Welcome to the Absolute Dog Sex and a Squirrel podcast. I'm Lauren Langman. I'm one of the world's leading dog trainers and it's my mission to help owners become their dog's top priority. In each episode, you'll discover how to gain trust and

communicate with your dog like never before, creating unbreakable bonds that make you the most

exciting part of their world. Now, sometimes bad things happen. And Amanda and I today are

going to be talking about how to defend our dogs because we know that whilst we might not be able to control

everything that leads up to an event, actually we can control what we do with it in the future.

And we can also control how we prepare our dogs. Welcome Amanda. And I'm excited to talk to you

about this. It's empowering for owners and therefore empowering for our dogs too, right?

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And thank you, Lauren. I always love sharing my experiences. There's always so

much learning that's out there in the world. And, you know, with the Defend Your Dog idea here,

this was born out of a really nasty incident that I experienced with my young Spaniel.

You know, you build optimism.

You want your dog to look at the world as a wonderful place.

And then you're, you know, you're on the trails and all of a sudden dogs come after your dog.

You don't understand why, but you have to think quickly in the moment.

And the specific situation that actually triggered this was I had just had a wonderful

training session with Harley. He's training as a gun dog. And of course, we're using lots and

lots of games for this and have really worked to build up his optimism. So he's absolutely wonderful

to work with. And at the end of our little session, we were working on a, you know, in a, it's a public area, but not a public area. So, you know, we, there weren't a lot of dogs around. And at the end of that, we just went for a little walk on the trails. And I've been down these trails often. And I often take my terrier down it. So, you know, down them. So I'm, you know, they're fairly safe to me.

So I thought. Because as we were turning around to come back, these two dogs appeared out of nowhere

and they launched on him. Now, fortunately, Harley has a pretty much, you never want to say 100%,

but a 99.9% recall. So he's really very good. And that's required if he's

going to be a gun dog. He has to be able to disengage and come back to me. But these other two dogs

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