Last weekend we had Dr. Julia Tomlinson come to present to us about dog health and ‘sports medicine’ type things. She was an excellent at presenting and interacting with all of the the people and dog attendees. She’s also very enthusiastic about her topics and that made everything even more fun for us. I’ve been to several seminars on this theme before – it seems like the presenters are often telling people what they want to hear. Dr. Julia told us things we didn’t even know that we didn’t know. She also said a lot of things that helped me put together what I learned at school with practical uses and application. It’s going to take me a long time to go through my notes and process all of the information as well as apply the needed parts to training with my dogs and in classes.
Here are a few pieces from what I understood!
1) Core exercises are important: But you don’t need to be able to do everything. There are lots of exercises that get a lot of attention online and various publications – and not all dogs need to be able to always do everything. Your dog should be prepared for what you’re doing, sometimes doing exercises just to do them might be counter productive to your training goals or they might just not be necessary (so that time could be spent on other things!)
2) Food and supplements can be important: But there’s not a magical combination that is -the- answer for all dogs. We need to look at the dog and the results we get from specific nutritional modifications. Popular opinions about some nutrition related topics is sometimes counter to some of the data that we have about what dogs actually need or use.
3) Puppy experiences are important: Trainers know this and emphasize exposure to people, places, animals, noises, scents, surfaces, etc… for behavior purposes. But there are also a lot of neurological purposes for why these experiences are important – keeping and creating specific connections between neurons as the puppy grows.
4) Old dogs can get help: There is a lot we can do to help them maintain physical and cognitive health. This is important and people don’t always know about these options. Training and puzzle toys and small amounts of activity can be great. There are specific exercises and physical tasks that can help too – depending on the dog and the challenges.
5) Training results aren’t just about behaviors and reinforcement history: We can do tasks to work and get nerves to ‘fire’ in ways that are appropriate for our training goals. If behaviors are very strong and specific to the point where the animal is responding out of habit – we may not be as efficient as we could be – there is less concentration and fewer nerves used. If we keep providing variations in training (location, orientation, distractions… we want the animal to be paying attention to the task, we will get a better performance. We need the neurons working properly so that the behaviors we need can happen.
6) Rest is important: Neurons need time to ‘reset’. We need time to process learning. Our dogs need ‘off days’ during the week from heavy physical exercise.
7) Be a good consumer: There are many nutrition/health products are great, but there also are many that are not necessary (or potentially harmful). Research the quality of the product – but also whether it’s something that could even be useful for a dog!
8) Find the right specialist: The weekend made me really wish that we had a local person like Dr. Julia! She has so much knowledge – but there also are so many pet owners would benefit from her help. In our area we have three clinics offering various rehab services with vets who have an interest in rehab, but they don’t have the same type of specialist qualifications.