How To Train Your Dog With Love + Science - Dog Training with Annie Grossman + Anamarie Johnson PhD - SFTD Trainer Maddie Messina on studying animal cognition, dealing with allergies, and more

SFTD Trainer Maddie Messina on studying animal cognition, dealing with allergies, and more

02/12/21 • 44 min

How To Train Your Dog With Love + Science - Dog Training with Annie Grossman + Anamarie Johnson PhD

Our trainer Maddie Messina, who started out with us as a walker two years ago, is getting a master's at Hunter's Animal Behavior and Conservation, where she is studying canine cognition. She and Annie discuss her early interest in veterinary medicine, the opportunity she had to work with primates as an undergraduate at Bucknell University, her current focus on working with puppies, and doing it all... while being severely allergic to dogs.

Book a session with Maddie at http://schoolforthedogs.com/maddie

Follow Maddie at Instagram at @onlyfurendswithdogs

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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

So thanks for being here, everybody. I am here with Maddie Messina who's been at School for the Dogs, working with us in various capacities for, gosh, could it be two years now? Is that right?

Maddie:

It's definitely coming up on that, for sure.

Annie:

So why don't you talk a little bit about what you're doing right now with us, and then we can talk about what else you've done and what you're doing when you're not wearing your training pouch.

Maddie:

Okay. Absolutely. So I started at School for the Dogs as a walker, and I came from a training background. So that was my step into the School for the Dogs world. And since then, I've transitioned to working at Day School, which is our adult basic manners drop-off program. And I also mainly focus now on puppy training.

I do a lot of first sessions. So people who come to the school, they see me for the first time as their trainer. And then from there, we kind of build out a program for them or lead them into our group classes, which I just started teaching as well. So last week was my first week of teaching puppy kindergarten.

Annie:

Oh yeah, congratulations. How did it go? I think I was, I was there right when you were starting to set up, I think.

Maddie:

Yeah, it was definitely a big change because I’m used to kind of handling one-on-one clients. But the one thing I will say is that I also think that I’m skilled in handling chaos. That was definitely just kind of practice in handling more chaos, but it went really well. I think the nice thing about our puppy kindergarten setup is that all the puppies who come, by the time they’re here for their first week, they’ve already kind of met with a private trainer and they know the gist, so I think it’s a little bit less chaotic than it would be if you had a group of puppies and parents who were stepping into the training world for the very first time

Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast

Get full access to Don't Be a Dick to Your Dog at dogtraining.substack.com/subscribe

Book a session with Maddie at http://schoolforthedogs.com/maddie

Follow Maddie at Instagram at @onlyfurendswithdogs

---
Partial Transcript:

Annie:

So thanks for being here, everybody. I am here with Maddie Messina who's been at School for the Dogs, working with us in various capacities for, gosh, could it be two years now? Is that right?

Maddie:

It's definitely coming up on that, for sure.

Annie:

So why don't you talk a little bit about what you're doing right now with us, and then we can talk about what else you've done and what you're doing when you're not wearing your training pouch.

Maddie:

Annie:

Oh yeah, congratulations. How did it go? I think I was, I was there right when you were starting to set up, I think.

Maddie:

Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast

Get full access to Don't Be a Dick to Your Dog at dogtraining.substack.com/subscribe

Previous Episode

The dog is peeing inside and it's totally okay: A family's practical and economical approach to housetraining a puppy

Annie has a toddler, a husband who is a busy guy, and a toddler. It's freezing outside, the dog hates the cold weather, and Annie's mobility isn't great at the moment: She's pregnant and lives in a walkup. All this resulted in a her family's inability to get the puppy, Poppy, on the six or so walks a day that she, as a dog trainer, knows would be needed to teach her to go outside on the city streets. The issue could be solved by hiring a dog walker to come a few times a day, but Annie calculated that this would cost at least a thousand dollars a month. So, Annie came up with a plan to teach Poppy to go on an indoor pottying spot -- one that could ultimately be transferred to the outside -- and to use her roof deck some of the time, while also making sure she goes out on the street at least once or twice a day, even if she isn't "bathrooming" out there.

Mentioned in this episode:

School For The Dogs (Free!) Community App http://schoolforthedogs.com/community

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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

So you’re a dog trainer. You get a dog, you teach the dog to pee and poop outside. End of story. Right? Well, I wanted to talk a little bit today about my experience housetraining my new puppy Poppy, who we got just about five weeks ago. She is maybe like six, six and a half months, a Chihuahua mix. Actually, we just got her DNA results back. She’s a Chihuahua, Chow, Cocker spaniel, pitbull, beagle, boxer, Rottweiler mix, but I think she’s mostly Chihuahua.

And she’s been a real dream. She is just a very sweet, affectionate dog, very tolerant of my toddler. Very loving with my toddler. Really the most cuddly kissy dog I think I’ve ever encountered. All she wants to do is sit in someone’s lap. And by and large, she’s a really quick learner. I think when you work with a lot of dogs doing the same exercises over and over and over as I have done, you start to get a sense of how quick a dog is.

It must be like that when you’re working with people too. If you do the same task with 5,000 people, you start to get a certain idea of a certain kind of baseline intelligence and whether or not someone is above or below that. And I’d say she’s pretty quick. She’s pretty smart. Loves her crate, goes into her crate no problem and learns new things pretty quickly.

But I don’t know if she had ever gone to the bathroom — it’s funny how we say go to the bathroom for peeing and pooping for dogs when they’re not actually going into a bathroom, but let’s go with that euphemism. I don’t know if she’d ever gone outside. She came from a shelter in Alabama. She was dropped off there with her parents and two sisters. Although I think whoever dropped her off just had her parents there to get spayed and neutered and ended up taking the parents back.

So I think she must have been in some kind of home up until she was in the shelter. So I don’t know what, what her home life was like. And I don’t think she was in the shelter for very long. She then was brought from Alabama to New York, stayed with a foster here for a little bit. I don’t think the foster had her go outside at all. And the foster reported, she was kind of like a C minus, I think the way she put it, when it came to hitting wee wee pads.

Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast

Get full access to Don't Be a Dick to Your Dog at dogtraining.substack.com/subscribe

Next Episode

News flash: Positive reinforcement isn't about being kind!

After attending two webinars where people extolled the virtues of positive reinforcement, Annie was left wondering why the term seems to be so misunderstood-- or maybe she is the one misunderstanding it? While she tries to train using positive reinforcement and she believes the world would be a nicer place if people were able to identify positive reinforcement and use it more effectively, she doesn't see it as some kind of sugar-coated panacea. Positive reinforcement can be very mundane! It is why you look at your phone. It's why you put one foot in front of the other when you walk, and why you push the gas pedal to make your car move forward. If a behavior has been encouraged, it has been reinforced. If it has been encouraged because of the addition of something, rather than the subtraction of something, it has been positively reinforced. So why has the term "positive reinforcement" gotten so mixed up with the idea of kindness? Yelling "No!" can positively reinforce a dog for jumping, and hugging a person might do the opposite of positively reinforcing a given behavior.

Annie recorded this episode on Clubhouse and was joined by podcast listener Leeyah (@leeyahiredale) and Dallas-based trainer Beth (@rehabyourrescue).

If you're on Clubhouse, join Annie on Thursday February 25 at 3PM ET for a discussion with SFTD apprentice Anna Heyward about her article, "Bad Dog," published in this week's New Yorker.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/bad-dog

https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/mWVGKyBY

If you need an invite to join Clubhouse (currently available on iOS devices only), text 917-414-2625

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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

I was an attendee in two different webinars earlier this month. One was hosted by the BF Skinner foundation, and the other one was also by a dog training group. But they were both CEU earning webinars, pretty legit. Both were hosted by PhDs.

One was not specifically about dog training. It was about I think the title was something like “how kindness helped me navigate the world of applied behavior analysis.” There was something about kindness. And the other one was about race and dog training.

So I am a dog trainer and a big behavior nerd and very interested in kind of different takes on behavior, sort of tangential to dog training. So was interested in both of these presentations. But I ended up walking away -- well, they were right after the other, one was one day, one was the next day.

And I ended up feeling kind of frustrated with both of them and tried to try to chat to the moderators while it was happening. But there were a lot of people in the room, and I couldn't seem to ask a question or say something in a way that made sense. But the takeaway from both of them was sort of like rah, rah, rah, isn't positive reinforcement a wonderful thing?

And in the one about race, it was interesting. It was this black dog trainer who I think is, I think she's a psychologist and she was interviewing kids in, I guess she lives in like Ohio, Midwest in a very white area. And she was basically interviewing children about about her, and like working with her, and what it means to work with someone who is black, or person of color was the term that was used.

Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast

Get full access to Don't Be a Dick to Your Dog at dogtraining.substack.com/subscribe