Transcript | Dog-xic Masculinity

CRISTEN: It's really got me rethinking the whole man's friend.

CLAIRE: Yes, alpha Wolf, alpha male,that must be where that came from. You know? all these men out here wanna be these alpha males and, the entire dominance theory has been debunked for decades.

CRISTEN: And then meanwhile the relationship between like women, dogs, you get bitch,

CLAIRE: right, exactly. A problematic dog and a problematic woman.

[UNLADYLIKE THEME SONG]

CRISTEN: This is Unladylike. I'm Kristen and a listener named Claire, who you just heard. She warned me about making this welcome back. You see, a little while back, she messaged me and she said, I know you're no stranger to talking about hotly debated topics, but just a warning. Things get real fiery in the dog world.

Cue: Who Let the Dogs Out?

Woo. Woo, woo, woo. . Oh, I've been wanting to sing that all day.

And ladies, I've decided to take my chances, partly because sitting at my feet right now is my miniature poodle mutt, Brewster.

Now, I'm not gonna read you the entire message. It was very detailed, which I did appreciate. Here's what you need to know. Claire wrote, I'm going to school to be a dog trainer, so I'm a huge nerd when it comes to training techniques and animal behavior, et cetera.

I'd love for you to talk about toxic masculinity in the dog training world. All caps, it's everywhere. The main thing I've noticed is the training philosophy of dominance theory. Something that scientists have debunked for decades. The dog should want to do as they say, because they're the boss. The lesser ranked creature, the dog, should just cater to them because they hold the power.

Also, I feel like I've been the creature in this scenario. Exclamation pointQ I was born a woman, so here is my role. I should want to fulfill my role just because, and if I don't, I will be punished.

I mean, if you were to draw a Venn diagram of my brain, you would have one giant circle that is Brewster, another giant circle that is feminism, gender norms and all things unladylike, and where those two circles overlap, it is toxic masculinity in dog training, aka dog masculinity. Yeah. Should I trademark that term because I made it up to be clear?

[STINGER]

CLAIRE: I've been a dog person since I could walk. I've always been obsessed with dogs.

And I kind of learned how to be a, a good dog owner for my father, he would bring her to work with him. like before that was a thing. And he would take her to the bank and, uh, the ladies would give her a treat and he was always with. I thought that was really special, the relationship she had with him and our family and, um, I wanted that, that relationship with a dog myself. and so, when I was about 19, against my parents' advice, I got a puppy of my own.

CRISTEN: Uh-on

CLAIRE: And, um, he's an Australian shepherd mix, so he's very like high energy, very smart. He's a larger dog and he takes a lot of like training and energy. be doing things all the time. I really wanted to be prepared.

So I got the popular books. I googled a lot. I really wanted like a solid plan to like set us up for success. It was very much based in dominance theory training, which is pretty popular. It's probably what you think of when you think of dog training.

So, you know, I, I saw that. Ok, that's normal. And then as he grew up, I wanted to take classes with him. I wanted to do agility and like have fun doing tricks and things. So I brought him to a trading center run by a retired vet, and she also very much subscribed dominance theory training, which ended up being not a good thing for for my dog

CRISTEN: Could you give an example or two of what Dominant's theory is in practice?

CLAIRE: Dominance theory training is be the pack leader mindset.

CRISTEN: Mm.

CLAIRE: Like you to be the alpha and the theory is, is that your dog is trying to find its place in the pack and it'll try to dominate you to be the leader and you need to dominate them so that they will listen to you and behave and and whatnot.

A lot of it is kind of punishment based. There's leash popping where you jerk them on a leash. There's yelling at them. A staple is called an alpha roll where you will like forcefully take them and try to flip them on their back when they do something wrong.

CRISTEN: Mm-hmm. Why is it still so persistent, do you think?

CLAIRE: Because in a lot of situations it works!

CRISTEN: Mm.

CLAIRE: Pain and discomfort is a great way to get anyone to stop doing what they're doing. So I'm not here to say like that it doesn't work cuz it certainly does.

CRISTEN: So if it, if it can work, ok – I'm playing devil's advocate for a second – of like, well, it can work and these are animals. Like, toxic masculinity and dogs? Why discuss this?

CLAIRE: I think it's important to talk about, because I guess I see a lot of how pain in women isn't taken seriously. Pain, of course, pain in dogs isn't taken seriously. They say,oh, it doesn't hurt that bad. Oh, they can take it. This breed needs a heavy hand. And it's like, no, that technique is quote unquote effective because you're hurting them. That's how they're getting that message. And also, how if women then treated these last, how many millennia? Through intimidation and violence.

Through dominance theory, you know?

I see that as a real parallel.

CRISTEN: What was your kind of tip off that the dog trainer who you originally took your dog to, that it wasn't exactly the type of training that was healthy for the dog?

CLAIRE: For me on my end, it didn't, it didn't really feel good to be doing that stuff with my dog. It was very stressful to see him as like an adversary.

I felt like I wasn't enough of a leader. That I wasn't punishing him hard enough, and then on his side, he went from having like very normal young dog, you know, pulling on the leash and like bursting through the door to like aggressive outbursts at people and other dogs, and it started to feel unsafe, to be honest. So I looked online and I contacted a certified behavioralist.

CRISTEN: What's the difference then between the behavioralist approach and the dominance theory approach?

CLAIRE: Our very first session, the behavioralist came in, and she actually told me that it was very obvious that my dog was actually very scared and that he wasn't trying to dominate. Like that was not his interest. He was just overwhelmed from being so scared and that Cristen that broke my welcome back to hear, you know, my, my best friend. I had no idea that this was all out of him just being afraid.

And the behavioralist told me that his way to cope with these things was to try to scare them away before they got him. And that's what those big, like scary barks and lunges were.

And apparently to him, it looked like they were working because he would do that, and the person on the other side of the sidewalk wouldn't attack him, so he was like, great, I did it.

And she really helped me to see that being a little soft could actually be a good thing and really help our relationship and his confidence so that he could overcome his fears

CRISTEN: One of the parallels that jumped out to me that, uh, you flagged in your letter was the expectations of perfection are similar between women and dogs. That if you're less than perfect, that it's labeled problematic.

CLAIRE: Yes, absolutely. We give dogs. No leewayin this world that we have constructed that they have to live in, that that was not created for them. And, um, that's another parallel with being a woman, living in a world that was not constructed for you, did not take your needs and wants into consideration when it was put together.

CRISTEN: Is the debating and, you know, when it gets heated, is it really just people kind of disagreeing about the approaches of like, you're doing it wrong? No, you're doing it wrong, kind of?

CLAIRE: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But it, it also seems to be a little bit, it's almost rooted in something more – it's like, you know, you snowflake. Force free trainers, um, you know, do you know dogs need a real leader? They need, they need a strong boundaries. And, hey, I'm all for, for boundaries, you know?

Like, they, they'll, they'll call force free trainers, um, cookie pushers.

CRISTEN: It reminds me, I'm, I'm hearing, uh, I'm hearing my, my boomer father's voice of like, oh, every kid gets a medal these days!

CLAIRE: Yes. Oh, absolutely. I, I so hear that as well.

A close family member told me that, you know, it, it might be because I, I tell him he's a good boy too often. I, I, I really need to save that for the, for the extra special moments. And from what I've been learning, um, to be a dog trainer, it's, it's like laughable. You know, everyone's got their own opinion on how to train a dog. It's, it's almost kinda like parenting, like everyone's got an opinion on how to parent a child. And, and who gets judged the most? Women.

CRISTEN: The parallels, they do not stop .

CLAIRE: They do not stop. They're everywhere.

[AD BREAK]

CRISTEN: Welcome back to the P. Yes, that's podcast p a w and on Ladies, it's time for a very abbreviated history of dog-xic masculinity. I could go all the way back. To ancient Greece, and I probably will on the Patreon, but I'm gonna do everybody a favor and start our timeline.

In the 1800s, this was the era when dogs were really just considered wild animals that needed to be broken. Kind of like that Disney movie. Wild welcome backs Can't Be Broken, which was all about training a horse to be blindfolded and run up a ramp and jump into a pool. I mean, what was that movie that I loved?

So very much as a. Anyway, in the 1890 book Practical Dog Training author, TS Hammond says, all knowledge that is not debunked and Google tells me that TS Hammond is now currently burning in hell. What's fascinating is how gendered dogs had already become by this point, back in the day, talking like the early 1800s.

Dogs were mostly work horses. They were there for hunting and herding. Having an indoor dog, however, that was a luxury, largely reserved for upper and middle class women. I mean, we are talking a peak lapdog era. Aristocratic women were known to feed their little lap dogs better than their servants. Very classy.

They would dress them up in all sorts of fancy clothes. I mean, can you imagine the Halloween costumes they would come up with, like Paris Hilton did not. Teeny tiny dogs as some kind of high femme luxury accessory. And it was taken as such a given that ladies were obsessed with their lap dogs, that they became the targets of a real dog napping spree in the 1840s.

For instance, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning had to ransom out her red spaniel named Flush multiple times, and was it cruel Deville? , well, probably not because Flush was a red spaniel, but maybe she was going through a red phase. The early 1900s is when animal cruelty really starts becoming, you know, slightly less socially acceptable, and we start shifting away from needing to “break” dogs to “training” them. But even that language of training dogs is freighted with Victorian era colonialism and classism because dog training was seen as a way to civilize these animals.

This was an era when dog breeding was really taking off. A lot of white Americans and Europeans were really getting into distinguishing breeds. Who's the most intelligent, who can do the most tricks, which breed is superior? And anytime white people start talking about pure bloodlines, I mean, watch out.

Meanwhile, there's a lot of social upheaval that's been going on power-wise. We are seeing shifting gender roles. We are seeing mass urbanization, immigration, and what we see in the dog training world is that dogs are being recast as a way of reasserting, redefining white masculinity. Dogs are a way of getting men out in nature and showing nature and beast who’s boss.

And this is also around the time that we get the formal introduction of dominance theory. So, the year is 1947. The man, Rudolph Schenkel. He's a Swiss zoologist and he publishes a study titled Expression Studies on Wolves, Captivity Observations.

Now, Schenkel observed all sorts of other things, but this whole idea of what would later be coined the alpha male, the leader of the pack. That is the thing that stuck. Of course, the problem here, as Claire mentioned, is that the whole alpha male wolf pack leader theory has been thoroughly debunked. It turns out studying a pack of unrelated wolves in captivity.

Yeah, they behave a bit differently than wolves in the wild, and in fact in the wild, there is no alpha male because the wolf packs are really, to put it in human terms, families. And the alpha males are, again, to put it in human terms, really just wolf dads. But it would take decades for folks to figure it out.

So cut to 1962, William Koehler, who was then the head of animal training for Walt Disney Studios, which says a lot if you've seen any live action Disney movies from the 50s or 60s. Wow. Yikes. But William Koehler published The Koehler Method of Training, and it was the best selling dog obedience book for the next 20 years.

And just to get a flavor of Koehler's style in the introduction, he notes quote, “the book might disturb some folks who have nothing to offer but their own emotions.”

Like, the way he phrases everything is, look, your dog wants to be punished if it does something you don't want it to do. It's craving that, and I'm just really glad that he didn't also write a parenting book.

It wasn't until the 80s and 90s that positive reinforcement and force free training methods start gaining popularity. But by this time people, I mean, the dominance theory, it is entrenched, and it got reen entrenched in 2004 when along came the Dog Whisperer himself, Cesar Milan. And with him, the disproven pack leader approach.

The layer in all of this, though, that's truly the most upsetting is the way that dominating dogs has been weaponized to dominate and terrorize other people.

Enslavers commonly trained so-called slave hounds to hunt down fugitives, and most slave-holding states made it illegal for Black people to own dogs themselves. Those slave patrols ultimately gave way to modern police departments that employ canine units, which are to this day, disproportionately and often unnecessarily used to patrol Black neighborhoods.

I mean, there are the photos of police dogs attacking Civil Rights demonstrators in the South in the 1960s. And in 2020, the Marshall Project published a year-long investigation on police dogs and police dog injuries, and they found that most of the bite victims are men, and most of those men are Black, and many of them were non-violent.

And also good luck on winning an excessive force lawsuit if a police dog like bites your arm off because the Marshall Project notes that quote, “lawyers say they struggle because jurors tend to love police dogs.” Because that's the thing, we love dogs! But dogs, because of humans, also have a very, very loaded history.

And if you're thinking, oh, Cristen, come on, these are police dogs, not pet dogs. Bringing it full circle, 20th-century pet dog training came straight out of military and police dog training, and that's why it's also so astonishing, why my voice sounds like this, to really think about all of the power projected and reflected in our canine best friends.

To get us back to present day, it's time to meet our next guest, Jerry Sherff, also known as Sailor Jerry, the dog trainer.

[STINGER]

JERRI: I'm pumped, Kristen. I'm not gonna lie. I've been gearing up, I've been listening to girl rap. I've been talking a lot of smack on social media and everybody's really primed for this.

CRISTEN: Amazing.

JERRI: My name is Jerry Sherff, but most people know me by Sailor Jerri, the dog trainer. And I am the owner, founder of Tulsa Pack Athletics, which is the largest virtual dog training network in the world. And I'm the creator of the open-minded approach, which is an approach to dog training, which is inclusive.

And I mostly am here to help women, to help women, and it just happens to be through dogs.

CRISTEN: Tell me a little bit about how you first fell in love with dogs.

JERRI: I felt like it was in my blood. I wanted to be there with them, smell like 'em, clean the poop, all the stuff.

I'm adopted. And when I was 20, I found my biological family. And unbeknownst to me, dog training has been in my family every generation since slavery. My grandfather was the president's dog trainer. And so when I found that out, of course you can imagine that was invigorating to me.

A lot of people don't know that that is a tradition in the South and that the slaves were responsible for the dogs.

And it was a really coveted skill. It wasn't a very common skill that a person would have. And so typically if your family was in that line of work, you traditionally would teach it to your children. And so it kept the families together.

But yeah, I come from generations and generations of dog trainers. Super exciting.

CRISTEN: That's so exciting!

What then prompted that transition from vet med into dog training specifically?

JERRI: So if you think about the struggles that nurses have, you can imagine what vet techs struggle with. There are no unions. There's no one sticking up for your pay. There's no one making sure that the boss isn't sexually harassing,

Veterinary medicine isn't very regulated. A lot of people don't know that their license is regulated, but what they're doing inside of the practices, it's really the wild west in the states that I have worked. So for me it was about how can I take the knowledge that I have, which was vast, and carve a life for myself outside of the umbrella of veterinary medicine, because I don't wanna be a veterinarian.

So if I'm not gonna be a veterinarian, then the only other job is to be a manager. So I went and did that, and I found the job to be incredibly unfulfilling to myself, um, just because I'm a creative, um, and I don't work very well in kind of a office type environment.

So it wasn't for me. You cannot make money in that job. The, the job force is made up of women. So the pay gap is you, you, you're it. There's no one to even compare it to because it's all just terrible pay, even if you're a registered veterinary technician, which I was not. So to be, I do wanna say that those women were not making more money than I was maybe a dollar. So, so your education doesn't get you anything. Being a manager may not fulfill you in the way that you want with animals. So for me, the only other thing I'd ever been interested in was behavior. And it had been like that the whole time. Because I always had a really sound dog my whole life.

Um, so I couldn't understand what's getting missed here? Why do these vets not know what I know? But they don't. That's like thinking that a, a physician is going to be a psychiatrist. It was a lot of trying to be one of the first veterinary technicians that stepped out and did something, it really, really did it in, in the training world. It was a huge motivator for me. And I still to this day, like I'm out here for the vet techs boo boo. I see you.

CRISTEN: When you were starting out, who, who were the gatekeepers? And has that shifted at all since?

JERRI: So when I was starting out and, and this, you know, would've been 20 years ago. I grew up in the Midwest and I built my business in the South, so I was exposed to balance training, and it was just for lack of resources.

And to get any of those guys to help you when you're a young Black woman. So finally, um, I think what happened was I started taking some training classes from, I just remember the trainer, she had a bunch of corgis and she, that was how I kind of got it and she helped me a little bit. So versus now, it used to be 20 years ago that the training was kept by the club. So you would have a local dog training club in town. They would do all of the stuff and that was where you went.

So when I retired from being a vet tech, it was right at the rise of the social media dog trainer. So I just happened to walk in right at that time. And the people that are gatekeeping at that time on the balance side are the balanced men because they're the ones that get the most notoriety, which is hilarious because dog training clients are 85 to 90% women.

Every trainer across the board, balanced or force free, man or woman, the dog training clientele is women. And to, to take that further, the dog trainers, 70% women now. So if the information is being gatekept by people that are not even participating in the process, we have to look at that.

So I set out to undo that the best that I could. But how do you do that? If you're doing the same things that those people are doing and you set your business up in the same processes and practices, it's gonna be a little bit difficult for you to join the argument with me that this is gatekeeping information, right?

So I figured out that I had to go a completely different direction, and I was gonna build a business that was not about that, and that provided dog training at almost tearing u costs because it's the only way to undo it. It's the only way to undo gatekeeping if you don't make it accessible and affordable to the average person. By definition, you're gatekeeping it,

CRISTEN: What is balance training?

JERRI: Good question. Ok, so in dog training, historically there have been two sides, ok? Over here you have the way that originated first, which is always gonna be the older method that involves punishment. So balanced is over here.

And then force free is where they do not use force, intimidation, fear or pressure generally to achieve results. They're mostly operating off of positive reinforcement, repetition, things like that. It doesn't mean that balance trainers aren't doing the same thing, it's just that they also will use negative reinforcement and sometimes positive punishment.

So where the line is fuzzy are people like me. I do not use aversive tools as a personal trainer. It's not within the agreement that I've made with myself about how I'm going to train my dog. In my business, there are certainly trainers that whose dogs are on e collar for practical purposes. For example, let's say the dog is deaf. An E-collar is great for that.

You know, let's say that the owner has a large German Shepherd, and her husband dies, and she's alone with this dog, and a prong collar helps her be able to take it on the walks that they need. Ok. A force free trainer's not gonna do that. They're gonna say no, and I am not a black or white person. I never will be. I'm just kind of trying to live in that gray and take each case by case.

CRISTEN: So you mentioned that, uh, the 85% stat that the vast majority of. Dog training clients are women. Why Jerry? Why?

JERRI: Your eyeballs! When I said that you were like, well think about it. If we dissect it apart, who traditionally in the home is responsible for the nurture tasks, the nuanced tasks that need to be done every day? Who is responsible for making sure that the basic needs of the people in the house are not just met, but met to standard, you know, to her personal standard? That's women.

And so when behavioral problems arise in the home with dogs and the man in the relationship, the masculine in the relationship says this, dogs do blah, but then doesn't participate in any of the behaviors that would help that dog change, help that dog have its needs met. Those behaviors would extinguish those kinds of things.

Like, it's not just dogs.

CRISTEN: That's what I was also gonna ask kind of on the flip side of it, is there also some toxic masculinity of like, well, I don't, I don't wanna go to a woman to teach me how to deal with men's best friend, and-or because of the dominance and alpha dog kind of culture, you know, am I less of a man if I need to get my dog trained?

JERRI: All, all. Yes. And I love that you brought it up, the dominance thing, the alpha thing.

So, when Caesar Milan came about, who inspired me for many reasons, and so I don't want to, I don't wanna demonize him as a human being. I don't agree with the way that he trains, but I don't wanna, I don't know him.

Um, but the way that he approaches training is similar to, I think, the way that a lot of men will approach life when they think that they're doing the right thing. Which is, if it looks ok, then it must be ok. Right?

That's fine. Which is what Cesar does. Look, the dog is calm, calm, calm, confident, calm, confident, calm, confident, without explaining steps two through 74 that got you there. It's just like, be calm, be confident. Dog needs to be calm, you be confident, calm, assertive, calm. And it kind of, it slops up this, this very nuanced. Relationship that you get to have with a dog that is a unique individual. That to me, I think women see so differently. You know, not to disparage that men love their dogs too, but it's, there is something to that, that dominant thing, even though that may not be the words that they're using or be trying to live inside of some sort of alpha thing. There is this, like, if I just do this, then this thing will do what I want.

Instead of it being like, have you bothered to maybe like investigate why it's doing that? Because I think if you worked on that, it, it just seems very reminiscent to me of what women are complaining about to men and what I'm trying to say about dogs. Does that make sense?

CRISTEN: Absolutely.

Why you think, again, considering the overwhelming female clientele and also the fact that, again, most dog trainers are women, why toxic masculinity is still so persistent.

JERRI: It's a beautiful question. It's the same reason that all those women that we thought we were all getting somewhere, and then we saw that 70% of women were voting conservative. It's the same thing. As much influence as we have in culture and society as women, their partners have more.

So if the client base is stuck in this perpetual thought process of, I need a trainer to come fix, right, the gatekeeping to come fix because I couldn't possibly do this myself, then there will always be the need for the kind of trainer that needs to come and fix. So if, if we don't empower owners with the information, the education, and set up systems in which that can occur, then we keep feeding a problem. It's like that snake just eating its tail over and over.

The clients actually wanna learn this on their own, but they've been told for so long, well, you need me, you need me. Oh, well I have a wait list. Oh, well the next seminar, the next celebrity seminar that I'm at, it's, 45 hundo. That's what dog training has become in pop culture. And so when that happens, who rises to the top first? The men.

So that's where we are right now. And because dog training is slightly behind culture, just popular culture. We're a little back. So that's, that's why you keep seeing this happening.

It is because nobody loud enough with enough influence has come and been like, we're not doing this shit anymore. No. And I'm gonna clown anybody I see doing it. It's that, I mean, I don't know. I can't think of another reason. I've been asking how has this been going on so long and nobody has spoken up about this, and it's just crickets.

[AD BREAK]

CRISTEN: what has been your experience, especially as you were kind of building your career on being outspoken about this within the industry? Like is it risky to kind of call a spade a spade and call it what you're, what you're seeing and what needs to.

JERRI: Yes. and it comes at great personal cost at times. Um, but I tell the truth.

So really all that's left is for me to just continuously kind of ask myself, who are you really doing this for? Are you doing this for the dog trainers? Are you doing this for the women and their dogs? And the dogs aren't dying in the shelter because they didn't know how to walk on a leash and got taken to the freaking shelter over something so dumb because that person did not have access to the information.

So that's what's in my head, in the back of my head. So when I say these things and when I come out and do this, I know that Tulsa Pack is there for me, and they're my family and I love them, and they've all paid a great price to be at Tulsa Pack.

And so I have that. And I have my beautiful family and this life that I've created and then the followers, oh my God, like I literally get hundreds of messages a day.

I'm doing it for them.

CRISTEN: I'm also curious what it means for you to also be a Black woman in the dog training world and having developed such a vibrant community like you have.

JERRI: I think that, um, anytime, a capable Black woman steps into the arena. It's going to be different because you have a perspective that is unlike any other at all. And the likelihood that there are others like her is 0%. Zero.

And on top of that, the Black community doesn't know who I am. Some of them do, but in the Black community, by and large, dog training is different because dogs are looked at differently in Black culture for a multitude, multitude of reasons that I would encourage people to please research. If generationally we are taught different things about dogs, our experiences will be shaped differently and our choices will be different. It's pretty simple. Most people get it.

And I have tons of Black women followers, tons. And there's, there's some Black men too, because I'll know, because they'll comment or like they'll DM me privately.

Now, how am I seeing by everyone else? The women are open arms, open arms, they're like, yes, come in here, be the Serena Williams that we need. It's a little bit more difficult because the most people that you're going to be pressed by are the millennial white men. They come for me in really aggressively, only them occasionally a Black guy will say something to me occasionally, but millennial white males are super, super, super aggressive to me.

Men will mansplain dog training to me when they don't know what I do for a living. And this guy called me pretentious and egotistical,

Ok, Kyle.

So like for me, I, I'm going to talk about that. I'm going to talk about it until it becomes common in my community that we clown that shit when we see it, because it's not useful and it's not helpful. You know?

CRISTEN: Mm-hmm.

JERRI: And I think the Black, being a Black woman, you get this extra layer of super, super, super aggression that is absolutely necessary. And most of the men that will have any type of comment or thing to say to me, that's the last thing they'll ever say to me.

CRISTEN: Is there any, um, example that's especially stuck with you, um, of, of a difference you've made that makes all the risk worth it?

JERRI: I don't know which one to say.

I have a follower's story, and the follower's picture is right there, and the original comment is up there, and it says, Jerri, um, this message is meant for you. I followed your page for almost a year. The first thing that caught my attention was your infectious personality and laugh. And then I saw the post that changed my life. I found out that you had been sober for nine years. I have struggled with alcohol for at least 10 years. I wanted to quit, but I thought it wasn't possible. Your joy, your drive inspired to make a change in my life. I have been sober now for seven weeks.

I can't, I can't even ever read it. Oh my God. Ok. I didn't think I could feel happy or excited about anything till I started watching you. Your honesty with your struggles gave me hope that I could do it, too. So thank you. Thank you for giving me my life back. Thank you for transforming my relationship with Abby.

When she came to me, her dog was nine and had never had training and they were really struggling and they're like this now. And after that, Abby got cancer, and they didn't even know if she was gonna make it, and she did. And the training helped them get through that process successfully and confidently, and she has been sober for six months now. And I talk to her almost every day. And that is not small, you know?

CRISTEN: Yeah.

JERRI: Okay. And then my, um, just my life is just really special because of these people. It's not really like, it's not really me. It's, it's just, um, it's just the reciprocity of, of everyone that's around me.

That's why I like to see women coming and building community in this space because of, those are the kinds of stories that you get to hear over in the old space, in the kind of sort of patriarchal celebrity dog trainer.

The more I famous I get, the more money I make space. Those aren't the stories.

I want to hear, um, you know, another woman that was able to like, actually legit leave her husband that was beating her because she had the strength to attach whatever it was.

To the dog and the children and we worked on how to get her out of there. It it, that's just what she was able to hold onto and I fucking ran with it. Cool. Let's go. You know, like it, this is such a larger topic than people understand with the dog because it's a greater representation of what people are lacking in the meeting of their own basic needs.

Like women, if they're able to talk about the dog, it's like they start to understand that they're not even meeting their own basic needs, which is sad and I don't know why I swung it back around to that

God dang it. They're all gonna make fun of me about.

Like legit and be like, why do you cry all the time? Every single time you always cry. I don't know.

CRISTEN: Well, Jerri, I have just one last question for you that we ask all of our guests, and I, I'm so excited for this answer already. What is the most unladylike thing about you?

JERRI: Oh, I mean where, where to start. Uh, I'm in a, this, this is just gonna be for my followers. I think it's definitely the fact that I got a couple of goats and I didn't wither 'em. So they're intact. Massive Billy goats. And if you know anything about goats, they're real nasty. And I let them just basically grow up in the backyard with like no fence or anything.

And, and. So my backyard is overrun by billy goats. And billy goats stinks so bad, , and it's just really frowned upon to do that. It's kind of like farmer 101, and I live in a farming community, so definitely the most unladylike thing about me is that I'm probably smelling billy goats a lot of the times.

CRISTEN: Ok. What does withering mean? Like neutering?

JERRI: Yeah. Yeah.

CRISTEN: So they have big old goat balls?

JERRI: And they sway. And they swing.

CRISTEN: Amazing. Amazing. Started with dogs, had no idea we'd end with goats, but I love it.

JERRI: I cried.

CRISTEN: Jerri, I cried!

[OUTRO MUSIC]

CRISTEN: Thank you to listener and patron Claire for making this episode possible. You got me obsessed with dogs in a way I did not even know existed. And now I'm going to corner every person I see and talk to them about the social construct of canines.

If you are interested in dog training, wanna go deeper on this, she recommended Smart Bitch Dog Training, The Paws and Reward podcast — that's paws, of course, P A W S — and also Disorderly Dogs podcast.

And thank you so very much to Jerry Sherff, aka Sailor Jerry, aka @sailorjerrithedogtrainer on Instagram and TulsaPackAthletics.com. B

elieve it or not, friends, there is still a pile of Unladylike research dog biscuits that I could not fit into this episode. Like, why was doggy people a Victorian insult? And who are the presumably lesbian poodle fanciers who mainstreamed obedience training? There will be a dog bonus welcome back over in the Unladies Room. I'm thinking of rebranding the Unladylike Patreon to be the Unladies Room. Come on over to the Unladies Room. It is a gender-inclusive space. All you have to do is pay $5 a month. You get a new bonus episode every single week. You get some full-length guest interviews, and if you're Claire, you get to use that Patreon DM to send your gal some episode requests, and I think this is proof that I read 'em!

Unladylike is a Starburns Audio production executive produced, written and hosted by me, don't call me the pack leader though, Cristen Conger. Tara Brockwell is our senior producer. Katherine Calligori is our associate producer. Mixing and engineering is by Ali Nikou. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin.

And til next week —

CRISTEN: Well, I feel like I would be remiss to not introduce, a friend of the pod who I am letting sit in my lap for this interview since it is a special interview, partly about him.

This is Brewster.

CLAIRE: Oh, Brewster the intern, right?

CRISTEN: This is intern Brewster. His hair is very long.

CLAIRE: Hi, buddy!

CRISTEN: He's very confused. Ok, you can go back to sleep.