169. Eileen Anderson, MM, MS 

COLLEEN [0:05]

Welcome to Unleashed at Work and Home. I'm Colleen Pelar, and this is where pet professionals come for honest conversations about what it really takes to show up for yourself while serving the animals you love. If you've ever felt caught between compassion and exhaustion, you're in the right place. Here we explore what it means to reconnect with your inner wisdom and rediscover the joy that brought you to this work. Make sure to join my email community at ColleenPelar.com for gentle, practical insights designed specifically for pet professionals. Now let's dive in.

Welcome back to Unleashed at Work and Home. My guest today is Eileen Anderson, and you have probably read some of her work in the past. When I said to her, "So, how do we describe you and what you do?" it looked like it was going to be a really interesting answer, and I said, wait, don't tell me — we're gonna hit record. So, welcome, Eileen. Please tell us: what kind of pet professional are you? What do you do?

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EILEEN ANDERSON [1:08]

It's hard to put your finger on me. It's part of my mystique, you know. I have always called myself a passionate amateur in terms of actual training of dogs. I've trained six dogs seriously, and I've helped in some agility courses and things like that, but I do not call myself a professional trainer. I don't take clients, I don't take money for training. I see the differences between me and professional trainers very well, and it has to do with that broad experience of seeing lots and lots of dogs — and I have not had that. But I have trained my own dogs very deeply, and that training has led me into the theory, in which I'm pretty strong. I don't know if there's a name for that or not. One thing I am is I have graduate degrees in music and engineering science with a focus on acoustics, and I am kind of the only person right now that I know of bringing sound information into the dog world. So I shy away from "expert," but I would say that I am the person who can bring that information — but again, that's too many words. There's not a good label for me.

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COLLEEN [2:26]

Yeah, it's hard to put you on a bumper sticker, but the good news is you're a beautiful writer and you communicate things really clearly. So that's nice for those of us who are learning from what you've learned — when you share, it is accessible for the rest of us.

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EILEEN ANDERSON [2:43]

Thank you. And I forgot — dog writer. You could call me a dog writer. That is one label that fits.

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COLLEEN [2:49]

That is one label that fits. Yeah, I love "passionate amateur" — there's a lovely description. I'm so glad I didn't let you tell me this in advance. I'm glad we waited to share it here together. So, what do you think led you to go from just a person with a dog to being this passionate amateur who's using her gifts in so many ways in the dog world?

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EILEEN ANDERSON [3:15]

Thank you for that question. It was a typical beginning, although I didn't take maybe the typical path. I got a dog who was too much for me back then. I would have said she had problems, and they were mostly problems for me, but they were also problems for my other dog. I got a ten-month-old very mixed breed from a small-town shelter about 30 miles from here because I saw a picture of her. I'm not typically that impulsive, and like anybody — even then I was on the edge of the dog community — anybody in that community sees those sad pictures and sad stories all the time. But she was the one. When I saw her picture, I thought, I just have to go get that dog. You could say fate, you could say it was meant to be, and I don't know if any of those things are true, but I just knew I had to go get that dog.

She was 30 pounds, ten months old and underweight, and not my type of dog — I'm a hound and terrier person. My other dog at the time was a twelve-pound rat terrier who was extremely feisty and used to being the boss of the house, and they pretty much hated each other at first sight. I didn't know how to do introductions. I didn't know how to set up good feelings between them. I had just gone and got this dog, put her in a crate — I'd never crate trained a dog before — and tried to go on with my life. That did not succeed. She took lots more care and attention. My previous dogs had mostly been males, very laid-back guys, didn't chew anything, didn't have toys much, and she was the opposite. She chewed everything, and at the time I thought that was so weird, and I have since learned that she was probably the more typical, and they were not. I just didn't know how to cope with that.

But the big problems were that she and my terrier fought. She was 28 pounds and Cricket was 12, and Cricket probably started most of the fights — she just hated anybody else who was around for my attention. So it was quickly too much for me. I named her Summer, and I loved her — she was quiet and deep and very, very sweet, and hated my other dog. So I felt trapped. I felt like I couldn't let her go. She'd end up in a shelter again. She would be hard to place. I was pretty experienced with placing dogs and I didn't think I could. But keeping her was putting limits on my life that I had never had before. I couldn't leave the house in the evenings. I had to be there. Couldn't let her out in the yard by herself — I was one of those people who'd just put my dogs out and go to work. I'm not that now. But that transition felt so limiting to me at the time. It has helped me develop empathy for all the people who get a dog that's a little bit above their skill level or experience, and all of a sudden their life has changed. And so many people do so many kind things to try to keep their dogs.

And I love that about this world, and I try to talk about that, and encourage it, and model it. But it was a long journey for me. I went through the traditional obedience club route — well, you need to train your dog, she needs to be obedient — which does not help with aggression, really. But I did go to the local obedience club, and it was pretty traditional, it was punitive, although I will say there were lovely people there. I think those people love their dogs too. I will not denigrate them for making other choices — they were doing what they knew to do.

So I went through that, and that didn't help, although I kind of got hooked on obedience and agility there. I found the agility crowd easier and more fun, because there's less force training in agility — it can be done for sure, but there's less. And just gradually put things together. I finally found a great trainer here in Little Rock who was just head and shoulders over anybody else I had encountered, and she helped me learn about the science behind dog training, and I got badly hooked — so badly that I left my doctoral program in engineering, because behavior science was so much more fun.

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COLLEEN [8:32]

Wow. I mean, that's hooked — to leave a doctoral program that you were engaged in.

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EILEEN ANDERSON [8:40]

Yeah, I left out the part where I was clinically depressed. I had this wonderful, lovely, problematic dog, and the trapped feeling I got from taking care of her in this new way. I got seriously clinically depressed — it was the second time in my life — and I just had feelings of doom all the time, and it was triggered because of a new dog. So again, I feel for people who have had to make that transition between all the dogs I had before were easy and perfect, and now I have one who's not — but gosh, I still love her.

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COLLEEN [9:18]

Yeah, and it's easy to go, the common denominator is me, so I must be screwing it up, I must be wrong or bad or not enough, or any of those things. And that's hard. Or to turn it onto the dog. When it's actually just a really much more complex situation — what you needed to support her, what she needed, all of those pieces. That's amazing. That's extraordinary.

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EILEEN ANDERSON [9:49]

Thank you. A lot of people have that story, and it takes them into becoming trainers.

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COLLEEN [9:54]

Oh, yeah. Well, I definitely am a trainer because I had the dog that got kicked out of class. Yes.

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EILEEN ANDERSON [9:59]

Yeah, and my path — I knew I saw that path as I was going along it. I saw it ahead, and it's like, this is what usually happens. But I knew trainers by that time. I knew the heartache of taking cases in homes. I knew the beauty of it, and I knew the hardship of it. And I felt that I was not temperamentally suited to that, and so I took the route of writing about it instead of training professionally.

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COLLEEN [10:33]

Yeah, which has had some amazing ripples, because you've done quite a bit of writing — both books and blogging. Do you have a preference between books and blogging?

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EILEEN ANDERSON [10:46]

Oh, don't tell anybody, but it's blogging. My blog is my home, it's my little castle. I can do whatever I want there, and I can do short-form essays, which is what I love to do. I love writing books — I loved collaborating with my friend and colleague Marge Rogers on the puppy socialization book. That was a gas. It was fun. But I like, you know, 2,000 words is like what I like to write with pictures. And it's different when you start writing books — you don't use photos in the same way. I mean, you can have photos in your book, and we had dozens of photos in the puppy book, but they were all demos — we need to show you what this body language looks like, or we need to show you how to do this.

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COLLEEN [11:34]

Yeah, well, we'll link up to your books and your blog and things, so anyone who isn't familiar with those can find them. But I do like your blog, and I do like the pictures. I appreciate that you give a little information and then a picture, so I know where I am, and then a little more information and a picture. When you were ten, what did you think you were going to be when you grew up?

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EILEEN ANDERSON [12:02]

Probably a housewife, okay. I got a lot of mixed messages. I'm a boomer, I'm 67, and so back then it was atypical for little girls to be encouraged on a career path. But my parents both encouraged me to do that. I could do anything I wanted. My mother and my father especially encouraged me about science things for a while — he was talking about I should get into radiologic pharmacy, which was something new. But I come from a musical family, and the obvious thing to do was to go to music school. So by about 14 or 16, it was like, I want to change the world through music, I'm good at this, I love it, I'm gonna go to music school — which is what I did.

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COLLEEN [12:58]

And so then what did you do to earn money?

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EILEEN ANDERSON [13:02]

I did gigs as a classical musician. I played the harpsichord, and I was chosen for an early Baroque orchestra in the San Francisco Bay Area — Philharmonia [ensemble name uncertain — please verify] — and I made money doing that. I played concerts with my friends. We called that getting sandwich money, because you'd get $70 to split between five people. I tuned harpsichords. I was a harpsichord tuner at San Francisco Conservatory. Unlike pianos, they need to be tuned all the time — they don't have all that steel framing inside them, and they're unstable. When it gets more humid they expand, when it gets drier they contract. So I tuned about seven harpsichords every week for the conservatory, on Monday mornings.

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COLLEEN [13:56]

Wow, that's so interesting. And I realized, as I was saying "make money," I wasn't denigrating music at all — I am family members with musicians. It was more just like, from the ten-year-old perspective, and then the 14-to-16-year-old started thinking about music and career. So all of that music, and yet the passion for education was still coming, because you've got a couple of master's degrees. You're a practicing musician, playing, performing, tuning — what made you decide you needed more education in a specific area? And not only more, but two master's degrees?

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EILEEN ANDERSON [14:43]

I was always a person who wanted to know lots of different things. Even when I was in my young twenties and finished music school, I went off to UC Berkeley and was taking Prelude to the Calculus, and Italian at San Francisco State. Just always trying to go back to school. Later, I did stop playing music. I wasn't exactly a prodigy, but I was very talented, and I had followed that path very passively. I never really thought about making a living — I just figured somehow it would take care of itself, and I'm fortunate that I had parental support, and it did kind of take care of itself.

I stopped playing when I was about 25. I just went through a thing where I thought, I'm doing this because I felt like that's why my parents loved me — ah, that's kind of a shortcut, and that was not the only reason they loved me. But in behavioral terms, now I can say that's what I got reinforced for, over and over. It's a potent reinforcer, and musicians are adulated. If you can play something in this world, it is a high-level career. If you say that you're a musician, people go, "Oh, wow." And I felt like I had gone that way because of that reinforcement — I didn't call it that at the time — rather than a passion for it. And I decided to stop and see what happened.

Later on, I was working at a university, and we got free tuition — really good place for me. That's when I started taking undergraduate engineering courses, and I'm the only person I know of who got into the graduate program in engineering with a master's in music and no undergraduate science degree.

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COLLEEN [16:55]

Yeah, I imagine that would be pretty rare. So you mentioned earlier that you've got a focus on sound, and it's been fascinating to me. I stopped officially training around 2018, and all of the scent stuff was really burgeoning — so much more information was coming out, and continues to come out. And more recently, with my most recent dog especially, I've been hearing more about sound things that I never heard before, things I never learned. So give us just a little quick taste of why we should be paying more attention to sound in the world of our dogs, and maybe a first step for people who aren't aware that this area is underserved.

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EILEEN ANDERSON [17:47]

Yes. The sad reason for paying more attention to sound is that there are so many products out there that promise amazing things that are not acoustically possible — crates and headphones to protect dogs' ears. That kind of barrier can't protect a dog against low-frequency sounds, low-frequency as in thunder and fireworks. So if someone says in their marketing materials, "Get our crate and your dog will enjoy silence inside" — that is against physics. It doesn't work.

It's interesting that the sound stuff I share is all pretty basic undergraduate physics, but it's just not well known. Sound is not well understood. We have intuitions about it that are kind of wrong. We feel like — I'm looking at a closet here — but if I could line my closet with enough blankets and maybe some foam, it would make a nice place where my dog couldn't hear thunder. They would still hear thunder.

There would be an acoustical effect from that — it would dampen echoes and higher frequencies, so it could have kind of a cozy feeling, so the dog might like it. But it's not because they're not hearing the thunder. And there are practically no products — there are no products on the market that can protect a dog from hearing thunder and fireworks, because those sound waves are huge. They go through everything. That's kind of a downer.

Most of what I write is, I'm sorry, but that doesn't work. And if you think it's working, great, keep doing it — it may be working for some other reason. For dogs who have a mild phobia or sensitivity to thunder, if it's only for the really loud crashes, then maybe headphones could help a little bit, because it would take the edge off and might make them sound like they're farther away. But if you have a dog like mine who is clinically phobic of fireworks and thunder, they learn right away that those far-away rumbles predict bigger ones — and so a far-away rumble is scary as well.

So there's nuance to it. I think there are some dogs out there who could benefit. I just put out a blog two days ago about headphones. I think there are some dogs who could benefit from it, but they're probably few and far between. And the fact that you have to condition the gear for the dog to be happy in it — that's a lot of effort to put on on a gamble.

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COLLEEN [20:42]

That's very interesting. It makes sense. It's just one of those things — our intuition, first off, their senses and ours are so different. It's always interesting when we're stepping into what a dog sees, what a dog smells, what a dog hears. We don't know. I mean, science helps us, but truly the experience of, oh, this I think would be helpful — maybe not — because we're doing it based on our own senses and our own experience of the world.

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EILEEN ANDERSON [21:18]

That's really true with the music-for-dogs industry. It is music for humans. They're making music that sounds relaxing to humans. There are a couple of guys — one's an ethologist and one is a musician — who are putting out music for other animals. They put out music for cotton-top tamarins and for domestic cats. They wrote music that was species-specific. The cotton-top tamarin music, we can hardly hear it because it's all these high-frequency beeps and whistles. And the cat music is very charming to hear, because they have things that sound like purring in it and little descending motifs that sound a little bit like a meow. But their theory is that music for other animals should be in the frequency range of their communication and their hearing, and music for humans is not that for cats or dogs or cotton-top tamarins.

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COLLEEN [22:20]

That's so interesting. I mean, yes, obvious when you say it should be in the frequency range — of course. But from the perspective of what we're hearing when it's sold to us, and what we're assuming they're hearing — there are things they're hearing that we're not. So what is your recommendation for a dog with, say, separation anxiety, where they're trying to use a noise as an additional calming, soothing kind of thing, given that most of what's out there isn't necessarily going to work for that specifically? Is it just use anything and condition them to it, or are there specific things to look toward?

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EILEEN ANDERSON [23:06]

There's a review study of music for dogs, and they found that light classical music, and to a lesser extent reggae, had a small positive effect on relaxing dogs — and that means something like they lay down a little bit more. Usually very small differences. That is the best we have. Also, they tested specially created music for dogs, and it came in last every time. Apparently regular classical music that humans enjoy is better than that.

But I'll point out that all of those studies took place in shelters and vet clinics, where the animals are in a reinforcement-deficient environment. No matter how wonderful a shelter is, the goal is to get a dog into a home where there are all sorts of opportunities for good things. And what I notice is that music pretty much goes under the radar if there are lots of other things to do.

So the short answer is that I use music for masking — I use it to prevent the dog from hearing scary things. A dog with separation anxiety who also has a comorbidity with sound sensitivity, which is pretty common — I guess I would be playing whatever they could tolerate in terms of brown noise. Or I famously have recommended taiko drumming for dogs who are afraid of thunder, only if they're okay with that. Something that competes with the scary sound makes our brains process it differently. It doesn't drown the sound out — masking happens in our brains and in dogs' brains. It's about what is salient, and it makes the scary sounds less salient. So I use music or audiobooks, or brown or white noise.

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COLLEEN [25:09]

Audiobooks was a recommendation that someone made to me, and I'm pretty certain the name attached to it was "Eileen Anderson says" — and that's good enough for me. If Eileen Anderson says, then I'll try the audiobooks.

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EILEEN ANDERSON [25:26]

There's one study in which audiobooks came in ahead of classical music and specially arranged music for dogs. And I use it. There's kind of an art to using masking. I used to use it when I had electricians in my home, and I had a feral dog and a reactive dog — neither of them were very comfortable hearing voices in the next room. But a male voice on an audiobook could really mask that. And dogs know the difference between a voice coming out of a speaker and a voice that's really in the next room — but it didn't matter, because it was in the same frequency range, and it kind of just masked the speech that was happening in the next room while the electricians were deciding what to do.

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COLLEEN [26:16]

Yeah, that's so interesting. My brain is coming up with a whole variety of questions here. How do you know what to write about on your blog? Are you just pursuing your interest, or is it what people ask you?

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EILEEN ANDERSON [26:31]

It used to be mostly somebody's wrong on the internet, and I have to straighten it out — and it's still that, certainly. In fact, when I started my blog in 2012, my friend and colleague Marge Rogers was the one who said, "You ought to have a blog," and I said, "All I do is react — I just get mad at stuff." And she said, "That's fine, just start writing it." And she was right. In my early pieces, lots of them are myth-busting, and that's kind of how I became somewhat of a darling to the dog training community — because I wrote articles that they could show people and say, "No, we don't throw a cookie at our dog when they run out in traffic," like the balance trainers like to say nowadays.

It's often something that my dogs have done that I just find super interesting. I'll write about what's going on with my dogs. I've written about Lewis's sound sensitivity, which is an ongoing issue that we're still working on. He's a harder case than my dog Zany, who at the time spent four months in complete panic, but meds got her out and she got almost back to normal. We're not finding normal with him yet, but he's much, much better than he was. So I write about that, and I start seeing it's a different version of someone being wrong on the internet — it's about sound now. Buy our special crate and your dog will not hear the fireworks at all, or get our special headgear. I've been thinking about — I haven't done this yet — making a sound product bingo card, because they almost all say the same thing. They'll say "30 decibel reduction," which sounds wonderful until you find out that they're excluding low frequencies from their calculation, because their products don't work against those very well. There's a whole bingo card full of things that the marketers say. I don't want people to waste their money and their time on something that won't help. I want them to find good-quality training and a veterinarian and meds, if appropriate — and usually they are with sound sensitivity. It's very hard to get through it without.

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COLLEEN [29:00]

Yeah, it is very interesting. I've been fortunate that my more recent dogs haven't had too much thunderstorm phobia, but I have lived with dogs in the past with it, and it's just heartbreaking. There was a time in my life where, if I could have afforded it, I would have bought a "safe crate" — that predated the crates, I'm sure, because it's a while back for that particular dog. But she was just panicked, and we didn't have great options for her. And so I was just distressed, and she was panicked — and fireworks have been ruined for me too. Like, I enjoy fireworks. I did it too young. I was like, oh, we'll go to the fireworks, and now I'm like, well, I'm going to be home just making sure my animals are okay. And it makes me crazy when I understand that they add the sound to the fireworks — like, they don't need to be so loud and so whistly and so banging. They add that. And it's really interesting. Some places have done silent fireworks for PTSD reasons, and I thought, well, maybe if we could find a reason on a human level to say, let's at least add an orchestra, have music — we'll still see what we see, but we don't need to have the bang bang bang, and particularly for the little ones sold at the little corner stalls that are going off in my front yard ten days in advance and ten days after the holiday. Somebody's wrong on the internet — there's my soapbox.

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EILEEN ANDERSON [30:09]

Is it Italy that still has fireworks, but they're silent? I didn't know that was possible either. Well, orchestral accompaniment to a fireworks show is a great idea. They could play heroic music, and yeah, it could be great. That's a lovely idea.

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COLLEEN [31:11]

Yeah, when I'm in charge of the world, which is gonna be soon, I'm certain — I'm gonna add that. Will be that.

Yeah, so I ask all of my guests to share some words that had meaning to them, and the words you shared are: your dog is not giving you a hard time, your dog is having a hard time. Can you tell me a little bit about those words and what they mean to you, and why they're important?

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EILEEN ANDERSON [31:36]

They're important because when I came into the dog world, I saw it the other way. I saw, you know, this dog is giving me a hard time — see, I can't even say it anymore. She's acting like a surly teenager. She's just doing this stuff to bug me. She's making my life difficult, and I was the center of it. That's how I grew up. And it took a while for me — and I loved my animals. That's the thing: you can have that attitude and still adore your animals and take very good care of them.

It's hard to describe the change that comes when you start to see, oh, this creature is afraid. She's afraid for her life. No wonder she's acting like she is. Or this dog knew how to jump fences when she got to me, and that's where she got reinforcement — getting out of where she was. She's not trying to make my life hard, although it did make my life very hard. It's up to me. I'm the one with the opposable thumbs and the big brain to figure out how to get her needs met, so that she doesn't feel like she has to leave. But it's a transition that was central to my life.

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COLLEEN [33:05]

It's a really beautiful turn of phrase, because I think most people, when they hear it, can see it — we've all had the experience of feeling that someone is giving us a hard time, human or animal. And then to go, let's look at that, because if they were really having a good time, they probably wouldn't be doing that, because people, when they're happy, healthy, and get their needs met, are actually kind and supportive and compassionate. So when we're like, oh, that person's such a jerk — probably things aren't going well for them, and they're not getting all of their needs met either. They're having a hard time, and this is the way they're handling it.

And it is interesting how, with our story-making minds, people who absolutely adore animals or people make up stories that are so oppositional — giving me a hard time, surly teenager. My husband even did that recently about our grandkids. My son is doing some long National Guard training, so he's been gone for quite some time, and we've had the grandkids for a chunk of time every week while their mom, who's a nurse, is working. And one day was just a tough day, and he was kind of seeing my four-year-old granddaughter as being willfully defiant. And I'm like, do you know how much change she's been going through? Her dad is gone, her mom is so busy and so tired. She's at different houses with different rules. She's going to a new daycare. Like, let's just stop and look and go, amazing — this kid's doing incredible. She's having a really hard time and she's doing so good. As opposed to, she's doing something to him by not putting her shoes on. But it was a story-making machine in our brain that is just like, why won't you just — why won't you potty in the rain?

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EILEEN ANDERSON [35:16]

And there's social pressure about it too. I see it. I'm lucky with my dogs right now that I don't have one who's going to react very loudly on the street, but I see lots of other people walking their dogs — two or three people with food, yay. And how embarrassed they are when their dog starts reacting and lunging. "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." And it's like, gosh, I get it. We'll just go over here, we'll give you some distance, do what you need to do, you're doing great. No judgment here, definitely. But I do say something. I'll say something, because I love the change I'm seeing — more and more people thinking about what the dog is going through.

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COLLEEN [35:52]

Yeah, and what a gift that is for those people, to have someone just supporting them from a distance — yes, we will cross the street, yes, we will give you some distance — without being like, make your dog shut up. So when you're really intimately involved in the whole dog world, you know lots and lots of humans who are doing this work. If I had a magic wand and you could give us all a wish or a blessing, what would you give these humans who are dedicating their lives to helping animals? Take care of yourselves — I see how hard it is. I've gotten to know some shelter and rescue people lately, and I cannot imagine.

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EILEEN ANDERSON [37:01]

I'm careful to say that, because I know it's a sensitive point where people say, "Well, I couldn't do what you do because I care too much" — I would cry. I'm not saying that. I know you all care so much. But I would say: do whatever you can to take care of yourselves, because you are doing the hardest work, the hardest work. And trainers too, who have difficult cases and possible euthanasia cases, and just the regular heartbreaks you get as a trainer or behavior consultant. I see you out there. I'm friends with lots of you, and I am so glad you're doing that work for all of us. Take care of yourselves.

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COLLEEN [37:43]

Easier said than done, isn't it? It's really interesting. I've been running support groups for people in animal welfare, and yesterday the theme was: you are an animal too. So like, all of the things that you do to reduce stress and improve health and safety for animals — maybe you could use that genius brain and turn a little bit of that toward yourself. What would help you feel less stressed? What would help you feel more safe? What would help you feel a greater sense of belonging? What would help you feel more rested? We don't start training animals in a state of acute distress — we start by meeting their needs, their physical needs first. And that whole "take care of yourself" — it's so tricky, because it feels selfish or wrong. Like, some of the meaning-making that goes around that is, I can't take an afternoon off because there are animals who need me. And also: we need you. We need you to take care of yourself. Not just because it makes you help animals better, but because you are important just as you are.

So we will accept your blessing whenever the magic wand is repaired. They're all in the queue — as soon as the magic wand is functioning again, all of the guests' wishes will just be dispersed out to pet professionals all over the place.

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EILEEN ANDERSON [39:01]

Thank you. Please do. That's great.

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COLLEEN [39:14]

So as this passionate amateur who knows so many things about so many things — if people wanted to learn more about you and your work, how could they do that? And I will link up to everything.

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EILEEN ANDERSON [39:27]

The best place is eileenanddogs.com — that's my blog, that's my home, and you can find out about my other things that way. I'll give you links, Colleen, for my two books that are on Amazon: the one on dog dementia, and the one on puppy socialization with Marge Rogers. I'm on Facebook less these days, but I am on Facebook — that's where I learn what's going on in the dog world and get some things to talk about on my blog. I like getting to know dog trainers. I have a page called Eileen and Dogs, but also you can just come to my personal page — I will usually accept friend requests, and I like to talk to people about all this stuff. I have my dog dementia site, which is dogdementia.com — I was really lucky to get that URL. On that site I have quite a bit of blog information. If somebody can't afford the book or doesn't want to get the book, there's quite a bit of help on that site for people with dogs with canine cognitive dysfunction. And I am working on a second edition of the book — it's like 60% longer. We've learned more.

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COLLEEN [40:52]

Yes, that book was very helpful to me, actually — for two dogs. When the signs crept up in the second dog, I was like, no, no, no, I do have that book, here it is on my shelf. Yeah, that's an important — it's a tough disease. And it's nice that there's a book to help people and a website where people can find out more, because that's tricky. And you share it so well. So I am so appreciative of the people who love to dive in and learn, and then share what they've learned in a way that makes it accessible and understandable for people, and you really do have a gift for that. Your "passionate amateur" is such a beautiful description, because your passion really shows through. It really does.

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EILEEN ANDERSON [41:56]

Nicest thing you could say to me. Thank you.

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COLLEEN [41:58]

I am so grateful that you came on the show today, and also for everything that you give to dogs and the people who love them, both as family and as professionals.

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EILEEN ANDERSON [42:11]

It's been lovely talking to you.

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COLLEEN [42:14]

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.