Hello there. I'm Hannah Branigan, and you're listening to Drinking from the Toilet,

where we get real geeky about real dog training.

In dog training circles,

the topic of motivation is, well, it's kind of a hot topic. It's a big concept and it's something we care a lot about because, of course, reinforcement drives behavior. So it's worth spending some

time thinking about our motivators and how we can use them to reinforce the behaviors we're trying to build.

And I wanted to spend some time digging into this a little bit and seeing what's in that

motivation package. It's such a big concept that this is something that we're going to revisit

because there's just no way to do it justice in a single episode. So be sure to check back

for future episodes over the next

several weeks. And we will look at covering different facets of the concept of motivation.

Now this week, I had the ridiculous good luck to have a virtual conversation with Dr. Susan Friedman.

I had been asking her some questions as I was trying to wrap my head

around these ideas and what's going on when we're talking about motivation and how we can

be more clear and more precise when we're talking about it. And she agreed to come be a guest

on the podcast, which for me was both exciting, exhilarating, and also a little bit terrifying.

But of course, she was amazing, as always, and as I expected. Dr. Friedman is a psychology

professor at Utah State University, and she is a pioneer in the application of behavior

analysis science in captive and companion animals.

In addition to presenting seminars all over the world on a variety of topics on learning and animal behavior,

she also runs an amazing online course called Living and Learning with Animals for Professionals. And if you haven't checked that out, you're definitely going to want to put it on your list

for both personal and professional development.

It's a really good one.

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