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Today on Something You Should Know, the interesting legal story of the song Happy Birthday to You.
Then we explore the science of happiness.
Happiness, it seems, has three ingredients.
It's enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning.
We want to have a sense of enjoyment about our lives.
We want to take satisfaction in our activities and accomplishments.
And we want to know the why of our existence.
That's the journey and an adventure of a lifetime.
Also, why do people crack their knuckles?
And is it harmful to do it? and a leading expert with some advice for every dog owner.
If every single person in the world learnt that if their dog turns their head away from them or gets up and walks away that you do not follow, we would dramatically reduce our dog bite incidents across the world.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Something you should know.
Fascinating intel.
The world's top experts.
And practical advice you can use in your life.
Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
You know, for being such a simple song, Happy Birthday to You sure has a complicated story.
Hi and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know.
Happy Birthday to You was originally composed in 1893 as Good Morning to All by Patti Smith Hill, a kindergarten teacher and principal in Louisville Kentucky, and her older sister Mildred.
She was a pianist and composer.
After the song cropped up in the 1931 Broadway musical The Bandwagon, the family took legal action.
In 1934 and 35, a publishing company published and copyrighted all six versions of Happy Birthday to You, crediting Mildred and Patty as the authors.
And since then, the song has been through many legal battles over who owns it.
At one point, the song ended up being owned by the Warner Music Group and was taking in about 2 million a year in royalties.
Just as an example, while directing the movie Hoop Dreams in 1994, filmmaker Steve James shelled out 5000 to use that song in his movie.
For many years.
The reason restaurants often sang something other than happy birthday to you is because it would constitute a public performance and the restaurant would be subject to paying royalties for doing that.
However, as of 2015, following a judge's ruling, Happy Birthday to You is now in the public domain.
Anyone can use it.
Anyone can sing it for free.
And that is something you should know.
If you had to name a topic that comes up a lot in podcasts or books or anywhere.
Really, it's happiness.
People seem to be in pursuit of their own personal happiness in a big way.
We've certainly discussed it before on this podcast with some of the leading names in happiness.
And today we're going to take a look at the topic through a different lens.
It's the lens of Arthur Brooks.
Arthur is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.
He's a columnist at The Atlantic and one of the top experts on the science of happiness.
He's author of a book called The Happiness Files, Insights on Work and Life.
Hey Arthur, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Hi Mike, great to be with you.
People wouldn't need all this help.
So why are people struggling with happiness?
Well, it's funny.
They struggle with it because it's what they want and it's what they can't get naturally in their ordinary life.
It's a weird thing that the thing that people most want seems to be the most inaccessible thing.
You'd think it'd be something, a problem we would have solved, and are now selling on the Internet or providing by the government.
And yet it still seems to be this the biggest, most elusive mystery in life.
And I wonder though, if if people understand what it is, because maybe what they're seeking isn't really happiness, or maybe what they think is happiness is really something more like pleasure and not happiness.
Like, what is it to you?
Yeah well, the truth is, you're exactly right that the reason it's such a frustrating journey for so many people is because they truly don't understand happiness.
When I ask most people, including my students at Harvard What is it that you think you're here in class to study?
I do this on the first day of class, obviously.
They always talk about.
Well, you know, I can't quite define it, but I know when I feel it, or it's how I feel when I'm with the people that I love, or something like that.
And I say, beautiful, beautiful, poetic, wrong.
Happiness isn't a feeling.
It isn't.
Feelings are evidence of happiness, kind of like the smell of your turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner.
If you're looking for the feeling of happiness, you're just going to be going through the rest of your life hoping for the best, and that's what most people are actually doing.
There's several mistakes that they make about happiness, but that's the fundamental one.
That's actually where it starts.
So i i go to the sort of the drawing board at the very beginning of my classes and my lectures to say okay, if it's not a feeling, what is it?
And the answer is well, kind of like you define your Thanksgiving turkey, your dinner, which is not the smell of the turkey, but a combination of macronutrients protein, carbohydrates and fat.
And happiness works the same way.
It's a very tangible combination of three things in people's lives.
It's enjoyment. and satisfaction and meaning.
These are the three elements of it.
We want to have a sense of enjoyment about our lives.
We want to take satisfaction in our activities and accomplishments.
And we want to know the why of our existence, the meaning of our lives.
And each one of those things is a different pursuit.
It takes different skills and we're in different places.
And that's the journey and an adventure of lifetime.
Is it a rock-solid thing in the sense that can you be happy and still be going through difficulties, through grief, through trouble, and still be happy, or must you resolve that to get back to happiness?
That's a great question because that's the second big mistake that people make.
They think that they have to eradicate the negative parts of their lives to actually be happy.
And the mistake that they're making is thinking that happiness and unhappiness are opposites and mutually exclusive.
Kind of like light and dark can't coexist.
If there's dark in the room, it means it's not light.
And they think that if there's unhappiness in my life, it means there's no happiness.
And that's exactly wrong.
One of the ways that I teach this is by, I teach a lot of neuroscience in my class.
And one of the things that we know is that emotions associated with happiness and unhappiness are produced literally in different parts of the brain, because all emotions are an alert system that there's something around you that either should be avoided or should be approached.
It's either a threat or an opportunity.
Negative emotions that make you feel unhappy sadness anger disgust, fear.
These are things that say there's a threat and joy and interest.
And these positive emotions they say there's an opportunity.
You should go get it, is what they say.
And the result of it is that you need both.
Both are really, really important.
Unhappy feelings and happy feelings are both extremely critical for leading a good life, and they coexist.
But here's where it gets complicated, Mike.
It turns out that for you to get to be excellent at happiness, to get happier over the course of your life, you need to get extremely comfortable with unhappiness.
For enjoyment, for example.
You have to pass on a lot of pleasures to actually be governing your own sense of enjoyment.
For satisfaction, you need to defer your gratifications, delay feeling good right now.
And for meaning.
Of course you need to pass through all kinds of negative experiences so you can know the meaning of your life.
And here's the weird thing that people come to understand once they really, really get good at happiness.
It encompasses, it covers, it requires a whole lot of suffering.
For you to get happier, you have to learn how to be unhappy along the way.
Is that kind of like you have to be hungry to enjoy a good meal kind of thing?
That's like a lot of things in life and that's a good analogy to be sure.
You won't enjoy your dinner unless you're hungry, and that's one of the ways that we actually teach one of these lessons specifically about satisfaction to our kids.
You know, when you're a parent, which most of the people listening to us are or will be at some point.
And let's say that you're.
You know, you pick your kid up from Little League practice and you're driving home at 430 in the afternoon.
You drive by the Dairy Queen and the kid starts whining i want an ice cream.
We won the game, let's get an ice cream.
And you say no.
And they say why?
Because they're smart.
And you say because you're going to spoil your dinner.
So they say so what?
And then you lie.
At this point you lie to your kid.
You say that's not good for you to spoil your dinner that way.
That might be true.
That's not the main reason.
What you want is for them to enjoy their dinner, And the only way they're going to enjoy the dinner is they get to dinner hungry.
And they're in, you're not just worried about their satisfaction or their enjoyment.
You want them to learn a life lesson that when they delay their gratifications and they suffer a little bit, life is sweeter along the way.
You're teaching them to suffer so that life will be better, and that's just one of the great secrets to life.
You don't have to go out in search of suffering by the way it will find you.
The question is, what do you do when it does find you?
Do you bear up under it, do you learn from it, do you grow from it, or you just try to eliminate it and run away from it?
That's the wrong strategy and it leads to a whole lot of misery.
Is happiness, though?
Is happiness the result of something, or is happiness in and of itself a worthy goal?
Or is these other three things that you must do, and then, when you do them well, when you achieve that, happiness just knocks at the front door.
Well, it's a good question, because you do need to decompose happiness and have as a strategy things in your life that will bring you greater enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning.
That's how you can understand what your objectives actually are.
To say today, I'm going to go pursue happiness.
That's just too big.
That's just too diffuse as a matter of fact.
But, on the other hand, if you say i'm going to manage my pleasure, so they don't manage me, that's a question of enjoyment.
I'm going to defer my gratifications and set my sights on bigger things that i'm going to find satisfying, and i'm going to go in search of the meaning of life today, and there's a whole bunch of ways to do that.
That's what i write about a lot.
Then happiness will find you because you've decomposed it into its component parts and pursued the right things.
I don't, it seems too lofty for me.
No, I understand.
So let's take the hardest one of all, which is the meaning of life.
And I have a lot of data.
We've all seen, whether we have data or not, that has been an explosion of mood disorders, especially among adults under 35, and mood disorders means depression and anxiety.
So sadness and and and unfocused fear have really gone through the roof.
Multiples at, you know, two or three times the level of what it was by about 2005.
And everybody's asking why what's going on?
What's going on?
And people say it's because of too much social media, because tech is eating our brains, or because parents don't raise their kids right, or because the kids are a bunch of delicate flowers or something.
No, no, no, no, no.
These are not the explanations.
The explanation is that it's gotten harder and harder to find the meaning of life.
I have done a lot of research on this particular topic and it turns out you don't just say go find the meaning of life.
You're right, Mike.
You're like, I'm just going to have breakfast.
I got it.
It turns out that people used to do certain things that gave them a big sense of life's meaning that they're not doing anymore.
It's really important.
And by the way, the way that you do this research is super interesting.
So the depression and anxiety explosions?
We call that a psychogenic epidemic, which is a source of huge, huge misery.
That's not biological in origin.
That's a psychogenic epidemic.
And when you see any kind of epidemic biological or psychological the first thing you look at is people who are not suffering from it and see how they're different.
Well, when we're talking about this explosion, what you find is that there's a minority of young adults that are almost seemingly immune from these mood disorders.
And the reason is because they're doing literally six things that bring them a sense of meaning every day.
These are the people who are more likely to have deep friendships, with whom they have very profound philosophical conversations, which most people don't do anymore because they're distracted by devices.
These are people who are more likely to actually be falling in love and taking risks for falling in love and not using dating apps.
These are people who are more likely to say that they're searching for their calling in their work, not just a paycheck.
These are people who tend to be more religious or at least more philosophical than other people.
They're looking for something transcendent.
These are people who have a lot of beauty in their lives moral beauty, natural beauty, artistic beauty, which is largely bereft of many people's lives when they're working indoors all day long.
And last but not least, these are the people who are not afraid to suffer.
They don't believe in the therapy industrial complex that tells young people today that suffering means that something's wrong with you.
That if you're sad, it means you're broken.
We need to eliminate your suffering.
They say, no, man, that's part of being fully alive.
So young people that are immune from this problem, they do those six things.
We're exploring the science of happiness with Arthur C Brooks, who is a Harvard professor and author of the book The Happiness Files.
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So Arthur, it seems to me that satisfaction and enjoyment are very episodic, that I can feel a sense of satisfaction today.
Tomorrow it could be all gone because something happened and I'm not feeling satisfied at all.
So it isn't like my life is satisfying today.
My days might be, or my episodes might be, but i don't think of myself as a satisfied individual.
It depends on.
It goes from person to person, even from culture to culture.
As a matter of fact, you know the all of those worldwide happiness surveys that they look at the happiest countries.
They're basically nonsense, by the way, because people answer the happiness questions in different ways, and case in point is that when they go to the nordic countries that always score on top of these happiness indices, the reason that they say yeah, i'm really happy is because they they believe that they're very contented, that they have a strong sense of ongoing satisfaction.
Now the reason Mike, that you don't feel that way it feels more episodic to you is because well, I'm just going to guess that your grandparents or great grandparents were immigrants.
That makes sense.
Scotland.
There you go.
Of course, I should have known that.
They came here because they were not contented people and they have discontented kids and discontented grandkids, which makes you really successful.
Like you know, you could have done something conventional but, like now, i think i'm going to start a really popular podcast.
That's an odd thing to do contented people don't do weird stuff like that.
So the truth of the matter is that we're all different with respect to how easy it is to maintain a sense of the satisfaction.
One point however, that's worth pointing out for everybody whether you're a person with a burr under his saddle or you're somebody who just like who really likes that comfy couch and that is that that satisfaction is more enduring and more efficiently attained, not when we do what people typically do, which is i'll be satisfied when i have more, And if I have more and more and more, sooner or later I'm going to have enough, because that's wrong when it comes to money and power and pleasure and fame, particularly.
The answer is when you can learn how to want less, then satisfaction can be yours.
More, no matter who you are.
Real satisfaction is all the things that you have divided by all the things that you want.
Haves divided by wants.
The secret to more enduring satisfaction for all people is managing the denominator by wanting less as opposed to having more.
Even people who are happy, don't they fall below the line sometimes?
I mean, it's not something you achieve and whoop, now I'm happy.
Yeah, for sure.
And your happiness does fluctuate.
What fluctuates even more is your unhappiness.
And so you'll find people who are in general very happy, people who have episodes of extreme unhappiness, because that's normal.
That's how we're evolved.
We're evolved to feel kind of mild happiness and intense unhappiness.
That's the reason that the Brookses and the Carruthers of the world, they exist today, because their ancestors were able to pass on their genes.
The reason that your ancestors passed on your genes is because that intense unhappiness when there was a major threat, it got their attention.
They didn't get eaten by a leopard as a result of that.
So they passed on the tendency for people to feel intensely unhappy from time to time, even if they're otherwise extremely happy people.
This is one of the things that I always talk about with my students.
Look, as a matter of fact, we have a test on the intensity of your happiness and your unhappiness.
And I find that a lot of very unhappy people have also intense periods of unhappiness.
And I say good, that means you're fully alive man, that means you're really experiencing life, that means you're not kind of a i don't know.
You're somebody who's really really, really in it and it's.
It's good to be alive and it's normal to feel an intense unhappiness, no matter how happy you are.
Do you think?
When you work with people, is it your sense that well, first of all, that unhappy people know they're unhappy, or this is just life and other people are a big disappointment, but this is just the way it is.
Or do they really...
Admit, yeah, my life is miserable and I'm unhappy.
They know.
Unhappy people know.
I mean the people who don't know are the happy people because they're not thinking about it very much.
And I'm talking about happier and unhappier.
There's no such thing as a happy person, because everybody has negative emotions and everybody has negative experiences which, once again, is an ordinary part of life.
But people who are unhappier, they're very aware of it.
When people are suffering from, for example, anxiety and depression, they know there's nobody who goes through life and it's like, slaps their forehead and say ah, for the past 30 years i've been miserably, clinically depressed.
Even if they can't put a word on it, they know that they're.
Other people are doing better than me, man.
I mean, other people are enjoying their days.
They're getting enjoyment from life.
They're taking satisfaction and pleasure from their accomplishments.
They have a sense of their purpose.
And I don't know why.
And that's an alarm system that there's something that you need to correct in your life.
And that's healthy and that's good.
One of the reasons that people take my class is that they're probably a little bit below average happiness.
The happiest people don't take my happiness science class at harvard and and i wouldn't do research on it if i were so far above average myself.
On the contrary, i've traditionally been below average happiness and bang man, i knew it.
That's why i became a researcher in the whole field.
But if I'm one of those people who is below the norm, if somebody comes to you and says all right, so yeah, I sense that.
I sense I'm not happy.
And I've heard all this stuff that you've said, but what do I do right now?
What do I do today and tomorrow to?
To move from where I am and at least move a little bit towards where you want me to go.
So what I would recommend to any listener listening to us right now is pay attention to four things.
Put your time and energy into four accounts every day.
Number one, we'll call it faith.
It also includes philosophy.
And that means practicing something bigger than yourself.
One of the greatest sources of misery is thinking about yourself all the time is pay more attention to family relationships.
Many people have let those things wither idiotically, in many cases because of politics.
You need your brain needs, by the way, the the neuropeptides called oxytocin and vasopressin in your brain.
Need your family relationships.
Third is your friendships.
More and more people, especially successful people.
They have a lot of deal friends, but not that many real friends.
Think about the people who are useless and you just love.
It takes time to cultivate the relationship, but But that will bring true joy.
Call an old friend.
Go out with somebody that you actually just like for no reason.
And last but not least, is thinking about what you're trying to do in your work by serving other people.
This helps you to transcend your individual psychodrama.
That try to earn your success by working harder and succeeding becoming more excellent.
And these are the things to do every day.
The four areas to work on today to raise your happiness or your faith, your family, your friendship and serving other people through your work.
Great answer.
Great answer.
You must come across, because I come across them all the time.
I know people who are very unhappy, seemingly unhappy, miserable people.
And I sometimes think...
I don't think they would want to be happy.
Like, they wallow in it.
Like, if you made everything perfect for them, they wouldn't know what to do.
Like, what am I going to complain about now?
Yeah.
So there are a lot of people who compulsively do things that are bad for them because in the short term it gives them a sense of relief.
So complaining is a classic example of this.
Unhappy people complain all the time, constantly, as a matter of fact.
And this is actually what alienates them from friends and family, because it's not that fun to be around whiners and people who are complaining constantly sort of entertaining for a minute.
But then it just becomes so negative that people don't actually like that.
But they're complaining is what gives them a sense of power, because when you complain you get other people's attention and they want other people's attention.
They want other people's sympathy.
When you say my boss is a jerk, people say oh, i'm so sorry, and that's actually kind of what you need.
The problem is it's a very short-term strategy, so So I'll explain to anybody who's engaging in unhappy behavior.
Anybody who's listening to us right now is a chronic complainer.
The right strategy is to think about what you want in the long term.
Start thinking about the relationships that you want to cultivate.
When you complain, when you behave unhappily because you want more attention, you get unhappier.
It's like alcohol.
It's like compulsively drinking alcohol.
It gives you momentary relief from your anxiety, and then it gives you more anxiety in the long run.
The same thing is true about negativity and negative behavior.
Many people act as if they don't want to be happier.
They do.
Everybody wants to be happier, but they don't know how to get out of the vortex of complaining and unhappiness.
And so when this mechanism is explained to them, they can actually start changing their behavior.
Well, you've really given people something to think about because, as you say, everybody would like to be happier.
I mean, even happy people probably wouldn't mind being happier.
And this is like a blueprint to get there.
I've been talking with Arthur C. Brooks.
He is a professor at Harvard Business School and he's author of the book The Happiness Files Insights on Work and Life.
And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes.
Arthur, thank you so much for coming.
That's great.
I appreciate it, Mike.
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You know, what I find interesting is that so many people own and love their dogs, yet we're often baffled by them.
Some of their behavior puzzles us.
We don't know why they do some of the things they do.
And for most of us most of us dog owners we haven't really been educated about what dogs want or need.
We learn from experience or what other people tell us.
And we have the best of intentions, but we don't always really know what to do.
Well, here to help is Louise Glazebrook.
She's a well-known dog behaviorist and dog trainer in the UK and she's author of a book called The Book Your Dog Wishes You Would Read How to Raise the Happiest Dog.
Hi, Louise.
Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thank you.
Nice to be here.
So I would like to start because I know a lot of advice is very specific to breeds and the age of the dog and all of that.
But I would like to start with some really important general purpose advice for dogs that dog owners, that you think dog owners need to hear.
Yeah.
Don't use a ball lobber.
So I don't know if you know what I mean.
I mean by you know the sticks that you buy and you put the ball on the end and you throw it really far for your dog to chase.
Don't use those.
They create so many issues on so many levels.
So when we use those ball lobbers, they're obviously a man-made design.
Dogs didn't design those.
We designed those because we wanted to throw something further to wear our dogs out more.
But what tends to happen is that what we do is we create a dog that runs really really really, really fast to chase something.
And then that ball obviously has to come down and land.
When it lands, it stops very abruptly, which means that what we then do is we create gigantic problems on the dog's shoulders, on the dog's hips, on the dog's skeletal system, on their muscular system, which means that later on in life we have dogs that end up with cruciate ligament problems.
We have hip splacia.
We have lots of other issues going on.
We also find that with those kind of games where we are increasing speed, where we are making them run, that for many breeds it can increase their adrenaline, It can increase their cortisol.
It can make everything go very fast, which means it's then very difficult for them to calm down, which means that the whole nervous system is on alert and is heightened.
But you're not suggesting that you not play ball with your dog.
I mean, I've had dogs in my life that if they couldn't play ball, they would have no reason to live.
Some dogs really love a ball.
So there must be an option.
So, for example, if your dog loves the ball and they love to go after it, then a really easy change is that when you throw that ball, you throw it into the long grass, and they go into the long grass and they use their nose to search for it, because that's what dogs are incredible at doing.
They've got brilliant noses.
We've literally designed them to do this.
And that one change will save so many problems for your dog later on.
It will make them calmer at home.
What's another piece of advice that most dog owners probably don't know?
That would be really good to know.
If every single person in the world learnt that if their dog turns their head away from them or gets up and walks away, that you do not follow and that applies to children too we would dramatically reduce our dog bite incidents across the world.
Because that head turn is the first what I call green light signal that a dog can give to let you know they either don't want it, they don't feel comfortable or they feel uncertain in that situation.
And if we as humans respected that and backed away or walked off, We would find that dogs don't need to escalate their behavior to keep us away from them.
And that, for me, is one of the most important things that we can teach adults and children that live with dogs.
I know you have very strong feelings about dog parks. dog parks are something that i would really steer clear of if you can they condense dogs into an area where they have very little space they can't escape interactions and lots of owners will stand and chat and not really keep an eye on what their dog is doing and going through and what we tend to find as puppies is that as owners we want our dogs to be social so we take them up to meet people we have them on the lead and we take them up to meet dogs and we say hi can my dog say hi to your dog and it all is very cute and disney-like But the reality is, if we want our dogs to simply walk past another dog in the street, to ignore another dog and not to be obsessed with them or to react against them,
We have to teach that.
So what we should actually be teaching is that, when our dog sees another dog, is that we do what I call the treat and trail, which is where you walk backwards and you are literally treating your dog as they follow you for walking past another dog or going past something that they weren't sure about.
So that what you're teaching your dog in the long term is that when they see a dog, they don't go over to it.
They don't need to run into it.
They don't need to react to it, because what you have taught them is that you are going to just simply walk them past it, and they are going to be rewarded heavily for doing that.
And so that becomes your dog's expectation when they see another dog.
And if we taught our dogs that we would drastically reduce our dog's needs to react to other dogs on lead Because they would know and feel safe and secure that you were going to get them past it and reward them and that no dog coming into them or no interaction was going to cause them stress or make them feel fearful.
I sense that people have this belief that a dog is a dog and yeah, there's different breeds, but you can pretty much mold a dog any way you want.
But I've come to know, just from my experience with dogs, dogs are different.
Dogs are as different from each other as people are different from each other.
And if you're getting a dog, you really have to know what kind of dog you're getting, meaning what are their inclinations and preferences, their behaviours typically.
I think if you want a happy life with a dog, then definitely.
I think it's like anything you've got the opportunity to choose a member of your family, so why would you not take that seriously?
Because we all know with family members that we end up with and things that can go on.
It can sometimes be difficult.
Whereas if you have the opportunity to choose a family member, you can really sit down and think about your life.
You can think about what do I actually want to spend my time doing?
What are the bits that I love?
That's literally the opposite of what lots of people do.
And then they have challenges, and then they can struggle, and then they can find dog ownership difficult.
Whereas if we had those really frank conversations, we would have owners with happy dogs living happy lives together.
What about people though, who already have a dog, or they get a dog, but they didn't go through a real vetting process where they chose the dog?
It was just the dog at the pound they thought was cute, and now they have a dog.
So the dog's already here.
Now what do we do?
So what we then need to do is look at what does my dog need to be a happy dog?
And again, it's going to vary depending on each of our dogs.
And I think one of the things that's really important is that, as owners or someone who's thinking about getting a dog, is understanding that every dog is different in the same way that you and i are different and every human is different, and understanding that Once we have that dog, it's really thinking about the exercise that we give, the games that we play, the training that we do.
How can we make it fun?
How can we make sure that my dog wants to hang out with me?
I don't believe in systems where we are.
You know I hate the word command.
Telling your dog a command.
I live with my dogs in a way that is they are my companion.
They are a family member.
It seems like people bring their dog home and it comes to the house and they make sure it doesn't, you know, pee in the house and all.
But most people don't get into rigorous training.
They just have a companion dog to go on walks and stuff. play with and that kind of thing.
But, you know, they're not going to enter it into a competition.
No, but you've got to think about things like... So I agree with you.
All of my clients are companion dog owners.
They're the people that I work with.
They all want a best friend.
They all want a family member.
They all want a dog to be at home with.
But...
The way that we go about things.
What we have to think about is imagine that your puppy is running towards you and they're so excited to see you because they think that you're amazing.
And then they come into you and you're waving a finger at them saying, sit.
And then you're telling them to wait.
And then you don't give them the treat straight away.
And then you're telling them to get down because they're really excited, because they can see or smell the treat.
What's going to happen the next time is that your puppy is going to lose motivation, because they were really excited to see you and they were really excited to be with you.
But when they came into you, you then put all of these barriers to learn in.
And so your puppy will slowly start to realize it's kind of not worth listening, or I don't need to go back at this point.
Or when I do go back, what they promised me didn't happen.
And so it's not that people are necessarily being intentionally selfish. making it difficult or making it unenjoyable.
But we have this idea that to train a dog needs to be done with telling them to do something.
And actually, my version is we don't have to tell them.
We can observe what they're doing.
We can use it and capture it so that if my dog's running towards me and they're so excited to see me and I know that they're going to jump up then I would crouch down and reward them from the ground So that they don't need to jump up, but they still get rewarded for coming into me.
And I can then think about, right, they're going to jump up.
So that's something that I need to work on, instead of them running in, jumping up me, pushing them down and kind of spoiling that moment.
Jumping up is a problem I think a lot of people have with their dog.
People come over and the dog jumps on them or the dog jumps on the owner every time they come home and you try to say no.
You put them down, you say no and it doesn't seem to work.
So again, it goes back to why is the dog jumping up?
So I think if we approach everything of what does the dog get from it?
So there could be lots of factors.
We can have dogs that jump up because they're scared.
So we can have dogs that jump up because genuinely they're excited.
We can have dogs that jump up, because children have taught them to by holding toys up high, by keeping treats out of their reach, so they have to try and jump and reach them.
We can have dogs that actually have gastropain and will jump up frequently because it stretches the gut and it can help relieve the pain.
So there's lots of reasons why dogs can jump up.
And so it's often a reason why, when people are trying something that's not working, It's because they haven't looked at why they're jumping up.
It's just looking at the symptom, but not what's going on underneath that.
Well, how would you ever know?
I mean, how would you know whether your dog has stomach problems and that's why he's jumping, when it seems like every time you come home he jumps doesn't seem to have much to do with his stomach.
It has to do with he's excited and he jumps up.
If we're looking at something like a gut problem, a gastro problem, there would be other precursors to that.
So if our dog was really frantic, if we had a dog that was chewing on their paws a lot, If we had a dog that was kind of air snapping with their mouth, if we had a dog that was doing a lot of lip licking, those can all be precursors that actually something in the gastro area isn't working which is causing other behaviours.
I think one of the other things that we have to focus on is that dogs can't talk.
There is no ability to reason.
There is no ability to go through options.
So our job as a human is to learn about dog behavior and start to understand why is something happening.
Why is something being done?
What's going on for that dog?
So when we're looking at jumping up Yes, it might be excitement and that might be the only reason, but we do also have to rule out other reasons to make sure that we're not then asking unrealistic things of that dog.
So it's not always as simple as...
My dog is doing this one thing.
I just need to change this.
How do I do it?
There is often another pathway that we need to take.
What about barking?
I mean, that's a thing that seems to be very difficult to break, that a dog that barks a lot for seemingly no apparent reason, or barks when people come over, or barks when the car goes by.
And it's very annoying.
How do you address that?
Well, again, it depends on breed.
They're designed to go down holes, find things, bark and alert us when they're there.
So you're never going to get a quiet Dachshund.
So again, it comes back to why did you choose that breed?
Was it suitable for your lifestyle?
And are those breed traits the things that you want your dog to do?
Because if, for example, a dog that barks, is vocal, is not something on your kind of tick list, then we should really not be going out and seeking breeds that that is on their list of characteristics, because you're not going to change that.
The second thing is that we have to look at the reason why they're barking.
So if, for example, we have a dog that is um, i don't know, barking at everything that goes past the house, The reason that tends to happen is usually because there is a problem with pain and there is something that we need to figure out, because that dog is not functioning well and they're not resting well and they're not sleeping well and they tend to be on high alert, which means that their threshold to exist in everyday life goes down.
And so they will become more reactive to other outdoor noises, people, dogs, whatever it is.
So, rather like, if you are feeling ill, if you are in pain, your tolerance levels go down, and the same is true of our dogs.
But we as humans often don't see that, because what we just see is barking and it being really annoying and it's really loud or it's interrupting or whatever it is.
There does seem to be, and has been for some time, this trend of treating the dog like a member of the family, spoiling it, dressing it up, buying it a bed that looks like a human bed, making it like a child.
Is that fine or does it confuse the dog?
What does that do?
I guess it depends on what level owners are doing it.
So I am an advocate for dogs being part of your family.
My dogs are part of my family.
I think that that still means that my dogs have boundaries.
My dogs um are treated with respect, in the same way that with my children.
You know there are behaviors that i i don't want them to speak to me rudely, i don't want them to shout at me.
There are things that we work on and we talk about, and i put the same level of effort into the dogs that i live with to teach them things and how i want them to live in my family.
I think that the lines become very blurred when we don't make it clear for our dogs.
So dogs tend to thrive when they understand what's going to happen or what's expected or what might happen.
Now it becomes really blurry when that keeps changing or one owner does one thing, someone else does something else, someone else does something else.
One person lets them on the couch, someone else doesn't let them on the couch.
It becomes very confusing.
So i think with all of these things, I'm not necessarily worried what their bed looks like.
I don't really care whether, I mean, dressing up, yes, I do have an issue with.
Dogs don't need to be dressed up.
Most of them don't need to wear coats.
But I think fundamentally, what I do care about and what I do put an emphasis on is that you are understanding that your dog is a dog.
What does your dog need?
What is going to help them thrive?
What is going to make them happy?
Rather than thinking about as a human.
I have this dog and I got it for me, and I got it for this reason, and these lines are blurred.
We do need to think about if we've chosen to bring a dog into our home.
It is our job to do that research, to figure it out and make sure that what we are giving and doing for them is actually what they need to be happy.
What about when people, maybe after a few years of owning a dog, decide you know, this isn't working.
The dog needs to be trained better.
Can you teach an old dog new tricks?
Or by then, you know, patterns are set and it's probably too late.
No, I mean, my dog, Pip, I got when he was seven.
He's now 12.
And I would say he has changed so much within that time.
There's been so many things that we've worked on and things that he came with.
And with any dog, of course, some things might be ingrained.
Of course, some things might be a way of doing things, but we can still make changes.
We can still teach different ways.
We can create different routes.
We can create different pathways.
There is always that option that something can change when we work on it and the way that's going to suit the dog.
Well, having been a dog owner pretty much all my life, I've heard some things today that I have not heard before or haven't thought much about, and I appreciate you sharing it.
Louise Glazebrook has been my guest.
The name of her book is...
The book your dog wishes you would read, How to Raise the Happiest Dog.
There's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes.
And Louise, thank you so much.
Thanks so much.
It's been a pleasure.
I imagine you know someone, or maybe it's you, who cracks their knuckles.
Children are the most active knuckle crackers.
To them, it sounds cool, it feels good, and many of them like the attention that it gets.
Adolescents tend to crack more than their knuckles.
They find cracking their neck or their back also feels good.
But is there a danger to overcracking?
Well, experts pretty much agree that cracking does not lead to arthritis or result in any serious damage, but it can become a habit.
But it can become a habit and overzealous cracking can injure the ligaments that support the joints.
An avid knuckle cracker could end up with a looser grip because it can loosen the tendons that attach muscle to the bone.
It can also cost you friends, because a lot of people find the noise of cracking incredibly irritating to listen to.
And that is something you should know.
Now that you've listened to this episode, I would appreciate it if you'd leave your comments.
You can leave a rating and review on whatever podcast app you listen to this on.
We read them.
We appreciate them.
And I thank you for doing that.
I'm Michael Ruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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