Unlocking Your Dog’s Motivation: Finding your dogs currency

Hello, dog peeps. Jack here. Uh, just a quick one before we get into this episode. You may or may not be aware that when I'm not talking dog stuff with, uh, Max, I in fact interview people who are incarcerated in prisons across the United States on a show called One Minute Remaining: Stories from the Inmates. And that show has been nominated for an award in America. Uh, and I would love your support if you've got 60 seconds to click the link in the show notes of this episode and just vote for my show. That would be amazing if you could. Thank you very much indeed. Oh, and don't forget to verify your email address, otherwise the vote does not count. Thank you.

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It's the Dog People Podcast with your host Jack Lawrence. Secretly, I decided to start this podcast for some free dog training advice. You know, Malinois seem to be like the dog at the moment. Like, I think people see them on Instagram doing these incredible things. Yeah. Go, oh, Oh my God, that's awesome! And then I get one like, oh my God, what the fuck? And Max O'Neill.

You would not believe how many people I meet and I go, what made you want to get, say, an Aussie Shepherd? They go, I don't know. I'd go, had you met one before? They go, no. If you want to ask me how often I walk my own dog a week, it's only twice a week.

It is the Dog People Podcast, a podcast hopefully giving you a no-nonsense approach to dog training so you never have to shout, it's okay, it's friendly. My name is Jack Lawrence. Of course, no dog trainer here, just a dog Training enthusiast, but joined by an expert, Max O'Neill from Down Under Dog Trainer. Today, Max, we're talking dog training currency. Yes.

So dog training currency, what we mean by that is dealing in currency or something that motivates your dog, something that your dog actually needs. Some of the issues I see with people's obedience training or even behaviour stuff is they're trying to deal in a currency that the dog's just not interested in for various reasons. And we're going to break that down a little bit today. So, in the same way that, you know, we wouldn't go and apply for a job that was like, hey, do you want to come work here at Maccas? Yep, absolutely. Cool. We live in Australia, but we will pay you in Vietnamese dong. We'd probably go, yeah, that's not really my currency. That's not really what I'm needing right now. That's not what I'm going to need.

That won't work for me.

And quite often when we're trying to motivate our dog with something, we can be met with that. I always get people going, my dog's got zero food drive. Zero toy drive, um, this and this. They're not into that, they're not into that. And quite often we've got these things, these currencies all around us we're unaware that we're, you know, using incorrectly. And we're going to walk you through what those are today, why you should be using them, and how to use them even better so that you can really start to up your training game. So when I look at training currency, I mean, we can get more nuanced with this, but if we break it down into simplistic form, there's 6 main types of currency that we can deal with with our dogs when we're training them. Praise, food, play, toys, freedom, or removal of pressure, which we talked a little bit about in our leash walking episode, and we'll revisit again today. So in no particular order, let's start at praise. Every dog everywhere I've ever met gets praise throughout the day. You know, big stretch. Oh, good boy. Sleeping in a cute position. Oh, good girl. Just existing. Good boy. Good girl. And there's nothing wrong with that. Okay. I'm not here to say stop doing that. You know, blah, blah, blah, blah. But let's break it down a little further. If we're giving our dog those constant little praises throughout the day, good boy, good girl, and then we expect them to work for that. Hey, I want you to do this really tough training session. And if you do, I'll tell you, good girl. Your dog's like, mum, it's 8 o'clock and I've heard it 20 times already. I'm good. Like, I don't need that validation. I know I'm a good girl. You tell me that a whole lot. I'm certainly not going to work just to make you say that. I'm good. When we want to train with our dog, when the resource we're offering, whether that's praise, food, toys, we can either increase the— we can increase our dog's motivation and value on that currency or that particular resource either through scarcity or novelty. So a lot of old school trainers would say, look, don't give your dog absolutely anything. The only praise they get from you should be when they do something right. And that doesn't work for most people. And it doesn't really work for me. My dogs aren't just working dogs. my relationship with them isn't purely transactional. I really enjoy interacting with them, patting them, cuddling them. Nelson gets loved up from me all day long. So, we don't increase the value of praise through scarcity, we increase it through novelty. I'm like, hey, I'm going to— I'm the same. I'm just like all you guys. I'll tell Nelson good boy so much throughout the day for doing absolutely fuck all. But what we do instead to increase the value of our praise is through novelty. So, he'll hear me say good boy and this and that a lot throughout the day. But how we make it more novel is I go, hey, there's that extra level of praise I can go to. And he's like, oh yeah, I know. I'm like, it's when I get right down on your level, squish up your face, speak in that little high voice, give you all that tummy rubs and stuff. And he's like, oh yeah, that's rare. I'm like, cool. I save that for when he does really amazing stuff. So if I leave the gate open and I do like 5 trips in and out getting the shopping and he's waited behind the gate the whole time, that might be a time when I'm like, hey, Time for special praise.

Come here.

Oh my God. It's how we make that, it's giving, making him like the centre of attention for the next 30 seconds. It's all the stuff. Our dog will go, oh my God, that was amazing. Tonight, you know, he'll go, dear diary, today was the best day ever. You know, dad did this for me. If it means that much to our dog, our dog will work for it. So in terms of using praise as a currency, just good boy and good girl ain't gonna cut it. You've got to go to that next level if you want your dog to actually work for that type of praise. Does that make sense?

It does. But in my head, what I'm thinking about is that it doesn't feel like that is You know, for the situation you talked about, that's perfect. But it feels like in everyday training that you want to do, like place training, lead walking, whatever it might be, obedience training, that sort of praise is going to be very tricky to keep. It's going to keep, you know, keep you coming out of what you're trying to do.

Exactly. If you're like mid-obedience session, you're, you know, training and doing like a routine like we're doing for our PDC at the moment, I'm not going to teach Nelson that, hey, at any moment I could break out and do this because he's going to be expecting it. It can certainly work as like final reward at the end of something. Yeah, for sure.

Okay.

Hey, we're going to do— we might do this at the end of our thing, but yeah, it's finding where it works for you. It's not going to work in every setting, but it's one type of currency you can use and that's how you can use it to your advantage a bit better.

I mean, I was watching— I watch a lot of dog training content. I was watching this one where, again, it was gundog training, but this guy had this Labrador just— I mean, its joy in life was getting scratched behind the ear. Which is, which seems perfect because you can do that easily. So, I mean, it would just kind of like, and he would send it out, come back, he gets a scratch behind, you can see just legs going. It's just like, oh, it's amazing. So there are, there are dogs out there that will just quite happily be like, oh, that's the best. That's all I need.

Yeah. And that's actually a really good point as well, which we should touch on is not all reinforcement, not all currency is equal to dogs. You could do everything we've just said and your dog might Have no interest, or it could even freak out your dogs. I've met some dogs who, like you said, a little touch on the forehead is just orgasmic to them. Holy shit. Yeah, that was amazing. How do I make that happen again? That was incredible. I meet other dogs and every time you try and touch them, it's not even trauma, you know, it's not necessarily even due to trauma. They just go, I don't enjoy being touched. This is not reinforcing to me. And we go, hey, if you do this job, I'll touch you.

They go, yeah, I don't want to. Yeah.

So I'm not going to do it then.

This is not something I want.

And that's cool. That's no worries. So with all these guys, we're going to talk about ways we can increase it. But if you know your dog and you go, yeah, my dog's not into that, that's fine.

Move to the next one.

Move to the next one, which is food. So a lot of people like to train with food. A lot of people don't like to train with food. It is what it is. But let's talk again about how we can use it to our advantage. So again, like anything, we can increase our dog's food drive either through scarcity or novelty. So if we're going to use novelty, we go, all right, you eat this diet each and every day, whether that's kibble or raw or something in between. And when we train, I'm going to train with this, which is a bit more exotic. That might be cooked chicken, Prime 100, hot dog, ham, cheese, whatever. Something that's more novel for your dog where they go, oh my God. That's not really my style. Reason being is I find that that can have a bit of a glass, you know, quite a low ceiling on it because things become less novel the more a dog has access to them.

Yeah.

And if you're really into training your dog and you're training, you know, every day and sometimes a couple of sessions a day, Chicken starts to lose its appeal in a couple of weeks. Your dog's like, yeah, okay.

Yeah.

Then you've got to find something else.

You don't eat this every day. Dog's like, I kind of—

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Actually, actually, Mum, I do. So scarcity isn't always the best thing. And our dog can start to learn, you know, through our patterns. I see a lot of people go, you know, we tried chicken, we tried cheese, and then it worked for a bit. Then our dog got bored of it. And what your dog's really doing is going, hang on, if I like—

I turned my nose up at my food and Mum brought out chicken, it suddenly got better.

I turned my food up to chicken and then I got This. I turn my nose up and then all of a sudden, before you know it, that can just go and our dog doesn't understand that.

Wagyu steak by the end of it.

Yeah, exactly. Oh yeah. I had a session yesterday where the person said, because their dog did so well, as soon as you're going home, you're getting a T-bone. And we thought they were joking. Like, no, no, I'm going to go by the butcher and get him a really nice expensive tomahawk. I was like, oh, well, cool.

Lucky dog.

Lucky dog. So the way I like to increase value through food is through scarcity. That doesn't mean not feeding our dog.

Yeah. See, we've got to be careful there because people hear that and they just think, oh, You awful human. You're starving your dog so that it's going, oh, God, if I don't eat this, I'll never eat again.

So, what I mean by scarcity is it just means the food isn't for free. Nothing in life is free. You've got to work for it. I'll use my own dog, Nelson, as an example. Nelson is a Rottweiler. He's still in the late stages of growth. He eats 2 kilograms of raw food a day. That's more than a lot of dogs eat in a week. One of my clients recently who had a raw-fed Cavoodle, Nelson ate more in one day than that dog does in 18 days. So, he eats a whole lot of food. You should see, when you see this meat all stacked up and then all the extra, all the bones and shit he gets, it is a ridiculous amount of meat that he eats. But he does not get it for free. So, that is still scarcity. It doesn't mean I don't feed him. It just means nothing comes for free. Every single day to gain access to that bowl, he has to perform an obedience session and he gains access to that bowl. He gets released to it when I'm happy. Sometimes that's a minute in, sometimes that's 10 minutes of training, sometimes 5 minutes. We kind of vary it to keep him guessing and keep him interested. But yeah, we can increase food value through scarcity and novelty. One thing, when Jack and I met, Kira had very low food drive like a lot of herding breeds do. So the way we increased that again wasn't through novelty and going and getting Jack to buy chicken, it was scarcity. I said, hey, take away the food bowl, put it through the dishwasher, then put it on the shelf. You're not going to need it for the next couple of months. This treat pouch, food pouch, fanny pack that you're wearing, whatever you want to call it, I'm going to put all the food in that and she gains all her food through you through training. And that food drive just skyrocketed.

Yeah, absolutely. And look, we, I'm now, the food bowl gets used maybe 2 or 3 times a week, maybe. Otherwise for us, again, it's still food comes like last night, cause she's been away from me for a week. So she came home and straight away dinner last night was doing just some basic obedience. And, you know, or I'll, as I said, I'll hide the, I've said in a previous episode, I'll hide the food around the house so she could search for it. I do a lot of scatter feeding outside in the yard. So there's always, for her with food, it's always something involved in it. It's not just a case unless, you know, I'm running out of time and it goes in the bowl, but otherwise it's generally, there's always something involved around food. She doesn't just get it for free. There's something involved in that food, you know, mentally enrichment. Because, and that's what it comes down to, because I know there are people, and we'll talk about other options, because there are people that don't like the idea of, you know, making their dogs work for every ounce of food that, you know, it's just in their psyche. They just don't like that, which is fair enough. But I think, you know, it is so beneficial again for so many reasons for your dog. Like it's mental, you know, mentally draining for it to have to do things to get that food, which again is, it's enriching for the dog, you know? And again, you're going to have a dog like Kira is right now, passed out cold because she's already done work today for a ball. We have both, we have food and balls.

Yeah.

So she loves her ball. She loves her food. So she gets to, she has to work for both of those things. But again, it's draining the mental battery.

It is. Exactly. And it's funny, you know, like you said, some people are really opposed to that, but I haven't met many people who don't have to work for their money.

I've only met a few.

Oh, totally. We all have to work for our food.

We don't get food for free.

Exactly. We don't get free food. We work. We just, it's just different for us. We go to a job and we make money and we use that money to buy food and then we can eat it. And you're right. It's no different for a dog. They're just working a different way.

Yeah.

I mean, for dogs, food is their resource. Food is their money. I need you to think of it like that, guys. Like that's why they'll, You know, when dogs go and bury bones, that's them opening a savings account. Dogs will squabble and fight over food in the same way that humans will fall out over money. Like, it's no different. That's their currency. So, yeah, there's a couple of ways you can increase food drive. And again, guys, you might already have it. You might just be blessed with that dog who's just got crazy high food drive. Like my Labrador growing up.

Oh, yeah.

You could have a microgram of peanut butter on your finger and he would do anything. He would work for air. Then you can meet other dogs who can have the most amazing diet. They could do everything we just said. It'll have very little effect on them. Most dogs are not at either end of that spectrum. Most dogs are somewhere in the middle. And a couple of those techniques could absolutely improve it.

That dog that came to me for Christmas, who was— Oh, that lab. The lab. So the lab that came to me was, it was going to be a service dog of some form, but it was, it was overweight. And it of course had no food drive because it didn't need to. Like it was, it was full, it was fat, it was overweight. It was being fed too much. By the time it left here, it was trying to bite my hand off for the food because again, I took it away from the bowl. I reduced the food because it was being overfed. So it became more of a commodity to the dog that, oh, food. And, you know, and instead of, you know, luring and sort of really struggling to get this dog to lure into certain positions that it needs to be in for its job, by the end of it, it was like, what can I do? Yes, yes, let's do it. And a dog that came to me that didn't have a down, didn't have a stay, didn't have a place, anything like that, left with all of those things. And it would run to those spots. It would hit that down super quick and all that sort of stuff. So it just shows that you can make a dog still keep it healthy and happy. And I mean, the dog was super happy, but it just had more drive.

Exactly. I mean, and that's it. That goes back to what we're saying. When that dog came here, you were trying to deal with it in a currency of what's an interest in it. So, dude, I get this for free all day, but I get too much of it. I'm done with it.

Well, people leave bowls out all day with food in them and the dog will just graze and go, oh yeah, I might eat it. I might not.

Yeah. We should do an episode on that actually.

We should talk about that.

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Let's move on to the next point, which is play. So all of our dogs are motivated by play. They love to play with us. They love to play with other dogs. If we think of like, you know, where a lot of dogs get themselves in trouble with their owners, it's because of play. They go, oh, when my dog's playing with another dog, they won't come back. My dog struggles with lead walking because I just want to play with all the other dogs, or my dog ran off down the beach because I want to play with other dogs. So dogs are motivated by play.

Yeah.

So what we can do instead is we can look at what our dog loves to be. Does your dog love to chase or be chased? Does your dog like to hold something in the mouth while they're doing this? Does your dog like this to be zippy or do they like to stay in one place? Is your dog really intense or kind of medium? Is find and observe how your dog likes to play and try and recreate that. Be like, hey, I can do that with you. And when your dog starts to realise that, Oh my God, you, you can— like, we can play again. That can also be a currency. So I'm not saying don't play with your dog during the day, but I mean, again, you can start to use this as a currency. So play is one of our currencies we use for Nelson. Hey, if you do this, we will play. For a lot of working dogs, play is the biggest thing. If you come to the place, um, where I do Nelson's bite work on a Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday— shout out to Lone Star Animal Behavior and the Big Show PSA Club— Is a lot of those dogs, we're not necessarily going, hey, here's food. It was like, here's toys and here's play. Like they're the biggest currencies for a lot of those high drive dogs. So if you've got a dog like that, give it a shot. You might be surprised at how enticing that is for your dog and how hard they will work to make you do that again. Once they realise that that can be transactional.

I found moving Kira from food, 'cause she got, became really food motivated, which was great. And I thought, I want to move this to a toy now, or I want to move this to play. Yeah. I mean, I'm like, how am I going to do this? Because she's always been food motivated. But it was about finding the right thing again because yes, she loved to play and she loved a tug, but not to the level that, okay, well, I'm going to do what you're asking me to because I want to tug. It wasn't until we had the Staffy ball, and we'll talk about toys in a minute, but it wasn't until we have the Staffy ball that she— I finally found something that was like, I want that. So I'm like, well, you're not going to have that unless you do this for me.

Perfect.

And that's when the toy situation started to come through. She started to realize, oh, okay, so if I want that, I've got to do this. It's no different from the food.

Yeah, exactly. The dogs are going to work with us to gain access to that resource. It's finding that currency for your dogs. And play quite often ties in with our next point, number 4, which is toys. So when we have a toy as a resource or a toy as a currency, it's got to be a toy that your dog doesn't have constant access to.

Yeah.

Okay. So same, Nelson's got toys at home that he can just like mess around with during the day. He's got a couple out, you know, some soft ones, some hard ones that he can just mess with. But when these special toys come out, his balls on a rope and his balls, that's when he's like, oh damn. Yeah. Okay. Like, shit's getting serious. What do I need to do to get that? If I left those out all day, he's never going to not love them, but he's not going to work for them.

No.

If he's been playing with this ball for 8 hours and then I get home and go, hey, I'm taking away this, come and work for it. He's going to go, oh, that's right.

I'll play with it tomorrow when you've left it around for me just to use when I need to.

Spot on. It's not a currency because it's in abundance. So again, We utilise both scarcity and novelty. We're going, hey, I've got this extra type of toy that you don't always have access to. So, it's novel, but it's also scarce. You don't get it during the day. This only comes out through training. You have to work through me to get it. And that can be anything that your dog's into, but that can tie into play as well. For me, I use a ball on a rope. So, Nelson, that toy is more fun when it's engaged with me. Nelson has to try and get it off me. We chase each other, we throw it, et cetera. And an example Jack did use then with Kira was his Staffy ball. So a Staffy ball, for those that don't know, is like a bowling ball. It's a bit lighter, but it's a big hard ball about that size.

I can tell you it hurts when it whacks into your leg. It's rock hard.

Rock hard. Yeah. I've had people put, you know, oh, we gave it to him inside.

I said, I told you not to do that.

They go, yeah, well, yeah, we learned why. I've had people put holes in drywalls with their dog's Staffy balls. But they're fantastic for your bull breeds and your herding breeds. And that's not a toy that So, Jack will pick up and carry around, but it's, hey, there's a toy over there. You're allowed to go chase it if you complete this session. So, it's like an indirect reward. But toys are another huge currency we use with our dogs. And if you are wanting to use one as a motivator, and there's plenty of benefits to doing so, it's just finding something that your dog really is really, really into and then going, all right, we're going to withhold that resource and make you work for it. You're not going to get it for free anymore. And you can get some crazy levels of motivation for toy drive.

I mean, if you've got a dog that likes to chase a ball and it's just obsessed with the ball, there you are. That's your motivator. I mean, I used to be the person who would just grab the ball, throw it, get the dog, bring it back, grab it, throw it, bring it back, grab it, throw it, bring it back. And that was it. And now with realising that, hold on, what I can do in that is I can actually add in some obedience and all sorts of stuff. It's so much more fun as well for you as a dog owner to do that, as opposed to just throw, throw, throw, throw, throw.

Yeah.

So, but as you said, it's finding that toy that they're obsessed with. And I think I would imagine everyone listening to this, if you've got a dog that likes toys, you know what their favourite toy is, you know what they go nuts Yeah. Whether it's they love to play tug. Kirra likes tug, but not, you know, her ball's her thing. But, you know, if your dog loves tug, get their favourite tug and make them realise that, hey, if you do this for me, we're going to play an amazing game of tug and it's going to be so cool.

Exactly right. And that might be an episode in its own thing where we talk about different types of toys and the role they play. And, you know, I've got lots of different toys in my arsenal. Like I said, some he has for free, some he has for training, some we do for that type of training, sometimes for that type of training. They all have a different role and we can educate you guys on that at some point as well.

And I think that's really important with the toys, as you said, like to just, cause I went to a lady's house recently who looked after Kira, which is an amazing job. Um, but just toys scattered everywhere. Yeah. Um, and you know, and again, I, again, you know, these are all things I have learned. I'm not sitting on my high horse here because it's all things I learned cause I was the same. I used to leave things all over the place cause I'm like, you know, I didn't want the dog to dig or I didn't want it to chew on something that I didn't want it to chew on. So I left out all these toys. They're like, you've got all these options. But of course, if they're around, as you said, all the time, they get bored of them. Like, eh, eh.

They lose interest.

But if you take all of those away, you know, and again, people struggle because we think of dogs very human-like. You go, oh God, you wouldn't just take all your toys away from your kid, would you? But look at kids, right? I've got a toy room out there full of fucking toys. Do you think the kids play with any of them? No, because they're all there. What my wife does now is circulate toys. She'll take some away and put them away for a while. And then every now and then bring out those old toys they haven't seen in a while, and they'll be like, oh my God, there's this toy again. And then all of a sudden they're playing with it madly because like, oh my God, I haven't seen this in ages.

I'm pretty sure my wife does that to me. I have too many guitars and occasionally they go missing.

So, you know, again, I come back to it all the time, but very much like children.

All right, moving into our last 2, we've got freedom and removal of pressure. So freedom we touched on in our loose lead walking episode, uh, so Freedom obviously is a right our dog has to freedom. Absolutely. But there's certain times when freedom is a privilege. And in those moments, we can let our dog work for it.

Okay.

So, for example, on a leash, I will say, hey, Nelson, you can go and sniff or I will let you off this leash once you give me some really nice working. It's not going to come for free. I'm not just going to let you have it if you pull and show me you want to get it. So, we can use freedom as currency. We'd also same every— anytime we rock up to an off-leash area, it's a beach or a park or a forest, whatever. The first thing we do when we get there is I want to show him, hey, freedom is a currency. I can reward you with this or I can withhold this from you depending on your behaviour. So, the first thing we do no matter where we go is we get out the car and we straightaway get into obedience. It can just be sit, down, stand, here, recall, you know, heel, whatever. But it's just getting him to do a few behaviours and then going, okay, and then releasing him into his environment. It develops that relationship between, hey, This is not something you just constantly have access to for free. I decide when you get this and when you don't. And same, if he start— if I notice him, you know, get a bit overwhelmed and he stops listening, we'll call him back, we'll do some recall and refocus him, and we'll temporarily take away that freedom. Maybe pop him on a leash for a bit, and then when we're happy with behaviour again, then we send him off. So, freedom can absolutely be a currency that you deal in. And honestly, an issue I see in most dogs, a lot of those issues just stem from too much freedom.

Yeah.

Whether that's too much freedom in the house Too much freedom in the backyard, too much freedom out and about, and the dog's relationship with freedom is way off. So quite often in both, whether I'm doing obedience or behaviour training for someone, changing the dog's relationship with freedom is a huge part of that.

Yeah. I mean, it's something I've been working on with Kira as well, because I got into the habit where we would go to our— the place that we found, which I absolutely love, is a massive off-leash place. We'd walk in, just let her off straight away and just say, off you go. Whereas now what I'm trying to do as opposed to that is we go in, The leash comes off, but I'm like, hey, we're going to heel walk now for whatever it might be, 100 yards. You don't know. We might go for 2 minutes, we might go for 5 minutes, but you're going to stay by my side. If you do that beautifully, we'll stop and then I'll release you and then you can go.

We do that. We do the exact same thing on our walk with Morning every now and then. We will walk him to the park and sometimes we let him off as soon as we get to the field area. Sometimes it's 5 or 10 minutes in and we do varied in between.

So that's perfect. And I was struggling because I don't practice enough. We've talked about leash, you know, on leash Walking and she wasn't great at it. It was because I wasn't practising it enough. And I started, instead of going and doing that walk and just going, okay, off you go, I'm like, no, you know what? We're going to do maybe a lap of this park with you on the leash and you walk nicely on the leash for me while we go around here. I'm going to take it off and then you can go.

Perfect.

And that's it, guys. Freedom can absolutely and should be one of the main currencies you deal in. It will solve so many problems for you. Our last one is removal of pressure. So, removal of pressure is an example of negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement, we may— And we're going to do an episode on operant conditioning as well, but we'll add that to the list.

Yeah.

But negative reinforcement is where we take something away from our dogs in order to reinforce them. So, that means we take something, some type of pressure or something that they don't like away to reward them. Some examples of negative reinforcement we used last episode are the seatbelt or the fridge beeping at you. If you don't put your seatbelt on, the car will beep at you. If you don't close the fridge, the fridge will beep at you until you do the thing you want, until you close that fridge door, until you put your seatbelt on. Then the car or the fridge will take the beeping sound away to reinforce your decision.

We'll go, there you go.

Now you've done what I want. I will take this annoying thing away. Another example might be you're standing at the sun. God, it's hot. And then to negatively reinforce yourself, you step out of the sun into the shade. You remove that uncomfortable feeling of heat and go, oh, that's negative reinforcement. That feeling of, oh, something bad is gone. That's negative reinforcement. So a currency we can deal with our dog is removal of pressure. So quite often, again, when we're doing On-lead stuff is typically when we'd use this, is we're going to remove leash pressure. But that can also be different types of social and spatial and physical pressure. We'll talk about all sorts of different things in upcoming episodes. But removal of pressure is absolutely a currency you can deal in. We can say, hey, you're pulling on that lead. As soon as you start looking back at me, that pressure might go away. Or, hey, I've asked you to sit. I'm going to continue to stare at you and put that social pressure on, and I'm going to stop doing that and smile again. When you finally sit. Or, hey, I'm going to hold onto your collar and I'm not going to stop holding onto your collar until you relax, and then I'll let it go. That's all sorts of types of removal of pressure or negative reinforcement. So, they're the 6 currencies you can use in dog training. So, again, guys, those are praise, food, play, toys, freedom, and removal of pressure. Now, what we want you to do, if you enjoyed the parts on play and toys and want to know more, We might actually bring a guest on to help us with that one. So if you are keen on that, comment on either Spotify or the Facebook group and let us know, hey, really like the play and toys part, keen to hear from a guest.

And of course, any questions to do with anything with dogs, make sure you also comment in the Facebook group. You can find it, The Dog People Podcast. Thanks for listening.

Thanks, guys.

The Dog People Podcast is a Mashed Pumpkin production hosted by Jack Lawrence and Max O'Neill. Edited, produced, and audio production by Jack Lawrence.

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