May 21, 2025 • 18 mins
This week, Tony explains why confidence is so important with sporting dogs, and why we should train with this in mind at all times.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey, everybody, Welcome to the Foundation's podcast. I'm your host
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about confidence and
how important it is to our dogs. There are fundamental
aspects of being a well adjusted and relatively content person
that we understand deeply. The right level of confidence, you know,
(00:26):
not overbearing in your face arrogance, but just real self
assurance is huge. A been there, done that attitude matters
and it can shape your interactions with people in many
positive ways. It's also crazy important to our dogs. And
while we often think about how a dog needs to
learn a certain command or behavior or whatever, what is
intrinsically linked to that is just confidence. A confident Doug
(00:50):
is generally a better dog to train and be around,
which is what I'm going to talk about right now. Imagine,
if you will, a scenario where these things happen to you.
You get hyper aroused, but not in the way you
(01:11):
might as Valentine's Day starts to wind down and the
kids are in bed, but maybe instead in the way
you might feel when you're walking through your local Applebee's
and some dude with face tattoos and an ankle monitor
throws a plate of French fries in your face. I
don't know, I have no idea why that's my example,
but just bear with me. Your fight or flight response
(01:32):
kicks in your brain, which is oftentimes not your friend,
releases a whole bunch of stress hormones, which in turn
increases your heart rate, heightens your awareness, and generally makes
you feel like you could explode at any given second.
Imagine that shitty, no good feeling, because we've all felt it. Now,
imagine all of the scenarios in which that can kick
(01:53):
in out of nowhere. Perhaps you're at the zoo and
a silver back with a toothache breaks free from his enclosure.
Maybe you're out for a run and a rottweiler that
looks like a powerlifter decides to take a keen interest
in your presence. Maybe you're standing in front of a
podium and looking out on a couple hundred people who
(02:14):
are all waiting for you to start speaking. Glossophobia is
the fear of public speaking, and while it's often touted
as the number one fear of a fair amount of
the population, I'd guess it's not quite that high on
the list. I mean, if someone put a gun to
your head and said give this crowd a seminar or
I'm going to pull a trigger. You probably choose a seminar.
(02:36):
This is still a real fear, a big one, and
the prevailing theory on why it is so profound is
that not that long ago in human history, when we
spent our lives in small tribes, if you were in
front of a group and speaking, you had set yourself
apart somehow. This might not seem like a big deal,
but that tribe back then was literally your life. If
(03:00):
you are making the case and why you should stay
in that tribe, you are making a case for your
own survival because you weren't going to make it on
your own. Now. I know you think you might have
been fine alone, but that's not how it worked. There
is a reason we ended up working together in small
groups for a couple hundred thousand years and honestly, probably
(03:20):
quite a bit longer than that. Think about it another way.
Once fish figure out how to school and why that
means their species should survive, you know some level of
expected predation. You don't see a lot of those fish
suddenly break out of the school and swim out across
the open ocean, because they'll become a snack in no time.
(03:42):
So we have this hold over fear, just like fear
of snakes or spiders, although most of us are in
very little danger of either one. When something has the
time to establish roots gene deep in us, we don't
suddenly lose it because that threat isn't the same thing
any longer. Anyway, most folks would rather not speak in
front of a crowd, and I don't blame them, but
(04:04):
I know from personal experience that there are ways to
get over the fear, and if you do, the trajectory
of your life might change. It did for me when
I first got asked to speak at smaller outdoor shows
a long time ago. It wasn't fun, but it taught
me a lot like that I needed to speak about
stuff that I knew really well. I had to prepare
(04:25):
and rehearse and well just go through the reps. At
one point in my life, I did a fair amount
of public speaking engagements and it suddenly became something that
I didn't dread and I actually kind of started to
enjoy it, mostly because I developed confidence in my ability. Now,
if I'm in a setting where someone needs to talk,
and there are lots of people who clearly don't want to.
(04:47):
I usually just go for it, and I think that
has literally helped me in my life and definitely in
my career. I think about this a lot when I
think about one of the biggest problems I encounter in dogs,
which is confidence, or should I say a lack of confidence.
A confident dog is an adventurous dog that will generally
show up for work and generally be a pleasure to
(05:08):
be around. Those are both characteristics that we should all
want in our dogs, and it's worth it to not
only understand that, but to actively try to foster that
in our dogs, from puppies on up. Here's the rub
with dogs in confidence, though, we have to understand what
we are looking at. An easy example is a well
(05:29):
trained Labrador Retriever that sits quivering next to its handler
and watches with intensity as his handler tosses a bumper
into the lake. The dog is released and it charges
into the water, grabs the bumper, and swims back to shore.
Simple that dog knows what he's supposed to do, he
loves what he's supposed to do, and understands the whole process.
(05:53):
That's easy stuff. But that is a dog that has
already developed confidence in a specific task, and not a
situation where the dog doesn't know what it's supposed to do, or,
to put it another way, what is expected of it.
So things get a little muddy here. I recently fell
into a training gig where I met up with a
woman who was gifted a King Charles Spaniel. If you
(06:13):
don't know what that is, imagine a little, i don't know,
fifteen to maybe twenty pound dog, predictably adorable as Spaniels are,
with a snout that is about half the length you'd expect,
as if they are built from mostly pretty good parts
until the end, and you just threw on a nose
just to finish the job and go home for the day.
The owner said, the dog has been re homed three times,
(06:37):
is a barker, recently became somewhat of a biter or
at least a nipper, and was, in her words, extremely stubborn.
The dog that she showed up with was a high energy,
soft and pretty trainable one year old dog. Now he
has focus issues, as one year old dogs do. Now
(06:58):
he has some adopt to dog issues, too, like resource
guarding and an intense desire to protect his owner against
any threat, and he has some other stuff going on.
It became pretty clear that he needed more exercise, more
of a challenge in his day to day life, and
just maybe a little more structure. He didn't know what
to do with himself, so he did what he wanted.
(07:20):
It took only a handful of treats, a check cord,
a place board, and a little bit of time to
get him to not only place but sit there study
for maybe ten or fifteen seconds at a time, and
he generally showed me he's willing to work. This was
a dog that I expected to be a lost cause,
but he's not. He exhibits traits you'd think of his confidence,
(07:42):
maybe over confidence, like barking at dogs that could swallow
him whole, or chasing cars. But what he needs is
confidence in the little jobs, the little tasks, and direction
on how to behave so he can earn the rewards
he needs. On top of that, he has a ton
of natural hold and carry and was very happy to
(08:04):
receive praise. Now, if you look at that little spaniel
one way, you see somewhat of an adorable demon. If
you look at him another way, and you know he's
on his third home in a year and hasn't had
any help developing into a decent dog. You can still
see that all the ingredients of a decent dog are there,
and this is often the case, and they just need
(08:27):
to be pointed in the right direction. This is why
all of the best hunting dog trainers you've heard of
all work to get dogs into different environments with ever
(08:49):
increasing levels of distraction. They condition dogs to not only
be comfortable in new places with new people and new
sense and all of that, but it also helped the
dogs calm themselves down and think through new scenarios. That
might seem like a stretch. But let me try to
frame this up. I grew up in a family where
we didn't have a ton of money. We weren't destitute,
(09:09):
but we weren't on vacation in Paris during the holidays,
if you get my drift. Despite being raised to hunt
and fish like fiends in parts of my home state,
you know, close to home parts, it never occurred to
me to travel to hunt anywhere else. Then in high school,
my dad read an article in Field and Stream magazine
about turkey hunting in Missouri, and we went down there
(09:31):
to camp and hunt longbeards, which was a huge thing.
It was like going to Mars for me, even though
we were close enough to the Iowa border to practically
see it, and for my geographically challenged listeners. Iowa is
the only state between Minnesota and Missouri, and it's not
very tall as far as states go, but it was
like another world. And I still remember seeing a honey
(09:52):
locust tree for the first time. If you don't know
what that is, it's a diabolical satan level tree with
extremely sharp and way oversized thorns on its trunk. I
have a friend who traps a lot in Kansas, and
she frequently sends me pictures of bobcats and coyotes she
is skinned that have those thorns in their paws. It's
gnarly as hell. Now, just that six hour drive to
(10:16):
a new type of habitat to hunt the same turkeys
we have at home was intimidating, and I've never gotten
over it. As I've traveled to many different states in
so many different environments to catch fish and chase gritters,
it's always a little shot to the ego to realize
you're not confident to hunt in the big woods because
you're used to the deciduous forests or whatever, or the
(10:39):
immense feeling of being over your head and unprepared when
you decide to trade in your white tail tag at
home for an elk tag and you show up in
the mountains with all your brand new backcountry gear and
you get your shit ready at the trailhead while breathing
air that just doesn't quite have the kick the air
does at home, and you realize that you're about to
go into country that has several degrees more wild than
(10:59):
you're used to. But by the third trip it's all different.
You know, the drill in your confident. So think about
this from a dog's perspective. At maybe I don't know,
two feet tall. Doing a bunch of training in the
soccer fields is great, But will your dog only hunt
pheasants in mode grass? Probably not, or I hope not. Anyway,
they're going to hunt crp and thick stuff and cattails
(11:21):
and cover that is way different from the typical training grounds.
Would you expect them to be as good in that
environment as they are in a simple mode grass training environment. Now,
a dog that has been pheasant hunting varied habitat for
a long time, say prime age dogs so to speak,
it's a different story. They're not going to be shy
(11:42):
and hang out around the edges and pretend to look
for a rooster in the thin cover that most hunters
want to walk in. They're going to dive into that
cover because they're confident, you know, they're confident in themselves
and the belief that the birds are going to be there.
So take this another way. Have you ever tried to
train a dog to do more than retrieve at a time.
We start out with easy, single retrieves in situations where
(12:05):
the dog can clearly see the bumper from start to finish.
But eventually we can move into a different cover. But
the dog has a single mark to work and has
probably developed the confidence and basic retrieves. So the step
up process here is pretty easy and straightforward most of
the time. Now, the moment you toss one bumper, don't
(12:26):
send him, and then toss another one, the wheels generally
fall off. They'll run to one or the other, or
pick up one, then run to the other and drop
the first one and do some kind of ambitious attempt
to try to grab both. At least some dogs do
because they know what they should do with one, but
two is just suddenly a totally different story. It takes
(12:49):
baby steps adding in that second retrieve and time for
the dog to understand that his job is to mark
and retrieve one, then retrieve the other. Now that seems
so simple to us, but you won't get a dog
to master doubles in a single training session. He's going
to take time. I think this is an important point
to drive home here. That woman with that King Charles
(13:11):
Spaniel had made up her mind that her dog was this, this,
and this. Now he was some of the things she thought,
but he was also a lot of the things that
she didn't think about. So if you decide you have
a stubborn dog, you might not train him to be
confident in some task because it's going to be too hard.
Or if you decide you have a dog that is
(13:31):
just too high energy for a certain drill, then it's
easy to write them off because after all, they're not
going to get it. But you can get a dog
to understand an awful lot about what you want out
of them if you build up their confidence enough to
understand one thing, one command, whatever that is, or one
set of commands that all coalesce into a certain behavior,
(13:54):
a certain ask, and this isn't something that is a
one off deal. I have twins and one has kind
of unreal confidence in herself and the other one has
not that much. And the one that is nearly overconfident,
she's a social butterfly. She's in all kinds of activities
and she's just kind of a natural leader. The other
(14:15):
one is in a lot of activities too, But if
she can hide, she will. My confident daughter will have
an easier life than her sister, and it's something I
work on with them all the time. But confidence tends
to breed confidence. And while we as people have been
conditioned to sort of view confidence as another form of arrogance,
which it can be, it doesn't have to be. It
(14:37):
can be a pure good thing, and that pure good
thing can feed into many aspects of life. The same
holds true for dogs. When you give a dog a
problem with two choices. For example, you know, like I
don't know, working the stay command, that dog will break
because all dogs break at the beginning. And that's okay.
But if you get the dog to start to sit
(14:58):
and watch you for a release command, and it makes
that choice to do something unnatural stay for a reward,
whether that's treat or praise or whatever. It's learning that
it can make choices that result in a reward. A
dog that learns that and understands the connection of its
choices to your reaction to them and what you want
to see out of them is a dog that will
(15:20):
take to tasks easier as you ask more of them.
It's kind of like how college used to be viewed
as an institution designed not to just fill young men
and women's brains up with facts, but to teach them
how to think. The value and a degree used to
be that you had someone who had likely learned how
to think through problems. Maybe that's still a case. I
(15:43):
don't know, it's been a minute since I was a
college student. But that same line of thinking applies to dogs,
and it matters. You want to ask your dog to
do something, guide it to that behavior, reward it, and
set higher expectations as the whole thing cements their smooth brains.
You want a dog that recognizes the situations where it
(16:04):
is likely to be rewarded and make that positive association
to the whole thing, and then choose to give you
the behavior so that they'll get something out of it.
It's that simple, but generally hinges on us doing our
part to introduce controlled scenarios where they can develop into
confident dogs, because otherwise they'll just default to being plain
(16:25):
old dogs, and plain old dogs, as great as they are,
tend to be the same dogs that jump up on
your house guests and take off after squirrels through traffic
while we scream like lunatics in our bathrobes and are
generally not that much fun to be around. When they
get to that stage, we tend to go the other
way and write them off. Is not so good, not
so trainable, and not so much fun to own. And
(16:48):
the difference between the two, which in reality is a
hell of a lot, often boils down to us conditioning
the dogs to be confident in their ability to make
it through a situation in such a way that we
are happy with them. This cuts down on stress for
them and us, creates a better working relationship between us
and them, and produces dogs that are just generally more
(17:10):
fun to own and be around. It's actually pretty amazing,
but it has to be intentional on our parts, and
we have to recognize the long game with this stuff.
It's not easy, but man, is it worth it. So
think about that and think about coming back in two
weeks because I'm going to talk about the other side
of this topic, which is confidence in ourselves to lead
(17:31):
our dogs in a good direction through our training. That's
it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been
The Fundation's podcast as always, Thank you so much for
listening and for all your support. We just wrapped up
Dog Week a little bit ago, and it was amazing
the photo contest that you guys showed up for all
the content, the Pheasant film that I dropped, just incredible
(17:54):
to see you guys show up and just consume that content.
I truly want to thank you from the bottom of
my heart. If you want to see that stuff, or
you want to see the content that we drop every day,
from articles to podcasts to films, do you name it.
The mediator dot com has you covered. Go check it
out there.
Hey, everybody, Welcome to the Foundation's podcast. I'm your host
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about confidence and
how important it is to our dogs. There are fundamental
aspects of being a well adjusted and relatively content person
that we understand deeply. The right level of confidence, you know,
(00:26):
not overbearing in your face arrogance, but just real self
assurance is huge. A been there, done that attitude matters
and it can shape your interactions with people in many
positive ways. It's also crazy important to our dogs. And
while we often think about how a dog needs to
learn a certain command or behavior or whatever, what is
intrinsically linked to that is just confidence. A confident Doug
(00:50):
is generally a better dog to train and be around,
which is what I'm going to talk about right now. Imagine,
if you will, a scenario where these things happen to you.
You get hyper aroused, but not in the way you
(01:11):
might as Valentine's Day starts to wind down and the
kids are in bed, but maybe instead in the way
you might feel when you're walking through your local Applebee's
and some dude with face tattoos and an ankle monitor
throws a plate of French fries in your face. I
don't know, I have no idea why that's my example,
but just bear with me. Your fight or flight response
(01:32):
kicks in your brain, which is oftentimes not your friend,
releases a whole bunch of stress hormones, which in turn
increases your heart rate, heightens your awareness, and generally makes
you feel like you could explode at any given second.
Imagine that shitty, no good feeling, because we've all felt it. Now,
imagine all of the scenarios in which that can kick
(01:53):
in out of nowhere. Perhaps you're at the zoo and
a silver back with a toothache breaks free from his enclosure.
Maybe you're out for a run and a rottweiler that
looks like a powerlifter decides to take a keen interest
in your presence. Maybe you're standing in front of a
podium and looking out on a couple hundred people who
(02:14):
are all waiting for you to start speaking. Glossophobia is
the fear of public speaking, and while it's often touted
as the number one fear of a fair amount of
the population, I'd guess it's not quite that high on
the list. I mean, if someone put a gun to
your head and said give this crowd a seminar or
I'm going to pull a trigger. You probably choose a seminar.
(02:36):
This is still a real fear, a big one, and
the prevailing theory on why it is so profound is
that not that long ago in human history, when we
spent our lives in small tribes, if you were in
front of a group and speaking, you had set yourself
apart somehow. This might not seem like a big deal,
but that tribe back then was literally your life. If
(03:00):
you are making the case and why you should stay
in that tribe, you are making a case for your
own survival because you weren't going to make it on
your own. Now. I know you think you might have
been fine alone, but that's not how it worked. There
is a reason we ended up working together in small
groups for a couple hundred thousand years and honestly, probably
(03:20):
quite a bit longer than that. Think about it another way.
Once fish figure out how to school and why that
means their species should survive, you know some level of
expected predation. You don't see a lot of those fish
suddenly break out of the school and swim out across
the open ocean, because they'll become a snack in no time.
(03:42):
So we have this hold over fear, just like fear
of snakes or spiders, although most of us are in
very little danger of either one. When something has the
time to establish roots gene deep in us, we don't
suddenly lose it because that threat isn't the same thing
any longer. Anyway, most folks would rather not speak in
front of a crowd, and I don't blame them, but
(04:04):
I know from personal experience that there are ways to
get over the fear, and if you do, the trajectory
of your life might change. It did for me when
I first got asked to speak at smaller outdoor shows
a long time ago. It wasn't fun, but it taught
me a lot like that I needed to speak about
stuff that I knew really well. I had to prepare
(04:25):
and rehearse and well just go through the reps. At
one point in my life, I did a fair amount
of public speaking engagements and it suddenly became something that
I didn't dread and I actually kind of started to
enjoy it, mostly because I developed confidence in my ability. Now,
if I'm in a setting where someone needs to talk,
and there are lots of people who clearly don't want to.
(04:47):
I usually just go for it, and I think that
has literally helped me in my life and definitely in
my career. I think about this a lot when I
think about one of the biggest problems I encounter in dogs,
which is confidence, or should I say a lack of confidence.
A confident dog is an adventurous dog that will generally
show up for work and generally be a pleasure to
(05:08):
be around. Those are both characteristics that we should all
want in our dogs, and it's worth it to not
only understand that, but to actively try to foster that
in our dogs, from puppies on up. Here's the rub
with dogs in confidence, though, we have to understand what
we are looking at. An easy example is a well
(05:29):
trained Labrador Retriever that sits quivering next to its handler
and watches with intensity as his handler tosses a bumper
into the lake. The dog is released and it charges
into the water, grabs the bumper, and swims back to shore.
Simple that dog knows what he's supposed to do, he
loves what he's supposed to do, and understands the whole process.
(05:53):
That's easy stuff. But that is a dog that has
already developed confidence in a specific task, and not a
situation where the dog doesn't know what it's supposed to do, or,
to put it another way, what is expected of it.
So things get a little muddy here. I recently fell
into a training gig where I met up with a
woman who was gifted a King Charles Spaniel. If you
(06:13):
don't know what that is, imagine a little, i don't know,
fifteen to maybe twenty pound dog, predictably adorable as Spaniels are,
with a snout that is about half the length you'd expect,
as if they are built from mostly pretty good parts
until the end, and you just threw on a nose
just to finish the job and go home for the day.
The owner said, the dog has been re homed three times,
(06:37):
is a barker, recently became somewhat of a biter or
at least a nipper, and was, in her words, extremely stubborn.
The dog that she showed up with was a high energy,
soft and pretty trainable one year old dog. Now he
has focus issues, as one year old dogs do. Now
(06:58):
he has some adopt to dog issues, too, like resource
guarding and an intense desire to protect his owner against
any threat, and he has some other stuff going on.
It became pretty clear that he needed more exercise, more
of a challenge in his day to day life, and
just maybe a little more structure. He didn't know what
to do with himself, so he did what he wanted.
(07:20):
It took only a handful of treats, a check cord,
a place board, and a little bit of time to
get him to not only place but sit there study
for maybe ten or fifteen seconds at a time, and
he generally showed me he's willing to work. This was
a dog that I expected to be a lost cause,
but he's not. He exhibits traits you'd think of his confidence,
(07:42):
maybe over confidence, like barking at dogs that could swallow
him whole, or chasing cars. But what he needs is
confidence in the little jobs, the little tasks, and direction
on how to behave so he can earn the rewards
he needs. On top of that, he has a ton
of natural hold and carry and was very happy to
(08:04):
receive praise. Now, if you look at that little spaniel
one way, you see somewhat of an adorable demon. If
you look at him another way, and you know he's
on his third home in a year and hasn't had
any help developing into a decent dog. You can still
see that all the ingredients of a decent dog are there,
and this is often the case, and they just need
(08:27):
to be pointed in the right direction. This is why
all of the best hunting dog trainers you've heard of
all work to get dogs into different environments with ever
(08:49):
increasing levels of distraction. They condition dogs to not only
be comfortable in new places with new people and new
sense and all of that, but it also helped the
dogs calm themselves down and think through new scenarios. That
might seem like a stretch. But let me try to
frame this up. I grew up in a family where
we didn't have a ton of money. We weren't destitute,
(09:09):
but we weren't on vacation in Paris during the holidays,
if you get my drift. Despite being raised to hunt
and fish like fiends in parts of my home state,
you know, close to home parts, it never occurred to
me to travel to hunt anywhere else. Then in high school,
my dad read an article in Field and Stream magazine
about turkey hunting in Missouri, and we went down there
(09:31):
to camp and hunt longbeards, which was a huge thing.
It was like going to Mars for me, even though
we were close enough to the Iowa border to practically
see it, and for my geographically challenged listeners. Iowa is
the only state between Minnesota and Missouri, and it's not
very tall as far as states go, but it was
like another world. And I still remember seeing a honey
(09:52):
locust tree for the first time. If you don't know
what that is, it's a diabolical satan level tree with
extremely sharp and way oversized thorns on its trunk. I
have a friend who traps a lot in Kansas, and
she frequently sends me pictures of bobcats and coyotes she
is skinned that have those thorns in their paws. It's
gnarly as hell. Now, just that six hour drive to
(10:16):
a new type of habitat to hunt the same turkeys
we have at home was intimidating, and I've never gotten
over it. As I've traveled to many different states in
so many different environments to catch fish and chase gritters,
it's always a little shot to the ego to realize
you're not confident to hunt in the big woods because
you're used to the deciduous forests or whatever, or the
(10:39):
immense feeling of being over your head and unprepared when
you decide to trade in your white tail tag at
home for an elk tag and you show up in
the mountains with all your brand new backcountry gear and
you get your shit ready at the trailhead while breathing
air that just doesn't quite have the kick the air
does at home, and you realize that you're about to
go into country that has several degrees more wild than
(10:59):
you're used to. But by the third trip it's all different.
You know, the drill in your confident. So think about
this from a dog's perspective. At maybe I don't know,
two feet tall. Doing a bunch of training in the
soccer fields is great, But will your dog only hunt
pheasants in mode grass? Probably not, or I hope not. Anyway,
they're going to hunt crp and thick stuff and cattails
(11:21):
and cover that is way different from the typical training grounds.
Would you expect them to be as good in that
environment as they are in a simple mode grass training environment. Now,
a dog that has been pheasant hunting varied habitat for
a long time, say prime age dogs so to speak,
it's a different story. They're not going to be shy
(11:42):
and hang out around the edges and pretend to look
for a rooster in the thin cover that most hunters
want to walk in. They're going to dive into that
cover because they're confident, you know, they're confident in themselves
and the belief that the birds are going to be there.
So take this another way. Have you ever tried to
train a dog to do more than retrieve at a time.
We start out with easy, single retrieves in situations where
(12:05):
the dog can clearly see the bumper from start to finish.
But eventually we can move into a different cover. But
the dog has a single mark to work and has
probably developed the confidence and basic retrieves. So the step
up process here is pretty easy and straightforward most of
the time. Now, the moment you toss one bumper, don't
(12:26):
send him, and then toss another one, the wheels generally
fall off. They'll run to one or the other, or
pick up one, then run to the other and drop
the first one and do some kind of ambitious attempt
to try to grab both. At least some dogs do
because they know what they should do with one, but
two is just suddenly a totally different story. It takes
(12:49):
baby steps adding in that second retrieve and time for
the dog to understand that his job is to mark
and retrieve one, then retrieve the other. Now that seems
so simple to us, but you won't get a dog
to master doubles in a single training session. He's going
to take time. I think this is an important point
to drive home here. That woman with that King Charles
(13:11):
Spaniel had made up her mind that her dog was this, this,
and this. Now he was some of the things she thought,
but he was also a lot of the things that
she didn't think about. So if you decide you have
a stubborn dog, you might not train him to be
confident in some task because it's going to be too hard.
Or if you decide you have a dog that is
(13:31):
just too high energy for a certain drill, then it's
easy to write them off because after all, they're not
going to get it. But you can get a dog
to understand an awful lot about what you want out
of them if you build up their confidence enough to
understand one thing, one command, whatever that is, or one
set of commands that all coalesce into a certain behavior,
(13:54):
a certain ask, and this isn't something that is a
one off deal. I have twins and one has kind
of unreal confidence in herself and the other one has
not that much. And the one that is nearly overconfident,
she's a social butterfly. She's in all kinds of activities
and she's just kind of a natural leader. The other
(14:15):
one is in a lot of activities too, But if
she can hide, she will. My confident daughter will have
an easier life than her sister, and it's something I
work on with them all the time. But confidence tends
to breed confidence. And while we as people have been
conditioned to sort of view confidence as another form of arrogance,
which it can be, it doesn't have to be. It
(14:37):
can be a pure good thing, and that pure good
thing can feed into many aspects of life. The same
holds true for dogs. When you give a dog a
problem with two choices. For example, you know, like I
don't know, working the stay command, that dog will break
because all dogs break at the beginning. And that's okay.
But if you get the dog to start to sit
(14:58):
and watch you for a release command, and it makes
that choice to do something unnatural stay for a reward,
whether that's treat or praise or whatever. It's learning that
it can make choices that result in a reward. A
dog that learns that and understands the connection of its
choices to your reaction to them and what you want
to see out of them is a dog that will
(15:20):
take to tasks easier as you ask more of them.
It's kind of like how college used to be viewed
as an institution designed not to just fill young men
and women's brains up with facts, but to teach them
how to think. The value and a degree used to
be that you had someone who had likely learned how
to think through problems. Maybe that's still a case. I
(15:43):
don't know, it's been a minute since I was a
college student. But that same line of thinking applies to dogs,
and it matters. You want to ask your dog to
do something, guide it to that behavior, reward it, and
set higher expectations as the whole thing cements their smooth brains.
You want a dog that recognizes the situations where it
(16:04):
is likely to be rewarded and make that positive association
to the whole thing, and then choose to give you
the behavior so that they'll get something out of it.
It's that simple, but generally hinges on us doing our
part to introduce controlled scenarios where they can develop into
confident dogs, because otherwise they'll just default to being plain
(16:25):
old dogs, and plain old dogs, as great as they are,
tend to be the same dogs that jump up on
your house guests and take off after squirrels through traffic
while we scream like lunatics in our bathrobes and are
generally not that much fun to be around. When they
get to that stage, we tend to go the other
way and write them off. Is not so good, not
so trainable, and not so much fun to own. And
(16:48):
the difference between the two, which in reality is a
hell of a lot, often boils down to us conditioning
the dogs to be confident in their ability to make
it through a situation in such a way that we
are happy with them. This cuts down on stress for
them and us, creates a better working relationship between us
and them, and produces dogs that are just generally more
(17:10):
fun to own and be around. It's actually pretty amazing,
but it has to be intentional on our parts, and
we have to recognize the long game with this stuff.
It's not easy, but man, is it worth it. So
think about that and think about coming back in two
weeks because I'm going to talk about the other side
of this topic, which is confidence in ourselves to lead
(17:31):
our dogs in a good direction through our training. That's
it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been
The Fundation's podcast as always, Thank you so much for
listening and for all your support. We just wrapped up
Dog Week a little bit ago, and it was amazing
the photo contest that you guys showed up for all
the content, the Pheasant film that I dropped, just incredible
(17:54):
to see you guys show up and just consume that content.
I truly want to thank you from the bottom of
my heart. If you want to see that stuff, or
you want to see the content that we drop every day,
from articles to podcasts to films, do you name it.
The mediator dot com has you covered. Go check it
out there.
Host
Cal Callaghan
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