How to introduce a puppy to a (blind) cat
When introducing two animals, how do you know when to move onto the next step? What are potential red flags that tell you to slow down?
In this chat with fellow pet professional Sammy Hyde, we talk all about her blind cat Murdoch, the "king of the household." We broke down the ways Murdock made it clear that he didn't want to live with another cat, and how things progressed differently when new puppy Freja came into their home.
What you'll hear in this episode:
why you have to be an objective observer of your pets’ behavior when they AREN’T with the other animal
what makes the direction of behavior change, and not the speed, the most important aspect of a training plan
why the animals showing a lot of interest in each other (even if it seems friendly) isn't the green light for them have free access to each other
how you decide which animal to call away when they need space from each other
To listen to the full episode, click here to open it in your podcast player or press play below:
This episode’s guest: Sammy Hyde (B.S., UW-AAB, CPDT-KA, KPA-CTP)
Sammy and Freja on a hike
Sammy received her B.S. in Physiology and Neurobiology from the University of Connecticut. After working in medical education and research for several years, she decided to put her passion for science and animals together. She attended the Karen Pryor Academy Dog Professional Program, where she received her certification (KPA-CTP). She is also a Certified Professional Dog Trainer. She was awarded the Certificate in Applied Animal Behavior from the University of Washington in 2021. Sammy is currently perusing her MSc in Clinical Animal Behaviour at the University of Edinburgh.
She currently teaches at The Pet Republic in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She specializes in juvenile dog development, behavior, and training. She also has a special interest in fearful and reactive dogs, rescue adoptions, and shelter work. When she isn’t training dogs, Sammy enjoys hiking in the mountains, conducting gluten free baking experiments, attempting to grow low-maintenance plants, and reading all the books on behavior she can find!
You can get in touch with Sammy here:
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 And so I knew going into it, there was a chance that she would not stay our dog long term. And I was prepared for that. And I was prepared that if, you know, this didn't work out... I was hopeful, because again, I grew up in a multi animal household and we had had animals that didn't love each other, but we had always been able to get them to coexist.
Right. And that's really, I don't need them to be best friends. I need them to coexist.
đź“Ť Hello, you cat and dog people. This is It's Training Cats and Dogs. I am Naomi Rotenberg, a certified professional trainer who specializes in helping cats and dogs get along. And this is the show for pet professionals and pet parents who want to level up their cat and dog coexistence skills. In each episode, we talk nerdy about how to get your pets or your client's pets, living safer and happier lives together.
What specific behaviors should you be looking for when introducing two animals? Or if they're already having issues being together, how do you know when to move on to the next step in your coexistence plan? What are potential red flags that tell you to slow down? In today's chat with fellow pet professional, Sammy Hyde, we talk all about her blind cat Murdoch, who is the self-professed king of the household. We broke down the ways that Murdoch made it clear that he did not want to live with another cat. And how things progressed differently when new puppy Freya came into the home. And we let our behavior nerd flags fly with our impassioned discussion of ethograms and what they are and why they're important.
Anyway, let's hop into my conversation with Sammy.
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Hi, Sammy. Thank you so much for agreeing to be on the podcast. I'm really excited to chat with you today.
Thank you for having me.
Before we dive into your stories about your pets, their behavior, how you integrated them, all of that fun stuff, let's do a little quick icebreaker so that we can all get to know you a little bit as a human. So longtime listeners to the show know that I, for some reason, love to do two truths and a lie for my guests, even though I'm not so great at it.
So let's do that. Are you ready to tell me two truth and lie about yourself? And I will hopefully be able to figure out what the lie is.
I am ready,
Okay. Hit me.
All right, so the first is I have been playing piano since I was eight years old, but I cannot sight read. The second is I am an avid runner and I've completed five marathons in the last five years. And the last one, I enjoy training, agility, nose work, rally obedience at home, but I have never competed in a single dog sports trial.
Uh, let's see. So here's my logic that I'm gonna say out loud in case this is relevant for anything. So, very specific, eight years can't sight read. I get that. And Marathon. , you look like you're in shape. I'll allow it. Um,
you,
Um, let's, for the sake of the storytelling, say that the lie, is that you Uh, no. I think, ah, this is so hard. Okay. I don't, I don't know. I dunno. I didn't, I didn't look to see if you have any titles on your dogs Oh, no. Okay. Um, yeah, let's say the marathons is the lie.
You are correct.
Okay. Woo. That was tough. That was, that was, I had some heart palpitations going on there. Okay. So do you run at all?
I do. I, I do. I'm not fast. Um, it's not necessarily my favorite type of exercise. The longest race I've done is a half marathon, and I've only done it once.
That is still great. I can run a hundred feet, uh, if a bear was chasing me, maybe 200.
I mean, that's functional running. That's what you need, right?
What's the joke? You have? Just have to run faster than
Outrun the slowest person.
Exactly. So you like to do all of the training stuff, but haven't done any dog sport trials or anything that sounds very similar to me. Have you ever thought about doing dog sports stuff and you just are like, I'm not ready, or are you just like, Nope, not, not for me.
I really am interested and I really would like to trial. Um, my current dog, Freya, is the one that I do all the training with. She's the one who really got me interested in sports, but, I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about her history. She has arousal issues and a trial environment is just going to be too stressful for her.
And while it's something that I would love to do, I'm not willing to put her in a really uncomfortable place just so we can do something that I like. I know I'll have lots of dogs in my life and I'm sure that some of them will be interested in doing the sports with me and those guys, we can do that.
But with Freya, I, I just will not do it cuz I know it's gonna be really stressful for her.
And you get all of the benefits of doing the training and the enrichment and all of that stuff without having to do actual ring prep and all of that.
Yeah, and there's lots of fun virtual titles you can do. She has a trick dog title from Do More With Your Dog. And I actually, I need to submit her other videos for it, for the other levels. But yeah, you can do a lot of training at home by yourself and if you really want to do titles, there's also virtual titling for your dogs.
Yeah, that's cool. I haven't thought about doing that. Um, my guy's old, so you know, maybe when my kids grow up and I decide to delve into the puppy thing, then we'll see how that goes.
And music you have a guitar behind you. Do you perform or is this just a hobby?
No, I just, when I was a kid, I took piano lessons and I took it for many years. And I have a piano downstairs as well. I like playing music, the whole sight reading thing. Um, I just learned to memorize the stuff that I had to perform for recitals. Sight reading's really hard for me.
And I think it is because I have ADHD I really think that that contributes to how difficult it was, and very quickly I learned that I could easily memorize it. So I never put in the work to improve my sight reading
You have a different coping mechanism to reach the same goal,
And it's functional and it works, right? So I have no motivation to change my behavior.
Yay. Behavior mod theory in real life. I love it. I was a singer, but I dabbled in different instruments. My daughter actually just brought out my guitar today, this morning, um, and she's like, mommy, play it. And I'm like,
I know
I'm like, STRUM!
I bet she was impressed anyways. They're like, every time my cousins bring their kids over, they're so interested in the piano and they think that just any noise coming out of it is beautiful to them.
My husband plays jazz piano, but that's a skill that I just admire from afar. All the improv aspects of it. You know, it's so different from classical. Anyway, we digress. This is a, this is a dog and cat podcast, everybody. Let's, let's remember that. Um, Sam's just so cool, has a cool life.
Okay, so we talked about Freya a little bit. Tell me about her and you have a cat and kind of who they are as individuals and how they came to be living in your house.
Yeah, so I think we'll start with Murdoch, because he came first, he is the king of this household. Murdoch is about six or seven now. My husband and I had just purchased our first home and of course now that we had some extra space, we weren't living in a tiny apartment in Boston.
Um, the first thing I wanted to do was get a cat, cuz I grew up with cats. I grew up in a multi cat household. I was never without a cat growing up. So I was looking at local rescues and I saw a picture of this cat who had no eyes. His eyes are sutured closed, so it just looks like he's squinting or that like he's asleep all the time.
And I saw a picture of him and I think there was a video too. And I just thought he was the coolest, utmost gorgeous cat. And I texted my husband, I was like, how do you feel about adopting a blind cat? And I believe his answer was not great Um,
Doing it anyway.
Yeah. So we met him and um, his story is really interesting because he was born in Teran, Iran and he was found as a little baby kitten by himself as a stray. When they found him, there was clearly something wrong with his eyes. Probably the best guess is that his mom was a stray that rejected him at birth because of whatever was going on with his eyes, or he might have been abandoned because of having something wrong with his eyes. So the woman who found him, she was there visiting family, brought him back to the United States, and when he was old enough, they did surgery because his eyes were incredibly infected and they realized very early after treatment that they weren't gonna be able to save them.
So they did surgery to remove the tissue and close the lids. And during that time, the surgeon, I guess discovered that he was almost certainly blind since birth because the eyes never actually developed. That's likely why they got infected is because the tissue was underdeveloped. So he basically had like little nubbins, no real eyes, he couldn't see.
So I think he was probably about six or eight months when they did the surgery. Then his foster mom put him up for adoption after he had healed. He was about a year old, and that's when we adopted him and we brought him into our life.
So we will definitely talk about having a cat with an interesting behavioral history at being a singleton, being transported, and then having the blindness on top of that. So how did he acclimate into his new life, his new space?
It was very interesting. Like I said, I grew up with cats and we've always been a multi catt household. When I was a kid, for the most part, we always had at least two cats. There were times when we had three. And having had multiple cats in my life and knowing a little bit about cat behavior, not as much as dogs, but when we brought him home, we started him off in his own room where he had all the resources he needed.
He had lots of hidey places, little cat hidey holes. We had lots of elevated surfaces for him to climb on. And usually the recommendation when you bring home a cat is to start them in a comfortable, safe, quiet space where they can adjust and then you gradually can build their world to extend to other rooms in the rest of your home as they get comfortable and they wanna explore.
Within 30 minutes of having Murdoch home, we had to open the door and let him out of his safe space because he was just banging on the wall. He would put his paws underneath the door and like shake the door, like trying to open it. He did not wanna be confined, so we went, okay, let's just open the door if he wants to go explore.
If it's making him uncomfortable to be in a small space, let's just do it. And we just, Watched him walk around the house for about two hours, just exploring every nook and cranny. When he moves, it's really interesting. You can see he usually keeps his tail low and it kind of sweeps back and forth. Um, his whiskers are almost always pushed as far forward as they can go.
And he explored the house for like two hours and then jumped up on the couch next to us and fell asleep and that was it. He just had full run of the house from the get-go. He made himself very comfortable, very quickly.
So. that worked because he was the only animal in the house, right?
Yes, yes. He was the only animal in the house at that time.
So let's go down a hypothetical route. If he was coming into your house where there was already another cat or dog, what would we have done?
Yeah, so the rescue that adopted him out thought that because he was blind, he might do well with a another cat. So we did, when he first came home for the first year that we had him, we did during that time have a second cat. Um, who we realized , uh, shortly after having them both in the house that he didn't actually want a cat friend and it wasn't gonna be good.
We tried for a year, over a year to acclimate them to each other, but it didn't end up working out. But that's okay because my house is just like the, I think, what does my dad call it? My, my parents call our house the, uh, land of misfit animals. Uh, she was partially deaf.
We didn't find that out until about four months of having her. We realize we're like, we keep startling this cat really easily. We need to have her checked out by the vet. I think she has hearing issues. So she was partially deaf. She ended up going to a home with an owner who was actually partially deaf.
It felt like, like that was her home, was supposed to be her home. But when we had them at the same time, what we did is they both had their own spaces. And we let them both get used to just the idea of there is another animal in this household, I don't have to see them.
Which obviously isn't a problem for Murdoch, but for the other cat Electra, we called her L, that she doesn't have to see him. They can smell each other. They can hear each other.
Well, she couldn't.
Yeah. , not well, not well . And so, we kept them in separate places. We did, site swapping, which is where we would exchange who was in whose room so that they could then smell each other's spaces, and then we went from a door to a gate, and that's where we were stuck for over a year that they could not learn to coexist, even with just a gate between them. But that's usually, especially with cats, and we'll talk a little bit about how I introduced him to a dog, Freya. But if I am bringing home a cat and I already have a cat, that is usually what I recommend and that's what we did with them.
Again, the problem being that with these two, I think something we can probably talk about as well is that cats talk a lot with their bodies. They really communicate through body language. Murdoch is at a significant disadvantage that he can't see.
Mm-hmm.
He's also always been blind, so it's not like he has any idea of how to communicate with his body.
He doesn't even know that that's necessarily a thing. If it comes naturally, it doesn't matter. He can't, he can't see the other cat. And then, the other disadvantage being that, as you said, he's a singleton. He was, who knows when, he was very young when they found him. So if he had any time with his litter mates, it was quite limited.
And when he was in his foster home, there were other cats, but he had to be isolated from them because he was recovering from surgery. So he never really had that socialization. But yeah, that's what we did with those two. And that's usually my recommendation is give them both the space and then go slow. Because cats they have incredible hearing except for Electra. Um, they have an incredible sense of smell. Your cat's not dumb. They know there's another cat in the house. And especially when the cat that you're bringing home, let them get used to the new environment first. Being in a new home. Let them get used to you. Spend time with them before we start introducing, and especially like visually, not just a closed door, using something like a gate which physically blocks them, but they can visually see each other. For the cats who can see.
So what were the behaviors that you saw in the two of them that made you eventually call it and say she needs to go somewhere else.
oh, it was, if they got close to each other at the gate, it was hissing and it was in trying to bat each other, claws out. It was not playful. There was very stiff posture. You would see their tails flicking. Um, sometimes people, I think, especially as a dog trainer, I see clients who also have cats.
Cat and dog behavior is very, very different. And a wagging tail for a dog can be happy, but not always. But a quote unquote wagging tail from a cat is not happy
Nope.
That is not a happy tail. And the intensity of those interactions got more intense, not less intense.
Mm-hmm. Got it. It was not going in the correct direction.
Yeah. And then even worse, was that Murdoch would actually try to climb the gate to get to the other side. We did uh, co-feeding on either side. So basically trying to pair their first interactions with each other with something positive. We fed them on other sides of the gate and not like dishes on each side of the gate, super close.
We fed them each about four feet away from the gate, but had them both eat a meal. And we tried that for the first week that we had just the, the physical gate between them and neither of them would eat. Neither of them could eat in the presence of each other. Electra was interested in trying to stay away from the gate, but if Murdoch came up and he would come right up and try to climb it, try to get to her space, try to get through it, if he started reaching through it, right, he can't see her.
He's trying to reach in and see if there's an opening, she would come over and that's when there would be a lot of hissing, a lot of spatting, and a lot of whacking the crap out of each other. And we always interrupted it, but it would happen incredibly quickly. So that was really when we, we took back several more notches and we tried, like I said, for a year. Cats, it can be a slow process. And so we gave it a year and at that point we decided that, you know, they had to be separated from each other at all times. And they're both social cats. Both of them very, very social.
Towards humans.
Yes, towards humans that is good, very specifically towards humans and not towards other cats. And so that's when we decided that we would, we would rehome her.
Okay. So after this situation where Murdoch did super duper well with another animal, you said, let's bring, let's bring in a dog. Uh, tell me about . Tell me about how, how Freya came to live with you.
Yeah. So, um, Freya came into our life kind of against my better judgment, I guess? So, I've worked in rescue for a couple of years and my husband and I had been talking about getting a dog. I had been wanting an adult dog. We, you know, were starting to talk about it and I was talking to some of my friends who work in rescue and I was like, Hey, if you have an adult dog come through the shelter or through your rescue who has experience living with a cat, um, then let me know.
I'd be interested. And a couple months after we had really decided we want to try and integrate a dog into the household, a friend told me about a litter of puppies who were coming to be fostered in Massachusetts where we live. And she said, Hey, we have some puppies coming. They were conceived and whelped in an animal controlled facility.
They were separated from their mom at about five weeks old. Do you want one? And I said, no, who, who would want that? And because she knew these dogs were coming to foster, she had reached out because she was hoping to get some experienced home for these puppies because they didn't have the best start to life.
Maternal stress and a stressful environment. Then early. Okay. Yeah. Woo. Okay.
Whoa. Wait. They were conceived. Hold on, hold on. Going back.
They were conceived at the animal shelter?
Yeah, that was my first issue. I was like, I'm sorry. Uh, what happened? Uh, the, the story that was told to me is that mom had been picked up from, in hoarding case, and the animals were all being held in animal control facility while the state tried to gain custody.
So because the state didn't have custody, I guess they weren't allowed to spay her. And at some point, I guess she was accidentally put into an area with an intact male and got pregnant and somehow they didn't know until she had the puppies. That is the story that was told to me. Yeah, it's a good one. It's a feel good story. They separated them. They were in groups of two in foster. And so Freya was being fostered with her litter mate. And, I told my husband about her and he was like, well, why don't we just go meet her? Like it's, let's just go meet her.
Uh, so we did, and there was no big red flags. I mean, she was seven weeks old. She was less than seven weeks old. She was like six and a half or something when we met her. Uh, you can't tell a dog's adult temperament at that age. But there was nothing, like when I met her in person, that was a big red flag, but still. That early, her first two months, essentially on planet Earth had not been great. And knowing what I know, I was really not interested in what I foresaw as being a very big project. But on the drive home from meeting her, my husband said, well, if we don't take her, what about if she ends up in a home and they're not prepared to handle behavior issues?
He's like, our home is the best place she could be. Imagine what happens if that poor little puppy, that cute puppy you just met, imagine if she ends up in the wrong home. And so we agreed to adopt her. And I am .
Yes.
Oh man.
And I'm very, very glad that he pushed me because I can't imagine my life without her. She is truly my heart dog.
Um, so it all turned out good in the end. So she ended up coming home to us at about seven weeks old.
Okay, So
you have a blind cat who is sassy towards. Other, other animals in your experience you don't know about dogs. And then you have a, let's call it behaviorally at risk puppy coming in and the cat cannot read dog body language cuz he's blind and the dog doesn't know about cat body language cuz she's been in a desolate socialization experience.
It sounds like a great situation, right?
I'm like, I'm just gonna lay it all out there. Okay. Those are all the variables. So you being the consummate professional that you were, and you already knew that there might be some issues, you had a plan.
Yes. So I knew Murdoch when he was fostered, had been fostered in a home with a couple dogs. And according to his foster mom, he had been neutral towards the dogs. He had not shown a ton of interest. But you're right that I had, I, I really, I was, I was really scared. I'm gonna be completely honest, I was really scared.
And so I knew going into it, there was a chance that she would not stay our dog long term. And I was prepared for that. And I was prepared that if, you know, this didn't work out... I was hopeful, because again, I grew up in a multi animal household and we had had animals that didn't love each other, but we had always been able to get them to coexist.
Right. And that's really, I don't need them to be best friends. I need them to coexist. So when we brought her home, we have a room downstairs that's like our training room, and so that's where she started off. So she had her crate in there, lots of toys. That was her space. And so for the first week she was home, if she wasn't in that room either taking a nap or I was hanging out in there with her, having fun, playing, doing training, she was either there or the backyard. So similar to Electra and Murdoch, starting them with a closed door. I wanted her to get used to me. I wanted her to get used to being in a new space. Get used to a new routine and allow Murdoch to get used to the fact that I can hear an animal behind this door. Mom smells weird every time she comes out of there. Um, and so we did that. And for the first week he was interested in her door, but he didn't come super close. And so this is where, Um, I think the most important thing when it comes to animal introductions, but especially if there's a cat involved, is to let the animals tell you when they're ready to take that next step, right.
Electra and Murdoch let me know very quickly they were not ready for the gate and we went back to a closed door and we went back to reducing stress, providing lots of enrichment, working on slowly building up. Can you just, you know, explore each other's space, all that stuff we talked about.
Within a week, Murdoch was interested in her door and he was reaching underneath it and he was meowing and padding around and he would hear her playing and he'd come running to the door. And so after about a week, we opened the door and we had a gate there and we allowed Freya to see him. And obviously he can't see her, but there's now just a gate between them and for about a week and a half, two weeks. Um, we just did that. I'd hang out either on Freya's side with her and we'd play, and he would stand on the other side of the gate. He was always, you know, listening. You can see him like tilting his head back and forth.
His ears going. He's lifting his head up and down. Sometimes I, I call it like "owling". It looks like he's moving his head the way owls do because owls... Obviously cats can articulate their ears for hearing, but it kind of looks like he's doing the owl thing, trying to hear by like rotating his head around and bobbing his head.
And Freya was a puppy and she, was a little interested in him, but not that much. She had toys, she had chews, she had humans. That's her big thing. She loves her humans. So, when she was interested in Murdoch, the first thing I did with her training wise, and this was probably the biggest thing I did, is I taught her when she looks at Murdoch, that she can look to me and get a treat so she can disengage.
So anyone who's played like engage-disengage, look at the thing, look back or look away from it. You can get reinforced. Anytime he got into his, what we like to call, uh, hardcore parkour time, which is a couple times a day. He will just like start zooming around and bouncing off of his little cat trees and stuff.
Uh, we did a lot of engage, disengaged with that. Um, so if he starts getting all exciting and zooming around, look at me because I don't want her to chase him. And when he started to be interested in trying to climb the gate and get in with her, and again, this was markedly different than with Electra.
With Electra, he threw himself at the gate immediately and was ready to throw down . He was ready to climb that gate and get into her space immediately. He was a lot slower with Freya taking in more information when he wanted to climb the gate. What I started doing is I would have Freya on leash. I would hold her leash and I would open the gate so he could come in. And at the same time, going through this whole process we also did things like when she was out in the backyard and we were playing, or she was having a potty break, I would leave her room open so he could go in and he could explore it. I remember once I was outside in the backyard and my phone pinged that the puppy cam in her room, there was a motion detection and I knew it must be him.
And I opened up the camera. It was just his face really close to the camera. He must have heard it like the making noises, and he was like right up in front of it. Um, so I let her hem explore her space. He's a very curious cat. Anytime before her and since then, when a new dog comes into the house, he usually goes upstairs for like 30 minutes and then he'll come downstairs and be like, actually, I want more information about you.
I wanna come down and I wanna get closer and get more information. So luckily I think with him moved a lot faster than I would expect with a lot of cats, and especially with my experience with cats growing up. And so then he would come into the room and I would hold her leash. And again, she was young and she's such a sweet pup and she is very motivated to train.
So I would just work on being calm around him if he would start to race around the room, if he started batting around her toys, just reinforcing her for looking away, not wanting to chase him. And then when they started to really show that they were comfortable in the same room and not super interested in each other, I would let her drag the leash.
And this was our life until she was probably about 18 months. There were always gates up, and if they weren't separated by a gate, I would have her drag a leash or she would be tethered. And again, my big concern was I don't want her to chase him because while he has mapped the house really well, and he knows his way around, in a panicked, stressful moment, I don't want him to run, I don't want him to run into something. I don't want him to have the added stress of trying to get away from a dog, chasing him when he can't see. And again, my goal was always just coexistence. They get along really well. I, I, I, like I said, I think we got lucky with Freya that she's really from the get-go was not overly fixated on him.
She wasn't overly interested. Um, also, I mean, just while I would never want to get a puppy at seven weeks old again, she was also young and she was able to integrate that. Oh yeah. Cats. Cats are things in my world as opposed to you might get a dog as an adult who has never lived with cats before.
And that could be a lot more interesting. It could be a lot more fixated. When my brother's dog comes to stay with us, he does not live in a cat household. And so I am much more strict with management with him than I have to be with Freya because he is really interested in Murdoch. He is always watching him and he's like, what is that thing?
What is it doing? He will like, stare at him and if you don't separate them, he would follow Murdoch around the house if you let him. I know he would. But we worked on just coexisting and being uninterested in the cat for Freya.
So. Murdoch being a curious dude, did you have issues of him kind of bothering Freya?
Yes.
Right. Like, I like to think of it, you know, is my dog the asshole or is my cat the asshole? And sometimes it's both, right? Um, but it sounds like in this type of scenario, right, he's not scared of her.
So it's definitely possible that he might be overly solicitous and not be able to see that she is not quite pleased if he's in her space. So like how does that work?
Oh yeah. So, uh, in who's the asshole? Um, I love Murdoch to death. Um, but it's him. He - it is him. Um, and . So, um, absolutely he is the instigator. When he is looking for stimulation, he will often, if Freya is nearby, go to her. And they have certainly played before, but I don't encourage it just because there's such a disadvantage here for him.
And Freya being a very sweet dog who I would never imagine would want to try to hurt him, could easily hurt him. She's 60 pounds, and he's barely 10 pounds. So, what we did when she was a puppy, when he would try to bother her and maybe try to instigate and he would wanna play with her the way he plays with us.
But he plays really rough and I'm not super surprised - he never really had any playmates. No one was ever there to tell him, Hey, this is too much. I don't wanna play with you if you play like this. Right. So what we taught Freya is one of the first things she learned as a puppy was a recall.
And when he started engaging and he would start batting at her and maybe play biting her again, nothing, nothing traumatic. He wasn't injuring her, but it's a little much. We would call her away and reinforce her. And we taught her to walk away from him when he was like that. And if he was really in a feisty mood, we would separate them. And eventually Freya learned to walk away on her own just because we would always reinforce it. He starts to get feisty. He starts, like kind of chasing her down and batting at her. We call her away, and usually when she was that age, I would have her go into her crate or go on the other side of the gate and enjoy like a Kong or something.
Mm.
And so to this day, that is her default. If he starts to get feisty with her, as we say, um, or feral, we usually call it feral, that she will walk away, but he is, he is the, the one who will instigate. And so it does require it, especially at the beginning, it required a lot of management.
So I'm interested because if you had her walk away that he would accept that or would he follow her?
He would accept it. Murdoch has, I, I feel like he's such an interesting case study, but obviously case studies are a study of one, right? So you take it with a grain of salt, the behavior you see. But I think he's an interesting case study, because he was blind since birth. Growing up with cats, I and anybody else who has cats probably knows what I'm talking about.
You know, when they come to you and you're like playing or you're petting them or you're interacting and they're, they, they seem happy. And then after a few minutes, five minutes or so, whatever the timeframe is, they're done with it and they're either bite you and walk away sometimes, or they just get up and run away.
They're like, okay, that's enough. I'm done. Murdoch's default when he gets over stimulated, is not to move away. So he, if he is sitting in your lap and you're petting him and he starts to get overstimulated, though he doesn't tend to, he's a very cuddly cat. So usually that's not, it's usually play that he gets the most overstimulated.
But when he gets overstimulated, his default is to just, for lack of a better word, redirect on the thing closest to him, uh, and hope that it goes away. Um, I can't know for certain the motivations of his behavior, but he tends to redirect on the closest living thing until it moves away.
And then once you move away from him, he gives up. And I don't know if it's just because of his lack of vision or if he just disengages really easily. But he's always been that way with us. If he gets overstimulated, when you walk away, he doesn't pursue you. And so he never did when Freya was a puppy.
If he had, it would've been a whole different story. That would've required a lot more management.
Yeah. It's very common, right? It's like I'm not taking no for an answer.
Yeah.
And the cat's being more able to get places than the dog. It's hard to find a place for the dog that's a safe space that's away from the cat.
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. It's much easier to have places where the cat can get away, right? Murdoch even being blind, can jump over a gate, like takes him a little bit longer than it would a sight cat most likely. But he can jump over a gate. He can climb a cat tree. He loves climbing. Oh my, there's, there is now not a single vertical surface in this house he has not found. For a long time there were like two places in the house he hadn't figured out existed yet. One was the mantle above the fireplace and one was, there's a bookshelf over on this side of me. But he has since learned both of those exist. So you're right that with cats it's easier for them to move away.
Uh, Murdoch has never been one to pursue, again, other than Electra, who he was hell bent on getting into her room and starting crap. Um, if she walks away, he disengages.
Lovely. I love when it works out that way.
Yes. I think that there's a lot of things worked out well in this situation, which is nice. There were things that did have to be managed, of course.
Yeah. So she was 18 months and you kind of said, okay, you know, we're coming towards the end of our adolescence. I can trust them a little bit more. I know what you know, how to redirect and all of that stuff. So how did you make the choice to just say, you know what the leash is no longer in our lives?
That I always get that question of like, how do we know to like to take the next step?
Yeah. I knew I was ready to take the next step when I no longer needed that management. Like when I was no longer having to use the leash to guide her away or use the gate to separate them right. Over time, they really did truly learn to coexist. They mostly just both live their own lives, and they occasionally have social interactions. And as I found that I wasn't in need of the gate, I wasn't in need of the tether, that's when I started removing them and observing them. Did something change? If it had, I would've gone back. If I needed that management again, I would go back. But I think that's the biggest thing. And you're right, it's like everyone asks that question, when can I go the next step?
And the best advice I can give people is when your animals show you that they're ready. The whole process of integrating them was when they showed me that they were ready for that next step. So when Murdoch was no longer scared, suspicious of the noises on the other side of that closed door when we first brought her home, then we opened it up and had a gate.
And when she wasn't interested in him and he was like, actually I'm feeling kind of interested in maybe getting more information from her. And he started for me, it was very clear he tried to climb the gate to get in . Um, then the only thing separating them was me holding a leash. And then when they were starting to show that they were calm, cool, collected around each other, I dropped the leash and Freya could just drag it.
And then when I felt that the dragged leash was not needing to be used at all, I took that off. And then again, slowly removing those management, tools as I found them basically obsolete.
Yeah. So I think that's really a nice way to think about it is like if you have a gate that's separating animals and they are constantly at the gate like very clearly wanting to go through it, um, in some way for whatever reason, right? Then that gate is serving a very deliberate function. So if that gate was not there, then you would see very different behavior.
Then you would have to keep that gate.
Yeah, I have videos when Freya was a puppy of them on either sides of the gate together, and he was rolling back and forth on his back, not just on his back stiff - if a cat is on their back showing their belly stiff, that is not an invitation, nor is it for a dog, frankly. Um, but he was rolling back and forth and he was nice and loose and his tail was nice and loose, right?
Not lagging, not thumping, not flicking. And he was reaching through the barrier to try to get to her. And like that was very nice and that was a really great interaction. Thus why I filmed it. It was super cute, but there was a lot of that happening. There was still a lot of novelty for both of them. And I didn't wanna remove that barrier, like you said, until there was actually very little interest in each other.
Like, that barrier, if they're having those first social interactions, even if it's positive, that doesn't mean I just immediately removed the gate. The gate is there for a reason and I'm glad that they're having a positive experience through it. But just because that first interaction is positive doesn't mean we just pull the gate away and we're like, well, I hope it works out.
I, I always tell people I want numbers. Just because I had one or two social encounters through that gate that were good does not give me the confidence to remove the gate. Let's wait till we get some more data points that showing us that there are positive social interactions happening. And yeah, definitely the novelty, if they're fixated on each other, that's not necessarily positive.
Right. It's any kind of magnetization towards whatever the barrier is, whether it's positively valenced or negatively valenced it's like you, you want it to be a negligible force, as much as possible for a barrier to be.
So, first of all, those videos that you just mentioned, like, I would like to get them and put them in the show notes, um, so people can kind of see what the behaviors are that you're talking about.
Cause I think that's where a lot of the nuance comes in that is difficult to describe on a podcast. Good job, Naomi, for having a totally audio podcast that's based on animal behavior that you need to see. But like when we say the animals will tell us when they're ready. It's always really difficult to kind of quantify what that looks like for any individual pair of animals.
Cause like it could look super like they're both ignoring each other, or it could look like one is genuinely a little bit interested and the other is interested for other reasons, right? Like there's no like hard and fast rules of if you see this, you're ready to move on. Do you have any thoughts on like general guidelines besides for like, they're not sitting at the gate staring at each other, right? what kinds of body language we're looking at. I mean, I know I have my ideas and we can talk about that, but, do you have rules of thumb for your clients who are doing integrations?
Yeah. So I love that you point out that it does matter on the individual, and I think Murdoch's a great example of that because his body language and just his behavior in general is a little bit different than my experience with my other cats. But also before him, all of my cats were sighted and even they were different from each other.
Um, so the two things I tell people is, number one, observe your pets more. And what I mean by this is like basically become the ethologist of your household. I want you to observe your cat when they're calm and happy and comfortable. What does their body language look like? What are their vocalizations sound like?
Right? Um, same thing with your dog. Notice what their body looks like when they're nice and calm and comfortable. And usually at home, in the house is the easiest. But then also notice what they look like in a novel environment. Notice what they look like maybe when they're stressed, that obviously we don't wanna put them in a stressful position. But one place you can observe this, that for the vast majority of pets is stressful. What does your pet look like at the vet?
That's usually a pretty good indication of, at minimum what they look like when, you know, their arousal level's higher. Because most people, when we say stress, they, they think like negative emotional valence. Um, technically when we're talking about stress in animals, it's just like we are typically usually referring to physiological arousal.
Mm.
But yeah, start to learn what looks normal for your pet when they're relaxed versus maybe when they're a little bit stressed. And what I wanna see is that those two animals that you're trying to integrate are showing that they are relaxed, right?
And for cats and dogs, both of them, a good rule of thumb is a loose body if either of them is stiff and frozen. If their body is stiff, usually that's a sign that we need to take a step back because that is usually a sign that we're becoming stressed. But then there's also little nuances, between dogs and cats. We talked a little bit about the tail stuff. Um, With dogs, you'll see yawning. That's a displacement behavior. You might see them lip lick a lot. These are both two behaviors that are not abnormal, but out of context they can be an indicator of stress. And then I will say that for the most part, as we already talked about, I wanna see that we are not fixated and overly interested, and the biggest part of that is how easily they just disengage from each other. And I think that was really the last like puzzle piece for me feeling confident that this household was gonna work with these two is that they could easily disengage from each other. Um, I have this adorable video, um, that I can send you, but I think it's also up on my TikTok. When Freya was a puppy, she was still pretty young and she was hanging out next to me. I had her on leash. And she was chewing on a bully stick, and he was just wandering around the room and checking stuff out. And at one point he kind of hops over to her. Um, so again, nice loose body language.
He's a little hoppy and he like goes to bat her with his paw and she like, looks up. Obviously he can't see that, but right after he bats her paw, he just bounces away and it almost looks like he's like, let's play. Eh, nevermind. I'm bored. Like he bounces away and just gets distracted. And she looked up from her bully stick and was like, huh.
And then went back to it. Neither of them were overly interested. Neither of them did their arousal level spike and they got really intense. They both disengaged really easily even though Murdoch had instigated that social interaction. And that's what I wanna see. Can you call your dog away from your cat? Can your cat walk away from your dog? Can, can they disengage? I think that's a big one to look for.
Yeah, a big part of the programs that I do is actively reinforcing disengagement. So like, this is a skill that you can teach your animals. Like if they're fixated at the beginning, that doesn't mean, oh God, everything is terrible and it's not gonna work. Teaching basically that the other animal is irrelevant and or that disengagement is much more reinforcing than staring, is how you make progress towards coexistence. Even if you do nothing, the theory is the animals will habituate to each other and will become less exciting and therefore will be able to disengage easier, but you can help that process along
um, by actively reinforcing the disengagement, like you mentioned that you did with Freya at the beginning, like as a puppy, if she looked at him and she looked away, good job! Mark, treat, right? So, that's a huge part of the setups that I do when I get dogs that are like, literally, you could wave a hand in front of their face and they're like, Nope.
Yeah. You put the treat in front of their face and they just tilt their
right.
around your hand.
Right? I mean, that can be really scary for people. And it's a little bit like it's a red flag, right? But it doesn't mean that you cannot work past it. You'll be working on this for longer than if the dog very very easily was like, oh look, I'm just gonna like casually glance for a few seconds and then walk away. But like we were talking about rules of thumb. I, I agree with all of yours, and I think that the question for me is, as I've been doing this for a while, trying to figure out like how much can I codify what I mean by disengagement and easy disengagement. So like what you were saying is so beautiful about noticing which of your animals' particular indications that they are relaxed and like something is not a big deal.
And some animals are extra scary and three seconds of staring is absolutely nothing for them. They just happen to look at things for longer. Right? With any animal, when you're doing a training session with them, each repetition, is gonna be longer or shorter. You've got some really, really quick animals, you've got some slower, let's think animals, right? So same thing with how long it takes for them to disengage. You wanna kind of know the baseline for that particular animal. But I've kind of found that two to three. Mississippis
Yeah.
like it, you know, coupled with the stiff or loose body language, is a pretty good indicator of they're overly fixated and we need to help them versus waiting to see if they'll disengage on their own and then reinforcing that appropriately.
So, I'm just thinking of an example. Um, I have a cat client right now who likes to just sit and does the curl thing where all four paws are like basically within one inch square of each other. And then the tail is around, and he'll just stare. But like he's perfectly.
Happy to do that. Right? Like, he's, he's, he's relatively relaxed, right? It's, it's freaky for the dog. The dog is not relaxed, but the cat is like, I live in this one square inch for a while. And so for him, like three seconds of looking if he's in that position, that's not a rule of thumb I can use for him, right? But for another cat who doesn't do that normally, stopping their body for three seconds and staring, that would be an immediate, we need to redirect this. Those are two, those are the two ends of the spectrum in general. I say, okay, if you count one Mississippi, two Mississippi, and they are not looking like they're gonna flick an ear and move their head, you're gonna call them away and then reinforce the disengagement. Five repetitions of looking and they get stuck with three or four of them you need to take a step back.
I think that's a great explanation because like you said, it can depend on the animal. If your cat stares at your dog for 10 seconds, what usually happens after that? If the answer is something you don't want, like, if it's not great, then let's make sure that if we see our cat staring for that long, that we know that we need to interrupt. We have to change the antecedents, change the environment, right? We need to help to make sure that we are setting them up for success. So you know that that's a red flag. But if your cat just stares at your dog all the time and just kind of watches them and nothing problematic happens, then it's not a red flag for your cat.
Um, it's actually a great example is Murdoch. If he walks up to Freya and starts sniffing her for more than two seconds, two or three seconds, I need to interrupt that because it means he's gonna start trying to bite her and instigate something. But that's not necessarily a red flag. Cats and, and dogs too.
If your dog sniffs another dog for more than a couple seconds, that's not necessarily a red flag for all animals. Cats and dogs have really strong sen senses of smell, especially dogs. It's their primary sense. It's where they get a lot of information. But I know from past experience that if he is sniffing her for more than like two or three seconds, it means he's probably gonna start stuff,
so, um, one thing that's essential when you're starting these kinds of interactions, like actually having your animals have some kind of contact with each other, even through barriers, is like noticing when I like to call 'em, like noticing the big behaviors, like the ones you really don't wanna be seeing, and they can go all the way up to like hissing, spitting, smacking, chasing, all of that stuff.
But even like the awkward thing, like in your gut, you feel like this could go either way, right? Like noticing what's happening right before that and seeing if there's a pattern so that like you can identify, okay, like, yes, there are some universal things we need to interrupt, but also like this particular thing triggers this animal.
So we need to either, we need to both manage that and also work on it to make it so that it's less of a trigger. Um, I have a client right now who's, Dog and cat, they're totally fine with each other, honestly. Like they play and hang out with each other. But for some reason, when he is resting, the dog is resting and she walks, she, the cat walks by him like calmly and confidently, nothing happens.
But if she stops and like, looks for more than two seconds and like assesses whether she's gonna walk in the room or not, he's like, Nope, not today, Satan. And he like, chase apart, like outta a dead sleep. And like, I don't know how he knows whether she's looking at him or not. Like I, I'm, we're still trying to figure out, honestly, like this is one of those cases where I'm like, Hmm, let's let, this is a mystery.
Let's try to figure it out. Um, but he knows, he knows that she's staring at him. And so, That's a trigger for him. So now we're like, okay, well if we see the cat come in the room and she stops, we're gonna call her immediately.
Yeah.
Not because for any other cat dog combination like that is obviously a red flag that needs to be interrupted.
It's just like we happen to know from, like you were saying, from experience with them, that that's a trigger and we need to work on that. Um, so yes, I guess the moral of the story is there are rules of thumb and yet,
um, like you said before, we need more data. Um,
be an observer of your animals. You always need data.
Write things down. Um, Blah, blah, blah. All the things that, like we just say as trainers in general, like, and that everyone hates doing by the way,
like trainers included, right? Like, we keep saying like, let's take data, look at all this stuff. Like, it's hard, it's hard to do that, like, in life, um, often. So like one of the things that I try to do is like, try to make the, the data taking as easy as possible, non-obtrusive, but like, you know, it's hard to remember these details.
Um, but they're so important. It's so
Yeah, it really is. I think it's the most important part of owning a pet is obviously like, it's, the thing that I talk to all my clients about is it's like one of the first things I talk about, regardless of what we're working on, whether it be a serious behavior issue like reactivity or aggression, or if they're just coming to me for like puppy trading.
Uh, one of the first things I talk about is observing your animal and starting to get to know them because, um, dogs are different than us. Cats are different than us. There are certainly some similarities between us. We're both sentient beings. We do share some similar experiences in life, but, um, especially a lot of, uh, ways they communicate and a lot of social thing, social behaviors, um, are different.
And the best way to learn is to observe your pet and to really observe thoughtfully, um, because we tend to just assume, we tend to just, um, We anthropomorphize, we, we look at our animal's behavior through a human lens, um, and we interpret it with a human lens. Um, and so I just tell people, observe, and like you said, like just like even just write a few things down and just be objective.
What did the behavior look like? What did it sound like? I think that a, as a traitor, I bet that's one of the things you say all the time. So tell me what it looked like, because people are always like, well, so like my cat got mad and then tried to like attack my dog and then my dog was getting really angry back.
And you're like, well, so why don't you describe what that looks like to me? And I find that that's the easiest way to get objective is like paint a picture. Um, and the more you paint picture. , the more you might start to notice similarities and patterns, like you said, between certain situations that the picture always kinda looks the same.
And then you learn if Murdoch is sniffing Frey's leg for more than three seconds to call frail away, cuz he's about to bite.
Right. Right. I wanna go back to what you said in terms of what it means to be an observer of your animals, like to be the ethologist. Um, let's define that for people who don't know what
Yes. So an ethologist is someone who studies animal behavior, but very specifically ethology is really interdisciplinary. So we are looking for behavior not only from, uh, the lens of what a lot of people, I think, especially when it comes to dog training, people think of learning theory, right? Positive reinforcement, we always hear that word. That's part of operant conditioning and the theory of how animals, not only dogs, but humans learn. But we're also looking at it from an evolutionary perspective. And we're also looking from their perspective of genetics and development. And so ethology is the study of animal behavior and more of a, a modern take cuz there was a time when animal behavior, there were kind of like two schools of, of thought that either we had to look at behavior in a controlled environmental setting. And that's where like a lot of applied behavior analysis comes from.
So things like operant conditioning would people think of Skinner and a Skinner box and species like rats in a lab. And then there was a school of thought of looking at behavior in a natural setting, in observing animals in the wild. And let's put quotes around that when we talk about dogs, what is the wild natural environment for domestic dogs? So that's what ethologists do is they look at animal behavior from all those lenses. But we do use a lot of observation. Um, a lot of the research that we do on animal behavior is observing. We sometimes measure things, but even when we do measure things, we are sometimes measuring the occurrence of specific behaviors.
Yeah. So let's get nerdy a little bit. So we're talking, we're talking ethology behavior of the study of behavior. Ethograms, this is one of my favorite things in the world, which is literally a list of the possible behaviors that an animal's gonna do. And you basically like tally, how many times you see it happen and when and where.
Um, so fun.
But there are, uh, there are some ethograms existing out there that cover, you know, common dog behaviors, common cat behaviors. If I remember correctly, there in the last like 10 years, I think someone created an ethogram for cat social behavior or cat play specifically. It's basically a description of different behaviors and again, what they looked like, sound like, um, and. . Yeah. If you, in a lot of time in the research, what we do is we either live, observe an animal, or sometimes we're using video and you sit there with your little clipboard and you just tally every time it happens.
And there's different ways of measuring that. Sometimes you do it by per time interval. Sometimes you do it, I can't remember the, I'm so bad with, with terms, but you can either do continuous where you just watch and you mark every occurrence in the time it happens.
Or you can do like bouts of like every 30 seconds, I'm gonna record what the animal's doing right now. Right. Um, and so yeah, you just basically check off when it's happening, how often it's happening, what the dog is doing every 30 seconds or whatever your time interval is. And people, if pet, pet owners don't have to get that crazy.
But if there are, again, certain behaviors that you are interested and important for you to learn more about. Say if my dog is reactive and they engage in lunging and barking on the leash, I might start to keep track of when that happens. And I might also, again, look if there are other variables I'm interested in seeing if there's a pattern with, I might also record when those occurrences happen, what else is happening in the environment?
What happens right before,
Yeah. I think. The value for clients, I think is because they don't know what they're looking for necessarily. Having a general list of all behaviors or many behaviors. And then we as consultants can like circle, like these are the ones we're looking for cuz we know what we want them to be looking for, but they don't.
Right? Like, okay, we see the big behaviors of barky lunge, what was happening right before? They don't know whether it's like, oh well I was tying my shoe, or we are looking for did they stiffen right? Did they, what were they looking at? All of that information.
But that's a shorthand for us that it's not a very clear for a non behaviorally oriented human to know what they're looking for. So I think that there might be something here... here's the universe of behaviors that we're looking, that we're looking at, and here's what they look like.
Um,
Yeah. I mean, I always tell owners that if this was easy, intuitive, I'd be out of a job like it. The reason that this is hard for pet owners is that it, it's not easy and it's not intuitive, and it's not knowledge that we are born having. And even as someone who grew up with a variety of animals, including dogs, including cats, when I decided to professionally study animal behavior and to start working with animals, I learned a lot more.
And I learned a lot of things that I thought I knew before were wrong. So you're right that it's not intuitive for owners. That's why pet professionals exist. And you're right, may, I don't know, maybe after this podcast we'll have to talk about a project about, uh, Dog and Cat Ethogram for Pet Owners.
That would be
great.
that's a resource that needs to
Right? Tm.
we should get on it.
copyright it all right now. No, don't take our,
don't take our idea.
it? Email if you're interested in
Yeah. I'm always all about trying to do things a little bit differently. Making something a little bit easier for the client because it is such a big thing. Like they don't necessarily wanna become dog trainers, um,
Yeah.
um, right.
right. And a lot of us, okay, a lot of us have that origin story, right, of like, our dog was hard and we went to a trainer and we were like, oh, interesting.
Let's let's do that forever. Um, I like teaching humans, which is, not all dog trainers love teaching humans, which is a whole nother podcast, but I'm always being like, how can I tweak my program to be easier for them?
Because I do this for a living and I don't wanna train all the time. I don't have time. Like how do I do, like, you know, so just to make it as user friendly as possible. Um, using the tenants of behavioral science in a way that is accessible, blur, blur, insert lots of jargon.
Anyway, is there anything else that you want to make sure that this is gonna, this is such a valuable episode. I know everyone's gonna love it. Is there anything that you wanna have everyone keep in mind?
I think we talked about really a lot of it. I think the only thing we didn't touch on, um, that I think can be really important with multi-species households is, uh, resource management. I think that one thing specifically, especially when we're working with integrating cats and dogs. Make sure that both of your animals always have access to the resources they need and that they're not gonna block each other from it.
Right? So like when Freya was, you know, when we would put up Gates in the house to separate her and Murdoch, I made sure that she was never between him and a resource he needed and vice versa, right? But I think the biggest thing we, the biggest things we already touched on, and I think the point that I just drive home is like, go at your animal's pace.
Like, look at the animals in your house and go at their speed. I, I've been there, I wanted Murdoch and Electra to be able to integrate so badly, but I knew that going too fast was not gonna help. Like that first interaction through the gate I knew, I was like, oh, this is, we're gonna be, have to go a lot slower and also know that sometimes it won't work. If you're having trouble, get a professional in there to help you. But just let your animals guide the process. That's the big one. Like you said, everyone wants to know when when, when, and the answer is your animals will let you know. They will let you know when they're ready.
They'll let you know when you can take the next step. And don't do it before then. Don't push. We humans are so impatient, and especially with cats, the process is way slower than we typically want to wait.
Yeah. The animals will tell you when they're ready to move on or if they're ready to move on.
Yes. Yes. And again, I'm not a cat professional, but my part of my master's program does include cat behavior. There's a strong focus on dogs, but we do talk about cats and so, you know, I I I hope maybe it helps people to hear that like it didn't work for us. It, we tried and we gave it a good old college try.
It was over a year of trying to, to integrate them and it was really sad when it didn't work out. But that's okay. Like you said, they let us know it wasn't gonna happen. That's okay. And also, let's just briefly say that there are instances where rehoming might not be necessary, that your dogs, your, I shouldn say just dogs, but your pets can live separated in the home.
We just had two cats that were not gonna be happy living in a divided home, because there's only two humans in this house. And they both wanted both of us all the
Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point. Like crate and rotate, crate and rotate is
it has this like negative connotation. Oh we are, we're gonna have to and rotate forever and often it is very stressful and yet there are some households the way the house is set up, the way the animals enjoy their resources. If the cat loves spending time with you, like primarily at night sleeping and snuggling and the dog is happy in a crate downstairs, like, great, it could work.
And it could be relatively low stress and um, be totally fine, but that's a case by case basis. There's so many variables to think about and. , if you have any questions, you know where to call us. That's a great segue to Sammy, if people want to talk to you, or work with you or just pick your brain or whatever, what's the best way for them to contact you?
Yeah, so, one of the first places to start would be my website, which is sammyhyde.com. Sammy is s a m m y and Hyde is h y d e. From there, you can also go to my Instagram. I'm very active there. I do a lot of training and behavior content over there. It's Sammy j Hyde. Sammy Hyde was taken. If you would like to work with me, I work in the Boston area in Massachusetts.
I work through a company called the Pet Republic. And so if you go to powertothepet.com, you can find a lot of information there about dog training classes, but we also do private consultations. And so you can always go there to book something if you are looking for some one-on-one training advice.
Thank you so much, Sammy. This is wonderful and I know everyone is gonna love, love this episode and I am so excited for everyone to hear it. đź“Ť
I freaking loved talking with Sammy and I'm really impressed that she was able to avoid making the almost universal mistake that we humans make with our animals when we so desperately want them to be okay together. She didn't rush even when she was seeing consistent prosocial behavior, which is always so exciting. So if you want to learn more about Sammy head over to the episode, show notes linked in the episode description.
And my wonderful listeners, please help spread the word about the podcast and leave a five star review on apple podcasts or wherever you're listening right now. Or tap the share button in your podcast app to send this episode or any others to the other cat and dog people in your life. And also you can post about the episode on your social media.
Just tag me at praiseworthy pets so I can thank you. And that is all for this episode. You wonderful cat and dog people meet me back here in two weeks for more it's training, cats and dogs.
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