same way as us, and it's a big, big problem in relation to behavior, I think, and behavior conditions right across the board, not just with aggression, things like separation, anxiety, as well what it actually means, and we have got to be really, really careful.
Speaker 2:So I talk about aggressive behavior and I try and I know I still slip into it. But I try and avoid the word aggression itself because it makes people think that it's a defined behavioral unit that you can link to a particular stimulus or anything like that, and I think that's misleading. As I said, aggressive behavior is a style of behavior. It's a way of responding to a particular situation in a certain circumstance and often it's somebody's interpretation the observer's, you know, a third party, or sometimes it's the person who's the victim or potential victim, or feel that they're going to be the potential victim even if they're not, and that you know. I think failure to recognize that can lead to all sorts of problems.
Speaker 1:I agree, actually, and you know now that you've kind of dove into that a little bit more, even though my website is called aggressivedogcom, I try to actually avoid using those terms aggression or aggressive when describing a dog. You know, and like you, I'd rather just focus on the actual observable behaviors, because the interpretations when people start labeling things like that can really be unfair for the dog, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you touch on the second point, which is the aggressive dog. And as soon as you label the dog, then people see everything that dog does through that lens. It's an aggressive dog and I know we're probably going to end up talking about dangerous dogs at one point. But immediately everything that a dog does gets labeled as being done because that dog is an aggressive dog done because that dog is an aggressive dog. And when it does things that ordinary dogs do well, people still see it as well it's because he's an aggressive dog.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you're familiar. There's the classic experiment by Rosenhan where he got some of his students to go into psychiatric hospitals saying that they could hear noises and after that they were to behave normally and they kept notes and he wanted to see how long it took for them to get discharged. Well, after several months he had to go and rescue some of them because everything they did then was seen through them having mental illness and people couldn't see the normality of it. And the same will go with an aggressive dog. You know, once somebody labels that dog as aggressive, then everything it does, every time he makes the slightest little groan or anything like that, he's always growling and you know that's because he's nasty and it all becomes that sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Speaker 2:I think one of the things you know about as humans, we naturally fall into a thing called confirmation bias. It's where we see what we want to. That proves our point. It's where we see what we want to. That proves our point as a scientist, what I try and do not always successfully, but you try and step back from that and you try and look for the evidence that can disprove an idea and that's how you make the progress sort of. Well, I know it can't be that you can never prove your point in science. Science is always about dealing with uncertainty, never dealing with certainty. So you know, just that sort of nudging things along and trying to make those incremental changes and not just seeing what you want to see.
Speaker 1:I already like where this conversation is going, because the way you're framing this is we really need to empathize more with the dogs to understand truly what's going on versus what we're labeling them. That creates that bias that you were just talking about. So let's dive into that a little bit further the reasons for aggressive behavior that we might witness in animals and I've really been looking at emotions in dogs you know, much more so over the last five to 10 years than I would have earlier on in my career because I'd focused much on behavior and sort of a behavior analytics standpoint, looking at just the observable behaviors and not really thinking too much about the underlying reasons or motivations as much as I do now, especially with emotions. So in your book Dog Bites, which I actually have on my desk here, you have a number of other wonderful authors in that book, so it's a great reference for anybody listening in. Get that book Dog Bites, because it's got some fascinating read. Just don't read it while you're eating lunch, because there's some pretty gory pictures in there.
Speaker 2:be warned, unfortunately.
Speaker 1:the bit on fatal dog attacks yes yes, but you do talk about emotions, and from an effective neuroscience model as well. You had mentioned some of Pangsepp's work, which I often reference when I'm talking about emotions, but is that sort of similar to what you're focusing on now? Are you still seeing emotions in dogs the same way?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, science makes progress and I had the good fortune of meeting Jack Pangsepp a number of times and he's a very inspirational figure. One of his most remarkable achievements was he brought respectability to talking about emotions in animals and it might surprise people, you know, until 1998, when he published the first edition of that dog it was considered bad science. A lot of the time to talk about this. What I've been trying to do over the last 25 years or so is trying to develop a more systematic approach, exactly because of some of the issues that we've already touched on. When I looked at the sort of literature on dog aggression in particular, what I saw was that people were using a number of terms as if they were different forms of aggression, when actually they represented different psychological constructs, and let me just explain what I mean by that. So somebody might say that this dog has got football-related aggression, he's got possessive aggression and he's got frustration-related aggression, as if they're three different things, whereas protecting the football tells you the context. The protectiveness is the motivation and the frustration is the emotion that is linked to protectiveness in that situation, and it can be linked with other emotions. We're not ever in one emotional state. There's always a mixture of them, and you know, the first thing that I really wanted to do was try to separate those things out so that you know we recognize when we're talking about context, ie the situation in which it occurs. We recognize when we're talking about motivation, and that is what the specific goal of the behavior is. We use an adapted version of applied behavioral analysis, as a lot of people do there. However, the step that we make that is different is the sort of thing that will make applied behaviors turn in their grave, which is we use that not to identify or just look at the contingencies. We use it to make the inference of the internal psychological state, the motivation. What is the motivational state of the animal? And that's important because that becomes a hypothesis that we can test. We say, well, if it is trying to protect, then we predict this, let's test that and let's see what goes on.
Speaker 2:The issue of emotion so what emotions are unlike? People sometimes talk about emotivations as if they're the same thing, and I see them as something quite different when you think about the organization of behavior. The emotions first of all. They tell you about what is important, they set what is important to you as an individual. And emotions is what makes individuals different. Two things we value them differently.
Speaker 2:We look at that dog. We look at that dog differently. He belongs to you. You know he's your dog. I might think he's a cute dog. You love him. Yeah, they're different. It's the same dog but it's processed and that's what the emotion does and it sets the tone for the behaviors that we do in relation to that particular stimulus.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, the problem is that these are internal psychological states that we can't measure directly and people say, oh well, you know it's unscientific to do that. Well, you know what? I've never seen an atom or a higgs boson, but people can study it scientifically and they invest a lot of money on it. So just because you can't access something directly, we need to get over this idea that it can't be studied scientifically. I think that it's important to understand emotional states.
Speaker 2:Sometimes we get a dog and they've got a range of behavior problems and you can see that they're all related to frustration. So if I address the frustration of the dog, the problems disappear. I don't have to address every single problem, whereas if the dog is very food bowl protective and it's the only thing that he's aggressive over then, yeah, treat the behavior, treat the motivation, don't worry so much about the emotion. And that's the beauty of that sort of approach, that it gives you that level of insight. You know that you can start to develop protocols that make sense at a emotional level or at a specific behavioral level.
Speaker 2:Again, going back to what we were saying earlier about people seeing what they want to see, any given behavior therapy, we don't know exactly how it works and it's easy to frame it according to what your belief system is. That's all, well, do that. And it works because of this? Well, we don't know, it works, great. But it's only by testing it in a range of situations do we start to say, actually, you know what? That's changing the emotion, that's not just changing the motivation. We talk about developing things like impulse control exercises. Impulse control exercises are about reducing impulsivity across the board, and some of the work that we've done, where we've trained the animals using some of the exercises, we see that they become less impulsive in areas which they've never been trained to, and that shows you that it's having this effect on the general behavioral tendency rather than just addressing particular motivations, and it becomes much more efficient that way yes, there's a lot I want to unpack there.
Speaker 1:Well, first, I'm feeling very validated because I talk about emotions a lot in my presentations, especially some of the negative, balanced emotions and the sort of motivations for some aggressive responses. So fear or, if we're looking at a pancest work, the systems of fear, or maybe rage or anger, probably the two most common underlying emotions or systems, I should say, for the cases I see, and then we could talk about some of the other systems, or positive balance, or seeking, which I wouldn't actually put into the aggressive category or the aggressive behavior category, so like predation, or a dog guarding their livestock or something like that. Can you give me a few of your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:So okay, let me give you the controversial one. First of all, there is an argument, a philosophical argument, to say that aggression is not related to fear.
Speaker 1:I've heard that.
Speaker 2:And let me unpack that for you then, because, if you think about it, when an animal is scared, it wants to avoid harm. That's what fear is about, you know, preventing harm. Fight and flight and freeze are the three Fs that are often talked about in that situation. Well, flight takes you out of harm's way. Freeze and the important thing with freeze is freeze is not the same as behavioral inhibition, and I think people confuse that, but I'll come back to that one later. But freezing, the purpose of freezing is not to be detected and not to provoke. Yeah, fight means those safe strategies are not working. So therefore I have to defend myself. It happens when frustration kicks in on top of the fear. So the aggression itself, whilst it has its root in being in fear, the actual control processes for the aggressive acts may well lie much more closely aligned with frustration. Because I can't escape, I need to take some control of the situation, which is what frustration is about autonomy. Therefore, I have to defend myself. So pure fear, some people may argue, doesn't result in aggression. It's when I've got no escape I am frustrated, whilst I'm scared.
Speaker 2:Again, picking up on the Panksepp thing, people sometimes think oh well, the animal's in one of these emotions. Our brain is made up of living cells. All our emotions are active. They're held in control by inhibition. And again, you know one of the things that sometimes falls out from the behaviors approach. People think about stimulus response and they think about behaviors being triggered and stimulated. No behaviors happen because the inhibition is released. So those things are all there. Those emotions are there. It's just a question of how intense they are. In fact, I've got the thing at the moment which a friend of mine is building of a dog brain, which is all these different colors which represent different emotions, and you change the brightness according to the state of the dog's head, and I think it's a great way of actually visualizing what we mean when we're talking about emotional states in animals.
Speaker 1:I want to kind of jump off that question too, because I'm sure you're approached with many different new technologies and strategies for assessing all kinds of things in science. But especially when it comes to emotions, Do you see anything on the forefront where it's going to help us as practitioners or scientists to assess truly what's going on? So kind of thinking of Dr Greg Byrne's work with the MRI scans, those kinds of tools. Do you see anything else on the horizon that's going to say, okay, this dog is probably experiencing this emotion.
Speaker 2:So I'm involved in some work at the moment with colleagues at the University of London and the University of Cambridge where we're looking at mobile EEGs so looking at brainwaves, and we can do it in a remote way and we can look at synchronization of EEGs between dogs and their owners. Now this is an ambitious project. If it works, then I think that will be quite interesting to look to see, because there is this idea of emotional contagion and how dogs may potentially manipulate situations in order to unify the emotional states. I'm not saying they're thinking about any of these things, but it's just what they do. You know you try to operate in a happy emotional situation. Life's better for you in that and that seems to be sort of a dog's mission in life. The technology is there and we could do it. What we don't have is the investment. That's the problem is. Just before COVID we actually got some funding from the European Union for somebody to look at developing a whole battery of physiological measures that we're going to try and triangulate different emotional states in dogs. Covid hit we couldn't access owners and their dogs and unfortunately, you know it was really soul destroying for that poor researcher and you know she's pretty much left the field now. It's a real shame I mean, we made some good progress there and when we think about emotion, that there's so many different elements of it. So you're probably aware, you know we did stuff on. First of all, one of the experiments that we did was to demonstrate that dogs must have some sort of concept of emotion in their head, and it's become quite an important piece of work just trying to show that they have some categorization, have some concept of emotion. To what degree they think about it is a different issue. We, then, have done a fair bit of work, starting to look at the communication of emotions, which is another element of it.
Speaker 2:I have a phd student at the moment who's looking at the idea of the importance of regulation of emotion, because that's another important property that you can. You use various mechanisms. In fact, I was talking to one of my other students earlier this afternoon and talking to her about what we call auto communication, so the idea that you give signals out that are for your benefit and help you in regulation, and they help to regulate your emotions. So she's actually studying cats and we're talking about rubbing and how that information may actually help reassure.
Speaker 2:I don't know about you. But you know, if I go to a hotel and it's all pristine, first thing I do is empty my suitcase or backpack and just spread stuff around so there's more familiar stuff for me to look at and I feel more reassured and less at sea, and you know that sort of auto communication. But it serves an important role as far as regulating our emotions go, because you're in this strange room that seems just too sterile and you want to make it more familiar and make yourself more relaxed as a result. And it's not an area that we've really looked at and I think partly because we've not given emotions the attention that they deserve. But now that we are starting to consider emotions much more, then we can start to think of communication, not just in relation between two individuals, but also the things we do that help us regulate our emotions, which can include elements of auto-communication.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it's something as trainers. We talk about it all the time, but do we really know? So we talk about things like displacement behaviors or even, well, calming signals is a debatable term, but in terms of you know the dogs calming themselves or trying to calm somebody else, which is again debatable. But we talk about it all the time, but we don't really know for sure if that's truly what the dog's intent is. Are they trying to self-regulate? Are they doing it for themselves? Are they doing it to communicate to something in the environment? Right?
Speaker 2:yeah, so one of the things again you know, the more I've studied dogs and dog cognition and I've increasingly saying this that the more I think that dogs are not very smart, and what I mean by that and I say that deliberately, to be provocative and just make sure- anyone is drifting off at this stage. Thought what I hope they're not just switching off.
Speaker 2:But dogs do not, I don't think, do that much by way of thinking. What they do is. They're incredibly perceptive. Now they do very human-like behaviors, but not with the rational thought I think that humans use. They're very in tune to emotion. I don't think that requires them to actually analyze it, and I think one of the traps that we easily fall into is because we're capable of rational thought.
Speaker 2:We think that most of our behavior is controlled by rational thought. That's not the case. I mean, it's quite clearly not. But most decisions we make are actually made for us and our brain decides to make us aware of a few of them. If you're driving along and somebody steps out, you say, well, I put my foot on the brake because I saw somebody step out. No, before you were aware, you process that somebody has stepped out. Your foot had already moved to the brake, your brain had made those decisions and then bothered to tell you, create a little bit of consciousness that you're aware of that, and actually responding in that sort of time allows you to respond very, very quickly in emergency situations. And whilst we can act rationally, I think a lot of the time we don't. We are driven by our emotions and we go for those sort of very overt associations, and that's a very efficient way of operating most of the time. Now, if it's a dangerous situation, then we do need to slow down. We do need to think about things because the cost of getting it wrong.
Speaker 2:I'm naturally an optimist, for whatever reason. That's just sort of the way that I've developed and I've been very successful. I've been very fortunate in the people that I've known and the people that have helped me in my career. Being an optimist means that you're very good at potentially exploiting resources if they're there, but what it means is I'm really bad at judging risk. I've nearly been killed multiple times. I've been run over. I've nearly drowned twice in the space of about 10 minutes because I did exactly the same thing again after the first time. I've fallen run over. I've nearly drowned twice in the space of about 10 minutes because I did exactly the same thing again after the first time. I've fallen from heights because I misjudged things. I've had a gun pulled on me. I do not recommend the strategy of laughing at the person who pulled the gun, but it worked because I couldn't believe that it was happening.
Speaker 2:I'm really poor at that because I tend to be fairly spontaneous and, yeah, I open my mouth and I say things that perhaps I don't really mean but I'm thinking of at the time, you know, and that can get me into hot water. But so you know different traits and different personalities, and whether or not you think things through vary with the environment and the circumstances. I can stop and think well, I think I can, otherwise I wouldn't be able to write the papers that I write. But most of the time I'm just operating in this free world where I'm just drifting from one thing to another and just enjoying it. And dogs, I think, are very perceptive. They're very good at picking up on cues. They like happy people. Happy people are good for you. If you're a dog, the chances are there's something in it for you if somebody is smiling. However, angry people are generally not good news. Now, the dog doesn't have to know that it's angry, he just has to say this is not the situation that you know, that I want and I will try and do something about it. So, depending on who the individual is, dogs will respond differently with an angry person or where there's negative emotion.
Speaker 2:In some situations, if, for example, you've got an owner, you know who's trying to get their dog to recall and they're screaming at their dog to come here and eventually the dog comes, screaming at their dog to come here, and eventually the dog comes. The dog keeps himself about two meters away and he does that for a number of reasons. Two meters is about the personal distance of a dog and it means that you're out of my personal space, but it's also a safe distance. And as the owner goes to grab the dog, to chuck him on the lead, because they're absolutely fuming that the dog has been chasing rabbits, what does the dog do? He runs off. And he runs off as an act of play. What he's trying to signal is and they say doesn't it take any great thought? But you're my human that I hang around with. You've said come, but everything else in you is saying you'd better stay away from me. So maybe if I use play, then we can all be happy and I can bring the system back into balance.
Speaker 2:However, if you've got a situation whereby you've got a dog in a home and two people are arguing, whether that's teenagers or the two owners these people the dog has a bond with how am I going to resolve this? Well, the dog might just take himself off. But dogs don't understand what's going on in an argument. They pick up on the tension and some dogs will say, well, I'm going to try and resolve this, so I'll go and bite one of them and then we'll make up. And from a dog's point of view, sometimes you bite and then you make up, because it just resolves the tension and it moves things on. And that's why, you know, sometimes people get bitten by their own dog, often having an argument with somebody else in the house. All the dog is trying to do is just trying to create some stability in that situation. So it doesn't involve great thought. It's just a question of responding to relatively simple situations or being in tune with certain situations.
Speaker 2:There's a lovely bit of work that was done quite a few years ago now you may well have seen it of some dots on a screen and one dot is one color and then there's four or five dots that are a different color and basically when you watch it it looks like these dots are basically hunting the bigger dot, let's say the red dot, and it very much predicts, yeah, this sort of hunting movements when you've got wolves with a deer or something like that. But all it requires is that the yellow dots are attracted to the red dot and they try to maximize the distance from themselves. So what you get is you initially get pursuit and then, as they get closer, so they start to fan out and eventually they circle. Well, if you add another rule, which is, if you're at the head end, you bite the throat, you're hunting. It doesn't involve any communication between the individuals.
Speaker 2:It looks like such an intelligent thing and we would say, oh well, look, they're coordinating themselves and the way they do it. But you just need very simple rules and you don't need, let's say, the complexity that we sometimes impose and sometimes people say, oh, you know, isn't it? Don't you find it sort of depressing if it's like unmasking the magician? And I think no, actually, when I see how a trick is done, I actually think that is so, how somebody thought that, that, how to do that. I find it just as amazing, and I find it just as amazing that you can do things with really simple rules without having to be complicated about things.
Speaker 1:Yes, and it's got me thinking. Do you think you know in terms of dogs' thought processes and how much they can actually think through problem solving something? Do you think dogs are capable of deception or lying?
Speaker 2:Can you define for me deception and lying there we?
Speaker 1:go let's. Maybe we should use an example. We've seen videos.
Speaker 2:If you're on social media.
Speaker 1:You might see it. You know, the owner comes home and they see the mess on the floor and there's two dogs and the owner's like you know who did this? And then one dog will like poke the other dog or put their paw over the other dog as to say it was them. Right now, obviously there's a lot of other ways to look at that. Yeah, something like that where dog is maybe purposely trying to shift their owner's behavior through their actions, but it's actually, in a way, deception.
Speaker 2:I don't have a problem with the idea that they manipulate their owner's behavior for their benefit. So you know, it's a little bit like the issue of jealousy. Yes, yeah, is the dog jealous or is it sensitive to reward inequity? So you know, the classic experiment that was done is you train a dog to give you its paw with a piece of kibble yeah, and the dog reliably gives its paw when you ask it. You train another dog to give its paw in response to a liver treat, and the dog reliably gives its paw in response to the liver treat. Both dogs perform really well until you bring them together and you get the dog that you've trained with the kibble to give you the paw on command. He gives the paw, you the kibble to give you the paw on command, he gives the paw. You get the other dog to give you the paw and he gets a liver treat. And then you go back to the first dog and he says what, hang on, he's getting the liver treat. Now. You can anthropomorphize that all you like, but actually they are sensitive to that. Now. That has real practical value.
Speaker 2:And actually a number of years ago I had a master student look at this in puppy classes. Because what happens if one person is training with cheese and one person's training with kibble? The person who's training with kibble, are they having a harder time training their dogs? We started to look at it and we didn't publish it. It's a shame because it's a beautiful piece of work. It's just it needed a fair bit of work to get it ready for publication. But we did find evidence that the dogs in the classes that were receiving the lower value rewards might be affected by the observation or something that was going on with other dogs receiving higher rewards. Now there has been work which suggests that it's not about reward inequity, it's about the inaccessibility of reward that affects it. But I mean, that's a more sort of nuanced scientific issue.
Speaker 2:The important thing, I think, from a practical point of view, is, yeah, the dogs behave differently. Exactly why they do it? And that's a much harder question to answer and we mustn't jump to a conclusion, because the problem is, if we jump to the conclusion, then we set our expectations for the dogs. We have to recognize yeah, the dogs do this, dogs behave differently here. Let's just accept that without reading too much into it. Or, if we do, start to generalize it because we believe it's for a particular idea. We have to approach that with an open mind and say, if, if I tried in this situation, if he doesn't respond, then actually it might well be that my belief in why he's doing it is wrong, not that the dog is being nasty or anything like that.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's something that comes up quite often in my intra-household dog-dog aggression cases when the client might assign jealousy or some other reason and competition over a particular resource. But it is something you can notice when one dog is not receiving the same resource as the other or it's a different level of value that you start to have problems and sometimes we witness frustration type behaviors from the dog not getting those particular reinforcers. So it's an interesting conversation we're getting into here because it matters in our aggression case, especially if it's an intra household case. I think, going along exactly what you're saying, just to recognize the context or recognize that this is happening, what can we do to adjust it? Be careful about what we assign for the actual reasoning. Would that seem like the right thing I'm saying there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we try to recognize and acknowledge the emotions of the animals.
Speaker 2:We're not saying that we know what's going on in their head, we're not saying we know how they feel either, but it allows us to generate hypothesis that we can test in the real world and, as I said, develop treatments that are potentially more effective.
Speaker 2:And it allows us potentially then to predict risk better if we recognize that this is not something that is just controlled by a particular stimulus, but if we recognize that this is not something that is just controlled by a particular stimulus, but if we recognize that, yeah, the animal perhaps struggles with this particular emotion. That's why we developed a number of the temperament scales that we've developed in order to look at behavioral predisposition, because if the animal has got that predisposition as you know, a dog that is scared of something specific you can train it to desensitize it to that particular stimulus, counter condition it as well, and that's fine. But if the dog is also temperamentally fearful, then it's almost certainly going to relapse. So your whole strategy of how you manage the dog in the future needs to bear that in mind, and it might be then that you need to think much more seriously about the use of medication to prevent the risk of relapse and help the dog generally cope and, yeah, improve the resilience of the dog.
Speaker 1:Very well said and I'm going to take a quick moment to hear a word from our sponsors and when we come back I want to talk more about kind of the issues we're seeing with aggression cases in general and are we seeing an increase, are we seeing about the same and what factors are influencing those things? So we'll be right back. Thanks for tuning in and I hope you are enjoying this episode. I have a very special offer that I am announcing again just before the Aggression and Dogs conference this year. You've heard me talk about the Aggression and Dogs master course on this podcast and for a limited time, to celebrate the fifth annual conference, I'm going to launch a bundle offer that includes the course and a whopping 28 webinars from the world's foremost experts on aggression. Yes, that's all of the webinars. The webinars alone would typically cost more than $900 to purchase together, but I'm including them for free in this special bundle deal with the all-new Aggression and Dogs Master Course. That's right. I've updated the Master Course in 2024 with the latest advances in modern training and understanding of behavior. Webinars include how to break up a dog fight, assessing canine posture and movement, the genetics of aggression, dog to cat aggression, dog to child directed aggression and treat and retreat with some of the most respected behavior pros in our field, including Suzanne Clothier, grisha Stewart, dr Amy Cook, dr Christina Spaulding, laura Monaco-Torelli, jen Shryock, trish McMillan, dr Tim Lewis, just to name a few. You'll receive 28 webinars, the master course, live group mentor sessions and access to the private Facebook group a value of over $3,000, all for just the price of the master course, which is $595. There will only be 50 bundles available in this offer and I'm going to drop a link to the bundle in the show notes for this episode. The offer will expire on October 31st 2024, which is just two weeks after the conference, though the bundle typically sells out quickly, so please take advantage. If you are interested, head on over to the show notes for this episode in the podcast platform you're listening to and click on the Aggression in Dogs Master Course and Expert Webinar Bundle link.
Speaker 1:All right, we're back here with Dr Daniel Mills. We've been chatting about a lot of really interesting topics, but I want to dive now into, you know, post-pandemic a lot of trainers have been talking about. Are we seeing an increase in aggression cases? The general synopsis is yes, we're seeing a significant increase, or is it just because of, maybe, where we're getting the dogs from more media coverage, more talking about it, more blaming it on the pandemic. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think, at least in the UK? What are you seeing there? Are you seeing an increase in the number of cases of aggression or is it about the same?
Speaker 2:in your experience, Well, most of the cases we see in the clinic are aggression cases, so it's difficult to increase but the impression that we've gotten, as it happens, this summer I have a student who's going to look at this specifically. She's going to look at the cases that we've been seeing the phrase pandemic pups and we certainly seem to be seeing a pattern there. Now it seems that I don't know whether it's more frequent, but certainly we got the impression that it's more severe now. Is it because these dogs are not well socialized and there's an issue there? Is it the stress that owners were under when they were looking after? And this is?
Speaker 2:You know, it's so easy to latch onto one explanation, but we're going to be looking at the cases that we saw during the pandemic. We're going to be looking at the cases that we see now, the cases before the pandemic, trying to control for age of the puppies. Are we seeing more younger dogs? My feeling is I think we are. Historically we tend to see animals after several years that the problem's been going on. We're seeing many more. Is it because owners are better informed? I don't know, but I don't think we know the full extent to which the pandemic has affected all of us, dogs as well as humans. I think we are probably seeing more, and I think we are probably seeing more and I think we're seeing a slightly different profile in the nature of it and you know, their ability to regulate their emotions and the nature of the aggressive behavior that we're seeing in particular types of dogs.
Speaker 1:we see a lot of cockapoos why do you think we're seeing it's more intense at a younger age, if I'm paraphrasing that correctly, or do you think it's a function of where we're getting the dogs, the breeding practices? I know last time I was out in the uk they were seeing more dogs brought in from different countries and some of the romanian street dogs and things like that. Do you think that's a factor as well?
Speaker 2:yeah, we have a. We do have a big issue with potentially Romanian street dogs and things like that. Do you think that's a factor as well? Yeah, we do have a big issue with, potentially with street dogs and I do understand the reason why people like to rescue of these dogs. But one of the reasons we get a dog is because the emotion of it. The problem is when we think with our heart rather than our head, we don't necessarily make good decisions. As I I said, I make some pretty poor decisions in those situations. So issues like the street dogs and certainly pre-pandemic, that was a really big issue.
Speaker 2:People were rescuing in inverted commas dogs from the streets of romania. Now, I fully understand that. You know a dog that walks the streets in romania could easily get run over. But if you think you're rescuing it when you take it off the street and keep it within four walls for eight, 10 hours a day, I don't think that's actually rescuing it. That's taking it from Romania and changing the risks the dog faces and imposing other stressors in that situation. They're not adapted. They're used to having that much more freedom. In fact, when I first graduated as a vet, I worked in a place called Plymouth, in the Southwest of this country and a couple of doors down there were a couple who came from Liverpool and it was very much a cultural thing for people in Liverpool around about that time that when you went to work you, your dog out on the street it'd be cruel to leave your dog shut up during the day. And this couple were from liverpool and they used to do that with the dog and I think your dog's gonna get run over and I said, what else would we do? This is pre-dog sitters being widely available or anything like that. And you think, well, actually you know they got a point there. You know, if the dog is streetwise, does it have a better life? We've got, you know, dog wardens and whatever. But it's an interesting sort of scenario giving them that much more freedom, and certainly being in the home and not having control can be really problematic for a lot of dogs that they will struggle in those situations.
Speaker 2:So we did look at what happened when the pandemic happened and we looked at people both in the uk and the us, worked with a number of colleagues in the us to help us gather the data and it just did seem that as lockdown happened, the dogs started to get frustrated and they got increasingly frustrated as time went on. Now I've had another student again we've not it, but she looked at what happened when people started to go back to work. Interestingly, what she seemed to find and we need to look more closely at the data is we got problems again. So going back to work didn't solve the problem and it seems that actually the really big issue for dogs was the change. So when people stayed at home more, it wasn't that they were at home more, it was the fact that there was a change in the routines, a big change in the routines.
Speaker 2:This is my take on it at the moment and I know other people have got studies going and it may not be right, but as far as I can tell, it looks like when lockdown happened, that was a big change. That caused a lot more frustration in the dogs. People were at home for a while, assuming they got over that first hurdle. Then there was an increased risk with time spent at home, the quality of the relationship. They started to get tension with increased time in that situation. Then, when they went back to work, when you think, oh well, you know those frustrations will be relieved. No, it's another big change in the routine, another big risk period at that moment as well.
Speaker 2:So there was a lot of unscrupulous breeding that went on during the pandemic as well, and maybe that's one of the reasons why we're also seeing increased problems as well. So I think we should resist the urge to just hang it on one particular explanation. There's a whole myriad of factors that went on. People were stressed, people were out of work, not necessarily being able to get benefits or anything like that. It was an incredibly stressful time. I don't think we've seen the worst of it yet, especially when it comes to children.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely a couple of ways. I want to go with the next part of this conversation. I'm just trying to think of the one that's the best, because there's two. I'm being kind of selfish and I want, for my own information, to hear your answer.
Speaker 1:But you know, when you think about the behavior problems that we see with dogs in modern society and you think about with some locations of street dogs obviously being the exception, but the vast majority of dogs on the planet not being necessarily owned or being contained in a particular environment, they have much more agency in their environment, in their world.
Speaker 1:We don't see the levels of behavior problems in those dogs. Now, again, it it could be location-specific, depending on their environment, depends on how the culture treats dogs, but most of the time you're gonna see very behaviorally healthy dogs, maybe not physically healthy because of being hit by a car, but even then, the other part of the argument is our breeding practices. If we're breeding for shape and look versus function and health, pain underlying medical issues could also be influencing this problem we're seeing with pain-related aggression and things like that. So sort of a broad question just to get your thoughts on all of this. You know, in terms of what are we doing in modern society that can be creating many of these aggression issues that we may not necessarily see, or behavior problems in general? Not just aggression, but behavior problems, problems in general that we may not see in dogs that are in a more natural they're quote natural environment for those dogs so I think the first thing to appreciate is that the dogs in the natural environment, the free roaming dogs there is massive selective pressure going on.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, you don't see the problems because they're dead.
Speaker 1:No, nature takes care of that very efficiently.
Speaker 2:You know, the vast majority of free roaming dogs don't make it to three years old. Yeah, so that's the brutal reality there. One of the things which and again I'll just throw this out here I'm probably going to take on a new phd student. We're just checking that everything's going to work out and we're going to look at the issue of the concept of love with owners and how that translates to caring, because what we say and what we rationalize going back to being rational, you know what we say and what we rationalize and what we actually do I often don't meet up. In fact, one of the papers we published earlier this year, I I would love the title. A student came up with the title have you Seen this Drivel? And basically what we did is we went into social media groups and we went into the breed-related groups for different types of breeds and you know the title is just to be provocative and just to get people to read it. We say the most important thing in any scientific paper is the title, because that's all that most people will read. So if you try and catch them. But it's absolutely fascinating because what we found was that when you went into the groups like the Labradors and the German Shepherds, they have health problems. We were interested in how they discussed health problems and what they would do is they would talk about the health problems and the nature of them problems, and what they would do is they would talk about the health problems and you know the nature of them, and it was very much about, well, these are the issues and this is what can be done. These are the options and there was a discussion about options very much more. When you went into the smaller dogs and we focused particularly on brachycephalic supply I'm not saying this is unique to brachycephalics you saw some of the same, but you saw much, much more social support. You know, you poor thing, as soon as somebody said they've got this problem with animals, there's much more emotion in the whole situation.
Speaker 2:Now, one of the things we're doing at the moment is we're trying to work out why some of the campaigns welfare organizations have launched to try and regulate or reduce the popularity of dogs with breathing problems, brachycephalics that have not been bred. Well, you know, first of all, I love pugs. I have a life-size pug. Actually, I've not got it in this room because I love pugs, they find them so cute, but I won't get one, because I can just about, with my rational brain, say no, it's not a good thing to do, the risks are too great. There are some very responsible breeders who will breed good dogs, but there are also some people who will exploit.
Speaker 2:And what we think is going on is that when you do a campaign, you tell people these dogs have these problems and therefore we shouldn't be breeding them. Okay, which seems a very reasonable argument which most people can say. Yeah, I can relate to that. You know, if you said that if you took a different species, you know, would it be right to breed an animal where there was this risk of these harms? Most people would say no, it's not the right thing to do. However, if you are attracted to these dogs and there's lots of reasons why you'll be attracted to these dogs there's a deep biological reason.
Speaker 2:Some of the facial features we find intrinsically attractive, they remind us of some of the childlike features. But even things like poor gait, being lame, actually may bring out the nurturing in us. Poor gait, being lame, actually may bring out the nurturing in us. So when somebody says these dogs have these problems, they don't hear these animals have these problems. This is a welfare problem. They hear these dogs are suffering, they need special care. I like these dogs, therefore I ought to get one, because they need special care and I'm a loving person. And so the campaigns have the complete opposite effect of what you would predict. And that's the difference between being rational and being emotional. When you process information emotionally, it takes on a completely different path through our brains. You know, it still makes perfect sense, but it's just not the outcome. And the danger sometimes, as scientists, is like economists. You know. Historically, economists just assumed for too long that people act rationally and then realized that no, they don't. Actually People go and buy stuff that's completely useless for them.
Speaker 1:Now, speaking of campaigns and maybe rational or irrational thoughts, can we talk about the XL bully ban? I think that's recently taken hold there and your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:I think it's desperately sad. That's my starting point, in fact I don't know how much time we've got. I nearly failed my veterinary degree because of the Dangerous Dogs Act. I was actually asked in my finals about a particular breed of dog and I thought, oh, dog behavior is one thing I can talk about, but I'll spare you the story for another time. But the problem that I have with the legislation?
Speaker 2:I have several problems with the legislation and I'll just outline a number of them to start with. Firstly, I have a moral problem with banning breeds. A breed is a group of individuals that share a particular characteristic, usually a particular visible characteristic, that tend to breed with each other. In humans we call it races. In dogs we call it breeds. In sheep we call if you ban breeds, you are racist. The two are the same. That to me is a problem that you distinguish between individuals on the basis of what they look like as opposed to what they've done.
Speaker 2:I have a number of other issues with it, in so much as in the uk, the legislation. Originally it came with a mandatory death sentence with no discrimination. Well, we don't have death sentences in this country as a rule. It also came that you were guilty until you prove your innocence. The burden of proof was on the owner to show that their dog was not of the type, which again is completely contrary to the legislation. So you know, there's a number of real problems, ethical problems I have with that legislation.
Speaker 2:Quite apart from that, I think there are a number of other issues with the legislation, not least of which is, as I said, the idea that first of all you've got to try and prove your dog is not of the type. Well, how are you supposed to do that Because of the type when we don't have a breed standard? I used to do an exercise with the students where I'd give them the American pit bull standard that was often used as being of the type and say you know, we could argue that if it's got over 50% of the characteristics listed here, then it is of the type. And a Dalmatian fits that. If your Dalmatian got seized and somebody said that's of the type, you'd have a real job trying to prove that it's not, in fact even a chihuahua, potentially you know, might meet the type, I don't know, but you can do it with real dogs, with a whole variety of dogs, and show that it's very difficult.
Speaker 2:So it's not a clear criterion. But the other real issue here is that labeling a dog as dangerous, as we mentioned earlier, as soon as you label a dog as dangerous, you see it in a certain way, but equally, from a public health point of view, you create the impression that some dogs are dangerous, which means that some breeds of dogs aren't, which completely undermines the idea of sensible behavior and safe behavior around dogs. I'm the youngest of five kids. My mom had five of us under the age of five. You know she didn't hang about when she got married. My two brothers were born first my two sisters. There was a gap about she lost one in between me and my sister. I had the dogs to play with.
Speaker 2:If I got bitten by the dogs it was my fault. You don't do that. Leave sleeping dogs lie. Every child getting bitten is a tragedy, absolutely.
Speaker 2:But to put the blame just on the dog is completely insane and does not encourage good behavior. So making it about the breed of the dog I'm not saying you know, genetics plays a role in behavior. But when we talk about breeds and breed related behavior, we're talking about averages, and that's the midpoint, if you like. Yeah, the variation around that is enormous. So just because it is a pit bull does not mean that it wants to kill you. Some of them do. Some chihuahuas want to kill you, some Dalmatians want to kill you. One of the most aggressive dogs that I had in the clinic that I can remember it's the only time I've had to drop physically on top of a dog was a golden retriever with a dietary allergy and it just had these explosive rages and in those days I used to have the students in the clinic with me and the dog had got hold of something on its way to the clinic and it just started to explode and I literally dropped on the dog to stop it from biting somebody.
Speaker 2:So you shouldn't make laws on the basis of averages and ban everybody of the type you know. As I said, that is racist. So that's where I come from. I'm not denying that there are genetic factors, but equally the idea that a ban is going to solve the problem is naive. And originally, you know, with the Dangerous Dogs Act, it was said oh well, these people are fighting dogs. Well, I don't know if you've ever seen a dog fight, but in the UK typically they might occur in something like a pub cellar. If your dog is remotely interested in people, your dog is going to lose the fight because the other dog will rip its throat out while it's busy looking at people, because the other dog will rip its throat out while it's busy looking at people. So it's a completely illogical link that dog fighting is linked to aggression towards people and you actually create a badge of having one of these types of dogs. So you create a market for a particular type of dogs.
Speaker 2:Yes, they're banning American bullies. Yes, they're banning American bullies. We will be back in five, 10 years time with the XXXL American Dr Bordeaux or something like that. They're going to go for something bigger and beefier and they'll just move on to something else. It's not going to solve the problem of irresponsible ownership. It's not going to protect people. Sadly, it's not going to encourage safe behavior and responsible ownership. So, sadly, I think it is just a political move which is going to harm people and harm dogs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we see kind of the mirroring of the issues here in the US with the banning of pit bulls in some small jurisdictions, which we are seeing, of course, are not working. You know, and I think you summed it beautifully with just saying, you know the irresponsible ownership and that's really the main problem. And when we look at most aggression cases, we sometimes see that in some of our cases where we're seeing something in the environment or something that people are doing, or somehow the people are breeding for certain things, you know, and I'm certainly not blaming the owners here- you know, I want to make sure that that clear.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and irresponsible ownership begins with irresponsible breeding. So it's not saying it's all about the environment. No, people are breeding dogs with horrendous characteristics and with certain tendencies. But, as I said, with anything you've got the average and you've got the variation around it. I don't know know if you know, a number of years ago we looked at Labradors compared to Border Collies and impulsivity and the interesting thing is, yeah, there was, on average, some differences between the breeds, but the really big difference was when you looked at the working lines versus the show lines. In the show lines there was very little difference between the two breeds. In the working lines there were. So, yes, you can breed for behavior, absolutely, but to think that behavior is determined by genes is so naive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love how we're talking about so many of these nuances and I want to take a step back, if you don't mind to. We were talking about the relationships, so the study of love, for instance, and how much our relationships with the animal in our care or the dog in our care is going to impact their behavior. So, looking at kind of the attachment theory or the different types of attachment broad question, I know, can you talk more about that as maybe in relation to the aggression cases where we see a particular attachment style or something going on in the relationship that typically impacts the likelihood of aggression from your observations?
Speaker 2:So again, it's not that complicated. If things are predictable as a dog, you've got an easy life. You know. If things are good and predictable, you've got an easy life. You know. If things are good and predictable, you've got an easy life. Now you want a degree of variety. I don't know very few people want to just lie on the beach all day, every day, for many years. You know it gets boring. After a while you want to read a book or something.
Speaker 2:So if everything is good, the natural state of the brain is to go and learn or play. You know and you learn through play and investigate. That's the default situation. So if you've got a secure attachment with your owner, you know you can depend on them, which means you can switch off a lot of the time. Now, if you've got an insecure attachment and there are many forms of insecure attachment, but if you've got an insecure attachment, depending on the type of insecurity, you may make the prediction that my owner is of no value to me when it comes to social support, in which case you become quite distant and you do your own thing and you don't take much by way of point of reference from the owners. The really harmful type of insecure relationship is when your owner is unpredictable. Sometimes they love you, sometimes they seem to hate you, and I think it's interesting and you've got to be very careful. But well, we've got some data which we are writing up and, who knows, by the time this comes out we might even have it submitted.
Speaker 2:But yeah, this style of attachment whereby, or caregiving, the owner is the caregiver rather than attachment, for me attachment has several different meanings, again, even within the scientific literature. But for me attachment is the bond between a care receiver and a caregiver, and I make the distinction between attachment styles so and a caregiver, and I make the distinction between attachment styles so. A dog is attached to its owner, or an infant is attached to its mother. The mother is not attached to the infant, she has a caregiver bond which has different characteristics. But if you look at the caregiving style that leads to insecure attachment in the care receiver in this case the dog, that inconsistency where sometimes they're raging and sometimes they're loving for want of a better term then they're the dogs that are really struggling because they don't know what's going to happen. And we know, for example, in children where they've got parents in that sort of situation, they're the ones that really struggle with mental health issues and that means that you're going to get a dog. If they are highly stressed in that situation, yeah, they're more likely to use aggressive behaviors, absolutely.
Speaker 2:As I said, the data we've got seems to indicate that as well. That that's where the problem is. Now we've got to be careful again. Just preface this, because correlation is not causation.
Speaker 2:But when you start to look at the literature on risk factors with aggressive behavior, people have focused on the use of punishment or aversives in dog training.
Speaker 2:One of the problems with a lot of that work is it's epidemiological.
Speaker 2:You know, if your dog is perfectly well behaved, you have no reason to use punishment.
Speaker 2:So you know it's not surprising that you see the relationship that dogs without behavior problems are less likely to have suffered from aversion. But some of the more nuanced studies what they're seeing to show is that people who use a mixture of methods, of using a lot of positive reinforcement and using aversive methods they're the dogs with the real problems, and that is very consistent with this idea. Now, as I said, there's a lot of caveats there and we would need more evidence, but on the balance of probabilities, I think that makes a lot of sense, and I think this is where we've got to be careful about that mixture. What the dog wants from the owner is that secure relationship, and if you engage in physical punishment of your dog, how do you expect your dog to trust you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's real problem, and what we need to be doing is teaching the dogs to do what we want to do and guiding them always towards that, and there just isn't the need to brutalize the dogs.
Speaker 1:Very well said, and you know I can agree more because I always talk about safety and the feeling of safety. You know the lack of safety or feeling safe breeds aggression in so many cases, and so if we're doing things to the dog where they're not going to feel safe from us, then it only makes sense that you know it's a higher likelihood of them to resort to aggression because they're not feeling safe.
Speaker 2:They've got to look after themselves and if they feel threatened, they've only got one way of looking after themselves. You know, they've got four walls, they cannot run away.
Speaker 1:Yes. So to wrap up here, I would love to get. Because you're somebody with so much experience and you've been in this industry for so long, studying dogs and so many facets, I feel old.
Speaker 1:So, I always ask you know, when I have somebody of your caliber that's had so many experiences just studying things at such a high degree, but in so many different, not just one particular topic. I mean I find it fascinating and the question I ask is if you have one takeaway from all of your life's work and experiences to help the dog guardians that might be experiencing, let's say, behavior problems or aggression issues, or they're trying to fix things with their dog. What would your takeaway be?
Speaker 2:I'm not sure if this quite answers the question, but I think one of the things that we don't say enough and I think isn't recognised enough is your dog needs a safe space in the home, and safe space is not a bolt hole. A bolt hole is somewhere you go hoping you will be safe, and we've developed protocols for what we call safe havens. A safe haven is somewhere you go knowing that you're going to be safe, so you have confidence, and it's a spot that you set aside and there's a number of features of it. I don't know whether I've got time to go through, but basically you never impose on the dog in that space. So the dog knows that if he goes there he's in control and he also knows that because he's in control, no harm will happen to him. So even if some scary stuff is happening around him, he is safe. And whilst we call it a safe haven, it is actually a very powerful tool for giving the dog some autonomy in the home and we see a lot of problems start to evaporate in that situation. So the dog that is scared of fireworks. He goes to a safe haven. He's not that happy, but he'll chew his toy and when the fireworks go, he'll stop and he'll startle. That's normal. It's a sudden noise, but he'll then go back to chewing his toy and that's so much easier to do set up a safe haven with the right rules than it is to desensitize a dog. Likewise, if you've got visitors, the dog takes himself off.
Speaker 2:The key things about a safe haven is it's clearly demarcated. The rule is when the dog is there, you do not impose on the dog. So you do not go and put the lead on him. You do not go and give him a treat. Now, if he's off his safe haven and he's in another room, you can put a treat in his safe haven for him to find. That's absolutely fine. But you do not impose yourself on your dog. If you want to go for a walk and your dog is in the safe haven, you can hold the lead and see if he chooses to come off. We don't say walkies. You give him the choice. He can see the lead. He knows what that means. But if you say walkies, you're imposing your. Well, you're not actually. You know most of the time it's not a choice.
Speaker 2:When we give instructions to dogs it is obedience, and the other key rule is that anybody who doesn't understand those rules and can follow those rules cannot be left unsupervised with the dog. Then your dog has a way also of communicating that actually you know, we do this a lot with our clients and they start to say, yeah, I've noticed that he starts to use it in these situations. I didn't realize that he was uncomfortable. Then you start to open up a dialogue with your dog. So that's one thing. The other thing I would say is there is so much fun and joy to be had by watching your dog and just watch, let your dog make choices, and just observe, formulate your own ideas and then test them and see if they're true. But don't set them up to try and confirm them, to say, well, okay, let's see how things go. We spend far too much time doing and not enough time, I think, looking.
Speaker 1:Very, very well said and an excellent way to wrap up the show. Daniel, thank you so much. Where can people find you and where can people learn more about the research you're doing?
Speaker 2:I have a presence on Google Scholar so if anyone goes into Google Scholar, if you put dogs and mills, you'll probably find one of my papers and then that will take you to my whole profile so you can find it there. You can find my webpage at the University of Lincoln under the staff pages. Somebody set up a Wikipedia page about me. I saw that Came as news. I'm not sure how up to date it is. Somebody has to teach me how to do it.
Speaker 2:During COVID, I started to do a series of interviews with people who had inspired me, called what makes you click if you go into youtube and you put my name and what makes you click what I really loved? I was so lucky to meet some really great people early in my career and I just use it as an opportunity to catch up with some of them during covid and beyond, and I haven't done anything for probably over a year now. I really ought to do some more, but some people aren't aware just how important some of these pioneers are and how important they have been in shaping the field. One of the things that really kicked it off was I was lecturing to the students about some of the protocols that we use in managing problem behavior and I mentioned Vicky Voith and students just looked at me blank.
Speaker 2:I could have said well if I said mickey mouse, I would have got more recognition and I thought you don't realize that she's the person who wrote all these protocols and really codified and actually we've become really quite sloppy in the application of the original protocols. So there is one with vicky the. The first one I did was with Kathy Howell, who's been very good to me, people like Ben and Lynette Hart and many others. So if people are interested in just hearing me rabbit on and chat to other people who I find really inspirational, then there's that presence there as well.
Speaker 1:Excellent, and then, as usual, be sure to link to those in the show notes. I highly recommend that as well. The YouTube channel is excellent. I was listening in on some of those earlier on. So, historically it's also fantastic because, as you said, some of these protocols get shifted, so it's great to hear from the original pioneers. So absolutely, daniel. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful and I hope to see you again in the future.
Speaker 2:Yep, hope to see you again soon. Thanks a lot, bye now.
Speaker 1:What an amazing way to wrap up this season. I'm incredibly grateful for the chance to connect with so many talented, knowledgeable and passionate individuals in our community, and Danny was no exception. A special thanks to you for tuning in and supporting the show. Your support means the world to me and makes all of this possible, and thank you for everything you're doing to help the dogs in your life. I'm excited to kick off season six with more fantastic guests and hope to see or hear from you at one of the upcoming AggressiveDogcom events. As always, stay well, my friends.