Speaker 1: Hi Mark, you call your workshops, Resolving Conflict in Human-Canine Relationships. Can you explain what you mean? Sure. First of all, anytime we have problem behavior in a house with a dog, there's some kind of conflict, you know. There's something that's frustrating the dog, and there's something that's frustrating the people, and that creates conflict between them. And one of the things that I've really focused on and learned a lot about over the 30 years or so that I've been working dogs, is that that conflict that's created by the dissonance in the behavior is really key to what we're looking at, but also that most training systems involve some level of conflict. So of course in old-school training, it's very clear we're creating conflict because we're forcing the dog to sit down, maybe harshly correcting the dog out of its reactive behavior. But even in a lot of the more modern reward-based training, there still is a lot of conflict because people are still really kind of fighting against the behavior that they don't like. In the reward-based training, what tends to happen is they're working very hard to create incompatible behaviors. So they're trying to get the dog maybe to sit so that it doesn't jump and that kind of thing, or to look at them as opposed to chasing the squirrel or whatever, and there's still an inherent level of conflict in that. And one of the things that I've made as a focus of my work is teaching people how to change behavior without creating the conflict in doing that. Basic conflict. You want to do this, I want you to do that. And so we call the workshops that because what we do in our workshops is teach people the fundamentals of how I do this same thing with my everyday clients. When we walk into a home and a dog is barking, carrying on, and rushing up and jumping on us, there's all kinds of conflict there. Almost any time we do that, the owner is telling the dog to be quiet, to stop it, to not do that. The dog is in conflict between its excitement and its emotions, and the owner trying to get it to calm down. There's typically conflict between the dog and the new person who's walked in who's overwhelmed by the behavior. If we can get to where the dog knows how to greet those people, just using greeting as an example, in a way that's very comfortable for the dog and is very comfortable for the people, and the dog's behavior is some form of natural behavior, then the conflict goes away. The dog's happy, the owner's happy, the visitors are happy. And it turns out we can do the same kind of thing with virtually every problem behavior. And what happens is not only does the undesirable behavior go away, but it gets replaced with calm, comfortable, confident feelings on the part of the dog. So that's really the primary perspective we come from, that we don't just want to change the behavior, but we want to remove all the levels of conflict from really everything that's going on in the dog and the people's lives.