82: Expanding Understanding in Canine Behavior Evaluations with Suzanne Clothier (Part 2) S8

"I prefer to ask people, have you had dogs before?  What did you love about them? If you could pull those qualities from that dog, the things you love most about him, what were they? And if you'd had a magic wand what would I like to just tweak a little bit."
 - Suzanne Clothier

Episode 8 of series 8: The World of Animal Welfare and Sheltering Transcript ( Part2)

Have you ever wondered what goes into assessing shelter animals and adopting the perfect pet? We sat down with Suzanne Clothier, an expert in the field, to unravel the complexities and nuances of animal assessments. Our discussion delves into her unique animal assessment tools - CARAT, RAT, and FAT, and how they contribute to understanding  behavior. We also take an in-depth look at how our emotions and biases can affect our decisions when it comes to selecting our next four legged-family member.

Guest: Suzanne Clothier has worked with animals professionally since 1977, with a background includes obedience, agility, puppy testing, breeding, Search and Rescue, conformation, instructing, kennel management and AAT.
Her Relationship Centered Training™ approach blends science and heart to create humane, effective and practical solutions for dogs and the people who work with them, whether professional working dogs or couch warming companions. Her suite of assessment tools provide a powerful framework for trainers and organizations:

RAT™ (Relationship Assessment Tool) – handler/dog dynamics, rapid assessment plus ability to track and compare
CARAT™ (Clothier Animal Response Assessment Tool) – temperament assessment on 6 categories, 21 dimensions
FAT™ (Functional Assessment Tool, release in 2022) – global of functionality/welfare assessment across physiological, social and cognitive dimensions

Book Recommendations:
Kinship with All Life by J. Allen Boone and  Behaving As If the God in All Life Mattered by Machaelle Small Wright and An Immense World by Ed Yong

Other Links:
Meet Your Match
Home to Home Program

Show Credits⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you also to John Lasala for his beautiful music and audio engineering on Series 11!

⁠⁠⁠⁠Read the Blog! (Guest profiles, book recommendations, trailers and more!)

What to start your own podcast in he Animal Advocacy or Animal Welfare Space? Check out my ⁠⁠⁠⁠ Podcast Mentoring Services⁠⁠⁠⁠!

⁠⁠⁠⁠Become a Patron! ⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠⁠Sign up for the Newsletter

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:10

This is the Deal with Animals. I'm Marika Bell, anthro-zoologist, cptt, dog trainer and an animal myself. This is a podcast about the connection and interaction between humans and other animals. So this is the second part of this episode, because when Suzanne and I get to chatting, we really go deep. I wanted to make sure you got to hear all of the goodness. So this is the second part of the episode. If you haven't yet listened to the first part, what are you doing here? Get back there and listen to the first part and then come back and listen to this.

Speaker 2: 0:43

However, for a quick summary of the first part, we discussed understanding animal temperament, the role of genetics and animal behavior. We also talked about the problem with assessments that many shelters are currently using and the need for a more nuanced approach. In this episode, we're going to discuss what the goals of animal assessments are, what makes a successful adoption and why do people return dogs after having an initial connection, and how do we make sure that the dogs we're matching are truly going to fit this family's hopes and expectations. Also, how airports are like animal shelters for humans. And we go deeper into Suzanne's assessment tools carrot, rat and fat. Suzanne gives us new answers to the three questions I always ask and we explore our own relationships with bugs and spiders. Thank you so much for joining us as we try to answer the question. What's the deal with animals? Often the behavior aspect is not even addressed in a lot of shelters because it's just again the overwhelming aspect of how many animals come in.

Speaker 2: 2:06

The main focus is can we get this animal a home? And sometimes it's depending on the rescue it's. Can we get this animal the perfect home? What is going to be the ideal home for this animal? And those ones end up saying no to people sometimes and really sorting through and sometimes creating some barriers for people who probably would have been very good owners, but then they end up not because they just can't get access for whatever reason. Others are just trying to find good homes, right, just a bare minimum. This home is going to be good. But I think what you're saying is that there's another piece to that. We have to find good homes for the animals, but those homes actually have to be suited to that animal as well if we're going to have a situation where both the human and the dog are happy with the outcome.

Speaker 3: 2:59

Yes, and we need to. And this is the elephant in the room, I think, for shelter and rescue, the effective bias is so profound that we feel strongly for or against on an emotional basis, and that so colors our decision making that we can't be objective. So and this is the classic well, we all love this dog. Well, if he's all that lovable, at what point in three years did no single person look at this dog and say, wow, that's the one. For me, it's like he's a good boy most of the time.

Speaker 3: 3:35

I just went through this with a training director for a decent sized shelter and they were asking me as a consultant about this dog who's bitten multiple people. This is a large dog. He is almost 100 pounds. He's extremely powerful. The last adult he bit in the stomach. This is bad. And he says you know, biting the first thing that's in your face is more typical if they're communicating. Coming up into the trunk of the body is deliberate and it's scary, but he's a good boy.

Speaker 3: 4:13

And at one point I said do you want this dog living next to you and your children? And she said well, and I could hear her. We were gone, which is it was just yes, but, yes, but? And she said, well, yes, I would. As a matter of fact, I would be fine if he lived next door. And I said really, because an adult stomach is about the same height as a child's face.

Speaker 3: 4:37

And she goes yes, but my children are dog savvy and I was like ma'am, if being dog savvy stopped people from being bit by dogs, no decent trainer, whatever get bit, it wouldn't happen. And she was just so determined she did not want to put the start to sleep. She had staff members who were fighting for him. None of them would take him home and adopt him. But so they're holding open the space for this dog who has already demonstrated I will hurt people, I will hurt people and I'm big enough to do possibly fatal damage, without question.

Speaker 3: 5:17

So that that of all of our cognitive biases, the ones that really get in our way with animals, is that effective bias which is I really really like you or, conversely, I really hate you and so, therefore, you must die or live whichever. And that one is brutally hard. It is so even the best assessment can't get us around that piece of it. But if we back it up, we're like what is it we need to know? And I think meet your match tried very hard to say can we qualify these personality traits and put them in a nifty, cool, color coded kind of way?

Speaker 2: 5:56

So meet your match is a system produced by the ASPCA. It includes the adopter taking a survey that is supposed to help them find the best match to fit their home. There's also a cat survey and a dog survey to whittle things down a little bit. The shelter can then write each of the animals based on a color code to match whatever code the adopter received, based on things like for dogs, couch potato, teacher's pet, busy bee, go getter, or for feline alities like secret admirer, sidekick or party animal. Each of these titles encompass a set of behaviors that you may see that animal producing on a regular basis. You can see how these packages might be true for a dog in a certain situation and yet in other situations might not match them at all, which is where sometimes this would not work out as well.

Speaker 3: 6:51

Hey, I want an orange, you know whatever. And the problem was it's not very finely grained, it's very coarsely grained. So it's like hmm, it's kind of like some of the personality tests you can take for yourself online Would you rather skin a cat alive or hang upside down from your ankles in the Himalayas for a night? It's like what? Neither Like what, wait, what? So they're forcing them into a limited number of categories and there's no nuance. And that, as who I am, as an animal person and as a trainer, it drives me crazy. So I'm thinking, no, no, no, let's, let's back this out, let's look at this as as a constellation, or let's look at this as a recipe. If I say we're going to make brownies, I know you, so you'll be using raw cashew milk or I don't know. Some rare tribe in New Guinea will have handpicked the cocoa beans for you and no animals will have died in the process, and that's fine, because that's going to be your recipe for mix of great brownie. Someone else is going to be.

Speaker 3: 7:59

You know, I'm importing the butter from Ireland and I got the chocolate from wherever. What is the recipe? What does it actually look like? What are the nuances? Because there's differences. There's differences that really matter and we know that in our own food or in the quality of how our house was built. Or the first time I ever gotten an S class Mercedes in Germany, I was like, oh, this is why people pay so much money for these cars. Oh my God, this is very different from the 1964 Ford that I'm driving around. Oh yeah, wow Cool, I didn't know there was a difference and it's all those ingredients coming together in a certain way or not.

Speaker 3: 8:47

So that's what I started to do is to say, is this dog social? Well, what does that mean For me? Sociability, like in Carrot we're looking at sociability. Is the animal even interested in a conversation and someone intensely interested? Someone goes by and they're seeking the eye contact like hi. The main problem I have with my puppy she's hello, gorgeous German Shepherd puppy over here, like I know, you saw me. So hello, hello, and I'm like you cannot do that. You can just bark at people because you want to meet everybody in the world. She goes, but I do, and I'm like I know, but you're scaring some of the people and they see, you know she'll leap up like an Impala to hold herself together.

Speaker 3: 9:31

She's only four months old. She leaps like an Impala and then she's like come on, can't you see, I'm unbelievably interested I am in talking to you and she is, and she her use of space. She will happily climb up into a stranger's lap and they can hug her, pick her up, kiss her. And she's like yes, we shall be friends. Her great grandmother would be like what in the hell? Yay for you. You're drawing breath, uh huh. Good, you're not on my list of people I care about. You may touch me, I will be tolerant, but I'm not really interested in having a chat with you. I have no desire to curl up in your lap and do not think about picking me up. That's ridiculous. However, she's socially tolerant. So if someone does something that's rude or provocative and I literally had someone do this to the puppy when she's 12 weeks old got so excited she squeezed your pickup and lifted her up into her lap and I thought, hmm, I was ready to get her out of there if I had to. But I also know my puppy and I've known her since birth. Right, and it's like nope, she just thinks that's just the bestest. So what happens if you're not interested in a conversation but someone pushes it? So now we're talking about social tolerance and it is no different from us. You know the listeners can think about if they're sitting on a park bench or in a restaurant or stuck in an inline someplace.

Speaker 3: 10:57

Do you strike up a conversation with people? Are you the one that provokes it? Are you the one, like me, who tries to avoid the eye contact that the person next to you who is really sociable, trying to get you to chat and I'm just like, yeah, no, that's why I have a kindle, that's why I don't. I'm just too much of an introvert to do that easily. But if someone's rude to me, like, what's my social tolerance? Do I take offense easily?

Speaker 3: 11:27

So you can have a dog who's super social but also who thinks oh, I did not say you could touch that part of me, what the hell? No, and that confuses people, like, but he came right over you, he was so friendly. Yes, I said we could have a chat. I didn't say you could do that to me. So in terms of handling and so some of the assessments were roughly handling dogs the question we're asking is if someone does something rude or provocative to you, what do you do? But we mash it all together so we can't ask just about the conversation piece. We can't ask about how do you use space, like how do you use space? Some dogs are like, I can see you from here.

Speaker 2: 12:10

And do you think that these questions are important for shelters to be asking I?

Speaker 3: 12:16

do, I think, some of my carrot students and that's carrot, like you know, you get with a diamond. Some of my students have studied carrot with me and then been in a situation to go acquire a new dog whether that was a rescue or a puppy or whatever and so they engineered the recipe. The constellation, we'll know it looks right when it has these things at this level, and the people that have done that and then went and found the dog that lined up with those things, because what they're building is their dream dog.

Speaker 3: 12:53

And it's just like having your dream house. It's like, well, if it doesn't have that, as long as it has that, that's a good compromise. But to a person most people that I have encountered there's some qualities they want, especially in that social, those three social aspects, and then in core, which is arousal, resilience and physical energy. Just, you know at what speed does the dog naturally move through the world, just like people. Some dogs are quick and some dogs are not. Some people like a high arousal dog who gets excited fast and easy. They're like, oh, he's got so much enthusiasm. And other people are like, oh my Lord, is there a pill I can give him? Well, now, he's hardwired that way. He's got that balance of neurotransmitters and neurons firing and muscle twitch responses. That's who he is and you're not going to change that, which is different from a fearful response or anxiety driving something. We're saying just this dog as he is.

Speaker 3: 13:58

So if we don't have a way to ask people hey, what are you looking for? All right. So one of my students and her daughter, they're like, okay, their dog died. So I said decide what it is. That's super important to you. What is it you really want when you think of I want a dog to share my life. What do you want? And the daughter said it's just so important to me that he's willing to cuddle, that he enjoys contact with me as much as I enjoy contact with him. I love curling up on the couch at night watching a movie, and you know, or if I'm sick in bed, or it's a rainy day and I'm reading, I want a dog is like, yeah, let's do that.

Speaker 2: 14:37

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 14:38

And so they went deliberately searching for a dog, who said you know what I really love? I love being in contact with people, not because you paid me, not because you trained me, not because you have cheese, but because that is naturally appealing to me. But by the same token, I've had people say I don't want one of those damn Velcro dogs that follows you everywhere and is stuck to your pants leg and like, well, don't get a shepherd, we don't know what that's like, Do we Uma?

Speaker 3: 15:09

Yeah, I know it's like do you get dressed wearing your dog? We tease when people come to get a puppy from me. I'm like do you have a strong spleen? Because this puppy is going to want to rub her spleen against your spleen and that's how she knows you're close enough. So what are the things that matter? And people might say I want a dog who's going to be a competitive nosework or I need a dog who's going to be my emotional support dog, or what is that constellation, what does that recipe look like? And what are the negotiables and what are the non negotiables? Because then we start to frame okay, this dog and this, run these four dogs over here. Nope, they're not going to fit that bill. They're really super active, they're high energy, they're fun, but their idea of contacting you, maybe to bounce off you and body slam you because they enjoy that you can get another another person is like I love that. I love that.

Speaker 2: 16:05

Yeah, I just love a dog. Is like that, finding people like that for dogs, because there's a lot of those in shelters sometimes.

Speaker 2: 16:10

Exactly, but I think this is a really, really important point that people need to put a pin in. Here is because I highlight it on a podcast energy level is such a huge part of why dogs are often returned. Right, that was too much dog for me, or this dog is too shy, I just I'm not bonding with it because they're not very sociable. So there's these. The bonding aspect, as well as that energy level aspect, is a huge reason why dogs get returned or just dropped off at the shelter in the first place. And I think the question that in shelters, we're often asking is maybe what it is is that people need a bit more coaching in terms of what to ask, the what people are looking for.

Speaker 3: 17:03

I'm not saying this well, no, no, we don't have a good framework for when you show up to say all right, what when I have a puppy by your questionnaire. One of the questions I ask is describe your, your, your perfect German Shepherd, and what I want to know is what they write on that. What are the qualities that matter to them?

Speaker 2: 17:23

Well, often when somebody comes to a shelter and they you ask them describe your perfect dog, and they will not say things like sociability, energy level, any of that sort of thing.

Speaker 3: 17:34

No, we need to actually tease it out.

Speaker 1: 17:35

They will say I want a golden retriever that doesn't shed.

Speaker 2: 17:41

So the two things they think they're concerned with is how the dog looks and whether it sheds or not. Those are the things that they think that they are most interested in. But when you really get to talking with them and, from experience, knowing what ends up not working out for people when they do adopt, is that trying to get them to the point where they understand what they really need to be looking for is how sociable is the dog that you need? What is the? What are you looking for in terms of sociability and what are you looking for in terms of energy level? Because if we don't match those and I'm using those two because those are the two we've talked about primarily if you don't match those two things those are going to be, those could end up being deal breakers, whether you realize that or not. Now.

Speaker 3: 18:28

Exactly so when we say remember, and it's been around in various forms for a very long time, but I think it was IMS that did it. Like you know, answer this questionnaire and you'll know which dog might be right for you. Well, it was pretty much like how much time do you want to spend exercising your dog? That it's not a very useful question. That you're willing to walk two hours a day, it does not equal that you're going to be training a project dog who loses his mind when you take him outside of your home because he sees another dog or a person or a bicyclist. And now you have this foaming at the mouth, face plant. Your dog is like ah, so that you're willing to walk him for two hours? Yay for you. So you meant in your head when you say you know, if you need to exercise your dog, you're like I will take him to the park and we will play ball over. We'll take long walks in the park and around the block or hiking off leash.

Speaker 2: 19:25

That's one of the things. That's bigger than the hospital is my favorite dog who can hike off leash. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 19:29

I just got to read a form for someone who who adopted a coon hound and that's their dream is to go running off leash and go to the beach with their rescue coon hound. It's interesting composition, it's possible, but let's just say I'm doomed to fail for, I think, a number of reasons. So instead of saying so, I prefer to ask people like have you had dogs before? What did you love about them? If you could pull those qualities from that dog, like the things you love most about him, what? Were they.

Speaker 3: 20:04

And if you'd had a magic wand not that you don't love him and he wasn't amazing and a big piece of your life, but if you could have had a magic wand and said you know what? I would like to just tweak a little bit. It's like a house where you're like, if I just had one more bathroom over there, make my life a lot easier. Yeah, and so people actually do know. If they don't know, now you're diving into their fantasy of a dog. And so then you start to you start to think more about the relationship and the dynamic. So of the things I've created, I mean my assessments, I think, are solid. They're not easily learned. They require a sophisticated knowledge of behavior, but you can take parts of them and see what's what. There's no two ways about it. So carrot is temperament assessment, rat is my relationship assessment tool and that one says here's this dog, whoever that is, and here's this person, and the dynamics of how they interact can be observed very fast, very fast. I mean that assessment takes five minutes. So it's like oh, so you say that you want to dog about this big and you're active and you like to hike, so you're going to take a dog that's got some energy and you don't mind if he's a little physical. It's like, okay, let's go for a walk, and what you find out in just a matter of minutes is they may not have the skills to handle the dog that they're attracted to. It's like you know what, let's take you for a walk with Roger here I know that guy, you saw his, you saw him on face finder or pet finder and his face spoke to you. But okay, so that's how that went. You take Roger, who may be a more suitable match, and suddenly you have a dog who can accommodate their lack of skill or their habits. Because what I'm looking for in rat is where are the points of conflict and where what I call the fireflies, that great saying from Buddha I believe it's from Buddha that enlightenment is not a sunrise, it's fireflies so that we all learn to be healthier in our relationships and we develop our skills and we get these firefly moments. So I want to make sure that the dog and the person are well matched and there's enough fireflies for me to build on so that everyone has a basis of agreement and then we can always refine it. But an absolute mismatch. It's so obvious in these little rat assessments so that you can set them up with a dog who will push their buttons. It's not hard to find a dog who will, if they think they can handle a dog on leash.

Speaker 3: 22:50

This is like my friend went on a horseback holiday in Ireland and she had the sense to say to the Irish I can barely ride at all, I'm barely a sack of potatoes being held on by a string, which wasn't quite true. But someone else in her party's like oh yes, I'm a very good rider. You know, I want one of your better horses. And they're like do you? Ah, yeah, we've got just the horse for you. Yeah, she was in a hospital by day three. They're like you can't ride. You said you could, but you know what the horse just told us? No, you can't. So there's something to be said for that, without hurting someone or setting them up to fail. It's simply line them up with an animal. And they're like oh, I want this, it's okay, this is what this feels like. You're like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hey, let's for rescues. We're going to bring, you know, the little guy over to your house and listen to his. Pretend he's your dog. Let's go for a walk around the block.

Speaker 2: 23:48

That's why I like the idea of foster to adopt in some ways, because people can have a dog in their home, they can actually live with the dog and but at the same time. So I tried this foster to adopt with a couple of dogs and it did not work out well for me, to be honest. I learned very quickly what was or wasn't going to work. I learned a lot from the experience, but I was under the impression because I had literally never adopted an adult dog in my life. I had an adoptive puppy who was six months old and I got a puppy who was 12 weeks old, and that is my adult experience owning dogs.

Speaker 2: 24:25

I've trained and worked with people training many dogs, hundreds of dogs in shelters and in homes, but living with them is a very different prospect, very, and my empathy has grown a lot through this experience, as has my humbleness. But the thing that I found really interesting about the situation and the dog I ended up with was that I did not foster her because I knew my capabilities at that point and said, okay, well, if I can't handle this dog, then I shouldn't have a dog right now, but I can handle this dog, even with the issues that we know she may have or does have. There are certain things that we have been able to establish, and bringing her in she was very different from what the shelter and the foster were able to tell me about her.

Speaker 3: 25:16

So here's this is the interesting crux of it, right, yeah? So what's the difference? Tell me what they presented her as versus what your experience of her has, because it's in that gap that dogs are lost, people are heartbroken and things go bad. And that's what I would like to have. I've got enough tools to help people so that their assessments are as accurate as they can be on both ends. So what was it they presented her?

Speaker 2: 25:51

as Well they presented her as, and what they knew of her essentially was that she was living in a home with other foster dogs and was getting along with those dogs, so that's what they called it getting along.

Speaker 3: 26:06

So that criteria means no one was fighting or-. Yes, I assume In some cases I've had it right, exactly where people have said oh, she was fine with all the other dogs because she avoided them like the plague. Or what they meant was there were fights but we didn't have to take anybody to the vet, right? Or we just didn't let those two get together. I should have asked more questions about that.

Speaker 2: 26:26

Right, I didn't think. I thought, oh, she gets along with other dogs and she has lived with other dogs. This is what. This was a fact. She has lived with other dogs and did not end up in the hospital or cause other dogs to be in the hospital. She had lived with cats and again, same situation seemed to ignore them. I asked a little more questions about that aspect because that was a very important one for me, that we learned from a different dog that we had fostered, that their initial reaction to cat would be important, Not just how they could eventually get along with cats, but that initial reaction was going to be an important reaction because my cat was so stressed by having a dog in the house that barked at her, barked at him, that he started peeing blood. So we couldn't have that, not even for a day. And again, this dog liked to be on. People had not actually that they knew of really gotten to know any children, but they were confident she would be comfortable with children because of her reactions to adults.

Speaker 3: 27:25

And I said, okay, that's a big assumption, little bit of a leap.

Speaker 2: 27:29

We invited her to say hi to our children and to us. She was mostly avoidant, not overly avoidant. She would come and say hi and then she wanted to go back to her anchor person, which was the foster. She'd been in six different foster homes throughout this process that this organization had had her because she was pregnant when she first came in and had puppies. So she was with that foster and then she was moved and then she was moved. What we got was a dog who anchors to one person very strongly and other people are all right. But after she had settled in the house and this was really important two months later, if a new person comes in the house, now she's reacting to that. Now this is her territory. Whereas that first month anybody could walk in the house and she would greet them like they were a potential friend. After a few weeks she was more hesitant when people came in the house and now she will literally bark and growl at people who come in the house.

Speaker 3: 28:26

So, say, in carrot, we're really interested in not just the sociability, but there's a couple of other things that would fall into that category. One is social confidence and one is environmental confidence, because if the dog is worried and so as soon as you say they're gonna attach really hard to one person, it's like, hmm, this could be a plus, right, or this can also be a really big drawback for this dog, that they're putting all their eggs in that one basket. So then now we get to the other aspect of the tools I've developed, which is how behaviorally fragile or robust is this dog? How adaptable are they so that she's deeply attached to you? Okay, if you decide to go offer a week to a conference or go travel or go do something, and is she gonna be able to eat, is she gonna be able to function?

Speaker 3: 29:20

Yeah, can someone else take her leash and she can walk away with them and still be functional, because that's another whole aspect of temperament, right?

Speaker 2: 29:29

There's this thing that shelters, this rule of thumb that they tend to go by, which is it takes three days for a dog to become less fearful of its surroundings it becomes. It takes three weeks for a dog to settle in and start showing their true sort of behaviors and personalities, and takes three months for them to really feel like, oh, this is my home. Now. This is not just a temporary situation, and so their behavior changes significantly throughout that period of time. It is something that I feel like I've seen during this. She has changed so much in that period of time, not in those basic things, but in her ability to trust what's going to happen. Right. Her understanding of it used to really stress her out when I would take the kids to school. Even though she was in the car, she didn't know the context of what was happening, so it was scary and that would be a part.

Speaker 3: 30:24

Are we just going back to the shelter? Where are we going? Where are we going? Do we live here, Staying? Yeah?

Speaker 2: 30:30

And I think you forgot the kids. There's no kids in the car, oh my gosh. And then her 10 decibel bark would be like right in my ear, and but I couldn't leave her at home either. So this week I realized she was quiet all the way to the school run, yay, and all the way home again, and she wasn't distraught. And that was amazing. And the only thing I really had to do was take her a few times and show her that this is a pattern. And look, here's some nice treats. Nothing bad is going to happen. You can even come out of the car and see where the children are going and come back in again. And this pattern she's finally realized and and that has helped so much and it does make me wonder, those other dogs that I fostered would I have been able to to settle them in?

Speaker 3: 31:23

This is the other thing that's missing here is how robust I mean. I'm a couple quite a few years ago now. The older you get, the more you're like that was last year, it's like it was 10 years ago, but anyway, that happens. Just you can look forward to that. It's great fun, it doesn't matter what happens.

Speaker 3: 31:41

A while ago a friend of mine, their shepherd, died suddenly of hemangio. They didn't know that was possible, that you could have a dog and an hour later not have a dog, no warning whatsoever, nasty disease. And they were so heartbroken and I have. She's still with us. I had Piper, and Piper just was not a perfect fit and I wasn't sure I was gonna breed her and I thought you know what? Why don't you just take Piper? She's lovely, she's just a really nice dog. So take Piper, if only for a few weeks, just to help you get over the grieving. And so here is the difference when we have a dog who's temperamentally really stable. Piper walked into their house like oh all right, cool, she had to learn the patterns of their lifetime, but she was missing the concern or the fear or the separation.

Speaker 3: 32:37

So the more fragile the animal is, the greater consideration we need to give for how much support they're gonna get when they go someplace. It's like traveling with someone who's physically frail. You just you have to make accommodations. And you're traveling with children completely different If it's just you and Oliver. You guys are in the airport and you're like really, a six hour delay. Are you freaking, kidding me? All right, you'll find some way to entertain yourselves. You have two kids with you and you're like what, what Is there? Medication? Does the airport do supply medication? Yes, because they're not as robust and they don't have the coping skills, they don't have the bandwidth to just handle it.

Speaker 3: 33:23

So this is one of the aspects of temperament that people don't seem to wanna talk about, which is, some people and some animals are more stable and they are more resilient. They have better bounce back. What we say about those horses, those dogs, those cats, those birds, those sheep, whatever is, you can take them anywhere, you can do anything, because they're like oh okay, oh okay, they have to figure out the lay of the land. No one strolls into a strange situation, knows what's what, but they're not distressed by it. And so the more fragile the animal, the greater the care, so that some of the animals that get put into foster care there's a reason the rescues will say do not take this dog off leash in an unfenced area until you've got a solid recall. And yet it's all over. It's like I had him and then I dropped the leash or he got scared, or my neighbor came over and left the door open and now he's running, and it's so frequent. But these animals are already starting from a place where they're struggling as it is and so-.

Speaker 2: 34:32

Well, a lot of the animals through shelters, whether they came from a bad situation or not, are traumatized simply from being in the shelter, which is why there's now a lot of push for this home to home program. So somebody says, okay, they call in, they say I want to surrender my dog or my cat, and the shelter says, well, we don't have any space right now, so instead can you keep your dog and cat and we will promote them on our website through this home to home program, which is a separate from the shelter itself. They just help host it, so they're connected. So if somebody's interested in the animal they can just reach out through there. It's basically a way for someone to show their animals available for adoption.

Speaker 2: 35:08

They're not allowed to sell an animal there and say this animal is still at my house, but I have to move in three months, so we're trying to re-home them. And then the shelter doesn't really get involved in that at all, other than to just double check that yes, did this animal get adopted or did it not get adopted. And then they're done. So the person has to meet certain criteria to put their animal up there, but for the most part just about anybody can do that if they are legitimately trying to find and re-home their animal, and it keeps the animals out of the shelters, right, If as long as somebody hasn't left it to the very last minute, then they can do this and their dog or cat never has to be traumatized by being left in this large, loud, scary environment. As nice as a shelter Staff try to make dogs and cats comfortable, it's just not a situation most animals become. No, we would not do well.

Speaker 3: 36:01

Sometimes I think of airports as shelters, because I've had to deal with a lot of long delays, 14 hours being my all-time favorite. Did you just say 14 hours? Oh, oh, great, okay, but yes. So now you've got confinement and it's not quite, but it's got a lot of stressors and people just start to shred and I'm like, all right. So when you get these really bad cancellations and it's like, oh, we'll go sleep on your purse and also there's no more food and the toilets are overflowing and you're surrounded by strangers, and right, it becomes a human shelter and this is, it is not healthy and there's always gonna be this spectrum of people or animals and Victor Frankel talks about this and man search for meaning, which is and he was a concentration camp survivor.

Speaker 3: 36:49

And he's asking and this is a really important question for animal welfare and shelters how is it under these conditions? Some people remained a very fine version of themselves and some people shredded, some people recovered and went on and some people it destroyed them. There's an article in this month's Smithsonian recovering the classical music that was written in one of the concentration camps. Oh wow, there's a musician?

Speaker 3: 37:26

Yep, there's a musician who's hunted it down. So in these appalling, appalling conditions, they were still capable of creating great beauty. So that's a certain type of person and that's what Franco is asking what are those qualities that allow you to go into these horrific situations and not become the worst possible version of yourself, but to maintain who you are and others fall apart? So this continuum, I think is also true of shelter dogs. Like some dogs under the shelter conditions it's just too much. The pressures are just. They begin to just fall apart or it truly deeply traumatizes them. And others are like, well, it's not my idea a way to live, but all right. And then they go on and they're like okay, and then they come back to lead the fundraiser parade and that is also the catch 22, right, they don't realize.

Speaker 3: 38:23

Fred came back and now he's the head of the fundraising parade and he does all this cool stuff, and he was in the shelter for four years. It's he's not the same as Missy who just about peed herself because someone looked at her and really wishes she could just climb into her food bowl like an octopus and hide. She's deeply terrified and she's going to remain. She's fragile and she's going to be highly traumatized by the same situation that Fred was in. So that concept of carrot puts animals on a. How functional are they? How adaptable are they? And then, as they begin to move, either left shift, meaning they're going to become overwhelmed, or they become inhibited or avoidant or fearful. How far down that path do they go? Are they almost dysfunctional or just mildly Go? I wish you wouldn't do that to me, but I can handle it and go in the other way. Did they become activated, excited? Is there confidence there? Is there arousal that can get too intense, but they're going to have a different spectrum. And then we add fat, which is the app that I'm about to release, and fat is functional assessment.

Speaker 3: 39:41

So I can say to the dog in the shelter how are you doing so? You tell me, how are you functioning in basic ways in your life under these conditions? So we look at the physiological. We look at eating, drinking, defecation, urination, rest and sleep, mobility and pain. Then we look at cognitive, which is learning, work, doing stuff you know how to do and play. And then, from the social aspects, how are you with familiar people? How are you with unfamiliar people? How are you with the absence of preferred person or persons, and then how are you with familiar dogs and how are you with unfamiliar dogs? And that all gets. It's a guided questionnaire.

Speaker 3: 40:30

So when you're done, you have this really clear graphic which says you know what this dog. She was functioning pretty good at intake and now, two weeks into this, she's beginning to snark at people she doesn't know. She's beginning to. She's not sleeping well, she's refusing food, she has diarrhea. Even just the concrete kennel run is beginning to take a toll on her. She's beginning to limp.

Speaker 3: 40:59

All of this says this animal's struggling to function. And specifically how and what ways? Because there's no, I'm sleeping, I'm getting it wrong, not starting any fights and anybody can handle me, and all that I'm cooking on all cylinders. Then I know I can trust that what that animal is showing me is pretty much who they are. As soon as I see an animal struggling to function and in your case with the dog you're talking about laying at your feet there, she's whoa. So when you got her she would have said absence of familiar person. I'm not good with that. I'm not okay with that. That will upset me, and if you do that, the following things are going to fall apart, so that knowing how the animal's functioning helps us decide what we need to change or improve or add or take away so that we have maximal welfare. And it gives you a way to track it, so you know what. She was falling apart in the shelter, but now we put her into a foster home. Oh, okay, this is helping.

Speaker 2: 42:03

This is shifting her as a tool that is going to be useful, maybe for both things, but maybe primarily as a health assessment tool, like a behavioral and mental trauma. It's a well-being tool. Well-being tool. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, that's exactly what it's focused on, because, versus a behavioral evaluation, do you think it could also be used as a behavioral evaluation in terms of matching these dogs up with someone, or is it really just more of a in-shelter tool to assess welfare and make sure the animal is not falling apart?

Speaker 3: 42:43

I think that you can use fat to reflect how the animal's functioning and behaviors in there, because in the how do you interact with familiar people?

Speaker 3: 42:53

and familiar people. How do you interact with familiar dogs and unfamiliar dogs? There's a lot of details about what that actually looks like so that we can say, oh, you know what you can. Create him next to anybody. He's not going to start a fight. He's not going to be fence fighting through the runs versus other dogs. It's no, there needs to be a visual barrier or he's going to spend his days doing that and charging any dog that goes past. So buried within it is a ton of behavioral information, including this overall perspective of is this a really fragile animal or not? Because if he's struggling to function on a lot of different levels, so you can probably easily think of a dog who was overwhelmed by noise.

Speaker 3: 43:38

So they didn't sleep well in the shelter. They ate, but they often had diarrhea. If they were disturbed while they were eating, they're like that's it, I'm done. They might not eat for days, they might not approach people, they might really resist being handled. All of that says wow, this is pressuring this animal. This is pressuring this animal. This animal has needs that are not being met, so that if I'm going to put him in a home and it's like with your dog there, if I'm going to put her in a home? Do we know what she does in the absence of a preferred person? How severe is that? Does she simply just need to be taught how to be alone, or is she at risk of self-harming? Some dogs will go through a plate glass window and some dogs will just howl and distrust themselves.

Speaker 3: 44:31

So I think the combination I think fat is a really powerful way because you can only just do parts of it that you want to do. You don't have to do all of the parts, but it does offer a way to track is this better or worse? Or to identify. We have a problem here and it could be as simple as the dogs so sound sensitive that if you put a metal football down on a concrete floor and it starts to skid the dogs, nope, I'm only going to eat enough so that I don't die. But it's about the noise or it's about the dog next door staring at her that interrupts her eating, but it is. It's affecting how she eats which in turn affects.

Speaker 3: 45:15

So it's the whole dog and all of those interactive parts is what fat's assessing, and it's a day-to-day thing. To the more fragile or acute the situation you might do on every day, but you might just do one at intake and then someone in the kennels I don't know about that dogs. Well, let's quantify that, let's actually put it into information that we all have, we can all see, we can all share and that we can compare. Let's change this, swap that, and then next week let's do another assessment and okay, that did help or no, that's still. It's still not quite working. Do we need to talk to the vet about behavior meds? Do we need to change foods? Do we need to have her spend more time in the office under someone's desk instead of back in the runs?

Speaker 2: 46:05

shelters are in such a bad state at the moment that the amount of time that dogs, and specifically, are spending in shelters is about doubled from pre-covid. So the average of length of stay for dogs in municipal shelters was usually about 30 days, and now it's up to 60 or even 80 days in a lot of places, which is a long time. 30 days is a long time, but again, we're talking an average. Here.

Speaker 3: 46:30

There's some dogs at end of being there six months, eight months, nine months, and others that are adopted as soon as they become available because they're cute and little, and or they just get lucky yeah or you know that there are often really super nice, stable, adaptable, agreeable dogs and they're they're snapped up lightning fast because, yeah, not hard to place them, no, um, no, but the more fragile the animal, um and it. And I want to be really clear about this. It is not that they are not lovable, it's not that they don't deserve a life and and love. It's just that everyone has to be realistic about what that will require in terms of the environment and the investment by the people.

Speaker 3: 47:18

And what was I talking about was one lady. She's like, well, this dog had this and this. And I was like, oh lord, where are you going to find that home she goes. Oh no, as soon as they have any kind of disability, there's always people that show up that they'll take the special and needs dogs and they would actually get adopted faster than, say, an adolescent big black bouncy, as I call them. They're like woohoo, take me, I'm fun and they are, but they're too energetic and they're too big for a lot of people to see. Um, there's a lot of other qualities in there and some training might help.

Speaker 3: 47:52

It's just it's not that this dog is temperamentally a lunatic, he's just bored, young and energetic yeah and with some training and the right home, this is a great dog, but they can't see past the in shelter behavior yeah, we have that problem, right yeah yeah, so it goes that way.

Speaker 3: 48:11

Rat is a quick and easy tools. It's not terribly hard to learn. I I hope fat gets used to help people understand. How is this animal functioning like? How, how is this for you is one of my elemental questions, and fat asks it in a really detailed way. That also teaches people how to think about what that, what healthy functioning looks like, what well-being looks like on those different elements well, that's a really great place to wrap it up.

Speaker 2: 48:42

I think today and you know I've asked you in the past one if you'd share a childhood memory and I have. I've taken up a lot of your time tonight already, so I I don't want to pressure you to answer my normal three questions, since you have done them in the past, but if you might, have different ones you might exactly have different ones.

Speaker 2: 49:03

So if you have, time to answer them, I will I certainly not gone anywhere except in bed. So so, if there was a book that you could gift to all of the listeners today, what would that book be?

Speaker 3: 49:16

wow, that one, that one's fun, because it depends what mood I'm in, whether I'm in a like a, a sciency mood, or I'm in a much more.

Speaker 2: 49:26

I might even want to know what you're reading right now what I'm reading right now.

Speaker 3: 49:31

It's really funny what I read for pleasure or just like crazy ass murder mysteries because I just um. Or neil gayman I adore neil gayman. Um, because I don't want to think about anything that might possibly lead to um thinking about my job. Um, right now, um ed young's book, the immense world. Is that? I love that book, absolutely lovely.

Speaker 2: 49:55

But that book just blew my mind over and, over and over again and it as it should.

Speaker 3: 50:00

So, in that same vein, if I could gift everyone the book and I'm not sure everyone would appreciate it that would be an easy one. If I was over there would be under everybody's chair. That's good, um. But the one that had profound impact on me was kinship with all life by jl and boom, now that one goes into places where sometimes people are like you have got to be kidding and it's no, not kidding, not kidding at all. Read it, think about it, experiment with it. So I've helped a lot of people learn that there is value in talking to bees and flies and wasps. I haven't found hornets very particularly responsive. But, um, yeah, tonight the mode I'm in, everyone would get kinship with all life because it would challenge some of their preconceived notions.

Speaker 3: 50:47

Then go read ed young's book because it's an easy read and it blows your mind, but it doesn't necessarily like really challenge you to think about what you're thinking about. Yeah, kinship with all life is like that and as if the god and all things mattered. By michelle small right, also a very challenging book, which reshaped the my thinking about the natural. It lined up with stuff that I felt but I'd never had anyone articulate. That's the best kind of book, I think. So that's why those are the ones I would use. But ed young's book is just oh my god, that's so cool. Oh my god, yeah. You just want to email your friends like wait, did you know this? I know it's also. Did you? Yeah, and so?

Speaker 2: 51:36

those are fun. Books about the giant squid was like that. One was blowing my mind it's just too cool, yeah.

Speaker 3: 51:43

And then you think I do anyway. I was like I just want to meet all the animals in the world and I won't be able to. It makes me sad. It's like when I realized I could never read all the books or hear all the songs, I was like damn it. And so, yes, I'll be 65 in a few days and I'm like I am not gonna meet all the animals in the world but if I could hear some of those cool bugs though they put microphones on leaves.

Speaker 2: 52:11

I want to hear some of those bugs just there.

Speaker 3: 52:14

I know it's just wait. What does it cost to acquire those? And sometimes I look at my husband. I'm like could we build one of those? And he's like, technically. Then we have a friend who's a superbly good electrical engineer, works at virginia tech, and ryan actually probably could build it for me. And he's like, well, he would use this and that. And I think if I ever get a lot of money, god help us all with fun toys I'll have just to do that. So anyway, those are my answers for that. What books would I give everybody?

Speaker 2: 52:46

excellent and, uh, I know I've asked you this one before, which is if you would share a formative or earliest memory of your connection with animals, and I don't know if that that one would change for you oh, there's so many of them, there's so many.

Speaker 3: 53:02

It depends on what. The animal was right. So when I was 15, 14 for whatever reason it was a little town in jersey that had been an agricultural town there was one dairy farm left in it. It's half an hour from manhattan so you can imagine it was pretty suburban. But for their 200th anniversary, this developer gifted like an acre of land and put like a little community garden on it for the people that lived in the apartment houses and they put in a horse, a pony, a donkey, a couple of sheeps and pigs, a beehive, and so I saw this all going in and I was like, oh, animals not too far from my house. I'm like, hey, who's going to take care of this and how can I help and take me? And so I ended up. I ended up with being in charge of this little zoo.

Speaker 3: 53:57

You know I did most of the grunt work, so I just I just had this amazing relationship with the cow. There's a convenience store that was a dairy farm, so they donated this beautiful Jersey cow as a calf and she was just amazing. There's just nothing to start, she was just amazing. So it was the first cow I really got to spend time with. I took her for walks up and down these suburban streets Like on a Sunday morning I would just get up and take her for walks and got more kids slapped upside the head because they're like mom, there's a cow walking down the street and you'd hear there is not. You know, and shut up these poor hungover parents who are exhausted and I told you there's no cow. And then, oh my God, there's a cow and the kids. I told you there was a cow. So I probably created a lot of childhood trauma for children. But oh my God, I love that cow, sylvia. I loved her so much and she taught me she just taught me so much about.

Speaker 3: 54:58

I had no preconceived notions about cows. I'm like I don't know. It never dawned on me that you couldn't take a cow for a walk like you took a dog, or that you couldn't teach your stuff. So I did all of those things and I was like it was fascinating to me. Sylvia. She was a really just amazing animal, my suburban cow. It was a very and my mother was never sure when she came home what was going to be on our little tiny suburban lot. Was I going to be setting up like a jumper's course for the dog, or would I have walk the cow down to spend the afternoon? Grazing on the lawn. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3: 55:39

The yard was probably like I don't know, 50 by 50. We're talking little lots, maybe 50 by 100 lots. There's little suburban lots. But yeah, that cow, she was really helpful at a time when life was getting really complicated. But there was just. When I think of Sylvia, I just think of pure joy. And also, if you've never slept with a cow, they are like, oh, the ultimate, because they love to lay down to their cud and they're like these big, warm, soft, cushy sofas that are breathing and their heartbeat. And horses are also very nice to sleep with, but they don't lay down to chew their cud. So it's a much shorter timeframe. But cows they're great sleeping buddies, they're just weird, have been rolled over on.

Speaker 3: 56:28

Oh no, and in all the years that I have slept with many different I could we could do an entire episode just on species I have slept with, which sounds really weird, but it's true. Now the cows are, they're pretty clear. All of them have told me when they had to get up they just reached back. She would just nudge me like I know you're dead asleep, but I got to get up and like okay.

Speaker 3: 56:51

I'd get up all the horses too. No, I never had even the big 600 pound pigs that I've slept with, nope, nope. So yeah, my suburban cow adventures. Sylvia was quite quite a wonderful, wonderful animal, so she was really special.

Speaker 2: 57:12

And then the last question is what's the deal with animals?

Speaker 3: 57:18

My answer is still the same there's a whole, there's a whole ball of wax. I try sometimes, and ever since you first asked me that I think about that every time I see the title of your podcast and I'm like, yeah, what's the deal with animals? And then I think, like I watch TV sometimes or I meet people and they have no animals in their life and I it's like a planet that I guess I, I watch it and I think I, what Like I, how it's like trying to, I guess it's trying to like figure out like how do you breathe underwater? And I think I could guess it that better than the concept of a life that's not shared with animals, inside or outside, it doesn't matter to me.

Speaker 3: 58:11

This summer we had a Cooper's Hawk decide to put her nest in the old farmhouse, but she, she put it right above the window that I'm facing while I'm working. So all summer she would go hunt land on a dead stump in the tree line and then fly like right at the window. And it's hard to get work done because I pretty much just wanted to like camouflage myself and just watch her raise her babies. I'm just as interested as a bug going by. I don't know a world without animals. This isn't worth living. I have species I'm working on in case I'm, like, sent to a nursing home and it's like, then I want land snails, I want big land snails. Cause the sound of wild snail eating. Have you read that? I have heard of it, yeah, but I haven't read it. You must read that. It's not. It's not terribly long, but it's yeah.

Speaker 2: 59:06

So I told John okay, I'll tell you something, though that's exciting is my. My recent endeavor is to try to get other people to start podcasts in animal welfare, animal advocacy, animal knowledge in general, just expanding that within the podcast space so that more people have access to this information and this can start thinking more about animals, and one of the people I'm mentoring is actually researching the giant African land snail. Really. Yeah, it's, it's. I mean, he does lots of things, but this is his main area of research. It's pretty interesting.

Speaker 3: 59:40

I don't know that they'll let me have the giant ones.

Speaker 2: 59:43

Well, these are particularly invasive. So yeah, exactly, but there's others that are there's others that are native.

Speaker 3: 59:51

But I was inspired by that book and then it's also, I'll just get some jumping spiders. Those would be my little pets. I just cannot imagine a life where I went to a dog training conference once and it was in Orlando and everything was just sprayed to death, like there was like no, hardly any bird or insect life, even though it was Florida. So I knew it was chock full of poisons. And I got back to my hotel room and there was a little cockroach and he saw me and he was like ah, and he ran under the door into the bathroom. I'm like little dude, it's okay, like actually I'm glad to have a roommate because they've killed all the spiders. There's no spiders, there's nothing.

Speaker 3: 1:00:32

And I could not convince this poor little fellow. I wasn't going to kill him, but probably against all hotel rooms. I just made sure he had some food and water, my little roommate, because I'm like well, when I get in the shower here there's spiders that I've known for. I've known their, I've known generations, 25 years of spiders in that bathroom, I've known all their descendants, and those are the shower ladies and I'm like hello, ladies, how is it going to me? That's like part of taking a shower is to chat with the ladies in the bathroom. Spider residents. Yeah, so if I have to, it's well then.

Speaker 2: 1:01:13

Fine, you've shared a few videos on Facebook of those little tiny jumping spiders and that has completely changed my outlook on those jumping spiders. I actually my kids, found one in the house after I have seen these videos and I showed them the videos too of the little spider sleeping, which was adorable. And they're ah, you know. Their initial reaction was, ah, spider in the house. Yes, there's a spider in the house. Oh, it's one of the little jumping spiders. Ah, that's a jumping spider. No, no, let's just let's. Here's a little leaf, let's see if we can get him on the leaf. And now let's take him over and have what we put him on the house plants. This can be his new home. We'll name him Gregory and he can live here, gregory. And they love it. They have come to name all the spiders in the house.

Speaker 2: 1:01:54

Now, whenever they see a spider, their first reaction is oh my God, a spider. And they're like let's name it Robert. And then we have a lot of. We have Marius who lives in in ocean shores at our ocean shores place. I like that. Their reaction to spiders is much more relaxed than mine ever was as a child and they can see the spider. They can see when that's scared right, they scared one the other day. They accidentally hit the web and it broke the web and it well that spider landed on the table and they weren't. Ah, and Spider's going, ah yeah, explain to them.

Speaker 3: 1:02:26

Look the spider's, not Everybody's screaming, do we get?

Speaker 2: 1:02:28

anything Like the spider is terrified. Let's just get a little leaf, put her on it, or? And she didn't. She was so scared she didn't want to touch anything, like she was just, ah, covered her with the leaf and just let her be Like we can all still eat our dinner. She'll be fine. We're eating outside. This is her territory anyway. We'll all be fine.

Speaker 3: 1:02:47

I was afraid of spiders until I read Charlotte's web and it used to be like go to the kid. If I went into the bathroom and there was a spider, it was like ah yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:02:56

This is hysteria.

Speaker 3: 1:02:56

I remember once I was soaking in a bathtub and a spider fell into the bath water and it was. It was like the Titanic going down. It was bad and my father was like for the love of God, 40 gallons of water in the bathroom. It all came out with me. But then I read Charlotte's web and one fell in and I was like, oh, I'm sorry. And I I just so changed me that. I was like I'm very sorry, let me help you out so you don't drown. And I just calmly picked up a spider and said there you go. And that was that. So I still don't like to be surprised if one lands on him and startled with anybody else on the planet. But oh my God, I love the little jumping spiders. We had one in my car. I was like, dude, like you can't startle me while I'm driving, because that's not cool, don't jump, you are welcome, just show me where you are. And I find those little guys, if you read, kinship with all life. Those little spiders are really responsive to interactions. So I had a friend who thought he just thought we were bonkers, that we said this, until he witnessed this thing that happened in our.

Speaker 3: 1:04:02

I told you the story before it stopped me, but it was a training seminar up here at the farm. So we're in a room off the barn we call it the training room, though I don't train anything in there, anyway. So a bee buzzes in and he's the dog I'm working with is starting to really lose it because he's a bee, it's a jack russell, so he's just gonna. He's gonna kill it. And the bee is just lost. He's not looking for trouble, it's just a honey bee. And so I just said to the dog just chill, chill, dude. And I just talked to the bee and I said if you'll come with me like if you sting him you're gonna die, and if you get closer he's gonna kill you I can get you back outside where you want, but you've got to come with me. And I just just had my hands in this big open. It wasn't copying it, it was just like a guide. And as I'm starting to walk him back to the doors, my husband peeks in from the barn. I said hey, we've got a lost bee here. Can you get him outside? And so the whole group is watching this insane conversation unfold.

Speaker 3: 1:05:03

And so I said, and I say to the bee who's he's flying around in front of me. I was like, if you go with him, he'll get you outside and you'll be okay. And I just steer him towards John and the bee goes in a little circle for a minute and then he flies over to John, who's come with me, and guides him outside and I go back to working with the Jack Russell and everyone's sitting there like their mouths are hanging open. What was that? What just happened here? I was like what. I was like well, it's a bee, it's a honey bee. You can talk to honey bees. They're very responsive to conversation. They're like what I'm like spiders also. I'm not hornets no real success with hornets but paper wasp, mud wasp very nice animals to chat with.

Speaker 3: 1:05:46

And so my friend goes back to work and he gets to his desk the next weekend and the next week and there's this little jumping spider comes out from under a pile of papers and he's in the old days. I would just, I would just kill him. And so he's give the case his ancestors. You can take these, mate. So that's what he said, castically says himself. He's look, little fella, I'm going to be here from nine to five. I'm going to shuffle these papers around. I'd really appreciate it if you didn't make yourself known, but at five I'm out of here and the rest of it's yours.

Speaker 3: 1:06:22

I said the spider like, stared at him for a couple seconds and turn around, walk back under the papers. And the next morning he comes in to put the spiders out and about and he's hey, dude, day shifts here and same thing Spiders. Okay, it just became their little routine. He goes oh, I hope you're happy, because I was going to kill spiders. And now I talked to them and it works. I'm like, I know, I know. So yeah, I'm glad work for everybody listening right now.

Speaker 3: 1:06:52

Go talk to spiders or honey or at least to be yeah, and you can't tell them crazy stuff. It's got to be a respectful conversation. But by and large, still remember for a while. But spiders are? I find them amazing, just send the flies towards the spiders. Yeah, so so do you have some girl spiders. It sounds like a heavily male spider naming process going on there.

Speaker 2: 1:07:17

Yeah, I, we've started to find more girl spiders. I think I always assume the ones that we find are males, because those, I feel like, tend to be the ones that are transitory. Right, they're out there looking for the girls. Oh no, I have no idea. It's true, apparently, for the giant house spiders, which is the ones that are like those really big guys that are the size of your palm, and they're black. The boys. The females tend to make their little web areas behind furniture and under deep dark places and don't come out much. The males, though, will travel around looking for females.

Speaker 2: 1:07:50

And you can tell the males from the females, because the males have tiny little boxing gloves. I don't know if you've ever looked that close you can see their little front of their first. Little things have little covers on them. They meet another one right. So you can tell if it's a boy or a girl, and they're usually smaller, obviously, but you can if you look. So it's usually the boys that you find of those kinds, and I guess I just assumed that maybe all the ones I find that are out and about are boys.

Speaker 3: 1:08:13

But I could be wrong. Now I gotta go look it up, because what they call seller spiders are the kind that live in our bathroom. They are indoor spiders, so when people say, well, I capture them and then I put them outside, so it's not really their habitat. So I caught the penguin and I released him in the desert, and now he's safe. Whoops, don't take the spider outside. If you find a spider in your house, he probably needs to live in your house. But oh, I'm so glad though, because those little jumping spiders, and don't let them know that Rose has died. Okay.

Speaker 3: 1:08:46

Yeah, she's very special. I'm like I can barely talk about it, but she changed so many people's.

Speaker 2: 1:08:53

Is she the one that was on the that you were sharing? Yeah, yeah, she wasn't your spider.

Speaker 3: 1:08:58

She was Okay, yeah, john's, we already have enough large animals that if I now said I'm gonna start keeping spiders, no, no, he just knows this is that as necessity dictates. Yeah, yes, as I get more and more feeble, then we'll just shrink the size of the critters around me. But no, I will be very happy if in my deathbed I am attended to by bees and spiders and moss, who I love. I love, love, love, moss and yep, whatever other critter cares to share that space with me. And then, of course, the worms can have me. I'm really good with that whole life cycle thing.

Speaker 2: 1:09:41

On that happy note. On that happy note. Thank you so much for joining me tonight. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 3: 1:09:48

You're very lovely to talk to, always a pleasure.

Speaker 2: 1:09:50

I hope that everyone listening in, especially those people who are working in animal welfare and animal sheltering, got something from this conversation maybe some new ideas about how to approach animal welfare assessments as well as behavioral evaluations, and maybe as well as the people looking for the animals, and new ways to ask the right kind of questions.

Speaker 3: 1:10:11

Exactly, it's all about questions and answers, and the more questions you ask, the more answers you get, but then you have more questions about the answers that you've got. So, turtles all the way down, for sure, keep going, all right. Thanks, marika.

Speaker 2: 1:10:32

That was Suzanne Clothier. Author. If dogs prayers were answered, bones would rain from the sky. And the training assessments, the Clothier animal response assessment tool, the relationship assessment tool and the new functional assessment tool with accompanying very handy app. All of the books and apps we discussed will be linked in the show notes. You may also want to check out our Patreon page, which you can get from our website at thedealwithanimalscom. The Patreon page is going to have bonus content and currently has all the information about current and upcoming episodes.

Speaker 2: 1:11:05

Thank you for joining us as we tried to answer the question what's the deal with animals? I'm your host, marika Bell. I'd like to thank Kai Strascoff for the theme music and Natasha Matzart for sharing her skills to help grow the podcast. You can see links to the guest book recommendations, as well as their websites and affiliated organizations, in the show notes and at thedealwithanimalscom. This podcast was produced on both historical tribal land of the Snoqualmie and Kunal Indian nations. The Deal with Animals is part of the Irore Animal Podcast Network. Now, what do you think is the deal with animals?