00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Foundation's podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. Today's episode is all about our energy, dog energy and why we should understand this connection better if we want to have really good dogs. As I get older, I've just come to realize that if you sit back and watch people work, and by this I mean people who really know what they're doing, you can learn a lot. It's easy to be judge or convince yourself that you have things dialed, but when you get to observe someone who is truly an expert in something, it can change up your whole mindset. This happened to me a few times in regard to dog training, and it really stuck. It's also what this whole podcast is about, kind of. It's about energy and projection of energy and why it's so important for us to understand this whole thing when we ask our dogs to do something for us. Now, maybe that's clear as munt. Maybe it is, I don't know, but listen up, and I'm going to get somewhere with it real soon. I am not a horse guy. I don't trust them, I don't understand them. I will reach over a fence and give one a good scretch on the nose. But even then, I'm like, is this thing gonna headbutt me into Narnia just because it can? Now, I will ride a horse into the mountains if that's what it takes to get to places where the people aren't and the wild things are. Even then I'll be puckered up so tight that it's not an enjoyable experience for me. I feel like, at any moment, I'm about to get Superman right off of that hay burner. And I don't mean the part where you fly through the sky and save the world. I mean the part where you cush in your fall with the ladder of your vertebrae until one snaps and it suddenly becomes a different thing to get anywhere, let alone up to twelve thousand feet, where the late summer mule deer like to feed and hide out from the bugs. I'm fascinated by the connection to horses, though, even though the only dating advice my dad ever gave me was to stay away from horse chicks because they are often totally captain cuckoo bananas. The people who know how to train horses and have them built into their lives in some capacity just fascinate me. There's a book out there that you all should read called All the Pretty Horses. It's written by Cormack McCarthy, a fellow who recently passed away but left us about a dozen books that are all worth reading, although some of them you're only going to want to read once because they're pretty bleak. All the Pretty Horses isn't one of those, though. It's incredible, and it kicks off a trilogy of books that contain some of the finest wordsmithing known to man. The main character is a young cowboy who loses his place in the world and heads south to Old Mexico with a buddy to forge a path that's not exactly smooth. The symbolism with the horses throughout is thick, and there is one point where the lead character, John Grady Cole, soothes a horse with a burlap sack. He runs it over the horse along its flanks and its neck, and he leans into the horse and whispers to it, something that the author left his readers to speculate upon. The scene is by a couple of characters who don't understand treating a horse that way, but also don't understand how coal can break a wild horse the way he can, or get a horse to do anything the way he can now. A few years ago, while pushing out a dog podcast in my own before I got swallowed up by the meat eater machine, I had the pleasure to head down to Saint Louis to the Purina headquarters and watch a whole bunch of dog trainers work their dogs in a variety of situations. Not only was it fascinating, but I noticed behavior and some folks who became pretty good friends on that trip. One was a guy named Jordan Horrock, who runs a lot of English Cocker Spaniels but can pretty much train any dog to do anything. He has something that can't be taught, and when he explained to the crowd of onlookers how he gets one of his high drive dogs to do something, he used words, which I guess makes sense since he probably wouldn't draw us pictures or mine the whole thing. But it's what Horrock didn't say but did that caught my attention. When he greets a dog, he gets down to the dog's level and goes forehead to forehead with them. What he says to them is up to the reader to speculate, but it's not a coincidence that he does that move often and his results are incredible. Another trainer who I've become good friends with is a woman named Jennifer Broom. She's a certified badass on a lot of levels, but her work with dogs is just fascinating to me. She drove out to the Upper Midwest from her place way out east three years ago and we hunted grouse and woodcock together. Now, I was running a pup on her first season, but Broom has one of those super trucks with quite a few built in dog kennels. I can't remember exactly how many dogs she brought, but I do remember watching her not only hunt with them, but communicate with them. She just has a way about her, like Horrock, where there is something going on that we can only try to emulate. Broom she speaks to them, she jokes with them, and she often gets to their level and says something that is not for you and I to hear. And her results are incredible. The dogs want to work for her, just like they want to work for Jordan. They aren't operating out of fear of a correction. They aren't just being heard in one positive direction. They are responding to them with an attitude toward doing the work and having fun while doing it. Here's a rule I'm going to give you, and while you don't have to follow it, I kind of hope you do. If you meet a high strung dog trainer, run away. Now. I don't mean someone who seems to just get work done or be awful busy, because the good ones are always that, but they don't have that kind of wacky, in your face energy that causes people to just take a few steps back, sort of instinctively, like an old editor I had who isn't in my top two people I'd cage fight, but he's probably in the top five. Horrock Broom, Tom Doc and Josh Miller, Jeremy Moore and a whole bunch of other people I'm forgetting are dog trainers who I greatly resaive and who all have a very calm demeanor. They can put you at ease without trying, which I guess means we are probably as easy to train as dogs, probably easier. Although my wife has been trying to get me to engage in certain home improvement behaviors for a long time and that has not gone very well. So either she's a shitty trainer or I'm a shitty dog, but it's probably a combination of both. Any huski energy matters. That crazy fellow who figured out how time and space are the same thing quite a few decades before we proved it, whose name is Einstein, is often quoted as saying energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be changed from one form to another. Think about that. I'm not going to go into it here. But the Sun is very hot, and because of that, some of the atoms in the Sun, of which there are very many, slam into each other at very fast rates of speed. The result of that, while it takes around a million years to go on its journey, is a little package of energy that goes very fast in all directions, one of which is toward Earth. Plants need that energy. Everything here on Earth needs that energy. That's living, you know, except maybe for some extremophiles living on the bottom of the ocean in volcanic vents, but even that's up for debate. The energy from our closest star ends up in plants, which ends up in animals and so on. It just transfers through in many different forms. Energy is wild like that. Think about it this way. Have you ever had a really hard day at work. Maybe your boss who probably wears spurs to the airport because he's cosplaying being a cowboy. Maybe he's bent up your ass over a project or something, and you're spent. You walk in the door and the kids have been cooped up all day, maybe it's a snow day or something. And while you welcome the hugs, you don't welcome the chaos and the noise. You sit down, and then your wife, you know who's upstairs moving something really big around. She calls your name and you ignore it in the hopes that she'll remember your half deaf from the time your buddy Ben shot a grouse gun next to your ear in northern Wisconsin. But she yells louder and not in a more loving tone. The energy is all wrong. Scratch that, Your energy and your situation's energy are all out of balance. I'm not talking crystals here, or mercury being in retrograde so you know you want to buy a lottery ticket or whatever. I'm not talking about that kind of stuff. I'm talking about what's happening between you and your environment and those in it. With which you have to interact. Now, think about your dog. What do you have, what do you want to have? What kind of dog are you interacting with on a daily basis or hope to interact with soon on a daily basis. Do you have a big, stubborn male of some sort who just seems to want to do his own thing no matter what. Maybe you have a little female of some breed who's just a people pleaserer through and through and just looks you in the eye constantly for direction. What energy does your dog bring to the table. That's important, but not nearly as important as what energy you bring to the table. Let me give you an example. I have twin daughters. One is quiet and very conscientious, a good learner, she's super patient. The other one is like a bomb that is always going off, you know, not in a bad way, totally, just in a holy crap balls. Can you dial it back just a little bit. Once her energy is high, it's forceful. It takes over a room. When my girls work with my dogs, the reaction they get out of them is vastly different. Now, although you know, adult dogs seem to pretty much figure out how to train us. So now with my labs, it's not so bad. But when you're talking puppies, you know, like when my Sadie was younger, my one daughter made it nearly impossible to train with her. The energy level would just transfer from her to that pup, And instead of having one lunatic daughter and one normal dog, I'd have one lunatic daughter and then suddenly one lunatic dog, which, if you're keeping count, is enough lunatics to cause a major chest graber in a guy who primarily writes squirrel hunting articles for his job, which means he's just not going to fly too high career wise. If you get my drift, dogs feed off of our energy, but we often try to ignore this reality. Think about it another way. Ever, had one of those days in the pheasant slew where the roosters always get up just out of range, and then when one does sit tight, you shoot like you're holding the gun upside down and have an eye patch over your dominant eye. How long can that last before your temper starts to rise and your energy starts to go dark? In my case, and I'm not proud of this, but I might as well be honest with several thousand strangers it's very quickly, and again I'm not proud of it. Do you know how well my dogs respond to me when I'm having a little temper tantrum and a pity party all rolled into one because I can't handle not murdering a few more birds. They don't respond well, and why would I expect them to. That energy is no bueno, and it's going to lead the dogs doing something that they shouldn't because now they're running scared. They aren't operating calmly to do their favorite job. They are aware that you're not keeping your head together, and that manifests itself in bad behavior in us and them. It's a negative feedback loop. Now imagine just walking into the cat Tail slough. It's just you and your dog, nobodies, no other dogs, just a simple walk through that geothermal cover looking for a few Chinese chickens to pop up in range. If you let the dog dictate the pace, which you should, because they are better at smelling pheasants than you are, you'll be able to watch them in real time settle into a relaxed, slow working cadence. The minute you speed up and start stepping on their heels, that energy changes. That dynamic shifts, but if you go slow, they'll react to it, and there is a palpable difference not only in the enjoyment of the hunt, but often, very often how many rooster tail feathers you'll have poking out of your vest by the time you're back at the truck. There is no reason to not give our dogs the right energy when we are working with them, yet we often give them the wrong energy. Let me frame this up one last way to maybe contextualize this whole thing. This may surprise you, guys, but I sometimes say things or right things that make people mad. I know, I know, can you even imagine? Well it happens. And those people who take things a stranger says on a stupid podcast very seriously often try to tell me how horrible I am, or in some cases get me fired over some words they deem so egregious that a person with a whole family should lose his job because they got offended. Uh. Anyway, when I get one of those nasty grams, my first reaction is to go pretty hard in the paint and remind them of their flaws. But instead I sit on it and I don't respond until I go for a run. I hate running, but I do it a lot, so I don't jump in front of a city bus one day on a dark whim. As soon as that pent up negative energy has a chance to dissipate through a physical activity that takes energy. But more important is the kind of thing that allows me to just think for an hour or so. I'm never nearly as mad. Sometimes those people are right, and I shouldn't have said whatever I did. Sometimes they're just sensitive, but I don't know them and I don't know their situation. This happens with the super religious crowd a lot, and boy, they cannot take a joke, but sometimes their reactions are valid. Maybe they should go for a run too, though. Maybe that would help, But I'm not gonna help them manage their energy. A lot of us, maybe all of us, are just humming at a little higher frequency since COVID. I don't know what changed, but the stress level is higher, the tolerance for differences is lower, and as the kids like to say, our vibes are off bruh. We bring a lot of bad energy to the table lately, and I don't think that's going to end well. You know, that's fodder for a different discussion, but it definitely doesn't end well when you're trying to work on recall or steadiness or maybe hand signals with your dog. Calm, patient, relaxed, positive, Those are the things that will make dog training more fruitful. That's not all of it. But you can learn from the best of the best trainers on how to set up a double blind retrieve and work it through. But if you don't bring the right version of yourself out there to train good life. Now you might be thinking, I try to stay calm, but Rufus always does this stupid thing when we start our water work or whatever. Fine, what's the problem. Is it Rufus who doesn't want to do what you're asking? Or are you asking him to do something he doesn't fully understand yet? Is there a wrinkle in the training that you can smooth out? Probably? Will it help to be primed to get really pissed at Rufus because you just know he isn't gonna do what you want him to do? It will not. That's gonna make it worse, and they know it. It will condition him to fear that command or that drill. How well will that work out in the long run? Not? Well? My little amigos. There is a time for excitement around dogs, which can be very positive training tool. I remember Josh Miller telling me about how stupid he probably looks while training young pups because he throws a little party every time they get something right. That energy might seem excessive, but it's the right energy to use in the moment. I hope that makes sense because it's something I think about a lot, and I feel that it's the right move. So think about this as you're puppy shopping this winner. What dog do you want and how will its energy level match yours? Or more importantly, how will you get your energy level to match its. What if you're working with a dog now and you're struggling with something, or you train pretty well in the yard, but in the field the dog doesn't do what you want. Is it a matter of the dog just learning through the real world experience, or is it because in the yard you're relaxed because there's nothing at stake and you know your dog will perform. But in the field, maybe with a few buddies watching, all bets are off, the dog is probably coming at it with the same energy. Good energy, But are you I know this might seem a little nuts, but it's not. It's important, it matters, it's something worth thinking about. It's a good idea, and so is coming back next week because I'm going to talk about what we should feed our dogs, or at least what we should be aware of while choosing the right dog food. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been The Houndation's podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening and for all your support. If this podcast isn't scratching the itch enough, we have a whole network here at meter. We've got Clay's Bear Grease podcast. You got Brent Reeves, This Country Life, obviously, all the meat Eater podcasts we have out now, so much good stuff. There's tons of hunting films we're dropping at the medeater dot com, along with a bunch of articles and a bunch of recipes stuff like that. Go to the medeater dot com check it out. If you're super bored. You can find enough stuff to pay attention to and entertain you for a long time. And again, as always, thank you so much for listening. Two Man