Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of drinking from the toilet. I'm your host,

Hannah Branigan. This week, we are visiting again with a friend of the pod, Leslie McDevitt.

You'll remember Leslie was my very first guest ever on this podcast.

I think we had her in episode number three, which I'll link.

And if you listen to that episode, then you probably remember it.

It was certainly memorable.

And you probably are thinking, oh, well, this is episode 34.

And so in the intervening 31 episodes, surely they'd have gotten their act together.

Well, not so much.

Turns out, no, yeah, not at all.

So you'll find that this episode is just as real. Well, not so much, turns out. No, yeah, not at all.

So you'll find that this episode is just as real, just as unfiltered and unedited as the first one.

And it's filled with fun.

But I think also some good interesting conversations and discussions. In this conversation, we talked about this idea of balancing structure and choice.

When you take your dog to a new environment, how do we set up that training interaction?

What should we actually do? What steps should we take and how should we make decisions when we get the dog out of the car,

get them out of the crate, so that we can ensure that that training session is as successful as possible. And how do we balance this need to structure our dogs' interaction with the

environment so that we can control what behaviors get reinforced with the dogs need to make

choices? And then, of course,

that long-term outcome of, well, when I let my dog make a choice, that tends to build confidence,

it tends to build focus, as long as, again, I'm doing it within that scaffold or structure

where I have some control over which behaviors, hopefully more appropriate ones, get reinforced.

...