Dr Edward: 0:25

Okay, everybody, welcome to the pets, people. And how many podcasts. This is actually our very first ever interview. I've got my beautiful pearl here. He's very, very old.

Dr Edward: 0:38

We've got Brendan Goyer, who's a behavior consultant and canine coaching legend. He's got his beautiful little dog there. He's hiding behind his name so we can't quite see that dog's face. So Brendan started off in sales and finance, so I'm going to be looking over here just so I can read the bio and tell you who Brendan is. He left banking and finance to pursue a career in dog training in 2019.

Dr Edward: 1:07

He practiced alongside a whole lot of trainers for some time. Then he became clear to him that training dogs required more than the cookie cutter approach Sort of offered by a lot of these training programs that are out there, teaching everyone to do the same thing with every dog, and he developed his own brand, 2010 created canine coaching. Brendan takes a really more holistic, relationship based approach to behavior modification and he's really interested in looking at helping his clients look deeper into the various potential causes of less than desirable behaviors for the human which are often quite desirable behaviors for the dog, but the humans don't necessarily love them so much and meeting the needs of the dog first. Brendan really promotes positive reinforcement, offering more choice and appropriate play, and he's super keen on continuing to grow in this world. So welcome, brendan, and I'm so excited to have you here on our brand new sparkly, shiny podcast.

Bryndon Golya: 2:12

I'm very excited to be here myself. Thank you for having me, dr Edward. Best of the best.

Dr Edward: 2:16

Is there anything else you can add to that intro?

Bryndon Golya: 2:19

I mean it's a pretty good intro. It kind of encompasses my transition from, I guess, something outside of the pet world, and I had to Not really. I spend most of my time really just working with animals, so it pretty much encompasses what I do.

Dr Edward: 2:44

Cool. Well, this is like a little teaser episode for our full podcast episode that will be coming up in a week or so, and the topic is strengthen your relationship with your pets through deeper understanding. Could you tell us in a minute or two why this is important to you?

Bryndon Golya: 3:04

It's a good question.

Bryndon Golya: 3:05

It's very valuable, I think, for my clients to understand more about the why, why the pets are having a hard time and I say that they are having a hard time, not that they're having problem behavior per se, but they're really struggling to adapt to our world and we have a very complex that's my dog knocking the TV.

Bryndon Golya: 3:26

We have a very complex world that we live in.

Bryndon Golya: 3:28

That's advanced very quickly over the past 10, 15 or so years, and I don't think we've really acknowledged how much we are asking of our animals, whatever species of animal.

Bryndon Golya: 3:38

We have to figure out how to cope and understand and work with our dynamic world, and so it's become apparent to me throughout the little over 10 years of working with pets and dogs that just teaching the basics isn't quite enough, and it definitely doesn't help when a lot of your pets are overstressed or fearful or in pain or having a hard time working with what we expect them to do. And a lot of the solutions that are pretty popular, traditional, have pretty negative consequences and I don't think people realize how likely they are. I think they see a very small population sample of their neighbors and don't quite get the full understanding of what it really looks like with a proper sample size of hundreds and thousands of dogs and the percentages of dogs that we see that have a real hard time based on either a lack of understanding, a lack of presence with them or basically training them or working with them in a way that is detrimental to their welfare.

Dr Edward: 4:50

Drawing an illustration of some kind of logo onlay regarding the I look, I really agree with you and that's one of the reasons why I'm really excited to have you bringing all of your lived wisdom of you know a long time working with a lot of dogs, and what we do in these little introductory sessions, these little teaser sessions for the podcast, is we ask you to share the one thing, the one thing that you can tell us in about five minutes that, from your experience, is going to give people something that can really help their animals. And the one thing that you wanted to talk about today was three ways to increase your dog's confidence, and especially on lead, when walking, that sort of thing.

Bryndon Golya: 5:30

Right, I think there's some very simple things we can do, and I see this. You know, dogs are a magnet for my vision. When I'm driving, when I'm walking around, when I'm looking at my balcony here, all I see when I see a dog, I'm on it and I'm like what does that dog say? And what does a person do with their dog? You know, it's just.

Bryndon Golya: 5:45

I'm fascinated by our interactions, especially outside, on walks, with the public, and how we respond and engage with our animals, whether because it's it's interesting, our behavior really has a lot to do with their behavior, they're, we are just their guides, and the walk on a leash, most of the time where we want to take them, is so unnatural for them to understand and how to manage, without really clear understanding and a solid emotional foundation, that I think we expect too much of them most of the time, whether it be just to go to the bathroom, or whether it be going to stroll with us or how you know, whether it be meeting people, dogs, et cetera, all the things that are going to pass all the way.

Bryndon Golya: 6:31

So my, my easy tips are this one give your dog, most often, a little bit more leash. A five foot, a four foot, a six foot leash is fine for a really well trained dog with us in a specific environment. But I work with a lot of fearful animals or a lot of animals out of history, of understanding what a leash is and the consequences of what that. You know the consequences of a leash and how it really feels to be on a leash and so it is essentially being trapped. It's a barrier and a lot of behavior that people call me for is because of this. Essentially is this mechanism where the dog cannot communicate properly with the the rest of the environment.

Bryndon Golya: 7:15

They do not have the flexibility or freedom to inspect or sniff something that they've identified and find valuable, and every second or every, every very often, just hitting the end of the leash to smell something does a few things. One is frustration, and it builds up that. It also impacts the animals physiology. It pulls on their neck, somewhere on their body, and it often because we're not really keen on what that means. We just followed the dog and they learned to pull by happenstance. So there's, a lot of things that happen.

Bryndon Golya: 7:50

And most dogs aren't dying to run away. They're not dying to run down the street, run away from you. You know there's, and when I say add a longer leash, I'm talking about maybe a 10 foot leash and something you can turn into a five foot leash in a roll or a. You know, once you're real. In one time I found, by changing this over the past few years, one I can train puppies that are unfamiliar with boundaries and leashes much easier because they will not hit the end of the leash as often I'm not going to panic as bad Dogs who are very scent driven, which is every dog and specialty breeds like beagles and so forth and hounds.

Bryndon Golya: 8:25

They can access more of what they're looking for without having to end up pulling or hitting something, causing them frustration. And it also allows you to here's the cell walk less or be less, I guess corrective on your pet. Well, I can kind of walk here and my leash and now is the extra long my pet can kind of do this without having to follow me so intently or so carefully, which is very challenging. And so it allows the owner to actually get walk the same pace and their pet to cover more surface area.

Dr Edward: 9:02

So you've got more freedom for the human dog and the dog with a longer leash.

Bryndon Golya: 9:07

You're not like hurt, right, you're pulling so much. You know the dog is able to just get out of that boundary and get what they're really trying to get.

Dr Edward: 9:16

And then finally, that's the first thing, that's the first thing.

Bryndon Golya: 9:20

The second thing is you get to practice your recall on a walk now because your dog is just far enough ahead of you to call Gotcha.

Bryndon Golya: 9:29

So now, instead of having to be off leash or go to a park and put a 30 foot leash on there when your dog happens to smell ahead and you want to practice reorienting or coming to you to get more walk to get the same smell as he was going to get, you get to intermediate or kind of insert yourself into the picture, allowing your dog to work with you, just to, so you can work with him. So it kind of this relationship of I'm working with my pet to work with me and who's controlling who is kind of there's no control, it's just a matter of like we're doing this together in this way where I get to strengthen my dog's basic skills Because I get to practice. Come to my hand, look at me, sit, let's go, or whatever combination of those I want, and use the reward of the walk which is what he wants anyway just to keep going Because the leash is loose. It's just a little more seamless. There's not. It's not as hard of a test to kind of nail like. The dog has that flexibility.

Dr Edward: 10:25

And safety. You can practice recall with safety too. So I'd never thought that one. That's super cool. So what's the third thing?

Bryndon Golya: 10:32

Well, with this long leash, you know, and I had other ideas, but this long leash actually helps your dog meet dogs better, or helps your dog avoid meeting dogs better, because they now have more of an ability to communicate. I want to move forward or move backwards, and so, for instance, if a dog approaches yours or there's a say a dog startles you, your dog now can jump or run away just far enough to where it's not going to get hung up on it, and it finds there's a little bit more agency or control in this, because now they bound it out of the way or they backed up and it's diffused the situation, whereas the four on a four to six foot leash you're probably hitting it immediately and you're coming along with it, and if that's a big dog, that might be problematic for you as well.

Dr Edward: 11:20

Gotcha.

Bryndon Golya: 11:21

Yeah, I think, I think justice, and I would say this there's actually a type of leash that I prefer over all other materials.

Dr Edward: 11:29

Yeah.

Bryndon Golya: 11:30

It's called biophane. I think it's a regular material you can find around. It's basically like a kind of a pleather or kind of a rubbery kind of a thing.

Dr Edward: 11:41

It's nice and grippy.

Bryndon Golya: 11:42

Grippy, except when it's wet. However, there are essentially tracking lines that I found from other people that trainers, and if you're walking on concrete which is a lot of what we walk on out here this particular leash, if you step on it and you need to control your animal and there's a problem and you can't hold onto them, it has a very high friction. I guess coefficient, if that's the real word I want to use- On the pavement, if you just put on the pavement if you put your foot on it, it will not slide out very easily.

Dr Edward: 12:15

We will put a link to where you can find that kind of resource in the podcast thing.

Bryndon Golya: 12:22

Yep and it cleans up real nice. At the end of the walk you can wipe any pee poo, anything from the street, anything from the yard, just wipe it right down. It's brand new.

Dr Edward: 12:32

Awesome. So this is our little teaser because we want to inspire you to come along and watch the full 45-minute interview that we're going to have with Brendan. That's going to be released in a week or so, and Brendan is going to dig into three really super important topics in that extended interview, which number one is why kindness is the ultimate training principle. Number two is using management and rewards to strengthen your relationship with your dogs. And number three is offering a choice versus demanding behavior with your dogs. So that's going to be a really juicy rich conversation and you're going to learn a whole lot of really cool stuff. And, following up after the 45-minute session, we're going to have a two-hour-long intensive live online workshop where Brendan is going to teach you a whole lot of practical stuff that you can do with your dogs to make a massive, beautiful difference for them.

Dr Edward: 13:26

But that's the wrap for this little teaser introductory episode for the podcast with the title of Strengthening your Relationship with your Pets Through Deeper Understanding. We'll be back for the 45-minute-long full interview in a week or so, after this has been released out. Look forward to seeing you then. Thanks so much and goodbye. For now. Here's a shout out back to everyone.