Training Dogs, Lizards, and Sea Lions with Dr. Adrian Walton
We talk about animal training, helping pets to be less scared at the vet, and the link between pain and behaviour with veterinarian Dr. Adrian Walton of Dewdney Animal Hospital.
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Watch episode 38 of The Pawsitive Post in Conversation on Youtube or below, listen wherever you get your podcasts (Apple, Spotify) or below, or scroll down to read a transcript of the highlights.
Training dogs, lizards, and sea lions with Dr. Adrian Walton
What's a veterinarian's view on dog training methods? And if your pet is terrified of going to the vet, how can they help? We find out from an amazing veterinarian, Dr. Adrian Walton of Dewdney Animal Hospital in Maple Ridge, BC.
We talked about:
- Dr. Walton’s position on dog training methods, and his experience of so-called “balanced” trainers
- How he trained sealions at the Toronto Zoo with a whistle and a bucket of fish
- How a large lizard ended up at his clinic and what his technician taught the Nile monitor to do
- How we know that lizards can count
- The difference that medication can make for pets who are scared at the vet
- How pain can affect pets’ behaviour
- What it’s like working with exotic animals
- The best pet to get for your kid
- And Dr. Walton recommends the books he’s been reading
The books:
- Invertebrate Medicine by Gregory A Lewbart
- Boat Camping in Haida Gwaii by Neil Frazer
The books are available from all good bookstores, including my Amazon store.
Dr. Adrian Walton is the owner of Dewdney Animal Hospital in Maple Ridge, BC. He’s a graduate of University of Guelph and has degrees in Marine Biology from Dalhousie University and a Masters Degree from Simon Fraser University. Prior to moving to Maple Ridge he was an emergency veterinarian in Seattle. His area of interest is exotic animal medicine and spends a lot of his spare time helping abandoned and neglected reptiles and exotics find forever homes.
Dewdney Animal Hospital on Facebook.
Highlights of the conversation with Dr. Adrian Walton
Z: So we want to ask you about dog training methods. As a veterinarian, what's your position on dog training methods?
A: Well, I think we have to remember that every veterinarian is going to have a different perspective. There are going to be some veterinarians that believe in old school methods and there's going to be veterinarians that believe in more modern methods.
The main one is, what is the viewpoint of places like the AVMA, the American Veterinary Medical Association, the Canadian Veterinary Medical association, and pretty well every veterinary medical association in the first world.
And for pretty well every single one of them, reward based training is the gold standard.
There are some variations. For instance, the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association does leave open the ability to use deterrents like shock collars for keeping an animal on property.
But other than that, they do not recommend in any way, shape or form aversive training methods.
K: Yeah, that actually leads nicely into our next question, which was in your work as a veterinarian, you see animals of all stripes that are experiencing all sorts of issues or just getting regular care. So in your work as a veterinarian, what kind of adverse effects do you see for dogs who have been trained with aversives?
You know, we're in agreement, we don't want aversives to be used with dogs or cats, obviously. So what kind of adverse effects do you see if people are just misinformed or maybe haven't gotten up to date in how they're training and what does that mean for the dog?
A: Sure. So a lot of times people leave training way too late. By the time that they're oftentimes seeking out a trainer, they've already got some behavioral issues that are already beyond what most of us would consider.
And this puts us into a bit of a tough situation because some people will sit there and they just don't have any patience anymore. And so they're looking for a quick fix.
And one of the things that I've noticed is that there's a certain cohort of trainers who promote aversives as kind of a shortcut method.
This is where you tend to see a lot of the, what we call balanced trainers. They talk about aversives and non aversives, but whenever you have a conversation with them, the first thing they're doing is talking about the use of shock collars.
Well, you're not a positive trainer if that's your first thing you go to, but because for so many people, they're desperate, they will look to aversives for as a quick fix.
Now, one of the things that I unfortunately deal with as a veterinarian is I started off 25 years ago with you can save them all. And I have developed a more nuanced response since then that we want to help out animals as much as we can, but we have to understand expectations and limitations people have.
The problem we're oftentimes faced with is because people already are at the end of their rope, they seek out these trainers who, because they are looking for a quick fix, they're oftentimes making the problem worse.
So as a veterinarian, I'm often receiving animals that they've already gone to their vet, they've already gone to a, we'll say old school trainer and nothing has worked. And now I am faced with that absolutely terrible, being in a terrible position of euthanasia for behavioral issues.
And that's something that no veterinarian wants to be in, no veterinarian wants to be in that place.
Z: Yeah. So we need people to start seeking help sooner or we need them to know that they should start looking for help much, much sooner in the process.
And I've seen that you put a lot of messages about dog training methods on your social media. You have a very active Facebook page where you post a lot about this.
But when it comes to actually the conversations with your clients, if they come to see you about something, maybe it's not even behavior related, but you know that they're using aversive methods. Is this something that you talk to them about, where you bring it up in a consult?
How do you talk about these issues?
A: Sure. One of the first things we have to talk about is we have to talk about it in the puppy series. We don't wait till the issues are there. We start talking to people when they come in for that first visit and say, hey, look, are you going to be going to puppy class?
The idea is that puppy class is not as much for training the dog, but as for training the people and the methods that they're going to use ongoing with their pets to have a successful relationship.
We start off just saying, hey, look, are you going to go to a puppy class here? You'll probably need kennel cough vaccines. So we should have this conversation. It's a great way to start getting into those issues.
We start talking to them at the very beginning about when you have a dog that's very mouthy. We talk about some of the simple things that they can do to try to switch that to something else, like have it move to a toy or just do a little bit of high pitched squeal so that the puppy actually knows you're hurting, to even just stepping away from the situation to allow the puppy to learn that that's not appropriate behavior.
But whenever I say these things, I also tell people, hey, look, this is pup psychology here.
If you're having these issues now, this is a puppy. It's easy to deal with. Now you should be maybe having a conversation with your local trainer and try to get them into a well developed training regimen now rather than when the dog's three and is already biting people.
K: I love it that you talk to puppies and talk about good training with puppies, I think that's wonderful. And puppies are just, you know, when you have a puppy, you're just all about the love and the breath and the smell of their little feet.
So sticking in a little message there about, hey, this is something that we can, we can use these same types of methods to help our dogs become great sort of companion animals. I love that.
So now Zazie mentioned that you have trained sea mammals in the past and that, I mean, that intrigues me. It intrigues a lot of our audience. So can you tell us a little bit about what, what you were doing?
And then you did mention something about a lizard, which I would love to hear about. How do you do, how do you, how do you, what kind of reinforcement do you use for a lizard? Like what?
A: Well, the reason that you, you've actually heard about this was because one of the things we've been having, because Dewdney Animal Hospital, our Facebook page talks about some of the issues surrounding dogs, some of the bigger problems, the things that we don't normally want to talk about. We've been bringing up the training problem for quite some time.
And the interesting thing is I've actually received a couple of death threats already and even a entire social media campaign out to claim I'm a racist because of our stances about ethical dog training.
K: Wow.
A: And the reason this came up was I was sitting there going, so you're telling me you need a choke chain and a shock collar to deal with a slightly aggressive Chihuahua? And I could train an 800 pound sea lion with a bucket of fish and a whistle.
So, you know, my argument on this case is that positive reinforcement is really the only thing that is used in most animals other than, like dogs. You know, if you're training a sea lion or an orca or even a lion, you're usually going with positive reinforcement because that's the most successful technique.
And when I was training African fur seals at the Toronto Zoo, I mean, there was no way for me to be able to do any type of negative reinforcement. If they didn't want to be involved with it, they just go to the other side of the aquarium.
It's a huge pool. They go over there. I've got nothing I can do. And it's not like we're going to let them starve to death. They're always going to get their meal.
So one of the things we found was that the reason these animals responded so well to us was we made it fun, we made it play.
And so we started off with just you know, a whistle and a fish, whistle and a fish. Once they kind of made the association, they took just the plain whistle as a reward.
But one of the things that we found worked the best was basically we'd do this [hand gesture with each hand out to the side]. And what that was, was show us something different.
And so that training method, what we found would do is, yeah, sometimes they would go through their routine of stuff that they already knew, but every now and then they would do a different behavior. And once they did that different behavior, we would reward them like crazy.
And so we got it to the point where we could have this 800 pound, huge, absolutely humongous sea lion come up, stand on a scale, lift up its flipper so that we could pull blood so that the veterinarians could do their diagnostics. And this was all, all by positive reinforcement.
Now the other animal that we have some experience with is, Dewdney Animal Hospital has the only permit in British Columbia to rescue exotic animals. Mostly we deal with reptiles and so we'll have everything from alligators to giant snakes.
But a few years ago we had a phone call. There was a giant lizard that worked its way out of a Styrofoam container in the post office.
And it turns out somebody was smuggling this lizard in for a TV show and they didn't want to go through all the permits. But these animals are insanely good diggers. And it just dug through the Styrofoam like a hot knife through butter and was walking around in the post office.
So it came to Dewdney Animal Hospital and we the only ones who had the permit. So we kept it in the back and we talked to the person who smuggled it in and they said, nope, nope, not mine. And they reached out to the person who, who had the lizard in Ontario and they said, that's not mine. Because nobody wanted to get in trouble with the government.
And so all of a sudden I am stuck with a five foot long Nile monitor.
And we wound up having to get like basically in major large cages. We have an outdoor run for it because this thing was so big that it required a good large room to be devoted just to its care. So it had a three level cage. But to move it around, what we wound up doing. And it was one of my technicians who, Brad, who did all the training, taught him to follow a ping pong ball on the end of a stick.
So we would move him at night to one of our exam rooms so he could have the entire night to walk around. And then we'd lead him back to his cage in the morning. And this was our way to move him in a way, as well as to train him so that we could do all of the things we had to do.
And this is a lizard. They're amazing creatures, but we don't exactly think of them as trainable.
But this brings up another story. This is actually a study that was done on Nile monitors. And what they did was they took eggs and they hid them around the animal's cage. And they would always put out like, seven or eight eggs.
And then after they'd done that for several weeks, they then took one of the eggs away. And so they put out six eggs. And the lizard knew how many eggs were supposed to be there and literally would tear its cage apart looking for the seventh egg.
So we are doing huge leaps and jumps on learning about how intelligent non humans are. And this is just one example of how you can train a lizard by positive reinforcement, because I guarantee you, yeah, shock collar and the lizard probably would not have gone over well. They can be mean.
K: Wow, the counting lizard.
Z: Yeah. So you've got video of the lizard training that you're going to share with us, and I shall embed that in this post on my blog and share it on the socials along with the podcast. [Look for two lizard videos from the 13 minute mark in the video above, and another one around 19.25 mins].
I'm temporarily, hopefully temporarily, locked out of Facebook right now, but we'll find a way to get it on there as well so that people can see it.
And you mentioned lions. And I was incredibly lucky last year because I got to go back behind the scenes at the Sydney Zoo, and I saw the lions being trained there, and you just think it's amazing. So you can train lions, you can train lizards, you can train sea lions with positive reinforcement. Of course, we can do that with our dogs as well.
A: And I think a lot of people don't realize that the good zoos are not just, the animals are not just on display. The good zoos are actually doing a lot behind the scenes to help keep these animals entertained and mentally motivated, because we do know that without that type of stimulation, a lot of these animals get into repetitive behaviors.
And I've seen it at zoos that aren't that great, these roadside zoos, that these animals will literally walk a hole or a rut into the ground because they keep doing the same circles.
So there are good zoos out there and they're the ones that have these great training programs.
Z: And it's another reason to use positive reinforcement as well. Cause it's enriching and good for the animal too. Good.
So I wanted also to ask you about when someone has a pet who is absolutely terrified of going to the vet. Not necessarily a dog, could be a cat. And the fact that these days veterinarians can use pharmaceuticals to help with that.
So how do you help pet guardians understand this idea?
A: Sure. And this is a huge change in pharmaceuticals that we've had. We've always had access to drugs, we've always used them. The problem is we oftentimes didn't know exactly what we should be doing. So when I first started, and I'll be the first one to say, I'm on my 25th year of being a veterinarian and the medicine that I did 25 years ago, I look back on it and I'm horrified at what I consider to be acceptable behavior. And I hate to say it, there's still a lot of vets out there that do that old school medicine.
So we used to, with animals that had anxiety, use a drug called acepromazine and it's a sedative. And, you know, it worked. The dog would lie there in the corner and not react to the fireworks. But when you look at the pharmacology as a sedative, you're not dealing with the dog's anxiety.
It's still terrified. It just can't move because it's just so out of it, but it's still suffering. And so over the years we've started to look at other medications and probably the most common one that we're using now is a thing called Trazodone.
This is basically Valium. It's not a sedative, it's not a tranquilizer. It's an anti anxiety medication. The idea is you give them this medication and a lot of times we'll do it the night before and then two hours before the appointment or the stressful event.
And the idea is that they are coming into this event and it's less, more like, oh my God, oh my God, I'm terrified of like, yeah, I don't care. And just being able to reduce that stress lowers the cortisol levels, lowers the glucose levels.
So we will have say, a cat that comes in on just gabapentin and we will notice A normal blood glucose, where if the cat's incredibly stressed, we'll see these stress hyperglycemias and make us worry about, you know, does this cat have an insulin secreting tumor or is there something else going on? Or is the cat a diabetic? I should say, not insulin. That's the opposite way.
So these medications have been a huge, huge benefit. Problem is, I have a lot of clients resistant to it because their trainers told them that you shouldn't be having to medicate your animal. And that's insane.
I mean, we use pharmaceuticals. For any person going through a medical procedure, they'll offer sedatives or tranquilizers ahead of time because they know how much damage anxiety can do.
So if your trainer is telling you not to let your pet benefit from these drugs, they should have a conversation with their own veterinarian about, you know, maybe learning more about what we're doing.
K: That's sad to hear that. Some trainers are, typically the trainers that sort of Zazie and I are in sort of frequent conversation with. We're more having conversations about how do we as trainers work against our clients?
Sort of our clients put up barriers saying, well, we don't want to drug our dog, you know, we'd rather just take a natural route. And so we're always like, how can we find the wording that where we stay in our lane because we're not medical professionals, where we're like, well, maybe your vet and you would be able to have a conversation that might be useful. So it's sad for me as a trainer to hear that other trainers are also not in our work for us, you know.
A: Well, first off, as I said, Dewdney Animal Hospital tends to be a little bit more controversial. So a lot of the trainers I'm involved with hate my guts. That's fine.
But let's talk about this natural. What exactly is natural? Because cyanide is natural.
And so realizing that some of the medications that you're using and a lot of the most common one will be CBD, whether it's from plant based or from a pharmaceutical grade, they're the same chemical.
The difference is if you're doing a plant grade and I have no problems, herbal medicine is medicine. It's just depending on when the plant was harvested, what time of year, what conditions it was, you may have a lot of the active ingredient or you may have very little of the active ingredient. Whether it's herbal or pharmaceutical is the same basic concept.
Now if they want to do natural like desensitization, hey, veterinarians are for that. And one of the things you can do is talk to your vet. And say, hey, can I just bring my dog in, walk him around the clinic a little bit, put him on the scale, get him weighed, have the front staff give him a bunch of treats, make it so that it's not a once a year visit to a strange place, but maybe like someplace you go on like a once a month basis so that they become comfortable with going in.
So most veterinarians I know will say, yeah, by all means, come in, weigh your dog, and that way they get in, they're used to the smells, they're used to the lighting, they're used to getting up on a scale. And it becomes a lot less stressful when they do have to come in for a medical event.
And keep in mind that there's a reason that some clinics are more popular with dogs than others.
I know in my clinic we clean like three or four times a day. So we have a hit by car come in. I guarantee you we're going to have two or three hours where every animal that comes in hates my guts, is terrified. Why? Because they can smell the fear and the anxiety on that dog that came in.
So by cleaning regularly, and in the case of cats, we use pheromone sprays like feel away regularly in our clinic, we can try to reduce those noxious stimuli. So that's why you'll see that this is why cleanliness is so important in a clinic. And as I said, we have a lot of staff and they clean frequently because that seems to do wonders for reducing anxiety in pets that are come in.
K: So when you have these pets that come in, can you talk to us a little bit about the difference between, you know, if you have a dog or a cat, say, come in, that has been medicated for anxiety and stress versus one who you can tell, you know, you wish had, you know, they're, they're definitely upset. What are you seeing as a vet?
I know you talked a little bit about sort of blood work, but what are you seeing behaviorally? What difference does it make in your practice?
A: Sure. Well, let's take for instance, cats on gabapentin. Most cats will just sit there and they'll hiss at you and their fur will be up, but they'll let you do what you need to be done versus without gabapentin.
They're trying to kill me. Literally. They will jump out of the crate and like hiss and scratch at me. I have to wear full on welding gloves to be able to handle these cats.
That's not good for the cat, that's not good for me, that's not good for the owner. It's an absolutely terrifying situation to deal with a stressed out cat. So in those situations, unless the cat is actually like, it's an emergency situation and has to be treated that day, we'll just say, this isn't working out. So no charge exam. Here's some gabapentin, here's some trazodone.
Let's rebook you for another day where your cat's gonna be a little bit more ameliorative to being handled because if they're completely anxious, we're probably gonna make things worse. They could still get injured, they could have a cardiac event. Some of these cats are that stressed out. So there's always ways.
And I should have mentioned that, you know, when I have new staff come to the clinic, the policies are don't talk to me before I've had my coffee, don't play with the venomous reptiles until you're trained.
But the third one is nobody gets bit but me. If I'm, if, like, if something has to happen, I'll take that risk. I do not want my staff to get bit or injured. We can do sedation, we can send home with gabatraz. We can do desensitization, we can do the exam in the vehicle or our side parking lot. We can fence off so we can actually have the dog there outside. And that sometimes is enough to reduce anxiety.
There's always a way to handle an animal in a less stressful situation.
Z: I think this is something that's made a really big difference to the welfare of dogs and cats. And there's something else that as reward based trainers, we've become increasingly aware of, which is that sometimes pain can play or other medical issues can play a role in behavior.
So sometimes we might want to send people to their vet, say, go and ask your vet if there's something going on here. So as a veterinarian, I mean, what do you say about this? What do you like people to know about this?
A: I think pain is actually a major problem. Especially the main one is going to be dental pain. I cannot express to people how much pain bad teeth is for an animal.
And we talked about how medicine has changed over 25 years. About 12 years ago, I spent 50 grand on a dental X ray and we started taking X rays of all the teeth and something we hadn't done before because let's be honest, dentals have gone from like $500 to $2500.
And part of it is the amount of time it takes to take X rays and develop them, even, even digital ones. But what we were finding is that once we started taking X rays, we were catching a lot more dental disease that we did not realize was happening. The teeth could look beautiful, but underneath there was a rotting tooth or a tooth root abscess.
And I will say that having just had dental surgery myself, I have been bitten, I have broken limbs, I have had concussions. That sore tooth was enough to cause me to fall onto the ground and cry out of pain.
And it's made me realize how many animals over the 25 years as a veterinarian, I misdiagnosed because I didn't have access to an X ray to determine the amount of pain.
And I'm upfront with people that my job as a veterinarian is to not save the life of your dog. My job is to save your relationship. We are a quality of life over a quantity of life clinic. And I totally understand that some people aren't going to be able to go take their dog to a board certified surgeon. They're not going to be able to do chemotherapy.
But the one area that I am being more and more insistent on is explaining to people that how much pain goes with an animal's teeth. And a lot of times you can look at your dog's teeth and think they're beautiful. And when we take an X ray, oh my God, that would explain. And we have older dogs, 12, 13 years of age that we do a full dental, we remove rotting teeth.
And the number of times my owners come back and say, what did you do to my dog? He's acting like a puppy. And it makes you realize that they've actually been in pain for the last five years. And we just missed it because we didn't take an X ray of the teeth.
K: It's a tough one too, because I imagine behaviorally tooth pain, it's not like a limp, you know, it's not something that we could necessarily look at. I guess the way that they eat, maybe, you know, it's much more quiet.
A: But have you ever had your dog or cat vomit? The kibble comes out whole. They don't chew the way that we think they are. So you could have a dog eating kibble that never bites down on that tooth. So you never know.
And they could be having a chew toy and they're chewing just in front of it to avoid that pain. The tooth's still rotting, but there's just no way you as an owner can know.
Fortunately, there's a couple of things that we can see. Like we can see redness and inflammation, gum recession. Or even a cracked tooth that we can oftentimes see from just a visual one that a lot of, well, I'll be honest, most people don't look at their dog's teeth and then I'll, I'll lift up the teeth and show them the back and they're going, oh my God, I can't believe it's that bad.
Yeah, so I hate to say it, it's like dentistry is getting ridiculously expensive, but it takes three people anywhere from two to five hours to do a dental. That's why it's so expensive.
K: Yeah, I've got a cat sitting on my lap right now and he just had a dental a little while ago. So this is all very current for me.
A: Yeah, that's why you want to brush your pet's teeth now. It'll take you thousands in the long run.
K: Right. So for our last, I'm pretty sure this is our last sort of official question. We've been hearing that your focus is not just cats and dogs. You also take on some interesting animals and we wanted some examples then.
I admit I'm super curious. You work with lizards and I know that's a humongous category that might not even be like a taxonomically adequate category, but they have like different hearts and like, pharmacologically. Just how different are they to work with? I can't even imagine the difference. I mean, how much knowledge you have to have to work with like here's a mammal and then here's a lizard or maybe it's closer to the same.
And I'm curious if you have like a two minute summary of just how different they are.
A: So my first pet was a three toed box turtle. I still have it, it is 75 to 80 years of age. It was in terrible shape when it was given to me by my neighbor back in 1975.
So the simple fact is that this animal has lived in spite of me rather than because of me. Because the things that we did back then were terribly wrong. We didn't use the proper calcium we used bone meal. We didn't use UV light, we just used an incandescent bulb. I just happened to be lucky that my parents were from England.
So they were used to putting turtles or tortoises out during the summer months. So my tortoises had this entire run in the backyard from. Well, this was Montreal, so we'll say June through September and so got a lot of natural light, which otherwise we probably would have.
And I think you've seen my turtles, they don't look like they're supposed to. They're kind of mutated little, they look like VW bugs, turtle versions.
But fortunately we've adjusted that now in terms of the veterinary medicine aspect of it. I hate to say it, most of it is self taught and it's mostly different veterinarians using our background skills, our knowledge of pharmacology, anatomy, anesthesia to be able to develop a skill set. We're still probably 20, 30 years behind where we were with dogs and cats.
But you can actually get board certified in reptiles. There's a board certification process available. There is things like the, I forget the name of it. Basically there's a veterinary association for reptiles and things are changing dramatically.
Biggest problem we have is that these animals are still throwaway. They're considered to be Pokemon. There's a lot of people who collect these who will spend $500 on a new animal but won't spend $50 to treat an animal they do have.
And so this is where as a veterinarian it's been very frustrating dealing with exotics.
But on the other hand, I've got people who have done MRIs on their [reptile]. We've done surgery to remove bladder stones on iguanas. We've sent people down to the board certified zoology veterinarian down in Seattle and we've had them do surgery there. There's some amazingly compassionate people that keep these guys.
I will tell you this, people can be just as attached to their, their lizard or their snake as they can to any dog or cat.
And I'm going to throw this out there as the exotics vet. If you have kids and you want to get them a pet, please don't get them a pet dinosaur that will eventually be your pet and they could live 25 years. So that's going to be yours for a long time.
Get them a rat. They're smarter than pretty well. Well, they're smarter than pugs. I have pugs. And yeah, they're smarter than them. They're clean, they don't smell, and they're incredibly trainable. And I guarantee you that if you get your kid a rat, it will be you, not your child, who comes to me when the rat's too willing to spend 800 bucks to remove a mammary tumor because you've become so attached to the darn rat.
Don't get them hamsters. Don't get them gerbils. Don't get them crested geckos. Get them a rat.
Z: They are very, very intelligent animals.
A: Yeah, they're the best. And they live two, three years. So if your kid gets bored of it, you only have to take care of it for a couple of years, which is easy for the owner as well, the parent, I should say.
This transcript has been lightly edited for style and content.
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