[00:00:00] Allie:
Even if you’re already fantastic at observing, there’s still more to learn
through videos. One of the reasons we are such big advocates of watching video
as opposed to only relying on realtime observation is because you get to
manipulate a video. You can slow it down, you can start and stop it, you can
rewind. You get to spend as much time watching that interaction as you need to
to learn what you’re hoping to learn. Welcome to Enrichment for the Real World,
the podcast devoted to improving the quality of life of pets and their people
through enrichment. We are your hosts, Allie Bender…
[00:00:44] Emily:
…and I’m Emily Strong…
[00:00:45] Allie:
…and we are here to challenge and expand your view of what enrichment is,
what enrichment can be and what enrichment can do for you and the animals in
your lives. Let’s get started.
Thank you for
joining us for today’s episode of Enrichment for the Real World, and I want to
thank you for rating, reviewing, and subscribing wherever you listen to
podcasts.
Last week we heard
from Lili Chin, and one of the topics we discussed was essentially how to creep
on your pets to learn more about them. This week we’re going to dive further
into why you need to video your pets and talk about implementation with the
animals in your life. In this implementation episode, Emily and I talk about,
Emily’s love of infomercials, how we watch videos and what we’re looking for,
and a couple of interactions where sound was getting in the way. Let’s get
started.
We talk about
observation all the time, body language all the time, and we kind of just leave
it at that, just saying like, “Do the thing.” So, I’m really excited
today to dive deeper into one of the strategies that we use to observe pets,
and how we can make good, objective decisions when it comes to working with
animals. And that is spending a whole lot of time watching video.
[00:02:04] Emily:
Right, because here’s the thing. I’ve been obsessively staring at animals since
probably before I could walk. And then by the time I became a behavior consult,
I had a pretty refined intuition regarding body language of, you know, all the
species I had grown up with. But I couldn’t really articulate why I was
perceiving what I was perceiving. So, when I started working with clients or colleagues
and trying to discuss the body language of the animals we were looking at
together, I wasn’t super great about spelling it out until videos.
[00:02:35] Allie:
I wasn’t aware this was an infomercial.
[00:02:38] Emily:
I mean, obvi, when am I not a walking-talking billboard for the things I’ve
been passionate about?
[00:02:44] Allie:
I mean, that’s very true. Y’all, Emily will literally email me and Ellen about
a new product she’s found. Usually through Facebook ads, I’m not gonna lie, and
do a written infomercial for us about why we should consider it.
[00:02:58] Emily:
Wow. Just, wow. I didn’t think my professional wife would help me like this,
but I see you’re choosing violence today. Okay!
[00:03:08] Allie:
All day, every day. Any who-sles videos? Okay. Y’all should video your pets to
become even better observers. Even if you’re already fantastic at observing.
There’s still more to learn through videos. And let’s break down how we do
that. One of the reasons we are such big advocates of watching video as opposed
to only relying on realtime observation is because you get to manipulate a
video.
You can slow it
down, you can start and stop it, you can rewind. You get to spend as much time
watching that interaction as you need to to learn what you’re hoping to learn.
Emily, what’s your favorite way of doing this?
[00:03:48] Emily:
I like to watch the video at full speed first to kind of get a gut feel, but
then I watch each animal. I mean, this is assuming there are multiple animals
in the video, right? Obviously if there’s only one animal, I just watched that
one. But most of the time when I’m looking at body language videos, I’m looking
at multiple animals, and so I’ll watch each animal in slow motion separately. I
may go back and re-watch parts that are trickier, but I’m just focusing on one
animal at a time. Then I watch again in slow motion, but I’m looking at the
interaction as a whole. And then finally I’ll watch it again at full speed to
see what all those subtle interactions look like at full speed. And I’ve
actually found this to be a really powerful way of improving my ability to
catch those minute details in real time. How about you?
[00:04:37] Allie:
I do something pretty similar, and to your point of there’s usually multiple
animals in the video, I would say like you and I are counting humans in that
mix, and so if we’re not watching multiple dogs, or multiple cats, or a dog
cat, we’re watching a dog and a human, a cat and a human, so humans count in
that multiple animals mix.
I watched the full
interaction, like you said, kind of getting a gut feel, just, you know, getting
to know what to expect in that video. Noting parts that I need to pay more
attention to the second or third time around. Then on the rewatch, when I hit
those parts of the interaction, I play through watching one animal, then the
other, then the interaction as a whole by just stopping and starting the video
and rewinding and all of that, and that’s my version of slowmo.
[00:05:25] Emily:
I love that there are many paths up the mountain that gives people space for
personal preference and maybe even neurodiversities, too. So, we talked about
how we watched the videos. Next, let’s talk about what we’re looking for in the
videos. So first, Allie and I both practice watching without trying to
interpret what we’re seeing. We focus on the overt body language signals first.
If you’re new to practicing this skill, I highly recommend saying the body
language signals out loud as you see them, writing them down, or checking them
off a checklist.
Whatever you
prefer to do to create a tangible inventory for yourself, so you can go back,
review, and make sure that you’re catching as many body language signals as
possible. When you’ve done that for each individual animal in the video, then
you can do the same thing during the part where you’re watching the interaction
as a whole.
And this is particularly
important because sometimes body language signals can be ambiguous, or an
individual animal may be expressing some signals in atypical ways, and it can
be hard to tell what’s actually going on. So, the best way to identify what
their communications impact is on the other animals in the video is to watch
the other animal’s body language signals in response to the hard to read ones.
Then and only then after you’ve done all that work, is it helpful to start
interpreting what you’re seeing.
So often when I do
this exercise with our students, which by the way is on a regular basis because
we have monthly body language observation practice sessions, so we do this
frequently, the student’s final interpretation is very different from their
initial gut response, and I just think it’s really remarkable how when we take
that methodological approach to reading body language, it can really cut
through those cognitive biases that tend to cloud all of our perceptions,
including me. I’m not immune to that either, right? Even though I’ve been
looking at animals for more than four decades now, uh, it still happens to all
of us.
[00:07:25] Allie:
Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of clouding our perception, I find that sound is
something that can really influence how we interpret those interactions. And
yes, sound is absolutely another component of observation and can give us
really good information. However, some folks can be more sensitive to
vocalizations than others, and some play vocalizations can sound legitimately
scary regardless of your sound sensitivities or risk aversions.
And for that
reason, I usually actually turn the sound off the majority of the time that I’m
watching videos. I’ll often start with it on for the first initial watch just
to make a note of any vocalizations that are happening, but then I just focus
on the visual cues.
[00:08:08] Emily:
Yeah, same.
[00:08:09] Allie:
And I actually have the perfect example of this that literally happened with a
client yesterday. So, I’ve been working with these clients for their dogs,
Sadie and Oliver. Oliver is this just happy-go-lucky adolescent, and everything
that that entails. He’s a bundle of energy and wants to play and, and all of
the things.
Sadie is an older
lady and has not been appreciative of Oliver’s pep. So, uh, they called me in
for, for an intra household issue. Sadie and Oliver’s interactions were
escalating to the point of fighting, not injurious at this point, but they
really wanted to nip it in the bud and, and have a harmonious household.
So, when we
started, they sent, sent me the initial video of their interactions and it was
like, “Oh, yeah, no. Sadie is really not enjoying what’s happening here
and Oliver is really not respecting her communications.” We, we have some
issues on both sides of this fence here, so to speak, and sometimes literally
because we’ve been using fences and baby gates to help with their management.
So, we’ve been
working for a couple of months and yesterday I saw them again for their third
session and they were telling me, “Okay, Sadie and Oliver are now
interacting a little bit.” Hooray. We’ve gotten to that stage, but we’re
now in kind of that awkward stage in intra household cases where the dogs have
progressed enough, they have learned enough skills, that they’re able to
navigate some interactions, and the humans do not trust what is happening
there. And I’ve seen this happen in almost every intra household case that I’ve
worked on, where there comes a point where the humans are like, “Uh, I
don’t know that this is okay or not. I, I have no idea.”
They were telling
me that, Sadie would tell Oliver to go away. Oliver would escalate. They
weren’t sure how long to let these scenarios play out for when they needed to
inter interrupt them, when they shouldn’t interrupt them, and they should allow
them to just communicate with one another.
And so they sent
me videos during the session, oh my gosh, these videos were so good. Those
videos answered so many of our questions. One was, what does Sadie do when she
legitimately does need a break from Oliver? One of the problems that the
clients were having with interpreting that is both Sadie and Oliver play with
kind of a stank face where their face, if you only saw their faces, it looks
very angry. They have all the snarling, all the teeth happening, all the muzzle
wrinkling. I call it a stank face, and it just looks gnarly when you are only
seeing their face, so that was one problem that they were having was that the
face didn’t really change between play and angry. It just always looked angry.
And the other
problem they were having was that Sadie had some really intense vocalizations
during play and is a difference between her play and angry vocalizations, but
it’s pretty subtle and it, you know, something that is legitimately hard to
interpret when you’re just in the middle of these dogs playing, and trying to
make real time decisions.
So, we watched the
videos together. I turned the sound off, and the dead actually remarked that
the, the videos seemed so different when there wasn’t sound with them. And so,
that was a, a tip that he is going to take away and, and continue on as they’re
watching. The really nice thing about having the videos, they sent me four
videos was we were able to see the same exact behavior sequence from Sadie
every time she was done with Oliver.
And so, they were
having these questions of when should we interrupt and when should we let this
play out? And I was able to say, “This moment right here, stop the video.
You saw this is what happened, this is what happened next, that same sequence
has happened every single time in these videos. And so, this is the exact
moment that I want you to interrupt. Here’s how I want you to do that.”
And it gave them a much clearer picture and they’re much more confident now
with their kiddos interacting in this new, kind of no man’s land that we’re in
of like, “Okay, we’re doing better.” But that can sometimes be scary
for the humans who have seen it at its worst.
[00:12:50] Emily:
I love that story because I feel like that happens a lot. And actually my story
is kind of a similar theme. It just happened much longer ago than yesterday
because my story is about when I was brand new at the sanctuary where Allie and
I met, and our boss brought me a video and asked me, you know, watch this video
and tell me what you think about it.
And, I think part
of it was that legitimately there was some disagreement over what was going on
in that video, but I think also part of it was like Sherri was like,
“What’s your skill level at?” So, I watched the video first, full
speed, sound on, and she was like, “What’s your gut? What’s your gut
saying about this?”
And I was like,
“Well, right now it just looks like intense over the top play. But don’t
quote me on that. You know, I wanna look at it further.” When we went back
and looked at the actual kind of slow mo of each dog, it became really clear
what was going on, and also very understandable why people would misinterpret
it as conflict.
Because one of the
dogs was this huge blockhead, muscley dude, like just a big beefcake, and the
other dog was about the same height, but had a much more like streamlined
build. And so, I think all just right out of the gate, like the, the people
involved in that playgroup had some concerns about size and strength
differences between the two dogs.
And so, that’s
obviously gonna set you off with a negativity bias where you’re, where you’re
expecting things to go wrong. The big beefcake dog immediately, as soon as he
gets close enough to the other dog to, to start interacting, jumps up on his
hin legs and makes this like really terrifying [growly sound].
Like, just really
just like awful sound and like spits flying everywhere, and he’s got big jaws,
and big teeth. But when you looked at his body language, yes, his mouth was
open. Yes, he was bearing his teeth and making these awful sounds. But his open
mouth had this nice c-curve of the commissure, which indicates that the muscles
in their, on their cheeks and face aren’t actually tense.
He didn’t have any
tension in his brow. His ears were actually high and back, and yes, he had
hackles, but dogs can have play hackles. As he was on his hind legs, his whole
butt is wagging. So, he’s doing one of those like dancey things. And it kind of
got lost in the chaos because he’s also like flailing his front paws at the
other dog.
And so, I think in
real time it just looked like a lot of chaotic movement, but when you looked at
it in slow motion, he’s doing the happy, like butt dance, right? And then yeah,
his front paws are like slapping at the other dog.
And then what was
interesting is that you would expect a dog that’s smaller and more svelte to be
terrified by that, and to be fair to the caregivers who did the introduction,
it did look like the dog was flailing, but when you looked in slow motion, the
other dog was butt dancing back. They were both on their hind legs. They were
both doing the wiggly butt dance, and they were both like slapping each other
with their front legs.
But like Allie and
I say in our body language classes, when they’re slappy, they’re happy. And the
other dog also had like no tension in the face and the head. So, they’re both
like open jaw vocalizing at each other. They’re both just chaos, bodies
wiggling everywhere. But when you actually looked at it, it was actually really
sweet.
They were into it.
So, they never got any farther than that because the caregivers separated them
a few seconds afterwards, and then there was this debate about whether or not
these dogs were appropriate, um, an appropriate match, and whether the beefcake
was even appropriate to play with dogs at all.
And by slowing
down the video, and being able to look at all the body language signals really
methodically like that, we realized that they actually did wanna be play
buddies. We just need to help the beefcake slow his role a little bit when he
meets new dogs. So, we’re just gonna do intros with like a parallel walk into a
playgroup instead of just immediately taking him in direct approach to another
dog.
And, and then he
was beautiful. He was beautiful in these playgroup and they got to be buddies.
So, it was, it was legitimately scary to watch, but I had that gut feeling and
it was really nice to be, it was, the first time my body language skills had
been tested and it was like nice to ace that test, cause I was like, “Yes,
you did make a good choice to hire me.” this was really validating, but
also it was a really sweet example of like how it can look terrifying until you
slow it down and, and take a methodical approach and then it’s.
[00:17:48] Allie:
And then it’s cute. All right, so today we talked about why you need to video
your pets. That includes watching and rewatching those videos, whether that’s
in slow motion, or stopping and starting and rewinding, or a combination of all
of the above. Make sure to pay attention to one animal at a time, humans count
as animals in this, and watch each individual before putting it all together
and before coming up with your interpretation of what’s going on. Watch those
overt body language signals first. And one in doubt, try it without sound
because you may find like my clients that there’s some really lovely play
that’s happening. It just sounds really gnarly. Next week we are ending this
season with another Q and A episode.
Thank you for
listening. You can find us at petharmonytraining.com and @petharmonytraining on
Facebook and Instagram, and also @petharmonypro on Instagram for those of you
who are behavioral professionals. As always links to everything we discussed in
this episode are in the show notes and a reminder to please rate, review and
subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts a special thank you to Ellen Yoakum
for editing this episode, our intro music is from Penguin Music on Pixabay.
Thank you for
listening and happy training.
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