Does your pet struggle with some challenging behaviours? Do you have a new furry friend who could use some help getting used to the world? Ever wonder what it’s like to help pups become the best they can be? 

This interview with Emily Fisher, owner of Scratch & Sniff Canine Services is SO FULL of information that we had to split it into two parts!  Emily shares so much incredible information about dog training and how to best relate to your best (furry) friend.

Find her here –

Web: https://scratchandsniff.ca

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ScratchAndSniffCanineServices

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scratchandsniffguelph/

Now, let’s get to the interview!

Transcription:

Laura Wombwell:
Hi there, it’s Laura from Laura Wombwell Photography. And today I am joined by Emily Fisher of Scratch and Sniff Canine Services for another episode of the Southwestern Ontario Pet Collective. Hi, Emily, I am so excited to have you here.

Emily Fisher:
Hi, thanks for having me on.

Laura Wombwell:
So you have been a dog trainer for quite some time. Now, I’d love to know how you got started in training.

Emily Fisher:
Hmm. So as a child, I had the aspirations of being a vet, as many children do interested in working with animals. And I expected it was just kind of not the the field, I’m not so interested in the medical side of it. If I’m saying it’s interesting, but not so much translating chemical equations as we had to do to get all the prerequisites for it. So I ended up going another direction with schooling thinking that, you know, I’d left the the animal dreams behind. And I actually ended up circling back after going to university for a degree totally unrelated to anything. And when I moved back to Toronto, after going to school, I worked in a vet clinic for a little while, which kind of did seal that that wasn’t really the field for me, and then I got into dog walking. So I think that can be a really nice entry point. Getting into training, I think it is good to have somebody that you’re working with. So I was working with two quite experienced walkers to begin with. And from there, I started my own walking business, I got into training as with private training, as well as working with a school in Toronto called wWho’s Walking Who, moved on from there to another school where I was a head instructor. So I had quite a lot of just kind of experience with multiple dogs, I was fostering dogs, walking dogs working as an assistant in classes before head instructor. And then after a number of years on that moving to golf and actually setting up my own facility in downtown Guelph.

Laura Wombwell:
So how did you find your particular style and method of training.

Emily Fisher:
So that came about through doing things in a way that I would not recommend at this point. And I think that is the direction that a lot of trainers actually end up going, they figure out what not to do before they figure out what to do. So early on, actually, when I was in university, I had a dog, I my partner had a dog And he had a lot of behavior issues, he was quite aggressive with people with other dogs just generally very wired and a very, fairly large as well, all things considered, he could have been bigger, but you know, he was around 95 pounds or so. So we hired a trainer locally, where I was going to school in Peterborough. And we got some very, very, very bad advice. And we followed it pretty closely. And we did end up changing training methods and saw that behavior is actually here in gwelf. And, unfortunately, it It ended up with a behavioral euthanasia for him. So I think, yeah, it’s very unfortunate that we ended up going that route with that outcome. I think the nice thing though, is that I do know what it’s like to live with a dog like that. I do know what it’s like to use those methods to kind of see things deteriorate, to see things seem to get better before that deterioration. So I have all of that lived experience as well as the, you know, via I’m gonna call it theoretical experience, but the the broader knowledge around what was actually happening at that point, what was actually happening with that dog as we were going through that. So I think despite it being, you know, a sad outcome, it was something that gives me a lot of empathy for owners and owners who are using methods that that they might be even coached on with other trainers, but could ultimately be really damaging for the dog, particularly when we’re looking at dogs that are coming into situations with pre existing, you know, high anxiety, fear and aggression.

Laura Wombwell:
So, are there any particular whether it’s behaviors or, or specializations that that are particular to you?

Emily Fisher:
Yeah, I tend to do a lot of work with dog aggression. I would say the large majority of private training that I do is with dogs with some sort of aggressive behavior quite frequently adopted dog dog to human or bordering on that with you know, severe reactivity, even if they aren’t following it up with bites or different opportunities to bite so I find those cases to be quite rewarding, because you can see such differences in the dogs, once we have all the training on track, just to see them kind of like, just like take a breath and be able to come down from this constant emotional high that they can be on, especially living in an urban area where there’s, you know, just triggers all over the place, you know, even when they’re in their house sometimes.

Laura Wombwell:
So what’s your favorite thing to help dogs with within your business? Is it the reactivity?

Emily Fisher:
Yeah, yeah, I would say that I’m also quite liking a newer service that I’m offering now with the, you know, emergence of COVID. I had to do, like most business owners, a lot of restructuring. I was thinking through, you know, what does puppy play look like in in puppy socialization class, and there’s a lot of close contact between people, there’s a lot of management to the puppies, puppies, just because they’re young doesn’t mean that they have good social skills and a lot of help developing that. So if there’s, you know, something happening, I need to be able to get to the puppies quickly, if there’s people there, you know, getting bodies close together, all that sort of thing. So I ended up restructuring some services, to offer the obedience and manners separate from the playing socialization element of it. So I now have a drop off service, which luckily has been able to run through the lockdowns with permission through by law and public health, which has been fantastic, because there’s just so many puppies out there who are coming into homes and people are feeling completely, you know, stunted in their ability to to get their puppies out and doing things.

Laura Wombwell: There are a ton of folks who have brought new puppies into their homes throughout the pandemic. I know we’ve had a couple of questions about when is a good time to seek out training for your puppy, as well what are some key behaviors that your puppy should be learning?

Emily Fisher: Ultimately, right away. So you know, we look at children, for instance, they don’t not learn until they go to kindergarten at you know, four or so years of age, there is so much early education that’s happening with parents and caregivers, right from birth. developmentally, there’s so many changes that happened in that time. So I think puppies are very similar. This doesn’t mean that they need to learn, you know, all of these formal, like obedience behaviors of like, you know, sit only here and walk only there. It’s not that it’s about meeting their developmental needs, meeting their socialization needs. And I think that’s the really big thing that sometimes gets a little bit confused. A dog can learn to sit or lie down at literally any point in their life. I took an eight year old rescue into my house and adopted her. She She kind of knew sit when I had her she was a stray on the street, who knows what her background was. And I went on to compete in rally obedience with her. And she was eight when I got her and she knew basically nothing, right. So you don’t need to focus just on these hard skills of you know, changing positions or, or anything like that when they’re puppy. There are some things we want to get in place early. But really, we need to look at the socialization side of things. So exposure to the broader world, like knowing what is the world going to hold for your dog as an adult? And how can we cultivate positive experiences and exposure to these things, and to things that resemble these scenarios, right. So if you have a puppy and you’re thinking maybe I’m going to have kids in three or four years, it is going to be really really important to find situations to expose your your puppy to children in a way that is really enjoyable for your puppy. So not children that are going to you know, pick them up awkwardly or drop them or run past screaming and scare them. But actually cultivate good relationships with children so that you can more easily make that transition once you have the baby into the home.

Laura Wombwell:
So when we hear the term socialization, it’s not even necessarily just introducing the pet to various types of people, it can even be things in the environment too

Emily Fisher:
Oh for sure, for sure. So can kind of think of, you know, the world broken down into different types of categories. So you know, we have people and there’s going to be a huge range of what people are changing from like, size and race and sex, or gender and presentation and how they carry themselves. It could be people carrying objects a lot, or dogs or find the people, but people carrying bulky objects that suddenly something to be concerned about. So there’s Yeah, the people side of it. And that doesn’t mean Meet and Greet, and make friends with every single one of those people, it’s about being able to watch them at a distance and be okay with their existence in the environment without being concerned about it. But also without having to run over there and be you know, the Walmart greeter of, of the neighborhood. Same thing with dogs, they really don’t need to be going up and meeting every dog. And I actually prefer to not have on leash greetings between dogs, it can kind of cultivate an expectation of every dog I see, I should be able to greet. And then they start to get frustrated. And you can get that barking and lunch and coming from that frustration of wanting to go great, and now not being allowed to as they get older. And and, you know, you want to just go for a walk and not greet every dog. So having social contact is really important. I don’t want to minimize that. But it’s kind of one of those, there’s a time and place for it is not every person every dog, so we have that like social part of socialization. And I think that’s where the term kind of gets confused between social contact and socialization, meaning stuff like noises. And that could be anything from like a beep on the computer. So many dogs out there afraid of electronic beep noises, or like a coffee grinder or blender, or vacuum or noises like fireworks or gunshots or other sorts of like, all encompassing outdoor like big noises, as opposed to like the little beep on the computer. So looking at different types of noises, just living in a household will obviously have exposure to stuff like a beeping microwave, but you don’t necessarily get the exposure to the thunderstorms of the fireworks, especially this time of year when we’re just getting less of that. So can be a little bit hard to replicate that sort of thing. But sound CDs, even going on to YouTube, there’s a lot of weird stuff on YouTube that are just, you know, 10 hours of fireworks playing on repeat. And making sure that exposure to this is not fear, invoking that it’s just something that becomes background noise. Same thing with footing, walking on carpet is very different than walking on hardwood floor or laminate floor or anything slippery like that sidewalk grate. So we can kind of look at environment socialization as what is going to exist in your dog’s environment, even on the smallest scale like my pups been a little bit weird about clods of grass recently, there’s been a couple of puppy eating clods of grass, which has stared her down on the trail. And she’s like, no, you’re coming for me. So stuff like that, which is, you know, very normal for a puppy, especially pre-adolescent, she’s 18 weeks, to be a little bit suspicious about that sort of thing. And I think it’s stuff that we humans, we want, we just simply don’t notice because we don’t have the dog’s eye view. But stuff that we kind of need to incorporate into your dog’s life. And if you walk only around your block and your neighborhood, that dogs world is a very, very small world that you’re socializing them to, there might be clouds of grass there. But you know, there’s a lot of stuff which is not in just your neighborhood. So walking in new locations, walking in, you know, forested areas, versus urban areas versus a downtown urban area, versus a residential area. Just that kind of broad exposure beyond here, house, backyard and immediate neighborhood is really important.

Laura Wombwell:
Does the socialization process differ at all for older adopted animals? I know lots of folks have brought in rescues to their homes this during the pandemic as well.

Emily Fisher:
Yes, and a lot of people are having a lot of trouble finding them too. A little bit of a run on them as people are working from home. Yeah, so, socialization is very much like a biologically pre determined period of time in the early part of a creatures life. So if we’re looking at that critical period of socialization for puppies, it’s ending in that 12 to 16 week range. So that doesn’t mean that there’s suddenly one day that they go from being totally valuable and love everything to totally shut down. It’s not that black and white, but you do get this kind of gradual clothes off of starting to go there. That’s new and not okay. Rather than that’s new, that’s cool. I wonder what it is, let’s go check it out. So you start to get less of that curiosity. And how this plays out is of course going to be very different from from dog to dog, there’s going to be some puppies that really just out of the gates of that nervousness, and some puppies that out of the gates are just like, you know, you could do everything wrong, and they would still turn out fine. There’s a lot that kind of goes into this. But broadly speaking, you don’t get that when you’re getting an older dog. So what you get with the older dog is that you have, you know, they’re developmentally already stable, you’re not getting developmental changes, you’re just going to be getting changes. Assuming that, you know, they’re past that two to three year mark, you’re getting more changes based on what are they exposed to what changes have happened in their life. So if you’re getting a an older, say older, because you know, three year old dog is old, but a non puppy rescue from somewhere that was very rural, that they were a, you know, a free roaming northern dog from Northern Ontario, or northern Manitoba, or, you know, potcake or something like that. They have a very, very different life in those free roaming, kind of feral colony type environment, versus being put into an urban home where they’re very, very restricted. So even though you don’t have those changes in like that, that technical socialization, if we’re going to use the word like, it’s kind of more technical aspect, we don’t have the changes happening in with regard to developmental changes, but you do have changes happening with regard to the dog’s been plucked out of one environment and putting someone in very, very different. So we tend to get instead is that it can, it can almost look a little bit similar, but I think there’s a lot more of a I would say more cautious, but that that honeymoon period, oops, forgot that honeymoon period that you can have with a new rescue. Oftentimes, you know, in that first month or so, they are nervous. So instead of having a like barky lungy response to things, they inhibit, so they’ll tend to be you know, a little bit shy looking, or they tend to stay very close to on walks, and then after a little bit, they start to pull forward a bit more and go, now I have the confidence to be able to deal with this environment. So sometimes you need to support them a lot and going from, you know, coming over their shell, but coming in their shell in a way that exposes them to very manageable environments, that gives them a lot of support and going, I can see that thing makes you nervous, because you’re you’re staying away from it, you’re pretending it doesn’t exist. If your alternative is to go, now I need to bark at you. Let’s give you another alternative to go. Okay, I can see this scares you a little bit. Let’s give you a little bit of space, let’s see its food. Let’s let you approach on your own terms with curiosity and not complete, not feeling compelled to approach and cultivate that a little bit differently than seeing it as changes in development.

Part Two is coming up soon!

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