Episode 15 - Mentors for Puppy Owners: Do We Need a New Kind of Professional?

3/13/2024

I feel like there is a general need for a new kind of dog professional.

Don't you feel that many puppy owners could use something like IN PERSON "puppy parenting coach?" So not dog training per se, more like a breeder-mentor for puppy owners.

It just seems like puppy owners throw a lot of effort against things that are not really problems, but they don't know those things are not problems because they don't have someone with enough wisdom and experience to point that out. Someone who has raised 100 puppies, particularly if they raised puppies of that breed, could really save those owners a lot of trouble.

What do you think? Would any of you be interested in doing this?

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EPISODE 15 - TRANSCRIPT

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist, and this is a Puppy Culture potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

This week's topic is a post that I wrote into the Puppy Culture discussion group on Facebook. And it was just something that's been on my mind and I threw it out there and it got unbelievable crazy traction. So here's the post. This is what I wrote.

Just throwing it out there. I have no interest in doing this, but I feel there is a general need for a new kind of dog professional. Don't you feel that many puppy owners could use something like an IN PERSON puppy parenting coach? So not dog training per se. More like a breeder mentor for puppy owners. It just seems like puppy owners throw a lot of effort against things that are not really problems, but they don't know those things are not problems because they don't have someone with enough wisdom and experience to point that out.

Someone who's raised a hundred puppies, particularly if they've raised puppies of that breed, could really save those owners a lot of trouble. What do you think? Would any of you be interested in doing this?

Wow, the answer is crazy. I would say overwhelmingly people were like, Heck yeah, either we need this or breeders saying that, yes, I actually have offered this service.

This is a thing. And let me just say, when I used to do dog training consults, this was my business. I would sell a dog training session, but I am telling you, 98 times out of 100, they would come to me and walk up my front walkway and they'd be like, “Do you see? Do you see the, do you see what's up?”

And I'd be like, Yeah, What? It's normal. What's your question? That will be $250. And the people were happy. They just wanted somebody to lay eyeballs on the dog and let them know. In the discussion groups, we see it all the time where people are like my puppies biting me, my puppies aggressive or something to this effect. And then we see a video of the puppy and it's a normal puppy that is playing.

And you can't blame puppy owners because they don't know the difference, okay? They don't know the difference between a puppy play growling and tugging on your pant leg or really being aggressive and it's a serious distinction, but it's not something that you can go to school and find out. It's something that you just have to have looked at, an awful lot of puppies to know the difference.

These puppy owners bring their puppies to trainers and the trainers offer them the gifts that they have, which is the gift of modifying behavior. The puppy is doing this thing and the trainer is addressing it, showing them how to modify behavior, how to train, and if it's a good trainer, positive and fantastic.

But it's not addressing the underlying issue for the puppy owner, which is is my puppy okay? Is my puppy normal? And I'm just going to say, in my experience, having placed a large number of puppies and knowing the history of hundreds more placed by my breeder friends, very close friends, that I do really know the history of these litters intimately.

Not a lot of dog trainers who aren't also breeders are really capable of making this distinction. Now, at this point, I'm going to say that there was a lot of confusion in this thread and a lot of it with dog trainers, that said, but this is what I do. This is this is what I do. And if you are a dog trainer and you're listening to this, I beg of you to please listen to the end, because I do think that there is a professional opportunity for you here.

I think that there's a niche that needs to be filled that is not currently being filled and dog trainers with the right kind of experience could very easily fill this, but they are not currently filling it. So keep an open mind. Please listen on.

Now. Here's my wish list. With Puppy Culture in my seminars, I always say, listen, dog breeders are not dog trainers.

They don't want to be dog trainers. If they wanted to be dog trainers, they'd be dog trainers. That's kind of a thing with Puppy Culture, because Puppy Culture is a it's a puppy program. It's not a breeder program. It's not a trainer program. It's not a puppy owner program. It's a puppy program. So it's serving the puppy what the puppy needs, which so happens to include quite a bit of training and quite early at the time where the breeder has the puppy.

So the breeders get pushed into that lane. It's not their comfort zone. And at the time when I made Puppy Culture, I really thought that we were going to see a lot more trainers working with breeders to do the Puppy Culture protocols. And there are some in fact, we had a question about that this week, which I might do another podcast about because I love this idea, bringing people in to work with your litter, because again, breeders often are not the best trainers.

Trainers are really good trainers and puppies need training. Starting at four weeks in my breed. So I'd like to see that. But what I'm saying is I also want to see some going the other way too, where the trainers are staying in their training lane and the breeders are coming in with their expertise, which is more just wisdom about what's normal and what's not and what really has to be fixed and what doesn't.

Probably 20% of the puppies that I place, even though I do help my puppy owners find good dog training classes, some trainer will recommend putting a pinch collar on the dog because the dog's aggressive and my, you know, my dogs are not aggressive. The trainers, they can't read the dog. This is not dissing the amazing gifts that trainers bring to the table in our team.

But what it's saying is that we have lanes. The dog training lane is best served generally by a dog trainer. How do you get behaviors? How do you shape things? How do you look for antecedents, antecedents, behavior, consequence, good dog trainer can really instill this in the puppy owner. But you know, when the puppy owner has the puppy at home and it's 7:00 at night and the puppies running around the house doing something, biting whatever, and the puppy owner just can't read, is this normal or not?

That's an in-person visit to the person's house. That's somebody just walking in and taking one look at that puppy and saying, this is a normal puppy at 7:00 at night. I think there's even room for very breed specific versions of this professional, just literally the voice of of dogs, The way that they express each other as puppies can be very different, specifically with breeds.

So I just think when we're talking about this because a lot of dog trainers did write in and say, Oh yeah, I offer that service, but I feel like this is a breeder thing or, or a person who's raised a lot of foster litters. And I will qualify that and say raised and placed and worked with the puppy owners.

There's a kind of mileage that you get by raising the puppies, raising them in your house, placing them outside of your house, dealing with all of this again and again, seeing how puppy owners can be sort of flummoxed by normal puppy behavior and just understanding that and particularly breed and type specifically, I think it's a needed niche. So let me read you some of these answers that came in.

Yes, I am part of a service dog breeding program and I have always acted as mentor to anyone local who's new to the program or anyone who gets one of my girls puppies. So this woman breeds she's both a breeder and she's part of a service dog breeding program, pre-COVID. We met in groups of people with puppies of similar ages, experienced fosters and new people.

Having someone who has experience was a huge help. The success rate for Fosters goes way up. And then she says, You would be shocked at how many pups are returned because they quote unquote bite. Well, Sharon, No, I would not be surprised because we see it every day. So, you know, that's your unicorn dog trainer, the one that both has the experience raising her own litters, doing tons of service dog breeding.

You get a volume of experience. It's hard to get anywhere else. And she's a dog trainer, so she can really come at it from all angles, see, that's the kind of person that we need. Somebody else says, I love this idea as a dog trainer. Now, this woman is a breeder, too, but she says as a dog trainer, I find myself giving more support than training to most puppy parents.

I mean, exactly. This is what happened when we did our puppy course With Open Arms in Madcap University. Not that I'm shilling for it, but there it is. This is what we did. I do have a lot of training in it. I do show you how to train behaviors, but I realize the stumbling block for people is not so much how to get your puppy to sit or walk on leash, although that can be its own challenge.

It's, how do I carry this puppy home? What's reasonable as far as how much activity the puppy should have? What my what should my schedule look like? What does physically my house look like set up? These are the kinds of things that really are stumbling blocks for puppy owners. And yes, as a dog trainer, I agree. I spend a lot more time just telling people, yeah, you know, your puppy's normal.

So here's another one. I think that breeding mentors are sorely lacking these days. Even in my breed that has a breed mentor list with the National Club. Now I think that she's talking specifically about mentoring other breeders, but it used to be I remember when I started, I went to my local kennel club and there were some ladies there that helped me and I struggled with some things.

And this was the nineties, This was before the Internet really. And people would come to your house and help you. Now I'm going to just pivot a little bit on this and talk about the dog trainers that have become real phenomenon on the Internet and television before the Internet was around. And I'm going to call out Cesar Millan and also Barbara Woodhouse, if you remember Walkies, Walkies, Barbara Woodhouse, Monks of New Skete, that's another one.

Now I'm going to say all three of these entities, I do not recommend that you read their books, don't recommend you watch their shows. They are terrible. But, but their allure is that they present as knowing dogs. They give that feeling of mentorship, like, Listen, I just know dogs. They're not famous for being great dog trainers. They're famous for being great knowers of dogs. And I think that's the piece. That's what people are looking for.

And I think if we can get people who are, I should say, forward thinking and not stuck in the ancient days as far as dominance dog training, I think that would be a really good thing. Oh, so here's another one that, my breed;

I think this is a great idea. I had a mini bull returned to me after one week. Puppy was then ten weeks old. The reason given was that a behaviorist had said he had no impulse control and that he went after them to bite them. I really thought I had a monster coming home. Turns out he was a normal mini bull pup and settled into an alternative home with no problems.

I'm just going to say Amen, sister, because I have had this happen. Also. It happens with Staffy bulls because I know a lot of Staffy bull breeders. I think there is breed specific behavior that's just normal for our breeds, and particularly the bull breeds. A lot of the people that wrote in, in support of this idea either had primitive breeds or bull breeds, which is very interesting because I think they tend to be a little bit of outliers as far as normal puppy behavior.

Oh, yeah. Here I mentioned the primitive breeds. Totally agree. A bunch of Sheba breeders were just joshing around recently and they're like, We need puppy growers. And then responding to that, Yes, in my breed Sheba's, there are some puppy behaviors that are normal for the breed, but sometimes very worrying for new owners and for trainers that have no experience with such primitive breeds.

Sometimes trainers will even do damage if their methods are wrong. I support my owners from the start and I believe many here do, as I think that is an important part of Puppy Culture breeders. But I do help to others that reach out with these question about their Shiba puppies and what to do. Here's another one; 100%. I had family members convinced that they wanted a puppy, but in less than a week say it was too much work and re-home the puppy with a friend.

Very frustrating for me to see happen as I helped them locate the puppy from a great breeder, but better than the puppy living in a bad situation. They absolutely could have used personalized in-home help. I shared puppy books, my favorite toys and chews, and even photos of my expen and crate setups and even that didn't help them. They needed someone hands on.

Again, Amen sister. I mean, I'm the Puppy Culture lady. I'm the impossible dog lady. I am the puppy course lady. And my puppy owners, as soon as they're in the queue to get a puppy from me, they absolutely are getting all of these resources. We have groups. I go over with them. I'm like, this week you should be watching this.

I prepare them, I drip feed information and I am telling you, I still have to go to their house half the times. It's difficult for some people to see a picture of my set up and me saying This is how I do it, and then look at their house and say, Why? I don't know where to put the pen or I don't know how to set this up so it works. I don't know how to do this too.

So the puppies not being frustrated or the puppies not being overstimulated or under stimulated, and it takes 2 minutes of being in the house to help them with that. To my point, here's another one;

I offer my time to my families now with a Facebook private group. However, they have to initiate.

Some have a hard time knowing whether it's just breed behavior versus something that needs true diversion or correcting. I will have them ask me something that I will gladly help them. But in the end, their puppy has their number and is leading the charge.

Yeah, I've had puppies and their owners come and stay with me when they were having problems and she's seen the behavior firsthand and been like, Yeah, no, I mean no, this, this puppy can't be doing this to you. This is just this is a hard no. And I don't mean I correct the puppy, but I just redirect the puppy. But you see the difference is I'm not afraid of the puppy. I just know this puppy's just pushing. It's not it's not a bad puppy. It's not an aggressive puppy.

But to somebody that doesn't know it, you can't blame people they don't know. They need somebody to lay eyeballs on their puppy and say yay or nay. I just want to say here, I've been going on and on about, you know, how we can just show up and say, Oh, yeah, you're puppies normal. But sometimes, you know, the puppies not normal.

That has definitely happened. Certainly people have brought me. I can think of one in particular that I just said to her she'd gotten it from, I don't even know where she got the puppy. Some backyard situation, not a good situation. And the puppy was emaciated. It just it didn't look right and open the crate, it wouldn't come out and and it could have even been wormy.

I asked her to bring the puppy to the vet, make sure it was wormed and then she brought it back. And it still was like that. And I just was like, you know, this puppy, I it was almost like the puppy had brain damage is the only way I can explain it. It was not a normal puppy. So sometimes the situation is not a good one, and sometimes as a breeder, you can walk in and just say, Yeah, this is not a normal puppy, whereas a dog trainer is always going to try and train the dog in front of them.

That's not their job really. To say, Yeah, you should get rid of this dog. But for me, you know, I look at that puppy and I'm like, this is this is an accident waiting to happen. There's something wrong mentally with this puppy. In my training seminars, and I traveled the world and I said to Mark, if I didn't already have bull terriers, I wouldn't like this breed if I only saw them at my seminars because people would bring me all the dogs that were like, you know, a little weird.

I mean, certainly there was a lot of lovely, lovely ones, but people would bring me their dogs that were just mentally not quite right. And I don't mean aggressive per se, but just mentally not quite right. The late, great Pat Hastings used to say there's mental illness in dogs and they would bring me the ones that are just not mentally right.

That's a question for another podcast. Your responsibility as a breeder and advising people and yada yada. But my point is that I can tell you, looking at a bull terrier puppy in a very short amount of time, whether it's normal or not, and I can also tell you what you're going to have to train away, work on or just manage, and it's developmental and it will pass.

So now I'm going to give you those were all you know, those were all the yeas. Those were all the people that were like, Yeah, absolutely, we need this. And then we got a lot of people really giving pretty hard pushback saying, Well, isn't that what a dog trainer or a breeder should do? So let's see, here's one.

Isn't that kind of what we're supposed to be giving our families? Whenever I find out that a family is struggling, I do everything I can to help them understand the problem and the solution. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're getting at. Another one. Surely this is what good breeders give to their puppy buyers already we're there for the questions.

We send lists home with the owners. We say don't hesitate to contact us with any questions or problems. Some owners need minimum input, but others need guidance on everything.

And then here's one that says, that's literally a dog trainer, question mark. And here's another one, that is a service each breeder should be offering if they are unwilling to be available for all questions and concerns from their puppy buyers, they should not be breeding. As a breeder you're responsible for the puppies you produced for their entire lives and you are also responsible to the new owners for the life of that puppy. And then another person said, I mean, that's a breeder. 24/7 tech support is the way pure dog talk words it pure dog talk. There's a little plug for pure dog talk. She has some great episodes on there, another podcast.

Okay, so here's the thing. That woman who said, I mean, that's a breeder 27 tech support. Then she thought about it and she came back like a half an hour later and said, although that leaves puppy people who get their pup from another source like a shelter or an adoption out in the cold. Exactly. That's what I'm saying.

Not only that, but as a breeder, it limits me to a very small geographic area where I can place puppies. So my rule of thumb has always been I will not place puppies further than 5 hours from my house. Really, I don't like to go more than two because I want to be able to get just in a car, go down, look at the dog.

My last litter, one of the puppies. I just train the puppy myself because he's a sweet, darling puppy. But you know, it's just too much for the pet owners. It's really like you need a degree in dog training to train this dog. He's very environmentally interested and not food motivated. So I meet them once a week. I train their puppy and he's going to grow out of it.

I know. But, you know, they went to another dog trainer and the dog trainer was like, Oh, you, you need to put a pinch collar on the dog because he doesn't pay attention to you. So this is the kind of thing that if they lived 10 hours from me, I couldn't offer this. So what's happens with me is I wind up passing on a lot of really great homes, probably people that would make wonderful homes for my puppies.

But I just can't take a chance because I can't be there for them. There was a lot of people that wrote in enumerating all they have their Facebook groups, they have all their stuff that they do, their group chats, their Zoom meetings. And I found it very interesting that it's sort of scaled with the size and difficulty of the dogs.

So toy breeds smaller dogs. Those people basically are like, Well, yeah, I mean, we just we have zooms, we meet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because they're just generally easier to manage. But as soon as the size of the dog starts going up and also you get into dogs that are outliers behaviorally in the sense of what's normal, like your primitive breeds and your bull breeds.

People were saying, Yeah, we really need this. Oh, here's another one.

As a breeder, I already do this for free for my puppies. They have endless access for life of any of my puppies. For questions, we set up training, calls for progress and next steps. I'm a CPDTKA. trainer and offer the same service for any puppy starting at eight weeks.

Most trainers don't have the litter experience and are way off because of their lack of experience with puppies that age. Lots of unnecessary mistakes. You would tear your hair out if I gave you examples. Yeah. Hair being torn already, you know. Absolutely. That's my point. But listen, I sit on both sides. I'm a dog trainer and I am a breeder with a lot of experience with dogs and puppies in particular.

And I really see both sides. Dog trainers are very good at what they do, which is training dogs. But there does come a point where training is not the answer. That is where somebody with just the wisdom and experience to know puppies can give that puppy owner something else they need. That's that's not training.

To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail and I think we suffer a lot from that with sending our puppies to dog trainers for behavioral, quote unquote problems. In my experience, it's two different buckets. They don't sort together at all. And you really need all kinds of people on your team. You need the dog trainers on your team. But I think we're asking too much of the dog trainers in a lot of cases, too, to tackle these things.

Now, what would be my wish list is that more trainers were breeders. I would love this. So number one, I think it's a great path for trainers to take to do a few litters. I always say five generations. You just do just do five generations and you place those puppies in homes. You whelp the litters, you raise the litters, you place the litters, you interface with those puppy owners.

You are going to know everything you need to know. But it does take about five generations because you have to have some stuff blow up in your face and it takes time, right? To learn. That would be great. That would be my dream that that became a thing that trainers did, that they they started breeding dogs. If philosophically, that's not for you do Foster. Whelp litters for Foster.

Now, my caveat for that is if I were you and I as a dog trainer, I want to get expertise in this litter, I would say I would agree to do it, but I would stipulate that you place the puppies and you follow up with those puppies and you prescribe how those puppies are going to be raised and taken care of in their new homes.

Because, again, you know, rescue organizations can tend to be very controlling about it. And I get it. They have to have quality control because most of the people helping litters are just good hearted people that don't know much about dogs. They're just doing a compassionate thing by helping. But as a professional, if you if you want to get to that next level, you do really have to place the puppies and deal with them, deal with the puppy owners.

So I think there could be one or two trainers out there that might be saying, no, no, no, I can do this. I don't I don't need somebody that's bred and raised a lot of puppies and I'm certified. I know what I'm doing. And the only thing I can say to you is this, that I who have been training professionally for decades and breeding for decades, approach this with extreme humility.

I have an amazing network of friends and co moderators in my groups that breed a vast array of different breeds, and people will often send in a video of a dog, a puppy or a mother doing something. And a lot of times it's a group consult between the admins and my friends and just say, Hey, does this look normal to you?

Because this wouldn't be normal in my breed. And sometimes it is normal in another breed. Sometimes it's not. So what I'm trying to say is I think it's an opportunity for growth for the dog training industry to embrace this and to get some knowledge, some real hands on knowledge with raising a lot of puppies, either through fostering or breeding and offering that service.

That's the trainer that's going to be really in demand. That's what we need. As I mentioned, there's the geographic thing. I can't place puppies further away than I can get my hands on them. But then you've also got people that don't have the breeder support and then you have breeders that frankly breed a lot, which is okay because somebody has to breed the puppies.

I hope everybody realizes puppies don't grow on trees, somebody has to breed them, and people who breed them professionally often can devote more time to them and do a better job than people who breed them as a hobby. That's another podcast. But when you're breeding a lot, it becomes a lot to handle all the puppy owners. And I know the people that I know that breed a lot.

It is more than a full time job, just counseling puppy owners. To have a class of professionals that for hire that were really good, that were professional, that could offer this service would be amazing and a huge benefit to our dog community. So yeah, that was a hot topic. If you have more to say about it, be sure and write in either on the show page or feel free to join the Puppy Culture Discussion group on Facebook.

If you like this podcast, you'll love our breeder course at madcapuniversity.com. Puppy Owners, we have a course for you to at madcapuniversity.com. If you think you have an impossible dog, check out our dog training book When Pigs Fly! Training Success with Impossible Dogs available at puppyculture.com.

Well that's it for this time.

Thanks for listening. Bye bye.