00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation's podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about what our dogs are really like, which includes not only the things we love, but the traits we like to ignore. The reason that professional trainers can get so much out of dogs when a lot of general owners can't isn't just because they know how to ask the right questions, but it's also because they understand the fundamental nature of domestic canines. Now, that might seem a little crazy, but it's also true. They know how dogs think and act better than most of us, and that informs their training choices and styles. This is way important to the process, and it allows them to look past the typical biases of pet owners to the root of behavioral problems. This, and at least a roundabout way, is what I'm going to talk about right now. If you could hop into the wayback machine and go to a dance party in Miami in about nineteen eighty three, you probably wouldn't have to shake your ass too long before some dude with a flock of seagulls hairdoo would offer you up a little booger sugar. Now, if you took a little bump. You might want to thank whoever figured out how to get it from the jungles of South and Central America to Florida. You might send a postcard to a fellow you've probably heard of who went by the name of Pablo Escobar. No one is as tightly connected to the drug trade as he is, or at least was. When we think of cocaine, it's his name above everyone else's that pops up, and there are plenty of reasons for this. While he did try to go to college for some legitimate career that didn't last long, he instead followed his heart, which was that of an outlaw, from selling illegal cigarettes and bogus lottery tickets to stealing cars. Escobar started his criminal lifestyle pretty young. In the nineteen seventies. He hooked up with some drug smugglers to help them out in their day to day business operations, which also included kidnapping folks they would try to ransom off the consummate entrepreneur. He eventually started the Medahine Cartel in the nineteen seventy six, which was the organization he used to establish smuggling routes from Colombia to the US via Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. He also buddied up with governments in places like Nicaragua and Cuba. He was a busy fellow during those years, which involved not only moving an estimated seventy five tons of cocaine to the US each month, which is a lot of freaking blow, but also murdering politicians and police officers, and of course duking it out with rival cartels. It's hard to say the amount of people he killed or had killed or indirectly killed, but the number is a lot more than zero. He is suspected of taking down an entire domestic flight with a bomb, as well as bombing another building in retaliation for not being able to achieve his political goals, which I think we can safely say were probably somewhat suspect. He was eventually shot by a police officer when he wasn't hiding at forty four years old. At that time, he had a net worth that was estimated to be about thirty billion dollars, which in today's money would be about eighty billion dollars. You can bet rightly so that he wasn't paying a whole lot of taxes on that money either. He was by most folks standards, not a great guy, but it's also a little money. He was known as sort of a robin Hood figure in a lot of the areas of Colombia. He took care of people, poor people specifically, and whether it was solely a political optics type of move or a move because he identified with them, it's impossible to deny that. Also, a lot of people loved him and loved having him as a benefactor. He was devoted to his family and by a lot of accounts, very loyal to some of his business associates. At the time when his empire was growing and his power was becoming more more influential and far reaching, you could have found people with all kinds of opinions on him. You probably still can today. But we generally look at a guy like that as a net negative to society, just as we look at ourselves and our pets as net positives. But people are muddy. Though. For example, you might think of me as a law abiding citizen who isn't involved in the cd underbelly of criminal society. But if you saw me leave a little dog training session just the other night, and the way I just rolled right through a stop sign about seven feet from a sheriff who was not a fan of my work. You'd realize that mister Escobar and yours truly not so far apart. You might also not know this, but your dog is kind of a weird mix of outlaw and asshole as well. Now, before you send Steve Ranella emails that he won't read about how I should be fired, hear me out. We are very biased toward our dogs in the most positive ways possible, but that can be a problem because stick dogs are not always what we think they are. Allow me to give you a couple examples. A few weeks ago, I was fishing away with two buddies of mine when I heard what sounded an awful lot like a couple of dogs that were very, very excited. They were yipping and barking away on an island that we happened to be fishing for smallmouth. The commotion got our attention, and then I saw a golden Retriever and some kind of doodle dragon newborn fawn into the lake. The golden had the little baby deer by the ear, and the doodle had it by its leg. And I can promise you one thing, that fawn wasn't a week old yet. It also screamed loud enough that at first I thought there was a child in the mix. It was ugly, and while I love dogs, I also love deer, and I don't really like to watch baby deer get tortured. So I pulled up the trolling motor, drove over to the commotion, and scooped up Mamby to lay him on shore in the sunlight. He was terrified, shaking uncontrollably and not doing so great. The dogs, which if you saw them walking down the street would undoubtedly not strike you as cold blooded, infant deer murderers, they wouldn't leave that fawn alone, though. I ended up catching the golden and getting the owner's phone number, who wasn't as concerned with the situation as I hoped he would be. He also isn't a real big fan of me either, because apparently he doesn't like it when people swear in general or specifically at him. But he came and got his dogs, even though he wouldn't leave the woods of the island to come down and see the fawn. I have no doubt that that little deer died. I also have no doubt that a different fawn that I got to see pictures of two days later randomly died as well. Since it was in two pieces. The story behind that one is that a trainer at the gym I go to came over to talk to me and we got on the topic of dogs. She then pulled out her phone and said something to the effect of my son told me our lab did this, but I don't believe it. The picture was of a front half of a tiny fawn, she said. Her son claimed to have watched their seventy five pound three year old male lab tear up the baby deer, but she literally didn't believe it because that lab is a lab, and labs to us are sweethearts generally, just like goldens and even doodles and gsps and English cockers and you name it. But our dogs are just ruthless killers disguised as adorable goofballs who beg for popcorn and snuggle with us on the couch. Scratch that they are adorable goofballs as well as ruthless killers. Take it out of this way. Take your bird dog. I don't care if it's a pointer or a retriever for this exercise, because it'll work pretty well, either way, get yourself a bumper or a ball, tell your dog to sit and wait, throw that bumper or that ball way up in the air like you're doing just any old retrieving drill. Now, your dog might sit and wait if it's been trained for steadiness, or it might just go, but there will be body language that signals the dog's interest level in that particular toss. Now, do the same thing, but instead of yeating that bumper or ball way up in the air in a nice slow arc, side arm it and skip it across the ground. That rock steady dog from before has a way higher chance to break now, and if it doesn't, you'll still probably see its body language change as it tenses up because it wants to go. Why why would there be a difference in the two Because that low throw that bounces through the grass is more like a small woodland creature running away, That's about it. And their nature is to chase and to kill, no matter how many stupid sweaters we put on them or how much we act like they are for babies. You might think, well, yeah, hunting dogs like to hunt, but not my fluffy little house dog. Wrong, amigo. The same rules apply to most dogs because it's their nature. Their nature is also that of a selfish, resource guarding animal as well. I can watch my two dogs interact and see this play out all the time. The old dog, who is over twelve and draws sympathetic responses from just about anyone she encounters now, for her slow limpi gait and her cloudy eyes and her just general elderly vibe, has to compete with a four year old dog that's in prime condition and loves attention, treats and whatever else as much as the old dog does. So when I let them outside, for example, Luna has to gingerly make her way down the steps and out the door, while Sadie will blow right past her, often bumping her out of the way. If there are treats or food involved, Sadie will gladly muscle Luna out of the way to get to the front of the line. It would be understandable to believe the young dog loves the old dog, but not in the way in which we really think about love. Sadie thinks of Sadie first, just as Luna does. They don't care about manners or sharing or anything that would make them good in our eyes. They do some of those things because they've been trained that way, but it's not natural. Otherwise we wouldn't have to train them to take turns or not constantly bully each other out of the way for a quarter of a slice of bread. Now this might seem like I'm taking a less than charitable view of my dogs or dogs in general, but I'm not. It's just a part of what they are, and denying it doesn't do any of us any good, especially when it comes to training them. So for example, that little King Charles Spaniel I've been working with lately. He's about as cute as they come. He's a lover too, mostly, but it became apparent right away that when a bird would fly anywhere near him, he was fully ready to catch that bird and I assume kill it, or at least it enough to ground it permanently. He doesn't look like a retriever, he isn't a retriever, but he has real prey drives. So I figured I'd see if I could get him to retrieve, so that I could transition him from praise and treats as a reward to praise and retrieves. He took to it instantly and while his performance is far from perfect, I can generally get maybe five or six really good retrieves right to my hand out of him during any given session before he just gives it up because he wants to chase that bumper and he wants to catch it. He's a hunter in his heart, and there is no being a hunter without partially being a killer, even though that's not the optics we generally want to share about ourselves and our dogs. In this particular aspect of our dogs, we miss something important about how to handle them and how their behaviors manifest if we don't do this correctly. Let me frame this up by saying that there is nothing I would rather do than hunt or fish. It's just who I am, and on any given day, I choose either if they were options. When they aren't, I'm going to look for agates or antlers or try to solve some kind of problem in the outdoors. When I'm not allowed to do any of that stuff because of stupid life things. I'm crabby and generally not filled with a whole lot of peace. Since you're listening to this, I'm going to assume you have similar leanings in your life. Our dogs, especially our sporting dogs. They need to hunt, solve problems, and chase things, and just generally engage in those natural inclinations so that they can feel that piece and relax a little bit. When they don't get that, they don't have that piece, and so they engage in behaviors that maybe aren't so much fun, that might not seem linked to their desire to hunt and to kill stuff. So think about it this way. Imagine having a stretch of weather la like we just got here in the North Country, where it's either about to rain, is raining, or has just rained like every hour or two. There are a lot of dogs around here that probably didn't behave so great during those weather patterns because they didn't get out as much. We often think that is tied just directly to not getting enough exercise, which is absolutely a component of the whole thing. For for sure, a dog that needs to run is a dog that won't be as much fun to have around when it doesn't get to run. It's pretty simple. But they also want to chase things, and they want to catch things. It says they can't mostly do that with living creatures, which is what they want and is one of the reasons all those cute toys we buy for them have squeakers on the inside to mimic rodents and other animals in distress. We have to facilitate this type of thing. So when we run retrieving drills or hunt dead drills with our dogs, we aren't just preparing them for hunting with us. We are also allowing them to engage in their nature, even if it's structured engagement that goes against what their hearts really want. In fact, the best trainers use this to their advantage. They use this as a reward for asking dogs to offer us up behaviors that are wholly unnatural to them. Think about steadiness here, especially for duck dogs, that the dog wants nothing more to run as fast as possible to a bumper, or to jump into the water right now to swim down a green head that's flopping around forty yards out. They want that retrieve, but it's not solely because they want to retrieve something. They also want to catch something alive. To get to do that, we tell them you have to stay still until I tell you that you can go. Then you can go and earn that reward. You know, a child's nature is not to clean their room for fun, but they are drawn to high calorie sugary foods, so we tell them that if they clean up their room, they can have some ice cream. I know that's dumbing the whole thing now when it comes to dogs, but it's also fundamentally true. This is one of the reasons that a lot of hunting dogs that go to non hunting families end up being labeled you know, high strung, or stubborn, or you know, a host of other negative things that don't take into account the dog being mostly denied its nature for its whole life. It pays to take an honest account of your dog's specific needs. Not only does this start with your breed choice, but it also goes with your dog's specific bloodlines. And then it's the individual nature that you'll begin to understand the moment you bring your little pupster home to start its life with yours. It pays to acknowledge what drives our dogs, not just what we want to drive them because it conveniently jives with what we want to do with them or we want out of them. The more we understand their nature, the more we can work with that to mold them into the kind of pets and hunting partners that we really want. This is good for us and it's good for them because it provides a jumping off point for training rewards while also providing our dogs what they really need out of the day to day lives to turn the volume down just a little bit and become more tolerable for us at home. So let's just recap this quickly so we're all on the same page. I don't think your dog is a criminal, although I did meet a dog one time named Rambo whose owner almost immediately said, and I quote, he's a criminal. You just can't help it. I didn't ask her what she meant. But aside from Rambo, our dogs are great dogs and we all love them very much. They are also domesticated canines with needs in a hell of a lot of echoes, and their genes of a time when they weren't asked to be steady and calm, and instead every chase they engaged in involve life or death for them and whatever was in their crosshairs. Think about that, and more broadly, the nature of your specific dog, and then ask yourself if there is something you can use to your advantage. They're training wise or maybe something that's holding you back because you don't want to acknowledge it in your dog think about it. I think about coming back in two weeks for some more pups to related knowledge. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been The Houndation's podcast. I just want to thank you, truly from the bottom of my heart for all of your support. We've been making a move into this dog world and trying to put more content out there on the mediator dot com, and you guys have been consuming it. It's been great. We love it. Thank you so much for that. If you want more hunting content, whether that's dog training articles or maybe something totally unrelated, like a recipe for some walleyes you're catching this summer, maybe you want to go over and listen to Brent Reeves spin some tales on this country life podcast. Whatever content you need, it's over at the meat Eater dot com. We drop new stuff literally every day. Go check it out.