Hello there, fellow dog nerds.

Welcome back to another soothing episode of drinking fromilet, a podcast about training with positive

reinforcement in the real world.

I'm your always calm and relaxed host, Hannah Branigan.

Okay, so I'm totally kidding.

If you've spent any time at all with me, you know that calm isn't really in my repertoire.

And at least for me, relaxation is a learned

behavior. I've been able to learn to do it as I've gotten older, but it's definitely taken some

work and maybe a little bit of shaping. And I think that's the case for a lot of our dogs as well.

Now, certainly some individuals, particularly members of certain breeds, can come with the ability

to relax and

behaviors that we would call relaxation already pre-programmed in, or at the very least, they're

already pretty high-frequency behavior. So if you have a Whippet or a Greyhound or maybe a

mastiff, you might not find this episode to be super applicable for you. But if you have a

herding breed, maybe a Belgian shepherd or a border collie, or maybe

you have a terrier or a mimpin or anything in the sporting breed category, I think that

you're going to find that there's a lot of things that you might find helpful here.

Now I do think that teaching our dogs to settle is one of the most important

life skills that we can give a dog. Why is it so important? Well, first and foremost, being able to

settle, particularly on cue and particularly in specific contexts where settling down is appropriate and

helpful, minimizes the total level of annoyingness

that you as a positive reinforcement trainer are exposed to on a daily basis.

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