Grant Shannon: Dogs Connect

During his ten-year teaching career, Grant recognised that his students needed more from traditional education. He decided to create a program to help students feel more connected and engaged in their school environment.

Grant’s great passion for education has driven him to research the benefits of training wellbeing dogs for the classroom. He willingly shares his knowledge and scientific evidence, teaching students and staff how to build emotional intelligence and resilience. Many schools are now witnessing first-hand the impact the program is having on academic outcomes.

Find Dogs Connect online: https://dogsconnect.net.au/

Dogs Connect on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dogsconnectaustralia/

Dogs Connect on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dogs.connect/

Dogs Connect virtual course on Polyvagal Institute: Dogs Connect--Connection, Regulation, and Empathy

Transcript

Leah: 0:00

Welcome back, friends, to another episode of the Somatic Hound podcast. Today, I am very excited to be speaking with Grant Shannon, the founder of Dogs Connect. And I would like to let Grant just introduce himself, tell you a little bit about his background, and then how this organization got started.

Grant: 0:27

Hi Leah, thank you for having me. Okay, so my name's Grant. I'm the founder of an organization called Dogs Connect. What we do at Dogs Connect is basically we support other organizations in building what I would call really thorough and healthy process around the idea of introducing and bringing a dog into the community. And whether that be a workplace or a school or a community health organization or a hospital or a sports club, teaching those kinds of organisations what we believe needs to be considered and put in place so that this can be done in a healthy way, in direct relation to the animals first and foremost, but also a sustainable way so that that meaningful, positive connection can be something that's felt mutually in an ongoing way. And so that's what we do. in terms of the background it's a little bit of a story and if we've got time for a little story basically this all started over a decade ago now i was working as a school teacher in australia and was working with people probably around the age of 10 years old and I was becoming more and more convinced that what was a typical education setting, and I know through talking to you previously, there's some very strong similarities. They're probably universally pretty similar to education across the world. Feeling like those settings weren't really allowing and supporting these particular young people in ways that I thought they needed to be allowed and supported. and connected. So the typical come in, sit down, listen to me, I'm the teacher, sit still for hours, do everything the same as everyone else does it, it just kind of didn't sit right with me. So that combined with some of the young people that I was working with had some pretty unique needs and they needed to be supported through learning how to navigate their emotions mainly is what I think the need was. Because when this was something that they weren't able to do, their emotions could take over and could become, you know, somewhat out of control and out of their control, certainly. And it's not for anyone else to be able to control it, is my thinking. So the idea was, can we connect these people with an animal? Because I was at the same time I was managing the school farm, which was an operational farm. And I was seeing these young people who were having lots of challenging times in managing themselves and their emotions. I was seeing them differently around the animals and they were different around the animals. It was really plain to see what some of the other educators would call really bad behavior. Wasn't the term I would use, but behaviors that were challenging would just melt away around the animals. And you would see these young people become able to co-regulate. Their state of being would change rapidly. And that would be around cows, sheep, alpacas, pigs, chickens. And my thinking was, this is what these people need. It's one of the things that we've got on our doorstep. But I can't bring a big boar, a big pig, a big cow, a big wild animal into the classroom. But there must be an animal that we can bring in. And I have felt an affiliation with dogs all of my life. So there was the idea, can we bring a dog in? The answer was yes when I asked the question to the person who was in charge of the school. It was coupled with some... I was doing at the time as part of some postgraduate studies. That research was directly about student wellbeing and it was about applied learning. So coupling it with the research and seeing the need and having the opportunity was this perfect storm of where this all began. So I went about building this as a full-time teacher, building something that was enabling a young dog to come into the classroom in a way that we felt was safe for the dog safe for people it's been rapidly evolving ever since the impact initially was mind-blowing and it still is to this very day i have interactions with people that that give me goosebumps from the stories and the impacts and and so it feels like it started a long time ago but the feeling of it rapidly evolving is constant and it's still here today, which is something I love.

Leah: 5:43

That's awesome. Yeah, I probably should have started with how I found you or how we connected because I typically find people through following their content on YouTube or Instagram and I found your work If you want to call it that, the class that you have on Polyvagal Institute, because I've been studying Dr. Porges' work and Depdana and how to bring those concepts into my dog training, if you can even call it that, which we're going to get into some of the language stuff that we also have in common in terms of how we work with dogs. the dogs and what are we actually really doing? Is it even training? But yeah, I took your course on the Polyvagal Institute, which is like an overview of what you're doing with your organization. And then when we did our little pre-interview chat, you know, I realized, which I don't know why that didn't come to mind earlier but my mom had been a teacher in the special education field specifically with elementary school kids and then when I was home from college I used to substitute sometimes in her classroom with her but definitely getting a feeling for what's going on in classrooms this was a long time ago I hope there's something like this in the in the United States. I didn't even ask you that. If you have any... If you guys are international or...

Grant: 7:31

At the moment, we're not. But I do believe this is happening in little pockets globally. And it's a real grey area across the world in that it's really difficult because it's evolving more rapidly than the governing bodies and the governance itself. You know... to come back to talking about Dr. Porges and the polyvagal theory. When I first started to build this program, I was, I'm as excited today as I was back then, but I was in a place where I was discovering that science was underpinning what we were doing. And I was really excited to come across the polyvagal material. And I would listen to, I remember driving for hours and hours from one school to another and traveling the countryside. It's a really big place. It's not unusual to be driving for six hours here and just to go to another school. So listening to Dr. Stephen Porter's talk for hours and hours on end and being really excited about it because it aligned really strongly with what we were doing and what our vision was. and it really excited me so that has been you know something that underpins science is underpinning what we're doing more and more and more we'll get to the terminology and that really excites me because you and i are really aligned with some of the terminology that we want to move away from and that we some of the terminology we want to move towards but i think that the governance that you know that the governing bodies that the this concept of introducing a dog and building the idea differently in that this is not a trained dog in inverted commas that comes in and can just take what we think we can inflict or put towards this dog or expose this dog to that it's different and that it's about building relationship and it's about bringing a dog into a place in a way that is considering that the dog must feel safe and must feel that it can naturally connect with people on its own terms. It needs to be mutual and reciprocally offered. And the dogs must have choice. And so that's really different for a lot of people. It's certainly different from a lot of what the governance and a lot of what would be, I guess, legislation. A lot of the legislation that we align with is really, really old. It's 1970s, 1980s. It's really basic stuff. It's like shelter, food, water. This is what animals need. I feel like animals and the way we perceive animals is probably more the way to put it, is evolving really rapidly. People often ask me, what is it that I love the most about what we do? And my answer is truly, deeply the same every single time. I love that we're helping people to see dogs differently. to think about them differently and to feel about them differently. Because it wasn't that long ago that dogs were in the backyard, being fed total crap, being told to shut up when they barked. And it's changing really, really quickly. You know, our culture as humans, the way we bring dogs in, the way we're building relationships. There's countries where dogs have their own opah, you know, their own human assistant. And, and, this might be a family who have an opah for their children and another opah for their dog. You know, so we're seeing dogs and the role that they play evolving really rapidly and the relationships that humans build and the way that we're weaving into acknowledging the animal wisdom that we have the opportunity to learn from and invite into our lives and connect with. So, I mean, That is going far beyond and far more rapidly than what we'd call legislation or governance. So in a way, what we're doing in helping people to see this differently is going to bring policy and it's going to bring legislation and it's going to bring the governing bodies along, hopefully in this direction, because it's undeniable. It's undeniable that the way we... exist with dogs. I mean, if we stop, just stop for a minute and think about how many people in the world have dogs in their lives that they would genuinely call one of their best friends, if not their best friend. When people say, how many dogs do you have? I don't say I've got two dogs. I say there's two dogs who I'm the servant of, who I live with, who I hang out with. They're my best mates. I don't own them. I'm responsible for them. I'm their guardian. But, you know, if you think about the amount of people in the world that would say, yes, there's a dog in my life and he or she is my best mate and I do everything I can to, you know, I drive these dogs around to wherever they need to be. I walk around with them. You know, I pick up after them. I cater for them. They eat better than I do. I'm not joking. I'm a little bit, maybe a little bit different too. many people, but the way we are existing with dogs is evolving really rapidly. The language is evolving really rapidly. And I think part of our mission as Dogs Connect is to support humans and to support positive human animal relationships, to support the wellbeing being fostered, the emotional the emotional coherence, if you like, within the relationships. It's really exciting. It's a great space for me to be in because I'm so passionate about it. And people are open to this evolving. People want this to move. It's happening really naturally. You know, we're talking about animals in a really different way. We feel about them differently. You know, so many people are talking about that we've got so much to learn from animals now. not just dogs, animals. It's just amazing for me to be able to live and breathe and work in that space. I love it.

Leah: 14:15

Yeah, that's really cool because that's how I am with my dogs. They eat real food. I'm constantly thinking about have they had enough enrichment today or enough exercise or enough emotional connection? And then the interesting thing is some of my language and concepts are still a little behind because even when we started talking, I was like, oh, it's so cool how you use the dogs to teach people about the nervous system. And then we right away started talking about language and how, you know, We don't really want to even use that phrase of using the dog because the dog is not the tool. The connection to the dog is the tool. And so even I am like really quickly upgrading my language and making sure that I'm in alignment with how I actually feel about the dogs and I also came to you with this concept that you were training the dogs to kind of perform some sort of task the way we do here in terms of service dogs. Like in order for a dog to be classified as a service dog, it has to be trained to perform a specific task. So I was under the initial impression that like there was some sort of program that the dogs had to go through so that they could then perform a job sort of in service where what you and i are now talking about is like kind of flipping that paradigm on its head and really just like allowing the dog to be there and studying the dog so if you want to jump in there yeah

Grant: 16:18

but flipping it totally on its head and you're right in that most people think this needs to be about training a dog and You know, I'm talking about education settings. I'm talking about youth justice settings. I'm talking about hospitals, community care organisations, sports clubs. People say in their preconceived idearies, so the dog must pass a test. The dog must be ready. The dog must be trained. We are flipping it entirely onto its head and saying, no, no. Obviously, the dog needs to be appropriate to have around. Quite often common sense is enough that we need there. Sometimes it's more understanding. And part of our job at Dogs Connect is to build that understanding, to help people build it. It's not really hard to do. But the other end of the stick is, no, we're not training dogs. I don't even use the word dog training. We use the term understanding dogs. We've had to shift from the very beginning, never felt right to me to say obedience, to expect obedience. To use the word command feels very human heavy. To use the word understanding instead of obedience to talk about expectations, communication, relationships. flipping it now into saying it's the human's responsibility. It's the human's job. It's humans who are in charge of what happens. We can bring a dog into a school and say this dog is trained to the highest level. And to come back just very quickly to assistance, dogs are different because they are trained to assist people who need assistance. And that might be a young person with cerebral palsy needs help to pick something up when they've dropped it. Or it might be to assist people that have, you know, that have been through traumatic occurrences in their life and that now they require a certain level of assistance, it might be assisting someone who's vision impaired to cross a busy road. That's a serious assistance. The dogs we're talking about introducing, they're about connectedness, they're about companionship, they're about bright moments, they're about the natural feelings that that when people and dogs are connected authentically, that naturally occur. You know, the science talks about it. It's oxytocin release. The moment you look into a dog's eye, when you have a connection with that dog, you get an oxytocin release. So does the dog. You know, that's that love feeling that's talked about, the hug feeling. But basically we're flipping it on its head and saying humans, it's up to humans to build process. to build their understanding, to make sure that they can honor what dogs bring and what this individual being is. This dog is a sentient being that has his or her own emotional experiences. She doesn't talk our language, but we can understand her. We can learn to understand her very acutely and that we must, and we must consider her in bringing her into this very dynamic place where she is potentially and likely to be the most vulnerable being in the place. That's a big statement, but it's quite often very true. Dogs don't get to even go to the toilet unless we allow it. They don't get water unless we allow it. In a school, they don't get fresh air unless people think about it and plan it and say, this dog hasn't been outside for hours. No wonder it looks like it's sleepy. It's been under an air-conditioned, controlled environment for three hours. They're teaching people how to make sure they consider everything that dogs need and to offer it to dogs so that dogs can live a balanced work life. And by balanced, I mean not so much work and play balance. I mean what are the things they need in their day and let's get them balanced. Let's make sure they get exercise, fresh air. Let's make sure they get some interaction if and when they want it, that they get to sit and observe because they learn from observing just like we do. let's make sure they get toilet opportunities, fresh air opportunities. Let's make sure they get time to just be passively away from it all. So these are, I guess, obvious to us as what dogs need, but they're not obvious to everyone because not everyone has the experience or the natural ability to kind of see things through a dog's perspective. And educating people around that and having people build process, build protocol, build understanding, get to a point where, yes, we can do this in a way that we are confident that we're assessing our dog's well-being and state of being and health. We are confident that we are able to understand this dog and when he or she indicates that she likes, doesn't like, loves, can't stand, wants out, wants more of, that we can respond accordingly in the moment. And so That's about upskilling people a little bit, not a lot. The beauty of this is, and to come back to the polyvagal theory, is this is universal stuff. You know, most of it's about the way humans interact interpersonally as well. It's really easy to understand. And when the opportunity is to understand it in the context of a dog, it's quite often being disarmed, as in it's not personal. It's not about me potentially doing this wrong or with, to, around, or for you. It's about trying to do it with an animal that is offering unconditionally most of the time. It's about trying to do it in a relational setting where barriers have come down, where this natural connection with these animals, with these dogs, is a conduit to this understanding that that leads to the likelihood of these understandings landing. With people of young age and mature people as well, these understandings landing much more clearly and being embedded with much more ease because there is no threat. It's not me talking to you about what you need to do. It's you interacting with a dog and learning that you need to try and understand this animal because you would naturally care about it once the connection's there. And so weaving all of that together and weaving it into communities and cultures and weaving it into spaces and places and where there's lots of people, I mean, in my thinking, this is an amazing opportunity for the masses to see things differently around not just dogs but animals. And it's happening. And... you know, to come back to again, it's just an amazing opportunity for me to be a part of. And yeah, there's so many layers to it. Sometimes I feel like I could talk about this forever, but yeah, there's just so many layers to it. The language is so important to me. The Dogs Connect team are always talking about the language because it's evolving so quickly. We're now using terminology like emotional ecology. We're talking about custodians. We're talking about alignment and connection. We're talking about weaving this in and acknowledging the wisdom of animals. And so it's becoming more meaningful for animals. It's becoming less of a standalone, overarching human-driven framework. It's more and more animal-centered, which I love. I love it for us as humans, but also for animals and the evolution of our world.

Leah: 24:15

Oh, yeah. It really has huge implications. And gosh, there is so much to talk about. I'm going to pull a couple of threads from what you just spoke about. The first thing that popped out at me was the obedience commands. I've really for a long time tried to explain to people that once your dog is emotionally aligned with you, you don't really need commands. You kind of hardly even need verbal communication. I used to give this course online where the first two weeks of the course, I didn't want the humans to even speak to the dog. They had to do everything with body language and we were using food. I'm getting away even from using food because dogs can tend to perform for food or be shaped or kind of persuaded to do things that they wouldn't do if the food wasn't there. And if you get really, really sensitive to your dog, your dog ends up getting really sensitive to you. And There's just a different kind of communication that goes on. Like my dog will turn and look at me when she wants to go home. And there's just like a look, you know. Or like I'll ask her a question like, do you want me to keep petting your belly? Like it sounds silly because you think, well, of course she wants. Well, sometimes she doesn't. Sometimes she doesn't feel comfortable. like having that contact, you know? So instead of just mindlessly petting the dog, I have like a little hand gesture. I use more like sign language with my dogs and so that I can ask them questions and then it just gets finer and finer in the tuning and you know how the dog is feeling and you know if they want contact or wanna be left alone. And I do think, you know, my mentor wrote a book called Your Dog is Your Mirror, and he basically hypothesized that our own personal dogs are showing us what's unresolved about our emotional lives. And so it's really interesting what you're bringing up, the way that society is really quickly changing how we think about dogs and how we treat dogs. That's kind of a mirror also of how We are actually taking care of our emotional selves. So it just makes total sense to me that what you're doing is helping people to have a really sensitive understanding, a really deep understanding of the dog as an emotional being. And then that in turn helps people to kind of have a better emotional intelligence about their own emotional needs and states

Grant: 27:28

yeah there's so much in what you just said there's so many big concepts and and to think about let's just think about dogs for a minute we know that they're capable of some amazing understanding of some amazing communication we have dogs utilized in the world in different places that that enable them to call on their senses to support us in ways that are, whether we're talking about detecting explosives or rescuing people in rubble of collapsed buildings or, you know, detecting whether it be disease or contraband or, you know, there's so many examples of how dogs seem to have something that they're capable of that we don't yet comprehend fully You know, we may never, but for you to think about, you know, that potentially food and the idea of, I mean, the idea of obedience is, I mean, it just doesn't sit, it's never sat right with me, but using food can make dogs go into perform mode and shaping their behavior and it can nullify their intuitive nature. And it can also be very useful for, in shaping some behaviours, but you do, as a person who's with a dog a lot, you do become at a level where if you tune in enough and if you pay attention enough as a human, you don't need food, you can communicate very, very acutely without verbal cues even. And, you know, we do this with humans. The majority, the vast majority of our communication is non-verbal. I'm talking, it's like 90%. So to think that we can do this with dogs is completely the way it is. It's understandable. It works. But it requires us to pay attention. It requires us to watch and to observe and to inquire about, you know, the most acute movements that I see in the eyes of one of the older dog that I spend time with. He's 11 years old now. His name's Sonny. He can do something very acutely with his eyes and it can tell me a lot about what he wants to do in that moment, where he wants to be, what he expects from me, what he needs from me. We talk about using gestures a lot with Dogs Connect and we talk about reading body language, understanding, observing as acutely as we can. The idea that your dog is your mirror, I couldn't agree more that dogs are really clear mirrors. that they also absorb a lot of our energetic state too and that they can. But the opportunity to have a mirror then leads us to progressing with that thinking around, well, then does that mean that if something's not feeling right with our dog's behavior that we need to go internal and look at ourselves? And absolutely, yes, it does. We work with lots of people who talk to us about their dogs having anxiety issues And there's a push in the world at the moment that is Western medicine approach to dogs being labeled ADHD. I've been speaking to people who are telling me their dog's got autism just recently. He's got autism now. Anxiety and that the push is underpinned by pharmaceutical medication. So there's dogs everywhere being medicated for all of these things. Anxiety. mainly in my experience, dogs on Prozac, just sitting around, just being completely numbed out. So when we have the opportunity to work with someone who's open to the idea that their dog may be looking anxious and that can we stop there and can we ask, how are you? How are you in the world at the moment? 10 times out of 10, the person will say, I'm all over the place. I'm anxious. I'm suffering a bit myself. 10 times out of 10. So there's no judgment ever around this, but we see it as a beautiful opportunity to have the reflection opportunity and to say, can we be the cause of change for our dogs? Can we be open to that that's an opportunity in what we see in our dogs can be a reflection that we can look at, that we can say is potentially a mirror. How am I? If the dog that I'm really attuned with is off today, hang on a second, how am I today? I'm in a hurry. I didn't sleep well. I'm a bit scattered. I'm a little bit worried about a couple of things. No wonder Heath liked that. And you can see in a moment when that is deliberately shifted within a person that I do this really cool activity with young people and it's along these lines and it's linked directly to polyvagal stuff. So our state of being, if I can just digress from a minute and describe this, it's really closely linked to what we're talking about. Standing in front of a group of 15 year old humans who are declared at risk. And I've been asked to come in with Sonny, with Sonny the dog that I've just talked about. Can you come in with Sonny and can you do some work with these kids? we'd love for you to do some of your emotional co-regulation work we'd love you to talk about the escalation cycle you know we'd love you to just do your thing so we come in i go in without sunny first and i talk about the fact that i'm about to walk in with a being that is a pretty big dog I talk about him. I explain where he comes from. I talk about his name. I talk about what his behavior might look like when he comes into the room. And I make sure everybody feels really safe. And we've previously vetted the group in terms of anybody that has any fear or considerations that we need to work with. We're not just turning up. But to come in then to interact with Sonny, to talk about him while he's in the room, and to explain that what I would like to do is get really into him being excited and to play a game with him. You know, he loves to play tug. There's a few things that he likes to play, and he gets really happy, really excited, and I'll explain that his body language will change, but I'd like you to take notice of it. So watch me play with him for three minutes, and then we'll talk about what his body did So he gets quite into it. You know, Sonny's a big dog. He's like a little horse. When he gets to the point where he's so excited about the game that we're playing, he growls really deeply. It can sound vicious. I know him really well. And I know that his tail is going in a very happy direction whilst he's growling. I know he's right into it. But he'll move quickly. He'll jump around. He gets quite animated. We go over the list of what he looked like. But then I'll ask the group of young people to watch me do it again. And at the 60-second mark, I want you to watch what I do. And so at the 60-second mark, I stop and I take the stimulation out of the equation. I say, hey, Sonny, come over and stand with me for a minute. And he'll come over and stand with me. And I'll sit down onto my knees and I'll get to his level. And I'll just be next to him. And so he'll start to slow down and he'll be next to me. I'll put my hand on his back and I'll just sit. And so he and I are now just, we've slowed right down and we're pretty still next to each other. I'll just look into the forward direction and I'll take three really slow, deliberate breaths. In, out, in. touching Sonny on the back. Within approximately 30 seconds, he would go from being really amped to being pretty much asleep on the ground next to me. And so asking the young people, what happened? Well, you know, what are the four things that you saw? I used his name. I asked him to interact. We came into each other's personal space. I comforted him. And I know that the hand on the back is a comfort to him. If it was a young human, it might be different. It might be a totally different version of that. But then I deliberately did something with myself. I stopped. I slowed my breathing. I put some structure to my own physiology, my heart rate. I slowed my heart rate down deliberately. I did it with my breathing. I shifted my own state of being. He mirrored it. he deescalated rapidly. So he escalated pretty quick, but he deescalated rapidly. So we document this and we start to write on our whiteboards and we look at what escalation looked like. And then we look at what deescalation looked like. And we see the structure that's possible that we have some control over. We talk about it in relation to our nervous system. You know, some of these escalation can happen in a way that we don't do deliberately, in a way that's not so pleasant to experience. And some of the de-escalation can take a long time if we don't know how to have some influence on it. So that conversation is really easily linked very strongly to polyvagal theory and understanding how we can have some impact on some of the things that are directly related to our autonomic nervous system. Some of the things that, if we're not aware of, are out of our control. So, you know, that mirror that you talk about, that opportunity to have that experience or that For those 15-year-olds to sit and watch that after spending half an hour connecting with, understanding and feeling like there's a bit of buy-in with this dog and they want to see him, they want to watch him, for them to see that and to be able to label it and put structure behind it all within a 60-minute period is something that would be otherwise potentially very difficult to teach them. We're talking about escalating, de-escalating. We're talking about emotional regulation, co-regulation. turning into self-regulation. We're talking about structure that's deliberate, that you can help to manage yourself and your own state of being. Utilizing the connection with this dog makes that, as an educator, so possible in a really short amount of time, embedding it, opening up conversations. Potentially, these learnings in a 60-minute period are potentially then springboarding into what are some of the other breathwork exercises we can do? What are some of the moments where we can catch ourselves in an escalated state, where we can catch ourselves having noticed and grown aware really quickly that something has just shot us up, right up on our nervous system? What are the things that we can do in an instant to help shift it deliberately? These are potentially life-changing moments. These are young people who are on the verge of prison, that are standing in the room, that can snap into violent behavior from an autonomic nervous system level. They don't deliberately choose this stuff. They have big impacts on their nervous system. So bringing some awareness to this and opening up the idea that we can have some impact on it through the connection with this dog in a really short period in one room is, you know, that's the mirror. That's the effect. That's the power that this connection has. And that's where I think Dr. Stephen Porges could see the relationship and where the conversation was opened up. You know, he wanted to talk about it. I wanted to talk to him. You know, there's a really strong link here to how we understand trauma and how this connection can be powerful. And it's on offer. to us as humans. And I get emotional about it. I get excited about it. I get passionate about it. You know, we've got millions of dogs in our lives and this is on offer and it is huge. So to be able to come back to it and say, helping people with bringing different terminology to it, bringing in a slightly different lens. You know, we don't want the dog to be trained. We want to understand the dog. We want to bring him in so he can feel safe, so he can have some choice. We don't want him to look at me and go, yeah, but if I do that, will I get the treat? Will I get the reward? What do you want next? What do you want next? We want him to come in and go, oh, yeah, I know this place. I know this girl, Leah. I've seen her before. I'm going to go and say hello to her. You know, I'm comfortable here. This is cool. We get connection here. That's what we want. for humans, dogs on a big scale. You know, it's on offer. It's amazing.

Leah: 41:10

Yeah, you just hit on like all the main points that I have on my little list here. So I want to just kind of intuitively feel through it. I mean, all that is incredible to me. I'm going in this direction with my clients who have dogs where... I'm asking them to do breath work and see how it affects the dogs, even taking three deep breaths, or if you want to get technical, a physiological sigh, and then seeing what effect that has not only on their emotional state, but almost immediately, like you said, it gets mirrored in the dog. I actually want to put on a workshop where, what are those little It's like a pulse ox that you put on your finger and it reads your heart rate and your oxygen level. So I would love to do like a little mini workshop where people are actually wearing those and they can correlate and understand how making a choice to take a deep breath is having a physiological and emotional impact. And then I don't think we want to hook the dogs up to a machine to read their state, but just being able to look at the reflection in the dogs. Yeah, and you keep talking about safety, that the dog has to feel safe. And I don't want to get too in the weeds with polyvagal theory, but understanding neuroception, that the priority of the nervous system is to detect cues of danger and cues of safety and react accordingly, and how observing neuroception in the dog is such a powerful way to understand that the dog's behavior is really a product of their nervous system and whatever state they're in, if it's fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. And so you take the intentionality out of that by understanding, oh, the dog is reading the room as either safe or not safe, and they kind of don't have a choice necessarily It's all internally being decided for them. And a lot of time, I think we are operating like that as well. But we get these brief moments where it's like, oh, wait, I can decide to take a deep breath right now. But a lot of the time, it's the same for us. We have programs that we're running on based on What we learned was safe or what we learned was dangerous. As we were growing up as children, then we see those cues in the world and we may not be totally in control of our reaction based on what's going on. So that's really awesome that you're able to show that to people.

Grant: 44:22

Yeah, and a lot of the time... When you said a lot of the time it's the same for people, it's the same. So when we learn this about dogs, when we talk about neuroception, I've not often used the word neuroception with young people, but the concept is exactly what we explore. And so learning about these concepts in regard to Sunny is learning about them, period. So they apply across the board. They apply to humans. And by the way, we used to have young people come out and... and take Sonny's heart rate. You know, we'd do it, we would do it by feel. Every now and then we'd do it with a stethoscope. He was up for it. You know, this was his calling. You know, this is what this dog loved to do and he did it really well. You know, he's got a presence. He's got something special about him, but we would take his heart rate and we'd feel where his heart was. We would count. his heart rate, we would get human heart rate skyrocket really quick and we would do breathing exercises that brought it down. We would talk about what would his heart rate need to be, what would it get to, what would the point be where we would declare him unable to focus, unable to hear, unable to learn, unable to respond to me if I was using his name and saying, Sonny, you need to come over here, it's safer over here. we work out that there was heart rates and zones that we could then correlate directly to human zones. And we would have 10-year-old students standing at the door of the classroom, looking at their watch, checking their pulse after these workshops and saying, I'll be in in about 40 seconds. I'm still on 115 and they knew they needed to be between 60 and 80 to come back into the room because that enabled them to be in an environment that felt safe for everyone and in an environment where they could engage in dialogue and listen and focus and be on task. So they'd call it ready to learn. I'll be ready to learn in 40 seconds. And this all came from doing it with Sunny, you know, and saying, What's the cap? What does his heart rate get to? And then he's outside of his threshold of being ready to learn or ready to focus or engage. And what's too low for Sonny? What would be unhealthy for him to be? And then we talk about, well, if he was just laying around all day, you know, probably not healthy for him. His muscles will become weak. He'll be potentially not active in the brain. And so we explore all of these concepts in relation to a dog first and they're very easy to embed in the human context. The beauty of this is, you know, when you talk about mirror, these concepts apply across the board. You know, it's just such a fantastic opportunity through connection with a dog to engage in learning this and the breathwork that you're thinking about with your workshops and the breathwork that you do, you know, in whatever way that you do it. It's just such a... Such a reliable, powerful visual for people to see this reflected by their dog and by a being that they know they can rely on, that they know well enough to see and to say, this is real. Dogs don't fake this. So really amazing opportunity. I just keep coming back to thinking, I'm just so grateful that to dogs and so grateful for an opportunity to be in this realm where there's people, there's like-minded people like you, you know, there's people across this planet who are, you know, growing in awareness rapidly around how this is evolving and what it can be. And dogs are loving it too. You know, they're stepping up to the plate when, when a climate is set right for a dog in a place like a school, you, you, can see it in their walk you know they walk with confidence they walk knowing they're safe they walk knowing that they're valued you know they they kind of prance around like they're pretty special you know um we hear people say that that he walks around like he's a rock star in this place and so he should because he kind of is you know he's different to us all he's bringing he is individually as one being bringing thousands of smiles and bright moments and he's walking around like he knows he's doing it you know so that's the difference between a dog that's focused on what we want from it you know what is this outcome that's expected and and what have you been trained to do the difference is huge when you see a dog that has been brought in with authentic opportunities to connect and for it to be mutually, reciprocally offered as an opportunity that he can take or leave. So yeah, every time you speak, it makes so much come to mind about there's just so much in this. It's so big and so beautiful and the opportunities are... just beginning to go to what feels to me like a real new level between dogs and humans. And I absolutely love it. I

Leah: 49:41

just kind of got the feeling like this might actually be a good place to start to wrap up, even though I know that you and I could go off on so many different tangents. And I think this was like a really good introduction to what you're doing with the Dogs Connect organization and then, you know, giving people some of these concepts without getting, again, without getting too in the weeds on polyvagal theory. So I just really appreciate this instant kind of rapport that we had because we have some of the same ideas and passionate about some of the same things around how people are interacting and learning from dogs and how, like you said, really quickly our understanding of dogs is evolving. And so, yeah, if there's anything else you want to, and don't feel like we have to wrap up quickly, but if there's anything else specifically about your program that you want to share, like if there was a, you know, something that we didn't touch on that you thought was important? I

Grant: 51:03

don't have anything about our program, our organization that I really want to share or push or anything. I would just urge people to feel that it's evolving and continue to pay more attention to the animals that are around you. In particular, if you've got a dog in your life, watch more closely and let it evolve. It's happening and feel it. is what I would love more people to do. And if that's happening with one or two people as a result of this conversation, then that's awesome.

Leah: 51:36

Yeah, I totally agree. So if people are curious to learn more, can they get in touch with you through the website or how would you like to connect with people?

Grant: 51:47

Website is the easiest. There's website contact. There's email on there. Basically, we'll talk to anyone who's interested in learning more. We're really passionate about it. The Dogs Connect team loves what they do. So go to the website. It's just Dogs Connect. And we'll be here. We'll be here forever, hopefully. We love it.

Leah: 52:13

Okay, cool. And then if anyone's interested in the virtual course that's on the Polyvagal Institute, that's how I found you. But I will post all the links to your website, your social channels. And yeah, I'm so grateful that we got to have this conversation and that we're helping move things forward together. in that really exciting evolution that's happening in the relationship between humans and dogs. So thank you so much.

Grant: 52:52

Thank you, Leah. It's a pleasure.