#120 - Why Your Pet Needs a Safe Space (and How to Make One)

Whether your pet is overwhelmed by the doorbell, a new houseguest, or the invisible ghosts that apparently live in the laundry room, having a safe space can make a world of difference. In this episode of Enrichment for the Real World, Emily and Ellen break down why safe spaces aren’t just cozy corners—they’re essential tools for helping our pets (and us!) navigate stress in all its forms: tolerable, chronic, and toxic.

You'll learn what makes a safe space effective, why avoiding stress isn't the goal, and how breaking this concept down into smaller teachable skills can help your pet learn to self-soothe. Plus, you’ll get actionable tips on using your pet’s senses to create the ultimate comfort zone for them. 

Join Ellen for a 5-week safe space deep dive! Learn how to implement all the skills in this episode and more in At Ease: Safe Spaces for Home and On-The-Go!

TLDL (too long, didn’t listen): 
1️⃣ Stress Happens, Let’s Plan for It
We can’t eliminate stress, but we can give our pets the tools to handle it better, starting with a safe space.

2️⃣ Safe Spaces = A Combo of Skills
An effective safe space is more than a dog bed in a quiet room—it’s the result of layered training, observation, and support.

3️⃣ Customize It to Your Pet
From preferred relaxation spots to sound and texture preferences, your pet’s unique needs should shape their sanctuary.

Links & Resources from the Episode
🧾 For full episode transcripts: Arial l OpenDyslexic

✅ At Ease: Safe Spaces for Home and On-The-Go - Join Ellen for a 5-week safe space deep dive! Learn how to implement all the skills in this episode and more!

🌐 Find the full episode show notes here

🎧 #42 - Dr. Kristina Spaulding: The Stress Factor in Dogs 

🎧 #5 - Creating a Restful Environment for Our Animals 

🎧 #106 - Dr. Kelly Ballantyne: Combating Caregiver Burden 

🎧 #81 - How to do a Sound Preference Test 

📚 14 Categories of Enrichment Poster 

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Ellen's 4-week live course, At Ease: Safe Spaces For Home and On-The-Go, is enrolling! 

Head to petharmonytraining.com/safespace to learn more and grab your spot. 

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellen: Safe spaces are, uh a big deal. They're critical for learning, everybody deserves it. Every living creature deserves to feel secure and to be safe. A lot goes into that. It's a lot of different skills that are layered into us saying build a safe space. It's the ability to regulate, to complete one stress response cycle. It's the ability to acknowledge, and feel, and do something about stress. It is the ability to find a way to remove those stressors and to do all of those things. It takes a lot of skill on both the dog and the human. It can be a lot of fun to build those skills, but I. It can also feel like a heavy weight when you have a creature who is having a hard time in the world.

[00:00:39] Allie: Welcome to Enrichment for the Real World, the podcast devoted to improving the quality of life of pets and their people through enrichment. We are your hosts, Allie Bender...

[00:00:57] Emily: ...and I'm Emily Strong...

[00:00:58] Allie: ...and we are here to challenge and expand your view of what enrichment is, what enrichment can be and what enrichment can do for you and the animals in your lives. Let's get started.

Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Enrichment for the Real World, and I want to thank you for rating, reviewing, and subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts.

[00:01:18] Emily: In this episode, you're going to hear Ellen and I talk about the feedback loop of stress, letting our learners throw themselves into the deep end, decide with them, not for them, and everything is washable. All right, let's get to it.

Okay. Today we're talking about safe spaces because safety and security are critical to welfare and wellbeing, and yet our society often glosses over it at best and at worst, just straight mocks the concept of a safe space. And so let me first start by defining what I mean when I say safety and security. For people who have not read our book or heard us talk about this before, safety is the act of being protected from harm.

So we are, we are less likely to be harmed when we are safe, security is the perception of feeling safe. So we feel as if we are like, unlikely to be harmed. And those are two different things and they're not always happening at the same time. You can be safe and not feel secure. You can be very not safe and feel quite secure. But both of them are critical to welfare and wellbeing.

So here's why it's important to reframe this idea of giving individuals of all species a safe space and why it's so important. First of all, everyone experiences acute, chronic, or toxic stress at different points in their lives.

And those things are those words mean different types of stress. So let's break that down.

Acute stress is like, you're living your life, everything's fine, and then all of a sudden this major stressor happens. You get into a car wreck, you get a piece of really bad news, some rando dog barrels into your yard where you know the status quo was happening, and then all of a sudden it's very much not happening.

Real life example for me, that just recently happened a couple nights ago. I was getting my job done, doing things. It was all great. And then I just get this text out of the blue from one of my family members that just sounded really dire. And I was like, what do you mean? And they were being really.

Sketchy about it. Like they wouldn't like give me more information. And I was like, what is going on? So I just like randomly start texting everybody like, what is happening? What is happening in my life? Oh my God, do I need to fly home? Like, what's the deal? And so I could just immediately feel my pulse speed up.

I could feel myself flushing. I could feel my hands sweating. I could feel my. Solar plexus burning, like all of the indicators that I was experiencing, sudden and acute stress. Ellen, you got something like that to share?

[00:04:07] Ellen: Yeah, I just had dental surgery and like it was really. It was a really great experience, which I'm sure not a whole lot of people feel that way about dental work in general. But my clinic was incredible. They are trauma informed. They were doing a really good job of making sure and checking in and doing all of the things.

I learned a lot about things I could layer into cooperative care with my dogs from that experience, which was pretty cool. But there were a couple of moments where I was very, I was very comfortable. Given, everything, and of course it's medical stuff. Things will lead to me having a, a flush response, as you said, muscles tightening, holding your breath, all of those things.

[00:04:50] Emily: Yeah, that's a good one. Even when they handle it well it's still a stressor and I think it's really important to bring that up. That, that you brought that up, that like they are trauma informed and they are. Doing everything they can to reduce that stress. But the stress already happened, like it happened just by virtue of you showing up.

And that, that is definitely a lesson that we can learn in all of the animal welfare fair fields, not just ours. Right.

[00:05:15] Ellen: Yeah, and the thing that I took away was like, still stinks. Let's be honest. Nobody has. Somebody somewhere might have fun. Most people don't have fun in those scenarios, and I had to have. Week one. Week two, I was no more stressed going in. I was in fact less stressed going into week two, even though it was still stressful because they did such a good job of making sure that I was okay through the entire process, giving me adequate breaks, making sure the environment was nice and comfortable, giving me predictability on things like all of the stuff that we talk about in creating safety and security they did and, even for something that nobody wants to do, I was like, yeah, I, I got this is this, be fine. We can do.

[00:05:58] Emily: Yeah, I, I think it's interesting because. Um, a, a lot of times we expect like, I know you had this negative experience, but now we've done this force free thing. Or like, we've given you a start button, or, you know, whatever. Like, we've done cooperative care, so why are you so stressed? And people are surprised by that.

But if we think about it for our own experience, yeah, obviously like a lifetime of scary experiences at the dentist is still a lifetime of scary experiences and one or two experiences at a trauma-informed practice is not going to just immediately make that lifetime of experience go away. It takes time and repetition. Not repetition in short sequences, repetition over time with long breaks between the trials.

For us to sort of be able to relinquish some of that stress. And we may never fully, it may never go away, but that leads us to chronic stress. The difference between acute and chronic stress and chronic stress is when. We experience stress over a long period of time. So a good example for me that I didn't even realize this, it's such a good example because I didn't even realize that I was stressed until I wasn't anymore.

I am not a desert person at all, and when I was younger, I didn't. I really have any phobias and I, I didn't realize that I had a phobia of the desert until I was 19 years old and or 20, I don't remember. I was in college and some friends of mine and I took a road trip to Arizona and we got to like.

West Texas desert where there's just nothing. And I full on panicked. Like they had to keep me drugged up on Dramamine to get me to Arizona because every time I would become aware or alert again, I would start panicking again. And that's so not my personality or, or like my, like in general, they were shocked and I was shocked that I had this visceral.

Extreme fear response. So that experience was an acute stressor. But fast forward 12 years from that experience, and, and Chuck and I decided to move to Kanab, Utah, which is high desert. And I thought, the move itself was comically stressful. It was like a Ben Stiller movie, like someday I should write a short story about that move.

Um, because it was a, a nightmare in. Retroactively the most hilarious way ever. But once we were there, I didn't realize I was stressed. I felt like I was fine, and I could objectively see that there was a lot of beauty in that area. I mean, we were an hour from the Grand Canyon, from Zion, from Bryce, from like all these different like, beautiful areas and and so I didn't notice that I was stressed.

And then about six months into living there. Chuck and I finally, I, I changed jobs at, at the sanctuary, and that meant my, I had weekends that overlapped with Chuck's weekend, so for the first time. In six months, we had a day off together and we were able to go do something together. And so we drove up to Duck Creek, which is up in the mountains, and we got up, we like, there's this bend in the road and it went up and it shifted from high desert landscape to mountains, evergreen trees, these crystal clear glacier ponds or lakes or whatever. I could just feel the stress melting away from my body, and I did not realize that for six months of living in the desert, I had been experiencing this low grade chronic stress where I was just holding myself kind of tightly and I was always in this kind of like icky space, and I didn't even notice it because it was chronic, because it was just my reality.

I didn't even notice it until it left. And once we got up in the mountains, I was like, oh, wow. I'm still not a desert person. I just didn't notice that because it was a chronic stressor and I'd been living in it for six months.

[00:09:52] Ellen: Yeah, my realizations of chronic stress have always come from finding the relief. Never from like self-reflection. Yo, you okay? No. I had the same thing when we moved back from Florida. Florida is beautiful. There's a lot about the Floridian environment that does agree with my body because opposite of you, I.

I feel chronic stress in cold. I don't do cold well. So the heat was really good for me. But we moved back up to the Seattle area and we moved in a time where if you're from the area, we refer to it as the mountain is out. Clear blue skies, you can see the mountains from pretty much anywhere that you're not surrounded by trees.

And I saw the mountain for the first time and I was like, oh, look at all that, go away. That's interesting. I don't even wanna climb the mountain. People out here climb the mountain and they find joy and beauty in that. And that sounds like misery to me. But like just seeing it was a relief, which was kind of strange to me.

[00:10:47] Emily: Yeah. It's funny how a lot of times we don't even realize what our chronic stressors are and we can't articulate why, they're a stressor. Like I have no idea why I had such a fear response to the desert. The only thing I can think is that I've always loved plants and I've always been a water baby. I mean, I spent most of my childhood swimming. Like, so. I mean, that's probably why, but I just I can't tell you, like, I can articulate that this desert space is beautiful, and it still stresses me out and I don't know why, right.

But I mean, that's also a lesson for like, when we're taking care of non-human who can't articulate how they feel, a lot of times we find with our clients that they also don't notice their pet's chronic stress because it's welcome to Tuesday, right? So, that's another thing that we need to be aware of, is that chronic stress happens for in all sentient beings, and it can be really hard to identify it in ourselves, which means it can be extra hard to identify it in another living being, especially one who can't tell us their experience. 

[00:11:51] Ellen: Yeah, and I think the circle that comes with that one is that I have a lot of clients who are attuned to their pet's stress, and in turn, if we think back to like Dr. Kelly Ballantyne's episode, that caregiver burden seeps in and then that's chronic stress on the human. And then we've got a bunch of creatures cohabitating in the house trying to not do the chronic stress thing, and just positive feedback loop in the chronic stress.

And that is one of the reasons that I default to having a safe space in the plan is also for the human, because it can play such a big role in letting them walk away from imperfection and being okay with that.

[00:12:30] Emily: And then that leads into toxic stress, which my understanding is that most chronic stress is toxic stress or it has the potential to become? This is where my, you can tell that like I'm sort of veering out of my lane a little bit.

Fortunately, um, there's an incredible book by Dr. Kristina Spaulding called The Stress Factor in Dogs, 10 out of 10 recommend that book for everybody who lives and works with animals, but especially dogs. And she does a much better job explaining and articulate this. Articulating this than I do, but toxic stress is when that sustained chronic stress starts messing with our body's ability to return to a baseline, to have some sense of status quo, and then that throws our entire system out of whack. It affects our physical, behavioral, and emotional health, it affects our immune system.

It just impacts every single part of our bodies, and I experienced that firsthand when I was in Utah. I mean, I lived in Utah for eight years and I experienced toxic stress for those entire eight years that I was there, and lo and behold, my seventh year there wait, 2013 to 2020, yeah, seventh year there. I developed an autoimmune disorder and it took years and a whole lot of labor, and expensive medical practices, and elimination diet, a physical therapist, like a whole healthcare team and many, many years to get that autoimmune disorder into remission, which fortunately now it is. But there I couldn't identify anything other than the toxic stress and the air quality that would have set that off. The air quality in Salt Lake is pretty dismal.

But so toxic stress is where things get real bad, right? So, this is really why the safe space, the concept of a safe space is so important because our job is not to bubble wrap our learners or ourselves so that we never experience stress.

Some stress is good for us, it's healthy to have a certain amount of stress, but when we get into the chronic and especially toxic stress, that's where it can really mess us up on every possible level if we don't take measures to mitigate that.

That's the first part of why a safe space is so important.

The second part of that, and kind of it follows the logical next step, is that in order to prevent ourselves from being steeped in toxic stress or even experiencing chronic stress, is that we need to be able to complete our stress response cycle and return to that baseline that is critical to that physical, behavioral, and emotional health sort of triad. And if we aren't able to do that, that's when things get messed up and out of whack.

And in order to do that, in order to complete our stress response cycle and get back down to baseline, we need to be able to remove ourselves from stressors. So you see where we're going with this. The safe space is how we remove ourselves from stressors, and this is especially important for learners who generally have less control over their lives, like children and pets, because the less agency a learner has in general, the more important it is that they have agency over their ability to complete their stress response cycle at a bare minimum, an individual should be able to complete their stress response cycle, even if they have no other control in their life.

So I would argue that safe space is one of the most important things that we need to give our learners, that we need to give the learners in our care. So again, like I said earlier, our job as caregivers isn't to wrap our pets in bubble wrap and protect them from ever experiencing stressors that actually, causes a lot of harm because when learners don't have the opportunity to experience that stress in a healthy way, and overcome it, and, and be able to complete their stress response cycle, they actually are harmed in kind of an opposite way. They have no resilience, they have no ability to go out there and live their lives and do things and face challenges and take risks, right?

So it's really important that we allow our learners to do that. And the way that we allow them to do that is to empower them to do that because most individuals don't know how to do that on their own, or they only know how to do that on their own contextually, and they don't know how to do it on their own in every situation.

So more often than not, we have to teach going to the safe space, self-regulating, completing their stress response cycle, all of that stuff as skill sets so that they can do them in every situation in which they need to be able to do that. And I wanna say here, optional sidebar, because I have spent most of my life in areas with a lot of different training methodologies, just because we shouldn't wrap our learners in bubble wrap and protect them from stress doesn't mean that we should be intentionally introducing those stressors to our learners.

There's a huge difference between socially mediated stressors where socially media, social mediation means that the teacher introduces or applies the thing to the learner, to their environment, and, either naturally occurring automatic or mechanical stressors. So there are three terms for the same concept, naturally occurring automatic and mechanical means things that just happen in their, in your environment. Antecedents, consequences, motivating operations things that just happen in your environment.

So that makes a huge difference in the learner's experience between, i'm a learner and, and my, my teacher, my caregiver is the one who did this thing to me to try to give me opportunities to overcome stress versus I'm a learner and my teacher or my caregiver. Was there to support me while I experienced stressor from the environment.

And my teacher and my learner actually guided me through that process and supported me and gave me help when I needed help. So instead of being the ones who are introducing the stress to quote unquote build resilience in our dogs. We should be a safe space for our learners. We should be there to support them as they go through those challenges, as they experience the naturally occurring stressors in life.

We shouldn't shield them from the stressors, but we also shouldn't be the ones who are introducing the stressors. We should be there supporting them as they navigate the stressors that just happen in life. And I get to do this with Miley a lot. I get my little puppy is giving me so many opportunities to just be there to support her while she navigates the world.

And it is such a joy to watch her. We'll go out on an adventure walk and she's like, I'm gonna try to cross this creek on this little rickety twig. And I'm like, I don't think that's gonna work out for you. But I also can do a risk assessment and see that, and you're not gonna be in any serious danger if you learn this lesson.

So I'm gonna let you try it and I'm going to be here for you if you need help getting yourself out of a sticky situation. And I will say one of the reasons I felt okay doing that is because. She has really good core strength because the breeder did a lot for the puppies, and also I've continued that work with Miley in our home.

So she's got excellent balance. She's got excellent core strength. She did try to cross the little, the little stick across the pond. In fact did not go well. She did fall into the little pond or the little creek. I mean, I've been calling it a pond. It was a creek. I don't know why I called it a pond. But then she had to figure out how to get out of that embankment, and she had to kind of try a few different ways to navigate climbing up that embankment.

She fell down into it a couple of times. I was watching her. I was making sure she was okay. There was one point where she got stuck. Her little hoodie got stuck on a twig, so I had to sort of like untangle her 'cause she couldn't figure that part out for herself. So I was there to support her and help her when she needed it.

But after a couple of minutes, she figured it out and when she got to the top, I celebrated with her. I dried her little wet butt off. And we kept going and she had the grandest time. She was not worse for the wear, for having that experience, but I didn't throw her in the ditch to make her like to introduce a stressor and make her figure out how to climb out of it.

I let her have that experience and I was just there to supervise and support as needed. 

[00:21:12] Ellen: Yeah, I think that's an important distinction, like a hugely important distinction. The question I always ask myself is, am I doing this to my learner or am I letting my learner do this? And those are two very different things. Laika has done a very similar thing. If you see our um, 14 categories of enrichment.

Poster that we worked on with Lily Chin. Lika is safety, security. I don't know. She is on the edge of an embankment about to go in the water because that was a thing that happened. She likes to go in the water. I did the same assessment. The water is clean enough. She is gonna be fine. We can do a bath. I can get her out. Everything's gonna be fine. She went in and she was like, well, that was deeper than I expected. Swam to the edge and then did it again. Like she was fine.

Meanwhile, I've had Griffey who launched himself into a pond, not knowing what it was, and then he got a look on his face like, "Oh my God, what did I do? This is, Mom, Help!" And like, buddy, you gotta swim. I'll come get you if I have to, but like, I believe that you can get back to this embankment. And he opted to not do that again. I didn't do, I didn't toss either of them. Literally into the deep end, they did it themselves and they got to navigate out.

[00:22:24] Emily: I love that we're basically just letting our learners throw themselves into the deep end.

[00:22:27] Ellen: I mean, the other day, just yesterday, we were doing some scent work in the house and a treat rolled under. We have a foam pad that's pushed up because we need to get rid of it, but who wants to do a dump run? Not me. And a treat rolled underneath and I could see that it was, probably gonna fall. And also I know that it's not gonna hurt Griffey and he is resilient enough because I have let him have those experiences. So he did it. It fell on him. He was like, what is this? And then climbed on top of it and dug it out and got underneath again to go get the cookie. He did totally fine. I didn't drop something on him. I don't need to do that. He makes poor choices enough as is again, back to I don't need to, 'cause he will himself.

[00:23:06] Emily: Yeah, I think at least once a day I ask Miley why she has such a death wish, because she has no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. But that's why I'm here. I'm here to make sure that she is safe so that she can continue to be secure as she tackles all these huge challenges in her life and overcomes them and becomes more confident and more resilient and more skilled.

You know what? In subsequent adventure walks, she's gone down into that embankment and she was able to scramble out of it in a matter of seconds because she learned how by accidentally falling in the first time. 

[00:23:42] Ellen: And I will say, 'cause I'm sure there are people listening that are like, but what about, because humans are really good about the, but what about, and Emily and I both have done exposure therapy, type scenarios with dogs, there is a time and a place to set it up so that your learner can experience certain stressors.

But there are a lot of criteria to do that well, and to do that ethically, and to do it in a way that they are able to lead themselves into the experience safely. And it is not something that I am doing to you. I'm not gonna drag griffey within 20 feet of a dog. I can instead go somewhere where I know a dog's scent may be present, or a dog might be 60 yards away. He gets to, into how much he engages with that stressor.

[00:24:28] Emily: Yeah. One of the things I can already tell I'm gonna have to work on with Miley is teaching her to jump into my arms because. She definitely inherited the typical biji trait of, I'm not going to start something, but if you start something, I'm gonna finish it no matter how big you are. And so I need her what if we're out in a situation where some dog is talking big smack and she tries to respond to that.

I need her to be able to jump into my arms so that I can carry her out of that situation because she has had big feelings about, dogs who have talked smack to her. Now, she loves dogs. She's great dog skills in general. But if a dog talks smack, she's like, oh no, you didn't Like, she's very typical biji in that regard.

So I'm gonna have to teach her to jump into my arms as a safe space to get away from her, her little brawling tendencies.

[00:25:25] Ellen: Yeah. And I think that takes us into the first key takeaway, which is find a space that your pet feels secure in. And Emily just talked about teaching Miley that that is a safe space. That is one of the things, but don't start there. If this is your first foyer into building a safe space with your learner, let's find one that they already are predisposed to using and one that works well for you.

So first thing is make sure it's actually safe. Like if your pet wants to, I don't know. When Leika was little, she really wanted to hang out under the kitchen sink, which is a different story for a different time. Not safe. In the long run, not a safe place for her to be in the long run. So we needed to find something else that she could use for that thing.

Observe them, see where they are predisposed to spending time, observe what they like. I'm gonna be a little anthropomorphic. Do they seem joyful? We can operationalize that. But do they seem happy? Do they seem relaxed? Do they seem comfortable and calm? If you don't know what that looks like, then let's work on that skill. 'Cause those are. We focus a lot on stress, but sometimes we wanna see the joy too. So observe them, see what they're pre predisposed to already, and then let's leverage that to make the process a little bit easier for everybody involved.

[00:26:44] Emily: Yeah, and I think one thing that I see a lot with clients is that they know their dog's safe space. They just don't know that they know it. Because I often would ask clients like, does your dog already have a safe space? That they go to. And clients will either be like, no, or I don't know. And then I'll reframe the question and be like, okay, if something happens and they run away from something, where do they run to?

Do they run to a specific place? And the client will be like, oh yeah, they always go to like my husband's lazy boy. Or, you know, something like that. And it's like, okay, that's the safe space. So I think that's one of the things that I find delightful is that. People know, they just don't know that they know.

So a lot of times it's our job to help them realize what they already know, which is they know their dog, they know where their dog goes to, to get out of harm's way, and that's, you know, we, we just have to help people to realize that, to articulate that for themselves. 

[00:27:37] Ellen: And I think the other part of that is we're not asking for perfection here. We're looking at like, what's, what can we build on? So like to that point, I worked with a dog named Ben. Ben had a storm and thunder phobia to the point of injuring himself. During those times and when I was talking to his people, he would go into the bathroom, the bathtub, which is very common for that particular suite of things.

The issue is once he got in there, he couldn't. He couldn't relax to that. He could help himself enough to go to a place that was a little bit better than everywhere else. But once we got there, we got stuck and we were still, we would dig to the point of injuring ourself if we weren't interrupted. And so we started with, all right, so he's already told us that that bath tub bathroom is providing him some, some relief, something.

It is being maintained without your help. He's choosing it. He's going there reliably. It is helping in some way, shape, or form. Let's now look at that and say, how can we make it better for him? Not, can I teach you to go use this crate in my bedroom or whatever it is, or can I make you do X, Y, Z thing? Like let's go ahead and just take what they have and build on it rather than starting entirely from scratch unless we have to.

You have to teach Miley to jump up because you already see the problems, but you also, Miley has multiple safe spaces already that you have a foundation to build from.

So with that, start with somewhere that we can build and then we're gonna teach them how to use it. So this can look like a couple of different things. I realistically want my people, my clients, myself, to be able to cue the dog to go to that place because what I coach my, my clients on is when we're starting this process, unless your pet already has a lot to work with, and I do have some that are like, Nope, I've got this. I will go there 100% of the time. Whenever stress is present, don't worry about me.

There's gonna be a point where you see the stress and you're gonna say, Hey, let's do this. Hey, let's do this. Hey, let's do this. And tell they will feel the stress and go, maybe I should do this and go to their space. So we wanna be able to put that on cue. And for us it's like go to bed or come here. Depends on what we are trying to do in that safe space. Eventually for you, for Miley, it's gonna be some sort of cue that says, get up in my arms little creature. Please don't make me pick you up. I don't wanna do the work for yourself.

[00:30:07] Emily: I don't wanna put my face down in barking, snapping faces, so I need you to just come up to me so we can both just get the hell out of Dodge.

[00:30:15] Ellen: Yes, I don't, none of us, nobody has benefit from being in this location.

And then the second part of that, we wanna be able to cue them. And then once we get there, we wanna be able to layer in things that make this like a spa-like experience. And take the essence, not the actual spa. That's going to be different for each dog. I had one, his name was Alfie. His safe space sound was the nanny, the TV show, the Nanny. And for like some families, that is going to be the absolute nightmare. Alfie, you put on the nanny, he would go on his bed and lay in the sun and like flip belly up and snore.

And so for him, the nanny was a spa-like experience. So we have to look at what is your pet like? And we can look at auditory things, we can look at olfactory things, we can look at different visual stimuli. Some dogs are gonna really like it to be dark. Some dogs are gonna like it to be bright. Some dogs are going to want there, certain textures. I worked with one dog that his safe space would never include a dog bed. His safe space actually needed to include an elevated metal platform because he ran so hot that like that temperature regulation was a huge part of it. For him, it was the only way he could feel comfortable and relaxed.

And so what we wanna do is layer all of those things in there through preference testing typically. And we have a episode on preference testing that I will link in the show notes for folks that are wondering how to do that.

[00:31:43] Emily: Yeah. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to do this with your learner, not for your learner, and make sure that they actually, are choosing these things because, yeah, I had a client with Greyhounds and we tried all different types of beds for their safe space slash relaxation station and he also ran hot.

And so he just really, really loved their polished concrete. And so we just put painter's tape in a square. On the polished concrete. And that was his designated relaxation station slash safe space because we needed it to be a specific space that everybody in the house could see to honor it, but also he just really wanted to be on the floor.

And also one of my, my, one of my other favorite stories is one of my clients. Which is ground zero for essential oils. Tried to use lavender essential oil as the dogs. Relaxation scent. And he let her know in no uncertain terms that lavender was not it for him. He ripped the infuser out of the wall.

He took it out the dog door to the very farthest back corner of the yard, dug under the fence and shoved it under the fence. I was like, I don't be. That he is not a fan of lavender, right? So just because essential oil companies tell us that lavender is a calming scent does not mean that every individual is going to agree with that assessment.

And BT Dubs, I'm also one of those people, since I got COVID, I fortunately recovered all of my scents of smell and taste. But the only thing that changed about my sense of smell and taste is now. Lavender and chamomile make me feel nauseated. They have to be buried deep into like a profile of other sensor flavors for me to be okay with them.

So I'm also on the anti lavender train, like, please don't give me a lavender scent at anything. Right? So I hardcore identify with that, with that dog.

[00:33:47] Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. And I've had a number of the internet, capital T, capital I Internet is probably gonna tell you that white noise is magic depending on where you end up. And I have had so many dogs that have a fear response to white noise. Like the white noise kicks on and our ears drop and our eyes get big and our posture gets low and we start trembling. And so we have to look at what, what do they like?

Both of my dogs find a couple of things in particular, very relaxing. I. They're part of that safe space. When things are stressful, we can put it on and we see an immediate response.

It is Julien Solomita on Twitch or YouTube. 'Cause we have spent so much time watching that while we're just relaxing that the dogs are like, oh, Julien's on it's nap time and West Coast hip hop. Very specifically, other forms not the same result as that West Coast vibe. And so like when we're at the vet, and I will turn on one of those two things when.

The dogs next door are having a lot of feelings. I will turn on those two things and you can visibly see both my dogs go, oh, it's rest time. And they will go hunker down in their beds and they will do the thing, and we are able to move on to another activity rather than being hypervigilant about whatever is happening.

But that's because I observed that was the result of those, those two things. I wasn't like, you little creatures are gonna love Julien because I do. That's not how that worked.

[00:35:12] Emily: Yeah, no, my, my birds, every bird that. I've had, has had very strong music preferences and they've all been very different. Like Kaya is a post punk girl, like her favorite band is cursive. I, I used to listen to Art as Hard all the time when she was a little baby. I mean, I think Art as Hard is one of the most perfect albums of all time.

It's just perfection from beginning to end. And so I think that's why she is a post punk girl. And, and she loves listening to. Any, any post-punk, not just cursive, like any post-punk. Bayou when he was alive was a musicals boy. Avita was his favorite, which was unfortunate for me 'cause Avitas not my favorite musical, but he loved to sing along to Avita.

I had a little Scarlet McComb named Elle, who was absolutely in love with Joanna Newsom. This bird had some like medical issues and she was in a lot of pain as a baby, and Joanna Newsom was the only thing that would calm her down. And I had a African gray who really, really loved Disney songs. Like songs for Disney cartoons.

So like they all have very strong preferences and I think, you know, dogs and parrots are different, but I think that there's a lesson to be learned from that, that like you really have to do those preference tests to let the learner tell you what is actually relaxing to them.

[00:36:29] Ellen: Yeah. One of the most delightful things, a few years ago, I had a client that was working on building the safe space, so that. Her dog could be home alone and deal with some stressors on all of the things. And so she went on the sound preference deep dive. She found what worked for Molly and at the end of the year her Spotify wrapped was essentially Molly's safe space playlist. And it brought me so much joy to see that.

[00:36:52] Emily: Yeah, I, um, I would lose my cool kid card from working in music if any of the people that I worked with in the music industry saw my Spotify rap. But I'm like, in my defense, I'm using this music for reasons. This is not what I just listened to for fun.

[00:37:09] Ellen: Yep. Not to yuck anybody's yum, but this is not my yum. It's somebody else's. Yum.

[00:37:13] Emily: Well, even if it is my yum, I wouldn't listen to it exclusively and obsessively, except that it's serving a very specific function.

[00:37:20] Ellen: And I think that takes us to the last key takeaway I tell my client, we are signing a social contract with your creature right now. When we start to build this, we are going to sign a social contract that says, within the best of my ability, I am going to prevent anything bad by your perception happening to you here ever.

Now, caveat, asterisk, that is what we are trying to do. We're going back to the socially mediated versus naturally occurring. That does not mean if I have a client that is working on sound phobia, that I want them to carry the weight of, oh my God, my dog just went to their safe space, and then the thunder is going to start, and so I have to get my dog out of the safe space because the thunder is gonna start, let them be.

Our goal is that our safe spaces are so resilient and have so much weight on 'em that if they're using 'em and then something bad happens to happen. We're not gonna start from square one. We are going to be able to build that trust and that rapport up pretty well. If it was extreme enough that's not the case, then whether or not your dog was on the safe space probably was not gonna make a difference, like something bad real happened.

So two are the best of my ability. I'm not going to let anything bad happen to you here. And so the example that I always use is like a safe space where mom and dad would get the timeout signal is if she goes to her dog bed and goes and lays down, particularly her pink blanket is her blanket. She loves that blanket.

And, um, like if you have not seen her, she's a scruffy little mutt. And so sometimes she gets a little hangar on after she goes poop. It doesn't happen all the time. She doesn't enjoy it. We are now at a point where she enjoys the poopy butt less than getting the poopy butt taken care of. So now she comes over and she gets really sad and like hunches her back and looks at us and just kind of trembles and then rears up on us, like, please fix it.

But before, if we saw that she had a hanger on, we would. We would not allow her to make it to her dog bed if we were going to take care of it once she made it to the dog bed. That just meant we were doing a whole lot of laundry friends, because we are not gonna violate that and do something that I know you're not gonna like while you were there.

We just gotta wait for it and then when you come off, we will go ahead and take care of it. We'll do all the laundry and all of the things. My mom's a preschool teacher and always tells kids everything is washable. We don't need to stress about these things. So once you're there, within the best of my ability, nothing bad will happen to you once you are there.

[00:39:49] Emily: Yeah, I think that's, we've also had to do this for copper because we knew that bringing a puppy into a house with a 16-year-old dog was going to come with its challenges. And we learned pretty quickly what those challenges were going to be, and obviously the big one for copper was he just needed a, a way to get away from Miley. He needed to have a safe space, and for many reasons, the up the entire upstairs made sense to be his safe space. Miley. It's very hard to manage our upstairs for a lot of different reasons. The largest of which is that it's a wide open space. There are no doors upstairs, so you know, baby gates and ex pens just aren't really a thing up there.

But also our, our family bed is up that's where Copper likes to go to take a nap during the day. So it was easier for us to put a baby gate at the stairs on our main floor. And we had to be really clear with Miley, like, this baby gate is not for you.

It's, this is. Coppers gate. And if he asks to go here and he goes through it, you don't go through it. You can do other things. I'm gonna make sure you have lots of fun and social time, connection, all of that stuff, but the gate is not for you. And she learned that very quickly, fortunately. I mean, she's a, she's a puppy.

She's, she's great at picking up on new things. But yeah, we have to keep that sacred. She never goes upstairs. I don't know. She may never go upstairs. Miley and I may sleep in the office for the rest of copper's life. If. We do end up moving back into the family bed with Miley. There would have to be some very clear criteria for telling Copper when the upstairs is Miley time and when the upstairs is safe space, we would have to create very clear contingencies for him so that we don't violate that safe space.

But it may be easier for us to just let him live out his life and Miley and I just sleep in the office for the rest of his life. Which would, I would be sad about that, but it, I would do it for our dogs. 

[00:41:46] Ellen: Yeah, I think that's important to specify. Nothing bad in your perception happens to you here. I don't get to decide that back to, I don't get to decide most of this. They have to tell us for copper Miley being up there, not great. ' cause she's a puppy and he's old and like, leave me alone. You got a little razor tea. And just like, let me have some alone time. It may be. Family members entering that space. I have plenty of dogs that once they wanna go to bed like they have to, you have to let them go to bed. Nobody can go in there. You have to let them sleep. It is critically important that they are left alone when they go there.

And then for some dogs, the nothing bad is going to happen to you. Also includes closing a door or confining them in that space for some way. If it is a requirement that they will have to be closed in at some point for. A dog who has stranger danger or a dog who has a tendency to get into all of the shenanigans while their people are gone.

If that is a safety thing that the dog needs to be confined, then we have to teach that as part of the safe space. And so that's where the ebb and flow comes. Ben, safe space was the bathroom. We're not gonna lock Ben in the bathroom. But if Ben was a little baby puppy and I had to go to work for a couple of hours and little baby puppy was going to get into everything and absolutely everything, then I would make sure that closing the door was taught and built in outside of the context of everything terrible is happening.

So we have covered a lot in this and safe spaces are, uh. A big deal, like Emily talked about in the very beginning, when they're critical for learning, everybody deserves it. Every living creature deserves to feel secure and to be safe. A lot goes into that. It's a lot of different skills that are layered into us saying build a safe space.

It's the ability to regulate, to complete one stress response cycle. It's the ability to acknowledge and feel and do something about stress. It is the ability to find a way to remove those stressors and to do all of those things. It takes a lot of skill on both the dog and the human. It can be a lot of fun to build those skills, but I. It can also feel like a heavy weight when you have a creature who is having a hard time in the world. Diving deeper into this topic, Emily already mentioned the stress factor in Dogs by Dr. Kristina Spaulding. I recommend it for to like everybody. Well, also we had Kristina on the podcast, so I will link to her episode in the show notes as well so that you can get a little teaser there, she talked about building resilience, stress, what stress is, the foundation stuff.

And then I am also running a safe space class where we are going to start from the ground up. What are your dog's current preferences? How do we build it up? What do you need out of a safe space? So we talked a lot about safe spaces in the home, but for somebody like Emily who needs a safe space on the go, we're gonna build up some of those.

Last year we had folks that were working in the house, we had folks that were working for vet clinics, we had folks that were working on safe spaces for sound sensitivity and noise phobia, for having guests over where the dog could go and hang out and meet their needs without being a part of the rendezvous.

So we're gonna be talking about a lot of those things from identifying your pet's preferences, all the way to starting to layer in when stressors happen. How do we leverage all of this that we have spent a couple of weeks building? It's a lot of fun. Come join me please. I love to see pets learning this skill. It just lights me up.

[00:45:15] Emily: 10 out of 10 recommend the course. I think it's great. I might be biased, but I think Ellen is the best person to teach on this topic. So 10 outta 10 recommend. Okay. To recap, safe spaces are a necessary component of completing the stress response cycle for all sentient beings. Find a space your pet feels secure in. Teach your pet how to go to that space, keep that space sacred, and you can learn more from Ellen by taking her course.

[00:45:46] Allie: I hope you enjoy today's episode and if there's someone in your life who also needs to hear this, be sure to text it to them right now. If you're a pet parent looking for more tips on enrichment, behavior modification, and finding harmony with your pet, you can find us on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Harmony training. If you're a behavior or training professional dedicated to enrichment for yourself, your clients, and their pets, check us out on TikTok and Instagram at Pet Harmony Pro.

As always, links to everything we discussed in this episode are in the show notes. Thank you to Ellen Yoakum for editing this episode and making us sound good. Our intro music is from Penguin Music on Pixa Bay. Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. That helps more pet lovers and professionals find us so they can bring enrichment into their world too.

Thank you for listening, and here's to harmony.