Ethology and Working Dogs with Kim Brophey

[Music] Hello and welcome to the K9 Conservationists Podcast where we're positively obsessed with conservation detection dogs. Join us every other week to discuss ecology, odor dynamics, dog behavior, and everything in between. I'm your host Kayla Fratt and I run K9 Conservationists where I train dogs to detect data. Today I have the absolute joy of talking to Kim Brophy about ethylogy. If you listen to dog podcasts the way I do, you're probably already a bit obsessed with Kim. Today we're going to dive into how we can use ethylogy to better select and meet the needs of our working dogs. So welcome to the podcast Kim and why don't you remind our listeners or tell our listeners who may not be as deep in the dog podcast world a little bit about yourself. Hey Kayla and thanks for having me back or I should say on one of the newest or first episodes for your kind of redesigned. Yes, our pivot. Yes, yes, yes. It's very cool. So yeah, I am an applied ethylogist and so ethylogy being the study of animal behavior kind of in their natural habitats from an evolutionary perspective. Applied ethylogy is studying animals that are under some form of human control, some type of captivity. So farms, zoos, laboratories, and then of course our companion animals who many of us don't think of as captive animals but they actually are captive and domesticated. And so we're studying kind of the intersection of human and animal behavior there, largely from an evolutionary perspective, which gets a lot more complicated with domesticated animals because of artificial selections and fun stuff that we'll be talking about today. But yeah, I'm a behavior consultant kind of in practice and then doing a lot of professional education in the field right now to bring ethylogy into the dog training and behavior world. Yeah, oh my gosh, yeah, exactly. And I think by now people hopefully are going to understand a little bit about why we're so excited for this interview. And before we dive into it, I have to remind all of our listeners that the field vehicle repair fundraiser is ongoing. As a record, the van is still in getting its engine reworked and hopefully we'll be ready to go by the end of May and ready to go in time for our field season. But if you want to help support that, you can either join our Patreon, which has a couple really exciting new options we'll talk about in an ad break, as well as you can just support right over directly on our go. Fund me link. Both of those will be linked in our show notes. So Kim, as we were, as we were kind of viewing our pre-interview before we hit record, we were talking about a rousal in different dog breeds and how that can look different and how that could apply to this field. So why don't we, why don't we just dive back into this? We were, you know, we were picking on Malinois a little bit and then you brought up Bloodhound. So let's talk a little bit about potentially why a Bloodhound may not be an ideal conservation detection dog. And then we can always circle back to our Malinois because that's a slightly more fraught conversation because they aren't a little bit more popular in the field. Well, and of course, I, you know, just upfront, don't do canine conservation work. I am completely interested in it. And it's one of those kind of bucket list things I'd love to do later on in life when I have some more time to kind of get into some special personal interests. But I, I would love to hear about your own experience working with conservation dogs in different environments for different species. But in the example we were talking about right before we started with like a Bloodhound or Cent Hounds is, you know, Cent Hounds of course have amazing odor detection abilities like, you know, more so than other breeds because of their, their selective pressures from people breeding them to track animals historically for hunting as opposed to for conservation. But when you're tracking an animal for hunting, you know, oftentimes the dog is going to be a further distance away from the handler, not always, but oftentimes. And they were developed for baying upon a rousal in order to help the hunters figure out where the dogs were, you know, and what therefore what kind of where the prey was. And so this is long before we had GPS devices to kind of literally know exactly where the dog is in the field. And so that baying was really helpful historically for hunters. And I was just imagining that depending on what kind of species you were using the canine conservationist for, that might actually be tricky because you might say be, you know, trying to locate some type of an animal that would be very sensitive to the baying, it might run when the dog located that particular species upon hearing all that baying. And I think one of the things that just kind of generally that makes me think about is that we've breaded these specialists breeds of dogs, types of breeds of dogs to respond in very specific ways, to specific conditions. And so you've got that interplay between the environment and those kind of releasing stimuli. And of course we can affect what will be some of the releasing stimuli right. We can kind of like funnel it this way or that and say here this particular scent, not this one, etc. But it's really hard to affect what type of arousal response or response in terms of that arousal, that particular type of dog will have. So you were talking about a malle being kind of bitey upon arousal, which is of course what we've breaded. Malle's to do upon arousal, or is part of their kind of behavioral repertoire upon arousal. And so while we can work with those behaviors to some degree, there are limitations within that in terms of exactly what we can modify with their kind of behavioral software. Yeah, exactly. And I know it's so interesting. I hadn't even, when I've talked to people about hounds and people will say, like, oh, I've got, you know, I've got a young blue tick, coon hound, or a bassit, or whatever it is, like do you think we could get into this line of work? Generally what I've pointed to as far as why we don't do much with hounds in this line of work is the difference between a scent trailing dog and an air-senting dog, which gets a little bit technical for people who aren't in this line of work. And I tend to get some people up with their eyes glazing over. But you know, the difference with a trailing dog is that they're usually doing some amount of like a match to sample sort of thing, where you know, they sniff the hairbrush and then go follow to find them a missing child, or they sniff the rhino horn and then go track down that individual rhino. And they're actually have been a couple dogs that have been trained to do that sort of thing. I'm not entirely sure why. They need the dog to track down an individual rhino. But I would imagine it's for health checkups or something like that. But you know, and that's quite different from just kind of getting out of the car and telling the dog to search and the dog is actually searching like the air and spending a lot of time looking, not even looking obviously they're sent for the odor molecules that are available in the air and then following that odor cone, which is, it's very different from starting the dog on a track where you kind of know that someone once was there. And that's much more so to my understanding what hounds are bread for. I'm sure that people have successfully trained hounds to do more of the air-senting sort of thing, but they are, they do tend to be very, very ground-senting tracking focused. But the bang is also a great point, you know, just yesterday, and this will come up two weeks before this interview. I was interviewing Esther Matthew from South Africa and she did her, she was talking about just this amazing project where she's trained her border collie to find this highly, highly endangered species of rabbit. And they were actually locating the live rabbits and then the handler had to be close enough when the dog located the rabbit, that when the rabbit flushed, the handler could confirm whether or not it was the correct species of rabbit. So for a dog that worked really independently and was being a kind of itself, that would, you know, really obviously just not work well for that particular project. Yeah, no, and all that really just kind of expands my understanding and, you know, in thoughts about how those kinds of things would come into play like in your particular line of work with dogs, you know, because you're right. I mean, that kind of tracking that's, and that singular mindset, right, that sent hounds were developed to get into with it. So, you know, when, if they get on a scent, that is very arousing, whether that's something that we've build up to be arousing or something that's just kind of naturally arousing for them, you know, then they get like literally consumed by that because that was a good scent hound, right? Like a good scent hound gets on that trail and come hell or high water doesn't come off of it. And, you know, that like that perseverance is really fantastic if you're trying to track an animal over especially long distances. But for work where we're needing a little bit more like give and take interplay, nuance, you know, flexibility, the ability for us to kind of like be close in proximity, as you say, work in closer partnership and even proximity with the person. Those things are going to matter, you know? Yeah, absolutely. I know there is a guy, I believe in South Africa, and I'm forgetting his name, but I'll try to find him and drop him into the show notes who has a pack of hound dogs. I believe they're trained by a guy in Texas as well. So I'll try to find both of them and if they're not connected, they are, they do do similar work. And the guy and stuff. Yeah, yeah. So they do poaching and they're actually tracking the poachers. Yeah. And I believe that they actually basically release this pack of hounds. And then they follow them in a helicopter, you know, which is the 2021 version of chasing after your hound dogs on horseback. Yeah. Yeah. I saw that actually. And I thought that was a really cool story. And it was also just kind of interesting, you know, trying to separate my emotional self from my more objective self about the situation. I remember when, when I first heard about it, I don't even remember the article that I read. I wish I could. if I remember, I'll tell you you can pop it in the show notes later. But the Breeder in Texas was talking about how they were breeding the dogs for aggression to be a little bit more aggressive in case I guess they find the poachers. I'm not really sure that's the supposed to be. Yeah, I think they are supposed to be able to take down the poachers. Yeah, and so that's a whole kind of interesting dynamic in itself. And they have a specialized breeding program for that and a specialized early socialization and training program for it. And they were talking about some of the dogs from Texas making it and being good enough for the work and others not. I think the kind of point generally that it brings up is the shoes got to fit, right? It's like it's got to be that you have the right tool for the job. And that's a really important consideration to me and all of the work that we've talked about before. Just in pet homes and stuff like that is that oftentimes we have the wrong tool for the job, right? We have like a working dog in a pet home and that's a lot of what's behind the increase in pet behavior problems, pet dog behavior problems in my opinion. And so in this case, we actually want the working traits. It's more about getting really detailed about what specific traits you want. Yeah, exactly. And I think where I know I get nervous and it's not just this Breeder in Texas. I don't want to pick on him, but anyone who's breeding Malinois for a ring sport or Dutch shepherds or we can pick on any number of breeds is thinking, well, okay, where do the dogs who don't make it in the working lines end up? And how are we making sure that we pair them appropriately so that potentially as they do reach social sexual maturity and hit more releasing stimuli, you know, because a dog who maybe couldn't make it as a dog who tracks poachers over miles and miles through the South African bus and take those dogs down, a dog could conceivably fail, quote unquote, at that job and still be a very, very poor candidate for your average kind of home. And you know, that's not really what we're here to talk about, but it is something that I love thinking about. Yeah, I just, I do think it's an important thing to keep in mind because, you know, for whether we're talking about pure needs, whether we're talking about those particular dogs in Texas, whether we're talking about folks, you know, developing Malle's for ring work, or we're talking about the fact that there's still a bunch of, you know, jerks out there that are breeding dogs for dog fighting. And then some of those dogs don't make it. And so, you know, Cimont Gabois brought up that point, you know, in the interview that we had the other day about, you know, there, if you have all these people breeding for those traits and then you have one that isn't aggressive enough, but still they were intentionally bred to be dog aggressive and be injurious. Then what happens when that dog doesn't make it, do they end up in the local gene pool in the shelter? You know, there's a lot of considerations. Yeah. Yeah. So I love my neurotic working line border collies. They're not good pets for most people. I've had so many dog sitters, like as I come to collect my dog after a trip, kind of hand them over, like their eyes are wide, kind of bloodshot, they're just like, I don't know how you do it. He looks so good in your YouTube videos. They are good, but they're like, you know, permanent crackets. I actually got a really hysterical video of my 14 year old border collie mix, even, okay? So like, yes, probably one half of his answer, we'll get the DNA back soon and we can chat about that. It'll be fun. I've placed wagers with my husband about exactly what I think is in there, but I would wager working line border collie on the one side in American Eskimo, which just makes him nuts and neurotic on the other side. But he was, my son yesterday was playing basketball. We were all joking around on the other day. And like the border collie is just hurting him because of his crazy basketball moves and everyone joking around. I mean, it's there, right? And it's like, yeah, but the border collie was hurting a pile of firewood yesterday, two days ago, where he wanted us to throw the stick and every time we didn't throw the stick for too long, he did this beautiful, like, go out, circle around it, lie down, like, and it's like, we've done a couple hurting lessons and he's almost 10% chow. He is like, he's like 86% border collie and then 10% chow and 4% lab or something. So I don't know what happened back in the grandparents generation. So let's let's circle back a little bit to our Malinois and, you know, and we don't even necessarily have to pick on Malinois. We can, like, I kind of lump a lot of our, our bide shepherds into this group. So our Malinois has got shepherds. Yeah. Our bidey shepherds. Yeah. You know, to distinguish them from our Australian shepherds and our English shepherds. No, they bred the bite back in. That's important for people to know, right? Like, they were hooking dogs at one point we had selected against the bite, but then they were developed for human hurting basically. You know, you start talking about use for police and military work and stuff and they brought the bite back in. Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah. So, you know, our Malinois, our duchies are, you know, even like, our terves are grown and ill, so I-- Yeah, they're grown ill. Yeah, they're grown ill. But, and of course, our German shepherds. Right. And, you know, and there's obviously differences between breeds, but, you know, I find it really interesting. And I think you do as well to talk more about these breed groups and the similarities there because I think we tend to be more accurate when we even lump a little bit more in Zoom out a little bit more. And again, you know, what I've seen is that they, they seem to have, you know, their more likely to grab and bite, which can make them painful and frustrating to just train. You know, I've had more, more shirts ripped by Malinois than border collies by a long shot, even though I spent a lot less time working with the Malinois. But also, you know, similarly with potential prey animals, the--I feel like I've seen-- I don't even feel like--I know that I have seen more kind of concerning behavior that looks more like an intact predatory sequence from our shepherds in this line of work. And that is part of the reason that I personally don't know if I'm ever going to end up working a shepherd in this line of work as much as I love them. And they're excellent, excellent, excellent, excellent job. Well, that's kind of an interesting thing in itself, even you're talking about the predatory sequence because if you talk about herding dogs in general, you know, I mean, I think a lot of people, like just kind of nerd out on the predatory sequence for a minute. A lot of people don't realize that a great many of the jobs that we have artificially selected dogs to do throughout history, those specific behaviors are modified versions of the predatory sequence. And so with herding dogs, you know, generally, we're just speaking in generalizations. We wanted a really strong, orient eye-stocked chase, but we wanted it to be really sensitive to feedback, have a lot of nuance and flexibility within it. And then we did not want a grab bite and a kill bite and the dissect and confuse consume for obvious reasons because we didn't want our livestock to be grabbed because, you know, a lot of them will fall over and dive shock even if the bite isn't that horrible. So like, you know, those things were like a little bit mutually exclusive from the kind of original shepherd herding dog purpose. But when you breed that back in, you're breeding those last steps of the predatory sequence that we had kind of historically artificially selected to mute, you know. We've bred those things back in for those purposes like we were talking about for, you know, being able to grab the perpetrator or the offender or what have you in bite work. And so it's a little harder potentially even though you still have that herding dog flexibility in terms of their supposed to stay responsive to our feedback and our directions and our, you know, cues and prompts and directions. It's a little bit harder when you know that there's, so to speak, there's a bullet at the end of it, right? Meaning like there could be follow through where, if I'm working with like a border collier and a show in shepherd or even a cattle dog, like the level of follow through that I'm concerned about is a lot lower. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because yeah, again, and I always, when I'm giving talks, I always mention this. So it's like any border collier that 10 generations ago harassed a lamb a little bit too roughly or, you know, having free a bit actually grabbed a lamb was absolutely not bred. And in all likelihood, I would imagine was removed completely, you know, not just removed from the breeding population. And yeah, it's just, it's different and I don't know, you know, I don't know enough about predatory sequences to know more about, you know, the idea of muting things and then bringing them back in with our shepherds. But again, you know, I've noticed with my border collies, they still will be responsive to movement in this line of work. So, you know, the situation is where you flush our rabbit or we've got a prairie dog running from one hole to the next and kind of crosses the horizon line in front of the dogs and the border collies do tend to be highly reactive to that sort of movement. But even if they, I've been able to call my border collies off of that and I've also been able to call the malinois off of that with enough work. But I have found that generally, I've never had a border collie actually grab whatever it is that they were going for and I have had the malinois grab things and pick them up. They do tend to be more orally fixated or, you know, more mouthy or however we would We want to say it. And, you know, I mean, like I think my dream, a dog, behaviorally for this line of work, would be something like a, like almost like a border collie springer sort of deal, yeah. - Yeah. - Which I think could create a lot of internal conflict 'cause I know both of my border collies really don't like spaniels, they get stressed out by that constant frenetic movement. I've really noticed like, the kind of behavior. - Yeah, and just, you know, they tend to be so wiggly and they do so much kind of like pacing and quartering, even indoors that I can, like what I've fostered spaniels. I can just see my border collie, like he's like trying to lie down and trying to turn off, but is so, just like, oh my god, stop moving, sit down. Like he just can't, they're very stressful for him to be around. But anyway, like, because I think, you know, an ideal dog for this line of work would have some element of like the more of a hunting dog, like the really natural flushing and quartering, a little bit more independent work. And generally, an even less intact predatory sequence because if we think about it like our herding breeds, our much more bred to actually chase. And control movement, and you know, that's therefore hard for them when they flush a prey animal or a non-target animal. I guess we don't always want to call our study subjects prey animals. Versus, you know, again, in my experience, the labs and the springers don't seem to struggle with that quite as much. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, it's interesting because you talk about like the gun dogs. I mean, we bred a strong kind of, you know, muting and kind of a pause. It's almost like a stall out in a way into the predatory sequence with the gun dogs because we wanted to either have the game birds set upon pointed out or flushed out and then retrieved potentially by any number of different kinds of gun dogs, but didn't want the dog to go and like grab it as part of the hunt, right? Like that was supposed to be our job with the gun, like to bring them down with the gun, post to the dog actually like catching it. And so being just because of the nature of like the limited amount of meat, you know, and the sensitivity of that meat and so you could destroy a small, you know, lowland game bird with one good bite. And so you have this kind of interesting ability to intervene upon it at that point without a lot of that chasing the fast movement, you know, that you get like, right, with the herding dogs and stuff. And it's almost like at what point do you have the most flexibility? And then one of the things about both gun dogs and herding dogs that I think would make both of them really ideal if I'm imagining, you know, with conservation work being that I don't actually do it, is that you're gonna need, I would imagine a lot of dialogue with the dog that you're working with. And you need a dog that is gonna be receptive to and interested in your guidance and feedback and information and, you know, quite honestly, there's a bunch of dogs that could, I'm sure from just a pure scent detection perspective, be able to locate whatever those species were, but then there's all of those other kind of, you know, kind of the world. - Yeah, it's a blessing on their radar. - Yeah. - Yeah, I always make that joke about like, you know, there's no reason that a gray-hound or a husky can't do this work physically. - Right. - But I mean, like then of course you could argue that like those genes are probably wired somewhere physically in their brains. But, you know, as far as like the, what their, their old factory capabilities are and you know, their call information and everything, there's no reason that they couldn't, but I will be shocked the day that I see that because they're just, you know, they're not bred to be highly responsive to our direction and both of them also, and it's interesting to me how a lot of our breeds, and correctly if I'm wrong, maybe I'm just doing, what is it, not confirmation bias, kind of confirmation bias. But anyway, a lot of our breeds that tend to be really independent and therefore would potentially be tricky for this line of work. Also tend to be our breeds with much higher prey drive. Like do we have a lot of breeds with a much more intact predatory sequence that are also super highly responsive to people? Or like, like, okay, so like with livestock, guardian dogs, obviously you have a much lower predatory, like drive sequence, et cetera, because we didn't want them to predate against the animals they were guarding. So they're very independent. But, you know, don't have a strong, and at least it would be a fault, you know, in terms of having a predatory sequence. And I'm trying to think, so say your question again, just because I think I was kind of thinking about livestock guardian dogs. - I was trying to think of an example of a dog that has a really intact predatory sequence. - Okay. Also generally kind of described as highly responsive to people. - I mean, so the intact predatory sequence, sequences would be terriers, both types of hounds, scent and sight, the natural dogs, and then by default some of the bull breeds because of the terrier. And so. - Yeah, it almost maybe put pit bulls in like the most responsive. - Oh yeah, no, yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, because really, I think one of the interesting kind of things about terriers is that they can be super responsive if you have to get on the ground. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, I mean, they can be very responsive, but I think once they find something more interesting to respond to, then all of a sudden we can fall off their radar like a cliff, you know? And so the whole thing about like when you get aroused by whatever, how on your radar do I stay? And of course a lot of that is training. I mean, it's not like we're saying like, oh, they're like, you know, just born this way and like that's completely predictive because it's that interplay, like, you know, Seemong et boi and I were talking about between the nature and the nurture of, you know, so their experiences are gonna turn certain things on or not, you know, or kind of direct things in a certain direction or not. So like, you know, if you get like a beagle for instance, you know, anyone who's ever like raised a scent hound for a particular type of animal that they wanna hunt with that scent hound, yes, there's been certain types of scent hounds that were developed to track particular types of animals, but a lot of them will track and bay at any number of different kinds of wild animals until the person is kind of like working on really directing and funneling that drive in one particular direction and trying to minimize it and the other because you don't want that dog to get distracted, charling and deer when you're out there hunting rabbits for instance. And a lot of that is that like, nurture part interaction, interacting with the nature, you know, and so there's probably some of the basal breeds if I had to guess in the natural dog group that were kind of like on the continuum towards, say, herding dogs, you know, take a some way it or something like that, right, where you're like, you know, or an elk hound, like, so you're like, it's like almost like a stepping stone breed towards some of the other herding dogs. So they're getting a little more human centric, a little more kind of malleable to our influence and direction through that process of artificial selection. And I mean, that's the thing about like the tinge and edit groups even as I talk about them. It's not like, these are in this box clean, cut and dry. These are in this box clean, cut and dry. It's all kind of like, you know, this dog might have a little foot over in this one over here, you know, and it's not completely black and white. We're just kind of like, you know, using that categorization as a point of reference for people to start their expectations. 'Cause frankly, if you got an elk hound, even if they were a herding basal breed and you expected that elk hound to function like a working line border collie, you're gonna be really disappointed too. - Yeah, yeah, I would imagine. One of Niflers best buddies in Puppy Kindergarten was an elk hound and it was funny. They had a trio of the border collie, the elk hound and the husky. That were like best buds and it was so funny to watch, you know, when it came time to like, catch your puppy and call them to you and like, you know, it was always like, Nifler came first, which, you know, I'm sure part of that is he's the one who gets to live with professional trainer. - Sure. - And then the elk hound would come second and then the husky was always the last one to be caught. Half the time his people had to go collective and it was just this fascinating little paradigm of like, yeah, we've got our continuum of our like responsiveness in our little three stooches of gray and white puppies. So, and this is probably a question for Dr. Gatoboa who we are going to have on this podcast soon. But one of the other things that this is changing tax a little bit that I've been really interested in thinking about is like dopamine receptiveness in our dogs and I don't know, I haven't read any of the primary letter on this or anything yet. But I don't know if you've got any thoughts on a lot of these breeds that we really like for this line of work. tend to be these really high dopamine breeds. And you know, is that, why is that? What does that mean? You know, I think, you know, and again, Dr. Gatoboa will have a lot more to say on that. I mean, you know, he's understanding kind of the inner workings of the kind of um, uh, But like the behavioral endocrinology, right, which is just like it's a whole another World that I am not remotely going to pretend to be an expert in But what I do understand is that dopamine serves as a motivator and a reinforcer and like That's really interesting when you think about it because it's like and it makes sense, right? So like dopamine is just meant it I mean, I think someone used the example recently. I think it was one of my chakashi's podcasts with Nando and Joe Rosie and they were talking about just like you wake up in the morning and you have like us elevated dopamine You know what I mean? Or even cortisol like it's just like there are these Things that are operating that help to motivate us to behave appropriately in our environment, right? And so like just having Something in the environment that occurs that is something meaningful for you to interact with as an organism Should motivate you to have an appropriate action and so dopamine is part of that process, you know So it's released to help motivate an appropriate action um and and so when I'm thinking about working dogs and I'm thinking about dopamine in that sense and I'm thinking about a motivator Like I mean, I look at my piernaise newfoundland who has like ridiculously low dopamine and it's like I can just see why it would be difficult To get her engaged and keep her engaged. She's got a great sniffer But I could just see her laying down in the pasture and being like I just don't even feel like doing this today You know what I mean like yeah, and so even just on that motivation and I think you want a dog that is going to when presented with the Context that we're trying to help train and develop them for will step up to the plate, right? Like we want a dog who's gonna be ready to go and ready to work But then it is a good question because I would also wager that like Terriers and and scent hounds also have higher levels of dopamine um, you know and and I would love if I had like a whole second lifetime to just really be able to do specific studies on all the different groups of dogs and Really be measuring their dopamine in real time, you know when presented with certain stimulus I mean at scent hounds are one of those That I just have like questions and theories about but obviously like no studies to back them up at this point I'm like why are they so on and off and actually like pitties and a lot of the bullies too It's like you get like really mellow lazy chill seemingly kind of baseline low dopamine Yeah for like 23 and a half hours a day right and then this explosive high dopamine, you know An athleticism and so Yeah, I just think a lot of it is is poking around and asking different questions and maybe creating some hypotheses knowing that we really don't have a lot of the answer yet Yeah, no, and I was I've been thinking a lot about this dopamine question recently because I was listening to a human psychology podcast and they had Um, they had an expert on who has you know basically, you know It's one of those many like kind of pop psychology like here are four different personality or brain types or whatever But it was looking at dopamine serotonin estrogen and testosterone And there was like a quiz sort of thing in the In the podcast and of course there are much more Which were in depth ways to look at this and again, it sounds pretty pop psychology e to me I haven't gone back and read the pot there was lit yet, but I personally scored super high on dopamine and Really low on serotonin which makes sense. I am on an SSRI and have been really loving it But um, yeah, just it's so interesting to think about like I'm really drawn to these these high dopamine dogs and I'm one of you know in my friend groups You know ever since I was a kid I've always been the one who's like the most easily excited the most enthusiastic The one who people are always being like how do you have time for all of this and I'm just like my brain just needs more It just always wants more like yeah when I come home I Unwined by doing more work And it's like you know, I think when I joke that my border collies and I are the same I might be a lot more right on a neurochemical level than we are ever going to actually know Yeah, I mean actually and that really makes me think about some of the other stuff that see Mocha But I were talking about we were talking about pan-stick pan steps work and like the seeking system and you know He has his like seven blue ribbon emotions and like you know, and there's some other folks that have done some work I think he mentioned and I won't remember their names some other Researchers that have kind of looked at that same set of questions, but you know this idea that There are different channels if you will that the brain kind of gets into for evolutionarily like adaptive reasons that and you know some of those things obviously are just like diversity and mutations that are occurring in Natural selection as it just occurs like you have this like wildcard factor where nature is always throwing that diversity that Variability back into the ring to see what works in what conditions better You know, I have a I'm myself. I'm a very excitable person and always have been and people will be like God, how do you have the energy to do all those things? I'm like my problem is turning it off not like being able to motivate and turn it on You know and so I'm sure I'm kind of a higher-al zoe person I'm sure that like you know, I do have higher dopamine. I guarantee you than my husband does and you know most of the people that I've ever worked with but see that's the second part of the dopamine right is as a Reinforcer and the reward center of the brain, you know and It's thinking about like you said that that concept and feeling and urgency of more and more and more right like which any one of us He's ever had like a border callee can relate to like more and more and more again again again And you know that's actually In humans they have also identified the gene 7R that they called the nomadic gene It's really good issue of national and geographic did an article about that years ago And so this particular gene 7R is related to people that are diagnosed with ADD or adult ADHD and Also people that are prone to isms so the development of things like alcoholism or you know drug addiction or exercise addiction or workaholism or whatever that might be is kind of um, you know that that reward center of the brain and the orbital frontal cortex that like is is meant to say Oh, that's enough like that will that'll do right like people that gene 7R are like more more more It's like what about this and what about this and maybe we should do this and if you think about it from like a human historical anthropology kind of perspective right like You know, this is what they were talking about in that national geographic article about the nomadic gene is that like There it takes both types in a way to make the world go around like so if you have people that were Gardening and doing agriculture and whatever that are satisfied with we have enough food and we're doing our thing and we're living off of the land Then you have those people that are like, but what's over there? What's over on that mountain or maybe I can invent this or maybe there's a better way to do it And often the people that are like that nomadic gene, you know hyperactive Type personalities are also the ones that solve some of the world's biggest problems because they're thinking so outside the box Because their brain isn't satisfied that we have all the answers or enough food yet or Whatever that might be I know I think I've read this article or read something else that was about it and yeah, yeah, they were talking about you know, we needed Or you know, I guess we had I don't know if we needed but we had some people who were you know willing to make These little rafts and you know go out and find Polynesia like Right a little bit of crazy maybe but like at the same time that's what pushes innovation and And um and I think they gosh, I'm trying to remember now they had talked a little bit in in whatever article I had read about how you can actually find different levels Of this this gene I believe or this gene variant in different populations where you know if you look at people who are You know like our Polynesians for example, and I might be picking on the wrong the wrong country But you know, we get the idea these island nations that had me um colonized way back in like ancient human history Um, they have a much higher level of this of this particular gene versus if you look at people In like you know the interior of Russia Um, who I've just kind of always been there forever and never left um They they on a population level had a lower level and again, I'm sure I'm getting a lot of this wrong Because I read this article like three years ago um, but okay, so we're gonna take a quick ad break And then I want to come back and we're gonna talk about um New Zealand actually has a relatively different paradigm for how they do Conservation dog work that I think really relates to this so we'll be back to talk about that Hey, everyone just popping into this episode with an update on our patreon We still have the three dollar a month dog eat detector level which allows you to ask questions for me and the guests to answer each episode But now also let's you join our monthly training video analysis calls these calls are going to be recorded Of course and we'll also publish the video afterwards for everyone to view and ask questions about prior to the call To ensure that all time zones kind of participates fully so we'll basically publish the video We're going to analyze so that you can ask questions and view it and prepare ahead of time Then we'll have the call what we talk about it. 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I wanted to go to New Zealand and study their selection of conservation detection dogs partially because New Zealand is the country that has had conservation detection dogs for the longest. There was a guy in 1890 named Richard Henry who started training his dogs to find I think it was endangered ground nesting birds and he was moving them from one island that was either infested with rats or foxes. I can't remember which to another island that didn't yet have those predators to help save the populations but so anyway you know they've been doing this for a really long time versus here in the US conservation detection dogs really took off in like the 90s because our DNA analysis from SCAT got finally good enough that having dogs being able to collect a bunch of SCAT got really useful and that's what really kind of exploded the field here in the US but so in here in the US it's really really normal we've got a lot of our conservation detection dogs are trained using very similar methods to your bomb dogs your search and rescue dogs you board a patrol dog swear it's very much so about these you know these dogs that are absolutely toy crazy we use them to teach them what we're looking for and you know they'll work their work through kind of insane amounts of adversity to get their ball. Verses in New Zealand they use terriers to find invasive rats they use bird dogs to find endangered birds and they do much much more so and they you know when you talk to some of them about like oh yeah you know here in the US we use border collies and reward them with balls they're just like what are you talking about why would you use a border collie to find a bird. Interesting. Yeah which makes sense in terms of the natural receptivity for the particular species that they're using right so or particular species they're interested in finding and using the particular dogs for those particular species I think it'd be tricky if you had like a conservation dog and you wanted to be able to work that dog on a variety of different kinds of species. Yes I think that's probably part of part of the difference and I don't know how you would if you were trying to choose the perfect breed to get a dog to find an invasive plant. You know where do you go with that we don't have a dog breed that is bred to find plants as far as I know I guess maybe well actually maybe like a legoto but yeah exactly I was gonna say truffle yeah that would be the closest thing that I can think of yeah fascinating oh my gosh I'd love to know now I'm like maybe my next dog's a legoto maybe I need to try this. Have you ever worked with a legoto before? I've met a couple but I've never like worked intensively with gosh I'll just tell you right now the only ones that I have worked with were absolutely in the top percent of intelligence dogs that I've ever worked with like you think a total smart like and it makes sense right because they're like kind of old school poodle ancestry you know but oh my gosh intelligent and actually incredible sensitive working drive the legoto that I worked with the first time who ended up being quite too smart for her own good she was a service dog that I was training with a client so she's training her own dog and I'm guiding her through that process everything we ever taught the dog single trial single trial every new skill it was it was just one of those dogs you know you you get border collies and Aussies and stuff like that sometime where you're like hey let me show you something and they're like okay cool you showed me this dog was so funny because she the only dog I've ever worked with that if she got frustrated with you know us kind of in her mind I guess beating a dead horse like we did something too many times like being like hey like let's do it again just to make sure you got it she'd pee on the floor to be like and that's to tell you I'm tired of your lesson like and it was clockwork and it was hilarious she was an opinionated strong will dog but she was so intelligent she could call you on my name you what I said what a cool young lady she absolutely was very determined but yeah so I mean the small tangent there but I you know the idea of using ethylogy to think about what you know which dogs are just gonna have that natural kind of key to the lock fit to the particular things that you're trying to get them to work with is fantastic I would have the question for folks in New Zealand what do you do with that terrier when he finds that endangered rat right because like most terriers upon finding an endangered rat would proceed upon grabbing said endangered rat well and I think they tend to work them in muscles I know I would explain a lot yeah and I think generally for the rats it's pests they don't have native or endangered rats so the the terriers are doing the invasive pests side and then the bird dogs are doing the endangered local okay that makes much more sense so you do have a lot of damage they're okay well and I don't know then you know and this is where like we really need to just get a New Zealand a New Zealand conservation dog handler on to ask all these questions so you know you know where to find us and shoot us an email if you're you know someone or if you are someone but you know so say you're doing that you've you've got your your terrier your jack russle going out you're trying to find the rats and I don't know potentially you actually do allow that terrier to dispatch the rats at the end I'm not sure but yeah then what do you do if the terrier comes upon like an echidna or do they have a kidna in New Zealand or is that just Australia no I'm just you know there's gotta be something down there that you wouldn't want your terrier to go after and and if you're just going off of instincts how you know how much availability do you have into your target species if you're not using like these external rewards and this would you know this is a similar question for like our sentounds or something or I'm not quite sure how you convince your set dog to to just go for for foxes and ignore the deer you know I gently don't know and I don't know again without some sort of external reward how you get much malleability in this where if you want to trade trade your dog from finding ground nesting so kakapo or ground nesting parents in New Zealand to potentially finding like key unests which are you know it's a high alpine parent I would imagine most pointers are just gonna tell you about most birds but at some point you don't want to know about the 10,000th rock dove right yeah I mean and that's all you know I can see how you could basically just foster and encourage what shows up in the direction that you want it to go and that just even that you know you get into some of the social behavior right like it's just the endorsement and the provocation it's kind of like you know I mean one of the things that I just I've always been so amused by and I'm doing this with everyone of my dogs is completely dumb but I'm just amused by it is every time like anyone of my dogs ever started digging a hole and you know you start encouraging like what is that you know what's in that hole and they're like oh oh you're into it okay I'm gonna dig more like you see that just like the suggestive power of being like oh it's in there and then you get closer and you're like acting like you're interested too then they like start digging faster like I mean I think about that social layer right and I think about how if you're working with a dog for something like that if you were kind of not endorsing of the dog pursuing or showing interest or you know in a particular species that that should have some weight probably more so with dogs that are bred for you know that's human sociability and partnership you know working so that they're they're gonna be more interested in your opinion of whatever it is that they're digging but and then the same could be true that if you're you know encouraging and reinforcing the dog for engaging in that particular identification that that's gonna help like drive that neural pathway like to become more carved out and more fluid you know and at a certain point just the frequency with which that neural pathway has been traveled has staying power in itself you know what I'm saying so like yeah if you get enough water under the right bridge for a particular species that in itself is competing with the dog's distractibility for the other species because you got enough of that current yeah yeah yeah that makes sense and that's to my understanding that's how a lot of early conservation dogs were trained where you know it was a field bow just who was going out and trying to find uh I don't know a given species of milkweed so that they can tag it to then come back and check it. Later, the season one was big enough to host a Monarch butterfly. For example, I don't know if I'm describing a real thing at all, but they were going out and they brought their dog out in the field. Every time they stopped and found a milkweed, they were showing some interest in it. They tagged it, maybe they gave the dog a snack. It doesn't take all that long before you have a dog who's kind of self-taught in conservation dog work, who will just kind of be like, "Hey, weren't we looking for this over here?" "Why?" "Don't you like these?" And again, that's my understanding of those dogs wouldn't necessarily, they may or may not have what it takes to then do this professionally, where you're asking them to go out and do it for hours and hours every day, species after species, month after month. Like that's again where I don't know about the individual dog, but as far as them kind of going out and like helping you in the field. There's a lot of dogs that have been able to do that historically. And that's another thing I always tell people and they're interested in getting into this field is like, you may not have the dog who has what it takes to do what barley does right now, where we do different species every couple of months, and we're going out and working him, working his toenails to a stub, and he loves every single second of it. But you might have a dog where you have, if you volunteer with your local invasive species weed removal crew, that dog could probably come out into the field with you and be helpful. You know, it's funny you were just talking about that. It made me think about this phenomenon. I remember when I learned about it years ago, first from Temple Grandin, and then read a really good article actually that I can send you. You can also put in the show notes about dopamine. You said history. And one of the reasons that I just love those two things connecting with each other is because both were describing how the dopamine is at its highest right before actual acquisition of the concrete award. So it's kind of like, let's say you're shopping for the perfect black dress or whatever. It's like, it's when you see it like 10 feet away on the rack and you're like, "Oh my god, I think this is it." Is it my size? You know, it's that moment when the dopamine is the highest. It's not actually like the buying the dress part and taking it home part. Right. And so it makes me think about that. Yeah, we're wearing it the first time or. Right. No, it's none of that. It's the right at that last moment. Right. So if you're thinking, "I'm definitely the happiest when I think about buying a cookie. I not want to buy a cookie." I'm actually thinking like, "Right, you're like, it's that moment when I'm, oh, I'm going to take that first bite." Right. So then, one of that's partly to explain kind of the self-reinforcing nature of, once we've kind of fostered that neural pathway of seeking and looking for this particular thing that there's any kind of reinforcement history behind. At a certain point, so whether that's a genetic reinforcement history, so like nature or human artificial selection has said, "This thing is meaningful and you should seek it." So we've, you know, that's been bred in on some level with dogs. But then also how we then influence it through that nurture and our feedback and the environment and training, etc. to become specifically meaningful, then you have at certain point, like this response that's happening internally, where it's like, "I think I found it, I think I found it that that in itself continues to reinforce the dog for looking for the whatever that might be." It's just kind of fun to think about the sensitivity of all of those processes internally for the animal and how much is going on that it's invisible to us, you know? Yeah, I know if you think of the ball that's reinforcing it, but it could be the whole other thing after a while. Exactly. I know Rogue Detection teams on their Instagram, this was several months ago now, so maybe like February 2021, had a bunch of really cool posts where they talked about the difficulty of when you've got a dog who's made an alert and you need to go over and confirm whether or not the dog is correct. And in some cases, you know, if you're looking for like bumblebee nests or, you know, lizard scat or something like that, you're going to have to really dig around in the leaf litter, even if the dog is telling you, you know, it's in a foot of here. And even the act of the handler coming over and starting to inspect an area as the dog has made an alert can be enough for some of these dogs to then start wanting to re-enforce, yeah, and tell you about, you know, whatever it was that wasn't correct. And it's just, you know, as far as when we're talking about off-target indications, which is kind of my preferred term for a false alert. It, you know, it's not just about whether or not you gave the dog the ball. It's whether or not, how much time you spent inspecting it, what your response was as you're doing that, or if the dog was not alerting to something that you wanted, how you kind of react to that. And certainly not like digging around and pulling a ball out preemptively, even if you don't give it. Right. Yeah. And the subtlety that goes back to the social referencing part we were talking about earlier, that social psychology component of like our endorsement or lack of endorsement for any particular behavior. So in this case, like indicating, you know, that we've found the potential target or what have you, that has real ethyl logical weight. And this is something we tend to think very operantly still about all behavior that like we're rewarding or punishing the behavior, you know, we're controlling whether or not this is reinforcing for you or not. And we're not as powerful as we think we are. Like, yes, all that's very real. It's just not the whole story. And something like, I mean, actually, I try to explain this to clients all the time too, is if you like, if your dog is barking like crazy at every person that walks by your house, and every time your dog is barking out the window, you come up and stare and look to and whatever the dog is barking at, the dog can perceive that response as you taking cues from them, which on its own right can potentially reinforce the behavior if we're both looking together outside the window at the thing, we're making it more meaningful. Like, and so the subtlety of like, okay, if the dog does a particular behavior and then we even come closer to inspect whatever it is that you've found. Like, I was talking about encouraging my dogs with the holes. Like, if I come closer to the hole that they're digging in, it's the same thing. It encourages the behavior and it'll increase. And I think, you know, that's that same phenomenon is even true like with aggression, right? So we'll see that like a dog is being aggressive or potentially aggressive or there's this tense moment or whatever. And sometimes when the people move in towards that tension or the altercation is when it will actually escalate because there's something about just even the increasing sense of other social members kind of coming in that turn on or, you know, further a rousal. So there's a lot of interesting stuff that can be going on beneath the surface that's motivating and reinforcing for the animal. Would love to hear Simons or Simons, you know, take on that and like what is going on in those moments like step by step, but it's fascinating to say the least and it's definitely about more than the ball. Totally. Yeah, yeah, that God, that could be a t-shirt for us. It's about more than the ball. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And, you know, and I don't know practically how to fix that as a handler as far as like you do need to go over there and you do need to confirm. And, you know, in theory, if you've trained your dog well, and we talked about this with Stacy Barnett on an episode that should have dropped by the time this one airs about sourcing and how a lot of what we're doing when we're training our dogs is thinking about, or she and I are at least, thinking about really getting the dog to be working with the odor and you're really working to pay attention to their body language. And so it's not just about the alert because a lot of times if if you're only way as a handler to tell whether or not your dog is on target is by them alerting, you're going to miss so much because that just that final response that down for my dogs lying on the target is so easy for the dog when they're tired or frustrated to just kind of like I've seen barley do this where he just kind of like, oops, and like lies down and it's so different from his normal alert. But when I was a newer handler, I had a really hard time noticing that because I wasn't watching his tail. I wasn't watching his breathing set. I wasn't watching for the crabbing and the bracketing and all the other like, oh my gosh, fun, sexy body language things that I get to look for now. So now I feel like I can really tell the difference. But anyway, so much of that for me is about de-emphasizing the alert for the dog so that when you can kind of tell that they're just downing because they're tired or they're frustrated, you can just kind of redirect them. And that also is where it's helpful to be working like a no and hide if your dog is struggling with this because then you can kind of, you know for a fact that like you put something out there and the dogs at the wrong area. But obviously again, sometimes in the field it's just not possible and I don't quite know, you know, with barley I will come over inspect things in a really neutral voice and then kind of cue him to search again and then hopefully be able to put something out so that I can reward him at something that is confirmable because of how you, real quick just to emphasize like the your tone of voice that you brought that in, right? Like I mean something that subtle again that's that social referencing component. is it's not like the real thing. Good dog. It's just even your tone. Yeah, yeah, it's just like, no, search. I'm just being this-- I'm sorry, guys. Yeah. But dogs are like-- No, I'm not sure. [LAUGHTER] What do you get? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I was so funny when I watched training videos. Like I'm assessing training videos of them. Like you can hear-- they're getting better at it now, but especially depending on which speaker system my computer is hooked up to, if I hear, if I say search or chase, which is their cue for their ball being thrown, both of the dogs are so reactive to that sound. OK, but yeah, so there's the body language thing. And just this tonal thing. And then also, I will turn physically road it my hips away and start taking a couple steps. When I was first teaching this with barley and definitely with the malinois that I spent a lot of time handling, I actually sometimes had to have them on leash and just kind of gently physically move them. But it's so challenging. And this is one of the things that I find most challenging in this field. And it's one of the things that I really, really hope that in five or 10 years down the line in this field, I'm going to have a better answer for. But what do we do at these times where we have these unconfirmed heights or these unconfirmed alerts? Where particularly if we're working with say, I'm always picking on this black-footed ferret project that I worked on where it's a black-footed ferret. It's down a whole-- they're nocturnal, they're mostly solitary, unless we're lucky enough to wake it up and piss it off, and then it chatters at us. We're just not going to know what they're not, the dog is correct. In most cases, there are times where we were able to work with a collared ferret. And we know that the ferret was seen at 5am, near this hole. And then the dog is alerting to it at 8am. We can say it's probably there. But what do we do there? You don't want to give the dog a correction, because you don't know they're wrong. And I don't even like entering corrections into my training period, and especially not within a scent training, which I always want to be a fun enthusiasm-filled thing for my dogs. And I don't know. Like there are times where I do give a verbal redirection, which I think a redirection at a correction are kind of the same thing. But we can get into that some other time. Yeah, I would be curious about is with hurting dogs anyway, just because the distance increasing behavior of ascending away is so kind of naturally part of their ethology software programs. It makes me wonder whether in a situation, you'd have to breed it into your entire sequence. I mean, not breed it. You'd have to work it into your entire training sequence to work without being punishing for the dog in some situations. But if they had an alert, and you don't know if it's a false alert, and you don't want to accidentally reinforce it just by moving in towards it, you could build in something into the kind of sequence where the dog would alert, and then upon realizing that you've noticed the alert, there was a cue that was an out, like, come away, get spaced at 15 feet, and then await while you inspected, because that would buffer against the likelihood that the dog would perceive you coming in towards that particular target. Totally. Yeah. Like-- Yeah, I'm not a dead. Just putting them on a stationers. I mean, I could totally just-- Totally. --towel into the field. Throw it down. Barley is beautifully mat trained. He would go, he would station on it. I believe-- And then you got it right. You could bring them back in. Do you know? And that would reinforce the crap out of it, because that would be like the whole pulling back of the rubber band funneling, where it's like this down-to-start stay for agility, you know? Like how it-- Yeah. You're springing back that excitement and that anticipation. And they would probably, if they had it right, they'd be chomping at the bit to rush back and get that reinforcement. Or if they got it wrong, you'd be like, oh well. Yeah. And then walk away from that target area. That's just-- It's so fun to think about that. Yeah, I do think that would actually work really beautifully. I think I'm going to have to start trying that. And then I think with Barley-- and I would not be able to implement this with Niffler yet-- I think with Barley, he's got a solid enough go-to-mat behavior that I wouldn't have to reinforce it, because then the tricky thing would be, like if the dog is working for a couple hours, and yes, they want their ball. But then you're reinforcing them with food for going onto their mat. Oh, you could build some sort of behavior chain. Absolutely. The out and the way-- I mean, frankly, is-- I think with a hurting dog, you'd be able to do it relatively easily. I think it would be really hard to get a springer to do that. I think our springer handlers or our lab handlers listening might need a different solution. That is more ethologically valid for those breeds. Right. I agree it would work so much easier with a hurting dog, particularly a sheep hurting dog, where removing pressure from such a sensitive type of flock or herd animal is a valuable and necessary part of their ethogram. But yeah, I think whether you used a mat or whether you just did kind of an out-down state, you could build up a reliability of that. And actually, separately-- so you're not using food for that particular behavior, right? But build that up as part of the sequence, ultimately, once they've got that behavior separately, weave it in as part of the sequence so that they know that you always, upon locating, you indicate it's right here. You wait till I've noticed the alert, and then you're sent away for confirmation. And then it's self-reinforcing at that point just to go away and be knowing that if I'm right, it would be interesting as a hypothesis to see whether it accidentally-- because they could backchain the behavior sequence. It might have conditioned reinforcement value just to even go to the mat in anticipation of coming back to what ever it was for you. You know, this is the trickie of the opposite part of the gap. Well, then on a logistical matter as well, I think I would need the dog to hold its alert until I could walk up and throw a pin flag where they alert it. Because unless they're alerting to the base of a given tree or something, which I have seen before when I shadowed a jaguar and big cat scat detection dog in Costa Rica, and a lot of times they're alerting to latrines that aren't the base of trees. So in that case, I can see he alerted in between those two roots of a k-bock tree. We'll go up there. But if we're out in a field, I need my dog to hold his alert because if I put my pin flag, or if I think he alerted just two feet away, and he's alerted to a little rosette of an invasive plant, that's only an inch and a half in tall and two inches wide, I really need to be able to put my pin flag in search, really close to where he actually alerted. Because otherwise-- It's almost like you need a tiny hacky sack at the bottom of the pin flag. So it's weighted enough that you can toss it. You know? Oh, my gosh. I-- and now I'm imagining my border collie thinking that that's his ball. I think I'm going to dog with a hacky sack pin flag running around. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. I mean, this is something I definitely want to try and play with and think through. And like, can I-- could I at least walk up while the dog is holding his alert, put a pin flag in, do that nice and neutrally, and then call the dog away to his matter, to his place. And that still would build less anticipation than him having to be right there as I'm rooting around. Right. And he'd like to grasp it. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least let me get close enough to figure out where he's alerted and then-- Because you could be very deliberate about walking up neutrally in your body language. And as long as he doesn't perceive from that social referencing component, you searching, then that won't accidentally reinforce it. But like, I mean, again, I'm not being particularly in this field, but just being really into kind of weird creative solutions. I mean, you could take like a fishing weight, you know what I'm saying? Like, you could get like a tiny little fishing weight that just had some little brightly colored wood ever on it, keep like a dozen of them in your pocket or something. But something that isn't-- it's heavy enough that you could toss at 10, 5 or 10 feet. But it's small enough that it's not going to damage anything that you're talking about. Yeah. Well, I was trying to think-- this is where my crazy-- when I was a little kid, I wanted to be an inventor. I either wanted to be an inventor or Jane Goodall or Steve Irwin. Those were the three odds. And I was trying to think of like, could I have something on the dog's collar that I could have a remote for that would then drop like a little poof of-- Yeah. --of collar stock or drop something that I could then just-- I know that wherever my dog's neck in is probably within a couple feet of whatever he's alerting to. Yeah. Oh, that's genius. You could totally figure out how to do that. You just have to make sure whatever it was was an accidentally punishing to the dog. Yeah. Yeah. I think the colored chalk idea would be really cool. And probably would be too punishing to my dog. And then I would end up with all sorts of fun. I've got like a really beautiful purple dog by the end of our search day. Exactly. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. We'll have to think about that and see. I know we've got a couple engineers in our audience. So if anyone's listening, it wants to brainstorm this further. I think that could be really cool. And the nice thing is it would be relatively project dependent. If we're going out and we're finding Elkscat or Bear Cat or a lot of our cat from animals that are more than 25 pounds, it's pretty easy to go up and confirm most of the times the dog is going to be correct. It's easy enough that you wouldn't necessarily need to implement this solution. But when we are dealing with like really, really tiny things, like again, I'm thinking, and I haven't worked on a bubble-be-project, but I know conservation docs collective has worked on a couple, you know, they're really, really hard, and really, really, really, really, really tiny. And that's, well, this will be probably one of our last things as we're wrapping up, but thinking about different, different dogs in my experience have do better with detail oriented searching, like finding little teeny tiny bubble-be-nests, where the dog might actually just be searching like a quarter-acre a day, which is, you know, for our conservation dog incredibly small, versus having a dog who really enjoys working a big scent cone of like a grizzly bear scat, and they're searching like 300 acres in a day. And I've really noticed different dogs really prefer that sort of work, and I haven't noticed a lot of breed, like breed-specific tendencies as far as that goes yet, but I wonder if there would be, or at least just, you know, figuring out what your individual dog, what they, what they prefer, and then trying to, you know, if you've got enough dogs trying to get the right dog for the job. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, because even how dogs move through space varies so much depending on the genetics, like you're talking about with the gun dogs, you know, that kind of like flushing type of pattern. It's funny, even when I'm working with client dogs, and, you know, we're working on just leash skills, like how many of the spaniels and the setters, and, you know, the pointers tend to do this kind of like weaving walking style, just when they're moving through space, which is, you know, just very kind of unique to the gun dog group, you know. And yeah, I mean, I can see, I would wager that there would be dogs that would be more detail-oriented. I mean, just right off the top of my head, I'm thinking terriers, you know, they're very detail-oriented. It's the nitty-gritty and kind of getting in the weeds of whatever it is that you're particularly looking for, whereas, I mean, some some dogs would be more inclined to cover large distances. But again, I think those are, I don't know what everyone's doing in your field, and particularly in different countries, but like how, how many people are using any and every kind of breed to do this kind of work worldwide that you know of? It's a fine friend. It's relatively widespread. I would say it's interesting, particularly in the US, most of the organizations here in the US are relatively rescue dog-based, but it's super fascinating to see different organizations culturally prefer their different rescue dogs. So like rogue detection teams, they're primarily rescue dogs. They're almost all cattle dogs. Working dogs for conservation is all rescue dogs, and they have a pretty even mix of the labs and the shepherds. They've got a couple border collies, but mostly labs and shepherds. And then conservation dogs are collective. They're, they do mostly purpose-bred dogs, but they're almost entirely labs. I think they've got one pity mix. And then me, you know, I've got, I'm 50/50 between lab, between rescue and purpose-bred, and I'm border collies. So, and I suspect it's actually a lot of handler preference as well, which we we do not have time to get into. Right, versus target versus target difference because I know for a fact that a lot of those these organizations are, we're working on similar targets, but you know, again, rogue detection teams like they are nuts for cattle dogs, and like at working dogs for conservation, they don't have a single one, and they've got like 30-some dogs worldwide. So interesting. So then it's not like you see though like a random sight hound or no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no hounds as far as I know, at least here in the US with any of the big organizations, and you know, the interesting thing in this field as well is just that like I pick on these same couple organizations like the New Jersey Trail Coalition has a couple dogs, Conservation Dogs Hawaii has several, but there's also a lot of people like me in this field where it's like there's one person and two dogs, so I'm sure there's someone out there. I just don't know everyone in the field quite yet because we don't have a conference, so I can't meet everyone. You guys need a conference. We don't have a meeting log on virtual, you could have an international conference pretty easily. I know, yeah, it's just I just got myself a Twitter this week, and one of my first tweets was, I do not need more projects. I do not need more projects. Yeah, well, and even just kind of going back to this like detail oriented versus not sort of dog, the two dogs that I can think of that were most extreme on this that I've worked. We're both labs, both yellow labs even. And one, one was like he was an absolute freak for detail oriented work. He just he loved, loved, loved searching for boats. He did insect work. He loved it. And then as soon as you let him off, leash this dog lost his mind. I mean, he was just running these like massive loops and just and you knew for a fact, he was like running past odor cones because he was just so excited almost. And like I'm sure some of that is definitely a training thing. But just he was such a beautiful search dog when you had him on-lation doing detail oriented stuff. And as soon as you let him off, it was like, oh my gosh, this dog means so much work versus and they were interesting. And they lived and trained with the same handler. And again, they're both yellow labs. But there's just must be something different versus this other this other lab. You know, she I mean, you could see when you had her doing boat searches, like she was plotting, like her tail was down. She was just like fine. I'll check the boat. And as you've got her off, she had these beautiful search patterns. She was happy and she was really, really reliable. Wow. Yes, and that's really interesting too because that makes me think about competing a rousal. Right? So like it could be something like for that one really detail oriented lab, it could have been that there was a competing a rousal upon being off leash that kind of turned on a different type of searching mechanism. Right? Like that maybe some of the flushing and you know, so it's just fascinating to think of all that. And I think one of the reasons I love talking with you and so many of these other awesome people who've got these podcasts, these last, you know, number of months is that like it's a it's a humble exploration, right? Like we're interested. We're intrigued. We're not like, oh my gosh, we've got all this stuff figured out. Let us give you like an hour long. We have one lecture of blah, blah, blah. It's just like, they're really interesting questions and I think it's so humbling in a field that has been kind of defined by there's an answer. You're supposed to have the answer. You're supposed to be God. You're supposed to be able to control everything. Like you know, this kind of power dynamic and dog training of like, make it do what I want it to do, make it not do what I don't want it to do. And it's so it's so incorrect. It's just so oversimplistic and like minimizing the vastness of what we don't know. And there are just so many places to look and ask and explore that I think really matter to a more complete understanding. Knowing that there'll always be things that we don't know and always new questions to ask. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's so so so much. There's so many rocks left to overturn. And I do I really think like at some point, I don't know. I need like, I need to go to grad school three times, I think. Yeah, I want to go like get four PhDs, you know, like in a variety of different things. And I don't have enough lives and time to do it. But oh, many there. Yeah, I've like had legitimate conversations with mentors about mine of mine. I think I need to go to grad school once for animal behavior and like canine cognition or ethylogy or something. And then I need to go back again and do ecology rather than doing a PhD in one of the two at least to start. And I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do. As we're wrapping up here because I do, I try to keep this at an hour. And I'm so bad at it what I'm talking to you because there's just so much to go through. Is there anything else we need to to bring up or circle back to before we let you plug your pluggables? No, I don't think so. Okay, cool. Well, and I'm sure we'll think of things and people on our Patreon, of course, can submit questions that will have a conversation. Who knows? Maybe if you, if our patrons are nice enough, we'll get Kim on to do a patrons only live. I don't know. Join our Patreon and we'll find out. So Kim, I know you have a bunch of amazing courses and all sorts of cool speaking gigs that people need to need to know about. So where can people find you and keep track of all of that? Well, they can of course check out our website right now. It's not the new one, but the new one will be up soon and that's dogdoorbehaviorcenter.com. Find me on Facebook. It's just Kim Brophy or you can look at our dogdoor page that we have on Facebook as well. We have an upcoming awesome course that's going to be in person at Wolfpark in Indiana in August. And that same course will be offered online starting in September, but enrollment is now open. So for folks that are already working with dogs professionally or are thinking about getting into working with dogs professionally or some kind of a dog related field, it's meant to fill in all those planks and kind of build some bridges and get people's minds open to this vast amount of science that hasn't really been integrated fully into the dog training behavior world so far. And then I'll also be speaking at APDT this year. So that'll be I think that's in October. So some folks can catch us there as well. Awesome. Yeah. And we'll make sure to link to all of that in the show notes as well as the you know the chat. - Not Geo article on the dopamine gene and - Yes. - Next up in all sorts of stuff. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's gonna be a lot of links in this episode, I think. So, and you can find our show notes at canineconservationists.org. It's letter K number nine conservationists.org. And there you can also find information on our Patreon, which has, as we've mentioned, we've got two new tiers in our Patreon where you can now do a video analysis club at the two highest levels of Patreon and at the highest level. You can submit videos of you and your dog working together to get some feedback. It's meant to be super constructive and helpful and kind. I'm really, really excited about that. And you can always of course support us over at GoFundMe or all sorts of, if we've got swag, we've got merch over on our website right now. So just, it's all over on canineconservationists.org. You'll find it there. That's the easiest thing. - That's awesome. - So, again, thanks so much for coming on Kim. It was a pleasure as always. And we'll talk to you again soon. Sounds good, have fun.