Over the weekend, I shared a post on social media thanking my friends John and Linda for joining

this and bringing along their dog toady to be this is anchor dog. Now, that prompted people to say,

well, what the heck is an anchor dog? Hi, I'm Susan Garrett. Welcome to Shape by Dog and, as you may

have guessed. The topic of today's podcast is anchor dogs. Now, anchor, not to be confused with one of my favorite movies,

Anchorman. Stay classy, San Diego. An anchor dog is a term that I coined for dogs that help other

dogs be more confident. Now, think of an anchor. It's grounding, right? According to Dr. Google,

in ancient times, the symbol of an anchor represented safety. And an anchor dog certainly is what I'm

looking for is safety for my dogs. Because, as you know, dogs pick up the emotions of people and they also pick up the emotions

of other dogs. And so if you have a dog that is really pretty confident in the environment

that your dog isn't currently confident, then that dog could be your anchor dog. Now,

I'm going to put a little asterisk on this because it depends

why your dog is confident. So in the case of this, as I mentioned in episode number 29,

where I talked about understanding and preventing reactivity and aggression in your dogs,

I mentioned in that episode that different can be alarming to some dogs. And in this case, that's a big reason

for her fear is it's different. We spend a lot of time here on the property. She knows what

goes on here. She can be confident here. Something that's different sends off alarm bells. What I would like is that

different could be white noise, that different could be curious. So is it something that I've seen

many times before? If it's not, I'll be curious. I'm not going to go from zero to fearful.

I'm going to go zero to curious. And that curious could simply

be diffused by, oh, just that. Or I need to investigate more. And what's going to get my dog

there is an anchor dog. And so if you have a dog that is fearful because of bad experiences, an anchor dog won't

give you as much benefit. I'm not saying they won't be beneficial. I think any dog modeling

...