And of course, the old argument is, well, that's because he's being dominant.

Right, right.

But now we'll say, oh, no, no, you unenlightened.

That's not dominance.

That's arousal.

That's arousal, yes. Hey there, fellow training nerds. I'm Hannah Branigan, bringing you another episode of drinking from the toilet.

If this is your first time listening, welcome. I'm truly happy to have you here. And I hope you

won't hold this episode against me. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. I'm so grateful

to you for sticking with me. This is episode number 69. And for no reason in particular,

this week's topic is arousal. Now, get your mind out of the gutter. We're not talking about sex here. We're talking

about behavior. Well, okay, sex is behavior, but we're not talking about reproductive functions.

But if you are a behavior nerd, the topic of arousal is pretty sexy. It's a word that gets

thrown around a lot in dog training circles. It shows up in conversations

about behavior in so many different contexts, from shelter dogs to working dogs to performance

dogs, high arousal, over arousal, low arousal. And one of the problems that we run into is that

we often mean different things and we're coming from different perspectives. So what does

arousal mean? What does it look like? What can we do about it? In this episode, returning friend of the pod, Lindsay Wood Brown

and I attempt to explore this crazy, complicated concept. You may remember Lindsay from episode

number 36, where we attempted to unpack the conditioned emotional response, commonly abbreviated

C-E-R. And yes, that was the infamous ball feelings episode. I'll link to that one in the show

notes if you want to give it a listen. Lindsay is a board certified applied animal behaviorist.

She has worked for years in the animal shelter world, developing positive reinforcement-based behavior modification programs and saving the lives of more animals and dramatically increasing rates of successful adoption.

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