Hello there, Intrepid listener. I'm Hannah Branigan, and you're listening to Drinking from the Toilet, the podcast about real life, real dogs, and real training.

Today, I want to talk about distraction-proofing.

Or rather, I don't want to talk about distraction-proofing.

See, I don't really like that term.

I know it's just semantics, but at the same time, words matter. This topic is brought

to you by one of my favorite students, who's currently recovering from injuries sustained

while mountain climbing in the Alps, or maybe it was hell of skiing in Colorado. I can't exactly

remember. But whatever she was doing, I hope she feels better soon. So she noticed that I mentioned in an interview on the FDSA podcast that I'm not a fan of

the term proofing when it comes to dogs, and she wanted to know more.

So that got me thinking, what do I mean?

Where are my feelings coming from?

Are they even valid?

And so that meant I needed to drag some stuff out of the

closet and take a look at it under the light, which isn't always comfortable. So first,

because my primary defensive strategy after denial is research, I looked it up in the dictionary.

What does proofing mean to everyone? Well, it turns out there are many definitions of proof or proofing, including one that has

something to do with baking, which tells you how much I know about baking.

But there was one definition that jumped out as particularly relevant for our purposes.

And that is, quote, able to withstand something damaging, resistant.

Okay, so that's not so bad. We all want behaviors that are resistant to distraction, so do I. Like a raincoat is waterproof, we want

behaviors to be distraction-proof. And then I had a really fun visual of my dog healing along

and distractions, which took the form of little multicolored lint balls, were just bouncing

...