Hey there. This is Hannah Branigan, defying the odds to bring you another action-packed episode of drinking from the toilet. This week, I'm excited to welcome back Emily and Eva of Carpe Momentum.

I'm going to keep the intro short this time because, well, as usual, our conversation ran

a little bit overtime, which isn't a bad thing, but we'll be efficient.

This week, we're talking about start button behaviors.

The idea of letting a dog tell us the

trainers when he's ready to begin a repetition, which is kind of a cool idea and maybe a

little bit mind-blowing.

Now, I think we mostly agree that allowing animals to make choices and have an element

of control in the training sessions is a good thing, although sometimes it can be hard to figure out how to incorporate it.

It allows the trainer and animal to have a dialogue where the communication flows both ways.

And that's good for the welfare of the animal, but it's also really good for our training.

The hard part is in applying this practically in real life,

while still building reliable behaviors. What I love about defining a start button behavior

is that it takes a lot of the burden off the trainer to try to read the dog and identify

small emotional signals when we're trying to determine when it's

safe to raise criteria or if we should stay at the current level or reduce it or even for

on the right track altogether. We want to know what the dog's emotional state might be at any given

moment and really by the time we're seeing some overt emotional sign, the dog showing clear avoidance

or something really obvious, the moment where we should have adjusted the training session,

that's already passed. So being able to clearly and specifically define a behavior that we're looking for and then build a

predictable structure around it is fantastic for working with any kind of potentially stressful

stimuli. It makes it a lot clearer for when we make decisions from the training standpoint.

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