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Dogs in Captivity with Kim BropheyWhy are dog behavior problems increasing in recent years? How do changes to their social bonds and environment affect rescue dogs? What does it mean to see our dogs as they really are: captive animals? In this thought-provoking episode, Emily and Libby speak with Kim Brophey about her groundbreaking LEGS model of dog behavior, her new course, “The Dog’s Truth,” and why this information is crucial for shelters, rescues, and adopters.
www.familydogmediation.com |
Episode Transcript
Libby 0:01
Welcome to pod to the rescue a podcast from summit dog rescue in Boulder, Colorado.
Emily 0:06
I'm Emily.
Libby 0:07
And I'm Libby.
Emily 0:08
We're both Professional Dog Trainers with multiple certifications in dog training and behavior. Together we have more than two decades of experience in dog rescue.
Libby 0:18
We want to share everything we've learned along the way with other folks involved in dog rescue, sheltering, fostering and adoption and anyone who just loves dogs.
Emily 0:27
Rescuing the dog is just the first step.
Libby 0:30
We're here to help with everything that comes next.
Hello, listeners and welcome back. Today we are so thrilled to bring you a much anticipated interview with Kim Brophy. Kim is an applied ecologist, a certified dog behavior consultant, a dog trainer, owner of the dog door behavior center in Asheville, North Carolina, and the creator of the legs model of family dog mediation. And in this conversation, we talked about her new course called the dogs truth. And this is a one hour course aimed at dog owners and guardians, shelters, rescuers fosters any one and the general public who deals with dogs in their day to day life. Whether that is having a pet dog or working with dogs. And Emily and I both took her legs course the full length course for trainers. And it has seriously changed the way we view the behavior of the dogs in our rescue. And so this one hour course the dog's truth is such a game changer. And we highly recommend it to anyone who wants to go a little bit deeper into understanding why our dogs are the way they are, why they do what they do. So in this conversation with Kim Brophy, we talk about applied ethology, which is concerned with the relationship between human and animal behavior and captive and domesticated species. So that's our pet dogs. We talk a lot about those misconceptions that we so often have about the dogs in our lives. And we talk about ways to help them. So this is a super important conversation. And we reference a lot of links that we'll put in the show notes. There's a link to the dog's truth course. And she has a really amazing offer for rescues and shelters. So make sure you listen to the end to get the full information. We hope you enjoy.
Hello, Kim Brophy and welcome to pod to the rescue.
Kim 2:59
Hi, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you guys for inviting me.
Libby 3:03
Yeah, we're thrilled.
Emily 3:04
Yeah, we're excited. We were waiting a long time for this.
Libby 3:08
And it's the perfect time to talk to you because you just released the dogs truth, which is a one hour course on family dog mediation, the legs model. And it is so so good. So can we start by talking about the dog's truth and why it's important for our listeners to know about?
Kim 3:32
Yeah, um, you know, it was always the plan to take this huge course that you guys have taken the full professional legs applied ethology, a family dog mediation course and boil it down into something that would be kind of public facing. But it became clear that we needed to kind of put that on the fast track. Once we had so many pros around the world that took the full course. And of course, then we're in this position as pros of how do we share this information with our clients in a digestible way. And that's a big task to ask someone who just took the 20-30 hour pro course to themselves, boil it down into what are the key points that I need my clients to understand if I'm going to integrate this model into my work, whether that was in sheltering, whether that's as a trainer or behavior consultant, veterinarian, tech, whatever that might be. People really wanted to be able to share it, but weren't quite sure how to translate it. So largely, we wanted it to be available for that purpose sooner than later. And then we were tasked with making it so digestible for clients and therefore the public. And so we really went the whole nine yards to make it kind of like a documentary style so it'd be really understandable and isn't just got the kind of more academic approach that the full courses and I think I think it's a real winner. I mean, I was really pleased with the results. I feel like what we've done has been able to translate the heart of the full course, for the public at a time when we all really need to be talking about these things and looking at them, as you know, the the whole kind of premise behind the whole paradigm shift towards legs and Applied Ecology. And then the service model of family dog mediation is realizing that welfare needs to be our primary concern, and not just basic welfare of needs being met, but welfare in the same sense that we look out for other captive species, whether they're in zoos and on farms, you know, this whole field of applied ethology looks at what are those needs that the animals have to have met in order to be behaviorally psychologically and emotionally healthy. And so that's where those topics really come into play for our dogs that have been largely ignored in the pet industry. The idea the niche and habitat and the appropriateness of an organism to their conditions, and whether or not they're then able to behave functionally in those conditions or not. And, of course, it's an immediate kind of call for us to look at some of the myths that we have about pet dogs, that we've been told that they're all pets, kind of by definition, and that their niche and habitat is in our home and inside with us in our living room, when that's not actually true for the majority of breeds. And so recognizing that the need for trainers and behavior consultants, and the increased presentation of behavior problems, isn't because we don't have enough trainers, we definitely have more trainers than we've ever had. We're just having so many more behavior problems than we've ever had, because of modern conditions. And that all makes sense to apply the theology but not much else, if we're not looking through a lens like that.
Libby 6:47
Okay, so you use the term Applied Ethology? What what does that mean? And what does the average pet dog Guardian need to know about it?
Kim 6:57
Good question. So the actually most people, whether they're pet dog owners are in academia in the US don't know what Applied Psychology is, because it's such a small field, and it has a much larger presence in Europe. But ethology is the study of animal behavior and their natural habitat. And so that's looking at behavior, kind of, from an evolutionary or biological perspective, like, why would this be adaptive and relevant for this organism to exhibit this behavior in these environmental conditions to survive. So looking through that lens, and then looking at how those implications from all of those natural sciences related to ethology, how those implications show up in captive in domesticated species. So it takes something that has this kind of perfect natural checks and balances, and then organism evolving in nature because of those pressures and opportunities in their environment. And then humans intervene. And we're either controlling their genetics through artificial selection, or controlled breeding, or we're controlling their environment through captivity, or both. And so in the case of our dogs, we have dogs that are both genetically controlled by humans in for the large part. And then we have also a species in terms of pets that are environmentally controlled, because they don't have the autonomy to kind of individually adapt to their circumstances without our interference.
Emily 8:22
I remember seeing you on Michael Shikashio's aggression course year, like four years ago, and when you said the dogs are captive animals, I swear, like my jaw dropped, I had just never, I don't think that the general population, myself included, thinks of them as captive animals.
Kim 8:41
Right. And we haven't been taught to, you know, and that's the thing that I think is important to just kind of pull back the curtain on is that we are living in a really unique period in time and history for so many reasons. But one of those is, is that this snapshot of time and reality we're living in here in the 21st century, is entirely different than it has been for hundreds 1000s of years. 10s of 1000s of years even. And so I use as a point of reference, just to put that in perspective for people often refer to the fact I grew up in Atlanta in the 70s, and 80s. And the dogs were still loose. And so the behavior problems that people experienced at that time, were much less because you're not getting the the fallout of captivity, because the animals are able to follow their instincts autonomously and make their own choices and basically have more agency over their own welfare overall. And so then we're just kind of part of their life, like what they we are companions with them and that sense, and we have these relationships, but it's different than exclusive pet conditions and captivity, which now because of societal norms and laws and wanting to respect our neighbors and be responsible people and everything, of course, we have all these new restrictions. And I'm not, you know, delusional about the fact that you know, we can't go back and nor am I suggesting that it's just that recognizing that most of the breeds of dogs that we actually have in the gene pool were not bred for pet conditions, especially the exclusive indoor pet conditions were mean, honestly, let's be real, most pet dogs probably get less than two hours a day outside. When we do the math, and so that in itself, if we look at nothing else, just time spent outdoors or indoors, it's really remarkable how much that's changed just in the last couple of decades.
Libby 10:30
A pet dog home is not the natural environment for a dog. Right, but we're expecting them to behave as if it is.
Kim 10:39
Exactly and I think it's, you know, it's kind of an interesting human question our own behavior and marketing and industries as to how we got here. Because, you know, if we look back over the course, the last say, you know, 2025 years, the pet industry has been one of the few that's been recession proof that has just continued to increase over the course of the last couple of decades, really, by by, you know, millions or billions of dollars in revenue a year. And so the people that are watching the markets, they see that and there's a lot of opportunity to exploit our commitment to our animals and our lives, through products and services and various marketing messages. That's kind of solidified this idea that like, all dogs, and all kitties, and all pets want nothing more than just to be at your feet in your home with you in your modern lifestyle. And of course, it's a complicated question. They do want that right, they want to be with us, they want the companionship, they need the relationship desperately. But it puts them in an interesting position of conflict because we're not outside as much as we used to be right? We're not outside working on farms are agrarian society that was dominant, even 100 years ago is no more. And most of us live largely indoor sedentary lifestyles, where we're not planning on using all of the specific perceptions and behaviors that all these working dogs were bred for so deliberately for years. And now we kind of tell it like, it's a fun little story about the ancestry in the breed. Oh, these dogs used to hunt lions, or, you know, these dogs used to be able to work 14 hour days on a farm, you know, working livestock and helping to get up hay and all these things. And, and now we're just you know, we just like having a really smart dog. But then, of course, people squarely run into the frustrations, you guys in sheltering know that behavior problems that have been in are the number one reason dogs are relinquished to shelters. And so it does kind of incentivize are taking a look at what Where's that coming from? Right? We've got plenty of pros, able, qualified, willing, ready to treat the symptoms of the behavior problems, but we're not solving the phenomenon of the problem. It's just getting worse.
Libby 12:54
Yeah, it's making me think of like, the the meme of, you know, a dog in a home with double income, no kid millennials, and they have a toy box in every room. And like, you know, I rescued you from this terrible situation. And, you know, people wonder, Well, how could this dog possibly have behavior problems? But that, I mean, it's begging the question,
Kim 13:21
right. And, and, you know, it's interesting too, because if we, if we look at it, there's a little bit of a tandem analogy to human mental health problems in the 21st century, and canine behavior problem, behavior problems and mental health problems in the 21st century, people can have everything they could possibly ever want or need at their fingertips and be suffering tremendously with mental health problems. Because our own ethology is his is so different than our current reality. So like, you know, here we are social species, so often isolated, here we are a species developed and literally our physiology our biology created to be active, and we're not so active. So so many of us are having health problems. Um, you know, here we are developed to be so perceptive and able to comprehend and process really large loads of information in our lives and in our world. And yet, we have so much information at our fingertips, so much stimulation coming in, that people are plagued by insomnia, stress and anxiety, you know, so it's kind of like, we haven't been able to adapt fast enough to keep up with the rate of environmental change, which is unprecedented in the history of the planet, and nor have dogs and so we're all kind of a fish out of water with this sense of like, like frustration or apathy and neurosis, you know, because a lot of the corn means that we have to behave in ways that have been adaptive for centuries or millennia are no longer necessary. You know, even something is core is like meeting a purpose. You know, because in nature Sure, nothing's as easy as it is for a lot of people five these days. So you should be motivated to go do things and struggle and find resources and protect resources and, you know, have a purpose. There's no such thing as just kind of a free lunch in nature, right. So when all of a sudden, everything is so easy and served on a platter, there is some cognitive dissonance, that happens, some disorientation. And again, with all the artificial selection for all these really specific behaviors that we've developed dogs for, we've built drive into their phenotypes that now has no place to go. So it's kind of like, you know, a really driven ambitious person with nothing but unemployment options.
Emily 15:44
I was just chatting with Libby before you came on, we just rescued last month of Brittany spaniel who came in and your legs assessments would be a great one to talk about with him just because he came into rescue, and we're in suburbia. And the first thing we noticed was he had an incessant energy. And he ran like 20 miles an hour in the yard, looking up to the point where he knocked his amazing foster mom down, and she bruised some ribs. Yeah, we found him a great home, he has now adopted but it was a challenge for us. So I was thinking, Could we like dive into like, what legs is? And how shelters and rescues can do, like, use it to kind of figure out like, what's going on with these dogs?
Kim 16:34
Yeah, absolutely. Um, so legs is just a manageable framework for talking about a complex dynamic collection of variables that any net animal in nature, any organism is going to be influenced by in terms of their behavior and their overall being. So we call that in biology or ethology a phenotype. And the phenotype is the collection of those variables problem with the word phenotype is accurate as it is it doesn't have it doesn't give us a lot of information about where to go to next. So if we want to break down all of those variables that are contributing to that collection, that phenotype, legs gives us a way to do that. So there's learning is the L of the legs. And that is the experiences in education that an individual has had in their life. So far, the environment, so the external conditions of the E, so we can think about that both retro actively what were the original environments for this particular dog, if we do know their genetics that they were developed for, so that we can then appreciate the compatibility or lack thereof to the modern environment, or their new environment, their current environment, we can also look at things like, you know, kind of what is their whole life environment, then like, and all the variables of that recent environment, current environment, in the specific moment, all those things are going to be factors that are going to affect their behavior. And then the genetics, which is the piece that's been kind of most lost in the last few decades and understanding dogs, largely for for well intentioned purposes of people not wanting people to judge dogs by their genetics, because genetics aren't predictive. But genetics are definitely a component in nature for every organism and for our dogs to particularly with that relationship with the environment, right. So the genetics become what they are because of what worked or didn't for prior generations in nature. And so that complicated by our artificial selection, we have to really look at how that is going to affect our dog's behavior as far as compatibility to our current conditions. And then the last piece is the self. And those are the internal conditions for the animal. So age, sex, health, nutrition, disease, disability, injury, infection, all of that good stuff, as well as the unique personality. So in the last, you know, couple of decades, it for the involvement that I've had working in rescues and shelters, I haven't worked full time in a rescue or shelter environment, but I've been on the board of the Asheville Humane Society here locally for some years, until recently, and have been very heavily involved. So um, that's kind of the extent of my knowledge with that world. But you know, we have been kind of looking at in terms of an animal's profile or in terms of trying to find the right environment for the dog, what we know about the dog's learning history so far, we try to put that together into some kind of a description. So the LPs, we do a good job talking about that, and then the SP so the internal conditions, were aware of the sex, the age, the health, medical issues, you know, all of that that of course, an adopter is going to need to be aware of anything that we've observed in the environment, about their personality, their likes, their dislikes, comfort levels, about things, etc. But the part that we really haven't looked at is the genetics and the environment and that lock in the key question that we talked about in the course, about this suitability to conditions. So we don't necessarily at least as common practice, say, okay, so given what this dog's genetics seem to be, which will cut into the complexity that in a shelter environment, because I realized that's an issue with genetic testing accessibility, what might we expect the dogs needs are going to be in an environment, and that what might we expect certain perceptions of signals in the environment and therefore, certain behaviors that have been genetically selected for in this breed or type of dog might be not so we can condemn and judge but so we can set them up for success, right? So we can make sure that we are being an advocate in the environment. And we're being assertive towards conditions so that the dogs don't fail simply because we're ignorant of certain selective pressures that have been there in the past that might or might not show up in their behavior now.
Libby 20:56
So let's use a specific example to help illustrate this concept. And I love picking on herding dogs because I have one. They're so easy to pick on. Yeah, so say you have a blue heeler mix coming into a shelter rescue situation. And you can tell just by a visual or maybe you've done the DNA testing that okay, this dog is at least 50%. Australian cattle dog. So what would you be looking for, in terms of this interplay of genetics and environment?
Kim 21:35
Right, so one of the fun things about the legs model, you know, to this question is, you can kind of go back to the book, or you can go back to the course, if you've taken the full course, even with the dog strength, you can just watch that one little section of it just as a nutshell for what you need to know. So you could recognize then right off the bat that with herding dogs, if they're going to fit the standard deviation of traits that were selected for a herding dog, we could expect reactivity to fast moving objects, we could expect reactivity to sudden environmental contrasts. So you know, if you have small children that kind of embody sudden environmental contrast, immediately safe, and we could have some challenges there, we would expect that it could be possible for that dog to perceive those infractions to status quo as something that would motivate an action to reconcile that disruption to the status quo by organizing those social players. That's what herding dogs were developed to develop to do is control other living beings, and manage them in order to maintain status quo. And so you might expect a lot of behavior along those lines. And what people often don't understand specifically about herding dogs, too, is that a lot of herding behavior, sure, will be experienced as aggression on the other end, because it's lunging, barking, snapping, biting, often ankles and shoes and things of that nature. And, and it doesn't look like herding behavior when you don't have a flock of sheep that are moving in a nice organized fashion across a field. But it can come from the same place. And I think there's this kind of idea that, well, as long as I don't have sheep, why would they be inspired to herd but the instincts in terms of the signals that will become releasing stimuli for those modal action patterns. They're not apples to apples. So it could be that anything resembling that sudden environmental contrast or fast moving individuals in the environment is going to act as an accidental releasing stimuli for those otherwise kind of dormant software programs sitting in the background. And that's why it's so tricky is because you know, people will see some of these behaviors in the home, not expecting it not understanding that and then have behavior problems as a result. And that dog might actually be a textbook, perfect representation of whatever breed it is. And we're looking at them like they're pathological talking about putting the dogs on Prozac, you know, talking about what training we need to do with this behavior to make the dog stop. And as we all know, we can end up beating our head against a wall ad nauseam, because the genetics have like generations of reinforcement history behind them, right. So there's a lot of current we're up against. So that's why sometimes training doesn't work at all with certain kinds of behaviors because they're, they're hardwired, they're instinctual. That all that said, you could get a lemon of a cattle dog that doesn't have any herding behavior at all and as a couch potato, and the most mellow wing man ever and is pro social and could not care a hoot about sudden environmental contrast. So we also need to remind listeners about that like these are all kind of likely facilitating contributing variables, but there's no prediction, there's no guarantee. So just because breeders spent forever trying to breed that into a breed, you would always have a pup out of a litter that's going to have little or maybe even no representation of those denotes desired traits in their behavior.
Emily 25:13
And you have these amazing breed group handouts that we've used in our own rescue. When we've had hurting dogs, or, or livestock Guardian dogs, and they have been invaluable, we're gonna put them in the show notes, or if anybody wants them emailed, we can email them, because we had several pyrenees in a row. And we would just send anyone interested that handout and be like, you know, this is kind of what you might be looking at if you get a pyrenees. And a lot of people were like, thank you so much. I actually did not realize that and I thought they were just white, fluffy, Newfoundlands.
Kim 25:47
Right. Yeah, and that's really helpful to have, you know, so we can get on the same page. And I think that's kind of the other purpose. We're hoping for the dogs truth in the shelter and rescue environments. We are very hopeful that rescues and shelters would be willing to have like, host public viewings of the dogs truth, like once a month or something so that people can be invited to come for free. And just watch and get more information before they make a determination about what might be best for them and their family and their lifestyle.
Emily 26:23
Can you talk more about that lock in the key or the square peg in the round hole? Because I really think that is so much of the problem. We're having like, I personally have a rescue peonies, and I live in suburbia. And I got her from a suburban home where she was surrendered to us during the pandemic for Guess what? excessive barking. So why I thought that was a good fit for me. Sure. You know what, when we go, I have land up in the mountains. When we go there, she barks maybe once every three hours when we come down here and I put her in the yard. It's Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark. So you know, but I have taken the legs course. And I will like take a deep breath and be like, This is what I did. But my friends were like, You're a dog trainer. Why is she doing that? Like, right? Come on in Sweetheart, you know, and she can't be out. Because, yeah,
Kim 27:18
and that's the expectation to one on trainers these days. And, you know, the dog training industry has helped create that narrative is that like, I can fix anybody in any size, any age, I can make it compliant to your wishes. And like, it's so fundamentally illogical, unscientific, and unethical actually like to think you can just really manipulate an animal's behavior to fit your expectations, regardless of what their biology or their phenotype their legs are. Because that's not how nature works. That's not how natural science works. And so, you know, thinking about the lock and the key analogy, I actually find it really helpful to think about other species and to take like, okay, the field of applied ethology that has focused so extraordinarily, on captive animals for decades, largely not paying much attention to companion animals, because we've kind of had this idea like they haven't made and so unless they have really dire welfare, you know, for some reason, like they live live their life on a chain, we don't think about dogs as having welfare issues. So we have kind of our own cognitive dissonance there. But when we think about other species, so like, think about animals, say living in a zoo, or animals living on farms. When animals are particularly wild animals, we see this very obviously, you have animals that have again evolved in a certain ecosystem instead of opportunities and pressures, which then naturally select for certain sensory and perception, capabilities and even hardware in terms of like bats sonar, for instance, is the way it is because that was what was a relevant set of sensory attributes and characteristics for their species, you know, in order to detect their prey. So nature's always kind of pushing and pulling behavior in different directions, depending on you know, all of those threats and opportunities in the environment. And so if you say, Take a wild animal like a polar bear to a zoo in Florida, and you put it in the flamingo enclosure, it doesn't matter what you feed it, how much freshwater you hand it every day, what kind of, you know, parasite, medication you give them to make sure that they're healthy and all of that the animal is going to develop what is known as kind of zoo Kosis or stereotypical behaviors. In that habitat, even habitats where people attempt to emulate the natural habitat are often not enough to afford the individual the opportunity to express natural behavior. So for something like a polar bear, for instance, Since polar bears are large megafauna predators that are meant to travel large distances in search of food, so even just the local motive like needs of the animal are to continue moving and wandering and pacing. And so like, you know, when they have no place to go, except this inside of the enclosure, they'll end up walking circles around the inside of the enclosure in a rhythmic fashion. That stereotypical it's maladaptive, it's dysfunctional. But it's because there's this drive, that's the key to to go to seek to hunt to find, even though the food's provided for me to survival drive to go find food is still there. That's what's so interesting, because it was artificially selected for for so long. So your Pyrenees as an example, Emily parities are meant to patrol massive tracts of land, right, and to bark at any potential intruders and threats, largely predators, specifically, ie other pet dogs in the neighborhood, to warn them off away from the flock that they've been charged to protect. And so even something like a normal fence shard for appearances is already the polar bear in the zoo, that's going to pace. And then for them, they've been selected to bark and ward off any potential intruders against specifically other predators, like pet dogs in the environment. And I guarantee you, your parent, e6, can hear and smell all of these other dogs and in the neighborhood. And they're all threats to your sheepy family, even though you actually aren't cheap, because it's not apples to apples. So the dog gets confused, and also just finds themselves exhibiting these kinds of natural behaviors they didn't ask for, right? We selected those behaviors into them. But now we don't want them anymore in modern conditions. But if we didn't have the captivity factor, if all the purities were just like that were around, we're all just running loose. They could adapt, they could figure it out. But between artificial selection, you know, modern medicine, and captivity, they can't even solve their own problems at this point. It's a pickle.
Libby 32:15
It really is. So we and rescue even the last five years, it seems like it's getting harder and harder and harder. And, you know, you've spoken about how it just it seems that way in the training business to like, we're just seeing harder cases. I mean, is this a case of just increasing Zoocosis? Is that what's going on?
Kim 32:42
That's my that's one of my theories. Yes. And like we don't have no one's really asked these questions until very recently. So we don't have any kind of, you know, recent data. But if you anecdotally speak to anyone who's been in rescue, sheltering, or dog training and behavior for the last two decades, and is still in the weeds, still working cases, still helping dogs, they are all saying the same thing. From all over the world all developed nations to it's not even the United States thing, any developed nation where the kind of pet keeping practices are similar to our own. They're seeing the same phenomenon. So I think the you know, the additional factor to everything we've talked about so far, is that we have a snowball effect, because the population, the gene pool is getting worse as a result of all the things we mentioned. So let me explain that. So going back to my childhood, when the dogs were still loose, still half the dogs in the gene pool, at least were naturally selected to some degree, right? So nature is selecting for what's working or not in those conditions. Well, now that dogs are increasingly not loose, or they are spayed or neutered, which I'm not against, it's a wonderful, important thing. But the thing is, is that when we humans are deciding who's reproducing instead of nature, deciding what's reproducing, and we're fixing, as a matter of practice, all the dogs that come through rescue, we might be altering so that they can't reproduce and maintain those genes in the gene pool, dogs that are really coping very well. So those dogs, gene pools or their lineage is ending when we spay and neuter them. And you know, Sue Sternberg has talked about this. She's one of the only folks in the industry who's been talking about this for decades about the importance of like, Hey, if you find a gem in the rescue system, find him a date, not a not a spay neuter surgery, so that we keep them in the gene pool. But I think we haven't been selecting for dogs that are coping well. We keep breeding for fads. We breed for pop breeds, you know that we that are like cool and fun and are on the recent commercial or Disney movie or whatever. But we're not necessarily briefing, breeding for adaptability and coping, you know, to the 21st century conditions. So not only then are those more adaptive lineages dying out. But we know now about epigenetics, which makes all this more complicated. So epigenetics is basically how genes are learning through experiences and then passing on that experience to subsequent generations. So let's take a walk, there's lots of puppy mills. Now we all know about those. So let's take take a puppy mill breeding mom, whose whole life has been nothing but trauma, since she was born at the puppy mill, in a ridiculously enriched environment, unnatural environment, you know, basically, in a rabbit hutch kind of stacked one dog on top of another. And then she gives birth to a litter of puppies. After that trauma, not only are the puppies going to be exposed to that early stress and the important developmental stage of their life, but they quite arguably can inherit the trauma from her own trauma and experience. If she is reproducing after that traumatic experience, then she is theoretically capable of passing on that trauma to her offspring, which is going to make more and more traumatized, even genetically, dogs in the gene pool. So dogs that are predisposed to this on a generational level. So then if we go and we really look at what happens after five generations of puppies in that puppy mill, it's you see where I'm going with this, we have a snowball effect of dogs that are more and more born already set up for extreme struggle, failure, trauma, etc. And then if we really want to widen that out beyond puppy mills, there's a lot of traumatic things that are done to dogs in the name of dog training, or ways that dogs are kept historically. And still, that can be traumatic, frankly, even spending 20 hours a day in a crate or even 12 hours in a crate for some dogs and still for other dogs two hours a day in a crate if they weren't properly crate trained. And then, you know, they're just stuck in a box and have a complete panic attack. Like one of us might if we had claustrophobia, I mean, all these types of things can leave lasting marks on dogs. And then if they happen to be reproducing after that, then they could be passing that stuff on to subsequent generations. So it gets a little overwhelming. Yeah. So I do think it's worse though. Yeah.
Libby 37:25
Yeah. So while we're on the subject of trauma, Em do you want to ask about the trauma of the separation and the wolf Park? Question.
Emily 37:36
Okay. So when we were at Wolf Park last year, you said something so profound about that the, that for a dog to lose its social group, and move to a new home, I think you said was akin to like the threat of death in their, to their being. So could you expand on that a little bit more or clarify?
Kim 37:58
Yeah, so and I know, this is really tough stuff to chew on. Because, you know, we know that for most rescue dogs, they're gonna get bounced around a little, you know, before they find their their perfect match. And so I don't want anyone like internalizing this in a way that just makes them feel kind of paralyzed by the implications of this, because it is what it is, and we're doing our best. And I have no more respect for anyone than I do for people who commit their entire life to working in shelter and rescuing. So don't internalize it, just, you know, think about it objectively. So we can start solving these problems. But you know, in nature, your your social group is defined by family, right. And then you might, particularly if you're a young male, have to go and find a new social group, which then is going to revolve around your, you know, relationships and breedings with those others, and then your own offspring, but a large part of the social group for social animals is that kind of family and the whole purpose of social behavior and oxytocin, nurturing behavior, etc, is to facilitate and maintain bonds that then enable us as individuals and as a group to be more successful in our efforts to survive, right, which are far less guaranteed in nature than they are in pet conditions, right? So we look at it like, you know, well, like, our dogs aren't going to die because they're re homing. But in nature, if you lost your whole social group, if your social group rejected you, you would probably die. There'd be a low chance of you getting kind of readopted by another social group, you're much more likely to be rejected. And so a rejection within your social group can feel like the threat of death. Even an unstable social group can feel like the threat of death and so like a lot of the kinds of new behavioral phenomenon that we're observing, like Karen overalls info holes control behavior, where the dogs are just kind of scrambling almost to like grasping at straws, like trying to micromanage things in their environment comes from a place of feeling like, I'm not safe, I don't feel like things are stable and secure. And I'm trying to kind of create some chaos order out of the chaos. And we see that a lot in rescue dogs, you know, or over bonding. So they become like, hyper attached to a new family member, because they've lost so much. And they felt as a result of having lost those bonds, that they're completely alone. And for a social animal to feel without the security of those bonds and the stability, that social group makes you feel like, you're in a really bad position, and you're not likely to survive. And so it's really about appreciating, frankly, the fragility of life and nature, you know, we it's not, we kind of value all life over all deaths. But in nature, it's a different set of values and checks and balances. It's, it's about functional, adaptive, fit life that's working for the conditions. And if it's not working for the conditions, then it's selected against, yes, through death or inability to reproduce. But it means that the life that the animals are living kind of makes more sense, and it's working more cohesively, so we don't have as much, you know, really what we would think of as like abnormal behavior or behavior problems, because you figure it out, or you don't make it, frankly. But yeah, so I think for rescue dogs, when we're thinking about that, if we think this dog's been through three homes, if we think about children, it's not that different. And if you think about how a child's emotional or psychological state might be after going through three homes, because cognitively young children and dogs aren't really that dissimilar. I think the we Yes, of course, we're projecting because we can't ask the dog but I think we could all agree having worked with many rescue dogs, you see plenty of evidence of that trauma in their behavior, whether they go into complete shutdown, or they go into kind of like a hyper attachment mode, or, you know, something as small as you know, people will adopt a new dog and bring it home, put it in the house leave to go to work. And the dog spends the whole day panicking and trying to get out of the house, not because they have clinical separation anxiety, but because they don't know you, they don't know where they are, they're probably trying to get back to the last people or animals they had bonds with, you know. And so those things make sense through a theological lens. But they don't necessarily make sense through the lens of pet ownership, the way that we've been taught it as a culture where we make everything pathological.
Libby 42:40
And also, it doesn't make sense through this really human construction. Have I rescued you? Shouldn't you be grateful? Right?
Kim 42:50
Yes, no, thank you so much for bringing that up. That's really important to me, because, like, I think, in part because we were trying to encourage people to rescue shelter dogs, and, you know, dogs in Foster's, it was kind of this, like, you know, you get to save a life, you know, and, and that just will mean so much to you. And so we kind of have this idea, like I saved you, and you'll come home and you're just licking me with gratitude and you'll be so happy and appreciative and you'll just sigh this huge sigh of relief and then everything should be fine. But it's so much more complicated than that. But you're right, that is kind of one of those pop narratives that we have in our head or I rescued you Why did you bite me? You know like you're a jerk. I'm doing you a favor. Why would you? You know, bite me it's like well, because they don't know you. I mean, if you found yourself without explanation pulled from your family, and placed in another family, and expected to just get on board kind of reminds me of Handmaid's Tale, honestly, right? Like that would be really traumatic. It's not even if they're being kind to you and not doing the other things. And The Handmaid's Tale. It's still traumatic. I mean, I'd say the number one trauma for anyone familiar with that show for her is the loss of her family. It's not all the horrible things that are done to her the number one trauma for her was losing our family. And if I think for two seconds about losing my own, I'm right there. And I know exactly what that feels like. And I think we've we haven't appreciated the science of the emotional experience of dogs and their cognitive potential. And how all of these other evolutionary and biological forces kind of go into play for dog behavior until very recently, so we thought, well, their dog, whatever, they just want a bowl of food, they want a ball, they want to walk in a belly scratch and that's as complicated as they get and it's not true.
Libby 44:42
I think that's such an important thing to keep in mind when we're talking about rescue dogs. You know, I think about my dog Daisy, I think we're her sixth home. And that makes it it just puts All of her behavior into perspective, and it helps me realize, like, you know what? Yeah, she's probably going to bark at another dog who comes on our property, and she's not going to be okay with it. And that's just, that's just who she is. And, you know, it's better for us all to accept that and support her than to try to train her out of it, whether I'm using a clicker or something else, you know, it's just understanding that because of her history, that's who she is. It, it's a more supportive place to look at it, I guess.
Kim 45:45
Yeah. And I think that's, um, that's a really big reason for legs, right is because legs asks us to take a second and stuff, step back and look at the whole picture. We've had this idea, and you know, this cultural kind of attitude and part of the whole dog training marketing industry that, well, we can change anything we don't like, if you just have a competent trainer. And like, it's kind of insulting to the complexity and the integrity of these animals. You know, if you think about, like, in human psychology, if you had like a life of trauma, and then you went to a human psychologist, and you're like, I want a behavior plan for you to fix me in less than six months, they would be like, Mmm, that's not realistic. Like, it's not just that, like, you know, there's so many supportive elements that we have to look at. And each individual is going to be different, each individual recipe of legs is going to be, you know, different than another. So let's say your particular dog, with that history, was a super prosocial breed artificially selected to be very gregarious, outgoing, indiscriminate in terms of their interactions with others, then we might expect an easier run for that dog going forward, not necessarily, but we might say, well, maybe for that golden retriever, then it might be easier to rebond, possibly, then it would be for say, a guardian breed who was artificially selected to be wary of strangers to begin with, and then they lose their primary bonds. And then if they do rebound to someone, the likelihood they're going to perceive all the other people as threats is going to be a lot higher, because it's given almost like a reason for those genetics to come into play. See, there was a threat, I did lose my family, I'm not gonna let that happen again, you know, so like, when we factor in and layer in all the components of the legs, then we can see sometimes like, oh, that's why I'm having such a difficult time making progress on this behavior. And sometimes, frankly, it does ask us to say, Well forget trading at it, then I'm not going to expect that square peg to turn into a round peg, I am just going to accommodate that square peg and not ask my guardian to socialize with strangers, when I have people over for dinner, I can just create another, you know, routine and management system around that, that works for everybody, because those people don't live here. So it's just a temporary few hours, you know, but everyone has this idea that all dogs are supposed to act like golden retrievers, and so that when when they don't, there's seriously disappointed.
Emily 48:23
I think that's such an important thing for people to, to think about. And, you know, yeah, just looking at the legs of an animal, when you and then we have more compassion, because we can understand, like, my parents cheese is going to bark out there. So how can I manage her around it, because I'm not going to fix it. And that's why we go up to the mountains. So she has her time or we go for walks and quiet places. But to think she can just sit in that yard and be quiet is just not feasible. And it'll just lead to frustration between both of us. And then I was just thinking when you were talking, we have a dog in our program right now. And he's five months old. And he's struggling a little bit because he spent six weeks in a shelter. And so he's five months old, and the, you know, I guess between two and four months, he was in a shelter. So like looking at his learning history, it's been limited or strange being in four walls. And then his genetics, we think he's lab in German Shepherd, the DNA test is not back. So we're working really hard with him. And we have like, some of the best behavior people in our county helping him. But we had our veterinarian come because we're going to try to do a little like, anti anxiety to just try to get him to not react when he sees things and not go to that place of anxiety. And she was so clear. She was like, no matter what you guys do, and I commend you for everything like this won't be a problem that will ever like or this won't be a situation I even hate the word problem but like, he will never be fixed and she was like so ever who adopts him needs to know like this is how he's going had to bring himself into his life. And I just appreciated that, that it was like kind of, so I'm thinking with him, we should sit down with his adopters and be like, This is what we did with him, there's, these are his legs. And this is what he might struggle with potentially. But these are the skills that we have taught him to cope with.
Kim 50:22
Right. And, you know, it's not that we should ever, like give up on our efforts to, you know, intervene. And it's sometimes those interventions or training, and sometimes they're provisions, right, like, what are things that we can just kind of like take pressure out of the tank with in various ways, because sometimes providing a really appropriate healthy outlets, even for your parent uses barking or something like taking her up to the mountains or whatever person provides important relief. And then it makes the behavior makes sense in those conditions. So it's less likely to just kind of keep erupting in the other conditions. But there's, this is partly the legs model to and what's coming out of it with this group of students in the family dog mediation practices, people are coming up with so many creative ways of dealing with these problems, like the Carl hack for the singleton puppies, which are increasingly common that people just have one dog and they get a puppy. And the puppies don't have that species appropriate normal developmental outlet for roughhousing and biting and you know, ambushing other social members, because we humans don't like being on the other end of it. And just something as simple as the provision of a life sized stuffed dog can be such a game changer for these puppies that would otherwise be you know, really frustrated, and therefore exhibiting behavior problems that are just perfectly normal developmental behaviors.
Emily 51:41
Yeah, I love that.
Libby 51:44
Something I'm really interested in is what we're seeing with World dog rescue. And in our area, res Dog Rescue is also really popular. We're in Colorado, and we get a lot of dogs from the four corners region. And we often see these dogs struggle when they're brought from an area, you know, like a reservation, or somewhere that we're free roaming, and we bring them into an apartment in downtown Denver or boulder. And thinking about the legs, it makes sense why a dog would struggle in that transition? What are some things that rescuers and adopters need to know about bringing a world dog into their home?
Kim 52:35
So I a couple of things, I think, kind of on a fundamental basis as a culture, we should question the practice. First of all, I'm not saying that it's always a bad idea, but I think it sure can be and I think we have a biased judgment of value, that any free roaming dogs welfare is worse than it would be in any average pet home. And that is full of assumptions. Because again, we have defined arbitrarily not historically accurate and not scientifically accurate that a dog's place is as a pet in our home, when the reality of the situation is that 80% of the dogs living on the planet right now are free roaming dogs in cities or villages, or rural areas in underdeveloped nations, or, you know, geographic vicinities, such as reservations in the United States. And that is their niche. As a matter of fact, that is more the accurate, quintessential dog niche of the 10 to 40,000 years, humans have dogs and dogs have been together than our modern pet home. So it's just worth stepping back and being objective and saying, if that dog seems, you know, they're not causing problems in the area where they're living, if we can mend them and kind of do the catch and release model like we have with some feral cats, but spaying and neutering maybe to control populations, etc, I think it's quite arguable that some of those dogs should stay in those situations, rather than us seeing ourselves as the necessary heroes. So that's the first thing. Secondly, if we do make the determination that such a dog is in need of our intervention and rescue, as you know, the staff involved in doing that, and we have that dog in the population, and then we then by extension, are placing that dog in a home in terms of thinking about that home the dog goes into, or is the person who might then be taking the dog in, you have to realize that the point of reference that was established for that dog in their life already becomes all that they know. And that even if those were horrible, horrible conditions. It's all that they know. So we see this a lot when dogs are also rescued from puppy mills for kind of the same reason where, strangely enough there's a new acute massive trauma, when we rescue the animal and put them in a totally different set of conditions, because they have no point of reference for how to operate, my best way of highlighting this for people is to suggest that they go and they watch the movie room, which is about a boy who is born in a garden shed because his mother was abducted by serial rapists to abduct children. And then he raped her and kept her in a garden shed and then she has a baby in the garden shed, and her boy grows up in the garden shed. And it's all he's ever known is this tiny little room. But she did her best to normalize it and to try to create some joy and love for him. And he just doesn't even know that a world exists outside of it. And she tries to make that normal. And the movie is so fascinating, because it shows that his trauma doesn't occur until they escape. And then he's so cognitively dissonant in that environment where he's just like, I don't know what any of this means. I don't know what any of this is. So if you have a dog who's grown up on a reservation, they've never seen the inside of a car, or maybe even a house or been in a veterinary hospital, or, you know, I mean, going on a walk with a leash or you know, had to deal with, you know, all of the various pressures of just modern life maybe being created while we go to work. I mean, all these things that we think, well, a dog should just be fine with that. And for them, it would be kind of horrifically confusingly similar if is if we got dropped off on some alien planet. So those are just things to keep in mind, if for no other reason, so that we can really compassionately support the dog through the transition. And recognize when we do, you know, see the dog default to their own self preservation and personal protection of their body and personal space, or they are not interested in following our suggestions or commands, because a human's never been in that position of relevance to them before, when they steal all of the food off of the kitchen counters, because their entire life has been defined as an opportunistic scavenger of the good when it was worth getting, you know, it's like this, instead of seeing that as well, that dog needs a dog trainer. It's like, that's all they've ever known. So what they need is advice, they need guidance, they need explanations for this new world instead of conditions they've found themselves in, they don't need a heavy hand and to learn to be obedient.
Libby 57:30
That's so important. So before we let you go, if we could talk for hours, I think about legs and rescue dogs. Before we started recording, you were mentioning the legs shelter program, can you tell our listeners a little bit about this? And how to get more information and how they can be involved with it?
Kim 57:52
Yeah, sure. So in 2023, we'll be launching the complete leg shelter program, and we're going to be having an event at St Hubert's. And we'll have more information about that in a few months. And that will have be like completely comprehensive, like intake forms, and, you know, resources, increased resources for adopters, ways to help support dogs legs, in the shelter, etc. But where we are right now is we have just, as you mentioned, launched the dogs truth, and we have a pilot shelter program going on with that right now. And there's kind of two options, folks can either participate in the pilot program, which means that they can get the one hour version of the legs course the dogs truth, for free to give to every one of their adopters. And all they have to do as part of that is then to track like the retention rates and a couple of other kind of data points that we'll be looking at. So that we can see the efficacy of having doctors have this information, in terms of them being successful with the dog in their home by understanding them and their legs better and being more compassionate to their position. And then we also have the option folks just want to buy at the discounted rate, and they don't want to track any of the data, they can buy the dogs truth at a 95% discount to then give to their adopters as well. So the course normally costs $100 and shelters can buy them for $5 apiece, and then give them to their adopters. So either is an option that's currently available. And I think we've got about a half a dozen shelters right now that are about to start the pilot program. So by next year, we'll have some real data as far as how well this is helping.
Libby 59:33
That's amazing. And where can our listeners find more information about the course and getting involved with the pilot program.
Kim 59:42
So the best place to go is familydogmediation.com. And that has information as well as links to enroll for both of the courses. And our new directory of licensed family dog mediators is up and increasingly being populated right now. I think we've got maybe our We're at about 50 licensed family dog mediators. And so folks just kind of want to find someone in their area maybe to talk to about their dog, they can find a professional to speak with who's applying the legs model to their work there. And we also have folks licensed in different divisions. So we have a number of people in the sheltering division. So let's say you happen to work at a shelter. And you don't necessarily need advice for your dog or a client's dog, but you want more information about legs in the shelter environment, I would highly encourage that you reach out to one of our licensed shelter division members to ask them those questions and get some guidance.
Emily 1:00:37
We would love to have you back once you've got some data points, and you know, really talk about like how this is working in the shelters and how people are, are making it useful in their lives with their dogs.
Kim 1:00:51
Thank you, I would love that. And I'm very optimistic about it making a difference that, you know, one of the biggest things that we can do is to change people's expectations. And expectations have a lot to do with our experiences living with these dogs.
Emily 1:01:05
I think that's like, half the reason we have the podcast is you know, to really, you know, support people but also change that mythology, we've talked a lot about, which we've had ourselves, you know, like, growing up, like, they're just our dog, they should just be their happy wagging when you come home. And, and there's all those little, you know, bumps in the road and, and the legs really explain it. In a lot of cases.
Kim 1:01:31
Yeah, expectations are a really big deal. You're right. And it's so amazing. You guys have this podcast that's really dedicated to just clearing a lot of that up, because I think a lot of clients and adopters, surprisingly, almost the relief that people feel when they can shed those expectations is huge. You know, it's not so much that there's all this resistance like nobody, it has to be this way. I think most people have just kind of learned that and believe that that's how it is supposed to be. But that's not their experience. It doesn't seem like it is that way. So then we're almost just giving them permission to do some of those expectations.
Emily 1:02:11
That makes sense. I think it's Sara strumming says these aren't pipes and we are plumbers like you do need to like change the way we all feel about like these behavior problems can be fixed, because a lot of times they're just what the dog came with. Yeah, we would never feel like that about humans, you know. So I love some of what you said about like, it's, you know, if I went to therapy and three times and I was like, I'm still having these issues, like we would know, it's not a three time fix.
Kim 1:02:39
Yeah, you might you might go the rest of your life. And that's perfectly normal, you know, especially if we've had a lot of trauma. So we just need to normalize dogs as also cognitively complex beings like ourselves. They're not as different as we think that they are. Mm hmm.
Libby 1:02:56
I think that's a perfect place to leave it Kim Brophey thank you so much for your time. And wow, this is just amazing information to share with our listeners, and we're really grateful.
Kim 1:03:09
Thank you so much again for having me.
Libby 1:03:15
Thanks for tuning in. If you liked this episode, don't forget to rate and review. It helps other folks like you find the show. Thanks to Mike pesci for the original music and James II have be heard for production. For show notes and transcripts visit pod to the rescue.com. Let us know what you think about this episode on social media or at pod to the rescue on Facebook and Instagram and we love connecting with listeners. We'll catch you next time on pod to the rescue. Oh, and tell your dog we said hi
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Welcome to pod to the rescue a podcast from summit dog rescue in Boulder, Colorado.
Emily 0:06
I'm Emily.
Libby 0:07
And I'm Libby.
Emily 0:08
We're both Professional Dog Trainers with multiple certifications in dog training and behavior. Together we have more than two decades of experience in dog rescue.
Libby 0:18
We want to share everything we've learned along the way with other folks involved in dog rescue, sheltering, fostering and adoption and anyone who just loves dogs.
Emily 0:27
Rescuing the dog is just the first step.
Libby 0:30
We're here to help with everything that comes next.
Hello, listeners and welcome back. Today we are so thrilled to bring you a much anticipated interview with Kim Brophy. Kim is an applied ecologist, a certified dog behavior consultant, a dog trainer, owner of the dog door behavior center in Asheville, North Carolina, and the creator of the legs model of family dog mediation. And in this conversation, we talked about her new course called the dogs truth. And this is a one hour course aimed at dog owners and guardians, shelters, rescuers fosters any one and the general public who deals with dogs in their day to day life. Whether that is having a pet dog or working with dogs. And Emily and I both took her legs course the full length course for trainers. And it has seriously changed the way we view the behavior of the dogs in our rescue. And so this one hour course the dog's truth is such a game changer. And we highly recommend it to anyone who wants to go a little bit deeper into understanding why our dogs are the way they are, why they do what they do. So in this conversation with Kim Brophy, we talk about applied ethology, which is concerned with the relationship between human and animal behavior and captive and domesticated species. So that's our pet dogs. We talk a lot about those misconceptions that we so often have about the dogs in our lives. And we talk about ways to help them. So this is a super important conversation. And we reference a lot of links that we'll put in the show notes. There's a link to the dog's truth course. And she has a really amazing offer for rescues and shelters. So make sure you listen to the end to get the full information. We hope you enjoy.
Hello, Kim Brophy and welcome to pod to the rescue.
Kim 2:59
Hi, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you guys for inviting me.
Libby 3:03
Yeah, we're thrilled.
Emily 3:04
Yeah, we're excited. We were waiting a long time for this.
Libby 3:08
And it's the perfect time to talk to you because you just released the dogs truth, which is a one hour course on family dog mediation, the legs model. And it is so so good. So can we start by talking about the dog's truth and why it's important for our listeners to know about?
Kim 3:32
Yeah, um, you know, it was always the plan to take this huge course that you guys have taken the full professional legs applied ethology, a family dog mediation course and boil it down into something that would be kind of public facing. But it became clear that we needed to kind of put that on the fast track. Once we had so many pros around the world that took the full course. And of course, then we're in this position as pros of how do we share this information with our clients in a digestible way. And that's a big task to ask someone who just took the 20-30 hour pro course to themselves, boil it down into what are the key points that I need my clients to understand if I'm going to integrate this model into my work, whether that was in sheltering, whether that's as a trainer or behavior consultant, veterinarian, tech, whatever that might be. People really wanted to be able to share it, but weren't quite sure how to translate it. So largely, we wanted it to be available for that purpose sooner than later. And then we were tasked with making it so digestible for clients and therefore the public. And so we really went the whole nine yards to make it kind of like a documentary style so it'd be really understandable and isn't just got the kind of more academic approach that the full courses and I think I think it's a real winner. I mean, I was really pleased with the results. I feel like what we've done has been able to translate the heart of the full course, for the public at a time when we all really need to be talking about these things and looking at them, as you know, the the whole kind of premise behind the whole paradigm shift towards legs and Applied Ecology. And then the service model of family dog mediation is realizing that welfare needs to be our primary concern, and not just basic welfare of needs being met, but welfare in the same sense that we look out for other captive species, whether they're in zoos and on farms, you know, this whole field of applied ethology looks at what are those needs that the animals have to have met in order to be behaviorally psychologically and emotionally healthy. And so that's where those topics really come into play for our dogs that have been largely ignored in the pet industry. The idea the niche and habitat and the appropriateness of an organism to their conditions, and whether or not they're then able to behave functionally in those conditions or not. And, of course, it's an immediate kind of call for us to look at some of the myths that we have about pet dogs, that we've been told that they're all pets, kind of by definition, and that their niche and habitat is in our home and inside with us in our living room, when that's not actually true for the majority of breeds. And so recognizing that the need for trainers and behavior consultants, and the increased presentation of behavior problems, isn't because we don't have enough trainers, we definitely have more trainers than we've ever had. We're just having so many more behavior problems than we've ever had, because of modern conditions. And that all makes sense to apply the theology but not much else, if we're not looking through a lens like that.
Libby 6:47
Okay, so you use the term Applied Ethology? What what does that mean? And what does the average pet dog Guardian need to know about it?
Kim 6:57
Good question. So the actually most people, whether they're pet dog owners are in academia in the US don't know what Applied Psychology is, because it's such a small field, and it has a much larger presence in Europe. But ethology is the study of animal behavior and their natural habitat. And so that's looking at behavior, kind of, from an evolutionary or biological perspective, like, why would this be adaptive and relevant for this organism to exhibit this behavior in these environmental conditions to survive. So looking through that lens, and then looking at how those implications from all of those natural sciences related to ethology, how those implications show up in captive in domesticated species. So it takes something that has this kind of perfect natural checks and balances, and then organism evolving in nature because of those pressures and opportunities in their environment. And then humans intervene. And we're either controlling their genetics through artificial selection, or controlled breeding, or we're controlling their environment through captivity, or both. And so in the case of our dogs, we have dogs that are both genetically controlled by humans in for the large part. And then we have also a species in terms of pets that are environmentally controlled, because they don't have the autonomy to kind of individually adapt to their circumstances without our interference.
Emily 8:22
I remember seeing you on Michael Shikashio's aggression course year, like four years ago, and when you said the dogs are captive animals, I swear, like my jaw dropped, I had just never, I don't think that the general population, myself included, thinks of them as captive animals.
Kim 8:41
Right. And we haven't been taught to, you know, and that's the thing that I think is important to just kind of pull back the curtain on is that we are living in a really unique period in time and history for so many reasons. But one of those is, is that this snapshot of time and reality we're living in here in the 21st century, is entirely different than it has been for hundreds 1000s of years. 10s of 1000s of years even. And so I use as a point of reference, just to put that in perspective for people often refer to the fact I grew up in Atlanta in the 70s, and 80s. And the dogs were still loose. And so the behavior problems that people experienced at that time, were much less because you're not getting the the fallout of captivity, because the animals are able to follow their instincts autonomously and make their own choices and basically have more agency over their own welfare overall. And so then we're just kind of part of their life, like what they we are companions with them and that sense, and we have these relationships, but it's different than exclusive pet conditions and captivity, which now because of societal norms and laws and wanting to respect our neighbors and be responsible people and everything, of course, we have all these new restrictions. And I'm not, you know, delusional about the fact that you know, we can't go back and nor am I suggesting that it's just that recognizing that most of the breeds of dogs that we actually have in the gene pool were not bred for pet conditions, especially the exclusive indoor pet conditions were mean, honestly, let's be real, most pet dogs probably get less than two hours a day outside. When we do the math, and so that in itself, if we look at nothing else, just time spent outdoors or indoors, it's really remarkable how much that's changed just in the last couple of decades.
Libby 10:30
A pet dog home is not the natural environment for a dog. Right, but we're expecting them to behave as if it is.
Kim 10:39
Exactly and I think it's, you know, it's kind of an interesting human question our own behavior and marketing and industries as to how we got here. Because, you know, if we look back over the course, the last say, you know, 2025 years, the pet industry has been one of the few that's been recession proof that has just continued to increase over the course of the last couple of decades, really, by by, you know, millions or billions of dollars in revenue a year. And so the people that are watching the markets, they see that and there's a lot of opportunity to exploit our commitment to our animals and our lives, through products and services and various marketing messages. That's kind of solidified this idea that like, all dogs, and all kitties, and all pets want nothing more than just to be at your feet in your home with you in your modern lifestyle. And of course, it's a complicated question. They do want that right, they want to be with us, they want the companionship, they need the relationship desperately. But it puts them in an interesting position of conflict because we're not outside as much as we used to be right? We're not outside working on farms are agrarian society that was dominant, even 100 years ago is no more. And most of us live largely indoor sedentary lifestyles, where we're not planning on using all of the specific perceptions and behaviors that all these working dogs were bred for so deliberately for years. And now we kind of tell it like, it's a fun little story about the ancestry in the breed. Oh, these dogs used to hunt lions, or, you know, these dogs used to be able to work 14 hour days on a farm, you know, working livestock and helping to get up hay and all these things. And, and now we're just you know, we just like having a really smart dog. But then, of course, people squarely run into the frustrations, you guys in sheltering know that behavior problems that have been in are the number one reason dogs are relinquished to shelters. And so it does kind of incentivize are taking a look at what Where's that coming from? Right? We've got plenty of pros, able, qualified, willing, ready to treat the symptoms of the behavior problems, but we're not solving the phenomenon of the problem. It's just getting worse.
Libby 12:54
Yeah, it's making me think of like, the the meme of, you know, a dog in a home with double income, no kid millennials, and they have a toy box in every room. And like, you know, I rescued you from this terrible situation. And, you know, people wonder, Well, how could this dog possibly have behavior problems? But that, I mean, it's begging the question,
Kim 13:21
right. And, and, you know, it's interesting too, because if we, if we look at it, there's a little bit of a tandem analogy to human mental health problems in the 21st century, and canine behavior problem, behavior problems and mental health problems in the 21st century, people can have everything they could possibly ever want or need at their fingertips and be suffering tremendously with mental health problems. Because our own ethology is his is so different than our current reality. So like, you know, here we are social species, so often isolated, here we are a species developed and literally our physiology our biology created to be active, and we're not so active. So so many of us are having health problems. Um, you know, here we are developed to be so perceptive and able to comprehend and process really large loads of information in our lives and in our world. And yet, we have so much information at our fingertips, so much stimulation coming in, that people are plagued by insomnia, stress and anxiety, you know, so it's kind of like, we haven't been able to adapt fast enough to keep up with the rate of environmental change, which is unprecedented in the history of the planet, and nor have dogs and so we're all kind of a fish out of water with this sense of like, like frustration or apathy and neurosis, you know, because a lot of the corn means that we have to behave in ways that have been adaptive for centuries or millennia are no longer necessary. You know, even something is core is like meeting a purpose. You know, because in nature Sure, nothing's as easy as it is for a lot of people five these days. So you should be motivated to go do things and struggle and find resources and protect resources and, you know, have a purpose. There's no such thing as just kind of a free lunch in nature, right. So when all of a sudden, everything is so easy and served on a platter, there is some cognitive dissonance, that happens, some disorientation. And again, with all the artificial selection for all these really specific behaviors that we've developed dogs for, we've built drive into their phenotypes that now has no place to go. So it's kind of like, you know, a really driven ambitious person with nothing but unemployment options.
Emily 15:44
I was just chatting with Libby before you came on, we just rescued last month of Brittany spaniel who came in and your legs assessments would be a great one to talk about with him just because he came into rescue, and we're in suburbia. And the first thing we noticed was he had an incessant energy. And he ran like 20 miles an hour in the yard, looking up to the point where he knocked his amazing foster mom down, and she bruised some ribs. Yeah, we found him a great home, he has now adopted but it was a challenge for us. So I was thinking, Could we like dive into like, what legs is? And how shelters and rescues can do, like, use it to kind of figure out like, what's going on with these dogs?
Kim 16:34
Yeah, absolutely. Um, so legs is just a manageable framework for talking about a complex dynamic collection of variables that any net animal in nature, any organism is going to be influenced by in terms of their behavior and their overall being. So we call that in biology or ethology a phenotype. And the phenotype is the collection of those variables problem with the word phenotype is accurate as it is it doesn't have it doesn't give us a lot of information about where to go to next. So if we want to break down all of those variables that are contributing to that collection, that phenotype, legs gives us a way to do that. So there's learning is the L of the legs. And that is the experiences in education that an individual has had in their life. So far, the environment, so the external conditions of the E, so we can think about that both retro actively what were the original environments for this particular dog, if we do know their genetics that they were developed for, so that we can then appreciate the compatibility or lack thereof to the modern environment, or their new environment, their current environment, we can also look at things like, you know, kind of what is their whole life environment, then like, and all the variables of that recent environment, current environment, in the specific moment, all those things are going to be factors that are going to affect their behavior. And then the genetics, which is the piece that's been kind of most lost in the last few decades and understanding dogs, largely for for well intentioned purposes of people not wanting people to judge dogs by their genetics, because genetics aren't predictive. But genetics are definitely a component in nature for every organism and for our dogs to particularly with that relationship with the environment, right. So the genetics become what they are because of what worked or didn't for prior generations in nature. And so that complicated by our artificial selection, we have to really look at how that is going to affect our dog's behavior as far as compatibility to our current conditions. And then the last piece is the self. And those are the internal conditions for the animal. So age, sex, health, nutrition, disease, disability, injury, infection, all of that good stuff, as well as the unique personality. So in the last, you know, couple of decades, it for the involvement that I've had working in rescues and shelters, I haven't worked full time in a rescue or shelter environment, but I've been on the board of the Asheville Humane Society here locally for some years, until recently, and have been very heavily involved. So um, that's kind of the extent of my knowledge with that world. But you know, we have been kind of looking at in terms of an animal's profile or in terms of trying to find the right environment for the dog, what we know about the dog's learning history so far, we try to put that together into some kind of a description. So the LPs, we do a good job talking about that, and then the SP so the internal conditions, were aware of the sex, the age, the health, medical issues, you know, all of that that of course, an adopter is going to need to be aware of anything that we've observed in the environment, about their personality, their likes, their dislikes, comfort levels, about things, etc. But the part that we really haven't looked at is the genetics and the environment and that lock in the key question that we talked about in the course, about this suitability to conditions. So we don't necessarily at least as common practice, say, okay, so given what this dog's genetics seem to be, which will cut into the complexity that in a shelter environment, because I realized that's an issue with genetic testing accessibility, what might we expect the dogs needs are going to be in an environment, and that what might we expect certain perceptions of signals in the environment and therefore, certain behaviors that have been genetically selected for in this breed or type of dog might be not so we can condemn and judge but so we can set them up for success, right? So we can make sure that we are being an advocate in the environment. And we're being assertive towards conditions so that the dogs don't fail simply because we're ignorant of certain selective pressures that have been there in the past that might or might not show up in their behavior now.
Libby 20:56
So let's use a specific example to help illustrate this concept. And I love picking on herding dogs because I have one. They're so easy to pick on. Yeah, so say you have a blue heeler mix coming into a shelter rescue situation. And you can tell just by a visual or maybe you've done the DNA testing that okay, this dog is at least 50%. Australian cattle dog. So what would you be looking for, in terms of this interplay of genetics and environment?
Kim 21:35
Right, so one of the fun things about the legs model, you know, to this question is, you can kind of go back to the book, or you can go back to the course, if you've taken the full course, even with the dog strength, you can just watch that one little section of it just as a nutshell for what you need to know. So you could recognize then right off the bat that with herding dogs, if they're going to fit the standard deviation of traits that were selected for a herding dog, we could expect reactivity to fast moving objects, we could expect reactivity to sudden environmental contrasts. So you know, if you have small children that kind of embody sudden environmental contrast, immediately safe, and we could have some challenges there, we would expect that it could be possible for that dog to perceive those infractions to status quo as something that would motivate an action to reconcile that disruption to the status quo by organizing those social players. That's what herding dogs were developed to develop to do is control other living beings, and manage them in order to maintain status quo. And so you might expect a lot of behavior along those lines. And what people often don't understand specifically about herding dogs, too, is that a lot of herding behavior, sure, will be experienced as aggression on the other end, because it's lunging, barking, snapping, biting, often ankles and shoes and things of that nature. And, and it doesn't look like herding behavior when you don't have a flock of sheep that are moving in a nice organized fashion across a field. But it can come from the same place. And I think there's this kind of idea that, well, as long as I don't have sheep, why would they be inspired to herd but the instincts in terms of the signals that will become releasing stimuli for those modal action patterns. They're not apples to apples. So it could be that anything resembling that sudden environmental contrast or fast moving individuals in the environment is going to act as an accidental releasing stimuli for those otherwise kind of dormant software programs sitting in the background. And that's why it's so tricky is because you know, people will see some of these behaviors in the home, not expecting it not understanding that and then have behavior problems as a result. And that dog might actually be a textbook, perfect representation of whatever breed it is. And we're looking at them like they're pathological talking about putting the dogs on Prozac, you know, talking about what training we need to do with this behavior to make the dog stop. And as we all know, we can end up beating our head against a wall ad nauseam, because the genetics have like generations of reinforcement history behind them, right. So there's a lot of current we're up against. So that's why sometimes training doesn't work at all with certain kinds of behaviors because they're, they're hardwired, they're instinctual. That all that said, you could get a lemon of a cattle dog that doesn't have any herding behavior at all and as a couch potato, and the most mellow wing man ever and is pro social and could not care a hoot about sudden environmental contrast. So we also need to remind listeners about that like these are all kind of likely facilitating contributing variables, but there's no prediction, there's no guarantee. So just because breeders spent forever trying to breed that into a breed, you would always have a pup out of a litter that's going to have little or maybe even no representation of those denotes desired traits in their behavior.
Emily 25:13
And you have these amazing breed group handouts that we've used in our own rescue. When we've had hurting dogs, or, or livestock Guardian dogs, and they have been invaluable, we're gonna put them in the show notes, or if anybody wants them emailed, we can email them, because we had several pyrenees in a row. And we would just send anyone interested that handout and be like, you know, this is kind of what you might be looking at if you get a pyrenees. And a lot of people were like, thank you so much. I actually did not realize that and I thought they were just white, fluffy, Newfoundlands.
Kim 25:47
Right. Yeah, and that's really helpful to have, you know, so we can get on the same page. And I think that's kind of the other purpose. We're hoping for the dogs truth in the shelter and rescue environments. We are very hopeful that rescues and shelters would be willing to have like, host public viewings of the dogs truth, like once a month or something so that people can be invited to come for free. And just watch and get more information before they make a determination about what might be best for them and their family and their lifestyle.
Emily 26:23
Can you talk more about that lock in the key or the square peg in the round hole? Because I really think that is so much of the problem. We're having like, I personally have a rescue peonies, and I live in suburbia. And I got her from a suburban home where she was surrendered to us during the pandemic for Guess what? excessive barking. So why I thought that was a good fit for me. Sure. You know what, when we go, I have land up in the mountains. When we go there, she barks maybe once every three hours when we come down here and I put her in the yard. It's Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark. So you know, but I have taken the legs course. And I will like take a deep breath and be like, This is what I did. But my friends were like, You're a dog trainer. Why is she doing that? Like, right? Come on in Sweetheart, you know, and she can't be out. Because, yeah,
Kim 27:18
and that's the expectation to one on trainers these days. And, you know, the dog training industry has helped create that narrative is that like, I can fix anybody in any size, any age, I can make it compliant to your wishes. And like, it's so fundamentally illogical, unscientific, and unethical actually like to think you can just really manipulate an animal's behavior to fit your expectations, regardless of what their biology or their phenotype their legs are. Because that's not how nature works. That's not how natural science works. And so, you know, thinking about the lock and the key analogy, I actually find it really helpful to think about other species and to take like, okay, the field of applied ethology that has focused so extraordinarily, on captive animals for decades, largely not paying much attention to companion animals, because we've kind of had this idea like they haven't made and so unless they have really dire welfare, you know, for some reason, like they live live their life on a chain, we don't think about dogs as having welfare issues. So we have kind of our own cognitive dissonance there. But when we think about other species, so like, think about animals, say living in a zoo, or animals living on farms. When animals are particularly wild animals, we see this very obviously, you have animals that have again evolved in a certain ecosystem instead of opportunities and pressures, which then naturally select for certain sensory and perception, capabilities and even hardware in terms of like bats sonar, for instance, is the way it is because that was what was a relevant set of sensory attributes and characteristics for their species, you know, in order to detect their prey. So nature's always kind of pushing and pulling behavior in different directions, depending on you know, all of those threats and opportunities in the environment. And so if you say, Take a wild animal like a polar bear to a zoo in Florida, and you put it in the flamingo enclosure, it doesn't matter what you feed it, how much freshwater you hand it every day, what kind of, you know, parasite, medication you give them to make sure that they're healthy and all of that the animal is going to develop what is known as kind of zoo Kosis or stereotypical behaviors. In that habitat, even habitats where people attempt to emulate the natural habitat are often not enough to afford the individual the opportunity to express natural behavior. So for something like a polar bear, for instance, Since polar bears are large megafauna predators that are meant to travel large distances in search of food, so even just the local motive like needs of the animal are to continue moving and wandering and pacing. And so like, you know, when they have no place to go, except this inside of the enclosure, they'll end up walking circles around the inside of the enclosure in a rhythmic fashion. That stereotypical it's maladaptive, it's dysfunctional. But it's because there's this drive, that's the key to to go to seek to hunt to find, even though the food's provided for me to survival drive to go find food is still there. That's what's so interesting, because it was artificially selected for for so long. So your Pyrenees as an example, Emily parities are meant to patrol massive tracts of land, right, and to bark at any potential intruders and threats, largely predators, specifically, ie other pet dogs in the neighborhood, to warn them off away from the flock that they've been charged to protect. And so even something like a normal fence shard for appearances is already the polar bear in the zoo, that's going to pace. And then for them, they've been selected to bark and ward off any potential intruders against specifically other predators, like pet dogs in the environment. And I guarantee you, your parent, e6, can hear and smell all of these other dogs and in the neighborhood. And they're all threats to your sheepy family, even though you actually aren't cheap, because it's not apples to apples. So the dog gets confused, and also just finds themselves exhibiting these kinds of natural behaviors they didn't ask for, right? We selected those behaviors into them. But now we don't want them anymore in modern conditions. But if we didn't have the captivity factor, if all the purities were just like that were around, we're all just running loose. They could adapt, they could figure it out. But between artificial selection, you know, modern medicine, and captivity, they can't even solve their own problems at this point. It's a pickle.
Libby 32:15
It really is. So we and rescue even the last five years, it seems like it's getting harder and harder and harder. And, you know, you've spoken about how it just it seems that way in the training business to like, we're just seeing harder cases. I mean, is this a case of just increasing Zoocosis? Is that what's going on?
Kim 32:42
That's my that's one of my theories. Yes. And like we don't have no one's really asked these questions until very recently. So we don't have any kind of, you know, recent data. But if you anecdotally speak to anyone who's been in rescue, sheltering, or dog training and behavior for the last two decades, and is still in the weeds, still working cases, still helping dogs, they are all saying the same thing. From all over the world all developed nations to it's not even the United States thing, any developed nation where the kind of pet keeping practices are similar to our own. They're seeing the same phenomenon. So I think the you know, the additional factor to everything we've talked about so far, is that we have a snowball effect, because the population, the gene pool is getting worse as a result of all the things we mentioned. So let me explain that. So going back to my childhood, when the dogs were still loose, still half the dogs in the gene pool, at least were naturally selected to some degree, right? So nature is selecting for what's working or not in those conditions. Well, now that dogs are increasingly not loose, or they are spayed or neutered, which I'm not against, it's a wonderful, important thing. But the thing is, is that when we humans are deciding who's reproducing instead of nature, deciding what's reproducing, and we're fixing, as a matter of practice, all the dogs that come through rescue, we might be altering so that they can't reproduce and maintain those genes in the gene pool, dogs that are really coping very well. So those dogs, gene pools or their lineage is ending when we spay and neuter them. And you know, Sue Sternberg has talked about this. She's one of the only folks in the industry who's been talking about this for decades about the importance of like, Hey, if you find a gem in the rescue system, find him a date, not a not a spay neuter surgery, so that we keep them in the gene pool. But I think we haven't been selecting for dogs that are coping well. We keep breeding for fads. We breed for pop breeds, you know that we that are like cool and fun and are on the recent commercial or Disney movie or whatever. But we're not necessarily briefing, breeding for adaptability and coping, you know, to the 21st century conditions. So not only then are those more adaptive lineages dying out. But we know now about epigenetics, which makes all this more complicated. So epigenetics is basically how genes are learning through experiences and then passing on that experience to subsequent generations. So let's take a walk, there's lots of puppy mills. Now we all know about those. So let's take take a puppy mill breeding mom, whose whole life has been nothing but trauma, since she was born at the puppy mill, in a ridiculously enriched environment, unnatural environment, you know, basically, in a rabbit hutch kind of stacked one dog on top of another. And then she gives birth to a litter of puppies. After that trauma, not only are the puppies going to be exposed to that early stress and the important developmental stage of their life, but they quite arguably can inherit the trauma from her own trauma and experience. If she is reproducing after that traumatic experience, then she is theoretically capable of passing on that trauma to her offspring, which is going to make more and more traumatized, even genetically, dogs in the gene pool. So dogs that are predisposed to this on a generational level. So then if we go and we really look at what happens after five generations of puppies in that puppy mill, it's you see where I'm going with this, we have a snowball effect of dogs that are more and more born already set up for extreme struggle, failure, trauma, etc. And then if we really want to widen that out beyond puppy mills, there's a lot of traumatic things that are done to dogs in the name of dog training, or ways that dogs are kept historically. And still, that can be traumatic, frankly, even spending 20 hours a day in a crate or even 12 hours in a crate for some dogs and still for other dogs two hours a day in a crate if they weren't properly crate trained. And then, you know, they're just stuck in a box and have a complete panic attack. Like one of us might if we had claustrophobia, I mean, all these types of things can leave lasting marks on dogs. And then if they happen to be reproducing after that, then they could be passing that stuff on to subsequent generations. So it gets a little overwhelming. Yeah. So I do think it's worse though. Yeah.
Libby 37:25
Yeah. So while we're on the subject of trauma, Em do you want to ask about the trauma of the separation and the wolf Park? Question.
Emily 37:36
Okay. So when we were at Wolf Park last year, you said something so profound about that the, that for a dog to lose its social group, and move to a new home, I think you said was akin to like the threat of death in their, to their being. So could you expand on that a little bit more or clarify?
Kim 37:58
Yeah, so and I know, this is really tough stuff to chew on. Because, you know, we know that for most rescue dogs, they're gonna get bounced around a little, you know, before they find their their perfect match. And so I don't want anyone like internalizing this in a way that just makes them feel kind of paralyzed by the implications of this, because it is what it is, and we're doing our best. And I have no more respect for anyone than I do for people who commit their entire life to working in shelter and rescuing. So don't internalize it, just, you know, think about it objectively. So we can start solving these problems. But you know, in nature, your your social group is defined by family, right. And then you might, particularly if you're a young male, have to go and find a new social group, which then is going to revolve around your, you know, relationships and breedings with those others, and then your own offspring, but a large part of the social group for social animals is that kind of family and the whole purpose of social behavior and oxytocin, nurturing behavior, etc, is to facilitate and maintain bonds that then enable us as individuals and as a group to be more successful in our efforts to survive, right, which are far less guaranteed in nature than they are in pet conditions, right? So we look at it like, you know, well, like, our dogs aren't going to die because they're re homing. But in nature, if you lost your whole social group, if your social group rejected you, you would probably die. There'd be a low chance of you getting kind of readopted by another social group, you're much more likely to be rejected. And so a rejection within your social group can feel like the threat of death. Even an unstable social group can feel like the threat of death and so like a lot of the kinds of new behavioral phenomenon that we're observing, like Karen overalls info holes control behavior, where the dogs are just kind of scrambling almost to like grasping at straws, like trying to micromanage things in their environment comes from a place of feeling like, I'm not safe, I don't feel like things are stable and secure. And I'm trying to kind of create some chaos order out of the chaos. And we see that a lot in rescue dogs, you know, or over bonding. So they become like, hyper attached to a new family member, because they've lost so much. And they felt as a result of having lost those bonds, that they're completely alone. And for a social animal to feel without the security of those bonds and the stability, that social group makes you feel like, you're in a really bad position, and you're not likely to survive. And so it's really about appreciating, frankly, the fragility of life and nature, you know, we it's not, we kind of value all life over all deaths. But in nature, it's a different set of values and checks and balances. It's, it's about functional, adaptive, fit life that's working for the conditions. And if it's not working for the conditions, then it's selected against, yes, through death or inability to reproduce. But it means that the life that the animals are living kind of makes more sense, and it's working more cohesively, so we don't have as much, you know, really what we would think of as like abnormal behavior or behavior problems, because you figure it out, or you don't make it, frankly. But yeah, so I think for rescue dogs, when we're thinking about that, if we think this dog's been through three homes, if we think about children, it's not that different. And if you think about how a child's emotional or psychological state might be after going through three homes, because cognitively young children and dogs aren't really that dissimilar. I think the we Yes, of course, we're projecting because we can't ask the dog but I think we could all agree having worked with many rescue dogs, you see plenty of evidence of that trauma in their behavior, whether they go into complete shutdown, or they go into kind of like a hyper attachment mode, or, you know, something as small as you know, people will adopt a new dog and bring it home, put it in the house leave to go to work. And the dog spends the whole day panicking and trying to get out of the house, not because they have clinical separation anxiety, but because they don't know you, they don't know where they are, they're probably trying to get back to the last people or animals they had bonds with, you know. And so those things make sense through a theological lens. But they don't necessarily make sense through the lens of pet ownership, the way that we've been taught it as a culture where we make everything pathological.
Libby 42:40
And also, it doesn't make sense through this really human construction. Have I rescued you? Shouldn't you be grateful? Right?
Kim 42:50
Yes, no, thank you so much for bringing that up. That's really important to me, because, like, I think, in part because we were trying to encourage people to rescue shelter dogs, and, you know, dogs in Foster's, it was kind of this, like, you know, you get to save a life, you know, and, and that just will mean so much to you. And so we kind of have this idea, like I saved you, and you'll come home and you're just licking me with gratitude and you'll be so happy and appreciative and you'll just sigh this huge sigh of relief and then everything should be fine. But it's so much more complicated than that. But you're right, that is kind of one of those pop narratives that we have in our head or I rescued you Why did you bite me? You know like you're a jerk. I'm doing you a favor. Why would you? You know, bite me it's like well, because they don't know you. I mean, if you found yourself without explanation pulled from your family, and placed in another family, and expected to just get on board kind of reminds me of Handmaid's Tale, honestly, right? Like that would be really traumatic. It's not even if they're being kind to you and not doing the other things. And The Handmaid's Tale. It's still traumatic. I mean, I'd say the number one trauma for anyone familiar with that show for her is the loss of her family. It's not all the horrible things that are done to her the number one trauma for her was losing our family. And if I think for two seconds about losing my own, I'm right there. And I know exactly what that feels like. And I think we've we haven't appreciated the science of the emotional experience of dogs and their cognitive potential. And how all of these other evolutionary and biological forces kind of go into play for dog behavior until very recently, so we thought, well, their dog, whatever, they just want a bowl of food, they want a ball, they want to walk in a belly scratch and that's as complicated as they get and it's not true.
Libby 44:42
I think that's such an important thing to keep in mind when we're talking about rescue dogs. You know, I think about my dog Daisy, I think we're her sixth home. And that makes it it just puts All of her behavior into perspective, and it helps me realize, like, you know what? Yeah, she's probably going to bark at another dog who comes on our property, and she's not going to be okay with it. And that's just, that's just who she is. And, you know, it's better for us all to accept that and support her than to try to train her out of it, whether I'm using a clicker or something else, you know, it's just understanding that because of her history, that's who she is. It, it's a more supportive place to look at it, I guess.
Kim 45:45
Yeah. And I think that's, um, that's a really big reason for legs, right is because legs asks us to take a second and stuff, step back and look at the whole picture. We've had this idea, and you know, this cultural kind of attitude and part of the whole dog training marketing industry that, well, we can change anything we don't like, if you just have a competent trainer. And like, it's kind of insulting to the complexity and the integrity of these animals. You know, if you think about, like, in human psychology, if you had like a life of trauma, and then you went to a human psychologist, and you're like, I want a behavior plan for you to fix me in less than six months, they would be like, Mmm, that's not realistic. Like, it's not just that, like, you know, there's so many supportive elements that we have to look at. And each individual is going to be different, each individual recipe of legs is going to be, you know, different than another. So let's say your particular dog, with that history, was a super prosocial breed artificially selected to be very gregarious, outgoing, indiscriminate in terms of their interactions with others, then we might expect an easier run for that dog going forward, not necessarily, but we might say, well, maybe for that golden retriever, then it might be easier to rebond, possibly, then it would be for say, a guardian breed who was artificially selected to be wary of strangers to begin with, and then they lose their primary bonds. And then if they do rebound to someone, the likelihood they're going to perceive all the other people as threats is going to be a lot higher, because it's given almost like a reason for those genetics to come into play. See, there was a threat, I did lose my family, I'm not gonna let that happen again, you know, so like, when we factor in and layer in all the components of the legs, then we can see sometimes like, oh, that's why I'm having such a difficult time making progress on this behavior. And sometimes, frankly, it does ask us to say, Well forget trading at it, then I'm not going to expect that square peg to turn into a round peg, I am just going to accommodate that square peg and not ask my guardian to socialize with strangers, when I have people over for dinner, I can just create another, you know, routine and management system around that, that works for everybody, because those people don't live here. So it's just a temporary few hours, you know, but everyone has this idea that all dogs are supposed to act like golden retrievers, and so that when when they don't, there's seriously disappointed.
Emily 48:23
I think that's such an important thing for people to, to think about. And, you know, yeah, just looking at the legs of an animal, when you and then we have more compassion, because we can understand, like, my parents cheese is going to bark out there. So how can I manage her around it, because I'm not going to fix it. And that's why we go up to the mountains. So she has her time or we go for walks and quiet places. But to think she can just sit in that yard and be quiet is just not feasible. And it'll just lead to frustration between both of us. And then I was just thinking when you were talking, we have a dog in our program right now. And he's five months old. And he's struggling a little bit because he spent six weeks in a shelter. And so he's five months old, and the, you know, I guess between two and four months, he was in a shelter. So like looking at his learning history, it's been limited or strange being in four walls. And then his genetics, we think he's lab in German Shepherd, the DNA test is not back. So we're working really hard with him. And we have like, some of the best behavior people in our county helping him. But we had our veterinarian come because we're going to try to do a little like, anti anxiety to just try to get him to not react when he sees things and not go to that place of anxiety. And she was so clear. She was like, no matter what you guys do, and I commend you for everything like this won't be a problem that will ever like or this won't be a situation I even hate the word problem but like, he will never be fixed and she was like so ever who adopts him needs to know like this is how he's going had to bring himself into his life. And I just appreciated that, that it was like kind of, so I'm thinking with him, we should sit down with his adopters and be like, This is what we did with him, there's, these are his legs. And this is what he might struggle with potentially. But these are the skills that we have taught him to cope with.
Kim 50:22
Right. And, you know, it's not that we should ever, like give up on our efforts to, you know, intervene. And it's sometimes those interventions or training, and sometimes they're provisions, right, like, what are things that we can just kind of like take pressure out of the tank with in various ways, because sometimes providing a really appropriate healthy outlets, even for your parent uses barking or something like taking her up to the mountains or whatever person provides important relief. And then it makes the behavior makes sense in those conditions. So it's less likely to just kind of keep erupting in the other conditions. But there's, this is partly the legs model to and what's coming out of it with this group of students in the family dog mediation practices, people are coming up with so many creative ways of dealing with these problems, like the Carl hack for the singleton puppies, which are increasingly common that people just have one dog and they get a puppy. And the puppies don't have that species appropriate normal developmental outlet for roughhousing and biting and you know, ambushing other social members, because we humans don't like being on the other end of it. And just something as simple as the provision of a life sized stuffed dog can be such a game changer for these puppies that would otherwise be you know, really frustrated, and therefore exhibiting behavior problems that are just perfectly normal developmental behaviors.
Emily 51:41
Yeah, I love that.
Libby 51:44
Something I'm really interested in is what we're seeing with World dog rescue. And in our area, res Dog Rescue is also really popular. We're in Colorado, and we get a lot of dogs from the four corners region. And we often see these dogs struggle when they're brought from an area, you know, like a reservation, or somewhere that we're free roaming, and we bring them into an apartment in downtown Denver or boulder. And thinking about the legs, it makes sense why a dog would struggle in that transition? What are some things that rescuers and adopters need to know about bringing a world dog into their home?
Kim 52:35
So I a couple of things, I think, kind of on a fundamental basis as a culture, we should question the practice. First of all, I'm not saying that it's always a bad idea, but I think it sure can be and I think we have a biased judgment of value, that any free roaming dogs welfare is worse than it would be in any average pet home. And that is full of assumptions. Because again, we have defined arbitrarily not historically accurate and not scientifically accurate that a dog's place is as a pet in our home, when the reality of the situation is that 80% of the dogs living on the planet right now are free roaming dogs in cities or villages, or rural areas in underdeveloped nations, or, you know, geographic vicinities, such as reservations in the United States. And that is their niche. As a matter of fact, that is more the accurate, quintessential dog niche of the 10 to 40,000 years, humans have dogs and dogs have been together than our modern pet home. So it's just worth stepping back and being objective and saying, if that dog seems, you know, they're not causing problems in the area where they're living, if we can mend them and kind of do the catch and release model like we have with some feral cats, but spaying and neutering maybe to control populations, etc, I think it's quite arguable that some of those dogs should stay in those situations, rather than us seeing ourselves as the necessary heroes. So that's the first thing. Secondly, if we do make the determination that such a dog is in need of our intervention and rescue, as you know, the staff involved in doing that, and we have that dog in the population, and then we then by extension, are placing that dog in a home in terms of thinking about that home the dog goes into, or is the person who might then be taking the dog in, you have to realize that the point of reference that was established for that dog in their life already becomes all that they know. And that even if those were horrible, horrible conditions. It's all that they know. So we see this a lot when dogs are also rescued from puppy mills for kind of the same reason where, strangely enough there's a new acute massive trauma, when we rescue the animal and put them in a totally different set of conditions, because they have no point of reference for how to operate, my best way of highlighting this for people is to suggest that they go and they watch the movie room, which is about a boy who is born in a garden shed because his mother was abducted by serial rapists to abduct children. And then he raped her and kept her in a garden shed and then she has a baby in the garden shed, and her boy grows up in the garden shed. And it's all he's ever known is this tiny little room. But she did her best to normalize it and to try to create some joy and love for him. And he just doesn't even know that a world exists outside of it. And she tries to make that normal. And the movie is so fascinating, because it shows that his trauma doesn't occur until they escape. And then he's so cognitively dissonant in that environment where he's just like, I don't know what any of this means. I don't know what any of this is. So if you have a dog who's grown up on a reservation, they've never seen the inside of a car, or maybe even a house or been in a veterinary hospital, or, you know, I mean, going on a walk with a leash or you know, had to deal with, you know, all of the various pressures of just modern life maybe being created while we go to work. I mean, all these things that we think, well, a dog should just be fine with that. And for them, it would be kind of horrifically confusingly similar if is if we got dropped off on some alien planet. So those are just things to keep in mind, if for no other reason, so that we can really compassionately support the dog through the transition. And recognize when we do, you know, see the dog default to their own self preservation and personal protection of their body and personal space, or they are not interested in following our suggestions or commands, because a human's never been in that position of relevance to them before, when they steal all of the food off of the kitchen counters, because their entire life has been defined as an opportunistic scavenger of the good when it was worth getting, you know, it's like this, instead of seeing that as well, that dog needs a dog trainer. It's like, that's all they've ever known. So what they need is advice, they need guidance, they need explanations for this new world instead of conditions they've found themselves in, they don't need a heavy hand and to learn to be obedient.
Libby 57:30
That's so important. So before we let you go, if we could talk for hours, I think about legs and rescue dogs. Before we started recording, you were mentioning the legs shelter program, can you tell our listeners a little bit about this? And how to get more information and how they can be involved with it?
Kim 57:52
Yeah, sure. So in 2023, we'll be launching the complete leg shelter program, and we're going to be having an event at St Hubert's. And we'll have more information about that in a few months. And that will have be like completely comprehensive, like intake forms, and, you know, resources, increased resources for adopters, ways to help support dogs legs, in the shelter, etc. But where we are right now is we have just, as you mentioned, launched the dogs truth, and we have a pilot shelter program going on with that right now. And there's kind of two options, folks can either participate in the pilot program, which means that they can get the one hour version of the legs course the dogs truth, for free to give to every one of their adopters. And all they have to do as part of that is then to track like the retention rates and a couple of other kind of data points that we'll be looking at. So that we can see the efficacy of having doctors have this information, in terms of them being successful with the dog in their home by understanding them and their legs better and being more compassionate to their position. And then we also have the option folks just want to buy at the discounted rate, and they don't want to track any of the data, they can buy the dogs truth at a 95% discount to then give to their adopters as well. So the course normally costs $100 and shelters can buy them for $5 apiece, and then give them to their adopters. So either is an option that's currently available. And I think we've got about a half a dozen shelters right now that are about to start the pilot program. So by next year, we'll have some real data as far as how well this is helping.
Libby 59:33
That's amazing. And where can our listeners find more information about the course and getting involved with the pilot program.
Kim 59:42
So the best place to go is familydogmediation.com. And that has information as well as links to enroll for both of the courses. And our new directory of licensed family dog mediators is up and increasingly being populated right now. I think we've got maybe our We're at about 50 licensed family dog mediators. And so folks just kind of want to find someone in their area maybe to talk to about their dog, they can find a professional to speak with who's applying the legs model to their work there. And we also have folks licensed in different divisions. So we have a number of people in the sheltering division. So let's say you happen to work at a shelter. And you don't necessarily need advice for your dog or a client's dog, but you want more information about legs in the shelter environment, I would highly encourage that you reach out to one of our licensed shelter division members to ask them those questions and get some guidance.
Emily 1:00:37
We would love to have you back once you've got some data points, and you know, really talk about like how this is working in the shelters and how people are, are making it useful in their lives with their dogs.
Kim 1:00:51
Thank you, I would love that. And I'm very optimistic about it making a difference that, you know, one of the biggest things that we can do is to change people's expectations. And expectations have a lot to do with our experiences living with these dogs.
Emily 1:01:05
I think that's like, half the reason we have the podcast is you know, to really, you know, support people but also change that mythology, we've talked a lot about, which we've had ourselves, you know, like, growing up, like, they're just our dog, they should just be their happy wagging when you come home. And, and there's all those little, you know, bumps in the road and, and the legs really explain it. In a lot of cases.
Kim 1:01:31
Yeah, expectations are a really big deal. You're right. And it's so amazing. You guys have this podcast that's really dedicated to just clearing a lot of that up, because I think a lot of clients and adopters, surprisingly, almost the relief that people feel when they can shed those expectations is huge. You know, it's not so much that there's all this resistance like nobody, it has to be this way. I think most people have just kind of learned that and believe that that's how it is supposed to be. But that's not their experience. It doesn't seem like it is that way. So then we're almost just giving them permission to do some of those expectations.
Emily 1:02:11
That makes sense. I think it's Sara strumming says these aren't pipes and we are plumbers like you do need to like change the way we all feel about like these behavior problems can be fixed, because a lot of times they're just what the dog came with. Yeah, we would never feel like that about humans, you know. So I love some of what you said about like, it's, you know, if I went to therapy and three times and I was like, I'm still having these issues, like we would know, it's not a three time fix.
Kim 1:02:39
Yeah, you might you might go the rest of your life. And that's perfectly normal, you know, especially if we've had a lot of trauma. So we just need to normalize dogs as also cognitively complex beings like ourselves. They're not as different as we think that they are. Mm hmm.
Libby 1:02:56
I think that's a perfect place to leave it Kim Brophey thank you so much for your time. And wow, this is just amazing information to share with our listeners, and we're really grateful.
Kim 1:03:09
Thank you so much again for having me.
Libby 1:03:15
Thanks for tuning in. If you liked this episode, don't forget to rate and review. It helps other folks like you find the show. Thanks to Mike pesci for the original music and James II have be heard for production. For show notes and transcripts visit pod to the rescue.com. Let us know what you think about this episode on social media or at pod to the rescue on Facebook and Instagram and we love connecting with listeners. We'll catch you next time on pod to the rescue. Oh, and tell your dog we said hi
Transcribed by https://otter.ai