161. Kim Brophey, CDBC 

Welcome back to Unleashed at Work and Home. My guest today is Kim Brophey, who is the owner of Family Dog Mediation and the developer of the LEGS model. Hi, Kim, so glad you’re here.

[1:07]

Kim Brophey: Hi, Colleen. It’s really good to see you.

Colleen Pelar: I just said the LEGS model—is this something everyone knows what it means? Just in case someone doesn’t, what’s the LEGS model?

Kim Brophey: So in a nutshell, every animal has a phenotype. What is a phenotype? A combination of nature and nurture. LEGS just gives us a way to account for the gazillion things that go into each individual phenotype. For those of us who work with dogs, we end up looking at the products of their behavior, which includes their genetics—that’s the G part of LEGS—and that gets qualified by the other factors of every individual’s nurture: their learning, their environment, their individual personality, circumstances, health, age, sex, disease, nutrition, injury, disability, all that good stuff. We all know that there’s a million things that can influence a dog’s behavior. LEGS gives us a way to make sure we don’t lose track of those things. In some funny ways, we’ve kind of treated dogs like they’re the exception to natural law. We forget that they have a natural history as a species, that they have behavioral ecology, that genetics are part of the puzzle for them like they are for other species. It’s important that we have some kind of practical model to talk about all that overwhelming stuff. So that’s what LEGS is—Learning, Environment, Genetics, and Self.

[2:25]

Colleen Pelar: Perfect. Thank you. I love a good acronym, especially one that forms a word. I am a person who has always felt that I’ve had disorganized thinking—thoughts are related and connected and all sorts of stuff, but they’re not sorted. To have a model that gives me buckets of information—here’s what to look at here, and here’s what to look at for this—it’s so helpful to me in so many facets of my life. Thank you for sorting that out, because otherwise I would be looking at learning right next to environment right next to genetics and then coming back to learning, not necessarily developing the relationship between these in a systematic or organized way to come up with the most helpful outcomes.

[3:24]

Kim Brophey: Yeah, it’s funny you say that—my brain kind of naturally does murder boarding. It’s just “and then, and then, and then,” and there’s all these strings connecting to all the other strings. But then I can lose track of them because there’s so many moving parts, and they all kind of connect with each other at some point in time. In some ways, LEGS was kind of initially like a selfish endeavor for me, because—this is before we had Google, which tells you I’m aging myself—I was doing all this research when my son was born. Something about my client load at the time made me start digging more. As my son started going to school, the things people were telling me about his behavior—I was like, well, that’s a perfectly normal thing for a three-year-old boy to be doing, or have trouble sitting still for extended periods of time. I started really seeing the overlap, and so it sent me down this, probably to some degree, unhealthy obsessive research path, where I had stacks of papers and books on my bedside table and was color-coding everything and trying to create some order out of the chaos, digging into all these different disciplines to try to understand what’s happening to dogs and what’s happening to kids. Over time, the color-coding system started getting distilled and then better organized, and I realized this actually overlaps perfectly with the concept of a phenotype. The problem is a phenotype still doesn’t tell us how to proceed—the rocks we need to look under, kind of thing. LEGS became a way I could talk about it with other people, share these things with my colleagues and clients, and make heads or tails of it. If something was happening with a dog and the client was like, “This is a training issue,” I could actually show them that this is an incompatibility between the E and the G—the environment isn’t fitting the genetics—and that’s why the dog is struggling, that’s why you’re struggling, it’s not an L issue at all. And they were like, “Oh.” It made things more practical to apply. So it’s been fun, but also very much a selfish endeavor—the result of an ADHD brain.

[5:53]

Colleen Pelar: Which is where some of the miracles occur. When people find a solution for themselves and then find a way to communicate and share it with others, then we all go, “Wow, I wish I’d thought of that,” because it does serve a need. It serves this ability to make something easier for us—from the sticky glue of a Post-it note to a whole model that allows you to notice what you want to be exploring and how they relate. So that is so cool. And presumably you didn’t grow up imagining you were going to develop a new model for looking at canine behavior. So I do love to ask my guests: when you were ten, what did you think you were going to do when you grew up?

[6:43]

Kim Brophey: It’s a really fun, interesting story. I love to kind of paint this picture, because it’s how I got here. I was a nature nerd. I wouldn’t read the fiction summer reading books—I would read National Geographic and the encyclopedia. I grew up in Atlanta, so there was only so much nature available, but wherever it was, I found it. I was in the creeks, playing with the crawdads and the salamanders and the snakes and whatever else I could find, and was constantly begging my parents to get me out into nature. Frankly, my love affair with dogs probably started as a matter of convenience—they were the species that was really accessible to me to hang out with and study. The dogs were loose in Atlanta at the time, so there was a lot to discover about them. I just fell in love with having these beasts at my feet, if you will. I did not think that would turn into dog training. I didn’t like the dog training experiences that I had when I was a kid. This was when there really wasn’t a lot of pet dog trainers—it was more like you took your dog to a dog training class because it was fun or a hobby. People didn’t need it the way that they need it today. So I kind of thought I would work with animals in some capacity. I would look at zookeepers and think that was cool. I also wanted to be a cowgirl—out on the ranches, riding horses through the prairies and sleeping under the stars. And then as I got a little older, I was like, I want to save the world. I’ll join Greenpeace. I’ve just always been a nature nerd at heart. The dog path is just what opened up for me. In many ways, I’m still having the same feelings and thoughts and goals that I did when I was ten. I used to go into a local dime store in Atlanta—they had all of these pets in cages—and I was writing letters to state officials and organizations about the bad welfare of these animals in these cages, and how concerned I was. Looking back, it was always in me to revere nature and have concerns about humans’ interruptions of it. In many ways, everything I’m doing is just an evolution of that same childhood feeling.

[9:30]

Colleen Pelar: That’s so cool. So take me along the path—at the end of high school, what?

[9:37]

Kim Brophey: So I went to Warren Wilson College here in western North Carolina. I didn’t go into it thinking I’d end up majoring in applied ethology, but they have an Integrative Studies program there, so if someone wanted to create a kind of specialized focus for their degree that wasn’t available specifically, they could do that. At the time, there was no applied ethology or relationship-between-human-and-animal-behavior kind of program. So I essentially did that with applied ethology. I organized what courses I would take, what independent studies I would do, and then you have to have a whole senior thesis. It was really cool because it gave me an opportunity to study the relationship between humans and animals—particularly humans and dogs—historically, evolutionarily, through natural selection, artificial selection, the many capacities of our relationship. As a Lassie fan growing up, I was like, gosh, dogs can tell you Timmy’s in the well. I believed it. So I went out and got a herding dog as soon as I went to college. They are that smart—you can talk to them. I didn’t know that I would end up turning it into something specific with dogs. But the more I got into my college education at Warren Wilson and realized what that program offered, I got really excited and very ambitious about it. At first I thought I would go into service and therapy dog training, because that was kind of where the action was in 1998, 1999. That’s where the new stuff was coming out with the Delta Society and Pet Partners, and they were kind of leading the conversation on actual learning science. So those were the first conferences I went to—I think I went to my first APDT conference in 1999, maybe 2000. Then the field of behavior consulting opened up, and I went down that road. The rest, I guess, is history.

[11:59]

Colleen Pelar: The rest is history. I think my first APDT conference was also 1999.

Kim Brophey: Really? Even at the time, I couldn’t tell you what city we were in. People would be like, “Didn’t we see each other wherever?” And I’m like, I saw an airport and a hotel. That’s all I remember. I was in an airport and a hotel, and then I spent days in hallways talking to people about dogs.

[12:40]

Kim Brophey: All these are really fun things you could go do in these cities, and I’m like, who does them? Like, I never leave the hotel. I feel like I don’t see the light of day for four days during conferences.

[12:51]

Colleen Pelar: At the time I couldn’t afford anything extra. It was a big enough stretch to even get to a conference and pay for the airplane and the hotel and the conference. But I was so happy to be there because it was so difficult to find quality education. We traveled for weekend workshops, we traveled for conferences, because there were no online courses—who knew the world was going to open up in such powerful ways? And education is so much more accessible now, and higher and higher quality over time. It’s so interesting to think about things that were shocking and new to me back then that are just basic accepted information now and are being built upon. It’s so exciting.

So the behavior consulting piece—you graduated with this degree. Did you just start a dog training business, or did you have some other vision in mind right after college?

[14:15]

Kim Brophey: When I first got out of college, my vision—because the field of behavior consulting was kind of just emerging—I really liked the idea of doing the service and therapy stuff, because that’s kind of where I started. As part of my college education, I had designed some programs for at-risk youth. One of my first jobs out of college was implementing a program in a daycare and then in a local foster organization for teenagers—they allowed me to introduce an animal therapy program in their facilities. Then, about a year or year and a half into that, I saw an article in a paper that was hiring for the executive director of a new no-kill animal sanctuary opening in western North Carolina. Very well-funded, with a bunch of big-hearted, fabulous folks who didn’t know anything about behavior, welfare, all of that kind of stuff, nor did they have a big budget. I was like, I actually have a degree in a field where they don’t really even exist. I will take pennies on the dollar if you let me have the opportunity to become the executive director of this organization. Which meant I got dropped into the deep end of the pool—started doing everything from public speaking for the organization to writing all of the materials, designing all the programs, hiring, evaluating dogs from the kill shelter, bringing them to our facility, managing play groups and interactions, placing them in homes. It was a wonderful experience. But then reality hits when you’re getting paid $17,000 a year. So I ended up actually starting my own behavior consulting company while I was still at that job, and then transitioned into that full time.

[16:27]

Colleen Pelar: When approximately was that—that you transitioned into behavior consulting full time?

[16:32]

Kim Brophey: Probably about 2001. I do that too, where I say “21” like, oh—I have dyscalculia. I’m so bad with numbers. And then at the time there was some really interesting stuff going on regionally. We had a number of really problematic no-kill shelters in the area at the time that were actually hoarding cases—like, 500 dogs in a local warehouse. We kept about 12 dogs at our facility at a time, so we focused on high turnover, really quality programming. The state veterinarian was evaluating all these different facilities, and they ended up asking me to come as a consultant—because behavior consultants weren’t even really a thing—to consult with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture veterinary division. I got to help rewrite the Animal Welfare Act for the state, about long-term confinement and what were the needs of animals in captivity when they were kenneled. That was my first contact point with Ray Coppinger, who I would become friends with years later. So that was just a fun experience early on in my career.

[18:29]

Colleen Pelar: What a cool experience. I had no idea about that in your history. What powerful ripples have come from that—to be somebody who was able to take part in writing the Animal Welfare Act for your state. That makes a difference in animals’ lives every single day.

[18:54]

Kim Brophey: I think it’s been revised probably numerous times since, and enforcement is always an issue, and interpretations are always an issue. We still have a lot of trouble here in the state when it comes to those things. But it’s nice—even just when you get people thinking about stuff, like, oh, you can’t just stick a dog in a kennel for six months and call it good.

[19:13]

Colleen Pelar: Yeah. And we do need to be open to revising things and having updates. But we need both—we need to be able to plant our feet somewhere and say, this is what we’ve agreed, and then we’ll revisit. But to have some common ground. So having taken part in the writing of that is amazing. Cool. I like to ask all of my guests to share some words that have meaning for them. The words you shared are “be kind.” Tell me a little bit about why you chose those words.

[20:00]

Kim Brophey: Humans always have a bias toward their own lens and for human psychology. We literally experience the threat of our belief systems like a threat of death. Humans have always had trouble interacting with others they disagree with, who they don’t understand, those that challenge that belief system and make them feel uncomfortable or threatened. But the scope of that type of othering that’s been enabled in modern times—between humans, through the internet and social media—has just exemplified and exponentially increased the harm that we’re able to do to others that we’re not necessarily even aware of, by things we say and do and the words that we choose. One of my favorite books is The Four Agreements. He talks about having the integrity of your word—that that starts in your thinking, in how you think about yourself and others, and then it goes out into the world in the things we choose to say to other people and do. The idea being that we’re casting spells, if you will—not literally, of course—but that there are ripples. We could say something to someone today that haunts them for years. I have been on the receiving end of things, and I’m sure I have unwittingly been on the giving end of those things as well.

I think people might say, well, it’s just silly to say something like “be kind,” but I think it’s so important that we give people the benefit of the doubt in the same way that—especially as dog people—we give dogs the benefit of the doubt. We love dogs, and we’re like, “Oh, what’s going on for you, buddy? What’s happening with your LEGS? What happened with your learning, what’s going on in your environment, what’s going on with your genetics or your internal conditions? Maybe you’re not feeling well, maybe you’re on a new medication, maybe you’re hungry.” And we just don’t tend to reflexively give people that benefit of the doubt with the spirit of generosity. I personally have found that transformative in my life, personally and professionally. I feel like when we choose to just be kind, it can be transcending on so many levels to what is then enabled after that.

[22:44]

Colleen Pelar: Yeah. I think it’s a profound and important concept that is also so basic that it can feel like we don’t need to say it. But we do need to say it, because there are a lot of systems in place that are encouraging less-than-kind behavior. As humans, we have some tendencies with the negativity bias—to notice what’s wrong before we notice what’s right. So we can be less than kind unintentionally, and we can be less than kind intentionally, and both are risky. So “be kind” is a nice guidepost. Are those words present in your life in your thinking, or is it just a stance?

[24:22]

Kim Brophey: I have a more… not G-rated version. “Don’t be a [boop].” That is actually the one that goes through my head. So when I’m editing it for public consumption, I tend to replace it with “be kind.” But we actually have a sign in our house that we got years ago when the kids were in middle school—and Lord knows, it’s hard for middle schoolers to be kind. We bought it because it says, “Don’t be a boop.” And we put it in our house, and our whole family lives by it. I raise my kids on The Four Agreements. That is one of those things we live by as a family. The rule is: you can have all kinds of feelings and opinions and disagreements and needs, but you have a choice about how you communicate those things, how you conduct yourself, and how you are treating the person as the receiver of that information.

I just think the world needs it more than ever. We are so into polarized positions that just become sharper, with a bigger gap between them, through online and social media. I think it’s really infected the dog world. You think about the mental health crisis that modern people are experiencing. And then fields like ours that are so prone to burnout, where we have so much compassion fatigue. And we’re running our own small businesses, so we’re wearing 10,000 hats and burning the candle on both ends and working through weekends just to make sure we can keep doing what we love. And then it just takes one person not thinking about the power of their behavior and their words.

[25:59]

Colleen Pelar: —for $17,000 a year.

[26:03]

Kim Brophey: Exactly. It takes one person just not thinking about the power of their behavior and their words. About four years ago, in the pet dog industry, I got bullied. I became the target—the target rotates in the pet dog world at any given time, or there are multiple targets. A group of people decided they didn’t like what Kim Brophey had to say, and that she was a fraud. So they decided I was lying about my education. They called up my college and tried to find out if I actually went there. They made an ethics report to one of my certifying organizations. My name when I was in college, before I got married, was different. So they had a hard time finding Kim Brophey, because Kim Brophey didn’t go there—Kim Bellows went there. The treatment I got—they all ganged up with each other and were saying these horrible things, and then people were sending me screenshots and calling me an idiot. I didn’t even know these people.

[27:15]

Colleen Pelar: I was shocked—

[27:19]

Kim Brophey: —the effect that it had on me, psychologically and emotionally. It was such a jarring moment to realize the invisible—to us, as the sender—effects on the receivers of that stuff out there. You may not even call them by name. You may call them by group, you may call them by belief system, you may call them by organization or preference for one thing or another. And yet the damage can be the same. We’re all ultimately animals. We forget that we are animals. We like this human exceptionalism that we’ve adopted. But the reality is, we’re dogs in different fur. We’re just animals. Dogs are animals, and we all deserve that same kind of reverence that little-kid me had for all those other critters out there that were just kind of innocently plugging along, doing their best.

[28:16]

Colleen Pelar: I’m participating in a group that’s developing support groups for animal welfare workers—it’s a ten-week program. Week two, which I just ran a session on, was “You are an animal too.” That’s the theme. Noticing some of the just physiological experiences that we have—our sympathetic systems, all of these things that we like to just kind of be in our brains about. The gift for our community is that we have so much education and learning about supporting animals that when we are able to turn the focus toward ourselves, there actually are skills already developed over years of experience that can be so effective. But it’s amazing how hard it can be to encourage people to use those skills on themselves, or on their fellow species members at times—to recognize that we really are all just doing our best. We’re all trying. But for various reasons, some of our behavior, at least sometimes, leaves something to be desired. And we’re all going to fall down from time to time, too.

[29:52]

Kim Brophey: Yeah. And I think, for me, realizing the context of where we are as a species and a planet right now—we don’t talk about this on a wide scale in society, because frankly there are too many people profiting on not talking about it. But being animals, since our departure from being hunter-gatherers, and since the adoption of agriculture, and then moving into the Anthropocene and the industrial revolution, and then the technology revolution starting in the late 80s and 90s—we are experiencing what modern eco-psychologists are describing as evolutionary mismatch. And there’s a tremendous amount of really cool research out there on that, but it explains so much of what we’re experiencing. We’re like, why do I feel uniquely broken? Why do I feel so incredibly lonely? Why can’t I find community or purpose that feels valuable and essential? Why am I having such unmanageable anxiety? And frankly, through that lens of “you’re an animal, just like any other species,” you have an ecology that’s specific to your species. We departed from that ecology, and we’ve been successful in some ways while our welfare has been significantly compromised in others—same as dogs, right? They have better health, better nutrition, shelter. But they’ve lost so much agency and purpose and connection and fulfillment and meaning. We’re kind of going through the same thing they are as a species. And there’s such an opportunity for compassion of this shared boat we’re all in, and opportunities to find our feet together, cracking open the little parts of ourselves and our lives and our experiences that reconnect us back with that ecology and make us feel whole again. And that can sound Pollyanna, but it’s hard-as-anything science.

I get so much self-care out of remembering to look at things through that lens and be like, yeah, Kim, spending eight hours a day behind a computer is not natural, and it’s not a shock that you would be kind of irritable by the end of it some days, and that you just get exasperated and overstimulated and you don’t have bandwidth left. Whereas we’re all thinking we’re supposed to be able to do all the things all the time, say all the right things, do all the right things, show up for all of it. Remember to pay our taxes and our bills, download this app, update this credit card—it’s just a never-ending list of things that our brains were not biologically designed to handle. So if any one of us is feeling at the end of that rope, it’s good to be like, yeah, well, join the club. We all are. Hence—be kind.

[32:48]

Colleen Pelar: Be kind, yes. Thank you. So if I had a magic wand and I could give it to you, and you would grant us a wish or give us a blessing for pet professionals out there, what would you use it for?

[33:18]

Kim Brophey: More opportunities to be. And what I mean by that is it is so hard for a person to go outside in nature, surrounding yourself with all of the sensory signals that your bodies and brains were designed to receive as indications that all is well and right in the world. It’s so hard to find those places, because there’s people everywhere, and there’s cars everywhere, and even when we go hiking in the woods or camping, there’s people and it’s so hard to find a place where we feel safe enough to just be—to kind of be animals—and feel like the door, whether real or just figurative, kind of closes behind us and we’re alone, maybe just with another dog or another person that we can share silence with. But we stop talking, we stop analyzing, we don’t use our phones. We listen to the birds. We feel the earth under us. We experience the wind and all of the smells. Because every animal out there, as part of their daily life, has periods of time where they are just being. There’s such a rejuvenating, regenerating benefit to all of that, and we don’t allow ourselves to do it. Even when we’re out in nature, we’re often still talking, or checking our phone, or wondering what that guy over there is doing.

This is actually something we’re trying to figure out how to develop within the LEGS community right now—the idea of a space that you could go into that we could then scale and have in every city. It would be like a sniff spot, but much more deliberate. Not someone’s backyard, because when I run a sniff spot and it’s in someone’s backyard, I still feel a little squirrely—I feel like I’m in someone’s property. Something that feels like I’m going in, it’s my hour, the door locks behind me, I know I’m safe. I’m with a dog if I want to be, or not. With someone else if I want to be, or not. But I’m just here to be, to sit in this chair or on the ground and just be present.

It’s so beneficial. I’ll have weeks go by where I forget to do it. It’s part of my routine here where I live because I have a forest on my property, and usually I will go do it at least once a day for an hour at the end of the day. But when I get really busy—like for the last couple weeks, my mom moved in with us—I haven’t, and I could feel the accumulating effects. Yesterday, at the end of the day, after three weeks without a day off, and without giving myself the opportunity to do that, my mom was supposed to come over for dinner, and I said, “Mom, I am there. I’m freaking out. I need to just go sit in the woods for an hour.” And that’s what I did. And as soon as I did, I could feel my nervous system de-escalating. It’s so palpable. But we think, oh, that’s crunchy hippie granola stuff. No, it’s not. It’s basic biology. We’re animals.

[36:25]

Colleen Pelar: Yeah, and it is a shame that when we’re feeling stressed, the first things we give up are the things that help us most. Time by yourself in the forest really mattered. Dinner with your mom is really valuable, too. When we’re really busy, we’re like, oh, sorry, too busy for dinner.

The podcast is audio only, but one of the things I watch for in coaching calls is people’s body language and physiology. I kind of wish it wasn’t audio only, because when you started talking about the experience of being out in nature, you just lit up. There was such a glow in you. It is you, even though you were only in your head—you had stepped out into the experience of that. When you were doing your magic wand wish for us, I could feel it. This idea of: what would it be like if you took time for yourself and went out in nature with just no obligation, no distraction? You’re just safe, you’re with a dog or a friend, but there’s no need to do anything other than be. Allow yourself to envision that for yourself. What does that mean for you? Because the envisioning is lovely, but not enough. I’m hoping that that plants the seed of desire enough to make you do it, just like you had said about when you realized you were full—you were like, no, I’ve gotta go to the forest. It’s time. Ding, the timer has gone off. So thank you for sharing that. We will take the wish that you were granting us and we will run with it.

If people want to learn more about you and your work, Kim, how could they do that?

[38:32]

Kim Brophey: A number of different places. Our website is FamilyDogMediation.com—we’re going to be redoing that website here soon, so it may look different whenever you go there, depending on when you’re listening to this. You can find me on Facebook, and you can find us at Family Dog Mediation on Instagram. There’s also a bunch of stuff on YouTube and podcasts and things like that. So if you’re interested in just, like, who is this person, what’s she talking about, what’s her gig, you can go dip your toe in the water pretty easily just by Googling podcasts, or you can go to our YouTube channel. There’s some interesting stuff there as well. We are also out there in person, connecting with our colleagues at conferences and all of that good stuff too.

[39:28]

Colleen Pelar: Some city with some airport, right?

[39:32]

Kim Brophey: Exactly—where you won’t see the light of day in the forest.

[39:38]

Colleen Pelar: Oh, thank you so much, Kim. I’ll hook all of that up in the show notes so that people can find you in all the places. I really appreciate you talking with me today. It was such a fun conversation.

[39:47]

Kim Brophey: Thank you so much for having me. It was great to see you again.

[39:50]

Colleen Pelar: That’s our conversation for today. If something we talked about resonated, I invite you to sit with it. Notice what feels true and what you want to explore further. You don’t have to have it all figured out to start moving toward what matters. Whatever showed up for you today—clarity, questions, even resistance—trust that it’s pointing you toward something important. For more support, join my weekly notes at ColleenPelar.com. And until next time, remember: you are enough, always, just as you are.