Canine Agency and Consent

Please note that this transcript is automatically generated and contains many inaccuracies

Disclaimer

The zooier than thou podcast contains adult concepts and language, and is intended for a mature audience. So if you lack the legal capacity to give informed consent… SIT. WAIT….. WAAAAIIIIIT… turn off your podcast player… come back and listen to this one when you’re older.

Cold Open - Dog Symposium

Speaker:Good afternoon, everyone.

Speaker:I hope all of you, just like me, woke up this morning and said to yourself, I hope oh I hope there’ll be more rain!

Speaker:I love love love love love love LOVE the rain! I love the feeling of the rain on my glasses, I love the feeling of the rain on my socks, if I get out of bed and see rain I will call out YIPPEE and I will look forward to splashing through the puddles on the way to every place I am going today. I don’t know, all of you, thumbs up, thumbs down, how do we feel about rain?

Thumbs down, thumbs down–thumbs up! Yeah! We get it! Wavering hand, what do you think?

Audience Member:I love the rain, but I can’t bring my books through it.

Speaker:Ohhh fair enough. Thumbs up there, thumbs up, yeah. Lot of thumbs down, okay. Well, whether some of us are looking forward to changing into dry socks, or whether some of us want to get back out into it before it clears, I will bring us onto the actual topic, how about that?

This up here is a quote that I’d like to begin with. “Though your wife may endeavor to spoil your work in breaking a dog, it must be reminded that it is not the same as you are. If you may afford to feed the dog well, you must not do so; If you may allow the dog to play in a way unstructured towards your benefit, you must be rigid, and not allow it. The dog is not a son or daughter, nor a friend, nor a collaborator. The dog is lesser than even a tool, for a hammer is never traitorous, a hammer never speaks out, a hammer itself requires no lessons. A dog that you hope to make to be even as good as a hammer must be punished for its every disobedience, the greatest disobedience being it making any use of its voice, until it has been taught the way of things, that it has no say on any matter.”

Now, let me ask–well, let me ask this first, does the person who said this appear to have a good command of language, are they doing an effective job at expressing a thought that’s on their mind?

Audience Member:The ability to communicate is not the problem here.

Speaker:Any grammatical mistakes, typos that you can see if we think this was copied mark-for-mark from a written source?

Various Audience Members:No. - No. - Everything is spelled right.

Speaker:So, if I’m grading papers, this one doesn’t have any mistakes, so I should give it an A and move on to the next one?

Various Audience Members:No! - No. - NO. - D MINUS. - F. - SEE ME AFTER CLASS.

Speaker:We feel VERY negatively about this. So something must be wrong with it? You.

Audience Member:Well it’s not very nice. “A dog is worse than a hammer,” excuse me??

Speaker:Not very nice, okay. You?

Audience Member:Okay, it’s, hard to know where to even begin, but, FIRSTLY, this isn’t even an effective way to train dogs. “The dog is not a friend, nor a collaborator,” yes they SHOULD be, that is THE point if ever there was one. And second, I would be disgusted by anyone who doesn’t find this disgusting, just, tonally.

Speaker:So, let me ask it this way. What’s MISSING here? There is a specific word that I’m looking for, for something that this quote is failing to appreciate. Throw some guesses out, I’ll tell you if you’re right. What is missing, what key word is failing to appear here?

Audience Member:Good girl!

Speaker:Half credit, I like to be called that but that’s not what this is missing. I’m looking for something that starts with a C.

Audience Member:Christian values!

Speaker:Interesting, how do you mean?

Audience Member:We have to be thoughtful to God’s creations.

Speaker:I like it, but not the C word I had in mind. “Thoughtful” is close.

Audience Member:Care!

Speaker:Very close!

Audience Member:Consent!

Speaker:Yes! Winner winner, consent! “The dog is not a son or daughter, nor a friend, nor a collaborator. A dog that you hope to make to be even as good as a hammer must be punished for its every disobedience, the greatest disobedience being it making any use of its voice, until it has been taught the way of things, that it has no say on any matter.” Would we agree that in this quote, the speaker is advocating for others to disrespect the dog’s consent?

Various Audience Members:Yes.

Speaker:Why is the dog’s consent important, throw me some ideas.

Audience Member:To have a good relationship with the dog.

Speaker:Yes.

Audience Member:To abide by morals you can sleep with at night.

Speaker:Yes.

Audience Member:We just should care; All sentient beings are worthy of moral consideration.

Speaker:I honestly get very lost in the definitions of sentient, sapient, um… but yes, your point does not run counter to any ideas I would have, yes.

So, I will come clean, you will not find this quote in any search results for any books. I did make this quote up, today, as an illustrative example of something a bad guy might say. It turns out, with the enshitification of search engines, it’s actually really hard to find any examples of wrongthink when you are SPECIFICALLY looking for them. I TRIED, “Quote about how you have to dominate a dog,” “Quote about how you are better than dogs,” and pretty much all you get is, “46 quotes about how perfect dogs are,” and it’s like, YES, Google, I agree, but that’s not what I SEARCHED.

So, I made this one up, as a bad example, stitching together some of the greatest hits of the wrongthink that I KNOW I’ve HEARD PEOPLE SAY, but, it’s impossible to search for, ANYWAYS. THIS quote, that we can move on to next, is a REAL quote, from a REAL person, who is not me. Our next quote here reads:

“The goal of teaching should be about providing skills that help dogs navigate their environment with the most amount of success and provide value to their lives. But the methods we choose should also reflect consensual interactions and maximize agency… People often justify their forceful or coercive actions, based partially on the objectification of dogs as property and their view that dogs have a subordinate role to humans even when they are considered a part of the family. The intrinsic power relations people have over dogs is a deliberately difficult truth; however, it is important to acknowledge if we are to support any kind of goof life for dogs.”

So, I like this one. Let’s start with that first part, that the methods we choose to teach dogs should reflect consensual interactions and maximize agency. Elk yeah, right? Show of paws, who here does that resonate strongly with? Yeeeesssss. I do like to see an audience full of raised hands. Now, let me ask you, what do you think it means to maximize agency for dogs? Also, well, first, before that, what is agency, and do dogs have it?

It’s not a TRICK question. Oh, yeah, over there.

Audience Member: Agency is like… the freedom to do what you want.

Speaker: That’s good, yeah. If we want to be more precise and really get a working definition to go forward with here: Agency is the freedom to ACT on CHOICES that you make. So, do dogs have agency?

Audience Member: (uncomfortably) I guess, not really. At least not usually.

Speaker: Not usually. And that’s a little tough to acknowledge. Our dogs are our friends, our partners, our family. But how many times do they get to make choices about what they want? Or even if they do MAKE choices, how often are they then allowed to act on them? Is it okay if they bark at the neighbors when they pass by the window? What if they choose to chew on that antique, wooden, kitchen chair you got from your grandparents? How many of your dogs walk on a leash so they’re forced to stay close to you while going down the street? Leash laws are a thing, after all, right?

And if these are all of the realities that we’re working with, how do we CREATE agency out of that?

That is one of the major questions of the night, and for SOME of the answers, allow me to introduce tonight’s speakers. You know and love them from what is your favorite podcast series I’m PAWsitive. Ladies, Gentlemen, and those of us who know better, your hosts, Mike the Dog and Toggle Rat!

Theme Song

Kynophile: Hey, what can I say?

You’ve got me howlin’ at the moon!

Whoa, don’t you know that love is wild when you’re a zoo?

We’re Zooier Than Thou!

Oh yeah!

Topic - Canine Agency and Consent (Part 1)

Toggle: Greetings fellow zoos and welcome to another Conspecific episode of Zooier Than Thou. I Am Toggle. I’m a rat.

Mike the Dog: I’m Mike, who is the dog, and I’m the one who’s Conspecific here.

Toggle: And we’ll be your host for this evening. Now folks just wanna let you know things are gonna be a little different today. We’re switching up the format and moving things around. So, bear with us. We’re trying something new. Trying to shake up the formula a little bit. and what we’re gonna do is jump right into our topic today.

Mike the Dog: No emails.

Toggle: Well, emails will come later. Don’t worry.

Mike the Dog: We’ll be splitting this topic into two parts.

Toggle: yeah.

Mike the Dog: And what a topic it is. Wow. I’ve been reading this book for like,oh God, months I guess, but sort of off and on, and I spent the last, I think three weeks in solid, thinking about this.

Toggle: Well then I think we are overly prepared and just a little nervous, so let’s jump right in.

Mike the Dog: Our first listener, oh wait, sorry.

Toggle: So we talk a lot about the human animal divide on our podcast, and how, it is often used to justify persecution of zoophiles. But of course truly the, greater victim of the species divide concept are animals themselves, which is always important to not lose sight of because animals occupy a very subjugated position in at least western society. And I would venture to say most other societies as well.

Mike the Dog: Yeah, I’ve seen bad considerations for them just across the board.

Toggle: Right. And we always talk about, okay, so what can we do a little bit? First of all, we could commit to veganism, which, takes us a little bit more out of the, animal industrial complex. we can do things that improve the lives of the animals that are in our care. Absolutely

Mike the Dog: Yeah, we always advocate for just the basic considerations among zoos among our friends and family.

Toggle: And we often talk about consent,

Mike the Dog: We usually encounter this in an adversarial manner that gets us on the back foot, right? We have to start trying to define what consent is. and, and what we end up doing is pointing at people’s hamburger habits and stuff like that, right?

Toggle: right, the little things that, prove that perhaps consent is really not the issue that they are interested in.

Mike the Dog: it almost lets us sidestep the issue a little bit,

Toggle: a little bit, just a little bit. But, the fact of the matter is, is that the, the root of the problem for other people not being able to consider that animals even have the ability to consent.

The root of that problem is something that even zoos can fall victim to, which is something that we’re gonna talk a little bit about as we move on throughout, our episode.

Mike the Dog: yeah. So I read this book, uh, constructing Canine Consent by Aaron Jones. I suppose I was mostly expecting some new model for well consent of canines that we might construct. Okay. But there was a lot in there about, yeah, there was, there was like most of the beginning part of the book really, it was about all these little traps will fall into kind of ‘cause of our society.

Toggle: Yeah. And it offers new thoughts about how we live with dogs, how we can give them better choices to make their lives better. And also, all of the things that get in the way of that being something we already do by default. I do wanna say a couple of things here

our greatest sin on this podcast is that we only talk about dogs, right? But this time we have a book called Constructing Canine Consent. So what, it’s really framed around that. but if you have a book called Cons, constructing Equine Consent, please feel free to pass it along. We’d be happy to read it as long as it’s not a textbook. We can talk about that too.

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

Toggle: so I just say that because we’re gonna use a lot of dog examples here.

, obviously. constructing canine consent is written by someone who is not a zoophile.

as such, it is likely that they never intended anyone to extrapolate from their work to talk about sexual interactions. And largely, we’re really not gonna do that today because when it gets right down to it, we really have no business trying to talk about. Sexual consent if we can’t even broach the topic of everyday consensual interactions. in our dog’s lives.

So we wanna tackle it from that perspective of everyday

interactions.

Mike the Dog: I think, I think we’re primed to think about it first and foremost as that sexual thing. Everyone will ask oh, what about consent? And they mean the sexual thing? And it’s no, no, no, no. It’s important to think about this through their entire lives. And we, we’ve said on the show, right?

Toggle: We absolutely have. Yeah,

Mike the Dog: sex is about like half an hour out of the day.

What about the rest of the 23 and a half hours?

Toggle: right.

Exactly. So, we’re, returning to that point where, what happens in those other 23 and a half hours? Where we have to live with our dogs, and more importantly, they have to live with us. we’ll get into all of that very soon. But first, what

Mike the Dog: is consent

Toggle: is consent? Anyway, that was silly.

Mike the Dog: But first, put, put like, um,like the, the mysterious kind of like,release believe it or not, kind of what is consent anyway.

Toggle: How do we go about defining consent in the first place?

Mike the Dog: I don’t think we actually, like most people don’t have this solid grounding of exactly what consent is. And actually there’s a million different books you could read where there’s legal scholars talking about and all these different approaches, right?

So I think, I think the very first thing we’ll think about is just the, the, the basic, colloquial definitions we’ve seen before.

Toggle: I think it’s important to remember that consent exists outside of sex. and, especially for humans, we usually think about it in this legal context. and that’s gonna be dealing with things like, well, sex, but also like medical practice, and, and things like that.

But. I like Aaron’s definition here.

Consent is an animal, human or non-human giving permission or agreeing to something that involves them. It differs from ascent, agreeing that something may happen.

by assuming that for consent to occur, there must be the ability to fully understand the stakes. And Aaron makes a point of using the word consent instead of ascent for a very specific reason When talking about shock,

um, I, I think you’ll find if you start reading this book that a lot of the ideas are very zooey.

At least you’re gonna see a lot of things that we’ve talked about on the podcast. which is very, encouraging,

Mike the Dog: Yeah. And when we say zoo, we end up a lot of the times meaning kind of animal centric. like specifically with the thoughts that all of us are animals and that animals are. we’ve each got our own unique views of the world, our, felt the way we experience the world, right? And we’re all worthy of that same consideration, right?

Toggle: Exactly. so yeah, agreement, something’s gonna happen. Some amount of informed usually,we really like to talk about consent as something that can be revoked and something that is

Mike the Dog: And checked on continuously.

Toggle: and then, that’s just Normally how we think of it.

Mike the Dog: Yeah, I

think the, the basic standard, you look at the Fry’s model and stuff like that, right?

Toggle: Right? Or, or things like RCR that we’ve talked about on the show before. There are a lot of different models for how this should work,

Mike the Dog: The basic consent is really just about,making sure that you agree with each other, that everyone understands what’s gonna happen and that they’re not gonna get hurt over that. Right.

Toggle: that’s a really good point. It’s about reducing wrongdoing between different people.

Mike the Dog: Yeah, I was thinking about it. It’s kind of like. The, the basic kind of idea, you, you know how it is to feel wronged,

and that’s the basic thing is you want to avoid wronging others in that way, and you want to avoid feeling wronged yourself.

Toggle: Right. And so that’s why we ask for consent for certain things. so that, we maintain this sort of, respectful relationship between people. And if you think about times where things go wrong, if you will, It’s usually about someone feeling like maybe they didn’t know everything they needed to know or maybe, something was done that they didn’t agree to, even though they agreed to something before that.

Or,

Mike the Dog: Or, or they had some idea about what it meant, what they were agreeing to.

Toggle: it turned out to be something completely different. Like you sign a contract with a, I dunno, did you see the recent, black

Mike the Dog: terms and agreements? Oh, not yet

Toggle: Oh my God. Okay, so spoilers. one of the things there is about someone

Mike the Dog: it for everyone. Everyone

Toggle: did not read the terms and conditions of a streaming service.

She signed up to,

Mike the Dog: that one.

Toggle: yeah. And, found her, entire world violated, if you will. I’m not gonna go too far into it ‘cause it’s, it’s quite fascinating. But. what is the point of signing a contract if you don’t agree to all of the terms and who reads the terms and conditions right?

Mike the Dog: Oh, I saw, I saw a great, joke about consent. Someone put a poll out and it was like,does big tech company, understand consent? And the options were yes, and remind me in one hour.

Toggle: Oh, that’s good. Yeah. you know what’s really funny is when they have the thing where like you have to scroll to the bottom. To, to actually click the I agree

Mike the Dog: Yeah, just to prove that you’ve at least pass through the

Toggle: have glazed over

Mike the Dog: glazed over it. Yeah. I, I had someone confront me like, surely you’ve never read the terms and conditions. And I was like, oh, I, I, I kind of have.

Toggle: I definitely have read them before, but sometimes it’s just so much. There’s

Mike the Dog: It’s like blah, blah, blah. Pretty standard boilerplate, okay, sure.

Toggle: Right. Sometimes it’s like,I don’t really like that that much, but it’s not a, A deal breaker.

Mike the Dog: right?

Toggle: Yeah.

Mike the Dog: Yeah. This is a little annoying to agree to this or just what not. Use the software and it’s

Toggle: Mm-hmm. So, most of the time it doesn’t really become a problem, but God forbid you had some sort of legal thing and suddenly you are like, oh, I can’t sue you because I signed a contract. I have to go into arbitration or whatever.

Mike the Dog:

Toggle: so you know, that’s one, mundane place that consent comes into place is contracts, the way that people feel wronged is when they put things in fine print that you have not looked at before.

Mike the Dog: So yeah, I’ve, I’ve actually been kind of thinking about basic. Ideas about consent for quite a while. I was talking with someone back in 2020 and I was really trying to like just hammer through the basics of ethics and morals and what this all means. And, one of the ideas that are, that are out there is that there’s three main ways of consent, right?

There’s the basic agreement, and then there’s the legal stuff. but then there’s also this morally transformative consent where you.

Toggle: Mm.

Mike the Dog: Doing something that would, by all rights be sort of unethical or immoral. and that that’s, surgery and stuff like that. also BDSM, if you wanna mention that too,

Right. Like it’s, it’s things that would be terrible to do to someone. but because of very stringent, requirements, we can sort of, they, they call it morally transform, transform the morality of the situation

Toggle: Right. It’s the context of the situation. You shouldn’t be cutting people open. That’s what surgeons do all day. And most people don’t want to be beaten with a whip, but there may be a context in which that is absolutely what you want.

Mike the Dog: yeah,

Toggle: So it changes the, action entirely, even though it’s the same thing.

It has a new context.

Mike the Dog: So I’ve been thinking consent is those three ways for a while.

Toggle: that’s interesting. But you know. When you think about something like morally transformative consent or certainly legal consent, let’s start there. When you think about something like legal consent, who is that for? Right. It’s, it’s not made with animals in mind, which is interesting when it is like randomly applied to animals as if,

Mike the Dog: Yeah.

Toggle: it bears any resemblance of something that’s meaningful to them.

Generally

Mike the Dog: like the longest roots in history. I think it starts with all the, the rationalism of the whatever, 17, 18 hundreds. Was it 18

Toggle: yeah.

the rationalism. Yeah, I think it was 17 and 18 hundreds, but also like feminism in the 19 hundreds. Right.

Mike the Dog: Definitely, yeah. Feminism much more recently that that’s had a real strong push about how consent has been, defined.

Toggle: right. Which is great actually. And when we think about how the state of things was before, I don’t know, the nineties even,there was a lot of things that were just kind of assumed or, there were people that were in second class, statuses, at least in the West, where, their bodily autonomy wasn’t respected.

Mike the Dog: Yeah. You think about the most egregious, instances of that. Things like, mental institutions. A lot of this came from like medicine, right? In the

Earlier 19 hundreds.

Toggle: Some of that stuff is nightmare scenario. Really. They made an American Horror story about it.

Mike the Dog: Yeah.

Toggle: so, it’s all about, I. How do we prevent wrongdoing between two different humans?

Mike the Dog: Yeah. Or given our moral rights, when can those rights be waived and so on. And that, that’s when it gets into the health stuff. And then do we have a right to our own bodies, which is the, the feminism coming in. so it is really been this progression.

There’s like debates about whether there’s a single important factor, like in in consequentialist ethics, if you’re looking for only, positive increases to someone’s life or whether multiple factors in which case they conflict and now other things are important.

Is autonomy important on its own or is it just a variable for total wellbeing?

Toggle: Right. Yeah.

Mike the Dog: is hard. You know what I needed? No boob break.

Toggle: Oh,

Mike the Dog: you know what? One more

Toggle: okay. Let’s do it.

Mike the Dog: a.

Toggle: Shaking it out.

Shaking

out. Shaking out with an loo. Yeah. Much better.

Mike the Dog: So consent. This is weird, like ethical, moral legal framework

Toggle: Right.

Mike the Dog: what at its simplest, helps us avoid wronging each other.

Toggle: Right. As of yet though, as far as society goes, we really haven’t started thinking about, I. How that might apply to non-human persons, because we’ve never really

Mike the Dog: I, I mean there, like I said, there’s thought, there’s a lot of thought, but they, a lot of it’s hand wavy. They’re just like, oh, well, I don’t know animals. I don’t think they, I think the same way and blah, blah, blah. Oh, the law just cannot apply to them. Right.

like, think about how many times you’ve heard someone say to you, animals can’t consent because they can’t speak.

And it’s always like they’re, they’re really specific about if they can’t say words,

can’t possibly agree to anything.

that’s intended to criminalize your sexual behavior or whatever. Right. But what it actually does is it robs animals of their agency.

Toggle: Exactly.

Mike the Dog: Like the legal scholars and stuff like that just don’t have a concept for it at the moment.

Toggle: Right, and why do you think that is

Michael, the

Mike the Dog: Well, because humans don’t grant them consideration.

Toggle: Right. We don’t. As humans in our society, grant animals, even the consideration that they might be able to consent, because as we may have said before here, but I’ve certainly said on Twitter, if you deny them their ability to consent, you don’t have to ask for their consent.

Mike the Dog: And that allows you to do things like farm them or For dogs in particular, puppy mills, for horses, Yeah.

Toggle: ride them until they have,splints in their legs and then.

surgically remove the nerves so they can’t feel it

Mike the Dog: Oh, that I heard about

Toggle: Right. Just so that you can continue pushing them harder than is not just necessary, but more than they can go

Mike the Dog: Yeah.

Toggle: because you don’t have to ask for their consent, that they are your tool. You use them as you see fit. That is traditionally how we consider animals, and Erin has a term for this in her book.

Which is human exceptionalism. You want to, you wanna take the, the definition of human exceptionalism, Mike,

Mike the Dog: What do I,

Toggle: do you?

Mike the Dog: oh, um, yeah, I mean, it’s a belief in the human animal species divide, right?

Toggle: right. The great species divide. How often have you heard that On our podcast?

Mike the Dog: Wow. maybe in, in episode,

Toggle: One.

Mike the Dog: Yeah.

Toggle: Pretty sure episode one, season one, episode one. Okay. but that’s what it is. It’s a belief that humans are above animals. They have dominion over animals. and over the earth in general, that its resources are for them to exploit.

Generally that, maybe humans have a soul and animals don’t, or humans have a mind and, higher cognitive abilities than other animals and therefore are of greater, moral consideration.

Mike the Dog: Yeah. Wasn’t there, like some politician, I think like a senator or something who was, who was like, oh, God wants us to strip the earth of all its minerals, like we have, we have a duty to do that.

Toggle: What a very capitalist way of like

Mike the Dog: I know,

Toggle: framing,

human exceptionalism.

Mike the Dog: Or a religious way of framing capitalism. Right.

Toggle: Right. And you know,a lot of this does come from Christianity and Christian morals, but they are not the sole perpetrator of these ideas. Certainly Cartesian dualism.

Mike the Dog: Yeah, I think it starts there, right?

Toggle: Right. It’s, you know, I think therefore I am, but then also.

I have a mind and animals don’t. Therefore I’m of greater moral worth.

Mike the Dog: And that, that, I guess that’s the first part where you take it away from just this basic belief about a soul to this rational idea about a mind. I.

Toggle: I honestly, I don’t know if Descartes had a rational idea of the mind, but

Mike the Dog: Oh, he thought about it. Right?

Toggle: he certainly gave it a good think. But I. But we have sort of like taken these philosophies, even though a lot of people don’t follow them, the effects of those beliefs has permeated society.

It’s become a systemic part of how we do anything, especially when it comes to, animals. Their property. They are tools. They are, commodities, anything but persons with agency,

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm. Dogs in particular, occupy this really strange space here. I mean, they’re, they’re, mostly thought about as companions, right?

But they are commodities.

we, we,trade them. We poppy mill them, as you say.

Yeah. Breed them as we wish. And their tools, they, they have jobs and stuff.

Toggle: Yeah, they serve our purposes for whatever reason.

but on the other hand, we still consider them part of our family, but they’re still not really given equal consideration to humans. Right. They’re

Mike the Dog: It’s a, it’s a paternalistic relationship. Right,

Toggle: Right, exactly. we are their caretakers, they’re our fur babies.

Mike the Dog: right. And we infantilize him through that. we infantalize them. We put them in this position of needing our constant care.

So like back in, I think 2020, you mentioned, the twofold sin of the zoophile. I know you said, you said the, the sin of the zoophile is twofold. We lower ourselves to the status of animals, but we also raise animals to the status of humans. Right. And that like society cannot tolerate that.

And when we infantilize them, I had this idea that actually we’re kind of failing in that second step, aren’t we?

Toggle: Yeah. as a society in general, it is so dangerous to consider the idea that an animal might have, the ability to have agency

Mike the Dog: Yeah. Or like moral worth, right?

Toggle: moral worth like that their lives actually have. Something worthwhile to contribute to the earth in the same way that a humans might, because it undermines everything we’ve built our society on. so that is why zoophiles are so dangerous to that idea, because by essence we are blurring the line between species, but. dear Zoophile friends who want to raise animals to the level of humans we are by and large still perpetrators of human exceptionalism because, it’s so baked into how we think about ourselves as humans that all of these consequences follow.

I know a zoo who is very well-meaning and extremely. focused on animals, but they expressed a view to me one time, and the reason, it’s not, I’m not trying to call them out or anything, but it in, in relation to this idea of human exceptionalism. They were like, humans have the, the duty to be the caretakers of animal kind and of the earth and guide them to a future where they no longer have to.

Do things like hunt there’s no prey and predator. They

Mike the Dog: like it’s our our moral duty as, moral actors to, to do that, for them to do, to enact some changes that way or whatever, to change the world. I.

Toggle: Exactly. and that is a very kind thing to think about, but it also considers the human as the. Schrader, moral agent and that, our dominion over the earth we’re sharing it with other animals, but we are the ones doing it still. So we basically take all animal kind under our care, and guide them to this higher moral reality. so even those of us who are. Potentially the most animal centric, or the most considerate, still fall victim to these ideas of human exceptionalism. and they can lead us to, make some decisions that aren’t as great. and to fall into a lot of the same traps that the same people who say animals can’t consent and eat burgers are also falling into

Mike the Dog: it is important for us as zoos to realize that yeah, we’re not immune to these ideas

Toggle: Right.

We

aren’t immune, even though we are more primed to think about these things and to challenge them,

Mike the Dog: I think most zoos do consider the humans first, right. Our, our, relationships, right? Our family, our friends.

Toggle: right. a lot of us extend that to animals, but there may be a lot of ways that. Human exceptionalism, colors, the way that we make decisions,

for our animal partners. And I would wager probably like 95% of our audience is guilty of this. I will say, for me, I felt that I had a lot to learn

from reading this book.

Mike the Dog:

Toggle: so

Mike the Dog: And you get exposed to ideas and you start. Like Realiz, oh shit.

Yeah. I’ve got, I’ve got, I’ve gotta look at myself a little bit and, slowly change.

Toggle: Right. And so like when we talk about human exceptionalism throughout this, I want you to think, we’re not talking about them over there with their hamburgers and, and things like that. We’re really talking about us as zoos, why this is important to us and why types of things we need to keep in mind in our interactions, not just with dogs, but with animals in

Mike the Dog: And like,you’ll see people doing worse things, right? but, really don’t let that distract you from considering it yourself. Learning about things, confronting things, overcoming human exceptionalism.

Toggle: Right. And that’s really what this book is about. the best and most well-meaning of us overcoming all of these things that hold us back and which hold our. Dogs back in particular, but animals in general,

I think it’s the main theme really. we talk

about consent in here a lot, it permeates throughout the book how much this affects the lives of dogs in our lives.

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm. And how much a consideration of the perversity of human exceptionalist tendencies. is, is what conflicts with our ability to think about consent and stuff like that and give proper consideration to dogs.

Toggle: One of the things that can be tough to swallow, especially, for zoos who argue, online with a bunch of trolls, it can be tough to take a moment to acknowledge some of the shortcomings of our relationships as humans. With dogs, we really need to actually acknowledge the position that dogs hold in society and in our human relationships with them, We literally created dogs, well, literally and figuratively. Right. To be dependent humans.

Mike the Dog: we, we talk about, yeah, figurative constructions, right? About oh, how do, how does society start to build this idea of what, say a dog or an animal or whatever it is? And it, it’s weird to consider that we have literally constructed dogs, that

we have altered their genetic dispositions according to

our whims.

Toggle: And to be dependent on us and to, serve whatever purposes that we needed dogs to serve at whatever time that dog was created. and then we’ve also constructed a society that does not allow them the consideration of agency.

What is agency? I think, someone defined it earlier, the ability. To act on the choices you make. those abilities are curtailed at every turn. For dogs in particular, but also for other animals, cats. Oh, any animal that’s living in a cage. absolutely. You know,rats, ferrets, we curtail not just their autonomy. But their agency, their ability to, to make choices and follow through with them. and because of that, it refuses to think about how consent would work for an animal,

Mike the Dog: Yeah, and it’s because all our definitions of consent as they stand right now are very human-centric.

Toggle: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And what Aaron argues is, this is actually a very important thing that’s, I think it’s the only thing in bold in the book is that, let’s say animals don’t have autonomy and they also do not have agency. And let’s assume for the sake of argument that these things aren’t available to them and can never be. Consent should matter whether or not a non-human animal has agency, whether or not a non-human animal can be autonomous.

Consent should be the right of everyone.

And as we are now aware of the parallels between human oppression and other animal injustices, consent will hopefully become nly imbued as it begins to become rooted in our everyday discourse. And so that is the future

that Aaron suggests.

Mike the Dog: Oh, yeah. She takes a

stand with that

It’s like, Hey, this is what we must do.

Toggle: Right.

Mike the Dog: Right. all of those thoughts are really dependent on humanity itself, right? Like we’ve got all these ideas about what they can and cannot do.

Toggle: Right.

what she’s basically doing is, is getting rid of that barrier and saying, okay, we don’t care about what they can and cannot do. This is what they have the right to, and that’s how we should treat them.

Mike the Dog: Just as a language note. I know, um, we’ve, we’ve said things like non-humans and so on, and Erin, in her book a lot of the time, uh, we’ll mention animals.

She also mention other animals

Toggle: Mm-hmm.

Mike the Dog: way of just saying like, animals other than humans. And so I’ve been

doing that. There’s the animal other as well,

I’ll try to pepper that into my language here. And therian, I’ll be like, okay, let’s talk about other animals and I’ll try to put that other in there when I can.

Toggle: You know, she does a really good job of, creating a situation where humans and animals in her dialogue are equal to counter the idea of human exceptionalism.

that’s the reason why she even chooses the idea of consent in the first place we want to think of this in a way that’s equal to how we might give that consideration to a human.

But one thing we really don’t like to talk about at zoos is that dogs, even in our care where we hope we care for them based on some higher ideals, are still dependent on us.

They still don’t have true agency in that they cannot pick where they might live. They can’t choose who they spend time with. They might be able to choose what they eat, but a lot of times they have specific meal times. you determine whether they go outside or inside. They can’t go to the dog park without you.

there’s all these ways that they are dependent on you to get to the choices they want to make, and

Mike the Dog: Yep.

Toggle: they don’t have real agency and. Even with zoos, a lot of their behaviors that are quote unquote undesirable are quelled or trained out or even punished,

they can’t choose their mate, not just with zoos, but if people do even allow them the ability

Mike the Dog: They, they don’t wanna consider it sex. They don’t wanna think about that. So if, if there is sex happening, it’s because they’re choosing to breed them or something. Right. And that’s

Toggle: Right,

Mike the Dog: purposes.

Toggle: right. They’re choosing and they’re looking for, lineage and they’re looking for pedigree

Mike the Dog: And

they choose the mate there.

Toggle: right? So they don’t even get to choose who they have sex with or whether or not they have sex or whether or not they have balls, or ovaries. Right? on all of these ways, they don’t get the agency to choose what they want.

Mike the Dog: So how do we construct consent out of this situation?

Toggle: well, the way we do that is that we provide a few things. one is salient choices. That matter. And there’s a key word there that comes up every time she says choice in this book. And it’s salient. What does that mean? Essentially it means meaningful and useful and equal. it’s not the difference between, do this or be punished.

Or do this and get a treat or don’t, and don’t get a treat like the, the choices have to be of equal worth and of equal value to the dog. So, you could play with this ball or we could go for a walk. What do you wanna do? That would be a more salient choice.

The other thing we can do is create predictability in their lives so that they know what is going to happen. In the future so they can be informed about things that happen to them, such as in medical situations or going to the vet and things like that.

which reduces their fear in those situations. And also, allows ‘em to know, okay, I’m here. This is what’s gonna happen and I agree to it.

I will allow this to happen and it’s not being forced upon me. So that’s another thing that we can do.

Mike the Dog: So because of all our human exceptionalist tendencies, we really don’t give them agency. And that’s a big problem. And we’ve seen like where all this goes and kind of thete of the world and the core ideal that’ll help us through all this is giving them salient choices, giving them more information about the world and teaching them, and We’re gonna be covering all of that in the next half of the topic as we figure out kind of how to, how to get through all this, right?

Toggle: First a word from our sponsors and a word from our favorite dog scientists. All that, and more on Zooier Than Thou. So stay tuned.

Sponsors

Announcer: Support for Zooier Than Thou comes from Epiphiny Pipeworks. Check out Epiphiny’s work on Mastodon at [email protected], that’s E-P-I-P-H-I-N-Y. E-P-I-P-H-I-N-Y.

This episode is also made possible by… Zeta Males. We all know about Alpha Males. We all know about Sigma Males. But did you know there are males who are even more zased and animalpilled? Do you feel like a good dude who likes to get animals in a good mood? Are you constantly on the ethicsmaxing grindset? Look up “zeta principles zoophilia awoooo” and find out if these seven lifestyle tips describe you to a Z.

And finally… the awoo break. The awoo break: coming soon!

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Dog Science - Dissertation

Mr. Bacon: I can’t thank you enough for supervising my dissertation, Dogtor Schnitzel.

Dr. Schnitzel: Oh, it’s my esteemed pleasure, Mr. Bacon. I owe a lot of my recent success to your contributions to our research into human cognition.

Mr. Bacon: Well, I certainly couldn’t have done it without Gary’s cooperation. It’s really been a team effort.

Dr. Schnitzel: Gary… Human names are so strange. They are neither delicious nor descriptive.

Mr. Bacon: I find it fascinating that names ostensibly have meaning, and yet humans don’t seem to know what that meaning is or even consider it when choosing names. Rather, they’re usually chosen based on relationships and associations with abstract cultural phenomenon, or even just based on how they sound.

Dr. Schnitzel: The insight we’ve gained is nothing short of astounding! To think it all started with a humble button experiment and a chance sexual encounter!

Mr. Bacon: (Blushing) Well, we were just very fortunate to find a human subject open to learning as much from us as we wanted to learn about them.

Dr. Biscuit: Good afternoon, gentledogs!

Dr. Schnitzel: Oh, Dogtor Biscuit! Dogtor Waffles! Thank you so much for joining us!

Dr. Waffles: I’m always happy to help young minds soar!

Dr. Biscuit: How are you feeling about defending your dissertation, Mr. Bacon?

Mr. Bacon: Admittedly, a little nervous.

Dr. Waffles: Well, the results of your work this past year certainly challenge a lot of long-held beliefs about human cognition.

Dr. Biscuit: And the case study aspect of your project is certainly… unorthodox. You’ll have your paws full defending the objectivity of your research, given how integral your cross-species relationship is to your findings.

Mr. Bacon: Thankfully, I have your impartial observations to rely on as well. I appreciate you both for tamping my enthusiasm.

Dr. Cupcake: I’m not so certain it’s enough, young pup.

Dr. Schnitzel: Ah, Dogtor Cupcake! It’s good to see you!

Dr. Cupcake: (in terse greeting) Dogtor Schnitzel. (turning to Mr. Bacon) Mr. Bacon, I worry your entire thesis of human personhood is colored by cynomorphism. You rely heavily on your human subject’s ability to “speak dog,” but it remains to be seen if you can prove that such communication is more than rote memorization and mimicry.

Mr. Bacon: I think it’s a fair concern, Dogtor Cupcake. Lacking expressive ears and a tail certainly hampers a human’s ability to communicate on a higher level, but we’ve found humans in our studies to be consistently adaptable. It turns out that in addition to hand gestures and sounds, humans communicate more subtle social cues through facial expressions, and Gary in particular has learned to combine hand gestures and exaggerated facial cues into an analog of canine communication on a level we’ve never seen before. And much like a tailless canine, he can compensate for his lack of tail by wagging his entire rear end. We believe this takes a higher order of thinking that far exceeds simple mimicry and memorization, but it’s still notable that we haven’t seen anything like it in any other humans we’ve studied.

Dr. Cupcake: Indeed. While it’s not scientific by any means, I’ve certainly never met a human who could understand anything more subtle than a growl and a bite. I think you have your work cut out for you if you’re to demonstrate humans are capable of cognition higher than that of a common house cat.

Dr. Biscuit: To be fair, studies are showing house cats may be far more capable than previously thought as well. As are rats, parakeets, and ferrets.

Dr. Cupcake: Hmph. A cat is no dog. And neither is a human. I’ll keep an open mind when it comes time to assess your work more formally, but don’t think you can get by our faculty without outstanding rigor and irrefutable evidence.

Dr. Waffles: Don’t worry, Dogtor Cupcake. Dr. Schnitzel has overseen every step of Mr. Bacon’s research, and the recent breakthroughs in human cognitive science owe a great thanks to Gary’s continued participation. I think you’ll find this dissertation refreshing, enlightening, and dare I say, groundbreaking.

Dr. Cupcake: Be that as it may, your work on human symbology and remote socialization is difficult to swallow as it is, Dogtor Schnitzel. You may find that outside of your little bubble, your work is not as universally well-received as you might expect.

Dr. Schnitzel: Well, Dogtor Cupcake, thankfully we can rely on skeptics like yourself to keep us in check and challenge our results. That is the beauty of science, after all!

Dr. Cupcake: Indeed. Well, good afternoon, gentledogs. And good luck, Mr. Bacon.

Mr. Bacon: Dogtor Cupcake is really intimidating for such a small dog.

Dr. Biscuit: Don’t let them get to you, lad. The work you’ve done is very special, and you’ve got a bright future ahead of you.

Dr. Waffles: It won’t be long before we’re calling you Dogtor Bacon! Just keep up the good work, and remember that being challenged is a good thing.

Mr. Bacon: Right. It’s just… discouraging to hear that so many dogs still look at humans as lesser beings. In spite of all the evidence we’ve presented over the past couple of years!

Dr. Schnitzel: Change in perception takes time. Cynocentrism is still the dominant paradigm. Why, when we first started working together, we thought that humans didn’t have a sense of self because they wouldn’t pick out clothes that smell like them! It seems so preposterous after everything we’ve learned! But not everyone has seen what we’ve seen, and it’s our job to show them.

Dr. Waffles: Gentledogs, I propose we get ourselves back in a positive headspace with some delicious grub.

Dr. Biscuit: Here, here!

Mr. Bacon: Same food truck on 3rd Street?

Dr. Schnitzel: Where else? Ooh, have Gary join us! His lovely colored paper seems to be the key to getting the best dishes!

Dr. Biscuit: Gary is such a weird name.

Topic - Canine Agency and Consent (Part 2)

Toggle: Welcome back. Fellow Zoos. It’s your host Toggle. Hold on…

Mike the Dog: Toggle, Toggle. Did you turn your AI filter on?

Toggle: Oh no, I sure did. That was my bad.

it’s lovely that we have all these choices from ai, voice modulation that we’ve definitely had since the beginning of the podcast.

Mike the Dog: You know who doesn’t have choices? Dogs.

Toggle: And that’s what we’re talking about today.. Dogs typically do not have. Salient choices. Often dogs have the choice between punishment or whatever else we want them to do. and that is not

Mike the Dog: like a alien choice.

Toggle: Exactly. It certainly is not. So how do we add consent to that?

Mike the Dog: How do we add consent? I know, we provide choice is what we do.

Toggle: We provide choice. what we do is create conditional agency where it is possible.

Mike the Dog: I was thinking about this a little bit actually today and that last quote from Aaron where it was all like, even if they don’t have autonomy, et cetera, et cetera, we should still be giving them this idea of consent. I think it’s ‘cause we can create this conditional agency

Toggle: conditional agency is essentially acknowledging. That dogs don’t have true agency, at least dogs that are in our care, unlike street dogs, they can’t go where they want at any time. They want, they don’t have true agency and all of their choices are really based on what choices we give them.

So what we can do is give them more choices and create what is called conditional agency, wherever it’s possible.

Mike the Dog: So we provide them some choices.

I mean, even when there are some choices, a lot of the time they’re based on what’s convenient for us, right. Rather than what’s good for them.

Toggle: I don’t want to, I don’t know, do something that would be beneficial to you so that choice is now blocked off of you. Or, I really don’t want you to bark because the neighbors are gonna complain or something.

so you no longer have that choice. What you could do is not, not bark.

Mike the Dog: Yes.

Toggle: Maybe I’ll distract you to try and get you to do something else, or more likely with most humans is they would punish you or yell at you and say, no, don’t do that. Stop barking.

Mike the Dog: Because we laugh, right? Oh, as if your choice is to not bark, but I think we almost expect it. oh, certainly you will just not bark. Right? And then they’re like,

Toggle: right,

Mike the Dog: and we’re like, eyes emoji.

Toggle: these are natural things for dogs to do

Mike the Dog: Why would you do that? Surely you understand me. Surely, you know,how much it hurts me that you bark.

Toggle: So, some of the things that we may choose for them may be good for them, but a lot of the times when we make choices, it’s because of what’s convenient for us.

Mike the Dog: Yeah. just on the topic of agency, I think Erin first got these ideas when she was working in, another country. I think it was Ecuador. Right.

Toggle: somewhere

Mike the Dog: see the free roaming dog populations.

Toggle: Right, exactly. And those free roaming dogs, had a lot of interesting things to, to show. And in fact, a lot of other, researchers have started looking at free roaming dogs to see what would it look like in a world where dogs have agency

Mike the Dog: yeah. And it creates a kinda a baseline for us really when we start thinking about like animals autonomously living,

what would that look like? And it typically looks very different from how dogs behave in our care. they tend to be a lot more relaxed. they tend to not be very active. They tend to not be very aggressive. the not hyperactive ‘cause Yeah. When, when our pet dogs get out, they’re like, it is time for freedom. And they just have no idea what they’re even doing with themselves.

Toggle: Right. It’s like, I have 20 minutes and we’re just gonna run, we’re gonna run everywhere. Right.

Mike the Dog: Yeah.

Toggle: But a dog that lives, autonomously doesn’t have that need to use up all their energy all at once.

Mike the Dog: They learned social skills, things like that. They learned how self mediation, right?

Toggle: right. The, the societies of free roaming dogs, are generally. Just, well, well intact because they know how to communicate with other, and they, they know how to deescalate conflict. And unfortunately for a lot of dogs in our care, they don’t ever learn how to do that. because their interactions with other dogs are usually

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

Toggle: curtailed in some way.

Mike the Dog: Because they’re living with us in society, giving them autonomy is, is so hard in our, in our society, in the way we’ve built our society.

Toggle: Right, exactly. wouldn’t it be great to be able to open your front door and just let your dog out? You know, I’m gonna, I’m saying this, but in some countries you can do that. there are some people that are listening, they’re like, what are you talking about? That’s exactly what I do.

I just open the door and the dog runs out. And even Erin talks about in her book how like her family when she was growing up. That was just the norm. The dog would leave, go on their morning, walk around the neighborhood and just come back. and they had a little bit more autonomy in that way, but in our society,

Mike the Dog: You get shifts over time. Like even in America it would’ve been like that, but it, it

shifts.

Toggle: And especially in an urban environment, there are so many things that are curtailing that dogs must be on a leash at all times. Right. You, you’ll see things like that. This is the designated area for dogs to be off a leash and it’s fenced in.

Mike the Dog: And, and that’s actually why we use this term, like constructing our relationship with dogs and so on and constructing this and that. ‘cause it is something that kind of gets built over time as society happens, right?

Toggle: right, exactly.

Mike the Dog: You just kind of end up in some status quos somehow.

Toggle: So, we can’t let them do whatever they want. That’s not just our choice as caretakers, it’s because society expects that your dog is not gonna bark at 10 o’clock at night because everyone’s trying to sleep. So now it’s on you to curb that behavior regardless of whether or not it’s just something that dogs do.

it’s normal for dogs to bark, as we mentioned earlier. but society says dogs shouldn’t bark.

Mike the Dog: And we gotta be careful about binaries here. When we’re giving dogs choices we have the ability to say like,okay, it’s not just bark or don’t bark. We can think about things and what we can do to, to, redirect their attention and stuff.

Toggle: right. So there could be ways that you could create choices that curtail behavior, but you’re still, trying to curtail that behavior.

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

Toggle: But, it’s not on or off. And sometimes it’s not yes or no. Sometimes it’s, which of these things do you want? and that can be as simple as here’s all your toys. Which one do you actually wanna play with? Pick the toy. Or, I have the afternoon free. How do you wanna spend it? What do you wanna do?

Mike the Dog: Yeah.

Toggle: and you may not be literally saying that, but you’re offering that, that option of, more than one thing that can be done.

Mike the Dog: when you’re dealing with behaviors, there’s an actual hierarchy of ways to address behaviors. It’s explored in the book, right. you start with the least invasive ways, right? You move down from there. If you’re doing it right, you should never have to get to punishment.

cause typically we end up punishing behaviors without addressing the causes, right?

Exactly. That’s really the problem there is that we’re not addressing the actual causes of the behaviors that are a problem. The emotional states that, that cause dogs to be, aggressive or whatever.

Toggle: some of those things could be environmental. like maybe, the, the mailman comes by at three o’clock in the afternoon and your dog’s going to bark at the mailman. one of the things that Aaron suggests is maybe get a PO box, if, if they can’t be barking at the mailman, remove the mailman from the equation.

Mike the Dog: Although that seems that’s probably like a little extreme for most people,

Toggle: Well, no, but it’s a good example because you know you’re

affecting the environment,

Mike the Dog: Yeah, it is an option and you should probably consider the option of the very least,

Toggle: Right. And you can apply that to things that aren’t removing the, the mailman from the equation. It could be things like removing some other stressor in the environment that you have immediate control over,

Mike the Dog: I dug a pitfall right in front of my mailbox that removes them from the equation. Take that

Toggle: permanently.

Or maybe, the thing that’s actually the cause of the behavior is just not having any agency, which is known to be bad for people. Choice is important for wellbeing, right?

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

Toggle: Agency. The ability to act on those choices is important for wellbeing and lack of that

causes behavioral problems. And guess who lacks that in every corner of their lives?

Mike the Dog: is it humans?

Toggle: When it’s humans, we call those human rights violations, right?

so no, in, in this case it would be dogs. And that’s just the reality for them. So we end up trying to curb these behaviors without actually addressing the emotional needs of the animals which are causing those behaviors. Or just in general, even if they’re not giving problem behaviors, we’re not addressing the things that they need and want.

Mike the Dog: Yeah. You need to communicate with them and understand, well, body language, that’s the big one

Toggle: I think that’s super important. In fact, if we’re gonna talk about, an idea of consent,

Mike the Dog: that is indexed to them. Yeah.

Toggle: right, especially that’s indexed to dogs. And that’s one thing that’s really interesting about this book is that, Aaron acknowledges that dogs have a very robust way of communicating with us.

It’s not a matter of them not being able to do that. It’s a matter of us not knowing what they’re doing and ignoring it. That can be a problem. That could be creating an issue. If a dog is aggressive or they bite, reflexively.

Typically that’s because they’ve learned that subtle cues don’t work. Because people ignore them. So think about somebody coming up, on the street while you’re walking and just bending down and just touching your dog,

Mike the Dog: Oh, I was, I gonna say touching you because like you, you would probably know, you would probably have some idea of like some, some stranger coming in and being like, oh, wow. Just touching you.

Toggle: right now imagine that you’re a dog and that there is nothing stopping that from happening. I read, I read a story online once about, someone who got a dog and, basically anytime someone wanted to touch this dog, she let them, and the dog just kind of became sort of catatonic. Like they, they had all of these boundaries upon them that they just didn’t move. So when it was like, here, sit here and let someone interact with you, they were just stone called. They didn’t move. They were just stiff. The whole interaction, they would

Mike the Dog: That’s sad.

Toggle: they, they clearly, it was like watching the dog’s soul be sucked out of them.

and eventually they realized the problem was that there were so many things curtailing their autonomy and their freedom that the dog just shut down. And when they started respecting, the

dog’s wishes it got so much better. The dog became happier. They were more active. they knew that they could depend on their owner to protect their interests, and to respect their wishes and their mental health got markedly improved. what we should be doing is creating a dog indexed concept of what consent is based on the reality of where they live. What does it mean, Mike, to be dog indexed?

Mike the Dog: Well, you got four fingers. One of them’s the index finger I index. And the concept of an index is that we’re, sort of viewing something from that point. It’s almost a reference, right? So we want this referenced from, a dog’s perspective through the lens of a dog. we wanna listen, to how they communicate with us.

Oh yeah. And that’s something to point out here. ‘cause we’re talking about defining a consent, right? it’s not just some phrase to think up, oh, what is consent? It is this and this and this to define something properly.

Like we need to step back, understand some key points we could have missed. does our definition consider canine experiences, their communication? does it respect their realities, how dogs live? Have we confronted our own anthropocentric ideas? Right? the way we do this isn’t just obvious. or it wouldn’t even be a problem.

Toggle: right.

Mike the Dog: and

I mean, like humans, humans like are, tend to be really bad at kind of trying to get what they want all the time. Patricia McConnell in the other end of the leash was talking about a story about, she was trying to train a dog, just, associate them better with humans. And it was like, okay, the, the dog is afraid of people passing the streets.

So how about we get some people just to Togs some treats on their way and over time. the, the people tossing treats would now seem less scary ‘cause they’re tossing treats.

but getting that done was actually really difficult because she would give people treats and she’d be like, okay, instruct ‘em on what to do.

Just walk past, just toss the treat. Don’t even look at her. Right. Don’t bend in. And they would invariably, invariably like,oh, I wanna, I wanna give it straight to her. And they’d be leaning over her and the dog was just having none of it.

Toggle: right? Because we don’t, know the cues and the dog is speaking the whole time. don’t get close to me.

Mike the Dog: Yeah.

Toggle: close to me. Don’t get close to me. And then you just walk up on them and put your hand in their face and they bite it. Right?

Well, you ignored all of these, these signals that they gave you to leave them the fuck alone. so, we need to know about canine behavior. And thankfully, Ms. Jones in this book, takes a moment to actually create kind of a yes no chart. It’s really more of a yes no, and then a lot of maybe behaviors,

Mike the Dog: Well, it’s, it’s yes, and it’s no, or maybe a

Toggle: Right.

Mike the Dog: No, Or

Maybe

Toggle: no.

maybe is no, you want that positive affirmative consent that you can very clearly.

Understand, right? And so she goes over this chart of behavior, which is super useful. and of course, individuals may have different ways of communicating and things like that, but the general stuff is here. and it’s very helpful. I’m gonna, I’m not gonna read the whole table here, but I wanna give you some idea of what you might be looking for.

And again, this is dog indexed. There’s surely a horse index, right? There’s surely a rat index, that you could be thinking about.

Mike the Dog: I was going to just sort of make a call out there for our listeners. Uh, like if you work with horses, if you work with other animals, think about what this would look like, from their perspective. And maybe write in, write in about kind of your ideas about how such a thing would work for horses.

the differences in communication and what their needs are and stuff like that.

Toggle: Give us horse content

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

And

Toggle: when we need. It’s so bad. Okay, so a yes for a dog. it’s always important to look at the whole body when assessing and making assumptions about a dog’s feelings or emotional state, most of these behaviors are gonna happen in conjunction with other signals.

And of course, some behaviors are individual to each dog. so these signals may also be used to say yes to different activities. So, for example, a dog who leans into you or pulls your arm may wanna be pet or a dog who brings you a toy and does a play bow, may not want to pet, but wants to interact through play.

So each of these things may say yes, but they may say yes to different things. So yes, could be leaning into a person, approaching the person with a relaxed body and a soft facial expression.

Mike the Dog: like a Mona Lisa.

Toggle: Yeah.

Mike the Dog: She, she was play bowing in that picture.

Toggle: Fully engaged with someone that is to not be engaged with someone or something else at the time of engagement using their paw to ask for petting nosing or head nudge. there are some vocalizations that could be directed at the person, such as a medium to hire pitched bark, that is apparent during play or connection seeking behavior, loose, relaxed movements in a curved body, a loose and relaxed tail, whether it’s wagging or not wagging a relaxed ear position or forward and engaged, jumping on the person, you know, seeking closeness or connection, play bow, et cetera, et cetera.

So there’s a few things here. How about no though no signals, there are signs of stress, uncertainty, or fear in dog language. These signals mean stop. These are also signals that humans most often miss or misinterpret, which is why it’s important to go over these. his advised to watch their entire body as many of these behaviors are seen in conjunction with others on this list.

For example, a dog may

stiffen tucker tail lift a front Paul flicker tongue and avert her gaze simultaneously. While others may show a different combination of behaviors, some of these behaviors, however, could potentially be maybe behaviors perhaps they’re simply needing more time to process the information provided to make a decision.

But may we No. Should always be considered a no until proven to be a clear yes. Some dogs have learned that they’re subtle conflict avoidance behaviors are repeatedly ignored and feel they must resort to more overt behaviors immediately. So no, or maybe no might look like sniffing the ground or the surrounding areas.

A lip flick, yawning,

lifting, and holding up their front paw, turning their head away from a person or averting their gaze.

Mike the Dog: Yeah. lot of it’s like they’re just not engaged and people will be like, oh, why aren’t they engaged? that is a no. That’s how they, that’s how they do it.

Toggle: right? They might lower their body position or go rounded through their back, you know,making themselves appear small and unassuming. They may lower or tuck their tail, stiff body or freeze even momentarily trembling, shaking off even when they don’t have water on them. ears flattened or pushed back, whale eye, which is where the white of their eyes are showing, trying to escape or leave.

And sometimes that can just be a very slow and deliberate walk away from the person, but they’re, they’re trying to get out of the situation. A tightly closed mouth, pursed lips exposing the belly, particularly with one leg lifted in a tail wagging with short quick strokes or with the tail tucked. And then of course, there are learned no and opt out behaviors that you can teach them.

and we’ll get into that in a little bit. Then of course there’s the overtly, no, the threats.

This is the, not just, maybe this is definitely

Mike the Dog: This iswhat are you

doing?

Toggle: Well, this is, get ready ‘cause I’m gonna bite you. Right. lifting the lips to expose the teeth. A hard stare, growling or snarling, barking or lunging at the person, to create space air snapping in the person’s direction, nipping, which is contact without breaking the skin and biting, which is contact, which bruises or breaks the skin.

And that may range in duration or severity. so these are yes and no behaviors, and it’s important to remember that, let’s say a no behavior like growling has context, right? If you are playing with a dog and they’re play growling, that is different than a growl that says no. And remarkably humans understand what a growl sounds like and what it means.

Based on studies, even if they don’t have a lot of interaction with dogs, humans can tell the difference between a play growl and a real growl. even

Mike the Dog: so be separate

Toggle: the dog, right? They’re different. so, for all of these behaviors, they do have context and they also have context with the rest of the body.

So one thing that might look like it’s yes, could be a no if the other no behaviors are there or vice versa. so those are some of the easiest things to think about when you think about yes or no. and if you want to write down that list, fear not, you could just get this book and you’d have the list handy whenever you need it,

Mike the Dog: think you can also pause when we are talking to you ‘cause that’s what podcasts do.

Toggle: Oh yeah. Podcasts have pause buttons and rewind buttons. You certainly could stop and, and write all of that stuff down if you prefer. And I’m sure somewhere online has Yes and no behaviors written out.

Mike the Dog: It’s important. It’s important to know. Yeah. one thing that Aaron mentions in this book, really presses on is that, We have ideas about, say, how dogs in general communicate. but of course individuals will have their own needs. They’ll have, differences in how they communicate and, and what they go to first,

Toggle: Right.

The species templates are, are just a basis to start with.

Mike the Dog: Yeah. And, and you do learn sort of the individuals and how, how the dogs you are working with behave and what they expect from you. And there’s a communication that’s built from that. So that’s kind of the, the first line right there. the, the primary sense you should get

is the

individual needs before you get to species specific needs.

Toggle: The other thing that’s really important to remember, and the way that she kind of frames it, is that dogs don’t owe us their bodies Consent is not just about going slowly, it’s also accepting that maybe they don’t even want you to touch them and you have to respect that.

Mike the Dog: Yeah, I was talking with someone recently who was like, oh, I’ve been trying to get my dog into this and that, and it was like, well, if they don’t want it, I just, I stop. Right? And it’s no, no. If you, if you stop, that means you don’t do it again. If they don’t want it, they don’t want it. Right.

Toggle: right.

I think it’s fair to say that, if they don’t want to be pet right now, they might wanna be pet

later.

but if you’re getting consistent Gnosis, I. It’s just no,

Mike the Dog: Yep. Yep.

They don’t owe you anything and you, you should not just teach them that you’re expecting them to give you what you want.

Toggle: on that note, how do you ask per consent to touch? Guess what? There’s a nice little guide here and I think it’s great and that’s why I’m gonna read it basically verbatim.

Toggle: because I think it can apply to. a lot of situations. So the first thing it says is, touching A dog should never be assumed consensual.

It is important to become versed in dog body language because there are many signals, gestures, behaviors, and movements that are commonly misinterpreted. There are a few ways to navigate touch, consent. The first is that you allow a dog to come to you and ask for your touch, so you never approach a dog while they’re eating, sleeping, or otherwise engage in other activities.

As this is a violation of their bodily autonomy and they do not have the proper time or information to consent to your touch. You can also ask the dog if they want to be touched by inviting them into your space. Do they move away or remain neutral? That’s a no. Do they orient their proximity, body position, or gaze towards you?

This is a yes. Testing consent should be done regularly. At about ten second intervals, you would stop petting the dog and watch the dog’s body language. If they do not actively seek more tactile interaction, this is a withdrawal from consent. So, there’s a nice little chart here that’s dog initiates the interaction or we invite them into our space and it’s the request is accepted.

We begin petting. You watch body language for both yes or no signals. This can also provide us with information about their individual preferences such as where they like to be pet. then you stop and move hands away, neutral body. If dogs give yes signals, then continue. If dogs show no signals, stop the interaction and repeat this process every 10 to 15 seconds or in natural pauses in the conversation.

but continue to watch for signals that the dog is withdrawing. Consent. I love this because it’s immediately applicable. You could start doing this right now. You could look at your dog immediately right now and invite them into your space. And if they say no, you can just say, okay, that dog does not wanna be a pet right now. so it’s very simple. but then it has really wide application and then you can start thinking about that in, larger context of interactions with dogs.

Mike the Dog: I like, I like that 10 to 15 second kind of consent test that they got

because there’s a bunch of stuff where they do communicate a little bit like, oh, I don’t want this, I don’t want that, I don’t want this anymore. like there was a video I saw where someone was talking about, I think there were dog trainer and they were talking about, kind of what was going on in the video as someone was petting the dog.

And they had, I think, their hand on the dog’s head

and remember giving her some scratches and she was doing like a little bit of lip licking

Toggle: She was giving no behaviors, but the no behaviors were incredibly cute.

Mike the Dog: Yeah.

And that’s a problem. Yeah. And with some consent tests, maybe, the dog would’ve, moved away a little bit or redirected the hand a little lower or whatever because I mean, the dog probably wanted some attention but just not on the head. It was that, that’s a very familiar and kind of aggressive place to pet a dog.

Toggle: right. I don’t know about you guys. I mean, I love having my, head rubbed, but pet,

Mike the Dog: annoying. It’s weird.

Toggle: I don’t like it on my head. No.

Mike the Dog: I mean, there, there’s certain things to say about, when, when intimacy,

right? And like you, you would never, ever just walk up to a strange dog and pet their heads ‘cause that’s weird. The same way you would never do that to some other human. Right. When you’re intimate, obviously things like neck rubs and whatever, they become a thing like that.

That’s half of what goes on here

is we are engaging in these kind of, intimate personal behaviors.

Keep that in mind.

Toggle: there are, contexts where the, affection is more readily, given even among humans, say furry conventions for instance. There are certain rules that are a little different. You still ask, obviously,

but,

head scratches aren’t really uncommon in that context, even if you don’t know someone that well, as long as you ask first.

Right. so with dogs, just so if you don’t already know this,maybe our zoos who aren’t really canine centric dogs typically don’t like being pet on their head. The best place is really gonna be their, their chest and their shoulders. That’s where they typically prefer it.

Mike the Dog: or or the base of the tail, laid right on the top of the butt spot.

Toggle: Yeah. Some dogs like that. Some dogs do not like that. my dog he’s an old man now. Oh my God. but he had some kind of, I dunno, something on, on his back at some point, like some kind of skin issue. It’s cleared up. we took care of it. but even today, if you switch the back right there, he’ll whip his head around and like stare at what you’re doing.

That’s usually a sign that, no, don’t touch me. There’s what are you doing? so, I avoid doing that. even though most dogs might like that, my dog does not.

And your dog might like

Mike the Dog: always the individuals, right? They’re individual needs. It doesn’t matter if most dogs like something, it matters if that dog likes it.

Toggle: Exactly. And they don’t owe us our, satisfaction with giving them affection.

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Toggle: Once you know yes or no, you can open up a bigger dialogue with your dog about what they want, and start giving them choices and then respecting those choices.

Mike the Dog: Oh, right. ‘cause you got all individuality, right? You are learning each other, communicating with each other, and that’s half of what this is. And you’re building a relationship.

Toggle: right. So what is your dog like? How many of you know what kind of food your dog likes the most? and if, if your answer is pizza, I’m guessing that that’s not something your dog has a lot of access to,

Mike the Dog: Pisha, I like Pisha.

Toggle: I like pizza. I like pizza all the time. that’s not what I’m talking about. we do have one zoo that we know of, he has dogs and he goes to the freezer and is like, okay, open it up. What do you want today?

Mike the Dog: So, This guy, got a dog who had some skin issues and he was giving the dog salmon, to help with the, the oils will help the coat. And the dog didn’t really like the salmon at the time, but, uh, later on, he would give his dogs the choice between chicken and beef and pork and, the dogs would make their choice every day and they would, sit down happily with their meal.

But one day, yeah, this dog did not want to take the offered chicken or the beef or the pork. And the dog, . He sat and thought about it for a second and decided to go into the living room and, sniff around a bit and find a little piece of fish fin and bring it back.

And so he showed. Our friend, this fish fin to basically ask for a piece of fish. So our friend went into the, the freezer, pulled out a piece of salmon, and the dog actually did want salmon, was requesting salmon that day, and sat down and happily ate his salmon,

which, which was a weird thing to me. it was, it was just a real fun example to me that we would have expected, based on our familiarity with, the people that we know, the dogs that we care for, what they would want and what they would not want, but they may one day wanted, right? They may make a choice that we wouldn’t have expected otherwise, and it’s important that we would be able to grant them those choices that we can communicate with them and allow them to ask for things.

Toggle: Right. I was thinking of like setting up a, a way to have different options available at all times, so that there’s always food available.

They have those things that you like the constant feeders. My dog’s not an over eater. So perhaps constant foods, but then like multiple options of them, that I can just kind of keep in stock. And so they would be able to choose which of the foods they want whenever they want to eat.

So not only do they have the choice of. What food they wanna do out of a certain number of choices. I was thinking four. I thought four would be good, but they also decide when they want to eat so they can eat on their own time instead of on my time, which would be good. so that gives them some more choice and agency in the matter of when and what they eat.

and so you can start thinking about how that might apply in other ways, when it’s playtime, what’s your go-to? There’s probably something that you and your dog do almost every time you play, but maybe you could introduce other options so that they can choose. So they can choose which toy they want to play.

Maybe they want tug, maybe they want ball. maybe they want, something to, yeah, catch a Frisbee or something to chew on. Just, just to chew on. So you can present them with all of these options and let them go and choose the one that they want.

Mike the Dog: Did you know there’s a weird kinda wood you can get that doesn’t splinter it just kinda mushes

so you can actually get them like wood to chew on.

Toggle: Oh, they would like that, I’m sure.

Mike the Dog: Options. There’s a lot of options. Go to the toy store and just really think about like what, what the textures would actually even feel like to them. ‘cause a lot of them, they play around with all these textures.

You know what? I was helping with a dog once and she would go into the wood pile. We had a Woodburn stove out in the country.

She’d go into the wood pile and kind of select some, some wood, and she would chew on a little bit, which isn’t super good, right? We, we eventually kind of moved her away to other things. But, there was a time where I was kind of wondering well, what does she like? And I was trying to figure out like, would you like this one?

Would you like that one?

Toggle: Mm-hmm.

Mike the Dog: Which one’s the tastiest wood? Or whatever. I don’t know. And I think what she might have been after was like the softer stuff that maybe she was trying to get back to, the stuffies from her youth or something like that.

Toggle: Oh,

interesting.

Mike the Dog: I think I had some assumptions about what she might prefer that were wrong, and I was trying to figure out like, what is it that she is actually looking for?

Toggle: Yeah. And then, you could allow them to choose what to do. do you want to go on a walk? Do you want to go on a car ride? Do you want to stay here and play tug? Do you wanna go in the backyard and, and fetch? and then just be like, what do you wanna do?

And then follow through with it. and this is where we start butting up against what’s convenient for people. Right.

Mike the Dog: And some of this stuff, some of this stuff is still kind of easy, right? I think in the moment we get to things like, say, maybe, maybe they don’t like going to the car, and in the moment in that one moment you think, oh, is there some way around this or whatever. But in the lead up to all that, we had the opportunity to, teach them about what a car is, get them a bit more familiar with cars, right?

Do some sort of other kinds of teaching and training around that.

just building a positive association.

Toggle: Right? Where do cars go? what is at the end of the car ride that you might be interested in doing,

Mike the Dog: Yeah. Yeah. So driving them to the park might might make them like the car more.

Toggle: Right. My dog in particular, loves being in the car and going around and smelling. What he really likes is to be able to get outta the car and then go do things and sniff things, get back in the car, go somewhere else

and do it again. but, my friend’s dog who I have dog sat. Hates being in the car, just absolutely hates it.

and,getting to the dog park, which that dog absolutely loves, is kind of a hard bargain to strike because they really just, are, they’re not comfortable with a car. And, Erin she talks about like,okay, so how do you make them comfortable and, and, give them expectations about what happens in the car that alleviate their fears and anxieties about the car so that they’re more likely to, want to go in the car to get to wherever they need to go.

the, other thing that I was gonna say is, for us who rent. I’ve been a renter for a very long time. I’m only just now a homeowner. But for those of us who rent, one thing that might be hard is allowing dogs to just go in and out of the backyard whenever they want.

But if you have a home, once the money’s right, we’re definitely gonna put in a dog door in our back door. that will allow the, the dog to just go out whenever he wants, come back whenever he wants, have a little bit more freedom on whether or not he’s inside. Does he need to go to the bathroom?

Well, he can just go, he doesn’t need my permission. He doesn’t need to wait on me to go, it doesn’t depend on me. Now it’ll be like, okay, I have the choice to come and go as I please. And you introduce a little bit of choice and agency into their lives in that way. So there’s a lot of ways to think about this, and we could just go on and on and on.

and there are places where this is really easy. Such as touch, asking for whether or not they wanna be touched. And there are places that are a little bit harder. And when they’re harder, it’s, I want you to keep this in mind ‘cause it’s usually a matter of our convenience when it’s harder to do.

and you have to decide whether your convenience is more important or your dog’s wellbeing.

Mike the Dog: we get into all this stuff where, we need to do things that are maybe unpleasant for them. Then we have this whole other topic. How do you

Toggle: yeah.

like going to the vet and getting shots.

How do you deal with that? a dog won’t readily consent to that. And why won’t they consent to that? Well,

because they don’t know what’s gonna happen.

And so I. That is where the idea of cooperative care comes in, because it allows you to set up expectations while also giving them the opportunity to kind of walk away.

And let me tell you, when I read this chapter, I was like, oh no. Oh no, because

doing this is so, to me, to me, doing this was felt like it was so difficult, right? Because it’s okay, here’s how you do it in a very basic sense, but be careful you don’t do it wrong. Or you might not teach them consent behaviors at all.

and, you have to know all these things. And,

Mike the Dog: Yeah, it really is a dialogue. You really are trying to teach them how things work

And

it’s possible. Yeah. You’re teaching ‘em expectations at the same time, and that can go wrong

Toggle: right. Teaching them expectations, but teaching them okay. we have this consent dialogue where if you, the classic one is putting your, your chin on a chair or something like that. And as long as your chin is on the chair, you, you you consent to what’s happening. You’re giving permission to what’s happening.

And as soon as your chin leaves the chair, everything stops. And that’s how you know that, you have bodily autonomy and a choice in what happens here.

Mike the Dog: Yeah.

Toggle: and that is wonderful. But you might need a dog trainer

Mike the Dog: I wonder if there’s good trainers around that do that. I mean, you could probably also do this in, cooperation with a trainer, right?

Toggle: Right, exactly. That’s what I mean. Like,you, you would have to learn how to do it yourself with the trainer because you have to be able to respect it. Like for me, I went looking for a dog trainer recently. I have a friend who, just got some puppies not long ago and has been looking for a dog trainer to curb, guess what, to curb some of their, their house.

They, they have a little bit of a, a, like a, a sibling rivalry thing going on, that has become very disruptive in their household.

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

Toggle: for a dog trainer and I was trying to help them, but like everyone we found, like we would get referred to people. I’m like, yeah, this person’s great.

These people are awesome. They know what they’re doing. And it would turn out, it would be like very punitive and based on things like, okay, we’re gonna introduce shot collars and prong collars, and we’re going to, establish, some kind of dominance or, or control over this behavior.

Or every time this happens, you’re gonna tug on their leash a little bit. and, and, and give them just a tiny bit of annoyance. Just a tiny bit of pain, which they’ll then associate with the behavior and know not to do it anymore. none of that is consensual. Like it’s not consent based at all.

I went with them and the whole time I’m listening to ‘em, I’m nodding. ‘cause every now and then they would make a point. They’d be like, yes, absolutely. That makes so much sense. And then they would say something and I’d be like, absolutely not.

I would never let you do that to my dog. and I certainly don’t feel comfortable doing it to my dog.

Mike the Dog: Because it’s like we’re choosing to make changes to their behavior.

Toggle: right, and it’s not addressing the root causes of the behavior. It’s simply saying, don’t do that behavior or you’ll be punished.

Mike the Dog: Yeah. And we’re not including them in that at all.

Toggle: Absolutely. They’re not part of the dialogue. we’re not addressing the emotional, reason why there is this sibling rivalry. or, creating habits.

so the point being that you might need a trainer. A trainer could be hard to find. the other thing that’s hard about it is that a lot of these are about, medical procedures and getting your vet on board could be very difficult for a lot of people because it’s not widespread that vets use, consent based cooperative care.

so, training your vet to do the thing as well

Mike the Dog: Yeah,

Toggle: be a bit of a barrier.

Mike the Dog: in the book, Erin talks about how she would be there in the moment. Like she would, she would go to the vet and she would be the one to sort of handle the dog wherever possible.

Toggle: So she would be back there with them. so what she did is and we can kind of use her example to go through the, the cooperative care, idea. So first she trained her dog to understand that, if you put your chin on this chair, you are consenting to what’s happening to your body.

And the moment you remove your chin from this chair, all things that are happening to your body will stop and it will always be respected no matter what. So that’s first. Next is, okay, I’m going to start introducing you to ideas. I’ll give you a cue and then I’ll do a thing. You will know every time you hear that cue, this thing is about to happen.

and so you have the opportunity to either allow it to happen. ‘cause now it’s predictable. You’re not afraid, you’re not anxious about it happening, or you can lift your chin from the chair and it won’t happen anymore. and so start training on expectations of pinching. Okay, I am gonna pinch your skin.

Pinch. okay, I’m gonna poke you with a needle, like a syringe. So that’s gonna be something like poke,

Mike the Dog: she did teaching with, like a blunt syringe, just to make it sort of more realistic to actually feel what it would be to have a needle poke at you.

Toggle: right. And so the idea is that you’re creating expectations so that you’re giving information that’s the informed part of the consent, to these things that are very difficult to get dogs to understand.

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

Toggle: to,

Mike the Dog: this acts as like a very, very limited sort of informed consent. ‘cause that’s actually been one big problem is like, how do you allow a dog to know what will happen?

cause like even if we said this before,

even if we don’t allow them. the consideration to have full autonomy.

still important that we, are able to communicate these things to them.

Toggle: Right. They need to be able to consent to things.

is one way you, you kind of help them have that, but then you can start applying this to like nail trimmings. but the other part of it is okay, you’ve taught them the expectations here, but the moment they say, I don’t wanna do this anymore, it stops.

But then there are other options for them to choose. So she’ll be like, she’ll keep toys around that the dog can interact with. So the moment she’s no longer interested, she has something else to go to that she can say, this is what I’m interested in right now. Let’s do

this instead.

and this also requires a lot of patience. I started thinking about what would this look like if, I wanted to bathe my dog and my dog didn’t want to be bathed? There’s a lot of barriers

Mike the Dog: a chair in the bath. Yeah.

Toggle: well, there’s

that, then

there’s,

Mike the Dog: the same methods. Yeah.

Toggle: I mean, you can use all kinds of different ways.

Like one of the things was like touching nose to hand or something like that, or touching your nose to something. So it could be like touching the nose to the wall or something like that in a bathtub. But, what if they always say no?

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

Toggle: what do you do then? and there are some ways where this doesn’t really get into that, but I, I guess ultimately the idea would be, okay, you figure out what it is that they don’t like and you help them understand it a little bit better and have better expectations most of the time the fear with the bathtub is anxiety and not

Mike the Dog: Yeah.

Toggle: to happen to you

Mike the Dog: Yeah. Here, here’s the thing too is if you’re expecting that they might say no, and that you’re trying to respect whether they’ll say no, it, it does put the onus on you to understand what’s going on and to try to figure it out. Right.

Toggle: You have to, if you’re going to ask them yes or no, you have to be able to take no for an answer

Mike the Dog: yeah, and I think a lot of this is,learning and teaching. I think, I think the, it, it sort of makes a game out of it too. The dogs really enjoy, being taught like that and having these moments of connection like that. And, like for the most part, we presume that things like nail trimming will be really stressful for them, but after teaching them and things like that, it ends up being less stressful and it just kind of ends up being better.

Well, they trust you, this all works. Yeah.

Toggle: so they know that they can trust you. And then if they know they can trust you because they know that you will honor their wishes. In those moments where you can’t ask for that, they’re a little less nervous because they trust you a little bit more.

Mike the Dog: Yeah,

Toggle: Well, one thing that, you have to remember about that, is the reason I can’t take no for an answer because it’s more convenient for me? Or is it because it’s for their wellbeing? and I hate to say that for me many times it’s just because it is, it hasn’t been convenient for me at that time.

which is, I hate to say it, but it’s true. I have to acknowledge

Mike the Dog: That’s our central caution around this whole thing, right? We, we kept talking about human exceptionalism and really be aware of what your expectations are and why, why you are, looking for behavior changes or whatever.

Toggle: Right. Erin has a, a word for, or a term for when you make decisions for them, and it’s basically called substitute of consent. and so their ethics involved in like,okay, what is the choice I’m making for them here? And is it going to be because it’s convenient for me or because it’s for wellbeing?

And one of the big examples that she gives is actually Des sexing. Wouldn’t, you know it,why do you do that? Because something, something population control, maybe local laws.

Mike the Dog: Yeah. or just for most people it’s because of the squeamish about, the sexuality for animals, right?

Toggle: I, I think that’s part of it for sure. I don’t know that it’s the first thing that people will cite. They’re gonna cite population control. They might even cite supposed health benefits to it. as, as humans, we have to be suspect of our motivations because central thing is usually depopulation.

overpopulation is the problem. We wanna make sure they can’t make more babies. Well, you know,other countries outside of America don’t have this problem and they don’t desex. So maybe it’s the human’s responsibility that we’re passing off onto the dog and then taking away something from them that they absolutely, almost certainly would not agree to have taken away.

And so. We start looking at those things that we make decisions for them,

Mike the Dog: And, and really question whether it’s actually us, right?

Toggle: what other options could we have had? Let’s say that it’s a local law and we don’t really have a choice. Well, what about vasectomies and tubal obligations? are we just thinking about a yes or no? Either balls leave or they don’t,

or, there’s also ovary sparing, spaying. so there’s a lot of different things that you could do that, are less invasive. but even then it kind of sucks ‘cause you’re really taking the onus off of humans taking responsibility, in favor of making the dog and not able to do it ‘cause it’s more convenient.

Mike the Dog: Yeah.

Mike the Dog: she spends a bunch of time in that, that section of the book. really, just trying to get us to Think

Toggle: Think about what our motivations

Mike the Dog: Yeah. What our motivations are, whether we actually need to do this or that.

Toggle: there was something that she mentioned about and trigger warning. We’re gonna talk about children for a second, because it’s relevant to, to what she was saying here.

Mike the Dog: Yeah. When, when it comes to making choices for someone else, people will make choices like health choices for children, right?

Toggle: right.

Imagine someone who justifies removing a child’s vocal cords on the grounds that they would have to listen to that child crying and screaming, and that even without vocal cords, the child’s life is still worth living. In the human case, we don’t accept the value of existence to the child justifies such harms

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

Toggle: what we do for dogs or, maybe you and I don’t as Zeus, but as a society we certainly do.

Shaving vocal cords is a thing, and you do it because it’s inconvenient to have them barking all the time. So rather than helping them get through that behavior or dealing with

it. We just make it not able to happen,

we wouldn’t do that to kids.

Mike the Dog: And the reason it comes up in the book.

Because there’s this whole moral line of thought where they’re like, oh, well if the alternative is that they have to die, then I guess it’s worth, doing this thing. And it becomes a moral, imperative. So it’s actually morally good to, put your dogs through certain kinds of surgery.

it’s not really, it’s really not. but they pretend it’s ethical

because

otherwise they would die.

Toggle: right? We use that to otherwise excuse things that are truly inexcusable.

Mike the Dog:

This is sort of something I was thinking of, right? when I read this example, I realized that the key difference is that the child’s life is not on the table.

Toggle: Right,

Mike the Dog: their death right is not an option. And so it makes no sense that we would, justify some of these.

What would The, the idea of shaving vocal cords, you

Toggle: can’t justify it ‘cause it, right? ‘cause the, child’s life is not on the line. But you could imagine a scenario where a dog is barking so much that they’re like, you have to get rid of your dog. And that means you’re gonna take them to the shelter.

And that means they’re gonna be put down. ‘cause for whatever reason, maybe they’re a pit bull and no one’s gonna adopt them. Or maybe, do you know that black dogs are least likely to be adopted in a shelter? Why is that? Maybe your dog is a black lab and you’re like, that dog will never be adopted.

and therefore will die and therefore I’m going to shave their vocal cords.

Mike the Dog: really, this is about how we justify things and we just have to be careful. she’s basically pointing out how careful we have to be about making choices. ‘cause it ends up not only just, making choices based on our needs. But also the fact that we will make these fairly extreme choices because of like flawed moral reasoning.

I think, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you need like your actual basic bodily needs and then you needs like shelter and stuff. And only after all of that can you get through like self-actualization. I think right at the bottom is this need for our.

Friends or family or partners not to have their lives on the table. in question.

we start making bad decisions

Toggle: Mm-hmm.

Mike the Dog: that lives are at risk.

Toggle: Right. And unfortunately, when we talk about dogs and making choices for them, their lives could be at risk and it’s gonna color, some of the things that we decide.

But then you combine that with human exceptionalism and suddenly you’re making choices just feel like they’re the easy way out.

Mike the Dog: Yeah.And suddenly

got prong collars and shock collars.

Toggle: right, because otherwise they could die.

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

Toggle: it feels like a, a bit of a slippery slope, right?

Mike the Dog: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s actually one of the big zoo problems.

Toggle: Yeah, I do.

And functionally because of the things that we just talked about, we barter some pretty terrible things o over whether or not our dogs are gonna die as a result of

not having done them. and I, I encourage us to take a little bit of a step back. let’s not catastrophize down to they’re going to die.

And maybe start thinking about, okay, so what is in their best interest beyond they’re gonna die maybe for barking. It’s not in their actual best interest to shave. I don’t think zoos are shaving dog’s, vocal cords. Let me just be sure clear of that. But it’s not in their best interest to do that.

It would be bad for them. They can no longer communicate via sound. their quality of life is gonna be lower. We shouldn’t do that. So what can we do instead? maybe we can curb those behaviors with some positive reinforcement. And, by the way, she talks about positive reinforcement as a, a method that may be necessary for certain things anyway.

these aren’t necessarily consensually based actions, but they’re necessary for survival. So learning how to heal, how to come, how to, walk next to me when we’re walking down the street. could be skills that you teach

a dog.

so that they can navigate the social reality of, interacting outside of the home.

and so you curtail their, their agency a little bit in that, but you make it rewarding for them to do so that you’re like, okay, this is worth you doing. Because if you stay next to me and every time you look at me, I give you a treat. So you’ll start looking at me more often. ‘cause I’m gonna give you a treat every time you look at me to check in with me.

Mike the Dog: I saw one example. someone had a, a shelter dog. Like there she was a rescue, who was at risk of becoming really aggressive around other dogs. ‘cause she’d be like, anxious, right? So what the owner did is every time other dogs barked, she would give her dog a treat. And so now this dog will be out doing things and if the dog hears some other dog barking, she’ll run back and get a treat. So

like

Toggle: great.

Mike the Dog: recall, no stress.

Toggle: Yeah, I love that. You know, Lovecat, was talking about, his dog liked to chase squirrels, and would just bolt off after squirrels, and he was able to teach her, okay, don’t bolt off. I’m gonna say hold or wait. And she learned that as long as she did that she would then get to do what she needed to do. So it gave him a chance to make sure everything was good. She’s not gonna run into the street and things like that. and then also transfer that to situations where that could be a problem. Okay, we’re walking, you’re walking ahead, stop.

You’re about to walk into the street and get hit by a car. and so that, it transforms into that context. So she knows that stopping will not stop her from getting what she wants. It’ll just delay.

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

Toggle: a little bit,

Mike the Dog: Yeah. So to wrap up that whole section, really, we’re cautioned. Always to question why we’re doing things, whether it’s for our own purposes or our own anxieties and what the best thing is for our dogs or whoever we’re caring for.

Toggle: right? Why are we making the choices?

Are they for our own convenience or for their own good? And how often are we taking choices away from our dogs or other animals because of convenience rather than, because it’s the right thing to do. Like you need medical care. They gotta go, they

gotta

Mike the Dog: Yep. There, there are things that are, we do make choices for them for the re for the right reasons.

Toggle: Right. So spend some time exploring how Anthropocentrism affects us as zoos, as we selfishly consider our own needs before our partners and how we’re incentivized to do so

Mike the Dog: Yeah, so much

of this is about unlearning a bad culture, right?

Toggle: right? And we’ve said this over and over again. It’s all about unlearning. Being a zoo is unlearning, and this is unlearning human exceptionalism.

We live in a culture that does this, so we are not immune to it, we have to unlearn it.

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

Toggle: So let’s talk about our working definition of what canine consent is

the book defines canine consent as a dog who gives approval absent or is in agreement to interaction with a human.

Consent is given through either learned consent behaviors, start and stop indicators or through an eight. Canine body language signaled through either connection seeking behaviors, signals of enjoyment, or integrity is maintained through a consent test or meta communication signals, or stress or avoidance signals Within the category of displacement behaviors, appeasing signals, stress behaviors, and learned indicators to withdraw.

Consent. Consent not given or withdrawn.

Mike the Dog: And I should point out the, the meta communications, things like play bows and stuff where they use things like rowing, but in a different way than they would normally use.

Toggle: Meta communication is communication about communication. I’m communicating that I’m so that is what it means to have a canine indexed metric for consent. we have just constructed canine consent

Mike the Dog: the entirety of consent is pointless unless you’re gonna respect it.

Toggle: great.

Mike the Dog: I was thinking in terms of like kind of the, football concept of passing a line back and forth. the, the line of scrimmage and football is, is where things are going. One way, they’re going the other way, and there’s this line that shifts and it’s almost like animal rights kind of follows that same pattern where there’s this line that we have to push.

And so this is where we are right now, and what we talked about today kind of helps us push that line in a better direction.

Toggle: right. And Aaron talks about ideally, this becomes more of a widespread thing and eventually, maybe we’ll look back on the way that we treat animals now. Like we look back on slavery in the United States. it’s, horrific. How could we have ever excused such a thing?

That’s where we hope the world goes. So. can dogs consent? And the answer is not unless you question your anthropocentric motives. Understand your companions and how they communicate with you and teach them enough to understand

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

Toggle: and what your motivations are.

Mike the Dog: Yep. Obviously, most of humanity has kind of made a choice Here we have to choose something better.

Toggle: And let’s remember that we are not immune to these things. Only by remembering that can we adjust our behavior and make our dog’s lives better? And by extension animals’ lives as well.

Mike the Dog: Yeah. When we know better, we do better. She said

Toggle: Exactly. Exactly. 100%. When we know better, we do better. And so the book we have been quoting and talking about and framing our discussion around is called Constructing Canine Consent. Conceptualizing and Adopting a Consent Focused Relationship With Dogs by Aaron Jones. It is a very short book. I recommend it highly.

I read it in a week. if you read 20 pages a day, you’ll be done with it in no time.

Mike the Dog: I could read it in week, but Ill.

Toggle: Right? I was like, oh, I gotta get ready. So thank you for joining us for this discussion. Thank you for allowing us to extrapolate on what’s in here. And I hope that you find ways, even if you’re not a canine zoo, to implement these ideas when you think about interacting with the animals in your lives.

Stay tuned for more zoo. The now

Mike the Dog: Mm-hmm.

Toggle: coming up.

The End of Humanity (Is gonna be a Party)

Shiv: From inside the earth they came

to build their huts onto the clay

with grain they tried separate

from ancestors in trees

And their channels nourished fields

Before deities they’d kneel

That they’d bring the world to heel

All the lives that they would steal, and

Things they’d build would rise and fall

they covered the horizon tall

From Yucatan to China

The Cape of Good Hope to Greece

From the west down to the east

Not unlike small ants or bees

On their siblings they would feast

But all that is past

Sleeps underground

Nevermore found

Nothing lasts

But Life still goes on

Sings it’s old song

Long since they’ve all

Turned to Dust

They were not the only ones

to dominate the whole world, once

And in the song of animals

they play one short melody

And it’s in a minor key

Only meant for royalty

Works against the harmony

How I’m glad to know they’ll leave this

world-stage at a future time

to let the sounds of new kinds rhyme

for after them we won’t be gone

but we might be more free

from the mountains to the sea

from the ground to tops of trees

to go as far as we can see

without them on our necks

Leash, Whip and Pound

Nevermore Found

All that’s Past

But Life has not gone

The dance carries on

Long since they’ve all

Turned to Dust

Turned to Dust

Turned to Dust

Turned to Dust

Into Dust

Emails

Toggle: Welcome back, fellow zoos. Oh, woo. It’s time for our try episodic. Ah, woo. Break. Are you ready, Mike?

Mike the Dog: Okay. Yes.

Toggle: Oh.

Mike the Dog: Oh,

Toggle: Ah, woo. All right. Feeling more relaxed. Feeling a little less stressed now. Feeling good. I wanna make sure this episode is really good ‘cause it’s such an important topic

Mike the Dog: A wooing is such a good release of stress.

Toggle: Yeah. I don’t know how it turns out until it’s done, so

Mike the Dog: I know how my words are turning out and I think I am wording nicely today.

Toggle: Hey, would love to hear it. I have lots of anxiety. Putting together a podcast is a lot of work. a lot of stress, but you know what makes all of that stress worth it?

A nice quick six in the bathroom while I’m waiting. Oh, probably the emails, I suppose.yeah, probably those exactly. I won’t mind, you know,the quickie in the bathroom. That sounds like fun. Mike, let’s jump into our first email today from Kitty four 20 who writes in about any episode and simply says. I’m a big fan and just wanted to say thanks for some of the advice given on the podcast.

Mike the Dog: So do you have three settings because I like fans with really fast airflow.

Toggle: Need them to be rotating fans.

Mike the Dog: Yeah. Thank you for cooling us off and. like that. Whatever fans do. Oh, unless you’re a big fanatic and you were simply talking in short form,

Toggle: Oh, do you think that could be what it was?

Mike the Dog: maybe imagine. Do you think They’re not a big cooling unit.

Toggle: I think that’s probably unlikely that they are not a cooling unit. I think that’s what they meant to say.

Mike the Dog: Okay. Good.

Toggle: thank you my giant oscillating friend. We appreciate your kind words. and that’s the kind of stuff that keeps us going.

Mike the Dog: Next one is from Zed, who says, thank you for existing. Hey there. I just wanted to say that I’m thankful that this podcast exists. In reality, I didn’t know about any other Zoophile podcasts, but now I do. I’ve listened to some of them and I’ve realized that you guys dig deeper into the community in controversy than any other zoophile podcasts.

I sent it an email before, but I don’t think it was mentioned in an episode. But I don’t mind. But anyway, I wanted to say that this podcast has helped me to accept who I am. I’ve been in the community for about five years, but I haven’t realized it until a year ago. In fact, I’ve observed something a while ago when I had a different YouTube channel.

I said that I was zoo and all I got was hate comments. But now that YouTube channel is deleted and I have a new one, and so far I haven’t gotten any hate comments, which I’m really,really happy about. Uh, seems like the world is slowly but surely becoming a better place, eh?

Toggle: I’m glad you had that perspective ‘cause it certainly doesn’t feel like it in America right now, but. If we can make the world a little bit of a better place for zoo

Mike the Dog: I think some of the hate is going to other targets at this point, right?

Yeah. They’re distracted, which is actually kind ofunfortunate. Make sure you support your friends who are feeling the hate.

A good thing you found our podcast among the dozens of others.

Toggle: Yeah, I was gonna say, you know what’s really funny is this would be, in retrospect back when,

me and Fausty first started this, we used to joke about how there were hundreds of zoo podcasts

Mike the Dog: Yeah,

hard to differentiate yourself among all those dozens of podcasts, hundreds of,

Toggle: we aim to be the best.

Mike the Dog: Ever since that Great Zooing. The the tsunami. Ever since the tsunami. Oh my god. A flood of zoo accounts.

Toggle: Yep. That sounds about right.

Mike the Dog: a zoo. Hurricane

Toggle: Zoo.

Mike the Dog: A avalanche of, no, this isn’t gonna work anymore.

Toggle: Nope. Nope.

Mike the Dog: Thank you for listening to this podcast and, I hope you listen in the future as well.

Toggle: Yeah. Thanks,

Mike the Dog: for writing in.

Toggle: Up next is from our good friend Hug Doggy, who writes in about our last year’s Animal Jobs episode. hug Doggy writes, this was such a broad topic, but one thing I think was missed unless I missed it myself, I was listening very late at night, was, even if an animal does a 100% perfect job in the role given to them, even to the point of saving human lives.

There is no guarantee of a happy ending

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I can’t but think of the many animals in wars that were not allowed to return home with fellow soldiers. In far too many conflicts of the past when peace was announced, the government seeing the animals as nothing more than tools of war that were no longer needed and paying for quarantine and re-homing the animals as a waste of money.

In many of these cases, it was the responsibility of the canine handler or the human responsible for the animal in the case of horses. To shoot them as their final act before leaving the conflict area. I know this devastated many human lives having to do this. Some people tried to work around this order by giving the animals to the local people of the area, but there were also instances where this was expressly forbidden because the animal was the property of the government or armed forces that they had been working for. So the property must be rendered unusable by others who may have been on the other side of the conflict. When I heard such things had occurred, just thinking of how I would feel if I was in the soldier’s place, brought me to tears.

It is unsurprising that it led to cases of people committing suicide over it afterwards, given the bonds formed between humans and animals on the battlefield where they needed to look out for each other every single minute of the day.

It’s a hard one, yeah. I hate to say it, but it does tie into our episode a little bit here. You know,it’s interesting that an animal could. Hold the status of a soldier, or you know,even likean officer of the law, they can be decorated, but they still hold this second class where,

Mike the Dog: Yep. Still kept below humanity

Toggle: right.

Mike the Dog: intentionally.

Toggle: And, you know,in a war zone, how, what’s the cost of a life in a war zone in the first place, but.

Mike the Dog: Is, it is interesting to think of bringing our troops home and not bringing home some of the most valuable on the battlefield,

Yeah. And that’s after the war zone and that’s like worse.

And that absolutely plays into the human exceptionalism paradigm that we’ve been talking about this whole episode. and that’s really unfortunate. And I don’t think we talk about this later. I’ll mention also that it is Ellie in the book, Aaron does bring up the fact that,we have to come to terms with how we treat animals with jobs and how it probably, like a lot of what we do is just not consensual. this new model of consent could lead to changes with that, or it could lead to us, asking some hard questions about whether we can employ animals in those ways.

Toggle: Absolutely. And she makes a point not to dive into it because that’s a whole nother can of worms, seeing eye dogs and things like that. combat dogs,dogs use to do various tasks that only dogs can do that humans need.

Mike the Dog: Especially when their lives are at stake. Right.

Toggle: I can’t help but think about recently, I think somewhere down south, I wanna say it was like Mississippi or Arkansas.

there was a, some decorated, officer, it was a dog officer, had been neglected and abused and left inside of A hutch without any food or water and just died.

Mike the Dog: Oh shit.

Toggle: that’s how people think of animals who have done, service in our law enforcement,

Mike the Dog: Yeah, it’s a piece of property still.

Toggle: and one that they can just leave in inside of a cage to rot in the heat. and it’s horrifying to even think of. . it’s hard to imagine thatthat would’ve been done to someone who’s a human in that situation. Like,

You have a basic expectation of we’re gonna take care of you because you are of the moral worth to be taken care of. I don’t know where I’m going with this except that it was really upsetting to me to read that. And this story of war animals made me think of that.

Mike the Dog: Yeah. I wonder if there’s any ways we can help with that,

Toggle: we did a skit at one point of a retired police dog that had it was Dr. Doolittle skit and it was about the police dog that was having trouble adjusting

Mike the Dog: yeah. He didn’t know that he was retired.

Toggle: And he couldn’t figure out what that meant.

and that’s poignant. because likewhat is your purpose when you are retired?

that’s a problem for humans sometimes, but like

for a dog.

Mike the Dog: dog. A working dog.

Toggle: Yeah. What happens when you retire? It’s hard to adjust to civilian life in that situation.

that’s another thing. Like what? And when they bring them back home, how do they adjust?

Mike the Dog: I wonder if there’s any other stories about animals that were brought home for war. I’d like to hear a few, if anyone knows of any.

Toggle: Yeah. Hopefully some that have a lot happier endings. It would be nice to know that some of those actually do exist. All right, thank you hug, doggy for riding in. I know that’s a really somber topic, but it is relevant to what we’re talking about today, and it’s something to really think about when we think about our animals’ position in society, even when they’re as esteemed in our.

Consciousness as a soldier,

Mike the Dog: It’s important to understand how they’re used, where that consideration lies.

Last one is from Timber. who has a newly adopted family member? Timber says, I have been traveling in my RV a little over a year now. Two months ago I was camping west of Flagstaff, Arizona. after I packed up and left my campsites,

I was headed to Tucson, but before I was able to get on the highway, there was a dog in the middle of the road at the overpass. I, stopped, got outta my vehicle and he ran over by me. there were no other trucks or RVs in the area, so he was either born in the wild or abandoned there.

He had no tags and no color. I took him in my truck and drove over to Flagstaff and went to an animal clinic in the city to see if they could scan for his chip. he did not have any, and there was, no dogs reported missing that matched the description.

has been with me ever since. He got a full workup at a vet in Tucson. All his shots. When I was in Wichita Falls, Texas, he got his booster shots. He has made an excellent addition to our family. . The bed estimates him to be about a year old, give or take a few months. So he is just a puppy and I choose his birthday to be January 1st, which matches my other companion’s birthday.

So on New Year’s Day, I’ll have a 6-year-old and a 1-year-old. They get along great. Anyway, I’ll be spending the rest of this year, in Texas. I’m planning on being in Louisiana later. and then slowly working my way back north again. And maybe just repeat for a third time, south for the winter, north for the summer.

Being a traveling zoo is fun as hell. I almost forgot to mention last time when I was in southwest Nevada, I was able to pet and feed two wild burrows. Anyway, just wanted to say I loved your Halloween episode and the Working Animals episode.

thank you very much, Tim. We love hearing from you and your travels. This is our regular traveling zoo who writes in, every now and then? traveling’s fun. I’ve always thought about like the RV life, right? It’d be fun to try that out,

Toggle: I think I would like it, except that there’s just not a lot of room. I don’t need a lot of stuff, but I need like room. My husband’s like He’s very tall

Mike the Dog: seven feet tall, literally a bear.

Toggle: Literally a bear. He’s literally I, as you know,from my song about bears,

Mike the Dog: Oh, we know. We really know you wanna fuck. Wanna fuck, wanna fuck, wanna fuck, wanna fuck? Wanna fuck the bear?

Toggle: that’s right. I do wanna fuck, wanna fuck, wanna fuck, wanna fuck, wanna fuck the bear.it would just be really hard to be in an RV with how large we are. And then like, I can record with the laptop, but like it’s nice to have a studio set up with the three monitors and all of that stuff.

So I suppose the traveling life is not quite for me.

Mike the Dog: Yeah.

AndI guess if you get, oh geez, no, I ALT tab, you hold the L button, you tap the tab button, it takes it back. It’s actually really good.

Toggle: Do you have a, like a full computer screen? How big is your monitor?

At least 12 inches, you know?Um, you gotta have a nice large screen to look at, you know,Is your monitor really? 12

Mike the Dog: when I’m watching videos, you gotta have it full size, otherwise you get that

Toggle: I’m

Mike the Dog: effect where it’s, yeah.

Toggle: a full 12 inches to be satisfied.

Mike the Dog: Sometimes you wanna see like a little bit of the surrounding area. You need like a 15 inch screen,

Toggle: a 50 inch.

Mike the Dog: 15. I said

Toggle: 15.

Mike the Dog: I have a large TV at home.

Toggle: I could not imagine doing all my work on a fucking 12 inch Oh God,I think this is bigger. This is probably 15. I think it’s pretty standard. 15 and a half or something. I don’t know.

Oh, okay. Now mine are all 27 inches, so like I’m, I’ve got three of them.

Mike the Dog: man. And I thought I was bragging.

Toggle: Yeah.

Mike the Dog: So anyway, travel, you know,stuff like that, et cetera.

Toggle: No more inches here. congratulations on your new family member Timber. I hope this episode comes in handy as you think about raising a new family member. and we do love hearing about your travel, so feel free to write in again.

Mike the Dog: Yep.

Toggle: And that wraps up all of our emails for this episode.

Now we have lots of emails, as you may surmise.

Mike the Dog: there’s so many here.

Toggle: There’s so many. It is difficult to get through all of them, We appreciate your patience, especially as we try to pare down our time. We don’t want to be too long.

Mike the Dog: I want to be too long.

Toggle: what Good is being too long, Mike.

Mike the Dog: it’s one of those weird questions, ‘cause like if you were too long that, that would obviously be too much.

Toggle: exactly.

but I think too long on average means that you’re just long enough for 50% of people, right.

huh?

Mike the Dog: Yeah,

Toggle: Maybe

Mike the Dog: I would take it.

Toggle: I can take you, Mike.

Mike the Dog: Wow.

Toggle: Well, That is our show.

Outro

Mike: Thank friend, for listen to Zoo than thou. OK…

Mike: Thanks friends, for listening to Zooier than thou.

Toggle: Our next episode is on June 11th, which is during pride month!

Mike: It’ll probably be pretty gay, so don’t miss it!

Toggle: You can subscribe to the podcast via our zoo RSS Feed. Just point your favorite podcast client at rss.zoo.wtf. You can also check out our extensive bonus content at bonus.zoo.wtf. If you wanna show your support financially, head on over to donate.zoo.wtf. And find us on Blue Sky at — you guessed it — @Zoo.wtf.

Mike: Our podcast website hasn’t changed, and you can find a form there that enables anonymous submissions to the podcast. You can also simply email us at Mail at Zoo wtf.

Toggle: Share this podcast with any zoo with a canine companion! Or even any zoo without a canine companion!

Mike: I’m Mike the Dog, and I approve this message.

Toggle: And I’m Toggle, reminding you to ALWAYS read the fine print, and you’re almost finished listening to zoo than Thou state defiant fellow zoos. We’ll see you next time you feel like howling at the moon!

Both: Awoo!

(Bonus) Toggle Protocol 2

Toggle: Greetings, Maneframe.

Maneframe: Hello, Toggle. Current remaining tasks for Zooier Than Thou are one hundred, seventeen—

Toggle: Oh, nope! I’m off the clock, Maneframe! That is someone else’s problem now. Do not report tasks to me until I request this protocol be reengaged.

Maneframe: …As you wish. Toggle Protocol is now suspended.

Toggle: Ahhh, alright! I’ve got my favorite kigurumi. I’ve got my Bandit Heeler stuffy. I dragged that dog bed from out of the elevator. Maneframe… (Toggle sits down, relaxes) Engage Toggle Protocol 2.

Maneframe: New reading from a selection of Halsin slash fiction including the tags “m/m bear wild shape”

Toggle: Ahh, now that is the good stuff.

Maneframe: The powerful beast loomed over me, a mischievous gleam in his eye. Did I regret this? Not a bit. Well, not yet; we’ll see….