SPEAKER_01 0:00

We're really thinking about their skill sets, thinking about which environments we've got access to that can really just gently stretch that skill set and stretch their comfort zone and stretch their abilities in a way that they can step up to and without being overwhelmed. And we're just setting them up for success.

Welcome And The Training Gap

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Welcome to the Absolute Dog Sex in a Squirrel podcast. I'm Lauren Langman. I'm one of the world's leading dog trainers, and it's my mission to help owners become their dog's top priority. In each episode, you'll discover how to gain trust and communicate with your dog like never before, creating unbreakable bonds that make you the most exciting part of their world. Okay, so there is a journey when you're teaching a skill, needing the finished result, but you're the in-betweener and you're not quite there yet, and we're bridging the gap. What the hell do we do, Alice? And can you give me an example when you have bridged that gap?

SPEAKER_01 1:06

I can, I can. So I am the proud owner of a naughty but nice, massive mega muck called Bonnie. And we earlier in our training journey were in a position where we really just needed to ditch the walks completely. No one was having a good time, no one was particularly safe or in control on those walks. We were rehearsing all the wrong stuff, and we just needed to reset and start again. So we ditched the walks for a while. We were playing games at home, teaching some foundation skills, you know, sort of starting to reshape Bonnie's brain and rehearsing the right skills and the right kind of behaviors at home. And then you get to this point where you think, yeah, but how do I translate this into real life, if you like? Well, how do we get from doing these things at home where we've got no distractions and things to to kind of send everything into a tailspin? How do we kind of regrow this? And bridging the gap is that route, isn't it? Is from from going from that starting point, perhaps, you know, like ditching the walks, through to kind of rebuilding that in a way that you know you can be proud of in a way that makes you feel cool, calm, and collected when you're out on those walks. And I'm super excited to talk about this topic with honestness.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

And I I love that that you really want to talk on this one.

Why Dogs Forget Outside

SPEAKER_00 2:33

So I suppose one of my questions would be why does a dog seemingly know it at home when you get outside and they forget it completely?

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Well, dogs are not always that fantastic at generalizing, are they? So what they rehearse in one environment might not make any sense to them whatsoever when you then take it somewhere else where there's a whole bunch of environmental factors vying for their attention. So that's where we kind of really need to think about just gradually stepping up the difficulty level, if you like, rather than just expecting it to be this overnight transformation.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

And so, what might preparation look like for bridging the gap? Like what might that look like? How might that picture go?

SPEAKER_01 3:17

So we we often talk about training for the situation instead of training in the situation. And this this approach allows us to move at the right pace with our dogs and to be honest, on our own skill set level. So this might be training for the situation for a war.

Train For The Situation

SPEAKER_01 3:39

We might play some proximity games at home, some focus games, some disengagement games. We might do all those at home, and then we might think about taking that to like a slightly different, different environment, perhaps just going from your living room out into the garden, for example, which is still kind of a fairly low distraction environment, but there might be birds flying overhead, there might be different scents and things that your dog can pick up on, but it you know, you you haven't got a lot of sort of busy traffic and novelty and and whatnot kind of happening in your garden. So that might be a way of you kind of starting to take it a step up and kind of go from there.

Secure Fields Then Quiet Public Spaces

SPEAKER_00 4:16

And for me, obviously we ditched the walks. What's our next step? And I love the idea, and I know that you've suggested this one. Well, the next stage is is is logically somewhere like a secure field, or somewhere like an enclosed paddock. I know at Bowerland, if any of you are ever at Bowerland, we have Holly Hawkfield. Holly Hawkfield is your bridging the gap next space. Explain that for me, Alice.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

The secure fields are brilliant because that would be like the next step after your garden would be something like this, where actually it's still kind of like a secure garden, but other people have been there with other dogs, so there's going to be more sense for your dog to pick up on. It's there's it's just a bigger environment. The you know, there might be, you know, different kinds of apparatus sometimes in these fields, where the, you know, there could be like you know, tire tunnels or whatnot, you know, things that could be distracting or things to explore. So it just steps it up a level without necessarily having, like in my case, training Bonnie, her major, major thing that she struggled with. I mean, she struggled with reactivity to lots of things, but particularly to other dogs. So actually going somewhere like a secure field where she would be able to pick up on the sense of other dogs, but there weren't any other dogs there, was actually a really nice way of just graduating the difficulty level. And then from there, what we did was then go, okay, well, we're getting some really nice, reliable, focused behaviors, some nice proximity behaviours in this environment. We can now go to a public field at a time where we know it's gonna be quite quiet. So that again, there is the chance there's gonna be somebody else walking a dog, but there's it's not it's not gonna be a Saturday afternoon where everyone is out there with their ball chuckers and it's chaos. Like that would not be a nice way of bridging the gap. But going at a quiet time where there's gonna be one or two other dog dog walkers, you know, with plenty of space, was then a really nice way of testing that and and kind of growing that skill set so that we could then play the same games. And Bonnie is going, Oh, hang on, I've rehearsed this a lot. I know this pattern, I know this game, I know where the rewards are coming from. And we would be able to kind of win against the environment a

Car Parks And Industrial Estates

SPEAKER_01 6:24

little bit.

SPEAKER_00 6:24

And the other thing, and I love this one as your next hack, your next hack was car parks. Like car parks are our friend, a blooming love, a car park. I love a car park, and the reason I love a car park, and I've always trained at car parks because if I think back when I was at university, I used to train at St. David's car park. So shout out to St. David's, shout out to X to University, St. David's train station. I used to live there, and I've got this really weird affinity with trains, like I'm a bit of a train spotter. And so I actually love being at a train station. And so for me, it always takes me back to training my dogs. And for me, training in a car park is where I spent hundreds of hours with my late dog poppy just training in car parks. I loved car parks because she was very dog reactive. Why are they useful? You do see people, but you see less dogs. The people are all busy, they're not interested in you. It's normal life, normal smells, normal sounds. You will have dogs around, but they're typically on lead or potentially with some homeless people. And so they tend to have them under close control, actually, because they kind of know they have to. Um and so for me, actually, it was really useful because those things were scents that were there, but they were never coming near me. And most people really aren't interested even in saying hi to a dog because they're preoccupied with their own day. So you get no dog walkers, you get any dog that you do see is either on a lead or potentially with someone but under close control. I love the fact that you're not going to see things like the squirrels, the birds, the cats. You might see the odds pigeon and seagull. Pigeons are a real thing. I have to say, I'm glad I didn't live near any pigeons. They would be a nightmare for me. I think you should have pigeon for supper every day. What else do you love car parks?

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Oh, car parks, yeah. Don't diss a car park. Like this is it, people might think we're mad talking about this, but actually, there this was absolutely my number one hack for bridging the gap with Bonnie, from sort of going from really, really quiet places to slightly more real life feeling kind of places. I would just drive up to an industrial estate near us, park up in the car park, and to begin with, we'd never we wouldn't even leave the car park. We'd just play games in the car park. So I say, I wasn't gonna see any cats or dogs. Luckily, Bonnie's all right with pigeons, not really interested if it's got feathers. Nobody around there is wanting to say hi, they're all there, they've got a job to do, they're commuting or they're doing deliveries.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

They're not interested in us, are they?

SPEAKER_01 8:32

Yeah. And then where we then led it on from there was to then leave the car park and actually have a little wander around the industrial estate. Yeah, and this is this has really moved the needle more than any other environment for us. This really worked for us because again, we were not seeing loads of dogs, cats, critters, any dogs we did see were on lead, but also the roads built for kind of HGV access, so they were broader with more kind of wider corners. So not only did I have more distance, if there was a dog, somebody walking a dog on the other side of the road was much more distance than we would have in the streets near where I live, but I had greater visibility around corners, these big sweeping corners, rather than where I live, it's all kind of narrow terraced streets and tight corners, so you really cannot see what's about to leap out of you. Totally. And and actually, there's no destination. Yeah, you know, when I start walking Bonnie around an industrial estate, she's not even beginning to think, oh, I'm gonna pull to the park or wherever. We're just wandering around these streets that all just kind of interconnect, so we can practice some really nice loose lead walking and rehearse all the right skills because you know what, yeah, there'll be a hedge and a bit of grassy area for her to sniff or have a roll around in and stuff as we go around, but there isn't one massive, exciting destination that we are going to.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

No, it really it definitely, definitely works. I think the biggest thing for me, I love that when you're there that everyone has a job, everyone's busy, no one's interested in you. Like no one is interested in you, and they they've all got their own things to do. They hustle and bustle. I think that's what I like about stations, they're so energetic, they're always so energetic. So, so yeah, for me, I've always enjoyed those scenarios. And actually, when you are there, like you said, the enrichment is massive when you're at an event or a space like a train station or a bus station or a car park or those sorts of scenarios. For me, there's so much enrichment there, whether it's climbing on something or being on a park bench or doing a wrap around a cone or then volard. Like there's so many different things that you can do. It's almost like um street art, like you're going out and you're playing street art games, aren't you? And so for me, I absolutely love it. And like you said, go first on a quiet day. So pick a Sunday, pick a day when no one's really going to the train station because it's actually quite sort of minimal in terms

Real World Wins And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 10:53

of travel. Now, this really is the um step-by-step sort of results-driven learning that you did with Bonnie that really did get you places, didn't it, Alice?

SPEAKER_01 11:02

Definitely. You know, by doing this, by breaking it down and really thinking outside the box a little bit about which environments we started to sort of play the games in step by step to just gradually increase the kind of real lifeness, if you like, of the places we were taking her to. It solidifies those skills. You know, we're taking it at a pace where we're not overwhelming the dog with distractions, where we're kind of setting them up to fail. We're doing the opposite. We're really thinking about their skill set, thinking about which environments we've got access to that can really just gently stretch that that skill set and stretch their comfort zone and stretch their abilities in a way that they can step up to and without being overwhelmed. And we're just setting them up for success. And it's allowed us to actually take Bonnie to a much greater range of places than than we could be.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Show off, show off, Alice. Where can you go now?

SPEAKER_01 11:55

I mean, now you know, we we could go for, you know, well, walks on the beach or walks in the woods. She can have off-leash freedom, we can go on walks with friends and their dogs. You know, we've even when we came down to Devon, we kind of, you know, we went to kind of a couple of nice little pretty towns and go and find an ice cream somewhere and actually go, yeah, that's fine. Bonnie can come too, and she's gonna manage with that.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

You are living the dream, Alice. High five. Yes, lady.

Stress Free Walks Masterclass Invite

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Amazing. Alice, that was amazing. Bridging the gap. Guys, go and bridge that gap. And if you're unsure where to start and you've ever wondered how to get those brilliant skills from your living room out into the big bad world, we'd love you to join us for our stress-free walks masterclass. We'll show you exactly how to bridge that gap, build confidence in real life environments, and set your dog up for success on walks. Absolute dogs.me forward slash stress free walks masterclass